Weeds of Eden

Evolution slithers like a snake through the Gardens of Eden, urging life along by random changes to what becomes the past, but it needs accomplices among its victims.  Those individuals touched by its fangs can fail to act and thus die away, or they can respond to the choices presented to them and struggle for their personal survival, thereby ensuring a newer and a better species.
    In this fragment of the multiverse, mankind flees the Fishmen and escapes unprepared into the midst of the powerful galactic Empire of the Foreverones.  A poet and her daughter live as immigrants in the slums of an Imperial Jerusalem and tell their stories in the Plaza of Once Upon A Time.  A warrior imprisoned on an alien spaceship converses with a philosopher crab between battles in gladiatorial arenas.  A physicist marooned on the sandy dunes of a desert planet leads a group of children in search of heaven.  Their struggle for survival after being tossed onto barren ground, leads to their observation of the quantum states of man causing a butterfly effect that takes humanity to the next level.