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This world has had two beginnings, the second given to it as a second chance, everything done to make it possible for the planet and it's people to have a second life, and the rest of us left took ourselves away for our survival and for yours. There was a world populated by people, human as yourselves with great knowledge, great power, power over the flow of life and death itself and power over creation. We built our cities, our curiosity lead us into the world of science and this was to become our undoing. It was always for some good, being able to feed more people, cure more diseases, have the ideal society. But it was unchecked and not all have the ideal motives, the same ideas about the ideal society and so weapons were produced, ways to harm as well as heal and there were those who had no limits to what they would do to satisfy their curiosity.
As we found out more, thought we understood our science more, we became able to manipulate life and lives to levels which would have been unbelievable before. And then we discovered how to tap the very force of life itself, the power that was itself our life and that of all the universe around us, gathered into a binding force of creation and endless cycles of existence. We realised it could let us achieve all our dreams, but ultimately it led to our nightmares. At first we needed machines, of complexity beyond that in nature to gather the force for us and allow us to channel it into our projects and we built these machines in research laboratories and then hospitals and factories and finally into weapons. They became the most valuable piece of technology on the planet and lives were paid for possession of these machines. But we knew that this power was that of life, that it was flowing through us even as we made these machines to capture it and that all we needed to do was make a person who was capable of holding and directing this force as our machines were and that person would have access to an inexhaustible well of power, or so we thought. It turned out that in one of our assumptions we were very wrong. The efforts of the scientists were turned night and day to discovering what it was about life that meant it attracted this power, how it flowed, how to make it something our senses could feel and manipulate, how to make a human into one of our machines. But with an advantage the machines could never have. That it would be natural for this power to be there, it would just be an extension of what already existed, the force would not have to be bound and held it could be drawn from the world around and controlled with the flexibility and imagination of human thought. It took us years and many failed experiments. Of course because we were working to manufacture a human the failures were broken humans with physical and mental deformities, which would have been condemned, had they ever become known outside the laboratories. But they didn't and the experiments continued. Some of the failures were capable of survival and one of these was to be the seed of a dark line, a line of humans which were to create and use a force which was not the life, but the twisting of life, not the natural cycle but the opposite of such if you can imagine this. An embodiment of the bitterness, pain, hatred, and lust for power of the experimental subjects and rogue scientists who aided them. But all this was to be discovered later. In the beginning all we saw was our first success, a human who had the ability to use the power inherent in all around him by the power of his will. It was hailed a great breakthrough, the scientific discovery that would bring about the transformation of the world into a Nirvana with disease, pain, starvation all forgotten. Now that the way was known, the specific alterations to the code documented it was adapted, made into a kind of human upgrade, which could be given to those with genetic lines deemed pure enough to become carriers of this new gene. They would then interbreed and the ability passed on into the future. We did consider that the individuals needed to be aware and intelligent, to understand what they could control and be able to use it in the ways that we wished. Also it required them to be physically fit, constant use was tiring and a weak individual would be not be able to keep using their ability for long. We selected the genetically fittest and gave them the new gene. There was a decision to allow all those unfit to live out their full life-span but not to breed, not to produce a new generation of unmodified people. In the end this ruling did not matter. We were not to last that long. For some the joy of this creation was not enough, the criteria for selecting those fit enough to receive the gene not strict enough, it was being given away they said, only those who had been intelligent enough, to be the creators deserved such a gift. There was a split in the scientific community. Many of the scientists had been deemed physically too weak to wield the new technology and were angry, they wanted this for themselves. They left the laboratories that had been their homes for so long and went to ones provided by big companies who wanted the secrets and rival powers in the world government. The traitors were given funding and most importantly some of the failed test subjects went with them. Including the one whose forces were not that of life but of the void. They saw what was different about what he could do and tried to recreate him, to produce humans who could be a weapon to defeat all others. At first they could not, the code he bore was the same as that of all the successes. The rest of genetic line was looked at and no differences were found which were the cause, they were lost, there was no genetic answer to this puzzle. They became frustrated and their sponsors impatient, the number of the 'gifted' as they called them were growing in the world, if they were to produce a rival it must be soon. The companies and rival powers became impatient and went to those who still remained on the original project and offered them increasing bribes of money and power until one of them gave in to the temptation and despite himself having the link to the force joined the laboratories of these rivals. It was not recorded when or why but one week he arrived and was different, he had the powers of the void and he shared his secret with all there. It