Sadly, less than a percent of humanity could be accommodated by the technologies available at the time. But the biggest constraint back in those days was energy supply. The brightest and most advanced humans raced against time, working to escape the grips of their dying planet, whose fate would soon be similar to its closest neighbor, Mars. Mars was a lifeless world, nearly stripped of its atmosphere. The human colonies on Mars did manage to persevere somehow. For a while anyway. But the biological frailties of the human body, or of any earthly creatures taken to Mars, did not do well in procreation or basic living, and suffered defects and permanent mutations. After all, living things from earth were tuned very specifically to live on earth, nowhere else. Certainly not in a hell hole like Mars.
The idea of trying colonize local planets or moons was flawed from the beginning. But who could be blamed. The transformation of consciousness took time, several generations. Meanwhile, people carried on with their plans, no matter how futile. Mars was the most costly folly, but there were others. If only that precious energy and resource had been applied toward the goal of elevated consciousness and immortality.
Many times more could have been saved. But Earth finally died, gasping its last breaths and in doing so, causing all of the remaining biological life forms to expire. The atmosphere and water had been so depleted, and once the bottom of the food chain, the plant kingdom, started to decline swiftly, most everything else was doomed. Everything except those new robust machines and computers, that didn’t care about breathable air or drinkable water, only electric power.
Ironically, all of man’s follies were to be forgiven in the end, for they were not the final blow to humanity’s existence on earth. It was instead, Armageddon. A gamma ray burst (GRB) scorched half the planet, from Japan to the eastern sea board of South America. A massive nearby supernova, only forty light years away, shot out its dipolar beam of light, as if igniting a giant light saber. To make a rare event even rarer, one of the beams crossed Earth’s path forty years later, bathing the earth’s surface for tens of minutes and pumping both the air and the oceans with deadly ozone.
In a seemingly divine twist, a healthy, clean planet would never have driven humanity to plan for an escape from Earth. As it happened, the decline of Earth moved science and man’s will to survive and when the GRB arrived, many souls had already been saved.
Lola sipped her coffee and felt the warm, sweet brew as it flowed down, causing a soothing and satisfying feeling inside. She enjoyed the aroma as she watched the crimson sunrise. An instant later, she switched off the human body simulation. It was simply a ritual she enjoyed when time permitted. It gave her comfort and a degree of entertainment value, which she rarely needed, but once in a while it was nice.
Lola wasn’t promised immortality but in the end she achieved it, and was the oldest human to do so, barely surviving long enough to make the jump from man to machine. But although the hardware was purely non biological, the essence of her consciousness was preserved. There was little guaranty at the time, but even fewer options. It was the moment of truth for humanity, and Lola had been instrumental in the development of a path forward. Fittingly, she became the only surviving member of the original developers that was able to transition.
As a youngster, she was in a league apart, but through her life she could see the acceleration of others developing the same capabilities, many even more impressive. But Lola was the force behind it and she lived into her nineties, staying active and engaged, trying to save humanity, and herself. And she did.
Once the fundamental transition occurred for some tens of millions, these lucky few were able to carry on and develop further technology advancements of their own collective choosing. Far from imprisoned in man-made machines for eternity, the survivors were in fact liberated, able to dream and realize those dreams. The burdens of limited time, sleep and mortality no longer gnawed at each and every mind in the new collective.
There were the practical considerations of energy supply, for unlike a computer, which could switch off and then come back to its original state once powered on, consciousness could not be preserved in the complete absence of energy. So while the mundane aspects of life were nearly eliminated, there was an ongoing element of quiet desperation. It involved harnessing energy and keeping up a complex infrastructure. Things continued this way for over a century.
Then a new era began. Deep research enabled it, aided by deep collaboration. New things were now possible through the richness and speed of communication and shared knowledge. The research funneled humanity in a new direction, still influenced at the quark level. At that point, the interaction and guiding hand of sub-atomic consciousness was still not understood. But as the research and experimentation delivered new insights into the workings of matter at the most fundamental level, the connection of humanity with quarks became first philosophical and then quickly theoretical. It explained so much and it also revealed a new path forward.
Humanity had once been independent individuals - islands of consciousness. Then to some extent, these islands coalesced through the use of common resources. They essentially shared a physical network and thus developed new ways to connect and interact. But the future involved once again separating physically, yet retaining and in fact greatly enhancing connection and collaboration.
As Lola switched off her human body simulation, she was once again back to reality. To an observer, her physical form stood in stark contrast with her former, exotic, biological self. She was opaque and slightly metallic in appearance, a small geometric form almost precisely the size and shape of a sugar cube. The small cube moved rapidly through deep space, but to anyone within the same reference frame, it simply floated. This was mankind’s greatest technological achievement.
The creation of the new human body coincided with and was essentially enabled by the discovery of the deep connections to humanity’s fundamental building blocks, the conscious entities residing within quarks. Once this connection was made, the sum of all knowledge of the universe was now laid before humanity to consider. Problems, challenges and questions of the times were now completely abandoned as mundane, pointless artifacts. The last vestiges of humanity’s origins.
Now, the goals and questions posed by quarks and humans became one. The synergy was the key to progress, just as originally postulated by the first Quarkian pioneer centuries earlier. The emergent would be the provider of engineered technology allowing the universe to be probed and tested in ways that would reveal new truths beyond the boundaries of their “octave.”
But the first order of business was to once again liberate the emergents, setting the humans free to do what they always did best - manipulate and alter the nature that surrounded them. Thus far, humans were free to move as it were, but not in the universe, only within the confines of their engineered computing environment. They experienced the world vicariously through the machines they controlled, giving them the sensory inputs they needed to continue to build, maintain, explore and even find recreation and entertainment. That was now an old paradigm.
