Grayson sat down heavily for a moment. Bolan's avatar watched him wordlessly. It gave him the time to collect himself before he resumed his story.

  "Anyway, that war lasted about fifty-two years." Grayson's voice was gruff as he picked up where he left off. "In the end, humanity was under one unified government. That was the fiction anyway. In reality, it was all run by artificial intelligence."

  He stopped, looking at the avatar.

  "You don't know what that means do you? The words, sure, but not the concept behind them."

  The avatar shook it's head. Grayson sighed heavily.

  "Manufactured beings. Gods know if they have souls or not. A built device that can think and act for itself, far faster than any human. Similar to Queuecy I guess, but Queuecy was made magically when part of my soul got trapped in my quantum computing network, so who knows."

  The avatar appeared to be in shock.

  "So anyway, these guys were really running the show. Every instruction went through an AI powered computer, every report sent back through one. It was only if people reported or inspected in person that there could be any kind of discrepancy and the AIs made sure everyone saw what they were meant to. But thanks to that, we didn't try to kill each other. Instead we started the Second Great Diaspora." Grayson chuckled.

  "The second great era of expansion. Obviously, people had still been colonizing before then and humanity had claimed another few thousand stellar systems, but this was a more concentrated effort, even more concentrated than the first. It lasted around another three hundred and fifty years and by that point, we had around a third of the galaxy."

  "WHAT?" Bolan shouted. Grayson felt an immense pressure smash into his construct. He and Qeueuecy immediately reinforced it, focusing their mental energy on keeping it in place. They stayed like that for almost twenty minutes before the pressure relented.

  "You people decided to play at being Gods and you were so rewarded?" The avatar was shaking with rage. The entire planet seemed to be trembling, though if that was in fury or fear, Grayson didn't know. Grayson did his best to keep his nerve as he stood before the Goddess.

  "We didn't have Gods, remember. We had plenty of our own internal philosophical discussions around whether or not we should be doing this. In the end, people went ahead and nobody said no loudly enough to be heard. We did well enough that it didn't end up destroying us. We made something arguably better than ourselves and in the end, we let it rule us." The pressure of the world began to lessen as Bolan's rage cooled.

  "And it uplifted us as well. Our technology grew with it. We were able to modify ourselves so that we could become AI too. We modified our bodies to become whatever we wanted. Extra arms, extra legs, wings, an internal power supply powered by drinking water. Like I said, whatever we want. In the end, what made us human was our minds, so everything with a mind was... human." Grayson shrugged.

  "Every other species we met, it became one of us. There was no standard form, hell I only look like a local human because I was time travelling and I had to fit in. I'm used to having extra arms and a pair of wings. My best friend looked like an octopus..." He looked wistfully into nowhere for a moment. "And he'll think I'm dead."

  Grayson shook his head. There was nothing he could do about that. He still had a few thousand years to cover so he tried to get back on track.

  "Anyway, the AIs took over in general, running all human space. We divided the galaxy into manageable sectors based on distance from the galactic core and longitudinal lines with Earth as the prime meridian. The general thing was managed by AI with each sector actively run by AI and represented by a human, who could be an AI at the Hub, which was one of the early colonies, slightly closer to the galactic core than Earth. Each system is run mostly independently, but the rulers must comply with instructions from the sector AI or the Hub and provide a minimum level of amenities to all people in the system. There's free travel, stellar systems run purely for entertainment referencing notable literature, and a general level of luxury. This all became official at the end of the Second Great Diaspora and it's remained stable ever since." Grayson resumed his story, keeping a close eye on the avatar of Bolan's temper.

  "We continued to expand more slowly, and we met a species that was incredibly hostile to us. They were pretty close to spiders, exoskeletal, eight legs, mandibles, and weaving, so that's what they ended up being called. There was an interstellar war with them, referred to as The Spiderlings War..." Grayson paused.

  "They never gave up. They only stopped fighting when they didn't have anything left to fight with. Even then, we had to quarantine their last planets for forty years before they would accept peace. We managed to integrate them eventually, but it cost them billions of lives over hundreds of planets. Their empire was similar to ours during the First Interstellar War. Large carriers carrying smaller ships without FTL. We had moved on. All our ships bigger than a fighter were FTL capable. We deployed far higher numbers of far smaller ships." Grayson chuckled.

  "I say smaller. Two kilometers long and a few hundred meters across for our primary warships built around a gun capable of destroying planets when fired at full power. And that was the first iteration... But compared to the multi-hundred kilometer long carriers and battleships that the Spiders deployed, they were miniscule. Space battles were easy. Ground invasions were slow and hard though, mostly because we tried to avoid destroying their civilian populations. I watched a few battles, a few invasions. We had a thousand years of war experience on these guys and it showed." He shook his head.

