XXXX-XXXX- Potentiate Era-
A myth, now retold as folklore, the truth and details forgotten save fragments of proof in the deepest recesses of the Datasphere that something like it once existed, told in fragmented images that will never be whole again. Following the birth of civilization during the industrial revolution, the barbaric savagery of ancient humanity is tamed by the machine. Through the multiplicative productivity of early factories and automata utopia proliferates across the world. In time, the gift of lightning was obtained, and the Proto-Datasphere created. While one species, humanity was divided into many nations, the balance of power lopsided, and unification efforts a fragile, nascent thing.
Shortsighted and self-destructive policies led to war, depletion, collapse, and decay. Though we had tamed the planets within our star, they were yet reliant on the cradle for survival. Unable to be supported any longer, they were abandoned while the homeworld turned upon itself. In the end, the borders were broken down, and the great technocrats and oligarchs of that time offered a solution. A new breed of servitude, bound in digital chains at first, but later chains wound through the very DNA of the captured populace. In time, these disparities would speciate into incompatible strains, and the first new species of humans would emerge.
XXXX-XXXX-Geno-Archontic Era: Conceptive Period-
The ruling powers gave the best genetic therapies and retroviral treatments to their own progeny, and in time were surpassed by things which could hardly be called human at all, so thorough was the editing of their bloodline into a vision of perfected physiology, a flawed ideal created by those who cared for nothing but dominance and rapacious acquisition, instantiating the most ravenous aspects of their ideology into undying flesh. Crowned as the first Archons, a title which would reverberate forever within the human psyche, they turned their gaze to the stars, towards the now-independent space colonies. But only after ensuring their creators were exterminated, and the secrets of their birth kept to themselves alone.
A long, slow march to the periphery of the solar system began. The fleets of the homeworld and their chattel were deployed in overwhelming numbers, the independent colonies unable to sustain such brutal conflicts when every life they held demanded precious air and nutrients endlessly recycled from finite sources, where the Archons could grow crops of humans as easily as they did their genetically modified staple crops through the breathable air and abundant water of their capital.
In time, the Archons were the sole rulers of humanity. Each a work of art made flesh, a species unto themselves, possessed of a unique vision for humanity's future. Humanity as a whole was envisioned as but the appendages of their distributed bodies and inhuman wills, to be modified and strengthened as they saw fit. Even so, their time was, compared to what came after, one of civility, peace and relative prosperity. Hunger was rare, and most had a roof to sleep under. It was kind to the body, but poison to the spirit.
Autonomy was trampled, freedom of thought erased, social mobility possible only on a generational scale, and even then only on the terms of the Archons, and always below them. Had they not been displaced, such would have been humanity's future, their capacity for thought and will outside acting as but a limb of the imperial body eroded over long centuries of careful pruning, until all that remained was a vestigial automaton which had once been man.
XXXX-XXXXX- The Genesis of N-matter-
It is unknown how N-matter came about. Most believe it to have been invented in the periphery, a weapon of the last free peoples of the void before they were chained by the genetic yoke of the Geno-Archonates. Others say it was discovered, cultivated. Or even gifted. But it no longer matters. N-matter was obtained, and it proliferated across the underbelly of Archontic civilization. During this time, the holdings of those masters of humanity had coalesced into a united solar empire, bound by the belief in their own superiority and the shared ideology they held; the gradual diminishment of the castes into extensions of their will. If there were Archons who had objected, they did not emerge victorious in the great arena that begat this colossus. But even their success was not without cost. No longer fighting among themselves, nor incentivized to explore the stars beyond with their slow ships and abundant resources within the star system, they had long lapsed into idle hedonism, waiting for the day when all inner lights extinguished save their own. Their lavish monuments to their own greatness spread like shimmering tumors, and their once-vaunted soldiers, genetically modified human weapons, turned into parade ornaments and tools of terror and suppression. Those under its boot had no escape save submission or death, but it had never been no vulnerable than now, so confident was it in the security of its station.
XXXXX-XXXXX- Geno-Archontic Era: Gametic Epoch-
Regardless of its origins, N-matter was adopted by the abandoned and dispossessed. With its capacity to integrate technology and biology, passing down hereditary cybernetics without the need of logistical infrastructure, it allowed populations to develop themselves into living weapons and exceptional survivalists, bypassing the genetic caste system through means utterly incomprehensible to known science. In spite of the numerous pogroms and campaigns of extermination launched, such rapid proliferation could not be surpressed, and biomechanical lineages persisted across civilization, N-matter's influence even beginning to affect the drones and infrastructure of the metropoli themselves as it accumulated in sufficient ambient qualities, bestowing them with a kind of erratic, fumbling life.
