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All Tomorrows PDF
All Tomorrows PDF
Nemo Ramjet
To Mars
After millennia of earthbound foreplay, Mankind’s achievements on a
noteworthy level began with its political unification and the gradual
colonization of Mars. While the technology to colonize this world had existed
for some time, political bickering, shifting agendas, and the sheer inertia of
comfortable, terrestrial usurping had made this step seem more distant than it
actually was.
Only when the risks clearly began to present themselves, only when Earth’s
environment began to buckle under the strain of twelve billion industrialized
souls, did Mankind finally take up the momentous task.
All through the decades, traveling to, and later settling on Mars had
been envisioned as quick, relatively easy affairs; complicated but feasible and
manageable in short term. As the push finally came to a shove it was realized
that this was not the case.
When everything was ready, people came from their crowded world.
They came in one-way ships; fusion rockets and atmospheric gliders, packed to
the brim with colonists, sleeping in dreams of a new beginning.
The first steps on Mars were taken not by astronauts, but by barefoot children
on synthetic grass.
1
A lander ferries the first people to the pre-terraformed Eden of Mars.
2
The Martian Americans
For several hundred years Mars remained as a backwater; prospering
but still dim compared to the splendour of Earth which was glowing brighter
than ever before. Thanks to the relocation of environmentally demanding
industries to Mars, Earth could usurp everything, without having to damage its
tired biosphere. This was the Terrestrial Heyday; the climax of economic,
cultural and social development on old Earth.
This, however, was not to last. Like the gradual separation of America from her
Colonial mother, the governments of Mars adopted a new, Martian identity.
They became the Martian Americans.
The difference between Earth and the Mars was not only political. A few
generations in the lighter gravity gave the new Americans a spindly, lithe
frame that would look surreal in their old home. This, combined with a certain
amount of genetic engineering, took the Martians’ separation to a new level.
For a while the silent schism between the two planets was mutually accepted,
and the balance of power hung in an edgy equilibrium. But the Terra-Martian
standoff did not, could not, last forever. With limitless resources and an
energetic population, Mars was bound to take the lead.
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4
Civil War
The Martian turnover was expected to occur in two ways; either through
long-term economic gains or by a much shorter but painful armed conflict. For
almost two hundred years, the former method seemed to take effect, but this
gradual stretch eventually did break in a most destructive way.
Almost since its establishment, Martian culture was suffused with an explicit
theme of rebellion against Earth. Songs, motion pictures, and daily
publications repeated these notions again and again until they became
internalized. Earth was the old, ossified home that held humanity back, while
Mars was new; dynamic, active and inventive. Mars was the future.
For Earth, it was a death sentence. Without the resources and industries of
Mars, the Terrestrial Heyday would quickly devolve into a pale shadow of its
former glory. Since a trade of essential goods continued, nobody would starve.
But for every citizen of Earth, the Martian boycott meant the loss of up to
three fourths of their yearly income.
Most of the time the combatants never saw each other. Most of the
time the combatants were not there at all. War became a duel between
5
complicated, autonomous machines programmed to maximize damage to the
other side while trying to last a little longer.
Barely escaping extinction, the peoples of Earth and Mars made peace
and re-forged a united solar system. It had cost them more than eight billion
souls.
6
Star People
The survivors agreed that massive changes were necessary to ensure
that such a war never occurred again. These reforms were so comprehensive
that they entailed not political nor economic but biological changes as well.
One of the greatest differences between the people of the two planets was
that over time they had almost become different species. It was believed that
the solar system could never completely unify until this discrepancy was
overcome.
The answer was a new human subspecies, equally and better adapted
not only to Earth and Mars, but to the conditions of most newly terraformed
environments as well. Furthermore, these beings were envisioned with larger
brains and heightened talents, making them greater than the sum of their
predecessors.
In only a few generations, the new race began to prove its worth.
Organized as a single state and aided by the technological developments of the
war, they rapidly terraformed and colonized Venus, the Asteroids and the
moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Soon however, even the domain of Sol grew too small. The new people who
inherited it wanted to go further, to new worlds under distant stars.
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8
Colonization and the
Mechanical Oedipi
Even for the Star People, interplanetary travel was a momentous task.
Early minds had boggled over the problem and fantasies such as faster than
light travel and hyperspace emerged as the only “solutions”.
Simply put, it was impossible to take a large number of people with enough
supplies to even the closest star to make colonization feasible. The existing
technologies could only slug along at mere percentages of light speed, making
the journey an epoch-spanning affair. Enormous “generation ships” were
conceived and even built, but these succumbed to technical difficulties or on-
board anarchy after a few cycles.
The solution was to first go there, and make the colonists later. To this
end, fast and small automated ships were sent forth to the stars. On board
were semi-sentient machines programmed to replicate and terraform the
destination, and “construct” its inhabitants from the genetic materials stored
on board.
Even then, however, the remaining half was enough to fill Humanity’s
own spiral arm of the galaxy.
9
The Summer of Man
Right after Mankind’s colonization of the galaxy came its first true golden
age. Reared by machine prophets, the survivors of the Oedipal plagues built
civilizations that equalled and even surpassed their Solar forbears.
This diffusion across the heavens did not mean a loss of unity. Across the skies,
steady flows of electromagnetic communication linked Mankind’s worlds with
such efficiency that there was no colony that did not know about the goings on
of her distant siblings. The free-flow of information meant, among other
things; a vastly accelerated pace of technological growth. What couldn’t be
figured out in one world was helped out by another, and any new
developments were quickly made known to all in a realm that spanned
centuries of light.
During all this development a curious phenomenon was observed. While alien
life was abundant in the stars, no one had encountered any signs of true
intelligence. Some attributed this to an overall rarity, while others went as far
as divine influence; resurrecting religion.
10
Two Star People watch a holographic movie as they lounge under the remnants of
their colonized world’s indigenous flora. For them, it is a life of continual bliss.
11
An Early Warning
During those times a small discovery of immense implications warned
humanity that it might not be alone.
While every other large land animal on that colony world had three
limbs, a copper based skeletal system and hydrostatically operated muscles;
Panderavis was a typical terrestrial vertebrate with calcium-rich bones and
four extremities. Finding it there was as unlikely as finding an alien creature in
Earth’s own strata. For some, it was irrefutable proof of divine creation. The
religious resurgence, fuelled at first by mankind’s apparent loneliness in the
heavens, became even more intensified.
Silently, humanity once again began to build and stockpile weapons, this
time of the interplanetary potency. There were terrible devices, capable of
nova-ing stars and wrecking entire solar systems. Sadly, even these
preparations would prove to be ineffectual in time.
12
A reconstruction of Panderavis shows the creature’s rake like claws, with which it
dug furrows in the soil to find its food. Opportunistic local animals walk alongside
Panderavis, looking for morsels left over from its feasting
13
Qu
The first contact was bound to happen. The galaxy, let alone the
Universe, was simply too big for just a singular species to develop intelligence
in. Any delay in contact only meant a heightening of the eventual culture
shock. In humanity’s case, this “culture shock” meant the complete extinction
of mankind as it had come to be known.
Almost a billion years old, the alien species known as Qu were galactic
nomads, traveling from one spiral arm to another in epoch-spanning
migrations. During their travels they constantly improved and changed
themselves until they became masters of genetic and nanotechnological
manipulation. With this ability to control the material world, they assumed a
religious, self-imposed mission to “remake the universe as they saw fit.”
Powerful as gods, Qu saw themselves as the divine harbingers of the future.
To them humanity, with all of its relative glories, was nothing more than a
transmutable subject. Within less than a thousand years, every human world
was destroyed, depopulated or even worse; changed. Despite the fervent
rearmament, the colonies could achieve nothing against its billion-year-old
foes, save for a few flashes of ephemeral resistance.
Humanity, once the ruler of the stars, was now extinct. Humans,
however, were not.
14
Qu triumphant in the fall of Man. To his left floats a nanotechnological drone, to
the right, a genetically modified tracing creature.
