All Tomorrows:
Page 2
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.
Yet life remained on this unforgiving place. Forests of crystalline “plants”
blanketed the surface, recycling oxygen for the animal life that teemed underground. One
such species, barely longer than the arms of their ancestors, was the sole surviving
vertebrate. Furthermore, it was that planet’s last heir of the star people.
Distorted beyond recognition by genetic modification, they looked for all the word
like pale, overgrown worms. Tiny, feeble feet and hands modified for digging were all
that betrayed their noble heritage. Aside from these organs, all was simplified for the life
underground. Their eyes were pinpricks, they lacked teeth, external ears and the better
half of their nervous system.
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.
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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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Predators 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.
Fortunately, the selective forces of evolution made their agony a short-lived one.
Simply put, a brain was not advantageous to develop if it could not be put into good use.
A dim-witted, half minded Mantelope grew up faster than a smart one, and grazed just as
efficiently. The Mantelopes’ animal children overtook them in less than a hundred
thousand years, and their melancholic world fell silent for good. Nothing was sacred in
the evolutionary process.
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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 armor, 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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Lizard Herders
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.
The dumb people eventually settled in a symbiosis with some of the other
creatures that inhabited their planet. They began to instinctively “farm” some of the
large, herbivorous reptiles, ancestors of which were brought from Earth as pets.
Soon the balance of this mutualism began to tip in the reptiles’ favor. 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.
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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.
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Temptor
In the Temptors’ case, the remodeling 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.
No human would have recognized them as their descendants. The females were
beaked cones of flesh some two meters tall, rooted in soil like grotesque carnivorous
plants. The males on the other hand, resembled contorted, bipedal monkeys. Unlike their
mates they were perfectly ambulatory; dozens of them ran around the females’ mounds
like so many imps. Some would gather food, others would clean the females while others
would stand on guard for danger. Although their actions looked purposeful, the males
had no will of their own.
In Temptor society, females controlled everything. Using a combination of vocal
and phermonal signals, they guided the masculine hordes into any number of menial
tasks, while mating with the strongest, the most obedient and the dumbest to produce
even better drones. On certain periods they would also give birth to a few precious
females, who would be carried away by subservient males to root themselves.
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.
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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.
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Bone Crusher
Through the deliberate modifications of Qu and the blind molding 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 colors 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.
But some, belonging to the hardiest breeds, survived. In less than a geological
eyeblink of a few million years, the descendants of such creatures radiated into the
evolutionary vacuum of their garden world. One lineage led to a profusion of human
herbivores. These were preyed upon by a variety of enamel-beaked raptors, each evolved
to deal with a specific prey. Among these generalized niches were entire assemblages of
specialized animals, resembling anything from ibis-billed swamp sifters to splendorous
forms with bizarre crests that flared out of their toothy beaks.
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.
Despite their shortcomings, these corpse eating primitives were one of the first
species to attain intelligence, and although primitive, a level of civilization. All of this
proved the fallacy of human prejudice in the posthuman galaxy. A creature could feed on
putrefying meat, stink like a grave and express its affection by defecating on others, but
it might as well be your own grandchild and the last hope of mankind.
In eventuality, however, not even the bone crushers fulfilled this promise. Their
dependency on carrion for food limited their population severely, and their mediaeval
civilizations crumbled after a few uneventful millennia.
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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.
So they were made into disembodied cultures of skin and muscle, connected by a
skimpy network of the most basic nerves. They were employed as living filtering devices,
subsisting on the waste products of Qu civilization like mats of cancer cells. And just to
witness and suffer their wretched fate, their eyes, together with their consciousness,
were retained.
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.
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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.
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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 aeth
er like angels. (Or demons,
depending on the point of view.) There were a few bizarre kinds 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.
The only exception proved out to be a monkey-like species that flew on wing
membranes stretched across the last two fingers. Their advantage was a unique, turbine
like heart, artificially developed during the regime of Qu. No other human flyer in the
galaxy had such an adaptation. The starfish shaped organ sat in the middle of their
chests, directly funneling oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream in a supremely
efficient way. This meant that the Flyers could develop energy-consuming adaptations
such as large brains without having to give up their power of flight.
Not that the flyers were going to reclaim their sentience right away. Instead, they
literally exploded into 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.
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An ancestral Flyer in her native element. Although ungainly, these creatures have an
artificial metabolic advantage that gives them tremendous evolutionary potential.
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Hand Flappers
Some flying posthumans re-approached sentience in an entirely different way.