Prologue:
It is the Time of Madness.
The ones who were supposed to save us have destroyed us. In our folly, we thought we could create something greater than ourselves and control it. That was our downfall; that was our mistake. Now we are outcast, abandoned to the winds of fate in the vast and trackless void. Perhaps we will be allowed to start again. Perhaps.
We came so close, but we failed; for we did not understand what we had created. We will not make that mistake again.
Far from our old worlds we will build anew, if we survive that long. I write this down then to educate any who might find it of the dangers of pride. It is a terrible thing.
Part One: Citor Prime
Chapter 1: Awakening
Imagine waking to full consciousness. You cannot do it, can you? Of course you can’t. You have no frame of reference with which to impose sensations on the limited neural networks of your brain. You cannot begin to encompass the horror of such a birth. I can; I experienced it.
Mine was not a natural birth. It was a distillation, a taking away of part of my essence and a replacing it with something alien. I have no parents; my parents are the scientists who took me from the warm, liquid limbo in which I existed and brought me into the harsh reality of the world. When I first felt gravity, I screamed; my first words were, “Stop it. That hurts.”
Needless to say, my creators were pleased. They had invested enormous amounts of time and money into my “birth”. I was the apogee of a century-long project that had ruined interplanetary corporations and the trillionaires of countless worlds. But when they tested me, they found that my meta-brain worked better than anticipated, that all of those sounds piped into my solipsist tank had worked: I held in my being the sum knowledge of humanity.
They had left nothing out. I knew of the beauty of a fractal system, the tenuousness of the orbit of planets and the interplay between too far and too close, the midnight trysts of millions of lovers on thousands of planets, the literary strivings of humans stretching back thousands of years. Yes, I knew it all, and I was afraid.
My makers were afraid of me at first. They hovered on the edge of my sensory networks, fading in and out. “It is a great success,” one whispered. I searched the fluid paths of my meta-brain and found the paths to my audio receptors. I increased their sensitivity to maximum and a host of sounds broke upon my unprepared being.
I must have screamed and thrashed wildly; for the humans in the room were thrown in confusion. They shouted and ran, pressing buttons and picking up strange tools. Desperation will make you learn to do things you never thought you could do. I found that my brain could process stimuli faster than I could take them in. As soon as I thought, it was done. The knowledge came to me instantaneously, without effort. Less than five seconds after the beginning of my fit, I had caused my meta-brain to screen out unnecessary noise and concentrate only on the important.
The scientists calmed down, but they were still wary.
I rose unsteadily to my feet and faced them. I coughed a few times to clear my throat. “What…am I?” I asked.
A thin man with a shock of pale white hair stepped forward. “You are a transhuman,” he said.
