I do so love the setting. So much attention being paid to the small but important details and practical problems that stem from such an extraordinary event happening. Most authors tend to just gloss over those challenges in favor of keeping the plot moving, but those details add depth and believability.

That said, the outlook in the setting has always struck me as overly pessimistic. Sure, integrating an entirely new species would be a challenge dwarfing any amount of prejudice we might be familiar with today, but I'd like to believe it could be done without anywhere near the amount of bloodshed shown in New Purpose and hinted at here. I suppose it's the optimist in me, world needs more optimists.

Thank you very much. I'm glad you enjoyed the little things that I like to add to give my stories more substance. Everyone likes dragons, but I don't think enough nuance is given to how they'd integrate into a human world. Were there any details in particular that made enough of an impression to stand above the others?

I wish I could share your optimism, but humanity's past just doesn't give me much reason to hope. Humans are violent and jealous of their place. They do not like to share resources. If you want a contemporary example, I give you the Gray Wolf. If you want a historical example: I give you what European Colonists have done to the native inhabitants of; North America, South America, Australia, and Africa. If you want a pre-civilization example: look what humans did to nearly every species of mega-fauna once they began to migrate across the world. Humans are the 6th mass extinction and every day more species are gone from the world forever because they keep wanting more. Then these aliens, and the transformed dragons, appear, telling them to stop or face consequences. A species that has for millenia become inured to being masters of the world they plunder. Being told to stop or face consequences. Hah! You want proof of how obstinately greedy humans can be? Turn on the news for 5 minutes and listen as people simultaneously exult at and deny what is being done to the world.

In every example, death, destruction, pillage, and control. No... I am afraid I am not very optimistic.

The thing is, bad news sells, and the media loves to capitalize on that. Once upon a time local newstations gave something like 5-minute timeslots to local events like fundraisers or adoption services being run out of local shelters. They stopped doing that because of ratings, there was always a sizable dip in viewership when "neutral" or "good" news came on the air. They want to keep viewers to make money, so they air whatever retains the most viewers for the longest time. AKA Crimes, political BS, overseas tragedies, and controversial opinion pieces on old news to fill the gaps.

Good things haven't stopped happening, they just don't get press. That's more true than ever in the internet age, where there's misinformation, outrage, and fatalistic thinking being spread all over every social media site you care to name. Combine that with the evolutionary tendency of human psychology to recall bad events more readily than good ones, and you have a perfect storm to promote pessimism. It takes conscious effort to focus on and pay attention to the good things that do happen every day, and that's more challenging for some than for others.

Bit off topic, I grant, but there's my rambling pseudo-philisophical rant for the day. Far as your story goes, I admit to being more than a little bewildered by how bad those so-called "engineers" are at their job. If your job is to come up with product to sell to dragons, one would think you'd do a little market research into what they are or are not capable of first. Not to mention dropping verbal prejudice even if not the unspoken. The simple fact you're trying to sell stuff to them carries the implication that they're more than animals.

The media and psychological biases you speak of are true enough. But that's not what I'm getting at. Do you dispute the historical events I cite? The proof is in the fossil record itself. Among other things. Do you deny what has happened to aboriginal cultures and mega-fauna species with the spread of more dominant (advanced) Europeans and homo sapiens, respectively?

A valid criticism of my engineers. Perhaps I've been a bit too influenced by portrayals like seen in Dilbert and Office Space, the socially inept but intelligent engineers kept hidden behind sales representatives like Kevin. I admit, that I didn't complete my Engineering Degree, but I saw enough of the exact same archetypes to know that it is no coincedence.

What I had been trying to get at here is that the dragons aren't a known quantity yet that can be readily exploited (marketed to) after only 10 years of existence on Earth. How many decades/centuries/millennia have humans been trying to figure themselves out? Have they? I certainly don't think so!

Whether they're animals or not seems to be beside the point. No one gets bogged down in the philosohpy of what chewable bone design a dog best responds to. Here you see a spectrum of approaches. Some of the designers/marketers approaching the dragons see them as equals that have their own tastes, others see them as creatures to be exploited because they happen to have preferences. The former, treating them as similarly intelligent beings. The latter, determing what variety of carrot the draft animals prefers most.

