Lucy's World

'Lucy's world' is a grandiose name, but not one anyone actually uses. In fact, hardly anyone knows who "Lucy" is at all. Lucy is just someone, a person trying to make do in a world without humans.   In a time long ago, there were humans everywhere. Humans spilling out of every hole in the ground they said, in numbers people don't even have names for anymore. They were so many and so mighty, building the entire world up around them over thousands of years. To the people who remain, they sound almost as if they were gods. The world they live in now, building their homes in the towering shadows of cities that stretch from one horizon to the other, feels like one lost, left behind by something entirely more incredible than those who remain.   And yet, all the humans are gone. The how and why is lost to the flow of time, grown over with a thousand different plants and buried beneath the debris of a world in recovery. The ones who survived are people to be sure, but by blood and body they are human no more.   Tests, experiments, some desperate bid for survival stretched the human genome to its breaking point and well beyond, altering and splicing DNA with every creature imaginable. Whatever disastrous fate befell humanity, these mutations saved the new blood, and in the years that followed they proliferated and rebuilt communities in the ruins of the old world. Anatomy in these new people varies more between individuals than between entire orders within the animal kingdom, with fangs claws, tails, feathers, even compound eyes and tentacles commonplace. Some people reap great benefit from their bodies, others are dealt a crueller hand by their genome. But all make do, and all survive.   Kind, altruistic and barely able to comprehend the world they had inherited, they flourished and survived on a culture of farming, sharing and repairing what technology remained. Solar powered lights bulbs strung through the boughs of huge trees encouraged to grow through cold concrete, reaching up into a stark, cloudless blue sky.   But lying deep within Lucy's genetic code is a secret, a revelation that could change the whole world, and what it means to be human. What will Lucy find out about the old strain along the way, and what dark things will she mistakenly release?