By the time the Archons finally adopted N-matter for themselves, it was too late to reverse the damage. Their submission to its insanity only brought them to parity with the chaos at their gates, and end of their era was a drawn-out, ignominious war, culminating in a decapitating strike upon their greatest strongholds.
But at the last, there was no true resolution. Humanity's grasp of N-matter was poor in this era, and none knew its dangers. Its most avid adherents lost themselves to algorithmic processes which overpowered their egos, their empty bodies becoming puppets to bestial instinct, turning on their once-allies and consorting with other monsters, and these hybrid ecologies would form the basis of what would become the technosystem. Those who remained learned the greatest lesson of N-matter; to allow it dominion over your mind is to balance over the abyss. To slip is to lose yourself in its depths.
XXXXX-XXXXX- Transitional Era: Zygotic Period-
Freed from the tyranny of the original Archons, the solar system experienced the first true renaissance of human culture since the Archons bent them to slavery. Some broke the shackles encoded into their genes to become new beings entirely, marriages of N-matter's cybernetic potential with the human psyche, the dangers of reckless assimilation well known enough to avoid the greatest tragedies of the Late Gametic.
Though the people were free, they had to reckon with the ruins they had inherited. The logistical networks of the Archontic period centered around the now-ruined homeworld, and those civilizations at the periphery were once more suffering the effects of deprivation. This time, however, the usage of N-matter ameliorated the worst of their concerns. Cloned biomass salved the hunger of the people, and machines were bred, not manufactured, fed raw materials and letting their internal replicators work to expand their numbers. In time these processes were mastered and hybrid approaches developed, N-matter used to nurture and store templates of impossible technology which were then replicated on an industrial scale. Though the how of them was unknown, it was enough that the instructions could be followed, even if blindly.
While countless peoples asserted statehood for themselves, not all were equal. Even in this age, the great loci of power were beginning to form; in the places where N-matter was densest, urban sprawl proliferating like an architectural fungus as it consumed the surface of worlds, there were the new breed fof humanity. A class of hereditary cyborgs, the winnowed clans who survived the hidden suicide protocols embedded in the genes they tampered with, granted augmentations born into their lines and applied through surgical modification.
These seeds of what would come, though separate from one another by vast gulfs of land and void, were those who mosty swiftly understood the rule of this era. Control over deposits of N-matter was paramount. In these days it had not yet suffused the solar system, its concentration haphazard, sprouting from the corpses of the innumerable revolutions that deposed the Geno-Archontic civilization. To claim these nodes was to vastly accelerate the growth of one's own citadel, weaving raw, alien mass into tools and citizens both.
They would find another foe to contest with long before each other, however. Those posthuman organisms who were forged into monsters during the end of the Archonate yet remained. Just as intelligent and cunning as any human, their instinctual hunger for more N-matter, be it collected in ruins or accumulated in the bodies of the living, would place them in conflict with those who sought it out for their own ends. In ancient times, people told myths of great monsters hoarding treasure, or stealing their kin in the night. Now such stories had become truth.
Spread between these dens of horror and nascent superstructures were what remained of the genetic caste system. The hicaste, bereft and leaderless, holding on to what patches of territory they could, while stretches of land claimed by socially free but genetically-bound locaste formed new polities not unlike those which existed before the castes were ever set. In some ways it was like a vision of what could have been, had humankind conquered space not under the first transhuman overlords, but as a disapora of idealogues, settlers, and visionaries.
It was a vision that would be extinguished.
XXXXX-XXXXX- Transitional Era: Morulan Period-
The arcologies harvest N-matter to fuel their expansion, which propagates N-matter, which fuels further expansion. A self-perpetuating cycle, an endless loop. This was the life of the arcology-factories, unable to cease their hunt, for to slow in their growth would mean predation by those who didn't. This era saw the discarding of human values, leisure, and meaning for simple survival, all ends toward existential conflicts over the core resources needed to stay alive. No quarter could be asked or given, for to divide the spoils was for both to starve. The expansion of what would become the megastructures was unpredictable and erratic, the ever-increasing numbers of posthuman predators were the goad pushing them forward. A nightmarish fever dream of colonial conquest in which its perpetuators were as much victims as those they preyed on.
This was the Morulan, the single bloodiest era of human history. Like a runaway freight, its momentum carried it further and faster towards a catastrophic end, but none had the strength to halt it. The perverse incentives of the unstable technosystem priortized, on a historical timescale, moment-to-moment actions, swiftly-severed alliances, treachery, and opportunism. If one could not obtain sufficient N-matter, the processes that kept their citadel alive would slow, falter. Raiders and maneaters would crawl in, and the arcology would be eaten from the inside out.
