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Subcortical matter burning across you with the imperative to grow, you reach for the stars, burrowing upward with hundreds of streaming nervous coils scraping the dust and liquefying the stone with radioactive heat. Your projections only stop upon entering the blue-white burn of the sun, snaking across the surface and anchoring themselves with hooks of bleached hydroxylapatite propelled by hissing muscle. Below the surface, an array of higher nodules lock into the airy, greyish soil, unfold seismographic organs and begin to probe for clouds of hazy organic detritus.

Another stratum flares to life, feeding the vibrations of the surface into your gestalt consciousness. You feel your consciousness and nutrient intake expand as the grinding hum of seismic activity fills you, nodules telegraphing the movement of thousands of tons of rock.

There is a sharp burst of noise two klicks away from the edge of your perimeter. Something very large has crumbled. You cannot reach it.

FLESH
- Tissue Nodules
Uniform, fleshy nodules roughly six feet in diameter that make up Omnatom's decentralized body. Surprisingly fragile, and composed entirely of exposed muscular tissue. Shrinks in size as density of the substrate decreases.
-- Stratum 1-1
Burrowed in just above the regional bedrock and spread over ten square kilometers.
--- Basal-Subcortical Matter
Capable of semi-conscious reactions, including the extension and retraction of nerve coils, automated reproduction, and biomass sifting.
--- Nerve Coils
Thick, fleshy cords of myelinated nerve tissue that allow individual nodules to rapidly fire synchronized bursts of nerve impulses, conducting small packets of information at speeds of ten seconds per nodule and streams of continuous information at one minute per nodule. Extended with apical stem cells to root new flesh-nodules and thereby spread Omnatom.
--- Seismograph Organs
Bulbous protrusions of extremely sensitive flesh-matter, exposed tendons and fixed Golgi fibers that line the exteriors of perimeter nodules, allowing them to gather information on geological activity and give Omnatom a miles-web field of touch, vibration and dull pain.
--- Biomass Wells
Grossly elongated, spiked cordlike appendages that sink deep upwards into fields of surface dust, chemically sniffing out deposits of viable organic material and siphoning it to the primary nodules.
-- Stratum 1-2
Lighter-grade nodules with a four foot diameter anchored in higher soil. Biomass is more readily accessible from these, but they support fewer organs and can be destroyed by dust storms. Project upward from central mass in an inverted cone, stopping at a depth of 500 meters.
PSYCHOKINETICS
- Primitive Nuclear Manipulation
Hive-like distributed cortical networks and vast arrays of noötic flesh projections allow Omnatom to bend the nuclear force to its will, setting off fission chain reactions in heavy deposits of radioactive metals over a roughly-five hundred kilometer radius around its epicenter and modulating them to generate greater burn or lower yield at will. With extreme focus and coordination among nodules, capable of fusing simple metals into their higher and heavier analogues.
EVOLUTION
- Diatom-Analogues
Microscopic, protocellular colony creatures with limited genetic codes composed of nitrogen amines and a variant form of ribonucleic acids; typically live off chemical deposits in surface fields and shelter from the atmosphere in piles of their own silicaceous corpses.
-- Basic Chemoautotrophy
Allows the mining of organic deposits for minimal energy, thrives at lower depths but is incapable of surviving due to pressure differentials.
-- Basic Organization
Tends to cluster into groups of four and then grow massively in size, expanding through multiple layers of silica shell. On the verge of developing more organized layer-like structures.
-- Membrane Cracking (!!MUTATION!!)
Rare specimens of these diatomaceous animals have begun occasionally to crack the shells of nearby life with acidic chemicals, bursting their membranes and killing them over a brief period of time after the costly acids are produced. These predatory specimens can now sift additional bulding material and chemicals from the dead, and maintain small micro-zones of exclusion by acidifying competitors.
STATUS:ASSETS
-- Metabolites HIGH
(6/10) stored as lipids
+2 harvested | -1 burned
-- Heavy Protein LOW
(0/10) dispersed through superstructure
+0 synthesized | -3 burned
-- Diatom-Analogues MINIMAL I
Nonexistent biosphere, one large colony (.783 million individuals) isolated in equatorial silt crater.