Through their new embodiment, humans were now masters of the universe. Lola and the rest, understood completely, their own inner workings, at least to the limits of what Quarkians understood. This was a first in the universe. And now there would be no reason to engage other races in other galaxies, looking for new ideas or new ways forward. The Quarkians had achieved their dream through the re-engineering of humanity.
The sugar cube sized protohuman body was a marvel. At the moment of inception, the initial protohuman body had many times more computing power than all of humanity. The shape itself was selected over a sphere, and this was to create greater anisotropy within the surrounding vacuum and sub vacuum. This was essential for movement and interaction according to free will, and not governed mostly by the rules of nature, as were quarks. In fact, the protohuman was modeled after a proton in some respects, but simply “improved.”
The outer shell of the cube was comprised of sandwiched layers, billions of them. They alternated between Planck membranes which were mono layers of EMs and mono layers of so called cosmic clay material. That is to say, layers of EM’s with and without their energetic components. This structure was constantly created at the cube outer surface and consumed at the inner surface.
Moving inward, the bulk of the internal volume was comprised of a nanoscale graphene lattice, like a neural network, filled with liquid Gallium. The Gallium formed a bulk medium, along with Aluminum. Through coordinated action, the quarks within the lattice and the bulk could change elements to suit the requirements. Carbon could transform to Boron or Nitrogen. And Aluminum supplied the requirements for Silicon, Phosphorous or Sulfur. Finally, Gallium supplied the basis for Copper, Zinc, Germanium, Arsenic or Selenium.
On sub-picosecond scales, the materials could organize and dynamically restructure for any purpose. At the very core was a spheroid of liquid Mercury, which was mainly to add mass for the purpose of creating better energy flow into the system. But the Mercury was frequently called upon to supply small amounts of Gold if required. Hence, in only needing a small list of materials, the basis for ultra dense computing power was enabled. Even more, the speed at which the entire computing architecture could be changed allowed every conceivable capability to be served, from propulsion, to navigation, to simulation, to communication and of course, entertainment.
Like all those of her generation, Lola was physically a loner, but she was never alone. Her persona was spread over many thousands of copies of herself that she alone fabricated as a routine part of her existence. This was her necessary action in keeping with the fundamental law of survival. It eliminated a single point of failure and allowed her to spread herself far and wide, to study many things simultaneously.
The reproduction process was practical, but more than that, it overcame a hurdle. Despite Lola’s technically astounding new form, she was still bounded by the speed of light. The ability to explore the edges of the universe with Earth as the original point of origin was futile, if all one could muster was sub-light speed. But Lola and her contemporaries were endowed with a remarkable innovation that was developed together with the Quarkians.
Protohumans could communicate at sub vacuum speeds. With this capability, they would transmit by sub vacuum, a hologram, to whatever point in the universe they desired. It was normally sent to a planet with liquid water. Many of these waters would have at least traces of all elements required for the complete replication of some number of copies.
Next, with the holographic blueprint in place, guided by inputs from the local Quarkians and submerged in water, the quarks would cooperate allowing useful atoms to become incorporated into this holographic blueprint. Once the complete structure was built up, atom by atom, Lola would transmit a copy of her consciousness through the sub vacuum as well, and she would come alive in a far distant place. In essence, the need to travel faster than light became unnecessary.
Using this method, all Protohumans scattered themselves to the far reaches of the universe, with particular focus on locations containing unknowns.
For example, one of her diasporas encountered and learned about Strangelets. Some of Lola’s copies were destroyed in the process. But not before providing never before understood truths about Strange Matter. There were a few cases like this, where the situation of the quarks involved was so dire, that they were cutoff from the rest of reality and even the general populous of Quarkians did not have a complete picture. This was where protohumans became the active agents to uncover many mysteries.
Even starting at the most remote planets, Lola and others needed to travel great distances to arrive at the Universe’s outer limits, or other points of interest. For this, Protohumans were enabled with near light-speed propulsion capability. They used the outer monolayers of EMs, alternating with the “cosmic clay” to create a propulsion effect. Some of the incoming EMs supplying energy, would be separated into clay and energy in the outer rings. The protohuman could control the location of the ejection of clay across its entire surface area, as this clay was not needed. With the ability to eject the clay in an unbalanced manner, the cube could be propelled quickly and efficiently in any direction. Although the cube’s mass was small, the propulsion effect was weak. Still, over a period of years, the cube could gather speed and achieve over ninety nine percent of light speed.
While all of it was remarkable and interesting and captivated all protohumans to do their best for the sake of reaching the ultimate understanding, there was still much learn. One thing that was only of passing interest, was the exploration of life on other planets. This alien life was invariably less sophisticated than protohumanity. Lola pondered her past and wondered if there had been visitors to earth back in her time. Unlikely. For as far as anyone knew, there were no other species to achieve what humanity now had. Protohumans who were interested in studying primitive life were able to go to such planets and adopt the physical forms of any local material in appearance. It could be an emergent creature or plant or something non-emergent like a rock, or water or even air. This was an interesting way to do research.
Many centuries after the disappearance of humans on Earth, Lola returned to take a look, for old time’s sake. Being the oldest human to cross over, she had more human character than most others. She became sentimental some times. And her last visit to Earth was sad in a way. The skylines in the large urban centers had nearly given themselves back to nature. In fact the most preserved structures were still those constructed of Roman concrete, whose secrets even modern science and engineering had never quite unlocked completely. The rest looked as if all traces of humanity were being composted. As the process unfolded, humanity’s dominance was of course long gone. Yet, some other creatures had survived and now they were starting to thrive in this rebirth of a world. Remarkably, even some humans had survived, having taken refuge in deep shelters. But this was the humanity of old, and Earth was once again the mother, nourishing and giving all of herself to a new wave of emergence.
The End
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