The Solarigens (was: The Helians)
Johnny1A
> Way entirely, but there were still a scattered few left. Most were in
> tiny isolated communities such as domed mining cities on remote
> Kuiper-type iceoids, or similar tiny groups. One by one, these
> isolated groups perished, as their desperate efforts to survive proved
> unequal to their limited resources and the dangers they faced.
>
> But there was a last group that had greater resources. It was a group
> which would leave a legacy that would echo down the megayears.
>
> Shermanlee
>
> MORE LATER.
The Greater Milky Way consists of the Milky Way itself, the galactic
core, the disk, the halo of individual stars and globular clusters
that swirls around the core and disk, and the various satellite bodies
such as the Clouds of Magellan. The Helian empire had been present
throughout this enormous system.
After the 1500 years of warfare and chaos that had reduced the Helian
empire to ruins, the Greater Milky Way was all but empty of
intelligent life, other than Eldren. Where quintillions of Helians
had lived and worked and played less than 2000 years before, now
millions of formerly inhabited planets were littered with wreckage.
There were still Helian-type life forms in plenty, on countless
worlds, worlds where the Helians had wiped each other out under the
influence of the civil war or the Weapon, but on which the ecosystem
had survived. Of course, some formerly inhabited worlds were so
devastated that not even microbes survived.
Most of the surviving civilized Helians had departed the Greater Milky
Way inn search of 'greener pastures'. A handful remained, most of
them doomed. One group would, however, leave a legacy.
In the meantime, the Eldren continued their own experiments with the
new type of life. They also continued to observe the non-sapient
helium-life that remained (their fascination with biological life was
never confined to just sapient beings).
The Eldren gradually destroyed the remaining automatic Helian weapons
that occasionally threatened living worlds (of either type), and they
continued to 'terraform' and 'areiaform' planets to seed them with
species from Earth and Mars. When they found places that could be
transformed sufficiently to be useful, they also seeded some of the
life-forms from Io, but ioniforming proved to be more difficult than
terraforming or arieaforming, because of a scarcity of suitable
starting sites.
The worlds they transformed at this time were more-or-less similar to
Earth and Mars, but they were similar to the Earth and Mars that
existed in the early Ordovician Period. Naturally, once a
self-sustaining ecosystem was operating, the newly living worlds
tended to move in their own directions, which was just precisely what
the Eldren wanted.
Recognizing that the galaxy-wide civilization of the Helians had
managed to self-destruct, taking with it many intricate and
fascinating biospheres, the Eldren concluded that not even a
galaxy-wide spread of life was totally safe. Therefore, they began to
terraform a scattering of planets in the Andromeda Galaxy, the
Triangulum, and other galaxies of the Local Group.
The majority of the transformed worlds were made over along the Terran
template, because Earth had more native species and a richer biosphere
than Mars and Io combined, but the Eldren also converted many worlds
for the Martian and Ionian strains of Solarigen life. As Earth, Mars,
and Io evolved and changed, later transformed worlds tended to reflect
the transformation.
Thus, as Earth went from the Ordovician to the Silurian, to the
Devonian, and then to the Carboniferous, newly terraformed worlds
started out with conditions comparable to those on Earth at those
times. Evolution would then take off in new directions on these new
planets.
Periodically, the Eldren would also introduce species from Earth, or
one of the other 'colony' worlds, to an ongoing biosphere simply to
see the results. Sometimes the results were minor, sometimes
spectacular.
On Earth, true plants spread onto the land, followed by the
arthropods, and then the first tetrapods, even as the fishes continued
to speciate and spread into new niches. Some of those species were
introduced to new worlds, where distant cousins already were thriving.
One thing the Eldren never did was introduce off-world species back to
Terra or Mars or Io.
This was a hard-and-fast rule set down by the Watcher, the leader of
the group of Eldren who were performing these experiments and who had
previously spread the life-forms of Helius.
Hundreds of millions of years passed, and the Helian empire receded
into the past as the Solarigen experiments continued. The Eldren had
long since ceased heliuforming worlds, having concluded that the
potential variability of Solarigen life was intrinsically greater.
They continued to transform new worlds into Earth-like and Mars-like
environments.
Eventually, by the middle of the Permian period on Earth, there were
over 70 million worlds in the Greater Milky Way with Solarigen
biospheres, ranging from near duplicates of Earth and Mars to worlds
deeply alien (though nothing like as alien as the Helian worlds!).
The Eldren were busily and happily occupied with their experiment.
With only a few hundred Eldren involved in the experiment (there are
countless trillions of trillions of Eldren, but most could not be
bothered with this experiment), it was a challenge to supervise and
monitor 70 million worlds with thriving vital biospheres. Thus, it
perhaps is not surprising that it took the Eldren some time to notice
an interesting development: their biospheres seemed to be in the
process of dying.
As the most closely watched biospheres, it was first noticed on Earth
and Mars. Various species seemed be dying out. Then whole genuses,
then families, began to disappear.
This was not unprecedented, at first glance. There had been mass
extinctions in Earth's biological history before. The Eldren had seen
several such. At first, this appeared to be merely another such, and
the Eldren watched with interest to try to deepen their understanding
of the mechanisms of such.
But this one seemed to be somehow larger than the previous ones.
Whole niches of life were being emptied out, at a rapid rate in
geological/biological terms, and it seemed to be accelerating. The
Eldren studied more closely, but then they realized something
interesting: a similar die-off was occurring on both Mars and Io.
Given the sparse and dying biosphere of Mars, it wasn't as obvious
there that the already half-dead world was now dying faster. But Io's
biosphere was thriving, or had been, and it took seemed to be
suffering from a massive extinction event.
The Eldren were disconcerted because there appeared to be no obvious
reason for it. There were individually visible and discernable
reasons for the specific extinctions, but there was no reason why the
apparently unrelated reasons should all be clustering in one
relatively short period (a million years or so).
Oxygen levels plunged in Earth's atmosphere, then rose. Temperatures
varied, ice advanced and retreated, but no one cause seemed to
interconnect the events. The causes of the extinctions seemed just as
varied on Mars and Io.
The Eldren studied all three inhabited planets intensely, searching
for some cause, some linking factor, to account of the apparent
coincidence. They studied the Sun, seeking to discover if the link
lay in the common star.
They found nothing that seemed to fill the bill for a linking factor.
Then came even more alarming news: a regular survey of the extrasolar
biospheres revealed that the extinction-pattern being observed on
Earth, Mars, and Io was also occurring on millions of worlds all over
the Greater Milky Way. Some worlds were less affected by _whatever_
was causing it, some more. A few seemed untouched, but the untouched
category appeared to be no more than a few percent. Some worlds were
being affected much more than Earth, to the point that some biospheres
were degrading rapidly toward the minimum-viability point.
The Eldren had no idea of what was happening, why it was happening, or
what if anything they could or should do about it.
The Great Permian Extinction had begun.
Shermanlee
MORE LATER.
Johnny1A
>
> The Eldren had no idea of what was happening, why it was happening, or
> what if anything they could or should do about it.
>
> The Great Permian Extinction had begun.
>
>
> Shermanlee
>
> MORE LATER.
LATER.
The extinction rate continued to gradually accelerate during this
period, and on Earth, to the Eldren's dismay, there began to emerge a
visible pattern to the extinctions, if not to their causes. The
species that were dying tended to be critical ones, species that
played key roles in various intersecting food webs, symbiotic
connections, and nutrient and energy networks. When such species
vanished from the stage, they tended to produce rippling additional
extinctions.
There could be no question that some sort of deliberate agency was
involved in this pattern, which was also emerging on the extra-solar
worlds, but the mechanism and identity remained obscure. But then
came a new development on Earth: the oxygen level in the atmosphere,
and thus the sea, began to fall steadily. It had already been
somewhat unsteady in recent kiloyears, but now it began to plunge in
earnest. As it did, what had been a steady flow of species
extinctions became a wave, then a flood.
This oxygen depletion appeared to have various causes, including an
already extant die-off in photosynthetic organisms. The Eldren also
noted that large coal beds, laid down in the Carboniferous and Permian
periods, were now exposed for weathering and oxidation. But still,
the equations wouldn't quite balance: the oxygen was vanishing at a
faster rate than the visible causes could produce.
But before the Eldren could figure out what was happening with the
oxygen levels, a new disaster befell the Terran biosphere: immense
volcanic eruptions began to occur in Asia, flood eruptions that filled
the atmosphere with dangerous levels of pollutants. Combined with the
falling oxygen levels and the wild variations in climate, the effects
were murderous.
On Mars, the already slowly dying biosphere was nearly dead, from a
hundred different apparent causes. On Io, the biosphere was hanging
on, barely, but _something_ was degrading the intricate structures
that the Ionian organisms used to tap electrical energy from the flux
tube, playing horrible havoc with the intricate and fragile balance of
life on the Jovian satellite. On the extrasolar worlds, the
extinction rate varied from modest to terminal.
The Eldren were near despair at figuring out what underlaid all this,
until one Eldren, a relatively new addition to the group, happened to
be examining the dying remnants of what had been a vast reef system,
when it happened to recognize something that should not have been
there: what appeared to be an individual of a particular arthropod
species, which should have been found in the coastal shallows, and
which was totally unsuited for a reef-based existence. Taking a closer
look, this Eldren realized that the creature wasn't really an
organism. Though it was made of flesh and blood on the surface,
within it was metal and sophisticated synthetics.
This Eldren had no idea of what it was, but he called in others to
examine it, and some of them did recognize it, from their experiences
with the Helians: it was a machine within a living layer of tissue, a
cyborg of sorts. Though the Eldren were not, as a species, tool
users, they could certainly recognize such from learned experience.
This device was so intricately designed, so perfectly camouflaged,
that it was only the malfunction that had brought it into an unnatural
and impossible environment that revealed it for what it was. To
almost every external sense, at anything but a very close analysis, it
looked like a natural living organism.
In fact, it was a living organism, with most of the natural qualities
of such, wrapped around a microbot of such miniaturization and
sophistication that it verged on being a nanobot. Both the biological
and the 'mechanical' systems of the thing were superbly engineered for
remaining hidden, even from a superficial search with the Eldrens'
penetrating senses.
But once the presence of the thing was revealed, the Eldren knew what
to look for, and they knew where to look: the natural environment
where this particular microdevice would have been expected to be
found. Once they started looking actively, they started finding them.
In large numbers. All over the planet.
Within a year, the Eldren had discovered such cyborg microbots in
every ecological region, in deep ocean, shallow sea, flat plains,
hills and mountains, tundra and tropics, the planet could fairly be
said to be infested with them. When they went to look, as they had
more than half expected, Mars and Io proved to be similarly infested.
Further examination indicated that every single world on which the
ongoing extinctions were occurring was likewise playing host to the
hordes of various types of cyborg mini-microbots.
They existed in many varieties, the purposes of which were not always
clear. But sometimes the purpose was all too clear. On Io, one
variety of microbot was discovered to be quietly, and subtly, using a
variety of methods, destroying the electrical taps and geothermal
channels that the local organisms subsisted with.
On Mars, a variety of microbot existed in the deep cryosphere,
spreading tailored toxins through the water cycle.
On Earth, the microbots were everywhere, and doing a huge variety of
things. Some of them quietly, slowly, and inexorably hunted out
specific 'keystone species'. Others interpenetrated food webs,
carrying poisons and toxins, to reduce the efficiency of various food
networks. Individually, all these efforts were minor, but
collectively, over a period hundreds of thousands of years, the
pressure began to have serious effects.
To the Eldren's amazement, they even discovered cyborg 'bots that
would permit themselves to be ingested, or inject themselves into
larger organisms, and in the manner of some parasites interfere with
their behavior and use them as tools for other purposes. One variety
of such, for ex, took effective control of a species of large oceanic
coastal predator, and once having done so, use it as a tool to hunt
out and destroy creatures this predator would normally ignore, to the
point of driving the target organisms' populations below viability
levels.
Though it seemed improbable that such tiny efforts could have such
vast, planet-wide effects, the Eldren eventually realized that these
mechaorganisms had been at their destructive work for at least a
quater of a million years. Further, they were in contact with each
other, by a variety of subtle means, many of them chemical signals
along the lines of those used by genuine natural organisms. Also used
were very weak radio signals passed from device to device at short
ranges, or tiny pulses of laser light, or any of dozens of other
methods, all well considered for secrecy.
Though the individual processing power of each microbot was tiny, they
formed something like a collective gestalt processor. It could
analyze information, slowly but steadily, on a global level, and adapt
its collective actions accordingly. The goal appeared to be the
collapse of the Terran ecosystem. Similar collections of thousands of
different types of microbots also existed on the other affected
planets.
Once they spotted the pattern, the Eldren noted that it had other
components. Some purely biological species had been altered, very
subtly, to produce effects that would never have appeared by natural
processes, or thrived if they did. Indeed, some of these creatures'
evinced behavior that should have led to their rapidly being selected
out, so _something_ was renewing them. They interacted with the
gestalt-microbots in a hundred different and collectively destructive
ways. One of the effects of this was to account for the oxygen
depletion anomaly. Another was the discovery that the cells of one
kind of altered plant had the peculiar effect of taking in natural
viruses, and in the process of replicating those viruses (as was
normal), producing new strains of enhanced virulence. Those were
examples of literally thousands of such individually modest, but
collectively devastating, tendencies, working away under the radar of
the Eldren for hundreds of thousands of years.
Once the Eldren discovered the existence of the peculiar 'infestation'
that was eating away at the connective tissue of life on their worlds,
including Earth itself, they were left with the problem of what to do
about it. It would have been straightforward to blast them
infestations out of existence, by doing something drastic like raising
surface temperatures by a few hundred degrees globally, or any of a
dozen other things. The downside, of course, was that to do would be
to do the work of the infestation for it, all in a day: ending
metazoan (and perhaps microbial) life on the subject worlds.
The infestation, both cyborg and biological, was mixed smoothly,
almost integrally, into the planetary biospheres, in such a way that
the Eldren could find no ready way to remove it without doing
unacceptable damage themselves. Meanwhile, the decline of the
biospheres, even on Earth itself, the healthiest and most vital of
them, continued to accelerate.
MORE LATER [including the explanation of What's Happening].
Shermanlee
Mike Miller
The (Helian) Empire Strikes Back?
Bullies among the Eldren are kicking sand in the faces of the nerd
Eldren running the terraforming experiments?
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Johnny1A
You're close! Sorta. Glad to see people are still interested, it
won't be long before Later comes.
Shermanlee
Patrick Spinler
>
> Glad to see people are still interested, it
> won't be long before Later comes.
>
> Shermanlee
Very much interested. I have to admit the original atlantis saga lost
me for a bit, but the interactions between the elren and the helians
were pretty darn neat.
Your Eldren bear a passing resemblance to some creatures from a book
called "War for Eternity" by Chris Rowely. (Wherein a tribal and
fanatically laissez-faire human colony world is the sole source of a
longevity drug, which the eeevvviiilll commie homeworld reaches out to
take, in collusion with the corrupt drug processor merchants.
Unfortunately, the biosphere of the world is a carefully crafted
powersource for aforesaid Eldren-like beings.)
Ring any bells ?
-- Pat
sm...@albany.edu
> You're close! Sorta. Glad to see people are still interested, it
> won't be long before Later comes.
>
> Shermanlee
Yeppers, I'm still interested. What I'm interested, however, is the
complete story. Do you have all your various histories gathered in one
place? I'm missing the beginning of the Atlantis thread and a few
other bits and pieces, and having a single source would be great.
Stephen Mann
Johnny1A
Nope. To the degree I borrowed the Eldren from anyone, they're
loosely plagiarized from James Blish's _The Star Dwellers_, with a
little bit of several other things thrown in.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
Not yet, I don't. It may happen in the future, though! It's a
complicated storyline, I admit.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The infestation, both cyborg and biological, was mixed smoothly,
> almost integrally, into the planetary biospheres, in such a way that
> the Eldren could find no ready way to remove it without doing
> unacceptable damage themselves. Meanwhile, the decline of the
> biospheres, even on Earth itself, the healthiest and most vital of
> them, continued to accelerate.
>
> MORE LATER [including the explanation of What's Happening].
>
> Shermanlee
To explain what was bringing about the decline and collapse of
Solarigen ecospeheres across the Greater Milky Way, we must turn our
attention back across time to the end of the Helian empire. The
Helian empire lasted, in its glory period, about ~1.5 million years.
While this made the Helian civilization longer-lived than any
Homosentient society ever approached, it was a blip in the vast scale
of time that followed. The time between the end of the Helian empire,
which was approximately at the Cambrian/Ordovician border, and the
end-Permian extinction, was ~260 million years. This vast gap of time
was four times longer than the time between the end of the dinosaurs
and the dawn of Terran recorded history. Even to the immortal Eldren,
it was a significant amount of time.
On Earth, since the end of the Helian civilization, modern kingdoms of
Solarigen life had emerged from the sea, plants evolving into vast
forests of conifers and other large forms, fish had become amphibians,
some of whom had evolved a way to lay eggs on dry land, and some of
those had begun to show vaguely mammal-like characteristics. Vast
beds of coal were laid down, and continents grew and moved around the
face of the globe. Changes on a similar scale were occurring on the
other terraformed worlds. Two hundred sixty megayears is a _long_
time. The Solar System itself circled the galactic core twice in the
time between the fall of the Helian society and the end of the Permian
period.
To most indications, the only thing left of the Helian civilization
was the vast ruined cities that spanned continents on the formerly
inhabited worlds. There was plenty of Heliugen life left, of course,
on the heliuformed worlds all over the Greater Milky Way, but none of
its was conscious.
But most is the operative word. There _were_ a few remnants of the
Helian empire left that were more than ruins and artifacts.
In the aftermath of the collapse, with the Weapon having rendered the
majority of Helian-habitable worlds useless to the Helians, and after
the exodus of the bulk of the still-technical survivors from the
Greater Milky Way, there were still a few Helians left here and there.
Most of these small groups lacked the resources and skills needed for
survival. But a few managed, against all odds, to hang on, and
eventually to regain contact with each other. But they had a basic
problem: there were far too few of them to maintain a
full-space-based existence over time, they lacked the necessary
technical knowledge and basic resources to follow that path.
Adding to their torment was the fact that the Greater Milky Way (GMW)
was littered with perfectly healthy Heliugen ecospheres, rendered too
dangerous to approach by the presence or potential presence of the
Weapon. Worlds with the resources to support billions of Helians,
utterly useless. The tiny handful of survivors lacked the resources
to even hope to mount a counter to the Weapon.
Over the course of a few thousand Terran years, many of the last few
survivors gathered in one of the last remaining fully functional and
largely automated space habitats. It was one of the largest the
Helians ever built, and it's automatics were good for tens of
thousands of years, but they would eventually wear out, and their
resource base was likewise limited.
Efforts were made to get around their problems, some of them partly
successful, but somehow it was never quite enough. This last
community of Helians grew to the size of several million, but it could
grow no larger within the limits of its resources. But a new
possibility opened up to the researchers of this last community.
Helians were very, very alien, by Homosentient standards. In mind and
body, they were quite unlike us. But they did share one
characteristic with the various Human species that would someday
inhabit the GMW. Like us, most Helians had no wish whatever to depart
this mortal coil. Their natural lifespan of about 100 Terran years
had been extended by advanced 'biotech' (or heliutech) to 1500-2500
Terran years during the golden age of the Helian civilization. But
the Helians remained mortal.
Now, prevented from external by lack of resources and the Weapon, the
Last Helians poured their researches into surviving within the
confines of their situation. Because of the nature of Helian
reproduction, in which the 'parent' entity could pass on memories and
mental tendencies to the 'child', various obsessions and interests
could tend to amplify over time in a community in which all the
'parent' generation shared them, since whether a Helian budded alone
or as part of a group, the same tendencies were passed on.
Thus the Last Helian community's members began to move from the normal
Helian aversion to dying to something Homosentients might characterize
as obsessive, with the tendency amplifying generation after
generation. They poured their researches ever more into this
obsessive quest for _individual_ longevity. After several tens of
thousands of Terran years, in a time when the great space habitat that
formed the core of their community began to finally break down from
wear and lack of proper maintenance, they made a breakthrough that
promised them individual immortality...or a sort.
They did not find a way to keep their natural bodies fully functional
indefinitely. But they did discover a way that their equivalent of
the Homosentient central nervous system (several different organs in a
Helian) could be preserved. The process offered individual Helians
the possibility of last for _far_ longer than the normal span.
Hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of years, in theory.
But at a significant cost.
Even for a species as egocentric and survival-driven as the Helians,
most would not have chosen this option before the Collapse. But the
Last Helians had mostly unwittingly 'bred' themselves for a level of
aversion to death that made the choice seem reasonable. When the
process was finally made viable, the majority of the several tens of
millions of Last Helians opted to undergo it.
