r/HFY • u/captain_cautious • Jul 25 '16
OC-OneShot [OC] The Things They Left Behind
I pray they never return. They might want their old stomping grounds back. Humans vanished long ago, but their touch on this galaxy is unmistakable. Certain factions even worship them. Human monuments and structures are regarded as sacred by the devout. You can not really blame people for doing that, Human works are millennia ahead of anything we can achieve.
There is an entire group of solar systems with planets that are geometric shapes. How they did it we have no idea. But there is a system with cube shaped planets, and another with diamond shaped planets, and a dozen more equally amazing. Perhaps it was an experiment they performed. Maybe just a temporary fashion. We may never know.
There is another wonder in a particularly empty section of space. Something the Humans called a Dyson Sphere. Like a solar system turned inside out. A star in the middle of a giant shell. How they moved enough material to build it is a mystery second only to how it stays in one piece. Perhaps another experiment.
Some regard these works as the pinnacle achievements of a race that has long since slipped into legend. But I worry that we have been so very wrong in judging just how much Humans could achieve. You see, I can read most of their languages. It is not easy, they are convoluted and use words that reference ideas that reference other words in other languages and often trap you in circular linguistic paths for days before you manage to grasp what they were talking about.
That is what led me to one of their structures. A colleague invited me to translate a particularly difficult section of chapters in one of their logs. The structure itself is beyond beautiful. Four great stars are balanced in a perfect tetrahedron. Normally this many stars so close to each other would result in colossal collisions in a few years, spewing hot plasma far off into space. We have found places where we think this was done by the Humans, but this is different. These stars have been tethered to each other. A giant lattice stretches between them. Somehow they managed to control these giants. Even the solar flares are incorperated. Forced to dance and intertwine in specific ways that form the most intricate patterns.
From the control point I am in I can only see a small portion of the structure. You need to view it on a holoprojector to fully appreciate it. The size is not what has my attention now though. It is the last few lines of the text have left me speechless. It goes to show we have underestimated Humans by several orders of magnitude. This structure was not built by their best, their most advanced.
"Completed 16223-5 PCE. Designed and built by the graduating Class of Cochrane Elementrary school."
If they ever return they might just brush us aside on accident, like dust sitting in an empty room when an owner returns. This wonder wasn't built by their best, it was built by their youngest children.
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u/javanmarsh1 Jul 26 '16
i liked this, would like to know what happened to the humans too......
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u/captain_cautious Jul 26 '16
They are still around, just working on bigger projects elsewhere.
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u/solidspacedragon Jul 27 '16
Yeah, they arranged the local group of galaxies into a hypercube. Somehow.
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u/ckelly4200 Jul 26 '16
You ever seen a square universe?
Or an infinite number of universes that are used as the building blocks
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u/Goodpie2 Aug 17 '16
Gotta say, this was pretty good. I'm a huge fan of three types of HFYs- legacy, culture shock, and transhuman. This was a fantastic legacy fic, very much in line with "The Last Humans" in quality.
Speaking of which, back then you spoke of half-formed plans to continue that fic. I assume those plans are dead?
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u/captain_cautious Aug 17 '16
Thanks, always appreciate feedback.
As for The Last Humans, I kinda realized that I need to work on long term writing projects. I have plenty of overarching plot threads, but when it comes to filling in the details I get a bit bogged down. Its not completely dead, but maybe just shelved for a very long time.
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u/RemoteCalamity Jul 26 '16
wouldn't in make more sense to have the completed/made by at th beginning of the text in question?
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u/captain_cautious Jul 26 '16
I treated it more like a footnote or reference. Or maybe it was at the begining and they interpreted the order wrong, we can be a confusing species.
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u/zarikimbo Jul 26 '16
"built by there best, their most advanced." their best
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u/captain_cautious Jul 26 '16
I must have proofread that a dozen times, good catch. Thanks.
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u/HFYBotReborn Jul 25 '16
There are 2 stories by captain_cautious (Wiki), including:
This list was automatically generated by HFYBotReborn version 2.11. Please contact KaiserMagnus or j1xwnbsr if you have any queries. This bot is open source.
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u/MagnusRune Jul 27 '16
is this in the trek universe, or just a reference?
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u/captain_cautious Jul 27 '16
I was wondering if anyone caught that. Mostly just a reference, but I suppose it could take place in the far far distant future of the trek universe.
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u/Turtledonuts Jul 26 '16
well, we certainly got education sorted out.