Read The Architect of Aeons Online
Authors: John C. Wright
The Architect of Aeons (65 page)
Tellus damaged during a Kitsune experiment, and disintegrates, returning to subsuperposthuman levels of intellect and organization. Further Kitsune activity, allegedly attempts to repair Tellus, spread the insanity.
Oceans fill with alcahest, a nanotechnological waste product. Demeter, a near-surface Archangel used for earthquake control, begins a Telluric reclamation project.
(This is the predicted last No
ö
sphere, had Jupiter not been brought into being.)
⢠42nd Millennium
A
.
D
. / 28 V
Renaissance of the Golden Lords: Jupiter intervenes. A new balance is struck within the cliometric dynamics of the Golden Afternoon, allowing the Hierophants to retain power despite ever-growing turbulence from the Kitsune and Myrmidon underlings.
Sacerdotalism becomes the established religion of the Hierophants. Laresianism lingers among military units for several generations, and is finally wiped out.
Terrforming Terra
: Hierophants begin sea reclamation.
[This is the predicted last generation of civilization, had Jupiter not been brought into being.]
⢠43rd Millennium
A
.
D
. / 27 V
Shcachlil the Salamander creates a shepherding moon for Venus to move the world into a cooler orbit.
The Gas Giant
Twelve
of Tau Ceti converted to sophont matter, becoming the Fifth Human Power. The failed star Siegfried of 61 Cygni converted, becoming the Sixth Power named
Vonrothbarth
.
⢠44th Millennium
A
.
D
. / 26 V
Industrial growth on Earth leads to restoration of space colonies. First colonists on Venus are Pantropists, with genes evolved to track the progression of the terraforming due to the shepherding moon's action.
⢠45th Millennium
A
.
D
. / 25 V
Colony fails on Venus due to unexpected solar activities.
Second colonization attempt at Venus, this time, with human terraformers attempting to modify Shcachlil's result.
The Sacerdotal Order issues an invitation for Splendids from Delta Pavonis to starfare to Venus as an act of religious merit, leaving homes and kith to be lost to the relativistic passage of years.
Alpha Draconis is the Pole Star
⢠46th Millennium
A
.
D
. / 24 V
Venus occupied by a Splendor-dominated theocratic order devoted to the subjection of all human freedom to ecological interests. Venusians send a fleet toward Earth, which is wiped out by a single, scalding beam from Shcachlil.
Splendid Venusians betray their strict code of noninterference in the gene plasm, and produce a race of space-flying disease-spreading anthropophagic predators called Vampires. These entities are able to cross the distance between worlds during conjunction without vehicles.
Onset of the Plague Years.
⢠47th Millennium
A
.
D
. / 23 V
Mars moved into a serviceable orbit by Shcachlil.
Shcachlil removed from the sun by the Domination of Hyadesâperhaps in order to avoid some ever-mounting debt.
SALAMANDER DEPARTS
Shapetaker's Millennium: Humans organize into permeable-barrier clades of fertile Nyctalops Melusine called Skulks, beneath the protection of totipotent Kitsune.
Beginning of the Tribulations
, when no cliometric plans unfold as expected.
The Golden Lords are not overthrown, but reduced to ceremonial figureheads. Hierophants dwindle sharply in number.
(
A
.
D
. 46400)
Third ignition
of the deceleration beam directed at M3.
The Photinine Heresy reemerges under the leadership of a Heresiarch named Lemur, who demands a simplification of the cliometry calculus, and the creation of a race with a simpler psychology than man to make the calculation easier, creatures called Eidolons.
Lemur is assassinated and replaced by a Fox impersonator, but the Lemurian movement nonetheless fragments and mutates into a bewildering variety of revisionists and counter-revisionists.
Beta and Gamma Ursae Minoris are the Pole Stars
⢠48th Millennium
A
.
D
. / 22 V
The Beautification
(
A
.
D
. 47000â47300) The beautification of man takes place during these years. Eidolons restored to full humanity. Fox Maidens meddle in the gene stock of firstlings, whose 350-year lifespans are quadrupled, and who retain their youth and beauty well into their later years, so that an earthwoman of 1,400 still looks like a fourteen-year-old, and can live to 1,600.
THE INTERSTELLAR WAR
(
A
.
D
. 47400) Cliometry Revisionists demand the halt of life-extension biotechnology and the destruction of all tomb slumberers older than nine hundred ninety-nine years. Starfaring ports and strongholds attacked, as well as biosuspension tombs.
(
A
.
D
. 47500) Revisionism spreads to other worlds.
(
A
.
D
. 47600) Immortalist colony at Odette attacked and destroyed by Crusaders from Odile. Surviving Immortals flee offplanet, including to Sol, suppress the Revisionists, and establish hegemony.
(
A
.
D
. 47700) On Venus, the Splendids are eaten by their creations, the Vampires. Vampires imitate Jupiter's internal personality control system for their social order.
On Earth, rise of a class of land-owning peasants born of recently humanized Moreaus in Baltica overthrow the Immortalist hegemons and erect a communal form of Vassalage called the Five Thousand Fiefs. Some ceremonial functions are restored to the Golden Lords.
(
A
.
D
. 47800) The Fiefs grow corrupt, and yield power to various charismatic tyrants, gathered into a single alliance under Myrmidon control. These tyrants, called Lectors of the Analects, enforce a set of strict honor codes, prohibiting humanism and trans-humanism.
(
A
.
D
. 47900) Beginning of the Fox Hunts, the Lector-led genocide of the Kitsune.
⢠49th Millennium
A
.
