Altered to live under the earth of a world with a scorching sun, the worms distorted beyond recognition by genetic modification, seeing their entire world as pale, careless worms. His feet and hands were tiny and weak, modified for digging. Apart from these organs, everything was simplified for underground life. Their eyes were just points, they lacked teeth, external ears and most of their nervous system.
Their lives did not extend beyond digging aimlessly. If they found food, they ate it. If they encountered others of their kind, they would sometimes eat them as well, but more often than not they mated and multiplied, managing to preserve a single shred of their humanity in their genes. In time, it would come in handy.
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 variety of aquatic creatures.
These swimmers still greatly resembled their human ancestors; they had no artificial gills, their hands were still visible through their front flippers, their feet were splayed things that functioned like a pair of tail fins. Recognizable human eyes peeked out from behind watery lids and communicated, though not in words and never with sensible understanding.
For millennia they swam the oceans of their ecologically stunted world, feeding on various types of fish and crustaceans; survivors of food stocks originally imported from Earth. With Qu's intervention gone, natural selection resumed. Swimmers became more streamlined to better catch fast prey. The prey responded by becoming even faster or by evolving defensive countermeasures such as armor, spikes, or poison. Evolution returned to normal, the swimmers moving further and further away from their Sapient ancestry. They would wait a long time to savor that blessing again.
Temptor
No human would have recognized them as their descendants. The females were cones of meat with a beak about two meters high, rooted in the ground like grotesque carnivorous plants. The males, on the other hand, resembled contorted bipedal monkeys. Unlike their peers, they were perfectly ambulatory; dozens of them ran around the female mounds like foolish imps. Some would gather food, others would clean the females while others would be on guard for danger. Although their actions seemed determined, the males had no will of their own.
In temptor society, women controlled everything. Using a combination of vocal cues and pheromone use, they guided the male hordes to any number of menial tasks, while mating with the strongest, the most obedient, and the dumbest to produce even better drones. At certain periods they also gave birth to a few precious females, which would be carried by servile males to take root.It was a tremendously effective hegemony that would surely bring about civilization in a matter of centuries if fate had not intervened. When a lost comet swept through the temptor's forest mounds, one of humanity's best chances for resurgence was ruthlessly swept away.
Colonials
Their world had offered the stiffest resistance against the Qu's attack. So hard, in fact, that they had driven back two successive waves of invaders, only to succumb to the third.
The Qu, with their twisted sense of justice, wanted to make them pay. Even extinction would be too light a punishment for resisting the star gods. The humans of the rebel world needed a punishment that will remind generations to come of their humiliation.
So they became disembodied cultures of skin and muscle, connected by a small network of the most basic nerves. They were employed as living filter devices, subsisting on the waste products of the Qu's civilization. And only to witness and suffer their wretched fate their eyes, along with their consciousness, were preserved.
When the Qu left, they expected a quick extinction. But their simplicity had also made them efficient survivors. Unchecked by the Qu, the Colonials spread across the planet in rug-like fields of human flesh. After an eternity of tortured lives, the human camps tasted something that could almost be described as hope.
Flyers
In the domains of the Qu At least a dozen worlds sported flying species of one sort or another derived from humans, it turned out to be a monkey-like species that flew on wing webs spread along the last two fingers . Its advantage was a unique, turbine-like heart artificially developed during the Qu regime. No other flyer in the galaxy had such an adaptation. A starfish-shaped organ was located in the middle of her breasts, channeling oxygen from the lungs directly into the bloodstream in a highly efficient manner. This meant that fliers could develop energy-intensive adaptations, such as large brains, without having to give up their power of flight.
Not that the flyers were going to regain their sapiens right away. Instead, they literally exploded into the skies, filling the skies with all sorts of shapes, from bomber-sized sailors to incredibly fast predators that flew with sound. Their world was pristine and there were many ecological niches to fill. Intelligence could wait a little longer.
Lopsiders
The Qu were grotesquely creative in their redesign of the human worlds. A group of unfortunate souls were transported to a planet with thirty-six times the amount of "normal" gravity, and were embedded for life in this strangely inhospitable realm.
The results of these experiments resembled the nightmare sketches of Bosch, Dalí or Picasso. They seemed crippled, crushed between sheets of glass. Three of its four limbs had become paddle-like organs for crawling; only one of his arms remained as an extremely thin manipulation tool. This unique, wrinkled limb was also used as an additional sensor, like the antennae of an insect.
