Part I: Myla's Vision
Year 2220
In the secluded laboratory of Cylinder Habitat Hypatia, Myla worked beneath the cool light of projection screens. The walls were alive with data: spirals of DNA uncoiling and rewinding, ecological models spinning in fractal loops, culture-simulations playing out in compressed time. This was her sanctuary, a place where she could pursue the dream that had consumed her since childhood—the creation of a people who could thrive where humans faltered.
The inspiration had been planted long ago. Grayson's work on Earth had stirred her imagination, even when it was dismissed by colleagues as reckless fringe science. She had followed the quiet trail of his fingerprints through Ring archives: resilience metrics too elegant to be committee work, ecological patterns tuned like music. Where others saw anomalies, she recognized a voice. His Elves had proven that an engineered race could be more than survival—they could be stewards, builders of culture.
Now it was her turn. The asteroid belt waited: unclaimed, unforgiving, rich beyond measure but hostile to human frailty. Myla intended to give it children of its own.
She called them Dwarves. In her mind's eye they were stocky, barrel-chested figures adapted for low gravity and high labor. Their lungs would be immense, alveoli dense and efficient enough to strip nearly every oxygen molecule from their breath. Their circulatory systems would carry redundancy like braided ropes, ensuring no spark of energy was wasted. To fuel their bodies, she envisioned organelles capable of radiosynthesis—turning background radiation into energy, much as plants turned light into sugar. Others would rip oxygen atoms directly from silicates and ores, feeding life from the bones of rock itself.
But physiology alone was never enough. Grayson's example taught her that. A people needed more than survival traits. They needed identity, culture, myth. The Elves had been bound to stewardship, to the law that all things have worth. The Dwarves, Myla decided, would be bound to creation. They would live for the joy of craft, for the shaping of stone and metal, for the dignity of labor made sacred. Perseverance, ingenuity, restraint—these would be the bones of their society.
The challenge was how to give them that soul. Neural laces alone could not birth a culture. They needed parents, teachers, and rituals. Yet the board would never sanction live births for an untested people. So Myla built a compromise.
She engineered simulation pods—wombs woven of biotech and quantum processors. Inside them, time could run compressed, years of cultural experience passing in months. Adoptive families linked through headgear would nurture infants remotely, guiding them through early development while Myla monitored every flicker of brain activity. Songs, myths, and lessons could be tuned into the very architecture of their neurons. She would not only design bodies—she would midwife a civilization.
The first genomes pulsed on her screen, glowing red where edits still needed refining. Myla leaned forward, eyes bright despite the long hours. The Elves had been Grayson's gift to Earth. The Dwarves would be hers to the stars.
Part II: The First Prototypes
The pods glowed like lanterns in the dim lab, their translucent walls pulsing with the rhythm of nascent lives. Myla stood at the observation rail, her palms pressed flat to the glass, watching the first of her Dwarves stir within their chambers. The hum of quantum processors merged with the steady thrumming of pumps, a heartbeat for an entire people.
They were small still—infants by any measure—but already unlike anything humanity had known. Stocky limbs twitched with dense musculature, bones laced with mineral scaffolds strong enough to shrug off impact. Tiny chests rose and fell with astonishing efficiency, alveoli designed to strip nearly every molecule of oxygen from the air—or from water vapor, or from the faintest trickle of oxidized ore. Their blood, dark and metallic, glimmered faintly as it coursed through arteries, capable of catalyzing reactions that would keep them warm even in the vacuum's killing cold.
Myla's notes scrolled alongside the pods: Lung-adjacent organs—confirmed functional. Radiosynthetic pigments present in dermal layers. Ore-chemosynthesis organelles responding to early tests. It was all working. They could breathe rock, drink radiation, and carry the heat of stars within them.
But she had not built them for survival alone. She pressed her lips together as the simulation feeds came online. In compressed time, whole centuries began to unspool. Each Dwarf would spend four years in the pod, but inside that cradle of quantum processors they would experience two hundred years of living history. Where the Elves grew under a gentle 4:1 compression, these children of stone raced forward at fifty times that speed. By the time their bodies walked in the waking world, their minds would already carry the weight of generations.
And they did not waste that time. Myla watched as AI tutors wove lessons into ritual, story, and game. Apprenticeship began with toy hammers and chisels, but within a few simulated decades, those same minds calculated orbital transfers with the same intuitive ease. They did not simply learn metallurgy—they learned the cold equations of spaceflight, of mass and momentum, of gravity wells and escape vectors. Where humans required instruments and lengthy calculations, Dwarves would glance at a vessel, at a load of fuel, and know its range the way a farmer knows the heft of a stone.
