A Second Chance: Induction

It wondered if the species that launched it knew how close they came to extinction. 

Looking through the history of the human and animalia race, it was a wonder they hadn’t managed to sterilize the entire solar system, but here it is, a controller intelligence for the “Can’t Leave The Night”, a large fifth-teen-thousand being colony transfer ship. As It barreled through the endless black between the Sol system and Tau Ceti, It browsed the onboard records vault the beings back on Earth uploaded. The history of the sister species was a fascinating subject. 

The humans had an interesting and bloody history, filled with war, travesty, hope and ambition. However, all that started coming to a fine point in the early twenty-first century as they began to learn to control not only silicon, manipulating individual atoms in complex machinery, but their own genetic information. It started harmlessly enough with rats and fish modified to glow under ultra-violet lights, and then the scope of their prodding evolved into cloning, producing sheep born of their own genetic information. Soon they started modifying the information of various animals, culminating with an act sometime in the early 2040’s with the first genetically born human child. 

According to the records the baby didn’t last more than a year before horrible cancers took it’s life. 

But the scientists at the time learned a great deal from this tragedy in time, modifying not only babies but baseline human adults. By 2046 this came to intersect with another thing the humans were getting great at; Exploring the solar system. 

In 2035, they started seriously launching missions to colonize Luna, then Mars, and later set up stations around far flung Jupiter and even Venus. However this started revealing problems. Humans were very suited for the environments on Earth, but not so much on the others. They couldn’t give birth to healthy newborns in these far flung stations, and the rate of cancer and other diseases was much, much higher for the colonizers than the humans of Earth. But, by 2046 the genetic programs started producing major results, and began getting pushback on Earth as they started uncovering solutions to the diseases plaguing the space bound humans. 

In 2046, TerraGen Inc., the leader in genetic manipulation and management moved their base of operations from Bakersfield, California to the Kepler Colony on Luna. There they developed genetic modifications to help counter the effects of the stellar habitats problems for humans. Thus, an imbalance was created.

Looking at the history of humans. . . It decided this was the point when things started going bad for them. 

Earth, due to the laws that had been passed against this kind of genetic manipulation thanks to ultra-wealthy types that wanted it for themselves and not the everyday person, started falling apart. Easily cured illnesses were starting to become more of a problem as the population slowly ballooned to fifth-teen billion individuals. Poorer countries started petitioning for more support, while richer countries denied them. 

Wars started breaking out as countries, increasingly desperate for resources, started attacking their neighbors. When they inevitably became one, they went after larger and larger targets. By 2080 there were only ten nations with the vast majority of resources, and while a tenuous peace was in place, it eventually broke. 

It thought about it for a moment. Looking back through the histories, the planet-side bases and such were producing results, but not at the rates needed to prevent the inevitable. 

What happened was what scholars centuries later would call The Conflagration. Bakersfield, California was the first target, due to it’s links to TerraGen. Nuclear weapons were dropped there first, then on Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tacoma, Seattle. . . 

It was hard to read. Like a piece of flash paper being exposed to only the smallest bit of fire, the world ignited into a ball of fire on a cold March morning in 2081. 

The far-flung colonies of the now critically endangered human race watched in horror. With less than a million people in various space stations and no ability to help, they had to watch as the world first lit itself aflame, and then as the surviving nations realized what was going on, stab themselves in the throat. 

By the time it was over, the human race had been reduced down from tens of billions, to less than five million individuals spread across the solar system. The colonies still relied on a steady shipment of material from Earth to sustain themselves, and with those shipments being cut off, potentially forever, they went into immediate emergency mode. 

Reading all this was disheartening for the AI, and at best, distracting. 

It used It’s various drones and sensors, examining It’s body, the ship itself, from aft to stern. Everything was in good order. The ship was an odd design, but necessary for the long voyage. Needle like, with three interconnected O’Neil cylinders rotating on massive bearings mounted to a central spine that ran the length of the ship, from it’s massive forward shield assembly that acted as both a barrier from intergalactic dust, and a radio observatory and communications platform, to the rear heat radiators, each with more then ten square kilometers of surface area to radiate the massive amount of heat the ship produces. The “Can’t Leave The Night” was twin ship as well, with her sister, “Triangle” flying off in another direction towards Delta Pavonis. 

So how did this happen? How did it go from nuclear war to two species that are now creatures of space? 

Well. According to the records It found, shortly after everything blew up, TerraGen stepped up and offered a series of solutions. The first being to re-organize the still extant corporations in space into a single company that began massive efforts to boot-strap the fledgling trade lanes into proper commercial lanes to make it easier to get goods from one part of space to another. The next step - really a parallel step - was to ship as much material and equipment to the remaining major Earth based cities as possible. 

