From Seer to Sophont: Becoming the Daydreamer

The Spark of the Seer

263 Million Years PE

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Three million years ago, just around the time the anatomically modern southern gravedigger appeared and the arms race of intellect began between predator and soon-to-be-sapient prey, another story was unfolding in a world away. Far away from the forest refuge the first progenitors of another race of people tentatively took their first steps from the darkness… and started to see into themselves.

They were descendants of the seastrikers, which reigned as fierce, apex predators of the cold ocean for seven million years, and like them were fully-aquatic, tied completely to the ocean in a way no land animal could ever relate to. Seastrikers were already a near-sapient species for more than seven million years. This meant they straddled a hard to define line, with cognitive abilities somewhat below gravediggers, humans, or woodcrafters (though the latter evolved sapience after them), yet somewhat above a clever animal (like an elephant or a dolphin). Near-sapients in the context of Serina’s fauna broadly are defined by having a capacity for complex and creative thought similar to a young child, but generally not developing beyond this developmental stage at any time in their lives.

No physical changes demarcated the first daydreamers from the animals that, though several million years evolved and thus changed a little in shape and color, were still considered seastrikers. Instead it was mental differences, rather than physical, which first defined their kind. They were aberrant individuals, born different from the rest, that were smarter than they should have been. For hundreds of thousands of years they were extremely rare, occurring just once in hundreds of years, but they developed so far ahead of their peers that they were often extremely successful, with even adolescents frequently taking on roles of leadership even over seasoned adults. By the age of only two or three years they were more intelligent than their parents, and they thought of things others couldn’t comprehend, beyond day to day survival. They thought about the world beyond the waves, about abstract ideas and the future. They dreamed and they saw visions. They became seers, believing they could lead their kind to a better future.

Yet for countless generations over millions of years, their kind didn’t understand them. They couldn’t, and nor did they care about the far future, about dreams and ambitions and thinking just for thinking’s sake. The seers were not shunned by the others of their species, who benefited greatly from their guidance and leadership, but the seers lived lonely lives with none to relate to on an equal level, with even the most skilled elders in their communities child-like in comparison. Hundreds of thousands of generations passed with most seers never knowing another seer, another one who would understand them, as the mysterious condition reappeared again and again, but never spread successfully through the population. The inheritance of the condition was complex, the result of many simultaneous, recessive mutations, and seers didn’t usually produce seer offspring. Instead, the individual genes that produced the sapient condition were retained among typical seastriker individuals, only combining in just the right way exceedingly rarely and entirely by random chance.

But everything changed three million years ago, when two seers of opposite sexes found each other. They came from widely separated clans; one of sedentary shepherding seastrikers that herded domesticated livestock, the other from migratory hunters of wild game. The two kinds did not naturally mingle and were inherently hostile, separated by hundreds of thousands of years of cultural mate-choice even though they remained one wider species. Each of the seers held a high position in their respective social groups, and was expected to maintain the culture their lines had developed. Yet the draw of another like them was too much to ignore. They broke all taboo of their animal culture and - as leaders of each respective group - formed a pair bond, thus uniting their clans.

These two individuals would become the progenitors of a new species. Both carrying all of the necessary recessive genes to produce sapient progeny, they had many children together, most (though not all) of which were like themselves. Those which were not, which would be throwbacks to the ancestral condition, also carried all the right genes and frequently produced seers in the next generation. For about two hundred thousand years, the seers and the seastrikers were thus still intertwined, as some normal seastrikers descended from seers bore seer offspring. After this period the two populations began to diverge more strongly, with seers developing a stable population independent of interbreeding with other seastrikers. Throwback individuals became rare in this more homogenous population, where most individuals carried all the correct genes in the right combinations to bear sapient offspring. A new age began, and another civilization, that of the daydreamers, was born.

The Daydreamer: First People of the Sea

265 million + 15,000 years PE

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The rich, cold sea of the middle Ultimocene was the only home their kind had ever known. A proud race of people, adapted perfectly to a life beneath the water, with a range across the entire ocean. A varied people of many cultures with endless stories to tell, the daydreamers are the fourth sapient species we find upon Serina (chronologically they are the third, evolving prior to the woodcrafter.) They are the first of any, however, to be confined completely to life underwater.

