> From: Richard S. Crawford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Standard spoiler alert applies. I doubt that anything in here is going to > spoil anything about the _Uplift Storm_ trilogy, but... well, be careful > anyway. > > At any rate, I just finished reading this trilogy. Fantastic sci-fi, of > course, but I can't help but feel that I missed a couple of things. Notably: > > 1. Who uplifted humanity after all, or was it self-uplift? I don't > feel like this question was ultimately answered... Was it supposed to be? > and > > 2. Whatever inspired Creideiki to investigate the Shallow Cluster > in the first place? > > I was quite happy with the conclusion of the trilogy overall, and I don't > see how any more satisfying stories could be written in the Uplift > universe; anything else would be anti-climactic. And I'm sure my questions > have been discussed in this forum before, but... Lets put together what we know: Earth was never found by any alien species (cept perhaps those elder beings who dove into Sol so very long ago (almost assuredly the progenitors in any case)), never colonized, polluted with alien life, DNA, etc. A pure habitat, untouched. The _Library_ has no record of Sol before humans. Since the galactics are almost programmed to believe in the library to the exclusion of almost any/everything including exploration, they had NO reason to believe that their was any errors in it, and no reason to explore further, since everything was already known to the library. But what if the library was programmed that way from it's very beginning? Such that no record of Sol would ever stay in the archive? No exploration / mass starcharting would ever betray this poor yellow star? For indeed it is beyond imagining that NO one could ever have not seen Sol in the sky through telescopes / etc. and not marked it down somehow. How could it not? But it did. But who could perpetrate such a grand conspiracy down through the ages if not the Progenitors Themselves, who set everything in motion? Who indeed. They were there from the start, and they set the up the 'client' uplift model. They set up the institutions and the _Library_. Now these progenitors are accordingly _Older_ than the universe (or was it the galaxy cluster, I forget). How could that be without time-travel? These progenitors were from the future. Another thing that is mystifying about these so called progenitors is their uncanny resemblance to humans. They look verily like humans, only much older, many billions of years more evolved. For indeed who else could the progenitors be? The only race that uplifted itself through millions of years of uninterrupted Darwinian evolution. For indeed no other race could get a chance with all these galactic aliens about everywhere disrupting the natural evolution of every living thing, such that none save those in some grand conspiracy would ever get the chance to self-uplift at all. But it has happened! And it is a grand conspiracy indeed, for how could it have happened otherwise, that the progenitors be but humans billions of years in advance, and contrived to make it so humans would evolve without interference. Indeed, it could have happened no other way.