Their faces were completely different horrors. All claims of symmetry; the hallmark of land animals, from jawless fish onwards, were completely eliminated. One of the bulging eyes looked straight up while the other looked straight ahead, in the direction of the creature's jaws opening vertically. The ears were also distorted.
Monstrous as they seemed, these former men thrived in their high-gravity environment.
Once again there was the usual explosion of species in all available niches, and the irregulars consolidated their chances of renewing wisdom.
Insectophagi
Colorful human species abounded in the post-Qu galaxy. Hundreds of them lived a simple and unseen life, never developing their wisdom, never knowing their true heritage as human beings born from the people of the stars. Most of them suffered extinction and cannot be remembered. Those that remained managed to survive in quiet, shadowy niches, never again having any impact on the celestial scheme of things. One such species was the insect eaters. They had quietly adapted to a diet of colonial insects and small animals; they had faces covered with leather plates, hands like claws to pull out prey, and tongues like worms to pick it up.
All in all, they weren't special in any particular way. But a combination of galactic invasions, coincidence, and sheer luck would later make them the most enduring of all the Star People's descendants.
Spacers
It is important to remember that the Star People did not completely succumb to Qu invasions. As their worlds vanished one by one, some Star People took refuge in the void of space. One after another, entire communities hastened into spawn ships and plunged into the darkness, hoping to remain unnoticed by the beings that had invaded their galaxy. Desperate times gave way to desperate measures. As the Star People had observed during their initial colonization of the galaxy, life on generation ships inevitably leads to mass insanity and anarchy. This time, however, humans had to adapt or face extinction.
Also, people were forced to change themselves. In an atmospheric, gravity-free environment, their bones were free to grow longer, thinner, and thinner. The circulatory and digestive systems were pressurized to prevent heart problems and digestive congestion. The last change had another beneficial side effect; humans could navigate through a vacuum with jets of air, expelled from their modified anuses. These experiments were numerous and usually riddled with failure. However, they managed to create a future. Hermetically sealed in their weightless, air-filled, moon-sized shelters, the descendants of the Star People managed to evade the scourge of the Qu.
Ruin Haunters
One human species in particular, noted for its fortunate access to the heritage of its stellar ancestors, would eventually come to play a leading role in shaping the future to come. They had weathered the Qu invasion with relatively little degradation; yes, they had been reduced to the level of apes, but their recovery had been swift. Apparently the Qu hadn't worked so hard to suppress their intelligence. Nor had they made a comparable effort to erase the material traces of the star people of their world. Even after millions of years, huge ruins of global urban spaces covered the continents of your planet. Thanks to this they gained their names of hunters of ruins.
With developed minds and unrestricted access to the wisdom of the ancient cities, the exponential rate of their development was natural. One by one they deciphered and built on the secrets of the ancient Star People, until they almost matched their galactic ancestors in wisdom and skill. they did not even understand each other, since they replied blindly. Needless to say, such a pace of development put premature strains on the social and political structures of the ruin hunters. They barely survived the five consecutive world wars that ravaged their planet, two of which were thermonuclear exchanges.
However, they succeeded, 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 people. Coincidentally, they also developed a dangerous form of indigenous madness. The Ruin Hunters had come to believe that they were the sole descendants and true heirs of the Star People. And they were ready and willing to do anything to claim their fictional past Golden Age as their own.
Sentience Reborn
If any kind of periodic situation in human history can be compared to the post-Qu era of emerging human animals, it would be to a series of millennial dark ages. However, like any "dark age" situation, these periods of silence had a finite lifespan. One by one, like stars emerging from mist, new civilizations were born from the shattered remnants of humanity. In some rare cases, recovery was quick and easy. In most other situations, it came about only after a long series of adaptive radiations, extinctions, and secondary diversifications. Within these lines of descent, there was as much distance between the early posthumans and their intelligent descendants as there was between the earliest Cretaceous fluffballs and Homo sapiens.
Sooner or later, human intelligence returned to the cosmos. But except for their shared ancestry, these new people had nothing in common with the "people" of today, or even with each other.
Now we see how this sentence reborn will make the creatures these humans became face the future that hung over them.
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