D
. / 21 V
Parthenocracy established, a Fox-Swan hybrid social order created in imitation (some say mockery) of the Hierophants, who were Man-Swan hybrids. The franchise is limited to virgin girls and unwalled cities.
Skulks, with Jupiter's aid, gain predominance over the scattered Lectors. End of Lectorship. End of Fox Hunts.
Fox attempt to restore humanity to the Myrmidons fails. In disgust, Myrmidons sever all ties with biological life, becoming a spaceborne form of machine life called Megalodons.
Polaris is the Pole Star
Patrician Era
⢠50th Millennium
A
.
D
. / 20 V
FIFTH HUMANS: PATRICIANS
The Megalodons, cooperating with the Gam City-Mind of the Ocean Palace (whom they oddly resemble), gain supremacy over the Parthenocrats. The Palatials take up the perquisites and forms of Golden Lords.
Meanwhile, the Vampire kings of Venus breed a race of men, called the Overlords, immune from all biological attacks, but who are so heavily modified that the Eco-theocracy of Splendid is discredited and forgotten.
Patricians Born
. Foxes return the humanity to the vampire kings of Venus, a race now called the Fifth Men, or
Patricians.
This a monosexual species able to reproduce with any female human or Moreau. The resulting hybrid, called a Plebian, is self-aware, and possesses a Patrician-compatible nerve configuration, sanity, stability, and integrity.
End of the Crusader kingdoms. Moon loses atmosphere, becomes uninhabitable. Lunars migrate to the Chimerical penal colony on Mars.
Veneric ecology placed under interdict by the Patricians, forcing a return to Terrestrial norms. Timed extinctions, known as the Ineluctable Curses, are bio-programmed into xenophilic life.
Long-slumbering Eventide patriarchs hidden at the Martian core since the time of the Sculptured Lifeways are found and revived and rise to power. The Chimera, the Lunars, and the Eventides form The Anachronism, a system of life based on the ancient precepts of the Cryonarchy combined with cliometry, which encourages migration via hibernation to various foretold eras of time.
Martian terraforming begun by the Anachronistic Council (and completed in later years by the Conservator of the Museum of Man). Earthly creatures, many of Veneric decent, dependent on xenophilic life, migrate to Mars, in order to escape the Ineluctable Curses.
Alrai is the Pole Star
⢠51st Millennium
A
.
D
. / 19 V
(
A
.
D
. 50822) Arrival of the
Ultimate White Ship
.
Snow wars. Abundance of snow (antimatter weapons) leads to an expansion of Ecological Militia and Armiger Orders. Melusine Palatials disband.
Rise of the Summer Kings or
Aestevals
, a caste (later, a subspecies) of terraformers biotechnologically and psychologically adapted to entering mental union with ghosts in order to perform otherwise impossible feats of chaos mathematics, needed for precise weather control.
The Summer Kings dominate the worlds of the inner Solar System. Suprastratospheric weather-control clouds circle Earth and Venus. Poles heated and tropics cooled by engineering the world ocean currents. Mars is crisscrossed with a series of vast canals, an ancient myth at last come true.
Eventide Life-Sculptors occupy Laurasia, the Eastern continent of Earth. Earth becomes famed for the beauty of its women, the perfect tropical charm of its nearly seasonless environment.
SECOND POWER of SOL
Birth of Neptune
, a second Power of Sol, the Seventh Power of Man [Neptune is roughly 7,000 miles in diameter at this time, 90^4 IQ.]
Neptune Brain establishes forward bases on Uranus, makes contact with isolated elements of the Patrician sovereign-mind named Cnaeus.
⢠52nd Millennium
A
.
D
. / 18 V
A final attempt is made to assimilate Fox cliometry into the baseline of predictive history, without success, with the Fox Maidens serving as an Amazon soldier class in the place of the now-extinct Myrmidons.
The Summer Kings, awash with wealth of dubious origin (energy funds meant to be set aside to ignite Rania's deceleration starbeam), reestablish the old Golden Lord racial caste system with Patricians occupying the ranks once occupied by Hierophants.
Patrician Golden Lords reclaim power over crucial nodes of the cliometric model on Earth and other worlds, while allowing the Summer Kings to seem to retain control.
This marks the end of the Tribulations
. Course of predictive history restored.
Neptune enters a period of external inactivity and internal reorganization, thought to be akin to REM sleep.
TREASON OF JUPITER: Jupiter refuses to ignite the deceleration laser for a
fourth
burn of the returning lightship of Rania the Vindicatrix. Jupiter attempts to use the energy budget instead to copy itself into the Hyades Concentric at 20 Arietis.
A.D. 51554âJupiter slain.
Jupiter commits ritual suicide with a solar beam weapon when its avatar on Earth falls in a duel.
(
A
.
D
. 51600)
Fourth and final ignition
of the deceleration starbeam directed at M3. Economic collapse follows the liberal expenditure of energy beyond forecast.
The Summer Kings retreat into fictional dreamscapes. Those not altered by Fox Maidens into Swans soon divaricate.
Judge of Ages, with a picked crew of Rosicrucians of the Brash archetype called the Sons of Cazi, hijacks the starship
Emancipation
and departs from Sol, allegedly to seek for a lost colony of Houristan at Epsilon Bo
ö
tis.
Iota Cephei is the Pole Star
At this point in time, 17,000 years remain before the Vindication of Man.
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JOHN C. WRIGHT
is an attorney turned science fiction and fantasy writer. He has published short fiction in
Asimov's
and elsewhere, and wrote the Chronicles of Chaos, the Golden Age, and the War of the Dreaming series. His novel
Orphans of Chaos
was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2005. This is his fourth novel in the Count to a Trillion series. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
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