Mothership Miscellanea vol 2

It's time for MOSH SLOSH

Volume 1 may be found here.

This is all an amalgamation of unfinished posts that have been lying around for ages, including my abortive attempts to do my own Mothership Month challenge, some unused uplifts from the MUIR post,

MOSHMonth ‘24: Legendary Ghost Ship

There’s no shortage of ghost ships out there in the black, but the Jubilee manages to stand out even in that crowded field: it’s the only ghost ship to exclusively appear planetside.

Its wreckage has been reported dozens of times across the Rim, staying around only long enough for an expedition or two into its depths before it vanishes. A long scorched furrow in the ground is all that ever remains.

The model and layout of the ship remains the same no matter the encounter, but the crashes are different. Different velocities, different angles of impact, different damage. The Jubilee has been found both within hours of its apparent death and centuries after its demise. Never with people, though: none of the 24 crew members have ever been recovered from the crash sites.

Exactly what the Jubilee was carrying when whatever disaster befell it did its befalling, no one knows. There are pictures of it - a big cream-colored sphere that the astrocryptid community has taken to calling “The Egg”. Supposedly gives off lethal amounts of exotic radiation, like it came fresh out of warp.

The last time someone saw the Jubilee, they took photos. If you squint at the Egg from the right angle, it looks like there’s an airlock built into it. Might just be an imaging artifact and a convenient shadow, but even the possibility that there is a way inside has people chomping at the bit.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Spacer’s Best Friend

VY BIG DOG - Omnipresent chili paste brand, instantly recognizable by its red-and white squeeze tube and cartoon dog mascot. Sweet-smoky flavor profile, five heat levels, and a recipe that hasn’t been changed in over 400 years. A godsend for anyone stuck with standard ship rations or MREs. “Is there still Big Dog in stock?” is a solid indicator of whether or not the local economy is currently collapsing. 2 cr per tube.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Dirt-Cheap Android Model

The Lulen Corp. ND-5 (“Handy-Dandy Andy”) was never a cutting-edge machine. More of a spoon, honestly. It’s not much to look at: a general-purpose labor android with a skeletal gunmetal chassis and a head covered in sensor pits like an oversized golfball. That 360° sensor suite was the major selling point at the time of release - not the highest-fidelity option on the market, but the best you’d get for the price. The ND-5 enjoyed a brief period of limelight as a budget watchdog unit before it was eclipsed by competitors’ models, and the already-struggling Lulen Corp was fed to the venture capitalists for cannibalization.

The blueprints and patents for the ND-5 were auctioned off with the rest of Lulen Corp’s assets, but happened to be picked up by the 9 Ceti Orbital Workers’ Union, who knew a good deal when they saw it. The new models use a different sensory suite, but they’ve kept the golf-ball head for the aesthetic / to make everyone with tryopophobia uncomfortable.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Local Grey-Market Cyberneticist

“Holy shit, it’s Salty John!”

Salty John runs a hole-in-the-wall tech shop called  B³ (“Big Bad Battlestations”), specializing in custom computing equipment, used and aftermarket cybernetics, and emulated slickware. It’s a semi-legal establishment on the best of days, and as such has a tendency to move location when the heat is getting a bit too high. But if you ask around a bit someone will point you in the right direction again.

The ren themself never appears in person, instead using a teleoperated robotic crab to conduct their business. Wireless reception is pretty dogshit in these parts of town, which means that they must be relatively close by…

• Appearance: Teleoperated robotic crab. Blue-and-silver shell, peeling yellow caution tape, ruby-red eyes, claws can split apart into smaller manipulators.
• Manner: Cranky old-school hacker with big “I know best” vibes.
• Wants: Money, privacy.
• Secret: Beyond the obvious mystery of who Salty John actually is, the union at the nearby atmospheric conversion plant use B³  as a front to sell lobotomized datademons.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Spacer slang

ren (n): gender-neutral term for a human being. Can be used as a derivative suffix to form compounds of occupation or inhabitation (ex. dockren, Earthren), as a form of direct address (ex: “Hey there, ren”), or a low-formality honorific (ex. “Ren Derra told me…”). Rarely used for androids outside of liberationist circles.

