The Great Mystery

from "A Terran's Guide to the Galaxy"

Skip this part if you’re caught up!

Welcome to A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy, a companion volume to Arch/Eternal, which is a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

The chapters of this Guide are an attempt to render some of the world-building that this kind of book requires a bit more reader friendly.

If you’re feeling lost, consider one of the following options:

1. Go back and read the beginning of the Guide.

2. Start with the Prologue of Arch/Eternal, the novel-in-progress.

3. Dive right into the latest chapter - there’s even a short, helpful summary at the beginning to help you get caught up quickly.

Or of course you can go ahead and just read THIS to get a taste for what’s going on here.

Enjoy!

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The Great Mystery

The galaxy is full of life. For billions of years, millions of planets have teemed with it in great evolutionary waves. Where an errant solar flare or late-coming meteor or explosive supervolcano causes mass extinctions, the vestiges remain, and recover. 

We call planets with biospheres living worlds. The lifespan of a biosphere can be short or long — anywhere from a spray of self-replicating proteins that vanish in the heat of an expanding star, to rich ecosystems that flourish for a billion revolutions around the white dwarf husks of ancient supernovae. 

But sentience, or what we call intelligent, self-determining awareness, is not an inevitable product of evolutionary processes. Brains are ubiquitous, but they are, with one special exception, deterministic biological machines. Like all the gorgeous array of life, they may change, but not choose. 

Humans are that special exception, and more than half of all the living worlds so far discovered have produced them in some variety. And here we use the term “human” not as a generalized figure of speech, but as a specific designation for the species of animal with roughly symmetrical pairs of arms, legs, ears, and eyes, along with a nose and a mouth. And hair, usually. 

Did they all descend from primates? Sort of. On every planet, as on Earth, we find archeological evidence of ape-like evolutionary roots, originating in some speciation of mammal. While the entirety of the evolutionary trees themselves are vastly differentiated, there always appears a branch that results in humans, each of them generally suited to their respective planets. But just as on Earth, once these humans reach sentience, they stop evolving in significant ways, just as humans have on Earth. It seems that the power and privilege of an intelligent self-determining species is that it can flip evolution in the other direction — forcing its environment to change rather than helplessly adapting via “natural selection,” or, more accurately, gradual generational mutation.

But, as if this all weren’t baffling enough, it gets weirder — these branches of evolution that so consistently terminate in some form of human also all got started within a window of less than a million years — the blink of an eye, in cosmic terms. 

By now, you’ll be wondering how so many people who all share such similar biology wound up on so many thousands of worlds across the galaxy within such a short timeframe. And if you’re not wondering that, you should be. 

Because of the approximately 10% of the galaxy’s star systems and habitable planets that have been explored, none of them host any intelligent life other than human beings. This goes for the Firstborn, too, who started off as essentially human. 

Why?

This will probably disappoint you, but it’s called The Great Mystery for a reason. We don’t really know how this happened. There have been theories, of course, but no one has found any incontrovertible evidence to support any of them, so it hardly seems worth it to catalogue them here.

One conclusion seems inevitable: a pan-galactic intelligent being has been pulling some very sophisticated strings. 

Because things like The Great Mystery do not spontaneously emerge. When so many phenomena line up in such statistically impossible ways, it all starts to look intentional. So, while you can still find (vanishingly few) smart people who torture themselves with convoluted theories about how all this might somehow have happened by chance, the overwhelming majority of us begrudgingly accept the idea that someone or something vastly superior to even the godlike Firstborn are behind The Great Mystery.

The shorthand for this being (whoever, whatever, and however many it may be) is the Sower¹. Some people use the plural, illustrating their presupposition that our galaxy’s living worlds were seeded and cultivated by some unthinkably advanced alien race. There are entire disciplines of study dedicated to the material and theoretical exploration of who the Sowers are, and how they did what they did. None of these efforts have been rewarded with meaningful success. 

For those less inclined to plumb the depths of The Great Mystery, the word Sower has blurred into a euphemism for God. And why not? Any being mysterious and powerful enough to do what was apparently done in this galaxy has certainly earned the designation. 

Meanwhile, the biggest question remains the most hotly debated: Why? 

Why did the Sower sow? To what end? For what purpose? 

It seems important, but since the only beings in the universe who could provide a definitive answer have not, to anyone’s verifiable knowledge, revealed themselves, or left any evidence of their intentions, we are left to speculate. 

And that, friend, is what all the religions² are for.

1. This Guide does not contain a chapter on the Sowers, because nothing more is known of them than what is written in this chapter.

2. It is also outside the scope of this Guide to catalogue the numerous religious that exist within the Fellowship.