Paradise Lost.
Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 6:35 pm
Alright, don't worry gents I fully intend to continue the tides redux and you'll have a late halloween "episode" soon enough. In the meanwhile, this came to me as I was shooting the shit about old Sci fi shows in a discord chat and it reminded me how damn prescient..this particular show was.
As such I wrote this this up as a half modernization/reboot though I believe the core message and issues examined in the show don't really need any modernization. I did it half to be cheesy and tongue in cheek and half because I realized...holy crap...This show really had something and it was cheated out of the story it could have told by meddling execs.
Here are the first two chapters...Let me know if this would interest you at all and let me know if y'all want me to continue.
..........................
“The alleged diversity of the early twenty first century was little more than painted homogeneity at gunpoint and its mandate came at a dreadful price. They understood that, its why they came ……
And knowing what they truly are, we must reject such paths at all costs”
“How much is the human soul worth? Is the value of your solitude truly greater than the price of peace?”
120, million years ago. Triangulum Galaxy
She was beautiful, once. Even now some would call her beautiful, her features were still that tanned color, the canines that were so pronounced in her fellows of “pure” blood added an exotic quality to her. He could see the tips edging out from lips that were still red and filled with life. She was still fit, lithe and had a body shaped like an hourglass, a form species that evolved along her lines tended to find aesthetically pleasing on an instinctual level. It often allowed for far easier childbirths and far more of them. Her hair was an opaque color, so black that the light would vanish in its depths if caught in her long wavy hair which contrasted a pair of eyes so light and turquoise as to nearly be green.
It was easy to understand why such lifeforms would be drawn to beauty like that. He’d long ago abandoned the form he chose to inhabit to court her and he was still drawn to her ageless beauty. Still loved her, and what a love it had been! A love so powerful, it brought her kind back from the brink of extinction and irrevocably chained the destiny of their two species for all time, altering them both in ways that even his people with all their vast powers and foresight could not fully comprehend. A love that had defied death, a beauty matched with an incredible intellect that when coupled with an unnatural charisma had prompted a quarter of her entire race to declare her a messiah and follow her into the void. A terrifying and wondrous mix that had inspired legions to move entire stars, to shift the gravity wells of blackholes and to break the barrier set by laws of relativity long ago.
It was all an illusion now, her youthful figure cracked ever so lightly. When he’d known her and loved her, she was lost in the void, her worldships falling in on each other, energy like sabers from the tips of fingers dug into the flesh of those unwilling who had been forced to come along in this journey, her own followers had begun to prey on one another as well and exiles on a journey to seek a brighter tomorrow only to come to the gates of hell. At first, they’d started with clones, their conventional foodstuffs and replication was still saturated with the radiation of their home world, one that brought them an eternal youth and allowed them to suppress their predator’s instincts. But over time, the energies thinned and hunger soon reigned, hunger gave way to death, death had spawned fear and fear birthed madness. By the time his vessel found the chain of worldships she was the only one left with the sanity to resist, so near to deaths door that even the incredible sciences of his kind barely saved her. In the end it had been the creation of an artificial wormhole and the arrival on a world filled with billions of simplistic lifeforms that had saved them.
They fed, gorging themselves on non-sentient life and once the fever, the lunacy died down, when these luminous beings of conscience realized what they had done many killed themselves. Many more wailed and lamented, but it was her courage that guided them through. Her rigid discipline and her unwavering optimism created a primitive psychic link by which they learned to suppress their predator’s instincts, to feed, to hunt, to rape and kill. Through gentle effort and dedication, he watched as she built up that link until it could simulate the instinct chaining effects of her mother star. He watched as they began to enhance their animals, domesticate them and make them more “life force rich” while doing their best to make the motion compassionate, he watched them build cities. In a century, homeless refugees had made for themselves a primitive (by his standards) kingdom on the Western continent of this little world.
