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Description

The year 4,029 (Common Era) is approaching on Earth, although most terrestrials are unaware of this and others would dispute the date. It’s a rather different planet than ours, with raised sea levels, no north Polar ice cap, and, most notably, no Moon. Deserts have generally expanded, the surviving jungles have expanded in some places but died out in others, and the shore ecosystems have undergone rapid and cataclysmic change with the sudden loss of all tides save the Solar ones.

(The craters are fairly noticeable. They’re a result of the explosion of the _second_ Alpha-Omega bomb, the one located in the Moon base, as a result of the desperate struggle of surviving Astronauts and Cosmonauts for the very limited resource base remaining on the Moon. Fortunately, most of the Moon was blasted away from the Earth, leading to a cloud of large asteroids preceding Earth in its orbit, but enough pieces hit the planet to cause the Seven Years Winter and drop the human and ape population by another 90%).

(Complicated gravitational interactions will probably at some point lead to a rock of at least dinosaur-killing size running into the Earth, but probably not for some millennia yet. OTOH, the math to prove this the case is too complicated for any Ape society to calculate, so it’s probably for the best if space travel comes along soon).

The tree of life has been pruned, by massive radioactive fallout, global temperature rise continuing for nearly a century after humanity suffered from Civilizationus Interruptus, a more temporary but still severe increase in radiation due to ozone damage, and the chemical damage from innumerable burning cities, factories, and chemical depots either deliberately targeted by war planners or just too close to other atomic targets. The situation was not helped by various biological weapons targeted at food crops mutating into forms with a more variegated diet.Large scale die-offs of vegetation led to increased soil erosion, with heavy increases in rainfall in some areas speeding things downstream even faster, leading to further expansion of desert and “badland” zones. And then there are all the new mutated animals and plants that have popped up: some, like the giant frogs, aren’t too bad, but the giant rats that have taken up the space previously occupied by large canine predators are just nasty.

On the positive side, the climate situation has largely stabilized, radiation is way down in areas where people weren’t deliberately dickish with cobalt-salted weapons, a rich variety of new species created by radiation mutations are expanding into emptied niches in those cases they didn’t turn out horribly unfit, the ocean ecology has recovered to the extent a real draw-down of excess CO2 is starting, and the current intelligent life forms are at least few enough in number to not do too much damage (yet)).

Such intelligent life forms are different and more varied than those of a couple of millennia earlier. The most prominent are the apes - chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Not all orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees are the same. The common model in the city-states of former north America - the “warrior” gorilla, the “bourgeois” chimpanzee, and the “politician and priest” orangutans - is hardly universal: besides different social structures, not all apes underwent quite the same sort of genetic modification. The descendants of gorillas laborers, modified to increase their pacific rather than aggressive elements, tend to create communistic (in the tolerant sense) and non-violent societies. All Chimpanzees are descended from gene-lines bred for lowered aggression: the Chimp norm was after all one of ball-biting, baby-eating, Colobus-monkey-exterminating general nastiness. Some are more aggressive than others, though. The orangutans which retain their original solitary habits may still remain part of ape society, as scientists or philosophers or managing limited-access libraries, while others have returned to a hunter-gatherer existence due to their intolerance for large groups. Somewhile create weird theocracies.

Then there are the Bonobos.

Most ape societies are multi-racial, with all three species contributing their individual strengths and balancing their weaknesses. The ancient tradition of Ape Brotherhood (apes, alas, are almost as sexist as humans, historically) dates back to the ancient struggle against humanity when apes knew they could stand together or fall separately. That struggle has long been forgotten, but the tradition remains, and is a cornerstone of ape religion and philosophy. Also, multi-species societies just tend to outcompete those with only one member species. (There are one-ape societies, but they tend to be primitive and geographically isolated.)

Apes are sufficiently different genetically that any children between two species that survive are going to be sterile “mules”: in most ape societies bearing such a child is considered a violation of the natural order and often a downright abomination, although there is an ape society in former Indonesia in which such hybrids form an important religious caste, their inability to bear children being seen as a guarantee against nepotism towards descendants, like human eunuchs.

Ape societies tend towards low population densities. Hereditary monarchies or dictatorships are uncommon, generally being a rather more unstable form of government among apes (the one-species nature of such a setup being a fundamental problem, although there are occasional Napoleon types), and the devastated nature of the planetary environment creating obstacles to expansion in the form of deserts and wastelands of various sorts, as well as areas shunned for their legendary toxicity. Apes tend to also reproduce more slowly than humans.

However, things are rapidly changing. Some fifty years ago First Contact was made between time-lost human astronauts and Ape in a manner less disastrous and contrived (shot in the throat and survived while losing his voice? Really?) than in some other timelines. Although the loosely federated ape city-states of the former US Greater Appalachians zone (inland from the long-deserted Forbidden Zone, the east coast mega-cities having been an areas of lingering radiation long after other places had become safe to live) did not initially take well to the notion that humans were once as intelligent as apes, and there was unpleasantness, in which one of the humans died rather messily, and even a brief Holy War but things have settled down. The “secularist” winning side, like the winners of the Swiss Sonderburn, have created a more centralized, if still federal state, and have pursued a path of expansion and modernization, picking the brains of the astronauts (and the _other_ astronaut that showed up a couple years later) to drive their already early industrial technology into full steamape-punk. Apes continue to crash early model heavier-than-air machines, but they continue to try: after all, they _know_ it’s possible, so they’re going to get it right eventually. Dirigible owners scoff. Rails now link the region, and have been driven through the sweaty mutant Kudzu-choked jungles of the deep south and the less heavily radioactive parts of the east coast to the sea. An Age of Discovery has come about, with the apes of the American interior sailing their rather clunky steam and early internal combustion ships to Africa and Europe, South America and Asia and even distant Australia.

Humans, globally, have had a bad time of it - with the collapse of civilization, the stronger and more wilderness-adapted apes had an advantage, and with the atomic fallout, biowarfare, inbreeding, and most people being rather bad at the hunter gatherer thing, populations plummeted for a long time. Evolution can happen fast in small, inbred populations, and when you add in an extremely high radiation background with a resulting high rate of mutations, human descendants underwent some substantial physical as well as cultural changes. Many human descendents have returned to a primordial, pre-language level, little better at mental challenges than the pre-genetic uplift hairy apes, with tools limited to rocks and pointy sticks, although for some reason they still wear the skin of animals they kill (no matter how stinky). It is true they don’t suffer from the mental fossilization adult base-line apes did, and could keep on learning - if they did not mostly die quite young. Most surviving humans in the Americas, Europe and Africa have fallen far, although not perhaps entirely beyond redemption (see below).

