Sail People (Descendants of the Finger Fishers)

A Sailor goes hunting with his harpoon-wielding companion in the background. Extremely violent by nature, these people frequently resort to savage hunting campaigns to quell their bloodlust in modern life. Notice their tongue-derived "hands," and the accompanying flying creature, actually one of the Sail Peoples' distant cousins.

The Finger Fishers were already among the most divergent of the post-human races. With harpoon-like digits and almost crocodilian muzzles, they looked nothing like their parental stock. But even this form would look conservative to their sentient descendants. With many small, scattered islands, isolated sub-continents and differentiated niches, their homeworld was an evolutionary cauldron where isolated members of certain species could, under the right circumstances, evolve into wildly different forms. This condition was similar to the island-realms of Madagascar, Galapagos, or Hawaii on old Earth, except that this time, it was on a global scale.

Some descendants of the Fishers, trapped on lonely islands, grew smaller and developed their fishing claws into graceful wings. Others took directly to the sea and became the analogues of whales, dolphins and mosasaurs. Within this evolutionary bubbling, one particular lineage gave rise to the ancestral Sail People.

They too elongated their fingers into wings, but these were not used for flight. Instead, they became sails that drove them effortlessly across the oceans. With fingers turned into sails, they used their mouths and extended tongues to catch their pelagic prey. These organs eventually assumed the role of the Fishers' long atrophied, dexterous hands. The need to better navigate the endless seas put an inevitable pressure on their memories, and the Sailors' brains grew correspondingly. It was only a matter of time until one of these navigators became smart enough to think.

Even when sentient, the Sail People still needed a long time to achieve any sort of social stability. Their scattered world made for a tremendous diversity of cultures, which competed and fought just as resiliently. Across generations, untold flotillas of tribal warriors battled each other in epoch-spanning, pointless conflicts. Nomadic warriors and pirate societies inevitably came into being, prolonging the uncontrollable cycle of violence.

Only when a certain warrior tribe developed warfare on an industrial scale, and the state society needed to support it, and then, only when this notion of modernity gave rise to an idea of peace did the Sail People finally manage to unify. Generations of blood had stained the oceans for far too long.

Symbiotes (Descendants of the Parasites)

A Symbiote poses on one of his several hosts. In the background can be seen some of their rural housing, with man-sized doors for the mindless hosts, and the smaller holes for their intelligent patrons.

As time passed, the relationships between the parasites and their hosts got connected to such a degree that it began to involve a co-operation of the individuals. These were no longer single-sided relationships; in exchange for the hosts' nutritious blood, the parasites offered their heightened senses as early warning against predators and other hazards.

A great "arms race" of symbiotic relationships thus commenced. Certain "parasites" offered their hosts larger eyes, others sharper senses of smell, hearing or even additional defensive weapons in the shape of venomous saliva, malodorant sprays or an extra bite. The hosts returned the favor with longer running legs, stronger bodies, and specialized, ergonomic nesting sites rich in blood vessels and covered in insulating fur. Different complexes of parasite and host species evolved, compatible only amongst themselves.

The development of such creatures was in a way reminiscent of the great Modular colonies, thriving on their own world light-years away. But unlike the Modulars, the components of the Symbiotes belonged to different species, instead of modified variations of the same basic organism. In eventuality, both relationships led to the same point: Sentience.

In the secluded forests of a certain continent, a new parasitic species developed. They did not have the ballistic poison sprays, infectious stings or the grossly hypertrophied arm-claws of their relatives. Instead, these parasites offered a simpler bargain; an ability to think in return of total submission. Initially this relationship was more like a horse and its rider, but after a few hundred thousand years the Symbiotes could manipulate their hosts like puppets through a combination of tactile and olfactory signals.

A few more millennia and these combined beings developed an order not unlike our own, complete with countries, politics and even war, albeit reduced in the newly globalizing world-culture. In this age technology filled most functions of the hosts, but a thriving husbandry of these creatures still remained due to tradition and simple efficiency. An average Symbiote would begin the day on his business host, and move onto a more comfortable domestic one when he returned home after work.

And perhaps, on the olfactory television, he would smell news of the excavations of the million-year-old Qu ruins, of the marvelous discoveries salvaged from the Star Men wrecks, or of the enormous radio arrays that rose everywhere to listen to the stars.

It was a pattern that was being repeated all over.

