This New World (original fic - one shot)

[Somes J]

This is a work of original fiction inspired by a dream I had last night. It's intended as a stand-alone, it isn't connected to any wider universe.

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Josiah Schmidt realizes that water is rushing into his nose and open mouth and down his throat, that he’s underwater, that he might be about to drown. Fear surges through him. He doesn’t know what’s happening or how he got here. For a terrible moment he’s thrashing blindly and it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. He sees sunlight above him and thrashes toward it. He breaks the surface of the water, spews out the water and gulps in the air. The surge of fear and adrenalin starts to subside. He’s breathing hard, his heart is hammering in his chest.

The last thing he can remember is going to bed in his apartment. It’s daytime now. His eyes don’t seem to need any time to adapt. The light isn’t painful. That’s weird, but it’s a minor thing at the moment. He’s floating in a calm green ocean. It’s a bright, sunny day. There’s a city in front of him, some distance away, but it’s not New York. He doesn’t recognize it. It has a huge skyscraper in it; a huge gleaming tower of glass and white metal built close to the sea shore that completely dominates its skyline. There are other buildings, some of them tall ones, but they’re completely overshadowed by that enormous skyscraper, and the other tall buildings look dark, as if designed to make the big skyscraper more obvious to the eye by its glass and white shininess. At first he thinks it may be a trick of perspective, but he realizes it isn’t; that building really is that much bigger than all the rest. Already at this distance it looks big. Whatever this place it’s hilly; the city is in a valley surrounded by hills near the coast and low mountains in its back. It’s a bit hard to tell at this distance but the hills and mountains are green but don’t look like they have any or many trees on them.

He can’t tell which direction is west or east, but it looks like late morning or early afternoon light, and the sun is to his back, in roughly the opposite direction from the city. His watch tells him it’s 3:30. It’s not waterproof. He wonders whether that means he’s in any danger of being electrocuted when water gets into it. It’s electrical, after all. He decides not to take the chance, takes it off, hesitates to throw it into the ocean because he doesn’t want to have to spend the money to buy a new one unnecessarily but decides to err on the side of safety and lets it fall into the water. It’s metal and quickly drops out of sight. He looks up to see the sun in the sky and –

It takes him a moment to realize what he’s seeing. The sun’s high in the sky, and not too far away from it in the sky there’s another small light, like a very bright star, but bigger and brighter than any star he’s ever seen – bigger and brighter than any star he’s pretty sure even exists. It takes him a moment to realize that’s exactly what it is; a star that’s so bright it’s easily visible in the daytime, like a small second sun.

He waits for it to show itself as a reflection off an airplane or a helicopter or a cloud or a light on an airplane or a helicopter or something possible, anything possible, but it doesn’t.

That’s impossible, right? No way something like that could exist, right? If there was something like that around he’d have heard of it, wouldn’t he? He’s never heard of anything like that. Maybe it’s something weird he’s never heard of. Or maybe – probably – he’s just dreaming. Yeah, that makes sense. But it feels too real. Dreams – his dreams, anyway – don’t feel like real life. They’re jumbled, the sense of time is distorted, when he wakes up and reviews them they seem like collections of snapshot images, like a movie, not like real life. He often suspects it’s a dream even while he’s dreaming, they feel wrong. There’s too much detail in this; the cool air, a light breeze, the green waves coming over him, the cold of the water around his body and his soaked clothes puffing and billowing around him and pushing against his skin sometimes when the water hits them right or clinging to his skin sometimes when one of the clothed parts of his body comes above the water. But it can’t be real, can it? The whole thing is just too unreal, too insane, to be real. He pinches himself, and it feels real, but he’s heard that doesn’t always work.

He tries to will himself to wake up. He does that often, when he has dreams he doesn’t like. Sometimes it works, or seems to work. It’s not working this time. And the whole thing still seems too real to be a dream. If it isn’t a dream, maybe he’d better start swimming toward the city. It looks a fair ways away. A fair swim. Especially for a man in his late sixties. He starts swimming toward the city.

