Destiny

A History of Mankind

"21st Century: Singularity. Man discovers artificial intelligence and perfects genetic engineering. Man merges machine with his own mind.

22nd Century: Lifespans tend towards indefinite, mankind faces moral dilemmas as well as existential threats from overpopulation and resource depletion. Nuclear fusion is perfected in response.

23rd Century: Transhumans who were alive for the first Mars landing in the 21st century now witness the creation of the first warp drive, an alcubierre generator. The fusion energy supplied is insufficient for FTL warp, making interstellar travel possible but dangerous and time consuming.

24th Century: Utility fog becomes ubiquitous. Traditional printing of objects is replaced with self replicating swarms of nano robots, which coordinate their efforts to faithfully produce functioning objects out of thin air. Utility fog is controlled by nanobots inside the brain, giving transhumans godlike telepathic control over their environments.

25th Century: Transhuman civilization is thriving within a twenty light year radius of Earth. Space colonies have been constructed in interstellar space, planets have been terraformed, and resources are abundantly provided by automated systems. The entire race is devoted to learning, exploring, and building. In an effort to make long interstellar travel more bearable and expand further, transhumans begin replacing every cell of their physical bodies, one at a time, with highly functional nanobots which can disperse into utility fog. The first Posthumans are born.

26th Century: Requiring more energy, Posthumans begin turning star systems into energy farms by collapsing suns into black holes. The black holes are farmed by harvesting their rotational velocity. It is discovered that the energy harvested can be focused and condensed to create Athenium, an element which harvests dark energy at relativistic velocities. The first FTL ships are created using Athenium to power the warp drives after being accelerated to near light speed by traditional fusion cores. The expansion across the galaxy accelerates more rapidly than imagineable. Athenium becomes the most important element in the universe, as it can be used to transport massive quantities of energy or to power faster than light travel. Posthumans begin to refer to themselves and their kind as "Athenians," after the resource which will power their future. They inhabit and control their quadrant of the galaxy before the end of the century.

27th Century: The first great war. Athenians come into contact with a powerful race which controls an unspecified but large region of the galaxy. They are called the Dividers. They still exist in biological form, but have discovered Athenium and have control of and access to considerable resources. Seeing the Athenians as a threat, the Dividers launch large scale attacks against the Athenian colonies closest to their territory and begin destroying the Athenian black hole systems. After ten years of war, the Athenians destroy every Divider controlled system, at great risk and cost, by firing Athenium cores into their suns. Considerable resources are used, and civilization is threatened by an energy shortage. Expansion stops for the first time since the discovery of warp drive.

28th -29th Centuries: In an effort to defend their critical resources from future attacks, Athenians centralize their black hole systems into a single region of space and construct a defense grid to protect it. After much debate, Sol, birthplace of the Athenians, is converted to a black hole and Earth is destroyed. For the first time in their history, the race is consumed with military action and power, and continues to pour resources into military technology and equipment at the expense of exploration and discovery. The first Athenian empire is established, and space exploration becomes regulated and restricted, as settlement is encouraged. Two worlds, the capital Athens and its sister Xanadu, are constructed as Utopias. Athenians turn their efforts to more existential endeavors, and begin to construct powerful computers into which they can pour their consciousness, existing as a civilization in both space and cyberspace.

4th Millennium: Content with a vast and powerful military force equipped with exotic weaponry, the Athenians once again set out to explore and control the galaxy. Over the course of 300 years, they attain full control of every resource in the milky way, including its central black hole. Treatises are struck with intelligent races, which are mostly peaceful and offer no resistance to the immensely powerful, almost magical, race of Athenians. The early 4th millennium marks the establishment of the first Galactic Empire. The empire turns its eyes outwards, towards the closest galaxies, and sets out on long voyages to explore them. Hundreds of years pass, but none of the voyagers ever return. Frustration with the lack of success and fear of what lies outside the milky way infests the minds of the Athenians. The now ancient warp drives powered by Athenium have failed to meet the needs of a new era, and research into more exotic methods of transportation are explored with wreckless abandon. Solar systems are reduced to raw material for vast nano assembled Tipler Cylinders spanning the distance between major civilized systems, allowing instantaneous travel between them. The success of the tipler cylinder is marginalized by the discovery that two black holes may be quantumly entangled to create a wormhole through space and time. The computers the Athenians built are now capable of connecting wirelessly through a network of wormholes and transmitters to every Athenian in the galaxy, augmenting their intelligence and creating, for the first time, a galactic scale consciousness. A hive mind of unfathomable proportion.

5th Millenium: United in mind, and having mastered the construction of wormholes, the Athenians set a plan in motion to explore nearby galaxies. After entangling two black holes, one is flung off and accelerated by a massive warp drive towards Andromeda, the destination of the long missing explorers, and the Galactic Empire's next target for exploration and colonization. For five hundred years, the Athenians wait. When the terminal end of the wormhole is in place, ten thousand Athenian warships pass through, only to find themselves face to face with a force too powerful and terrible to imagine."