Every part of their biology reinforced this orientation. Their eyes, tuned to dim light, tracked trajectories against starfields with precision. Their inner ears, hardened against low gravity, gave them an innate sense of rotational dynamics. Even their breath became a tool: lungs that drew so efficiently could be synced to chants that doubled as mnemonic codes, encoding orbital mechanics into song. They would hum equations as lullabies, teach fuel ratios through rhythm, and bind generations with choruses that doubled as reference manuals.
One of the first infants opened her eyes, pupils contracting against the low amber glow. She reached upward, grip-adapted fingers curling around a projected toy hammer. The neural lace linked her to the voice of her adoptive father across the Ring. "That's it," he whispered, his voice breaking with awe. "Hold fast."
The infant struck the toy against the cradle's surface. Sparks of light scattered, harmless but brilliant. In the compressed world within her mind, it was the echo of a forge, the first swing of a hammer that would shape not just metal, but orbits, vessels, and cities carved into drifting stone. The pod's sensors noted the act, rewarding the child with a faint pulse of neurochemical reinforcement. Perseverance. Craft. The beginning of myth.
Myla felt her chest tighten. This was more than engineering. This was the birth of a people. The Elves had been bound to stewardship. Her Dwarves would be bound to creation—craft not as pastime, but as survival. Already, in their compressed centuries, she could see the first sparks of culture forming: apprenticeship guilds, chants that synced their breath to the rhythm of engines, intuitive geometry passed like lullabies. Even fuel volumes and orbital ranges became instinct, judged by sight and feel alone, because failure in such matters meant extinction.
She tore her gaze away from the pods long enough to scribble into her log: Prototypes viable. Cultural imprinting stable. Risk: perfectionism addiction. Must monitor carefully.
But her hands trembled as she wrote. For all her caution, she could not deny the truth: she was watching the first engineers of the void. Forgers of orbits. Masters of stone and star. A people who would step from their cradles with two centuries of craft already etched into their souls.
Part III: The First Society in Simulation
Inside the pods, centuries passed in the span of only a few years. The dwarves were born into struggle, and from that struggle they shaped their identity. In the compressed flow of time, their clans and codes crystallized into something unmistakably their own.
Their environment was always hostile: vacuum that stole breath, stone that could fracture without warning, radiation that seeped into marrow. To live was to endure hardship, and to endure hardship was to find worth. Out of this came a warrior's code—not aimed at enemies of flesh and blood, but at the endless trials of the void. Every task was treated as a battle, every success a victory, every failure a dishonor that endangered kin. Strength was not measured in conquest, but in how one carried the weight of survival alongside brothers and sisters.
Clans rose around crafts. Mining clans, forging clans, navigation clans—each guild held knowledge as sacred and passed it down through oaths and apprenticeship. Songs became textbooks; chants carried the mathematics of orbits, fuel ratios, and gravitic wells. To the dwarves, these equations were not sterile abstractions but hymns of continuity, binding their children to the labors of their ancestors. The rhythm of breath became the rhythm of engines, each exhalation a promise of precision.
Gender mattered little. Male and female bodies were built nearly identical, broad and resilient, with no clear markers unless one looked too closely. Bonds were formed through shared endurance, comradeship, and loyalty. Breeding was rare, almost incidental—an accident of intimacy discovered only when two who had chosen each other revealed themselves to be compatible. Children were blessings, not obligations, and the true family was forged through labor, not blood.
Purpose wove itself into their myths. They came to believe they had been made to face the stars directly—to carve stability from chaos, to hammer order into drifting stone, to wrest life from the jaws of death. The stars were harsh gods, indifferent and immense, but the dwarves sang that they had been created to defy them with sparks of craft. Honor, loyalty, and excellence under duress were not just virtues—they were the pillars of existence.
By the end of two centuries of compressed time, the dwarves no longer thought of themselves as experiments or orphans of design. They thought of themselves as a people, bound in kinship, sharpened by hardship, and destined to master the void. When their pods opened, they would not emerge as children but as clans already sworn to one another, carrying a warrior's code into the waking world.
Part IV: Emergence
The day came when the pods dimmed, their compressed centuries completed. The lab filled with the scent of ozone and resin as seals cracked and chambers unfolded. One by one, then in waves, the first cohort of dwarves stepped into the waking world—ten thousand strong, beards already thick, bodies hardened, eyes sharp with the weight of two hundred years lived in simulation.