15
Man Extinguished
The worlds of humanity, gardens of terraformed paradise, seemed
strangely empty to the Qu. Often there were no raw materials available other
than people, their cities and a few basic niches of ecology, populated by
genetically modified animals and plants from Earth. This was because humans
had erased the original alien ecologies in the first place.
Offended by another race trying to remake the universe, the Qu set forth to
punish these “infidels” by using them as the building materials of their vision.
While this led to a complete extinguishment of human sentience, it also saved
the species by preserving its genetic heritage in a myriad of strange new
forms.
One day, they departed as they had come. For theirs was a never-ending quest
and they would not, could not stop until they had swept through the entire
cosmos. Behind them the Qu left a thousand worlds, each filled with bizarre
creatures and ecologies that had once been men. Most of them perished right
after their caretakers left, others lasted a little longer to succumb to long-term
instabilities. On a precious few words, descendants of people actually
managed to survive.
In them lay the fate of the species, now divided and differentiated
beyond recognition.
16
A mile-high Qu pyramid towers over the silent world that once housed four billion
souls. Such structures are the hallmark of Qu, and they can be seen on every
habitable world they passed through.
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Worms
Their world lay under a scorching sun, its intensity made monstrous
through the interventions of the bygone Qu. The surface lay littered with husks
of dead cities, baking endlessly like shattered statues in a derelict oven.
The lives of these ersatz people did not extend beyond digging aimlessly. If
they encountered food, they devoured it. If they encountered others of their
kind, they sometimes devoured them too. But mostly they mated and
multiplied, and managed to preserve a single shred of their humanity in their
genes. In time, it would do them good.
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Two Worm parents with their young.
19
Titans
On the endless savannah of a long-extinguished colonial outpost,
enormous beasts roamed supreme. More than forty meters long by terrestrial
measurements, these behemoths were actually the transmuted offspring of
the Star People.
Several features betrayed their human ancestry. They still retained stubby
thumbs on their elephantine front feet, now useless for any sort of precise
manipulation except for uprooting trees. They compensated this loss by
developing their lower lip into a muscular, trunk like organ that echoed the
elephants of Earth’s past.
As bestial as they seemed, the Titans were among the smartest of the
reduced sub-men that remained in the galaxy. Their hulking stance allowed for
a developed brain and gradually sentience re-emerged. With their lip-trunks
they fashioned ornate wood carvings, erected hangar-like dwellings and even
began a form of primitive agriculture. With settled life came the inevitable
flood of language and literature; myths and legends of the bygone, half-
remembered past were told in booming voices across the vast plains.
It was easy to see that, within a few hundred thousand years, Humanity could
start again with these titanic primitives. Sadly, as a catastrophic ice-age took
over the Titans’ homeworld the gentle giants disappeared, never to return.
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Hunters and Prey
Devolved predators were common among humanity’s feral worlds. Most
of the time they resembled the vampires, werewolves and goblins of bygone
lore; hunting equally sub-human prey with a combination of derived
weaponry. Some had enormous heads with large, killing teeth. Others tore
their victims apart with talon-like feet. But the most common kinds bore
modified fingers and thumbs, bristling with razor-sharp claws.
The most efficient of these predators lived on one of mankind’s first off-world
colonies. In addition to paw-like hands with switchblade thumbs they also had
gaping, tooth studded jaws on disproportionate heads with large, sensitive
ears. All of these served to make them the dominant predators on their home
planet.
They ran the prairies, stalked the forests and ranged through the
mountains in pursuit of different people; herbivorous saltators with bird-like
legs. While their prey lapsed into complete animosity, the hunters managed to
keep the spark of intelligence alive in their evolutionary honing.
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Mantelopes
Not all devolved people lapsed into complete bestiality. Some held on to
their minds, while losing all of their physiological advantages to the genetic
meddling of the Qu.
A singular species was a prime exemplar. They had been bred as singers and
memory-retainers, acting much like living recorders during the reign of Qu.
When their masters left they barely survived, reverting into a quadrupedal
stance and occupying a niche as grazing herd animals. This change was so
abrupt that the newly evolved Mantelopes endured only due to the forgiving
sterility of their artificial biosphere.
The Mantelopes, equipped with full (if slightly numbed) Human minds
and completely disabled animal bodies, lived agonizing lives. They could see
and understand the world around them, but due to their bodies they could do
nothing to change it. For centuries, mournful herds roamed the plains, singing
songs of desperation and loss. Entire religions and oral traditions were woven
around this crippling racial disability, as dramatic and detailed as any on
bygone Earth.
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Swimmers
Perhaps because their life cycle involved an aquatic larval stage, the Qu
had transmuted a large number of their human subjects into a bewildering
array of aquatic creatures. Taken care of by specially-bred attendants, these
post-human water babies came in every shape and size imaginable. There
were limbless, ribbon like varieties of eel-people, huge, whale like behemoths,
decorative people who swam by squirting water out of their hypertrophied
mouths and horrifying multitudes of brainless wallowers that served as food
stock.
All of them were perfectly domesticated. All of them went extinct when their
masters left.
All save a few lightly mutated, generalized forms. These swimmers still
resembled their human ancestors to a large degree; they had no artificial gills,
their hands were still visible through their front flippers, their feet were
splayed affairs that functioned like a pair of tail flukes. Recognizably human
eyes peeked through their blubbery eyelids and they spoke to each other,
though not in words and never in sentient understanding.
For millennia they swam the oceans of their ecologically stunted world,
feeding on diversifying kinds of fish and crustaceans; survivors of the food
stock originally imported from Earth. With the intervention of the Qu gone,
natural selection resumed. The swimmers became more streamlined to better
catch their fast prey. The prey responded by getting even faster, or evolving
defensive countermeasures such as armour, spikes or poison.
Their evolution back on track, the swimmers drifted further and further
away from their sentient ancestry. They would wait for a long time indeed to
taste that blessing again.
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28
Lizard Herders
These were the lucky ones. Instead of unrecognizably distorting them as
they had done to most of their subjects, the Qu had merely erased their
sentience and stunted the development of their brains.
Distantly resembling their ancient forebears on Earth, the primitives led feral
lives for an unnaturally long time. They never regained sentience after the Qu
left, despite having every incentive to do so. This was partially due to the total
absence of predators on their garden world, resulting in no advantage for
intelligence. Furthermore, the Qu had made some small but integral changes
to their brains, tweaking with the structure of cerebellum so that certain
features associated with heuristic learning could never emerge again. Once
again, the reasons for these baffling changes remained known only to the Qu.
Soon the balance of this mutualism began to tip in the reptiles’ favour. The
tropical climate of the planet gave them an inherent advantage, and they
underwent a spectacular radiation of different species. They encountered no
competition from the only large mammals on the planet; the brain-neutered
descendants of the starfarers. Faced with a reptilian turnover, the only
adaptation the sub-men could muster was to slip quietly into bestial oblivion.
29
A lizard herder scans the world with blank eyes as his stock grow stronger and
smarter. The future does not seem to belong to him.
30
Temptor
In the Temptors’ case, the remodelling was done with an almost artistic
enthusiasm. How they managed to survive in their bizarre form was not clear;
their ancestors were used as sessile decoration and through some miracle of
adaptation they had endured.
It was a terribly efficient hegemony that would certainly give rise to civilization
in a matter of centuries had fate not intervened. As a stray comet obliterated
the Temptors’ mound forests, one of Humanity’s best chances for re-
emergence was cruelly swept away.
31
A male and female Temptor illustrate the sexual discrepancy that is characteristic
to their species. Note the female’s elongated, pit-like vagina. When mating, the
males descend into it like subway commuters.
32
Bone Crusher
Through the deliberate modifications of Qu and the blind moulding of
evolution, the heavens came to be populated with creatures that would put
the myths of their ancestors to shame.
Their ancestors were pint-sized pets of Qu that were bred for the dazzling
colours of their tooth-derived beaks. When their masters left, most of these
pampered creatures died, with no one or nothing left to take care of them.
There were even secondarily sentient forms, in the shape of the ogre-like bone
crushers. To an observer of today they would indeed be the stuff of
nightmares; three meters tall and hairy, sporting vicious thumb claws and
enormous beaks that suited their scavenging diet.
