All Tomorrows: Read online

  they passed through.

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  Worms

  Their world lay under a scorching sun, its intensity made monstrous through the

  interventions of the bygone Qu. The surface lay littered with husks of dead cities, baking

  endlessly like shattered statues in a derelict oven.

  Yet life remained on this unforgiving place. Forests of crystalline “plants”

  blanketed the surface, recycling oxygen for the animal life that teemed underground. One

  such species, barely longer than the arms of their ancestors, was the sole surviving

  vertebrate. Furthermore, it was that planet’s last heir of the star people.

  Distorted beyond recognition by genetic modification, they looked for all the word

  like pale, overgrown worms. Tiny, feeble feet and hands modified for digging were all

  that betrayed their noble heritage. Aside from these organs, all was simplified for the life

  underground. Their eyes were pinpricks, they lacked teeth, external ears and the better

  half of their nervous system.

  The lives of these ersatz people did not extend beyond digging aimlessly. If they

  encountered food, they devoured it. If they encountered others of their kind, they

  sometimes devoured them too. But mostly they mated and multiplied, and managed to

  preserve a single shred of their humanity in their genes. In time, it would do them good.

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  Two Worm parents with their young.

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  Titans

  On the endless savannah of a long-extinguished colonial outpost, enormous beasts

  roamed supreme. More than forty meters long by terrestrial measurements, these

  behemoths were actually the transmuted offspring of the Star People.

  Several features betrayed their human ancestry. They still retained stubby thumbs

  on their elephantine front feet, now useless for any sort of precise manipulation except

  for uprooting trees. They compensated this loss by developing their lower lip into a

  muscular, trunk like organ that echoed the elephants of Earth’s past.

  As bestial as they seemed, the Titans were among the smartest of the reduced

  sub-men that remained in the galaxy. Their hulking stance allowed for a developed brain

  and gradually, sentience re-emerged. With their lip-trunks they fashioned ornate wood

  carvings, erected hangar-like dwellings and even began a form of primitive agriculture.

  With settled life came the inevitable flood of language and literature; myths and legends

  of the bygone, half-remembered past were told in booming voices across the vast plains.

  It was easy to see that, within a few hundred thousand years, Humanity could

  start again with these titanic primitives. Sadly, as a catastrophic ice-age took over the

  Titans’ homeworld the gentle giants disappeared, never to return.

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  Predators and Prey

  Devolved predators were common among humanity’s feral worlds. Most of the

  time they resembled the vampires, werewolves and goblins of bygone lore; hunting

  equally sub-human prey with a combination of derived weaponry. Some had enormous

  heads with large, killing teeth. Others tore their victims apart with talon-like feet. But the

  most common kinds bore modified fingers and thumbs, bristling with razor-sharp claws.

  The most efficient of these predators lived on one of mankind’s first off-world

  colonies. In addition to paw-like hands with switchblade thumbs they also had gaping,

  tooth studded jaws on disproportionate heads with large, sensitive ears. All of these

  served to make them the dominant predators on their home planet.

  They ran the prairies, stalked the forests and ranged through the mountains in

  pursuit of different people; herbivorous saltators with bird-like legs. While their prey

  lapsed into complete animosity, the hunters managed to keep the spark of intelligence

  alive in their evolutionary honing.

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  Mantelopes

  Not all devolved people lapsed into complete bestiality. Some held on to their

  minds, while losing all of their physiological advantages to the genetic meddling of the

  Qu.

  A singular species was a prime exemplar. They had been bred as singers and

  memory-retainers, acting much like living recorders during the reign of Qu. When their

  masters left they barely survived, reverting into a quadrupedal stance and occupying a

  niche as grazing herd animals. This change was so abrupt that the newly evolved

  Mantelopes endured only due to the forgiving sterility of their artificial biosphere.

  The Mantelopes, equipped with full (if slightly numbed) Human minds and

  completely disabled animal bodies, lived agonizing lives. They could see and understand

  the world around them, but due to their bodies they could do nothing to change it. For

  centuries, mournful herds roamed the plains, singing songs of desperation and loss.

