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All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of
the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man.
Long ago, in the distant past, humans colonised
Mars. It took centuries to terraform the red
planet. First, they made oceans using the
ice from comets. Then they sent microbes to
create breathable air, then introduced genetically
modified plants and animals. It was only after
Mars was transformed into a habitable world
that the first people came to Mars, in colony
ships. So “The first steps on Mars were
taken not by astronauts, but by barefoot children
on lush, green grass”.
The people of Mars developed their own culture
and identity, separate to Earth. The low gravity
made Martians tall and spindly, and they became
almost a different species to the Earthlings.
For hundreds of years, the two planets coexisted,
but as Mars started to surpass Earth, tensions
led to war. And interplanetary war wasn’t
glorious or exciting. There were no heroic
pilots or massive spaceships. The war was
fought by complicated automated machines,
in a slow strategic nerve-wracking contest
that caused unimaginable destruction. Billions
of people died in the war, and humans almost
went extinct, so the survivors of Earth and
Mars united and made a plan to ensure this
could never happen again.
Humanity made massive reforms to their politics
and economics, and they changed themselves.
They genetically modified humanity into a
new subspecies called the Star People, made
to be better and smarter and adapted to expand
into space. And it worked. Within a few generations,
the unified Star People peacefully colonised
the solar system. Other stars were too far
away to fly to. So instead, the Star People
sent out automated machines that would fly
to distant worlds, and terraform them, then
use genetic material to create people to live
there. There was a weird problem with these
colonies, where many humans fell in love with
the machines that created them, and died in
mass identity crises. But the colonies that
survived thrived and expanded across the galaxy,
starting a “golden age” for humanity.
Trillions of people lived peaceful, utopic
lives, their worlds united by communication
across centuries of light.
As the Star People explored space, they discovered
some alien creatures, but didn’t find any
intelligent life. So they wondered – were
humans alone in the galaxy? On one alien world,
they found a fossil of a bird-like creature
that didn’t seem related to the other native
life – the native creatures had three limbs
and copper bones, but this bird had four limbs
and calcium bones. It was related to an extinct
dinosaur from Earth. So how the hell did this
extinct Earth animal end up on this distant
alien world? Some people thought God must
have done it, and there was a resurgence of
religion. But others thought aliens did it.
That there must be some civilisation out there
who had space-flight and bioengineering millions
of years before humans even had fire. Humanity
hoped that these aliens would be peaceful.
But just in case, they built weapons to defend
themselves, weapons so powerful they could
obliterate stars – but all of that was useless
in the end.
Humanity was attacked by a godlike ancient
species called the Qu. They were “galactic
nomads”, who constantly migrated through
space. And they had a fanatical religious
mission to remake the universe using genetic
manipulation. So when the Qu found humans,
they didn’t see them as people – they
were just objects to be changed into whatever
shape the Qu wanted. Within a thousand years,
the Qu destroyed human civilisation – but
some human species lived on. Cause the Qu
used their bioengineering technology to reshape
humanity into thousands of bizarre subspecies
– they made humans into tools, into pets,
and to wild animals. They ruled over the human
worlds for forty million years, and then they
fucked off to find their next victims – leaving
humanity “divided and differentiated beyond
recognition”. These twisted species were
the last remnants of humanity.
On one world, where the husks of dead cities
baked under a scorching sun, lived the Worms.
They were humans, but the Qu had modified
their hands and feet into tiny feeble appendages,
reduced their eyes to pinpricks, and removed
most of their brain. All their lives, the
Worms dug aimlessly through the ground. If
they found food, they ate it. If they found
other worms, they.. sometimes ate them – or
reproduced. They were wretched mindless creatures
but their humanity would eventually resurface.
On another world were the Titans, who roamed
a vast savannah. Their hands were clumsy stumps,
but their lower lip was like the trunk of
an elephant, and could be used like a hand.
They were some of the smartest of the new
human species, and gradually, they evolved
sentience. They built homes, agriculture,
language, literature, made ornate wood carvings.
In booming voices they told “myths and legends
of the bygone, half-remembered past”. With
enough time, these Titans could have started
a new humanity – but an ice-age hit the
planet, and these gentle giants disappeared
forever.