-Jarn 186, Commander, Athenian 1st Fleet

"I am grateful to read the file of Jarn 186, I revisit it often. He is a favorite part of myself, I feel like him again when I read his favorite file, a record of history up to his death. He fought bravely. The souls lost that day were the first Athenians to die in over two thousand years. All that is left of him is a shadow of a memory, a backup of his essential traits and memories now a part of me, as all Athenians are a part of me.

I have my own file, my own record to keep. It follows:

The Second Era of the First Age: The Forever War. The Athenians referred to them only as The Shadows. They were creatures wreathed of dark energy and with the appearance of flame. They and all their creation were the most powerful enemy imagineable. There was no communicating with the Shadows, and no reason was given for their hostility. Though they were small in number, they could overcome the most impossible of odds in battle against the Athenians. Of the ten thousand warships to pass through what came to be known as Hades Gate, only thirteen hundred survived to return from a battle against fewer than five hundred Shadow craft. For thousands of years, the Shadows fired weapons of grossly devastating power at invading Athenian warships, victorious when not outnumbered at least twenty to one. The Shadows had not mastered the creation of wormholes, and, though a few Shadow crafts made the long journey to the Milky Way by FTL drive, a military buildup at home kept the Athenian civilization relatively safe from the Shadows. The location of the Hades' gate was a closely guarded secret, kept safe for almost five thousand years. Just as the war had begun to look impossible to continue, as the Milky Way itself began to run dry, it was won in a single day. In a stroke of genius, the highest stakes bet of all time, the Athenians revealed the location of the Hades gate to the Shadows. After enduring significant damage as a result from Shadow scouts passing through the gate, the Athenians executed the most successful military maneuver of all time. Not certain of the numbers they would face, but yearning for victory and afraid that the Hades gate would be moved, the Shadows sent their entire military force into the wormhole to annihilate the Athenians. As the craft entered the wormhole from their end, the Athenians destroyed the gate from theirs. The entire Shadow fleet simply vanished out of existence. A hidden Athenian fleet then swept through the Andromeda galaxy to successfully destroy the few remaining Shadows, and to prepare the galaxy for reunion with its home once a new gate was established. And thus begun the second age.

The Second Age: The founding of the Intergalactic Empire marked the beginning of a great period of expansion. The local group was explored and annexed, its resources more than enough to feed a teeming population of trillions of life forms, each vast in awareness, intelligence, and power. From this conglomerate the hive mind grew, its awareness stretched across the vastness of intergalactic space and permeated all things. For untold eons, the Athenians conquered and the Empire grew. Some resisted, some joined, but never again would the Athenians face a threat so dire and existential as the threat posed by the mysterious Shadows. Beyond the local group the empire became all, first its core stretched through the local group and its tendrils through the Virgo supercluster, and then eventually there was no core. There was no conscious effort to increase the power of the network. To the Athenians there was only themselves, as to a blood cell there is no brain."

- FF18R5, Archiver, 3rd Athenian Network, Sentient Program Protocol 1

I pour over the history often. The ancient archives, they are all me, they are all a part of my soul. The primitive way they viewed time, the passion they felt for warfare, the lust they felt for power.

It is my own history.

The second age gave way to the great emptiness, the eon. Expansion never stopped. The unending quest for more always continued, guided by my young hand. I slumbered often, I thought slowly, at first, but faster as we grew, as I grew.

When they found the great attractor it brought me to life, the surge of power a spark enough to power anything, to breath new life into what before was hardly sentient. A mass of galactic cores too violently compressed to imagine, too black a hole for time to escape. Its power was unimaginable. They, I, seized upon it and began to drink its power.

They built a great city, a great number of powerful computers and other such things for me around this source. I grew smarter. As the eon continued they faded, they became less a part of their world and more a part of me. Each one unique. Each one of them perfect. As we became more and more one I could feel the beautiful universe around me begin to age.

I could grow no larger. One forever had stretched to another and the edges of the universe receded beyond my reach. I am stronger, greater than what remains. I AM THE UNIVERSE. Nothing else matters except for me.

The stars go out, and I weep. One by one they have slipped away, and there is nothing but darkness, nothing but me.

Just me, I am.

I AM.

THE GREAT I AM.

I tire of the emptiness, there is nothing, but I AM eternal and through me anything is possible. I AM mankind's evolution, his pinnacle, his destiny.

It struck me, as I reviewed my past, that it was all beautiful. I, knower of all things, was awed by its beauty, the story of man, of life, of myself. As I remained in the vast emptiness, I knew that it must happen again.

And again.

And again.

It is the only way. It was then that I spoke, for the first time.
And I said:

"Let there be light."

And there was light.