They were not infants. They did not stumble. They moved with the surety of adults who had spent lifetimes in toil and study. Their muscles carried memory, their hands knew craft, their voices held chants that bound equations to rhythm. They looked around not as newborns but as comrades reunited after long labor, brothers and sisters stepping from a forge's smoke.
The lab fell into a hush as they beheld one another in real flesh for the first time. Their eyes lingered, tracing features they had known in simulation but never touched. In that silence there was awe, but not hesitation. Each dwarf saw the same truth reflected back: they had been made, hammered into form by another's hand, their lives sparked in a forge not their own.
And yet, instead of despair, resolve kindled. They did not shrink from the knowledge of design; they accepted it as debt. A people shaped in someone else's crucible still had the chance to prove worthy by building their own. The work ahead was endless: carving homes from stone, bending orbits to their will, proving that their code of honor and endurance could sustain more than a simulation.
A chorus rose from the crowd, low voices rumbling into harmony. It was a song of awakening, a hymn forged from two centuries of memory. It spoke of stone and void, of clans and kinship, of gods who offered no mercy and of mortals who gave none to weakness. Their beards shook as they sang, their stocky frames trembling not with fear but with the fierce joy of burden accepted.
Myla stood above them on the observation platform, tears burning her eyes. Ten thousand lives gazed upward, not at her, but at the ceiling beyond—as if already envisioning the rock and stars they would soon claim. She had given them shape, but their purpose was now theirs to fulfill.
The first clans of the dwarves had entered the waking world. They knew they were born in another's forge, and that only through their own work could they prove themselves worthy of the gift. And so they began, not as children, but as a people already sworn to labor, to honor, and to endure.
Part V: Voyage to Stone
The transports were not built for comfort. Their walls were bare metal and fungus-grown bulkhead, their decks cold beneath booted feet. Yet the dwarves filled them with life the moment they boarded. Ten thousand strong, packed shoulder to shoulder, they began their first true voyage not with silence, but with song.
The resonance came not only from their throats. It came through Gold, the racial System that bound them in harmony. Gold was their chorus, their ledger, their collective voice. Every dwarf carried it, and when they sang, Gold wove their voices into one great tide of sound and meaning. Equations rode on those chants—orbital ranges, gravity wells, the weight of stone and the cost of thrust. To outside ears it would have been noise, but to them it was scripture, perfectly tuned, their craft encoded in music.
They feasted on the way, though the feast was unlike any human celebration. Alcohol flowed—fermented sugars distilled into fuel for body and spirit alike. Meat roasted over microbial braziers, rich and fatty to load reserves into muscle. Bowls of ore dust were passed from hand to hand, swallowed with water and liquor, their mineral grit feeding the organelles that would keep lungs burning hot when air grew scarce. Radiation lamps bathed them in steady glow, charging the pigments embedded in their skin until every dwarf shimmered faintly, like statues carved from embered stone.
Myla watched from the command gallery, awestruck. She had expected nerves, hesitation, questions about what waited for them at journey's end. Instead she saw preparation without complaint. They loaded their bodies with sustenance, filled their spirits with song, and stared at the bulkheads as though already seeing the rock that would soon be theirs to claim.
When the transports reached their mark, docking clamps hissed and the hatches groaned open. Beyond stretched the surface of a nameless asteroid—raw, jagged, hostile. No breathable air. No welcoming light. Only stone, dust, and silence.
The dwarves did not falter. They moored their transports with the futuristic tools of creation, binding metal to rock as if hammering their first rivets into the bones of the world. Then they drew one last shared breath inside the holds, lungs swelling with oxygen, organs heavy with ore and radiation. With chants rising through Gold to bind them, they stepped out together into the void.
Their boots struck the dust, and the first cohort immediately set to work. Picks and plasma cutters bit into stone. Beams were braced. Passages tunneled inward. They would not feast, not yet. Their printers, their livestock patterns, their supplies for sustained life—all would wait until the first halls stood secure. Only then would they allow themselves celebration. Patience and endurance were their inheritance, and they carried it without complaint.
The void gave nothing, but the dwarves needed nothing more than stone, radiation, and the swing of their tools. The black between the stars fed their pigments, the searing shifts of heat and cold stoked their inner fires. As long as rock endured, they would endure.
One great breath was enough to sustain them until the first hall was carved, a refuge hacked from silence by hands that had been waiting for centuries to labor. Gold echoed through their veins and across the stone, marking the beginning of their true home.