All Tomorrows

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.

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.

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.

Lizard Herders

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.