had not been his genetics, a chemical change, it had been his will, he had willed that the force he wielded act like the void, he would feel the void as the failure did, it would become a part of his nature. And it did. The plans began to be drawn, the plans to return the power to those who deserved it. By whatever means became necessary, and to this end weapons were created, the rival governments knew the battles would be force against force and created soldiers, the power was bound into machines again but this time to make their soldiers better, with the advantages of humans but without the flaws. These machines combined with humans also took the force from around them and stored it, trapped within the components in the void form the soldiers and the treacherous scientists used. It began to be gathered in large amounts, building up and it had not been considered what would happen if this was released. Also the side of the pure forces was not weaponless, we had considered the threat of the defected scientists and begun preparations of our own. We had not however predicted the weapon which in the end was unleashed against us, that of our own creation turned to destruction. The war started as a campaign of terrorism and threat, demonstrations of what could be done with the combination of machine and humans, deaths to scare and to blackmail, a campaign to force the world government to crumple and accept the wishes of those who held it to ransom. It did not give in. It was considered a matter of principle and we had our own weapons, these would prove superior. The people began to flee the cities as counterstrike after counterstrike was launched, as the violence escalated and the weapons became more destructive, as the power used by man against man became greater. The force of life was used as a weapon of destruction. The void became more powerful as the machines drew more force from the land. The battles were like those of the gods. Those with the genetic alteration were refused permission to leave the cities; those who had already left were hunted down by both sides as recruits. Those still just human, the unskilled, physically defected, mentally deficient fled the destruction. Very few of them survived. The cities were destroyed by earthquakes, tidal waves, great pillars of fire, the forces of nature wielded by man. Battlefields were hell on earth, swept by tornadoes, sheets of lightning and the explosions of man made weapons augmented by force. Everything was destroyed. There was no food, no clean water, the earth was polluted and scorched unable to support life of any kind. Men were turned into mutated creatures to bear weaponry where the weight alone would have crushed a normal man. The battle for the ownership of the world was destroying the world. Our scientists in their bunkers, the original creators of the gene watched with their monitors and sensors and they began to see something that caused their minds to freeze with fear. They could see that the effects of the war were reaching deep into the planet, the drain of the forces was leeching all the power, which bound together the substance of the planet into life. It was dying. We were desperate. We formed a plan and worked in our laboratories on a new weapon, but not this time one to be used on the battlefield, this time it was a weapon which would destroy the machines which held the force. We had tried before and failed but this time we knew they would not get a second chance. What was needed was something new; an idea we had not used before, that had been missed so far. It was a chance in millions. The order was sent out to all those left, all those fighting the war with their gift against those with the void. They abandoned long fought for positions, and made their way to the bunker our scientists had been trapped in. They gathered, there were not many, there were tales of those who had died trying to get there. Many more of them would die in what followed. Our scientists planned to overload, the machines, pour so much into them that they could not hold it and let the force return to the planet. It would require all that the altered had left, including the very force which kept them alive. It would take them concentrating on each machine in turn for all the machines. It took a week without sleep, with barely any rest, it killed many of those there but it worked. The machines could not take the levels of power forced into them in a rush, they melted, fused, destroying whatever they were attached to whether it was a building or a soldier and all the contained force flooded back into the world. Except it was no longer what had been - it was void. It flowed back into the planet into all the living things, into the cycle of force and slowly but surely things began to decay. But the war was over. Our scientists in their bunker thought they had victory. We set about looking for the remainders of our people, the remainders of their labs. The scientists used their instruments to look for concentrations of the force still remaining in the world, to find their old machines and to look for the enemy still alive. There was something strange about what they found, there was interference blocking their searches. At first it was thought to be just the energy released, still not reabsorbed, then we found that it was the void, that all the power that had been released from the machines had been converted to void. Our scientists did calculations and models but they knew the answer before they had finished and we knew that we had a certain amount of time. It was shorter than a lifespan and the world was in a ruin we had to repair. What we had left was the Labs in the bunker, those who had survived the final battle and the normal humans living as best they could in the now desolate landscape. We knew from before the war that the power that had been taken had been in the living, in the land around us, but now that was destroyed and all the power left save small amounts was of the death our war had created. We set about trying to reproduce the planet as it had been not just before the war but before the cities had been built, before there had been no space remaining for the plants and animals. The archives were dug out of the ruined cities and the species regrown. We took raw pieces of code and constructed the organisms they represented. Used our technology this time to create the beings it had once