Of course, there are different sorts of wilderness. Apes are of tropical origin, and while smart enough to bundle up in the cold, they are generally more sensitive to cold than human beings, especially those habituated to it by inhabiting such godforsaken places as Greenland and Wisconsin. (Also, apes, with all the hair, tend to find tight-fitting clothes itchier and more uncomfortable than humans do. Only the most deliberately backwards jungle-dwelling tribes of apes go about naked, but few apes like bundling up like an Inuit with a chill.) As a result, most of Canada, Scandinavia, and other frosty zones of the globe have been left unsettled by apes aside for the occasionally adventurous hunter or wacky mystic seeking enlightenment, and some human communities large enough to maintain some cultural tradition made it through the demographic eye of the needle unmolested by apes. A mixed Canadien/Inuit/other First Nations society exists in the far north, herding reindeer and oxen, hunting seals, and distilling some incredibly foul spirits. A weird Russian/Lapp/Norse polar culture exists north from Finnmark and east along the arctic edges of Russia. After the destruction of the last human cities of the high Altiplano, apes largely deserted an area with air pressures of an almost suffocating thinness: the apes of the jungle and desert lowlands consider tales of figures on the high mountains, seen blurrily through telescopes, about the same way as humans OTL consider tales of the Yeti. There’s even some marginal survivors in Antarctica. And then there are the special cases.

Not all areas of the planet were affected to the same extent by the third world war. Fallout and bioweapons and devastation of the ozone were global, but a number of nations in the third world avoided direct attack while also having few apes: these areas might have been centers for a new rise of humanity. India, although exposed to global cooling and heavy fallout due to its northern hemisphere location, had enough people and few enough apes to host a rebirth of human civilization, if they had not been foolish enough to stumble in the later stages of WWIV into a fight with a China in full From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Three mood. Apes fleeing the utter devastation of much of the North clashed with desperate human survivors, joined by apes from those southern hemisphere nations which had embraced large-scale ape labor. The struggle was long, bloody and drawn out, and then the Moon blew up. The mess has left the ape societies in that part of the globe with a rich myth-cycle of legends about wars of gods and demons. It was also not completely effective in wiping out Asia’s vast human population: in some isolated areas, pockets of humans survived and maintained agricultural civilization, while in southern India a sizable (still mostly) human population survives under the Ape Yoke to this day.

The Tibetan highlands, an area with an environment particularly inhospitable to apes, saw a mix of indigenous Tibetans and Chinese plus Indian refugees manage the enormous climate and fallout driven population decline without a total collapse of civilization. More than a millennium later, they would outgrow the carrying capacity of the Tibetan plateau, and hungry for new lands, descend the mountains to war with the lowland apes.

The endless ape-human wars of the so called “Marcher states” between Tibet and the main centers of ape civilization has created curious hybrids, a strange love-hate relationship in societies where the ruler and the ruled may switch depending on the outcome of the latest war. In one of the larger Marcher states, a great conqueror has arisen, expanding both at the expense of other warlords and the more solidly Ape states to the east. He has taken the new American notion of humans as the “fourth ape race” to heart, and enforces equality by force. More than that, he has taken human as well as ape concubines, and even shaved off most of his fur as an act of solidarity. (Which is actually not that bad an idea in the suffocating heat of south China in the summer.) He is also doing his best to duplicate the new advances in *American ape technology: he’s an outsized ape with outsized ambition, and like another famous modernizer with an obsession for hair removal, he’s building a fleet to the most modern specifications.

Another mixed human-ape society exists on the island of Iceland, now “Avendon”. Depopulated by WWIV and the Shattered Moon, the island was resettled by humans and apes seeking to escape from the genocidal conflict between the by now greatly shrunken human and ape populations. (The island was originally named _Avalon_, but there has been linguistic drift in the intervening centuries. A few of the founders (both human and ape) were big fans of the Arthurian romances, and a somewhat mangled version of the myths have become part of their foundational stories: while modern locals are aware they’re not living in 6th century Britain, and the technology is early to mid industrial (they do some remarkable things with steam power, and have a primitive sort of crystal radio), the place retains its Renaissance Faire style and sees Arthur’s court, with its chivalric code and openess to brave knights of whatever origin, as an ideal. All kings of Avendon (constitutional monarchs, actually) take the reign name “Arthur”. The King’s traditional chief advisor is known as a “Merlin” and is almost always an Orangutan.

In the oases and river valleys of the north American desert west, an oddly Olde West society has arisen based on muddled myths which give the locals a sense of “frontier pride.” The thin local population of humans and apes have forgiven each other's sins in the interest of simple survival in a marginal land, and treat the occasional mute wild human that wanders into their lands with compassion, while apes stand shoulder to shoulder with humans to repel nomadic raiders from the east.

They’ve also reinvented the six-shooter.

In the deep Arabian wastes are the secret cities of the Jews, survivors fleeing the wreck of Israel in a terrible Anabasis. Living off deep fossil water and careful recycling, solar and wind power, and with firmly controlled reproduction, they keep the ark of Jewish civilization afloat in difficult times. Their secret cities are sometimes stumbled upon by madly adventurous or utterly lost Apes, who are given the choice of conversion and remaining for the rest of their lives and death. None have ever escaped.

The east and south Africans, battered by disease, Nuclear Winter, meteors, and Meteor Winter as they were, still got off lightly enough from WWIV that they were among the last of humanity to fall to the Apes, and it was a long struggle with a fighting retreat into the deep interior of Africa. The overrunning of much of Africa with new vegetation, including various new mutant species, gave some refuge, ironically, from Apes more accustomed to urban settings or ordered farmland. At the heart of the Great Thorn Forest is the greatest human city on Earth, Sexxtann, which having just held onto the Scientific Revolution after a long period of inescapable technological decline has clawed its way back to late 20th century modernity. It’s rulers, the Industrialists (the old legends tell that those nations which did not Industrialize were crushed and colonized) are increasingly well informed about the outside world, and are not very happy with what they see. Changes will have to be made.

