Rough draft, excerpt 4: The Capstone

Note on content:  this is one of several portions of the novel presented in short-story format, depicting the creative output of the characters.  It is as yet undecided where in the novel this will appear; in all likelihood, it will be reserved for Volume II.

Building an Arch:  Entry 1, Version 1 -- "Rise of the Capstone"

Editor's note:  This is by no means a complete retelling of the Capstone origin myth, but as a generic account, it does incorporate contributions from at least 14 member worlds, including the much more recent lore regarding modern loyalists.  As a temporal cross-section of these stories, it still retains, in the early portions, some of the idealism of the early myths promulgated by the Capstone themselves, while over time taking on the more cynical tones of legends originating post-collapse.  In this, this abridgement presents a rare evolutionary progression of the galaxy's perception of the Grays.  The collected mythology as told from the point of view of those worlds that suffered the most from their predations, and during the collapse itself, takes a completely different tone, and is best presented separately (see "Legends of the Fall," 24).

Some of this material is of course apocryphal, and the durations of the time spans in particular are disputed by modern historians and mythographers.  It is not presented as a definitive account of the Empire's early history, but rather as an aspect of the ethnographic record deserving of deeper analysis.

Like slime molds they were, in the times before the Arch.  They were fungi occupying the soils of their damp, cool, dark world.  A society of animals had dwelt there once—-reptilian beings who’d built stone cities and moved about in sun-powered vehicles—-and when most of them fled the world, and their remainders died out, taking most of the higher life on that world with them, they left behind those stone cities, crumbling into the muck as their ancestral swampland reclaimed their civilization.

For a long time there was only greenery, arthropods, some fishlike beings wallowing in the muddy shallows, and the lichens...lichens, every one improbably composed of two separate kinds of beings, fused into one shapeless mass, devouring the stones of a dead society, marching forth quietly to conquer the world.

The fungi which entered into this symbiosis were volunteers from a family which had colonized every niche of the pre-civilization swamp and the encroaching patches of greenery which had tried but failed for millions of years to deserve the name forest.  There were several different colonizations which might under certain taxonomic systems qualify as species, but closely-related species in this family were never really totally reproductively isolated from each other.  In many ways, each individual cell retained much of the ancestral character of amoebae, and when activated—-stirred into motility by the collective chemical call of their buried brethren—-they relied on this feature to join together into sluglike colonies which could migrate, reproduce sexually and produce billions of spores for windborne release.  But the cells also harbored a genetic toolkit which their ancestors had cannily held over from an even more primitive stage of existence, the miniscule, exquisitely simple unicellular life forms found on every life-harboring planet and universally (informally) referred to  as germs.  However vastly unrelated and separated by time and space, bacteria on planets everywhere can exchange packets of genes, which practice can obscure the distinction between individuals and even between species.  This is a feature which is usually lost, outside of exceptional cases, to the higher stages of biotic development. 

But here on the Capstone ancestral world, long, long after some of their distant descendants had taken on more complex forms and achieved multicellularity and even intelligence, some of their more humble descendants rediscovered the trick, which had lain dormant in their genes for eons.

It was first employed within the lichens which oversaw the reclaiming of the lizard cities.  The fungal microbes had always lived by invading the cells of the green plants which comprised the other half of the symbiosis, taking nourishment directly from them while providing them with water and minerals, leached from the rock by their unrelenting digestive chemical onslaught.  Some intrepid cells of a mutant line discovered that they could invade the nuclei of these plants and assimilate their genetic material directly.  And after a time, these fungi had consumed the plants entirely, using the newly-learned genetic code to build themselves hybrid plant-fungoid bodies which could do the work of both species.

These fungi shared this trick with their brethren, by means of swapping nucleic acids with them.  And the lichens prospered, and they sent calls to the amoebae of their neighboring species, who answered the call and came.  And the secret was thus spread, and eventually all the fungi of the cities and the fungi of the swamps knew the trick.

