Xeelee - War With The Humans

War With The Humans

While recovering from a brutal occupation by the Qax that enforced stagnation and flirted with extinction, Humanity adopted an extremely xenophobic imperative that aimed to ensure the future of the species (known as the Druz Doctrines after its founder, Hama Druz). Eventually Humanity again began to expand into the galaxy, wiping out an uncounted other species during their advance. Eventually Humans became the second most advanced and widespread race in the galaxy, second only to the Xeelee. Humans had no knowledge of the Photino-Xeelee war or even what was at stake, making the Xeelee actions interpreted as being sinister. Building the Ring had the appearance of being destructive on a galactic scale because its larger purpose was not understood until the very far future, and many smaller Xeelee projects, such as changing the orbit of Callisto to preserve the bacteria living in the ice, lacked an obvious explanation. Though there were several orders of magnitude fewer Xeelee than humans known to be in the Galaxy, their high degree of technical advancement made them a formidable enemy.

Through a bitter war of attrition, Humans eventually contained the Xeelee within the Galactic Core where the battle lines stagnated for at least three thousand years. Both humans and the Xeelee gained strategic intelligence through time travel by constructing Closed Timelike Curves, further contributing to the stagnation. Human casualties were estimated to exceed more than 10 billion per year and more than 30 trillion over the course of the assault. The imperative commitment to total war also stagnated human physical and intellectual evolution. The Druz Doctrines did not encourage exploration or research and there was little new development. Further, very little effort was directed toward projects that did not have an immediate and conspicuous benefit to maintaining the massive logistics tail necessary to continue the assault.

Eventually the Humans developed a means of hiding their actions from the Xeelee by making movable pocket universes that had no causal relationship to the universe as a whole, thereby eliminating any advantage of moving information into the past with time travel. Humans further developed a time-travel based computer that allowed humans arbitrary computer power to outthink the Xeelee by analyzing tactical problems (giving the pilot tactical information to defeat Xeelee maneuvers) and a dual black-hole cannon that would fire two singularities to merge at a known distance away, releasing enormous gravity waves in the process. Knowing that the ecology around the event horizon and the creatures that live within it would be damaged or destroyed if humans continued to batter the event horizon of the supermassive black hole, the Xeelee withdrew from the Milky Way within minutes after the humans scored the first successful hit.

No longer having the Xeelee as a unifying threat, humanity fragmented into multiple governments over the next several hundred years. The doctrinal stagnation collapsed and Humanity advanced technologically over the next 100,000 years. Humanity then unified again to begin directly attacking Xeelee concentration in the greater supercluster of galaxies across the local group. Humans proved only a slight annoyance or distraction to the Xeelee.