They chose a planet for their new home, a planet almost nothing like
ancient Helius or the Heliugen ecospheres that still existed. The
world they chose was an airless, liquidless rockball about the size of
Mars. It orbited a red dwarf star of the sort Helians tended to
prefer, much like Heliustar itself, on the usual cold outskirts, but
that was all it had in common with their former worlds.
A section of the planet was leveled, carved into a shallow 'bowl'
about twenty miles wide, and that bowl was filled with a fine material
like 'sand', but that was actually a complicated nanomaterial. Each
silvery grain was a solid-state device with circuits and elements
'doped' into it. To the Homosentient eye, it would have looked like
the finest of sand, except that it was of a glistening silver color.
Set into this artificial sandy plain were the actual containment
devices for the disembodied Helien 'thought-organs'. They were
uniform in design, each of them a ~three-meter tall four-sided
pyramidal object, with cubic bases, all composed of a TL12 alloy
designed for endurance. To a Homosentient, they looked like
steep-sided obelisks, with transparent panels set in each of the four
sloping faces. (To the Helians, those panels wouldn't have been
transparent, it was a coincidence that they wree transparent at the EM
wavelengths we see with). The obelisks were the top part of a large
square rectangular mass os systems and devices buried in the silvery
'sand'.
Within each of those obelisks, the five separate organs that served a
Helian in the same way the brain and spinal cord serve a Homosentient
were placed, with life-support equipment and associated devices
contained within the base of the obelisk. The obelisks were arranged
in regular rows, running all across the vast 'bowl' of 'sand'. That
vast artificial plain contained over _ten million_ of the obelisks, in
neat rows about ten meters apart on either side. Within each obelisk
reposed the essence of an individual Helian. In this form, they hoped
to last out the ages, the 'Last Helians' indeed.
Creating this strange new environment taxed the limited resources of
the dying Last Helian habitat past its limit. When they were done,
the habitat was a hulk floating in space, its energy sources cold and
dead, its systems stripped to build the new home of the Last Helians.
Though they now had something of the personal immortality they had
sought, the other half of their obsession was the preservation of the
Helian species. Their new plan allowed for that, too. Realizing that
if something were to destroy their new habitat, their species would be
gone (they had no idea that an entire fleet of refugee Helians had
left the GMW entirely), they used their species' equivalent of cloning
and bioengineering to create millions of 'embryonic' Helians. They
could have done this at any point, of course, but there was still no
safe place for a new traditional-Helian society. Instead, these
embryonic half-bud Helians were placed in suspension capsules, with
advanced robots, and launched to selected target worlds, where
facilities similar (if initially smaller) than the first one were
constructed. Then the 'Helian-buds' were reanimated by the robots,
and grown to the point that their organs-of-thought could form the
core of new obelisks on new worlds. There, when that was done, new
ores would be mined, new embryo-buds budded off, and the process
repeated. It was slow, but the newly immortal Neohelians could afford
to take the long view.
The process was a classic geometric progression, but it was slow,
because the Last Helians deliberately chose to keep it slow. One of
their goals was to make sure that the Eldren did not suspect these new
immortality receptacles had been created, which meant they had to keep
a low profile. (That was one reason for choosing dead, airless,
liquidless worlds for the site of the new habitats, along with the
fact that the mechanism required it. They knew the Eldren were still
watching the living Heliugen worlds.)[1]
Thus, over the course of a quarter million years, several tens of
thousands of such 'dead' worlds became host to these
immortality-sites. All looked much like the original, though some
were much larger, and some were smaller. All were marked by vast
plains of the silvery 'sand', usually a few meters to a few tens of
meters deep. All were on parts of their planets chosen deliberately
to be as geologically inactive as possible. In each one, neatly
ordered rows of obelisks marked the location of an individual,
nigh-immortal neo-Helian.
When they felt that a sufficient margin of safety for their species
was reached, the expansion was stopped. Again, they knew that to keep
adding new sites around the GMW would increase the chance that the
Eldren would learn of their existence. After that stage was reached,
their activities changed, all carefully calculated for 'quiet'.
The Last Helians had their own names for these places, of course, both
collectively and individually. The image that would first occur to
Terran observers of these places, in almost every case, was a
graveyard. Thus, when Sir Ian Carlyle, the first Terran to visit one
in person, nicknamed it a 'Helian Graveyard', the term stuck, and
became almost universal among Terrans and Terran-influenced
Homosentients.[2]
MORE LATER
[1] I'll get to _why_ the Last Helians wanted this kept secret from
the Eldren in the next installment.
[2] Sir Ian was not entirely mistaken in his characterization of these
places, as we shall see.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The Last Helians had their own names for these places, of course, both
> collectively and individually. The image that would first occur to
> Terran observers of these places, in almost every case, was a
> graveyard. Thus, when Sir Ian Carlyle, the first Terran to visit one
> in person, nicknamed it a 'Helian Graveyard', the term stuck, and
> became almost universal among Terrans and Terran-influenced
> Homosentients.[2]
>
> MORE LATER
These 'Helian Graveyards' were in fact far more complex than their
appearance would have suggested. They were intricately designed and
carefully constructed fortresses, life-support systems, and hiding
places, utilizing technology at the low end of TL12.
Each 'obelisk' contained the organs-of-thought of a Helian, a
self-contained power unit in case the external power system failed, a
full life-support system able to keep the organs-of-thought alive and
viable almost indefinitely, a dedicated TL12 Complexity 8 neural-net
computer which was integrated into the mentality of the Helian, and a
force-shield system designed to protect the obelisk if the larger
defense systems of the Graveyard failed. There were also
communications systems, sensors, and a dedicated microbot swarm which
worked to maintain the entire system.
The 'sand', examined closely, would have been seen to be made up of
very tiny dodecahedral objects, barely large enough for a sharp-eyed
Homosentient to make out the shape with the naked eye in good light.
Each of these tiny objects was a phenomenally complex device, a
solid-state device woven with billions of circuit elements and
microscopic components. Individually they were nearly inert, but when
in physical contact with other objects of their sort, they could
interconnect to form many different systems. Depending on its
programming, a given dodecahedron could serve as part of a computer, a
communications system, a power distribution device, or any of many
other things, or combinations of things.
Each Helian Graveyard was circular, a shallow (4D6) meter deep
depression cut into the rock of a rockball planet. The Helians always
chose a geologically nearly dead area, since they were concerned about
groundquakes or volcanoes. They chose, when they could, areas with
very low background radiation levels, even going so far as to seek
regions with low levels of natural radioactives like uranium or
potassium-40. They were thinking long-term, and concerned with even
minor potential sources of trouble.
Each of these vast shallow 'bowls' was filled with the 'sand', within
which rested the obelisks, which were held perfectly vertical by the
'sand', and took advantage of its special properties.
In their determination to remain hidden from the Eldren, the Last
Helians faced some special problems. One was their power source. In
the low temperatures of the Graveyards (2-20 degrees K), most active
power sources would create a noticeable source of thermal emission.
Many power sources would also emit tell-tale radiations that might
give away their existence to a passing Eldren. To complicate matters,
they needed a source of energy that would be good not just for
centuries or millennia, but for megayears or more. That limited their
choices considerably.
Most Graveyards had a deeply buried (a mile or more below the surface)
nuclear power core, with sufficient charges of fissionable material to
maintain a steady flow of moderate power for up to a 1,000,000 years
before refueling was necessary. This was manageable at TL12, and each
Graveyard kept extensive records of the deposits of fissionable
material in their own planetary crusts, and in the other bodies of
their specific star systems, for when refueling was needed. In order
to lengthen the time between refueling, the Graveyards were designed
to be as energy-efficient as they could be. Even individual Helians
would spend times between activity in a state of total sleep, using
less energy even for life-support.
Each Graveyard had a force of robots, with limited self-control,
operated by the occupants of the Graveyard. These robots did the
physical activity the now-sessile Last Helians could not. The systems
were so carefully integrated that the Helians could teleoperate the
robots, perceiving the universe directly through their senses. When
not is use, the robots would usually be stored in underground chambers
below the Graveyard.
The 'sand' of each Graveyard, along with its other functions, formed a
tremendously parallel distributed computer system, linked to each
obelisk, and as they members of each Graveyard community existed
millennium after millennium, their thoughts tended to move into a
state of synchronization, such that an entire Graveyard community
could act almost as a single entity in directing its affairs and its
robots and its activities. The members of each community communicated
with each other by traditional Helian telepathy, by laser-com (they
eschewed broadcasts for secrecy's sake, opting instead for low-power
short-range lasercoms, relayed from obelisk to obelisk), and by
physical linkage through the sand-substrate.
All these different methods of communication worked at once, producing
an intricate web. Over time, each community became almost flawlessly
synchronized, to a degree the Helians themselves had never quite
expected. Immortality had its surprises, including the elimination
(within the individual Graveyards) of the hitherto inevitable
internecine competitive violence that had marked Helian existence
throughout history.
One thing that motivated all the inhabitants of the various
Graveyards, derived from the original group of Helians that had
created the first one, was the desire, almost to the point of
compulsion, to remain hidden from the awareness of the Eldren, as
noted earlier.
The reason for this was rooted in the nature of the Collapse that
destroyed the Helian civilization, and in the physiological nature of
Helian intelligence. The Collapse had been brought about, physically,
when the Eldren had removed the leadership and most of the members of
the conspiracy to try to destroy Solarigen life in the Sol System.
Like the tiny noise that triggers the avalanche, this tiny event had
produced the sequence of events that ended in total collapse for
Helian civilization. As with the avalanche, the necessary prior
conditions for the event had been building up quietly for hundreds of
thousands of years, the entire final 25% of the history of the Helian
empire, in fact. The Eldren had done what they had done after
considerable provocation.
But it was undeniable that the Eldren action had been the specific
triggering stimulus for the 'avalanche'.
Recall that budded Helians could and did 'inherit' memories from their
parental organism, and that the parent could if it wished partly
'edit' those memories. Inherited memories 'felt' just like personal
ones, such that a Helian could remember things that happened to its
ancestors as if it had lived them itself. Thus, even many generations
after the empire collapsed, the Last Helians could 'remember' the
collapse as if they had lived it. Furthermore, in order to impress
upon their offspring the criticality of remaining hidden, the memories
had been edited with an emphasis on the potential _danger_ of the
Eldren. The fact that the Eldren were the only reason the Helian
species had survived the Great Nova, and the fact that most of their
living habitable worlds had been 'gifts' of sorts, from the Eldren,
was, while not forgotten, _de-emphasized_ in their inherited memories.
This reinforced the tendency to edit for fear in the next generation,
and the process 'fed upon itself'. After enough generations of this,
the Last Helians began to display an almost literally innate paranoia
about the Eldren. That last generation, the ones who made themselves
immortal in the Graveyards and duplicated themselves across the GMW,
had a nearly visceral compulsion to stay 'below the radar' of the
Eldren. They remembered that the Eldren could be numbingly dangerous
and almost incomprehensibly powerful, and all but forgot that they
were not necessarily enemies.
For the most part, the Last Helians were content to simply survive, in
their new immortality, staying safely out of the Eldren's view. They
no longer needed ecospheres to survive, after all. In a sense, they
had almost divorced themselves from all the requirements of their
former existence.
But a few of the Last Helians, at the same time that the Helian
Graveyards were being created, had a more ambitious agenda in mind,
one they kept secret even from their fellow Last Helians.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
> time. The Solar System itself circled the galactic core twice in the
> time between the fall of the Helian society and the end of the Permian
> period.
Oops. Just noticed that I had a figure wrong there, that should be
that the Solar System circled the Galaxy _once_ plus a little in that
period.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
> But a few of the Last Helians, at the same time that the Helian
> Graveyards were being created, had a more ambitious agenda in mind,
> one they kept secret even from their fellow Last Helians.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
This particular subgroup of the Last Helians had mostly similar
motivations to their fellows, but a different 'slant'. They were less
content to ensure the survival of their species by individual
immortality in the Graveyards, and more inclined to seek a revival of
the former Helian empire, across the length and breadth of the Greater
Milky Way. They certainly wished to ensure their own continued
existence, but they also wished to see the great continent-spanning
cities revived, the Heliutype worlds again inhabited, etc. Their goal
was a Helian empire in which individual Helians lived their normal
spans, then 'retired' to the immortality of their obelisks, creating a
'ruling class' of immortals who could keep the endlessly fractious
nature of Helian societies in check, while permitting that society to
grow and thrive.
Several barriers stood in the way of this vision. The Weapon
continued to make many otherwise thriving Heliugen worlds untouchable
to sapient Helians. Their resource base was limited (though that
could have been overcome with time). But above all, they knew the
other Last Helians would object to any movement in that direction,
with vigorous and if necessary lethal force.
The reason was simple: any such attempt would be bound to catch the
attention of the Eldren, sooner or later, and almost certainly sooner.
Indeed, among the Last Helians, the desire to stay below the Eldren
radar had led to a general ban on even entering the same star system
as a living Heliugen world, enforceable by death. This ambitious
subgroup knew their fellows would be quite prepared to kill them to
maintain their secrecy.
Furthermore, this group actually mostly agreed that their fellow Last
Helians were right. They had no more wish to come to Eldren attention
than their fellows did, at least not yet. Where they differed was
that they thought that _eventually_, it would be safe for the Eldren
to discover their existence again, if certain prerequisite conditions
could be arranged. It would take a great deal of effort and a very
long time, but they were prepared to be patient.
This difference of view was the reason they dared not hint at their
intentions to their fellows, who intended to remain out of Eldren ken
_indefinitely_, and who were quite insistent about that goal.
Therefore, while the various Helian Graveyards were being set across
the GMW, this group laid plans for their own. It was somewhat
different than the others, most notably in its location. All the
others were on planets or planet-sized moons of gas giants, sometimes
one to a world, sometimes several. The worlds were almost invariably
cryogenically cold airless silicate rockballs, ranging in size from
about the size of Luna to perhaps 50% bigger than Mars. This sort of
world was not common, but they existed in more than sufficient numbers
for the needs of the Last Helians.
This group instead chose a moonlet, a ball of stony nickel-iron about
200 miles in diameter. In further deviation from the norm (and
defiance of Last Helian law!) they chose a moonlet that orbited a
Solarigen world! Had their fellows known, they'd have been
exterminated for that alone. But they kept their activity very quiet,
and it's easy to keep a small slow activity hidden in a very big
galaxy.
The planet was about the size and diameter of Earth, and the Eldren
had terraformed early in their Solarigen project, and seeded its new
oceans with life drawn from Earth. In the relatively short time
since, that life had throve, spreading throughout the shallows around
the four continents and outward into the depths. Already, this life
was diverging from its cousin species of Earth's early Ordovician
Period.
The four small continents of the planet were utterly barren, as no
land-based life had yet evolved locally, and the Eldren had brought
none (indeed, not even Earth would have much land-life for some time
yet).
But the Eldren had literally _millions_ of terraformed worlds to mind,
and this group of Helians had been watching. This world was rarely
visited by any Eldren that the Helians knew of, and it was somewhat
'out of the way', astrographically speaking. It was the third of
seven worlds, with one large satellite and the smaller 200 mile
moonlet on which this little group of Helians now settled. The inner
moonlet orbited relatively close to its primary world, tide-locked
rotationally, and the whole thing was close enough to the star (a
G-class sun a little cooler than Sol) that its temperature range was
similar to that of Luna. That, of course, meant that even at its
coolest, it was blazing hot by Helian standards.
On the side of the moonlet facing 'out' from the planet, the Helians
carved out a small Helian Graveyard. It was not large as such things
went, housing only a few thousand of the 'obelisks', but it would be
big enough for their needs. They brought with them a higher ratio of
robots to Helians than most Graveyards ever needed, but they had
different plans than most, too.
Once their personal Graveyard was ready, giving them what amounted to
a sessile immortality, these Helians turned their teleoperated
machines to the task of digging deep shafts and tunnels into the
consolidated metal and rock of the moonlet. They had plenty of time,
and the robots dug their shafts down to a depth of fifty miles each,
more or less. At that depths, they began excavating a labyrinth of
tunnels, chambers, passages, galleries, and small cubicles, spreading
out from the base of the shafts until they met and interconnected,
forming a layer of excavations 1000 levels thick, fifty miles
underground, and reaching around the tiny worldlet. Then other
chambers were excavated, some closer to the surface, a few deeper,
though not so extensive as the main set of levels. All this took
time, but the Helialisks (the Helians in their obelisk form) had no
shortage of that. If it took 1000 Terran years to excavate the
underground workings, then so be it. If it took 5000, what of that?
In one of the largest of the chambers on the 'main levels', a vast
spherical chamber a mile in diameter, the teleoperated robots now set
up a vast network of intricate machinery, and other robots brought in
helium, carbon, and other organically useful (for Heliugen life)
materials from the outer star system. Now the Helialisks on the
surface began the greatest 'bioengineering' project in the entire
history of Helian civilization.
Within that underground chamber, starting with 'buds' that could have
been used to create new Helians, they 'grew' a different kind of
organism, an organism like nothing nature had ever produced in any
Heliugen biosphere. It was huge, sessile, and complex, basically a
vast network of 'organs-of-thought', supported by a system of
simplified organs and tissues that existed only to support the
'brains' of the thing. Interconnected with the organs-of-thought were
some of the most advanced and specialized supercomputers the Last
Helians knew how to make, machines of TL12 sophistication.
Surrounding the whole thing were intricate life-support systems
designed to keep this amazing...thing...alive and functional over
geological ages.
When they finished, within the mile-wide spherical hollow was a matrix
of life-support systems surrounding what would have looked, to
Homosentient eyes, like a vast membrane-enclosed 'blob' of organs and
tissues, barely recognizable as such, based on Helian life-processes
rather than Solarigen. One in the trivial gravity of that underground
chamber could that 700 meter-diameter entity have survived, and even
there anti-gravity generators kept the strain on it even lower, so
that it fairly 'floated' in its chamber, which was flooded with liquid
helium and cooled within 2 degrees of absolute zero.
A layer of insulating material helped keep the chamber cold, while the
most capable and reliable heat-pumping systems they could construct
added to the effect. The heat was a problem, of course, since it had
to be radiated away eventually, but to do so, they installed thousands
of disguised radiators all over the surface of the moonlet, linked to
heat-sinks able to smooth out the flow and keep the radiated heat to a
minimum.[1]
Along with growing that entity, they also installed security systems,
automated factory facilities, communications systems of various sorts,
the best sensor systems the Helians could still make, and an array of
weapons and defenses designed to provide protection if ever needed.
Deep within the asteroid, they installed arrays of the largest fission
and deuterium-fusion plants ever built, to provide power for the whole
assemblage. They had sufficient pre-refined and pre-processed fuel
(uranium and deuterium) to run the power plants at full capacity for
hundreds of thousands of years when they finished, with the resources
to mine more fissionables and harvest more deuterium. Of course,
these power plants too generated heat that had to be dealt with, but
the same systems used to cool and conceal the entity could be used
here as well.[1]
The great 'entity' they were creating was a sapient being. Instead of
being based on 5 separate and distinct organs-of-thought, as were
Helians, it was based upon millions. Three of the five types of
organ-of-thought that Helians had were to be found in countless
numbers within the entity, along with some types not present in
natural Helians. The entity 'awakened' well before it finished
growing, and the Helians began teaching it, and connecting it to the
vast network of systems that would be its 'body'.
It took something like 10,000 Terran years for the entity to finish
growing to its full physical size and complexity after it 'awakened',
and another 10,000 years or so of early learning, its equivalent of
'toddlerhood'. It was connected to a vast multitiered neural-net
supercomputer network, which shaped itself to the growing intellect of
the new entity. It required _another_ several tens of thousands of
years to get the new creature to the point that it could smoothly
integrate its biological and cybernetic elements, but learn to do so
it did. There were many setbacks, many blind alleys, and many
problems, but the Helialisks on the surface in their 'Graveyard' had a
surfeit of time.
At last, though, the creature was ready. It was firmly in control of
its new 'body' (the network of machines and facilities and the army of
teleoperated drones that ran throughout the planetoid), and its
programming was ready and loaded into the 'softwired' structures of
the creature's organs-of-thought. While much construction and design
and other work remained to be done on this place, now the entity could
finish on its own, directing its own growth and carrying out its
programming using its own resources.
The Helialisks then transferred control to their creation, and went
through the arduous process of having themselves moved. The Graveyard
on the surface was destroyed and all traces hidden, the individual
Helialisks spread across the galaxy to be integrated into other
Graveyards, their inhabitants all unsuspecting of what the new
arrivals had just finished creating in an out of the way corner of the
galaxy, in a forbidden star system.
The new being (for such it was) had no name for itself that we would
recognize, even if we could speak the Helian telepathic 'language'.