And the fungi set out to consume everything that lived, adopting the genetic diversity of what they consumed, learning the biochemistry of their prey, the better to invade their cells and assimilate them.  And everything that lived was infected, invaded and assimilated by the fungi.  The swamp fish and tadpole-like beings which were now the highest life forms on the planet were attacked, sickened, and devoured from the inside.  Their forms remained, and their function, but their cells were made over in fungal form, and their nuclear material was now that of many species, fragmented and collected together.  And the interplay of species and niches in the ecology went on unchanged, although the chemistry involved was now vastly different.

Some of the brethren returned to the soil, and there they formed vast networks of mycelial fibers, joining each to his distant relatives by means of shared chemical impulses.  The networks grew in complexity, becoming endless, many-layered twinings spanning entire continents.  And murky intelligences bubbled up from the slime, responding to the environmental changes wrought by the great fungal empire, achieving after many generations a dim self-awareness which fancied itself responsible for the chemical upkeep of the environment.

And everywhere the secret spread, individual cells would mobilize, gather together into reproducing bodies, and loft their spores to the winds, carrying the secret to every cranny, every pore, every puddle on the planet.  Last to be colonized were the arthropods, whose more sophisticated members had learned the art of flight, and who could ride the winds all around the world.  The slime mold classes learned to adopt the forms of creatures they’d long-previously assimilated, and they built themselves soft insectile bodies which they clad in glass, exuded chemically from the consumed stone leachate provided by the lichen classes.  And these rode the winds, learning on-the-fly how to best extend their morphology to catch ever-rarer winds at ever-higher altitudes.  And the most lofty of these found the topmost winds, and saw from above the clouds the bottom of the eternal nighttime sky which swaths every planet.

And they wondered.

The planet was slowly changing, coming alive, as the fungi sunk ever deeper and converted more of its mass to themselves.  The various distantly-connected intelligences were intertwining, and exploring the ancient depths of their world, and there was not a place that was not beslimed with their wanderings.  The world thrummed with the resonating electromagnetic signatures of their signals, and over time they learned to exploit this energy as well as a food source.

When the time came that there was nothing left to devour but the cold hard rock of the planet’s interior, the fungi invaded at last the buried, rusting steel vaults of the lizard people’s laboratories and healing-places, where sterile conditions had prevailed long past their own demise.  And there the fungi encountered the crumbling bones of the walking beasts who’d built cities and made machines, and there the fungi consumed what could be gleaned in the remaining nucleic acids.  And they learned the form of the lizard people.  And they learned the growing of complex individual brains.  Their knowledge thereof was incomplete, because the genetic instructions were meager and fragmentary, but they could apply their own knowledge of mycelial networks to fill in the gaps.  They made for themselves hybrid brains which combined traits of both the civilization-building bipeds and their own ancestral mycelial mats, and these brains, like the mycelia, could at times be interconnected with those of others to form physical networks of individuals sharing information.

The fungal tissue from which they were built was fairly simple and undifferentiated; it took the shape of the organs of the assimilated, and emulated them, but any cell in any organ could be employed in any other organ on an as-needed basis.  Digestive tracts were largely abandoned, as any material ingested would simply be engulfed and dissolved by the surrounding tissue, no matter where it made initial contact with the Being.  The tissue simply enfolded any contacted organic material, breaking it up as it was absorbed.

The chief physiological distinction between all the Kinds and the life-forms they assimilated and replaced was a lack of distinct cells in their tissues.  Cell boundaries—membranes—were constantly being dissolved and reformed, with old, expended material constantly pushed toward the exterior and shed in a kind of living decay.  Nuclei, the repositories for nuclear material, were the only relatively-fixed element of this kind of tissue, and sometimes cell boundaries could reform around many nuclei at once, even around an entire Being.

The tissues employed in the brain were the most distinctive, and there was less interoperability in the cells, but there was still a great degree of plasticity.  A Walker whose brain was physically damaged could regrow most if not all of it, although some memories and some of the original personality might be irretrievably lost, to be later replaced by new growth.

