Wednesday, December 04, 2013

context beware...

The Gelturke look like small piles of bubbling muck and sticks. Of course, if you had access to the appropriate context-co-environment they just look like you or me, and have similar issues and life-stories. They share most of our genetic code too. The Sunspinners and Starwhirlers of the Linsellenorai coast, however aren't from around here and are arguably just a little more alien to us than the Gelturke and the Pund are. Yes, they kind of look like us. Genomically, they are around 60% tree, 30% butterfly, 5% mantis shrimp, and the rest is out of this world. When asked, Lirrensily Aranaic-Arracaranserel replied "metagenomics is fairly nifty, no?". Oh, and they're nuclear powered. They have two organelles which perform the proton-proton chain and CNO-cycling, and the gamma photons emitted are directly captured and drive an ATP synthase complex. Their bones are made from buckymesh. They're bioluminescent, their skin is covered in chromatophores. They're also a lot nicer than humans/hominids, in general. The exotic anatomies of the Sunspinners and Starwhirlers arose because a machine civilization found to its dismay that its power source (a pulsar) had encountered an exotic part of the pulsar-life cycle and would explode yielding mostly iron. (some extremely rare complex-exthalpy matter had gotten itself lodged in the core.) At that point, the best long term survival strategy was to build hominid-esque bodies for its constituents --the Sansuraro Galaxy was too far away from any civilization that could build quantum foam bodies for that to be an option -- and to transport them somewhere habitable. Tsiliere was the best bet -- nice atmosphere, relatively standard hominid population (except for the Gelturke),

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