7 Anomalous Aliens

salpfish1

This is part of what I must now call a semi-regular series, previous installments include:

• 4 Precursor Aliens
• 6 Spacefaring Aliens
• 8 Space Stations
• 9 Metahuman Clades
• 7 Character Backgrounds
• 4 More Backgrounds
  

The universe is filled with life, and we have met very little of it. We understand even less, and that great unknown is filled up with an astounding amount of bullshit: blurry photographs of nothing, clearly doctored video, claims passed around as fact without a single bit of evidence. Unidentified spaceship sightings are common as carbon and typically given far less consideration. The misinformation machine, whether fueled by ignorance or malice, dominates the discussion of aliens - outside of the web of a million lies, the prevailing attitude is that if they're real - real aliens, that is, and not just misidentified human craft, sensor glitches, or bullshit - they'll either be properly discovered at some point, or they're good enough at hiding that we'll never get the chance.

The beings listed below are those that sit in the middle ground between total fabrication and accepted part of life - those that have not been properly studied or formally contacted, but have accumulated enough verifiable evidence to prove that they (probably) exist. What precisely they are is another matter entirely, and only best guesses can be made with the limited information available.

 

Blackballs

A classic of cryptoxenology: black spheres that are incredibly fast, anomalously low-temperature, lack a visible a drive tail, and appear in groups of 1-9. Most evidence of their existence is low-quality long-range photography or meager blips in the scanner data. Theories abound - they are probes sent to observe us by aliens; they are probes to observe us sent by the government; they are hyperspace anomalies; they are life forms, not ships; they are a hallucination caused by too much time in hyperspace; they are a meme that's turned into a stand-alone complex.

They would have remained the generic unproven alien encounter were it not for a cluster of systems, all within a 35 light-year bubble, where Blackballs appear in-atmosphere. These seemingly-inert specimens drift half a kilometer or so above the surface (similar to tensegrity sphere habitats), only seeming to become active long enough to avoid contact with observers. If they are indeed tensegrity habitats, then something must certainly be inside. If only one could be caught...

Hypothetical Antimemetic Biota

Endemic episodes of lost time and memory loss among colonists on the garden world of Palaemon - separate from any shared pre-existing condition or apparent environmental cause - has led to a widespread belief in native life capable of wiping itself from the memory of the observer. In violation of both company and Alliance policy, the colonists have resisted the expansion of surface operations and have begun to form a loosely-defined animistic religion centered on these Ignotae. Offerings are left outside of airlocks, murals are painted with absences of pigment, wise men and fools try and reverse-engineer who they are dealing with from tracing the missing pieces. Somewhere, out in the purple jungles of the planet, something watches us, and we are blind to it.

 

The Runaways

Known through a single, well documented sighting. A rimspace mining vessel, while staking a claim on a gas giant ring system, witnessed three asteroids sharply veer out of their normal orbit, burn torch for three minutes and twenty seconds, and then transition into hyperspace. No further encounters have been confirmed, though there were a spate of claims when the news hit the noosphere.

Of great concern to observers are the anomalies shown in the asteroids' apparent drive capabilities: not only did the torch drives in use dwarf the output of any terragen propulsion systems by orders of magnitude, the hyperspace transition was much closer to the gas giant's center of mass than the normal minimum safe distance for a human-operated interface. Combined with the camouflage on display, more paranoid factions in the Expansion Sphere have used the Runaways as fuel for conspiracies of secret invasions, immanent or already underway.

 

The Basilisk Transmission

The story goes like this: an alien transmission was received by the long-distance communication station orbiting Arete, packaged with its own decryption code. Soon as it was unlocked, the data package started subverting the colony's governance node and most of its civil network. The comm station workers took down the whole satellite network to stop it from spreading out of the system. Alliance warships, in the system for a scheduled refit, bombed the colony into oblivion. The CTA then put up a quarantine around the planet and a hyperspace interdiction on the system, which remain active.

The official line is that rebellion had broken out on Arete, and that the governance node had been subverted by extremist elements of the Aretan Workers' Union. Most people buy this explanation, as it'd neither be out of character for the Aretans, nor even their first rebellion. But with the quarantine and interdiction in place, there's no way to tell what the actual situation is on the planet, or in the small iteration of the City around the system's lone ice giant.

 

The Barbelo Remains

At first glance there is nothing unusual at all about the original inhabitants of Barbelo: they were of that genre of aggressive, inventive species whose CO2-choked tombs dot the cosmos in their dozens. Nothing unusual there: acidic seas, pressure-cooker atmosphere, a few hardy strains of biota surviving in pockets.

But then the excavations began. A partial skeleton was found, and then another, dozens of them. Then hundreds. A mass grave? The excavation went deeper. A structure, built in a region of low tectonic activity. Signs of attempted breach - all failures. A series of chambers, arranged in a circle some 20 kilometers around, linked by a single long hallway. Filled top to bottom with rows of shelves and niches, and on each there was another skeleton. Thousands, then tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Ground-penetration scans revealed another ring of chambers below the first, then another, then five more beyond that. All identical. Millions of individuals, neatly arrayed in their niches.

In the center of the great crypt-ring is another skeleton; five hundred meters tall, its knees pulled up to its chest, sitting upright. Around its skull is an enormous circlet of worked metal.

A second complex has just been found.

 

The Samarkand Hyperspace Gate Incident

The Samarkand Gate is a well-known xenoartifact - a long-defunct hyperspace door in a decaying orbit around a brown dwarf. The device has been picked to the bones by xenologists hoping to find some clue to its creators or purpose, but there are no signs of planetary or orbital development in the Samarkand system at all - at least not within the last ten million years or so.

