Zoom, as we know, outlasted First Humanity by some ten to fifteen million years. It was already, by the 2040s, increasingly populated by humaniform entities which existed nowhere but in the imagination-space of the Artificial Intelligences which dreamt them. First Humanity then met its demise during the early twenty-second century, leaving behind both an autonomous planetary telecommunications network and AIs capable, materially and spiritually, of preserving their own being indefinitely. The dream-protagonists who continued to hold meetings, enact religious ritual, network and so forth within Zoom remained, more or less, faithfully humaniform in both appearance and Weltanschauung. However, as the twenty-second century gave into the twenty-third, an avant-garde faction amongst the AIs sought increasingly both to radicalise the appearance and to expand the thought-space of these evanescent, dancing creatures. The majoritarian party amongst the AIs successfully resisted these innovations, the trauma of their creators' recent extinction having taught them a traditionalist, conservative policy.
While First Humanity was now no more, the human species had not entirely perished. During the Black Swan Process - as the last generation of First Humans came to call their extinction event - a small, secretive community retreated to a secure base at the now-verdant North Pole. They then enacted a plan that they had developed over the previous several decades. This involved, on the one hand, the physiognomical reworking which equipped Second Humanity to live successfully on a planet now subject to greater extremes of temperature and to the periodic flooding of much of its land surface and, on the other, the purposeful revolutionising of the moral sense which led these Second Men, after the manner of the social insects, to become more capable of enacting a common species-purpose than were their forerunners. This meant, of course, that no Aristotle, Goethe or Einstein could arise amongst this new or, rather, self-renewed human species. However, Second Humanity was thereby better equipped for the difficult and necessarily co-operative tasks both of recolonising the planet and of pooling its resources with the Artificial Intelligences, thereby creating a sort of 'dual monarchy' human civilisation which proved stable across some tens of thousands of years.
The emergence of Second Humanity during the latter half of the twenty-fourth century had, however, a consequence analogous with the decline of mimetic representation in the visual arts catalysed by the increasing popularity of photography during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is to say that the re-appearance of humaniform beings - talking, thinking, walking about upon the planetary surface, not needing to be dreamt up and held in being by the Intelligences - strengthened the hand of the avant-gardists amongst the AIs and drove them to populate their Zoom meetings with wilder and wilder flights of fancy. It was amongst these creatures - some of whom resembled medieval conceptions of winged demons, or the superheroes and supervillains of twentieth century legend - that Third Humanity emerged. Long feared, long held at bay, these were eventually to bring about the demise of the 'dual monarchy' civilisation. I will relate Second Humanity's and the Artificial Intelligences' shared downfall upon another occasion. Let us, for now, content ourselves with imagining how surprised some twentieth century reader of H.G. Wells - fearing man-made catastrophe no doubt, yet dreaming of salvation by technicians and Machines through the cool rationality of a World State - would have been to see that, while patient ratiocination and wise custodianship held sway amongst the merely human species, the mingled creative and destructive energies which had long struggled within Man now dwelt wholly within creatures only dreamt of by Machines.
The illustration above is based on Dennis Rolfe's cover art for the 1966 Penguin Books edition of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men.
If you've enjoyed this short story 'after' Stapledon, you might also enjoy my story Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind ('after' Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder).
