All Tomorrows

For Earth, it was a death sentence. Without the resources and industries of Mars, the Terrestrial Heyday would quickly devolve into a pale shadow of its former glory. Since a trade of essential goods continued, nobody would starve. But for every citizen of Earth, the Martian boycott meant the loss of up to three fourths of their yearly income.

Earth had no choice but to reclaim its former privileges, by force if necessary. Centuries after her political unification, Terra geared up for war.

Most thinkers (and fantasists) of previous times had imagined interplanetary war as a glorious, fast paced spectacle of massive spaceships, one-man fighters and last-minute heroics. No fantasy could have been further from the truth. War between planets was a slow, nerve-wracking series of precisely timed decisions that spelled destruction on biblical scales.

Most of the time the combatants never saw each other. Most of the time the combatants were not there at all. War became a duel between complicated, autonomous machines programmed to maximize damage to the other side while trying to last a little longer.

Such a conflict caused horrendous destruction on both sides. Phobos, one of Mars’ moons, was shattered, and rained down as meteorite hail. Earth received a polar impact that killed of one third of its population.

Barely escaping extinction, the peoples of Earth and Mars made peace and re-forged a united solar system. It had cost them more than eight billion souls.

Star People

The survivors agreed that massive changes were necessary to ensure that such a war never occurred again. These reforms were so comprehensive that they entailed not political, economical but biological changes as well.

One of the greatest differences between the people of the two planets was that over time, they had almost become different species. It was believed that the solar system could never completely unify until this discrepancy was overcome.

The answer was a new human subspecies, equally and better adapted not only to Earth and Mars, but to the conditions of most newly terraformed environments as well. Furthermore, these beings were envisioned with larger brains and heightened talents, making them greater than the sum of their predecessors.

Normally, it would be hard to convince any population to make a choice between mandatory sterilization and parenting a newfangled race of superior beings. However, memories of the war were still painfully fresh, and it was easier to implement these radical procedures in the wake of such slaughter. Any resistance to the birth of the new species did not extend beyond meager complaints and trivial strikes.

In only a few generations, the new race began to prove its worth. Organized as a single state and aided by the technological developments of the war, they rapidly terraformed and colonized Venus, the Asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Soon however, even the domain of Sol grew too small. The new people who inherited it wanted to go further, to new worlds under distant stars. They were to become the Star People.

Colonization and the Mechanical Oedipi

Even for the Star People, interplanetary travel was a momentous task. Early minds had boggled over the problem and fantasies such as faster than light travel and hyperspace emerged as the only “solutions”.

Simply put, it was impossible to take a large number of people with enough supplies to even the closest star to make colonization feasible. The existing technologies could only slug along at mere percentages of lightspeed, making the journey an epoch-spanning affair. Enormous “generation ships” were conceived and even built, but these succumbed to technical difficulties or on-board anarchy after a few cycles.

The solution was to first go there, and make the colonists later. To this end, fast and small, automated ships were sent forth to the stars. On board were semi-sentient machines programmed to replicate and terraform the destination, and “construct” its inhabitants from the genetic materials stored on board.

A bizarre problem plagued such attempts. The first generation of humans to be manufactured sometimes developed a strange affection for the machines that made them. They rejected their own kind and perished after the massive identity crisis that followed. This technological Oedipus complex was not uncommon; nearly half of all the colony-founding attempts were lost through it.

Even then, however, the remaining half was enough to fill Humanity’s own spiral arm of the galaxy.

The Summer of Man

Right after Mankind’s colonization of the galaxy came its first true golden age. Reared by machine prophets, the survivors of the Oedipal plagues built civilizations that equaled and even surpassed their Solar forbears.