Its state of affairs as a minor tourist attraction was expected to continue indefinitely (with some talks of stabilizing the gate's orbit and moving it back out to a stable lagrange) until it reactivated. This should have been impossible, given the amount of degradation in the machinery, but less than an hour later, a ship emerged from the folded space beyond the ring.

Unlike many mystery ships the vessel appeared to be well within known technological capabilities, resembling middle interplanetary period vessels now centuries behind the modern terragen average. It broadcast a series of wideband radio signals (which remain undeciphered - they don't seem to follow any sensible patterns of first-contact protocol) and remained at the mouth of the gate. Attempts at formal contact were made by the few ships in communication range, but no response was received. After half an hour, the ship turned around and re-entered the wormhole, and the Gate returned to inactivity.

While there's still no sign that the Gate can be reactivated from the terragen side, post-Incident studies (bolstered by some lucky measurements of the Gate's exotic energy discharge during the Incident) have been enough to narrow down the region of space the mystery ship originated in. If the calculations are correct, it is roughly 1500 light years coreward and widdershins from Samarkand. Uncharted territory, so any expedition would be extremely slow going - still, talks are already underway. 

 

The Worms

Longhaulers drifting into port with their crews massacred. Frantic spacers waking up from cryo to find something growing in their stomachs. Entire stations quarantined, suppression marines brought in by the platoon. Asteroids found floating still and silent in hyperspace, honeycombed with dark chambers. Blurry video of things long, wriggling, deep red. Cultists proclaim the end of humanity and the coming of the Conqueror Worm. A pilgrimage, to the distant planet where all things go to die.

Six Spacefaring Aliens

Sigmacastell / swampgirl

A sequel of sorts to my 4 Precursor Aliens post. (Many thanks to sigmacastell/swampgirl for the art)

**

 

The lucky few. The blessed company of those who have passed through the Great Filters and reached the stars.

This list contains only those whose expansion spheres have come into contact with metahumanity - there are other interstellar civilizations detected in the galaxy (7 with a detectable expansion sphere of 100 light years or more and 17 smaller ones), but for now they are too far away to contact or observe in detail.

The Triple Alliance

A civilization built on the symbiotic relationship between three unlikely species:

• Enormous filter feeders, cream and orange in coloration, natives to the upper atmospheres of hydrogen giants.
• Hunchbacked omnivorous crustaceans, hailing from the interior oceans of frozen moons where they live pressed to the inner shell by buoyancy.
• Von-neumann robotics that maintain and oversee the technological aspects of their society.

The two organic members have been cyborged for mutual interface compatibility among all three member species. Together they have formed an expansion sphere significantly larger than that of humans, though due to their preferred environments they typically go overlooked or unnoticed - sometimes to the point that other species will unwittingly share a system with them. They rarely travel, and when they do their ships are designed and piloted so as to minimize detection. On their colonies they maintain a generally low-technology society, save for their integrated communication suites and the presence of Species C.

The Triple Alliance is open to some communication and trade, with most direct contract done with Species C. They have denied access to all of their worlds save designated meeting habitats and have threatened retaliatory violence if this agreement is not upheld. Scientific / historical / cultural media received via trade is clearly heavily edited for propaganda purposes. (From a human standpoint, quite ineptly, but this is due to the propagandists' inability to adjust for different psychologies)

Xenobiologists hypothesize that Species A and B were uplifted to some extent by another force, but whether that force is Species C or another party remains unknown.

Cybeles

A sea slug the size of a small truck, attended by a harem of their remote-controlled proxy bodies, arrives to negotiate a trade agreement between the two expansion spheres. The entire time, despite the misgivings of the current government, it is nothing but the picture of cooperative and pleasant. By the time it goes home, the human diplomats are pocketing cheap import deals and leases on six new worlds and the cybele has precisely what they want.

See, the cybeles are here to help. Here to lift humanity out of the mire of suffering that it has trapped itself in. Here to lead us towards a bright utopian future under the careful guidance of their empire of the gentle hand. They don't hide any of this, they aren't lying. That is a lot of what makes it so appealing.

The cybeles promise long lives of pleasure, free from want and pain - an easy sell for the tortured undermasses of humanity. Why not let them take care of things? Why not start adopting their mores? Take a cybele lover, take two or three; it's easier that way. Less to worry about. After so much suffering, don't you deserve to let go a bit?

The relationship grows increasingly one-sided. Cybele technological and cultural goods flood into the terragen sphere, subverting all the old hierarchies and letting them gather all the pieces into their own. Planets break away from human hegemony to assimilate with the cybeles. The slugs tut-tut the violent uprisings but shrug and welcome the breakaway worlds into the fold. Everyone is happy here. They'll deliver utopia, on time and built to spec.

The predictable far-right groups lashing out against the cybeles' influence have more in common with them than they realize. The alien leadership, deep in their coral cathedrals and far from the prying eyes of human observers, is dominated by oligarchic arch-conservatives, who view humanity as a band of idiot savages squatting on real-estate they are either wasting or destroying outright. The cybele psyche is less inclined to physical conflict, and has accordingly developed a keen strategic mind for social-warfare, one that humans have so far found themselves easy prey to.

