All Tomorrows

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.

Snake People (Descendants of the Worms)

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’.

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.

Killer Folk (Descendants of the Human Predators)

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.