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Yet some aspects of humanity, such as the basic desire to expand, remained. To
this end the Asteromorphs built great fleets of globular sub-arks and spread their
influence across the heavens, into every stellar cluster and every star system. Within less
than a thousand years, the galaxy was straddled by a new and far more alien Empire of
Man.
Strangely enough, its dominion included none of the newly emerging post-human
species, for its masters had completely lost interest in planets; those stunting, gravity-
chained balls of dirt and ice. The newborn arks settled comfortably in the outer rims of
star systems, quietly observing the lives of their struggling relatives.
For the first time in history, there were actual Gods in the myriad human skies.
They were silent and weren’t even noticed for most of the time, but their watchfulness
was ultimately going to pay off.
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86
Second Galactic Empire
Over time, the sentient post-humans began to reach out to the galaxy. They
inevitably stumbled across the ruins of the Star Men, and figured out their interstellar
ancestry. These discoveries were followed by a realization; that there might be others
like them, unimaginable distances away. Thus, the fledgling civilizations set about to
probing the skies.
The contacts, all established by radio communication, were not spread out evenly.
The Empire began little more than a few million years after the Qu left, with the first
dialogue between the earliest Killer Folk and the Satyriacs. A few thousand years later
they were joined by the Tool Breeders, hailing out from the ocean depths through living
radio arrays.
The second wave of sentient species joined in during the following ten million
years, as the Modular Whole, Pterosapiens and the fledgling Assymetrics contacted their
celestial cousins. Finally, in the next twenty million years, newly evolving civilizations
such as the Sauros, Snake People, Parasite/Symbiotes and the Sail People successively
contacted the burgeoning Galactic Empire. The Bug Facers were aware of the whole
process, but due to their xenophobic experience, they only opened up after a staggering
forty million years of silence.
This union was an empire of speech, for actual travel between the stars was too
difficult to be practical. Like the bygone colonies of the Star Men, the posthumans co-
operated through the unrestricted exchange of information and experience. Although
covering every aspect of an astonishing variety of cultures, the Empire’s efforts focused
on two main issues; political unification (though not homogenization) and galactic
awareness; constant readiness for possible alien invasions. Everybody had come across
the remains of the mysterious Qu. Nobody wanted a repeat of the same scenario.
When the Second Empire ran into the Asteromorphs, (who had silently saturated
the galaxy with their own Empire of Man,) they feared the worst. But luckily for them, the
godlike beings were not interested in the Second Empire, nor any of its worlds. The
Asteromorphs were given a wide berth and accepted as they were; incomprehensible,
omnipotent forces of nature.
This coordinated effort lasted for almost eighty million years, during which its
member species attained previously unimaginable levels of culture, welfare and
technology. Each species colonized a few dozen worlds of their own; in which nations,
cultures and individuals lived to the fullest potentials of their existence.
Needless to say, all of this was possible only through constant communication and
a total openness to the Galaxy. Most communities took this for granted and dutifully
participated in the galactic dialogues. But there were others, silent, darkened beings who
refused to join in. Through them would come the ruin of the Empire.
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Gravital (Descendants of the Ruin Haunters)
After the lesson of the Qu, Second Galactic Empire kept a constant watch against
alien invasion. Ironically, they neglected to look among themselves. The second great
invasion of the galaxy came not from outside, but from within.
The Ruin Haunters, who were lucky enough to inherit the secrets of the Star Men
and Qu when other species were mere animals, had experienced a tremendous advance
in technological prowess. All in all they were as sophisticated as, if not more, than the
Asteromorphs of the void. But their ascendancy was not a sane one. Recall that most
Ruin Haunters were already deranged with a twisted assumption of being the sole
inheritors of the Star Men. They refused to communicate with their relatives on other
planets, and kept to their own affairs. This neurotic hubris assumed truly dangerous
proportions after the Ruin Haunters modified themselves.
The origin of this modification lay in an earlier catastrophe. The Ruin Haunters’
sun was undergoing a rapid phase of expansion, and the species, advanced as it was,
could do nothing to stop the process. So the Haunters did the next best thing, and
changed their bodies.
The infernal conditions of the solar expansion meant that a biological
reconstruction was totally out of the question. Thus, the Haunters replaced their bodies
with machines; floating spheres of metal that moved and molded their environment
through subtle manipulations of gravity fields. In earlier versions the spheres still cradled
the organic brains of the last Haunters. But in successive generations, ways of containing
the mind within quantum computers were devised, and the transformation became
absolute. The Ruin Haunters were replaced by the completely mechanical Gravital.