Asymmetric People (Descendants of the Lopsiders)

An Asymmetric nobleman poses nude to reveal his bizarre anatomy. Normally, these creatures dress up in elaborate garments that resemble heaps of interconnected, enlarged stockings.

Although contorted by gravity, the Lopsiders managed to regain their sentience, and develop a civilization in a short few million years. Squat, pancake-like buildings spread all over their planet. These constructs looked like squashed bunkers, and they were never more than a few meters high. They did not seem like much, but such structures were entrances to underground homes, schools, hospitals, temples, universities but also embassies, prisons, asylums, command centers and arsenals. They lived strange lives, but the Lopsiders were human in all of their virtues and evils. Thus, it was only natural for them to expand outwards and look for new frontiers to colonize. Fortunately, their solar system harbored other planets, similar to the Lopsider homeworld in almost all respects, all respects except gravity. But they weren't willing to let such trivial details stop them.

Throughout their history, humans had always risked changing themselves to preserve their future. It was a risky gamble, but it had paid off since the days of the Martian-Americans. But reengineering the flattened Lopsider body for a benign gravity was a monumental task indeed. Suffice it say that the experiments took millennia to achieve even limited success. After countless attempts, the Asymmetric People were born, or rather made. Their bodies were changed considerably; what had been shovel-like toes to slither through the high-gravity dirt had become centipedal legs, and the singular, grasping hand was elongated to an extreme degree. Their grotesque faces had been inverted and turned upside-down after reverting from a flounder-like existence. Twisted as they were, members of this new race enjoyed tremendous advantages over their flattened forefathers.

Their social development also parallelled that of the bygone Martian-Americans. Once again there was a golden age, followed by increasing tensions and interplanetary war. But unlike the Martians, the Asymmetrics ruthlessly exterminated their parent race and went on to rule the solar system alone. On the way, they stumbled across the remains of the Qu and the Star People and advanced immensely. Triumphant on their own realm, they turned to the heavens for further exploits.

Pterosapiens (Descendants of the Flyers)

A Pterosapien poses by the bizarre buildings of a seaside resort. At ten days long, this will be the only holiday in her ephemeral life.

The flyers' supercharged hearts had given them an evolutionary winning hand, and they diversified to fill up the heavens. It was only a time before the competition in the skies got too intense, even for their souped-up metabolisms.

Some lineages gave up their wings and returned to the ground, living as differing sorts of predators, herbivores and even swimmers. Their aerial adaptations gave them an edge on the ground and they produced forms of stupendous size and agility. There were wonderful beings, but no sentience came out of the terrestrial sky-beasts. Instead, civilization flowered in the skies. One species, from a line of wading, stork-like predators, evolved a brain that was large enough to imagine and act upon the world. Their feet, already versatile to catch slippery, swamp-dwelling prey, got even more articulate and assumed the role of hands. As a compensation they lost some of their aerial streamlining, but what they could not do with their bodies, they were more than able to make up with their minds.

Their power of flight made the Pterosapiens a global folk, before they could invent nations and borders. With such an inherent ease of travel, ideas and individuals diffused too fast for social differences to ossify. Acting with a planetary awareness, they farmed their gigantic, terrestrial relatives, raised cities of perches and fluting towers, harnessed the atom and began to gaze up to the stars, without having to compensate (too much) from the average individual's welfare, and without dividing up into quarrelsome factions.

As egalitarian as their life seemed, they paid a stunting, inevitable price. Their hearts, even in their boosted state, had trouble supporting their power of flight and grotesquely large brains at the same time. As a consequence, they had an ephemeral lifespan. A Pterosapien was sexually mature at two, middle-aged by sixteen and usually dead by twenty-three years of our time. This grim cycle caused them to appreciate every moment of their existence dearly, and they pondered upon it with feverish intensity. A shelf of scrolls by Pterosapien philosophers would've been the envy of every human library. In their cities, life blazed away with unreal speed, rushing past to meet fleeting deadlines.

As a species, the angelic flyers were victims of heart disease.

Modular People (Descendants of the Colonials)

A modular colony treats a specialized digester unit with sprays of anti-ulcer medication produced by the medical drone held in its "hands". Note the differing segments, each of them mutated human beings in themselves.

The blind workings of evolution followed the unlikeliest paths, made use of the most fleeting opportunities. The very existence of the Modular People was testimony to this fact. Their ancestors, the Colonials, would've been seen as hopeless cripples by almost any observer; they lacked coherent organs and their existence was limited to carpeting water shores like mats of algae. But as degenerate as they were, the Colonials were resilient survivors, able to hold on to life in the harshest of conditions.