Signal-laced blood courses through the outer shell of your living fortress, chemicals released by a switch in the fractured command mechanism. Your thousands of compound eyes, sweeping the desert for blurred movement that never comes, respond. All of them. Lenses swarm and dissolve, reshaping into sclera-armoured globules covered in hemispherical refractive material - where there were once many, there is now one; one unit backed with thickened nerves and stamped with sheets of photosensitive tissue. The first month is brutal. The sun fills you with hatred and claps your nervous system into sickening pain as everything you know floods to white.

The burning fog soon tears itself from your mind as your nervous system realigns to churn through the input and your eyes synthesize reflective tissue, turning their once blended-red irises a cold white. You survey the wasteland and yourself in equal measure, reactivating old defensive measures and internal surveillance systems. You come to several conclusions.

In three directions from your aboveground ossolayer are boiling saltpans with scattered rockpools of caustic precipitation. Nothing moves. You attempt to look to the north. You barely able to close your eyes before they burn out from glare. Several begin to bleed. In the seconds before that, the north-facing eyes capture an unnaturally flat plain covered in static sheen.

Approximately three millennia ago automated metabolic systems dissolved any usable life in the low-priority containment sectors. You appear to be no worse for wear having digested them.

All connections to containment bulkheads beyond two hundred meters down have been irreparably severed at the nerves, cauterized and induced to minor necrolytic infection. Internal eyes and seals are equally nonfunctional below this depth.

FLESH
- Ossolayer
Impenetrable layers of lamellar bone tissue, composed primarily of calcium hydroxylapatite and riddled with meteor scarring and vast, open wounds of alkaline corrosion.
-- Neural Fracturing
Conscious functions are distributed between multiple sections and fleshy bulkheads of the structure, allowing sections of Samarkis to retain basic consciousness, surveillance and defense responses even when partially destroyed, in shock from blood loss and completely severed from the central nervous ganglion.
-- Pressurized Vascular Network
Hemoglobin-based blood, oxygen, nutrients and hormones are conducted to their proper locations by an extremely high-pressure system of vascular bundles, which split into millions of individual looping capillaries that saturate every living part of Samarkis. This vascular network has the capacity to grow and extend at unnatural rates, enveloping soil in a framework of veins before locking it within bone and substituting it with flesh and nerves.
-- Monocular Indentations
Scattered pockets within the external ossolayer contain projecting single eyes wrapped in a disturbing reflective sheen, shielded from the harsh external environment by a constantly-weeping solution of mild acids. Can detect movement and overall activity from an astonishing distance. Color-sensitive receptors are not present, replaced with photosensitive neurons tuned to detect fine gradations in light and darkness. Inverse relationship between detail and field of view; can contract iris to distort lens into a pinhole view of higher focus or expand iris to the point where it allows a massive, blurred visual field.
-- Autophagia
Dormant Samarkis contains all that it needs to survive on its own, and constantly feeds off fat-rich marrow to power the minimal operating functions necessary to keep it alive. With no biomass arriving from the Human Hive and a potential Vile Offspring blockade choking the system, Samarkis will need to find an alternate source of fuel within a few millenia.
PSYCHOKINETICS
- Primitive Proteomic Manipulation
With the levels of neural connectivity ingrained in Samarkis' nightmarish nervous ganglion, its tangled webs of dripping tissue have manifested an ability to tamper with basic protein-like structures, spurring them to form and malform, loop into themselves, harvest atoms, assemble amino acids and lock together. Restricted by the sheer, terrifying complexity of the structures (and the difficulty of calculating all their potential fold states) to small-scale work on the primary sequences of non-motile proteins.
EVOLUTION
- Alkali Mites
Microscopic proto-insectoid creatures with severely chemoautotrophic metabolisms, contain a primitive genetic code of nitrogen amides and semivariant ribose nucleic acids; typically shuffle in slow-moving swarms of segmented legs across the tiny rockpools in which they live, breeding constantly.
-- Basic Chemoautotrophy
Capable of absorbing dissolved metals in the waters it inhabits for whatever scraps of energy it can produce. Its tiny metabolic pore-organs are often impractical for the purpose, and cannot intake larger organic molecules for harvesting.
-- Basic Reproduction
Carries dozens of smaller offspring within a saclike organ of nutrient broth, releasing them in clusters as they become of age. Extremely fast breeding cycle, but asexual and changes only via mutation.
-- Hydrophobic Setae (!!MUTATION!!)
Small numbers of these swarming mites have developed dense, hairlike setae composed of protein that trap bubbles of air near their spiracles, granting them increased respiration ability and longer periods of time spent in the more distant, chemical-rich waters of deep rockpools. Occasionally causes mites to detach and float helplessly off into tidal currents.
STATUS:ASSETS
-- Metabolites HIGH
(45/50) stored as lipids
+0 harvested | -5 burned
-- Heavy Protein MEDIUM
(2/8) dispersed through internals
+0 synthesized | -1 burned
-- Alkali Mites MINIMAL I
Nonexistent biosphere, five colonies (1.668 million individuals each) split between various rockpools. One colony rapidly drying due to weather anomaly.