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Colonials
Their world had given the toughest resistance against the Qu onslaught.
So tough, in fact, that they had turned back two successive waves of the
invaders, only to succumb to the third.
The Qu, with their twisted sense of justice, wanted to make them pay. Even
extinction would be too light a punishment for resisting the star gods. The
humans of the rogue world needed a sentence that would remind them of
their humiliation for generations to come.
For forty million years they suffered; generation after generation were born
into the most miserable of lives while absorbing the pain of all that they were
going through.
When the Qu left, they hoped for a quick extinction. But their lowliness
had also made them efficient survivors. Unchecked by the Qu, the colonials
spread across the planet in quilt-like fields of human flesh. After an eternity of
tortured lives, the human fields tasted something that could almost be
described as hope.
35
A section from a Colonial field shows the misery that compromises their entire lives.
Note that these disorganized creatures can reproduce through both asexual and
more familiar methods.
36
Flyers
They were not uncommon at all in the domain of Qu. At least a dozen
worlds sported human-derived flying species of one kind or another. Most
resembled the bats or the pterosaurs of the bygone past, dancing through the
aether like angels (or demons, depending on the point of view). There were a
few bizarre kinds who relied on swollen gas glands for floatation as well.
Sadly, most of these creatures were already too specialized to be anything but
flyers. They had forsaken their humanity for the conquest of the sky; they had
little potential for further radiation beyond their limited roles.
Not that the flyers were going to reclaim their sentience right away.
Instead, they literally exploded into the skies, filling the heavens with anything
from bomber-sized sailors to impossibly fast predators that raced with sound.
Their world was pristine and there were plenty of niches to play in. Intelligence
could wait a little more.
37
An ancestral Flyer in her native element. Although ungainly, these creatures have
an artificial metabolic advantage that gives them tremendous evolutionary
potential.
38
Hand Flappers
Some flying posthumans re-approached sentience in an entirely different
way. Without the augmented metabolisms or the gravitational advantages of
their siblings on distant planets, they had no choice but to give up their power
of flight in order to develop further.
The Hand Flappers were one such species. Their wings, once used for
butterfly-like flutters in the unearthly gardens of Qu, had shrunken and
reverted back into their manual condition. Their legs were likewise re-adapted,
but they bore a splayed awkwardness from their perching ancestry.
Only a singular, and an almost sadistically simple flaw held them back
from developing civilization. In the course of their secondary atrophy, the
wings of the Hand Flappers had become useless as hands as well. Their flag like
appendages were very useful in signalling and mating dances, but they
couldn’t hurl missiles, construct shelter or even manufacture basic stone tools.
All that they could do with their useless hands was to display each other’s
sexual availability, so the Hand Flappers did just that; flashing and dancing
their way to oblivion.
39
A Hand Flapper on the edge of his mating territory. During their almost comical
exaggeration of sexual display, his kind has begun to lose their edge at adaptation.
Theirs will be a boisterous, ecstatic but ultimately ephemeral existence.
40
Blind Folk
When the Qu came they dug in, and dug in deep. Inside several
continent-sized shelters under their besieged world, they waited for the
invaders to pass them by. It was a futile gamble. The Qu located the shelter-
caves and remade their inhabitants without effort.
People were present here as well, albeit in unfamiliar forms. They were
more often heard than seen, as they tried to find their way in the dark with
banshee-like screams. These albino troglodytes lived in a realm where sound
and touch, not sight, was the gateway of perception. They had developed long,
tactile fingers, enormous whiskers and mobile ears to live in the dark. Where
their eyes should have been, there was nothing but a patch of haunting,
flawlessly smooth skin. Their perfect adaptation to the world of darkness had
erased the most basic feature of human recognition.
As adapted as they were, they were doomed. Before the Blind Folk could
develop any kind of intelligence to crawl out of their geographical graves, the
glacial constriction of their World’s continental plates snuffed out the shelters
one by one.
41
A startled Blind father with his year-old daughter. Although he knows to sit still in
order to confuse sonar-equipped predators, the youngster screams and soils herself
in terror. Their attenuated fingers are hallmarks of a lifetime spent in darkness.
42
Lopsiders
The Qu were grotesquely creative in their redesign of the human worlds.
One group of misfortunate souls they transported to a planet with thirty-six
times the amount of “normal” gravity, and made them over for life in this
bizarrely inhospitable realm.
43
A Lopsider feeds some indigenous pets native to his high-gravity world. The
domestication of native fauna is the Lopsiders’ first step on the long way towards
civilization.
44
Striders
While the Lopsiders were redesigned to live under extreme gravity,
another species had been adapted for life under the exact opposite conditions;
on a Jovian moon with one fifth of Earth’s gravity.
It was a world of wonders, where even the grass grew almost ten meters tall
and the trees were beyond belief, towering to sizes attained only by the
skyscrapers of antiquity. In these surreal forests lived equally spectacular
fauna; the descendants of pets, pests, and livestock of humans, who in turn
had been reduced to animosity as well.
One could see them in the league-tall forests, almost dancing among the
trees as they reared higher and higher to browse. Their arms, legs, and necks
had been stretched impossibly thin, great flaps of skin blossomed throughout
their bodies to dispense waste heat. Sometimes they would even change their
colour in order to reflect light and keep cool. Overheating was a great problem
for their grotesquely tall, thin bodies.
About two million years after the Qu left their towering works of human art, a
lineage of fearsome predators evolved from the terrestrial poultry that had
gone feral on the planet. Resembling attenuated versions of their dinosaur
ancestors, the predators swept through the garden world like wildfires,
extinguishing any species too fragile to escape, or resist. The peaceful, delicate
striders were among the first to go.
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46
Parasites
Humanity had diverged into two separate lineages on their world. On
one hand there were several races of almost Australopithecine cripples,
degraded by the Qu for managing to turn back their initial wave of invasion.
Yet simple atavism was too light a punishment for them. Their twisted
relatives, the parasites, made up the second part of their sentence.
There were actually several kinds of parasitic ex-people, ranging from tortoise-
sized ambulatory vampires to the more common fist-sized variety that lived
attached to their hosts. There was even a tiny, endoparasitic kind that infested
the wombs of their female victims like ghastly, living abortions.
All of these evolutionary tortures were played out under the careful
scrutiny of the Qu for forty million years. The punishment was so baroque, so
elaborate that most of the artificial parasite-host relationships died out when
the Qu left. Some sub-men learnt to cleanse their tick-like relatives by
drowning, burning or even eating them. Others, like the vaginal parasites, died
out as their aggressive method of parasitism effectively sterilized their hosts.
Yet one or two varieties did manage to cling on to their hosts with abdominal
suckers, muscular, gripping limbs and sterile, pain-soothing saliva. But their
success did not lie entirely in the strength of their parasitical advantages. They
also learnt to regulate their dumb hosts, not killing them by over-infestation
and thus ensuring their own long-term survival as well.
47
A parasitic person, shown real size. Although their fate seems inhumane in every
aspect to an observer of today, their very survival shows that such subjective values
are ineffectual in matters of long-term survival.
48
Finger Fishers
Their ancestors were trapped on an archipelago world; a planet
sprinkled with many small continents and countless islands over
interconnected networks of calm, swallow seas. Like a magnified Aegean, this
place was a terrestrial paradise in many respects. Except that after the Qu, no
minds were left to enjoy it.
As prolific as they were, the Fishers were still no better than animals.
Their “humanity” would come only after another spasm of outlandish
adaptations.
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50
Hedonists
Even the blissful existence of the Finger Fishers would have seemed
bothersome to the Hedonists; for their kind was not evolved, but designed for
a life of pleasure. The Qu had kept them as pampered pets; set loose in a
tropical island-world of succulent fruits, bountiful trees and calm, lapping lakes
full of sweet, bacterial manna. Furthermore, the Hedonists were left as the
only animal life on this place. They had no choice but to enjoy it to the fullest.