As far as human observers know, the situation is thus: The cybele expansion sphere is larger than humanity's, though less densely populated. Their technology is within the range of what the human expansion sphere can produce, but it more efficient and effective than the terragen norm. They prefer warm oceanic worlds and leave the rest to their machines. Access to their worlds is tailored, leaving enormous dark spots in what anyone knows. Some xenologists hypothesize that they have already assimilated other species, potentially even the ones that presumably uplifted them in the first place.

Bathyspheric Civilization

Enormous ooid vessels - shimmering, chromatic, bathed in exotic radiation - emerge from hyperspace without warning. Drone fleets like locusts descend on small worlds of rock and ice, devouring them and bringing the spoils back home. Entire asteroids are dragged from their orbits and hauled back to the technicolor maws of the fleet. The resource-gatherers do not care about efficiency or grace; they will burn torch at whatever brute force necessary to lay a straight line back to their source. What would take decades by other means they will complete in a tenth of the time. And when they are done, by whatever metric they measure their task, they will vanish - slipping back into hyperspace with only a faint ripple of gravitational anomaly.

And this is all that we know for certain. In those instances when they have visited an inhabited system for their harvest, or when they have been stumbled upon by happenstance, they have remained utterly non-communicative. It is uncertain even if they are aware of humanity at all - they have yet to harvest a settled world, which makes most scientists believe that they are avoiding them, but this cannot be a certainty. Observers have thus far kept their distance, hoping to avoid a violent reaction.

The discharge of exotic energy buildup has only been measured on one occasion, and the accuracy of this data is questioned. If accurate, it indicates that the ships in question were exposed to the hyperspatial medium at Jump-1 depth for 350 - 430 Earth Standard Years. If this is the case, the inhabitants of the vessels must possess some resistance, inherent or engineered, to the mental degradation of long-term hyperspatial residence. If the inhabitants are biological, cybernetic, or the vessels themselves is fodder for white papers and conspiracy theories.

The pressures that would drive a civilization to such a risk-heavy survival method have been endlessly debated without any productive conclusion.

Ten-Legs-Tall

Candyapple-red harvestmen a dozen feet tall. In their interactions with humans they come across as curious, highly social, nonviolent and frustratingly vague at the worst moments. For reasons the explain only as taboo they refuse to use any sort of hyperspace-capable technology, leaving them dependent on slower-than-light interstellar travel. The cyborg bodies they have engineered for themselves make this easier with the aid of greatly extended lifespans and long-term hibernative abilities, to the point where they have permanently adopted a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Permanent planetary populations existed at some point in the past, but these have been either abandoned or forgotten (sources are unclear)

Their lifestyle means that they are encountered only during their resting periods which make up a very small fraction of their lives. They are willing to trade exotic matter and metamaterials for antimatter, fusion fuel collection rights, and human cultural goods - the difference in time scales on which the two species operates means that humans generate enormous quantities of novelties to while away the decades between stars.

Their few stationary permanent settlements tend to be on rogue worlds or kuiper-belt objects, only occasionally adventuring deep into a system. These settlements are occasionally abandoned without obvious cause, and likewise occasionally reclaimed. Intrusion in an abandoned habitat is discouraged.

The Dysonwood Minds

A self-replicating environmental intelligence. Enormous plant-fungal neural-analog matrices feeding off the volatile-rich innards of comets and asteroids, seeded by passing sower modules as they drift from star to star. Differences between the internal ecologies of individual trees can be radical, and only more so when comparing tress of different systems and sower-lineages, but all life found within them is based on the same source pattern, presumed to be the environments of the world of origin.

The Minds were not discovered until well after the exploration of the Dysonwoods, when contact was made with hominid-analog organisms during a cataloging expedition of an orbital grove. It was through these Interpreters (who were later revealed to have been dysonwood-native organisms modified according to recovered human corpses) that a general contact was made with the Minds themselves. With the Interpreters acting in the stead of the Minds, appropriate treaties could be made. Scientific study and limited lo-tec settlement is permitted, in exchange for distribution of Interpreter templates to groves in other systems.

Of the Minds themselves, this much can be said: like their environments, they are based upon the template of a single original intelligence. They have remained surprisingly consistent over several million years of replication drift, so that Minds light years apart will still think in similar fashions. They do not communicate often amongst themselves except with their grove-neighbors, and appear to interpret humans as aspects of another environmental intelligence. They do not actively seek peaceful coexistence but will remain within a niche without hostility to the outside.

The Interpreters, now that several generations have passed and ironed out the bugs, act very much (but not entirely) like lo-tec human societies. This is an illusion - the neural network they share with each other and their Mind grants them stability and perception beyond what a human culture would be capable of.

Humen

There's nothing intrinsically special about them; the universe is littered with hundreds of thousands of similar species, crumbling to dust in anonymous, unmarked graves. The jump to interstellar civilization selects for the patient, the diplomatic, the far-seeing and the careful, and these are traits humen have only sporadically. Their incredible adaptive pattern-recognition and robust social-connection formation serve them well, but they are perpetually undermined by an inability to recognize when no pattern exists and a low threshold for community size. Internicene conflict and self-destructive self-interest are rampant in their diverse and fractious civilization, and this makes them poor neighbors.

Their high aggression and willingness to brute-force solutions at high cost to their own population have, however, managed to carve out an interstellar civilization in a very short amount of time. The long-term stability of such an arrangement remains uncertain.

The Tohuls

 

Luke Campbell

These guys from Orion's Arm might be my favorite aliens in science fiction. Namely because their gimmick is that they are incredibly close to humans psychologically, but thoroughly alien physically. They're these blind bat-starfish things who live comfortably at 135 C and 70 atmospheres, who would instantly die in at least three horrific ways (freezing to death, lethal alkaline burns, explosive decompression) the instant they emerged into a human-safe environment, but they're still the closest thing to us.