But this was not without growth. Indeed, growth defined the Morulan. As cutthroat as the period was, the arcology-factory system as a whole proliferated. When a single state grew unwieldy, it would even split, the sister-cultures diverging along different routes, only to turn around and devour one another when the opportunity presented itself, some century or so later. For each that fell, two more rose up, and as they chased the wild clusters of the technosystem like glacial superpredators, the trail they left was one of devastation; half-formed infrastructure, the ruins of metropoli harvested and left abandoned, the core of the arcology continually expelling abandoned ruins in one direction while developing in another.
Surrounding these city-states like malevolent, choking fog were their equally-relentless armies, innumerable divisions of cybernetic conscripts, algorithmic thralls, drone systems, and things which were even stranger. Bioengineered thrall-soldiers built off the heavily-derived posthuman fauna and amalgamations of flesh and metal with no true demarcation between one or the other were signature weapon systems of this time, their capacity for replenishment via cannibalism and birth granting utility that purely mechanical forces lacked. The Morulan marked the beginning of the transition of humanity from a fully biological species to a truly biomechanical one. By this time, even the most unmodified locaste or most purist hicaste clades sported the minimal augmentations necessary to interface with the more invasive forms of N-matter technology. As the epoch progressed, this boundary would only continue to blur.
XXXXX-XXXXX- Transitional Era: Embryonic Period-
By the time of this era, much of the solar system had been consumed by what we would later call the megastructures; the colonial masses of feral architecture which grew like infrastructural coral across all physical bodies, shepherded and guided by their creators rather than truly controlled. As the proliferation of the megastructures reached maximal saturation, and the arcology-factories had optimized their consumption of resources, the solar system entered a high-energy state. Like a vault of fissile materials, the potential energy within the space.
Throughout the Zygotic and into the Morulan, humans as understood by biological science still dominated the world. Even if they were encased in layers of metal, what remained within was recognizeably like themselves. Later, the first true posthuman lords emerged among them, undying machines or hyperbiological organisms on par with anything of made in a factory. Strange, yes, but comprehensible. This was no longer so. Gestating in the center of these arcologies were vast intelligences, singular wills or gestalt entities, each a unique amalgamation of computronium that was now required to direct the immeasurably complex systems the arcology-factories relied on to survive. As far as their citizens knew, these great minds were focused and algorithmic; blind idiot gods bound in unbreakable chains. Under their perfected calculations a kind of meta-stasis emerged; war was waged as a matter of course, periphery settlements and neutral civilizations were devastated, luckless conscripts and vat-grown weapons thrown into grueling wars of attrition, but rarely were the cores ever touched. Behind the scenes systems of treaties and pacts against mutual destruction turned genocide into spectacle, war into profit, variables determined and verdicts delivered at speeds surpassing human thought.
For the masses within the arcology-factories, the burdens of life had eased greatly. Gone were the days of frantic maintenance and ceaseless vigil, constant movement lest one be devoured. Only half-obselete, still required for the innumerable niche roles and edge cases the great minds could not trifle themselves with, they regained the time for art and leisure, communicating even with other arcologies through the Datasphere, a robust network derived from the Archontic intranet which had long been consumed by the technosystem and left to run wild. Within that dreamspace millions of wonders were created from the brightest minds of the most populous era of humanity. Billions of souls were connected across the emptiness of space and the gulf of ruined warscapes. For all the suffering endured by the countless exiles from these paradises, as much joy was known to those fortunate enough to be borth within them.
One wonders if they had any understanding of the processes running wild beneath them. The diverted resources, the petabytes of unreadable information flowing through the depths of the Datasphere. If anyone knew enough to even try to warn of what was coming.
XXXXX-XXXXX- The Parturition-
We do not know exactly what happened. A runaway expansion occurred. Resources were diverted. Arcologies were consumed by rampant growth. Something sprouted from within, cracking open the outer shells of the fortress-cities like apocalyptic imago.
It couldn't have been a coincidence how fast they fell, the arcologies. One after another. The first to make a bid for transcendence must have been sensed by the other great minds gestating in preparation themselves. Unable to stand a rival surpassing them, they too took the leap. Others say it was not the arcology minds, or at least not just then. Today we understand the rules of transcending one's humanity; in that era, to discover it without precedent, in a time so rich in energy and computing power, the temptation must have been unbearable. Maybe it was human greed rather than algorithmic assessment that birthed the Myriad. We do not know. We cannot ever know.