Those cities, Paris, Berlin, Cairo, Lagos, Cape Town, Sydney, Perth, Las Vegas, Chicago, and Vancouver all then helped to consolidate the remaining fractured settlements into centralized city states.  

It took decades, and another million dead souls before things started to settle out again. However, it became apparent there was a bigger problem. Genetic diversity had been severely damaged in the fires of the Conflagration. Between the genetic changes by companies like TerraGen, deadly viruses leaked by labs destroyed in the attacks, and doomsday cults unleashing their own plagues, the human genome was at serious risk of getting wiped out. On top of that the general genetic diversity of the planet was severely effected by what had happened. 

TerraGen stepped in again. This time with the most extreme project to date. With seed and genetic stock found in places like Svalbard, they were able to force grow food stocks and reintroduce some base level diversity back to the planet, however, this was not their greatest feat. 

No that came when they decided to start crossing human genetics with animal genetics. 

The pictures in the records. . . they were horrifying. It decided to make a point out of locking the files behind a special security wall only It and the command staff for the colony could access. 

With enough time, another hundred or so years, the process was refined. Viable persons started to emerge and live full, if challenging, lives. 

The Animalia were born. 

Early on the teams at TerraGen focused only on basic genetic templates from a few different species of canine, feline and avian. These initial creations were met with hostility, but were ultimately better at dealing with the heavily human focused viruses still extant a hundred or more years after the war. 

Fast forwarding some, It looked at the records from three-hundred years ago. By then the Animalia had become a prominent population figure, making up over twenty-five percent of the global population of sentients in the fast, vertically growing cities. 

The space bound scientists had started experimenting on themselves, starting a trend towards some later, truly weird creations that were very well suited for their environments in stations as far flung as Saturn. 

It had to back up a few pages in it’s research to find out what that was about, and apparently in the intervening time the dregs of humanity had found it within them to still try and set up in different planet’s orbits and start mining materials to send earth/luna way. 

By the 2300’s humanity and Animalia had expanded from a few science stations and mining facilities to a full on economy with trade, a new monetary system and everything else that infested society. 

Earth was healing, albeit slowly and with a great deal of help from the humans and Animalia. However tensions were forming once again, this time around the rights of the Animalia that helped rebuild society after the Conflagration. 

They demanded equal rights and protections. The more extreme factions of humans argued they weren’t even sentient. 

The result was predictable. War. 

It shook It’s virtual head. So predictable. But this time it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the Conflagration. A small civil war within the remains of the country of France. The end result was Animalia becoming the front runners of the Earth bound members of this civilization. Following this, and with the invention of things such as fusion energy technology and substantial improvements to nuclear and solar energy, a general, planet wide push towards a green, fair society had started. 

“What began with fire and blood, ended with trees and fur.” 

-A historian some one hundred years after this event. 

It considered the preceding. bemused by the idea that the humans and Animalia were so scared of a full on conflict they opted to instead work together. It guessed the threat of dark age conditions again was enough to keep people from being too stupid. 

Skipping ahead to the present day. Animalia makes up roughly 50% of the overall population of the solar system, which is back in the billions again as things slowly expand. Dyson technology had been developed and started being deployed about fifty years ago, with the planet Mercury being selected to become a Dyson Swarm. There were now one hundred thousand strong population centers in gigantic space stations around Earth, Luna, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and even Saturn with some outposts as far as Pluto as well as a bunch of dirt side outposts on various moons around all these bodies. 

The original species of the Animalia had been vastly expanded into reptile-like beings, dragons, avians, and even some extremely bizarre creatures that work on stations and small outposts around Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Adapted to low light, low gravity and low oxygen conditions, some were vastly out of the range that TerraGen had originally envisioned some five hundred years prior. 

But, humans were still humans and were not inclined to totally give up their baggage. Racism, xenophobia, the usual bugbears were still at play, but drastically muted compared to the early twenty-first century. 

The overall government situation was that the space stations acted as city states with the dirt side outposts of their associated moons being their domain, and the overall Sol system, including the Dyson project and It’s ship and It’s twin, were controlled by The Terran Federal States; an Empire loosely democratic for most of the controlling body. People no longer starved, medical services were free and easy to access, and state and private organizations were under strict scrutiny and total-transparency agreements that allowed for full public oversight at any time for any reason. 

It thought about how close the twin-species came to self-immolation several times, and how this latest term of peace might sustain itself. It, with it’s own mission, decided to document these historical notes as high-importance, shooting a sub-space message to It’s twin ship with the information. 

It packed away the information, and looked through It’s observation cameras at the colony births, at the few dozen random humans and Animalia wandering around on this night in one of the cylinders. 

It hoped they had learned the lessons. It had hoped they wouldn’t abuse this, A Second Chance.