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?
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.
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.
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 billionyear-old foes, save for a few flashes of ephemeral resistance.
Humanity, once the ruler of the stars, was now extinct. However, humans were not.
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 worlds, descendants of people actually managed to survive.
In them lay the fate of the species, now divided and differentiated beyond recognition.
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.
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.