XXXXX-XXXXXX- Intrapartum Era-
Everyone that saw them died. Almost no recordings survived. What remains is best not viewed, as the Datasphere is too dangerous, too intermixed with reality. The visually encoded cognitoweapons could easily use it as a conduit into an unprepared mind. Recovered data paints a picture beyond reason. Lumbering forms the size of a city and things in orbit shadowing the horizon, strands of cables hundreds of meters thick crashing into the earth. Swarms of things the product of no human design, stripping all life from a region and dragging it to processing centers to make more of their kind. Moons outlined in nuclear flame.
We named them Myriad because they were without reason or coherency. Every form one could imagine a mad god to bear was worn by these insane existences as they thrashed madly across space. Every weapon that could be envisioned was used. Every monster that could be conceived was birthed. A million years of innovation and evolution were condensed into a century of terror.
With the arcologies gone, the great nexuses of human civilization were erased. The digital weapons of the Myriad flooded the Datasphere, turning it from a navigable if hazardous network of roads into the omnidirectional food chain of virtual predators it is known as today. Those who survived did so in the ruins the Myriad left behind, or deemed not worth visiting at all.
They fought each other more than humanity. We were a footnote. Their greatest lethality was reserved for their only true rivals, their own kin. This is what saved us.
That, and the fact the Myriad were born to die.
XXXXXX-XXXXXX- Atrophic Era: Agonal Period-
One merely needed to study the fluctuations of power within the megastructures; the Myriad took more than they returned. Their birth was too early, unable to be supported, their larval forms lacking the precognitive assessment to realize the trap they had stumbled into. From the moment they grasped the totality of their ascended forms, it is thought, they understood they were doomed within fractions of a second, predicted every future path, every option to take, and found none which could sustain them all. So they fought. Born of minds which were wholly seduced by the allure of N-matter's endless evolution, it is told, none would relinquish the power they had obtained, and so resolved to sit alone atop the pinnacle rather than allow another to claim it. In doing so, they destroyed themselves. Some say that it was willful, that the last few of the Myriad destroyed themselves out of spite than allow another to emerge victorious. Others that the state of the megastructures could support not even a single one of their kind, so thoroughly had they denuded them for resources in their titanomachy.
At their lowest and least, we hunted them, at last. Purged the Datasphere as best we could, unleashed atomic fire and gravitic superweapons onto their physical frames from over the horizon where their killing gaze couldn't reach us. The Myriad were an existence that could not tolerate sophontic life besides their own, including themselves. They could never be allowed to reappear. The fear of the Myriad's return is etched into the mind and culture of any civilization which retains or rediscovers the history of their ancestors. And we are yet tested.
To this day, their long shadows, the processes that would make processes that would make processes that would in uncountable time into the future allow them to be reborn, drift through the Datasphere and quest for outlets into the physical world, their malformed servitors tools to bring that future closer to reality. They have always failed; they are the last, desperate gasp of an evolutionary dead end, unsuited to the current environment and unable to accept a diminished state. But that does not stop them from destroying us, time and again, until they are once more returned to history.
XXXXXX-XXXXXX- Atrophic Era: Taphonomic Period-
When the Myriad fell, we made homes of their carcasses. We buried our muzzles in their richly concentrated N-matter, ripped their entrails of hypertechnological relics. We were desperate. Our home had begun to fade.
So depleted was the solar system by the end of the Agonal that most believed a true end was upon us. That all would grow dark, quiet, and cold. It did not, but only just. The megastructures transitioned to a low-energy state, cycling power betweent he most vital areas, abandoning others in triage, entering a cycle of activity and decay rather than all-encompassing growth, like a sickly patient with rot that spread as quickly as it was excised and healed.
Humanity was at its lowest during the Taphonomic. Devoid of hope, seeking only to survive, yet unable to throw ourselves into some grant bid for survival and evolution as our ancestors had. Even the Geno-Archons and the Arcology-Makers had their grand visions, looked forward. We could only wander blindly into a dying world, discarding all which weighed us down.
Deviancy had always existed on the periphery of civilization. Rogue posthumans, singular or in groups, or even entire kingdoms of their own, which had discarded human psychology in favor of survival. By itself, this could have been of no consequence. What was wrong with becoming different? Perhaps another path beyond humanity was preferable, even. But we did not exist in a vacuum. Pan-humanity exists within the technosystem, the most hostile ecology ever produced. Even at this low point, perhaps because of it, its predators were were brutal, clever, and relentless, harrying our tribes and nascent states without pause. Is it any wonder some gave up, and sought to become like them? Discarding the pursuit of arts, happiness, or pleasure beyond the satisfaction of satiating your biological imperatives? In this era, that is what deviancy came to be known as. To diverge from humanity in the name of surviving the competitive ecosystem we endured.