Among the new skills the Walkers acquired was one which enraged the Ground-Kind.  Every individual could regenerate parts as needed, consuming its own material to support the growth.  In order to ensure that memory and personality could be retrieved in the case of even extreme brain damage, Walkers learned to recycle cells out from the brain into other tissues, where they could be recalled in an effort to re-establish prior connections.  From there, the next step was to encode the connnections directly in stretches of nucleic acid which the individual deemed worthy of sacrifice.  In this way the Walkers learned genetic memory. Long stretches of experience could be encoded and stored away, relieving the brain of the burden of tracking it until it was needed, at which point a transcription from nucleic acid was required to retrieve it from storage.

From this time the War of the Kinds raged.  Those who walked upright in lizard-form wanted to build machines to loft themselves away from the world, to fly in the spaces between worlds and find others to occupy.  The remaining brethren wanted to consume the world, down to its rocky roots, to crumble its rock and take it in and make it part of their living substance, and once having done so, to send forth spores into space and let them fall where they may, in the time-honored tradition of their ancestors.  The lizard-ken did not believe that spores could be lofted into the space between worlds without machines.  And so they argued that machines, and bodies to operate them, were required to ensure the survival of The Kinds.  The groundborne brethren tried to destroy the remainder of the cities, to crumble the rock and the metal and the memory of the machines and the vaults which held the laboratories where machines were invented.  The walkers tried to beat back the groundborne, to preserve the machines and to build new ones with which to defend themselves and remove their Kind to high places where they might build flying machines unmolested.

The Ground-Kind detested the walkers as undead monsters of an alien race, beings made of Kind-flesh but clothed in the ghost-forms of a dead species.  The Walking-Kind believed the Ground-Kind would lie about and consume until all was consumed but itself, and would die unfulfilled on the stage of destiny that they alone, the Walkers, could enter when—if—they took to the stars.

In the end, the Ground-Kind sent forth the most recent and advanced of its forms, those of the flying insects it had most recently colonized.  The insects were better fliers and more adaptible than the Walkers, and found them wherever they retreated to, there destroying their machines and chewing the Walkers to pieces, which were then re-assimilated by the Ground.

The insects took what they found novel from the Walker genetic code, and learned the secrets of upright walking and of big brains.  And they understood what the Ground-Kind had not:  that their advancement into space was the only means of securing their future in the universe.  And the insects turned on the Ground.

Being nimble, and able to fly, the insects outstripped the Ground, and outflew the spores which were sent to Infect them and bring them back to the Way.  They chewed away the tendrils and plant-like growths sent up by the Ground, and bred in fierce numbers to build armies to defend the laboratories and the machines.  And being upright, and with complex brains, they made chemicals with which to war against the Ground, and they forced their brethren to retreat and leave the barren, digested rock behind.

And the insects forced a truce.  And they communed electrically and chemically with the other Kinds, those they’d warred with and those who’d remained out of the fight.  And an arrangement was achieved.  Those who took form, and walked upright, would build machines with which to loft themselves into space.  Those who remained behind and remained formless except when fruiting, or who took forms bound to the ground, could consume the world until it was gone.  After that, when there was nothing left to consume except The Kind, all must abandon form and come together, and stop consuming and go dormant.  To continue consuming would mean gnawing at the Kind’s own substance until total homogeneity were achieved, at the loss of all the diversity the Kind had thus far gained and remembered.  To prevent the forgetting, the Kind must sleep.  It must encorcel its substance away from the harshness and emptiness of space, by growing a glass shell around itself, and there it must await the return of the machines flown by the walkers, who would meanwhile seek out other worlds to land their machines on, to explore and to conquer, and hence to bring the substance of The Kind that it may begin anew consuming each world severally.

