Return ................................................................................................ 108
All Tomorrows ................................................................................. 110
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.
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.
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 energyconsuming 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.
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.
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.