The UPF’s official adherence to Church doctrine was one of those charming little fictions everyone played along with, like pretending nutrient paste was food or that officers were inherently smarter than the enlisted scum they commanded. I’d been braced for that particular brand of hypocrisy, the kind where they pay lip service to a shared morality while their boots are planted firmly on your neck. So, color me genuinely surprised—shocked, even—to find that on the Crow, it wasn’t just a formality. It was… real.

  Back in the fringe, where ignorance reigned supreme among those who thought they knew better, God was an inconvenient myth, a story for desperate people huddling in the dark, and a useful means to maintain control. The slaver worlds, those festering sores the UPF somehow found room to welcome, openly mocked the whole idea.

  Their creed was one of raw, untamed power: we are becoming gods. And from what I’d seen of their handiwork, they were doing a piss-poor job of it. Monsters aspiring to be bigger monsters.

  The whole mess started centuries ago, with the first mad scramble out from Old Earth. The explorers, the delvers, the fortune-hunters—they were overwhelmingly male. The powers-that-be back on a stabilizing Earth probably saw it as a convenient pressure valve.

  Ship all the rebels, malcontents, and ambitious troublemakers off to die in the black. Meanwhile, the women who valued stability over adventure stayed behind, and the social landscape shifted. Polygamy, polyamory—it all became commonplace. Security was the new currency, and family was the bank it was stored in.

  Then they discovered cultivation. A man leaves Earth, taps into the essence of the universe, and suddenly, he’s not just a man anymore. He’s a superhero from an ancient flat-vid. He lives for centuries, punches through bulkheads, and thinks in equations that would melt a normal brain. And he does it all in a universe that is, for the most part, a profoundly lonely place.

  That was the recipe for disaster. A galaxy full of powerful, lonely, potentially immortal men with a grudge against the comfortable world that had essentially told them to get lost. Old Earth became a backwater, its relevance bleeding away into the stars, replaced by new empires built on that foundation of lonely, potent anger.

  Solutions were attempted, each more ethically bankrupt than the last. A female ‘tithe’ that made conscription look like a holiday picnic. Bans on cultivators returning home. It sparked wars. It revived slavery in a dozen ugly new forms. The galaxy got a lot darker and a lot more complicated.

  Then came genemodding. The great new hope. For a hot minute, it looked like we could engineer our way out of the problem. All-male colonies that reproduced artificially? Done. Entirely female sub-breeds, like the Nymphs, who could pop out a dozen kids a year? Created. But each ‘solution’ just spawned new nightmares.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  The all-male colonies tore themselves apart in civil wars that made the old Earth conflicts look like playground spats. The Nymphs became a population bomb waiting to detonate, their sheer numbers a threat to any system they settled.

  The Dryads were the worst. A media conglomerate’s brilliant idea: create the perfect, beautiful, near-immortal influencer. A propaganda machine you could fuck. They were designed for loyalty—to their corporate owners, not to any concept of right or wrong. For the hordes of lonely, powerful men, they were a plague of manipulation.

  The male Dryads were rarer and even more dangerous; perfectly crafted to be sociopathic rulers, their beauty a weapon and their charm a trap. They were the first spark that lit the Gene Wars.

  And then the Church, riding a wave of post-diaspora traditionalism, decided it had the answer. They would create the perfect woman. A companion for the lonely explorer. Endlessly loyal, adventurous yet craving security and family, mostly asexual in youth to avoid the old pitfalls, and gifted with a profound affinity for magic that they could pass to their children.

  They created us. The Maenads.

  And that was the straw that shattered the galaxy’s spine. Within two generations, the worst of humanity had figured out how to twist and break us. The ethical violations were so horrific that they sparked the all-out Gene Wars. And we, the intended solution, became the ultimate victims.

  Dryads were purged, relegated to history texts. Nymph colonies dwindled into nothingness. And we Maenads? We disappeared, fleeing to the most inhospitable rocks we could find, becoming rare and expensive commodities on the slave markets.

  Countless genemods were annihilated. ‘New humans’ were outlawed. Oh, the elites still got their genetic pre-selection, their recessive negative traits neatly edited out. But the new ideal became the ‘pure’ baseline human, because even a normal human could be ‘purified’ and empowered through cultivation, and a lack of reinforced recessives gave the normal human a stronger starting point, rather than a replacement.

  The only modified strains that survived were the useful ones. The tough, strong. and easily-manipulated Orcs. The clever, numerous Goblins. The reclusive, industrious Dwarves and the thoughtful, passive, and nearly immortal Elves.

  There were rare breeds running around, sometimes created by movie studios or even rare churches, but they were a minority, often destined to interbreed with humanity until nothing remained but stubby antenna, or restricted to special worlds that were simply impossibly inhospitable to baseline humans. But in the end, they were all designed to breed back into humanity, to prevent another gene war.

  Through it all, the Church remained. And for my people, it wasn’t just a comfort. It was a lifeline. When your entire species is hardwired to do anything for the ‘right man’—even if that man is a monster who buys you as a child and forces a bond through rape—you need something immutable to cling to.

  The Ten Commandments. Set in stone. Backed by a wrathful, loving, real God. It was the anchor that kept us from being swept away by our own terrifying potential. The fact that we could simply… die… with a thought, an unintended side effect of our affinity-tuning, made that anchor all the more necessary. It was the retreat of last resort.

  It probably didn’t help that a significant number of us were born with the potential to become worse than the monsters we feared. At least two major affinities were the norm, not the exception. An independent Maenad, if she grew powerful? She could become a nightmare to make the old Technomancers weep.

  That was our bogeyman. The monster in the mirror. The reason the Commandments weren’t just rules; they were the bars on a cage we built for ourselves, that was as much protection as it was bondage.