A New Take on the Aurora Universe, by Shadar

Here's a fairly simple primer on the aspects of AU history that is relevant to my writing in 2017 and beyond.

While the AU has gotten so rich and involved that even I can't keep up with it (Brantley is the only historian who understands all of it now), I've simplified things as much as I can while still clinging to the bits and pieces of history, sometimes modified slightly, that I find indispensable:

Background of the Aurora Universe (AU2017)

The AU, as I envision it for my 2017 writing is drawn from my old AU-2 definition. It shares many concepts and bits of history with Brantley’s explorations in his universe (AU-3), particularly his depictions of the early days of Arion (which he calls Aurean) and Velorian history.

1) It begins with the Galen, a very advanced alien race who discovered that humans are both intelligent and uniquely resilient, and have a genome that’s easy (for them) to create "client races" who can populate Earth-like planets across the galaxy. They’ve secretly been abducting people from Earth for thousands of years. These abducted “Terrans” are tweaked to be able to live in the various environments on the worlds they want to populate. There are now hundreds of human-populated worlds out there.

The only people who don’t know any of this are the people of Earth, who the Galen keep in the dark so as to not corrupt the wild seed source of their genetically-engineered human races. Basically, we’re a seed bank, and we’re being mushroomed. But like any scientist, the Galen find it important to maintain a control, and also a fallback to start over if things go too wrong. That’s us, stuck on our Earth with a powerful alien race who is determined to not let us get too far off it.

2) The Galen have been fighting with another ancient alien race called the Elders for millions of years. Somewhere along the way, the Elders managed to render all Galen females infertile, presumably with some bio-engineered orgasm that even the Galen couldn’t stop. This dooms the Galen to eventual extinction, although they live a very, very long time.

3) The Galen decide to bio-engineer a group of humans into dedicated procreators, or surrogates, to allow their race to survive. They scoured the Earth for a robust, homogeneous breeding group with a narrow gene pool to simplify their work, and found a village of remarkably tall, robust, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordics in a region of what would eventually be called Sweden, over near the current Norwegian border, the time around 1000AD. Glaciers and other inhospitable terrain had isolated this pre-Christian population in an otherwise fertile valley for many hundreds of years. The timeframe is the waning years of the Viking era, and the Vikings are the only outsiders who know of this village, and they protect it from any travelers. Unknown to history, a handful of Viking royalty have chosen wives from this village for many generations to strengthen their line, given their offspring are always born tall and amazingly athletic.

(The closest currently-named location to where this village once stood is Laisdalen, Sweden. Only a few Sami reindeer herders and the occasional hiker pass through this empty land today, which is ironic given Laisdalen spawned a galactic civilization that remains unknown to most Earthers.)

Given that the Galen are very powerful beings, they had to greatly enhance these new abductees with their own DNA so they could survive the act of mating and also protect and raise their immensely powerful children, who are powered by an energy form called Orgone. They enhance these humans by eliminating most of the non-coding (junk) genes and replacing them with one’s analogous to their own. They then placed their newly engineered humans on a gold-cored planet named Velor, thus creating the Velorians. The Galen call this new subspecies Homo Sapiens Supremis to distinguish it from the other surviving subspecies, Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

(I use the term Terran to refer to both the Earth-resident version of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and the modestly tweaked versions of us that live on their seeded worlds. ) 

They also engineered in a control mechanism so the Velorians couldn’t escape Galen control, and they based the control on the way gold suppresses the secretion of certain hormones (presumably also a weakness with the Galen).

The Velorians themselves didn’t originally understand any of this, other than the handful of young women they harvested from Velor each year to become a procreators, who were never allowed to return to tell their stories.

