#tailed spacers

Lunar Hanging Gardens

"Spacer" in RttS is a generic term for a person living off of a planet. "Tailed spacers" are a clade of genetically modified humans designed for microgravity labor. "Tailers" is a nickname for tailed spacers. "Spacer" is not a nickname for them, it would be like referring to a Frenchman as a "man" for short... because yeah, not false, but that's not the important part of the term. The politically correct name for tailed spacers is rather vague— it's a direct result of their historical clade name ("Simians" or "Simian spacers") being considered a slur in modern day. Tailed spacers are hardly the only GMH or spacers with tails, but the portmanteau "tailer" specifically refers to them in English.

Shyam's passive hydraulic back brace. She wears it while working on-planet to support her hyperflexible lumbar spine. I’ve written more about tailed spacer GMH joint issues living under gravity here, and drawn Shyam’s skeleton here.

X-ray imaging in RttS is better than ours because their radiography technology has greater scintillator efficiency-- basically they need less x-rays for an accurate image. But you still need a higher frequency and intensity of ionizing radiation to do radiography of tailed spacers, who can appear nearly opaque under certain conditions.

Tailed Spacers

Average adult height (bipedal): 120cm / 3.9ft Average adult weight: 30kg / 66lb Tailed spacers, aka tailers, are the oldest successful clade of GMH. They were engineered about 200 years ago as part of a corporate vanity project seeking to create the ‘ideal’ human worker for life in micro/low gravity environments and generation ships. The Martian hypercapitalist state that created them did not survive WW3. In modern RttS there are about 2 billion living tailers, many living in tight-knit communities onboard space stations. The largest ground-based community of tailers is on Luna, where they outnumber typ humans 20 to 1.

The primary pigment in their skin is selenomelanin, a reddish artificial pigment that’s effective at blocking most forms of low level cosmic radiation. It expresses much more uniformly over their body than melanin in a typ human, and can even be found lining their organs. Their skin tone ranges from red to purple-brown to dark purple depending on the amount of eumelanin and pheomelanin they have in addition to selenomelanin.

Much of their body has been altered for their intended microgravity lifestyle. Tailed spacers have a bi-quad bauplan, because moving through spaces in microgravity is usually done head first. Their thumbed feet and muscular prehensile tail allow them to form a stable tripod grip on surfaces, and their hyperflexible lumbar spine allows them a huge range of access for their arms and upper body while gripping to a surface. Their supraorbital, genal, and carpal whiskers give them greater spatial awareness in cramped quarters and detect airflow in spacecraft compartments. Their diminutive size means less fuel mass needed to push them through space, less food and water weight needed to sustain them, and less room needed on spacecraft to keep them sane.

Tailed spacers also have genes that prevent muscle and bone density loss and cranial pressure buildup from life in microgravity… but, modern gene therapy regimens have made it so that most typ humans, especially in space-dwellers, have these genes too.

Shyam’s three main speed settings. (Her fourth speed setting is electric motorbike.)

Tailed spacers are bi-quad GMH, meaning their bauplan was designed to let them to walk on two legs or all fours, though quad mode is much faster because of their long flexible lumbar spine and short legs. Although they were engineered to maintain muscle and bone density appropriate for 1g while living in microgravity, their shape is still pretty terribly optimized for living long periods under gravity. Bipedal movement puts strain on their lumbar spine and feet, which can’t deal with constant downward pressure like a typ human’s; and quadrupedal movement puts strain on their wrists and shoulders, which aren’t that different from a typ human’s. Shyam prefers to walking bipedally to keep her hands free, so she has to wear a flexible back brace while she’s working in her heavy equipment workshop to prevent stain injuries. She's developed some chronic pain problems from living on-planet for most of her adult life.