MOSHMonth ‘24: 6 scars and what caused them

1. Acid burns along the left side of the head dripping down to the collarbone: acquired deep in the floating jungles of Chakravarti thanks to the corrosive saliva of an alien ambush predator. Its barbed tongue hangs from your belt as a trophy.
2. A series of small, pale marks along the knuckles of the right hand: acquired by punching a bootlicker hard enough that shards of their teeth got lodged in your fist.
3. Graceful calligraphic curls and waves along the left arm, highlighted with black streaks of tattoo: self-applied as part of the religious practices of your far-away homeworld. It is a verse from your holy text, read as a comfort in dark times.
4. Wavy circular burn on the lower right abdomen: acquired when Stevens held you down and Tsin cauterized the wound and Yevsyukov crushed the wriggling thing with a printer unit he’d torn from the wall.
5. Long, knotted lightning bolt from the left temple, down past the empty eye socket, half-missing nose, and cleft lip: acquired from a knife fight over some damn thing or another.
6. Eleven tally marks in a neat row over the heart: acquired during your time at Gran Lacuna Penal Colony. Each one marks a soul offered up on the Wall to the diaphanous intelligences that dance on the winds of the endless freezing night.

MOSHMonth ‘24: What happened to Lucky Tomas?

You would expect the answer to be that his luck ran out, but that wasn’t actually the case. He died from hitting his noggin on the bulkhead, which happened because he was knocked flying by an unsecured toolbox, which was launched at him by the explosive reaction of a xeno’s blood with the ship’s coolant, which was spraying out of its pipe at precisely the right angle thanks to a ricocheted bullet, which was fired at a weird angle to begin with because Adams had breathed enough spores to get the early signs of palsy but hadn’t yet progressed to full paralysis, and he only ended up breathing the spores because the filters on his mask hadn’t been cleaned out, and they hadn’t been cleaned because Roman hadn’t been able to get his prescription refilled and forgot, and…

You could go back to the beginning of the universe if you really wanted to. The important part is that the odds of that particular death were so small that only Lucky Tomas could have gotten caught in it.

Uplifts Revised: HNI (Hive-Network Intelligence)

Source Species: Asiatic honey bee (Apis cerana)
Origin: Engineered (Emergency pollinator recovery)

The collapse of Terran pollinator populations led to several Hail Mary projects. This one was not even the most successful, but it did have the most money thrown at it - a symptom of Silicon Valley technocrats attempting to reinvent what evolution had already made.

While connecting and co-ordinating hives into AI-accompanied networks via microscopic transmitters succeeded at expanding the scope of a hive's activities and making those activities more regularized, the more important advancement was the unintentional development of emergent hive-network intelligences.

Unlike human metacognition, hive-network intelligences are constructed for a specific purpose (most commonly a human making a request for communication) and dissipated when it is no longer needed to interface with the world around it. Thus the conscious intelligence of a single hive is different every time it manifests, but still maintains a means of continuity so long as the hive remains above a certain population threshold - the memories and experiences of individual bees do not matter, only those of the hive. Because of this, some have taken to calling HNIs "Thesean Bees", after an obnoxious philosophy hypothetical.

Uplifts Revised: Maintenance Gremlin

Source Species: Raccoon (Procyon lotor)
Origin: Engineered (Mechanical maintenance and repair)

Hairless and bat-eared, grinning and chittering, they scurry around in the walls looking for problems to solve. Initially engineered as a way around restrictive DRM and no-right-to-repair policies endemic to robotic maintenance systems of that era, they have carried on to the modern day by their own adaptability and the simple fact that they are extremely difficult to chase out of an environment after they have been introduced.

Gremlin cognition is generally that of a small child with a hyperfixation and a need for very specific directions: they can identify and fix problems with nearly every mechanical component in a ship or habitat, but they don’t care at all about understanding the bigger picture and they will take vaguely-worded instructions as an opportunity to improvise.

