The following is an essay by Torque Edwards when he was sixteen years old and studying at the Vatzit University in Gripp, Weiland, in 2398.
On a magical planet called Luma, life made of magical matter evolved, culminating in the appearance of an intelligent species called Illuminati. Illuminati are made mostly of spirit matter, but also conjured matter. They have eight legs sprouting from a spherical body a meter or so across, two long arms with four-fingered hands, and eight eyes distributed about their forehead beneath their two antennae.
On magical worlds, electronic machines and machines driven by high pressure gas cannot function. Nevertheless, the Illuminati learned to make class two space bridges, and these allowed them to send magical robots called daemons into space, powered by space bridge thrusters. The daemons traveled at close to the speed of light, their speed being limited by their ability to endure collisions with interstellar gas.
Over the next few centuries, daemons discovered countless planets. After a thousand years, a daemon discovered Terra. Terra is a non-magical planet, home to biological life, including homo sapiens, or simply sapiens, all of which evolved upon the planet by natural selection. When the Lumans discovered Terra, the sapien nation called Mesopotamia had just begun to use writing.
By this time, the Lumans had learned to transform an existing class two bridge into a class three bridge that would pass spirit matter. While they themselves could not pass through a spirit bridge, because they contain both spirit and conjured matter, they could send magical machines made only of chemical and spirit matter through their bridges to join daemons hundreds of light years away. They sent machines called demons to collect samples from the Terran surface. A daemon would land upon Terra, in a remote place, release a hundred demons, and wait until they returned with insects, plants, and animals. The samples were passed back through molecular bridges to Luma.
The Illuminati soon discovered Terran spiders, and were amazed at the similarity of the spider to themselves, even to the spinning of webs through an orifice in the spider's abdomen. The popularization of Terran life among Illuminati was in part due to the popularity of spiders as pets for Illuminati children.
In the reign of Sargon the First, of Agade, the Lumans sent machines called demigods to Terra whose spirit matter brains were enclosed in biological bodies that looked like those of Terran animals. Demigods explored the planet observing its flora and fauna, and reported what they learned.
Two centuries later, the Lumans sent machines called gods, clothed in sapien bodies, to live among sapiens and study their cultures. Gods talked like sapiens, looked like sapiens, ate and drank like sapiens, and smelled almost like sapiens. The Illuminati designed the gods to adopt the cultural and emotional behavior of the sapiens around them. By listening to what the gods had to say, and by examining the brains of gods taken back to Luma, the Illuminati came to understand sapiens better than they understood themselves.
One thing the Illuminati learned from sapiens was how to use chemical matter. In particular, they learned to extract and work metals. There are types of spirit matter that can compete with stone and wood as materials for structures and tools, but there is no spirit matter to compete with chemical metals. The Illuminati imported small quantities of metal from Terra. But they were, at that time, an enlightened and careful people. They did not want to affect sapien civilization by the commencement of large-scale trade between the two planets. They wished to remain unknown to the Terrans. In order to obtain metals, therefore, they turned to the mining of asteroids and made plans to exploit the material resources of the many other planet discovered by their daemons.
The Illuminati had become masters of biochemical genetic engineering. They used their knowledge to make bodies for their gods and demigods. It was a simple matter for them to alter existing species so as to create a new species called alterations, or blend the genes of existing species to create amalgams. In the final years of Sargon's empire, at the beginning of the Egyptian middle-kingdom, the Lumans created two alterations of homo sapiens. The first was homo hortulanus, or elf, a long-lived, slender, and philosophical species designed to help transform barren planets into homes for biological life. The second was homo cuniculus, or dwarf, a hardy, strong, industrious species designed to mine metals and stones on the newly inhabitable, or bioformed, worlds.
Neither elves nor dwarves as they existed then were able to reproduce without hormones distributed by Luma. The Illuminati wanted to make sure that elves and dwarves would not multiply to the point of becoming a threat to Illuminati. Over subsequent millennia, however, fertile mutations arose, and now there are populations of elves and dwarves that can sustain their numbers without the use of these hormones..
After working for a thousand years as the servants of Illuminati anthropologists, the gods living on Terra grew frustrated. They wished to take a more active role in sapien society than the Illuminati would allow them. Many of the gods had, despite Luman rules, become fabulously wealthy on Terra. Metals were still precious on the Illuminati home planet. Gods who had accumulated hoards of gold and copper could buy influence upon Luma. Eventually, most of the gods took to ignoring their Luman masters. In the lifetime of Helen of Troy, the gods in Greek nations openly declared themselves to be divine, and became active and competing players in a game of sapien manipulation.
Eventually, the Illuminati agreed to give the Terran gods their freedom, but forced them to leave Terra. In the Treaty of Exile, the gods were granted ownership of a sector of space three thousand of light years from Luma, at the limits of Luman exploration. The sector was defined as a sphere one hundred light years in radius, centered upon a giant red sun called Medius. Unknown to the Lumans, but known by the gods, there was a planet within ten light years of Medius that was covered with silent biological forests, with an atmosphere suitable for the immediate introduction of Terran species. It was this planet that the gods made their new home. They called it Olympia.
The Lumans forbade the gods to take sapiens from Terra. The Illuminati feared the intelligence and reproductive power of the species would be a threat to Luma if it were allowed to spread across the galaxy. But the Illuminati sent two thousand elves to Olympia, and a like number of dwarves, to assist with the introduction of Terran species and the mining of metals on Olympia.
Soon after their arrival upon Olympia, the gods discovered that their sector contained large, inter-stellar beings that connected the surfaces of the many bioformed planets within the sector with one another through large space bridges called conjunctions. The gods named these creatures celesti. Celesti alight at the same place upon a planet surface at regular intervals to generate a space bridge. They work in pairs so as to connect two worlds. The gods were amazed to find that every world lead to by a conjunction was also bioformed, covered with the same quiet forests that originally covered Olympia, and supplied with the same breathable air. All types of matter could pass through a conjunction, even conjured matter: they were class four bridges. The Illuminati of Luma, at least at that time, could not make class four bridges. They were therefore unable to make space bridges through which they themselves might pass.
With the help of conjunctions, the gods took Terran life to many worlds. They refused to allow the Lumans to study the conjunctions, saying that they would do so only if the Lumans allowed the gods to take sapiens to Olympia. The Lumans declined the offer for four centuries, but when they found themselves losing an economic battle with their own rebellious colonies, they traded two hundred thousand homo sapiens from Terra for the privilege of sending daemons to examine the celesti.
During the first years of the Roman Empire, the gods transported two hundred thousand homo sapiens from Terra to the Celesti Sector, where they multiplied rapidly. Over the next two thousand years, they populated continents of a hundred worlds, and eventually learned to use magic for themselves.
The Luman study of the conjunctions came too late. After three years of study, the daemons were near discovering the secret of the celesti, but it was then that the Luma was struck by an asteroid, Luman power extinguished, and the study ended. It seems odd that when Lumans were so close to discovering the means by which they could themselves travel instantly across space, after thousands of years of effort, that their planet should be struck by an asteroid and their dominion ended. But the conflict between Luma and its colonies was caught up with the paradoxes of time travel, which always accompany travel through space, and such tragedies abound in its history.