That was when he and a few of his fellow star travelers opted to help reveal themselves openly. For though they had assisted and saved them centuries prior, it had been in the in concealment, more akin to a classic abduction than a true first contact. They were still ashamed of their animal roots, the claws, the need to feed several times a day was a source of great shame. He’d understood immediately what the problem had been, like his species a billion years before them these exiles the Rish’Teari had been on the verge of evolving into beings of thought and energy. Like his kind, this began with the organic body evolving to generate something they called Qirus or core energy. To generate that power, some species evolved to naturally tap into the vast undercurrents of the innumerous dimensions between the physical realms. As his kind had, for them supplementing the energy came naturally, the psychics in their now, long faded empire had blended the mystical and the scientific and it allowed them pass into the light without much loss or hardship. But other races, sought other paths and most eventually went extinct because of it. These exiles, an exception, perhaps would eventually pass into the light despite their shortcomings, defying extinction, the burn up and exhaustion of core energy, or perhaps they would do as his kind had once, moor themselves partially in the physical when they so choose, allowing for recovery of those energies, perhaps they would be wise enough not to repeat the same mistake his kind had and pursue immortality, ignoring in arrogance the cost.
They decided to help, while they couldn’t accelerate their evolution, he and his friends decided to utilize their malleable nature to impart on them an element of themselves. The Kimera were an incredibly ancient species, they’d wandered the stars at their dawn, forged empires that spanned thousands of galaxies, raised up countless trillions of species, destroyed others, conquered many and had changed forms so many thousands of times they had become a repository for the genetic material of life itself long before they sought their immortality by bending the light to their will.
Those empires, had risen and fallen, taken old forms and new and were now all dust, but their imprint on the stars was indelible, it would endure until the ending of the universe, perhaps longer. And so, once again they touched those echoes and bring life to what might be the closest thing to a successor species his kind would ever find. They drew on their ancient powers, awakening abilities that long been dormant and slowly crafted for themselves a form in the image of the Rish’Teari, containing elements of their DNA, but remaining Kimera. They approached the leader of the exiles and bestowed upon her, through an union of the flesh and spirit the means by which to streamline the feeding process, her claws became regular fingertips and the palms of her hands glowed with the immense power of the one gift his species had no name for, yet it had ensured their evolution would reach its pinnacle and beyond, the means by which, these exiles might defy extinction.
He’d taken her that night, or rather, she’d taken him. For in all his eons of life no Kimera had experienced a species who instincts and passions matched their own. The organ, which would become perfected in the next generation would allow them to absorb energy more efficiently, without any pain and without the ravenous frequency. Fueled by this organ they called Sha’qar’ava, they might one day become as his kind was now. quod sumus hoc eritis.
She’d given him twin sons within a year of that exchange and over the next four thousand years she’d given him two hundred more, sons and daughters a veritable legion. Other Kimera had followed his example and their children melded the DNA of both races, creating a new hybrid species that was far more energy efficient and whose lifespans would be measured in the hundreds of thousands of years instead of tens. These were called Jar’Rish’Teari and they would bear the heaviest of crosses in time.
But how could they know? Two million years had passed, she would have, should have been long in the grave. Her children should have as well and yet, they’d persisted. The engines of their science spun, what technology the Kimera had gifted had been modified in unforeseeable ways and spurned on by the instincts they held tightly in check, channeled through Kimera DNA and that terrible gift of the Sha’qar’ava they became, something more, something horrible. Instead of evolving slowly towards the light they seemed to relish the physical even more, their drive towards enlightenment was twisted into a lust for conquest both of the physical and of death. Multiplying like locusts they swarmed the cosmos. When they discovered that though their life force could be sustained and prolonged, it would invariably begin to weaken, they from the radical to the perverse. Upon discovering that the essence of sentient beings could in part negate this withering they gorged themselves on trillions.
He’d left her then, just as she was planning her conquest of a random galactic cluster. Genetic engineering had increased the efficiency of energy absorption and due to her being his student and lover, due to her brilliance she was soon viewed as a goddess. And making her perversion complete, she embraced this image. Within half a million years, they far outnumbered the population which had driven them out, within a million they were drowning entire galaxies in blood, consuming all sentient life and moving on.
