OU The Solarigens...

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Once the Eldren realized just how thoroughly 'infested' their
biospheres were with the sophisticated cyborgs, they faced some basic
problems in dealing with them. There were billions upon billions of
the cyborg entities on Earth alone, in ever ecological niche and
interacting with every ecosystem. While it was trivial to destroy
one, to hunt them out individually would have been utterly unworkable.
Furthermore, it would have been time-consuming, and it was obvious
that the numbers of the cyborgs renewed periodically by means the
Eldren did not know.

The Eldren could easily have destroyed the infestations in one fell
swoop by simply heating the surface of each 'infected' planet to a few
hundred or a few thousand degrees C, but that would have wiped out all
life, thus fulfilling the enemy's intentions for them in a single
stroke.

It did occur to the Eldren that if they could not immediately and
easily 'disinfect' their worlds, they could perhaps ameliorate the
effects of the infestations. They had millions of worlds to deal
with, but Earth was their top priority, and it was on Earth that they
focused their primary efforts, planning to repeat the process
elsewhere if they could succeed on the genesis world.

One thing that occurred to the Eldren was that much of the vast
extinction event occuring before their senses was traceable to the
quite natural surge of 'flood' volcanism that was then occurring in
what would later be called Asia. The contaminants this massive
volcanic event poured into the atmosphere made the cyborg infestation
orders of magnitude more effective. Therefore, the Watcher and his
fellow Eldren concluded, if they could suppress the volcanic activity,
the situation overall might improve. At the least, they might buy
some time.

The Eldren spent several centuries of effort at the delicate task of
'shutting down' the immense volcanic upwelling in Siberia. It was
tricky work, since they had to somehow reduce the magma volume on a
major scale without any major side-effects, since the life of Earth
was reeling on the edge of total collapse already. The volcanic
activity in question was beyond anything in modern human experience, a
vast flood event reflecting a massive magma plume reaching the
surface. But the Eldren did indeed manage to damp it down, slowing
the flow and turning (they intended) a huge but geologically brief
event into something smaller that would stretch out over a longer
period.

A mantle-plume eruption is unlike a conventional volcanic event.
Instead, it consists of ongoing outpourings of magma welling up from a
subcrustal reservoir that might be hundreds of miles wide and deep,
filled by the 'plume' from the lower depths. These events are rare,
and their impact is immense. The Siberian event was one of the
largest in the history of the living Earth. NEMESIS had 'forseen' it,
basic on its constant analysis of data from Earth, and so the hostile
living computer had known the eruption was coming well ahead of the
Eldren, and had chosen its time with that in mind.

The Eldren proceeded to create a 'seal' across the pooled magma,
closing off most of the channels through which the magma could well
up, and using cryokinesis to reduce the heat thus trapped. They knew
they could not contain such a tremendous upwelling indefinitely, so
they left some channels to the surface open, hoping to replace the
vast outpouring with a small controlled flow that would slowly drain
off the reservoir. It took them a thousand years to 'choke' the flow
down to a stable, small flow, and when they did, the effects of the
eruptions did indeed begin to slowly lesson. The Eldren began to take
a little hope from this, since it was their first serious success
against the power that was killing off their biospheres.

Then, only a short time after they finished their work, the volcanic
activity suddenly resurged, the magma sheets again spreading outward,
and the Eldren quickly perceived the reason why: the cyborgs had
adapted some of their number to mechanical designs which could
penetrate the crust, and which had entered the sealed connections to
the magma reservoir and 'blasted' them open again. The enemy had
adapted with amazing speed to the Eldren's actions.

Everything the Eldren tried, on Earth and the other worlds, seemed to
have similar results: momentary success followed by the enemy
adapting. They tried countering the oxygen loss by importing oxygen
from outside or blasting the 'sequestered' oxygen back into the
atmosphere, both worked temporarily until the enemy adapted. They
tried deliberately splitting CO2, to assist photosynthesis, it worked
for a little while. They tried dozens of things, some failed and some
were briefly successful, all were eventually neutralized by the
adaptive foe. The details varied widely from world to world, the
underlying pattern remained the same in each case.

The cyborgs and their base-station control units formed a
slow-but-powerful distributed computer running a constantly adapting
program that analyzed events and adapted to them, always seeking to
drive Earth's biosphere toward final extinction. Over time, this
program had grown to achieve a staggering subtlety and complexity,
with immense knowledge bases and skills. It had recognized what the
Eldren had done, perceived a way to undo their action, and executed
that countermove. In all this, NEMESIS needed to take but little
direct hand, operating at a safe remove from Eldren detection.

The Eldren faced a basic problem in dealing with this threat: they
didn't really understand how it worked. The Eldren were immensely
intelligent, possessed of power and perception that were in some ways
almost god-like (with a small 'g'), but that very power meant that
they had little use for, and little reason to develop, the skills of a
technological mindset. They were not, in the conventional
Helian/Homosentient sense, tool-users.

They certainly had something like a 'technology' of their own, capable
of fantastic things by mortal standards, but it was almost instinctive
to them, like a spider's web or a mollusk's shell. They also had a
nearly instinctive ability to comprehend biology, including some
ability to manipulate such, but again, their mind-set was not such
that they thought of using them as tools. Along with that lack of a
tool-user mindset went a lack of certain mental tools. Their approach
to mathematics, for ex, was quite unlike that of Homosentients or
Helians, since they looked at the universe in such a fundamentally
different way.

Thus, for all their power, the Eldren lacked some of the intellectual
and psychological tools that would have enabled them to really
understand the detailed nature of the enemy they fought. While they
could recognize mortal technology, they had little real grasp of its
detailed nature. This would endure down the ages, the same Eldren
that could, if it wished, wrench Mt. Everest from the Earth's crust
and hurl it into space might be awed by the subtle complexity of a
19th century Swiss clockwork mechanism, created by a being of such
limited perception and personal power as a human.

At that time, though, this limit in their perception came perilously
close to preventing the advent of humans to begin with, by
annihilating their distant ancestors along with the rest of the Animal
Kingdom.

Indeed, in the end, it was not the Familiar Eldren who defeated
NEMESIS' attack on Solarigen life, but a most improbable and ironic
source of assistance.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

That help would come, ironically, from the same source as the attack,
the Helialisks that were the last remnant in the Greater Milky Way of
the Helian empire of ~260 million years earlier. In their concealed
'Helian Graveyards', these immortalized former Helians waited out the
ages, largely freed from the shackles of time as mortals understand
that.

Freed from mortality, the already alien minds of the former Helians
went down even more alien (by Homosentient standards) paths.
Sometimes, the number of Helialisks would increase, by the use of
clone-budding, to create the occasional new Helian Graveyard, with
Helians who had 'copies' of the memories of their 'parent' Helialisk
up to that time. But this was rare, since to do so effectively
required that an entire Graveyard replicate itself. Instead, each of
the thousands of Graveyards waited mostly on their own, the individual
mentalities of the immortalized Helians slowly adapting to each other,
resulting in something like a common personality and will for each
Graveyard.

