On the Blood of Gods and Men (2/6)

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The Early History of Titans on Earth

Our ancestors hailed from the world of Kaos - or perhaps a world of chaos, it's hard to tell, sometimes, when the storytellers are being literal or waxing poetic. For expediency's sake, we'll assume that the world was properly named "Kaos". The Kaosians were highly advanced biologically, exhibiting numerous high-tier mental abilities. They were also shape-shifters, able to alter their forms to mimic those of other living, carbon based organisms. I remain uncertain which adaptation preceded which. Developing the ability to alter their physical forms at will may have facilitated the development of their remarkable mental abilities, but the ability to shape-shift may itself be seen as an extension of those abilities.  The chicken and the egg, as the humans say.

Much like the humans we share this world with, our ancestors pursued technologies that would capitalize upon their natural strengths and abilities. These pursuits culminated in two discoveries that we now struggle to comprehend. Their longevity and brilliance sired a wide range of technological and scientific feats, to be sure, but the most remarkable of their wonders were, without a doubt, nanite-embodied artificial intelligence and active gene-editing. Through these technologies, the Kaosians unlocked abilities far beyond any that could be achieved through natural evolution. They were able to shape-shift into ever more complex forms, seemingly in defiance of physical laws. More remarkably, they could influence meteorological, geological, and biological processes through sheer force of will. Kaosians even gained the ability to manufacture objects from thin air.

For reasons that were not made clear to me as a child, this led to a very long, very ugly war. Kaos was divided between progressives who sought to continue pushing the boundaries of what was possible, and reactionaries who wished that the technology should be destroyed. Kaos was nearly destroyed, with victory ultimately seized by the Three Fates, who implemented an oligarchy in which they, and only they, would wield the power. Most of the war's survivors forfeited their power to see the war's end, regressing to a weaker and much more homogeneous state.

There were, however, those who could not or would not relinquish their power, and the Three Fates - quite reasonably - concluded that these individuals could not be allowed to remain on the planet with the largely depowered populace. The Three Fates ordered the construction of the Tartarus, a massive ship that would carry these men and women far away to an uninhabited world, where neither they, nor their descendants, would ever bother the people of Kaos again.

Functionally, the Tartarus was part refugee ship and part penal ship. Many of those serving aboard the ship as crew, or quietly slumbering in cryo-pods below decks, were good men and women eager to start a new life somewhere else. But in the most secure depths of Tartarus there were also war criminals and monsters, powerful entities responsible for some of the greatest atrocities of the final Kaos War.

Tartarus was supposed to settle on an uninhabited world but - again, for reasons not made clear to me as a child - the crew instead decided to end their one way trip here, on Earth, where several primitive species of anthropoids, cetaceans, and cephalopods had achieved varying degrees of sentience. The ship was buried beneath the sea floor, and our ancestors set about the task of establishing their dominion over this wild, untempered world. The humans they strode above called them "Titans".

Those first arrivals to this rocky little planet made little effort to hide their alien heritage. Their powers had allowed them to adopt a truly stunning diversity of default forms, combining elements from countless species on our home-world, and multiplying them and modifying them in all manner of ways. Their ancestors, however, had been characterized by the same bilateral symmetry and bipedal gate characteristic of the people of this world, and so - as generations passed - this natural predilection reasserted itself. Furthermore, perhaps due to some natural mimetic instinct, each successive generation looked more and more like the indigenous hominids of this world.