7 Billion Years BCE

The universe is young and rapidly expanding. Fewer galaxies and a relative handful of bright new stars. Orbiting these closely neighboring stars are a few thousand planets cradling intelligent life.

Solar systems are closer together, and the fabric of the galaxies are lousy with tears– wormholes. Given the speed with which travel is possible between planets and systems, the sentient species sail on solar winds and the tides of space/time.

Question is, do I keep humans as one of these sentient cultures– keeping in the trope of human as touchstone and anchor for the audience– or do I do away entirely with us? Focus on what could be called, from our standpoint, older races?

Want to move away from visual stereotypes of space opera. Definitely a Froudian aesthetic. Imagine The Dark Crystal as a space opera, at least visually. Very organic technology, living ships. Space whales. But not Farscape.  More an age of established empires.  Empires of what we call the Old Gods, now simply the Gods.  The Untenables.  The great, unknowable beings of the Cthulhu Mythos.  Likewise probably Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana, and Carcosa ain’t so lost, and the King in Yellow sits enthroned.  Maybe not directly, but certainly inspired.  If Gaiman can get away with a Lovecraft reference in everything he writes, then so can I, doggammit.

Brain attack

It just sort of happened.  The gun was still smoking, and cordite burned his nostrils.  At least, what he assumed was cordite, it’s not as if he’d ever fired a fucking pistol before.  He stared down at the heavy, smoldering thing in his hand– tarnished silver, black where the grip met his hands and in the moving parts, the hammer, the trigger.  Oh Christ, the trigger.  When I hold you in my arms, and  I feel my finger on your trigger, I know nobody can do me no harm… What a load of bullshit.  There’d be plenty of harm, and more to go around.  Of course, he’d be the only one catching that heat, because there was no one else to take it.  He’d acted alone, that was absolutely true.  It wasn’t as if he’d had a motive, even.  Picked up the gun, and decided to see what it would do to someone.  The curiosity was overwhelming.  Curiosity killed this fucking guy right here.

Now it was just a matter of handling the body.  The two-hundred and eighty-seven pounds of human compost.  He was very afraid he might need an axe.