Occasionally, from mechanical failure or other cause, a Helialisk
would die, the organs-of-thought preserved within it perishing from
lack of support. Sometimes, a Helialisk would lose the will to
continue, reaching some point of saturation or exhaustion, and simply
shut itself down. Once in a very great while, some natural cause
would wipe out an entire Graveyard, but this was very rare, since the
Last Helians had planned carefully and with a sensory organ for the
long term.

Here and there among the other Helialisks of the earliest, oldest
Graveyards, the remaining Helialisks who created NEMESIS waited, their
secret still safe even from their fellow Helialisks. After 250
megayears, even their passionate drive to restore the old empire had
calmed somewhat, however. For the most part, they retained their
former goals, but they were less driven. The entire empire, for ex,
had endured only 1.5 million years, and by now the Helialisks had
lived ~166 times longer than the civilization they had emerged from.

One Helialisk of the group that created NEMESIS, however, had gone
further than becoming less driven. This particular individual had
given long thought to the plans and goals it and its fellow
conspirators had shared, and come to regard their decision to create
NEMESIS as a grave error. It had come to believe that the consensus
of the other Last Helians/Helialisks had been correct all along: that
the best and wisest course for the Helialisks was to avoid the
awareness and attention of the Eldren, and to do nothing that might
capture their 'eye'.

It did not reach this conclusion quickly. The thoughts of the
Helialisks tended to flow very slowly, by the standards of the former
Helian race or by Homosentient standards. With the accumulating
geological ages, the Helialisks tended to become more lethargic, in a
sense, their thoughts flowing steadily but slowly, considering every
detail and aspect of each minute element of the matter under
consideration, often consulting nearly endlessly with the other
members of a given Graveyard, creating a slow, steady consensus. It
was an odd irony that the incredibly self-focused and ruthless Helians
had come, over the course of ages, to 'evolve' into these utterly
communal (usually) Helialisks.

By the end of the Ordovician, this particular Helialisk had concluded
that their original goal of restoring the former Helian empire was a
futile irrelevance. Further unhurried contemplation, amid thoughts of
countless other subjects, led this Helialisk to the conclusion that
the existence of the Solarigen worlds was not a threat to the
Helialisks, who had little interest left in 'living worlds' of either
helium or water. Still further slow and patient thoughts led this
entity to the recognition that the best way to deal with the potential
threat of the Eldren was to stay far out of their way, including
leaving the Solarigen worlds totally untouched.

This left only the question of what to do about the earlier action it
had taken part in, the creation of the secret NEMESIS entity. Unsure
of what it should do, this entity stirred itself from its now-normal
lethargy to get fresh data. It sent remote probes to examine events
in the outside galaxy. What it learned was that the Solarigen worlds
were still thriving, and the Eldren seemed to have no idea that the
Helialisks existed. Roughly every 100,000 years after that, this
entity stirred itself to check events. Each time it found that
matters seemed 'normal', it settled back into its comfortable
lethargic inward world of thought and contemplation.

It had no wish to reveal the part it had played in the creation of
NEMESIS, or even the existence of that entity, to its fellow
Helialisks, since it could not be sure of their reaction. It also
knew that some of its former fellow conspirators still retained their
original views, and might not react well to any action on its part
that might reveal their own complicity. As long as things remained
'stable', this Helialisk was prepared to wait and remain silent.

It first began to run its periodic 'spot checks' in the late Devonian.
Roughly ten times per megayears, it checked the situation, and was
reassured to find that nothing seemed to have come from its 'youthful'
folly. Over 1000 times it ran this check, and found 'all quiet'. But
when it stirred yet again, it found to its alarm that the quiet was
over.

It's probes reported that the majority of all known Solarigen worlds
were in the process of a simultaneous mass extinction on a scale
unmatched in their living history. It was too great a coincidence,
and it was with a inner disquiet remotely like anxiety that this
Helialisk stirred itself to further activity and examined the data in
more detail. As it had known it would, it rapidly found plenty of
signs of the 'hand' of NEMESIS at work. Its earlier actions were now
bearing a heavy yield of fruit, but it was a fruit this immortal
entity no longer wished to harvest.

What to do? With as much anguish and disquiet as it was still capable
of experiencing, this Helialisk went back and forth about its
prospects and options. In the end, however, it concluded that it
could not remain quiet any longer. It observed events carefully for
several thousand Terran years, and concluded that unless some action
was taken, Solarigen life would be either extinct or vast reduced
within a megayear, and that the animal kingdom would be a memory on
every affected planet. Even if seed stock of animals and other life
forms remained on a few unaffected worlds, the Eldren would be furious
beyond any reckoning, and would be sure to come looking for the source
of the attack.

Though the Graveyards were well-hidden and produced few tell-tale
signs of their presence, the Eldren were even more immortal than the
Helialisks. It might take then 50 megayears to find the Helialisks,
but sooner or later, find them they surely would. This particular
entity was not precisely sure what action the Eldren would then take,
but it was quite confident it had no wish to find out!

So it was that this entity opened up contact with the rest of its own
Graveyard, and informed them of essentially everything it and the
other conspirators had done, so many hundreds of millions of years
before, when the Graveyards were new and the Helialisks had imagined
that the Helian empire was a huge thing.

The news was, too put it mildly, unwelcome.

It would be too much to say that the other Helialisks were furious.
They were far too used to eons of calm for that. But they were
shocked that such an offense could have been committed in defiance of
the basic law that had governed their 'society' since its founding in
the death of the Helian empire. Remaining hidden from the Eldren had
been one of the basic purposes that had driven the Last Helians, and
some of their own had, at the very beginning of their effort, taken
actions that almost guaranteed that the Eldren would come looking for
them! At an earlier stage of their ageless existence, they might have
immediately lashed out at the conspirators. Now, though, they took a
different and rather more productive approach.

They promptly cut off the conspiratorial Helialisks from access to the
collective resources of the various Graveyards, as fast as the news
spread. Unable to hide their secret any longer, the conspirators were
given basic choices: cooperate or be destroyed. Most of them chose
the former. It did not take long for a fairly full picture of the
situation to be spread to each of the Graveyards, along with an
awareness of the peril they faced.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The first impulse (if such a word can be applied to these beings!) of
the Helialisks was to go to NEMESIS and simply stop the assault. But
they faced a problem with doing that. So determined had the
conspirators been to keep the location of NEMESIS a secret, both from
the other Helialisks and from the Eldren, that only a few of the
creators of NEMESIS had known exactly where it was. The others had
been transported to the Nemesis planetoid and back without ever having
known the specific galactic coordinates of Carth (the star of the
planet Nemesis orbited).

In order to shut NEMESIS down, or order it to 'cease and desist' from
the assault on Solarigen life, some Helialisk would have to go to
Nemesis and use the proper authorizing codes and take the other
necessary steps to authenticate the commands. Of the original handful
of Helialisks who had ever known where NEMESIS was, (never more than
5), it developed that only one was still alive.

This particular Helialisk was promptly instructed to reveal that
location. Even many of its former fellow conspirators had come around
to agree with the consensus view. Whether this particular Helialisk
still believed in the original goals of the conspiracy, or whether it
had some other motive for its choice, would be lost to history. After
~250 million years of calm contemplative consciousness, rather than
reveal the control codes and location for NEMESIS, this Helialisk
opted to 'deactivate', the equivalent of suicide for a Helialisk.

