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 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.
Bug Facers (Descendants of the Insectophagi)
Over time, their insectivorous ancestors came to resemble their prey. Hardened, leathery faceplates, 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 easy ride from there on. Although millennia-long in itself, the development from stone ax 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.