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All Tomorrows: Page 7

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  During this age of reconstruction, which lasted for another two million years, many

  Asteromorph world-builders emerged as true Gods, creating inhabited worlds almost out

  of scratch. Their Subjects, meanwhile, became the inheritors of a truly new, war-torn

  Phoenix of a Galaxy.

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  The Post-War Galaxy:

  When replenishing lost worlds, the Asteromorph gods also took measures to

  ensure the continued safety of their creations. The abrupt rise of the Machines had shown

  that unless carefully regulated, the wealth of the stars could always host a race of pan-

  galactic usurpers.

  The Asteromorphs, watchful but ever transparent, did not want to interfere

  directly. Instead, they produced terrestrial versions of their own kind to regulate the

  galaxy. They adapted their delicate, ethereal fingers into spidery limbs, and shrunk their

  brains considerably to re-adjust to the rigors of gravity. The resulting sideline was

  stunted by Asteromorph standards, but still it produced demigods in every sense of the

  word.

  These beings, known often as the Terrestrial Spacers or simply the Terrestrials,

  nurtured and controlled the development of the post-war civilizations on many planets.

  They acted as caretakers, prophets, kings and emperors, but also as grim reapers as the

  occasion dictated.

  The endeavor did not always proceed as smoothly as planned, of course. Most of

  the time the newborn races refused to heed their mentors and in several cases even

  rebelled against them. Needless to say, this crime was always punished with a swift

  extinction. Furthermore, even the Terrestrials grew corrupted. Instead of offering

  guidance, Terrestrials on many planets simply played god, weaving contrived religions

  around themselves to shamelessly exploit their subjects. It was not ethical or even

  productive, but this method seemed to guarantee more stability than actually trying to

  bring up the new races.

  This way or another, organic sentience reclaimed its dominance in the galaxy. The

  New Empire; managed by Terrestrials, populated by a myriad descendants of the

  Subjects, and overseen ultimately by the omniscient Asteromorphs, achieved greater

  progress and a longer-lasting calm in the galaxy than all of its predecessors combined.

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  A nude Terrestrial shows the highly divergent, yet still bizarrely human anatomy that is

  the characteristic of this species. These particular Terrestrials maintain a religious

  hegemony over their clueless subjects; dressing up in elaborate veils and headgear to

  assert their ‘divine’ inheritance.

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  The New Machines:

  Long after their fall from grace, the Machines still clung on to existence. During

  the initial aftermath of the war, the Asteromorphs had planned to exterminate every last

  one of them, only to discover that the Machines were simply too useful to destroy. For

  millions of years they had perfected the interface between mind and machine to such an

  extent that they could live and operate in the most inhospitable conditions. Such beings,

  deprived of their galaxy-straddling power, would make invaluable contributions to

  research and exploration in the New Empire.

  There was a sense of poetic justice in all of this. The Machines, who once distorted

  biological life forms to their whim, were finally treated to a similar fate. To begin with,

  the Asteromorphs completely scrapped their ability of self-contained gravitational

  manipulation; the very force that had rendered them invulnerable in the first place. They

  were given finite life spans and slightly numbed imaginations, so that history would not

  repeat itself. The degradatory nature of these changes, however, did not imply an overall

  regression.

  Unlike their ancestors, the New Machines were endowed with nanotechnological

  bodies that could remodel themselves continuously, which meant that they could come in

  every shape and size imaginable, and then some that could not. A machine citizen could

  live for some time in the void of the space, conducting research, and then transform into

  a completely different body plan for a holiday on a cometary halo, tropical jungle or a

  methane ocean. He or she would also make the trip personally by growing temporary

  hyperdrives and ramjet engines!

  Despite their breathtaking versatility, the Machines were never as common or

  prominent, even after completely accepting their role as lowly citizens of the New Empire.

  The greatest wars in conceivable history had ingrained the organics with too deep a

  mistrust of their mechanical neighbors, and the New Machines were always treated with a

  degree of discrimination. The sins of their fathers had come to shackle this most

  splendorous of all human species.

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  A machine citizen of the New Empire. She sports a dazzling pair of branching arms that

  suit both the latest fashion trends and her job as an artisan. Machines following fashion

  might seem unusual to a reader of this era, but never forget that these beings are human

  intelligences, only in different bodies.

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  Second Contact:

  With successive waves of machine-aided discovery and colonization, the New

  Empire grew exponentially. Such was the growth of wealth and progress that its

  description would need the use of concepts that remain unexplored today. To talk with a

  man of today about the comings and goings of the New Empire would be akin to giving

  lectures of 20th century geopolitics to a hunter-gatherer.

  This magnificent entity was not blind to the universe around it. It tuned in its

  eyes, ears and sensors, and probed the events of the surrounding galaxies. The New

  Galactics suspected that the surrounding nebulae might also have their indigenous folk,

  and it was wise to contact them before a misunderstanding, or conflict could occur. On a

  darker side, these observations also served as lookouts for potential invaders. Even then,

  the memory of the Qu was not forgotten.