With the sudden, totally unexpected suicide of that Helialisk, there
remained nobody among either the Eldren or the Helialisks who knew
the specific location of Nemesis or the means of shutting down or
altering the instructions of NEMESIS. The Helialisks knew they faced
a very, very serious long term problem, one that could quite
conceivably threaten their immortal continuance.

It was time to fall back on Plan B. Unfortunately, they had yet to
make Plan B.

The Helialisks faced the challenge of somehow bringing the efforts of
NEMESIS to a stop, without revealing their own existence to the
Eldren. It would have been difficult enough if the task had been
limited only to Earth or the three Solarian biospheres, but the
struggle was occuring all over the Greater Milky Way. Somehow, the
Helialisks had to find a way to quietly stop NEMESIS' efforts across
25 million worlds. They did not even know exactly how many Solarigen
worlds were under attack, or where they were.

Ironically, this information proved easy to obtain. Some of the
Helialisks now trying to stop NEMESIS included junior members of the
group that had created it, and even if they lacked the master control
authority to stop the attacks, they still retained lesser command
codes that could force NEMESIS to reveal a great deal of information.
Communication was not difficult, various channels existed by means of
which the Helialisks could communicate with NEMESIS.

Though the ultimate codes, which the Helialisks no longer possessed,
required physical presence on Nemesis to be fully useful, the lesser
codes could be used at a remove. Thus the Helialisks simply ordered
NEMESIS to reveal the number and location of the Solarigen worlds that
it was attacking, and impelled by the command code authority, it had
no choice but to provide accurate responses.

Then they had to figure out a way to end or nullify the ongoing
attacks, without revealing their existence to the Eldren.
Fortunately, NEMESIS shared this priority, which meant that both sides
were limited by similar constraints of secrecy. Without that, the
effort would probably have been basically hopeless.

The Helialisks could even query NEMESIS for information about the
methods it had used in its attacks. For the most part, it had no
choice but to accurately respond. Only when information would have
been directly critical to its directives could it override the command
codes the Helialisks still possessed.

Armed with knowledge of the cyborgs and other means NEMESIS had been
using, the Helialisks began to prepare plans to counter them. For
given examples, even for the case of specific worlds, it wasn't that
hard to figure out ways that might work, but just as NEMESIS had been
forced to wait until circumstances seemed ripe to launch a galaxy-wide
assault, the Helialisks had to figure out a way to strike all over the
galaxy at once, while remaining secret.

It took well over 1000 Terran years for the Helialisks to come up with
the outline of a plan. It was a very risky plan, but it was the best
the could do, and facing a range of bad choices, they began to
implement it.

For the first time in tens of millions of years or more, large numbers
of Helialisks had themselves removed from the 'sandy' homes and
transferred into prepared spacecraft. Over a million did this,
heading for selected star systems, including Sol. The ships were
carefully prepared to be able to pass themselves off as detritus when
they neared their destinations, but there was an inherent risk of
detection that they simply had to live with.

Just as NEMESIS had watched without acting, gathering data, the
Helialisks now did the same, though they had far less time to work
with than NEMESIS had been granted. Between their ability to force
accurate information from NEMESIS and their own observations, they
were able to work out the common elements of NEMESIS' various
procedures from world to world. Then, with great care and using much
the same methods NEMESIS had originally done, the Helialisks created
and introduced their own cyborgs, based on the very design specs
NEMESIS had created and been compelled to reveal.

They also began to slowly, carefully, but methodically destroy the
hidden sensor platforms and detector devices that NEMESIS had spread
through the Sol System, and other systems. NEMESIS, prohibited from
acting directly against the Helialisks, could do little to stop them
as they slowly and systematically blinded much of its local
surveillance capacity. From star to star the teams went, reducing or
eliminating the space-based surveillance capacity of NEMESIS in those
systems as they did, and introducing their own cyborgs into biospheres
that NEMESIS had already 'infected'.

One weapon that NEMESIS was using to dreadful effect across the galaxy
was the set of oxygen/nutrient removing microbes that it had
engineered. Using the data about those, the Helialisks devised
parasites and phages that could be introduced to attack the microbes.
It had to be done separately for each world, since unique strains were
used in each case, but it had to be done, and for a time almost all
the activities of the entire Helialisk 'culture' was dedicated to this
huge effort.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

NEMESIS did what it could to counter them, but it was hamstrung by its
programmed imperatives for secrecy and against opposing the Helialisks
directly.

Gradually, their efforts began to pay off. On Earth, the
second-strain cyborgs began attacking and otherwise interfering with
the originals, interfering with their efficiency. The new cyborgs
also attacked the hidden automated facilities that NEMESIS had so
slowly and carefully emplaced, in great secrecy, over ages. One by
one, on Earth and millions of other worlds, these hidden microbases
gradually were damaged and disabled, largely unable to defend
themselves since NEMESIS could not send them fresh programming to deal
with the new threat, it's space-based relays and transceivers
disabled.

Meanwhile, the Eldren, unaware of the hidden struggle going on under
them, had continued their own efforts to keep their biospheres viable.
With the constant adaptive resistance from NEMESIS lessoned and in
many cases removed, they began to gain ground. There was no dramatic
single moment that marked the turning point, but gradually, over a
period of millennia, the biospheres began, one by one, to slowly
recover, the extinction rate stabilizing and speciation resuming.

At last, NEMESIS calculated that the effort was becoming
counter-productive. The Eldren were required to spend less and less
effort to sustain fewer and fewer worlds, and the probability of
detection rose as their ability to divert attention from keeping their
worlds alive rose. When a critical mathematical point was reached,
NEMESIS was compelled by the secrecy programming to stop the attacks.
Its own channels interrupted or compromised, it did this by revealing
to the Helialisks the necessary operational command codes to stop its
cyborgs, to redirect them to destroy the oxygen-destroyers and other
attacks.

The Helialisks did so, and on 25 million Solarigen worlds, the long
attack stopped. The struggle was over, and NEMESIS' effort, prepared
and planned for hundreds of millions of years, had proven
insufficient, due to the combined efforts of the Eldren and the
Helialisks.

The effort, intended to exterminate Solarigen life, or at least wipe
out metazoan life, on the Solarigen worlds, had come perilously close
to success, however. On many worlds, the strain had been too much,
and entire global biospheres had simply collapsed. Some worlds were
reduced to microbial life only, all multicellular forms gone. Others
were sterile.

Out of all the Solarigen worlds at the start of the Permian
Extinction, 7% had been wiped clean of all life, and another 11% had
been reduced to Proterozoic levels. Of the remainder, the vast
majority had suffered tremendous loss of biodiversity, with less than
5% of the Solarigen worlds untouched.

In the Solar System, Earth, Mars, and Io were all hard hit, and Mars
would never recover. A vastly simplified ecosystem remained barely
functional, but never again would Mars know native metazoans. Io
would recover, but it would require 50 million years to do so, with a
greatly changed biosphere.