We will call it by the name that Terrans would one day know it. When
Sir Ian Carlyle and his American friend J.T. Cameron discovered its
existence (the first Terrans to do so), they would call it 'NEMESIS',
after a discredited theory about mass extinctions from the 20th
century. We shall follow their lead and call it the same. [2][3]
Though it was a living, conscious entity, in some ways NEMESIS had as
much in common with a computer as a Helian or a Homosentient. It had
binding programs it was compelled to follow, 'softwired' into its
organs-of-thought. Its various programs were of tiered priority.
At first, NEMESIS was fully occupied finishing work on _itself_, that
is, its habitat and its 'body'. This occupied it for probably about
100,000 years. It used its army of telebots to replicate themselves,
and then to further tunnel out Nemesis and finish construction on the
vast network of machines that made up the 'body' of NEMESIS. It also
completed construction of its various defenses, and of its ways of
manipulating the outside Universe.
When it finished this work, to all external appearances, Nemesis
looked as it had before the Helians came. Only telltale faint sources
of anomalous heat [1] could give away the presence of more, and these
were low-level, well hidden, and carefully designed to _not_ be
noticeable if one was not activity seeking them.
Its defenses were extensive, since its Helian creators had programmed
it with no small dose of defensive paranoia. Tens of thousands of
concealed beam and missile emplacements dotted the surface. In
concealed landing bays cut into the crust of the tiny rock, tens of
thousands of semi-automated semi-living combat machines waited,
surface-machines designed to sally forth aganst any foe that reached
the surface, space-capable robots ready to engage in the open 'sky',
and more specialized machines of destruction as well, for special
needs.
At will, it could shroud its entire planetoid in multi-layered
force-shields, and local shield-generators existed as well to protect
key sites. Normally, these shields would be off, since their
operation could be detected at a distance, but they could be activated
in nanoseconds, and there were tens of thousands of redundant
shield-generators present, for added safety and reliability, in hidden
emplacements all over the moonlet's surface.
Additional protection, of course, was provided by the fact that the
entity NEMESIS, both its Heliugenic-organic core and the machines that
made up its indispensable 'body' were all nestled under over _fifty
miles_ of stony iron. This by itself was quite a formidable defense,
and within the access passages that linked the surface to the
labyrinthine depths were veritable armies of killing machines. Access
to NEMESIS was not a simple matter for an enemy.
It also had a directive, however, that it was not to reveal its
existence to the Eldren if it could help it, and if that could not be
helped, it was to guard the secret of its location even then, since
the Helians knew all too well that even those elaborate defenses would
be unable to withstand the Eldren if they were genuinely motivated.
The implementation of NEMESIS' programming could be counted on to
infuriate them, and only secrecy could be relied on to protect NEMESIS
from the fury of the Eldren.
When it completed creating 'itself', NEMESIS dutifully began to seek
ways to implement its prime imperatives. These were based on the
wishes of the little group of Helians who had created it, and in turn
were based on their long-term desires.
NEMESIS' master directives included, but were not limited to:
1. Study and isolate a way to undo the damage of the infamous 'Helian
Weapon', thus making the Heliugen worlds habitable to sapient Helians
again.
2. Determine the outline of the collapsed Helian empire, seek out and
identify surviving Helians that were unknown to its creators, and
guard against threats to the survival of the Helian Graveyards and the
Heliugen biospheres.
3. Prepare for the eventual restoration of the Helian empire, by
removing extraneous factors interfering in that reestablishment.
The first two directives would have caused no trouble from the Eldren,
the third was bound to do so. The group of Helians who had created
NEMESIS were the direct genetic/psychological descendants of some of
the conspirators who had launched the ill-fated (and fake)
extermination attack on Earth, Mars, and Io, which had been the spark
that set the Helian empire ablaze.
The original leaders of that conspiracy were long dead, and had always
seen it merely as a tool to assume control top tiers of the Helian
empire. The Eldren had destroyed the leadership, but a few of the
more ideologically driven (and thoroughly duped) followers survived
both the wrath of the Eldren and the downfall of the empire, their
biases and assumptions amplified with each new 'generation' of budded
Helians.
One of their obsessions was that the existence of Solarigen life was
an intolerable threat to Heliugen life and the Helian species. This
was incorporated into NEMESIS as a directive to determine a method to
exterminate _all_ Solarigen life wherever situate, and to implement
that method. [4]
MORE LATER.
[1] Radiating that heat was a headache to the Helians, since secrecy
was one of their watchwords. But they _had_ to radiate it, the Laws
of Thermodynamics are not known for their negotiability.
[2] The idea of 'Nemesis' was posited in response to an _apparent_
periodicity in mass extinctions in the fossil record on Earth, to the
tune of every 26 million years or so. It was suggested that every 26
megayears or so, an unnamed object (brown dwarf, neutron star, black
hole, ?) crashed through the outer Solar System on its long orbit
around Sol, resulting in comet showers on the inner planets and mass
extinction. The theory was controversial, and is not widely accepted,
but the name will last down the decades.
[3] For convenience, 'NEMESIS' refers to the sapient entity, 'Nemesis'
is the planetoid on which (or rather IN which) it exists.
[4] While the Solarigen life forms in no way actively caused the
destruction of the Helian empire, it is undeniable that the Eldren's
discovery of Solarigen life did set in motion the chain of
individually improbable events that led to that destruction. Thus the
paranoia of this group did have an (albeit extremely slender) thread
of a basis.
Shermanlee
Bryan J. Maloney
Soon as I saw the name "NEMESIS", I knew: This is a narrationally
important Very Nasty Thing (TM).
Johnny1A
> Soon as I saw the name "NEMESIS", I knew: This is a narrationally
> important Very Nasty Thing (TM).
:) Bit of a giveaway, huh?
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> One of their obsessions was that the existence of Solarigen life was
> an intolerable threat to Heliugen life and the Helian species. This
> was incorporated into NEMESIS as a directive to determine a method to
> exterminate _all_ Solarigen life wherever situate, and to implement
> that method. [4]
>
> MORE LATER.
NEMESIS faced an enormous task. Even by this early date, the Eldren
experiments had transformed some millions of planets into more-or-less
Earth-like environments, with Solarigen biospheres. They were spread
across the entire Greater Milky Way, and NEMESIS did not even know the
precise number of such worlds, or the locations of all such worlds.
NEMESIS had one such biosphere immediately at 'hand', on the planet
Nemesis orbited. This planet, later called Carthesis by Terrans,
provided NEMESIS with a living example of the subject of study, as
well as 'protective coloration' if it was ever needed. Thus, until
NEMESIS was ready to try to make a 'clean sweep', the life-forms of
Carthesia were in fact the safest life forms from the threat of
NEMESIS.
NEMESIS could easily enough have found ways to inflict enormous damage
on specific biospheres, even on a great number, but its programming
mandated that it find a way to destroy _all_ of the Solarigen
biospheres, down to the last microbe. As NEMESIS analyzed the
problem, the full scale of it began to become apparent.
It was not difficult to reduce the population of a species, but
driving it to full _extinction_ was more difficult. As NEMESIS
simulated various possible means of attacking the problem, it
repeatedly found that it much more than twice as hard to extringuish
20% of a world's species than it was 10% of them, and the simulations
tended to show that the difficulty rose expoentially past the 25%
mark. Furthermore, those means that showed the most promise for truly
effective rapid extinctions were all quite 'obvious', and if they
befell many worlds at once, the Eldren could not help but realize that
an attack was occurring.
The need for secrecy suppressed the directive to exterminate the
Solarigen biospheres, forcing NEMESIS to consider ever more complex
and subtle means of carrying out its mission. Realizing it needed
more information, it turned its attention to finding a way to observe
many worlds in detail, not just the single example around which it
orbited.
Here it faced the problem that the Helians had never quite mastered a
technique for fully automated interstellar travel. They could
certainly build such ships, but they tended to run afoul of unexpected
circumstances. NEMESIS itself was the first truly sentient artificial
mind the Helians had ever created, and NEMESIS now needed a way to
built spacecraft capable of handling unexpected events effectively.
After some consideration, it found such a way.
Starting with basic designs in its memory files, NEMESIS began using
its automated factories and robots to construct new ships, with the
crew and passenger facilities absent, optimized for specific missions.
To add flexibility and imagination to the mix, NEMESIS used its
biological engineering facilities to create what amounted to
infinitesimal versions of itself, tiny assembles of cloned
organs-of-thought and support tissue, integrated directly into the
control and life-support systems of the starships just as NEMESIS was
to the vastly larger mechanical body that was buried within its
planetoid.
The first several such attempts went totally awry, but NEMESIS was
effectively immortal, and had plenty of time. Eventually, it was able
to create the 'living computers' it wanted to guide and control its
ships, and it began to launch these out into the Greater Milky Way, on
missions ranging from scouting out the various Solarigen and Heliugen
worlds, to preparing additional facilities against the day when
NEMESIS would be ready to make its move againt Solarigen life. The
ships ranged in size from small scouts to compact flying factories,
all imprinted with total loyalty to NEMESIS itself and its primary
directives.
Unlike traditional Helian ships, usually made of cryogenic 'plastics'
and ices, with a minimum of refractory metals, these ships were
designed to be at home close to stars, able to land on Solarigen
worlds, or drop in closer yet to stars, if that seemed desirable.
While the scouts explored the galaxy, gathering information and
returning it to their creator, the factory-ships sought out moonlets
and asteroids of suitible composition and location, usually similar
(if smaller) than Nemesis, and began constructing secondary bases,
with automated manufacturing facilities, weapons, and research
facilities. As with Nemesis, these planetoids would be altered in
ways that left them looking as 'natural' as possible, secrecy was
always a priority. When the project was finished, there would be a
secondary facility, a smaller version of Nemesis, with the
'brain-creature' of the original factory-ship acting as the governing
intelligence of the new base. Over time, hundreds of these bases were
created in a network spanning the Greater Milky Way, extending the
range and scope of operation possible to the NEMESIS entity.
Of all the Solarigen-inhabited star systems of the Greater Milky Way,
the Sol System was the one that occupied the highest priority in the
view of NEMESIS, since it was the site of the three 'natural'
Solarigen biospheres from which all the others were directly or
indirectly derived.
Of those three biospheres (Earth, Mars, and Io), Earth was at the top
of the priority queue. It was here, on Sol III, that the original
genesis event had started Solarigen life. It was here that the source
of what NEMESIS was programmed to regard as an infection could be
found, and here that the greatest variety of species and the most
vital and enduring biosphere could be found.
Thus, one of the first things NEMESIS did was begin setting up a
constant surveillance of the Solar System and Earth in particular.
Carefully disguised scout ships entered the Sol System, separated by
millennia, and took up position for quiet observation, both of the
Solarigen life there and of the Familiar Eldren who could be found in
the Sol System more often than any other place.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Prince Charon
>
> Shermanlee
How much later?
Prince Charon
Johnny1A
>
> Thus, one of the first things NEMESIS did was begin setting up a
> constant surveillance of the Solar System and Earth in particular.
> Carefully disguised scout ships entered the Sol System, separated by
> millennia, and took up position for quiet observation, both of the
> Solarigen life there and of the Familiar Eldren who could be found in
> the Sol System more often than any other place.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
For a very long time, NEMESIS did little but quietly observe and
collate and analyze data. Its hidden eyes watched as Eldren came and
went from the Solar System, tracking them across the Greater Milky Way
as best it could, and by so doing adding worlds to its list of
targets. As time passed, NEMESIS got better at this quiet spying, and
its lists of Solarigen-inhabited worlds grew longer and ever more
complete.
It also spent time and resources on its other priorities, of course.
It analyzed data from the Heliugen worlds, always looking for ways to
counter the effects of the Helian Weapon, and on occasion it quiety
intervened in events that might otherwise have placed various Helian
Graveyards in danger, all in secrecy as its builders had directed.
But much of its attention was always on the 'Solarigen project'. For
literally tens of millions of years, NEMESIS watched and waited,
analyzed and prepared, running ever more complex simulations to
detemine the most effective course of action. At last, it concluded
that its best bet would be a simultaneous and highly flexible attack
on a thousand fronts at once, rather than a grand-scale spectacular
assault. Had it faced just one world or a handful, such an 'open'
attack might have been a viable strategy, but not against millions.
Over the course of a hundred thousand years, NEMESIS arranged for
machines, disguised usually as random detritus such as meteorites, to
'crash' on Earth, Mars, Io, and the extra-solar biospheric worlds.
The nature of these packages varied, some contained sensors, some
robots, some biological cargo. With the almost incomprehensible
patience of an immortal entity, NEMESIS used these disguised tools to
slowly, quietly construct hidden facilities on the target worlds.
These hidden facilities were rarely large, and usually hidden deep
underground or other hard-to-observe locales, and always carefully
disguised.
In the Solar System, NEMESIS would stop operations altogether when
there were large numbers of Eldren about, or when they seemed to be
especially interested in something on the planets in question. When
they were elsewhere, work would resume, and if moving so cautiously
meant it took ten thousand years to do what it could otherwise have
done in a century, then NEMESIS called that a reasonable price to
minimize the risk of discovery.
Gradually, on Earth, on Mars, on Io, and on millions of other worlds,
networks of hidden facilities rose, constructed by robots and microbot
swarms, hidden with the exquisite care of the most paranoid entity in
existence, these facilities were mostly self-controlled, requiring
little direct supervision.
These facilities then began to manufacture the disguised cyborg
creatures that the Eldren would later discover. Again, the process
moved with creeping slowness but a terrible steadiness, and the
cyborgs worked their way into the already extant and busy ecosystems
of the planets, behaving like the natural creatures they emulated,
collecting data at an exquisite level of detail. A million years of
these machines in operation, and NEMESIS had an understanding of the
operation of the various types of Solarigen biosphere that easily
rivalled that of the Eldren themselves.
On each world, the control-computers of the hidden 'base-machines' and
the tiny controllers of the billions of cyborgs formed a collective
processor of great power, running programs more complex than any ever
created up until that time. Like some infectious disease, the
infestations had an adaptive intelligence to them, though they were
not genuinely sapient.
NEMESIS began to see ways it might conceivably execute its murderous
prime directives, but it also saw that timing would be important. Its
own efforts could be potentiated if they were combined with natural
causes, if it 'made its move' at a time when life was already on the
ropes. For a single world, such periods came every so often, the mass
extinctions that mark the biological history of every Solarigen world.
But NEMESIS wanted something larger, and it knew that if it waited
long enough, sheer chance would eventually produce an event cluster of
sufficient size to be worth exploiting. Earth remained as always the
top of the queue, since destroying Earth's biosphere would be
particularly useful from NEMESIS' POV.
So NEMESIS waited, with the inhuman, indeed the unhelian, patience of
a machine and the cunning and imagination of a living thing. It
waited, and watched, and waited, and watched, until at last, the data
accumulating in its decision-matrix began showing the chance event
clusters it had long awaited.
Several factors showed signs of coming together to make an upcoming
interval a bad one for Solarigen life, even without help. Several
supernovae happened to erupt in the Greater Milky Way during this
period, and quite a few stars seemed to be near the point of becoming
such in the relatively (a few million years) near future. Local
climate conditions seemed to be moving out of the ideal zones on more
than the statistically average number of worlds at once. Best of all,
Earth itself appeared to be approaching a troubled period.
All of this was quite coincidental. If you wait long enough,
improbable clusters of events do occur, and such a cluster was
happening now across the Galaxy. By itself, it would produced a
remarkable number of extinction events around the Greater Milky Way,
but not enough to imperil Solarigen survival.
On Earth, NEMESIS' geophysical models were showing the imminent advent
of a period of continental 'flood' volcanism in what would later be
called Asia. That alone would be enough to make at least a modest
extinction event occur. To make it more interesting, the continental
land masses of Earth were coming together to form a single land mass.
Vast stretches of biologically vibrant coastal shallows were draining
out, further cutting biodiversity.
Even without help, Earth was about to have another of its periodic
(and quite natural) mass extinctions. With a little assistance,
NEMESIS thought the possibilties to be quite encouraging for something
more lasting.
The order finally went out, and on millions of worlds, the
'infestations' that had lain silent and hidden, disguised within the
living ecologies, watching and waiting, began to behave in new ways.
'Keystone' species suddenly found themselves hunted by creatures with
no reason to prey upon them. Toxins were introduced in small but
steady amounts to delicate ecosystems. Genetically engineered
pathogens and microbes were introduced to the ecosphere to do things
natural selection would never adapt an organism to do. The effect was
minor on a scale of years, decades, or centuries, but over thousands
and tens of thousands of years, it began to add up.
On Earth, the volcanism came as NEMESIS had projected, the effects all
it had hoped for. On a world orbiting a star 80,000 light-years from
Sol, an ecosphere dominated by land-dwelling coelenterates, already
weakened by cyborg sabotage, was driven to the brink of sterilization
by the blast of a nearby supernova. Yet a different world, where
distant cousins of starfish were the dominant mountain predator, found
itself riven by cyborg sabotage and dying from the sudden increase in
brightness as the local star entered a serious flare period.
All over the galaxy, Solarigen life found itself faced with natural
threats at a time when it had already been weakened by cyborg
interference for 250,000 years of quiet sabotage. The combination was
devastatingly effective.
Even worlds where nature was not attacking were weakened, as NEMESIS
merely pushed _harder_ in such cases, gambling that the Eldren would
be too busy to notice the difference, or to realize that a natural
coincidental series of events was being 'helped'. While NEMESIS
doubted it could permanently end all Solarigen life at this stage, it
hoped to damage or destroy the majority of Solarigen worlds, and it
had a high hope of leaving Earth, Mars, and Io sterile.
On Earth, hundreds of millions of years later, human scientists would
spend a great deal of effort on the causes of the Permian Extinction,
arriving at a variety of possibilities. Many of them were partly
right, since the cause was multiple. The cyborgs _did_ induce massive
methane releases from hydrated deposits on the sea floor, raising
global temperatures and producing local firestorms. So carefully was
this done, though, that it appeared to be quiet natural. Flood
volcanism _did_ flood the atmosphere was contaminants, and this _was_
quite natural. The climate _did_ fluctuate wildly, partly for natural
reasons and partly by subtle manipulation.
But NEMESIS' 'ace-in-the-hole', however, was a collection of
genetically engineered microbes. They were 'designed' to do a few
things and do them very well, while being almost immune to mutation
and resistant to most environments.
Their basic function was to take oxygen out of the atmosphere and the
seas, binding it up and storing it rather than releasing it as carbon
dioxide. These microbes instead secreted the combined oxygen in
various excreted forms, all of them solid or densely liquid (as
opposed to carbon dioxide gas), and they had the function, over time,
of draining oxygen out of the biosphere and 'sequestering' it away.
They might be regarded as the opposite of cyanobacteria, in terms of
their function. They were very efficient oxygen-converters, but
horribly maladapted life-forms. Their metabolisms ran 'superhot', but
the energy was not expended in successful reproduction or survival, it
was 'wasted' converting the oxygen into inaccessible forms. The 'extra
effort' they put into their work meant they were not competitive, and
in the normal course of events natural selection would have rapidly
removed them from the environment, but always they'd be replaced by
fresh batches from the hidden emplacements of the enemy.[1]
Oxidation and other processed were already lowering oxygen levels in
the Earth's atmosphere anyway. Toxins and other sabotage from the
NEMESIS infestations, together with the natural damage from the
volcanism and other ongoing troubles, had cut into plant life
considerably. That plus the new oxygen-devourers meant that the level
of free oxygen in the atmosphere and the oceans fell, and fell, and
fell, and fell.
On Earth and on millions of other worlds, the common strain linking
the animal kingdom was oxygen dependency, and NEMESIS had a knife to
that life-line. So successful was the sudden oxygen-fall that on
millions of worlds, what had been a normal extinction event suddenly
turned a 90% die-off of animal species, sometimes more. On Earth the
job was easier than it was in some places, because nature was already
helping, but everywhere the 'oxygen-devourers' were established and
maintained, the reaper had an immense harvest.
The Eldren had by this point become deeply alarmed, but had been
unable to figure out what was causing the galaxy-wide disaster. They
were reasonably sure that some intelligence was at work, but the work
was so subtle that it looked, from all observable evidence, like the
greatest coincidence in the history of the Universe. Until a
malfunctioning cyborg insect-analogue finally gave the Eldren the bit
of proof they sought, the first clue in the chain they would need to
follow to stop what was turning into the triumph of NEMESIS.
MORE LATER.
[1] Obviously, such an organism makes no biological sense. That's the
point, it was designed by NEMESIS to do a job, and it couldn't survive
on its own for long without support. But NEMESIS had the support in
place, able to keep the population of the deadly organisms high and
their activity constant. They were solar-powered living respiration
machines, draining oxygen and lots of nutrients (another key factor)
out of the ecosystem and then _keeping_ them out, rather than
returning them in other forms.