On other worlds, humans had been twisted into
predators, looking like the vampires and werewolves
of myth, with sharp claws and killing teeth.
Their prey were also human – made into herbivores
with bird-like feet. The prey had the dull
minds of animals, but the Predators, on the
hunt, kept some spark of human intelligence
– which would eventually re-emerge.
The Mantelopes were bred to be singers and
memory-retainers for the Qu. So they had fully
human minds – they understood the world
around them. But in the bodies of grazing
herd animals, they were powerless to change
anything. So for centuries, “mournful herds
roamed the plains, singing songs of desperation
and loss”. They created whole religions
and oral traditions around their grief and
frustration. Until gradually, mercifully,
their agony faded. Cause evolutionarily, a
stupid simple-minded Mantelope survives as
well or better than a conscious sad Mantelope.
So within a hundred thousand years, this melancholy
world fell silent. Human minds aren’t sacred
to evolution, and soon only animals remained.
The Lizard Herders were “the lucky ones”,
cause the Qu wiped out their intelligence,
and stunted their brains so they could never
regain sentience – so they didn’t suffer
like the Mantelopes did. The Lizard Herders
survived in symbiosis with some herbivorous
reptiles. And while the Lizard Herders stayed
simple-minded, the reptiles evolved, slowly
growing stronger and smarter.
The Qu twisted humanity into a variety of
aquatic creatures – there were limbless
eel-people, and whale-like behemoths, and
“horrifying multitudes of brainless wallowers
that served as food stock”. Most of them
went extinct when the Qu left, but the Swimmers
survived, feeding on fish and crustaceans
in their world’s oceans. They didn’t look
very human, but human eyes peered through
their blubbery eyelids, and they spoke to
each other – though, underwater, they couldn’t
hear each others’ words.
The Temptors were so fucked up it’s amazing
they survived at all. The Qu made them into
bizarre living decorations – two-meter-tall
cones of flesh like grotesque carnivorous
plants. Those were the females. The males
were mindless little monkey imp creatures
who blindly served their queen, controlled
by vocal and pheromonal signals. They’d
gather the food and guard their queen, and
occasionally they would mate by descending
into this breeding tube like a subway commuter.
It was weird, but it worked, and the Temptors’
mound forests spread across their world. They
could’ve built some kind of civilisation.
But they were obliterated by a comet, and
one of humanity’s best and weirdest hopes
died out.
The Bone Crushers looked like monsters – like
giants or ogres with beaks derived from teeth.
They only ate putrefying meat, and they communicated
by defecating on each other, but they were
actually pretty successful. They reached a
medieval level of civilisation, until they
ran out of rotting meat to eat, and eventually
collapsed.
When the Qu attacked, most human worlds were
quickly defeated. But one world fought back,
resisting the Qu two times before falling.
The Qu punished and humiliated this world
for its resistance, by making them into the
Colonials. They were disembodied cultures
of skin, connected with a network of basic
nerves. The Qu used them as living filtering
devices, living off waste products. And for
no other reason than to make the Colonials
suffer, the Qu left them their consciousness
and their eyes, so they could fully witness
their own wretched fate. For forty million
years, the Colonials suffered generations
of misery, hoping for their extinction – but
they were made to be efficient, and so they
spread across the planet in “quilt-like
fields of human flesh”. Though eventually,
after an eternity, the Colonials would taste
hope.
The Qu made lots of flying human species – some
like bats or pterosaurs, others like angels
or demons dancing through the aether, or strange
ugly creatures that floated on glands full
of gas. One species, called the Flyers, had
a special starfish-shaped heart that processed
oxygen so efficiently, that they had enough
energy to support flight and human-like brains.
Other flying species weren’t so lucky. The
Hand Flappers had wings that were useless
for FLYING, but also couldn’t be used as
hands. All they could do was flap about to
display their sexual availability – and
so they ecstatically flashed and danced their
way to extinction.
