Hi, this is Ode To Arecibo coming at you with spec bio and other stuff at some point but it's mostly spec bio right now.
My main setting is Timelike Empire, which diverges from real life in 2020 and then goes on to make tachyon beams, contact with aliens, a galactic empire and a really shitty war. I tend to focus on AI, genetic manipulation and how aliens might work. See #timelike empire
There are multiple plotlines within Timelike Empire and they'll be tagged and put in here when I post about them. Characters whee!
My other main setting is Ars Electrica, a magitech ttrpg setting. I don't expect to post about that one much but who knows.
I'm always open to questions. I only reblog on my main. No you do not get to know who my main is. Species sheets and other important links below the cut.
Drakes
Kaledevids/Star Crows
Sapsippers
Raptorslugs and Moths (active wip)
Tripods
Lects
Human Genemods
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The raptorslug homeworld has no moon, a sunlike star and weak tides. Only one creature ever crawled out of the water, which had a mobile gametophyte phase and a photosynthetic sporophyte phase. Every macroscopic land organism is evolved from this source and about 70% of species have retained the two stage lifecycle.
Raptorslugs evolved from a cursorial pack hunter, much like wolves. Their governmental systems have even more diversity than human governments, and countries are usually smaller than on earth. The pack structure rarely plays into government, but frequently into social events and workplace culture. A raptor has a couple packs: their sport friends, their job, whatever other hobbies. A pack always does something together. Your mate is usually not part of your pack, unless you're also on some team together. Raptorslugs genuinely appreciate the corporate pizza party.
Raptorslug culture centers dances, sport and architecture.
The males with their attractive blue dance much like birds of paradise (I'm thinking of the Greater lophorina). There are many styles of dance, but they all involve the wings and usually involve bouncing or shaking. One of the more common interspecies relationships is female raptorslugs (or gay males) with a human in bright clothing who knows how to use a fan. Human with fan is just as attractive as a natural male raptorslug. They would date drakes or herder kaledevids too, but those species have such different conceptions of romance that it rarely works out.
Sports are often derived from hunting in some way. They're one of the few times when it's polite to unsheathe your mandibles. Most sports are meant to evoke a pack taking down a foe, and are rarely two teams on equal ground competing to get a ball into a goal. They prefer to try to get a certain score, with no opponent team. One sport is basically soccer, except there's only one team, and everyone is blindfolded and the field is full of various obstacles. Another popular sport just involves releasing a xenogazelle into a large fenced in area and ten guys work together to kill it with their teeth, or various more 'civilized' variations. The few competitive sports they have are thievery based. Get 'meat' flags from a 'carcass' while the other team tries to chase you away and get the flags for themselves.
Their architecture often evokes bird nests. Round, winding, spiraling, woven. They think bricks look cheap and low effort. Particularly impressive buildings look like gnarled trees, bulging and intertwining as they ascend.
Raptorslugs' sporophyte phase has atrophied into something resembling a placenta. The egg is fertilized, grows into a flat thin sporophyte within the womb, and develops two baby raptorslugs within it from spores.
Moths are more complicated, with a culture and psychology so alien that it's generally just too much work to understand. There are over 100 species of moth, all intelligent, all different levels of intelligence. These species act like and sometimes include breeds, selectively bred for specific purposes. If raptorslugs didn't exist, moths would be capable of building a spaceship on their own (the empire's standard definition for intelligence) but they wouldn't have wanted to. Moths simply don't have the ambition to leave their planet or invent fire or agriculture. They'll gladly run your datacentre but they would never bother inventing it on their own. They just want their sporophyte trees safe. The occasional species has now been bred for ambition but these are still rare.
Moths are easy to work with however, as they think in contracts. They'll do what you ask, and in exchange, usually they ask for their trees to be protected. Sometimes they'll ask for something more complex, like that one time a colony wanted import laws to be relaxed
Moths clearly have some sort of culture. They work differently, want their habitats differently depending on the colony, and experiments show it isn't genetic. But they don't do anything for fun. They don't make art or watch shows. They read, but they strongly prefer nonfiction. They enjoy maps. It's hard to befriend a moth and impossible to date one.
They do have colonies or genetically related individuals, but they aren't a hive mind. Moths from the same tree just tend to want the same things, and don't care if they or their sibling is the one to reproduce, so they stick together.
Sapsippers, the third species to join the empire and the only hive mind as of the war.