Johnny1A
>
> [1] Obviously, such an organism makes no biological sense. That's the
> point, it was designed by NEMESIS to do a job, and it couldn't survive
> on its own for long without support. But NEMESIS had the support in
> place, able to keep the population of the deadly organisms high and
> their activity constant. They were solar-powered living respiration
> machines, draining oxygen and lots of nutrients (another key factor)
> out of the ecosystem and then _keeping_ them out, rather than
> returning them in other forms.
Errata. I called the artificially altered oxygen-draining
microorganisms 'solar-powered', but they aren't, they exist to carry
out an exothermic reaction and don't need outside energy to do it.
Sorry 'bout that, I was mixing up two different thoughts as I posted.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The Eldren had by this point become deeply alarmed, but had been
> unable to figure out what was causing the galaxy-wide disaster. They
> were reasonably sure that some intelligence was at work, but the work
> was so subtle that it looked, from all observable evidence, like the
> greatest coincidence in the history of the Universe. Until a
> malfunctioning cyborg insect-analogue finally gave the Eldren the bit
> of proof they sought, the first clue in the chain they would need to
> follow to stop what was turning into the triumph of NEMESIS.
>
> MORE LATER.
Once the Eldren realized just how thoroughly 'infested' their
biospheres were with the sophisticated cyborgs, they faced some basic
problems in dealing with them. There were billions upon billions of
the cyborg entities on Earth alone, in ever ecological niche and
interacting with every ecosystem. While it was trivial to destroy
one, to hunt them out individually would have been utterly unworkable.
Furthermore, it would have been time-consuming, and it was obvious
that the numbers of the cyborgs renewed periodically by means the
Eldren did not know.
The Eldren could easily have destroyed the infestations in one fell
swoop by simply heating the surface of each 'infected' planet to a few
hundred or a few thousand degrees C, but that would have wiped out all
life, thus fulfilling the enemy's intentions for them in a single
stroke.
It did occur to the Eldren that if they could not immediately and
easily 'disinfect' their worlds, they could perhaps ameliorate the
effects of the infestations. They had millions of worlds to deal
with, but Earth was their top priority, and it was on Earth that they
focused their primary efforts, planning to repeat the process
elsewhere if they could succeed on the genesis world.
One thing that occurred to the Eldren was that much of the vast
extinction event occuring before their senses was traceable to the
quite natural surge of 'flood' volcanism that was then occurring in
what would later be called Asia. The contaminants this massive
volcanic event poured into the atmosphere made the cyborg infestation
orders of magnitude more effective. Therefore, the Watcher and his
fellow Eldren concluded, if they could suppress the volcanic activity,
the situation overall might improve. At the least, they might buy
some time.
The Eldren spent several centuries of effort at the delicate task of
'shutting down' the immense volcanic upwelling in Siberia. It was
tricky work, since they had to somehow reduce the magma volume on a
major scale without any major side-effects, since the life of Earth
was reeling on the edge of total collapse already. The volcanic
activity in question was beyond anything in modern human experience, a
vast flood event reflecting a massive magma plume reaching the
surface. But the Eldren did indeed manage to damp it down, slowing
the flow and turning (they intended) a huge but geologically brief
event into something smaller that would stretch out over a longer
period.
A mantle-plume eruption is unlike a conventional volcanic event.
Instead, it consists of ongoing outpourings of magma welling up from a
subcrustal reservoir that might be hundreds of miles wide and deep,
filled by the 'plume' from the lower depths. These events are rare,
and their impact is immense. The Siberian event was one of the
largest in the history of the living Earth. NEMESIS had 'forseen' it,
basic on its constant analysis of data from Earth, and so the hostile
living computer had known the eruption was coming well ahead of the
Eldren, and had chosen its time with that in mind.
The Eldren proceeded to create a 'seal' across the pooled magma,
closing off most of the channels through which the magma could well
up, and using cryokinesis to reduce the heat thus trapped. They knew
they could not contain such a tremendous upwelling indefinitely, so
they left some channels to the surface open, hoping to replace the
vast outpouring with a small controlled flow that would slowly drain
off the reservoir. It took them a thousand years to 'choke' the flow
down to a stable, small flow, and when they did, the effects of the
eruptions did indeed begin to slowly lesson. The Eldren began to take
a little hope from this, since it was their first serious success
against the power that was killing off their biospheres.
Then, only a short time after they finished their work, the volcanic
activity suddenly resurged, the magma sheets again spreading outward,
and the Eldren quickly perceived the reason why: the cyborgs had
adapted some of their number to mechanical designs which could
penetrate the crust, and which had entered the sealed connections to
the magma reservoir and 'blasted' them open again. The enemy had
adapted with amazing speed to the Eldren's actions.
Everything the Eldren tried, on Earth and the other worlds, seemed to
have similar results: momentary success followed by the enemy
adapting. They tried countering the oxygen loss by importing oxygen
from outside or blasting the 'sequestered' oxygen back into the
atmosphere, both worked temporarily until the enemy adapted. They
tried deliberately splitting CO2, to assist photosynthesis, it worked
for a little while. They tried dozens of things, some failed and some
were briefly successful, all were eventually neutralized by the
adaptive foe. The details varied widely from world to world, the
underlying pattern remained the same in each case.
The cyborgs and their base-station control units formed a
slow-but-powerful distributed computer running a constantly adapting
program that analyzed events and adapted to them, always seeking to
drive Earth's biosphere toward final extinction. Over time, this
program had grown to achieve a staggering subtlety and complexity,
with immense knowledge bases and skills. It had recognized what the
Eldren had done, perceived a way to undo their action, and executed
that countermove. In all this, NEMESIS needed to take but little
direct hand, operating at a safe remove from Eldren detection.
The Eldren faced a basic problem in dealing with this threat: they
didn't really understand how it worked. The Eldren were immensely
intelligent, possessed of power and perception that were in some ways
almost god-like (with a small 'g'), but that very power meant that
they had little use for, and little reason to develop, the skills of a
technological mindset. They were not, in the conventional
Helian/Homosentient sense, tool-users.
They certainly had something like a 'technology' of their own, capable
of fantastic things by mortal standards, but it was almost instinctive
to them, like a spider's web or a mollusk's shell. They also had a
nearly instinctive ability to comprehend _biology_, including some
ability to manipulate such, but again, their mind-set was not such
that they thought of using them as _tools_. Along with that lack of a
tool-user mindset went a lack of certain mental tools. Their approach
to mathematics, for ex, was quite unlike that of Homosentients or
Helians, since they looked at the universe in such a fundamentally
different way.
Thus, for all their power, the Eldren lacked some of the intellectual
and psychological tools that would have enabled them to really
understand the detailed nature of the enemy they fought. While they
could _recognize_ mortal technology, they had little real grasp of its
detailed nature. This would endure down the ages, the same Eldren
that could, if it wished, wrench Mt. Everest from the Earth's crust
and hurl it into space might be awed by the subtle complexity of a
19th century Swiss clockwork mechanism, created by a being of such
limited perception and personal power as a human.
At that time, though, this limit in their perception came perilously
close to preventing the advent of humans to begin with, by
annihilating their distant ancestors along with the rest of the Animal
Kingdom.
Indeed, in the end, it was not the Familiar Eldren who defeated
NEMESIS' attack on Solarigen life, but a most improbable and ironic
source of assistance.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> Indeed, in the end, it was not the Familiar Eldren who defeated
> NEMESIS' attack on Solarigen life, but a most improbable and ironic
> source of assistance.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
That help would come, ironically, from the same source as the attack,
the Helialisks that were the last remnant in the Greater Milky Way of
the Helian empire of ~260 million years earlier. In their concealed
'Helian Graveyards', these immortalized former Helians waited out the
ages, largely freed from the shackles of time as mortals understand
that.
Freed from mortality, the already alien minds of the former Helians
went down even more alien (by Homosentient standards) paths.
Sometimes, the number of Helialisks would increase, by the use of
clone-budding, to create the occasional new Helian Graveyard, with
Helians who had 'copies' of the memories of their 'parent' Helialisk
up to that time. But this was rare, since to do so effectively
required that an entire Graveyard replicate itself. Instead, each of
the thousands of Graveyards waited mostly on their own, the individual
mentalities of the immortalized Helians slowly adapting to each other,
resulting in something like a common personality and will for each
Graveyard.
Occasionally, from mechanical failure or other cause, a Helialisk
would die, the organs-of-thought preserved within it perishing from
lack of support. Sometimes, a Helialisk would lose the will to
continue, reaching some point of saturation or exhaustion, and simply
shut itself down. Once in a very great while, some natural cause
would wipe out an entire Graveyard, but this was very rare, since the
Last Helians had planned carefully and with a sensory organ for the
long term.
Here and there among the other Helialisks of the earliest, oldest
Graveyards, the remaining Helialisks who created NEMESIS waited, their
secret still safe even from their fellow Helialisks. After 250
megayears, even their passionate drive to restore the old empire had
calmed somewhat, however. For the most part, they retained their
former goals, but they were less driven. The entire empire, for ex,
had endured only 1.5 million years, and by now the Helialisks had
lived ~166 times longer than the civilization they had emerged from.
One Helialisk of the group that created NEMESIS, however, had gone
further than becoming less driven. This particular individual had
given long thought to the plans and goals it and its fellow
conspirators had shared, and come to regard their decision to create
NEMESIS as a grave error. It had come to believe that the consensus
of the other Last Helians/Helialisks had been correct all along: that
the best and wisest course for the Helialisks was to avoid the
awareness and attention of the Eldren, and to do nothing that might
capture their 'eye'.
It did not reach this conclusion quickly. The thoughts of the
Helialisks tended to flow very slowly, by the standards of the former
Helian race or by Homosentient standards. With the accumulating
geological ages, the Helialisks tended to become more lethargic, in a
sense, their thoughts flowing steadily but slowly, considering every
detail and aspect of each minute element of the matter under
consideration, often consulting nearly endlessly with the other
members of a given Graveyard, creating a slow, steady consensus. It
was an odd irony that the incredibly self-focused and ruthless Helians
had come, over the course of ages, to 'evolve' into these utterly
communal (usually) Helialisks.
By the end of the Ordovician, this particular Helialisk had concluded
that their original goal of restoring the former Helian empire was a
futile irrelevance. Further unhurried contemplation, amid thoughts of
countless other subjects, led this Helialisk to the conclusion that
the existence of the Solarigen worlds was not a threat to the
Helialisks, who had little interest left in 'living worlds' of either
helium or water. Still further slow and patient thoughts led this
entity to the recognition that the best way to deal with the potential
threat of the Eldren was to stay far out of their way, including
leaving the Solarigen worlds totally untouched.
This left only the question of what to do about the earlier action it
had taken part in, the creation of the secret NEMESIS entity. Unsure
of what it should do, this entity stirred itself from its now-normal
lethargy to get fresh data. It sent remote probes to examine events
in the outside galaxy. What it learned was that the Solarigen worlds
were still thriving, and the Eldren seemed to have no idea that the
Helialisks existed. Roughly every 100,000 years after that, this
entity stirred itself to check events. Each time it found that
matters seemed 'normal', it settled back into its comfortable
lethargic inward world of thought and contemplation.
It had no wish to reveal the part it had played in the creation of
NEMESIS, or even the existence of that entity, to its fellow
Helialisks, since it could not be sure of their reaction. It also
knew that some of its former fellow conspirators still retained their
original views, and might not react well to any action on its part
that might reveal their own complicity. As long as things remained
'stable', this Helialisk was prepared to wait and remain silent.
It first began to run its periodic 'spot checks' in the late Devonian.
Roughly ten times per megayears, it checked the situation, and was
reassured to find that nothing seemed to have come from its 'youthful'
folly. Over 1000 times it ran this check, and found 'all quiet'. But
when it stirred yet again, it found to its alarm that the quiet was
over.
It's probes reported that the majority of all known Solarigen worlds
were in the process of a simultaneous mass extinction on a scale
unmatched in their living history. It was too great a coincidence,
and it was with a inner disquiet remotely like anxiety that this
Helialisk stirred itself to further activity and examined the data in
more detail. As it had known it would, it rapidly found plenty of
signs of the 'hand' of NEMESIS at work. Its earlier actions were now
bearing a heavy yield of fruit, but it was a fruit this immortal
entity no longer wished to harvest.
What to do? With as much anguish and disquiet as it was still capable
of experiencing, this Helialisk went back and forth about its
prospects and options. In the end, however, it concluded that it
could not remain quiet any longer. It observed events carefully for
several thousand Terran years, and concluded that unless some action
was taken, Solarigen life would be either extinct or vast reduced
within a megayear, and that the animal kingdom would be a memory on
every affected planet. Even if seed stock of animals and other life
forms remained on a few unaffected worlds, the Eldren would be furious
beyond any reckoning, and would be sure to come looking for the source
of the attack.
Though the Graveyards were well-hidden and produced few tell-tale
signs of their presence, the Eldren were even more immortal than the
Helialisks. It might take then 50 megayears to find the Helialisks,
but sooner or later, find them they surely would. This particular
entity was not precisely sure what action the Eldren would then take,
but it was quite confident it had no wish to find out!
So it was that this entity opened up contact with the rest of its own
Graveyard, and informed them of essentially everything it and the
other conspirators had done, so many hundreds of millions of years
before, when the Graveyards were new and the Helialisks had imagined
that the Helian empire was a huge thing.
The news was, too put it mildly, unwelcome.
It would be too much to say that the other Helialisks were furious.
They were far too used to eons of calm for that. But they were
shocked that such an offense could have been committed in defiance of
the basic law that had governed their 'society' since its founding in
the death of the Helian empire. Remaining hidden from the Eldren had
been one of the basic purposes that had driven the Last Helians, and
some of their own had, at the very beginning of their effort, taken
actions that almost guaranteed that the Eldren would come looking for
them! At an earlier stage of their ageless existence, they might have
immediately lashed out at the conspirators. Now, though, they took a
different and rather more productive approach.
They promptly cut off the conspiratorial Helialisks from access to the
collective resources of the various Graveyards, as fast as the news
spread. Unable to hide their secret any longer, the conspirators were
given basic choices: cooperate or be destroyed. Most of them chose
the former. It did not take long for a fairly full picture of the
situation to be spread to each of the Graveyards, along with an
awareness of the peril they faced.
The first impulse (if such a word can be applied to these beings!) of
the Helialisks was to go to NEMESIS and simply stop the assault. But
they faced a problem with doing that. So determined had the
conspirators been to keep the location of NEMESIS a secret, both from
the other Helialisks and from the Eldren, that only a few of the
creators of NEMESIS had known exactly where it was. The others had
been transported to the Nemesis planetoid and back without ever having
known the specific galactic coordinates of Carth (the star of the
planet Nemesis orbited).
In order to shut NEMESIS down, or order it to 'cease and desist' from
the assault on Solarigen life, some Helialisk would have to go to
Nemesis and use the proper authorizing codes and take the other
necessary steps to authenticate the commands. Of the original handful
of Helialisks who had ever known where NEMESIS was, (never more than
5), it developed that only one was still alive.
This particular Helialisk was promptly instructed to reveal that
location. Even many of its former fellow conspirators had come around
to agree with the consensus view. Whether this particular Helialisk
still believed in the original goals of the conspiracy, or whether it
had some other motive for its choice, would be lost to history. After
~250 million years of calm contemplative consciousness, rather than
reveal the control codes and location for NEMESIS, this Helialisk
opted to 'deactivate', the equivalent of suicide for a Helialisk.
With the sudden, totally unexpected suicide of that Helialisk, there
remained _nobody_ among either the Eldren or the Helialisks who knew
the specific location of Nemesis or the means of shutting down or
altering the instructions of NEMESIS. The Helialisks knew they faced
a very, very serious long term problem, one that could quite
conceivably threaten their immortal continuance.
It was time to fall back on Plan B. Unfortunately, they had yet to
make Plan B.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> With the sudden, totally unexpected suicide of that Helialisk, there
> remained _nobody_ among either the Eldren or the Helialisks who knew
> the specific location of Nemesis or the means of shutting down or
> altering the instructions of NEMESIS. The Helialisks knew they faced
> a very, very serious long term problem, one that could quite
> conceivably threaten their immortal continuance.
>
> It was time to fall back on Plan B. Unfortunately, they had yet to
> make Plan B.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER
The Helialisks faced the challenge of somehow bringing the efforts of
NEMESIS to a stop, without revealing their own existence to the
Eldren. It would have been difficult enough if the task had been
limited only to Earth or the three Solarian biospheres, but the
struggle was occuring all over the Greater Milky Way. Somehow, the
Helialisks had to find a way to _quietly_ stop NEMESIS' efforts across
25 million worlds. They did not even know exactly how many Solarigen
worlds were under attack, or where they were.
Ironically, this information proved easy to obtain. Some of the
Helialisks now trying to stop NEMESIS included junior members of the
group that had created it, and even if they lacked the master control
authority to stop the attacks, they still retained lesser command
codes that could force NEMESIS to reveal a great deal of information.
Communication was not difficult, various channels existed by means of
which the Helialisks could communicate with NEMESIS.
Though the ultimate codes, which the Helialisks no longer possessed,
required physical presence on Nemesis to be fully useful, the lesser
codes could be used at a remove. Thus the Helialisks simply ordered
NEMESIS to reveal the number and location of the Solarigen worlds that
it was attacking, and impelled by the command code authority, it had
no choice but to provide accurate responses.
Then they had to figure out a way to end or nullify the ongoing
attacks, without revealing their existence to the Eldren.
Fortunately, NEMESIS shared this priority, which meant that both sides
were limited by similar constraints of secrecy. Without that, the
effort would probably have been basically hopeless.
The Helialisks could even query NEMESIS for information about the
methods it had used in its attacks. For the most part, it had no
choice but to accurately respond. Only when information would have
been directly critical to its directives could it override the command
codes the Helialisks still possessed.
Armed with knowledge of the cyborgs and other means NEMESIS had been
using, the Helialisks began to prepare plans to counter them. For
given examples, even for the case of specific worlds, it wasn't that
hard to figure out ways that might work, but just as NEMESIS had been
forced to wait until circumstances seemed ripe to launch a galaxy-wide
assault, the Helialisks had to figure out a way to strike all over the
galaxy at once, while remaining secret.
It took well over 1000 Terran years for the Helialisks to come up with
the outline of a plan. It was a very risky plan, but it was the best
the could do, and facing a range of bad choices, they began to
implement it.
For the first time in tens of millions of years or more, large numbers
of Helialisks had themselves removed from the 'sandy' homes and
transferred into prepared spacecraft. Over a million did this,
heading for selected star systems, including Sol. The ships were
carefully prepared to be able to pass themselves off as detritus when
they neared their destinations, but there was an inherent risk of
detection that they simply had to live with.
Just as NEMESIS had watched without acting, gathering data, the
Helialisks now did the same, though they had far less time to work
with than NEMESIS had been granted. Between their ability to force
accurate information from NEMESIS and their own observations, they
were able to work out the common elements of NEMESIS' various
procedures from world to world. Then, with great care and using much
the same methods NEMESIS had originally done, the Helialisks created
and introduced their own cyborgs, based on the very design specs
NEMESIS had created and been compelled to reveal.
They also began to slowly, carefully, but methodically destroy the
hidden sensor platforms and detector devices that NEMESIS had spread
through the Sol System, and other systems. NEMESIS, prohibited from
acting directly against the Helialisks, could do little to stop them
as they slowly and systematically blinded much of its local
surveillance capacity. From star to star the teams went, reducing or
eliminating the space-based surveillance capacity of NEMESIS in those
systems as they did, and introducing their own cyborgs into biospheres
that NEMESIS had already 'infected'.
One weapon that NEMESIS was using to dreadful effect across the galaxy
was the set of oxygen/nutrient removing microbes that it had
engineered. Using the data about those, the Helialisks devised
parasites and phages that could be introduced to attack the microbes.
It had to be done separately for each world, since unique strains were
used in each case, but it had to be done, and for a time almost all
the activities of the entire Helialisk 'culture' was dedicated to this
huge effort.
NEMESIS did what it could to counter them, but it was hamstrung by its
programmed imperatives for secrecy and against opposing the Helialisks
directly.
Gradually, their efforts began to pay off. On Earth, the
second-strain cyborgs began attacking and otherwise interfering with
the originals, interfering with their efficiency. The new cyborgs
also attacked the hidden automated facilities that NEMESIS had so
slowly and carefully emplaced, in great secrecy, over ages. One by
one, on Earth and millions of other worlds, these hidden microbases
gradually were damaged and disabled, largely unable to defend
themselves since NEMESIS could not send them fresh programming to deal
with the new threat, it's space-based relays and transceivers
disabled.