Beside free humans, there are places where humans enslaved by apes have not fallen as far as those of North America. New Zealand, although largely untouched by WWI aside from that one plague that got through their quarantine, suffered a technological collapse after being thrown back onto their fairly limited non-sheep resource base with the end of international trade, and would later be conquered by Apes from Australia. The wars of conquest were long and bloody, and the humans reduced permanently to hewers of wood and carriers of water. Today’s human underclass maintains spoken if not written language, and have not suffered too badly from genetic damage, although the ruling apes are quite sure that they are a fundamentally inferior and less intelligent species: reports of more advanced humans threaten to fundamentally undermine their social structures.

Human slavery is also used on a large scale in the south Indian ape oligarchies, where macabre efforts to breed humans into more “useful” types have been ongoing for the last millennium in spite of the difficulties created by the slow human reproductive cycle.

These facts on the ground have largely destroyed the humans = brute beasts position among the Appalachian Apes (although of course there are still stubborn hold outs), but ironically have done much to harm the Human Rights movement. If humans once ruled the world, might they not try to reestablish their rule again? Humans may be weak, but they’re vicious, fast-breeding, really good at throwing stuff, [1] and they run good.

Furthermore, they can _learn_. Given time and patience, a sizable proportion of North American “wild humans” can be taught at least rudimentary speech, which they pass onto their children - which often improve on it. Some Apes are enthusiastic about a program to breed together the more verbal humans to “redeem” their species - far more think it’s a terrible idea. It’s already illegal to use humans for medical experimentation - what will they get next, the vote?

Mutants are a whole other kettle of malformed fish. While in most cases humans seeking refuge from apes in highly radioactive areas died off faster than they could produce offspring functional enough to reach breeding age themselves, some mutations _did_ confer some advantages, some did make the next generation a bit more resistant to radiation, and in the end populations did manage to rebound. Civilization and full sapience didn’t always survive: the mutants of southern California are a feral bunch, to be avoided as much as possible. However, mutant communities did manage to maintain civilization of sorts in deep places beneath the ruins of the Bowash corridor, in the rank, tangled regrown forests of central Europe, the wreckage of South America’s proudest cities, the irradiated and then dessicated interior south of China, and in the vast spaces of Siberia (where some scraps of advanced biotechnology were maintained long enough to give the genetic wheel of chance some extra spins).Some mutants also emerged in north India, but they eventually moved to Tibet, where in time a population of telepathic mutants became the much feared Hidden Movers, a secret society acting to further the interests of human Tibetans in general and Tibetan mutants more specifically.

Most notable, aside from the telepathic mutants of NE America and their bomb fetish, are the Central European and South Chinese Mutants. The concealed cities of the Europeans are mostly within former Germany. Proud of their maintenance, and in recent centuries, some advances on pre-cataclysm technology, they are known to their secret foreign contacts, mutant or ape, as the Makers. (Most notable has been the development of electronic mind control, something still experimental at the time of WWIV: they use it to enslave apes captured on the borders of the central European Forbidden Zone, usually captured by previously captured apes for plausible deniability if anyape sees. Horrendous death rates, especially of babies and children, from radiation for a very long time has kept their population low, although it has been growing in recent centuries as things became more livable. Cybernetics frequently compensate for non-functional body parts and organs or large scale removal of said parts due to cancerous growths.

The Chinese mutants, not particularly remarkable in themselves, are ruled by giant telepathic human brains living in elaborate life support tanks. A product of the latest in Chinese biotech experiments, they consider themselves the Inheritors of human civilization, a new superior species carrying on from the old. Their laboratory, located in a secure facility deep underground, survived WWIV and they then telepathically summoned survivors to dig them out. They have been working on developing ways to destroy the Apes for millennia, hampered by the tendency of their servants to die off no matter how often they telepathically commanded them to hump, and by the fact that the Chinese scientists trying to create biological supercomputers out of human brains really didn’t know what they were doing. (They’re smart, but not _that_ smart.)

The Makers and Inheritors only recently discovered each others existence recently, with a mutual reaction of disgust and contempt. Quite a bit of their resources have been re-tasked to destroy the other, hampered by their difficulty in sending technological assets nearly half way around the planet without the Apes noticing something funny. This has, by the way, largely distracted them from the sudden surge in technological development happening in North America.

Both are vaguely aware of the Siberians, and in that case their reaction is more one of fear. The Siberian mutants are the largest and most powerful mutant group by far, and their attitude towards the other mutants is largely one of contemptuous indifference. Like the Inheritors, they consider themselves a new species and are indeed proudly post-human. (Admittedly, once you remove the usual mechanical bits they’re mostly weak-eyed albinos with bad teeth and either too many or too few fingers, but they’re quite radiation resistant!) Telepaths are rare: that particular breed of mutant was largely wiped out in earlier, more radioactive times, by a leadership really not willing to let just anyone read their minds. They’ve recently managed to redevelop advanced genetic engineering techniques, and are eager to improve themselves further through techniques other than cybernetics (the Makers enhance themselves cybernetically out of necessity: the Siberians do so out of ideology.). Whether they will have to make war on the apes (which they hold in arrogant contempt [2]) eventually is uncertain: if they do succeed in duplicating the star drive, they plan to leave this damaged planet for the stars, and a starship moving close enough to the speed of light is almost as effective for disinfecting planets as an Alpha-Omega bomb.

Most Apes are quite ignorant of the uplifted intelligent dolphins, whose complex philosophical and mathematical speculations fill the seas with thin piping cries. As yet the Apes do not suspect they are not the smartest species on the planet, although this may change if the dolphins succeed in their current effort to evolve thumbs. Among sea-going apes there are tales of mysterious scaleless fish rescuing drowning sailors, but such tales are largely poo-poo’d by land dwellers. (The fact of the matter is that Dolphins are serious dicks, and they’ve drowned rather more Apes than they’ve saved - it’s just that those ones don’t live to tell their stories. And in most cases it’s just for kicks.) Dolphin specimens are virtually unknown, after all: they’re smart enough to avoid nets and stay out of harpoon range of boats.To most apes they are a vague legend, like sea serpents or the giant amphibious human.