In normal conditions, any given species would quickly crowd out such a
utopian environment. But normal conditions had never been the point of the
Qu redesign. They had altered their subjects so that they could conceive only
after mating an enormous number of potential suitors, continually over a
period of decades. While this took care of the population problem, it also
made the species less adaptable. Without any point in sexual competition,
natural selection would progress only at a glacial pace. Fortunately, their
stable microcosm remained free of environmental catastrophes even after the
Qu left.
All these changes had also made the Hedonists’ day. Their lives were
juxtaposed routines of browsing, sleeping and mind-blowing sex; troubled
neither by the concerns of disease or pregnancy. Aloof and carefree, they
enjoyed the most pleasurable times of all mankinds, albeit with the intellectual
capabilities of three-year-olds.
It didn’t really matter, though. Who needed to think when having such a nice
time, after all?
51
The favourites of the Qu. A female Hedonist lies alone on a beach, contemplating
absolutely nothing. Without any pressure from the world, their days make
themselves as they go along.
52
Insectophagi
Nondescript, quaint human species abounded in the post-Qu galaxy.
Hundreds of them lived out simple, unnoticed lives, never developing to
become sentient, never learning their true heritage as star-born human
beings. Most of them went extinct, not to be missed or even remembered.
Those that lingered on managed to survive in shady, quiet niches, never again
making any impact on the celestial scheme of things.
One such species was the Insectophagi. They had quietly adapted themselves
for a diet of colonial insects and small animals; they had faces covered with
leathery plates, claw-like hands to dig out prey and worm-like tongues to
scoop them up.
All in all, they weren’t special in any particular way. But a combination of
galactic invasions, coincidence and pure luck would later make them the
longest-enduring of all ur-starmen.
The meek would inherit the cosmos, though not just yet. For now, the
Insectophagi were concerned only with the location of insect colonies, and the
onset of the mating season.
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Spacers
It must be remembered that the Star People did not succumb entirely to
the Qu invasions. While their worlds fell away one by one, some Star People
took refuge in the void of space. One after another, entire communities
scrambled into generation ships and cast themselves off into the darkness,
hoping to go unnoticed by the beings that had overrun their galaxy. Desperate
times made for desperate measures. As the Star Men had observed during
their initial colonization of the galaxy, life in generation ships inevitably lead to
mass insanity and anarchy. This time however, humans had to adapt
themselves - or face extinction.
Entire asteroid fields were confiscated and hollowed out to make space-ships
of unseen size. These hollow shells cradled bubbles of precious air and water,
but no artificial gravity of any kind. It was discovered that a purely ethereal
existence would ease the stress of interstellar exile, provided that its
inhabitants were adapted for life inside such an environment.
It was an endless diaspora. Even after the Qu left, they would find themselves
too divergent to have anything to do with their ancestral lifestyles. The
survivors of the initial hurdle would never set foot on a planet again.
They were also painfully rare; their entire population in the Milky Way
Galaxy did not exceed a few dozen arks and a hundred billion souls.
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Forty million years from today, Spacers like this individual are the only truly sentient
human beings that survive. They are so comfortable in their weightless refuges that
the fates of their bestial cousins elsewhere do not concern them.
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Ruin Haunters
A particular human species, singled out by its lucky access to the
heritage of its stellar ancestors, would eventually get to play a leading role in
the shape of things to come.
They had gotten through the Qu invasion with relatively little degradation; yes
they had been reduced to the level of apes, but their recovery had been quick.
Apparently, the Qu had not worked as hard at suppressing their intelligence.
Nor had they made a comparable effort to wipe away the material traces of
the Star Men. Even after millions of years, enormous ruins of the global urban
spaces littered the continents of their world. Thus did the Ruin Haunters earn
their names.
They made it through, their baptism with fire had hardened and
awakened them. The wars united them politically and pushed their
technological capabilities even beyond the level of the Star Men. Co-
incidentally, they also developed a dangerous form of autochthonous
madness. The Ruin Haunters had come to believe that they were the sole
descendants and the true heirs of the Star People. And they were ready and
willing to do anything in order to claim their fictitious, bygone Golden Age.
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Only a thousand years after the Qu departure, a Ruin Haunter wanders among the
shattered remains of a city of the Star People. The dominating form of an even
greater Qu pyramid can be seen in the background.
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Sentience Reborn and Extinction
If any sort of periodical arrangement can be brought to the history of
mankind, the post-Qu era of emerging human animals can be likened to a
series of millennial dark ages. However, like any “dark age” situation, these
periods of silence had finite life spans. One by one, like stars emerging from
the fog, new civilizations were born out of the shattered remnants of mankind.
In some rare cases, the recovery was swift and straightforward. In most other
situations, it came only after a lengthy series of adaptive radiations,
extinctions and secondary diversifications. Within these lines of descent, there
was as much distance between the initial post-humans and their intelligent
descendants as between the first Cretaceous fuzzballs and Homo sapiens.
But not all human animals made it through. In fact, it must be realized that the
majority of post-Qu humans died out during the eras of transition. Extinction,
the utter and absolute death of an entire family, entire community, entire
species, was rampant in the galaxy.
In all of this death, however, there was new life. As one species vacated a
certain niche, others would soon step in to take its place. Adaptive radiations
would follow, filling in the blanks with myriads of diverse and varied forms.
Despite the fallen, the flow of life would proceed, blazing in constant turnover.
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The fossil of an extinct, aquatic human from a forgotten colony world.
Unbeknownst to the universe, his kind adapted, flourished and died out soon after
the Qu retreat. His tale serves to tell us that all that is alive will inevitably perish,
and it is the journey, not the conclusion that matters.
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Snake People
(Descendants of the Worms)
The scorching sun eventually cooled down, and life flooded back to the
surface from her subterranean stronghold. As animals of all kinds exploded
into the terrestrial niches that had been left vacant for millennia, so did the
descendants of the worms. On the surface, they found new opportunities as
entire assemblages of serpentine grazers, swimmers, predators…
…and people. One form, descended from tree-climbing mammalian snakes, re-
evolved the human intelligence that had lain dormant for so long. They
observed, contemplated and philosophized with novel, spirally coiled brains
and handled the world with a singular pelvic “hand”, borne out from the
remnants of their ancestors’ feet.
They looked nothing at all like their distant human ancestors, but their
social development followed a similar path; several agricultural world empires,
followed by industrial revolutions, social experiments, world wars, civil wars
and globalization. But then again, socio-political parallelism in history did not
necessarily imply a similar, or even recognizably human world. Modern cities
of the global Snake world were tangles of pipe like “roads”, branching, three
dimensional railroads and windowless, hole-like buildings. Though their
knotted architecture differed from region to region, these settlements
generally looked like kilometre-wide balls of glass, metal, plastic and cloth,
wrapped so tightly that a human of today would find it impossible to move
inside them. Plazas and open areas were totally absent, as they presented
navigational obstacles and areas of insecurity. Their evolutionary background
in the trees had made the Snake People into borderline agoraphobes.
None of these, of course, was unusual to the Snakes in any way. Their
relatively “alien” lifestyle was as particular to them as ours is to us. All across
their world, the arterial cities throbbed with people, each with their own joys,
sorrows and chores, living out lives as human as any other intelligent beings’.
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A Snake person at home, enjoying a book while smoking and “listening” to
vibrational ground-music. Through the open door can be seen the chaotic tangle of
the city.
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Killer Folk
(Descendants of the Hunters)
The carnivores also rebounded into civilization. Their journey involved a
series of changes during which they lost the adaptations that had allowed
them to endure as the top predators of their world. The sabre teeth, once
used for slashing through sinew and trachea, became fragile and thin, useful
only as organs of social display. The hook-like thumb claws were also reduced,
but not deleted. In their place, the last two digits rotated perpendicularly to
become new-fangled graspers.
All this gracility, however, did not mean weakness. Although they were no
longer specialized for hunting, the Killer Folk could still kill with their bare
hands, but only if they really wanted to. What enormous claws and teeth could
not do, they could easily achieve with bow, arrow, flintlock repeater or gas
rifle.
Their descent from predators gave the Killer Folk a unique social profile.