The city gets bigger as he swims toward it. The big skyscraper starts looking really big now. It really towers over him. A little bit scary. He supposes that’s a bit funny – maybe more than a bit funny – for a guy who lives in New York, a city that – after all – everyone knows for its skyscrapers. But Manhattan’s skyscrapers don’t stand all by themselves surrounded by only much smaller buildings like this thing. And this thing is built, not right by the waterfront but maybe a few blocks from it, so from the water below it you can really get an impression of its size, and while there are a few other tall buildings close to it most of them seem to be toward the back and the sides of the valley, closer to the hills and mountains. The city doesn’t seem to have any real downtown, just loose strings of tall buildings in different places – a bit like what he’s heard L.A. is like. And the big skyscraper isn’t just tall, it’s big all around. It’s impressive not just for how tall it is but for how wide the base is – and the base is pretty tall itself, it’s gotta be at least twenty stories. And the tower that sticks up above it – much taller than the base – is pretty impressively wide itself. The building looks at least as tall as the World Trade Center, and much bigger around. As he gets a feel for just how big the building is Josiah again wonders where he is. That’s a pretty impressive building. It’s got to be one of the biggest in the world – maybe even the biggest. So how come he can’t remember ever hearing about it or seeing a picture of it?

He’s swimming into what looks like a commercial wharf district. A bit grimy looking. Lots of boats coming and going. Well, assuming he isn’t dreaming – and he’s more and more beginning to think he isn’t, the last time one of his dreams had such a stretch of continuous time in it was a long time ago – at least maybe now he’ll getting some answers.

One of the boats must have noticed him. It’s pulling straight towards him. It looks like maybe a fishing boat or a tugboat, its hull low to the water, puffs of dirty-looking black smoke come out of its smokestack. He swims toward it, yells, waves his hands. It’s close enough he can make out the crew.

That half convinces him again that he has to be dreaming. Or hallucinating. Or something. The weird second sun in the sky’s weird enough, the totally unfamiliar city with what has to be one of the biggest buildings in the world that for some reason he’s never seen a picture of or heard of is weird, but what he’s seeing now is just impossible - unless he’s stumbled into other dimension or something similarly ridiculous – absurd! - that sounds like something out of a comic book – sounds so ridiculous it’s impossible to take seriously on its face even as he thinks it and yet there’s no way this is happening in the world he knows, in what he’s always thought of as the real world, the realm of things that he or anyone else on planet Earth might actually presently experience.

The boat’s crew aren’t people. They’re powerful-looking, muscular creatures with six legs and tails like an iguana’s, built a little like iguanas but their legs are straighter and their stomachs don’t drag anywhere near the ground. They’re sand-colored with spots of black, except their undersides, which look white – they look very much like cheetahs in that way. Big red wattles hang from their throats and under their heads behind their beaks is something like an elephant’s trunk but shorter. On some of the – things – it’s curled tightly under the head, out of the way, but Josiah can see others handling things with them. Josiah realizes it’s hard for him to get a sense of their scale because the boat is built for things their size, but as they get closer he thinks they look big. And their feet have big claws.

Josiah doesn’t know whether he’s hallucinating or dreaming or what’s going on, but if this is real now he isn’t so sure it’s a good thing that he’s got the attention of those – those things. He starts to swim away.

He’s not as fast as the boat. It’s coming close to him. Some of the things are sticking their elephant trunks in his direction – he doesn’t know whether they’re pointing at him or not, but it looks like it. He can hear their voices now. Screechy whistles, like a bird of prey. Harsh, unpleasant sounds. A couple of the creatures look to be getting a net ready. Josiah takes a big gulp of air and disappears under the surface, tries to swim away underwater where he hopes the things can’t see him. He tries to surface as little of himself as possible, for as little time as possible – just his face for a few seconds, to take a gulp of air. There are loud splashes behind him. Some of the creatures are swimming towards him. Their swimming reminds Josiah of dogs. They swim fast and well, better than him. They’re wearing things like goggles, little domes of plastic over their eyes. Their trunks hold a long metal pole with a hook at the end. They’re around him, herding him, cutting him off, and behind him the things on the boat throw down a net.

