The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1926

Chapter 1926 The First Human Produc

It was strange.

How did Ves end up in this situation?

He just wanted to enjoy a normal Mastery experience for once. How did that lead to possessing the body of a dwarf and hoodwinking a large number of height-challenged miners to accept him as a god?

If he ever told what happened to Gloriana, she would probably collapse in laughter!

Of course, then she would likely jump on him and attempt to strangle him for deifying a male god instead of a female god!

Rion's body awkwardly coughed.

Controlling the body of a dwarf was a novel experience. Ves certainly never expected to view reality from a height he had never experienced since he was a younger boy.

Living through the life of a dwarf, even for an instant, gave him a brand new appreciation of the benefits and downsides of a divergent breed of humanity.

Heavy gravity variant humans were different from baseline humans. They were designed and cooked up by geneticists in highly-advanced labs and institutions to fulfill specific purposes

In other words, they were both humans and products married in a single, compact package.

As their official name suggested, dwarves were excellently adjusted to living on giant planets with elevated gravity.

A lot of planets like this existed in the Milky Way Galaxy and probably the Red Ocean Dwarf Galaxy as well.

The usual method to make them livable was to break some pieces of the planet up and chuck them into space to make the gravity more tolerable for baseline humans.

This worked fine when the gravity was only 20 percent stronger than standard gravity, but what about a superplanet like Desala X where the gravity was 4.6 times stronger than the gravity of Old Earth?

Turning Desala X into a livable planet for normal humans was too costly! Cracking it up until only a fraction of the original planet was left would not only throw countless resources away, but also result in an enormous financial loss!

It simply wasn't cost-effective to transform these giant planets into normal planets.

Therefore, humanity much preferred to adjust to the heavy gravity environment rather than the other way around.

The next solution was to rely on antigrav technology and other advanced solutions to adjust the gravity downwards.

This was a realistic solution, but one that made humans too dependent on a piece of technology to survive.

What if an antigrav module malfunctioned? What if terrorists or enemy saboteurs managed to cripple the antigrav network of an entire city?

The fact of the matter was that humans did not fare well in heavy gravity environments under a sustained period.

In the Age of Stars, some colonists attempted to live on a 1.5 g or 2 g planet without any gravity adjustments!

What happened was very interesting. Though the rate of injuries increased and childbirth became a lot more problematic, baseline humans actually managed to cope in this environment.

With the passage of years and decades, their bodies slowly morphed in response to the constant gravity acting on their body mass.

Their bones became denser, their muscles became stronger and their hearts became more vigorous.

They also tended to stop growing taller. THis was especially evident over the generations as their descendents became increasingly shorter and stockier!

Despite these encouraging developments, the human descendants that naturally adapted to a heavy gravity environment failed to pass muster.

Their brains started to regress as it came under a lot of pressure. The gravity acting upon its sensitive tissue combined with the difficulty of supplying it with lots of blood meant that the descendants were actually becoming less intelligent with each subsequent generation!

Evolution didn't work very fast. A couple of hundred years was not enough to remedy all of these issues!

Since natural adaptation appeared to be ineffective, why not resort to artificial adaptation?

The controversy this decision ignited among the bright and adventurous humans during the Age of Stars had led to a lot of outrage.

Was it ethical to modify a new breed of humanity? Would these 'new humans' supplant baseline humans as the new masters of humanity? Or would the opposite happen were natural humans lorded over an entire caste of subhuman slaves?

Regardless of the arguments, humanity back then was far more divided compared to the present time. Even if the powerful Terrans were too squeamish to explore this option, plenty of smaller and more radical star nations were eager to try!

The first true human product was born.

The earliest incarnations basically took human descendants of settlers of heavy gravity planets as a starting point and extrapolated their evolution over the span of millions of years!

They were shorter because being tall was a huge discomfort under heavy gravity.

Their bones were thick and strong to endure various accidents such as falling.

They were very muscular because they needed the strength to fight against the enormous gravity as they went about their day.

Their brains were significantly altered in order to better cope with the gravity pressuring them downwards.

Their heart and blood circulation grew more robust in order to sustain the prodigious needs of their oxygen-hungry brains and muscles.

Their skin grew rougher and thicker in order to withstand the external pressures of living in a heavy gravity environment.

Their metabolism grew a lot more efficient and robust in order to keep up with the enormous demand for energy and nutrients of their bodies.

Due to various coincidences, the resulting breeds of heavy gravity variant humans just happened to resemble the race of dwarves in human fantasy.

Before long, no one used the term 'heavy gravity variant humans' anymore to refer to this specialized breed of humanity. It only showed up in official documentation and academic literature.

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