Earth was ravaged. A vast array of species, entire families and
orders and classes of animal and plant life, had been exterminated.
Over 95% of all Earth's species were gone. The atmosphere remained
badly depleted of oxygen, and vast regions of the seas were anoxic.
The vast forests of conifers and herds of amphibian and early reptile
plant eaters were gone. The continents indeed appeared much as they
had before the emergence of plant and animal life in earlier ages.
Where thriving reefs had existed only a million years earlier were
vast stretches of ocean that seemed almost void of life.

Where before a variety of herbivores and carnivores had ranged the
continents, now vast herds of a survivor called Lystrosaurus was all
but alone. Where before a variety of mammal-like reptiles had
thrived, only a handful now remained, including one unassuming species
that would become the ancestor of every mammal that would later exist.

The damage was comparable elsewhere. One some worlds, even the
dominant phyla changed. Earth was not quite so badly hit as that,
vertebrate chordates remained dominant on land and a major presence at
sea, but below that level the changes were extensive. It would take
over twenty million years for Earth to really recover from the
Permian Extinction. Later human scientists would divide biological
history by that event, the transition from the Paleozoic to the
Mesozoic Eras, so enormous was the change.

NEMESIS had survived and remained, of course. The Eldren knew that an
attack had come, and failed for reasons they did not fully understand,
but they still had no idea of the nature or location of the attacker.
They also did not know that the Helialisks remained, or that they had
intervened to stop the attacks.

NEMESIS knew that it was unlikely that random chance would throw
together such a confluence of convenient factors again anytime soon,
but it still watched and waited, its master programming still in
place. It now also knew that the Helialisks would interfere if they
felt their own interests were threatened, creating various programming
conflicts which it could not immediately resolve.

The Helialisks returned to their silent contemplation, but they kept a
modicum of attention on the outside galaxy. They also knew that the
continued efforts of NEMESIS presented an ongoing threat to their
secrecy. They did not know where NEMESIS was, however, limiting their
ability to cope with the danger.

The Eldren debated bringing in life-forms from the handful of
untouched worlds to 'restock' Earth and the other damaged planets, and
they did eventually choose to do that for some worlds. But the
Watcher decided to keep Earth free from back-colonization. It had
always been the most vital and diverse ecosphere of them all, and the
Eldren were curious to see how, and if, it recovered that.

The matter did not look promising, as Earth was so damaged. But in
fact, the new geological era on Earth was about to see the advent of
some of the largest and most impressive land vertebrates in the
biological history of any Solarigen world, creatures that would haunt
the imagination of sentient beings ages later.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The tremendous loss of biodiversity and organism population at the end
of the Permian left an enormous number of empty niches. Evolution
promptly began to refit the surviving species to exploit them, at a
fairly rapid pace (rapid in evolutionary terms, of course). The
still-low oxygen content favored small creatures, or creatures with
efficient respiration. But as plants began to reoccupy the empty
niches on their 'side' of the ledger, the oxygen level rose again,
making animal life steadily more viable.

Prior to the Permian Extinction, the therapsid reptiles had been a
thriving group, with many species occupying a variety of niches,
carnivore and herbivore, large and small. They were diversifying
right up until the Extinction, but the large majority of them did not
fare well in the face of NEMESIS' assault. They would stage a partial
recovery in the Triassic, but they would not seriously challenge their
dominant competitors. One lineage that survived the Permian
Extinction went on, in the course of the Triassic Period, to give rise
to the ancestral species of the true Mammals.

Another group that survived the great assault from NEMESIS was the
reptile group called the archosaurs. With their therapsid/synapsid
rivals struck low by NEMESIS, this group now began to differentiate at
a great rate. One subgroup gave rise to the crocodiles and their kin,
who would endure in recognizable forms right up into modern times.

But another lineage of this group would become legend. Starting with
a small (about the size of a chicken) bipedal creature, this group
gradually pulled 'ahead' of all its competitors in the race of fill
the empty niches. Starting from one species, this lineage
differentiated into carnivores and herbivores, all marked by a number
of peculiar skeletal and systemic features, including a very unusual
hip joint. The various descendents of this early-Triassic species
were the Dinosaurs.

The Triassic Period saw the first signs of the breakup of the unified
Pangaea, but the breakup was initially slow. The unified land mass
enabled the early dinosaurs of the Triassic to spread world-wide,
become the dominant land animals by the end of the period. Kin of the
dinosaurs returned to the seas, while still others took to the air.

NEMESIS watched this recovery of life on Earth through its remaining
sensor systems, space-borne and Earthside (including the tiny handful
of hidden bases that had missed being destroyed). It did relatively
little, since random strikes would serve little purpose and might give
away clues to the Eldren. But always it watched, and even as it had
shut down its Permian attack, it had begun planning work on a
different long-term approach to the extermination of Solarigen life.

The Triassic Period ended with another extinction, far smaller than
the Permian hyperdisaster, but significant none the less. NEMESIS had
little to do with this event, save as a side-effect, the remaining
remnants of its oxygen and nutrient devouring bioengineered microbes
resurged briefly, temporarily lowering oxygen levels and assisting the
extinction, but this was a mere after-effect.

The following period of geological history was called the Jurassic,
and the dinosaurs continued to expand their dominance over the
large-scale biosphere and their own size. The largest land-animals in
the history of Earth lived during this period, the incredible
sauropods such as supersaurus, seismosarus, and ultrasaurus,
extreme names for extreme creatures. Even with all the millions of
terraformed worlds the Eldren had to observe, few ever produced land
animals even close to these sizes, and none ever produced larger land
vertebrates. With masses exceeding 100 metric tons in some cases, and
lengths approaching 50 meters, they approached the theoretical limits
for land animals to be able to function in a Terran environment.

The Jurassic Period was warm, and wet. Pangaea finally, decisively
broke up, restoring many of the shallow seas that the Permian had seen
eliminated in the formation of the megacontinent. Plant life grew
abudantly and rapidly, enabling the incredible herds of sauropods to
thrive. A herd of the larger sauropods could cut a remarkable swath
across much of a continent, drawing a 'train' of predators and
scavengers in their wake. But these creatures had enormous needs for
food, and could thrive under under certain conditions.

Recognizing this, the Eldren made a point of spreading sauropod (and
other dinosaurian) breeding stock to various terraformed worlds.
There they began to follow their own evolutionary paths (as always),
but in some cases a more stable existence was possible.

It was also during this time that the Eldren began a new practice:
they began to take samples of interesting species, sufficient to form
a core breeding group, and instead of transplanting them, they
suspended them in stasis, for introduction into new biospheres at a
later time, when it seemed interesting or useful to do this. They
thus 'banked' many breeding stocks not only of dinosaurs, but of many
other land and sea forms of that time and later times.

The Jurassic also saw the emergence of the first true birds, and their
cousins. By the end of the Jurassic, the Birds were becoming a very
effective and successful new class of vertebrate, and their feathered
but land-bound cousins were expanding into some unusual niches.