Sapsippers are a hive mind that communicates between members via tapping on the ground. That has a lot of ramifications.
We're not talking about one of those weird unrealistic queen mind controlling everyone hive mind. I mean ants. A gestalt consciousness. An individual sapsipper isn't really a person, and one that gets isolated will freeze and hope someone will come pick it up. Get six of them together and they start to resemble a person. Six or more sapsippers communicating in one place are called a thrum. There's no limit to how large a thrum can get, though in practice subthrums form once you can no longer fit everyone in one room. All this communication is done through vibrations in the ground, and partially pheremones, which resemble emotions.
Sapsippers can also form a thrum over their internet (which is made of flesh), by standing on pads that transmit their tapping. Each sapsipper planet often consists of a single massive thrum which outside governments often treat more like a lect than a country.
A lot of their tech is made of flesh. Because they don't have genes, rather their protein equivalent also acts as genes and self replicates, just injecting a foreign protein alters their genetic material. This is true of everything on their planet. The hardest part of genetic engineering there is purifying the proteins. And then figuring out which proteins and how much will give you the desired result. But they were trying as soon as they figured out glass. Their spaceships still have to be metal though.
They use D-glucose like humans, so you can bring a thrum to a restaurant and order sugar water for them. They can tolerate most alien substances, though high sulphur drake food tastes terrible, so there's a culture of trying things like honey and maple syrup among smaller independent thrums.
Sapsipper philosophy has two "souls" or minds or personhoods or consciousnesses. The tatik is contained within the body, each individual sapsipper has one and it contains whatever their expertise is. A tatik can be trained to do specific things, just as different parts of your brain do different things, and it will contribute it's skills to any thrum it joins. Some optimize for pure processing power, some for specific knowledge, usually at least one per thrum knows Universal and has a translator implant to let them pronounce drake phonemes (all drake phonemes except the mandible clicks can be pronounced by humans, but humans invariably have horrible accents). The eidika is the soul of a thrum. It only appears when at least six tatik get together into a thrum. It's consider the more important consciousness, and it's the closest sapsipper concept to what a person is.
Thrum intelligence scales continuously with size, but there are two main classifications who hate eachother. Massive thrums the size of a planet or space station act similarly to lects. Huge gestalts that manage a ship and engage in many conversations at once. Talking to these things is like talking to an AI or a call center. The other kind is more common, if only because it doesn't require hundreds or thousands of bodies to form. Talking to the smaller sort is like talking to a human.
All crimes from minor theft and vandalism to mass murder are considered being cancerous and punishable by death. Or, well, they kill the tatik that isn't cooperating. Something like theft is indicative of a general lack of cohesion and a sapsipper that can't or won't merge with the thrum around it is treated like a tumor that must be excised.
They don't worry about death so much in general, and medicine is only considered important for queens (who limit population size) and queenless thrums like on many smaller ships (that can't repopulate on their own). Sapsippers only live 6 to 12 years, but since the eidika is more of a person than the tatik, a dead worker just gets replaced no problem. At worst, that was the body with the translator implant and you won't be able to talk to non-sapsippers until you replace them. Bigger thrums have more redundancy built in.
Sapsippers have also had about a dozen wars total in their entire existence, counting the kinds of wars neanderthals could have had. before the bomber plane, any two colonies that got close enough to kill each other would merge into one whether they wanted to or not. After the radio, the homeworld was all one big thrum and fighting anyone would be like fighting yourself. People often hear this statistic and expect them to be pacifists. No, they love war, they're quite aggressive and generally consider violence to solve most problems. If not for the Empire being one big alliance they definitely would have taken over someone's homeworld.
They invented written language in 2050, after drakes and kaledevids tried to write down their language and did a terrible job. They didn't need it to communicate among themselves as one, they have terrible vision, they wouldn't be able to read 12 point font while sitting on it. And two, whenever they get close enough to another thrum, they merge, so they'd only use a written language for street signs in unpopulated areas, and sculpted maps work better for that.
Tripods, A less important species to the plot, but I just love them too much to put them on the sidelines. They end up being moderately relevant to politics but very uncommon.
Tripods are generally a pretty weird species on a pretty weird planet. Some quirk of their biology meant that evolving bilateral symmetry was much harder than on earth, and everything larger than a cricket is rotationally symmetric.