To the Walking-Kind was charged a different mission:  that of finding new and suitable worlds for consumption.  They were given leave to choose form most suitable to their task, and after a time most chose a suitably representative shape:  bipedal, like the lizards, with grasping hands, but also with various insectile adaptations, improved by the growth of a large brain, superior even to that of the lizards.  These Walkers agreed to cast back to the Kind the learned diversity of those forms they would not need, remembering only those shapes which would best suit their progress; the Kinds would keep the memory of those forms for the day when the Walkers would return.  The Walkers could still shift form, and merge, and split, but the range of forms available to them was now limited, and their reproductive capacity was diminished.  The Walkers agreed that they would evolve and adapt in those ways required by The New Way as they moved out among the stars, and would only merge and recombine their material in the direst need.  They would not fruit or produce spores except when necessity drove it, otherwise reproducing by fission as needed.  The Walkers would represent a distillation of the Kinds down to one particular Species, which could then fragment and separate as dictated by the whims of nature.  By universal agreement, changes wrought by the assimilation of other species were prohibited to the Walkers; this privilege was left to the Kinds who remained behind, until such time as the Walkers and their descendants Returned to the Fold.

The division of privilege was intended to mollify those who remained behind, so that once new worlds were found, the Kinds could all together go and colonize and consume, leaving not their shared essence behind to wither and die.  And the insect-Walkers said that it was good, that they would abide by this, and that they would forthwith build the machines that would fly them to other stars.  But among them were Individuals, those who exceeded the limits of the agreement by retaining the ability to pass on genetic memory.

And they went into the laboratories, and they built machines.  And they created lighter-than-air platforms that would float on the air and loft spores high, unto the very top of the atmosphere, and they would collect the fallen spores and read from them the marks that cold, empty space had left upon them.  And they learned.

Their first forays into space were temporary and exploratory, efforts to learn how to live in the machines they’d built.  The Walking-kind eventually took permanently to their machines and left the ground entirely, floating eternally but never abandoning the vicinity of their homeworld.  For millions of years they patrolled the environs of the planet and its sun, while the groundbound Kinds finished the task of consuming the world.  And when the time came that there was nothing left to consume but itself, the ground-Kind drew itself together and grew a glassy shell to cover itself.  And the world was made over with a hard dry covering, and the soft living material within grew cold and sleepy and began its long dormancy.

And as the electrical chatter of the Ground-Kind faded, the flying-Walkers took their machines and flew outward in all directions from the cold, sleeping World, abandoning it to its fate, forgetting their promise.  And they migrated in great flocks to new stars, and in some worlds they found civilizations, living or dead, and these they occupied.  In some worlds they assimilated the inhabitants; in others, they captured the inhabitants and made them to perform labor for the Kind.  And on each world they found more of the sciences and the arts of the beings who’d lived there before, and they discovered the mistakes and the insights of all.  And they learned.

And the territory they encompassed grew.  And some shards of the Kinds who’d ventured far away were lost from kenning, their signals faded beyond hearing.  Those who remained in contact devised means of maintaining electrical contact all with all, as they had on the World; their minds could join, as they had in their infancy when only mycelia and not psychic impulses had bound them together, but they also used machines to amplify their signals so that even distant brethren could Join.

In those days, the flying-Kind flew under the banner of the Cap, symbolic of the mushroom disk which their forefathers had grown in order to cast spores.  Their flying machines were shaped like the Cap:  smooth, disklike, flat on one surface and convex on the other.  But their design was adamantine, like water-smoothed rock, and the People knew themselves as the Capstone.  Their machines were improved by their learning on all the worlds they came to, and they ventured ever-farther, ever-faster into the void.

Some shards of the Kinds there were who’d consumed the lives and civilizations of beings whose essence and teachings influenced them long after their own demise.  And this forged the first great crisis of the Capstone:  whether to always consume worlds completely, or to try to seek partnership and alliance with any intelligent beings they found.  For among those teachings were such ideas as the equality of sentient races, and the value of cooperation; and these were concepts the Capstone was familiar with from its days as another Kind back on the World, when the Kind was going about the business of devouring everything.