Almost all of their religions had rituals allowing for periods of completely
natural, animalistic hunts and duels. This necessity of venting these atavistic
urges also led to the formation of religious “hunter nobilities”; privileged
warriors who were skilled in the arts of hunting, war and murder. Entire
societies were assembled underneath these ruling classes; orderly
communities that erupted once every year into an orgy of death, sex, and
prayer. For thousands of years nomadic warriors, together with their vast
herds of once-human livestock, chased and battled each other across a
chessboard of continents.
All of this chaos was to be swept apart with the advent of modernity. In a
development comparable to an industrial revolution, one nation-pack of Killers
devised methods of settled, intensive factory farming. Organized state
structure, secularism and technological leap-frogging were quick to follow.
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Needless to say, such developments polarized the world into bands of
progressive, developed “factory herders” and increasingly fanatical “hunting
states.” While one side condemned their old, animal ways, the other side
embraced them with blind zealotry. This was their crisis of modernity; the
balkanization of the progressive and conservative factions on the road to
global unity. Fortunately, the Killers managed to pull themselves through, even
after drifting dangerously close to global conflict at certain points.
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A young male Killer tours one of the myriad ruined fortresses in his country,
testimony of their species’ bloody, protean history. The planet of the Killer Folk is an
archaeologists’ paradise. It has more buried dark ages, ruined cultures, and fallen
kingdoms than any other world.
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Tool Breeders
(Descendants of the Swimmers)
They used to be simple creatures, descendants of a battered people that
had taken to the sea. Their remote sapiens ancestors would have given such
beings no chance of a sentient comeback, for they thought that technological
advances were impossible in the fluid medium of the oceans.
But the swimmers disproved such predictions by founding one of the most
advanced and most outrageously alien cultures of the entire human lineage.
Fire, the cornerstone of industrial engineering, was almost impossible to
sustain and use underwater. But the Breeders simply choose another path
when complex toolmaking proved impracticable. They began to breed their
tools and machines for them.
It had started long before the species was even intelligent. In the endless
variety of life in the seas, the Swimmers always adopted and controlled the
organisms that were useful in some way. Once domesticated, these creatures
were willingly or unintentionally modified through artificial selection and
conditioning. The process was slow, but once underway, its effects were
formidable.
A modern city of the Breeders was a sight to behold. Huge, heart-like creatures
pumped out nutritious fluids to a network of self-repairing, living conduits.
This was their equivalent of a power grid, and it reached every single one of
the Breeders’ huge, exoskeletal dwellings; “powering” bioluminescent lights,
flickering cephalopod skin-televisions, medicinal sea-squirts, and countless
other devices that had been bred from living creatures. The advances in
biology had risen exponentially, until genetic engineering was completely
mastered. Modern Breeders did not even need to use animals; a simple
manipulation of cultured tissues and stem-cells could give solutions to any
problem at hand.
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The mastery of genetics had conquered many obstacles. The yawning
ocean depths, as well as the Planet’s few tiny landmasses were now firmly
within the Breeders’ grasp. However, they were not contempt with mere
planetary dreams. New forms and bizarre creatures were still being developed,
in daring attempts to conquer the one realm that was most hostile to life.
Sealed in their living ships, the Breeders wished to return to the stars.
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A Breeder huntress on a garden reef. Living tools are an indispensable part of these
beings’ daily lives; she manages to breathe underwater through an oxygen-filtering
crustacean fitted over her blowhole. She holds a mollusc-derived rifle that shoots
out specially-modified fish teeth, and her companion is a brain-augmented fish that
has been hardwired to return kills. Buildings made from calcified shells glitter in the
background, ablaze with bioluminescence.
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Saurosapients
(Livestock of the Lizard Herders)
One of humanity’s eventual inheritors was not even human. They came
from the reptilian stock that had proliferated during the demise of the Lizard
Herders. Theirs was a true case of a world turned upside down. As the humans
degenerated into witless animals, the cold-blooded reptiles prospered in the
tropical climate of their planet.
Millennia passed and they began to produce increasingly smarter forms, one
of which, distantly resembling featherless versions of the predatory dinosaurs
of the past, actually crossed over the threshold of sentience and built up a
series of civilizations.
These fledgling cultures were quick to understand the true origin of the
monstrous ruins littering their planet, ruins that until then had been
considered natural aberrations or timeless memorabilia of gods. Now,
however, they saw the intermingled ruins of the Qu and the Star People for
what they really were. It was through this understanding that the biologically
unrelated Sauros’ took up the cultural identity of humanity.
The pressure of such a reality put their cultures under enormous stress.
Some factions turned to made-up religions and remained ignorant under an
umbrella of comforting fantasies. Others acknowledged the threats of the
galaxy, but reverted to a paranoid rhetoric of conservationism. The galaxy had
scared them greatly. Finally, there were those who saw the galactic redoubt
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and acted to face the odds, however great they might be. Conflicts and even
wars were not uncommon between these three factions.
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Modular People
(Descendants of the Colonials)
The blind workings of evolution followed the unlikeliest paths, made use
of the most fleeting opportunities. The very existence of the Modular People
was testimony to this fact. Their ancestors, the Colonials, would’ve been seen
as hopeless cripples by almost any observer; they lacked coherent organs and
their existence was limited to carpeting water shores like mats of algae. But as
degenerate as they were, the Colonials were resilient survivors, able to hold on
to life in the harshest of conditions.
The eventual winner of this Colonial arms race was a sentient colony;
organized around hyper specialized units whose entire purpose was to direct
the others. These colonies spread around the planet as they adapted the parts
of their rivals to function within themselves. Thus were the Modular People
born. Living in fully-industrialized megalopoli, they came in an indescribable
variation of shapes and sizes. Anything from castle-like guardian forests to
diminutive, scuttling couriers was a member of the Modular whole. They could
combine with each other and split up, or exchange parts as needs presented
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themselves. The only thing constant in all of their protean existence was their
mental and cultural unity.
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A modular colony treats a specialized digester unit with sprays of anti-ulcer
medication produced by the medical drone held in its “hands”. Note the differing
segments, each of them mutated human beings in themselves.
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Pterosapiens
(Descendants of the Flyers)
The flyers’ supercharged hearts had given them an evolutionary winning
hand, and they diversified to fill up the heavens. It was only a time before the
competition in the skies got too intense, even for their souped-up
metabolisms.
Some lineages gave up their wings and returned to the ground, living as
differing sorts of predators, herbivores and even swimmers. Their aerial
adaptations gave them an edge on the ground and they produced forms of
stupendous size and agility.
Their power of flight made the Pterosapiens a global folk, before they could
invent nations and borders. With such an inherent ease of travel, ideas and
individuals diffused too fast for social differences to ossify. Acting with a
planetary awareness, they farmed their gigantic, terrestrial relatives, raised
cities of perches and fluting towers, harnessed the atom and began to gaze up
to the stars, without having to compensate (too much) from the average
individual’s welfare, and without dividing up into quarrelsome factions.
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aged by sixteen and usually dead by twenty-three years of our time. This grim
cycle caused them to appreciate every moment of their existence dearly, and
they pondered upon it with feverish intensity. A shelf of scrolls by Pterosapien
philosophers would’ve been the envy of every human library. In their cities,
life blazed away with unreal speed, rushing past to meet fleeting deadlines.
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A Pterosapien poses by the bizarre buildings of a seaside resort. At ten days long,
this will be the only holiday in her ephemeral life.
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Asymmetric People
(Descendants of the Lopsiders)
Although contorted by gravity, the Lopsiders managed to regain their
sentience, and develop a civilization in a short few million years. Squat,
pancake-like buildings spread all over their planet. These constructs looked like
squashed bunkers, and they were never more than a few meters high. They
did not seem like much, but such structures were entrances to underground
homes, schools, hospitals, temples, universities but also embassies, prisons,
asylums, command centres and arsenals. They lived strange lives, but the
Lopsiders were human in all of their virtues and evils. Thus, it was only natural
for them to expand outwards and look for new frontiers to colonize.