Some humans tried to escape the Qu by hiding
underground. The Qu found them anyway, and
made them into subterranean mousy morlock
people called the Blind Folk. They used whiskers
and long fingers and big ears and banshee-like
screams to navigate in the dark. They lived
off fungi and fish, and avoided predation
by bats and crocodilian creatures. These albino
trogdolytes looked fairly human, but where
their eyes should have been, there was nothing
but haunting smooth skin. Eventually the movement
of tectonic plates crushed these underground
habitats one by one.
On a planet with extremely high gravity, the
Qu made the Lopsiders – flat, deformed,
asymmetrical creatures right out of the fever
dreams of Picasso, Dali or Bosch. The Lopsiders
crawled along the ground on three hands, with
another limb used as an antenna, and a hand.
One eye stared straight up, while the other
eye scanned ahead. As wretched as they looked,
the Lopsiders thrived on their heavy world.
They domesticated some native creatures, and
began the long road to civilisation.
On a moon with very low gravity, the Qu made
the Striders – enormously tall, thin creatures
who walked among huge trees that towered like
skyscrapers. The Striders were very delicate,
so even with low gravity, a fall could shatter
their bones. The Striders were eventually
wiped out by a bunch of chickens who over
two million years evolved into deadly predators.
On another world where the humans temporarily
resisted the Qu, the Qu punished the humans
by creating an array of parasites, who were
also made from humans. There were tortoise-sized
vampire-like ambulatory parasites, and smaller
parasites that lived attached to their hosts.
There was even one horrific parasite that
infested the wombs of its victims. Many of
these parasite life-cycles were so elaborate
and baroque that they went extinct when the
Qu left. But some of the parasites survived,
and developed symbioses that benefitted their
hosts as well as themselves.
One human species evolved on a world of great
archipelagos, calm shallow oceans sprinkled
with countless islands. The Finger Fishers
evolved to catch fish with their long fingers
adapted into fish-hooks, and ate them with
long snouts full of needle-sharp teeth. But
their evolution would get even weirder later
on.
The Hedonists were created by the Qu to be
pampered pets, living carefree lives of pleasure.
Their world was a tropical paradise of succulent
fruits and lakes of sweet bacterial juice.
They were the only animals on their planet,
and had no predators or competition to deal
with. Under normal conditions, this might
lead to overpopulation, but the Qu designed
the Hedonists to only get pregnant after mating
an enormous number of times. So the population
was stable, and the Hedonists filled their
lives with eating, sleeping, and mind-blowing
sex. Their minds were blissfully empty. Cause
who needed to think when they’re having
such a good time?
The Insectophagi adapted to eat insects. They
had claw-like hands to dig, long tongues to
scoop up bugs, and leathery faces to protect
from bites. They lived quiet unnoticed lives
on their obscure world – but little did
they know, they would later play a key a role
in the fate of humanity.
When the Qu attacked, not all humans were
captured. Some of them escaped into space
and built homes inside hollowed-out asteroids.
They adapted to zero gravity by growing long
spindly limbs, and pressurised digestive systems,
so they could move around in space by farting
from their highly evolved sphincters. These
Spacers changed to the point where they could
never return to a planet with gravity. But
they didn’t care. They were comfortable
in their weightless void worlds, and paid
little attention to their human relatives
on the planets below.
So across the galaxy, these twisted post-human
species struggled to survive. They evolved,
diversified, rose and fell, and most of them
died out without the universe ever knowing
they existed. Which is normal. Extinction
is just as natural as speciation – and for
each species that died out, new ones evolved
to take their place, generating an ever-changing
kaleidoscopic variety life forms. And from
this endless churn of life and death some
species rose up to achieve new kinds of sentience
and civilisation, like stars emerging from
dark fog.
The scorching hot planet of the Worms eventually
cooled down, and life emerged onto the surface.
The Worms filled new ecological niches, evolving
into serpentine grazers, swimmers, predators…
and, eventually, people, with human-like intelligence.
The Snake People had unique spiral-shaped
brains which allowed them to observe and understand
their world. They developed a ‘hand’ derived
from their ancestors’ feet. And they built
vast cities of tightly-intertwined tunnels
and homes. They enjoyed books, and music,
played as vibrations in the ground. The Snake
People may’ve looked alien, but their daily
lives were full of joys and sorrows, hopes
and dreams, humanity.