destroyed. To rebuild the life and replenish the force. Whilst this was done a plan was formed. We found that if our technology remained, the world would remain unstable, the cities would rebuild and the void would not be countered. The plan was formed to evacuate ourselves to another world, away from this one and to take our technology with us. Leave the planet to recover a natural balance without interference. No more wars must destroy worlds; no more scientists to quest for knowledge which would lead to disaster. No more drawing on the power. It would be left and the void would be balanced by the life we seeded the planet with. There would be no altered people and no more trapping machines. The people looked at the world left around them and agreed to leave. The ships, the exploration and survey ships were converted into carriers of people and the places counted. But there would not be enough to take everyone. There would need to be some left behind to start again on the newly repaired world. But what the war had produced was no longer a natural balance of the force. To repair it would take time; time that we could not remain on the world for. So new machines were built, different machines, not traps this time, but channels, which would take in the power and regulate the levels until they were balanced and the machines would switch off. The machines were built in a web across the world, with the force drawn in parallel lines between the channels, one line above, the life, one below, the void. The technology was disguised so it could never be rediscovered but the sites marked and for each of the sites we created sentinels, guardians to preserve the machines until they were no longer necessary. The sentinels were created in the image of the mythical creatures believed to have once dwelled in the world. We created dragons, dryads, nymphs and trolls. All were represented, and all were to guard the site of a machine. Whilst our scientists were building their machines and their guardians they found something they had missed before, concentrating on what could be done with the power as a whole they had missed that it had aspects, that its flow could be within one of these aspects alone. This discovery allowed us to understand the force better, to see how we should have used it all along. We considered staying with this new knowledge to protect us, the land could be mended with its own power, change materials into whatever we required, repair our bodies from within. In the fever of a future still remaining on the planet we created beings we named the Avatars, the embodiments of the aspects our scientists had found. The first created was in the image of a dryad to represent the land and become the planet alive in one being. The second we created was in the image of a dragon the embodiment of the natural cycle of the changes within the world. The third created was in the image of a human, to represent the physical forms, of the life of the planet. Two of the aspects were not given avatar forms. They were sabotaged before they were finished. It seemed some void followers had survived. The avatars were given the reason for their existence, to protect the planet they inhabited and the scientists watched with hope and their hope faded. They could not counter that which was themselves reflected. They could not counter the void and destroy it. The scientists sadly went back to their work and created no more avatars. The humans on earth saw dragons fly and dryads flicker in the few trees that remained and wondered at what their technology could do. The machines continued to be built and placed but it took so long, the ships were prepared and modified, methods of producing food from what could be carried in such small space developed. Years went by and new children were born with only the repopulated ruins of cities to show them what had once been. People tried to recreate what they had once had, digging technologies from the rubble, repairing the power stations and planting small fields of food in the land they could find which would still support life. Slowly civilisation was rebuilding. The time came for the exodus, for the machines we had spent so long building to be activated and the world to begin again. Those who were to leave needed to be gathered. There was debate, there had been since it was known only some could leave. Who would go into the ships and who would remain to start again. There was one deciding factor, it was insisted that there should be no technology on the planet, nothing that could lead to the rediscovery of the machines before the balance had been restored. We estimated technology would have to be set back thousands of years. It was decided; all those who had skills, were engineers, surgeons, teachers had to leave. All of them. And then everything would have to be destroyed, the cities, the rebuilding civilisation, everything. The world population was scoured for all those with the skills, all those engineered with the ability to channel the forces and who had hidden from the war and they were either placed on the ships or if they resisted, killed. The weapons which had been used to kill men in the wars were recreated for the last time to destroy the cities to a level where they could never be refounded. Buildings became piles of dust, metal components melted into the base metals and scattered, plastics vaporised. Those who knew by now they were to be left behind watched in horror as the homes they had been rebuilding were destroyed and they were left with nothing. People started to resist; the remaining void followers stirred trouble and tried to sabotage machines and ships. The sentinels and avatars protected their planet. Dragons rose against riots; earthquakes helped shatter the cities. The scientists left one last order with their sentinels and avatars; they were to destroy any creations of technology anything above primitive farming for the next thousand years, then the ships flew. They rose into the skies and with weapons carried with them destroyed the reminder of the technology which had once existed, the platforms they had risen from. The machines flickered into life, we saw lines spreading across the world as they left, saw the void slowly being pulled out of the planet into the lines and then we switched off the screens and left our home and I saw no more of that world.
Marco Santini, historian from the ship WG Lathell. |