All Tomorrows

C. M. Kosemen
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All Tomorrows

This edition is based on the October 2006 version of "All Tomorrows: The Myriad
Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man" by C. M. Kosemen. Minor typos have been
corrected, and small aesthetic changes have been made for consistency.
©2006 C. M. Kosemen

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Contents
To Mars ............................................................................................................ 8
The Martian Americans ............................................................................. 10
Civil War ....................................................................................................... 12
Star People .................................................................................................. 14
Colonization and the Mechanical Oedipi .............................................. 16
The Summer of Man .................................................................................. 17
An Early Warning........................................................................................ 19
Qu .................................................................................................................. 21
Man Extinguished ....................................................................................... 23
Worms ........................................................................................................... 26
Titans............................................................................................................. 28
Predators and Prey .................................................................................... 30
Mantelopes .................................................................................................. 32
Swimmers ..................................................................................................... 34
Lizard Herders ............................................................................................ 36
Temptor ........................................................................................................ 38
Bone Crusher .............................................................................................. 40
Colonials ....................................................................................................... 42
Flyers............................................................................................................. 44
Hand Flappers ............................................................................................ 46
Blind Folk ..................................................................................................... 48
Lopsiders ..................................................................................................... 50
Striders ......................................................................................................... 52
Parasites ....................................................................................................... 54
Finger Fishers ............................................................................................. 56
Hedonists ..................................................................................................... 58
Insectophagi ................................................................................................ 60
Spacers ......................................................................................................... 62
Ruin Haunters ............................................................................................. 64
Sentience Reborn ....................................................................................... 66
Extinction ..................................................................................................... 66
Snake People .............................................................................................. 68
Killer Folk ..................................................................................................... 70
Tool Breeders .............................................................................................. 73
Saurosapients.............................................................................................. 75

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Modular People .......................................................................................... 78
Pterosapiens ................................................................................................ 80
Asymmetric People .................................................................................... 82
Symbiotes .................................................................................................... 85
Sail People ................................................................................................... 88
Satyriacs ....................................................................................................... 90
Bug Facers ................................................................................................... 92
Asteromorphs ............................................................................................. 94
Second Galactic Empire ............................................................................ 96
Gravital ......................................................................................................... 98
Machine Invasion ..................................................................................... 100
When Considering the Invasion ........................................................... 102
Subjects ..................................................................................................... 103
The Other Machines ................................................................................ 106
The Fall of the Machines ....................................................................... 108
The Post War Galaxy ............................................................................... 110
The New Machines .................................................................................. 112
Second Contact........................................................................................ 114
Earth Rediscovered ................................................................................. 115
Return ........................................................................................................ 118
All Tomorrows .......................................................................................... 118

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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.
It had to go step by step. Atmospheric bombardment by genetically-
tailored microbes slowly generated a breathable atmosphere in a
cycle that took centuries. Later, a few cometary fragments were
knocked off-course to bring forth seas, oceans; water. When the wait
was finally over, remnants of Earth’s flora and fauna were introduced
as specially modified Martian remakes.
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 lush, biosynthetic grass.

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A lander ferries the first people to the pre-terraformed eden of Mars.

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The Martian Americans
For several hundred years Mars remained as a backwater; prospering
but still dim compared to the splendor 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 European 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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Civil War
The Martian turnover was expected to occur in two ways; either
through long-term economical 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.
This ideology eventually reached its semi-paranoid, revolutionary
apex. Roughly a thousand years from now, the nations of Mars
banned all non-essential trade and travel with Earth.
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.
Earth had no choice but to reclaim its former privileges, by force if
necessary. Centuries after her political unification, Terra geared up
for war.
Most thinkers (and fantasists) of previous times had imagined
interplanetary war as a glorious, fast paced spectacle of massive
spaceships, one-man fighters and last-minute heroics. No fantasy
could have been further from the truth. War between planets was a
slow, nerve-wracking series of precisely timed decisions that spelled
destruction on biblical scales.
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

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between complicated, autonomous machines programmed to
maximize damage to the other side while trying to last a little longer.
Such a conflict caused horrendous destruction on both sides.
Phobos, one of Mars’ moons, was shattered, and rained down as
meteorite hail. Earth received a polar impact that killed of one third
of its population.
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.

