by user
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.
58
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.
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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.
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Extinction
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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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 conti
nents.
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.
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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.
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Tool Breeders (Descendants of the Swimmers)
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.
67
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.
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Saurosapients (Livestock 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.
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70
Modular People (Descendants of the Colonials)
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 we
re 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.
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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.
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Pterosapiens (Descendants of the Flyers)
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
