Vanguard of Man

Introduction

Introduction

IT ALL BEGAN WITH THE American collapse of its financial house of cards. The center could not hold, and one by one, the smaller economies fell apart. The life of Americans became even harsher, and the rest of the world blamed the Americans for the pain everyone felt.

The world was already a harsh place. Only the insane believed in the existence of U.F.O.s or psychic phenomena, few still believed in gods, or ghosts, or anything beyond the materialistic world around them. Science Fiction was written by the maladjusted misfits of humanity.

After the fall, the world fragmented, the remnant of the government quickly devolving into a source of death and misery to the common man. On an Earth where pain and death come easily, the living Americans suffered at the hands of the government. They suffered at the hands of gangs, at the hands of police, and finally even at the hands of Mother Nature herself, in the form of a string of Volcanic eruptions, and then the encroaching return of ice age glaciers.

Eric grew to manhood in the grip of this world of catastrophes. He found his way through most of the turmoil, only to contract a deadly disease, the Metaflu. The Metaflu was known as a death sentence, few if any survived its fevers and its pain. It shifted and changed as the victim fought it, slowly wearing down the resistance of the victim.

Eric finally has some good luck. There is a program administered by the only remaining scientific group left in the world, which sought to create the perfect crew and guardians of Humanity in the centuries-long voyage of colony starships. It was hoped that long-lived and intelligent forms of humanity could be created from human stock to take Mankind to the stars, while the human cargo slumbered in cryogenic suspension.

Eric survived the gauntlet of treatments to create the Vanguard, the modified form of man that would guide unmodified humanity to the star. Vastly stronger and more intelligent, he could survive almost anything when finally he finished the treatment of nanobots and hormones, enzymes and transfer viruses. He was smarter than any human who ever lived, he could do virtually anything as quickly as he could think it up, but he lost the parts of humanity that humanity thinks beautiful. His skin was armored in a dozen ways, his hair was nonexistent, and all that remained of his sexuality was his memories of being a man.

Eric survived the trials of transformation and was reborn as Enki, the Vanguard of Man. He was assigned to the great ram-scoop colony ship called the Relentless, along with ten of his fellow Vanguard, and forty of the new version called New-Borns created without benefit of a former life as a human.

This is the story of the colony ship Relentless, on its thousand-year voyage between the stars. This is also the story of how a being that was once a human man slowly loses the remaining vestiges of his humanity, over centuries, after he has lost the motivations and drives that make that being that we define as a human.

Because he was no longer motivated by sexuality, he lost the identification with the human race that the competition for s****l position brings. Because he lost the urge to social advancement by political, financial or other social tools, he also slowly lost all need for social interactions.

A desire to obtain knowledge, once an abstract motivation, had become the strongest of Enki's motivations. As the centuries past, it was a race between the total loss of Enki's human urge to protect his human charges and the off-loading of the final colonist.