But two million years, even with all her tricks was simply too much time. Her body remained outwardly healthy and strong, but he could see it, deep within the patterns, the wavelengths. She was dying, they were all dying. Where the life of one sentient being could delay entropy and old age for a thousand years, it now took twenty lifeforms to buy her the same amount of time, her children, their descendants were stronger, some had even moved into the light but most were obsessed, grounded, battling death that would come for them soon.
She’d incorporated Kimera DNA into herself and the other “pure bloods” as well. Elements of it, but the perception of their purity became a mark of distinction, divinity. Her hunger, her pride, her vanity was such that their children, their beloved twins were corrupted by her proximity. They watched in muted horror at first then resignation then as willing, gleeful participants as her blood lust, left a hundred galaxies a graveyard and as they moved into this Galactic cluster. Now, their slaves and scientists, their engineers began work on a series of immense spires at every cardinal corner of this new galaxy, with thousands of more on every other world within.
All followed her directions, all followed the grand design but knew not what it was they were building Some, some dared to guess.
But he didn’t need to guess, he knew.
-Ramaz, my love, what have you done- thought and voice were one as you drifted through the endless currents of energies within the light of creation and on some level, she heard him for he felt her mind touch his. “It’s been a long time, Ha’Gel”
That voice, he remembered it in its youth, he’d forgotten what music was until she’d sung to him after their first coupling. But now, there was no beauty, only a twisted perversion of it. “Do not do this” He whispered through the gulf, pleaded, his “voice” tear filled provoked perhaps a stir of consciousness only for it to flicker out. “Are the mighty Kimera the only species worthy of immortality” She asked, scoffing, a voice filled with resentment.
“You can’t know what you are about to do, even now, with all the blood you’ve shed, you cannot know”
“Don’t speak to of cost!” she bit back, her energies rising, what had once been vibrant blues and greens and scarlets, were a tempest of crimson, of indigo and of a murky jade that seemed sickly. She reared on him and he could feel her power, her presence from the void, hear the baying of the countless lives she’d stolen to prolong herself unnaturally. At once it horrified and broke his heart “Don’t you think I’d avoid this I could?! We’ve destroyed so many galaxies, taken so much and no matter what I do, genetically, no matter how much I modify, alter and fix our species, we are denied progress, denied growth, denied eternity”
“Only because you hold back your own evolution, you lock yourself in stasis”
“Death is not evolution!” she spat, her voice haggard, she sounded so old in his mind, so withered, so tired. “struggle, is growth, growth is painful, sometimes, it leaves many we love behind” Was that their fate now?
Were the Jar’Rish’Teari a lost species? Sensing his thoughts, she seemed to grow angrier. “We will not pass into myth! We will not become a nightmare! And if we grow, we grow together! We will become what you are!”
“Ramaz! You cannot force this change! It is as spiritual as it is biological! You must understand this!” What have I done, Ha’Gel thought, horrified, heartbroken, all I wanted to do was help these people who I’ve come to love, to cherish, my friends, my children?
Energy began to roar around them, a torrent that seemed to stretch through space, through time, ripping holes in the walls between dimensions and a horrific truth dawned on him. She’d activated her terrible machines with the feedback arrayed too…oh..no…our children!
“Ramaz! This insanity must stop!” He prepared to retaliate, to attack but he could feel the other Kimera interceding to stop him, to deny him the chance to put right this terrible mistake -this must come to pass brother-
“No! Ramaz! You’ll…you will…”
“Become something new, something grander.. Something superior”
He’d lost her, he knew it now, he’d lost her eons ago, perhaps he’d never had her truly. Perhaps he’d been too blinded by love to see it.
“Go now Ha’Gel, my love, we’ll see each other in eternity”
No, he thought. We will never meet again, but I will be there after the end.
The Triangulum Galaxy, flashed, in a bright, luminous glow that millions of years later would bring daylight to a little green blue world, a Galaxy close next door and lumbering simple beasts would look up in dumb wonder as daylight endured and endured and endured for ten days before the night returned.