  The discovery was eventually made. One of the neighboring galaxies was showing

  patterns of activity that were the unmistakable signs of a sentient organization. Some

  thinkers reviled in the discovery of a new civilization, while others feared a return of the

  Qu. Fortunately, this second encounter with an alien species proved to be a peaceful one.

  Perhaps the intelligences of both galaxies were finally mature enough to meet without

  quarreling.

  The other Galaxy was dominated by connected unions of different beings, presided

  over by various kinds of Amphicephali; bizarre creatures that resembled giant snakes

  with heads on both ends, one of which bore a secondary, retractile body that they would

  use to interact with the world. Apparently, they had undergone alternating series of

  regressions, evolutionary radiations and self-imposed genetic makeovers, just as

  humanity had.

  With all of their wild difference, the Amphicephali were welcome. They were the

  first, but surely not the last.

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  An Amphicephalus ambassador with spaceships typical of their kind. Her strange body

  plan betrays an evolutionary history as complicated as that of humanity.

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  Earth Rediscovered: />
  The purpose of this work is not to describe the limitless progress that followed the

  cross-galactic contact. One could go indefinitely, chronicling how the united galaxies re-

  encountered and subdued the Qu, how they cradled their suns with artificial shells,

  multiplying their inhabitable zones a billion-fold, how they criss-crossed interstellar space

  with wormholes and made travel a thing of the past. Ultimately, descendants of those

  beings even conquered Time itself, prolonging the existence of their minds indefinitely via

  rejuvenating technologies.

  For a time, all men were gods.

  But from (y)our vantage point, one discovery truly stood out in this orgy of

  advance. Compared with gargantuan achievements like the taming of space and the

  construction of the star-shells, it was a mere blip, a revelation of long-forgotten trivia.

  This was the re-discovery of Earth; the birthplace of humanity, where the omnipresent

  Asteromorph, the star-gliding Machine, and the millions of humble resident races could

  all trace their origins.

  It was made quietly, by a singular researcher combing the vestiges of forgotten

  history, decade after decade. Millions of years of wars, invasions and extinctions had

  buried the evidence thoroughly and comprehensively. When she finally came across

  irrefutable evidence, nobody was around to celebrate. That would come later.

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  By the time of Earth’s rediscovery, humans have diverged considerably from their

  ancestral forms.

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  Return:

  The discovery sparked a certain amount of interest, though nowhere as much as

  other breakthroughs had. To most humans of the cosmos, their ancestral birthplace was

  simply an interesting piece of information, a piece of trivia with which they had lost all

  ties.

  Still, a ship was sent forth, and it landed without ceremony, for now there was no

  intelligence left on Earth. Too far away from the main centers of population, it had been

  completely ignored, gone stagnant and feral. But still, it was Home.

  When the explorers stepped out, human feet trod on old Earth once more; after an

  absence of 560 million years. Mankind was back home.

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  All Tomorrows:

  I must conclude my words with a confession. Mankind, the very species which I’ve

  been chronicling from its terrestrial infancy to its domination of the galaxies, is extinct.

  All of the beings which you saw on the preceding pages; from the lowly Worm to the

  wind-riding Sail People, from the megalomaniac Gravital to the ultimate Galactic citizens,

  lie a billion years dead. We are only beginning to piece the story together. What you read

  was our best approximation of the truth.

  Why did they disappear? Perhaps it was a final, unimaginable war of annihilation,

  one that transcended the very meaning of “conflict”. Perhaps it was a gradual break-up of

  the united galaxies, and every race facing their private end slowly afterwards. Or

  perhaps, the wildest theories suggest, it was a mass migration to another plane of

  existence. A journey into somewhere, sometime , something else. But the bottom line is;

  we honestly don’t know.

  Ultimately, however, what happened to Humanity does not matter. Like every

  other story, it was a temporary one; indeed long but ultimately ephemeral. It did not

  have a coherent ending, but then again it did not need to. The tale of Humanity was

  never its ultimate domination of a thousand galaxies, or its mysterious exit into the

  unknown. The essence of being human was none of that. Instead, it lay in the radio

  conversations of the still-human Machines, in the daily lives of the bizarrely twisted Bug

  Facers, in the endless love-songs of the carefree Hedonists, the rebellious demonstrations

  of the first true Martians, and in a way, the very life you lead at the moment.

  Many throughout history were unaware of this most basic fact. The Qu, in dreams

  of an ideal future, distorted the worlds they came across. Later on the Gravital, with their

  insane desire to recreate the past, caused the ugliest massacres in the history of the

  galaxy. Even now, it is sickeningly easy for beings to get lost in false grand narratives,

  living out completely driven lives in pursuit of non-existent codes, ideals, climaxes and

  golden ages. In blindly thinking that their stories serve absolute ends, such creatures

  almost always end up harming themselves, if not those around them.

  To those like the misguided; look at the story of Man, and come to your senses! It

  is not the destination, but the trip that matters. What you do today influences tomorrow,

  not the other way around. Love Today, and seize All Tomorrows!

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  The Author, with a billion-year old human skull.

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