The Confession of the Meena Ascendant, Mateus

Few would dare face the Meena Ascendant in combat, it's mastery of the parapsychic arts was only rivaled by it's excellence in developing and deploying arcanotech devices. Such was the competence and power of the Ascendant that very few people knew anything of it's actual identity. The core of the Ascendant was a great floating pylon, shaped in the fashion of a Judaeo-christian crucifix, but appended with a set of ceremonial wings, three sets of arms, and the writhing naked form of Meliboea, a formerly rogue parapsychic. The handful of people unfortunate enough to have encountered the Meena Ascendant and lived foolishly believed that the woman seemingly nailed to the flying winged cross was herself the Ascendant. Meliboea was formerly a New Themysciran black ops parapsychic. Her second to last mission sent her into a permanent parapsychic burn, leaving her unable to control her powers and driving her increasingly insane. Her last mission ended when the Ascendant captured her, drove a modified Wachowski probe through the back of her skull, and turned the woman into both a living shield and a power source.

The Ascendant drifted into the center of the chamber, the surrounding lights gleaming off it's composite outer shell, glistening off the pale skin of the amazon fixed to it's front. The only motion was Meliboea's chest rising and falling as she drew breath. The chamber seemed empty, but it was full of eyes, dozens were to watch the initiation of the Meena Ascendant into the Lunar Order. Some watched through formality, others were curious about what the enigmatic Ascendant might reveal about itself, others were simply fans of the entity, it's utter calm as the eye of the storm, it's dispassionate cruelty and incidental barbarism.

'In the beginning,' Meliboea spoke, her voice was hers, but the words coming out of her mouth belong to the Ascendant, 'there was darkness, and the world was without form. The breath of God stirred the void, and from that, creation was born.' There was a pause, before the naked woman, her limbs lashed to the Ascendant, spoke again. 'In that darkness and void, there were entities, and from these entities, all life, everywhere, came into being. These primordial entities have been discovered, and documented. Doctor Samantha Grimm's 'space plankton' are the primordial essence of life. It is their millennia long cycle through the galaxy that is the germ of life. This is the origin of humanity, our species, all of our accomplishments, are nothing more than maggots writhing in an apple discarded from a distant tree. We stand on the cusp of our greatness, not knowing, that as a sentient species, we are nothing to the galactic ecosystem.

This is the great answer, the terrible answer, to why are we here? What is our purpose? We are here by accident, and we have no purpose.

'The galaxy is not empty,' the Ascendant spoke through Meliboea's blue-grey lips, 'At the peak of the Petroleum Era, when factories of burning coal churned out smoke, and leveled forests to feed the great engines of humanity, the Earth was nothing but a luminous petri dish. Our cities, the splendor and size of which we have not fully recovered, were nothing but glowing lumps of bacteria. It is the natural order of life to develop and progress. It is now time for humanity to progress, to leave the cradle or the corpse yard of Earth. The bacteria must grow, must advance.

Why should you, Meena Ascendant, be granted admission to the Lunar Order of the Anunnaki?

'In 2035 a joint lunar colony chartered by the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Japan discovered the ruins of an alien city under the Sea of Serenity. This was kept above top secret, it was deemed correctly that the world at that time was no ready for the truth that humanity was not alone, and that there were other aliens and other civilizations beyond Earth. An alliance of intelligence agencies was created, and the Glassenheim Foundation was created. This organization would operate in utmost secrecy, retaining the knowledge of the lunar ruins and the alien culture, while searching both for more evidence of this culture, as well as reverse engineering the technology recovered.

This was a vital service, as one of the first round of things discerned from the ruins were major breakthroughs in material construction. This allowed for the creation of the arcologies, as well as the related geofronts, seacologies, and space habitats. This allowed for a concentration of resources, both in terms of physical goods and in terms of mind power. This was ultimately the most important thing derived from the Serenity Archive. Without these fortresses, humanity might have fallen into something worse than the Dark Age that followed the futility of the Resource War era. By our calculations, had installations like Hollingsworth Hole or bastions like New Philadelphia, Columbus II and Columbus III, or the Londinium Arcology, mankind might have been set back to the end of the Iron Age, with a population reduced to approximately 100 million, worldwide.

