The world

History of the world

Chapters 1 to 4

Leaving Earth. Earth is a planet with a very long history, the ancient cradle of humanity, long forgotten and long buried. Yet it was here, in the history of a dead planet, that the events happening now first took shape. Remember the past in order to understand the present. The purpose of this history is to show that past, and to explain why we are all here. Many dark secrets stayed behind on the dead planet and lie hidden there for now. But those secrets will play their part in the story of RF Online, a story that began before you arrived, and that will draw you into an adventure where you have a decisive role.

Once the First Plan for the Far Development of the Galaxy was set in motion, studying Earth any further was considered pointless. The human race was spreading beyond the Solar System and beyond the galaxy; its hopes and its purposes lay out among unknown stars, in the dark depths of space, far from the cradle. The history of the planet seemed to have lost all meaning for a humanity that had stepped into the unknown. So it seemed.

Antarctica, once the subject of so much research, can serve as the starting point for the adoption of the Far Development project. The cold lands held secrets, and those secrets were being unpicked in research laboratories staffed by retired scientists and researchers.

Ivan Siburg, a retired biologist, belonged to the Secret Club, whose members, scientists and amateur researchers alike, studied the mysterious histories and civilisation origins that other researchers tended to neglect. The ordinary academics who held power called the Secret Club a rich boys' club, a gathering of wealthy gentlemen. The theories and ideas this elite group put forward were treated with contempt, and scholars had little faith in their outlandish readings. The group was regarded with scepticism. That mistake proved very costly for the human race.

Ivan Siburg came to Antarctica to study the creatures living in that remote and inhospitable part of Earth. The work he did drew none of the attention it deserved, because every living thing in the region was thought to have been catalogued already. His membership of the Secret Club only deepened the distrust of his ideas. It was only when Siburg discovered the Virus, the Dimens syndrome, that his ideas and his research began to command respect.

This mysterious virus, found hundreds of metres beneath the ice sheet in eastern Antarctica, excited Siburg enormously: his research and his hard work had finally paid off. He carried a sample of the virus straight to his own laboratory to begin studying it at once. Although the virus had been caught in an icy trap and had spent tens of thousands of years there, it was still active, waiting for the day it would be given life again.

Siburg thawed the ice carefully, expecting to prove to the world that unknown forms of life remained in Antarctica and that his name would be remembered for ever. What he did not suspect was that this discovery would bring an end to all humanity. The freshly thawed virus infected his brain. At first he thought a cold was behind his headaches, but over the course of the day his colleagues were infected too.

The virus brought on fits of unprovoked aggression. Its victims, sane people only minutes before, turned into uncontrollable and violent attackers. The virus planted a thirst for violence. Within a few days Siburg's research station had become a slaughterhouse. The consequences of infecting one small group of people were terrible.

A transport ship, informed of the incident, was sent to collect the researchers' bodies. Its return was a costly mistake.

Using the transport as its carrier, the mysterious virus spread swiftly across the whole of Earth, stopping at nothing, leaving no living thing untouched behind it. This infection resembled no virus ever discovered or created by man. The people of Earth took on the same traits as the infected researchers. They began to kill one another and, in the end, launched nuclear weapons at the human colonies on Mars and Saturn. Defending themselves, the people of Mars and Saturn answered by launching their own warheads at Earth. Humanity's self-destruction had begun, and with it the collapse of the Solar System.

Every human settlement in the galaxy was appalled by what had happened in the Solar System. Several search expeditions were organised and sent to survey the planets the virus had touched. The expeditions found only death and ruin. Poisoned by radiation, the Solar System was now an uninhabitable desert.

The researchers soon understood that nothing living could be found there, but they did establish the cause of the Solar System's destruction. The mysterious virus was still active, in spite of the heat and the radiation left by the nuclear blasts. Its elastic structure had shut down its vital processes and left it dormant. By a grim irony, that was the very state Siburg had once found it in.

Having lost most of the members of the research teams, the survivors returned to tell the truth about the destruction of Earth and the Solar System. It was already too late. Sector B-71, the principal site of the fourth plan for development within the galaxy, became the main administrative centre after the Solar System fell. In time, the events on Earth and in the Solar System were gradually forgotten. Humanity went on developing, having buried its memories of that terrible time.

Kart Doxon, president of the Secret Club and once a highly respected anthropologist, led research into the origins of human civilisation. His means were limited, and his academic peers therefore regarded his work with deep scepticism. His reputation was slight, and the academic community did not count him a scientist at all.

All the Secret Club's discussions centred on two great civilisations of Earth, Mu and Atlantis. Their studies and inquiries focused on the history of Stonehenge in England and on the mysterious Moai stone figures of Easter Island.