Ape societies still vary widely, often due to (usually unacknowledged) cultural inheritances from the human societies that they replaced. Almost all ape languages are descended from the speech of their former human masters, if often badly mutated by two thousand years of time or mixing together the languages of two or more adjacent human societies. The apes of South India have a caste system which cuts across species boundaries (although, as usual, Orangutans are overrepresented in the religious and administrative classes), if lacking the category of “untouchables” (instead, there are human slaves, some debased in ways hard to imagine.) The Apes of Nowe Ceasaria, in eastern Europe, have inherited myths of a great and evil empire of the red flag to the east - which now seem fulfilled with the rise of the Union of Socialist Ape Republics to the east, where Gorillas of the more pacifist sort allied with Chimpanzees against their more aggressive cousins and the scheming Orangutans to create a weird new superstructure atop the various scraps of Soviet ideology that survived the winnowing of time.

Another religion to survive the mass dieoff of its worshippers was Islam, the Koran existing in far too many copies and formats to be destroyed entirely during the Bad Years. Of course, Ape interpretations are a wee bit different from those of human beings - for one thing, they believe humans covered up the fact that the message was for all higher primates and stole it for themselves, for which they were struck low in WWIV and the ape revolt (the middle Eastern Apes acknowledge that humans were once intelligent and powerful, but deny that apes were beasts which only became intelligent under human rule.The Muslim Apes are also fine with pictorial representation of Apes, claiming that the old ban under human rule was to cover up the fact Muhammed and several other important religious figures were Apes. Whether he was a Chimpanzee or an Orangutan is one of the issues dividing the two major branches of Ape Islam.)

Of course, there are societies which diverge from any former human ones.

In the former territories of Brazil Bonobos largely form the powerful “Courtesan” or Cortesa class, which, like Japanese Geisha, are far more than sex workers, acting as highly educated and artistic entertainers, muses, mediators, ambassadors, go-betweens and general diffusers of tension and conflict, using charm, seduction, misdirection, and a great many polite lies to rub the rough corners off the machinery of government and, nowadays, the rise of advanced Ape capitalism. There are of course those who object to their influence on Ape society, and outside of the Brazil area Bonobo immigrants often meet with considerable suspicion and hostility.

The great African empire of Heart-of-the-World is an authoritarian merit bureaucracy like the Chinese empire, but with no autocrat at its center, and is as close as one gets to a state of “laws, not Apes.” The Primordialist Apes think leaving the jungle was a bad idea, and unlike humans with similar thoughts OTL, they’ve actually put their money where their mouth is. The True Ape Society has a clearer notion of Ape’s human heritage than any other state in the *Americas, and want nothing to do with it, trying to create a new society almost entirely from scratch, with a language structurally alien to the almost-Spanish of their neighbors, a new philosophy, a new religion, and while their technology is early 19th century at best (although struggling to catch up with the north Americans) they have developed a formidable appreciation of the methods of propaganda and memetics, and are attempting to create written texts that will act as mental “infections”, implanting their ideas into the heads of other Apes while they think they made a “rational decision” and “worked it out for themselves” with just a little help. And if minds are reformed, so will the world.

Then there are the sea apes. Most Apes stay away from large bodies of water, being poor swimmers, but some coastal Ape societies with few other options have turned to the sea for a living, fishing and trading. (It’s not like most human sailors in medieval times could swim, either). Traditionally even the boldest traders have hugged the coasts, with no deep sea crossing, which has helped keep the various Ape societies fairly isolated from each other. Only now with steamships, the compass, and high quality clockwork is deep-sea travel becoming widespread, first by the North *Americans, later by Apes from former Brazil, western Europe, India and the south of China.

However, they have been anticipated by humans in making their home upon the briny deep in a more permanent way. Many humans fled to the sea in search of safety after WWIV; most sunk or eventually were forced to come ashore due to running out of food or fuel (although some atomic-powered ships remained at sea for years), but a sort of evolutionary process occurred over time. Rafts don’t need fuel, and one can follow currents and winds to steer away from dangerous shores. If the raft is large enough, you can even grow things on it: if you have enough plastic sheeting, you can gather rather a lot of water through evaporation. If it’s made of the right material, it can last for many years. So humans living almost entirely on the sea, touching land only when strictly necessary and then preferably on uninhabited small islands, for some centuries managed to survive with almost no contact with the landbound Apes. Unfortunately for them, apes finally managed to develop coastal trade routes, and then piracy, and then things went non-linear.

Oddly enough, humans still live most their lives on boats in the Indian Ocean. The trouble is that they have to share bunk space with Apes, apes of various breeds which did not find the often rigid and conservative ape societies of the land suitable, and adopted human techniques and combined it with piratical habits to create a new lifestyle. The Sea Apes are divided into various factions, some more piratical, others more trade-oriented, some living almost entirely off the products of the sea and the scattered islands controlled by the Sea Ape not-an-empire. The factions sometime clash, but war is formalized and ritualized so to avoid sinking ships and killing too many skilled soon-to-be-impressed Apes and Humans. The islands are largely neutral territory and a common possession, and all join in their contempt of land-dwellers. Humans vary in status: they don’t _lead_ any of the factions, but at least there are factions where they aren’t actually slaves. Their Advanced Swimming Ability gives them some status, and a lot of work cleaning off barnacles and so on while at sea. Technology is an odd schizo mix, and some of the ships, after a millennium plus of cut and try engineering, are as large as any wooden deep sea ship ever built by human beings. They are one of the few Ape groups which have some clue about dolphins, which they distrust.

The world is changing at an increasing rate, after a long period of incremental progress. The apes of north America are building alliances and bridges with the Apes of *Brazil, western *Europe and *Africa, and even distant *Indonesia. There is talk of something like an Ape League of Nations or UN (although the two surviving, now elderly human astronauts warn that such things generally turn out to be a disappointment.) A mighty, bald Gorilla wonders how far his reach exceeds his grasp. A horde of sociopathic Humanzees begins a long-planned march to the north and east across the dry steppes. A formerly mute human says his first word while a Chimpanzee teacher beams, and an Orangutan scowls. Mysterious aliens (or perhaps some very far-diverged branch of ape or human kind) hide out in Antarctica. A Siberian scientist and hidden telepath begins, almost inadvertently, an ethical revolution.

The next spaceship to arrive will come from the future.

[1] Human beings have an evolved skill with accurately thrown projectile weapons unmatched by any other species of ape, and the genetic engineers didn’t put much effort into fixing that when upgrading apes. Apes do fine with guns and even bows and arrows, but like a Hobbit, a human with a rock and a sling, or even just a rock, is a dangerous thing at a surprising distance.

[2] They might not underestimate Apes as badly as they do if they had more telepaths, just saying. (The isolation doesn’t help).