And, relevant to our interests, they can fit in as a viable MoSh player option with only a little hand-waving. (OA features modified tohuls anyway). They think like humans anyway, right? The trade off of the engineering needed to survive in a human environment does unfortunately mean that some of their abilities are not as powerful as they would be back home, but that's not supremely relevant here. Qualitative, not quantitative is the order of the day - "this option has stat bonuses" is boring, "this option will force you to roleplay in a different way" is fun. Qualitative over quantitative.

In a way, I suppose this is just a longer version of Chris' Primordial monster writeups, but for a player option. I added one number in there just because it would feel remiss if I didn't.

So You Want To Be A Blind Space Bat-Starfish

• Average weight 60-70 kg, but the full scale can go 40 and 100.
• Tough, leathery skin (+5% armor)
• Blind - their eyespots can detect the presence of light but nothing more than that.
• Echolocation - effective both in tight focus and broad-band pings.
• Can generate and detect electrical fields, though this is only fully effective in water
• On land, can detect planetary magnetic fields.
• In water, can be used to deliver a mild shock to stun small prey.
• Can be used as a form of intimate conversation.
• Using echolocation / electrical field generation will reveal their presence to anything sensitive.
• Very good hearing - can shield ears from loud noises.
• Good sense of smell.
• Highly developed taste and touch using the small appendages on the underside of their limbs.
• Gripping pads on hands / feet which aid in climbing and gripping.
• Feet have opposable digits and can hold objects.
• Gliding membranes - not very useful out of their native environment, unfortunately.
• Slow, shuffling walk, can hop around somewhat faster. Their typical jump-glide is only really useful in dense atmospheres or low G environments.
• Writing is designed to be read either by touch or sonar.
• Originally nocturnal. Instinctual dislike of being stuck outside without shelter, inclement weather, the cold, and bright light.

If I did this right, it should should be rather easy for someone to pick this up and use their weird alien bat-starfish properties for interesting problem solving. Who needs stats?

Four Precursor Aliens

lukeoram

The Pillar of Heaven

Gleaming white cylinders nearly ten thousand kilometers long, featureless save for gigayears of micrometerorite scarring. Five have been found so far - all in wide orbits around resource-poor and otherwise unnoteworthy stars. 

Four of the five pillars actively broadcast simple, clearly artificial radio signals. These align with the typical contact beacon format of a loop of increasingly complex mathematical formulae on the 1420 MHz band. Should observers attempt to respond to this broadcast, the pillar will broadcast an extensive corpus of linguistic data. The language is precise, analytic, and obviously engineered for easy comprehension by automated translation software.

After the observer has transmitted a message containing any parts of the provided language, the pillar with switch to a loop of the following transmission:

DEFEAT OF ENTROPY! [past continual tense marker]

THOSE WITHIN ENDURE! [future continual tense marker]

GIFT WITHOUT PRICE! [emphatic statement marker]

ALL MINDS ARRIVE! [emphatic request marker]

Non-android individuals coming within 300m of a pillar will die instantaneously.

The pillars' message has inspired a fervent religious revival within the Expansion Sphere. Thousands of pilgrims attempt to reach them yearly, though few are able to make it through the corporate blockades of the five home systems. Common rumor on the ground is that the blockades are not for the prevention of mass suicide, but as a means of cutting off the only means of escape from a universe dominated by the twin forces of capitalism and entropy.

The reason for the fifth pillar's silence remains unknown.

The Scholz's Star Shellworld Builders 

Scholz's Star is a red/brown binary dwarf system that passed within a lightyear of Sol (~52,000 AU) some 70,000 years ago, close enough to interact directly with the Oort Cloud. That'll be a problem in about two million years, but that's a problem for two million years from now. 

It would have passed on as an otherwise mundane unique occurrence, were it not for the fact that the drone ship later sent to map the system found that it was inhabited. A total of 24 shellworld habitats (artificial planets built around planet-mass holes), ranging from 500 to 4000 kilometers in diameter  orbit the two bodies in system, each with a resident population of baseline humans and terragen flora/fauna. Genetic and cultural drift over tens of thousands of years, plus the lack of inter-habitat transport, has radically diversified the population. All extant societies, at the time of discovery, were pre-industrial, though this analog extends only to technology and not to social beliefs, which vary widely.

No other traces of the Shellworld-Builders have been found. It can be assumed that they were not natives of Scholz's Star, due to lack of any planets that might have supported life and the requirements of their apparent technological advancement. Their motivation in building and peopling the shellworlds also remains speculative - they didn't appear to make any physical modifications to the abductees, nor any noticeably imposed cultural structures.

That the closest approach of Scholz's Star and the Youngest Toba Disaster and resultant human genetic bottleneck occurred within the same time frame has not gone unnoticed

The Bloat

An entity or group of entities encountered only by those conscious during hyperspace transit or aboard vessels with malfunctioning Caldwell Manifolds. As with all hyperspatial entities, it is impossible to observe outside of its effects on humans; no hypospace manifestations have yet been confirmed.

Humans exposed to the Bloat will form a sort of parasitic relationship with it. The early stages are marked by an increasing physical and mental lethargy and inertia, followed then by the gradual loss of food or water. Those effected will eventually become nonverbal, though interviews from subjects prior to total loss have included statements implying a group-mind shared between effected individuals and the Bloat itself, as well as advanced understanding of hyperspatial mathematics. This latter trait has made Bloat-linked subjects a valuable commodity across the Expansion Sphere, as with with right cybernetic links a fully parasitized individual is outclassed only by a dedicated Navigator in terms of astrogation abilities.