Their bodies were changed considerably; what had been shovel-like toes to
slither through the high-gravity dirt had become centipedal legs, and the
singular, grasping hand was elongated to an extreme degree. Their grotesque
faces had been inverted and turned upside-down after reverting from a
flounder-like existence. Twisted as they were, members of this new race
enjoyed tremendous advantages over their flattened forefathers.
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exterminated their parent race and went on to rule the solar system alone. On
the way, they stumbled across the remains of the Qu and the Star People and
advanced immensely. Triumphant on their own realm, they turned to the
heavens for further exploits.
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An Asymmetric nobleman poses nude to reveal his bizarre anatomy. Normally,
these creatures dress up in elaborate garments that resemble heaps of
interconnected, enlarged stockings.
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Symbiotes
(Descendants of the Parasites)
As time passed, the relationships between the parasites and their hosts
got connected to such a degree that it began to involve a co-operation of the
individuals. These were no longer single-sided relationships; in exchange for
the hosts’ nutritious blood, the parasites offered their heightened senses as
early warning against predators and other hazards.
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most functions of the hosts, but a thriving husbandry of these creatures still
remained due to tradition and simple efficiency. An average Symbiote would
begin the day on his business host, and move onto a more comfortable
domestic one when he returned home after work.
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A Symbiote poses on one of his several hosts. In the background can be seen some
of their rural housing, with man-sized doors for the mindless hosts, and the smaller
holes for their intelligent patrons.
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Sail People
(Descendants of the Finger Fishers)
The Finger Fishers were already among the most divergent of the post-
human races. With harpoon-like digits and almost crocodilian muzzles, they
looked nothing like their parental stock. But even this form would look
conservative to their sentient descendants. With many small, scattered
islands, isolated sub-continents and differentiated niches, their homeworld
was an evolutionary cauldron where isolated members of certain species
could, under the right circumstances, evolve into wildly different forms. This
condition was similar to the island-realms of Madagascar, Galapagos, or
Hawaii on old Earth, except that this time, it was on a global scale.
Some descendants of the Fishers, trapped on lonely islands, grew smaller and
developed their fishing claws into graceful wings. Others took directly to the
sea and became the analogues of whales, dolphins and mosasaurs. Within this
evolutionary bubbling, one particular lineage gave rise to the ancestral Sail
People.
They too elongated their fingers into wings, but these were not used for
flight. Instead, they became sails that drove them effortlessly across the
oceans. With fingers turned into sails, they used their mouths and extended
tongues to catch their pelagic prey. These organs eventually assumed the role
of the Fishers’ long atrophied, dexterous hands. The need to better navigate
the endless seas put an inevitable pressure on their memories, and the Sailors’
brains grew correspondingly. It was only a matter of time until one of these
navigators became smart enough to think.
Even when sentient, the Sail People still needed a long time to achieve any
sort of social stability. Their scattered world made for a tremendous diversity
of cultures, which competed and fought just as resiliently. Across generations,
untold flotillas of tribal warriors battled each other in epoch-spanning,
pointless conflicts. Nomadic warriors and pirate societies inevitably came into
being, prolonging the uncontrollable cycle of violence.
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Only when a certain warrior tribe developed warfare on an industrial
scale, and the state society needed to support it, and then, only when this
notion of modernity gave rise to an idea of peace did the Sail People finally
manage to unify. Generations of blood had stained the oceans for far too long.
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Satyriacs
(Descendants of the Hedonists)
Their pleasure-drenched existence, locked between their static paradise
world and their inherently slow pace of evolution, seemed immune to change.
Perhaps this was true for a million years or so. But on larger scales, complete
stasis was a fable.
During a particular era, geologic upheavals threw up huge masses of land over
the shallow oceans of their world. The Hedonists, until then trapped on a
singular island no bigger than today’s Iceland, were not late to colonize these
new pastures. This was more of a necessary exodus, since the events that
raised the new lands had also thrown up enormous clouds of ash that
smothered the atmosphere and blocked out the sun.
Their innocence finally spoilt, most of the Hedonists died out, unable to
adapt. The only survivors were fast-breeding freaks who had abandoned the
reproductive quirks of their ancestors. It was these forms that colonized the
newborn continent and gave rise to a multitude of species which included the
Satyriacs, sentient heirs to the Hedonists.
These beings resembled their ancestors to a great degree, except that they
now sported enormous “tails”; boneless organs of balance woven out of
extended pelvic muscles and fat. Along this appendage, their entire bodies
were re-oriented in horizontal, almost dinosaurian postures. Although they
had abandoned the frantic reproductive strategies of their ancestors, their
social lives still retained a delightful tint of casual promiscuity.
The Satyriac civilization was quick to establish itself globally, for even with the
additional landmasses, the terrestrial domain of their world remained no
larger than Australia. For a while three and then two land empires competed
each other, before dissolving into a myriad smaller nations and finally re-
unifying into a coherent world order.
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From this point on, the Satyriac world once again became a Valhalla of
pleasure, with festivals, concerts and ritualized orgies punctuating every
working week. This time, however, it could all be savoured by true intelligence.
Satyriac audience goes wild as the performer hits the climax of his song. Such events
are an everyday part of the Satyriac life.
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Bug Facers
(Descendants of the Insectophagi)
Over time, their insectivorous ancestors came to resemble their prey.
Hardened, leathery face-plates, once used for defence against stings and bites,
ossified and became integrated into the jaw structure. Their hands and feet,
with reduced numbers of fingers and toes, developed into pincer-like affairs.
Even their metabolism reverted partially into ectothermy in the balmy, lazy
climate of their planet.
But it was none of those adaptations that gave them the edge in survival.
Simply put, a congenital defect allowed them to regain their sentience. Even
after the smothering by the Qu, the genes of the Star People remained
dormant in their cells. Through pure coincidence, one lineage of the
Insectophagi developed an atavistic throwback, resulting in larger brains.
Which just happened to be useful in cracking open insect nests with crude
stone tools.
It was easy ride from there on. Although millennia-long in itself, the
development from stone axe to spaceship was an eyeblink in geological time.
Like many other species, the Bug Facers passed through consecutive cycles as
agrarian (in their case hive-farming) empires, colonial endeavours,
industrialization, massive world wars and finally, globalized world-states. But
there was one thing that set their development apart from all other post-
human species.
History does not record much about the invaders, except that unlike the
Qu, theirs was a singular effort and it was beaten off in an intense cycle of
orbital and terrestrial wars. Although vanquished, the invaders did succeed in
leaving behind their traces. They introduced their own flora and fauna, which
flourished on the Bug Facer home planet long after they departed. More
importantly, they imbibed the poor Bug Facers with a pathological inter-
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species xenophobia, to the point that they were fearful even of their post-
human cousins on other stars.
Through an ironic twist of fate, their fears would be more than justified,
though not just yet. The Bug Facers still had time.
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A Bug Face celebrity, arguably the most beautiful girl on their planet, poses before
a coastal village. In the distance can be seen gasbag-like tree creatures, relics left
over from the mysterious alien invaders.
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Asteromorphs
(Descendants of the Spacers)
Initially refugees, the Spacers were quick to master the vastness of
interstellar space. Their isolated space arks joined together and multiplied to
form a gigantic, interlocked artefact that was large enough to contain entire
worlds. But no planets lay inside the Asteromorph capital; only cavernous,
gravity-free bubbles where the inhabitants could finally develop to their
fullest.
Freed from the constraints of weight, their bodies grew spindly and insectile,
with individual digits extending into multitudes of thin, versatile limbs. Other
than these, the only developed organs were their derived jet sphincters; which
went on to become the principal means of locomotion. But above all were
their brains, their bulging, swollen brains.
With no hindrance from gravity, the human brain could grow into
unprecedented sizes. Each generation devised experiments that produced
offspring with greater cranial capacity, giving rise to beings who went through
their everyday lives thinking in concepts and structures scarcely
comprehensible to people of today. The physiological limitations of the human
mind had been long since debated. Now, it was established that these limits
were indeed real, and individuals who could break them would likewise
conquer new grounds in philosophy, art and science. Everything changed.
Yet some aspects of humanity, such as the basic desire to expand, remained.