The Galen care nothing for Velorian men beyond ensuring the birth of future generations of useful females. Nor did they give men any way to store Orgone in their bodies, although they have the same abilities as their females when they have access to Orgone. It’s only their finest females, a genetic class called Prima-1, that the Galen want for procreators. They install a artificially intelligent Maternity Engine on Velor that purifies and tweaks the ova and sperm before in-vitro fertilization to ensure their needs are met and the race doesn’t mutate or diverge. This way they crank out both a sufficient number of Primas to be their surrogates, but also lesser classes of Velorians to support them, and just enough males to keep the whole system working. No interbreeding with ordinary humans is possible.

Also, given that the Galen solitary goal was to create Procreators, they amped up Velorian’s pheromones and hormones to make them extremely sexual beings. After all, they had only one use planned for them, and they wanted them to be both willing and inspirational.

4) After several hundred years of this status quo, a religious group of Velorian Natural Lifers emerges who believe that old fashioned reproduction is the sacred way of life, and they believe the Galen plan of controlling them to use only for their procreation is an abomination. This leads to a cultural split in Velorian society that threatens to become a civil war. Fortunately, the Naturals discover an ancient Galen transporter machine and use it to flee to a planet they name Aria. The Natural Lifers all leave, once again restoring harmony (and complete Galen control) to Velor.

But it doesn’t end there. The split is so acrimonious in the eyes of the religious zealots that these new Arions attempt to expunge any reminder that they were once Velorians. Since Velorians are 100% blonde and blue-eyed thanks to the narrow gene pool they brought from Earth, the Arions decide to release a wild retrovirus into their population on Aria to insert the dominant human gene for hair color (brown/black) into their population. Something goes drastically wrong (likely Galen sabotage) and this planet-wide dispersal of the retrovirus mutates to reduce the physical powers of most of their people (creating the numerous Betans) and enhances the physical power (even above Velorian levels) for a very small percentage, less than 0.01%.

That tiny elite fraction of Arions call themselves Primes, and they assume political, military and economic control.

5) Yet both Arions and Velorians remain trapped on their own planets while the Galen (through their agents called the Seeders) populate many other worlds with abducted Terrans. Only the Galen know they exist. The real story at this time is the proliferation of new human-populated worlds, which number in the hundreds.

This situation remains stable until an alien race of traders called the Scalantrans discover Velor. They find nothing to trade on that backward planet, devoid of technology except for the Maternity Engine, which does not interest them. Just a bunch of uniformly pale hairless apes of a type they’ve observed on a number of newly terraformed worlds, who in many cases they are already trading with.

But to their great surprise, they discover that the handful of Terrans who work and travel with them on their trade ships are very much taken with the Velorian women. While the Sclalantrans themselves have no concept of human beauty, the humans working with them report that the Velorians are all unimaginably stunning blondes, and sexually willing to the extreme.

One of those humans proposes a basis for commerce that would allow Velor to become a Scalantran trading partner. Since the Velorians are desperate for something to trade, they take the Scalantrans up on the radical idea of offering some of their young women as indentured servants to the Scalantrans. The plan is for the Scalantrans to transport these women (who they call Companions) to worlds with wealthy Terrans and sell their contracts. In so doing, they discover (in almost disastrous ways) that these women gain fantastic strength, the ability to levitate, to see through things and even burn things with their eyes, and they cannot be injured by any known weapon.

The panicky Scalantrans nearly pull the plug on the whole program when they realize that transporting these superwomen is extremely dangerous. That is, until they discover by accident that a solid gold choker around a Velorian’s neck (think slave collar) will reduce their strength to nearly that of a Terran, and eliminate all their other abilities except for their resistance to injury, which is only slightly diminished. (The gold band interferes with the neck’s pituitary gland which controls the hormones that allow Orgone metabolism).

The Velorian Council, which by now has had a taste of real wealth, accelerates the sale of its daughters into indentured servitude to gain the hard capital they need to trade with the Scalantrans. They make laws that guarantee that Companion contracts are inviolate for the equivalent of a Terran century, and order Companions to serve their contract holder in any way he or she wishes.

