Breeding Humans

By Harold King

When the Hekirs discover humans on their planet, they immediately seek to exploit them. Breeding programs are initiated in a competition to produce the world's first intelligent human. Zax, the first unofficial success, rebels against the injustice of being held as a slave and forms a revolt against the Hekirs. Now he must overcome the power of the Human Breeder Corporation in order to stop their plans for developing a human army, and he will fight to the death for it if he must.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781326979638

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Breeding Humans

BREEDING HUMANS

Harold King

Copyright © 2017 by Harold King

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written

permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations

in a book review or scholarly journal.

ISBN: 978-1-326-97963-8

Publisher: Lulu.com

Preface

This story occurred more than a hundred thousand billion years ago, before the formation of our Solar system, in another Universe...

In a sense this story is about the human race, even if it is not about humans. Because now I will tell you, Dear Reader, how the race of the elves evolved. Nevertheless, please do not think of a magical, wizard-like, ethereal creature when you read the word ‘elf’. For although in the great many years that had passed since the events referred to in this novel took place the elves had gained mastery over magic, in the time this story is set they had no such abilities. How could they have been capable of such a marvel if they still weren’t able to speak?

So this novel is about the elves, but from here onward the word 'elf' will no longer be mentioned. Instead we will call them 'humans'. There are two reasons for this: one is that elves are completely anthropomorphic, that is, their appearance is very human-like, or at least similar to perhaps prehistoric humans. In any case, I can assure you Dear Reader that if you came across such an ancient elf, you would say without hesitation that it was a human.

The other reason they should be seen as 'humans' in this story is that many billions of years later, humans did in fact evolve from this elf race—the humans we are now—because the human race is nothing more than a degenerated elf.

Well, let’s begin the story...

Chapter 1: The Hekirs

The hekirs were the inhabitants of the planet Roonya. They were evidently intelligent beings, since they had demonstrated their intelligence to be beyond that of animals through creating an abundance of civilization’s ingenuities, for example nationalism, frontiers, money, torture, patriotism, nuclear bombs, general obligation of national defence and child prostitution. Animals, who are irrational, would not envision such things as described above, so in this manner the hekirs had given overwhelming evidence that they were not animals but intelligent beings.

When they discovered the science of archaeology and found fossils of the less civilized prehistoric hekir races, then their own kind needed to be named somehow as being distinct from the previous ones, and they were elated by the fact of how much cleverer they were than their ancestors, because they didn’t have a nuclear bomb (this must have been the reason they died out). So their own kind was named ‘Hekir Sapir’. The meaning of the word ‘sapir’ was ‘intelligent’ in an extinct, ancient language. And they labeled with great ardor the different sub-variants of this hekir sapir race, each variant being named one form or another of course, and finally their own race, the current hekirs, received the honorable scientific label of ‘Hekir Sapir Sapir’, as they regarded themselves as doubly-intelligent.

However the hekirs did not have a human form. Perhaps from a distance, in dim light, a hekir might be mistaken for a human, but certainly not at close range. The only similarity between the hekirs and humans was that they both had two arms and legs. In all other aspects they were very different. For example, the average height of an adult hekir was around two and a half meters, and to a human eye they seemed extremely gaunt. The most striking difference was that, with the exception of their face, their entire body was covered in feathers. The feathers could be a wide variety of colors, in fact, if the hekir became bored with their natural color, they could dye them. In their society the different kinds of feather-dyeing denoted the fashion, as they had little need for clothing. They did not have hair, but instead short, fluffy feathers grew on the top of their heads. Although they had a special name for this plumage, we might as well translate it as ‘hair’.

The hekir’s head was rather egg-shaped, its height much larger than its width. Their two eyeballs bulged considerably on the sides. Their nose was almost non-existent, it barely protruded from their face, however under this nose was no mouth, but a long beak, just a little shorter than that of a stork. Their legs were quite thin, and scaled from the knee down with wide webbing. Consequently the hekirs did not easily sink in marshes or quicksand. Particularly because they had light, hollow bones, and even the most robust, strongest and heaviest hekir didn’t weigh more than thirty-five kilograms. But generally speaking, the weight of an adult hekir was below thirty kilograms. In addition, hekirs had short tails, or rather just a coccyx adorned with a tuft of feathers.