To this end the Asteromorphs built great fleets of globular sub-arks and spread
their influence across the heavens, into every stellar cluster and every star
system. Within less than a thousand years, the galaxy was straddled by a new
and far more alien Empire of Man.
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comfortably in the outer rims of star systems, quietly observing the lives of
their struggling relatives. For the first time in history, there were actual Gods in
the myriad human skies.
They were silent and weren’t even noticed for most of the time, but their
watchfulness was ultimately going to pay off.
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Second Galactic Empire
Over time, the sentient post-humans began to reach out to the galaxy.
They inevitably stumbled across the ruins of the Star Men, and figured out
their interstellar ancestry. These discoveries were followed by a realization;
that there might be others like them, unimaginable distances away. Thus, the
fledgling civilizations set about to probing the skies.
The contacts, all established by radio communication, were not spread out
evenly. The Empire began little more than a few million years after the Qu left,
with the first dialogue between the earliest Killer Folk and the Satyriacs. A few
thousand years later they were joined by the Tool Breeders, hailing out from
the ocean depths through living radio arrays.
The second wave of sentient species joined in during the following ten
million years, as the Modular Whole, Pterosapiens and the fledgling
Assymetrics contacted their celestial cousins. Finally, in the next twenty million
years, newly evolving civilizations such as the Sauros, Snake People,
Parasite/Symbiotes and the Sail People successively contacted the burgeoning
Galactic Empire. The Bug Facers were aware of the whole process, but due to
their xenophobic experience, they only opened up after a staggering forty
million years of silence.
This union was an empire of speech, for actual travel between the stars was
too difficult to be practical. Like the bygone colonies of the Star Men, the
posthumans co-operated through the unrestricted exchange of information
and experience. Although covering every aspect of an astonishing variety of
cultures, the Empire’s efforts focused on two main issues; political unification
(though not homogenization) and galactic awareness; constant readiness for
possible alien invasions. Everybody had come across the remains of the
mysterious Qu. Nobody wanted a repeat of the same scenario.
When the Second Empire ran into the Asteromorphs, (who had silently
saturated the galaxy with their own Empire of Man,) they feared the worst.
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But luckily for them, the godlike beings were not interested in the Second
Empire, nor any of its worlds. The Asteromorphs were given a wide berth and
accepted as they were; incomprehensible, omnipotent forces of nature.
This coordinated effort lasted for almost eighty million years, during
which its member species attained previously unimaginable levels of culture,
welfare and technology. Each species colonized a few dozen worlds of their
own; in which nations, cultures and individuals lived to the fullest potentials of
their existence.
Needless to say, all of this was possible only through constant communication
and a total openness to the Galaxy. Most communities took this for granted
and dutifully participated in the galactic dialogues. But there were others,
silent, darkened beings who refused to join in. Through them would come the
ruin of the Empire.
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Gravital
(Descendants of the Ruin Haunters)
After the lesson of the Qu, Second Galactic Empire kept a constant watch
against alien invasion. Ironically, they neglected to look among themselves.
The second great invasion of the galaxy came not from outside, but from
within. The Ruin Haunters, who were lucky enough to inherit the secrets of the
Star Men and Qu when other species were mere animals, had experienced a
tremendous advance in technological prowess. All in all they were as
sophisticated as, if not more, than the Asteromorphs of the void. But their
ascendancy was not a sane one. Recall that most Ruin Haunters were already
deranged with a twisted assumption of being the sole inheritors of the Star
Men. They refused to communicate with their relatives on other planets, and
kept to their own affairs. This neurotic hubris assumed truly dangerous
proportions after the Ruin Haunters modified themselves.
The origin of this modification lay in an earlier catastrophe. The Ruin Haunters’
sun was undergoing a rapid phase of expansion, and the species, advanced as
it was, could do nothing to stop the process. So the Haunters did the next best
thing, and changed their bodies.
While not even organic, the Gravital still retained human dreams, human
ambitions and human delusions of grandeur. This, combined with mechanical
bodies that allowed them to cross space with ease, made interstellar war a
frightening possibility.
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Machine Invasion
It took a long time for the Gravital to prepare. Propulsion systems were
perfected and new bodies capable of withstanding the interstellar jumps were
devised. But when they finally decided that the time was nigh, nothing
survived the slaughter.
The invasions followed a brutally simple plan. The target worlds’ suns were
blockaded and their light was trapped behind specially-constructed, million-
mile sails. If the dying worlds managed to resist, an asteroid of two finished
them off. Enormous invasion fleets were built, but it was rarely necessary to
deploy them. The Machines had caught their cousins completely off-guard.
Even the Qu had been loyal to life, they had distorted and subjugated their
victims, but in the end they had allowed them to survive. To the machines
however, life was a luxury.
Such thorough ruthlessness was not, ironically, borne out of any kind of
actual hatred. The Gravital, long accustomed to their mechanical bodies,
simply did not acknowledge the life of their organic cousins. When this apathy
was mixed with their un-sane claims as the sole heirs of the Star Men, the
extinctions were carried out with the banality of say, an engineer tearing down
an abandoned building. Under the reign of the Machines, the Galaxy entered a
brand-new dark age.
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A rare instance of a direct invasion by the Machines, on one of the shore cities of
the Killer Folk. Most of the time the inhabitants of the Second Empire were wiped
out globally, without the necessity of such confrontations.
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When Considering the Invasion
The Machine Invasion brought on the greatest wave of extinctions the
galaxy had ever seen; for it was not a simple act of war by one species against
another, but a systematized destruction of life itself. When considering such a
vast event, it is easy to get lost in romantic delusions. It is almost as easy to
write off the Gravital as ‘evil’ as it is to consider the entire episode as a
nihilistic, ‘end of everything’ kind of scenario. Both of these approaches are, as
they would be in any historical situation, monumental fallacies.
To begin with, the Gravital were not evil, at least not to their own perception.
These beings, although mechanical, still lived their lives as individuals and
operated inside coherent societies. They had surrendered their organic
heritage but their minds were not the cold, calculating engines of true
machines. Even after giving orders that would destroy a billion souls, a Gravital
would have a home to go to, and, as incredibly as it might sound, a family and
a circle of friends towards which it felt genuine affection. Despite being
endowed with compassion, their harsh treatment of the organics was the
result of a simple inability to understand their right to live.
Nor did the Machine invasion mean the end of everything. There certainly was
a widespread destruction of life, but what was lost was ‘only’ organic life.
Consuming energy, directing it for reproduction, thought and even evolution,
the machines were as alive as any carbon-based organism. Despite the
turnover, Life of a sort survived, and as would be seen, even preserved some
of its organic predecessors.
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Subjects
(Many descendants of the Bug Facers)
The Bug Facers; racially shy and xenophobic due to their background of
repeated alien invasions, became the first species to face the Gravital
onslaught. As ironic as their fate seemed, the Bug Facers were the luckiest of
the post-humans. Instead of being exterminated like the rest of their cousins,
they survived as the only organic beings in the Machine Empire.
The precise reasons for their retention remain unknown to this day. Perhaps
the Machines hadn’t perfected their ruthless apathy by then. Or perhaps they
pitied the poor organics, and allowed them to maintain a stunted parody of an
existence. Whatever the reason, the Bug Facers endured. But they hardly
resembled their original ancestors anymore.
Genetic engineering, the lost art of the galaxy-threading Qu, (and later,
the Tool Breeders as well,) was mastered almost as comprehensively by the
Machines. Not hesitating to warp the beings which they did not really consider
to be alive, they spliced their way into the Bug Facer DNA, producing
generations of literal abominations. Would a woman or man of today show
any apprehension towards re-assembling a computer, or even recycling trash?
Such was the attitude of the triumphant Gravital.
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Be it as tool, slave or entertainment, Humanity narrowly held on to its
biological heritage, while its Machine cousins reigned supreme for an
unbelievable fifty million years.
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The Bug Facer archetype, flanked by two of his twisted descendants. To his left; a
phallus-bearing polydactyl, bred as a sacrificial offering in one of the many different
Machine religions. To the right; one-off work of art; designed to play its modified
fingers like a set of drums while ululating the tunes of a certain pop song.