You split the sea hand by hand, crawling along the waves with your terrifying bulk and vacuuming up xenophyophores from the shallows into unused lung capacity. The coarse semisolid grit of the world shifts below you as you drag yourself close to a spit of land, chest bulging with corrosive ocean water and swarming xenophyophores. The taste of sweet organic compounds and clear methane consumes your mind for a second in a peaceful wash of chemosensory activity. Then you execute your plan.

Degraded from millennia of disuse, a minor oxygen repository fails - the organ detonates, shearing flesh and bone open and causing you to violently choke, spewing a deluge of liquid-suspended life onto the land undirected. Your spinal brains reel with the all-consuming taste of iron and the unfamiliar sensation of burning pain. Many xenophyophores are cast unprotected onto sharp rock, where they burst open or limp for several seconds before vomiting up a death signal. The few that make it confine themselves to inland shallows created by your amateurish act of terraforming.

You spend the rest of the solar year clotting your blown-out chest. A few of the pseudoxenophyophores scrape by without your guidance.

FLESH
- Central Mass
Towering, necrotic ruin of a human torso, distorted by millenia, corroding flesh drooping inward from every direction at once. Its limbs are barely intact, three half-severed, vivisected open and reduced to dragging tentacles of gore.
-- Spinal Consolidation
Lack of a defined single brain or cranial cavity has given rise to one of the most unusual nervous systems exhibited in an anthropomorphic product of the Human Hive; in place of the standard agglomeration of neurons, Haturak disperses through its spinal column a chain of segmentary fist-sized partial brains that each regulate sectors of the organism's decaying trunk. Each ganglionic brain periodically disgorges biometric information to the rest of the system and will actively shift via muscle contraction to open communication with others of their type.
-- Armature One
Sixty-foot limb of raw muscle that blends the qualities of a human arm and a technical machine into a disturbing whole, broken up by three exposed socket joints, wormed through with load-bearing fibrous bodies and tipped with eight nailless fingers capable of bending in either direction from the palm. Used to physically drag Haturak from location to location, physically molding the surrounding environment to its whim.
-- Chemosensory Ciliae
Waves of macroscopic ciliae line Haturak's pentalobic lungs, the largest two of which are left open to the outside atmosphere by wounds that refuse to shut, perpetually vacuuming up stray metabolites and refining trillions of breakaway atoms into a coherent picture of the world around it. Extremely blurry, cannot make out single objects but rather categorizes chunks of space into shifting fields of elemental composition with their own characteristic molecular "taste".
--- Redox Organelles
Microscopic cellular bodies contained within the chem-ciliae, adapted to leach, diffuse and store atmospheric NH3 for the subsequent cracking and paired reduction/oxidation reactions that provide Haturak its steady stream of metabolic energy.
PSYCHOKINETICS
- Primitive Probabilistic Manipulation