The Predators evolved into the Killer Folk.
Their deadly claws became grasping hands,
and their sabre teeth receded into organs
of social display. Killer Folk society was
built around hunting and violence, and so
their history was filled with war. For thousands
of years, nomadic warriors with vast herds
of once-human livestock battled each other
across a chessboard of continents. So their
world is an archaeologists’ dream, rich
with the ruins of fallen kingdoms. But one
faction of Killer Folk developed factory farming,
and rejected their violent past for a more
peaceful unified future. Some conservative
factions kept to the old way, fanatically
devoted to traditional warfare and hunting.
These two factions came dangerously close
to global war, but the Killer Folk reconciled
and survived.
Underwater, the Swimmers couldn’t make fire.
So they made a different kind of technology
– they learned to breed their tools and
machines. The Tool Breeders domesticated and
modified other sea creatures, and built entire
cities powered by organic life. Huge heart-like
creatures pumped nutritious fluids through
a network of self-healing conduits, like a
living power grid. The Breeders’ homes were
made from living shell and bone, with bioluminescent
lights. They had televisions derived from
cephalopod skin, medicinal sea-squirts, weapons
made from molluscs that fired teeth as ammunition.
With genetic modification, stem cells and
tissue cultures, the Tool Breeders mastered
their oceans, and even the small landmasses
of their world. But they weren’t content
with just one planet. The Tool Breeders grew
living spaceships and reached for the stars.
The Lizard Herders were stunted, and never
achieved sentience. But the lizards thrived,
and eventually built civilisations – using
the humans for transport, labour and food.
These lizards had no ancestral connection
to humanity, but they took on a human-like
cultural identity, cause they influenced by
the ruins of the Star People on their world.
They realised what the Qu had done to the
humans, and feared that if the Qu returned,
they might suffer the same fate.
The Colonials were wretched creatures – helpless
fields of flesh, carpeting the shores of their
world like algae. But they were resilient.
And eventually, they organised themselves,
evolving from a homogenous mass into differentiated
colonies. Each cell specialised to perform
different functions for the colony, and the
colonies started competing against other.
Some colonies grew tap roots to siphon resources
from afar, or starfish-life feet to move around,
or claws and poisons to attack other colonies.
The winner of this evolutionary arms race
was an intelligent colony called the Modular
People. In their vast industrial megalopolis,
the people took a wide variety of shapes and
sizes. They could combine themselves or split
apart or exchange parts – all interchangeable
cells playing a role in one great unified
organism. So the Modular People achieved the
impossible – turning their miserable existence
into utopia where billions lived happy lives
as part of the unified whole.
The Flyers diversified into many different
species, as predators, herbivores, even swimmers.
One species were like storks who waded through
swamps to catch their prey. Their versatile
feet, which had evolved to catch slippery
fish, became articulate hands as they developed
intelligence and society. Since these Ptersosapiens
could fly, they had a global mindset. Borders
and nations made no sense when it was so easy
to travel freely. People and ideas spread
quickly across their planet, and they built
an egalitarian society without strict social
classes. They built cities of perches and
fluting towers, harnessed nuclear power, and
farmed their relatives on the ground for food.
Though their civilisation thrived, their bodies
struggled to support their highly developed
brains and their power of flight, so the Pterosapiens
usually died by the age of twenty-three. Keenly
aware of their mortality, they appreciated
every moment of their lives. Their philosophers
pondered the meaning of life with feverish
intensity, filling libraries with their tomes.
The Ptersopaien in this picture poses at a
seaside resort. This ten day vacation was
the only holiday in her short life.
Despite the crushing gravity of their world,
the Lopsiders built an advanced civilisation.
Their pancake-flat buildings spread all over
their world, and they developed spaceflight
so they could escape their planet and its
oppressive gravity. To adapt to life on new
worlds, they engineered a subspecies who could
live in low gravity, called the Asymmetric
People. The Asymmetric People thrived in the
freedom of new worlds, but they had no love
for their creators. The Asymmetric People
ruthlessly exterminated the Lopsiders on their
homeword, and explored the heavens alone.
