All Tomorrows

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.

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.

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.

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.