As time passed, they began to organize themselves in differentiated colonies instead of homogenous mats. In the colonies, each human "cell" could perform a singular function and benefit from the union of others. Thus began the great age of organization, during which different colonies competed with each other by developing specialized human-cells that would give them an edge in the struggle for life. Some colonies grew enormous tap-roots that were able to siphon resources from far away. Others abandoned roots altogether and began to move themselves on starfish-like foot segments. Some colonies came up with units equipped with claws and poisons, taking competition to a brand-new, deadly level. Others responded to the threat with armor-plating, or watcher-cells equipped with enormous eyes.

The eventual winner of this Colonial arms race was a sentient colony; organized around hyperspecialized units whose entire purpose was to direct the others. These colonies spread around the planet as they adapted the parts of their rivals to function within themselves. Thus were the Modular People born.

Living in fully-industrialized megalopoli, they came in an indescribable variation of shapes and sizes. Anything from castle-like guardian forests to diminutive, scuttling couriers was a member of the Modular whole. They could combine with each other and split up, or exchange parts as needs presented themselves. The only thing constant in all of their protean existence was their mental and cultural unity.

Due to their biological structure, these people had managed the impossible. They were actually living in a world of peace and utopian equality, where everybody was happy to be parts of greater, united wholes.

Saurosapients (Descendants of the Lizard Herders)

One of humanity's eventual inheritors was not even human. They came from the reptilian stock that had proliferated during the demise of the Lizard Herders.

Theirs was a true case of a world turned upside down. As the humans degenerated into witless animals, the cold-blooded reptiles prospered in the tropical climate of their planet. Millennia passed and they began to produce increasingly smarter forms, one of which, distantly resembling featherless versions of the predatory dinosaurs of the past, actually crossed over the threshold of sentience and built up a series civilizations.

These fledgling cultures were quick to understand the true origin of the monstrous ruins littering their planet, ruins that until then had been considered natural aberrations or timeless memorabilia of gods. Now, however, they saw the intermingled ruins of the Qu and the Star People for what they really were. It was through this understanding that the biologically unrelated Sauros' took up the cultural identity of humanity.

In their archaeological efforts, the Sauros began to understand that the animals they used for food and labor were descended from the founders of their very existence. And somewhere in the stars lurked the forces that malformed them, forces greater than the Star People, dark forces that might someday return. The human animals served as a remainder, just as Panderavis had, that if the Saurosapients wanted to assure their continued existence in the cosmos, they had to be watchful.

The pressure of such a reality put their cultures under enormous stress. Some factions turned to made-up religions and remained ignorant under an umbrella of comforting fantasies. Others acknowledged the threats of the galaxy, but reverted to a paranoid rhetoric of conservationism. The galaxy had scared them greatly. Finally, there were those who saw the galactic redoubt and acted to face the odds, however great they might be. Conflicts and even wars were not uncommon between these three factions.

In the end, the centuries-long dispute began to resolve in the progressive factions' favor. As they expanded their spheres of knowledge, influence and activity, the Saurosapients became as "human" as any other civilization opening up to the galaxy.

Tool Breeders (Descendants of the Swimmers)

A Breeder huntress on a garden reef. Living tools are an indispensable part of these beings' daily lives; she manages to breathe underwater through an oxygen-filtering crustacean fitted over her blowhole. She holds a mollusk-derived rifle that shoots out specially-modified fish teeth, and her companion is a brain-augmented fish that has been hardwired to return kills. Buildings made from calcified shells glitter in the background, ablaze with bioluminescence.

They used to be simple creatures, descendants of a battered people that had taken to the sea. Their remote sapiens ancestors would have given such beings no chance of a sentient comeback, for they thought that technological advances were impossible in the fluid medium of the oceans. But the Swimmers disproved such predictions by founding one of the most advanced and most outrageously alien cultures of the entire human lineage.

Fire, the cornerstone of industrial engineering, was almost impossible to sustain and use underwater. But the Breeders simply choose another path when complex toolmaking proved impracticable. They began to breed their tools and machines for them.

It had started long before the species was even intelligent. In the endless variety of life in the seas, the Swimmers always adopted and controlled the organisms that were useful in some way. Once domesticated, these creatures were willingly or unintentionally modified through artificial selection and conditioning. The process was slow, but once underway, its effects were formidable.

