#foomf

This is actually pretty difficult.

They don't.  They won't meet until somewhere into the story, and I don't know how that will happen yet. So I can't write 500 words about it, because it hasn't happened.

Their meeting will probably be a turning point, and might be the fun part of the story.

Well, Opponent is one way to translate it anyway.

Antagonist Backstory, 500+ words

Here are 970 words.  I don't really LIKE them, and would probably avoid putting this info-dump in the actual story directly.

They began in a small galaxy that fell into the Milky Way. Their first world was very like Earth, though its dominant chemistry was a bit different; more methane, less oxygen, less nitrogen.

They were initially built in a fashion similar to Terrestrial life, as well, a slow increment of complexity and the accident of situation that pushed them to sentience, to a depth of awareness of the universe and themselves. They sought meaning and understanding, lived and died, and over much time they became a complex, compound mind, their mastery of the mechanism of themselves increasing until they were able to restructure. The compound-mind saw the giant galaxy looming in the sky, a bar of light, ever closer, and it saw the edges of their own galaxy ponderously spinning off across the darkness, drawn to the greater immensity. It wasn't terribly important. The being – it named itself the Swarm, for practical and ironical reasons. It had determined the need to escape the single world of its origin, to spread out over a greater range so that it would not be as vulnerable to extinction by the turbulence of the galaxy passage. The Swarm had encompassed all life on its world, become a part of all aspects of it, insectopod, mammaloid, ichthyan, avitan, even the greening and greying of the sessile bodies, and the liquid collective of the tiny lives that were the surface of its ocean.

The swarm-drive was an obvious thing. Travel by forced quantum-jumps, tiny but continual, and as it learned the drive, it learned the eight adjacent directions, the thirteen additional options that sometimes had to exist, and it encountered raw gravity, dark and unresponsive to the electromagnetic energy, but still quite malleable with other forces. It learned to move larger and larger masses with smaller exertion, and in a short time it was on the three rock-worlds of its home system, and then the gas-rich moons of the four giant cloud-worlds. It felt the first growth-pang, discovering that by extending itself so, the singleton-mind was split apart into slightly divergent units. It fought the closest thing it had known to a war, and it ended when it came across the first other-life in its experience.

It had considered this possibility. The Swarm was not a soulless insectile force of procreation. The Swarm knew joy, it knew beauty, it created meaning in symbol and in craft. The new-met life was a primitive thing. It was made from strange chemicals, it was too simple, it lacked even sentience, but that was not an obstacle to the Swarm. The original protocol had been built on the way the Swarm had gradually absorbed and welcomed all life into itself. Surely this would be not different.

The schism was what saved it. Bringing the new life into itself, investing it with millions of years of sentience and awareness, the Swarm was not prepared for the horror and despair this created. The new life, unready for oneness, unready even for complexity, ended itself, and the part of the Swarm which had incorporated itself went with it, mercifully killing its connection with the rest of itself before it suicided.

The war of separation ended, the four remaining centers-of-awareness determining two things: first never to force another race into oneness, to be very careful indeed about bringing anything into the Swarm at all; and second, that it must learn ways to be itself and be separated across distances. The swarm-drive becomes the answer to that as well – a constant flow of tiny parts of it begin circulating between its sections. It isn't perfect, but like the flashing of lightning-bugs in perfect synchrony, the Swarm is able to ensure a regular channel to identity.

It grows, slowly at first. Its home galaxy swings around the monster twelve times, shedding itself, leaving behind a smear of red giant stars in its path. The Swarm, by now, has encountered nearly a thousand civilizations, and hundreds of thousands of living worlds, and a few places that were even stranger. Thousands of nodes of itself began to lose their tight connection, and some of them, diluted perhaps by the dozen species from the giant galaxy which had chosen to join with the Swarm, had become decidedly eccentric.

The swarm-drive has also grown eccentric – a navigational protocol, looking ahead to possible landings, begins to reveal random locations, places of interest, unnervingly appropriate as though the drive itself were tapping into some transcendent knowledge.

A very small, very new exploratory surge of the Swarm, one which had a stronger identity with the arthopodian forms, passed close to an ordinary main-sequence yellow star, and through the oracle of travel saw an act that disturbed it so profoundly that it fragmented in four parts.