Description

The year 4,029 (Common Era) is approaching on Earth, although most terrestrials are unaware of this and others would dispute the date. It’s a rather different planet than ours, with raised sea levels, no north Polar ice cap, and, most notably, no Moon. Deserts have generally expanded, the surviving jungles have expanded in some places but died out in others, and the shore ecosystems have undergone rapid and cataclysmic change with the sudden loss of all tides save the Solar ones.

(The craters are fairly noticeable. They’re a result of the explosion of the _second_ Alpha-Omega bomb, the one located in the Moon base, as a result of the desperate struggle of surviving Astronauts and Cosmonauts for the very limited resource base remaining on the Moon. Fortunately, most of the Moon was blasted away from the Earth, leading to a cloud of large asteroids preceding Earth in its orbit, but enough pieces hit the planet to cause the Seven Years Winter and drop the human and ape population by another 90%).

(Complicated gravitational interactions will probably at some point lead to a rock of at least dinosaur-killing size running into the Earth, but probably not for some millennia yet. OTOH, the math to prove this the case is too complicated for any Ape society to calculate, so it’s probably for the best if space travel comes along soon).

The tree of life has been pruned, by massive radioactive fallout, global temperature rise continuing for nearly a century after humanity suffered from Civilizationus Interruptus, a more temporary but still severe increase in radiation due to ozone damage, and the chemical damage from innumerable burning cities, factories, and chemical depots either deliberately targeted by war planners or just too close to other atomic targets. The situation was not helped by various biological weapons targeted at food crops mutating into forms with a more variegated diet.Large scale die-offs of vegetation led to increased soil erosion, with heavy increases in rainfall in some areas speeding things downstream even faster, leading to further expansion of desert and “badland” zones. And then there are all the new mutated animals and plants that have popped up: some, like the giant frogs, aren’t too bad, but the giant rats that have taken up the space previously occupied by large canine predators are just nasty.

On the positive side, the climate situation has largely stabilized, radiation is way down in areas where people weren’t deliberately dickish with cobalt-salted weapons, a rich variety of new species created by radiation mutations are expanding into emptied niches in those cases they didn’t turn out horribly unfit, the ocean ecology has recovered to the extent a real draw-down of excess CO2 is starting, and the current intelligent life forms are at least few enough in number to not do too much damage (yet)).

Such intelligent life forms are different and more varied than those of a couple of millennia earlier. The most prominent are the apes - chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Not all orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees are the same. The common model in the city-states of former north America - the “warrior” gorilla, the “bourgeois” chimpanzee, and the “politician and priest” orangutans - is hardly universal: besides different social structures, not all apes underwent quite the same sort of genetic modification. The descendants of gorillas laborers, modified to increase their pacific rather than aggressive elements, tend to create communistic (in the tolerant sense) and non-violent societies. All Chimpanzees are descended from gene-lines bred for lowered aggression: the Chimp norm was after all one of ball-biting, baby-eating, Colobus-monkey-exterminating general nastiness. Some are more aggressive than others, though. The orangutans which retain their original solitary habits may still remain part of ape society, as scientists or philosophers or managing limited-access libraries, while others have returned to a hunter-gatherer existence due to their intolerance for large groups. Somewhile create weird theocracies.

Then there are the Bonobos.

Most ape societies are multi-racial, with all three species contributing their individual strengths and balancing their weaknesses. The ancient tradition of Ape Brotherhood (apes, alas, are almost as sexist as humans, historically) dates back to the ancient struggle against humanity when apes knew they could stand together or fall separately. That struggle has long been forgotten, but the tradition remains, and is a cornerstone of ape religion and philosophy. Also, multi-species societies just tend to outcompete those with only one member species. (There are one-ape societies, but they tend to be primitive and geographically isolated.)

Apes are sufficiently different genetically that any children between two species that survive are going to be sterile “mules”: in most ape societies bearing such a child is considered a violation of the natural order and often a downright abomination, although there is an ape society in former Indonesia in which such hybrids form an important religious caste, their inability to bear children being seen as a guarantee against nepotism towards descendants, like human eunuchs.

Ape societies tend towards low population densities. Hereditary monarchies or dictatorships are uncommon, generally being a rather more unstable form of government among apes (the one-species nature of such a setup being a fundamental problem, although there are occasional Napoleon types), and the devastated nature of the planetary environment creating obstacles to expansion in the form of deserts and wastelands of various sorts, as well as areas shunned for their legendary toxicity. Apes tend to also reproduce more slowly than humans.

However, things are rapidly changing. Some fifty years ago First Contact was made between time-lost human astronauts and Ape in a manner less disastrous and contrived (shot in the throat and survived while losing his voice? Really?) than in some other timelines. Although the loosely federated ape city-states of the former US Greater Appalachians zone (inland from the long-deserted Forbidden Zone, the east coast mega-cities having been an areas of lingering radiation long after other places had become safe to live) did not initially take well to the notion that humans were once as intelligent as apes, and there was unpleasantness, in which one of the humans died rather messily, and even a brief Holy War but things have settled down. The “secularist” winning side, like the winners of the Swiss Sonderburn, have created a more centralized, if still federal state, and have pursued a path of expansion and modernization, picking the brains of the astronauts (and the _other_ astronaut that showed up a couple years later) to drive their already early industrial technology into full steamape-punk. Apes continue to crash early model heavier-than-air machines, but they continue to try: after all, they _know_ it’s possible, so they’re going to get it right eventually. Dirigible owners scoff. Rails now link the region, and have been driven through the sweaty mutant Kudzu-choked jungles of the deep south and the less heavily radioactive parts of the east coast to the sea. An Age of Discovery has come about, with the apes of the American interior sailing their rather clunky steam and early internal combustion ships to Africa and Europe, South America and Asia and even distant Australia.

Humans, globally, have had a bad time of it - with the collapse of civilization, the stronger and more wilderness-adapted apes had an advantage, and with the atomic fallout, biowarfare, inbreeding, and most people being rather bad at the hunter gatherer thing, populations plummeted for a long time. Evolution can happen fast in small, inbred populations, and when you add in an extremely high radiation background with a resulting high rate of mutations, human descendants underwent some substantial physical as well as cultural changes. Many human descendents have returned to a primordial, pre-language level, little better at mental challenges than the pre-genetic uplift hairy apes, with tools limited to rocks and pointy sticks, although for some reason they still wear the skin of animals they kill (no matter how stinky). It is true they don’t suffer from the mental fossilization adult base-line apes did, and could keep on learning - if they did not mostly die quite young. Most surviving humans in the Americas, Europe and Africa have fallen far, although not perhaps entirely beyond redemption (see below).