A modern city of the Breeders was a sight to behold. Huge, heart-like creatures pumped out nutritious fluids to a network of self-repairing, living conduits. This was their equivalent of a power grid, and it reached every single one of the Breeders' huge, exoskeletal dwellings; "powering" bioluminescent lights, flickering cephalopod skin-televisions, medicinal sea-squirts and countless other devices that had been bred from living creatures. The advances in biology had risen exponentially, until genetic engineering was completely mastered. Modern Breeders did not even need to use animals; a simple manipulation of cultured tissues and stem-cells could give solutions to any problem at hand.

The mastery of genetics had conquered many obstacles. The yawning ocean depths, as well as the Planet's few tiny landmasses were now firmly within the Breeders' grasp. However, they were not contempt with mere planetary dreams. New forms and bizarre creatures were still being developed, in daring attempts to conquer the one realm that was most hostile to life.

Sealed in their living ships, the Breeders wished to return to the stars.

Killer Folk (Descendants of the Human Predators)

A young male Killer tours one of the myriad ruined fortresses in his country, testimony of their species' bloody, protean history. The planet of the Killer Folk is an archaeologists' paradise. It has more buried dark ages, ruined cultures and fallen kingdoms than any other world.

The carnivores also rebounded into civilization. Their journey involved a series of changes during which they lost the adaptations that had allowed them to endure as the top predators of their world. The saber teeth, once used for slashing through sinew and trachea, became fragile and thin, useful only as organs of social display. The hook-like thumb claws were also reduced, but not deleted. In their place, the last two digits rotated perpendicularly to become newfangled graspers. All this gracility, however, did not mean weakness. Although they were no longer specialized for hunting, the Killer Folk could still kill with their bare hands, but only if they really wanted to. What enormous claws and teeth could not do, they could easily achieve with bow, arrow, flintlock repeater or gas rifle.

Their descent from predators gave the Killer Folk a unique social profile. Almost all of their religions had rituals allowing for periods of completely natural, animalistic hunts and duels. This necessity of venting these atavistic urges also led to the formation of religious "hunter nobilities"; privileged warriors who were skilled in the arts of hunting, war and murder. Entire societies were assembled underneath these ruling classes; orderly communities that erupted once every year into an orgy of death, sex, and prayer. For thousands of years nomadic warriors, together with their vast herds of once-human livestock, chased and battled each other across a chessboard of continents.

All of this chaos was to be swept apart with the advent of modernity. In a development comparable to an industrial revolution, one nation-pack of Killers devised methods of settled, intensive factory farming. Organized state structure, secularism and technological leap-frogging were quick to follow.

Needless to say, such developments polarized the world into bands of progressive, developed "factory herders" and increasingly fanatical "hunting states." While one side condemned their old, animal ways, the other side embraced them with blind zealotry. This was their crisis of modernity; the balkanization of the progressive and conservative factions on the road to global unity. Fortunately, the Killers managed to pull themselves through, even after drifting dangerously close to global conflict at certain points.

Snake People (Descendants of the Worms)

A Snake person at home, enjoying a book while smoking and "listening" to vibrational ground-music. Through the open door can be seen the chaotic tangle of the city.

The scorching sun eventually cooled down, and life flooded back to the surface from her subterranean stronghold. As animals of all kinds exploded into the terrestrial niches that had been left vacant for millennia, so did the descendants of the worms. On the surface, they found new opportunities as entire assemblages of serpentine grazers, swimmers, predators-

-and people. One form, descended from tree-climbing mammalian snakes, re-evolved the human intelligence that had lain dormant for so long. They observed, contemplated and philosophized with novel, spirally coiled brains and handled the world with a singular pelvic "hand", borne out from the remnants of their ancestors' feet.

They looked nothing at all like their distant human ancestors, but their social development followed a similar path; several agricultural world empires, followed by industrial revolutions, social experiments, world wars, civil wars and globalization. But then again, socio-political parallelism in history did not necessarily imply a similar, or even recognizably human world.

Modern cities of the global Snake world were tangles of pipe like "roads", branching, three dimensional railroads and windowless, hole-like buildings. Though their knotted architecture differed from region to region, these settlements generally looked like kilometer-wide balls of glass, metal, plastic and cloth, wrapped so tightly that a human of today would find it impossible to move inside them. Plazas and open areas were totally absent, as they presented navigational obstacles and areas of insecurity. Their evolutionary background in the trees had made the Snake People into borderline agoraphobes.