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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, economical 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.
Normally, it would be hard to convince any population to make a
choice between mandatory sterilization and parenting a newfangled
race of superior beings. However, memories of the war were still
painfully fresh, and it was easier to implement these radical
procedures in the wake of such slaughter. Any resistance to the birth
of the new species did not extend beyond meager complaints and
trivial strikes.
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. They were to become the Star People.

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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 lightspeed, 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.
A bizarre problem plagued such attempts. The first generation of
humans to be manufactured sometimes developed a strange
affection for the machines that made them. They rejected their own
kind and perished after the massive identity crisis that followed. This
technological Oedipus complex was not uncommon; nearly half of all
the colony-founding attempts were lost through it.
Even then, however, the remaining half was enough to fill Humanity’s
own spiral arm of the galaxy.

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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 equaled 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.
Not surprisingly, living standards rose to previously unimaginable
levels. While this did not exactly mean a galactic utopia, it was safe
to say that people of the colonized galaxy lived lives in which labor;
both menial and mental, was purely compulsory. Thanks to the
richness of the heavens and the toil of machines, each person had
access to material and cultural wealth greater than that of some
nations today.
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.
Regardless of the theorizing, one question went truly and utterly
unanswered. What would really happen, if mankind ever ran into his
equals or superiors in space?

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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.

An Early Warning
During those times, a small discovery of immense implications
warned humanity that it might not be alone.
On a newly colonized world, engineers had stumbled across the
remains of a puzzling creature, considered so because it had every
hallmark of terrestrial animals on an alien planet. Justifiably named
Panderavis pandora, the colossal fossil belonged to a bird-like
creature with enormous claws. Later research determined it to be a
highly derived therizinosaur, from a lineage of herbivorous dinosaurs
that died out millions of years ago on Earth.
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, fueled at first by mankind’s apparent loneliness in the
heavens, got even more intensified.
Others saw it differently. Panderavis had shown humans that entities;
powerful enough to visit Earth, take animals from there and adapt
them to an alien world, were at large in the galaxy. Considering the
time gulf of the fossil itself, the mysterious beings were millennia
older than humanity when they were capable of such things.
The warning was clear. There was no telling what would happen if
mankind suddenly ran into this civilization. A benevolent contact was
obviously preferred and even expected, but it paid to be prepared.
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.

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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.

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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.
This dogma was rooted in what had been a benevolent attempt to
protect the race from its own power. However, blind, unquestioning
obedience had made monsters of the Qu.
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. However,
humans were not.

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Qu triumphant in the fall of Man. To his left floats a nanotechnological drone, to
the right, a genetically modified tracing creature.

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.
Populated by ersatz humans, now in every guise from wild animals
to pets to genetically modified tools, Qu reigned supreme for forty
million years on the worlds of our galaxy. They erected kilometer-
high monuments and changed the surfaces of entire worlds,
apparently to whim.
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.

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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.
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’ home world 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
They 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.
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.

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 pheromonal 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.

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.

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 aether 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.

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. 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
signaling 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 others’ sexual
availability, so the Hand Flappers did just that; flashing and dancing
their way to oblivion.

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.

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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.
The shelters became home to an entirely different ecology, a realm
of perpetual darkness, fueled by the trickle of water and nutrients
from the world outside. A surprisingly complex ecology developed
on this scant resource; gigantic pale insects; the descendants of
common household pests, competed with Dali-esque birds and
rodents over fields of overgrown fungi. Predators were not
uncommon; almost crocodilian fish patrolled the underground
streams and vast blind bats, echolocating with unnerving precision,
took their toll on the residents of the cave floor. The kilometer-high
ceilings of the shelters glowed in the dark with protean
constellations of bioluminescent fungi, and in some cases, animals.
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.

A startled Blind father with his year-old daughter. Although he knows better 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.

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49
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.
The results of these experiments resembled nightmare sketchings of
Bosch, Dali or Picasso. They looked like cripples squashed between
sheets of glass. Three out of their four limbs had become paddle-like
organs for crawling; only one of their arms remained as spindly tool
of manipulation. This singular, wizened limb also doubled as an extra
sensor, like the antennae of an insect.
Their faces were different horrors altogether. All pretensions of
symmetry; the hallmark of terrestrial animals from jawless fish
onwards, were completely and utterly done away with. One bulging
eye stared directly upward while the other scanned ahead, in the
direction of the creature’s vertically-opening jaws. The ears were
likewise distorted.
Monstrous as they looked, these ex-men thrived in their heavy-
gravity environment. Once again there was the usual explosion of
species into every available niche, and the Lopsiders consolidated
their chances for a renewed sentience.

