Update as of January 1st, 2016: I received the Rising Tide expansion for Civ: Beyond Earth for Christmas. As part of my one-year anniversary as an official member of FanFiction, I decided to re-edit my Civ: Beyond Earth fics to include material from the expansion. I also took the opportunity to fix the grammar and structure of those stories. They were among my first and needed some improvements in those respects. Also, a reviewer, ChocoloateTeapot, who now betareads my Civ stories, pointed out a few things that I got wrong with the original. I took the opportunity to fix those. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy version 2.0!
The Progenitors' Great Mistake
Set within the infinite universe is a small planet orbiting a medium-sized yellow star. The planet is normal in that it's a relatively large sphere of rock consisting of many various minerals and elements. It has an atmosphere of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and other gases as well as oceans of a transparent liquid known as H2O. Like a few other worlds scattered across this galaxy, it even has plant and animal life living in its seas, on its land, and even under its surface.
What makes this world truly unusual is a species that stands upright on its rearmost limbs. One of the things that separate this creature from its fellow lifeforms is that it possesses a characteristic that the rest of them don't have. Creatures with this characteristic are rare across the stars. They are complicated; a living, breathing mass of contradictions. They are intelligent, yet stupid at times. Their creations are only equal to the destruction they can wreak. They love and yet can hate. They are capable of great good and terrible evil. They are sentient.
The first outward manifestation of their sentience is a pinpoint of light that's only visible on the night side of the planet. This light is a massive city with a tower that points to the heavens. Citizens barter in its street, soldiers drill in the fields, and priests worship in the temples. Peace and prosperity reign supreme in this city of technological and artistic wonders. Its inhabitants call it the "Eternal City," and that's exactly what it looks like.
Sadly, it's not to last. Tensions grow within the city and all it takes is a spark to create an inferno. The first great civilization of this planet is torn to shreds and its former citizens flee all across the planet. Much knowledge and culture is lost, and the Eternal City is left to the few that remain. Eventually, those who fled either settle down and begin building their own versions of their original civilization, or degrade into barbarism.
These new civilizations create their own wonders of technology, art, architecture, and engineering. Some aren't as great as the wonders of the Eternal City, while others surpass it by far. Some are the best of allies and the worst of enemies, and this changes often. Periods of peace are interspaced with times of war. The wars are fought for many reasons: Religion, land, slaves, mates, money, old rivalries, new slights, etc.
A cycle begins amongst these "empires." A single nation arises to dominate the immediate area around it for a few hundred years, only to collapse underneath its own weight and have another take its place. The succeeding nation takes up where the last one left off in terms of progress and power. This cycle continues for thousands of years. As each new power discovers newer and better methods of transportation, more land and nations are discovered. Lands ruled by barbaric tribes are easy pickings for the more advanced nations. Colonization of the new-found territories leads to the rise of new nations in the former homes of the savage tribes.
The march of technology continues, and both the standard of living and the casualties of war increase with it. All fields of science advance beyond what any of the generations before the one enjoying them could've believed. Transportation, weaponry, communications, electronics, and medicine reach all new heights as new secular and religious ideas take hold.
Things change all the time on this world, but never at this rate. The tensions between the empires result in wars on a scale that have never been seen before. As the more tyrannical states fall, a desire for peace comes forth. Tensions remain however, and so new avenues of competition are explored.
One of these is simply astounding; the creation of a vehicle that can reach escape velocity and fly through the vacuum of space to other astronomical bodies. However, due to the plentiful resources of the planet and no real desire to leave their homeworld, the sentients merely send their best to land on the other bodies in their star system and then return to their planet. That's soon to change, sorrowfully.
Nations realize that there is power, peace, and prosperity in joining together. Close alliances give birth to new empires, and so the number of nation-states goes from a few hundred to less than a dozen. Enemies size each other up and decide to wait for a better time to strike.
It's during this time that new agents of chaos, terrorists, start coming out of the wood-work. Each organization has a different ideology and cause, but they all have one thing in common: They will do whatever it takes to get what they want. The atrocities committed by these groups shock a generation used to peace and prosperity, a generation that doesn't remember the horrors of the wars that once gripped their world. Life continues, however, as it always has.
In the most advanced of the empires, a scientist creates something that's truly revolutionary; a hugely complex organic molecule with the ability to cause single-point mutations in an organism.