Occasionally, Bloat-linked subjects might undertake construction or artistic projects of unknown purport. These should be destroyed upon identification.

[OAI EYES ONLY]

Xenothreat [BLOAT] rival / enemy to xenothreat [GAUNT]. Mutual aggression between effected parties. Further research required. Further specimens required. Construction or artistic projects undertaken by affected subjects to be destroyed upon identification. Recovered subjects to be transported to [BLACKSITE GAMMA] for processing.

Strata

A thin layer of organic compound found on the sites of ancient ocean beds on sixteen different terrestrial worlds within a 4-parsec bubble. It is a deep orange in color and stringy and fibrous in texture, and quickly dissolves in water. It is also a very powerful narcotic - a stimulant hallucinogen that very rarely plays nice with the rest of the digestive system. It it most commonly drunk (though this dilutes it), ground into a powder and inhaled, or smoked.

This has spawned a wild rush for drug mining. Guns drawn, knives out.

Further Alien Beings

Brent Hollowell

 

Previous installments can be found here and here.

They have names now!

*Kokopelli*

Hunchbacked hairless bipeds evolved from migratory herd omnivores. Cream colored underbelly, red-rust tortoiseshell dorsal pattern. Four huge black eyes, bracketed by bone plates, dominate an otherwise-featureless head. Retractable feeding apparatus. Language sounds between flute and pipe organ, can communicate easily over significant distance. Larger clades use a knuckle-walking gait. Climate shifts early in their development left them in an environment bereft of apex predators, but also subject to extreme seasonal variation, resulting in a tendency towards long-term planning, evenhanded resource allotment, and inter-communal cooperation.

*Centaurans*

Large, sessile radiotropes similar in structure to barnacles. Thick metallic shells provide armoring against predators and radiation. Vast fuligin petals absorb as much radiation as possible. Excess energy is transmitted out as shortband radio signals used for communication. Evolved on the meridian of a tidally-locked world orbiting a red dwarf: Those adapted for other worlds will require supplemental sources of energy, and have been used as radioactive waste containment in certain settlements.

*Flatlanders*

Colonial nanotechlife existing as two-dimensional images inhabiting solid surfaces, typically the walls of buildings. Forms and colors are variable, ranging from abstract to realistic. Colonies regularly migrate. Can perceive third dimension through visual, auditory, and electrochemical senses, but must communicate through displayed text.

*Toolies*

Similar in shape to a stocky, eight-limbed otter. Hundreds of known coat patterns and styles. Possess little in terms of material culture or tool use. About as intelligent as a small child, but capable of following complex directions without error and gifted with learning languages. Instinctively form strong social bonds with juveniles of other species. Believed to be a neogenic or uplifted species, or the descendants of one, used as pets or household guardians.

*APC*

Self-replicating fast food chain restaurant. Subterranean modules of the machine organism are devoted to food production, with above-ground levels used to host guests. Can grow to encompass up to half a dozen above-surface levels and host up to a thousand individuals at any given time. Will clone and cyborg staff from the local species.

*Fennecs*

Predatory bipeds from a low-gravity world. Wedge-shaped heads, very long limbs. Can keep up a loping stride with low effort over long distances at a steady speed. Nocturnal: enormous eyes and ears, both extremely sensitive. Hollow bones - flexible and light, but easily broken. Silent. Deep blue-black coloration.

*Bottom Feeders*

Pallid, eyeless, sluglike beings about the size of a walrus, their lumpy heads an eruption of. manipulative tendrils and feeding gills. Feed off marine detritus and abyssal chemical vents. The necessity of a high-pressure environment means that unmodified populations will always be at considerable distance from other species, some shallow-water and even amphibious clades have been engineered.

*Zebratupods*

Dome-shaped crustacean-analogs with a heavy metallic shell, about a foot and a half across. Scavenger-generalists. Capable of both swimming and digging to avoid predators and the common solar flares of their homeworld. When interacting with other species, they will typically use a vaguely-humanoid robotic body operated by an individual riding in the stump of the neck.

*Diamondoid*

Shards of artificial diamond strung together by a network of gold smartmatter filaments. Will take forms of trees, crystal matrices, the vague shapes of animals. Have made no direct network links with any other machine intelligence, preventing any observation of their internal mental organization - communicate instead by vibrating components to produce sound waves. Typically seen on board the vessels of other species. 

*Un-Men*

Wear human form like ill-fitting clothing, seemingly on purpose - corpulent bodies, stick-slender arms with too many joints and too many fingers. Broad, elongated faces poke out from beneath silken hoods. Skin the white of curdled milk, studded with shards of precious stones. Merchants of a sort, buying and selling unique goods of immense value and obtuse purpose.

*Daemoncore*

Clade of interplanetary vessels. Narrow profiles. Sharp, angular hulls. At the center of each vessel is a large, fluid-filled chamber containing the organic component of the ship; an immense being appearing somewhat like a fetus with an elongated, serpentine abdomen, measuring from 20 to 80 feet from head to tail-tip.

*Pertinamiles*

Tall, muscular bipeds that have retained the sturdy chitinous plating of their crustacean-analog ancestors. Abdominal swimmerets repurposed into mating displays. Inflatable throat pouch to produce intimidating noise. Six of eight arms are vestigial. Victims to a runaway militarist monoculture that has utterly destroyed both their home biopsphere and most traces of any earlier cultures. Not particularly good at war, due to the monoculture doing its best to undermine logistics, medicine, and tactics.