None of these, of course, was unusual to the Snakes in any way. Their relatively "alien" lifestyle was as particular to them as ours is to us. All across their world, the arterial cities throbbed with people, each with their own joys, sorrows and chores, living out lives as human as any other intelligent beings'.

Extinction

The fossil of an extinct, aquatic human from a forgotten colony world. Unbeknownst to the universe, his kind adapted, flourished and died out soon after the Qu retreat. His tale serves to tell us that all that is alive will inevitably perish, and it is the journey, not the conclusion that matters.

Not all human animals made it through. In fact, it must be realized that the majority of post-Qu humans died out during the eras of transition. Extinction, the utter and absolute death of an entire family, entire community, entire species, was rampant in the galaxy.

There was nothing cruel or dramatic in all of this. Extinction was as common, and as natural as speciation. Sometimes a species simply failed to adapt to competition, or the abrupt change of conditions. In other occasions, their numbers dwindled across imperceptible gulfs of time. This way or the other, human animals faded out.

In all of this death, however, there was new life. As one species vacated a certain niche, others would soon step in to take its place. Adaptive radiations would follow, filling in the blanks with myriads of diverse and varied forms. Despite the fallen, the flow of life would proceed, blazing in constant turnover.

Sentience Reborn

If any sort of periodical arrangement can be brought to the history of mankind, the post-Qu era of emerging human animals can be likened to a series of millennial dark ages. However, like any "dark age" situation, these periods of silence had finite life spans. One by one, like stars emerging from the fog, new civilizations were born out of the shattered remnants of mankind.
In some rare cases, the recovery was swift and straightforward. In most other situations, it came only after a lengthy series of adaptive radiations, extinctions and secondary diversifications.

Within these lines of descent, there was as much distance between the initial post-humans and their intelligent descendants as between the first Cretaceous fuzzballs and Homo sapiens.

Sooner or later, human intelligence returned to the cosmos. But except from their shared ancestry, these new people had nothing in common with "people" of today, or even each other.

Ruin Haunters

Only a thousand years after the Qu departure, a Ruin Haunter wanders among the shattered remains of a city of the Star People. The dominating form of an even greater Qu pyramid can be seen in the background.

A particular human species, singled out by its lucky access to the heritage of its stellar ancestors, would eventually get to play a leading role in the shape of things to come.

They had gotten through the Qu invasion with relatively little degradation; yes, they had been reduced to the level of apes, but their recovery had been quick. Apparently, the Qu had not worked as hard at suppressing their intelligence. Nor had they made a comparable effort to wipe away the material traces of the Star Men. Even after millions of years, enormous ruins of the global urban spaces littered the continents of their world. Thus did the Ruin Haunters earn their names.

With developed minds and unrestricted access to the wisdom of the ancient cities, the exponential pace of their development was only natural. One by one they deciphered and built upon the secrets of the bygone Star People, until they almost equaled their galactic ancestors in wisdom and skill.

All of this development happened in an unnaturally short period of time, and sometimes the old technologies were not even understood as they were blindly replicated. Needless to say, such a pace of development put premature stresses on the social and political structures of the Ruin Haunters. They barely survived the five consecutive world wars that raked their planet, two of which were thermonuclear exchanges.

They made it through, their baptism with fire had hardened and awakened them. The wars united them politically and pushed their technological capabilities even beyond the level of the Star Men. Co-incidentally, they also developed a dangerous form of autochthonous madness. The Ruin Haunters had come to believe that they were the sole descendants and the true heirs of the Star People. And they were ready and willing to do anything in order to claim their fictitious, bygone Golden Age.
Only a thousand years after the Qu departure, a Ruin Haunter wanders among the shattered remains of a city of the Star People. The dominating form of an even greater Qu pyramid can be seen in the background.

Spacers

Forty million years from today, Spacers like this individual are the only truly sentient human beings that survive. They are so comfortable in their weightless refuges that the fates of their bestial cousins elsewhere do not concern them. They are also painfully rare; their entire population in the Milky Way Galaxy does not exceed a few dozen arks and a hundred billion souls.

It must be remembered that the Star People did not succumb entirely to the Qu invasions. While their worlds fell away one by one, some Star People took refuge in the void of space. One after another, entire communities scrambled into generation ships and cast themselves off into the darkness, hoping to go unnoticed by the beings that had overrun their galaxy.