The net catches Josiah and becomes a sack around him as it’s pulled forward and up. The net’s lifted out of the water and lowered carefully onto the deck of the boat, and Josiah’s lifted out of the water and lowered onto the deck of the boat with it. The things open the net and pull him out of it with the help of the hooks on long poles, as if they don’t want to touch him. They tie him up with some kind of cord and tie the cord to the boat’s little smokestack. The things are crowded around him, screeching at each other. He thinks the screeches might be a language, but they don’t seem to have all that much complexity, at least as far as he can hear. The things are big. Not quite as big as cows, but getting there. Now that he has a close look at them he can see that their bodies are covered with something that looks like feathers. Their beaks have teeth in them – big, sharp teeth longer than his thumb, like shark’s teeth but longer and without the serrated edges and sometimes mismatched in size. The elephant trunks really are trunks, with nostrils at the end, and they have six boneless finger-like things on the ends that the things use to grab things with. The trunks are the only part of their bodies that don’t have feathers. Their eyes remind him of a chameleon’s or a frog’s; they’re in little turrets toward the tops of their heads that move around. Their eyes are red and yellow, with round black pupils. Some of the creatures are holding some kind of device in their trunks and screeching, and the device screeches back in a tone ragged with electronic distortion. It makes him think of a cell phone, or a walkie-talkie.

The boat pulls on shore and the things untie the cord from the boat and lead him on it like a leash, pushing him from behind with their hook poles. His wet clothes cling to him uncomfortably. The things lead him onto what looks like a busy intersection in sight of the waterfront. The space is big and overshadowed by tall buildings, almost in the shadow of the huge glass and white metal tower. There’s a big crowd of things coming and going, and the road is full of strangely designed cars – designed for the things, obviously, as they’re driving them. He notices that some of them are smaller than others, and have much smaller wattles. The things gawk at him. Some of them seem to be talking to each other, gesturing with their elephant trunks and their legs and sometimes their tails. Some of them are talking on the trunk-held devices – cell phones? – and some of them are taking what he’s pretty sure must be pictures. He thinks he can recognize camera lenses and flashes, even though the cameras are held like almost like guns and the eyepiece is like a short telescope. A van of some sort pulls up – it reminds Josiah of a paddy wagon in an old movie – and he’s pushed into it. The door’s closed and he can feel the van pull off. There aren’t any windows, just little vents for air. The ceiling’s too low for him to stand up straight. It’s hard to stand up when the van’s moving and he’s tied up and there’re no handholds, but Josiah tries to see as much as he can out of the narrow air vents.

The van’s leaving the city and following a road into the mountains. There’s very little around. Just shrubs and what might be farms. There are sturdy wood and sometimes metal fences and big creatures that reminds Josiah a lot of the things and a little of cows behind the fences, cropping the shrubs with their beaks.

* * *

It’s hard for Josiah to tell the passing of time from the windowless, mostly empty room the things gave him. It’s just an empty space with a light and a tap for water and two dials that let him fiddle with the light level and the temperature that one of the things showed him how to use before they locked him in. The ceiling’s low, but at least it’s high enough for him to stand up straight. Josiah thinks it may be a good thing, after all, that the things are so big. Otherwise, since they walk on all fours (sixes, really), they’d probably make their ceilings even lower, like the one in the van, and he probably wouldn’t have been able to stand up straight for weeks now. He hasn’t seen the sun since they first put him in this room. He had only a few seconds while they walked him from the van to the entrance of this place to get a sense of where he was. Some isolated place with nothing around but low scrub-covered mountains.

On the first day the things had given him what he thinks must have been a major medical exam. The examined him and stuck him in all sorts of machines and took samples from him. More examinations followed, and sometimes he thought they took pictures of him and filmed him. They left plates of syrup stuff in his room on them, and one of the things made a show of drinking some of it. He thought they were trying to see what he would eat. Some of the syrups were tolerable or even tasty, others bland or disgusting. He drank the tastier ones and from then on that was what he was given. The syrup the things feed him tastes like weak table syrup or some unappetizing cold fishy soup, but it’s better than nothing but water. More likely to keep him alive, anyway – he’s not sure whether it’s actually more enjoyable.