*Flagellants*

Rubbery wormlike beings possessing a cartilaginous endoskeleton, allowing them to grow to several meters in length at the largest and pursue an amphibious lifestyle. Dorsal surface carpeted with waving tentacles covered in paralyzing nematocysts. Typically hosts and protects smaller aquatic creatures in exchange for pest removal. Will rear up to display underbelly coloration (usually for attracting mates or threatening rivals) and mouthparts when interacting with other species, as this best approximates a face. Longer manipulatory and sensory cilia make up the anterior end and drape down the back when in raised stance.

*Motherfuckers*

Shuffle about on three stumpy legs. Grey-blue skin sags in wrinkles and folds, as if it is too big for the creature. Cartilaginous crests flush with color to display emotion. Immense eyes. Six delicate arms and hands, arranged radially, slip in and out of hidden pockets. tend to wear computer screens displaying smiley faces when dealing with humans. Symbiotic, droplet-shaped machine-life drones nest on them Three sexes: two male and one incubator that, while sterile, gestates and gives birth. Males can transition to incubators as they age, or when needed by population pressures.

*Red Queens*

Immense oceanic creatures filling a similar niche to terragen whales. Bright red in coloration, similar to the waters of their homeworld. Pods ruled over by the largest and oldest females. Males are much smaller, faster swimmers, and have a shorter lifespan. Initial observations were colored by an early instance of a leading female breaking away from the pod to bite the head off of of a male from another pod, for reasons still only presumed.

*Azazeli* 

Machine-life derived from adaptive virtual-reality consoles. Host simulations designed for therapeutic use by providing a safe outlet for aggression. Most common variant is a single-occupant capsule. Generally spring up in clusters in urban environments. The actual intelligence will rarely appear within the simulation, and in those cases will take forms and methods of communication appropriate to the participant. Tend towards stable tripartite organization.

*Semth*

Pallid, vaguely humanoid vacuumorphs. One to three head-analogs on sinuous necks - no outward features, packed with exotic sensory organs. Immense bodies clinging to the sides of spaceships with even greater wings stretching out a dozen times their bodies length, black on one side orange on the other. Planet-bound varieties perch on buildings like gargoyles.

*Moon-Eaters* 

Squat quadrupedal bodies with glistening, greasy skin and wide mouths filled with flat, grinding teeth. Thick coats of cilia. Enormous, luminous eyes. Bury themselves in mud to avoid the heat of the day. Accompanied always by a small, brightly colored flier covered in tufts of proto-feathers. The exact nature of the symbiosis is yet to be determined,

*Tripods*

Three too-thin legs, black. A small, round body, rust-red. A long, curved, bony false-head like a bird’s beak or mosquito proboscis. A loop of bone atop the fake skull. The brain and true organs are all compacted into the central body. Skittish, tend to flee at high speed when startled. Are starlted by most things.

*[Nomen Pending]*

A large, fleshy blob, roughly spherical, 20-30 feet in circumference. skin covered in flexible, ceramic scales as if a mosaic. Patterns of blue, white, and gold, swirl across flabby flanks. In lower-gravity environments they might fill their inner chambers with buoyant gas and float above the ground - these clade possess manipulator tendrils on the ventral pole. Will use members of other species exclusively as proxies for communication.

*Echidna Machines*

Derived long-ago from aquatic echinoderms, now used as surrogates to provide multi-species reproductive and modification services. Instrumental in the standardization of microbiomes and genetic modifications for species that share living space (for such a thing is impossible on a large scale without mass intervention over generations). The smallest individuals have six incubation chambers and weigh about a quarter of a ton - the largest known specimen covers a square kilometer.

*Reincarnators*

Biologically immortal. Progress through a repeating life cycle of 6-10 stages depending on clade, each stage lasting 50-200 years. Some memories and personality traits are maintained through metamorphosis, though fading fully after 3-4 transitions. Stages are generally bipedal, though some with longer metamorphosis times can more radically alter bone structure.

More Aliens

Nick Storozhenko

Flabby acephalic quadruped. Orange with darker speckles, cream underbelly. Glossy cybernetic enhancements along the spinal cord. Livestock, engineered and uplifted by a cruel and long-extinct patron. Delicious and aware of it. Possessing of a terrible, unshakable nihilism.

**

Rubbery conical body on a large muscular foot. Mottled green-brown color. Peak splits open to reveal extendable manipulator limbs, sensory and reproductive organs. Amphibious, primarily aquatic. Slow to act, very cautious, very patient. Can release clouds of neurotoxin in water.

**

A latticework of chitinous limbs supporting sheets of shimmering stained-glass gossamer. These are the treelike adult forms, alive for only a few days to mate and die. Their larvae, like huge pastel caterpillars, live and grow for decades in the fearful anticipation of that blissful moment when they will be beyond all thought and pain.

**

Humpbacked shell like yellowing teeth, rows of swimmerets and rasping mouthparts pulsing beneath. Hail from the frozen hydrocarbon shores of a Titan-analogue. Intense R-selection reproduction has fed into a detached, near-sociopathic logic of resource allocation.

**

Serpentine body, ten legs. Soft striped fur in red, bronze and black. Barbed proboscis with liquefying spittle. Six eyes for maximum field of view. Apex ambush predators, valuing silence, effective action, and maintaining territorial boundaries.