Of course, there are different sorts of wilderness. Apes are of tropical origin, and while smart enough to bundle up in the cold, they are generally more sensitive to cold than human beings, especially those habituated to it by inhabiting such godforsaken places as Greenland and Wisconsin. (Also, apes, with all the hair, tend to find tight-fitting clothes itchier and more uncomfortable than humans do. Only the most deliberately backwards jungle-dwelling tribes of apes go about naked, but few apes like bundling up like an Inuit with a chill.) As a result, most of Canada, Scandinavia, and other frosty zones of the globe have been left unsettled by apes aside for the occasionally adventurous hunter or wacky mystic seeking enlightenment, and some human communities large enough to maintain some cultural tradition made it through the demographic eye of the needle unmolested by apes. A mixed Canadien/Inuit/other First Nations society exists in the far north, herding reindeer and oxen, hunting seals, and distilling some incredibly foul spirits. A weird Russian/Lapp/Norse polar culture exists north from Finnmark and east along the arctic edges of Russia. After the destruction of the last human cities of the high Altiplano, apes largely deserted an area with air pressures of an almost suffocating thinness: the apes of the jungle and desert lowlands consider tales of figures on the high mountains, seen blurrily through telescopes, about the same way as humans OTL consider tales of the Yeti. There’s even some marginal survivors in Antarctica. And then there are the special cases.

Not all areas of the planet were affected to the same extent by the third world war. Fallout and bioweapons and devastation of the ozone were global, but a number of nations in the third world avoided direct attack while also having few apes: these areas might have been centers for a new rise of humanity. India, although exposed to global cooling and heavy fallout due to its northern hemisphere location, had enough people and few enough apes to host a rebirth of human civilization, if they had not been foolish enough to stumble in the later stages of WWIV into a fight with a China in full From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Three mood. Apes fleeing the utter devastation of much of the North clashed with desperate human survivors, joined by apes from those southern hemisphere nations which had embraced large-scale ape labor. The struggle was long, bloody and drawn out, and then the Moon blew up. The mess has left the ape societies in that part of the globe with a rich myth-cycle of legends about wars of gods and demons. It was also not completely effective in wiping out Asia’s vast human population: in some isolated areas, pockets of humans survived and maintained agricultural civilization, while in southern India a sizable (still mostly) human population survives under the Ape Yoke to this day.

The Tibetan highlands, an area with an environment particularly inhospitable to apes, saw a mix of indigenous Tibetans and Chinese plus Indian refugees manage the enormous climate and fallout driven population decline without a total collapse of civilization. More than a millennium later, they would outgrow the carrying capacity of the Tibetan plateau, and hungry for new lands, descend the mountains to war with the lowland apes.

The endless ape-human wars of the so called “Marcher states” between Tibet and the main centers of ape civilization has created curious hybrids, a strange love-hate relationship in societies where the ruler and the ruled may switch depending on the outcome of the latest war. In one of the larger Marcher states, a great conqueror has arisen, expanding both at the expense of other warlords and the more solidly Ape states to the east. He has taken the new American notion of humans as the “fourth ape race” to heart, and enforces equality by force. More than that, he has taken human as well as ape concubines, and even shaved off most of his fur as an act of solidarity. (Which is actually not that bad an idea in the suffocating heat of south China in the summer.) He is also doing his best to duplicate the new advances in *American ape technology: he’s an outsized ape with outsized ambition, and like another famous modernizer with an obsession for hair removal, he’s building a fleet to the most modern specifications.

Another mixed human-ape society exists on the island of Iceland, now “Avendon”. Depopulated by WWIV and the Shattered Moon, the island was resettled by humans and apes seeking to escape from the genocidal conflict between the by now greatly shrunken human and ape populations. (The island was originally named _Avalon_, but there has been linguistic drift in the intervening centuries. A few of the founders (both human and ape) were big fans of the Arthurian romances, and a somewhat mangled version of the myths have become part of their foundational stories: while modern locals are aware they’re not living in 6th century Britain, and the technology is early to mid industrial (they do some remarkable things with steam power, and have a primitive sort of crystal radio), the place retains its Renaissance Faire style and sees Arthur’s court, with its chivalric code and openess to brave knights of whatever origin, as an ideal. All kings of Avendon (constitutional monarchs, actually) take the reign name “Arthur”. The King’s traditional chief advisor is known as a “Merlin” and is almost always an Orangutan.

In the oases and river valleys of the north American desert west, an oddly Olde West society has arisen based on muddled myths which give the locals a sense of “frontier pride.” The thin local population of humans and apes have forgiven each other's sins in the interest of simple survival in a marginal land, and treat the occasional mute wild human that wanders into their lands with compassion, while apes stand shoulder to shoulder with humans to repel nomadic raiders from the east.

They’ve also reinvented the six-shooter.

In the deep Arabian wastes are the secret cities of the Jews, survivors fleeing the wreck of Israel in a terrible Anabasis. Living off deep fossil water and careful recycling, solar and wind power, and with firmly controlled reproduction, they keep the ark of Jewish civilization afloat in difficult times. Their secret cities are sometimes stumbled upon by madly adventurous or utterly lost Apes, who are given the choice of conversion and remaining for the rest of their lives and death. None have ever escaped.

The east and south Africans, battered by disease, Nuclear Winter, meteors, and Meteor Winter as they were, still got off lightly enough from WWIV that they were among the last of humanity to fall to the Apes, and it was a long struggle with a fighting retreat into the deep interior of Africa. The overrunning of much of Africa with new vegetation, including various new mutant species, gave some refuge, ironically, from Apes more accustomed to urban settings or ordered farmland. At the heart of the Great Thorn Forest is the greatest human city on Earth, Sexxtann, which having just held onto the Scientific Revolution after a long period of inescapable technological decline has clawed its way back to late 20th century modernity. It’s rulers, the Industrialists (the old legends tell that those nations which did not Industrialize were crushed and colonized) are increasingly well informed about the outside world, and are not very happy with what they see. Changes will have to be made.

