All Tomorrows

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.

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

Man Extinguished

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.

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.

Worms

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.

Two Worm parents with their young.

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.

Predators and Prey