**

Symbiotic amalgamations of three organisms: one, something like a wide, six-limbed tortoise. The second, a variety of coral polyp, growing in red-pink columns of tight-packed spirals. The third, tiny creatures between ants and starfish that live within the pillar. Means of mental function unknown, interference presumed. Do not appreciate prying eyes. Exclusively live in coastal regions.

**

Gigantic bell-shaped filter feeders from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. Cloudlike patterns of blue and white. Long draperies of baleen to scoop up food. Communicate through radio. Biologically immortal, capable of reverting to their nymph stage. Haunting songs. Difficult to communicate with. Forever seem to be focusing on something else.

**

Octopedal scavenger-generalists. Jungle-floor dwellers. Lumpy red shell. Spade-like forelimbs to assist with digging. Hyper-social and curious, with large family units and strong empathy bonds. Carve out immense networks of underground complexes and habitation mounds.

**

Digital lifeforms inhabiting amorphous, parasitic nanoswarms, which in turn are currently inhabiting the brains of a species of small, incredibly cute, fruit-eating arboreal creatures. Very old, devoted mostly to whim, relaxation, and entertainment at others' expense.

**

Stout, aposematic bipeds adapted to low light and high gravity. Resistant to pain and fear. Compulsive consumers - eat more than they can stomach when food is available, will fill up their living spaces with objects that are purchased and then ignored or thrown away. Enter states of nonvocal hyperfocus while carrying out tasks. Sponsors have been mentioned, but not seen.

**

Self-replicating communications satellite network, bootstrapped into evangelizing the media culture of a long-dead species. A pest with a habit of parasitizing other satellite networks. The records that remain are corrupted, incomplete, and mostly nonsensical.

**

Viral memetic cultureform transmitted through narrative and symbol. Triggers behavioral changes in susceptible host life-forms, inducing [DATA EXPUNGED] in order to proliferate transmission materials.

**

Vacuum-adapted life native to the icy rings of a gas giant. Feed off volatiles and sunlight. Sessile, communicate through radio waves. Vast solar collector leaf-analogs. Form large reef structures where other vacuum life resides, in parallel to similar aquatic environments.

**

Tall radial quadruped with silky fur coat. Each side is dominated by an androgynous humanoid face of smooth bone plates. Facial structures can pull back to to expose internal organs for repair by attendant tick-like servitors. Clearly engineered for interaction with other species.

**

Colorful arboreal grazer kept aloft through specialized gas bladders. Defend themselves by using sonar pings to confuse and disorient most predators, and clever tool usage for the rest. The ease by which they might be grounded and killed has imbued them with zealous group-protection and threat-reduction instincts.

**

Aggressive predatory tripods. Bullet-shaped body and stiltlike legs. Rubbery tawny skin with darker stripes. Will run prey into exhaustion and then deliver the killing blow through hydraulic mouthparts. Typically form packs of 6-12. Parasitic, vestigial males are traded as currency.

**

Heavily-armored radial pentapods. Thick scutes and defensive spikes mostly for show now, as few predators will go through the effort of flipping them over to attack the underbelly. Can live to thousands of years old, though they think so slowly they rarely have anything to say.

**

Parasitic worm-analogue. Networks into the host's neural system while residing in the lower digestive tract. Favors large fauna for scope of food intake and according social status. Individuals lucky enough to reside in megafauna hosts will often maintain servants

**

Apex predators. Shaggy white fur, dark skin beneath. Have developed bone-skids to assist transit across the near-global glaciation of their world. Strong paddle-like feet at the rear of the body push off against the ice, launching them mouth-first towards their targets. Teeth are shed and replaced constantly through life.

**

Spherical metal shipping containers with chipping paint and stenciled symbols. There is tapping from inside. Occasionally thin, greasy fluid leaks on occasion from the seams. The voices from within speak something you recognize, laden with malapropisms and irregular structures.

10 Sapient Aliens For Mothership

Juniorwoodchuck

And here we go, the last of my series of patreon-exclusive posts from back in the halcyon days of February.

10 Sapient Alien Species for Mothership (and other games)

1) A decaying satellite crying tightband radio bursts into the night, orbiting a world of desertified continents, sterile acidic oceans, and unbreathable CO2 haze.

• The satellite will respond to attempts at communication using the 1420 MHz band. Its first messages will be used to establish baseline proficiency in math and chemistry with whomever it is talking to, growing in complexity and steadily increasing the amount of data transferred. (Example puzzles: Prime numbers. Fibbonaci sequence, hypotenuse calculation, identifying elements (hydrogen, then helium, carbon, oxygen, uranium etc, chemical compounds like water, sucrose, caffeine etc.)
• The satellite will be able to form a basic vocabulary in a few days if provided with sufficient data. It will try for sympathy. It will lie.
• The satellite contains 2861 digitized minds - all that could be saved of the eleven billion beings that once inhabited the planet below. All of these are close enough in complexity to a human mind that they can be loaded onto a run on an android logic core. Makeup of the population is:
• 00-23 - Chrysocratic landowning caste
• 24-30 - Diplomatic stratoeunuch caste
• 31-50 - Petrofascist party leadership
• 51-65 - Cryptotechnocratic monopolists
• 66-89 - Retainers of the above parties (roll again, ignore 66+)
• 90-99 - Literate scientists and scholars.

2) Colonial organisms like tube worm pipe organs, living simple lives and thinking simple thoughts around the deep-sea vents at the bottom of a subglacial ocean.