The fragment that sought revenge began its work, as only an immortal being hundreds of millions of years old can. It infested their world, observing for some time, then began to very subtly, very quietly introduce ideas. They were all ideas that would have come to them anyway, but they were in the right place, to the right persons.

It grew, in its hive on the moon of Saturn, and kept its disconnection from the Swarm, because it knew that this would not be permitted. And when it had grown numerous, when the humans were able to preserve themselves, it punished them. It bent their star, burning away their planet, and it taunted them as they died.

But it wasn't satisfied, and it didn't know why. The star had fought back, as well, as if it were a life itself, and the planet remained. The humans remained. It had come to care for some of them, yet others it considered vicious animals. The swarm decided, then, to interfere further.

2820 words.

To be honest, I think I'm getting ahead of myself in places.  I'm putting in back story which maybe shouldn't be there, but then, I need to do world-building before I could do physical descriptions, and I already had elements of backstory to my protagonist.

On the other hand, exploring this a little more gave me a better idea of what the good and bad aspects of the societies are.

Time is still measured in years, still measured by the apparent-motion swing of the remains of Earth in its perpetual fall not-into the central star, against the backdrop of the million stars so distant that their placement might as well be the sphere of pinholes in the black sphere surrounding the system. Nobody in polite society calls it the Solar System now; the very word Sol is an obscenity to the Citizen-Drones, though to the Citizen-Breeders, it holds no particular onus. The reason for this is the reason for the Terra-Ring itself, and for the blasted and mostly lifeless rock that was once Terra.

Sol went mad. A year of increased turbulence, as if irritated by a million Terra-sized fleas crawling and biting at the shining star's face, then the sunstorms began to erupt. At first, it seemed coincidence. Three, then five, then a dozen flares blasted out, and each flare struck the small blue-green water-world, hammering her magnetic field and spinning radiation into her upper atmosphere.

Chaos seized the collective will of humanity, as scientists declared that this was the first sign of a premature expansion into a red giant, the surge that would devour the inner worlds.

With a year's warning, and only through the ruthless power-grab of a handful of scientists and soldiers, the majority of humanity was forcibly regimented, set to preparing for the catastrophe. Animals, plants, as much of the ecosystem as could be, was preserved, duplicated, or archived, sent to the safe haven of giant domes that swung out to hide behind Mars. It would be impossible to save every human, physically, so every human was Archived, a cybernetic implant transcribing their minds into a virtual-space, and the Second Dreamtime was created as they began to customize the place their minds lived inside.

And with a year's warning, humanity, embodied and virtual, worked frantically to understand the cause of the thing that might well destroy them. Some of the forebears of the Drones, more lent to chaotic beliefs at that time, began to pray to Sol, and to listen to the myriad radio signals given off by the storms. And they found, or perhaps believed that they had, something resembling communication. The magnetic pulsations and twists of the massive storm began to resemble the waveforms used by human cybernetic interfaces. The ruling council reassured the rest of humanity with mathematics and statistics but none of them could explain why Sol was suddenly screaming hatred at the planet. And at the last moment, as the final eruption finally came, it was impossible to hide the malicious, gleeful cry of “DIE BUGS!”

The solar expulsion struck the planet with merciless force, hardly anything to the mass of the star, but easily half the mass of Terra in the form particulate and electromagnetic radiation. The entire mass of Humanity watched, as the magnetic fields of the star warped unnaturally, forming a giant magnetic lens, turning that expulsion into a very sharp, brilliantly hot beam, half the width of the planet, and blasted it for six days while it screamed. And they died. Oh, the archive kept their minds, and the custodians tried to hide the last days but they eventually came back.

Two centuries later, the center-star remained peaceful, with no sign of the fury that killed Earth. Humanity had disassembled the moon, turning it into a ring around the devastation.

But Terra-Ring was still relatively new, strung around the planet like a necklace of beads on a carbon-fiber thread, and one bead, designated Sudam.Braz, was too loose. It began to oscillate, and smashed into the next one. It was sparsely populated, still, but nevertheless thousands of Drones were killed, and of those, a few hundred failed to recover from archive, and were lost permanently.

Citizen-Drone 0d81ed8025a19f35000666c40fc43009 was created as one of a replacement batch. It began, traditionally, as the collaboration of two Drones in mind-space, but their virtual-child was reviewed by the Citizen-Breeder Gadrama and chosen for realization.