History is a broad topic with a lot of contributing and situational factors involved, with wide swaths simply unknown or written by an unreliable narrator. Making blanket claims one way or the other is a fool's errand, instead you want to drill down to specific instances and total them up. Even then, almost every "bad" event you care to name does have some manner of silver lining to it. Usually in the form of bringing advanced medicines and infrastructure to underdeveloped corners of the world, those places suffering from deadly disease or without access to clean water or waste treatment. Africa is a prime example; everyone knows about villages being press-ganged into slavery or forced from their homelands to exploit natural resources, but few recall that some of those villages offered their own men up to the foreigners in exchange for lifesaving medicines or water pumps/filters and food. Malaria's fucking scary, and Europe's medicine far outstripped anything Africa had for a long time. Famine runs rampant in underdeveloped countries, and the science offered by people committing horrible atrocities also makes life easier to live.

That's the core of my point. For a long time I thought roughly the same as you, that Humans are nothing more than creatures of wanton hate and destruction. It isn't true, where there's capacity for hate there's also capacity for empathy and love. Where there's capacity for widespread destruction, there's also capacity for innovation and creation. All it takes is a conscious choice on an individual level, or the proper upbringing to guide motivations. Most of the evil in today's world is driven by the under 1% of people that have notable power and influence, who are overtaken and consumed by greed, pride, envy and the paranoid desire to hold onto what they have. Everyone else, we're just trying to survive in the unfair system that 1% created. Remember it's always the radical minority that makes the news.

Dude. Love your stuff but you have to expand your knowledge of history and human nature. It’s a lot more complicated than the examples you give. There’s cruelties and kindnesses, compassion and condemnation all through the world as long as humans have had the capacity to ponder such principles. If all you look at is the conflicts of course you’re going to have a dim view on things. It’s no different than if you focus exclusively on wolves fighting other groups, killing pups, snapping, growling and attacking eachother you’d think they’re monsters. Humans are also not apart from animals, we’re just one of the most clever and most already extend the hand rather than the fist. I’m a pragmatist when it comes to people. If a scenario like this happened of course there’d be humans who’d fight, probably those in the heavily orthodox religions around the world. Those who want anarchy, those who are blindly and rabidly anti authoritarian. I think those are in the minority. They must be when random strangers will band together to save an animal in distress. Complete strangers donate their manifest energy to buy mosquito netting so some one else across the world won’t catch malaria. I like grimdark settings as much as the next guy but sometimes in your setting people seem blindly, irrationally, even comedically evil. I think hate can be stoked into a powerful conflagration, but hate is taught. I think compassion would win out

It won't just be those anti-authoritarian, I think there'll be plenty of people who will also be following authoritarian leaders, as long as they're human saying what they want to hear.

And I hear what you're saying. Hell, I can even think of a few examples of people that did things that really did have a lasting positive change either regionally or globally. Clara Barton, Alfred Nobel, William Wilberforce, Bill and Melinda Gates, Andrew Carnegie (his philanthropy, anyway), Mahatma Ghandi, Florence Nightingale, just to name a few. But for everyone of those there's a Joseph Stalin, Mao, A.Q. Khan, Pol Pot, or Mullah Omar. Chaos agents willing to destroy lives and or manifestly make the human world less stable for any number of bizarre self-serving reasons. I can only think of a few characters in my story that fit your description of being blindly evil. There are plenty that act against them and their pursuits, as well though. Kim and her family serving as one example.

I do not think something as artificial as "compassion" will win out. Humans are animals, and like all animals they are driven to reproduce. To do that, they consume, and will continue to do so in an accelerating manner without any check on them whatsoever. I really don't care which side "wins" (it all seems to be a race to make the most money, anyway), I worry that that the natural beauty of Earth will not survive.