And in a dead galaxy, two new species awoke and looked at the graveyard in which they were born with confusion, fear and hatred.
As such I wrote this this up as a half modernization/reboot though I believe the core message and issues examined in the show don't really need any modernization. I did it half to be cheesy and tongue in cheek and half because I realized...holy crap...This show really had something and it was cheated out of the story it could have told by meddling execs.
Here are the first two chapters...Let me know if this would interest you at all and let me know if y'all want me to continue.
..........................
“The alleged diversity of the early twenty first century was little more than painted homogeneity at gunpoint and its mandate came at a dreadful price. They understood that, its why they came ……
And knowing what they truly are, we must reject such paths at all costs”
“How much is the human soul worth? Is the value of your solitude truly greater than the price of peace?”
120, million years ago. Triangulum Galaxy
She was beautiful, once. Even now some would call her beautiful, her features were still that tanned color, the canines that were so pronounced in her fellows of “pure” blood added an exotic quality to her. He could see the tips edging out from lips that were still red and filled with life. She was still fit, lithe and had a body shaped like an hourglass, a form species that evolved along her lines tended to find aesthetically pleasing on an instinctual level. It often allowed for far easier childbirths and far more of them. Her hair was an opaque color, so black that the light would vanish in its depths if caught in her long wavy hair which contrasted a pair of eyes so light and turquoise as to nearly be green.
It was easy to understand why such lifeforms would be drawn to beauty like that. He’d long ago abandoned the form he chose to inhabit to court her and he was still drawn to her ageless beauty. Still loved her, and what a love it had been! A love so powerful, it brought her kind back from the brink of extinction and irrevocably chained the destiny of their two species for all time, altering them both in ways that even his people with all their vast powers and foresight could not fully comprehend. A love that had defied death, a beauty matched with an incredible intellect that when coupled with an unnatural charisma had prompted a quarter of her entire race to declare her a messiah and follow her into the void. A terrifying and wondrous mix that had inspired legions to move entire stars, to shift the gravity wells of blackholes and to break the barrier set by laws of relativity long ago.
It was all an illusion now, her youthful figure cracked ever so lightly. When he’d known her and loved her, she was lost in the void, her worldships falling in on each other, energy like sabers from the tips of fingers dug into the flesh of those unwilling who had been forced to come along in this journey, her own followers had begun to prey on one another as well and exiles on a journey to seek a brighter tomorrow only to come to the gates of hell. At first, they’d started with clones, their conventional foodstuffs and replication was still saturated with the radiation of their home world, one that brought them an eternal youth and allowed them to suppress their predator’s instincts. But over time, the energies thinned and hunger soon reigned, hunger gave way to death, death had spawned fear and fear birthed madness. By the time his vessel found the chain of worldships she was the only one left with the sanity to resist, so near to deaths door that even the incredible sciences of his kind barely saved her. In the end it had been the creation of an artificial wormhole and the arrival on a world filled with billions of simplistic lifeforms that had saved them.
They fed, gorging themselves on non-sentient life and once the fever, the lunacy died down, when these luminous beings of conscience realized what they had done many killed themselves. Many more wailed and lamented, but it was her courage that guided them through. Her rigid discipline and her unwavering optimism created a primitive psychic link by which they learned to suppress their predator’s instincts, to feed, to hunt, to rape and kill. Through gentle effort and dedication, he watched as she built up that link until it could simulate the instinct chaining effects of her mother star. He watched as they began to enhance their animals, domesticate them and make them more “life force rich” while doing their best to make the motion compassionate, he watched them build cities. In a century, homeless refugees had made for themselves a primitive (by his standards) kingdom on the Western continent of this little world.