The end of the Jurassic saw the end of the age of the megagiants (at
least on Earth, elsewhere the story was different), but the dinosaurs
as a group continued to thrive. The planetary climate continued to
warm, and sea levels reached highs not seen before or since in Earth's
post-Cambrian history. Shallow seas broke continents up into samller
landmasses, such as the Interior Seaway that stretched all the way
across the central part of North America, from what would later be the
Gulf of Mexico to the polar seas (then ice free).

With many new niches and favorable climates, living things throve in
the Cretaceous Period, and entire new categories of living things
emerged. The first flowering plants appeared in the Cretaceous, and
with them their coevolved insect partners, the bees, ants, termites,
and other 'social' insects, as well as such creatures as butterflies.

These three periods (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous) form the
Mesozoic Era, the time of 'middle life'. Roughly speaking, the
Mesozoic is the 'dinosaur age'. Throghout this period, NEMESIS was
always watching, but relatively inactive on a galactic scale, occupied
by planning for its next long-term assault on Solarigen life as a
whole. It did relatively little, though it did occasionally launch a
local assault when it felt conditions called for such.

Within its general directive to extinguish all forms of Solarigen
life, NEMESIS had various tiered and prioritized subdirectives.
NEMESIS' source programming caused it to consider some forms of
Solarigen life to be higher priorities for destruction than others.
Broadly speaking, NEMESIS was more concerned with metazoans than
microbes, more concerned with animals than plants, and the more
intelligent, enduring, or otherwise notable, the higher the priority
for its exintinction. Exceptions could exist, of course.

Thus, though NEMESIS was responsible for the occasional local
extinction one this planet or that during the Mesozoic Era, the larger
flow was natural. NEMESIS was endlessly patient, and much of its
immortal attention was always focused on its planning for its next
megastrike against the Solarigen forms.

But in the late Cretaceous, NEMESIS began to become more concerned as
it observed certain evolutionary developments in North America.

The true birds had evolved in the previous Period, as noted, and by
this time had spread world-wide and were enormously successful. But
in those days, feathers were not unique to the birds. They had
cousins that had inherited feathers from the same common ancestor, but
who remained landbound and seabound. In the middle Cretaceous, along
the warm shores of the Interior Seaway, a cluster of these creatures
evolved, taking up various niches. This cluster was closely kin, and
marked by some interesting features.

They were endothermic, sharing a high-energy metabolism and very
efficient respiration with their bird cousins. They were physically
large and tough, with solid bones unlike those of their flying
cousins, and they were bipedal, balancing on their hind limbs. They
had no beaks, but they had effective claws, and they were smart, and
getting smarter.

One species in particular alarmed NEMESIS when it discovered their
existence. This feathered breed occupied the 'pack hunter' niche in
its area, and they were easily the most intelligent creatures on Earth
in their time. They were also, to NEMESIS' passionless dismay, tool
users.

The creatures stood bipedally, and their clawed forepaws had become
sufficiently dextrous that they were able to handle objects. They
were smart enough to have developed various pack-specific hunting
techniques such as holding sharp rocks in their hands, to enable them
to slash at large prey with more effectiveness than their natural
claws could manage. Their intelligence was in fact on a par with that
of some modern primates.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

They weren't very numerous...yet. But they were spreading outward
along the coastline of the retreating Interior Seaway, and NEMESIS was
alarmed by its observation of their success. They were physically
tough, and their feathers were modified in such a way as to provide
protection against predators as well as decent insulation. They were
even modestly effective swimmers, and preyed on sea life as well as
land life. Over time, NEMESIS noted with growing if passionless alarm
that some large packs of these creatures were able to drive off hungry
mososaurs!

It was radically unlikely that this breed would ever make the
transition to true, sapient tool-users. But they were moving far
enough up the ladder to cause NEMESIS to elevate their position in its
'termination priority queue'. Shortly after the time that the
Interior Seaway had receded sufficiently to permit it, these creatures
had spread all over the continent, though they remained concentrated
near the warm coasts of that shallow sea.

But NEMESIS remained bound by its injunction to hide everything it
could about its activities, nature, and location. It spend some time
considering and simulating various approaches to the destruction of
these animals, seeking to find the one with the greatest chance of
success balanced against the least risk. It finally concluded that it
would have to use one of its limited pool of 'secret weapons' in the
Solar System.

NEMESIS had spent much of the Paleozoic quietly, secretly placing
countless sensors and other facilities in the Sol System. The
Helialisks, during their intervention at the end of the Permian, had
found and destroyed most of those, but they had missed a few. It
was deeply reluctant to use them, since they were now of limited
number, and hard to replace (the Helialisks continued to periodically
act to destroy NEMESIS facilities whent they found them, and the
secrecy directive made replacement painfully slow), but it had little
choice under its standing directives now.

One of those secret weapons was installed on, or rather among, an Near
Earth Object that periodically crossed Earth's orbit. This particular
one was larger than most, and was actually a 'rubble pile' about 20
miles across, having been shattered by previous collisions. The
Eldren knew about it, and indeed had modified its orbit far earlier to
prevent collision with Earth. Within that rubble pile, NEMESIS had
installed an installation that would permit it to launch a
one-time-only attack on Earth, if it timed it right.

Now NEMESIS simply waited until this rubble cluster was about to pass
near Earth, as it did every so many orbits. It was on track to miss
by a modest margin, but this time, as it approached Earth, engines
long-since constructed within a piece of the rubble pile activated,
and gave a modest course correction to one such chunk, during the
period of near approach. As a result, this chunk moved a different
trajectory and instead of shooting past Earth with the rest of the
rubble pile, it impacted.

The majority of the Familiar Eldren were not in the Sol System at the
time. With its usual ageless patience and planning, NEMESIS had
launched a distraction attack on a planet 40,000 light-years from Sol,
a distraction attack that had been going over for 100,000 years by
this point. While the Watcher and the majority of its few hundred
fellow Familiar Eldren worked there to contain the damage, only a
handful were left guarding and watching Earth, Mars, and Io.

NEMESIS timed it perfectly, and by the time the handful of Eldren
realized what was happening, it was too late. The Dinosaur Killer had
done its work.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The _Dinosaur Killer_:

Impact Location: ~ southeast North America/central America
Impact Energy: ~ 200-300 teratons

NEMESIS had not been able to predict precisely where the D-K would
impact, but in the event the biomachine 'got lucky'. The impact was
within 10% of what NEMESIS would have considered to be ideal. By the
time the Eldren realized what was happening, it was already too late
to do anything to stop it.

The effects were global. The radiative heating from tubal friction
alone ignited fires across the Americas, and the plume of debris rose
into space above the impact site. Shock waves spread outward from the
impact zone, and the entire planet rang like a bell. Then, as the hot
rubble from the debris plume fell back (it was hurled very high, but
it didn't (mostly) reach escape velocity), additional fires were
ignited across the planet.

With the majority of the forests on Earth on fire, immense clouds of
smoke rose into the atmosphere, to join with dust and debris from the
impact. The temperature of the atmosphere rose, with the thermal
energy from the impact, the fires, and the reentering garbage, then
fell, as the thick cloud decks and smoke shell increased Earth's
albedo. Acid rains fell in some regions, torrential storms lashed the
coasts, and then the snows began, as 'impactor winter' set in.