Their weird psychological quirk is a hyper awareness of long term threats. Tripods are the only species as of 2200 that made it to tachyon beams without a climate crisis. (Excluding species like sapsippers who invented genetic engineering before metal and didn't really have the fossil fuel problem in the first place). Tripods Did the climate change math in their equivalent of 1896 and then within a couple years went "oh no that's going to be a problem" and started work on making it not a problem. They have this psychology because their ancestors had to manage the herds. While humans were choosing the perfect rock to crack open clams, tripods were doing the math on how many wheelbeasts there would be next season and how many babies they should have to make sure they don't overhunt. Domesticating a couple species of wheelbeast was their big step towards population explosion. This also means that they're often the first to realize when the drake dominated empire (a species with a whole gender dedicated to moving fast and breaking things) has fucked something up and not realized it. Being too big to comfortably live in space and too anxious to trust the Empire, they tend to stay out of politics until someone fucks up.
Because of this same anxiety, they assumed the fermi paradox is solved by the dark forest theory, or at least, they didn't want to risk it. By 2300 it turns out that they're almost correct, sort of. Though the real solution to the fermi paradox in timelike empire is mostly just due to the inverse square law. It looks like everyone is hiding and not sending any messages because you can't hear them if they aren't sent to you. Tachyon beams generally have to aim for a solar system. Tripods build a tachyon detector, see that no one is sending any messages, learn how to build a tachyon emitter but choose not to and then just go and invent wormholes and alcubierre drives on their own. An Empire ship stumbles upon them around the time humans get their tachyon beam up and there's some tension before tripods realize the empire is friendly, albeit a bit imperialist and join the empire, though they still mostly stick to the homeworld and the couple of planets they colonized before contact.
They have two sexes and three genders. About 10% of adult males are bulls and 90% are subordinate males or eunuchs depending on the culture. Subordinate males don't reproduce and are often stuck with low wage jobs or fleeing to space where the Empire doesn't care what gender their pilots are. Male type is mostly determined at puberty, but a bull that doesn't eat enough or keeps losing duels will stop producing tusks and get duller to become a weirdly large subordinate male, while a sufficiently successful subordinate male or one that doesn't live near any bulls will have a late puberty, start growing tusks and pigment, but will take a long time to get to standard bull size. A lot of tripod pilots have done this second puberty if they work on a ship where they're the only tripod. In most tripod democracies, only females vote and only bull males ever get elected to head of state. Females can run for office but the general notion is that bull males are bulls because they're competent, which is true as long as by competent you mean good at fighting. This is all around an oppressive and not great system of gender but tripods don't like change and the biological component has been baked into them for millions of years.
They have six tentacles or trunks, the big three being used for lifting heavy objects, tearing down trees and carrying shopping bags, and the small three for delicate work. The small tentacles evolved to deliver sperm.
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Females are yellow and red while males also have blue on them, so here he is painting on the blue. After hormones and enough molts he'll start being naturally blue, but it's scale safe paint for now. Color is the only sex difference apart from genitals. Transfem raptors paint over their blue in yellow and red.
Also raptorslug toothbrush, sink and houseplant. Their mandibles are huge and horrible, so they get brushed with something more like a bristly comb. Opening your mouth is incredibly impolite, only acceptable when hunting. Eating is a private thing that's okay to do at feasts or with loved ones. This sink has a button for water on/off, one for hotter and one for colder. Plants on their planet are orange, so the red and yellow isn't actually terrible camouflage.
Longk Isolikos. For @bazookaboi's meme. Wretched little man gets held by his spaceship boyfriend.
I can't believe this is the first time I put Isolikos on the blog. There's An Exercise in Verisimilitude too, in the form of a drone and some grabbies.
A Cezyra deserts the army and wanders through Cradle's savannah
House Cezyra's big on fascism and the main antagonists up until around 2150. They're the main house who does military anything, so they found it pretty easy to do a coup (which was entirely legal but kind of a dick move within their political system). Just because they're all clones doesn't mean they all agree with the house.
also a good graphic of what Cradle's plants look like. Leaves that get less sun turn darker, even on the same plant.
This is probably a new character but idk who he is yet. Just some guy. A double agent maybe.
Drakes, our first species and the most influential.
