Behold! A post!
So anyway, I finally got around to watching “Avatar: Fire and Ash or Whatever It’s Called.” It took a couple days to slog through the whole thing (over 3 hours), and I found it to be, on the whole, a very hollow experience. A lot of loud sounds and bright colors for the most part. There were, however, two characters of note: the Avatar-ified Colonel Quaritch, and the crazy cat lady Varang. Those two were indeed an unqualified hoot. It’s important that you find you a woman who looks at you the way Varang looks at a flamethrower:
Once again, the movie ignores the *real* story that needs to be told: the human spaceflight industry. The human enterprise in the Alpha Centauri system is FAR bigger than merely those messing around on the moon Pandora. There is, after all, a functional antimatter production facility nearby that supports something like a couple starships per year; numerous other moons are apparently being explored/exploited, with heavy industrial manufacturing. I suspect that Pandora could be completely cut off to the humans, and they’d kinda shrug it off.
Anyway, even though – or perhaps because of – the fact that the movie was a disappointment on most fronts, I had an idea occur for my own fan-fiction. This would explain some oddities that the movies don’t just gloss over, they ignore. One of the stranger biological oddities of the life on Pandora is the existence of the “neural queue,” the “tail” that dangles from the back of the heads of most (all?) life forms, not just the Na’Vi cat-monkey people. This is full of neurons and can connect minds of one species to those of any other, and ultimately to the planetary hive-mind called Eywa. This is a *very* odd thing, and the evolution of it seems hard to explain. In the third Avatar, a human is shown being infected by fibers of the native fungus; the fungus invades every system in his body and he ends up growing a fully functional neural queue. Which is an even odder biological oddity.
So here’s my fan fiction.
We see a small expedition of humans poking in the dirt somewhere uninteresting on Pandora. They turn out to be paleontologists, and they’re digging up fossilized Na’vi. They’ve been at this for a while, and have found enough to report some preliminary findings.
First: the fossilized Na’Vi are old. Really old… say, ten million years. But they are not much different from current Na’Vi. None of the other animals dug up alongside them are much different from modern examples. Evolution, it seems, has stalled. But there is one very important difference: nothing had a queue. What’s more, the Na’Vi turn out to have been members of a technological, industrial society. After 10 million years the metals and plastics have largely been lost, but fossilized artifacts, along with ceramics and glass and whatnot, show that those ancient Na’Vi were at least late-20th century in technology, perhaps even more advanced. A separate expedition on a nearby airless moon finds the meteoroid-trashed remains of an early lunar base, with mummified vacuum-desiccated husks of proto-Na’Vi within and without, with indications that at they end they committed mass suicide.
The paleontologists have sites around the world, covering many different geological eras. Evolution was constantly at work until 10 million years ago, when it seemed to freeze. Additionally, the population of the Na’Vi was considerable, with a population density that humans would consider respectable. But after ten million years ago, there was a population crash. There was an ecosystem-wide mass extinction event, but it hit the Na’Vi hardest, taking them from the top of the food chain to just one more species, with no further evidence of technology more advanced that banging rocks together. And they – everybody – had the queue now.
The humans scientists put all that together, along with genetic evidence taken from many local species and studies of the human who’d been forced to grow a queue, and they reach a tentative conclusion: ten million years earlier, the proto-Na’Vi had reached a high level of technological advancement. Almost certainly this had included genetic manipulation abilities. And then someone decided to tinker with some species of spores, mold or fungus. This modified species would infect all other living things – mammals, reptiles, fish, even trees – and modify the gene code of the infected animal to grow the queue. The planetary hive mind began to form, with a die-off of animals that failed to adapt to the new world. Na’Vi civilization collapsed as the species was subsumed within the planetary hive mind.
In effect, someone genetically engineered a biological version of the Borg. Resistance was futile and the Borg won. But fortunately for the rest of the galaxy, this version of the Borg was low effort, with very restricted horizons; it was satisfied to turn Pandora into a clockwork ecosystem. The off-world Na’Vi saw their homeworld overrun by a “Last Of Us” style fungal infection and, not yet having self-supporting offworld colonies but only scattered scientific/industrial bases, decided to just turn off the lights. Humans were spared the infection due to their alien biochemistry; Eywa simply ignored them. But now it knows that humans are at least sometimes infectable and modifiable.
The humans, the rightful protagonists of the “Avatar” franchise, are justifiably horrified by this and finally recognize Eywa for what it is: evil that must be destroyed. Whatever the humans do, they must prevent the Eywa infection from getting back to Earth. Perhaps that movie – say, “Avatar: Exterminatus” – ends with hundreds of starships gathering in orbit around Pandora, all turning their engines towards the surface and warming up.
A sequel to that movie could begin out in space, showing Pandora are a glowing ball of molten lava from pole to pole; the camera then pans to a whole different moon, showing vast industrial lights on it’s night side and a string of O’Neill habs in orbit. A new civilization is rising and expanding. The story can now begin in earnest, telling of the majesty and glory of the human drive to spread and learn. Perhaps a side-story can be told of one of the habs, a quarantine facility filled with scientists reverse-engineering native Pandora flora and fauna without the Eywa taint. They will probably never know why the infection was created in the first place. Was this something the Na’Vi largely wanted? or was it created by some mad scientist? We’ll never know.
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