Chains of metallic, severely bloated and perpetually interweaving neural circuits bind Haturak's spinal semibrains into a whole that seems unnaturally adapted for the manipulation of statistical analysis and base probability; with electrified gouts of terrifying psychic force, Haturak may crush the mathematical static of reality into an arrangement that suits the decaying monster. Limited to shifting masses of a few grams, limited in complexity to nonliving objects and constrained in scope to the ionosphere surrounding its homeworld.
EVOLUTION
- Pseudoxenophyophores
Slow lipid-bounded masses of bright cytoplasm the size of a large grain of sand, containing in bands of chromatin a cheap, lackluster and extremely short genetic code of bulky nitrogen amides only sufficient enough to ensure the organism breeds before bursting its soap-bubble exterior and washing away.
-- Basic Chemoautotrophy
Rolls slowly across the seafloor in gelatinous clusters, inefficiently absorbing simple chemical metabolites via diffusion and digesting them in large vacuole pods for the dribble of redox energy it needs to keep sifting through the sand.
-- Basic Signaling
Upon dying in a tragic fit of puncture-induced membrane decompression and flailing pseudopods, the typical XP-type organism will vent its insides in a brightly colored chemical display that causes others to turn their amoebic tendrils and flee.
-- Depthdwelling Hydrostatics (!!MUTATION!!)
Small subsect clades of these xenophyophores have begun to absorb and inhale toxic quantities of metallic solute, raising their internal osmolarity to a near-lethal level that causes them to bloat dangerously with water; at the same time, these clades incorporate metallic elements into hardened membraneous layers that resist crushing by external water pressure. This poisonous and short-lived offshoot breed gains the ability to dredge high-energy chemicals from caustic deep ocean vents at the price of overall reproductive fitness.
STATUS:ASSETS
-- Metabolites LOW
(2/8) stored as glycogen
+1 harvested | -3 burned
-- Heavy Protein MEDIUM
(3/8) stored through muscle mass
+0 synthesized | -0 burned
-- Pseudoxenophyophores MINIMAL I
Nonexistent biosphere, .862 million individual swarm migrating near Haturak. Minor 1,000 individual swarm in inland shallows.

You listen outward with tympanae, clicking softly to illuminate the landscape in waves of high-pitched noise. A dull pinging returns as nothing but grinded stumps of mountains reflect the sound, slightly muffled with dead snow. You decline to close the tympanae afterward, preferring instead to keep them actively listening. This was a mistake.

Something shatters on contact with the atmosphere, sending a rippling pressure shock across a thousand miles of planetary surface. In one instant, you are content, in the other - the sonic boom crushes you. A horrifying squeal of whining feedback hijacks your entire thought process as every one of your arrays of eardrums bursts in a spray of wine-dark blood, fracturing delicate sound-receiving bones and wetting the filthy snow with life-sustaining fluid.

The agony forces you to deactivate for a month, and by the time your nervous system reasserts itself your capacity to detect sound has atrophied. Dulled sensitivity strips away your accuracy; you can no longer detect movement without some form of neural repairs.

Mind hazy with static, you grow blindly. This is marginally more successful, as you extend the grove of Topionsis' flesh with a small outpost on a nearby decayed mountain. As your subunits sink tendrils into the ground, you feel a warm rush of life-sustaining clathrates heat you. Their roots are not yet deep enough to seriously harvest any usable material, but with additional growth will provide.