A few days after he arrived – or at least Josiah thinks it must have been a few days – he was brought into a room with a thing in it. The thing had a machine that might have been a camera and two other machines he didn’t recognize. The thing showed him rocks and sand and other objects, and each time it showed him and object it would push a button on one of its machines and it would give out sounds like the screeching sounds the things made but full of complex tones. The thing showed him different version of the same object and the device would play back the same sound each time the same kind of object was shown. Then the thing showed him a rock and didn’t play back the sound. Josiah thought he had an idea what was going on and repeated the sound the machine made each time the thing showed him a rock. The thing gave him something like a little shot glass full of the weak sweet syrup. Josiah pointed at the rock and said “rock” and that time the thing gave him two little cups of the syrup. That happened again for a couple of different objects, until Josiah was pretty this was, indeed, a language lesson. These lessons have come every day since, and he’s done his best to remember the sounds for lots of different things. He wonders why the sounds from the machine are more complex than the sounds he hears from the things. He thinks maybe most of the things’ language is beyond the range of human hearing.

The door opens and three of the things come in. Josiah thinks one of them’s the thing from the language lessons. It’s hard for him to tell the things apart, but he’s familiar enough with this one he thinks he can recognize it from its spots. The thing carries what he thinks might be its camera with it, and something it doesn’t recognize, and sets them down on the floor. The two other things stand by the door. The linguist thing opens something on the new machine – it looks like it might be a screen and keyboard – and pushes some buttons.

The machine speaks. Its voice is an eerily perfect copy of Josiah’s own. Of course, since they don’t really understand how human language works, they wouldn’t want any variable that might throw understanding, like a different tone. Still, it’s a little strange.

“I Big Triangle At Bottom of Neck on Left Side and Big Part Circle Spot on Left Middle Thigh, Word Scientist. I make machine talk you words. Get better know more your words. Faster now we can speak understand together.”

There’s silence for a minute. The linguist thing pushes more buttons on his machine.

“We talk question.”

A few more seconds later the linguist thing – Josiah decides to think of him as Word Scientist – enters a follow up statement.

“Why you come to my planet?”

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Word Scientist can’t answer why or how Josiah’d come to their planet. All they know is that he showed up one day in the water in what the translation machine called The City on the Bay of Below the Treeless Green Mountains and been fished out of the water by fishermen.

Things get better now that Josiah can communicate with the things – what Word Scientist says are properly called Beings Capable of Thinking and Feeling – a term that’s quickly shortened to Sentients. They can ask him questions, see if procedures like sampling blood and bone are safe – since they only have one of him, the Sentients are scared to do anything that might damage him. They can ask what sort of foods he needs, can tolerate, and likes. His menu quickly improves to the same foods the Sentients eat, but it takes a little while for them to figure out how to prepare it right. They eat everything raw, and their sense of what’s tasty is a bit different from people’s. Still, raw vegetables and fruit - or badly cooked vegetables and fruit and meat – beats synthetic syrup. He asks for, and gets, furniture and entertainment. And they let him go out.

Josiah tells the Sentients as much as he can about Earth, and learns about their world in return.

* * *

11 Earth years (10 local years) later

Josiah Schmidt leans over the railing and looks over the field and toward the hills beyond. It reminds him so much of the time, long ago, that he visited a winery in Napa Valley. The plants here aren’t grapes, of course, and they aren’t intended to make wine with, but the plants and the landscape look similar enough to remind him. This world sometimes looks so much like Earth he can almost forget where he really is.

He can almost forget that he’s somewhere in the middle of the disk of the Andromeda galaxy, millions of light years from home. That the Sentients’ scientists tell him that “it’s not parsimonious to assume the lightspeed limit is wrong,” that the home he knows is probably millions of years away in time as well as space. That for all he knows he may very well be the last living human being. That the Sentients’ doctors tell him he probably doesn’t have very much time left.