All these features existed due to the fact that hekirs had evolved from birds. So much so that even the hekir sapir sapir reproduced with eggs. However the current hekirs were not able to fly, because during the course of thousands of years of evolution, their body-mass grew and their tails became vestigial, as they no longer found it necessary to fly. So the hekir transformed first into a large, flightless bird, then later the purposeless wing was gradually modified to an arm-shaped limb, which made it possible to manipulate objects, and so technical civilization could be developed. But the original diet of the prehistoric hekirs remained, who as wading birds have long been eating all kinds of small worms, maggots, fish and rodents that they fished out of the mud, the marsh, or from shallow water with their long beaks. Accordingly hekirs did not grow any teeth.

There was yet another difference between the hekirs and humans—which inevitably must be mentioned—that was invisible from the outside. This was that hekirs did not use sound waves to communicate with each other but radio waves. They could perceive and transmit these waves in a narrow radio frequency range, therefore they conversed with amplitude-modulation of these waves. The frequency’s amplitude was analogous to the pitch of human speech. They could even shout, if they transmitted their words with greater energy. Also, every concept in human speech could be interpreted with this hekir communication form. But even if a hekir shouted forcefully, he was not able to transmit further than a few dozen meters. Thus, as with human speech, this type of conversing also had its limitations.

The evolution of this communication was thanks to the fact that a long time ago the prehistoric hekirs used the magnetic field of the planet Roonya for orientation while they were capable of flight, and later, when they could no longer fly, this sense organ began to perform other duties. However the hekirs were capable of speech with sound waves, but it was only used in exceptional cases, and not all of them had this ability. Occasionally in the hekir society there were such unfortunates born who lacked the organs to either transmit or receive radio waves, and they felt equivalent to the deaf or mute people in human society. For these handicapped hekirs, a method of communicating with sound waves was developed by the hekir educators, as a sort of deaf-mute sign language, but of course they had to learn this separately, and there were very few among the entire hekir race who had learned it.

The hekir civilization had evolved on the Fixup continent of the planet Roonya. This is interesting, because apart from this continent there was only one other continent on the planet, and it was almost directly on the opposite side of the planet. In addition, this other continent, which was called Lubar, was merely a quarter of the size of Fixup. And there weren’t any islands either between these two continents, because each island that existed was in close proximity to either Fixup or Lubar. One of the islands near Lubar, a largish one called Beo, had special significance. Namely the hekirs discovered humans on this island. 

This discovery occurred when the hekir society already knew about nuclear energy, in fact they also had some powerful computers. The discovery, at least that of the Lubar continent, was absolutely devoid of any adventure, because it simply happened that when the first satellite was put into orbit, it took a photo of the continent, which until then wasn’t known of by the hekirs. Given the fact that it was located on the other side of the planet and there were no islands between the two continents, the hekir navigators soon came to realize that sailing far away was futile as there was only the empty sea, so they turned back, assuming that there was no other firm ground on the planet. Therefore up until the age of advanced technology, that continent remained undiscovered.

But now however, since they had found a reason for traveling to the other side of the planet, the situation had totally changed, and they did indeed send an expedition over there to explore, all the more so because a substantial part of Fixup was in a temperate zone. Lubar was however nothing more than jungle and rainforest, so the hekirs hoped they would find here a multitude of valuable plants, particularly fruits, because although hekirs liked to eat small vertebrates, and invertebrates even more so, they were fond of delicious fruits too, which made up at least forty percent of their diet.

So the expedition set sail, reached its destination, then came home bringing delicious fruits. But that is not all. They discovered humans.

This discovery was credited to one of the expedition’s geologists, who thereby became world-famous. He was called Flexorboot, and his name was included in the high-school curriculum, but Flexorboot wasn’t able to bask in the glory, as he died from it. Not from the glory, but from the discovery.

Namely an incident occurred, in which he was walking on the island Beo, searching for ore deposits, when he came upon two human children. They had been playing under a large tree. These children did not run away from him, which—as subsequent studies revealed—may have been due to the humans being the largest animals on the island, you might say the dominant predators, so they had nothing at all to fear. In fact, perhaps they took Flexorboot for some