While not even organic, the Gravital still retained human dreams, human
ambitions and human delusions of grandeur. This, combined with mechanical bodies that
allowed them to cross space with ease, made interstellar war a frightening possibility.
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89
Machine Invasion
It took a long time for the Gravital to prepare. Propulsion systems were perfected
and new bodies capable of withstanding the interstellar jumps were devised. But when
they finally decided that the time was nigh, nothing survived the slaughter.
The invasions followed a brutally simple plan. The target worlds’ suns were
blockaded and their light was trapped behind specially-constructed, million-mile sails. If
the dying worlds managed to resist, an asteroid of two finished them off. Enormous
invasion fleets were built, but it was rarely necessary to deploy them. The Machines had
caught their cousins completely off-guard.
The great dyings, all of which occurred in a relatively quick, ten-thousand year
period, stretched the boundaries of genocide and horror. Almost all of the new human
species; unique beings who had endured mass extinctions, navigated evolutionary knife-
edges and survived to build worlds of their own, vanished without a trace.
Even the Qu had been loyal to life, they had distorted and subjugated their
victims, but in the end they had allowed them to survive. To the machines however, life
was a luxury.
Such thorough ruthlessness was not, ironically, borne out of any kind of actual
hatred. The Gravital, long accustomed to their mechanical bodies, simply did not<
br />
acknowledge the life of their organic cousins. When this apathy was mixed with their un-
sane claims as the sole heirs of the Star Men, the extinctions were carried out with the
banality of say, an engineer tearing down an abandoned building. Under the reign of the
Machines, the Galaxy entered a brand-new dark age.
90
A rare instance of a direct invasion by the Machines, on one of the shore cities of the
Killer Folk. Most of the time the inhabitants of the Second Empire were wiped out
globally, without the necessity of such confrontations.
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When Considering the Invasion
The Machine Invasion brought on the greatest wave of extinctions the galaxy had
ever seen; for it was not a simple act of war by one species against another, but a
systematized destruction of life itself.
When considering such a vast event, it is easy to get lost in romantic delusions. It
is almost as easy to write off the Gravital as ‘evil’ as it is to consider the entire episode as
a nihilistic, ‘end of everything’ kind of scenario. Both of these approaches are, as they
would be in any historical situation, monumental fallacies.
To begin with, the Gravital were not evil, at least not to their own perception.
These beings, although mechanical, still lived their lives as individuals and operated
inside coherent societies. They had surrendered their organic heritage but their minds
were not the cold, calculating engines of true machines. Even after giving orders that
would destroy a billion souls, a Gravital would have a home to go to, and, as incredibly as
it might sound, a family and a circle of friends towards which it felt genuine affection.
Despite being endowed with compassion, their harsh treatment of the organics was the
result of, as mentioned before, a simple inability to understand their right to live.
Furthermore, the Gravital did not constitute a singular, indivisible whole whose
entire purpose was to wreck the universe. True, their technological advancement had
allowed them to form a pan-galactic entity, but within itself the Machine Empire was
divided into political factions, and even religious faiths. Superimposed over these fault
lines were the daily lives and personal affairs of families and individuals. Like any
sentient being, they had a sense of identity and thus, differing agendas.
Nor did the Machine invasion mean the end of everything. There certainly was a
widespread destruction of life, but what was lost was ‘only’ organic life. Consuming
energy, directing it for reproduction, thought and even evolution, the machines were as
alive as any carbon-based organism. Despite the turnover, Life of a sort survived, and as
would be seen, even preserved some of its organic predecessors.
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Subjects (Many descendants of the Bug Facers)
The Bug Facers; racially shy and xenophobic due to their background of repeated
alien invasions, became the first species to face the Gravital onslaught. As ironic as their
fate seemed, the Bug Facers were the luckiest of the post-humans. Instead of being
exterminated like the rest of their cousins, they survived as the only organic beings in the
Machine Empire.
The precise reasons for their retention remain unknown to this day. Perhaps the
Machines hadn’t perfected their ruthless apathy by then. Or perhaps they pitied the poor
organics, and allowed them to maintain a stunted parody of an existence.
