NaNoWriMo Worldbuilding #1

[beccastareyes]

A Brief History of the World 2000 to today
by Melody Hartmann

All right, here's the deal. Someone set me up to explain the world. Here goes.

So, at the end of the 20th century, the Cold War is over with the United States of America as a power. Europe has started to organize into the European Union, the Middle East is playing a disproportionate role in everyone's politics thanks to the presence of a large stock of petroleum under it, and China and India are starting to consider challenging the USA.

The second space era -- the first being the period of Apollo and Mariner -- had a long lead-up, with a push into unmanned spaceflight by the USA and EU, the start of commercial launch facilities and China and India starting their own manned space programs. Mars became a sort of Holy Grail for the new space race, since it tested so many things -- could people really live on a place where they couldn't just zip down to Earth if there was a problem? A Mars colony would be the first place to build a self-sufficient base outside of Earth. Plus, it would exceed what the USA did in Apollo -- two people on the moon for under a month, and folks spending a year in low orbit. Of course, the USA, desperate to keep itself relevant in a century that was deciding it didn't need the superpowers of the last, signed on to keeping up with the neighbors. And the EU offered to help the USA.

So, we had several settlements on Mars -- China, India, Japan, the EU and the USA, with a couple of foreign nationals working there. They were mostly scientists, engineers and military personnel. The best someone who wasn't particularly educated or talented could do was a trip to low orbit -- and then only if they were important or rich. And outside of Mars and Earth space, there were only unmanned mining scouts moving around Near-Earth space looking for asteroids to build interplanetary spaceship and satellite hulls out of.

Anyway, back on Earth, people continued to mess with computers. All kinds of things -- fusion, quantum computers, and so on -- continued to be ten years off.

I'm not really sure who funded the bugs -- the first ones, I mean. Whoever it was, did it for ideological reasons, and no one really wants to take credit for them. And now, I suppose I'm gonna have to explain what the bugs were. Think of nanomachines -- a bit of memory space, some ability to build things, ability to make light and electrical signals, and a tiny motor to move around, all cell-sized. They aren't really that impressive, save for the ability to get into the human body, fool the immune system, and to network together. The only thing hard-coded into the bugs is the ability to locate and exchange signals with nearby bugs. Actually, they work a lot like cells, come to think about it, except they can go from 'single-cell' mode to multi-cellular mode easily. Meaning, if you get a bunch of them together in a small area, they start specializing. Especially if you tell them a mission.

(Linguistic note: the word 'bug' has shifted from meaning things like 'insect' and 'microbe' (a cold bug) to refer to a nanomachine that can and does interact with biological life.)

Anyway, no one really remembers who invented the bugs. Some folks say it was an Abrahamic sect, the kind that had this belief that God was going to carry them off at the end of the world; that rather than ending the world, they just following God's orders to make the Rapture. Or a Dharmic sect tryign to unify themselves with the universe. Some say it was the transhumans who were trying to create the next stage of human evolution by shedding our bodies. Like I said, no one wants to take credit for this, and the bugmakers left with the rest of the people.

Whatever happened, someone created the bugs, released them, and the first the rest of the world knew about was a strange dream asking them if they wanted to go on a trip to the stars. Most of the accounts I've read can't put it into words without making it sound surreal. Dreams are like that, even the kind created by bugs. Some people agreed, some didn't. For the people that didn't agree -- well, they were left alone. For the people who did -- well, here we're jsut guessing. It's not like you can get a coherent account of what the bugs were supposed to do. All we on Earth ever found was a pile of starches and chalk and gas that once was a human body. I imagine that the bugs didn't kill them, that part of the procedure was to make a copy of their consciousness onto the bugs' memory. Unfortunatly, it's not like we can ask the bugmakers, since they were the first people who did this to themselves.

Anyways, the next step was to get the bugs to orbit, then use the fact they are pretty tiny to use light pressure to send them onto the stars. Now their their passengers are so much data, I suppose they could have just used a radio beam, but that would need a decoder at the other end if you didn't just want to be lost, suspended, between the stars. We've never found aliens advanced enough to make a radio telescope. Or, or that matter, agriculture. Apparently the answer to Fermi's Paradox is that intelligent, tool-using aliens don't exist in our part of the Milky Way. Planets with life on them are common enough, but the Earth had complex land life for hundreds of millions of years before humans developed.

The bugs were programmed with that in mind. What would happen when they got somewhere with life, was that the bugs would land, and the first thing they'd build was a core -- a sort of repository of bugs that stored technological information. Everything you'd need to build a civilization in a hurry. A couple of places still have these cores around. Kemaryn does, but whatever the bugs were trying to do there failed, just like the Darynese colonization attempt later. Usually once the civilization was on its feet, the core would disassemble.

Second step was to start an accelerated case of genentic engineering to make something out of the local life enough to hold a human consciousness. Most of these places you can tell it happened. On Earth, there are transitional forms -- you get things like lemurs and monkeys and apes and humans. And, if you dig around, there's plenty of fossils to fill in the gaps. On a planet like Beacon or Daryn where the bugs were sent, there's nothing that looks remotely like a human, until you get to the Starsailors or the Darynese, which look a lot like one.