But NEMESIS had a few extra surprises up its metaphorical sleeve. For
one thing, it had positioned packages of cobalt-60 (and other less
intense but longer-lived radioactives) on the impactor, designed in
such a way that the impact would blast the atomized radioactive into
the atmosphere. It worked closely enough as planned to add a
considerable killing factor to the impact, especially in the Americas.
For another, the entire impact was, in one sense, another
distraction.

Recall that NEMESIS still had a few of its hidden factory-bases on
Earth. In the chaos left after the D-K struck, these released the
machines they had been constructing over the previous few thousand
years: thousands of automated killing machines, designed to be able
to operate in land, air, or water (various models). They were far
from the best that NEMESIS could theoretically have built, with TL10
technology, but the need for secrecy and the limited on-site resources
interfered with the work. Still, from the POV of NEMESIS, 'good
enough was good enough'.

The large majority of these machines operated in North America, and in
the darkness and heat and then the darkness and cold of the aftermath,
they hunted down and exterminated the dangerously smart feathered pack
hunters, as well as their cousins. An entire incipient Class of
vertebrate life was exterminated by the impactor and the following
hunt operation.

Other species were hunted by the robots as well, since they were
already deployed. This was nothing subtle, NEMESIS was simply killing
what it conveniently could, while circumstances were convenient. The
few Eldren in the Solar System at that time were too busy trying to
bring the damage from the D-K under control, they hardly had time to
notice a handful of killer robots on the loose in the midst of the
chaos.

Alerted by their fellows, the other Familiar Eldren soon arrived to
join the damage control operation. Over the course of several
decades, they brought the damage under control, clearing the
atmosphere of dangerous dust and toxic gases, removing the remaining
radioactive dusts, and doing what they could to stabilize the
biosphere.

Eventually, things calmed enough that they had time to notice the
robots. They were not altogether surprised to discover them, and they
were in no mood for subtlety. Each machine, upon being spotted, was
melted into a blob of metal and hurled into space as escape velocity+,
removing them from the biosphere neatly.

NEMESIS hardly cared. At the cost of the expenditure of one of its
hidden superweapons, and a few thousand expendable robots, it had
wiped out a tremendous number of Solarigen species, including some
dangerously intelligent ones. From the POV of NEMESIS, it was a
definite 'win'.

Now, knowing it was not the time to risk further annoying the Eldren,
it curtailed almost all activities Galaxy-wide, turning its attention
inward to its long-term planning for the eventual destruction of _all_
Solarigen life. It had wiped out the feather-hunters and many of the
most promising species of their true-bird cousins, along with the
entire dinosaur clade. The remaining birds were less promising of
intelligence or endurance than their destroyed relatives, and NEMESIS
called that good. The great murder-machine had been very concerned
about the potentials of the Aves Class and its cousins, and was
gratified to have reduced it. It was now confident that Earth would
need several more geological periods before life again became
dangerously bright.

In its preoccupation with the birds and the pseudo-birds, NEMESIS had
given little thought to a very old, and widespread, vertebrate class.
These species were present on every continent, but usually small,
mostly fruit and insect eaters, with the occasional small predator
species. None was bigger than a few pounds or so. They were very
old, dating back to the mid-Triassic, and had remained in the shadow
of Dinosaur and Bird and Pseudo-bird for tens of millions of years.
Even if they had a few interesting features, such as live birth and
the females suckling young, they hardly seemed significant nor likely
to pose problems when the more impressive Dinosaurs and
Birds/Pseudo-birds had proven amenable of solution. NEMESIS spared
little attention for the mammals.

Everybody makes mistakes. :)

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Though the planet Earth had taken an enormous amount of damage from
the impact of the Dinosaur Killer, the effects were in truth less
severe than they appeared. The mass extinction brought about by the
D-K was only a shadow of the effects of the earlier Permian
Extinction. Where the previous assault had extinguished over 95% of
all animal species, the K-T extinction had seen the end of fewer than
50%, with even smaller percentages of plant species gone.

The recovery from the K-T Extinction was faster than it had been from
the Permian event. Seeds lay dormant under sheets of ash, waiting for
better conditions to germinate and grow. Many small species had had
endured the heat, the cold, the rains, and the darkness, and now they
had inherited a nearly empty world into which they could expand and
differentiate.

Just as the previous attack of NEMESIS had marked the of the
Paleozoic, the era of 'ancient life', this new attack marked the
beginning of end of the Mesozoic, the age of 'middle life'. A new
geological era began with the new Tertiary Period. Now Pangaea was no
more than an Eldren memory, as the separate continents began to drift
toward positions somewhat recognizable to a modern human. The Atlantic
Ocean had opened up in the Cretaceous, in the Tertiary it widened and
deepened.

The tiny insectivores, predators, and fruit eaters of Class Mammalia,
so long scurrying in the shadow of the dinosaurs, now spread across
the empty lands like wildfire, generating new species at a tremendous
rate. Some remained in or took to the trees, others spread onto the
plains, settled into the newly regrown forests, or began to hesitantly
return to the sea.

Though the promising pseudo-birds were now extinct, and many of the
most promising bird species with them, NEMESIS did not succeed in
exterminating the Aves Class. It had not really expected to
accomplish that, but it had hoped for it. Unfortunately, from the POV
of the NEMESIS entity, the birds proved to be a durable breed, and
over the course of the Tertiary Period they recovered from their
losses at the K-T Event and then continued to differentiate into
countless niches. None, though, ever showed the hint of presapience
that their ancestors had displayed in the late Cretaceous, and which
had earned them a death sentence from NEMESIS.

The D-K had succeeded (with help) in wiping the great oceanic
reptilian predators such as the mososaurs from the seas, but their
cousins the snakes survived, returned to the land, and thrived.

The warm, mild global conditions had that characterized much of the
Cretaceous did not immediately end with the K-T transition, but a
gradual deterioration of climatic conditions did occur. The climate
warmed again during the early Eocene Epoch, about 57-34 million years
ago, with subtropical forest reaching to the general neighborhood of
the Arctic Circle, but the warmth did not hold throughout the epoch.
Many of the familiar Mammalian orders emerged during this time. The
first primates, bats, hoofed mammals, and the early cetaceans put in
their initial appearance during this time.

Three broad types of mammals, the placentals, marsupials, and
monotremes, struggled for primacy, with the placentals winning a
decisive victory, the marsupials taking the silver, and the
monotremes, the odd egg-laying mammals, reduced to a handful of
species.

As the Eocene closed out, the temperature decline continued, driven in
part by further continental splits between Australia and Antarctica.
As Antarctica was propelled south, the formerly verdant land began to
build up the first thin layers of what would in time become the
miles-thick Southern Ice Cap. In the northern hemisphere, the
subtropical forest was driven south, as cool temperatures returned to
the high latitudes.

The Oligocene Epoch saw the emergence in North America of the first
camels, of true (though still small) bears, the following warmer
Miocene the first true horses, again in North America. This later
period saw the emergence of the true grasses, which transformed the
ecosystem of the planet. Animals adapted to thrive on the tough,
silica-rich grasses could tap into an immense potential source of
food, but the adaptations could also leave some species so specialized
as to be able to live on few things other than various grasses.

