The Far Shore (Tall Tales)

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=Story By JA Baker & Canonshop=
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How far out do you think the Periphery goes?
The Joradian Cluster, one of the most far-flung astronomical features to be depicted on maps, is almost 1,900 light years from Terra. Beyond that, Perdition's Flames are generally agreed to be the most distant object anyone has ever visited and come back, in body if not mind.
So, less than two 2,000 light-years, which isn't all that bad, considering the 30 light-year safe limit on a KF jump. The further out you go, the more scattered and isolated the colonies and outpost become, the less frequent, and less reliable the JumpShips are. If you keep going, you eventually reach a point where you're alone amid the outer darkness, with nothing to keep you company but the light of distant suns.
It's quite out there, beyond the reach of radios and even HPG's, the kind of quiet that the Inner Sphere hasn't known for centuries. Gives you time to think, reflect upon some of your life choices, all be it mostly the ones that led you to be so far out.
But, if you can hold your nerve and steel your heart, and keep going, something truly remarkable starts to happen.
You find more worlds, more colonies. Sure, one or two are the result of freak hyperspace accidents, like Idrium supposedly sits at the far end of, but then you start to hear things things that don't tally with our understanding of history.
Because, if you go far enough in the right direction, you start to discover that we're not only not the only nations out here, not just little two-to-twelve world 'baby empires'. Big empires. Federated Suns big, Free Worlds League big.
And they never heard of Terra, or Sol, or the Star League.
Well, not until the first contacts were made they hadn't.
The first thing you have to do, if you go this way, is forget everything you ever assumed about...well...everything. Starting with 'The local language is not in your library'.
Because it genuinely isn't. Some of the languages might sound like they're derived from languages you know, but forget that right now, because that's just a result of how the human upper palate is shaped and the ranges of both your hearing, and the average human voice-box.
Fun fact: There are some things that just seem to evolve the same way, when you have human societies with technology. The dominant language is called... something I've never been able to pronounce, and it's like English in that it's a context based language with loan words from everywhere they've had contact.
Like English, it's a bitch to learn, and they'll learn your language, before you learn theirs. But that only gets you so far: without a common frame of reference, you're reduced to talking like a pair of toddlers.
Just think for a moment about just how much of day-to-day conversation is reliant on a shared context? You describe a building as Marik Revival, a piece of music as Steiner Neoclassical, or a painting as Kurita Conceptual. You may describe someone as 'Honorable as a Davion' or 'Sneaky as a Liao', but how do you explain that to someone with no frame of reference?
Thinks maths would be any easier? After all, 1+1=2, no matter where you're from, but how do you communicate units of measurement? What's a Day? Is it how long it takes Terra to rotate? Your homeworld? Theirs? Same goes for distance and weight.
Okay, okay, okay, I'm getting bogged down in details, when you want the proverbial "Big Picture": are they human?
Yes, but that's not as simple as it sounds.
See, there's evidence, in our mitochondrial DNA and theirs, that our ancestors crossed paths at some point ten thousand or so years, but not that they originated in the same place. This is only helped by the fact that they apparently have fossil evidence to back-up evolving... Well, elsewhere. Their name for it doesn't translate too clearly into any of our languages.
So, yeah, that's all kinds of out of my wheelhouse. I'm a Pathfinder, not a... a... Shit, I don't even know the word for what I ain't, but I ain't it!
So, we have two seemingly independent branches of homo sapiens, apparently evolving on worlds thousands of light years apart, and the last time our ancestors met, we were, according to the official history of the human race, still using stone tools. Again, I have no damn idea how that works, I just know that apparently our ancient ancestors went from painting on cave walls, to interstellar flight, then back to throwing rocks at each other, leaving no evidence behind.
There are theories; there always are, ranging from the absurd to the theoretically possible.
One of the most absurd, but popular among those "in the know", is the old classic: aliens. Now, I don't hold to this personally, as in the over one million square light years of explored space, we've never stumbled upon anything more advanced than a primitives using stone tools themselves. Certainly no trace of some advanced race capable of taking our ancestors across the stars to make the beast with two backs with our distant relatives, only to send them back home again.
Next we have another old classic conspiracy theory, Atlantis! Or whatever random legend of an ancient and advanced civilisation that predates recorded history, only to be lost without a trace. And in all honesty, I think this one is even less likely than the aliens: any society even close to developing spaceflight, let alone FTL travel, would have left an unavailable mark on Terra that would have been fund by now, even if it was just traces of refined metals and advanced alloys. But then there are legends of museums keeping hidden collections of artifacts that they can't explain, like microchips embedded in a lump of coal.
And if you believe that, then I have a bridge I'm looking to sell.
No, in my mind, the most likely theory that I've seen put forward actually has something approaching evidence to back it up: someone went to make a hyperspace jump, and rolled the worst case of snake-eyes in history, propelling them not only across thousands of light-years, something that has been proven to be possible, but also back in time. This at least has some credence to it, if you believe the stories, and given just how little we truly know about just how hyperspace works.
Technology wise, they're easily on a par with us, broadly speaking: less advanced in materials science and engineering, but so far beyond us in life science's that it isn't even close. Look at me; how old would you say I am? 50? 60? Maybe 70 standard years, with good genes and a healthy lifestyle? Well, thanks to a little time in one of their hospitals, I'm more than twice that. Life expectancy for them is around three hundred. They've even found cures for the so-called 'incurables', or at least, the closest equivalents to them. It's complicated.
Now, here's the rub: can they interbreed? according to the high school biology, separated populations result in specialization over time. Different characteristics, which should make these people a different sub-species of humans...
Only...
They aren't. All the plumbing works and they don't have any extra organs, or anything. They interbreed with 'our' humans just fine. How would I know that?
You asked me once where your mother went. Well, with the Star League coming apart at the seams, I think it's time you met the rest of the family...
The End
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*Note from the Author: Let's see what happens when Cannonshop and I put our heads together (aside from a sound like a bunch of a coconuts)
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