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.