For many centuries humanity had investigated its own origins, the civilisations it had produced, and the mystical powers spoken of in ancient scripture. Legends abound, and although no one had ever proved any of them true, people went on believing in them regardless. The Moai stones of Easter Island, which seem to hold a spiritual power and to be bound up with something beyond nature, helped bring the ancient civilisation of Mu into being. Could there have been even a grain of truth in those beliefs?

Doctor Doxon's research had to wait, because news of Earth's destruction was slowly reaching the far colonies. That terrible news moved Doxon to study the mysterious virus with enormous interest. Fortunately for him, the research material on the virus reached him before the terrible events aboard the research vessel overtook its crew.

Working from that material, Doxon made an interesting discovery and formed a theory to explain the disappearance of the ancient civilisations of Earth. The theory held that the fall of the two greatest ancient civilisations had in fact been caused by war. The reason for those wars would play a decisive part in all later human history.

Doctor Doxon believed that the cause of the war between the two great civilisations was the Dimens syndrome, a by-product of the mysterious virus. Neither greed nor politics lay behind that war. It was the urge to kill itself. The war left no trace, destroying both great civilisations utterly. The Dimens syndrome was forgotten, and it should have been lost for ever. It very nearly was: the virus lay dormant for thousands of years.

Now, though, it had become clear that the Dimens syndrome had not vanished from human life altogether. Human evolution had worked some of its elements into the human genome, elements that raised aggression and brought about certain physical changes. It seemed that people had acquired sharp teeth and nails purely because of their aggressive, warlike nature. Were these the marks of humanity's true nature? Those refinements had not come about for the sake of survival; they were preparation for a new war.

Doctor Doxon used his research on the Moai stones in an attempt to prove some connection between the events on Earth and the mysterious virus. His suspicions forced him to suppose that somewhere far away there existed a superior intelligence. An intelligence that had conceived and created the virus in order to bring about the fall of Mu and Atlantis.

Doxon had a great many hypotheses worth examining and a great many questions worth answering, most of them about ancient Earth and the secrets it kept. Where had the strange stone sculptures come from? What did the Nazca lines in Peru mean? Had they been made to worship a superior intelligence, or a mighty civilisation? Could the mysterious virus have been created to destroy all humanity, even though humanity worshipped that civilisation?

Doctor Doxon drew together everything he had gathered from suppositions, theories and historical events, and then put his hypothesis to the scientific world. To his horror, his theories were made a laughing stock. Leading scientists only laughed at him and mocked him for his foolish guesses. The higher powers had sent their final warning, and it was ignored. Humanity was beginning to disappear.

Far among the stars, on the planet Vega in the constellation of Lyra, rested the civilisation of the Gerodians. A race whose name alone stirred fear and hatred in many of the inhabitants of the universe. A civilisation that had ground hundreds of races into dust before they could develop, a people who stripped planets bare like locusts. Long ago the peoples of many galactic sectors formed a Great Alliance to fight the Gerodians, and the stars ran red with blood.

Later it emerged that a civilisation in the constellation of Taurus, unnoticed until then, had reached a level of development at which it could hold off the Gerodians alone. The Gerodians reacted at once. So began a war that lasted tens of thousands of years. Tens of thousands of years of ruin and devastation. The forces came into balance, a deadlock for both sides. Only the Book of the Dead grew and grew, with every day, every year, every millennium.

That war demanded every resource the Gerodians had. Those resources proved insufficient, and sooner or later the war would be lost. It was then that a way out was devised. Hundreds of artificially created beings conquered and settled dozens of planets with a single purpose: to drain those planets, to carry off everything that could be mined and used as weapons, fuel or building material.

And it was then that the Gerodians met humanity. They met it, and they were stopped. It became plain that the human galaxies would not fall to them. What surprised the Gerodians most was that this was not their first encounter with humanity. How had these people survived their earlier invasion, thousands of years before? An invasion begun with the newest biological weapon of its day. A weapon whose effects no people in the universe had yet survived.

It was then that the Gerodians developed the virus, a third-generation weapon, and there has never been a weapon more terrible or more destructive in the universe. A weapon that all but destroyed the constellation of Taurus, where they never learned what had caused such grievous losses.

Every action produces a reaction. Although the Gerodians managed to destroy several human civilisations that had developed apart from the main body of human sectors, they could go no further. Humanity was developing new weapons capable of destroying Gerodian ships. Humanity was devising new vaccines able to fight the Gerodian virus, known before as the Dimens syndrome.

Source: rfonline.ru (Innova, 2007–2009), recovered from the Internet Archive. original page