That was when he and a few of his fellow star travelers opted to help reveal themselves openly. For though they had assisted and saved them centuries prior, it had been in the in concealment, more akin to a classic abduction than a true first contact. They were still ashamed of their animal roots, the claws, the need to feed several times a day was a source of great shame. He’d understood immediately what the problem had been, like his species a billion years before them these exiles the Rish’Teari had been on the verge of evolving into beings of thought and energy. Like his kind, this began with the organic body evolving to generate something they called Qirus or core energy. To generate that power, some species evolved to naturally tap into the vast undercurrents of the innumerous dimensions between the physical realms. As his kind had, for them supplementing the energy came naturally, the psychics in their now, long faded empire had blended the mystical and the scientific and it allowed them pass into the light without much loss or hardship. But other races, sought other paths and most eventually went extinct because of it. These exiles, an exception, perhaps would eventually pass into the light despite their shortcomings, defying extinction, the burn up and exhaustion of core energy, or perhaps they would do as his kind had once, moor themselves partially in the physical when they so choose, allowing for recovery of those energies, perhaps they would be wise enough not to repeat the same mistake his kind had and pursue immortality, ignoring in arrogance the cost.
They decided to help, while they couldn’t accelerate their evolution, he and his friends decided to utilize their malleable nature to impart on them an element of themselves. The Kimera were an incredibly ancient species, they’d wandered the stars at their dawn, forged empires that spanned thousands of galaxies, raised up countless trillions of species, destroyed others, conquered many and had changed forms so many thousands of times they had become a repository for the genetic material of life itself long before they sought their immortality by bending the light to their will.
Those empires, had risen and fallen, taken old forms and new and were now all dust, but their imprint on the stars was indelible, it would endure until the ending of the universe, perhaps longer. And so, once again they touched those echoes and bring life to what might be the closest thing to a successor species his kind would ever find. They drew on their ancient powers, awakening abilities that long been dormant and slowly crafted for themselves a form in the image of the Rish’Teari, containing elements of their DNA, but remaining Kimera. They approached the leader of the exiles and bestowed upon her, through an union of the flesh and spirit the means by which to streamline the feeding process, her claws became regular fingertips and the palms of her hands glowed with the immense power of the one gift his species had no name for, yet it had ensured their evolution would reach its pinnacle and beyond, the means by which, these exiles might defy extinction.
He’d taken her that night, or rather, she’d taken him. For in all his eons of life no Kimera had experienced a species who instincts and passions matched their own. The organ, which would become perfected in the next generation would allow them to absorb energy more efficiently, without any pain and without the ravenous frequency. Fueled by this organ they called Sha’qar’ava, they might one day become as his kind was now. quod sumus hoc eritis.
She’d given him twin sons within a year of that exchange and over the next four thousand years she’d given him two hundred more, sons and daughters a veritable legion. Other Kimera had followed his example and their children melded the DNA of both races, creating a new hybrid species that was far more energy efficient and whose lifespans would be measured in the hundreds of thousands of years instead of tens. These were called Jar’Rish’Teari and they would bear the heaviest of crosses in time.
But how could they know? Two million years had passed, she would have, should have been long in the grave. Her children should have as well and yet, they’d persisted. The engines of their science spun, what technology the Kimera had gifted had been modified in unforeseeable ways and spurned on by the instincts they held tightly in check, channeled through Kimera DNA and that terrible gift of the Sha’qar’ava they became, something more, something horrible. Instead of evolving slowly towards the light they seemed to relish the physical even more, their drive towards enlightenment was twisted into a lust for conquest both of the physical and of death. Multiplying like locusts they swarmed the cosmos. When they discovered that though their life force could be sustained and prolonged, it would invariably begin to weaken, they from the radical to the perverse. Upon discovering that the essence of sentient beings could in part negate this withering they gorged themselves on trillions.
He’d left her then, just as she was planning her conquest of a random galactic cluster. Genetic engineering had increased the efficiency of energy absorption and due to her being his student and lover, due to her brilliance she was soon viewed as a goddess. And making her perversion complete, she embraced this image. Within half a million years, they far outnumbered the population which had driven them out, within a million they were drowning entire galaxies in blood, consuming all sentient life and moving on.
