The Sarrans Return

Prologue

Prologue

“There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.”

—George Bernard Shaw, 250,000 BC

Caserius, head of the Genetic Intervention Team (GIT), looked at the beautiful blue planet below. The Ethata combed the galaxy for others like themselves to aid in the wars against the Zyptz, and failed. Through sheer luck and determination the Ethata won the first few rounds of war and planned to deliver a killing blow which would set the Zyptz back eons and in another direction, but with the prescience common to their race they knew this would not be enough. The Zyptz were a blight on the galaxy. Having ruined their own planet they gobbled up others in quick succession and in only a few hundred generations left them as they left their own. If the Ethata took a pacifist role, all of the inhabitable planets in the galaxy would become hulking masses of technological and radioactive waste. Something had to be done.

It was clear that one planetary population, on its own, could not defeat the enemy. The Ethata needed allies. Yet, their explorations of the galaxy had not uncovered a single technological humanoid species with which to align to continue the fight over the millennia necessary to assure survival of the human prototype.

The Ethata debated long and hard attempting to come up with a suitable answer to their problem and found only one. If they looked further afield the Ethata were afraid that they might come upon a greater menace to their race than the Zyptz. The Ethata were stuck in a sociological choke hold. They could not go further without allies and they were no allies available.

Having come across no humanoid civilization with which they could align, the Ethata decided to play a long game. They would go to M class planets in the habitable zone of middle class stars and look for places to seed. The requisite planet needed to be a hospitable host for higher forms of carbon based life; life that could have been the precursor to the Ethata themselves. The Ethata decided to make their own future humanoids to carry forth the fight for the survival of the galaxy against the depredations of the Zyptz.

The seed planets needed to have an evolved a lower level humanoid population already positioned in several different locations across its face. For the first step of the plan to succeed, the population of the group of proto-humans needed to be robust; large enough to sustain genetic manipulation for fifteen to twenty generations of the Ethata breeding program. Their prescience told the Ethata that they and their own people would not survive the next crises in their current form and for humanoids to survive, the proto-humans needed to be nurtured and gently pushed in the direction that would allow them to eventually develop into a civilization capable of the level of technological achievement to put them into space and to eventually stand against the Zyptz.

Caserius’ team was only one of the four GITs responsible for administering the genetic engineering protocols to move the precursor populations along the path to becoming fully human. His team’s assignment was a class M planet located in an isolated star cluster at the edge of the galaxy.

His precognitive abilities told him that this group would be slow to develop. The team’s experience told them that the planet’s topography lent itself to the building of isolated nation states that would become tribal in nature. This isolation would result in dynastic and revolutionary wars which would impede the planet’s progress. But Caserius’ prescience told him that at some point in the future it would be necessary for this semi-isolated planet to be less sociologically and technologically evolved than the others.

After three hundred years of careful and considerate husbanding of their charges, the GI Team was ready to leave. Perhaps the most important part of the expedition’s protocols involved maintaining an absolute veil of secrecy regarding their interactions with the candidate planet’s inhabitants. But on this planet, they were seen. Thus, his GI Team was mythologized. And future generations would recount tales of gods and visitors from the sky that bestowed greatness and the wonders of mortality on the human inhabitants of the planet.

It was time for Caserius and his team to head home. He knew neither he, nor the Ethata, would survive to see the culmination of their work, but because of their work humans would one day be a force in the galaxy.