Parasites

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.

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 parasitehost 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.

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.

Lopsiders

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.

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.

Blind Folk

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.

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.

Hand Flappers

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.

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.

Flyers

An ancestral Flyer in her native element. Although ungainly, these creatures have an artificial metabolic advantage that gives them tremendous evolutionary potential.

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.

Colonials

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.

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.

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 medieval civilizations crumbled after a few uneventful millennia.

Temptor

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.

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.

Lizard Herders

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.

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.

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.

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 memoryretainers, 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.

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.

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.

Worms

Two Worm parents with their young.

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.

Man Extinguished

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.

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.

Qu

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

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.

An Early Warning

A reconstruction of Panderavis shows it'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.

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.

The Summer of Man

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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 Colonial 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.

To Mars

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