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>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, reevolved 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’.