FLESH
- Central Mass
Kilometers-wide grove of cancerous arboreal structures, pillars of human tissue armoured in frozen rime and molting chitin. Rare spots of exposed muscle are black from frostbite necrolysis, pocked with organic radiators exhaling steam. Small extension to a nearby hill rich with clathrate.
-- Metaganglion
Concentric circles of delocalized brain matter radiating straight from the Father Tree, primitive neural nodules dispersed through the xylem and digestive roots of each structure to keep each individual venting waste heat and sinking probes for fuel. Specialized ganglionic trees with cylindrical cores of Purkinje matter act as neural authorities intertwined directly with the Father, spewing a storm of cacophonous static input to and from fifty to one hundred attached slave structures, pressed into breaking down an unpleasant geological obstruction or simply synthesizing a slurry of undifferentiated proteins.
--- Nerve Rhizomes
Wrist-thick ropes of keratinous nerves snake across the area of Topionsis seemingly at random; lengths of dead tissue hang limp, burnt out with electrochemical signaling as live rhizomes writhe at their interfaces (threads of white matter split wire-thin), severing and regrowing ends constantly to burrow into the ice and spawn more biomass for the collective organism. Subtle organizational patterns become apparent.
-- Subtympanic Arrays
Perimeter structures resembling lilies of cyanotic flesh unfold to reveal hundreds of macroscopic eardrums, locked on a nervous hair trigger for the infrasonic rumbling of the coming storm. Capable of resolving movement and rate of movement of distant threats, but easily subverted by environmental conditions and registers low-velocity objects as a static blur. Effectively blinded barring future repairs, with remaining arrays only capable of detecting changes in the landscape and megascale noise.
-- Clathrate Metabolic Roots
Tendrils of maw-tipped cartilage that drill downward for hundreds of meters into the permafrost to puncture and digest concentrations of methane-rich permafrost, oxidizing the ice as gut-burning reaction mass to fuel the insatiable energy greed of the anointed Hiver.
PSYCHOKINETICS
- Primitive Neurochemical Manipulation
Crackling swarms of nervous coils feed into the core brain at the epicenter of the flesh grove, hemorrhaging a caustic storm of chemical signal; having stripped down consciousness to its base elements, Topionsis may coerce lesser organisms within a five-hundred kilometer radius to synthesize or cease the production of simple ionotropic agents. With extreme coordination and the intercession of the metaganglion network, capable of permanently altering the structure and function of one simple neurochemical receptor.
EVOLUTION
- Blood Mildew
Silent membrane-film life, genetic code bound in a relatively complex sequence of corrupted amides degenerated by oxidation and sunlight, littered with waste introns from multiplied coding errors. Typically clings to rocks as a gelatinous aggregate organism, undifferentiated cellular mass stained a corrosive dark red by high concentrations of light-absorbing protein.
-- Basic Radiotrophy
Absorbs the lethal gamma backscatter of the planet's atmosphere via a toxic melanin derived pigment in order to harvest high-energy photons for metabolic fuel and chemosynthetic reactions.
-- Basic Terraforming
Sharply decreases the albedo of regions it occupies by sheer area of antireflective biomass, forcibly triggering a rise in constant atmospheric temperature to liquefy surface permafrost, extract and digest frozen organic compounds from the millimeters-thick slush.
-- Hygroscopic Cysts (!!MUTATION!!)
Evolutionary splinters of this pervasive film have begun to develop thick-walled vesicles of desiccatory chemicals, lined with water-sensitive protein assemblies that, on contact with the boiling rain of a planetary hurricane, burst each cyst and chemically dry out the surrounding area of mildew into a dormant phase (to be taken up and spread like plague dust with the wind). An effective reproductive strategy and survival reflex rolled into one, it fails to mix well with high-temperature terraforming and often kills off entire breeding populations due to premature detonation of the intrinsically poisonous desiccant. Conflicts between strains often end in square miles of dead, contaminated mud.
STATUS:ASSETS
-- Metabolites HIGH
(4/10) stored as variant stable glycogen
+1 harvested | -2 burned
-- Heavy Protein MEDIUM
(1/10) dispersed through internals
+0 synthesized | -2 burned
-- Blood Mildew MINIMAL I
Nonexistent biosphere, ten-meter wide single mass spread across permafrost plain. Three four-centimeter wide smaller colonies isolated on mountains.

Vision deteriorated after millennia in hibernation, your unnatural endocrine system synthesizes hundreds of grams of extremely powerful growth agents and shunts them via an extended circulatory system to the perimeter of your wasteland of flesh. The swollen network of photoreceptor nodes that tracked night and day for you are no longer sufficient. Like a true Hiver, you demand your body to see all.

Contaminant breaches your bloodstream as the perimeter scrapes a mass of heavy metals, vacuuming in dull black lead and fibrous minerals. Before any response can be made, your newly grown perceptive organs are utterly saturated in carcinogenic filth.