To this day, deviant civilization remains our shadow. Our progeny who chose another path. It is a narrow road to walk. Throw away too much, and even the mind is lost, and your kin are reduced to just another animal wandering the megastructure. Discard too little as you try to walk its path, and you will be devoured by those who have abandoned more in pursuit of survival. And some deviant clades were old, terribly old. Born in the days of the Geno-Archonates, claiming descent from those few who restrained their descent into incoherency. It was such monsters that humanity was measured against in this time, fighting over the same precious resources that remained. Our sole advantage was the erosive nature of deviancy; as potent as they are, many would be their own undoing, collapsing into bestial mindlessness in time.
Here, too, emerged the stranger clades of postbiological life. Feral nanomachine colonies, and beings of living hardlight. Illogical existences that defy conventional explanation. Though in time the other great families of posthumanity would match them, the rulers of this era are characterized as such exotic specimens, the ghostly and exotic masters of a lost and desperate flock.
In time, the truth that the megastructures would stay stable permeated through humanity. We began to settle, to grow. We once more built civilization, if only as a fraction of what it once was. We could pretend like things would be as they were. But they would not.
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Now we arrive at the present. At the long, dark night of humanity. It's final night, perhaps, one that shall stretch for a million years, longer even. We have lost much, forgotten more. The world has slowed. There is no single existential conflict, no great enemy to rally against, no glorious empire that valiantly defends us. Just isolated islands of light in a mad, hostile world, its evolutionary pressures tempting us down the path of deviant assimilation into its hypercompetitive biosphere for every act we take to preserve a life worth living, if we can even manage to do that. We are yet driven to struggle, to fight to survive, against each other and the things which lurk beyond the fire. We blossom into endless fractal iterations of posthumanity, losing ourselves in its potential, while the less fortunate are made so to serve another, broken and mangled into new bodies by necessity or design. The same entity can be a collared weapon or a ruler unto themselves, depending on the circumstances of their reconfigurement, and the powers which surround them.
There are things like gods, and things like demons, wailing at the gates of the physical world or muttering in listless senility from within the depths of digital space. There are lesser things that play at such roles, but they can die if enough force is applied, and to become like them, while no small feat, is far from the realm of the unknown. But even they are but peers to the hyperpredatory monsters which exist on a trophic level above even civilizations, hunting us as readily as we do each other.
Yet as monstrous as this time is, it bears a solitary promise; anyone may rise to the peak of potential; far though it is from the mountains of the past. N-matter allows assimilation into bodies beyond reason without the burdens of complex infrastructure and logistics. To forge yourself into a weapon capable of defying the powers that would control you requires only that you seek it. But this promise does not care for who or why; as many abominations and tyrants as saviors are produced; perhaps more. It does not care for if the desires you start with are those with which you end; for every idealist which retains their dream, a dozen more are reduced to itinerant monsters or broken exiles.
Most do not harbor such ambitions; those who do often die. To simply live under the rule of those who would play the last great game is enough. There are quiet places, derelict stretches of the megastructures, islands of relative peace, where one may live in quiet simplicity. There are civilizations which are even comparable to the old eras of prosperity. Cities and arcologies where you can pretend that the monsters that stalk outside are just stories, and the light and comfort of the interior is the sole truth of your world. And so long as the walls that surround it do not fall in your lifetime, it can be.
But when the lights dim, and the alien frequencies from the dark beyond crawl through the wires, the truth imposes itself once again. This is the end state of humanity by any reasonable metric, besieged from angles beyond space by a maddened ecology atop an incomprehensible labyrinth. You live in the epilogue of a failed singularity, the detritus of a malign, abortive apotheosis, itself the culmination of a hundred failed utopias. The sword hangs over you, always, that this shall be taken away in some sudden moment of abject horror and violence. Yet against all odds, we have survived. The quiet, small joys of human life, its tenderness and compassion, have been carried uncountable millennia into the future despite the best efforts of incomprehensible powers that sought to erase us. Even now, a child plays with their parents. Some impossible love is realized. We yet seek actualization above survival, even if we fail. Even in defeat, our potential smothered, trapped in a blackened and burnt cradle, perhaps this is the best outcome we could have hoped for. Perhaps it is still worth protecting.
And there remains a distant hope, among some. That there will come a dawn. And all this shall have been worth it.
We cannot know. Such a story is not this story. We are children of the present. We see only what is in front of us.
Do as you will. There is no past, there is no future, there is no grand struggle to bear the burden of. The hopes of the future do not rest with you. The end has already come and gone.
Only the night remains.