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.