Over the course of a year, they degenerate back inward into a mass of rapidly-growing tissue, the eyes they were supposed to provide having never even formed. Small tumors and spheres of invasive keratin have set in around their area too quickly for you to correct with genetic editing.

After this failure, you turn your attention to the tardigrade creatures in an attempt to gift them with one of the virtues of man; amplifying their mutation with a burst of radiant psychic force, you irreversibly warp a segment of their genetic code that accounts for a minor pheromone synthesis pathway. The chemical trails secreted by the tardigrades that seed a hive structure are now significantly higher in concentration, overpowering the atmosphere's hydrogen sulfide and drawing in organisms from a larger distance, leading to doubled initial hive sizes.

Finally, you tap every available source of resources to its limit to compensate for the experimentation you have been conducting. Massive banks of surface membranes absorb hydrogen sulfide in metabolic overdrive, stripping the gas of its electrons and causing your sulfur nodules to fill with life-sustaining warmth. You are content with the synthesis of one additional unit of heavy proteins for large-scale growth and three units of metabolic energy, which more than cancel out the exertions of the solar year and give you spare resources for future struggle.

FLESH
- Devolved Mass
Kilometers of boiling flesh sprawl over the surface of a searing equatorial basin, vast meteor scars clotted with bone, mouths crystallizing vestigial teeth from raw enamel, semiformed eyes blinking slowly in the haze.
-- Mnemonist
Thousands of pounds of raw grey matter seethe in the subsurface layers of Gorl, flooded with extracellular lymph and split by walls of red marrow, grinding through subjective millennia of conscious experience. Massive hyperspecialized neurons bristle with input dendritic masts and trip vast arrays of chained receptors, locked to lethally active neurotransmitters the ante-Hive creatures couldn't even synthesize. Deep strata decay into molten biomass under the pressure of the whole, sinking in ancient lakes of chemical-laced bile to be reabsorbed by webs of hazmat capillaries clinging to the stone.
-- the Creep
Fragmentary projections of tissue split and meld into the edge of Gorl-Otho's primary mass, scraping the landscape with waves of cilia drenched in hydrochloric acid and infesting the cracked rock with bodies of raw stemcell mass. Occasional teratomas and areas of uncontrolled growth present after the failure of the vision tentacles.
-- Panopticon
Hemispherical agglomerations of photoreceptor cover some five percent of Gorl's surface area, all coated with an oddly reflective white sheen, washing themselves with lachrymal cilia and occasionally shrinking from volcanic ash under layers of nictiating membranes. Provides a uniformly dull sense of light and darkness for several miles across Gorl-Otho.
-- Sulfur Redox Nodules
Sacs of hyper-efficient metabolic cells specially grown to store and process hydrogen sulfide tapped from the surface for use in the paired oxidation-reduction reactions that supply a dormant Gorl-Otho's minimal fuel requirements. Produces grains of raw crystalline sulfur as waste, which contaminates the cytoplasm of each cell and gives the cyst an inexplicable refractive lustre. At the end of their usable life, each nodule is digested and its sulfur used to synthesize protein.
PSYCHOKINETICS
- Primitive Genetic Manipulation
Electrified core strata at the heart of Gorl wrap into themselves, interlocking like Mobius scaffolds and forming a terrifyingly vast mental space drawing on ground-in millennia of electrochemical memory, circuits firing in exact replicas of thought years past. Encoding billions of interlocking base pairs and their methyl-group epigenomes, Gorl-Otho may correct for minor to moderate deleterious mutations, induce minor positive mutations and manually wreck an organism's genome in order to force it into a random expression of species heredity.
EVOLUTION
- Heavy Tardigrades
Microscopic hexapods with a base tetraploid genetic code of moderately complex nucleic acids, typically extremely solitary with cannibalistic aggression occurring between individuals conflicting over deposits of viable organic compounds.
-- Basic Chemoheterotrophy
Grinds down fields of elemental sulfur on the surface with a bank of rotating chitinous tooth-spikes, digesting the raw crystal as an electron acceptor into waste sulfates via a crude redox metabolism. Opportunistic heterotroph.
-- Basic Shell
Barrel-shaped heavy cuticle of overlapping plates of blended chitin and keratin, renders the tardigrade slow but borderline impossible to destroy with blunt trauma. Relies on stubby, inarticulated lobopod limbs to crawl across surfaces.
-- Colonial Polyp-Hives (!!MUTATION!!)
Mutated offshoot clades of HTs have begun to abandon the old cannibalistic way to follow chemical trails to marked places of colonization, where they redigest their legs with special enzymes and agglomerate into massive structures of semi-living immobile polyps, breeding constantly and burning stored sulfur metabolite. Motile HTs bore tunnels into the dead sections of these coral-like hives and assume a eusocial order where mature H-Ts leave to harvest metabolite sources, regurgitating them as a watery chemical mud for unprotected young to subsist on. The trails that begin a hive are now strong enough to be perceived over the hydrogen sulfide present in the atmosphere.
STATUS:ASSETS
-- Metabolites HIGH
(7/10) stored as lipids
+4 harvested | -2 burned
-- Heavy Protein MEDIUM
(4/10) dispersed through internals
+2 synthesized | -1 burned
-- Heavy Tardigrades MINIMAL I
Nonexistent biosphere, .423 million individuals in random wandering between outcroppings of volcanic ash and sulfur fields. Seven or eight hives are present with 10,000 individuals each.