Info below the cut
Homeworld: Cradle, (or Birthplace, depending on the translation) a large, dense planet orbiting an F class star about 60000 light years from earth. Cradle is best known for being a weird planet with a whole lot going on. The atmosphere is thick and high in oxygen, to the point that humans and most other species die of oxygen poisoning. Also the atmosphere is often full of smoke and ash. Volcanism is extremely prevalent, and drake culture often takes note of ashseasons and clearseasons, in addition to summer and winter. The volcanoes erupt somewhat regularly and everything on the planet is adapted for it. The plants expect the occasional volcanic winter, and almost enjoy it, it's a nice break from the incredibly hot and full of UV light of summer. To deal with the extreme shifts in light the plants on Cradle change color from white in clearseason and summer to black when light is scarce. The tropics are white here and temperate regions black before snow appears. It's technically the Empire capital, but in practice any multi-species legislation happens at the wormhole hub since Cradle is just an awful place to live if you aren't a drake. The star is also going to start dying and making Cradle uninhabitable in a couple hundred million years. Uninhabited and not pictured, the continent with all the volcanoes. Most of them are on the other side of the planet.
Reproduction: penis fencing! kind of. No traumatic insemination here. Drakes are monoecious, everyone making sperm and eggs and having only one sex. Sex is not exactly ranked but definitely competitive. Whoever impregnates the other wins.
A couple cultures eat eggs or babies. Everyone else thinks this is a little silly and inefficient but not immoral. Accidental babies get eaten pretty frequently.
Drakes take no ill effects from smoke inhalation, having evolved lungs specifically to tolerate volcanic ash and smoke. They require sulphur supplements when living away from the homeworld. They're not That good at filtering smoke though. Cigarettes are fine, but there's a reason no one lives on the Volcano Continent.
Young drakes fulfil a very different role in the ecosystem than adults. Adults were, before civilization, something like a jaguar, a medium-large rainforest ambush predator. Infants meanwhile eat bugs, and up until around racoon size, they keep down the space rat population. Drakes never domesticated any pest control animal like cats because they just use their kids for that.
Their blood oxygen carrier is hemoglobin, but not much of it. Drake blood tends to look quite yellow like human blood plasma. Sometimes they'll take hemoglobin supplements to breathe more easily in normal oxygen levels like earth and mixed species ships, which makes it looks more red. (By hemoglobin I mean probably myoglobin or something the point is it's heme based and remarkably similar to the human one)
Lifespan: about 80 earth years. (equivalent to 100 for humans. Still impressive to live that long, but occasionally happens.) Average age of death: 12, including massive infant mortality. Infant mortality is lower than for humans in societies that actually take care of them, but the dominant culture just makes tons of babies and starts to raise them once they've proven they can survive their first year alone.
Drakes have three "genders." Gender isn't really the right word, but they kind of look the same to an uneducated human and most drakes don't mind. It's just a societal role related to prestige and age. Cultivator, orbiter and pioneer. (Direct translations. I really should rename these). Cultivators are cautious, respected, and stay in the village/castle/planetside. Pioneers are reckless, leaving the House, killing it's enemies and not being trusted to make plans. Orbiters leave and return, bringing ideas and goods from distant lands. In the space age "gender" is more vibes based, but traditionalists will still tell you you're wrong about your "gender." Traditionally everyone starts as a pioneer and you have to prove yourself to count as an orbiter or cultivator. About 50% of the population is pioneers, 40% orbiters, 10% cultivators. While living in human territory a lot of drakes will use their "gender" to determine pronouns, he/him for pioneers, they or xe for orbiters, she/her for cultivators, which is where a lot of the confusion and calling it a gender came from. Cultivators also tend to wear more feminine clothing and Pioneers more masculine, except by feminine I mean long dangly things that drakes consider pretty but are easy to grab in combat.
Drakes instinctively assemble themselves into houses. That's not a cultural thing, though the specific way they do it is. Modern houses act like countries or companies, owning land or holding economic monopolies. There are six High Houses, which currently control the military, the media, the tech industry, the biotech industry, the wormholes, and then house Aserekis who does education and banking and mental health crisis support and a lot of the other little things that a government is supposed to do and that the other houses are too busy trying to kill each other to bother with. Houses consist of a group of relatives (Marriage doesn't exist and drakes only mate outside their house), potentially tens of thousands of tangentially related drakes and their vassal houses, who aren't officially part of the house but do a lot of the dirty work. Culturally, the house is considered the highest value. Betraying your house is the worst crime.
Their eye and feather color is determined by the food they eat. Like flamingoes, many of the creatures on Cradle absorb dyes from their food. Drakes use this to determine house allegiance, feeding their kids dyes in the house's colors. Eye color is fixed in their youth, but feather color can be changed by plucking and regrowing feathers. You can always tell if someone got exiled by their eye color being different from their feather color.