Meanwhile, the Eldren, unaware of the hidden struggle going on under
them, had continued their own efforts to keep their biospheres viable.
With the constant adaptive resistance from NEMESIS lessoned and in
many cases removed, they began to gain ground. There was no dramatic
single moment that marked the turning point, but gradually, over a
period of millennia, the biospheres began, one by one, to slowly
recover, the extinction rate stabilizing and speciation resuming.
At last, NEMESIS calculated that the effort was becoming
counter-productive. The Eldren were required to spend less and less
effort to sustain fewer and fewer worlds, and the probability of
detection rose as their ability to divert attention from keeping their
worlds alive rose. When a critical mathematical point was reached,
NEMESIS was compelled by the secrecy programming to stop the attacks.
Its own channels interrupted or compromised, it did this by revealing
to the Helialisks the necessary operational command codes to stop its
cyborgs, to redirect them to destroy the oxygen-destroyers and other
attacks.
The Helialisks did so, and on 25 million Solarigen worlds, the long
attack stopped. The struggle was over, and NEMESIS' effort, prepared
and planned for hundreds of millions of years, had proven
insufficient, due to the combined efforts of the Eldren and the
Helialisks.
The effort, intended to exterminate Solarigen life, or at least wipe
out metazoan life, on the Solarigen worlds, had come perilously close
to success, however. On many worlds, the strain had been too much,
and entire global biospheres had simply collapsed. Some worlds were
reduced to microbial life only, all multicellular forms gone. Others
were sterile.
Out of all the Solarigen worlds at the start of the Permian
Extinction, 7% had been wiped clean of all life, and another 11% had
been reduced to Proterozoic levels. Of the remainder, the vast
majority had suffered tremendous loss of biodiversity, with less than
5% of the Solarigen worlds untouched.
In the Solar System, Earth, Mars, and Io were all hard hit, and Mars
would never recover. A vastly simplified ecosystem remained barely
functional, but never again would Mars know native metazoans. Io
would recover, but it would require 50 million years to do so, with a
greatly changed biosphere.
Earth was ravaged. A vast array of species, entire families and
orders and classes of animal and plant life, had been exterminated.
Over 95% of all Earth's species were gone. The atmosphere remained
badly depleted of oxygen, and vast regions of the seas were anoxic.
The vast forests of conifers and herds of amphibian and early reptile
plant eaters were gone. The continents indeed appeared much as they
had before the emergence of plant and animal life in earlier ages.
Where thriving reefs had existed only a million years earlier were
vast stretches of ocean that seemed almost void of life.
Where before a variety of herbivores and carnivores had ranged the
continents, now vast herds of a survivor called _Lystrosaurus_ was all
but alone. Where before a variety of mammal-like reptiles had
thrived, only a handful now remained, including one unassuming species
that would become the ancestor of every mammal that would later exist.
The damage was comparable elsewhere. One some worlds, even the
dominant phyla changed. Earth was not quite so badly hit as that,
vertebrate chordates remained dominant on land and a major presence at
sea, but below that level the changes were extensive. It would take
over _twenty million years_ for Earth to really recover from the
Permian Extinction. Later human scientists would divide biological
history by that event, the transition from the Paleozoic to the
Mesozoic Eras, so enormous was the change.
NEMESIS had survived and remained, of course. The Eldren knew that an
attack had come, and failed for reasons they did not fully understand,
but they still had no idea of the nature or location of the attacker.
They also did not know that the Helialisks remained, or that they had
intervened to stop the attacks.
NEMESIS knew that it was unlikely that random chance would throw
together such a confluence of convenient factors again anytime soon,
but it still watched and waited, its master programming still in
place. It now also knew that the Helialisks would interfere if they
felt their own interests were threatened, creating various programming
conflicts which it could not immediately resolve.
The Helialisks returned to their silent contemplation, but they kept a
modicum of attention on the outside galaxy. They also knew that the
continued efforts of NEMESIS presented an ongoing threat to their
secrecy. They did not know where NEMESIS was, however, limiting their
ability to cope with the danger.
The Eldren debated bringing in life-forms from the handful of
untouched worlds to 'restock' Earth and the other damaged planets, and
they did eventually choose to do that for some worlds. But the
Watcher decided to keep Earth free from back-colonization. It had
always been the most vital and diverse ecosphere of them all, and the
Eldren were curious to see how, and if, it recovered that.
The matter did not look promising, as Earth was so damaged. But in
fact, the new geological era on Earth was about to see the advent of
some of the largest and most impressive land vertebrates in the
biological history of any Solarigen world, creatures that would haunt
the imagination of sentient beings ages later.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Shermanlee
Mike Miller
>
How much later? I'm kinda missing my fix here, it seems to have been over a week. :)
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Johnny1A
>
> The matter did not look promising, as Earth was so damaged. But in
> fact, the new geological era on Earth was about to see the advent of
> some of the largest and most impressive land vertebrates in the
> biological history of any Solarigen world, creatures that would haunt
> the imagination of sentient beings ages later.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
The tremendous loss of biodiversity and organism population at the end
of the Permian left an enormous number of empty niches. Evolution
promptly began to refit the surviving species to exploit them, at a
fairly rapid pace (rapid in evolutionary terms, of course). The
still-low oxygen content favored small creatures, or creatures with
efficient respiration. But as plants began to reoccupy the empty
niches on their 'side' of the ledger, the oxygen level rose again,
making animal life steadily more viable.
Prior to the Permian Extinction, the therapsid reptiles had been a
thriving group, with many species occupying a variety of niches,
carnivore and herbivore, large and small. They were diversifying
right up until the Extinction, but the large majority of them did not
fare well in the face of NEMESIS' assault. They would stage a partial
recovery in the Triassic, but they would not seriously challenge their
dominant competitors. One lineage that survived the Permian
Extinction went on, in the course of the Triassic Period, to give rise
to the ancestral species of the true Mammals.
Another group that survived the great assault from NEMESIS was the
reptile group called the archosaurs. With their therapsid/synapsid
rivals struck low by NEMESIS, this group now began to differentiate at
a great rate. One subgroup gave rise to the crocodiles and their kin,
who would endure in recognizable forms right up into modern times.
But another lineage of this group would become legend. Starting with
a small (about the size of a chicken) bipedal creature, this group
gradually pulled 'ahead' of all its competitors in the race of fill
the empty niches. Starting from one species, this lineage
differentiated into carnivores and herbivores, all marked by a number
of peculiar skeletal and systemic features, including a very unusual
hip joint. The various descendents of this early-Triassic species
were the Dinosaurs.
The Triassic Period saw the first signs of the breakup of the unified
Pangaea, but the breakup was initially slow. The unified land mass
enabled the early dinosaurs of the Triassic to spread world-wide,
become the dominant land animals by the end of the period. Kin of the
dinosaurs returned to the seas, while still others took to the air.
NEMESIS watched this recovery of life on Earth through its remaining
sensor systems, space-borne and Earthside (including the tiny handful
of hidden bases that had missed being destroyed). It did relatively
little, since random strikes would serve little purpose and might give
away clues to the Eldren. But always it watched, and even as it had
shut down its Permian attack, it had begun planning work on a
different long-term approach to the extermination of Solarigen life.
The Triassic Period ended with another extinction, far smaller than
the Permian hyperdisaster, but significant none the less. NEMESIS had
little to do with this event, save as a side-effect, the remaining
remnants of its oxygen and nutrient devouring bioengineered microbes
resurged briefly, temporarily lowering oxygen levels and assisting the
extinction, but this was a mere after-effect.
The following period of geological history was called the Jurassic,
and the dinosaurs continued to expand their dominance over the
large-scale biosphere and their own size. The largest land-animals in
the history of Earth lived during this period, the incredible
sauropods such as _supersaurus_, seismosarus_, and _ultrasaurus_,
extreme names for extreme creatures. Even with all the millions of
terraformed worlds the Eldren had to observe, few ever produced land
animals even close to these sizes, and none ever produced larger land
vertebrates. With masses exceeding 100 metric tons in some cases, and
lengths approaching 50 meters, they approached the theoretical limits
for land animals to be able to function in a Terran environment.
The Jurassic Period was warm, and wet. Pangaea finally, decisively
broke up, restoring many of the shallow seas that the Permian had seen
eliminated in the formation of the megacontinent. Plant life grew
abudantly and rapidly, enabling the incredible herds of sauropods to
thrive. A herd of the larger sauropods could cut a remarkable swath
across much of a continent, drawing a 'train' of predators and
scavengers in their wake. But these creatures had enormous needs for
food, and could thrive under under certain conditions.
Recognizing this, the Eldren made a point of spreading sauropod (and
other dinosaurian) breeding stock to various terraformed worlds.
There they began to follow their own evolutionary paths (as always),
but in some cases a more stable existence was possible.
It was also during this time that the Eldren began a new practice:
they began to take samples of interesting species, sufficient to form
a core breeding group, and instead of transplanting them, they
suspended them in stasis, for introduction into new biospheres at a
later time, when it seemed interesting or useful to do this. They
thus 'banked' many breeding stocks not only of dinosaurs, but of many
other land and sea forms of that time and later times.
The Jurassic also saw the emergence of the first true birds, and their
cousins. By the end of the Jurassic, the Birds were becoming a very
effective and successful new class of vertebrate, and their feathered
but land-bound cousins were expanding into some unusual niches.
The end of the Jurassic saw the end of the age of the megagiants (at
least on Earth, elsewhere the story was different), but the dinosaurs
as a group continued to thrive. The planetary climate continued to
warm, and sea levels reached highs not seen before or since in Earth's
post-Cambrian history. Shallow seas broke continents up into samller
landmasses, such as the Interior Seaway that stretched all the way
across the central part of North America, from what would later be the
Gulf of Mexico to the polar seas (then ice free).
With many new niches and favorable climates, living things throve in
the Cretaceous Period, and entire new categories of living things
emerged. The first flowering plants appeared in the Cretaceous, and
with them their coevolved insect partners, the bees, ants, termites,
and other 'social' insects, as well as such creatures as butterflies.
These three periods (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous) form the
Mesozoic Era, the time of 'middle life'. Roughly speaking, the
Mesozoic is the 'dinosaur age'. Throghout this period, NEMESIS was
always watching, but relatively inactive on a galactic scale, occupied
by planning for its next long-term assault on Solarigen life as a
whole. It did relatively little, though it did occasionally launch a
local assault when it felt conditions called for such.
Within its general directive to extinguish all forms of Solarigen
life, NEMESIS had various tiered and prioritized subdirectives.
NEMESIS' source programming caused it to consider some forms of
Solarigen life to be higher priorities for destruction than others.
Broadly speaking, NEMESIS was more concerned with metazoans than
microbes, more concerned with animals than plants, and the more
intelligent, enduring, or otherwise notable, the higher the priority
for its exintinction. Exceptions could exist, of course.
Thus, though NEMESIS was responsible for the occasional local
extinction one this planet or that during the Mesozoic Era, the larger
flow was natural. NEMESIS was endlessly patient, and much of its
immortal attention was always focused on its planning for its next
megastrike against the Solarigen forms.
But in the late Cretaceous, NEMESIS began to become more concerned as
it observed certain evolutionary developments in North America.
The true birds had evolved in the previous Period, as noted, and by
this time had spread world-wide and were enormously successful. But
in those days, feathers were not unique to the birds. They had
cousins that had inherited feathers from the same common ancestor, but
who remained landbound and seabound. In the middle Cretaceous, along
the warm shores of the Interior Seaway, a cluster of these creatures
evolved, taking up various niches. This cluster was closely kin, and
marked by some interesting features.
They were endothermic, sharing a high-energy metabolism and very
efficient respiration with their bird cousins. They were physically
large and tough, with solid bones unlike those of their flying
cousins, and they were bipedal, balancing on their hind limbs. They
had no beaks, but they had effective claws, and they were smart, and
getting smarter.
One species in particular alarmed NEMESIS when it discovered their
existence. This feathered breed occupied the 'pack hunter' niche in
its area, and they were easily the most intelligent creatures on Earth
in their time. They were also, to NEMESIS' passionless dismay, tool
users.
The creatures stood bipedally, and their clawed forepaws had become
sufficiently dextrous that they were able to handle objects. They
were smart enough to have developed various pack-specific hunting
techniques such as holding sharp rocks in their hands, to enable them
to slash at large prey with more effectiveness than their natural
claws could manage. Their intelligence was in fact on a par with that
of some modern primates.
They weren't very numerous...yet. But they were spreading outward
along the coastline of the retreating Interior Seaway, and NEMESIS was
alarmed by its observation of their success. They were physically
tough, and their features were modified in such a way as to provide
protection against predators as well as decent insulation. They were
even modestly effective swimmers, and preyed on sea life as well as
land life. Over time, NEMESIS noted with growing if passionless alarm
that some large packs of these creatures were able to drive off hungry
mososaurs!
It was radically unlikely that this breed would ever make the
transition to true, sapient tool-users. But they were moving far
enough up the ladder to cause NEMESIS to elevate their position in its
'termination priority queue'. Shortly after the time that the
Interior Seaway had receded sufficiently to permit it, these creatures
had spread all over the continent, though they remained concentrated
near the warm coasts of that shallow sea.
But NEMESIS remained bound by its injunction to hide everything it
could about its activities, nature, and location. It spend some time
considering and simulating various approaches to the destruction of
these animals, seeking to find the one with the greatest chance of
success balanced against the least risk. It finally concluded that it
would have to use one of its limited pool of 'secret weapons' in the
Solar System.
NEMESIS had spent much of the Paleozoic quietly, secretly placing
countless sensors and other facilities in the Sol System. The
Helialisks, during their intervention at the end of the Permian, had
found and destroyed _most_ of those, but they had missed a few. It
was deeply reluctant to use them, since they were now of limited
number, and hard to replace (the Helialisks continued to periodically
act to destroy NEMESIS facilities whent they found them, and the
secrecy directive made replacement painfully slow), but it had little
choice under its standing directives now.
One of those secret weapons was installed on, or rather among, an Near
Earth Object that periodically crossed Earth's orbit. This particular
one was larger than most, and was actually a 'rubble pile' about 20
miles across, having been shattered by previous collisions. The
Eldren knew about it, and indeed had modified its orbit far earlier to
prevent collision with Earth. Within that rubble pile, NEMESIS had
installed an installation that would permit it to launch a
one-time-only attack on Earth, if it timed it right.
Now NEMESIS simply waited until this rubble cluster was about to pass
near Earth, as it did every so many orbits. It was on track to miss
by a modest margin, but this time, as it approached Earth, engines
long-since constructed within a piece of the rubble pile activated,
and gave a modest course correction to one such chunk, during the
period of near approach. As a result, this chunk moved a different
trajectory and instead of shooting past Earth with the rest of the
rubble pile, it impacted.
The majority of the Familiar Eldren were not in the Sol System at the
time. With its usual inhuman patience and planning, NEMESIS had
launched a distraction attack on a planet 40,000 light-years from Sol,
a distraction attack that had been going over for 100,000 years by
this point. While the Watcher and the majority of his few hundred
fellow Familiar Eldren worked there to contain the damage, only a
handful were left guarding and watching Earth, Mars, and Io.
NEMESIS timed it perfectly, and by the time the handful of Eldren
realized what was happening, it was too late. The Dinosaur Killer had
done its work.
The _Dinosaur Killer_:
Diameter: 5.3 miles longest axis.
Composition: Stony nickel-iron, rich in platinum-group metals
Mass: ~1.03 trillion metric tons
Impact Velocity: 22,453 kilometers/sec
Impact Location: ~ 21º30' N latitude by 89º50' W longitude
Impact Energy: ~ 4-6 teratons
NEMESIS had not been able to predict precisely where the D-K would
impact, but in the event the biomachine 'got lucky'. The impact was
within 10% of what NEMESIS would have considered to be ideal. By the
time the Eldren realized what was happening, it was already too late
to do anything to stop it.
The effects were global. The radiative heating from tubal friction
alone ignited fires across the Americas, and the plume of debris rose
into space above the impact site. Shock waves spread outward from the
impact zone, and the entire planet rang like a bell. Then, as the hot
rubble from the debris plume fell back (it was hurled very high, but
it didn't (mostly) reach escape velocity), additional fires were
ignited across the planet.
With the majority of the forests on Earth on fire, immense clouds of
smoke rose into the atmosphere, to join with dust and debris from the
impact. The temperature of the atmosphere rose, with the thermal
energy from the impact, the fires, and the reentering garbage, then
fell, as the thick cloud decks and smoke shell increased Earth's
albedo. Acid rains fell in some regions, torrential storms lashed the
coasts, and then the snows began, as 'impactor winter' set in.
But NEMESIS had a few extra surprises up its metaphorical sleeve. For
one thing, it had position packages of cobalt-60 (and other less
intense but longer-lived radioactives) on the impactor, designed in
such a way that the impact would blast the atomized radioactive into
the atmosphere. It worked closely enough as planned to add a
considerable killing factor to the impact, especially in the Americas.
For another, the entire impact was, in one sense, another
distraction.
Recall that NEMESIS still had a few of its hidden factory-bases on
Earth. In the chaos left after the D-K struck, these released the
machines they had been constructing over the previous few thousand
years: thousands of automated killing machines, designed to be able
to operate in land, air, or water (various models). They were far
from the best that NEMESIS could theoretically have built, with TL11
technology, but the need for secrecy and the limited on-site resources
interfered with the work. Still, from the POV of NEMESIS, 'good
enough was good enough'.
The large majority of these machines operated in North America, and in
the darkness and heat and then the darkness and cold of the aftermath,
they hunted down and exterminated the dangerously smart feathered pack
hunters, as well as their cousins. An entire incipient Class of
vertebrate life was exterminated by the impactor and the following
hunt operation.
Other species were hunted by the robots as well, since they were
already deployed. This was nothing subtle, NEMESIS was simply killing
what it conveniently could, while circumstances were convenient. The
few Eldren in the Solar System at that time were too busy trying to
bring the damage from the D-K under control, they hardly had time to
notice a handful of killer robots on the loose in the midst of the
chaos.
Alerted by their fellows, the other Familiar Eldren soon arrived to
join the damage control operation. Over the course of several
decades, they brought the damage under control, clearing the
atmosphere of dangerous dust and toxic gases, removing the remaining
radioactive dusts, and doing what they could to stabilize the
biosphere.
Eventually, things calmed enough that they had time to notice the
robots. They were not altogether surprised to discover them, and they
were in no mood for subtlety. Each machine, upon being spotted, was
melted into a blob of metal and hurled into space as escape velocity+,
removing them from the biosphere neatly.
NEMESIS hardly cared. At the cost of the expenditure of one of its
hidden superweapons, and a few thousand expendable robots, it had
wiped out a tremendous number of Solarigen species, including some
dangerously intelligent ones. From the POV of NEMESIS, it was a
definite 'win'.
Now, knowing it was not the time to risk further annoying the Eldren,
it curtailed almost all activities Galaxy-wide, turning its attention
inward to its long-term planning for the eventual destruction of _all_
Solarigen life. It had wiped out the feather-hunters and many of the
most promising species of their true-bird cousins, along with the
_entire_ dinosaur clade. The remaining birds were less promising of
intelligence or endurance than their destroyed relatives, and NEMESIS
called that good. The great murder-machine had been very concerned
about the potentials of the Aves Class and its cousins, and was
gratified to have reduced it. It was now confident that Earth would
need several more geological periods before life again became
dangerously bright.
In its preoccupation with the birds and the pseudo-birds, NEMESIS had
given little thought to a very old, and widespread, vertebrate class.
These species were present on every continent, but usually small,
mostly fruit and insect eaters, with the occasional small predator
species. None was bigger than a few pounds or so. They were very
old, dating back to the mid-Triassic, and had remained in the shadow
of Dinosaur and Bird and Pseudo-bird for tens of millions of years.
Even if they had a few interesting features, such as live birth and
the females suckling young, they hardly seemed significant nor likely
to pose problems when the more impressive Dinosaurs and
Birds/Pseudo-birds had proven amenable of solution. NEMESIS spared
little attention for the mammals.
Everybody makes mistakes. :)
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The _Dinosaur Killer_:
>
> Diameter: 5.3 miles longest axis.
> Composition: Stony nickel-iron, rich in platinum-group metals
> Mass: ~1.03 trillion metric tons
> Impact Velocity: 22,453 kilometers/sec
> Impact Location: ~ 21º30' N latitude by 89º50' W longitude
> Impact Energy: ~ 4-6 teratons
Type Correction: Impact velocity should be 22,453 kilometers/hour,
not kilometers/sec. If the D-K had impacted at 7 percent of
light-speed, it would _really_ have ruined everyone's day.
That'll teach me to pay better attention, I hope. :)
Shermanlee
ra...@westnet.poe.com
> sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) wrote in message news:<b3030854.04032...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > The _Dinosaur Killer_:
> >
> > Diameter: 5.3 miles longest axis.
