All Tomorrows

The Ruin Haunters, who were lucky enough to inherit the secrets of the Star Men and Qu when other species were mere animals, had experienced a tremendous advance in technological prowess. All in all they were as sophisticated as, if not more, than the Asteromorphs of the void. But their ascendancy was not a sane one. Recall that most Ruin Haunters were already deranged with a twisted assumption of being the sole inheritors of the Star Men. They refused to communicate with their relatives on other planets, and kept to their own affairs. This neurotic hubris assumed truly dangerous proportions after the Ruin Haunters modified themselves.

The origin of this modification lay in an earlier catastrophe. The Ruin Haunters’ sun was undergoing a rapid phase of expansion, and the species, advanced as it was, could do nothing to stop the process. So the Haunters did the next best thing, and changed their bodies.

The infernal conditions of the solar expansion meant that a biological reconstruction was totally out of the question. Thus, the Haunters replaced their bodies with machines; floating spheres of metal that moved and molded their environment through subtle manipulations of gravity fields. In earlier versions the spheres still cradled the organic brains of the last Haunters. But in successive generations, ways of containing the mind within quantum computers were devised, and the transformation became absolute. The Ruin Haunters were replaced by the completely mechanical Gravital.

While not even organic, the Gravital still retained human dreams, human ambitions and human delusions of grandeur. This, combined with mechanical bodies that allowed them to cross space with ease, made interstellar war a frightening possibility.

Machine Invasion

It took a long time for the Gravital to prepare. Propulsion systems were perfected and new bodies capable of withstanding the interstellar jumps were devised. But when they finally decided that the time was nigh, nothing survived the slaughter.

The invasions followed a brutally simple plan. The target worlds’ suns were blockaded and their light was trapped behind specially-constructed, million-mile sails. If the dying worlds managed to resist, an asteroid of two finished them off. Enormous invasion fleets were built, but it was rarely necessary to deploy them. The Machines had caught their cousins completely off-guard.

The great dyings, all of which occurred in a relatively quick, ten-thousand year period, stretched the boundaries of genocide and horror. Almost all of the new human species; unique beings who had endured mass extinctions, navigated evolutionary knife-edges and survived to build worlds of their own, vanished without a trace.

Even the Qu had been loyal to life, they had distorted and subjugated their victims, but in the end they had allowed them to survive. To the machines however, life was a luxury.

Such thorough ruthlessness was not, ironically, borne out of any kind of actual hatred. The Gravital, long accustomed to their mechanical bodies, simply did not acknowledge the life of their organic cousins. When this apathy was mixed with their un-sane claims as the sole heirs of the Star Men, the extinctions were carried out with the banality of say, an engineer tearing down an abandoned building. Under the reign of the Machines, the Galaxy entered a brand-new dark age.

A rare instance of a direct invasion by the Machines, on one of the shore cities of the Killer Folk. Most of the time the inhabitants of the Second Empire were wiped out globally, without the necessity of such confrontations.

When Considering the Invasion

The Machine Invasion brought on the greatest wave of extinctions the galaxy had ever seen; for it was not a simple act of war by one species against another, but a systematized destruction of life itself.

When considering such a vast event, it is easy to get lost in romantic delusions. It is almost as easy to write off the Gravital as ‘evil’ as it is to consider the entire episode as a nihilistic, ‘end of everything’ kind of scenario. Both of these approaches are, as they would be in any historical situation, monumental fallacies.

To begin with, the Gravital were not evil, at least not to their own perception. These beings, although mechanical, still lived their lives as individuals and operated inside coherent societies. They had surrendered their organic heritage but their minds were not the cold, calculating engines of true machines. Even after giving orders that would destroy a billion souls, a Gravital would have a home to go to, and, as incredibly as it might sound, a family and a circle of friends towards which it felt genuine affection. Despite being endowed with compassion, their harsh treatment of the organics was the result of, as mentioned before, a simple inability to understand their right to live.