Breaking the mold

Chapter 1: The before times.

 

The Taylorn weren’t always as we are now.  There was a time when we bore corporeal form.  Great seven to eight feet, per human standards, winged creatures; with sharpened beaks and long muscular arms that were attached to 3 digit claws with an opposable third claw.  There was a time.  With our stubby little muscular legs that resembled lions feet but with defined musculature and visible talons, we could sprint short distances but our wings would do most of our movement for us.  Our faces, besides the beak, were much like humans: we had eyes in the front of our heads and ears that resembled those of elves from your story books; our manes stretched down our back and we were covered in hair with the exception of our wings which were feathered, at least amongst the prominent families which I was from, with great white feathers as pure as a summer cloud.  It was a glorious time but progress waits for no man or beast as you humans seem to suspect.

The difference between my race and yours is that our drive for purity and progress was united amongst the strongest, to the middle of the road, of our society.  We were united to overcoming all limitations and things that made us weak.  Through this, we began experimentation on a great many things.  Most of our experiments on the Taylorn genome were a devastating disaster.  The progress we made created great strides in our medical fields but they fell short of creating the god like image we hoped to achieve.  Our abilities to become non-corporeal and transcend physical form happened quite by mistake.  It happened through experiments that had nothing to do with our physical forms at all.  Our non-corporeal forms happened as a result of the desire to move about the universe in no time at all.  Through a glitch in a matter transporter.

Our abilities to become non-corporeal and transcend physical form happened quite by mistake.  It happened through experiments that had nothing to do with our physical forms at all.  Our non-corporeal forms happened as a result of the desire to move about the universe in no time at all; through a glitch in a matter re-locater.

I believe it was may of my twenty seventh year that I began to remember the accident. There is no doubt in my mind that others who might walk amongst us may have had glimpses of it and formed religions and cults around it but nothing so perfect as the beings that we were.

Listen to me talking about perfection as if I even knew what it was. If I had been perfect, you'd think I would have found myself in a situation that didn't implicate such reprehensible and perhaps moral repercussions.

It was all such a haze but I suppose I'll start at the beginning:

My father was a tinkerer and my mother, a chef. The two of them were the most disorganized wild beasts our race had ever known but they were wealthy in a society of freedom and they were wealthy from other Taylorn's love.

My mother's cooking had not only given birth to a renewed respect for cooking and a cook book that gave individual Taylorn women respect from their husbands, but also a chain of successful restaurants world wide with staff so devoted, it could only be compared to the cults in earth terms.

They weren't violent like a cult though, they just served a higher purpose and they served it for the love of preparation and feeding and they served it for a few chips at a time.

The prices were so low and the food was prepared so well from such easy to find materials that it was practically irresistible to any passerby.

My father's tinkering was a bit more complicated to explain. It started off when he was young: fixing old toys and toasters for older Taylorn women but his complex mind and ease of craft would never be satisfied with such paltry pursuit. His experimentation began to evolve as he grew, moving from simple matter resequencers to the very first  transporter.

In his 370th year, he disappeared while in the midst of an experiment that ended in a massive power surge that shut down power for the entire cliff side.

My mother was cooking a fried bhat bhat loaf in the kitchen and I was playing by the cliff's edge. Every once and  while, I'd purposefully dive off the cliff, swoop down and around and then hit the cliff entrance to our home so hard that it dented the front porch.

I was only 98 at the time and as a young Taylorn, I was anxious and what was more dangerous to our poor front porch, I was getting hungrier with each wafting of my mother's fried Bhat Bhat.

The Bhat Bhat is a winged rat and they are usually fluffed up with meat on their stomachs like your earth turkey as they are clumsy in their landings. Some keep them as pets and find it barbaric for us to eat them but I was not about to trade in a fried Bhat Bhat for stewed cave moss and Cobbnobs. Sure they'd go well with the Bhat Bhat but it is the same way I do not understand humans who will order broccoli without the benefits of chicken when they order Chinese food.

"Djinn! Djinn, you awful thing!"
She burst out laughing as I skulked the edge of the cliff, feigning falling off and slamming back into the edge when she peeked out the window to scare her.

"Djinn, go get your father, remind him that cold Bhat Bhat means the crust will get soggy."

As I flew forward, I saw a blue flash through the tiny window of his room and his physical form collapse like sand granules. As I hit the cliff, the explosion came and all the lights went black.

I wouldn't know what took him until I reconstructed the entire experiment and used a far safer alternating form of current so as to control the process.

It was in a wind that gusted through the city that reminded me of that day. The day I watched my hands turn to dust and then into pure energy. Energy that was made of the electrical impulses in every being. As for my father and myself after that day, we simply had no form holding those impulses together except for the energy loop that was our pure form looping around into its self. We were a Möbius strip of energy and soon to follow was our entire species.