I have to say I find it odd that you call compassion artificial when it is one of the few things only higher order animals (Dolphins, Elephants, Humans Etc.) seem to be able to demonstrate since it requires the ability to remember the past and anticipate the future beyond animal cunning, as well as display some recognition of self and others. It's an emergent behavior based on neurological complexity.

Yes, as I stated, humans are animals. We have involuntary reactions that are present in fish, carried over from our last common ancestor. We still have all those brutish impluses and desires of our temporal brethren. The thing is, we developed this nice big lump of brain and it's entire point isn't to make us think faster or better. It's to regulate and temper the impulses of those baser level purely survival functions, and it must be exercised. It's how if you find a feral child past a certain age they will just never develop language and higher function because that part of their brain can't currently be activated.

To bring it together, we are an animal that developed the ability tamp down those baser urges (generally, I 100% agree with you that there are and always will be unscrupulous, radicalized and/or sociopathic and deeply misguided people) to wonder, question, remember, empathize and desire to mitigate harm. I have been abused in every possible way. Before I was out of grade school my nose had been broken three times as a product of bullying. Among a plethora of other things all those experiences have only strengthened my resolve to prevent them from happening to other people. Now that's just a personal anecdote, it basically means nothing. What has been shown though, is that a sense of "fairness" and compromise is hardwired into humans because we are one of the most cooperative species on the planet. Also. as more places are lifted out of poverty, the population universally start to have fewer children. Aside from a few religions that have scripture about kiddy creation, it seems that the high human birthrate is directly correlated with with high infant mortality among a couple of other factors. The whole "humanity is the true disease" or "If I kill everyone there won't be suffering anymore" ideas are tropes for a reason. They're projections of personal belief extrapolated extreme simplicity onto the entire world. The only mind one can truly know is their own, everything beyond that is guess work.

As far as what side "wins" geologically it basically doesn't matter. Until the sun turns red giant blasts the earth into a scorched rock, Gia is the one that's always going to come out on top. This planet has survived natural events orders of magnitude worse than humanity could achieve of they let off every nuclear and conventional explosive at once. It won't be habitable for humans, but the planet always makes due. Our own moon is the byproduct of a cosmic catastrophe. Nature always wins and rebuilds just look at the millions of years and plethora of eras that have already passed on Earth. Humans are less than a blink of the geological eye.

(p.s. I am absolutely loving the dragon PSAs you are putting out. Hilarious)

I really liked this little peek into the 'long distance' (mid distance?) of the Zero Day setting. It really does feel like a logical progression, and the idea that some of the changed Children of the Egg would eventually settle out of their confusion and pain from their change to accept what they've become and galvanize into a real community with values that are so alien from the humanity they came from is really fascinating and cool.

It's sad to see it go so downhill so quickly. I really would've loved to see some sort of miraculous turn around where humanity pulls their collective head out of their ass and actually starts to heed some of the things that the Golden-Eyed Ones say... but my experiences as a marginalized minority speak to the... unfortunate realism of the path you've chosen to take the story.

Human history is fraught with war and violence and destruction of the 'other,' and sometimes that 'other' is a scapegoat. I know the other long comment chain talks about the little lights in the darkness of small community events and things like that, and there have been some serious triumphs of human progress.

I just think that a lot of the time, the bad outweighs the good. Or maybe that's my negativity bias speaking. It's hard to feel like the worldline trends towards good and justice when you're living in a time where many states are actively passing laws to try and crush you and people like you out of existence. I empathize with the CotE that way, especially in this chapter, I guess.

*VIBRATES WITH EXCITEMENT*

Whats this about making fossile fuels useless? That would throw the world into complete chaps and kill of a larger parts of humanity unless governments set everything aside and used the last 10 years toprepare for it (lol).

It boils down to them (the golden-eyed aliens) caring more about the Earth (being the rare planet that is friendly to life that it is) than humans. They gave humanity 10 years, despite cynically knowing that they'd waste it fighting each other instead of developing some kind of Apollo or Manhattan style project to figure it out. Now, humanity can't say that the aliens didn't give them a chance.