Not in any way unusual, CD-0d81 was embodied in the standard Citizen-Drone template, and given the standard two years to establish self-identity, interests, and spontaneous peer-groupings, as well as learning the reasons for the Social Order, the Rules of polite society. It chose to become a Digger, and was given a template upgrade, now able to interface with the dig-mechs, and more durable than the standard. It spent a dozen years among the Repair Swarmers, repairing the damage inflicted by the slip. And during that time, it met with Citizen-Breeder Gadrama three times for more than the acceptable hour's interview, illicitly, because the Rules prohibit any Drone from interacting with the Breeders for unofficial interactions. No Drone should have a Breeder on their private contact-list; it was Vulgar.

CD-0d81 began to exhibit untoward curiosity about the cause of the Slip. It was warned, twice, for spending too much time too close to the Thread-Handler, earning full reprimand points as well as Social Polity reprimands. None of this would have required expulsion and excarceration, normally, but the Drone found indications that there had been tampering. It reported this evidence, not to the Troubleshooter, not to its Work Coordinator, but to Citizen-Breeder Gadrama, and the Citizen-Breeder broke protocol herself, traveling to the site of the alleged tampering, and in a profoundly disturbing accident as she was personally inspecting the situation, an electron flux-surge scrambled the Citizen-Breeder's bio-frame, erasing her.

Scandal ensued. CD-0d81 gained a half-billion Watchers on his life-record, before the Judge-Mediator was able to freeze sign-ups; this prevented any kind of cover-up, and the Council was invoked by default regulation. Their agent arrived just as Gadrama was reconstituted from archive into a new bio-frame, and the scandal erupted again when it was discovered that she had no memory of any interactions with CD-0d81, not even of her authorization for its realization. Rumors erupted: the Citizen-Breeder had (shocking) OMITTED parts of her memory to hide the unauthorized and illicit motherhood-relationship she held for CD-0d81, even though the Drone claimed that no such relationship existed, and refused to fully open its archive to public inspection to prove innocence. Or, the Citizen-Breeder's archive had been (whispered vulgarity) Edited by someone else, attempting to hide some deeper plot. Or, and this was the rumor that was highest-rated by viewers, the Drone had lured her there for its own perverse reasons, which is why it refused to open.

Of course, the Judge-Mediator could, and did, personally examine the Drone's archive, and citing the Council regulations for privacy, refused to disclose the contents, nor to confirm nor deny any of the rumors. The conclusion came: It was an accident, and the Drone had found something of interest, which would be handled by the Council.

Several Citizen-Coordinators, and two Citizen-Regulators, were recycled, but this was not made visible in any way to the Citizen-Drones. And with the conclusion of the investigation, the Judge-Mediator did not assign any defray to CD-0d81's account; the Drone was showing an unusual degree of independence of personality and of stubborn, somewhat atavistic assertiveness, a trait that would be of great value elsewhere, but not in the Great Society of Citizen-Drones.

It took two years before the decision came down. The Scandal had become an Entertainment, with three competing and different True Authorized Fictional Accounts serialized in the News-Archive, all very popular. The least of these was the one that CD-0d81 had actually signed: the one where it was a whistle-blower, acting on an oblique suggestion from a Citizen-Breeder which had acted, in complete propriety, as a mentor-contact, with no more than ten minutes of polite and entirely correct interaction in public, logged locations. Nevertheless, the Drone was identified as Too Interesting To Be Safe, and found that it was impossible to find work as a Digger.

It took only two months of failure-to-labor for the Equity Court to examine the Drone's accounts, and a collective “TSK!” at the magnitude of followers, the number of penalty points, and the stubborn insistence that all was conducted entirely properly (and because two of the members of the court had lost large wagers on the outcome of the case) … the Order of Excarceration was posted in the minimum seemly time. Court Agents, twice the mass of even the Digger-Agents, and equipped with weaponry, collected CD-0d81 at its assigned charger-station, roughly closing the open comlinks it had established with its peer-group, and it was brought before Equity Court.