I don't know why the bugs were so put up to make a new container for their passengers that wasn't a bug or a computer. If some of the theories about the Dyson Clouds is correct, most of those were also remenants of the bugs dumping their passengers into computers, rather than biological bodies. Maybe it was an artifact of the bugmakers -- they thought a body close enough to human was the best.

Anyway, so this happened. Meanwhile, back in the Solar System, Earth had suddenly lost a good deal of its population. While it was probably good for the ecosystem to suddenly not have to support as many people, it wasn't so good for human civilization missing a lot of people needed to maintain things. Furthermore, a lot of the people who disappeared were disproportionately the poor and disenfranchised who really were unhappy with being at the bottom, and a lot of the educated who dreamed of the stars. Problem is, if you take out a lot of the bottom of a pyramid, the entire thing collapses. So, the bugs managed to do what the Nuclear Age and Anthropogenic Climate Change didn't. Mars wasn't so happy with this either -- it wasn't quite self-sufficient back then, and a lot of the Martians were afraid that they'd all die, as the last bastion of human culture.

The couple of Mars colonies banded together. That's also where a lot of the reproduction laws come from, trying to balance keeping the population up and genetically stable with not expanding so fast that they run out of food or air or space.

Since one of my parents was Martian, I'm going to go into details here. Mama ??? says it was because some of the colonists were Chinese and had grown up with population laws that were a lot stricter and a lot of people were pretty scared that the laws passed. Anyway, there was a rule that each birth had to have two different parents -- so if a woman concieved a child with a man, she had to pick a second man to father her next child. There were also a lot of incentives to limit yourself to two or three biological kids, and to have at least one child, even if you adopted it out. Pair marriages started around now as a way of incorporating monofidelity with the new laws.

So, a pair marriage is four people -- usually either two opposite-sex or same-sex couples, though ones that can't be broken down like that, like my family, happen as well -- that agree to have kids together and help raise them. That way, you can have four kids, each with a different sire-and-dam combination, and there's less fighting over custody. I think some people also tried other polygamous relationships, but pair marriages really caught on. Especailly since a lot of the folks left family on Earth that were suddenly a lot harder to get to or even talk to, and there was suddenly a need for day care on Mars.

It's also the reason that there's kind of a look... a race, that's the word... for Martians, at least the old Martians who date from before the return of space travel. Something that isn't quite Indian, or East Asian, or European but looks like a combination of all of them. Culture's a lot like that too.

Pretty much everything human was trying to recreate civilization -- which is why the bugmakers aren't spoken of fondly. If you accidentally casued global civilization to collapse because you didn't think things through, people are going to not remember you kindly. Some people even use it as a means to be angry at non-Solars, since it was their ancestors that left us. A few even resent the Martians, even if the Martians were just as stranded as the Terrans and it was Martian crews who helped evacuate Near-Earth space down to the planet, trapping themselves on Earth in the process. Then again, some Martians resent the Terrans since the bugmakers were Terran. Just saying -- there are some bars, where you can start a fight by mentioning things.

Most probably, if humans hadn't discovered the bubble drive, no one would have given the non-Solars a second thought. Speed of light is a pretty hard delay on having a conversation with someone. On Mars, you can manage a conversation with 8 minute pauses on a good time of the year, and 40 minutes at a bad time. Still, you can still email folks on Earth, if you don't mind paying through the nose -- even at the worst of it, Mars and Earth still spoke to one another. On the other hand, you had to wait 9 years if you wanted a message back on Beacon, and that was assuming someone out on Beacon was listening.

So, until the bubble drive came around, no one knew what was going on as the bugs traveled out, and that humanlike civilizations were springing up around the stars near Earth, thanks to the knowledge that came with the bugs. Humans managed a trip out to Beacon just as the Starsailors were starting to put things into orbit, and spotted the automated probe. That was maybe a century ago. Most people alive nowadays never grew up not knowing that we had met the aliens and they are us. Some new colonies, started on places that either the bugs never went to or that they never too hold on, have started up. I'd say maybe one human-habitable planet in 5 has something like a nonsolar settlement, with maybe another one in ten with a failed spot. There are also plenty of planets worth terraforming.

So, that's roughly where things stand. Interstellar travel isn't that cheap, still, so most trade happens in information or DNA. Unless you're a diplomat or rich, making a trip outside your home system is pretty exceptional -- a colonist might send their kids back to Earth for school, but taking courses remotely is a lot cheaper.

As for me, I grew up on Nemea, which is a new colony -- my grandparents were some of the founding members. I was sent back to Sol system for schooling, as was my aunt before me. Both of us ended up staying there. Rihg tnow, I work as a journalist -- thanks to my ability to pick up languages, I have a leg up as a foreign correspondant, which means I can travel a lot more than is normal. Which suits me just fine, even if it means I'm overworked and underpaid.

--

Author's note

For those of you who remember Melody from my comic, her backstory has changed. She's become a fully-human character from a mixed Starsailor/Human* family.

* Or whatever I decide to call normal humans. After all, all the nonsolars were created under human direction and have human minds (or as close as you can get with alien brains). Terran would be interesting, but Martians are pretty common as their own race as legitamate as Hispanics. On the other hand, Mars human population dates to the colonization of Mars from Earth. Solars might be more correct, but I can't see it catching on.