Beside free humans, there are places where humans enslaved by apes have not fallen as far as those of North America. New Zealand, although largely untouched by WWI aside from that one plague that got through their quarantine, suffered a technological collapse after being thrown back onto their fairly limited non-sheep resource base with the end of international trade, and would later be conquered by Apes from Australia. The wars of conquest were long and bloody, and the humans reduced permanently to hewers of wood and carriers of water. Today’s human underclass maintains spoken if not written language, and have not suffered too badly from genetic damage, although the ruling apes are quite sure that they are a fundamentally inferior and less intelligent species: reports of more advanced humans threaten to fundamentally undermine their social structures.

Human slavery is also used on a large scale in the south Indian ape oligarchies, where macabre efforts to breed humans into more “useful” types have been ongoing for the last millennium in spite of the difficulties created by the slow human reproductive cycle.

These facts on the ground have largely destroyed the humans = brute beasts position among the Appalachian Apes (although of course there are still stubborn hold outs), but ironically have done much to harm the Human Rights movement. If humans once ruled the world, might they not try to reestablish their rule again? Humans may be weak, but they’re vicious, fast-breeding, really good at throwing stuff, [1] and they run good.

Furthermore, they can _learn_. Given time and patience, a sizable proportion of North American “wild humans” can be taught at least rudimentary speech, which they pass onto their children - which often improve on it. Some Apes are enthusiastic about a program to breed together the more verbal humans to “redeem” their species - far more think it’s a terrible idea. It’s already illegal to use humans for medical experimentation - what will they get next, the vote?

Mutants are a whole other kettle of malformed fish. While in most cases humans seeking refuge from apes in highly radioactive areas died off faster than they could produce offspring functional enough to reach breeding age themselves, some mutations _did_ confer some advantages, some did make the next generation a bit more resistant to radiation, and in the end populations did manage to rebound. Civilization and full sapience didn’t always survive: the mutants of southern California are a feral bunch, to be avoided as much as possible. However, mutant communities did manage to maintain civilization of sorts in deep places beneath the ruins of the Bowash corridor, in the rank, tangled regrown forests of central Europe, the wreckage of South America’s proudest cities, the irradiated and then dessicated interior south of China, and in the vast spaces of Siberia (where some scraps of advanced biotechnology were maintained long enough to give the genetic wheel of chance some extra spins).Some mutants also emerged in north India, but they eventually moved to Tibet, where in time a population of telepathic mutants became the much feared Hidden Movers, a secret society acting to further the interests of human Tibetans in general and Tibetan mutants more specifically.

Most notable, aside from the telepathic mutants of NE America and their bomb fetish, are the Central European and South Chinese Mutants. The concealed cities of the Europeans are mostly within former Germany. Proud of their maintenance, and in recent centuries, some advances on pre-cataclysm technology, they are known to their secret foreign contacts, mutant or ape, as the Makers. (Most notable has been the development of electronic mind control, something still experimental at the time of WWIV: they use it to enslave apes captured on the borders of the central European Forbidden Zone, usually captured by previously captured apes for plausible deniability if anyape sees. Horrendous death rates, especially of babies and children, from radiation for a very long time has kept their population low, although it has been growing in recent centuries as things became more livable. Cybernetics frequently compensate for non-functional body parts and organs or large scale removal of said parts due to cancerous growths.

The Chinese mutants, not particularly remarkable in themselves, are ruled by giant telepathic human brains living in elaborate life support tanks. A product of the latest in Chinese biotech experiments, they consider themselves the Inheritors of human civilization, a new superior species carrying on from the old. Their laboratory, located in a secure facility deep underground, survived WWIV and they then telepathically summoned survivors to dig them out. They have been working on developing ways to destroy the Apes for millennia, hampered by the tendency of their servants to die off no matter how often they telepathically commanded them to hump, and by the fact that the Chinese scientists trying to create biological supercomputers out of human brains really didn’t know what they were doing. (They’re smart, but not _that_ smart.)

The Makers and Inheritors only recently discovered each others existence recently, with a mutual reaction of disgust and contempt. Quite a bit of their resources have been re-tasked to destroy the other, hampered by their difficulty in sending technological assets nearly half way around the planet without the Apes noticing something funny. This has, by the way, largely distracted them from the sudden surge in technological development happening in North America.

Both are vaguely aware of the Siberians, and in that case their reaction is more one of fear. The Siberian mutants are the largest and most powerful mutant group by far, and their attitude towards the other mutants is largely one of contemptuous indifference. Like the Inheritors, they consider themselves a new species and are indeed proudly post-human. (Admittedly, once you remove the usual mechanical bits they’re mostly weak-eyed albinos with bad teeth and either too many or too few fingers, but they’re quite radiation resistant!) Telepaths are rare: that particular breed of mutant was largely wiped out in earlier, more radioactive times, by a leadership really not willing to let just anyone read their minds. They’ve recently managed to redevelop advanced genetic engineering techniques, and are eager to improve themselves further through techniques other than cybernetics (the Makers enhance themselves cybernetically out of necessity: the Siberians do so out of ideology.). Whether they will have to make war on the apes (which they hold in arrogant contempt [2]) eventually is uncertain: if they do succeed in duplicating the star drive, they plan to leave this damaged planet for the stars, and a starship moving close enough to the speed of light is almost as effective for disinfecting planets as an Alpha-Omega bomb.

Most Apes are quite ignorant of the uplifted intelligent dolphins, whose complex philosophical and mathematical speculations fill the seas with thin piping cries. As yet the Apes do not suspect they are not the smartest species on the planet, although this may change if the dolphins succeed in their current effort to evolve thumbs. Among sea-going apes there are tales of mysterious scaleless fish rescuing drowning sailors, but such tales are largely poo-poo’d by land dwellers. (The fact of the matter is that Dolphins are serious dicks, and they’ve drowned rather more Apes than they’ve saved - it’s just that those ones don’t live to tell their stories. And in most cases it’s just for kicks.) Dolphin specimens are virtually unknown, after all: they’re smart enough to avoid nets and stay out of harpoon range of boats.To most apes they are a vague legend, like sea serpents or the giant amphibious human.