Citizen Drone 11cb59a198a77aa57cb98dc015f80d0d presided, and issued a long, moralistic diatribe that ended with the admonition that CD-0d81 would be permitted to rejoin the enlightened society of polite citizens within a short time if it would avoid further excitement; it was advised to seek employ in some quiet pursuit, possibly accounting or data-stream programming. The phrase “sanctimonious homily” was resurrected in the comments on the judgment, earning the commenter only two demerit-points (one from each of the two members who had lost wagers) and a larger number of approbation-marks.

Citizen-Drone 0d81ed8025a19f35000666c40fc43009 saw none of this at the time; it had no access to the Commons, and it was being shriven. All removable enhancements had been removed from its frame, its credits (such as they were) disbursed among its peer-group.

The Arbiter strapped it to the Final Archival station, and executed the command.

Its last archive was taken. The Arbiter, unaccountably, left its personal-life feed unlocked for a full thirty seconds, and it (vulgarly) posted the signature-keys for the archive on its PublicSpace just before the Arbiter locked it, and then a moment of shock as the Arbiter pulled the three-bladed Clavier of its office from its sheath, and impaled it into the Citizen-Drone's head-bump.

It blinked, a reflex, lids closing over eyes, not optical-scanners. It had been archived, and its last coherent memory was the featureless 'face' of the Arbiter affixing the probe to the feedport in its neck.

The Equity order directed that the former Citizen-Drone be installed into a recycle- a temporary use, emotionless android body of relatively limited sensorium, provided for the use of Citizen-Drones when forced to operate in the Exo. This had clearly not happened (and there was an emotional surge of something like fierce triumph) because this template had feelings. Sensations. Skin, with several touch-modes, auditory hearing, a sense of smell, of taste – its mouth was sour and dry.

And it was immobile, the Arbiter still holding the new template impaled on the tines of its Clavier, through the chest, visible on monitors all around. The Arbiter, now shorter than it, began speaking a series of instructions, which came through the auditory sense.

“You are no longer a citizen-drone. You have been expelled from the Society, which found you disruptive. This is to your benefit; you were not suited to the very limited options of the Society of Citizen-Drones. Your new template is male. Your designate pronoun will be 'he'; this will come to feel quite normal in time, although you may choose whether or not to fully engender the template. It is considered highly vulgar to do so, though they are not permitted to penalize the choice. The Equity

Court ordered you to be embodied in a Standard Citizen Exo-Frame. If you insist, I will remove and reinstall you in such a frame, after three days. An initialization protocol has been loaded into this bio-frame's motor system, and in a moment I will enable it. First, do you have questions?” The former Drone tried to vocalize, but there was a confusion: the mouth and tongue and breathing wanted to speak, confounding the short-range communication band. The Arbiter adjusted the Clavier, and it was able to speak, normally through transcoder, rather than the confusing biological way.

“Why?”

The Arbiter shrugged, “The Court has no knowledge of conditions out here. And I do not work for them. I am under the direction of the Executive, and they have directed that anyone who presents certain personality traits should be given the chance to maximize their contribution, rather than being locked into failure.”

The Clavier made a noise, and the Arbiter did things to controls that the former Drone couldn't see.

“Very well. Oh, one last thing, before I activate your Commonality link. What name do you wish to register?”

“Name?” The concept was unexpected, but they hadn't given it... him... time to meditate or prepare. There was something, floating to the surface of his thoughts. It had an emotional tag which he couldn't quite parse, but it seemed familiar.

“Mikha'El.... Adu-Einar” He wasn't aware of speaking it aloud, but the Arbiter looked at him with shock and a bit of annoyance (which the newly excarcerated felon could not register, without access yet to the sub-context band.)

“No. That name, you have to earn. You may begin as Mike 7aa39de7c146b248646b10b06d314dcd, for now. Outside the Terra-Ring the standard abbreviation is five places, so you can sign as Mike 7aa39 without conflict.” The Arbiter abruptly pulled the Clavier from Mike's chest, and the sensation was both unpleasant and disturbing. The moment it cleared his dermis, the openings healed, tingling and itching profoundly, but the novel sensation of suddenly breathing, of blood being moved through his body, and the initial PING as the Commonality link opened up. He was back among Humanity again.

Three days later, the Arbiter was unsurprised to receive a notification: “There will be no need for your services, I will remain with this template. I rather like it.”