The Parasites and their hosts evolved symbiotic
relationships. Like, some parasites used sharp
senses to warn their hosts of predators, or
provide weapons like venom for defence. In
return, the hosts provided their nutritious
blood, and developed specialised nesting sites
on their bodies for the parasite to attach
to, rich with blood vessels and protective
fur. The Parasites and Hosts became inextricably
linked, almost like they were one being. Soon,
the hosts were like horses being steered around
by the Parasites, then eventually they were
no more than puppets, totally controlled by
the Parasites through tactile and olfactory
signals. The intelligent Parasite civilisation
eventually developed technology that replaced
the need for hosts. But they kept the hosts
around for tradition and convenience. An average
Symbiote might start the day in a business
host, then change to a comfortable domestic
host at home after work.
The world of the Fisher Fingers was full of
scattered isolated islands. Like the Galapagos
or Madagascar on Earth, these islands were
a seething evolutionary cauldron that gave
rise to wildly diverse species. One line of
Fisher Fingers evolved into the Sail People.
Their long fingers evolved into sails that
drove them effortlessly across oceans. They
used their tongues to catch prey, and eventually
their tongues split and articulated to be
used as hands. The Sail People needed strong
memories to navigate the oceans and locate
prey, so naturally they soon evolved intelligence.
It took a long to develop social and political
stability. Their scattered and diverse world
gave rise to a huge variety of creatures who
fiercely competed. For generations, flotillas
of tribal warriors and pirate societies battled
in epoch-spanning conflicts. Until finally
one group of Sail People became powerful enough
to unify their world, and make peace. Blood
had stained the oceans for too long.
The peaceful paradise of the Hedonists seemed
like it would never end. But over millions
of years, nothing lasts forever. Geologic
activity threw up clouds of dust that blocked
the sun and killed most of the Hedonists.
Only a small subset survived, mutating an
escape from the reproductive limits of their
ancestors. These Satyriacs were got their
shit together and built an advanced self-sustaining
civilisation. There were still traces of their
hedonistic past remaining in their genes,
and so their societies retained a delightful
streak of pleasure-seeking and promiscuity.
Festivals, concerts and ritualised orgies
punctuated every working week. And now, the
pleasure was savoured by sentient self-aware
people.
The Insectophagi started to look like their
prey. Their leathery face-plates hardened
and became part of their jaw. Their hands
and feet developed into pincers. And their
brains evolved intelligence. Like many others,
the Bug Facers built a civilisation, but they
also faced a unique threat. They were attacked
by an alien race. Little is known about these
aliens, not much survived in the historical
record. But it took an intense series of wars
on the ground and in orbit before the invaders
were defeated. This traumatic conflict gave
the Bug Facers a pathological xenophobic fear
of all other species. So when the human species
on other worlds started to reach out to each
other, the Bug Facers stayed silent, and withdrew
from the galaxy.
The Spacers became even more alien in the
void of space. Their fingers extended and
split into tiny grasping limbs. Their legs
atrophied, using their farts to move instead.
And in the weightless void of space, their
brains expanded, til their every thought was
far more vast and complex than anything other
humans could conceive. These Asteromorphs
spread to every star system in the galaxy,
but they didn’t interfere with the other
species. The Asteromorphs had no need for
planets – those ugly balls of dirt and ice
and gravity. They stayed in the outer rims
of star systems, silently watching over the
galaxy, like strange alien gods.
The advanced post-human species started making
contact with each other. The Killer Folk talked
with the Satyriacs. The Tool Breeders reached
out from their ocean depths. The Modular People
and Pterosapiens joined in, followed by the
Asymmetric People, Saurosapients, Snake People,
Symbiotes, and Sail People. They didn’t
visit each other in person, cause the interstellar
distances were too large. But they cooperated
by sharing knowledge and technology – and
by keeping watch for alien invasions. They
all had found the ruins of the Star People
and the Qu – and they didn’t want to be
attacked and changed again. This alliance
of post-humans lasted for almost eighty million
years, each species expanding to new worlds,