”You must understand that our ability to treat you is limited. You’re incredibly lucky that you share as much of your biology as you do, that you use DNA and proteins with about the same amino acids. The evolutionary biologists tell me the chances are a million to one, they talk about ancient links between your world and ours… If that wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t even be able to eat our food, you’re very lucky. But your similarity to ours doesn’t extend above the level that we’re similar to the most primitive bacteria. A lot of our medicines work on biological mechanisms that you don’t share…”

Sometimes he wonders what humanity might have turned into, in those millions of years while he was … what? In transit?

Sometimes he wonders if he ever existed. Some of the Sentients’ scientists talk about simulants…

A sufficiently advanced intelligence – a computer, say – could easily theoretically be able to create a simulation – to imagine a creature – that was every bit as complete as a real person. It could, for instance, take Seven Big Spots In A Circle On the Left Rear Thigh the Conqueror and, from historical records, recreate him as a person. The recreation would probably have to be heavily fictionalized, of course, probably not terribly authentic – but who alive could tell? And with our guest here … his entire civilization might never have actually existed – could be totally fictional - and how would we know?…

It’s a very nice day. The little companion star isn’t up yet – it’ll be lighting up the sky tonight, washing out almost everything but the moons. Both of the moons are up. The big moon’s two thirds of the way to full. There are less dark patches on it than Earth’s moon, and the pattern of them’s different, and Josiah thinks it might look a little smaller than Earth’s moon, but it’s hard to be sure. The month’s longer, at any rate, if the Sentients’ calculations are right. The little moon that looks a bit like a grey potato’s close to the eastern horizon. It races around the sky so fast. The Sentients think it’s a captured asteroid – it orbits real close, completes a full orbit twice a day – maybe once every 8 hours. Soon after Josiah had arrived the Sentients tried adjusting a watch until the seconds felt right to him, so they could calculate the day and year of Earth from that. They calculated from that that this world’s day was less than 18.5 hours. They worried about the subjectivity of the calculation, but that sounded right to Josiah. The days here felt much too short. He’s gotten used to it though.

If he ignores the little moon, and the differences with the big moon, it looks so like Earth…

We want to preserve some of your cells, and some samples of your sperm. We have to think about the preservation of your species. We could create a clone, but we need a way to revert your somatic cells to ova. Normal cells won’t work – biological incompatibilities… We’re not there yet. We’re years, maybe decades of research away. If we could preserve your cells … eventually we could clone you. We could take out your male chromosome and replace it with a copy of your female one, produce an opposite sex clone along with your normal one, start a breeding colony… You don’t know the status of the rest of your species, this may be its only chance to come back from extinction!…

At least this function is small. The interviews and functions and parties and press conferences tire him out. He can’t blame the Sentients for being curious though. He’d be, in their place. Maybe this’ll get them thinking about space a little more. They have three other habitable worlds in their solar system, but they’re barely more enthusiastic about space Earth is. Or was. A habitable planet right next door, and all they could manage in half a century was one flags and footprints mission. Sure, it’s a cold place, and life never got out of the sea, but still… Josiah has the suspicion they’re just not a very adventurous people. They’ve had nuclear power for more than half a century, but their world mostly looks like the 1970s. Seven of the eight continents of their planet were uninhabited until a few centuries ago – they’d never colonized more than a few islands off the coast of their continent of origin before they discovered steam power. Of course, their planet’s continents are more scattered than Earth’s, all separated by thousands of miles of open ocean… When he argued his theory with them, they liked to point out that the only comparably isolated landmasses on Earth was Antarctica, and it was never colonized by humans.

It could also be that they had none of Earth’s worries of the Malthusian curve bumping up against limited resources. Not when they seemed blessed with a climate much less susceptible to global warming, if what their meteorologists theorized was anything to go by. Not when severe breeding restriction laws had stabilized the population at 2.5 billion worldwide for more than half a century.

Josiah touches his pocket, where he’s carrying the water-discolored photo of a wife twenty years dead. Twenty years … or maybe two and a half million years. His eyes are wet. Tears roll down his face.