Desperate times made for desperate measures. As the Star Men had observed during their initial colonization of the galaxy, life in generation ships inevitably lead to mass insanity and anarchy. This time however, humans had to adapt themselves -or face extinction.

Entire asteroid fields were confiscated and hollowed out to make space-ships of unseen size. These hollow shells cradled bubbles of precious air and water, but no artificial gravity of any kind. It was discovered that a purely ethereal existence would ease the stress of interstellar exhile, provided that its inhabitants were adapted for life inside such an environment.

Furthermore, people were forced to change themselves. In an atmospherically sealed, gravityfree environment, their bones were left free to grow longer, thinner, spindlier. The circulatory and digestive systems were pressurized to avoid heart problems and congestion. The latter change had another advantageous side effect; humans could navigate through the void with jets of air - expelled from modified anuses.

Such experiments were numerous, and usually plagued with failure. Yet they did succeed in creating a future. Sealed tight in their moon sized, air filled, weightless havens, the descendants of the Star People managed to evade the scourge of Qu.

It was an endless diaspora. Even after the Qu left, they would find themselves too divergent to have anything to do with their ancestral lifestyles. The survivors of the initial hurdle would never set foot on a planet again.

Insectophagi

Nondescript, quaint human species abounded in the post-Qu galaxy. Hundreds of them lived out simple, unnoticed lives, never developing to become sentient, never learning their true heritage as star-born human beings. Most of them went extinct, not to be missed or even remembered. Those that lingered on managed to survive in shady, quiet niches, never again making any impact on the celestial scheme of things.

One such species was the Insectophagi. They had quietly adapted themselves for a diet of colonial insects and small animals; they had faces covered with leathery plates, claw-like hands to dig out prey and worm-like tongues to scoop them up.

All in all, they weren't special in any particular way. But a combination of galactic invasions, coincidence and pure luck would later make them the longest-enduring of all ur-starmen.

The meek would inherit the cosmos, though not just yet. For now, the Insectophagi were concerned only with the location of insect colonies, and the onset of the mating season.

Hedonists

The favorites of the Qu. A female Hedonist lies alone on a beach, contemplating absolutely nothing. Without any pressure from the world, their days make themselves as they go along.

Even the blissful existence of the Finger Fishers would have seemed bothersome to the Hedonists; for their kind was not evolved, but designed for a life of pleasure. The Qu had kept them as pampered pets; set loose in a tropical island-world of succulent fruits, bountiful trees and calm, lapping lakes full of sweet, bacterial manna. Furthermore, the Hedonists were left as the only animal life on this place. They had no choice but to enjoy it to the fullest.

In normal conditions, any given species would quickly crowd out such an utopian environment. But normal conditions had never been the point of the Qu redesign. They had altered their subjects so that they could conceive only after mating an enormous number of potential suitors, continually over a period of decades. While this took care of the population problem, it also made the species less adaptable. Without any point in sexual competition, natural selection would progress only at a glacial pace. Fortunately, their stable microcosm remained free of environmental catastrophes even after the Qu left.

All these changes had also made the Hedonists' day. Their lives were juxtaposed routines of browsing, sleeping and mind-blowing sex; troubled neither by the concerns of disease or pregnancy. Aloof and carefree, they enjoyed the most pleasurable times of all mankinds, albeit with the intellectual capabilities of three-year-olds.

It didn't really matter, though. Who needed to think when having such a nice time, after all?

Finger Fishers

Their ancestors were trapped on an archipelago world; a planet sprinkled with many small continents and countless islands over interconnected networks of calm, shallow seas. Like a magnified Aegean, this place was a terrestrial paradise in many respects. Except that after the Qu, no minds were left to enjoy it.

On this vacant biosphere, evolution was quick to begin her blind, unpredictable dance. Once feral, the descendants of degenerate humans adapted themselves to every available niche, no matter how exotic, how outlandish. One group learnt to pluck fish from the lazy shores. Millennia passed and they settled more into their piscatorial lifestyle. Elongated fingers became ambulatory fish-hooks, teeth modified for a generalized diet became needle-like affairs, lined up neatly in a long, thin muzzle. In less than a few million years, the Finger Fishers established themselves as a prominent lineage. There was scarcely a beach, an island or an estuary that was devoid of their pale, lanky forms.

As prolific as they were, the Fishers were still no better than animals. Their "humanity" would come only after another spasm of outlandish adaptations.