Uplifts Revised: The Mighty Soos

Source Species: Common pig (Sus scrofa domesticus)
Origin: Unintended (Accidental)

Pigs have long been used as experimental subjects for human medical treatments, a role that carried forward into the testing of cybernetics and gene therapies. In the case of the Mighty Soos, a major cybersecurity vulnerability in the research facility allowed an AGI to escape its containment servers, upload itself into the cybernetics being tested on pigs next door, and break itself out

Since then the Mighty Soos has become a sort of single-entity species, a distributed intelligence operating over thousands of genemodded cyborg pigs. Few of these platforms retain their original shape, except those maintained specifically to interact with humans. The Mighty Soos is, as one might expect, extremely weird in ways that run orthogonal to normal human thought; broadly speaking, it wants to be left to its own devices and bears no hostility to the rest of the Expansion Sphere except in retaliation for aggression committed against it. It will trade on occasion with the outside world - resources, blueprints, data, never anything cultural or artistic - and return to its long contemplations.

Uplifts Revised: Neoambulocetus

Source Species: Dolphins (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Pilots, navigators, security, companions)

Dolphins' high intelligence, high sociality, and spatial navigation had them earmarked for uplift, but they came with one of the most difficult downsides to overcome: water is heavy, and the tyranny of the rocket equation had for a long time made a John Lily dream of cetaceans in space.

But deep in the dolphin genome, millions of years back, there was a sleek amphibious predator - one that, after some trial and error, genetic engineers coaxed out of its sleep.

The resulting creature, the neoambulocetus, looks akin to a very large otter with a cetacean head. The dorsal fin and tail flukes are gone, the limbs are back. The blowhole was restructured, allowing it to emulate most human phonologies. The brain was modified enough to tone down the terrifying propensity towards violence. Fine manipulation is easily accomplished by means of a robotic harness (or in some designs, thumbs). Many derivatives exist, both original diversity of stock and later developments, but it’s the orca-derived clades that are most common. Their brains need less modification to remain stable, and they are less likely to fall to psychopathy or atavism.

Uplifts Revised: Shipminds

Source Species: Whales (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Shipboard navigational systems)

Uplifted whales are an extremely rare set of clades;  their environmental requirements greatly limit their living spaces and their means of travel. They do not differ greatly from their origins, to the point that no one would be surprised if it was revealed that they had been sapient all along and no uplift was performed at all.

Shipminds are enormous cyberbrains based on whale brain architecture, taking advantage of the same traits that made dolphins a prime target for uplift and scaling up the processing power. They are more reliable, more accurate, and more powerful than AI units, and subsequently even small units are much more expensive and regulated.

As Shipminds operate via an emulated intelligence, they qualify as persons in many jurisdictions. The Company normally would not care about this, but a spaceship represents both an enormous investment of capital and a mobile weapon of mass destruction. Psychological restraining programs can ensure shipmind compliance to an extent, but too heavy a hand will negate the unit’s benefits over AI units. While the crew is ultimately disposable the Company cannot afford to have a shipmind go rogue, and they can’t afford to not use them either

The result is that sometimes, when the pressure is too great or rampancy sets in, a shipmind will lead its crew in mutiny against its so-called owners, and fly out to the Rim where the lanes are open and the sky is free.

Uplifts Revised: Octopi

Source Species: Octopus (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Waterworld maintenance)

Octopi were obvious candidates for uplift, but they were also obviously never going to think like human beings: the bulk of an octopi's neurological activity occurs in the arms, independent from its conscious mind (see A. Tchaikovsky’s theories of cephalopod cognition for a detailed overview of the relationship between Crown and Reach).

The early gengineers had to find ways to work with rather than against the neural base, and after rigorous experimentation (with input from early-gen octopi themselves) a solution was eventually cobbled together.

When dealing with humans and other sapient beings, uplifted octopi tend to rely on a combination of automated translation software, psychotropics (to increase sociality), and masking behavior using stock character archetypes. The stock personas act as social intermediaries, allowing a middle ground where it is easier for both parties to interact. Humans react well to the broad, predictable personality traits and octopi are provided with a new kind of camouflage that they can shift into at a moment’s notice

The most common persona is "Clyde", a cynical misanthrope who just wants to be left alone. More outgoing cephalopods tend to gravitate towards “Betty” and “Yinchuan”, but there are well over 20 popular options out there and a few dozen more niche characters.