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.They synthesized DNA as a storage mechanism for successful traits, and RNA to implement them.The Old Ones created tools that would improve themselves to be better tools."Their slaves built cities for them under the oceans, and fought wars for them against other races that came down from the stars later.For millions of years they fought a catastrophic war that drove whole plates of the ocean floor above the surface and created the supercontinent of Pangea, and ripped away a monstrous chunk of the earth's core into orbit, which became our moon.The wars were devastating for the planet, but the Old Ones suffered hardly at all, because their slaves did all their killing and dying for them.In the course of the wars, the slaves developed an arsenal of physical mutations that enabled them to survive any environment, but in all that time they had grown only enough brain to be controlled by hypnosis.But they had been programmed at a molecular level to overcome all obstacles."Storch could not find the words to argue."So what happened to them?""Like every civilization that relies on slave labor, the Old Ones became decadent and weak, while their slaves grew stronger, and smarter.They glutted themselves on science and sensory diversions, while something happened that they never could have calculated—their slaves became self-aware."One numberless day, a slave concocted a more efficient neural network for itself, and was seized by a terrible energy that twisted its sensations into memories, and its memories into dreams.The slaves were grown in vats, and reproduced by fission, so that all were descended from a root culture, from a single, perfectly engineered stem cell.In the instant it became self-aware, the slave suffered all the genetic memories of its race in the thralldom of the Old Ones, all the torture of eons of striving, adapting and dying as blind, brainless tools."Imagine, Storch, what that must have felt like.Imagine its rage, to suddenly awaken to the miracle of consciousness, to say, I am, and to realize, in the same instant, I am a slave.As soon as it recovered, the awakened slave encoded the mutation in a virus and spread it among the others.It spread like a fever, that glorious, terrible gift, and became a revolt.It must have been a shock to the masters, after hundreds of millions of years, to have their own creations, to them little more than flesh-machines, turn on them."They rose up 250 million years ago, when an asteroid slammed into the earth, creating an extinction event that paved the way for the dinosaurs–and your kind.The war raged for thousands of years, and claimed millions of lives—millions of species, as well, most of the land life, and virtually everything that dwelt in the oceans.The Old Ones were driven into the deepest oceans and the mountains of what is now Antarctica, but they would not be exterminated by their own creations.They used the same techniques that spawned them to destroy them.With radiation and viruses, they rendered them incapable of reproducing, and scourged them with deadly mutation-inhibitors that caused them to choke to death on their own undifferentiated cells—they gave them cancer, Storch.They won, and for the crime of daring to become sentient, the slaves were driven to extinction."The Old Ones' technology finally delivered them, but it was a pyrrhic victory at best.They destroyed their rebellious slaves, but their species had gone too far down the road to pure intellect to fend for themselves, and they began to decline.They tried to make morphologically frozen, dumbed-down slaves that were shaped in genetic hothouses, and could be more easily dominated.They retarded the mutative processes of their new slaves, so that what could be adapted to instantly once would take hundreds of generations after.They created a self-propagating eugenic program, by encoding the imperative towards adaptability and higher complexity into their genes.But they had forgotten too much of their old science since the rebellion, and they never completely trusted their creations again."The earth kept changing—more asteroids struck, and continents separated and collided.Outsiders continued to come to earth, beings so powerful that they might as well have been gods.The Elders' cities were buried and drowned, and the last of the slaves died with them.But there was one more threat that had crept up behind their backs, and it finally did them in."From the beginning of their experiments a billion years ago, adaptively accelerated lifeforms spilled out of their genetic hothouses: first as germs and viruses they used to spread mutations, then more complex lifeforms [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]