All Tomorrows:

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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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  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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  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<
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  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.

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  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.

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  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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  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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  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.