  Entire religions and oral traditions were woven around this crippling racial disability, as

  dramatic and detailed as any on bygone Earth.

  Fortunately, the selective forces of evolution made their agony a short-lived one.

  Simply put, a brain was not advantageous to develop if it could not be put into good use.

  A dim-witted, half minded Mantelope grew up faster than a smart one, and grazed just as

  efficiently. The Mantelopes’ animal children overtook them in less than a hundred

  thousand years, and their melancholic world fell silent for good. Nothing was sacred in

  the evolutionary process.

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  Swimmers

  Perhaps because their life cycle involved an aquatic larval stage, the Qu had

  transmuted a large number of their human subjects into a bewildering array of aquatic

  creatures. Taken care of by specially-bred attendants, these post-human water babies

  came in every shape and size imaginable. There were limbless, ribbon like varieties of

  eel-people, huge, whale like behemoths, decorative people who swam by squirting water

  out of their hypertrophied mouths and horrifying multitudes of brainless wallowers that

  served as food stock.

  All of them were perfectly domesticated. All of them went extinct when their

  masters left. All save a few lightly mutated, generalized forms. These swimmers still

  resembled their human ancestors to a large degree; they had no artificial gills, their

  hands were still visible through their front flippers, their feet were splayed affairs that

  functioned like a pair of tail flukes. Recognizably human eyes peeked through their

  blubbery eyelids and they spoke to each other, though not in words and never in sentient

  understanding.

  For millennia they swam the oceans of their ecologically stunted world, feeding on

  diversifying kinds of fish and crustaceans; survivors of the food stock originally imported

  from Earth. With the intervention of the Qu gone, natural selection resumed. The

  swimmers became more streamlined to better catch their fast prey. The prey responded

  by getting even faster, or evolving defensive countermeasures such as armor, spikes or

  poison. Their evolution back on track, the swimmers drifted further and further away

  from their sentient ancestry. They would wait for a long time indeed to taste that

  blessing again.

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  Lizard Herders
r />   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.

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  A lizard herder scans the world with blank eyes as his stock grow stronger and smarter.

  The future does not seem to belong to him.

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  Temptor

  In the Temptors’ case, the remodeling was done with an almost artistic

  enthusiasm. How they managed to survive in their bizarre form was not clear; their

  ancestors were used as sessile decoration and through some miracle of adaptation they

  had endured.

  No human would have recognized them as their descendants. The females were

  beaked cones of flesh some two meters tall, rooted in soil like grotesque carnivorous

  plants. The males on the other hand, resembled contorted, bipedal monkeys. Unlike their

  mates they were perfectly ambulatory; dozens of them ran around the females’ mounds

  like so many imps. Some would gather food, others would clean the females while others

  would stand on guard for danger. Although their actions looked purposeful, the males

  had no will of their own.

  In Temptor society, females controlled everything. Using a combination of vocal

  and phermonal signals, they guided the masculine hordes into any number of menial

  tasks, while mating with the strongest, the most obedient and the dumbest to produce

  even better drones. On certain periods they would also give birth to a few precious

  females, who would be carried away by subservient males to root themselves.

  It was a terribly efficient hegemony that would certainly give rise to civilization in

  a matter of centuries had fate not intervened. As a stray comet obliterated the Temptors’

  mound forests, one of Humanity’s best chances for re-emergence was cruelly swept

  away.

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  A male and female Temptor illustrate the sexual discrepancy that is characteristic to their

  species. Note the female’s elongated, pit-like vagina. When mating, the males descend

  into it like subway commuters.

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  Bone Crusher

  Through the deliberate modifications of Qu and the blind molding of evolution, the

  heavens came to be populated with creatures that would put the myths of their ancestors

  to shame.

  Their ancestors were pint-sized pets of Qu that were bred for the dazzling colors of

  their tooth-derived beaks. When their masters left, most of these pampered creatures

  died, with no one or nothing left to take care of them.

