They had conquered the cosmos, populating the surrounding moons, planets, star systems, and galaxies. Their potent genetics exploited every niche on land and underwater, in the skies and in space—in an infinite variety of form, size and purpose. So far had humankind come that most had forgotten their humble beginnings of millennia ago. Yet some remembered, kept hold of their heritage, and celebrated its original shape… Lost, quiet, and alone amid the blackness of space, the vast cigar-shaped habitat Gaia-Prime carried on just as she had done for the last few thousand years: silent, majestic and self-contained. The hab orbited a gas giant in the Laland system, gliding among the planet’s waves of energy like a colossal whale feeding upon a bloom of plankton. A living museum to a long-lost past. But Gaia-Prime was failing. An evil had found her. Some remnant of humanity, so twisted and changed as to be almost unrecognizable, had infected the corporeal organism of the hab and sought her destruction.