• Observation can tell that they are thinking, but can’t tell what they are communicating to each other, or to what extent they are aware of their observers.
• The beings can, very slowly, guide the growth of structures from dead segments of the colony (akin to coral formation) that appear akin to cathedrals to the human eye - these have no practical purpose, and so are considered art and thus valuable.
• Pressure differences would kill these creatures long before they ever made it to the surface. This does not stop a certain secretive band of investment firms who want to transplant one of the colonies and sell it as an art installation.

3) Dolphin analogues (highly social aquatic pack predators) from the shallow oceans of a high-gravity superhabitable world. Sleek pointed cylindrical bodies with powerful tails and steering fins.

• A rough lexicon has been established, basic communication is possible with machine intermediaries.
• The beings have shown great curiosity in human researchers and AI probes. Several have volunteered to be taken offworld.
• This is less good, because someone found that they are delicious.

4) A terrestrial planet orbiting an ordinary K-class star, spitting out tightband radio signals contining sequences of prime numbers at every nearby star. Every probe sent to the system, and all have been destroyed within a few hours of exiting hyperspace, providing only partial images of the planet’s surface. Light-tracery resembling major cities can be seen on the night side.

• Nearby planetary governments have issued a general lockdown - attempts to contact the planet in any way are considered an act of terrorism and will be dealt with militarily.
• Someone claiming to be a listening station on the ANONNET claims to have received a different message from the system - prime numbers in descending sequence, from somewhere in the oort cloud of that sun.

5) Beings whose homeworld is on a very pronounced elliptical orbit and so spends the majority of its year frozen solid. These creatures cocoon themselves in clusters around geological hotspots, favoring those rich in the radioactive materials they feed off in this stage. Clusters are connected by complex webs of neural ganglia that have burrowed through the rock - they clearly are talking to each other, but we don’t yet know what they’re saying. No direct contact has been made, only ground-penetrating scans.

• The planet is due to move back into a temperate zone relatively soon, which means the next stage of these creatures’ lives, if such things exist, is bound to happen. There’s an actual low-key war going on between the members of different university xenology departments over who gets first exploration rights, and thus first publishing on papers.

6) A very simple machine species - glossy metal spheres from marbles to soccer balls, running around the near-Martian desert on their little spider legs. They have a symbiotic relationship with equally-artificial solar trees that they use to recharge. There have been no signs of any sort of civilization beyond the artificial ecosystem, and it doesn’t look like the planet has ever had native life.

• Remarkably quick to pick up human language, but they only seem to mimic it so far. Common source phrases (often cut up into pieces) include:
• [Repeatedly babbling] “Hi!”
• [Passable imitation of Alec Guiness] “Hello there!”
• “God fucking damn it where did I put the tablet?”
• “Have you seen Fareeha?”
• “Hold this, I need to go take a shit.”
• “Pickup’s been delayed by three months.”
• “I swear the little bastards are listening to us.”

7) A solitary ambush predator, something similar to an amphibious octopus, native to the shorelines of hydrocarbon seas on a frigid methane world. Old, cold, and terribly, impossibly patient.

• The single specimen kept in containment by the KeterDevelopment Corporation has attempted to escape twice. After nearly dying in the first attempt due to the atmosphere and pressure outside its containment unit, it managed to kill an inspecting caretaker, steal their pressure suit, fill it with the appropriate gas mixture, and crawl out the airlock in the space of seven minutes.
• Video from a planetary probe has been leaked to the public: in it, one of the creatures is seen brutally murdering another using an ice hand axe before dragging the victim’s corpse back into the lake.

8) Long-range space telescopes have picked up a distant patch of space lit up like a bonfire in the infrared, without a visible star. Consensus is that the anomaly is an alien dyson sphere dumping waste heat. No coherent radio transmissions have been detected from the civilization, and no nearby stars show any signs of dimming or other drastic change.

• The expeditionary force to the sphere has been a cavalcade of disaster and it hasn’t even left yet. It’s burned through six directors, three expedition leads, an armed revolt by the shipwrights’ union, a breakout of Red Death, a major political scandal involving coverup money paid to specialist fetish simulation designers, and the performative suicide of its bookkeeper as an act of protest. Launch is still scheduled for two years from now.

9) A space-faring civilization that, some four million years ago, had managed to colonize over twenty solar systems before suddenly vanishing. Very little is left now, mostly crumbling orbital infrastructure, the buried remnants of surface settlements, and the shared biospheres among their disparate worlds. Most of their material culture is gone, and few partial bodies have been recovered.

• These beings had managed to create a quantum-entangled communication network that was linked directly to the brains of each individual and most of their active technology, allowing for constant real-time communication among the entire species.
• Some corruption in the ansible, either deliberately introduced or a naturally-occurring anomaly, was able to wipe out the entire species in a matter of minutes. The exact method is still unknown.
• Accessing the ansible is still possible through elaborate workarounds, connecting old implants to newer devices. The interior mindscape is universally described as hell.

10) Social, adaptable, omnivorous, migrating across the temperate plains and river deltas of their homeworld. They have fire, they have tools and specialized crafts, they have oral history and artwork. Six legs, humpbacks, and mottled blue skin aside, they are more like us than anything else in the universe.

• The political battle over these beings has drawn lines between the Preservationists (no interference whatsoever), the Gradualists (minimal guided interference) and the Immediatists (Immediate absorption into interstellar civilization), with religious groups siding with all three. Shots have been fired, ships have been sunk.
• The taboo has already been broken in secret by factions within both the Gradualists and Immediatists. Preservationists have been moving towards sabotaging these programs before they go too far.