Ape societies still vary widely, often due to (usually unacknowledged) cultural inheritances from the human societies that they replaced. Almost all ape languages are descended from the speech of their former human masters, if often badly mutated by two thousand years of time or mixing together the languages of two or more adjacent human societies. The apes of South India have a caste system which cuts across species boundaries (although, as usual, Orangutans are overrepresented in the religious and administrative classes), if lacking the category of “untouchables” (instead, there are human slaves, some debased in ways hard to imagine.) The Apes of Nowe Ceasaria, in eastern Europe, have inherited myths of a great and evil empire of the red flag to the east - which now seem fulfilled with the rise of the Union of Socialist Ape Republics to the east, where Gorillas of the more pacifist sort allied with Chimpanzees against their more aggressive cousins and the scheming Orangutans to create a weird new superstructure atop the various scraps of Soviet ideology that survived the winnowing of time.

Another religion to survive the mass dieoff of its worshippers was Islam, the Koran existing in far too many copies and formats to be destroyed entirely during the Bad Years. Of course, Ape interpretations are a wee bit different from those of human beings - for one thing, they believe humans covered up the fact that the message was for all higher primates and stole it for themselves, for which they were struck low in WWIV and the ape revolt (the middle Eastern Apes acknowledge that humans were once intelligent and powerful, but deny that apes were beasts which only became intelligent under human rule.The Muslim Apes are also fine with pictorial representation of Apes, claiming that the old ban under human rule was to cover up the fact Muhammed and several other important religious figures were Apes. Whether he was a Chimpanzee or an Orangutan is one of the issues dividing the two major branches of Ape Islam.)

Of course, there are societies which diverge from any former human ones.

In the former territories of Brazil Bonobos largely form the powerful “Courtesan” or Cortesa class, which, like Japanese Geisha, are far more than sex workers, acting as highly educated and artistic entertainers, muses, mediators, ambassadors, go-betweens and general diffusers of tension and conflict, using charm, seduction, misdirection, and a great many polite lies to rub the rough corners off the machinery of government and, nowadays, the rise of advanced Ape capitalism. There are of course those who object to their influence on Ape society, and outside of the Brazil area Bonobo immigrants often meet with considerable suspicion and hostility.

The great African empire of Heart-of-the-World is an authoritarian merit bureaucracy like the Chinese empire, but with no autocrat at its center, and is as close as one gets to a state of “laws, not Apes.” The Primordialist Apes think leaving the jungle was a bad idea, and unlike humans with similar thoughts OTL, they’ve actually put their money where their mouth is. The True Ape Society has a clearer notion of Ape’s human heritage than any other state in the *Americas, and want nothing to do with it, trying to create a new society almost entirely from scratch, with a language structurally alien to the almost-Spanish of their neighbors, a new philosophy, a new religion, and while their technology is early 19th century at best (although struggling to catch up with the north Americans) they have developed a formidable appreciation of the methods of propaganda and memetics, and are attempting to create written texts that will act as mental “infections”, implanting their ideas into the heads of other Apes while they think they made a “rational decision” and “worked it out for themselves” with just a little help. And if minds are reformed, so will the world.

Then there are the sea apes. Most Apes stay away from large bodies of water, being poor swimmers, but some coastal Ape societies with few other options have turned to the sea for a living, fishing and trading. (It’s not like most human sailors in medieval times could swim, either). Traditionally even the boldest traders have hugged the coasts, with no deep sea crossing, which has helped keep the various Ape societies fairly isolated from each other. Only now with steamships, the compass, and high quality clockwork is deep-sea travel becoming widespread, first by the North *Americans, later by Apes from former Brazil, western Europe, India and the south of China.

However, they have been anticipated by humans in making their home upon the briny deep in a more permanent way. Many humans fled to the sea in search of safety after WWIV; most sunk or eventually were forced to come ashore due to running out of food or fuel (although some atomic-powered ships remained at sea for years), but a sort of evolutionary process occurred over time. Rafts don’t need fuel, and one can follow currents and winds to steer away from dangerous shores. If the raft is large enough, you can even grow things on it: if you have enough plastic sheeting, you can gather rather a lot of water through evaporation. If it’s made of the right material, it can last for many years. So humans living almost entirely on the sea, touching land only when strictly necessary and then preferably on uninhabited small islands, for some centuries managed to survive with almost no contact with the landbound Apes. Unfortunately for them, apes finally managed to develop coastal trade routes, and then piracy, and then things went non-linear.

Oddly enough, humans still live most their lives on boats in the Indian Ocean. The trouble is that they have to share bunk space with Apes, apes of various breeds which did not find the often rigid and conservative ape societies of the land suitable, and adopted human techniques and combined it with piratical habits to create a new lifestyle. The Sea Apes are divided into various factions, some more piratical, others more trade-oriented, some living almost entirely off the products of the sea and the scattered islands controlled by the Sea Ape not-an-empire. The factions sometime clash, but war is formalized and ritualized so to avoid sinking ships and killing too many skilled soon-to-be-impressed Apes and Humans. The islands are largely neutral territory and a common possession, and all join in their contempt of land-dwellers. Humans vary in status: they don’t _lead_ any of the factions, but at least there are factions where they aren’t actually slaves. Their Advanced Swimming Ability gives them some status, and a lot of work cleaning off barnacles and so on while at sea. Technology is an odd schizo mix, and some of the ships, after a millennium plus of cut and try engineering, are as large as any wooden deep sea ship ever built by human beings. They are one of the few Ape groups which have some clue about dolphins, which they distrust.

The world is changing at an increasing rate, after a long period of incremental progress. The apes of north America are building alliances and bridges with the Apes of *Brazil, western *Europe and *Africa, and even distant *Indonesia. There is talk of something like an Ape League of Nations or UN (although the two surviving, now elderly human astronauts warn that such things generally turn out to be a disappointment.) A mighty, bald Gorilla wonders how far his reach exceeds his grasp. A horde of sociopathic Humanzees begins a long-planned march to the north and east across the dry steppes. A formerly mute human says his first word while a Chimpanzee teacher beams, and an Orangutan scowls. Mysterious aliens (or perhaps some very far-diverged branch of ape or human kind) hide out in Antarctica. A Siberian scientist and hidden telepath begins, almost inadvertently, an ethical revolution.

The next spaceship to arrive will come from the future.

[1] Human beings have an evolved skill with accurately thrown projectile weapons unmatched by any other species of ape, and the genetic engineers didn’t put much effort into fixing that when upgrading apes. Apes do fine with guns and even bows and arrows, but like a Hobbit, a human with a rock and a sling, or even just a rock, is a dangerous thing at a surprising distance.

[2] They might not underestimate Apes as badly as they do if they had more telepaths, just saying. (The isolation doesn’t help).