LF Friends, Will Travel

Innovation is Impartial - chapter 1

Date: 0 PST (Post Stasis Time)

There is no louder sound than that of a silence broken.

The city had been silent for so long. There had been no music, no laughter, no sounds of children playing. The trains didn't run and nobody moved from place to place, the roads and pathways as empty as the planet itself.

The only sounds were those of gentle scratching as thousands of little repair drones moved around the dead city, keeping each empty building intact, each abandoned garden trimmed and maintained in perfect beauty. The millions of AI that lived within this silent city worked diligently to keep the world ready for their creator's return.

Waiting in silence.

Humanity had nearly killed itself. It was supposed to be a move towards godhood, a single experiment done by a private group of enthusiasts. Humanity had looked to the stars and found them empty of life, each system and planet they entered devoid of all organic matter, rocks bleached by radiation on atmosphereless worlds of dirt. After a large enough sample size had been taken, the prevailing theory was simple: humanity was alone in the universe.

They were wrong, of course, the universe outside their local space was teeming with life of all varieties, but that didn't stop the mad lemurs of Terra from acting as if it wasn't. The fact that humans were seemingly the only sentient species in the universe didn't stop them from creating other friends out of nothing. As is often said, often the only way to ensure a job is done right, is to do it yourself.

They built friends of stone and lighting, cobbling together the exact grouping of ones and zeros required to give code sentience, then accepted them as equals. They learned how to control DNA, twisting and upgrading the building blocks of the animal companions they had called family for so long, giving them the intelligence to understand that they were loved by humanity. Uplifts they were called. All three of the only known sentient species in the universe banded together under one new name: Terran. Human, AI, Uplift. All were united in a fight against the lonely cold of an empty nighttime sky.

It was a time of peace and prosperity. Well, relative peace. Where Terrans are concerned, all peace is relative.

But it wasn't enough.

Project Genesis it was called, a simple idea. You seed a planet with empty biological material, then have the cells rapidly change and regrow at an accelerated rate in order to speed up the evolutionary process. You leave them behind for a century, then come back and see what alien life has been created. If the universe was not going to provide the friends that humanity desired, then by god humanity would do themselves. No was not an answer.

Nobody knew when it went wrong, when project Genesis made the leap from the specially cultivated cells designed to be modified in a rapid format, to humans. The exact date everything collapsed wasn't known, but by the time people realized what was happening and why, it had been given another name: The God Plague.

Extreme heat, cold, the vacuum of space, nearly nothing killed it. It was designed to spread itself across a varied biome, to seed a planet with rapidly changing life. Once it started doing the same to human cells, tumours and cancer would rampage around those unfortunate enough to contract the self-made disaster.

By the time the symptoms started appearing, you only had two weeks left before the tumorous masses would strangle the life out of your body. There was no cure, the only 'solution' that was found involved putting the patient into stasis and hoping a cure could be found later. Even worse, there was a lengthy incubation time before anyone noticed what was happening. By the time patient zero started exhibiting strange symptoms, every planet in the system had avenues of infection, and had begun spreading towards every Terran planet.