A Sentient who’s wandered over to him taps him on the shoulder. It’s a male – Josiah can tell that from its large size and its big wattle. It takes him a moment to recognize it as one of the assistants of one of the biologists who helps with his treatment. It took a while for Josiah to learn to read the Sentients’ emotions, but he’s pretty good at it now – this one looks concerned. The Sentient asks if there’s something wrong with his eyes.

[Somes J]

I had a bunch of worldbuilding stuff for the aliens thought up but I couldn't find a way to incorporate it into the fic without gratuitous obnoxious infodumping or making it a much bigger and more ambitious project than I wanted to. I'll post it here.

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The Sentients (more properly translated as "Those Beings Capable of Thinking and Feeling") come from a planet orbiting in a binary system in the Galactic Habitable Zone of the Andromeda Galaxy. Their most common name for their world roughly translates as "The Place of the Living" or "The Mortal Plain" - a religious reference dating to a period before they understood the true nature of their world. It orbits a G class star somewhat smaller and dimmer than our sun. The companion star, a smaller and dimmer K class star, orbit at a distance corresponding to the Kuiper Belt on our own solar system. Seen from the Sentient homeworld, it is bright enough to drown out most of the stars at night, but not bright enough to be a true sun. The Sentient homeworld has two moons. The outer is somewhat mildly less massive and farther out than Earth's Luna, but still has enough pull on the planet to serve the function of preventing excessive shifting of the axis tilt. The inner moon is almost certainly a captured asteroid, and moves in an elleptical and highly inclined orbit that requires only ~8 hours to complete (this is slightly less extreme than the Martian moon Phobos). As a consequence, it would appear to rise and set from the a point on the surface of the Sentient homeworld several times a day.

The Sentient homeworld is similar in general characteristics to Earth. It orbits a little farther from its star than Earth, and combined with the dimmer spectral class of the star this means it recieves considerably less sunlight. The year is somewhat longer than Earth's, while the day is only ~18.5 hours. The reduced level of sunlight is compensated for by a higher level of carbon dioxide, roughly 13-1400 ppm compared to ~300 ppm on Earth (~4-5 times our level of carbon dioxide). This is roughly comparable to early Cenozoic Earth, and considerably less than the level that has existed in Earth's atmosphere for much of the Phanerozoic eon. Between these two effects the average temperature of the planet is similar to Earth or perhaps slightly cooler. Oxygen levels are mildly lower than Earth.

Despite this, the landmass of the Sentient homeworld is on average warmer than Earth's, and more fertile overall. Firstly, much less of this planet's landmass is near the poles. The south polar region is open ocean, while the north pole lies in the middle of an ocean comparable in size to Earth's Atlantic, with water exchange with the rest of the world ocean somewhat restricted by the presence of three large northern continents. Both poles have significant caps of sea ice, and the northern fringes of the northern continents are glaciated. There are also some large islands in the polar regions. However, there is nothing comparable to our Antarctica, although there is a sizeable land ice cap on one of the northern continents. The continents are also smaller, and the planet has less high mountains than Earth. This means rain more easily penetrates the continental interiors, and there are less rain shadows.

The downside is that the planet's eight continents all experience a level of isolation comparable to our Antarctica, seperated from other lands by thousands of kilometers of ocean. As a result of this and perhaps some other factors, seven of the eight continents were uninhabited until a few centuries ago (story time). The Sentients come from the largest continent, a triangular landmass in the southern hemisphere somewhat smaller than Asia, stretching from near the equator to subpolar lattitudes. The Sentients evolved from opportunistic omnivore-predators that lives on the grasslands toward the center of this continent.

Like our planet, the Sentient homeworld experiences periodic ice ages and warmer periods. During ice ages significant land glaciers form, sea levels drop, and the climate becomes cooler and drier. During interglacials most of the land ice melts, sea levels rise, and the climate becomes warm and wet. The last ice age ended between 15-20,000 years ago, agriculturalism beginning a few millenia later.