> > Composition: Stony nickel-iron, rich in platinum-group metals
> > Mass: ~1.03 trillion metric tons
> > Impact Velocity: 22,453 kilometers/sec
> > Impact Location: ~ 21?30' N latitude by 89?50' W longitude
> > Impact Energy: ~ 4-6 teratons
> Type Correction: Impact velocity should be 22,453 kilometers/hour,
> not kilometers/sec. If the D-K had impacted at 7 percent of
> light-speed, it would _really_ have ruined everyone's day.
A 3600 fold increase in speed, resulting in a nearly 13 million fold
increase in delivered energy? Yeah that it would. That's ~52-78 E tons
yeild (Exa tons or 10^18 tons TNT equivalent, about .1% of the mass of the
earth in TNT). I'm fairly certain that there would be something left of
the planet and that it would be nearly in the same orbit, but just barely
and I'm confident that life would be completely annilated.
Congratulations, you've passed you test to become a berserker.
John
--
Remove the dead poet to e-mail, tho CC'd posts are unwelcome.
Ask me about joining the NRA.
Johnny1A
>
> In its preoccupation with the birds and the pseudo-birds, NEMESIS had
> given little thought to a very old, and widespread, vertebrate class.
> These species were present on every continent, but usually small,
> mostly fruit and insect eaters, with the occasional small predator
> species. None was bigger than a few pounds or so. They were very
> old, dating back to the mid-Triassic, and had remained in the shadow
> of Dinosaur and Bird and Pseudo-bird for tens of millions of years.
> Even if they had a few interesting features, such as live birth and
> the females suckling young, they hardly seemed significant nor likely
> to pose problems when the more impressive Dinosaurs and
> Birds/Pseudo-birds had proven amenable of solution. NEMESIS spared
> little attention for the mammals.
>
> Everybody makes mistakes. :)
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
Though the planet Earth had taken an enormous amount of damage from
the impact of the Dinosaur Killer, the effects were in truth less
severe than they appeared. The mass extinction brought about by the
D-K was only a shadow of the effects of the earlier Permian
Extinction. Where the previous assault had extinguished over 95% of
all animal species, the K-T extinction had seen the end of fewer than
50%, with even smaller percentages of plant species gone.
The recovery from the K-T Extinction was faster than it had been from
the Permian event. Seeds lay dormant under sheets of ash, waiting for
better conditions to germinate and grow. Many small species had had
endured the heat, the cold, the rains, and the darkness, and now they
had inherited a nearly empty world into which they could expand and
differentiate.
Just as the previous attack of NEMESIS had marked the of the
Paleozoic, the era of 'ancient life', this new attack marked the
beginning of end of the Mesozoic, the age of 'middle life'. A new
geological era began with the new Tertiary Period. Now Pangaea was no
more than an Eldren memory, as the separate continents began to drift
toward positions somewhat recognizable to a modern human. The Atlantic
Ocean had opened up in the Cretaceous, in the Tertiary it widened and
deepened.
The tiny insectivores, predators, and fruit eaters of Class Mammalia,
so long scurrying in the shadow of the dinosaurs, now spread across
the empty lands like wildfire, generating new species at a tremendous
rate. Some remained in or took to the trees, others spread onto the
plains, settled into the newly regrown forests, or began to hesitantly
return to the sea.
Though the promising pseudo-birds were now extinct, and many of the
most promising bird species with them, NEMESIS did not succeed in
exterminating the Aves Class. It had not really expected to
accomplish that, but it had hoped for it. Unfortunately, from the POV
of the NEMESIS entity, the birds proved to be a durable breed, and
over the course of the Tertiary Period they recovered from their
losses at the K-T Event and then continued to differentiate into
countless niches. None, though, ever showed the hint of presapience
that their ancestors had displayed in the late Cretaceous, and which
had earned them a death sentence from NEMESIS.
The D-K had succeeded (with help) in wiping the great oceanic
reptilian predators such as the mososaurs from the seas, but their
cousins the snakes survived, returned to the land, and thrived.
The warm, mild global conditions had that characterized much of the
Cretaceous did not immediately end with the K-T transition, but a
gradual deterioration of climatic conditions did occur. The climate
warmed again during the early Eocene Epoch, about 57-34 million years
ago, with subtropical forest reaching to the general neighborhood of
the Arctic Circle, but the warmth did not hold throughout the epoch.
Many of the familiar Mammalian orders emerged during this time. The
first primates, bats, hoofed mammals, and the early cetaceans put in
their initial appearance during this time.
Three broad types of mammals, the placentals, marsupials, and
monotremes, struggled for primacy, with the placentals winning a
decisive victory, the marsupials taking the silver, and the
monotremes, the odd egg-laying mammals, reduced to a handful of
species.
As the Eocene closed out, the temperature decline continued, driven in
part by further continental splits between Australia and Antarctica.
As Antarctica was propelled south, the formerly verdant land began to
build up the first thin layers of what would in time become the
miles-thick Southern Ice Cap. In the northern hemisphere, the
subtropical forest was driven south, as cool temperatures returned to
the high latitudes.
The Oligocene Epoch saw the emergence in North America of the first
camels, of true (though still small) bears, the following warmer
Miocene the first true horses, again in North America. This later
period saw the emergence of the true grasses, which transformed the
ecosystem of the planet. Animals adapted to thrive on the tough,
silica-rich grasses could tap into an immense potential source of
food, but the adaptations could also leave some species so specialized
as to be able to live on few things other than various grasses.
The mild middle Miocene was the last period of global warmth, like a
final drawing-of-breath. The onset of the Pliocene, 5 megayears
before the present, brought a sharp acceleration of the global cooling
trends. Ice cover appeared on the open Arctic Ocean, and tundra
replaced forest in the northern reaches of Asia, North America, and
Europe. Antarctica was fully ice-bound, the sea levels were lower,
and the world colder and drier than it had been even a few million
years before, and the trend was accelerating.
Finally, the Pliocene gave way to the Pleistocene, and the Ice Ages
began. Great ice sheets spread out across North America, Europe, and
Asia, advancing southwards and lowering global sea level enormously,
only to temporarily retreat during the brief, warmer 'interglacial'
periods. This cycle repeated over and over, wiping out many species
and encouraging adaptation in others. The southern hemisphere was
spared the worst of the ice sheets, since the ice mass in Antarctica
was fenced off from South American and Africa by the ocean, but the
cold and dry conditions did not spare the southern lands.
In the Atlantic Ocean, still slowly, steadily widening under the
impetus of the outflowing new oceanic crust from the Mid-Atlantic
Rift, a modest magma plume had reached the surface, along the general
region of the Rift. In no mood to take chances, after the relatively
recent disaster of the Dinosaur Killer impact, the Watcher decided to
modify the geology of the region to reduce the risk of a global-effect
eruption series.
Instead, a geologically peculiar island complex rose in the middle of
the Atlantic, an odd but distinctly temporary feature, a sort of
artificial version of the smaller island of Iceland to the north. In
later times, this odd, self-contained island mini-continent would be
known as Atlantis.[1]
Now the lands and seas would have appeared very familiar to a modern
observer. The flora and the fauna were of types and shapes and sizes
familiar to the gaze of a modern human. The Earth had recovered from
the Dinosaur Killer long since, but that crucial event was far from
forgotten.
The Eldren had been caught off-guard, again. It did little to improve
their mood that the damage was far less in in the K-T Event than it
had been previously. Yet again, a fascinating and unimaginably
complex ecosystem had been irretrievably destroyed, and if the new one
rising in its place was also fascinating, it did not change the fact
that the previous one had been a painful loss.
The Watcher, for its part, was fed up. Determined to make sure their
mysterious enemy could not repeat the D-K attack, the Familiar Eldren
proceeded to spend over a quarter million years sweeping most of the
larger NEO rubble piles into the outer Solar System. Only a handful
of rocks remained that crossed the orbit of Earth, most of them small
and unlikely to impact.
Of course, new rocks were periodically perturbed onto Earth-crossing
orbits, but usually the Eldren swept them out again. On a couple of
occasions, big rocks _did_ get through, but the Eldren knew how to
cope with that now, and in each case they were able to localize the
damage and prevent a major mass extinction. NEMESIS noted this last
through its hidden eyes with disturbed interest.
The ease with which the Eldren contained and repaired the damage from
what should have been global-disaster level impacts made it clear to
the ancient living computer that another Dinosaur Killer type attack,
even if it could have readily arranged such, was by no means
guaranteed to be effective. Concluding from this (and other examples
of increased Eldren preparedness elsewhere in the Greater Milky Way)
that piecemeal attacks should be avoided where possible, NEMESIS
focused still more of its attention on its steadily maturing plans for
its next full-scale attack on Solarigen life, its next attempt at
total extirpation of the problem.
As well as it could, it kept a close 'eye' on the Solarigen worlds,
but it didn't have the clear view in had possessed in the Paleocene,
and there were more worlds than ever now. By the beginning of the
Pleistocene, the Eldren had raised the number of living Solarigen
worlds in the Greater Milky Way over well over 100 million. It should
be noted that they had never entirely ceased spreading helium-based
life, as well. Along with the 100 million Solarigen worlds, the
Eldren still watched over and observed 10 million or so Heliugen
biospheres. NEMESIS had no brief for the Heliugen worlds, however.
As for the Helialisks, they continued to watch for the actions of
NEMESIS, hoping to blunt or stop those actions before they could serve
to infuriate the Eldren and perhaps lead the disclosure of the
existence of the Helialisks. But their efforts were less strong at
the end of the Cretaceous than they had been at the end of the
Permian.
Roughly 200 million years separated the first and second of NEMESIS'
great assaults on Earth. The time between them was almost as great as
the time from the creation of the Helialisks to the Permian
Extinction. There were far fewer Helialisks left 'operational' at the
end of the Cretaceous than there had been at the end of the Permian.
The reasons were varied. Sometimes, in spite of the best efforts, a
natural disaster would damage or destroy a Helian Graveyard.
Improbable events can turn out to be nearly inevitable in hundreds of
millions of years. But the Last Helians had planned well, and most of
the Graveyards were in very, very, calm safe places.
A more common failing of their big for immortality was that the Last
Helians, being mortals themselves, had had _no conception_ of how long
even a million years could be. As the millions mounted up into the
tens of millions, and then the hundreds of millions, many of the
Helialisks who had hoped to outlive the stars found themselves losing
interest in the project.
This 'saturation' befell some far sooner than others, of course. The
first 100 million years of the history of the Helialisks it was a rare
thing, so strong was the native desire of the Last Helian psyche to
endure and so well had they prepared. But after 100 million years
this condition began to appear more and more often. By the end of the
Cretaceous, only about 30% of the original Helialisks were still
meaningfully functional.
The results of a loss of interest in continuation could very in
detail. A few of them simply shut themselves down, a form of suicide.
But most simply gradually slipped from the slow, steady, glacial
thought pattern that was the norm for the Helialisks into a
repetitive, ever less varied pattern, almost a trance state, and when
they finally slipped into that trance fully, they never emerged. The
life-support systems of the given monolith still operated, the Helian
organs-of-thought preserved inside continued to live in a biological
sense, but all reaction to stimuli and all interaction ceased.
A Helialisk in that state could continue on for a very long time
before the organs-of-thought finally died from lack of mental
activity, millions of years at times. But for all practical purposes
a Helialisk in that full trance state was already dead.[2]
Thus the resources of the Helian Graveyards steadily declined over the
course of the Mesozoic. By now, none of the surviving Helialisks, not
even the surviving original conspirators, had the slightest interest
in their former helium-biosphere homeworlds, and the entire 1.5
million year history of the Helian galactic civilization was a trivial
footnote in their multi-megayear memories.
Thus NEMESIS continued to dutifully execute programming based on
priorities of relevance to nobody, and opposed by the some of the very
beings who had once held those goals. It was an irony worthy of a
laugh, save that no Helialisk had a sense of humor nor any ability to
comprehend 'irony'.
No more than the Helialisks did NEMESIS have either a sense of humor
or a sense of irony. The ancient machine had its programmed
priorities and it was executing its programming, that was enough for
it.
So now, let us step back to the dawn of the Pliocene, ~5 million years
ago. Earth was recognizably modern in form. The outline of the
earlier history was told, the stage was set, most of the players were
ready to begin the show.
The Eldren, the Helialisks, NEMESIS, and other players yet to be
introduced were already in the great game, but now a new actor, as yet
unsuspected by any of the others, was about to step onto the stage,
and the story was about to become very strange.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
[1]We're finally starting to come back to where we started from (but
we're not there yet). :)
[2]Recall that the name 'Helian Graveyard' comes from the first Terran
to visit one, the astronaut Sir Ian Carlyle. I noted at the earlier
time that his initial naming impulse was not altogether wrong.
Rupert Boleyn
carved upon a tablet of ether:
> LATER.
>
> Though the planet Earth had taken an enormous amount of damage from
> the impact of the Dinosaur Killer, the effects were in truth less
> severe than they appeared. The mass extinction brought about by the
> D-K was only a shadow of the effects of the earlier Permian
> Extinction. Where the previous assault had extinguished over 95% of
> all animal species, the K-T extinction had seen the end of fewer than
> 50%, with even smaller percentages of plant species gone.
This is all very cool. I'm just reading your posts on this, having not
paid much attention earlier. It's worth the time spent reading it, so
thankyou very much for sharing.
--
Rupert Boleyn <rbo...@paradise.net.nz>
"Just because the truth will set you free doesn't mean the truth itself
should be free."
Mike Miller
> introduced were already in the great game, but now a new actor, as yet
> unsuspected by any of the others, was about to step onto the stage,
> and the story was about to become very strange.
Cool. I was wondering if you'd dropped the project, but then I get 2
new posts in one day.
Keep posting. I can't wait to see the effect of intelligent Solargen
life on the Helialisks/Eldren/NEMESIS mix.
Mike Miller, MatE
Johnny1A
>
> So now, let us step back to the dawn of the Pliocene, ~5 million years
> ago. Earth was recognizably modern in form. The outline of the
> earlier history was told, the stage was set, most of the players were
> ready to begin the show.
>
> The Eldren, the Helialisks, NEMESIS, and other players yet to be
> introduced were already in the great game, but now a new actor, as yet
> unsuspected by any of the others, was about to step onto the stage,
> and the story was about to become very strange.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
There are various interesting aspects to the advent of Man, not the
least of which is that it was so unlikely, under the circumstances.
One of the things NEMESIS always kept watch for was the advent of
dangerously intelligent forms of Solarigen life. Why, then, did the
ever-patient NEMESIS permit it?
The answer is that even half-billion-year-old living hypercomputers
are not infallible. NEMESIS made a mistake, or rather, a series of
mistakes deriving from a misevaluation of the data. All the way back
to the Cretaceous Period, NEMESIS was especially concerned about two
classes of life, Aves (the birds) and their cousins the Class
Plumivenitor (feathered hunters). So completely had NEMESIS wiped out
the budding 'feathered hunter' Class of life that Terran
paleontologists would not even realize they had existed until the
middle 21st century. It has also inflicted grave damage on their
Avian cousins.
But Aves survived the Dinosaur-Killer, both on Earth and elsewhere,
and NEMESIS remained especially concerned about them. While it
recognized the possibility that other forms of life might give rise to
alarming levels of ability, it considered the birds the group most
likely to do so. This assessment was not entirely without reason.
The Aves tend to have high-efficiency respiration, excellent senses
(especially vision), are highly adaptable as a group, and show
considerable intelligence for a given brain mass. Their feathers are
adaptable to be useful in a wide variety of environments, and they
were proven successes in many situations. They advanced rapidly once
they first emerged in the Jurassic, sufficiently so that NEMESIS had
felt the need to inflict the D-K on Earth.
In contrast, NEMESIS considered the Mammalia a low-priority group.
Again, this was not altogether without reason. Mammals existed long
before birds, dating all the way back to the Triassic Period. They
arguably could be said to predate the glory days of the dinosaurs.
Throughout the Mesozoic Era, the mammals were always around, but
though individual species came and went, they never seemed to leave
the same basic niches. They were always small, often nocturnal, and
while smart for their size and time, they were nothing all _that_
exceptional.
The period humans would later call 'the Age of Mammals' begins with
the K-T boundary and the death of the dinosaurs, but in fact this
entire period is less than 1/4 the full history of the Mammals on
Earth (and elsewhere). NEMESIS simply had not seen anything to
impress it about the potential of the mammals, and after the K-T
Extinction, NEMESIS remained more concerned about both the birds and
the surviving (on other worlds) dinosaurs and other groups than about
mammals. It had filed the mammals away as low priority, and it
perhaps failed to review its earlier assessments as often as it should
have.
Further, having inflicted tremendous damage on Earth, NEMESIS now
followed its usual pattern after inflicting one of its local (meaning
one-planet-scale) outrages by curtailing all activities and 'lying
low', while the Eldren calmed down and had time to lower their guard
again. Always, always, with the force of its core directives, NEMESIS
was concerned about secrecy. So careful had it been, that even after
hundreds of millions of years, the Eldren knew little of its nature
and nothing of its location. Much of its attention was occupied now
with an emerging plan for a future greater-galaxy-wide extermination
assault, a more thorough (it hoped) attempt at total extinction of
Solarigen life.
So while NEMESIS noted (through its limited sensory systems in the Sol
System) the expansion of the mammals after the K-T Event, it probably
did not fully realize how fast and extensively the long-quiet mammals
were suddenly growing and changing. It had, after all, over 100
million worlds to try to keep track of and work out ways to destroy, a
major project even for NEMESIS.
So when the first hominoids (not hominids) emerged in the very late
Oligocene Epoch, the fact was duly noted by NEMESIS, but it was filed
away with billions of other low-priority facts. The Eldren took
notice of the new group as well, which proved be quite adaptable and
successful on Earth, and hominoid colonies were soon found on millions
of other planets as well.
It should be noted, too, that neither NEMESIS nor the Eldren were
omniscient. The hominoids (the line that led to the greater and
lesser apes and humans) had been around for at least a quarter million
years before they were noticed by the Eldren and another 100,000
before NEMESIS learned of them.
These early ancestors were not apes, not yet. But they were the
ancestors of both apes and Homosentients. With the passage of time,
this group soon displayed a tendency that would repeat: a tendency
toward bursts of speciation. Throughout the Miocene Epoch, various
genuses of the great apes burst into being, spreading all over Eurasia
and Africa. It was, in a way, a golden age for the ancestral apes.
But then, over time, something interesting happened: their cousins
the monkeys began to outcompete the apes, who showed a steadily
_declining_ trend in both population and diversity. This, too,
reinforced that low-priority assessment that NEMESIS had assigned to
this family of species.
Along this period, one of the surviving species descended into two
lines, one which led to the gorilla genus, the other toward Pan and
Homo. The later line was low-population, and struggling constantly to
survive. They wasn't as physically tough as the proto-gorillas, nor
were they very fast, or (yet) overwhelmingly smart.
But this line too split, one leading toward the modern chimp. The
other (and less numerous and successful (at the time) line of these
ancient apes, however, gave rise to a breed that walked upright.
From this line came a cluster of species with larger brains and a diet
more inclined toward 'hard foods' and a certain amount of meat, which
was a major development, since meat is nutrient and energy rich, and
can support a higher-energy lifestyle and metabolism. This, in turn,
helped make a large brain a more workable prospect (the brain is
energy-intensive).
They were also the first animals in Earth's history to cross another
dividing line: their nervous systems and minds were sufficiently
sophisticated to make some practical use of the latent psionic
potential all living things possess.[1]
They mostly used this ability unconsciously. They were not yet
sapient beings, but they were able to instinctively use their growing
abilities crudely. They used an instinctive form of Telereceive, for
ex, to communicate within their family bands. A very crude,
involuntary ESP ability enabled them to find fresh water, better
sources of fruit, plants, and to track and identify vulnerable animals
for meat. Using this ability enabled them to gradually begin to
increase their population and spread into new regions.
This ability enabled them to survive and thrive in a particularly
dangerous time, but it also was a liability, in a way. Bands of
proto-hominids communicating half-consciously by Telepathy had little
incentive to develop spoken language. While ESP was their primary
tool to find food and water, cognitive methods had little incentive
for development. Had this line of events continued, it would appear
probable that these upright apes would end as a dead-end primate line,
successful in a limited way, but no more than any other genus.
But another species was about to impact on this evolving line, and
alter its destiny profoundly, as well as leaving a mark their
descendents would remember in their nightmares.
