Thus, multitudes of Subjects were produced, distorted to such an extent that even the meddling of the Qu seemed comparatively timid. Most of them were used as servants, caretakers and manual laborers. These were the lucky forms. Some sub-men were reduced to the level of cell cultures, useful only for gas exchange and waste filtering. Others were molded into completely artificial ecologies; baroque simulations that served only as entertainment. Some machines, with their still-human ambitions, took this practice into a new level and produced living works of art; doomed, one-off creatures who existed purely as biological anachronisms.
Be it as tool, slave or entertainment, Humanity narrowly held on to its biological heritage, while its Machine cousins reigned supreme for an unbelievable fifty million years.
The Bug Facer archetype, flanked by two of his twisted descendants. To his left; a phallus-bearing polydactyl, bred as a sacrificial offering in one of the many different Machine religions. To the right; a one-off work of art; designed to play its modified fingers like a set of drums while ululating the tunes of a certain pop song.
The Other Machines
Recall that despite its Galaxy-cradling might, the Machine Empire was not homogenous. It contained dozens of differing factions that did not always agree on everything, including the treatment of their downtrodden, biological Subjects.
Some Machines, over a process involving several religious, social and philosophical doctrines, began to comprehend the universality of life, and the common origin of organic and mechanical humanities. Initially such individuals lived in seclusion or withheld their beliefs from the world. They secretly engineered lineages of Subjects that could live, move and think as freely as they could. In a few memorable instances the engineers fell in love with their creations, and their martyrdom inspired other Machines to think just a little differently.
Eventually, the ideology gained enough momentum to be practiced openly in everyday life. However, the sect of Toleration soon ran into odds with their hardline, pan-mechanical rivals. The seething intolerance between the two factions finally broke when some Tolerant Machines wanted so set several worlds aside for the unrestricted development of biological life. All hell broke loose and the Machine Empire; the apparently seamless monolith of the galaxy, experienced its first short, bitter civil war.
The war did not cause any lasting damage, but it plainly illuminated one fact. The greatest entity the galaxy had ever seen was not without its problems.
The Fall of the Machines (Return of the Spacers)
In the longer run, the internal struggles of the Machine Empire just might have led to its downfall. But, there was no need to wait that long, as the Empire died a shorter, but immensely more cataclysmic death.
For a long time, the Machine and the Asteromorph Empires had been eyeing each other nervously. They hadn’t yet run into open confrontations, as the Asteromorphs kept mostly to their outer-space arks and the Machine Empire occupied the planets. In almost every inhabitable solar system of the galaxy, the same upside-down tension built up between organic beings living in the void, and machines inhabiting perfectly terrestrial worlds.
Power was evenly balanced between the two rival Empires. Moreover, this balance involved forces strong enough to destroy planets en-masse. Each side knew that any kind of war would result in mutual annihilation, and only insanity could start such a conflict.
Well, the post-civil war Empire of the Machines did go insane, in a sense. In order to divert attention from internal struggles, it needed a new enemy to consolidate its rival factions against. How unwise, that this enemy came to be the Asteromorphs.
It is unnecessary and nearly impossible to describe the carnage that followed. The conflicts lasted anywhere up to a few million years, and the resulting loss of life (both mechanical and organic) made the initial Machine Genocide seem irrelevant.
When the cosmic dust settled, the winners displayed themselves. The conquerors were the Asteromorphs, changed beyond recognition after fifty million years of continual self-perfection. Their grossly hypertrophied brains stretched out like wings on either side, and their finger-derived limbs had formed an intricate set of sails and legs. Endowed with superior technology and limitless patience, these beings almost completely destroyed the Machines, despite losing a substantial number of their own species.
The conflict also thrust the Asteromorphs into the affairs of their long-neglected human cousins. As impossible as it seemed, some of the Machines’ Subjects had survived the ordeal. Now, the Asteromorphs could no longer look away.
With the Machines gone, it was up to the Asteromorphs to clean up after them. They took up the Subjects and used their genetic heritage to populate entire planets. During this age of reconstruction, which lasted for another two million years, many Asteromorph world-builders emerged as true Gods, creating inhabited worlds almost out of scratch. Their Subjects, meanwhile, became the inheritors of a truly new, war-torn Phoenix of a Galaxy.
The Post-War Galaxy
When replenishing lost worlds, the Asteromorph gods also took measures to ensure the continued safety of their creations. The abrupt rise of the Machines had shown that unless carefully regulated, the wealth of the stars could always host a race of pan-galactic usurpers.
The Asteromorphs, watchful but ever transparent, did not want to interfere directly. Instead, they produced terrestrial versions of their own kind to regulate the galaxy. They adapted their delicate, ethereal fingers into spidery limbs, and shrunk their brains considerably to re-adjust to the rigors of gravity. The resulting sideline was stunted by Asteromorph standards, but still it produced demigods in every sense of the word.
These beings, known often as the Terrestrial Spacers or simply the Terrestrials, nurtured and controlled the development of the post-war civilizations on many planets. They acted as caretakers, prophets, kings and emperors, but also as grim reapers as the occasion dictated.
The endeavor did not always proceed as smoothly as planned, of course. Most of the time the newborn races refused to heed their mentors and in several cases even rebelled against them. Needless to say, this crime was always punished with a swift extinction. Furthermore, even the Terrestrials grew corrupted. Instead of offering guidance, Terrestrials on many planets simply played god, weaving contrived religions around themselves to shamelessly exploit their subjects. It was not ethical or even productive, but this method seemed to guarantee more stability than actually trying to bring up the new races.
This way or another, organic sentience reclaimed its dominance in the galaxy. The New Empire; managed by Terrestrials, populated by a myriad descendants of the Subjects, and overseen ultimately by the omniscient Asteromorphs, achieved greater progress and a longer-lasting calm in the galaxy than all of its predecessors combined.
A nude Terrestrial shows the highly divergent, yet still bizarrely human anatomy that is the characteristic of this species. These particular Terrestrials maintain a religious hegemony over their clueless subjects; dressing up in elaborate veils and headgear to assert their ‘divine’ inheritance.