Give a group of individuals this substance with the right conditions, and those same individuals would develop a new trait that they would later pass on to their offspring. This invention/discovery, kept secret from the populace, sparks a planet-wide controversy within secret laboratories amongst respected scientists and in clandestine meetings between government officials. Some wish to boycott and ban the "mass" entirely, while others see the chance to jumpstart their race to the next stage of their evolution, along with those who stand in between the extremes.
What one terrorist leader sees is a chance to take what he wants: The world. He steals the scientist's research and kidnaps him, forcing him to mass-produce the goo to weaponize it. Despite the best efforts of this world's intelligence agencies, this terrorist organization is able to hide the scientist and themselves until the moment comes to strike.
In each of the planet's major cities, a powerful bomb, with the mass as its fuel, is set. The idea is simple: with the leaders and militaries of the planet's most powerful empires mutating out of control, taking over once the organic chemical has dissipated will be too easy.
It works, all too well. The governments are all caught in surprise as the bombs explode, sending a fine mist of DNA-altering gunk through their cities, into the surrounding countryside, and into the atmosphere.
Within minutes, hundreds of millions of innocent beings, sentient and otherwise, cry out as each individual becomes his or her own species. The genetic code of those closest to the bombs that managed to survive the initial blast diverges wildly, turning them into bizarre caricatures of their former selves.
What the terrorists didn't count on was the miasma. Supercharged with the energy from the bombs, the mass also produces a fine mist. Consisting mainly of an odd spore, the miasma is deadly to those who are exposed to it. It also corrodes metal at an incredibly fast rate. It sweeps over the surface of the planet, killing far more than the mass mutates, including those that created the bomb.
Those that survive flee either to the domed cities or to the wilderness. With the mass and the miasma at bay, the survivors breathe a collective sigh of relief. What they don't know is that the nightmare is only beginning.
The mass has been blasted into both the planet's crust and its atmosphere. The rocks themselves develop a bizarre kind of DNA, and when they touch the mutating plant life, a reaction begins. The plants become gigantic nerve endings and the surface of the world, on the microscopic level, starts to resemble an organic brain. It spreads throughout the planet's surface and its core. A year after the attacks, the surviving sentients notice very small earthquakes on their sensors. What's odd is that the mini-quakes happen on equal intervals and are rhythmic, just like a heartbeat….
Finally, two years after the attacks, or the "Changing" as it's called, the mass and the miasma settles down enough to allow the beings to come out of their shelters. Out of the billions that lived before, only one billion sentients remain now. The mutations have stabilized, and there are now a lot of new species to study, a few of them sentients turned into animals.
What's interesting is that instead of killing these new animals, the miasma does the opposite and can heal them. This new phenomenon can wait to be studied.
The survivors mourn their dead and the mutated, and rejoice at their survival. No sooner is their guard down, then it happens. Deep within the planet, something stirs, shifts, and then…it awakens.
It feels the warmth of the star and the cool of the oceans. It hears the high winds, the roaring surf, the noises of singing animals, and the rejoicing of the people. It can see through the eyes of every living thing altered by the mass. And it's all too much. With the indignant rage of an infant born into the world against its will, the planet screams and a world ends.
A superorganism, newly born and created from the mass of a planet, can only express its displeasure with its new existence through one outlet: Destruction. The rejoicing turns to screaming as the land ripped apart by new volcanos, large earthquakes, and massive tsunamis. The new organisms go completely berserk, turning on each other and any sentient unfortunate enough to be in their path.
The remaining scientific and political minds of the sentients realize that now the only way their species is going to live is to leave. By working together and utilizing what resources they have left, massive ships to bear them to a new home are built; lifeboats worthy of a planet-sized ship.
One million beings are able to flee the enraged planet. A blueprint for an interstellar beacon is left behind in the ruins of some of the cities, so that any civilization created by survivors of the awakened planet will be able to call for help. Decades after the ships leave the star system, the planet calms down, and so does its surface and animal life.
The ecological changes are extreme, to say the least. The entire face of the planet has transformed. Huge craters and canyons carve up its surface. Bunches of fungi have replaced the diverse jungles and forests. From deep within its core, the planet vomited up both exotic and normal minerals. Basalt is common across the world's surface now.
What's new are two bizarre minerals deposited all over the planet's continents. One is an orangeish material that resembles a strange flower. The other is a purple-veined rock that, thanks to its odd magnetic properties and the planet's strong magnetic field, floats above the surface.