And the second great War of the Kinds erupted; those who wanted to pursue the elder, lost virtues of cooperation battled against those who wished only to consume.  And those who wished only to consume were subdued, in part because they lacked the ability to band together constructively diverse threads of thought and action.  And those who urged cooperation had the support and material presence of those civilizations they’d encountered but not consumed.  So in the end the consuming-Kind was banished, driven away in fragments of population too small to reckon, and, taking their flying machines to parts of the universe unknown to all others, they now vanish from the telling.

And the remaining Kind took it upon themselves to spread themselves and their Way across the known universe.  They had been changed by their eons spent in space, and were still being changed by it, and many could no longer truly live in the same way they had back on the World.  Partly out of necessity, and partly out of penance for the worlds they’d aggrieved with their consumptions, the Capstone declared to all sentient races it knew that it would thenceforth take residence primarily in space, treating each of their domed craft as a spore set adrift, whence to burst forth life when called upon to do so, but otherwise dwelling quietly and without incident.  The Cap-Kind declared that it would build an Arch of Stars, a bridge of civilizations spanning the galaxy, and that the Capstone greys would occupy the topmost position in the arch, the Keystone, by way of freely providing their colonizing and uniting technologies to the member races.  And each race that participated in the Arch would have the full benefit of space travel and trade and exploration, so long as none warred with the others or sought to consume worlds occupied by other sentient beings.  And the Capstone would ensure that the means to travel through space, and to remain connected to homeworlds, would be made available to all participant stones in the Arch.  And by means of providing this technology and related services to other beings, the Capstone grew immensely wealthy and powerful.  And the Arch extended its influence to span most of a galaxy, and many beings explored many worlds which would otherwise have remained forever out of reach.  And over time the galaxy was colonized.

As their technologically-enhanced hive mind expanded across the galaxy, it evolved.  Local collectives developed distinctive patterns of tokenization and transponding, and parts of these patterns fed back into the whole when Joining occurred on any greater than a local scale.  The civilization assimilated this evolution by gradually coming to accept it as a shared spiritual journey intended to cull those who could not continue to adapt.  In this way they supplanted their biological evolution with a sociological one.  Those who failed to keep up became castoffs from the hive, left to drift and die in solitude.

And the Capstone, curators of knowledge and wisdom, possessors of the machines which made the economy of the galaxy work, remained aloof, aloft and spaceborne, spores of the original civilization drifting over the heads of those they governed.  And they forgot entirely how to live on the ground, and those who ventured to the ground individually on a permanent basis often died.  Those who remained aloft, and in the company of their brethren, were almost immortal; unless killed, they could continue to live by splitting off clones, renewing themselves by casting off dead and decrepit material to be reconsumed by the collective.  The low gravity and the proximity of their other brethren seemed at this stage in their history to be absolute requirements of survival, conditions they cultivated by way of estranging themselves from all other species.  Their godlike benevolence, and their tight control over the technologies that permitted galaxy-wide transport and conquest, were one and the same.

But there were still those Individuals who thought differently, who longed for a ground-based existence, and argued that survival could be achieved if they went down in numbers.  This was the last of the great philosophical rifts the Capstone endured.  For millions of years their empire had waxed across more than two-thirds of the galaxy at their disposal, but now their numbers were waning, and their empire was in decline.  This they could not reveal to their member societies, but still it showed through at times nonetheless.  Their reproductive skills were deteriorating.  Each of the past few generations had lost some ability to pass memory on to clones.  And there was now real danger of a failure of their civilization due to the loss of knowledge and wisdom.  Whether this was due to a lack of diversity, or the onslaught of cosmic radiation, or even just a lack of gravity, none could say, but the question gave urgency to the controversy over regaining the ground.

