Primates

The Essential

When humanity's Project Ascendancy granted sapience to Earth's great apes in 4280 AD, the scientists expected gratitude. They received something far more dangerous: independence. Within seven years, the uplifted primates had escaped their laboratories and vanished into the thousand-meter megaflora of the Kouko Vallis Rainforest—a world humans could barely navigate, let alone control.

The Primates built their civilization vertically. Their cities breathe—living architecture woven from trees that remember their builders, lit by bioluminescent organisms that pulse in rhythms matching communal heartbeats. They developed neurofiber interfaces that let them commune directly with forest ecosystems, and lumen sacs that paint their speech in over a thousand colors of light.

That choice seemed like retreat. It was actually strategy. In 14,500 AD, the Primates secretly allied with the Ethereans—telepathic beings from another galaxy—to form the Primate-Etherean Theocratic Empire. For thirty-six thousand years, they waged shadow wars against the Lumen Coalition while the entire galaxy believed they were merely a minor ecological civilization.

The truth emerged in 50,000 AD: the species dismissed as "tree-dwellers clinging to the past" had become co-architects of a multi-galactic empire. Every intelligence assessment, every strategic calculation, every assumption about Primate capabilities—all of it built on a lie the Primates had maintained for longer than most civilizations exist.

In the Stories