The civilization that would eventually come to dominate the Sentient homeworld began during the Bronze Age approximately 9000 years ago with early warlord-kings conquering the low coastal plains of the triangular continent's east coast. This empire dominated the east coast for the next 9000 years, until the emergence of industrialism there several centuries ago. It subsequently gained control over the rest of the inhabited world. Weaker nations were conquered outright, while stronger ones were incorporated as subject-ally tributary states. At around the same time the exploration of the rest of the planet and the colonization of the other seven continents began. The other continents were settled by settlers from the old empire, eventually sealing its dominance by demography and control over most of the planet's resources (unexploited for most of history).

The century since unification of the planet was quite peaceful compared to its equivalent in Earth history (the twentieth century), although there were some unsuccessful rebellions. The planet also avoided overpopulation by artificial freezing of the population at a relatively low level (2.5 billion people), a feat made possible only by the empire's near-total control over the planet. The planet was also dealt favorable hands by nature, again in the greater amount of fertile land, and also in the fact that the higher carbon dioxide level made global warming much less of an issue, since it would take much more carbon dioxide to significant elevate the atmospheric level.

Society is more communalistic and less individualistic and capitalistic than Earth's Western world. The Sentient homeworld does not appear to have ever produced a democratic society of note. On the plus side, the empire manages its territory relatively well. There is nothing like Earth's impoverished Third World; very few Sentients die of hunger or preventable disease.

Sentient families and society are relatively similar to Earth. Gender roles remain somewhat uneven, with leadership positions going to males and traditional gender roles being similar to traditional human societies, although this has reduced with the advent of industrial society. However, this inequality is generally less forceful than in traditional human societies. This may have something to do with the fact that Sentients do not concieve of sex as dirty in the same way humans do (possibly due to the fact that Sentient sexual and excretory organs are further removed from each other than in humans).

Biologically, Sentients are egg-layers with a roughly similar lifespan, maturation time, breeding rate, and diet as humans. Their claws and teeth grow continuously, and require regular filing in the absence of the high levels of wear and tear typical in ancestral Sentient societies. Sentient males are larger than females, and have wattles and feather combs that are (respectively) inflated and held erect as a sexual display. The wattle also serves to convey emotion by its color, and females have a small wattle that is not capable of inflating for this purpose. Sentients have ZW sex chromosomes, so females are the heterogametic sex, rather than males as with humans. The female W chromosome is severely shrunken and does not participate in meiotic gene crossing, like the Y chromosome in human males. Sentients are biochemically compatible with humans, using DNA and most of the same amino acids and other basic biomolecules, suggesting an ancient panspermia event. Suggestively, the Sentient homeworld has a class of bacteria with similarities to Earth archaea.

Technological progress has been somewhat slower in general on the Sentient homeworld than on Earth, although space exploration has been mildly more dynamic, culminating in an expedition to the Earthlike fourth planet of their sun (theirs is the third planet). Manned expeditions have also been sent to both moons of the Sentient homeworld, and unmanned probes have been sent to all the planets orbiting their sun, with a single unmanned survey probe to the companion star.

Despite a high level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (~4500-5000 ppm) this fourth planet is a cold world. Much of its landmass is concentrated in a single supercontinent in the polar lattitudes of the southern hemisphere, which is heavily glaciated. Oxygen levels are low, comparable with early Cambrian Earth (~.11-.12 bars partial pressure compared to ~.21 bars for Earth). A number of relatively small widely scattered landmasses exist over the rest of the planet. Lacking a large moon, the planet exhibits extreme changes in axis tilt over time, resulting in dramatic climate changes and often harsh conditions. This has discouraged the colonization of the land by complex life, and much complex life remains in the ocean. The Sentients are debating whether the planet is more valuable as a potential site of colonization or for its oceanic biosphere, which would be best preserved by leaving it relatively untouched, as well as whether this relatively uninviting place is even worth bothering with. The companion star also has two habitable planets. They also lack large moons, and also lack a Jupiter-like planet to protect them against excessive comet impacts. As a result though conditions are somewhat more pleasant the highest lifeform is amoeba-like single celled organism. At a distance comparable to our solar system's Kuiper belt it takes decades for a Sentient spacecraft to reach the companion star with present Sentient technology - a factor that makes it unsurprising that they have not bothered with more than a single unmanned survey probe to date.