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.

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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 color in order to reflect
light and keep cool. Overheating was a great problem for their
grotesquely tall, thin bodies.
Although imposing, these Giacomettian wraiths were over-
developed as to be sickeningly fragile. Even on their gravitationally
forgiving world, a fall could shatter their bones, and slipping down
from a branch would prove to be fatal. Sometimes, on the open
plains, even a strong wind could bring them down like the toppling
masts. They survived entirely due to the merciful conditions of their
garden world, which were about to change drastically.
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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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.
In any case, totally single-sided relations were rare in any ecology,
natural or artificial. In millennial cycles, the cousin species’ vicious
parasitism began to give way into something more beneficial for
both sides.

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.

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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.
On this vacant biosphere, evolution was quick to begin her blind,
unpredictable dance. Once feral, the descendants of degenerate
humans adapted themselves to every available niche, no matter how
exotic, how outlandish. One group learnt to pluck fish from the lazy
shores. Millennia passed and they settled more into their piscatorial
lifestyle. Elongated fingers became ambulatory fish-hooks, teeth
modified for a generalized diet became needle-like affairs, lined up
neatly in a long, thin muzzle. In less than a few million years, the
Finger Fishers established themselves as a prominent lineage. There
was scarcely a beach, an island or an estuary that was devoid of their
pale, lanky forms.
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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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 an 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 mankind,
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?

The favorites 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.

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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.
Furthermore, people were forced to change themselves. In an
atmospherically sealed, gravity-free environment, their bones were
left free to grow longer, thinner, spindlier. The circulatory and
digestive systems were pressurized to avoid heart problems and
congestion. The latter change had another advantageous side effect;
humans could navigate through the void with jets of air-expelled
from modified anuses.
Such experiments were numerous, and usually plagued with failure.
Yet they did succeed in creating a future. Sealed tight in their moon
sized, air filled, weightless havens, the descendants of the Star
People managed to evade the scourge of Qu.
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.

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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. They
are also painfully rare; their entire population in the Milky Way Galaxy does not
exceed a few dozen arks and a hundred billion souls.

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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.
With developed minds and unrestricted access to the wisdom of the
ancient cities, the exponential pace of their development was only
natural. One by one they deciphered and built upon the secrets of
the bygone Star People, until they almost equaled their galactic
ancestors in wisdom and skill.
All of this development happened in an unnaturally short period of
time, and sometimes the old technologies were not even understood
as they were blindly replicated. Needless to say, such a pace of
development put premature stresses on the social and political
structures of the Ruin Haunters. They barely survived the five
consecutive world wars that raked their planet, two of which were
thermonuclear exchanges.
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
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.
Sooner or later, human intelligence returned to the cosmos. But
except from their shared ancestry, these new people had nothing in
common with “people” of today, or even each other.

Extinction
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.
There was nothing cruel or dramatic in all of this. Extinction was as
common, and as natural as speciation. Sometimes a species simply
failed to adapt to competition, or the abrupt change of conditions.
In other occasions, their numbers dwindled across imperceptible
gulfs of time. This way or the other, human animals faded out.
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 kilometer-
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

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with their own joys, sorrows and chores, living out lives as human as
any other intelligent beings’.

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 Human Predators
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 saber 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
newfangled 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.
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,

70
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.

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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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 mollusk-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.

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

73
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.
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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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.
In their archaeological efforts, the Sauros began to understand that
the animals they used for food and labor were descended from the
founders of their very existence. And somewhere in the stars lurked
the forces that malformed them, forces greater than the Star People,
dark forces that might someday return. The human animals served
as a remainder, just as Panderavis had, that if the Saurosapients
wanted to assure their continued existence in the cosmos, they had
to be watchful.
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 and acted to

75
face the odds, however great they might be. Conflicts and even wars
were not uncommon between these three factions.
In the end, the centuries-long dispute began to resolve in the
progressive factions’ favor. As they expanded their spheres of
knowledge, influence and activity, the Saurosapients became as
“human” as any other civilization opening up to the galaxy.

