* * * * *
“Long before Marankeil became the leader of the Seynorynaelian Elder Council, before he became the head of the Federation Council,” the record-keeper began, “before Hinev and the first group of explorers had even returned to Seynorynael from their journey, Marankeil had studied the geography and history of our own world and found relics he believed had been part of a glorious ancient Seynorynaelian civilization.” The speaker paused gravely.
Could it be that there was no punishment for breaking an oath of silence?
“But,” the record-keeper ventured cautiously, “it wasn’t until he and his closest friend Ornenkai discovered the ruins of the Enorian havens that Marankeil conceived the idea for the rebirth of an even greater empire, a Seynorynaelian Empire as the legitimate heir to Enor’s faded glory.
“Marankeil won a seat on the Seynorynaelian Council, and it was he who suggested sending out another major explorer mission, an army armed against the unknown. But even after the return of Hinev and his crew with findings that all of the humanoid races were descended from one, Marankeil would never admit that the first race existed, claiming instead that the Seynorynaelians alone were the descendants of the ancient supreme galactic civilization, Enor.
“Marankeil watched as scientists such as Hinev searched for proof that the humanoid races were descended from one in order to create a brotherhood of harmony. At most, Marankeil was willing to admit to me that the independent evolution of the galaxies might once have been guided by the Enorians, to attain greater perfection among the lesser species. That their ‘life cultures’ had spread life from one world to another, and that these cultures had developed into more primitive, inferior human forms.
“Marankeil’s interest in Hinev increased when he recognized Hinev’s genius as an experimental scientist in life-preservation. Though his interest in these areas had always been great, they were fields in which Marankeil himself knew relatively little. He was no biologist. But Marankeil’s unparalleled creative ability in the field of bioengineering had changed our lives years before Hinev’s return.
“Few remember that Marankeil had once been a scientific engineer and artificial intelligence research scientist, that he had created the first viable mechanized unit capable of emotion, memory, and thought transfer. Perhaps I am the only one who knows that he was the leader of The Memory Project that revolutionized technology and nanotechnology and created computers capable of thought transfer, holding sense memories, and limited higher reasoning abilities independent of humans.
“Then, shortly after his discovery of the Enorian havens, before his election to the Federation Council, Marankeil had discovered a way to transfer the entire mind and memory of a human being into a new form of mechanized unit, an armored humanroid that imitated humanity in every aspect. I found it ironic that a man so convinced of his species’ physical superiority could estrange himself from his own body and the reason for his supposed “superiority”, but the temptation of any form of immortality was too great to deny.
“So it was that Marankeil traded his own humanity for the body of a machine and gave up his human soul in exchange for a computerized mind and body that might live forever. Thus he was able to survive, to control the destiny of our world and realize his dreams of creating an empire. In no time, Marankeil bought the young and foolish Ornenkai’s soul with this promise of immortality and made him his second.
“Marankeil in part came to disdain the human form and its limits, but I knew he was only waiting until Hinev could unlock the key to physical supremacy through physical immortality, attaining perfect preservation of the human body from the Enorian clues that remained on our world alone. Marankeil knew the ingredients of eternal life were to be found on our world, in the innovations of the creatures that inhabited Seynorynael and the miraculous survival of our race itself.
“Secretly he still wished to live as he imagined the Enorians had, to preserve his own existence in an immortal human body that could never age, and never die.
“The hundred thousand year life span of Valeria, Seynorynael’s blue star, had just passed its half-way mark when the Empire under the Council of Elders was born. None of the Federation scientists had been able to reconcile the facts that Valeria was only a young star of 50,000 years, while the genetic evidence dated the original intergalactic humanoid race at three million years old and the variant of the Seynorynaelian form at one million years of independent evolution. Finding no other viable explanation for how our race even existed, our people provisionally accepted Hinev’s First Race Theory.
“Then, shortly after the Seynorynaelian Empire had been created, the Empire’s scientists were instructed to denounce the First Race Theory on the grounds that Hinev’s ‘first race’ had no determined origin and no one could actually prove it beyond a shadow of doubt, even though no other present theory could explain Seynorynaelian evolution. Despite Marankeil’s own private knowledge of Enorian legends and science, he would not let his people believe that those they had subjugated across the galaxy were their brother creatures, even though he knew, as I did, that Hinev was right.
“Hinev never found out what he needed to know about Enor or the Enorians. Marankeil had destroyed the information that he deemed a threat to his own motives. Then at last, Empire scientists finally discovered crude remains of early humanoid forms frozen in an ice glacier. The ancient creatures were very hairy and small with heavy-lidded eyes and leathery skin that had protected them from the ultraviolet light.
“Could these hairy men be our early humanoid ancestors? Many scientists wondered. It had been confirmed that they were genetically related to the Seynorynaelian animal families, and if radiation from the new blue star Valeria had caused Seynorynaelians to lose most of their body hair, they could have been our ancestors. When, just after the Empire was formed, Fynals Hinev suggested that both theories might be possible, that these hairy creatures had been genetically altered by the first race, the comet riders, who were possibly Enorian, that Seynorynaelian was one of many races that the first race had so created but was possibly its closest heir, he had finally come close to the truth.”
A truth he would never really know.
The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 78
