"Fiery Birds", Part X

It was now more than ten days after Zho arrived in Nova Bronswik. With each passing day, Zho seemed to grow more comfortable. He was almost getting to the point where he could understand writing, though not letters.

He saw them as pictures. 

"Exit" - this picture meant "doorway". 

"Elevator" - this one meant "vertically moving room".

"Shower" - this one meant "rain room".

He could understand signs, and was slowly growing to understand more, but it was not true reading. This was something in all New People, it was a deficit that was troubling. Some human colonies reported success teaching great apes how to read, and by their own genetics, the minds of New People should be beyond that, at least to the level of a young adolescent human. 

They weren't. They simply could not read. 

Dr. Trant and her team had found enzymes in the the brains of New People, those killed in the strange massacres, that seem to cause part of the brain to shut off. This pointed to genetic engineering, that whomever created the New People did not want for them to read.

Why?

-

Part of the answer came on Zho's tenth day. 

She had returned to her apartment after visiting with Zho when she had a call. After setting her shoulder bag down, she touched the wall panel, and an image appeared across from her couch.

"Dr. Trant?" the young man asked.

"Millar! How are you?"

"I'm fine. We found something... the dig."

Alouisa sat down on the couch, "go on."

"This... this is really disturbing," the young man on the screen said, "We may have found our first almost complete skeleton of one of our descendants, possibly the creators of the New People. I have to show you the skull."

"What about it?" she asked, growing intrigued.

"This is it," he said, lifting it up to the camera.

It was just the upper skull. The mandible was gone, there was no jawbone present, though it appeared as if there had been one. The cranial cavity was enlarged maybe a quarter that of a regular human. 

But it was the canine teeth that alarmed her. They were long, longer than those of a mountain gorilla.

She inhaled, a gasp.

"Millar," she managed, "did we find the jaw?"

"Still looking. I don't know what to make of that, myself. And that's not all," Millar said.

"Oh?" 

"We found some bones of New People, and a third human-like leg bone, but not from either this post-human or a New Person. It's strongly built, like it either supported weight, or needed a lot of strength. But it's the bones of the New People that disturb me most."

She had a cold feeling. "How?" she asked.

"Let me... let me show you," he said, as he dropped out of the picture. When he came back up, he was holding the femur bone of a New Person. 

"Zooming in, Doctor," Millar said, as the midsection of the bone grew in front of her.

There were marks. Fine grooves, close to one another. The head of the femur was cut, cleanly, smoothly.

She sank into her couch.

"I'm... speechless," she managed.

"I know," Millar said, "it troubles us all here. Our descendants were not just genetic engineers..."

"They were cannibals," she said, completing his sentence.

-

There were hardly any traces of the post-humans left. In fact, not only were they missing, so was the Earth's Moon. In its place was a tenuous ring of dust, but not nearly enough to account for the Moon's mass. The Moon was just gone.

The few traces of the post-humans that could be found were the large cities that they had abandoned tens of thousands of years before. Very few physical remains were found of them. The only thing like humans left were the New People. 

The surface of Earth itself was devoid of much life. If it had not been for human colonies taking with them plant and animal life, there might have been no trace left of all the larger creatures that had once populated humanity's home planet. Earth only had a few species of large land mammals left, and these were mostly deer, which appear to have evolved from white tailed. There were large rodent, all of which seem to be forms of rats. Every other type of rodent were gone.

The remaining birds had some diversity, but clearly they were all just descended from sparrows and pigeons. No other birds remained.

The situation in the oceans was even more dire. There was hardly any diversity, the largest remaining fish all being one species of mullet, though clearly engineered. 

The planet had simply been consumed of most animal life. At some point, only a few species survived. 

It was the same with plants. The trees were all the similar species of pine, myrtle, and oaks. There was certainly plenty of grasses, though most smaller plants seem to be of an evolved domesticated variety. Insects and other arthropods seem to be the only winners on this brave new world, and many of them evolved to fill niches left by the absent vertebrates. 

And there were the New People, a few thousand in three settlements clinging to what had once been the south eastern coast of the United States. 

That was the situation one hundred and fifty years ago, when standard humans first returned to their Solar System. 

The ancestral home of the human race, though somewhat recognizable, was far from what they were expecting. All that they knew from the other colonies, most very far flung, was that Earth seemed to disappear from the collective conscience of the species well over half a million years ago.