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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.
As time passed, they began to organize themselves in differentiated
colonies instead of homogenous mats. In the colonies, each human
“cell” could perform a singular function and benefit from the union
of others. Thus began the great age of organization, during which
different colonies competed with each other by developing
specialized human-cells that would give them an edge in the struggle
for life. Some colonies grew enormous tap-roots that were able to
siphon resources from far away. Others abandoned roots altogether
and began to move themselves on starfish-like foot segments. Some
colonies came up with units equipped with claws and poisons, taking
competition to a brand-new, deadly level. Others responded to the
threat with armor-plating, or watcher-cells equipped with enormous
eyes.
The eventual winner of this Colonial arms race was a sentient colony;
organized around hyperspecialized 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 themselves. The only thing

78
constant in all of their protean existence was their mental and
cultural unity.
Due to their biological structure, these people had managed the
impossible. They were actually living in a world of peace and utopian
equality, where everybody was happy to be parts of greater, united
wholes.

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. There were wonderful
beings, but no sentience came out of the terrestrial sky-beasts.
Instead, civilization flowered in the skies. One species, from a line of
wading, stork-like predators, evolved a brain that was large enough
to imagine and act upon the world. Their feet, already versatile to
catch slippery, swamp-dwelling prey, got even more articulate and
assumed the role of hands. As a compensation they lost some of
their aerial streamlining, but what they could not do with their
bodies, they were more than able to make up with their minds.
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 social welfare, and without dividing up into quarrelsome
factions.
As egalitarian as their life seemed, they paid a stunting, inevitable
price. Their hearts, even in its boosted state, had trouble supporting
their power of flight and grotesquely large brains at the same time.
As a consequence, their species had an ephemeral lifespan. A
Pterosapien was sexually mature at two, middle-aged by sixteen and
usually dead by twenty-three years of our time. This grim cycle

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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.
As a species, the angelic flyers were victims of heart disease.

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
centers 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.
Fortunately, their solar system harbored other planets, similar to the
Lopsider homeworld in almost all respects, all respects except
gravity. But they weren’t willing to let such trivial details stop them.
Throughout their history, humans had always risked changing
themselves to preserve their future. It was a risky gamble, but it had
paid off since the days of the Martian-Americans. But re-engineering
the flattened Lopsider body for a benign gravity was a monumental
task indeed. Suffice it say that the experiments took millennia to
achieve even limited success. After countless attempts, the
Asymmetric People were born, or rather made. 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.
Their social development also parallelled that of the bygone Martian-
Americans. Once again there was a golden age, followed by
increasing tensions and interplanetary war. But unlike the Martians,
the Asymmetrics ruthlessly exterminated their parent race and went
on to rule the solar system alone. On the way, they stumbled across

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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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84
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.

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.
A great “arms race” of symbiotic relationships thus commenced.
Certain ‘parasites’ offered their hosts larger eyes, others sharper
senses of smell, hearing or even additional defensive weapons in the
shape of venomous saliva, malodorant sprays or an extra bite. The
hosts returned the favor with longer running legs, stronger bodies,
and specialized, ergonomic nesting sites rich in blood vessels and
covered in insulating fur. Different complexes of parasite and host
species evolved, compatible only amongst themselves.
The development of such creatures was in a way reminiscent of the
great Modular colonies, thriving on their own world light-years away.
But unlike the Modulars, the components of the Symbiotes belonged
to different species, instead of modified variations of the same basic
organism. In eventuality, both relationships led to the same point:
Sentience.
In the secluded forests of a certain continent, a new parasitic species
developed. They did not have the ballistic poison sprays, infectious
stings or the grossly hypertrophied arm-claws of their relatives.
Instead, these parasites offered a simpler bargain; an ability to think
in return of total submission. Initially this relationship was more like
a horse and its rider, but after a few hundred thousand years the

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Symbiotes could manipulate their hosts like puppets through a
combination of tactile and olfactory signals.
A few more millennia and these combined beings developed an
order not unlike our own, complete with countries, politics and even
war, albeit reduced in the newly globalizing world-culture. In this age
technology filled 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.
And perhaps, on the olfactory television, he would smell news of the
excavations of the million-year-old Qu ruins, of the marvelous
discoveries salvaged from the Star Men wrecks, or of the enormous
radio arrays that rose everywhere to listen to the stars.
It was a pattern that was being repeated all over.

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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87
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.

A Sailor goes hunting with his harpoon-wielding companion in the background.