Whatever the reason, the Bug Facers endured. But they hardly resembled their
original ancestors anymore. Genetic engineering, the lost art of the galaxy-threading Qu,
(and later, the Tool Breeders as well,) was mastered almost as comprehensively by the
Machines. Not hesitating to warp the beings which they did not really consider to be
alive, they spliced their way into the Bug Facer DNA, producing generations of literal
abominations. Would a woman or man of today show any apprehension towards re-
assembling a computer, or even recycling trash? Such was the attitude of the triumphant
Gravital.
Thus, multitudes of Subjects were produced, distorted to such an extent that even
the meddling of the Qu seemed comparatively timid. Most of them were used as
servants, caretakers and manual laborers. These were the lucky forms. Some sub-men
were reduced to the level of cell cultures, useful only for gas exchange and waste
filtering. Others were molded into completely artificial ecologies; baroque simulations
that served only as entertainment. Some machines, with their still-human ambitions,
took this practice into a new level and produced living works of art; doomed, one-off
creatures who existed purely as biological anachronisms.
Be it as tool, slave or entertainment, Humanity narrowly held on to its biological
heritage, while its Machine cousins reigned supreme for an unbelievable fifty million
years.
93
The Bug Facer archetype, flanked by two of his twisted descendants. To his left; a
phallus-bearing polydactyl, bred as a sacrificial offering in one of the many different
Machine religions. To the right; a one-off work of art; designed to play its modified
fingers like a set of drums while ululating the tunes of a certain pop song.
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95
The Other Machines
Recall that despite its Galaxy-cradling might, the Machine Empire was not
homogenous. It contained dozens of differing factions that did not always agree on
everything, including the treatment of their downtrodden, biological Subjects.
Some Machines, over a process involving several religious, social and philosophical
doctrines, began to comprehend the universality of life, and the common origin of organic
and mechanical humanities. Initially such individuals lived in seclusion or withheld their
beliefs from the world. They secretly engineered lineages of Subjects that could live,
move and think as freely as they could. In a few memorable instances the engineers fell
in love with their creations, and their martyrdom inspired other Machines to think just a
little differently.
Eventually, the ideology gained enough momentum to be practiced openly in
everyday life. However, the sect of Toleration soon ran into odds with their hardline, pan-
mechanical rivals. The seething intolerance between the two factions finally broke when
some Tolerant Machines wanted so set several worlds aside for the unrestricted
development of biological life. All hell broke loose and the Machine Empire; the
apparently seamless monolith of the galaxy, experienced its first short, bitter civil war.
The war did not cause any lasting damage, but it plainly illuminated one fact. The
greatest entity the galaxy had ever seen was not without its problems.
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97
The Fall of the Machines (Return of the Spacers)
In the longer run, the internal struggles of the Machine Empire just might have led
to its downfall. But, there was no need to wait that long, as the Empire died a shorter,
but immensely more cataclysmic death.
For a long time, the Machine and the Asteromorph Empires had been eyeing each
other nervously. They hadn’t yet run into open confrontations, as the Asteromorphs kept
mostly to their outer-space arks and the Machine Empire
occupied the planets. In almost
every inhabitable solar system of the galaxy, the same upside-down tension built up
between organic beings living in the void, and machines inhabiting perfectly terrestrial
worlds.
Power was evenly balanced between the two rival Empires. Moreover, this balance
involved forces strong enough to destroy planets en-masse. Each side knew that any kind
of war would result in mutual annihilation, and only insanity could start such a conflict.
Well, the post-civil war Empire of the Machines did go insane, in a sense. In order
to divert attention from internal struggles, it needed a new enemy to consolidate its rival
factions against. How unwise, that this enemy came to be the Asteromorphs.
It is unnecessary and nearly impossible to describe the carnage that followed. The
conflicts lasted anywhere up to a few million years, and the resulting loss of life (both
mechanical and organic) made the initial Machine Genocide seem irrelevant.
When the cosmic dust settled, the winners displayed themselves. The conquerors
were the Asteromorphs, changed beyond recognition after fifty million years of continual
self-perfection. Their grossly hypertrophied brains stretched out like wings on either side,
and their finger-derived limbs had formed an intricate set of sails and legs. Endowed with
superior technology and limitless patience, these beings almost completely destroyed the
Machines, despite losing a substantial number of their own species.
The conflict also thrust the Asteromorphs into the affairs of their long-neglected
human cousins. As impossible as it seemed, some of the Machines’ Subjects had survived
the ordeal. Now, the Asteromorphs could no longer look away.
With the Machines gone, it was up to the Asteromorphs to clean up after them.
They took up the Subjects and used their genetic heritage to populate entire planets.