  But some, belonging to the hardiest breeds, survived. In less than a geological

  eyeblink of a few million years, the descendants of such creatures radiated into the

  evolutionary vacuum of their garden world. One lineage led to a profusion of human

  herbivores. These were preyed upon by a variety of enamel-beaked raptors, each evolved

  to deal with a specific prey. Among these generalized niches were entire assemblages of

  specialized animals, resembling anything from ibis-billed swamp sifters to splendorous

  forms with bizarre crests that flared out of their toothy beaks.

  There were even secondarily sentient forms, in the shape of the ogre-like bone

  crushers. To an observer of today they would indeed be the stuff of nightmares; three

  meters tall and hairy, sporting vicious thumb claws and enormous beaks that suited their

  scavenging diet.

  Despite their shortcomings, these corpse eating primitives were one of the first

  species to attain intelligence, and although primitive, a level of civilization. All of this

  proved the fallacy of human prejudice in the posthuman galaxy. A creature could feed on

  putrefying meat, stink like a grave and express its affection by defecating on others, but

  it might as well be your own grandchild and the last hope of mankind.

  In eventuality, however, not even the bone crushers fulfilled this promise. Their

  dependency on carrion for food limited their population severely, and their mediaeval

  civilizations crumbled after a few uneventful millennia.

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  Colonials

  Their world had given the toughest resistance against the Qu onslaught. So tough,

  in fact, that they had turned back two successive waves of the invaders, only to succumb

  to the third.

  The Qu, with their twisted sense of justice, wanted to make them pay. Even

  extinction would be too light a punishment for resisting the star gods. The humans of the

  rogue world needed a sentence that would remind them of their humiliation for

  generations to come.

  So they were made into disembodied cultures of skin and muscle, connected by a

  skimpy network of the most basic nerves. They were employed as living filtering devices,

  subsisting on the waste products of Qu civilization like mats of cancer cells. And just to

  witness and suffer their wretched fate, their eyes, together with their consciousness,

  were retained.

  For forty million years they suffered; generation after generation were born into

  the most miserable of lives while absorbing the pain of all that they were going through.

  When the Qu left, they hoped for a quick extinction. But their lowliness had also

  made them efficient survivors. Unchecked by the Qu, the colonials spread across the

  planet in quilt-like fields of human flesh. After an eternity of tortured lives, the human

  fields tasted something that could almost be described as hope.

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  A section from a Colonial field shows the misery that compromises their entire lives. Note

  that these disorganized creatures can reproduce through both asexual and more familiar

  methods.

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  Flyers

  They were not uncommon at all in the domain of Qu. At least a dozen worlds

  sported human-derived flying species of one kind or another. Most resembled the bats or

  the pterosaurs of the bygone past, dancing through the aeth
er like angels. (Or demons,

  depending on the point of view.) There were a few bizarre kinds relied on swollen gas

  glands for floatation as well.

  Sadly, most of these creatures were already too specialized to be anything but

  flyers. They had forsaken their humanity for the conquest of the sky; they had little

  potential for further radiation beyond their limited roles.

  The only exception proved out to be a monkey-like species that flew on wing

  membranes stretched across the last two fingers. Their advantage was a unique, turbine

  like heart, artificially developed during the regime of Qu. No other human flyer in the

  galaxy had such an adaptation. The starfish shaped organ sat in the middle of their

  chests, directly funneling oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream in a supremely

  efficient way. This meant that the Flyers could develop energy-consuming adaptations

  such as large brains without having to give up their power of flight.

  Not that the flyers were going to reclaim their sentience right away. Instead, they

  literally exploded into skies, filling the heavens with anything from bomber-sized sailors

  to impossibly fast predators that raced with sound. Their world was pristine and there

  were plenty of niches to play in. Intelligence could wait a little more.

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  An ancestral Flyer in her native element. Although ungainly, these creatures have an

  artificial metabolic advantage that gives them tremendous evolutionary potential.

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  Hand Flappers

  Some flying posthumans re-approached sentience in an entirely different way.