In the early-to-mid Miocene Epoch, during the great surge of
speciation that had produced many different kinds of proto-apes all
over the Old World, some were (naturally) much more successful than
others, and some that were initially successful could not sustain that
success. Even before the long decline of the proto-apes in the later
Miocene, one genus had nearly died off, and only a small breeding
population of this genus remained by 3 million years ago. Originally
thriving in Asia, this last remnant population had drifted back to
Africa, driven by more successful competitor species and climate
shifts to which they had been unable to adapt.
Unlike most of the proto-apes, this genus had been basically
carnivorous. While they could and did take some of the nutrients from
plant matter, their diet had emphasized meat, and this group of
species had preyed primarily on birds, rodents, and small mammals.
But now they were nearly extinct as a genus.
But that had something in common with the proto-human line: they were
developing to a limited degree the potential for a psionic ability.
Their brains were far simpler than those of even the primitive
proto-hominids, but by some quirk, they developed the ability to sense
the use of psionic power by other entities. The newcomers, already
adapted to hunt in pairs and trios, could use the ability to sense
psionic activity to detect the presence of a proto-hominid. They
became more or less viable prey.
The proto-hominids were relatively physically weak, compared to the
newcomers, which were nearly as physically powerful as modern
gorillas. Typically a trio of newcomers would corner a lone
proto-hominid, and being already adapted for predation, they could
usually overcome the target and make a neat meal of it. Once the
psionic sense became useful, evolution began to refine it, until the
descendents of the dying genus had developed the ability to sense
psionic power that wasn't even in active use, as well as the ability
to sense the presence of a working, living mind of any sort. Their
prey list expanded, as their senses became more effective.
The newcomers evolved, over about 200,000 years, into a new species,
_Incubus devoraris_ (~nightmarish devourers). In some ways, they
reversed certain evolutionary trends among primates, as they adapted
to a primarily predatory existence. Their fingernails again became
fairly effective claws, their teeth adapted to bite and tear, and the
incisors lengthened. Their hulking physical strength transformed into
a lean, dexterous, fast strength, their physical senses such as small
and hearing sharpened, even as they retained the primate eyesight.
They were fast, tough, and relatively smart. At that time, the
proto-hominids were only marginally more intelligent than _I.
devoraris_.
They had excellent night vision, and in fact hunted primarily at
night, when their favorite prey was least effective.
[The species name might seem a little melodramatic, but the
paleontologist who will name them will be, after all, descended from
their primary prey. :) As we shall see, the 'nightmare' part is not
entirely inaccurate, as well.]
For a while, _I. devoraris_ was the primary active predator faced by
the proto-hominids. Other creatures also went to feed the Devourers'
appetite, but they retained an evolved preference for hominids and
apes, who were especially vulnerable to their psi-sense. To make
matters worse, _I. devoraris_ also developed other applications for
its psi faculty, including a crude instinctive
probability-manipulation ability that gave every individual _I.
devoraris_ the animal equivalent of the Luck advantage. They were Bad
News, if you were a pre-hominid in Africa ~2.5 million years ago.
As with most predators, they tended to prey on the weak, the sickly,
or the young, since that took less effort. But they wouldn't pass up
a healthy adult if the chance presented itself, and the high-energy
lifestyle of the Devourers gave them high-energy appetites. For a
very long time, _I. devoraris_ represented a very effective check on
the population and safety of their distant proto-hominid cousins, for
a period of over 500,000 years, in fact.
So effective and dangerous a predator were they that the descendents
of their favorite prey never entirely forgot them, on some deep level.
They were able to go anywhere a proto-hominid could, climb the same
trees, slip into the same caves, elude barriers that other predators
could not cope with. The fact that they were similar in shape to
their favorite prey made it worse, somehow, psychologically for their
half-sapient victims. They often made a habit of slipping into a
sleeping group of near-humans and picking out a tempting victim,
sometimes slipping with a predatory cunning right past waking
sentinels.
It was all too common for a proto-human to be awakened in the night to
the realization that a Devourer was among them, in the cave, in the
trees. A long-lived proto-hominid might know this terrifying
experience many times.
_The common irrational fear of the dark that human (and other
Homosentient) children display dates from this time._ On thousands of
planets, Homosentient beings would recall unconsciously the fear that
haunted them in the wilds of Africa, a million years or more before.
The bogeyman in the dark, that faint sound you heard in the night that
sent a chill down your spine...something in the back of your brain
remembers them, even after 2 million years.
In response to the Devourers (and other reasons as well, but the
Devourers were one of the major ones), the proto-hominids became
steadily more social (safety in numbers), and adaptive pressure
favored greater intelligence as a partial offset to the advantages of
_I. devoraris_. Also, an evolutionary development changed the
equation. Their nascent psionic Powers had become a liability in the
face of the Devourer psi-sense. The disadvantages greatly outweighed
the advantages, and evolution responded by increasing the power of
their Antipsi to the point that it began to short-circuit their _own_
Powers, making them psionically invisible to the Devourers. The
Antipsi strength continued to grow in response to evolutionary
pressure, until it began to interfere with the Luck advantage of the
Devourers.
The combination of growing intelligence and more and more effective
social organization, the use of fire, the ability to use strategy and
tactics, the skill and will to shape tools as effective weapons (a
Devourer is a lot less threatening to a proto-hominid with a nice
sharp stone knife in its hand, and a _dozen_ such proto-hominids led
by an experienced hunter carrying a torch is better yet) began to turn
the tide against _I. devoraris_.
The emergence of the first true members of Genus Homo marked the
beginning of the end for the Devourers. Homo habilis was smarter,
just as ruthless, and able to organize themselves with true spoken
language. Parents could pass on useful tactics and skills to their
offspring, and the hunter became the hunted. There could be no
quarter for the Devourers, they had been too great a threat. The
emergence of the still more capable H. erectus was their death knell.
By 1 million years ago, _Incubus devoraris_ was extinct.[2]
The long harrowing struggle with the Devourers had left its mark. The
nascent psionic powers on which their ancestors 750,000 years earlier
had depended for survival were now self-suppressed.[3] In their place
were language, tool use, fire, and social organizations orders of
magnitude more complex than anything previously seen in Earth's
history. The primates had done what NEMESIS had feared the Cretaceous
Plumivenitors would do. They had become sapient.\
But if _Homo erectus_ was safe from _I. devoraris_ in fact, he never
forgot the Devourers. On some level, every subsequent human culture,
no matter the species or the place or the time, remembered. In some
form, the barely comprehensible hungry apes kept appearing in myths
and nightmares, so deep had the fear been, so profound the impression.
But now came the next scene in the drama. About which...
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
[1]We'll get to what happened to this potential fairly soon.
[2]Then again..., that's what they said about the coelacanth...
[3]Which is why psionic powers remain rare among H. sapiens and his
cousins ages later.
Johnny1A
and
Rupert Boleyn <rbo...@paradise.net.nz> wrote in message news:<lqsh60po7tcd06m6r...@4ax.com>...
>
> This is all very cool. I'm just reading your posts on this, having not
> paid much attention earlier. It's worth the time spent reading it, so
> thankyou very much for sharing.
Thanks. The latest installment is up now, guys, hope you find it interesting!
Shermanlee
Rupert Boleyn
carved upon a tablet of ether:
> >
> > This is all very cool. I'm just reading your posts on this, having not
> > paid much attention earlier. It's worth the time spent reading it, so
> > thankyou very much for sharing.
>
>
> Thanks. The latest installment is up now, guys, hope you find it interesting!
Coolness. BTW, is there any where (other than wading through google,
which I dislike) that I can read your earlier articles? My news-server
doesn't have the older ones anymore, and I skipped them first time
round (silly me).
Mike Miller
> Congratulations, you've passed you test to become a berserker.
...? Johnny corrected the 22453km/sec statement, lowering it to 22453km/hr.
Mike Miller, MatE
Johnny1A
> On 30 Mar 2004 23:06:21 -0800, sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A)
> carved upon a tablet of ether:
>
> > >
> > > This is all very cool. I'm just reading your posts on this, having not
> > > paid much attention earlier. It's worth the time spent reading it, so
> > > thankyou very much for sharing.
> >
> >
> > Thanks. The latest installment is up now, guys, hope you find it interesting!
>
> Coolness. BTW, is there any where (other than wading through google,
> which I dislike) that I can read your earlier articles? My news-server
> doesn't have the older ones anymore, and I skipped them first time
> round (silly me).
Not right now, there isn't, though I may yet do something about that.
One thing about the Google posts, most of the major posts are on a few
threads, under things like 'Eosian', 'Atlantis', 'Helian', and
'Solarigen'.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> But now came the next scene in the drama. About which...
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
With _Homo erectus_ now spreading out across Africa and Eurasia, one
might have expected that NEMESIS would take notice. Well, perhaps the
murder machine should have done so. But it should be kept in mind
that NEMESIS was not all-seeing. Surely, from time to time some
sensor or other, carefully hidden to avoid being detected by the
Eldren, would perceive an _H. erectus_ going about his or her
business. But only occasionally, and at that given time there was
always a chance that the person in question was not carrying anything
obviously artificial, or otherwise showing much sign that he or she
was anything but a great ape that happened to have less hair and walk
more upright than most.
Still, the clues were there, but there weren't assembled into a full
picture. The indications of something important happening in Africa
(and Asia and Europe) on Earth were spread out across many data files,
and NEMESIS, its attention largely elsewhere, failed to put the pieces
together.
Much of its high-level cognition was now devoted to the rapidly
ripening plan for a new galaxy-wide attack, a second attempt at what
it had failed to achieve at the end of the Permian. Another
distraction was also occupying the machine's attention at that this
time, on a planet on the far side of the Milky Way from Sol.
Yet again, NEMESIS was distracted by its bird fixation. On the second
planet of a class K star, over 70,000 light-years from Sol, the Eldren
had introduced a large number of species of birds during the
Cretaceous period. They did this on many worlds, but on this one the
birds exploded into the empty ecological 'space' left behind after a
local (and purely natural) mass extinction event.
The 25 or so species of birds the Eldren introduced exploded in
numbers and speciated radically. By the time H. erectus was emerging
on Earth, and finishing off _I. devoraris_, the birds on this far-off
world had speciated and taken up residence in every environment.
There were thousands of species of birds flying in the skies, there
were countless species of flightless bird on the plains, in the
forests, and roaming the jungles, there were shallow-water birds,
deep-water birds, and a few species of birds that lived their entire
lives in the sea. There were birds the size of hummingbirds, and
birds the size of elephants. There were birds with no greater
intelligence than a shrew, and birds that were showing remarkable
levels of social interaction and learning capacity. All in all, this
planet was made to order to alarm NEMESIS, with its already
oversensitized bird fixation.
This planet, which Terrans would someday called Avius, was the top
priority for NEMESIS during this period. For over 5 million years,
NEMESIS, with its usual careful, secretive thoroughness, placed
additional sensors, worked out scenarios of action, and generally drew
up its plans against the bird world.
This, then, might explain some of the reason H. erectus was not
noticed, or rather not properly recognized, by the enemy of Solarigen
life for so long.
In the meantime, H. erectus spread out until the species was to be
found in all parts of Africa, most of Asia, and some of Europe. The
population density was never high, but it was sufficient. For a
while, _H. erectus_ was relatively stable as a species, though brain
size was slowly growing. Then, sometime around 200,000 years ago, _H.
erectus_ began to display a speciating tendency.
In Europe, the species _Home neandertalensis_ emerged. Elsewhere,
some other new breeds of Human emerged as well. This speciating
tendency began to sputter along, with new breeds 'peeling off' the _H.
erectus_ breeding pool in various parts of the 'Old World'.
About 100,000 years ago, a fresh burst of speciation occurred, and
onto the stage stepped a new cluster of sapient species, including the
first true _Homo sapiens_, emerging in what would later be called the
Levant. But _H. sapiens_ was not alone. He had 'sibling' species
that were just barely different enough to be non-interfertile, plus
some of the oldest Homo species were also still around. By 100,000
years ago, there were perhaps 30 species of the genus Homo coexisting
across Africa and Eurasia. The breeding pool for most of them was
very small, and the continued existence of many was quite precarious.
These species, collective called Homosentients or Homosentience, were
all of comparable intelligence. They had some common tendencies
across the genus that limited their prospects, however. One major
problem the genus began to display was a low fertility. The
Homosentient species had a problem with childbirth, in that the large
brains necessary for consciousness and sapience required large heads,
in turn making pregnancy and childbirth particularly difficult for the
various Human breeds. Many of the species had annual or semi-annual
breeding cycles. Overall, they were a slow-expanding group.
There were some exceptions. The most succeessful of the new Human
breeds was _Homo sapiens_. This breed had, by the standards of the
genus, a high breeding rate, with multiple chances at pregnancy per
year, and easier pregnancies and childbirt than most of their sibling
species. By 85,000 years ago, _H. sapiens was the most numerous Human
species, and their percentage of the whole was growing slowly but
steadily.
It was ~80,000 years ago that the Eldren, surveying Earth on their
regular schedule, first noticed that since their last general survey,
a tool-using sapient genus had emerged. To say they were caught by
surprise would be an understatement, this was the first such thing
they had ever encountered in Solarigen life, and the first mortal
sapients they had encountered since the time of the Helian empire,
_half a billion years earlier_.[1]
The Watcher was summoned, and it gathered its fellow Familiar Eldren
on Earth, to take counsel on what should be done. The Familiar Eldren
gathered on Earth, actually having their meeting in physical
proximity, near what would one day be called Mt. Kilimanjaro. While
such physical proximity was not necessary (they could communicate
telepathically across intergalactic distances), it was sometimes
preferred.
A few humans saw the meeting, or rather, from a distance, saw that
_something_ very strange was happening on the great mountain. They
had no hope of comprehending what they saw, a dazzle of distant,
brilliant points of light flying about the mountain, shifting in color
and intensity from moment to moment, just one more supernatural
manifestation in a world of such, to a TL0 _H. sapiens_ or _H.
eostellaris_ or any of the other species inhabiting that region. Had
the witnesses realized that what they were seeing was a contentious
debate about their _own_ fate, held among beings mightier than their
tribal gods, they could hardly have understood the implications.
The debate went on for some time, and there were a variety of opinions
about what, if anything, should be done. The debate lasted for over a
Terran year, and it went on 24/7 throughout that time. Eventually, a
consensus emerged on a few points. The Familiar Eldren concluded that
the sapients of Earth would be relocated, and the preparations for
that plan now began.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
[1]At this point, the Eldren still did not know that the Helialisks
existed.
Johnny1A
>
> The debate went on for some time, and there were a variety of opinions
> about what, if anything, should be done. The debate lasted for over a
> Terran year, and it went on 24/7 throughout that time. Eventually, a
> consensus emerged on a few points. The Familiar Eldren concluded that
> the sapients of Earth would be relocated, and the preparations for
> that plan now began.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
The reasons for the disputes among the Familiar Eldren were complex,
but in much they were based on the fact that they still, even after
nearly half a billion years, had no clear idea of the nature of the
foe who was periodically inflicting so much damage on their
biospheres. They had not forgotten that the mystery-foe had come
perilously close to wiping out almost all multicellular Solarigen life
245 million years before, and that since then there had been many,
many cases of near-total extinctions on individual worlds that they
knew or suspected could be traced to their mystery-enemy.
They knew from observation that this foe used tools, along the same
line that the long-gone (as far as they knew) Helian sapients had
used. They had observed patterns in the attacks they had experienced.
In some cases, they had discovered something in time to ameliorate
it. Sometimes they managed to head of an attack beforehand, all too
often they learned that a world had been targeted when a regular check
revealed a more-than-natural extinction event had occurred since the
previous check.
Further, they had come to be aware that smaller-scale extinctions,
ones that left the planetary biosphere essentially untouched but
picked off a single species or group of species, were sometimes
occurring for less-than-natural reasons. With over 100 million worlds
to study, they had noticed that any species showing intelligence or
social organization above a certain level was a highly likely target
for their enemy, be the attack specific or world-wide.
They had even noticed that birds seemed to draw the enemy's attention
particularly often. In retrospect, they had a fair suspicion that it
was something about increasing bird intelligence that had led their
enemy to inflict the Dinosaur-Killer on Terra, a mere 65 million years
previous.
The dispute among the Eldren, once they became aware of the existence
of Man, was about what the likely results of the the genus Homo on
Earth would be. It was inevitable that sooner or later, their
mysterious foe would learn of the existence of sapient tool users on
Earth. There was little doubt among the Familiar Eldren that this
would draw an extermination attack of some sort, and the possibility
existed that the enemy might inflict something on the scale of the
end-Cretaceous to be sure of eliminating the Homosentients. After
all, there were already Homosentients spread thinly but widely across
three continents, and the Eldren could project that they would be
spreading further in a relatively short time, as such things went.
The wider the spread, the more likely the enemy would resort to global
destruction to achieve its ends.
They didn't know what sort of weapons or powers the enemy had
available that might be of use in such an attack. They had scoured
the Solar System and found nothing, but they remembered all too well
that they had scoured the System after the Permian Event, but missed
the modified Dinosaur-Killer, to dreadful consequence later. For all
they could be sure of, the enemy might well have further megaweapons
in wait, ready to be used if needed. The Eldren's lack of full
comprehension of technological thinking made the task of finding them
and identifying them that much harder.
The Eldren were delighted and fascinated by the emergence of sapience
in Solarigen life. They had been fascinated by the Helians, as well,
and had been sorry to see them (as far as they knew) wipe themselves
out. Now they had the potential for another fascinating sapient
civilization rising, and they wanted to make sure the enemy could not
snuff out the chance.
Also, of all their worlds, none could fully match the complexity and
vitality of Earth and its native biosphere. New species and new kinds
of creature appeared on Earth in greater numbers, and at a greater
rate, than on even most vibrant of the terraformed worlds the Eldren
had spread across the Greater Milky Way. But the enemy had already
inflicted world-wide damage to that biosphere twice.
One faction wanted to minimalize Eldren interference with the
Homosentients, to see what they would become. Another faction was
concerned about the danger of detection, and what might follow. Of
those who feared detection, the proposed solution varied widely.
Eventually, the assembled Familiar Eldren (by now numbering over 1000)
concluded that the safety of both the new sapient races and the
biosphere of Earth was compromised by their close proximity. It was
decided that the Homosentients must be dispersed, since having them
all on one planet made them vulnerable to a sudden thorough extinction
attack, and it was further decided that they made too tempting a
target for their mysterious enemy, and so that they should be
evacuated from Earth in the entire, for the safety of the primal
biosphere.
The meeting concluded after a debate of over a year, and the Eldren
immediately began work to implement their plan. Out of well over 100
million terraformed worlds, suitable environments had to be chosen for
the Homosentients who were soon to be involuntary colonists. This was
more complex than it might seem, because of those worlds, many were
'Earth-like' only in the loosest sense, not all of the worlds hosting
complex Solarigen biospheres would be hospitable, or even tolerable,
to unaided Homosentients.
Many of the terraformed worlds had environments too hot, too cold,
chemically unsuitable, too low or too high in oxygen, too much or too
little gravity, or were subject to other factors that made them
unsuitable for Homosentients, even though they could and did host
Solarigen life.
Eventually, the Eldren selected 1728 planets as colonization targets.
For the most part, these worlds were among the most similar to
'modern' Earth (this period is modern Earth, for all practical
purposes). A few were special cases, though. Once the target worlds
were selected, the Eldren began deciding which species or breeding
groups would go where. This was a complex task, requiring a great
deal of observation and calculation, and some guesswork.
In some cases, the Eldren decided that they would move all the members
of an entire Homosentient species to a single planet. This was
usually in the case of species that had numbers low enough that
dividing them would be a greater survival risk than putting them in
one place. For more numerous species, they chose multiple target
worlds, to minimize the risk of extinction natural or artificial.
Sometimes they placed more than one species on a single planet,
sometimes they restricted it to one per world.
When the time for the actual imposed exodus arrived, the Eldren were
ready. They had already been quietly mapping and sometimes moving
populations for convenience, usually by a slight telepathic nudge the
subjects weren't consciously aware of receiving. When the time came,
it was a trivial matter for the Eldren to wrap a group in stasis, and
to transport them across interstellar space to their new homes. For
those Homosentients, it was instantaneous, they had no sense of
passing time and no understanding of what was happening. One moment
they were in their familiar lands, the next moment, they were
elsewhere.
Let us take a brief look at one of these Homosentients.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
His name would not meaningfully translate into English, phonetically
it would sound close enough to Larketh. We join him as he rests in
the heat of a northern African day, having spent the morning tracking
game, with less than usual success. But he was well-fed, as his
people went. Indeed, he mused as he rested in the shade of a rocky
hillside, of late food had been plentiful, game seeming to almost fall
into their snares or to the spears of the hunters. Life had become
oddly easier over the last 3 or 4 seasons.[1]
Most of the True People, the people of his tribe, gave little thought
to such matters, but Larketh had the curse of wondering why. His
father and his father's father both had been thinner than he now was,
food had been harder to come by.