Built to glide through the seas, propelled by two sets of flippers, the daydreamers at the start of the ocean age are as powerful of predators as their predecessors as well as now being incredibly intelligent animals... and yet they lack any sort of manipulator except their beaked jaws. From the very beginning this has meant that they were largely unable to modify their environments except in the simplest of ways - a condition unlike any other sapient so far evolved upon Serina, and one that has completely dictated the direction of their civilization. Like the gravediggers, they were a species set to last a long time with little technological innovation, yet in their case it was not for lack of want. Their brains evolved toward ever higher intelligence first to facilitate highly coordinated hunting groups, to remember individuals and communicate to achieve a common goal. Yet with just a few chance mutations affecting neuron density, the sapient condition arose and with it came so much more than cohesion; they gained the capacity to see both into themselves and out into the world, to wonder and to imagine. And with few ways to modify their world, living in sleek bodies ideally suited to hunt at sea yet with no hands to create with, they instead filled their newly wide-open minds with all manner of philosophy. They made a culture - a civilization - based on thought itself. And the thoughts they could conjure, the experience of being a daydreamer, would be all but unimaginable to us, because the daydreamer dreams whilst wide awake.

The name daydreamer comes from a combination of their unique physiology around rest. To facilitate breathing at sea even while asleep, the brain of the daydreamer, the seastriker, and all of their dolfinch relatives shuts down to sleep alternately in two hemispheres. Though some marine Earth animals such as dolphins also manage to do this, they do it only to remain alert enough while asleep to rise and breathe from the surface. In these animals however, each hemisphere has evolved function nearly independent of the other; while half sleeps, the other half controls full behavioral function without loss of any alertness. Dolfinches may spend up to half of the day operating only on one brain hemisphere, with each side resting alternately in between short periods where both are active and communicating together. This arrangement, a duality of consciousness, is common to all dolfinches but lead the first daydreamers - the only one smart enough to contemplate what their dreams might mean - toward a highly spiritual state of mind. They took their waking dreams to be visions, prophecies, or views into alternate futures they could experience if they changed their ways, for good or for bad. It lended them to craft incredible yarns of creation, aesops and stories that transcended generations and immortalized influential figures through deep time via oral histories. These histories are incredibly rich and detailed accounts, forming a cultural memory going back to the very beginning, with even the original founding pair of daydreamers recalled as the parents of all their kind, though this is an exceptional record. Daydreamer culture is absolutely ancient, extending back three million years, and yet an astonishing memory of history is retained in the living generations. Though recollections past one million years of time are more often extremely vague, exaggerated and often highly imbued with fiction, becoming aesops used to teach morals to the young, remarkably accurate historical accounts exist as far back as half a million years, and they have been recorded entirely by word of mouth.

A species so capable of recording all of their history might be expected to live a peaceful life today, as they would be able to learn from past mistakes, and so to quickly advance to a utopian existence. But in practice things are never so easy. Over the eons, philosophy turns to ideology; disagreements inevitably arise, and cultures can diverge into isolation, toward hostility… and even into war with one another. In the face of such conflict history all too easily repeats itself. All daydreamer cultures remember clearly how the fracture formed, splitting a people once united by the very first daydreamers back into feuding factions, each following radically different codes of ethics. Yet none agree on who was right and who was wrong, and each one’s recollection of the events is tainted by their own biases to the degree that none tell the whole truth.

Today, the daydreamer is the most widespread and culturally varied sapient in Serina’s history. The entire sea is their domain. Yet for hundreds of thousands of years they have effectively been split into two opposing sides along a cultural rift. An ancient cold war is complicated further by the recent emergence of a new, deadly enemy from within, that threatens both sides of the ancient conflict, and the discovery of another mysterious people from the realm above the waves... just as the prophecies of some foretold.

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Complexity of behavior, now on the scale of entire civilizations, continues to increase upon the world of birds as time marches on.