Another piece of background flavour about my (secretly Exhuman) character's outlook. Enjoy! (BTW I should mention that I have no idea how any of this gels with the "GM-only" stuff in the back of the main rulebook. I've deliberately not read that section, so that our GM can do proper in-game reveals. So no spoilers, please!) --------------------------------- POSTHUMAN EVOLUTION Everything we know about evolution tells us that the natural state of a species is to be extinct. 99.999% of every species that ever lived on Earth was gone, even before the Fall. Why should we think that we’re any different? Survival is all about evolutionary fitness in the face of rapidly changing fitness landscapes. In the past, biological evolution was ‘fast’ enough. Not so now. Now, existential threats occur on timescales of months, weeks or even days. If we’re lucky. So we must be faster. Posthuman evolution is the evolution of the individual, not just the species. Because we can evolve memetically and because we can re-engineer our substrate, we do not have to wait for new generations of mewling primates in order to improve. Which is just as well, because the universe doesn’t wait and if we take too long we’ll be just one more cautionary example of a species that didn’t survive, like the ruined civilisations the Gatecrashers have found. Survival has to be earned. We must become more and more adaptable in order to survive. We must be able to go anywhere, do anything and we must be able to adapt rapidly to the new ecological niches we find ourselves in. Biology has gotten us this far, but is now clearly inadequate to the task. Conscious minds have always been software programs and the advent of digital uploads has given us a better option – memetic evolution, hosted on a computational substrate. We need superior software consciousness, capable of adapting to and evolving in response to each new challenge. And we need the capabilities to create better and better technological substrates. Synthetic bodies that can go far beyond the narrow ‘Cinderella’ zone habitable to regular biology. Machines that can replicate new substrates as and when we need them. This also raises an interesting corollary: are there other substrates on which we might run? Subatomic computronium? The quantum structure of space-time itself? Something even weirder? As far as we’re aware, the TITANs didn’t need to build giant, portable mainframes when they left for wherever they left for…