Once the wealthy and powerful Terran men on seeded worlds realize that they can buy a century-long indenture for the most beautiful women they’ve ever seen, they all want one. Not only to warm their bed, but even more importantly (for many) to protect them from any foe. These Companions help some of these men create dynasties on their worlds, given that their contracts are handed down from one generation to the next until the contract is completed. (Velorians live for many hundreds of years). Many Companions become so bound to their new families, and so estranged from Velor, that they remain long after their contract ends, many indefinitelyl. Velor, in any case, doesn’t want them back and the Scalantrans gain no advantage by carrying them home.

6) As this horrific trade in human flesh from Velor unfolds, the Arions develop their own spaceflight technology and begin a conquest to sweep the Terran worlds into their Empire. They try to convince the Companions who are in place that they are slaves. They believe that Supremis should be the dominant humans in the galaxy and they invite the Companions to join them as free people. The Arions also believe that only through shared strength and military alliance can they protect humanity from further exploitation by as yet undiscovered hostile alien races, rumors if whom they have heard from the Scalantrans.

7) As the Arions continue conquering worlds, drawing some Companions to their side, they begin to battle other Companions who decide to defend their contract holders. But those Companions are outclassed by both the more powerful Primes and a new weapon called a GAR (a weapon that shoots a circular laser beam to evacuate a tunnel to the target down which they shoot charged particles and, with some models, a tiny bit of anti-matter). These weapons can actually harm a Companion.

Also, while Companions are educated and skilled at many things, they aren’t trained as warriors. 

8) One Companion decides to break her contract and travel back to Velor with information about this new weapon and the Arion plans to subvert Companions so that a defense can be created. She winds up kicking off a revolt on Velor that leads to the collapse of the Companion trade.

Soon after that, a Galen scientist who was instrumental in creating the Velorians, and who is horrified by the rise of the Arion Empire, allies herself with Velor to begin further enhancing Companions into warriors who are even more powerful than Arion Primes. In such a way are the Protectors born.

9) Velorian Protectors are soon stationed on many Terran worlds to protect them from the Arions. On some worlds they are visible, and they form the Enlightenment, an alliance of worlds which opposes the growing power of the Arion Empire. However, on undisclosed worlds, like Earth, they operate secretly, if at all.

10) Earth is unique in that the Galen forbids either the Velorians or Arions from operating openly for fear of spoiling their seed bank. They certainly don’t want the people of Earth to realize that there is a vast galactic civilization out there, populated by abducted and tweaked humans.

They land some undercover Velorians whose job it is to block or discredit or otherwise interfere with programs like SETI which try to locate other civilizations. They will also secretly work to supress any spacecraft technology that emerges which has the potential to take Terrans outside their own system. Earth must remain mushroomed for all eternity.

The Arions have a different approach. They have been secretly infiltrating governments on Earth since at least the 1920’s. The Arions are hoping to create a total breakdown of societal and economic foundations that will lead to global war, and WWII is their first success. They believe the next such war, which will inevitably become nuclear and biological, will so threaten the Galen’s human seed-bank that the Galen will relent and allow the Arions to come in and restore peace by taking control of Earth and making it part of their Imperial Empire — something they are very practiced at doing. Or so goes the as-yet unrealized Arion master plan.

An underground war is now being fought on Earth between Velorian and Arion forces, but we ordinary humans usually can’t see it. We see the disintegration of culture, war and terrorism that results from the Arion attempts to subvert Earth, but Terrans assume those instabilities and chaos are of their own making.

It is only when a rogue Arion General decides to push things along by supplying Arion weapons to some of their client humans on Earth that the existence of the Supremis begins to surface.

The beginning of that conflict, illegal in the eyes of Aria and Velor as well as the Galen, is described in Imperial Earth Book 1, called Dinner Party.

This, then, is essentially is the story-space for my 2017 AU writing, with the additional caveat that portions of my stories may also take place on the seeded, terraformed worlds out there, as well as on Velor itself, as we will see in Book 2, Golden Planet.

— Shadar, 2017