The Arbiter simply sent him the image of his previous-life's PublicSpace front-page. He immediately placed the numbers on his current PublicSpace, discovering that he was far from alone in doing so, and that there were at least five other Exodwellers who had done so as well. He included two other numbers, though: the key to the elegy he had written for Gadrama, and the key to his previous-life's locked archives. Inside a week he had a thousand subscribers to the personal-life feed which he had not even started to populate. In a month, he had ten thousand.

It took a year before he mastered the body. It needed more fuel than even his Digger-modified frame had wanted, but it had more to repair. The techniques of moving, the subtleties of using its senses, the different way it processed nutrition, so unlike the feedback-sim that his prior frame had used. And of course, the skin. Drone skin was hard, generally insensitive, designed with high tactile feedback only in the manipulators. The Human Male Adventurer (Hero) template was, to put it mildly, sensual, and it was more agile, stronger, and (despite the organic sensors) the experience was richer than what he had experienced before. But the “free ride” was only good for a year, and he was already finding himself bored, chafing for activity, for something to DO. The chance to be a Kuiper Belt Miner came to him through another miner: a tremendously skilled man who had, if rumor could be trusted, seen the Mad Sun from the edges of the system, as he hunted down comets for the ice in their hearts.

His first upgrades were charged to the Parole agency, extending the time of his sentence, but necessary for his profession, mostly. He had determined to apprentice to a Kuiper Belt miner, being peculiarly unequipped with the standard-issue terror of open skies; this meant total depilation, dermal reinforcement and hard-vacuum survivability updates. His flesh eyes were replaced with more durable and superior cybernetic analogues, his dermis webbed with carbon fiber and interlaced with tiny glittering photovoltaic chips, allowing him to draw power from light and ambient radiation. Then (to the shock of the Citizen-Drone who had to approve the request) he not only requested full gender activation, but then requested retractile function and armoring, which surely must be overkill, but understandable for someone who risked exposure to the airless void. However, the purely cosmetic changes – flatter, wider nose, the extension of canines to almost fang-like length, and a reshaping of head and jaw that resulted in an even more primitive aspect; those were shocking, and the functionary charged double what the customary fee would be. Mike 7aa39 did not flinch.

The logs of his apprenticeship were posted to his personal-life feed as he lived it, and the parts he left out would have earned him another century of disapprobation, if he cared. When his mentor was satisfied, he gave his ship, and his maps, to Mike, and then self-terminated, in a public place, after a celebratory party. He had no archive.

At his request, Mike had left his Mentor's image out of his personal-life feed, and he removed it from the feed of his ending.

Antagonist, physical description.

359 words

The torture of insects was the thing that drew it to the water-world. It was coincidental, or it was the subtle working of an arthopod-deity calling attention to the murder of tiny lives, notable only because it was intentional, and cruel, not the act of an animal seeking food, or keeping them away from food, but simply a grubling with a lens made of silicon, focussing center-starlight to a point and exploding the tiny bodies.

The atrocity came into its attention when the world-window opened suddenly on the scene, blistering its segmented eyes with a thousand images of overwhelming brilliance and setting a sour taste along its antennae. The swarm-drive was damaging to less distributed minds, but when it was swarming its mind was spread across a terabody, a trillion separate selves with a single purpose. The Ethic said that it must not spread to planets where the sentients could not choose to join with it, so it considered, a pungent discussion wafted by seven-dimensional wings until the enthropy of the balanced contradictions split it in quatrain, and the swarm-drive broke.

The smallest mass was the one that arrived on the largest moon of the second largest nonstellar mass, well away from the water-world, while the rest of the swarm collected into their separate selves, light-years apart through flatspace.

The smallest mass drew itself together, dining on methane ice and ammonia rain, and once it had the Hive dug in, it began to spit seeds to the hot-wet inner world.

The seeds, each a few hundred of itself, would scarcely be seen by the sentients on the water-world, though they were much larger than the inhabitants of the sentients, with their appetite for shed skin particles and their gauche country-bumpkin manners. It gradually spread out across the planet, beneath notice of the clumsy, glopping water-bag bipeds.  It colonized a few of them, insinuating into their giant skullcases through ears and noses and eyes. Its dual-hexapodal bodies allowed it to infest quickly, to tunnel past the unpleasant constrictive stress of capillary action.