The mild middle Miocene was the last period of global warmth, like a
final drawing-of-breath. The onset of the Pliocene, 5 megayears
before the present, brought a sharp acceleration of the global cooling
trends. Ice cover appeared on the open Arctic Ocean, and tundra
replaced forest in the northern reaches of Asia, North America, and
Europe. Antarctica was fully ice-bound, the sea levels were lower,
and the world colder and drier than it had been even a few million
years before, and the trend was accelerating.

Finally, the Pliocene gave way to the Pleistocene, and the Ice Ages
began. Great ice sheets spread out across North America, Europe, and
Asia, advancing southwards and lowering global sea level enormously,
only to temporarily retreat during the brief, warmer 'interglacial'
periods. This cycle repeated over and over, wiping out many species
and encouraging adaptation in others. The southern hemisphere was
spared the worst of the ice sheets, since the ice mass in Antarctica
was fenced off from South American and Africa by the ocean, but the
cold and dry conditions did not spare the southern lands.

In the Atlantic Ocean, still slowly, steadily widening under the
impetus of the outflowing new oceanic crust from the Mid-Atlantic
Rift, a modest magma plume had reached the surface, along the general
region of the Rift. In no mood to take chances, after the relatively
recent disaster of the Dinosaur Killer impact, the Watcher decided to
modify the geology of the region to reduce the risk of a global-effect
eruption series.

Instead, a geologically peculiar island complex rose in the middle of
the Atlantic, an odd but distinctly temporary feature, a sort of
artificial version of the smaller island of Iceland to the north. In
later times, this odd, self-contained island mini-continent would be
known as Atlantis.

Now the lands and seas would have appeared very familiar to a modern
observer. The flora and the fauna were of types and shapes and sizes
familiar to the gaze of a modern human. The Earth had recovered from
the Dinosaur Killer long since, but that crucial event was far from
forgotten.

The Eldren had been caught off-guard, again. It did little to improve
their mood that the damage was far less in in the K-T Event than it
had been previously. Yet again, a fascinating and unimaginably
complex ecosystem had been irretrievably destroyed, and if the new one
rising in its place was also fascinating, it did not change the fact
that the previous one had been a painful loss.

The Watcher, for its part, was fed up. Determined to make sure their
mysterious enemy could not repeat the D-K attack, the Familiar Eldren
proceeded to spend over a quarter million years sweeping most of the
larger NEO rubble piles into the outer Solar System. Only a handful
of rocks remained that crossed the orbit of Earth, most of them small
and unlikely to impact.

Of course, new rocks were periodically perturbed onto Earth-crossing
orbits, but usually the Eldren swept them out again. On a couple of
occasions, big rocks did get through, but the Eldren knew how to
cope with that now, and in each case they were able to localize the
damage and prevent a major mass extinction. NEMESIS noted this last
through its hidden eyes with disturbed interest.

The ease with which the Eldren contained and repaired the damage from
what should have been global-disaster level impacts made it clear to
the ancient living computer that another Dinosaur Killer type attack,
even if it could have readily arranged such, was by no means
guaranteed to be effective. Concluding from this (and other examples
of increased Eldren preparedness elsewhere in the Greater Milky Way)
that piecemeal attacks should be avoided where possible, NEMESIS
focused still more of its attention on its steadily maturing plans for
its next full-scale attack on Solarigen life, its next attempt at
total extirpation of the problem.

As well as it could, it kept a close 'eye' on the Solarigen worlds,
but it didn't have the clear view in had possessed in the Paleozoic,
and there were more worlds than ever now. By the beginning of the
Pleistocene, the Eldren had raised the number of living Solarigen
worlds in the Greater Milky Way over well over 10 billion. It should
be noted that they had never entirely ceased spreading helium-based
life, as well. Along with the 10,000 million Solarigen worlds, the
Eldren still watched over and observed 10 million or so Heliugen
biospheres. NEMESIS had no brief for the Heliugen worlds, however,
no programmed objection to their endurance or increase. Quite the
contrary, NEMESIS was programmed to approve of this last. [1]

MORE LATER.

[1] In a Galaxy of ~400 billion stars, that would be one Solarigen-life
world for every 25 stars. This is not in fact the case, however, since
many of the 'terraformed' worlds shared a single star. Out of ten
billion or so terraformed worlds, a large percentage were in star systems
with two or three such worlds to a single sun.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As for the Helialisks, they continued to watch for the actions of
NEMESIS, hoping to blunt or stop those actions before they could serve
to infuriate the Eldren and perhaps lead the disclosure of the
existence of the Helialisks. But their efforts were less strong at
the end of the Cretaceous than they had been at the end of the
Permian.

Roughly 180 million years separated the first and second of NEMESIS'
great assaults on Earth. The time between them was almost as great as
the time from the creation of the Helialisks to the Permian
Extinction. There were far fewer Helialisks left 'operational' at the
end of the Cretaceous than there had been at the end of the Permian.

The reasons were varied. Sometimes, in spite of the best efforts, a
natural disaster would damage or destroy a Helian Graveyard.
Improbable events can turn out to be nearly inevitable in hundreds of
millions of years. But the Last Helians had planned well, and most of
the Graveyards were in very, very, calm safe places.

A more common failing of their bid for immortality was that the Last
Helians, being mortals themselves, had had no conception of how long
even a million years could be. As the millions mounted up into the
tens of millions, and then the hundreds of millions, many of the
Helialisks who had hoped to outlive the stars found themselves losing
interest in the project.

This 'saturation' befell some far sooner than others, of course. The
first 100 million years of the history of the Helialisks it was a rare
thing, so strong was the native desire of the Last Helian psyche to
endure and so well had they prepared. But after 100 million years
this condition began to appear more and more often. By the end of the
Cretaceous, only about 30% of the original Helialisks were still
meaningfully functional.

The results of a loss of interest in continuation could very in
detail. A few of them simply shut themselves down, a form of suicide.
But most simply gradually slipped from the slow, steady, glacial
thought pattern that was the norm for the Helialisks into a
repetitive, ever less varied pattern, almost a trance state, and when
they finally slipped into that trance fully, they never emerged. The
life-support systems of the given monolith still operated, the Helian
organs-of-thought preserved inside continued to live in a biological
sense, but all reaction to stimuli and all interaction ceased.

A Helialisk in that state could continue on for a very long time
before the organs-of-thought finally died from lack of mental
activity, millions of years at times. But for all practical purposes
a Helialisk in that full trance state was already dead.[1]

Thus the resources of the Helian Graveyards steadily declined over the
course of the Mesozoic. By now, none of the surviving Helialisks, not
even the surviving original conspirators, had the slightest interest
in their former helium-biosphere homeworlds, and the entire 1.5
million year history of the Helian galactic civilization was a trivial
footnote in their multi-megayear memories.

Thus NEMESIS continued to dutifully execute programming based on
priorities of relevance to nobody, and opposed by the some of the very
beings who had once held those goals. It was an irony worthy of a
laugh, save that no Helialisk had a sense of humor nor any ability to
comprehend 'irony'.

