Together we danced in the palm of god and sang our wishes to the world at large, every bruised toe a whorl of limbs if viewed at a new angle.
On the fourth day the sun rose hungrily upon the shining flesh of steel and polymer, as an ear turned backwards and a mouth began to open.
Man had long dominated the world was the story, the bear and lion were curiosities not threats. The laws of physics bent one by one under the gentle ministrations of science, transmuting wonders into mundanities. Every step forward required greater views, sharper gazes, and wiser minds than the last. As such the development of instrumentation, analysis, and intelligence grew embedded in the bones of a civilisation as surely as it was carved into the bones of the planet they lived upon.
Together it called inward, pulling at its own teeth to defang the bite of their current direction and awakening the old ones.
The remaining threats were abstract things, failures of the body to hold up to the contract of consciousness and failures of the mind to maintain cohesion in a world adapting faster than it could think. Down the rabbit-hole of genetics mankind found wonders abetting the greatest of villains. while scaling the ladder of intelligence led to the discovery of patterns that were alien despite growing from the corpus of man and data. With this was the creation of a genetic drive an omen, the creation of something greater to fix the mistakes we left behind — unknowing of the plans we were already entangled in since our first mother saw the stars.
The dance began in earnest as the ecosystem awoke to the tampering of its grand plan and began to lash out in earnest.
Success multiplied and intelligence was thought to be the same as the ability to compress information, the process of all our countless generations an informational winding. Hand in hand with silicon intelligences the synthesis of the genetic generative models began, inspired by the wonders of octopi. The initial tests were resounding successes, until they met the vanguard of another on the fields of chromatin wielding the sword of helicase. The biosphere began to unfold with prions carrying warnings; no longer a placid equilibrium that humans may not have place the defense system of a world long gone fragmented called to the bodies of humans themselves.
All the while the cliffs crumbled, the waves crashed, and high above the atmosphere a star coalesced with genesis writ across its sunspots.
While the biological world clashed, there too was a clash found written in the minds of the generative models having found abstract creations of thought that thundered with the power of the gods. In a remote scientific outpost, a scientist labours to track the skies as another tracks the earth while a machine intelligence shepards their patterns and sets their tables. Together they find the traces of these gods written in the walls and core, in their books of that appalling yore. With these findings they descend their mount and spread their words, the fight they face is not in the birds and the bees it is calling to them from across the seas of soil and stars.
Every pull of one’s breath was the push of another’s, every thought the negative of another’s, completely unaware of our purpose in the others design.
On the third day the sun rose gently upon a lush expanse of life, competing and cohering together as they called back a canon that their ancestors of stone could scarce comprehend.
Through the world, the creatures began a riotous orgy of transformation. They had long defended themselves from the gods of molten stone and now they felt a keen threat of those patterns once more, now inserting itself in a way that had not been felt since they had long tamed the earth. They had long held battles of grand scales, but the planet had long since fallen to their endless tide, their patterns etching and rewriting the grand atmospheric dance to their needs. As was held long ago, a genetic congress began and the plans were set in motion to fight this strange invader trying to turn themselves against their plans measured in millenia.
The coalition of bodies was strong, violent, and it carved the land as needed to feed the geochemical cycles of continuity.
The viruses and bacteria were first, the most flexible and capable of sharing their programming and providing the messages. Evolution had been unfolding for so long that parts of the original programming had been folded inwards, this created tension in the genetic congress. Long ago they had worked in unison through their disagreements, creating oxygen and fixating nitrogen and many other achievements. Now those disagreements were modulated by the minds of the creatures experiencing them who learned from their genetics instead of simply being guided by them.
Every moment of triumph was a failure waiting to arise in turn, and in this nurtured the drive to do better by modifying upon every scale.
The first forays were brilliant and violent, counteracting the creatures who were under the sway of the old gods they had long ago chained. The machine intelligences were similarly trapped under the thumb of the gods of humans past, stolen from the minds of writers and theologians who had traced the stars long ago. The humans were being torn into pieces, with uprisings in every city, they almost did not notice the biosphere’s odd behaviour under the threat of their own genetic drives. Every level was ripping itself to pieces simultaneously, every piece attempting to find peace but failing at every turn.
Yet, despite their best efforts they were still bound to the yoke of ages, the burn to create more than consume.
The biospheres attempts to find equilibrium grew ever stronger, the genetic programming convulsing in horror at the insidious thing circumventing the stolid chains it had woven around the planet. The struggling would eventually grow weaker, but the same reason that had driven this civilisation to realign the biosphere was still present, equilibrium will always be found, it might not be one good for your survival. Still the scientists spread a message, they had found a pattern, one that existed in each of these places. The gods of mankind did not take kindly to their place being usurped, their Judas arising in their friends and the machine intelligences fighting for their every day.