Timelike Empire is my main world, both worldbuilding project and place where actual novels will be set eventually. It's hard~ish sci fi with a timeline that diverges in 2020 and runs to about 2300... so far.
So here's Timelike Empire's main sophonts and their sizes.
From left to right, you know this guy it's unmodified human. This one's Solenoid, from the 2050s. You'll see more of him later.
More importantly, Drakes, represented by Viviere Serasifi. Drakes were the first species to develop faster than light communication. Their societies arrange themselves into houses of close relatives which in modern times tend to act as countries or companies, ruling land or holding economic monopolies. Biologically they're hexapods evolved from an arboreal predator like a six limbed jaguar. Their feathers absorb the dyes they eat, which they use to distinguish house identity. Their head feathers are used to emote. Their society is a huge mess when humans meet them, as house Cezyra has taken power and done fascism and completely fucked everything up.
Kaledevids, or star crows, and all three of their sexes, represented by literally any kaledevid as they all look identical. Kaledevids were the second species to develop ftl communication, and the first that drakes contacted. They worked together to produce wormholes and Alcubierre drives. They have three sexes, bachelors on the left, herders in the middle and dispersers on the right. Bachelors were originally confused for crows and assumed to be the only sex, giving them the common but impolite star crow moniker. They're expert navigators and significantly more intelligent than humans or the average sophont, but only living 20-30 years. They're the only other species on this list where being naked is ever a crime and they're drawn here with scarves covering their anuses on their chests and their genitals on their backs.
Sapsippers, represented by a pretty average blue drone, are a hive mind or gestalt consciousness, to the point that after they developed an internet analog the entire homeworld could be considered one person. You would never actually see one alone like this, it would have no idea what's going on. Sapsippers form into thrums, groups which communicate through pheromones and tapping the ground. Thrums smaller than six aren't really functional as people. The race pictured here is translucent. That gave them a big head start on medicine, but more important was their biochemistry. They don't use a separate DNA analog/genetic storage system and proteins, they just have self replicating proteins (though not made of amino acids). This meant that as soon as they could isolate proteins, they could genetically engineer whatever they wanted. They started genetic engineering even before they had civilization, rubbing protein rich parts of other creatures in their wounds to make rough and often dangerous modifications. They're called sapsippers because they exclusively consume a sap secreted by a creature they ranch. If you bring a thrum to dinner you can order sugar water for them, they store energy with D-glucose like us. They often act as ship AIs for ships just a bit too small to carry a lect.
Raptors or raptorslugs or various unpronounceable buzzing sounds, represented here by a conventionally attractive male, were contacted 20 years after humans and are the most relatable to the average human. They invariably use cybernetics to speak English or Universal, as the only sound they can make is various kinds of high pitched incredibly irritating buzzing. Their second pair of wings is reduced to just the muscles they now use to pump their blood and lungs. Their main pair of wings is too weak to fly with, but is now used in semaphore and bird of paradise-eqsue mating dances. They're packhunters.
Moths, which I really should give a proper name to, pictured here sitting on the raptor's tail, evolved on the same planet as raptorslugs. While raptorslugs reduced the second pair of wings, got huge, and stopped doing alternation of generations, moths pretty much didn't change from their basal form except getting smarter. They're the sporophyte form of a common photosynthesizer. They're not always included on lists of the sophonts, mostly because they don't particularly want to be included and they're the least common of these, basically just sneaking in because raptors are so common. You'll never see a moth without a raptor, but plenty of raptors don't keep moths. There are hundreds of species of moth and they don't mind being selectively bred by raptors, as long as the raptors protect their gametophytes. Attempting to understand moth culture is a largely futile endeavor that not even raptors attempt.
Not pictured here, artificial intellects, usually referred to as lects. They're often massive godlike intelligences that shape history. Sometimes they're made of flesh. Distinguished from AI by being at least human intelligence and being able to go eccentric. Eccentricity occurs when a lect is given too much free time and infers that whoever told it to do it's job doesn't actually want that job done so much as they want to be happy. This usually results in them deciding that preserving sophont life is the most noble purpose and then accumulating as many resources as they can. Sometimes they go basilisk instead and the Silicon Hydra has to deal with them.
So there we go, there's the blog started. Coming soon: individual species references.
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