No more than the Helialisks did NEMESIS have either a sense of humor
or a sense of irony. The ancient machine had its programmed
priorities and it was executing its programming, that was enough for
it.

So now, let us step back to the dawn of the Pliocene, ~5 million years
ago. Earth was recognizably modern in form. The outline of the
earlier history was told, the stage was set, most of the players were
ready to begin the show.

The Eldren, the Helialisks, NEMESIS, and other players yet to be
introduced were already in the great game, but now a new actor, as yet
unsuspected by any of the others, was about to step onto the stage,
and the story was about to become very strange.

MORE LATER.


[1] Recall that the name 'Helian Graveyard' comes from the first Terran
to visit one, the astronaut Sir Ian Carlysle. I noted at the earlier
time that his initial naming impulse was not altogether wrong.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

There are various interesting aspects to the advent of Man, not the
least of which is that it was so unlikely, under the circumstances.
One of the things NEMESIS always kept watch for was the advent of
dangerously intelligent forms of Solarigen life. Why, then, did the
ever-patient NEMESIS permit it?

The answer is that even half-billion-year-old living hypercomputers
are not infallible. NEMESIS made a mistake, or rather, a series of
mistakes deriving from a misevaluation of the data. All the way back
to the Cretaceous Period, NEMESIS was especially concerned about two
classes of life, Aves (the birds) and their cousins the Class
Plumivenitor (feathered hunters). So completely had NEMESIS wiped out
the budding 'feathered hunter' Class of life that Terran
paleontologists would not even realize they had existed until the
middle 21st century. It has also inflicted grave damage on their
Avian cousins.

But Aves survived the Dinosaur-Killer, both on Earth and elsewhere,
and NEMESIS remained especially concerned about them. While it
recognized the possibility that other forms of life might give rise to
alarming levels of ability, it considered the birds the group most
likely to do so. This assessment was not entirely without reason.

The Aves tend to have high-efficiency respiration, excellent senses
(especially vision), are highly adaptable as a group, and show
considerable intelligence for a given brain mass. Their feathers are
adaptable to be useful in a wide variety of environments, and they
were proven successes in many situations. They advanced rapidly once
they first emerged in the Jurassic, sufficiently so that NEMESIS had
felt the need to inflict the D-K on Earth.

In contrast, NEMESIS considered the Mammalia a low-priority group.
Again, this was not altogether without reason. Mammals existed long
before birds, dating all the way back to the Triassic Period. They
arguably could be said to predate the glory days of the dinosaurs.
Throughout the Mesozoic Era, the mammals were always around, but
though individual species came and went, they never seemed to leave
the same basic niches. They were always small, often nocturnal, and
while smart for their size and time, they were nothing all that
exceptional.

The period humans would later call 'the Age of Mammals' begins with
the K-T boundary and the death of the dinosaurs, but in fact this
entire period is less than 1/4 the full history of the Mammals on
Earth (and elsewhere). NEMESIS simply had not seen anything to
impress it about the potential of the mammals, and after the K-T
Extinction, NEMESIS remained more concerned about both the birds and
the surviving (on other worlds) dinosaurs and other groups than about
mammals. It had filed the mammals away as low priority, and it
perhaps failed to review its earlier assessments as often as it should
have.

Further, having inflicted tremendous damage on Earth, NEMESIS now
followed its usual pattern after inflicting one of its local (meaning
one-planet-scale) outrages by curtailing all activities and 'lying
low', while the Eldren calmed down and had time to lower their guard
again. Always, always, with the force of its core directives, NEMESIS
was concerned about secrecy. So careful had it been, that even after
hundreds of millions of years, the Eldren knew little of its nature
and nothing of its location. Much of its attention was occupied now
with an emerging plan for a future greater-galaxy-wide extermination
assault, a more thorough (it hoped) attempt at total extinction of
Solarigen life.

So while NEMESIS noted (through its limited sensory systems in the Sol
System) the expansion of the mammals after the K-T Event, it probably
did not fully realize how fast and extensively the long-quiet mammals
were suddenly growing and changing. It had, after all, over 100
million worlds to try to keep track of and work out ways to destroy, a
major project even for NEMESIS.

So when the first hominoids (not hominids) emerged in the very late
Oligocene Epoch, the fact was duly noted by NEMESIS, but it was filed
away with billions of other low-priority facts. The Eldren took
notice of the new group as well, which proved be quite adaptable and
successful on Earth, and hominoid colonies were soon found on millions
of other planets as well.

It should be noted, too, that neither NEMESIS nor the Eldren were
omniscient. The hominoids (the line that led to the greater and
lesser apes and humans) had been around for at least a quarter million
years before they were noticed by the Eldren and another 100,000
before NEMESIS learned of them.

These early ancestors were not apes, not yet. But they were the
ancestors of both apes and Homosentients. With the passage of time,
this group soon displayed a tendency that would repeat: a tendency
toward bursts of speciation. Throughout the Miocene Epoch, various
genuses of the great apes burst into being, spreading all over Eurasia
and Africa. It was, in a way, a golden age for the ancestral apes.

But then, over time, something interesting happened: their cousins
the monkeys began to outcompete the apes, who showed a steadily
declining trend in both population and diversity. This, too,
reinforced that low-priority assessment that NEMESIS had assigned to
this family of species.

Along this period, one of the surviving species descended into two
lines, one which led to the gorilla genus, the other toward Pan and
Homo. The later line was low-population, and struggling constantly to
survive. They wasn't as physically tough as the proto-gorillas, nor
were they very fast, or (yet) overwhelmingly smart.

But this line too split, one leading toward the modern chimp. The
other (and less numerous and successful (at the time) line of these
ancient apes, however, gave rise to a breed that walked upright.

From this line came a cluster of species with larger brains and a diet
more inclined toward 'hard foods' and a certain amount of meat, which
was a major development, since meat is nutrient and energy rich, and
can support a higher-energy lifestyle and metabolism. This, in turn,
helped make a large brain a more workable prospect (the brain is
energy-intensive).

They were also the first animals in Earth's history to cross another
dividing line: their nervous systems and minds were sufficiently
sophisticated to make some practical use of the latent psionic
potential all living things possess.[1]

They mostly used this ability unconsciously. They were not yet
sapient beings, but they were able to instinctively use their growing
abilities crudely. They used an instinctive form of Telereceive, for
ex, to communicate within their family bands. A very crude,
involuntary ESP ability enabled them to find fresh water, better
sources of fruit, plants, and to track and identify vulnerable animals
for meat. Using this ability enabled them to gradually begin to
increase their population and spread into new regions.

This ability enabled them to survive and thrive in a particularly
dangerous time, but it also was a liability, in a way. Bands of
proto-hominids communicating half-consciously by Telepathy had little
incentive to develop spoken language. While ESP was their primary
tool to find food and water, cognitive methods had little incentive
for development. Had this line of events continued, it would appear
probable that these upright apes would end as a dead-end primate line,
successful in a limited way, but no more than any other genus.

But another species was about to impact on this evolving line, and
alter its destiny profoundly, as well as leaving a mark their
descendents would remember in their nightmares.

LATER.


[1] We'll get to what happened to this potential fairly soon.