Geothermal vents are a usual sight as well. Lakes of the mass, the agent behind everything, that now seep up through the crust like petroleum, which is also much more plentiful thanks to the destructive, tectonic forces. Organic nests form over the lakes of goo, housing the new fauna. The mass serves as a food source for some, and an agent of mutation for all (occasionally). The miasma is back as well, floating out of the mass like steam from boiling water.
Out of all the divergent lifeforms that exploded over the world after the Changing, eleven have killed off the unstable species and become the most prevalent lifeforms: The drone, the manticore, the raptor bug, the sea dragon, the wolf beetle, the siege worm, the hydracoral, the makara, the ripper, the scarab, and the kraken, as they will come to be known.
By now, the once dominating rulers of the planet have been reduced to the mere thousands. They either travel across the planet as nomadic tribes or hide within what's left of their once-proud cities. They forget everything they once were and resort to anything in order to survive, including cannibalism. They even sacrifice their own offspring to idols in an attempt to please the angry Earth God.
After a few thousand years of this, a single elderly being stands in the gates of the once Eternal City. He stares off into the sunset, exhales, and then topples over, dead. No one comes to mourn or bury him. He was the last of his kind on the planet.
The planet itself went into a state of semi-sleep once its "tantrum" was over. It dreams of the time it awoke and the destruction it created. The strange, screaming things on the outside of its crust weren't even a nuisance. It hardly thinks of them at all. As the animals sleep in their nests, it reaches into their minds and sees their memories, storing them for the generations that will follow. The sun, moons, and stars wheel overhead, the oceans lap at the shores, the animals live their lives, and the planet sleeps. Here and there is a ruin or the gigantic skeleton of a mutant that was killed off years ago. All is peaceful.
A thousand years after the death of the last sentient lifeform on the planet, strange lights appear in the night sky. They resemble shooting stars but they don't wink out, and they appear night after night. Also, strange things like meteorites fall from the sky and land on the continents. Some of them, judging by the damage they've suffered, were never meant to land on the planet, while others are odd things that stick straight up towards the sky like a tree without branches. A few are simply gigantic. The planet barely notices them; they're just strange meteorites to it. Yet, they're to be incredibly important very soon.
A few years later, a lone raptor bug feeds on its downed prey, a wormlike creature. The wind blows gently on the grass and the nearby hills, the nearby surf adding its music. The bug bites a chunk off the carcass and looks around. It's quiet, too quiet. Somehow, the bug knows that that happens just before something big occurs. As it chews its mouthful, its sensitive ears pick something up, something that's straight up. It looks in that direction and spies a second sun in the sky.
A moment later, its instincts tell it to run, and to run hard. It leaves its prey behind and sprints across the field as fast as it can. The small murmur from whatever it is becomes a deafening roar, and the light becomes strong enough to cast a strong shadow on the ground. The bug keeps running. The wind from the falling thing and the sudden heat on its back drives it harder. Sensing that's it's about to be crushed or fried, the bug leaps…
And misses getting killed by a full half-meter. As the dust from the landing settles, the bug wobbly gets to its feet and looks back at whatever it is. It's huge and glowing red from its descent. Tired of huge, falling objects that ruin meals, the bug snorts and runs off at a much slower pace.
Moments later, a hatch opens and a two-legged, upright creature walks out of the offending object. It studies the footprints left on the ground from the bug and reaches to its head. "Command, we've got footprints here. And they're definitely alien." And so a species that calls itself humanity comes to this world.
More of them arrive, fleeing from a "Great Mistake." Some of them hunt and kill the wildlife, while others leave them be. They build structures and begin harvesting the resources. The planet studies them lazily and passes the information onto succeeding generations of animals, telling them how to act toward the different groups of these "humans."
The humans explore and expand across the world's continents and oceans, naming things as they go. The green gunk is named "xenomass," the orange mineral is called "firaxite," and the magnetic rocks are designated "floatstone." They call the animals "aliens," even though they are the true aliens. They discover the ruins and anything left over the former rulers of the world. They call them "the Progenitors."
The half-awake world just looks them over and stays still, for now.
Within a few of the ruins, humans discover the blueprint for the beacon. It's so old and broken-down that that they call it "the Signal." Whatever happens, whether one of the factions takes over the others, or one of them complete the goals of their "affinity," someone will break the code and build the beacon, telling the Progenitors that their old home is safe once again, and that a new species has entered the galactic community.
THE END
Well, I hope you all enjoyed the Rising Tides adjustment. I didn't really change that much, but I prefer my fics to stick to the original canon as much as possible. Feel free to leave a review or PM me with your thoughts. To all my readers, Happy New Year and happy writing!