But two million years, even with all her tricks was simply too much time. Her body remained outwardly healthy and strong, but he could see it, deep within the patterns, the wavelengths. She was dying, they were all dying. Where the life of one sentient being could delay entropy and old age for a thousand years, it now took twenty lifeforms to buy her the same amount of time, her children, their descendants were stronger, some had even moved into the light but most were obsessed, grounded, battling death that would come for them soon.
She’d incorporated Kimera DNA into herself and the other “pure bloods” as well. Elements of it, but the perception of their purity became a mark of distinction, divinity. Her hunger, her pride, her vanity was such that their children, their beloved twins were corrupted by her proximity. They watched in muted horror at first then resignation then as willing, gleeful participants as her blood lust, left a hundred galaxies a graveyard and as they moved into this Galactic cluster. Now, their slaves and scientists, their engineers began work on a series of immense spires at every cardinal corner of this new galaxy, with thousands of more on every other world within.
All followed her directions, all followed the grand design but knew not what it was they were building Some, some dared to guess.
But he didn’t need to guess, he knew.
-Ramaz, my love, what have you done- thought and voice were one as you drifted through the endless currents of energies within the light of creation and on some level, she heard him for he felt her mind touch his. “It’s been a long time, Ha’Gel”
That voice, he remembered it in its youth, he’d forgotten what music was until she’d sung to him after their first coupling. But now, there was no beauty, only a twisted perversion of it. “Do not do this” He whispered through the gulf, pleaded, his “voice” tear filled provoked perhaps a stir of consciousness only for it to flicker out. “Are the mighty Kimera the only species worthy of immortality” She asked, scoffing, a voice filled with resentment.
“You can’t know what you are about to do, even now, with all the blood you’ve shed, you cannot know”
“Don’t speak to of cost!” she bit back, her energies rising, what had once been vibrant blues and greens and scarlets, were a tempest of crimson, of indigo and of a murky jade that seemed sickly. She reared on him and he could feel her power, her presence from the void, hear the baying of the countless lives she’d stolen to prolong herself unnaturally. At once it horrified and broke his heart “Don’t you think I’d avoid this I could?! We’ve destroyed so many galaxies, taken so much and no matter what I do, genetically, no matter how much I modify, alter and fix our species, we are denied progress, denied growth, denied eternity”
“Only because you hold back your own evolution, you lock yourself in stasis”
“Death is not evolution!” she spat, her voice haggard, she sounded so old in his mind, so withered, so tired. “struggle, is growth, growth is painful, sometimes, it leaves many we love behind” Was that their fate now?
Were the Jar’Rish’Teari a lost species? Sensing his thoughts, she seemed to grow angrier. “We will not pass into myth! We will not become a nightmare! And if we grow, we grow together! We will become what you are!”
“Ramaz! You cannot force this change! It is as spiritual as it is biological! You must understand this!” What have I done, Ha’Gel thought, horrified, heartbroken, all I wanted to do was help these people who I’ve come to love, to cherish, my friends, my children?
Energy began to roar around them, a torrent that seemed to stretch through space, through time, ripping holes in the walls between dimensions and a horrific truth dawned on him. She’d activated her terrible machines with the feedback arrayed too…oh..no…our children!
“Ramaz! This insanity must stop!” He prepared to retaliate, to attack but he could feel the other Kimera interceding to stop him, to deny him the chance to put right this terrible mistake -this must come to pass brother-
“No! Ramaz! You’ll…you will…”
“Become something new, something grander.. Something superior”
He’d lost her, he knew it now, he’d lost her eons ago, perhaps he’d never had her truly. Perhaps he’d been too blinded by love to see it.
“Go now Ha’Gel, my love, we’ll see each other in eternity”
No, he thought. We will never meet again, but I will be there after the end.
The Triangulum Galaxy, flashed, in a bright, luminous glow that millions of years later would bring daylight to a little green blue world, a Galaxy close next door and lumbering simple beasts would look up in dumb wonder as daylight endured and endured and endured for ten days before the night returned.
And in a dead galaxy, two new species awoke and looked at the graveyard in which they were born with confusion, fear and hatred.