Extremely violent by nature, these people frequently resort to savage hunting
campaigns to quell their bloodlust in modern life. Notice their tongue-derived
‘hands,’ and the accompanying flying creature, actually one of the Sail Peoples’
distant cousins.

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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.
From this point on, the Satyriac world once again became a Valhalla
of pleasure, with festivals, concerts and ritualized orgies punctuating

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every working week. This time, however, it could all be savored 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 defense 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 all downhill from there onwards. 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 endeavors, 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.
They faced another alien invasion.
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-species xenophobia, to the
point that they were fearful even of their post-human cousins on
other stars.

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Through an ironic twist of fate, their fears would be more than
justified, though not just yet. The Bug Facers still had time.

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 artifact 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.
Strangely enough, its dominion included none of the newly emerging
post-human species, for its masters had completely lost interest in
planets; those stunting, gravity-chained balls of dirt and ice. The

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newborn arks settled 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. But luckily for them, the godlike beings were not

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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.
The infernal conditions of the solar expansion meant that a biological
reconstruction was totally out of the question. Thus, the Haunters
replaced their bodies with machines; floating spheres of metal that
moved and molded their environment through subtle manipulations
of gravity fields. In earlier versions the spheres still cradled the
organic brains of the last Haunters. But in successive generations,
ways of containing the mind within quantum computers were
devised, and the transformation became absolute. The Ruin Haunters
were replaced by the completely mechanical Gravital.
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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99
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 their 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.
The great dyings, all of which occurred in a relatively quick, ten-
thousand-year period, stretched the boundaries of genocide and
horror. Almost all of the new human species; unique beings who had
endured mass extinctions, navigated evolutionary knife-edges and
survived to build worlds of their own, vanished without a trace.
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.

 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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101
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,
as mentioned before, a simple inability to understand their right to
live.
Furthermore, the Gravital did not constitute a singular, indivisible
whole whose entire purpose was to wreck the universe. True, their
technological advancement had allowed them to form a pan-galactic
entity, but within itself the Machine Empire was divided into political
factions, and even religious faiths. Superimposed over these fault
lines were the daily lives and personal affairs of families and
individuals. Like any sentient being, they had a sense of identity and
thus, differing agendas.
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,

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and as would be seen, even preserved some of its organic
predecessors.

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.
Thus, multitudes of Subjects were produced, distorted to such an
extent that even the meddling of the Qu seemed comparatively timid.
Most of them were used as servants, caretakers and manual laborers.
These were the lucky forms. Some sub-men were reduced to the level
of cell cultures, useful only for gas exchange and waste filtering.
Others were molded into completely artificial ecologies; baroque
simulations that served only as entertainment. Some machines, with
their still-human ambitions, took this practice into a new level and

103
produced living works of art; doomed, one-off creatures who existed
purely as biological anachronisms.
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; a 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.

105
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.
Some Machines, over a process involving several religious, social and
philosophical doctrines, began to comprehend the universality of life,
and the common origin of organic and mechanical humanities.
Initially such individuals lived in seclusion or withheld their beliefs
from the world. They secretly engineered lineages of Subjects that
could live, move and think as freely as they could. In a few
memorable instances the engineers fell in love with their creations,
and their martyrdom inspired other Machines to think just a little
differently.
Eventually, the ideology gained enough momentum to be practiced
openly in everyday life. However, the sect of Toleration soon ran into
odds with their hardline, pan-mechanical rivals. The seething
intolerance between the two factions finally broke free when some
Tolerant Machines wanted to set several worlds aside for the
unrestricted development of biological life. All hell broke loose and
the Machine Empire; the apparently seamless monolith of the galaxy,
experienced its first short, bitter civil war.
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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107
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.
It is unnecessary and nearly impossible to describe the carnage that
followed. The conflicts lasted anywhere up to a few million years, and
the resulting loss of life (both mechanical and organic) made the
initial Machine Genocide seem irrelevant.
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 and limitless patience, these

108
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.
With the Machines gone, it was up to the Asteromorphs to clean up
after them. They took up the Subjects and used their genetic heritage
to populate entire planets. During this age of reconstruction, which
lasted for another two million years, many Asteromorph world
builders emerged as true Gods, creating inhabited worlds almost out
of scratch. Their Subjects, meanwhile, became the inheritors of a truly
new, war-torn Phoenix of a Galaxy.