Larketh was a grown man, experienced and skilled in the ways of the
True People, and he had lived now 22 dry seasons. His father's father
had long left them, but his father remained alive, though he no longer
hunted, and he advised the Old One who decided things for the True
People. Larketh mused on that, as he waited for the Hot Fire to sink
in the sky so he could resume hunting.
There were the True People, the ones of his tribe, numbering now 190.
There were the People, of course, the other tribes with whom they
sometimes exchanged good and women. They had been gathering here in
these grasslands in recent years, though none could say quite why each
tribe of the People seemed to feel the need to be closer to the
others. But then, there were the Other People.
The Other People looked like the People, or most of them did, but if a
man of the People lay with a women of the Other People, no child ever
came. The Other People were said among Larketh's tribe to be all
alike, but he had met them, and even spoken with them, and he believed
there to be many sorts of Other People, as Other to each other as they
were to the People.
Indeed, they could speak with each other, and many spoke the some
tongue as the People, while others spoke in ways none of the People
could understand. Sometimes Larketh had the odd thought that perhaps
the speech of the People sounded as silly to the Other People as
theirs did to him. Larketh had seen that the Other People seemed to
be gathering in groups, their own tribes moving closer together, but
if there was a reason it was beyond him.
When the cool of the evening came, Larketh resumed his hunt, but
unusually for recent times, the game seemed fled away. He returned to
the Place where the True People gathered, near the spring of cool
water. The White Circle rose above the Edge of the World as he
arrived, to find that the women had been more successful than the men
that day, and if there was no meat there was plenty of fruit and root
to eat.
It seemed the none of the hunters had succeeded that day, something
nobody could recall happening in 5 dry seasons or more.[2] There
seemed to be no game within hunting distance of the Place. Larketh
could think of no reason for all the animals to flee, but perhaps the
Old One could remember such a time before. The Old One, who had lived
50 dry seasons and more, had led the True People for 14 dry seasons,
and had lived longer than anyone of the True People could remember
anyone living. He could remember many things.
The White Circle rose up, as Larketh prepared to sleep, since it was
not his turn to stand watch for the True People. The White Circle was
tonight but a half a circle, and Larketh wondered why the White Circle
got bigger and smaller and sometimes vanished, while the Hot Flame did
not. He wondered such things, but nobody else in the True People did,
they just said it was the way of things and shrugged.
Larketh found himself unable to rest. Something, something he could
not define, bothered him. He forced his eyes shut, the mild night
breeze playing over his body, but the nervousness only grew. Then,
suddenly, he knew without knowing how he knew that something had
changed. His hunter's instinct caused him to tense, he opened his
eyes, and what he saw took an instant to penetrate his mind, but when
it did, he was afraid.
_The White Circle, which should have been descending toward the Edge
of the World, was gone!_
He sat up, and looked around, and terror filled his soul. All around
him slept the half-awake True People, but they were now stirring as
well, because they were no longer at the Place of gathering!
Panic soon filled the air. Larketh ran to the sentries, who were
babbling with fear. One who could still speak clearly said that in
one moment, the grassland was lit with the light of the White Circle,
the next moment, so fast he could remember nothing of the moment, they
were surrounded by trees!
Indeed, all the True People now found themselves in a clear area
surrounded on all sides by the largest trees they had ever seen![3]
The sound of the spring, and flicker of the fire, all were gone. The
people had awakened still sleeping in relation to each other as they
had been, but the World had changed.
A light came, and some thought it might be the White Circle, but as it
rose above the trees, a new fear filled them. It was too small to be
the White Circle, and it was in the wrong part of the sky! Then, only
a short time later, _another_ light appeared over the trees, larger
than the first but still too small to be the White Circle, which was
vanished from the sky!
It was then that Larketh's father, Larkeis, said quietly, "Before the
new lights appeared, I saw the stars, and the stars are wrong." This
filled Larketh with fear, because his father had watched the stars,
and knew them all.
The Old One appeared among them, and began to calm his People. Had he
not been there, panic might have taken them all, but they were used to
the calming presence of the Old One, and if Larketh could see that
that Old One was as afraid as everyone else, and as puzzled, he kept
this disturbing knowledge to himself.
As the hint of day appeared in the sky, many took hope, perhaps the
strange magic that had befallen them would be clearer by the light of
day. But when the Hot Fire rose over the trees, yet more fear
accompanied it, for it was too larger to be the Hot Fire, and it was
the wrong color!
Over the next few days, only the wisdom and will of the Old One kept
the True People together. He gathered them, and posted triple
sentries, and sent out scouts in groups of 2 and 3 to see what could
be seen. He refused to send more, lest too many of the young men fall
to some evil, he sent none alone for fear of losing a person
needlessly. The scouts were gone for days, but most returned alive
and safe. They had found that many of the tribes of the People were
here, but none had found any of the Other People.[4]
One pair of scouts reported that but a day's walk through the thick
trees they had come to a water so wide they could see no far shore.
and that the water was not good to drink, but that the water of the
rivers remained good. Larketh had spoken to some Other People once,
who had said that the land stopped in such a water to the north of the
lands of the People, but he had never known whether to believe such a
tale.
As the True People and their fellow People explored their changed
world, they discovered that indeed, all the lands had shrunk to a
single land with water all the way as far as the sharpest eye could
see beyond.[5] It was a land of trees, though it had some clear
areas, and nowhere in the shrunken land could any Other People be
found, only People.
Larketh would live to a great age, as the True People reckoned such
things. He would learn to live in his newly changed home, as would
his fellows. They would learn new foods, new animals that were good
to eat. They would discover one good with the new world: the great
predators were gone, nothing remained that would harm a Person.[6]
He would become the new Old One when the Old One had passed and the
One after the Old One had passed. He would live, indeed, to what
would have been 61 dry seasons before the Great Change, and he would
wonder throughout his long life why the World and the Sky had changed,
and never would he know.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Eldren repeated this process over 1000 times, varying the details
as they did to suit their plans. In no case was any effort made to
either explain what was happening, or ask permission, such a thing
simply didn't occur to the Eldren. Over the course of several
centuries of work, the majority of Earth's sapient population was
transferred from Africa, Asia, and Europe to 1728 planets orbiting
almost that many stars. For the majority of the species of Genus
Homo, the entire population of the species was removed, only a handful
of Homosentient species were still present on Earth by the time the
project neared its end.
The two most populous species to start with had been _H.
neandertalensis_ and _H. sapiens_, and of those remaining on Earth,
they were the large majority. Only a handful of a few other species
remained. Even among them, the majority of the population of each
species had been moved already. The Eldren were planning to move them
in the immediate future, which would have completed the task, leaving
Earth empty of sapient life.
But something was about to go strangely and drastically wrong with the
Eldren plan. But about that...MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
[1]To prepare their subjects for transport, the Eldren had indeed been
making life easier. Game animals were steered telepathically into
Homosentient traps or made easier to hunt. Foragers were 'guided' all
unawares to food, water, and safety. The Eldren wanted the
Homosentients in good health and well-fed for what was coming.
[2]When the Eldren were ready, they moved all the animals clear to the
target zones, since they wanted to transport only the Homosentients.
Thus the hunters had found no game.
[3]The True People are a tribe of _Homo eostellaris_, who had lived in
grasslands and plains and were unfamiliar with large trees in large
numbers.
[4]The Eldren had moved the entire breeding stock of _Homo
eostellaris_ to single new world, and decided to leave it a
one-sapient-species planet. Thus the other tribes of their own
species were present, but none of the groups of the other Homosentient
species they had known in Africa.
[5]Or more precisely, they had been involuntarily transported to an
island, and had they but known it, there were vast lands only 70 miles
from the shore of their new home. But they had never been near an
ocean, and as far as the terrified colonists knew, the world had
shrunk changed and flooded when the sky changed.
[6]The Eldren had cleared out the predators and other dangerous
animals and parasites from the island and the nearby continental
lands. It would be some generations before ocean-capable predators
returned to the region.
Johnny1A
>
> The two most populous species to start with had been _H.
> neandertalensis_ and _H. sapiens_, and of those remaining on Earth,
> they were the large majority. Only a handful of a few other species
> remained. Even among them, the majority of the population of each
> species had been moved already. The Eldren were planning to move them
> in the immediate future, which would have completed the task, leaving
> Earth empty of sapient life.
>
> But something was about to go strangely and drastically wrong with the
> Eldren plan. But about that...MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
In order to understand what was about to happen, we must step back a
moment and realize that there are more players in the game than we
have yet seen up close, and that there are many more Eldren in the
macrocosmic Universe than the Familiar Eldren we've encountered up
until now. Up until this point, the Eldren had little noticeable
impact on the tale of planetary life in the Greater Milky Way, with
the exception of the handful of Familiar Eldren. This situation was
about to change.
By the time Earth was nearly evacuated of Homosentient beings, with
only the last few groups remaining to be transferred, the Familiar
Eldren numbered a little over 1000. The group had grown over the half
billion years of the project's existence, but it was still led by the
Eldren Homosentients would someday call the Watcher. The Watcher was
the oldest and most powerful of the Familiar Eldren, and acknowledged
among them as the final authority over their 'little hobby' (that is,
the Heliugen and Solarigen worlds and life).
But 'oldest and most powerful' is a relative concept. A little over
_one billion_ years old, the Watcher might be loosely compared to a
grad student, in terms of its age and place in the Eldren hierarchy.
The other Familiar Eldren ranged from almost as old as the Watcher, to
a few who were barely more than a few tens of millions of years old.
The entire project, from its beginnings in the Cambrian Period to the
time of the Homosentient Resettlement, was no more by Eldren standards
than a modest hobby. The Familiar Eldren might be compared, in that
scale of things, to a group of collegiate and high school hobbyists.
But there are _trillions upon trillions_ of Eldren. They have their
own hierarchies, 'laws', and doings, most of them foreign to mortal
comprehension. But their power structure centers primarily on their
relative ages. The power, knowledge, and comprehension of Eldren
increases with the passage of time.
The ultimate authority with Eldren 'society' lies with the First
Generation of the Eldren, called variously the First Eldren, the
Celestial Eldren, or the Highest Eldren. They came into being in the
afterglow of the Creation, barely 10,000 years after the beginning of
time, over a brief period. After that, no more Eldren came into being
for over a billion years, and the later Eldren were far less powerful
and perceptive and knowing than the First Eldren. Within the Eldren
society, the word of one of the First is universally acknowledged as
law.
We'll get to why this matters in a moment.
The Eldren have their own rivalries, friendships, alliances, and
associations. One such rivalry existed between the Watcher and
another, somewhat older Eldren, a rivalry that dated back into the
Proterozoic. The source and reasons for the rivalry are
incomprehensible in human terms, and of little moment to our tale.
Suffice it to say that the rivalry existed, and was bitter.
As the Watcher and its associates prepared for the final stages of
their plan to evacuate Earth, they did not realize that this rival was
watching them. The Rival[1] was older and more powerful than the
Watcher, and knew how to cloak its presence from the Watcher and the
other Familiar Eldren, unless they were actively looking for it. The
Rival had come to realize that an effective way to irritate the
Watcher would be to sabotage the Watcher's favorite project. The
Rival was looking for the best way, and waiting for just the right
moment. After watching and waiting for a million years or so, that
moment finally came in what we would call ~73,000 BC.
The large majority of the Familiar Eldren were on Earth at the time,
preparing for the final population transfers. Only a handful were out
on the other Solarigen worlds, making preparations to receive the last
few shipments of people from Earth.
Unlike NEMESIS, the Rival had no reason to be particularly subtle,
since it wasn't all that concerned with secrecy. In fact, it _wanted_
the Watcher to know who was responsible for what it was about to do,
after the fact. The whole point was to annoy the Watcher, after all.
The Rival needed only keep its intentions secret long enough to carry
them out without the Familiar Eldren interfering to stop it. While
the Rival was easily a match for the younger Watcher in a
straightforward battle, it couldn't hope to prevail against hundreds
of its younger fellows at once.
The Rival proceeded to quietly begin altering the geology and
subsurface activity of various volcanic provinces and tectonic
activity zones. The Rival isolated the various megavolcanoes, such as
what Humans would someday call Yellowstone, Toba, Atlantis, Long
Valley, etc, as well as some unknown to science as of 2004. The Rival
built up pressure in the gargantuan magma chambers, and began to
quietly, steadily fracture the rock sealing them in, preparatory to
its plan to force full-scale eruptions in all of them at once.
The Rival was planning a mass extinction, of course, along the same
lines as some of those NEMESIS had inflicted in past ages. The Rival
did not really care about long term effects or the Solarigen project
as a whole, this was roughly the Eldren equivalent of drive-by
vandalism, meant to annoy the Watcher and little more. (The Rival
_knew_ about NEMESIS, mind you, and in fact knew a lot about the
murder machine. There is more to that story to be told.)
Unfortunately for the Rival, it got caught before it was ready. [2]
The Familiar Eldren were gathering another group of _H. sapiens_ for
shipment, one of the largest shipments to date, in fact. They had
actually placed the involuntary colonists in stasis, and surrounded
them in a force-shell for transport across the void to their new
homes. As the great globe of force was lifting clear to the African
plains, one of the Eldren shepherding it happened to focus its senses
more closely on the gathering heat anomaly under one of the
supervolcanoes, and it did so at just the right time to notice that
another Eldren was tampering with the subsurface magma plumbing.
Word flashed out telepathically to the other Familiar Eldren,
including the Watcher himself, who was supervising the transfer of
people. What followed took only a few minutes.
Recognizing the Rival at work, and perceiving almost instantly what
was in the works, the Watcher promptly split its forces, directing one
group to continue moving the Homosentients while the Watcher himself
and another group of the oldest and most powerful Familiar Eldren
moved to head off the Rival from finishing its sabotage.
The Rival, realizing he had been detected, tried to detonate the
supervolcanoes prematurely, planning to at least have the satisfaction
of doing some damage to the Watcher's pet project. But the Watcher
used its own abilities to try to stop the detonation, aided by other
Familiar Eldren, and what followed was a contest of skill and power,
using the elemental forces of nature as instruments.
Remarkably, against the odds, the Watcher and its fellows mostly won
the contest. All but one of the great supervolcanoes subsided, the
pressure (which was after all unnaturally applied) easing off, the
magma chambers settling down again. All but one.
In the supervolcanic province humans would later call Toba, the Rival
managed to 'blow' the magma chamber before the Watcher could stop him.
Toba was the volcanic province the Rival had brought closest to
readiness, and the eruption was gargantuan. [3]
Even the volcanoes where the Watcher had more-or-less won the struggle
for control often released small bursts of activity. Tremendous
amounts of ash were blown into the upper atmosphere, and global
temperatures fell noticeably in the ensuing centuries. It was far
from a mass extinction, however. The Watcher and the other Familiar
Eldren reacted fast enough to damp out the worst of the effects,
turning the intended event into a 'fizzle'. Mostly.
Even as the near-disaster was dying away, though, the Watcher and the
Rival had taken their dispute onto the physical level. The Rival was
still bent on doing some damage to the Watcher's favorite planetary
biosphere, the Watcher, for its part, was 'fed up'. As the Rival
tried to lash out, doing as much direct damage as it could as fast as
it could, the Watcher moved to intercept, and the battle that followed
would have been legend, had there been any Homosentients close enough
to perceive it and far enough away to survive the experience.
Even as it was, the battle (which lasted about 93 seconds from start
to finish) left the region blasted clean of life for centuries, soil
baked to glass, water boiled away, and the bedrock fractured. The
Watcher alone would have been overwhelmed by the Rival, but with the
assistance of several of its most senior fellow Familiar Eldren, it
was a more even fight.
The Eldren shepherding what would prove to be the last 'shipment' of
Homosentients found themselves trying to steer the half-mile wide
globe of force out just as the struggle between the Watcher and the
Rival broke out. It took them 33 perilous seconds of desperate
effort, but they managed to keep the force-globe intact and its
suspended-in-time passengers alive and healthy. But in the ensuing
chaos, they were forced to split the force-globe into smaller ones,
dividing the last shipment.
It was at this point that it became clear the that Rival was not
alone, either. Like the Watcher, it had several of its own
compatriots on its own side of the rivalry rushing to back it up. The
battle started to escalate, but the Watcher and its own allies were
more numerous on-site, and more familiar with Earth and the spacetime
around Sol, giving them a 'home team' advantage.
The Rival had another card to play, however. Exactly what it did
would be almost impossible to explain in mortal terms, but it might,
very, very, _very_ loosely, be compared to a computer virus. Any
Eldren has the ability to 'subdivide' itself into smaller selves with
the same mind, and to remerge those selves. The action of the Rival
had the effect of 'trapping' its victims in a subdivided state, and
forcing them into something like a 'trance state'. The Rival used
this weapon it had created on the Watcher and the Watcher's allies in
the struggle, and it was devastatingly effective.
But the Watcher reacted faster than the Rival expected, and managed to
trap the Rival into the same effect, before the Rival and its fellows
could get clear. Caught in their own trap with their victims, the
Rival and its allies were left just as helpless as the Watcher.
The remaining Familiar and Rivalrous Eldren who had been off-planet
were about to intervene to assist their leaders, but it was at this
point that the adults called 'time out', or an approximation thereof.
One of the Celestial Eldren, noting that the dispute among these
youthful Eldren was escalating to the point of becoming dangerous, and
irritated by the antics and nuisance it was causing, ordered the
remaining younger Eldren to 'cease and desist'. Both the remaining
free Familiar and Rivalrous Eldren were forbidden from taking any
further direct action with regard to the battle or the aftermath of
it. Earth was placed 'off limits' to both, neither permitted to
approach closer to Sol than roughly 43,000 astronomical units, nor to
take any _direct_ action with regard to the Solarigen or Heliugen
worlds, until further notice.
There was enormous protest at this, especially from the Familiar
Eldren, but
the Celestial Eldren had spoken, and that was that. Active defiance
of their authority was both socially unthinkable, and nearly
impossible, since one Celestial Eldren could easily overcome thousands
of lessers in a struggle.
It had all happened over the course of less than 24 hours. One
planetary rotation earlier, the Familiar Eldren had been in the
finishing stages of evacuating sapient life from Earth, for the
protection of both the sapients and the planet Earth. Just 24 hours
later, the leaders and many of the long-term members of the great
project were trapped helplessly on Earth, along with many of the
Eldren rivals, and the remaining free ones on each side were forbidden
to intervene to assist them. Though they were not dead, they were,
for the moment, essentially helpless and nearly comatose, and it would
be some time before that state changed.
The plan to evacuate Terra collapsed, of course. There were only a
relative handful of _H. sapiens_ and _H. neandertalensis_ left, and an
even tinier smattering of other hominid species. From the remnant of
_H. sapiens_ who had missed being removed, would come the modern Human
race of Earth. [4]
But perhaps the most significant fact of all, from the point of view
of a Homosentient or any Solarigen life intelligent enough to even
_have_ a point of view, was that the Familiar Eldren were effectively
removed from the picture. This meant, of course, that there was
nothing to prevent a certain living machine from executing its
programming without interference or the need for secrecy. The only
thing left between NEMESIS and that was the lack of realization on the
part of NEMESIS that the Solarigen biospheres and their innumerable
species were now essentially undefended.
NEMESIS would not immediately realize this (fortunately!), but it was
only a matter of time before it did realize the opportunity before it.
But about that matter, and what followed...MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
[1]It's as good a name as any, since it's an appellation applied later
by Homosentients. The Eldren don't truly _have_ names in the Human
sense.
[2]Even the Eldren can have good and bad luck.
[3]A 'supervolcano' (a vague term, but descriptive) such as Toba or
Yellowstone is to an ordinary volcano as such a volcano is to a dust
devil.
[4]Note that this is why the modern _H. sapiens_ population of Terra
shows such a remarkably low genetic diversity. The large majority of
our species' breeding stock was removed from Earth over 70,000 years
ago.
Rober...@yahoogroups.com
> NEMESIS would not immediately realize this (fortunately!), but it was
> only a matter of time before it did realize the opportunity before it.
> But about that matter, and what followed...MORE LATER.
I found your fascinating sci-fi story just today, and read most of the
parts about the Helians and about the Solarigens, and now your story is
up to about 80,000 years ago. Then I did a Google search for the last
paragraph, which you would quote in the next part, but didn't find it.
So when will the next part be posted?
Johnny1A
Glad you find it interesting, it's always good to know they're being
read!
The story switches to a new thread. The thing is, I've been posting
sort of scattershot for a while, so it jumps around a bit.
What you want is the Eosia Repost, Eosia Repost New Thread, and Eosia
Continued threads, they pick up the story where the Solarigen thread
leaves off. There are also some side bits, about the broodwyrms, the
Beasties, etc, that will make the story make more sense.
Shermanlee