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The Other Machines
Recall that despite its Galaxy-cradling might, the Machine Empire was
not homogenous. It contained dozens of differing factions that did not always
agree on everything, including the treatment of their downtrodden, biological
Subjects.
The war did not cause any lasting damage, but it plainly illuminated one fact.
The greatest entity the galaxy had ever seen was not without its problems.
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The Fall of the Machines
(Return of the Spacers)
In the longer run, the internal struggles of the Machine Empire just
might have led to its downfall. But, there was no need to wait that long, as the
Empire died a shorter, but immensely more cataclysmic death.
For a long time, the Machine and the Asteromorph Empires had been eyeing
each other nervously. They hadn’t yet run into open confrontations, as the
Asteromorphs kept mostly to their outer-space arks and the Machine Empire
occupied the planets. In almost every inhabitable solar system of the galaxy,
the same upside-down tension built up between organic beings living in the
void, and machines inhabiting perfectly terrestrial worlds.
Power was evenly balanced between the two rival Empires. Moreover,
this balance involved forces strong enough to destroy planets en-masse. Each
side knew that any kind of war would result in mutual annihilation, and only
insanity could start such a conflict.
Well, the post-civil war Empire of the Machines did go insane, in a sense. In
order to divert attention from internal struggles, it needed a new enemy to
consolidate its rival factions against. How unwise that this enemy came to be
the Asteromorphs.
When the cosmic dust settled, the winners displayed themselves. The
conquerors were the Asteromorphs, changed beyond recognition after fifty
million years of continual self-perfection. Their grossly hypertrophied brains
stretched out like wings on either side, and their finger-derived limbs had
formed an intricate set of sails and legs. Endowed with superior technology
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and limitless patience, these beings almost completely destroyed the
Machines, despite losing a substantial number of their own species.
The conflict also thrust the Asteromorphs into the affairs of their long-
neglected human cousins. As impossible as it seemed, some of the Machines’
Subjects had survived the ordeal. Now, the Asteromorphs could no longer look
away.
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The Post-War Galaxy
When replenishing lost worlds, the Asteromorph gods also took
measures to ensure the continued safety of their creations. The abrupt rise of
the Machines had shown that unless carefully regulated, the wealth of the
stars could always host a race of pan-galactic usurpers.
The Asteromorphs, watchful but ever transparent, did not want to interfere
directly. Instead, they produced terrestrial versions of their own kind to
regulate the galaxy. They adapted their delicate, ethereal fingers into spidery
limbs, and shrunk their brains considerably to re-adjust to the rigors of gravity.
The resulting sideline was stunted by Asteromorph standards, but still it
produced demigods in every sense of the word.
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A nude Terrestrial shows the highly divergent, yet still bizarrely human anatomy
that is the characteristic of this species. These particular Terrestrials maintain a
religious hegemony over their clueless subjects; dressing up in elaborate veils and
headgear to assert their ‘divine’ inheritance.
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The New Machines
Long after their fall from grace, the Machines still clung on to existence.
During the initial aftermath of the war the Asteromorphs had planned to
exterminate every last one of them, only to discover that the Machines were
simply too useful to destroy. For millions of years they had perfected the
interface between mind and machine to such an extent that they could live
and operate in the most inhospitable conditions. Such beings, deprived of their
galaxy-straddling power, would make invaluable contributions to research and
exploration in the New Empire.
There was a sense of poetic justice in all of this. The Machines, who once
distorted biological life forms to their whim, were finally treated to a similar
fate. To begin with, the Asteromorphs completely scrapped their ability of self-
contained gravitational manipulation; the very force that had rendered them
invulnerable in the first place. They were given finite life spans and slightly
numbed imaginations, so that history would not repeat itself. The degradatory
nature of these changes, however, did not imply an overall regression.
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A machine citizen of the New Empire. She sports a dazzling pair of branching arms
that suit both the latest fashion trends and her job as an artisan. Machines
following fashion might seem unusual to a reader of this era, but never forget that
these beings are human intelligences, only in different bodies.
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Second Contact
With successive waves of machine-aided discovery and colonization, the
New Empire grew exponentially. Such was the growth of wealth and progress
that its description would need the use of concepts that remain unexplored
today. To talk with a man of today about the comings and goings of the New
Empire would be akin to giving lectures of 20th century geopolitics to a
hunter-gatherer.
This magnificent entity was not blind to the universe around it. It tuned in its
eyes, ears, and sensors, and probed the events of the surrounding galaxies.
The New Galactics suspected that the surrounding nebulae might also have
their indigenous folk, and it was wise to contact them before a
misunderstanding, or conflict, could occur. On a darker side, these
observations also served as lookouts for potential invaders. Even then, the
memory of the Qu was not forgotten.
With all of their wild difference, the Amphicephali were welcome. They
were the first, but surely not the last.
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An Amphicephalus ambassador with spaceships typical of their kind. Her strange
body plan betrays an evolutionary history as complicated as that of humanity.
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Earth Rediscovered
The purpose of this work is not to describe the limitless progress that
followed the cross-galactic contact. One could go indefinitely, chronicling how
the united galaxies re-encountered and subdued the Qu, how they cradled
their suns with artificial shells, multiplying their inhabitable zones a billion-
fold, how they criss-crossed interstellar space with wormholes and made
travel a thing of the past. Ultimately, descendants of those beings even
conquered Time itself, prolonging the existence of their minds indefinitely via
rejuvenating technologies.
But from (y)our vantage point, one discovery truly stood out in this orgy
of advance. Compared with gargantuan achievements like the taming of space
and the construction of the star-shells, it was a mere blip, a revelation of long-
forgotten trivia. This was the re-discovery of Earth; the birthplace of humanity,
where the omnipresent Asteromorph, the star-gliding Machine, and the
millions of humble resident races could all trace their origins.
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By the time of Earth’s rediscovery, humans have diverged considerably from their
ancestral forms.
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Return
The discovery sparked a certain amount of interest, though nowhere as
much as other breakthroughs had. To most humans of the cosmos, their
ancestral birthplace was simply an interesting piece of information, a piece of
trivia with which they had lost all ties.
Still, a ship was sent forth, and it landed without ceremony, for now there was
no intelligence left on Earth. Too far away from the main centres of
population, it had been completely ignored, gone stagnant and feral. But still,
it was Home.
When the explorers stepped out, human feet trod on old Earth once
more; after an absence of 560 million years.
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All Tomorrows
I must conclude my words with a confession. Mankind, the very species
which I’ve been chronicling from its terrestrial infancy to its domination of the
galaxies, is extinct.
All of the beings which you saw on the preceding pages; from the lowly Worm
to the wind-riding Sail People, from the megalomaniac Gravital to the ultimate
Galactic Citizens, lie a billion years dead. We are only beginning to piece the
story together. What you read was our best approximation of the truth.
Ultimately, however, what happened to Humanity does not matter. Like every
other story, it was a temporary one; indeed long but ultimately transient. It did
not have a coherent ending, but then again it did not need to. The tale of
Humanity was never its ultimate domination of a thousand galaxies, or its
mysterious exit into the unknown. The essence of being Human was none of
that. Instead, it lay in the radio conversations of the still-human Machines, in
the daily lives of the bizarrely twisted Bug Facers, in the endless love-songs of
the carefree Hedonists, the rebellious demonstrations of the first true
Martians, and in a way, the very life you lead at the moment.
Many throughout history were unaware of this most basic fact. The Qu,
in dreams of an ideal future, distorted the worlds they came across. Later on
the Gravital, with their insane desire to recreate the past, caused the ugliest
massacres in the history of the galaxy. Even now, it is sickeningly easy for
beings to get lost in false grand narratives, living out completely driven lives in
pursuit of non-existent codes, ideals, climaxes, and golden ages. In blindly
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thinking that their stories serve absolute ends, such creatures almost always
end up harming themselves, if not those around them.
To those like the misguided; look at the story of Man, and come to your
senses! It is not the destination, but the trip that matters. What you do today
influences tomorrow, not the other way around. Love Today, and seize All
Tomorrows!
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The Author, with a billion-year old human skul
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