On the eve of first contact between the Xrans and man, a brief history of nature’s failed human intelligence experiment is set forth. The millions of years of nurturing of man by nature had borne no appreciable fruit. In all of that time, man had not progressed in any significant way. Man was one of nature’s ‘failures to launch’ – failures not particularly rare throughout the universe – and time was running out for this species – perhaps via a disease pandemic, although man was never in close enough proximity to each other for that method of extinction to operate successfully – or, perhaps a radical change in climate and resulting starvation, or, perhaps a meteor from space that would so devastate the orb as to preclude the lower intelligence human from saving himself. Whatever man’s end, it would be coming soon so as to make room for nature’s next intelligent being experiment.
In a microcosmic irony - one that would change the destiny of both the Xrans and man - one that started with the plunge through the atmosphere to the orb of the first Xran descent group behind Xra’s moon, the light of the entry attracted a small group of curious humans to the landing site, therefore allowing the Xrans easy access to their human counterpart.
At this point, it was time for me to describe the physicality of the Xrans, contrasting them to their human neighbors. An idea for the following scenario came from a movie with Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch – “Fantastic Voyage”, where a group of medical scientists are shrunk to a size that allowed them to insert themselves into the blood vessels of a dying diplomat in order to find the source of his malady and correct it medically. This story was very forward thinking for its time and the special effects were good – for the time. In my novel, the Xrans were already one ten-thousandth the size of the humans camping just above them on the orb’s surface, where they had just arrived to look for the terminus of the light that had just fallen from from the sky. The human group was easily available for a detailed study by the Xrans
After a detailed study of the orb (immediately around them), the Xrans first rejected out of hand, but then slowly and reluctantly embraced, the idea of a biological partnership with the humans. The humans’ body-mass fit the planet of their birth of course, while the Xrans were much too small to utilize the orb to its full potential. Another consideration was that while the life span of the Xran was just over an orb year, the resident human life span was over fifty years. Those were the primary reasons to consider the biological partnership and there were others. The humans could no doubt use the Xrans’ highly organized brain capacity, as well as the Xrans’ advanced synaptic neural network which, it was estimated, would catapult human intelligence thousands of years ahead of its current status. This might have been an easy decision for the Xrans except that the Xrans would have to give up life as they knew it as well as all of their conscious memory. The process would reserve an ability to tap into their native memory, but only in case of emergency and for certain inter-species communication requirements – especially in the early going. There were seventeen humans just above them on the surface and it would take approximately ten-thousand Xrans to meld with each human in order to achieve the maximum intelligent being.
Some Xran’s would choose not to be included in the assimilation process with the humans and would be attended by robots in their old age until the last of the Xrans, in their present form, passed from history. This was also the plan for the final three descent groups. The assimilation with the humans went as planned and a new brand of being arose, the humex – with the mass, strength and longevity of the humans and the vastly improved brain capacity of the Xrans. Thus began the rise of intelligence of the species and an escape from extinction for both species.
