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.