Ray Sullivan Author: science fiction

Thursday, 18 September 2025

Is the Journeymen coming true? Pt 2

When the 'modern' Journeymen arrived on Earth they found that their forebears had indeed settled, and had used their superior knowledge and technology to become the leaders of what we now think of the ancient world. All those superior civilisations run by kings and pharaohs were created by the original Journeymen. Sure, they had played around with the locals, diluting their alien gene pool, but had also managed to keep enough of that pool untainted.

The new Journeymen, stranded on Earth with no viable means to return in the immediate future, undertook to create a system that protected the original Journeymen, helped to preserve their lineage and steer technology to create a system to get the genetic material back to the home planet, a process that would ultimately take thousands of years.

To complicate matters, on the comet journey tensions had run high between one genetic faction led by Arlgon and the commanders of the mission, which created a rift that spanned the generations that travelled together and continues to this day. To keep the various Journeymen varieties identifiable the new Journeymen called the original Journeymen 'Colonists', the breakaway faction the 'Sons of Arlgon', usually shortened to the 'Sons', leaving themselves to be just the 'Journeymen'. There is a fourth relevant group to consider that should have been just the original human species, but as mentioned above, the Colonists liked to play home and away, hence all human DNA is in part alien. They are the majority of the population, considered disposable by the Journeymen, almost certainly includes you and me and are called 'Interbreds', or IBs.

From the off the Journeymen strove to move into positions of influence, supporting but not challenging the Colonists. Slowly they manoeuvred to make the Colonists more ceremonial than active players and occupied senior positions to direct policy. Think in terms of the current King of England and the senior Civil Servants. Not all the senior Civil Servants are likely to be Journeymen, just enough to ensure that particular ship is steered the way they want. And not all Journeymen are in the Civil Service - they spread out across all important branches of modern day living from controlling the media, to running the universities, to managing tech companies, to anything that helps meet their prime objective to get Colonist DNA to the home planet.

Not every Journeyman is high ranking and not every high ranking Journeyman is the best candidate for the role they occupy - ever been beaten to a job of a lifetime by someone who is technically inferior to you? Welcome to the unfair world of the Journeymen.

And the Sons? After all these years they are still the natural enemies of the Journeymen. They care not one jot for the Journeymen task and truth be told, they give a damn about this planet.

In the next part I'll explain how the modern world can be explained by the Journeyman story.

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Wednesday, 17 September 2025

Is The Journeymen coming true? Part 1

A long time ago I wrote The Journeymen. Some years later I wrote the sequel, Journeymen II Day of Reckoning. I've toyed on several occasions to write the third and final part of that story, but in many ways it looks like it's being written for me in real time.

First, a reminder of the main story that starts on a planet in another solar system a long, long way away. It is home to a society that that has developed superior technology not once but at least twice. A previous society virtually wrote off the current society in a planet-wide war that saw a phenomenal proportion of the planet wiped out and the society reduced to what we would regard as the Dark Ages. We meet the society many millennium later, repaired, restored and bound by a common will to co-exist under a set of guiding principles.

For the population of the planet life is good. There's a problem they have been shielded from, though. The war that destroyed their earlier civilisation also destroyed a significant amount of the ancient DNA that had evolved to create their lineage and the surviving DNA and gene pool wasn't as diverse as needed to build the healthy population they needed. Slowly, the gene pool was diminishing faster than Natural Selection could improve it. They could see a future, admittedly many generations away, where the gene pool would decrease to the point that the population would die out.

Fortunately for them, but not for us, they learned of a planet far away where the earlier, more technologically sophisticated population had visited and believed there was a possibility that the missing elements from their gene pool might still exist there. They mounted an expedition on a comet that passed their planet and the planet we call Earth on a two thousand year cycle and make preparations to hitch a multi-generational ride to travel to the far-away planet to find out if the genes they were missing was still around and uncontaminated and to find a way to bring it back - clearly the comet was a one-way ticket.

There's a lot more to this background story, and it's intertwined with events in a modern-day Earth. In the next instalment I'll introduce you to the Journeymen themselves.