'There would be many more exploration missions, searching the lunar surface looking for more ruins. More ruins were found, pyramids, ziggurats, buried cities, all covered in the lunar lava, all the same age. From these ruins more technology was found, their writing system was found, and connections were made. The written language of the lunar culture was very similar to the high form of Sumerian cuneiform. This revelation splinted the Glassenheim foundation into a number of factions. The Foundation was torn between it's duty in protecting the lunar culture, and the manifest desire to understand and exploit the technology discovered for the benefit of the Foundation. Thankfully, for mankind, this second faction, the Sefiroth cabal, won out. This was what drove the Second Renaissance, and allowed for the creation of everything from our modern society to my very existence before you.' The Ascendant rose and rotated.

Mateus

The entity Mateus, also known as the Meena Ascendant first appeared on record in India, along the Kashmir border. The area was a hotbed of wastelander, silk road terrorist, and agitators. At that point, Mateus had a minimalist cruciform body and lacked the ornamental wings. The entity demonstrated impressive technomantic capability, commandeering combat equipment, hacking mecha operating systems, and even infiltrating local data networks and intel systems. This alone would have made the entity a formidable foe. The Meena Ascendant also was armed with a number of high energy weapons, arcanotech weaponry, and the terrifying ability to manifest a Higgs graviton beam without mechanical components.

One op was dispatched to eliminate the entity. New Themyscira's HERA (Homeland Espionage and Reconnaissance Agency) deployed a five woman team. Four of the women have vanished and are presumed deceased, while the fifth now graces the front of Mateus like a callous hood ornament. The entity has full control over Meliboea, including using her water affinity and parapsychic powers for it's own use. This has manifested in not just water manipulation, but enhanced telekinesis, and the ability to create palings, or shields, around itself.

'The contents of the archives found on the Moon, especially the Sea of Showers archive, drove the Second Renaissance. Within it we discovered the secrets to unlock genetic manipulation, allowing mankind to sculpt his own genome with the same skill as the Old Masters of the Italian Renaissance. Within a generation, age old maladies were wiped away. The names of the diseases are unimportant, they've been gone long enough that their horrors are forgotten. Cancer is as relevant today as the Bubonic plague, or smallpox. Laughable.

Now we have phenocladistics, genetic classing, cloning, and cosmetic modifications. We are designing the next ten generations of humanity, creating new strains of mankind, new breeds and sub-species, all engineered to their great and wondrous tasks. Imagine, century long plans to create a new humanity to use technology that doesn't exist yet. And in the Cosmic scale of things, we are just falling out of the petri dish, the first polyps budding off of a tiny coral reef in a vast and empty ocean.

From that seed we bore rich fruit. Giant war machines, mecha, that fight, where our ancestors fought in wheeled metal boxes. Guns that shoot light, x-rays, even the fundamental element of gravity has been harnessed into a tool and a potent weapon. The CogNet and immersive entertainment let humanity plug their brains and pleasure centers directly into the media machine. Anthropotronics guide human emotions, the masses are happy, their ire directed, their passion focused, and their hands kept busy.

'Our warring has changed. In the Petroleum Era,mankind devised Unlimited Warfare. Entire cities were burned, charred with incendiaries, conventional explosives, and atomic weapons. In the Resource Wars, we saw the culmination of this, in places entire nations were burned away. The Wastelands are a reminder of what happens when control slips. Radioactive ruins, poisoned land, haunted by ghosts and zealots. We learned much, painfully, in the echoes. The wars of the past could not be the wars of the future. The power of the weapons that humanity now wield dwarf that of the past. How could one discuss something as barbaric and archaic as the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction when there are ships that have energy weapons that generate explosive yields measured in megatons