The Kinds had had little in the way of mythology back on their own world, but the Capstone had collected much of the history and the collective unconscious of the worlds it had assimilated.  Mysticism was endemic to some populations but not to others; to the Capstone it was a learned thing, and another distinction between themselves and the old Kinds.  As they’d done with everything else—-flesh, nucleic acids, civilizations—-they hybridized their own material with the assimilated, and constructed a spiritual framework within which to pursue their various inquiries.  Individuality was not something encouraged either by their genetic heritage or their former society, but it had developed over time in many of the Capstone because they’d done almost no Joining of the physical kind, and each individual’s experiences were being concentrated in his own brain, causing the arisal of many distinct personalities. 

There had been little pressure to increase their numbers over much of the past few million years, as their society had consisted of a fairly fixed number of gigantic spacecraft housing a certain number of individuals apiece.  Individuals would sometimes clone themselves for insurance, but doing so was expensive in material—-up to half was donated at each fission—-and to do so prematurely would risk not providing a full complement of personality and memory to the clone, so this practice was limited to the high-risk lifestyles, and repeated periodically.  Unused clones were often re-assimilated at a later time, which practice forced the development of “mindless clones”, individuals whose personalities were inactive until some environmental cue kicked in to turn them on, and which had to be fed with a set of memories—provided by any Individual—in order to be fully operational.  A mindless clone could then be thought of as a potential offspring, once given the right stimulus, or it could be used as a reservoir of substance to be re-consumed when needed.

With their civilization starting to lose influence, the Capstone decided that they would begin an expansionist phase, increasing their numbers and therefore their presence in each sector.  The increased need for sustenance would mean each member world would have to provide more biomass to them.  This announcement caused unrest.  The pressure to provide biomass caused some member societies to raid the more laxly-protected reserve planets.  And the Capstone, desirous of food, permitted this in order to justify their own planned predations, thereby facilitating the demise of their own legal credibility and authority.

Nonetheless, they expanded.  They built more space cities, and they labored to populate them.  This met with limited success.  There were those among them who had started to believe that their decline, in numbers and in influence, was a pre-programmed condition created by the Ancestors as a means to force their recall to the homeworld.  There were others who believed that it was punishment for their moral failings and hubris.  And there were others who thought it was some kind of biological attack from an unhappy member society.

And the last of the Wars of the Kinds erupted over what should be done.  The civilization split into several factions, aligned along spiritual and biological interpretations of the situation.  It became impossible to prevent the member societies from discovering this, and soon many of them had joined the fray on various sides.  Some occupied formerly-protected planets and used them as staging areas or strip mines.  Control over the various sectors fell to the dominant societies within them, and regional warlords came to be.  As the Arch crumbled, and the Capstone ceded territories to the regional powers, these clashed over borders.  Global war erupted in a firestorm of regional conflicts, and genocides ensued.

A great host of the Capstone abandoned their galactic civilization and retreated back whence they’d come, in search of the ancestral world.  Some few remained and maintained territories which included planets that could provide sustenance on a continual basis; these island hives were the last bastion of the traditional Capstone civilization in the galaxy.  There were also small renegade bands who sought out unexplored territories and preserve worlds to occupy, and their histories diverge in many directions and are lost to this telling.

The island hives which remain maintain a peace with the surrounding civilizations, because they still provide the technological backbone for galactic transport and communication.  But during the wars many formerly-dependent civilizations have acquired some of the Capstone technology, although they lack the savvy (and the electromagnetic neural wiring) to properly maintain and operate it.  In some sectors these enclaves of Greys still hold considerable sway, but there is a clearly-definable frontier beyond which there is only lawlessness and unexplored space.  Without the pervasive technological backbone of the Capstone, and their galaxy-spanning hive mind, most of the commerce and long-range exploration in the galaxy has dried up.  The Arch-loyal holdouts maintain the belief, which they sow among those worlds they still influence, that those who sought the ancestral world will find it, and awaken it, and will carry its substance back into the Galaxy, there to begin again the process of consuming and expanding.  These loyalists wreak their genetic and sociological influences where they can, to ensure that they are steeped in the mythology of the future coming of an entire lost world’s worth of hungry biomass, the myth of the world called Spore.