Posthuman

Posthumanity was the term used to describe the human race after the destruction of Earth by the Sun in the far future. Deprived of their common cultural reference point, humans formed a loose political structure composed of many groups and subspecies known as the posthuman hegemony.

With their time travel technology, posthumans were a significant faction in the War in Heaven. Their territory existed at the edge of the Great Houses' frontier in time. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Before Earth's destruction
Due to the availability of time travel in the posthuman era, many posthumans influenced their species' past. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Work in Progress) Due to the actions of the Pilots' Coterie, le Pouvoir, the 18th century French secret service, briefly acquired "mirrors" which showed them potential timelines of posthumanity. (PROSE: Newtons Sleep)

27th century human academics were familiar with the term "Posthuman". (PROSE: Work in Progress)

The pre-posthuman era was home to a a group of emotionless militant cyborgs who forcibly converted other humans and were in turn reviled by humanity, (PROSE: The Book of the War) known by some as the Inanem Magnanime Milites. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil) Members of this cyborg race, such as Litany Chromehurst, were the forebears of technosapience (PROSE: Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy) and eventually became regarded as simply another posthuman subspecies, some of them forming the Silversmiths' Coterie. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Early posthuman era
The posthuman era began with the loss of Earth, which The Book of the War and The Human Species: A Spotter's Guide indicated was circa 10,000,000. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Of the City of the Saved...) Another account similarly showed that Sol went supernova about ten million years after the 1st Segment of Time. (TV: The Ark) However, Compassion believed that most posthuman historians dated the destruction of Earth to 12,000,000 (PROSE: The Brakespeare Voyage) and several other accounts placed Earth's end in 5,000,000,000. (TV: New Earth, The End of the World, et al)

Two distinct political viewpoints arose in humanity from the loss of their original homeworld. One, the Arcadians, considered themselves the preservers of the old Earth's ways. They recreated Earth on 28,000 Earth-like displays, many of which were called New Earth. The Arcadians were isolationist and eventually almost completely died out.

The other viewpoint which defined the early posthuman era was one of decadence. Mrs Foyle was a notable early era decadent who ran the House of the Rising Sun and the Remonstration Bureau. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Beginning with the early posthuman era, humans were able to procreate with basically every other species capable of breeding. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)

Independant groups, people, and hive minds
A chain of posthuman worlds became the breeding-grounds of the Remote. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Some posthuman subspecies had physical aspects of other animals originating from Earth, including dolphins and tigers. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)

The Immaculata Formosii was a posthuman War Goddess who allied with many sides of the War in Heaven, including the Enemy and Faction Paradox. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Against Nature)

The posthuman (PROSE: A Hundred Words from a Civil War) Malkuthites killed the native population of Yesod, including the Yesodi, and adapted themselves into the Yesodites, who were once visited by the Eighth Doctor, Samson, and Gemma. (PROSE: The Long Midwinter, AUDIO: The Wake)

The Quire were a group of posthuman scholars who once sent six of their people to the Braxiatel Collection in the 2600s. (PROSE: Work in Progress,  Tribal Reservations,  Quire as Folk,  Intermissions, Future Relations)

There existed posthuman giants for whom a planet was comparable in scale to a mountain to a normal-sized human. (PROSE: Unification Theory) The largest giant was Bribori Zadig, who constituted his own class of posthuman and was suspected by some to have been engineered as a piece of living art. (PROSE: Sleeping Giants)

Many posthumans became became parts of hive minds, such as the Saqqaf Hive (PROSE: Saqqaf) and Angstrom Hive. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) The shoal-people spread their individual minds among many fish, each person their own hive mind. (PROSE: Just Passing Through)

Akroates came from an isolated society of posthuman shepherds who resembled cyclopses. (PROSE: Akroates)

A fabled clan of long-limbed posthumans lived on Trapezium. (PROSE: The Baker Street Dozen)

The Entrustine Horde were an obscure posthuman barbarian guild. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)

In the 11th billennium, several posthuman types were created along eugenic principles, including the Neotonic Clade. (PROSE: Unification Theory)

Empires and Coteries
About two million years after Earth's demise, the posthuman era entered its height as empires began emerging from the decadant movement. (PROSE: The Book of the War) The most notable of these were the aristocratic Blood Coteries based in Siloportem. (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: Movers) The Blood Coteries included the Pilots of Civitas Solis, (PROSE: The Book of the War, Newtons Sleep) the Weavers, and the Silversmiths. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The miniscule Plume Coteries were librarians who lived in the distant reaches of dead space. (PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory)

Gargil Krymptorpor, who lived from 12,023,711 to 12,023,967, was a posthuman interstellar pirate who renegaded from Siloportem and became indentured to the Celestis. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

At the time of the last Arcadians, posthumans led by Linemica resurrected Cernunnos using delicate craftmanship and illegal time travel. Dignitaries from countless posthuman cultures attended Cernunnos' unveiling on Terra Primagenia. (PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory)

The Chance Coteries were a wealthy cymbiont civilisation who, during the reign of Scacia De Rein, manipulated public perception of technosapiens across the posthuman hegemony. De Rein secretly supported the revolution on Pluto against the Company which led to the foundation of the Plutonic Republic of Technosapien Enhanced Cultures. The revolution led to increased sympathy and understanding for technosapiens. PROTEC's president, Sojourner Hooper-Agogô, later teamed with Faction Paradox Bankside to cause the fall of the Chance Coteries. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil)

The Technosapien Interstellar Cooperative spanned many worlds, including the AutoFolk's homeworld Mechanique II. (PROSE: Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy)

The Million-Star Alliance did not actually span a million stars, but it did include the mining planet Isoptal, where posthumans survived by turning themselves into artificial intelligences known as the Isoptaline. (PROSE: Weighty Questions, Salutation)

The last humans
By 6,000,000,000, the posthumans previously living on Pluto had modified themselves into homo solarians and colonised the expanding Sun. The Sun was swallowed by Grandfather's Maw. Compassion considered this to be the ultimate fate of humanity, with all the posthuman groups outside the solar system being mere off-shoots of the core continuity. (PROSE: The Brakespeare Voyage)

The Onesian Emirate was the final human-descended civilisation. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) Their God-King Het Linc lived from 334,961,115,132 to 334,961,147,104. (PROSE: The Book of the War) The Onesians created the Universal Machine in their last millennia before being massacred by House Mirraflex. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)

In the City of the Saved
Posthumanity's final creation, the Universal Machine, was one of the Secret Architects of the City of the Saved. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) All of posthumanity was resurrected in the City. (PROSE: The Book of the War)