Elvan – Gender neutral portmanteau of ‘elevated’ and ‘human’. Human beings who have injected themselves with artificially intelligent nanobots. Descendants of the 1% of the richest human beings.
Orcan – Gender neutral portmanteau of ‘organic’ and ‘human’. Human beings who originally altered their DNA to become ‘mutants’, but were then dipped into a vat, their bodies dissolved and reformed, into a new creature that has the genomes of every organism that human beings have ever able to map, stored inside special quad-helical DNA knots called ‘archive cells’.
Gynous – Woman, or, female.
Androus – Man, or, male.
Essence – Genetics, genes.
The Godlike Beings - Humans. Homo sapiens. Completely and utterly extinct.
Catastrophe - Climate change. 8+ degrees celsius and counting.
Eucatastrophe - The Post-Apocalypse. The birth of the elvan species. Term originally coined by The Godlike Who Cannot Be Named For Legal Reasons, meaning a miraculous and divine turn of fate after a seemingly inevitable doom.
Reath - Earth. An anagram.
Phyros – Venus. Root of word taken from ‘Aphrodite’.
Aryss – Mars. Root of word taken from both ‘Ares’ and ‘Abyss’.
Magick – Science.
Rotation (“Rote”) – Day. Day is no longer used because in the polar regions of the planet, daytime lasts for an entire season, instead of 24 hours.
Fortrote – Fortnight.
Luna – Month.
Revolution – Year.
The Long Day – Summer in the Southern Hemisphere, Winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Long Night – Winter in the Southern Hemisphere, Summer in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Long Dawn – Spring in the Southern Hemisphere, Fall in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Long Dusk – Fall in the Southern Hemisphere, Spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
Death Mist – It’s just mist, but it never goes away, holding over 35 centigrade temperatures and close to 100 percent humidity, which will cause death to any humanoid because the wet-bulb temperature makes it impossible for the body to cool off with sweat. Covers over half the planet, constantly.
Belt of Storms – the Equator. Constantly spewing storms out.
Hyphoon, Hurricane – a theoretical phenomenon, formed when ocean surface temperatures reach or exceed 50 degrees centigrade, by which a typhoon or hurricane reaches the Stratosphere and can last for months.
Upper Reath - The Northern Hemisphere. ‘The Global North’.
Lower Reath - The Southern Hemisphere. ‘The Global South’.
Frozen Wastes - Europe. Uninhabitable after the atlantic-meridional overturning circulation was shut down, causing temperatures to plunge as oceanic heat was directed away.
The Black Path – Crossing by way of Africa, through the Sahara Desert, and then through Europe, or reverse. Almost impossible because of the heat of the Sahara.
The Green Path – Crossing by way of Australia, Indonesia, China, and then Russia, or reverse. The easiest due to the protection of the Tibetan Plateau.
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The Red Path – Crossing by way of South America, and then North America, and then Canada, or reverse, using the Andes, Appalachian, and Rocky Mountain ranges to avoid
Jhirya – An oligarchic superstate that is the fusion of China and Russia. Created when China attacks Russia, leading to a stalemate, and then eventual merger of both governments and elites.
Morquarra – An oligarchic superstate that was once the United States of America..
Tuneden – An oligarchic superstate formed from the confederated government of Canada, and refugee states from Europe.
Oceania - Oceania. Australia and New Zealand.
Protorca - Patagonia.
Emerald Island of Vyredia - Greenland.
The Redeemer – Jesus Christ.
The Condemner – Take a guess.
The Celestial Escalator - is a Space Elevator.
The Void - Space.
Tunedic Archipelago - Nunavut.
Orca - Antarctica.
Forbidden Fire / Holy Fire - Fossil Fuels.
Dragons - Spaceships, serpentine in elvan design, fueled by bio-nanotechnological conducted molten fission reactions. Must release spent fissile fuel as a waste product.
Dragonbreath – Released and spent fissile fuel
Drakes – Sky bound craft sharing the same design as dragons.
Whirligigs - Helicopters.
Automaton Whirligig - Drones.
Spirits - Artificially intelligent nanobots that observe neural electrical connections and use a machine learning algorithm to replicate the patterns of thought. Originated as bacta, or cybernetic bacteria, a biological foundry of nanoscale machines, designed to augment the human body. The spirits underwent a ‘grey goo’ problem, and are present in some concentration in every bit of surface matter on Reath, and they are spreading through Aryss.
Psionics - Starting from the Neuralink technology, then afterwards using nanobots that record neuronal electrical connections, it became possible to read the thoughts of other people. The way psionics work is identical to the way neuronal connections are made. It is easier for a new connection to be created than for it to be erased, just like how deleting a memory is harder than putting in a new one.
Scrying - reading a memory through psionics.
Bacta - Cybernetic bacteria, the predecessor to spirits. Capable of easily modifying what kind of nanobots it produces through plasmid conjugation. With bacta building nanobots to integrate with proteins, it could gradually, by a nanoscopic process, turn any organism into a cyborg- such as elvans.
Gryphantene – carbon molecules that have been printed to hold specific molecular shapes – fullerenes, buckyballs, nanotubes, or combinations – to enhance the qualities desired. Basically, with the qualities of carbon fiber, except magnified. Cannot hold contradictory qualities (such as hard as a diamond but still ductile as gold) at the same time.
Elvankind - Elevatum sapiens. Descendants of the upper classes, who extended their lifespans to roughly 150 years for men, and 200 years for women, a natural factor scaling of the already longer lifespan of women. Since all the men were dead, the elites therefore had a fertility problem. While they had the technology to print embryos wholesale, their bodies had been corrupted by all the nanobots they had injected into themselves. The embryos could not survive. Therefore, they had to change their lifecycle entirely, becoming a parasitic species that required the use of the wombs of other organisms. After this change, the elvans could no longer be considered the same species as human beings.
Orcan Horde - Organicum sapiens. Descendants of the lower classes, that is, ‘mutants’. Forced to endure backbreaking labor in hellish post-climate change conditions, laborers were forced to genetically reengineer themselves to survive the tasks put upon them by the elites, those who would go on to become the elvans. Eventually they were liberated by the Horde Master, who dipped them into vats of bacta, dissolving their bodies, rebuilding them with most neural connections intact, but without their memories. Once dipped, the mutant emerges a ‘super mutant’, or an orcan. Since they become an entirely new organism after this process, with an entirely different chromosomal structure, even as the reproductive process remained the same, the orcans could no longer be considered the same species as human beings.
Capable of shapeshifting almost any animal’s physical traits. Inside each orcan body is a big knot of DNA – a novel quad-helical structure created from a modification of the G-quadruplex – also known as the archive cell. The archive cell has bundled inside it the genes of every genome that has ever been recorded from any organism, which by ~2600 AD, the time of the Eucatastrophe, is most of the ones we managed to discover, before they all went extinct, including, of course, the human being.
This novel is a satire and parody.
All references, similarities, portrayals, and allusions to other works, or actual living people, are completely intentional, and covered by fair use doctrine under copyright law.
Even the footnotes- they’re just like how scattered neuronal connections are made every time one neuron is triggered, it cascades into a series of other connections.