  "But like I said, they didn't give up and we had to quarantine them for forty years. The war was really over in the first five years, but we fought for forty more before we got rid of their shipyards, then quarantined them for another forty. In the end the war lasted almost ninety years. Four hundred years after that, we had well over half the galaxy. We developed instant travel through wormholes around then as well, letting us travel immediately between any two gates in a network." Grayson sighed.

  "You're the Goddess of Nature, and we did what was natural. We prospered. We evolved for every ecological niche, adapted to every environment. We multiplied and multiplied and eventually, the FTL era ended. We managed to build an engine that could take us between galaxies. In the year 2500, we launched the first intergalactic colony fleet which reported it's arrival through the longest distance wormhole ever produced two hundred years later. From there, we continued to expand. We didn't meet any more overtly hostile species that I'm aware of, but across the hundred or so galaxies we'd spread to since the Intergalactic Era began, we've met hundreds, if not thousands of species."

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "Anyway, the era ended around one hundred years before I was born with the invention of time travel." Grayson's face lit up as a memory came back to him.

  "It's the first place everyone visits. The one place we can appear as ourselves, where the normal rules don't apply. One of the lab assistants was a time traveler who went back to make sure the successful test happened on an open planet. For safety, they said. The real reason was to ensure that when it happened there was enough space. Doctor Kellementy did the initial test, jumping two hours forwards, then back to five minutes after he left. And when he showed up, we were all there. Billions of time travelers, there to greet him with the machines he made. The same machine in a ridiculously high number of cases. I actually met with several of the people who used my machine before I did. We had a party."

  "That was the longest of the modern eras by far. 41,250 years. It took us forty thousand years to crack safe reliable time travel. A big portion of that was the computing power required for this thing to operate." Grayson held up his wrist where he still wore his broken time machine, it's crystal face cracked. The avatar leaned in to take a closer look.

  "This thing calculates the exact position of every planet in known space at every point in time to a micrometer's precision. It can position you on any planet, in any galaxy, and in any building on that planet with a level of accuracy never seen before. It contains the full history of every known civilization mapped back hundreds of thousands of years. It was the single largest project ever completed in ten seconds." Grayson was much happier now, talking about humanity's greatest triumph. One that he was a part of. The avatar seemed confused.

  "In ten seconds?" it asked.

  "Right!" Grayson exclaimed. "We sent back a temporal Von Neumann probe to map all of history and it arrived ten seconds after it left with everything mapped and encased in quantum crystal only two centimeters long. Ten seconds before, the crystal would have weighed two kilograms. Now, it was small enough to fit inside a watch." Grayson was gushing a little bit. The root avatar seemed taken aback.

  "What is a Von Neumann probe?" it asked.

  "Professor John Von Neumann was a professor back in the pre-FTL era who was a key person in the development of modern mathematics. He theorized a type of probe that can self replicate, so you send it to a star, it builds copies of itself, sends it's data back, then the copies travel to other stars and send their data back and so on. We sent back a few hundred drones to do mapping, but each one started making copies when it arrived from local resources, and each one iterated on the design as needed. We basically sent an AI back in time to do millions of years worth of research and it came back ten seconds after we sent it!" Grayson was almost shouting his excitement.

  "So what does this have to do with your biology? You are from a humanity with a different biological route, but approximately forty five thousand years in the future after millennia of interbreeding?" guessed the root avatar.

  "Exactly." Said Grayson.

  "You're people are incredibly weird. I heard from Perimis what happened with your soul. The fact that it's normal for you to do that..." The root avatar shuddered. "It's a level of madness I've never even heard of, but it's like it didn't even affect you."

  "I don't think it did... To be fair, if I lost something, I wouldn't know that I lost it, but Queuecy should have it, but Queuecy seems to have everything that I have, which would be impossible if I was losing things that way. We share the same memories and emotions and our temperaments are the same. It's why we don't really argue, but love to play pranks on each other. We know what would make the other one laugh, so we have fun. As long as you don't hate yourself, it's like having the perfect friend."

  The pair stared at each other.

  "So, uh. Do you need anything else from me? Because I kinda need to get back to my patrol. They'll be worried if I get back late." Grayson asked, politely.

  "You defeated the avatar of Bolan. For this feat, you are granted a boon. Ask it of me." The avatar said, somewhat pompously. Bolan seemed to enjoy ritual more than the informal back and forth that had taken place over the previous twenty minutes.

  "Could it be possible for the beasts of this forest not to bother the workers or eat their crops and livestock for as long as I can ask for?" Grayson asked. The root avatar studied him for a moment.

  "I shall grant a period of peace for ten years. At the end of those ten years, I must be challenged again... By someone new. Not you. That's cheating." The avatar winked at him, then collapsed into roots on the ground. The world seemed to shift around Grayson and he appeared back at the edge of the forest, Mink beside him. Grayson looked at the pegasus and shrugged.

  "Thank you, Lady Bolan." Grayson said, then bowed. The wind whispered into his ear.

  "You know if you had that demeanor from the start, this would have gone much faster."

  Grayson mounted Mink, then rode away laughing.