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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.
These beings, known often as the Terrestrial Spacers or simply the
Terrestrials, nurtured and controlled the development of the post-
war civilizations on many planets. They acted as caretakers,
prophets, kings and emperors, but also as grim reapers as the
occasion dictated.
The endeavor did not always proceed as smoothly as planned, of
course. Most of the time the newborn races refused to heed their
mentors and in several cases even rebelled against them. Needless
to say, this crime was always punished with a swift extinction.
Furthermore, even the Terrestrials grew corrupted. Instead of
offering guidance, Terrestrials on many planets simply played god,
weaving contrived religions around themselves to shamelessly
exploit their subjects. It was not ethical or even productive, but this
method seemed to guarantee more stability than actually trying to
bring up the new races.
This way or another, organic sentience reclaimed its dominance in
the galaxy. The New Empire; managed by Terrestrials, populated by
a myriad descendants of the Subjects, and overseen ultimately by
the omniscient Asteromorphs, achieved greater progress and a
longer-lasting calm in the galaxy than all of its predecessors
combined.

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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.

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.
Unlike their ancestors, the New Machines were endowed with
nanotechnological bodies that could remodel themselves
continuously, which meant that they could come in every shape and
size imaginable, and then some that could not. A machine citizen
could live for some time in the void of the space, conducting
research, and then transform into a completely different body plan
for a holiday on a cometary halo, tropical jungle or a methane ocean.
He or she would also make the trip personally by growing temporary
hyperdrives and ramjet engines!
Despite their breathtaking versatility, the Machines were never as
common or prominent, even after completely accepting their role as
lowly citizens of the New Empire. The greatest wars in conceivable

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history had ingrained the organics with too deep a mistrust of their
mechanical neighbors, and the New Machines were always treated
with a degree of discrimination. The sins of their fathers had come
to shackle this most splendorous of all human species.

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.
The discovery was eventually made. One of the neighboring galaxies
was showing patterns of activity that were the unmistakable signs of
a sentient organization. Some thinkers reviled in the discovery of a
new civilization, while others feared a return of the Qu. Fortunately,
this second encounter with an alien species proved to be a peaceful
one. Perhaps the intelligences of both galaxies were finally mature
enough to meet without quarreling.
The other Galaxy was dominated by connected unions of different
beings, presided over by various kinds of Amphicephali; bizarre
creatures that resembled giant snakes with heads on both ends, one
of which bore a secondary, retractile body that they would use to
interact with the world. Apparently, they had undergone alternating
series of regressions, evolutionary radiations and self-imposed
genetic makeovers, just as humanity had.
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.

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.
For a time, all men were gods.
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

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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.
It was made quietly, by a singular researcher combing the vestiges
of forgotten history, decade after decade. Millions of years of wars,
invasions and extinctions had buried the evidence thoroughly and
comprehensively. When she finally came across irrefutable evidence,
nobody was around to celebrate. That would come later.

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
centers 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. Mankind was back
home.

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.
Why did they disappear? Perhaps it was a final, unimaginable war of
annihilation, one that transcended the very meaning of “conflict”.
Perhaps it was a gradual break-up of the united galaxies, and every
race facing their private end slowly afterwards. Or perhaps, the
wildest theories suggest, it was a mass migration to another plane
of existence. A journey into somewhere, sometime, something else.
But the bottom line is; we honestly don’t know.
Ultimately, however, what happened to Humanity does not matter.
Like every other story, it was a temporary one; indeed long but
ultimately ephemeral. It did not have a coherent ending, but then
again it did not need to. The tale of Humanity was never its ultimate

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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 it came across.
Later on the Gravital, with their insane desire to recreate the past,
created the biggest 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 ultimates,
ideals, climaxes and golden ages. In blindly thinking that their stories
serve absolute ends, such creatures almost always end up harming
themselves, if not those around them.
To those like them; look at the story of Man, and come to your
senses! It is not the destination, but the trip that matters, and 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 skull.

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All Tomorrows follows humanity as our species spreads to the stars, encounters a
mysterious, hostile race, and is scattered across thousands of worlds as animal-
like, post-human beings. In the summer of 2021, All Tomorrows was
"rediscovered" thanks to a popular video dramatization on YouTube and has since
enjoyed a surge in popularity.
Watch an animation compilation on YouTube

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