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.