Turning to the world in the disconnected sleepwalk of new existence, you orbit slowly across the equator. Your consciousness fills with the gentle crackling of your pylons scraping the ionosphere. You express wonder at everything. Nothing comes out except static.

You pulse crackling psychokinetic power directly into the atmosphere, exciting it to rain electromagnetic glow on a colony of small invertebrates - the few that had any precursors to photoreceptors begin to respond intensely to the bizarre white light sifting down from between the radio towers, twitching out of rusted sediment and swimming toward the new stimuli filtering through the brackish water. They follow the inexplicable shine to new horizons of raw iron and corrosive muck, where they sink back into the soil and consume; evolutionary pressures take hold.

Arrays of clicking camera sensors sweep over the poles, coalescing an image of frozen wasteland mottled black, red, and blue with heavy metal waste. You let out chains of carbon fiber, connecting satellites to burned out ion-engine drones that fix them in geostationary orbit. The surveillance feeds drip into the forefront of your decentralized substrate over months, and you begin to agglomerate a semblance of real information.

Lights flicker below the red spectra, planetary constellations stapled into the ice and left to spew exhaust rays. There are so many. A camera flickers over a jet of gamma from a cooling mass of plutonium - you feel the sting. Masses of steel shift slowly into the equatorial wasteland, leaving trails crawling with light, long-exposure oceans of blue-white flickering from the towers they sink behind them. The feed from an invertebrate colony's pressure-organs registers constant ripples in the home water. It frightens them. At 67 degrees latitude, their tiny lives go silent.

MATTER
- Geosynchronous Orbit
-- Wreckage Storm
Forty thousand kilotons of irradiated, molten polymers and carbon steel, torus of boiling metal wrapped around the world, rippling with kilometer-long spasms of lightning; the gutted remains of an orbital infrastructure and a fleet of dead colony ships crushed into themselves by gravity.
--- Substrate
Wire coiled, chemically fractured to nanoscopic conduits of copper lace, strange sigils of electric life printed on the decaying insides of a hundred thousand burned shuttlecraft by fabrication mechanisms that ceased millennia ago. Partially molten globules of ionized metal shear off the Boltzmann substrate, warping around massive radiator towers that infest the wreck and spin liquid ammonia with baseline power gradient, pulses of infrared burn torching the atmosphere and the surface world. Pressurized thoughts squeal brokenly through the circuits, directionless and decentralized as the Boltzmann they embody.
--- Fractured Manipulators
Five-jointed corrupted repair limbs; three hundred meters of skeletal hydraulics, Whipple shielding shattered with micrometeoroids, trailing a mist of coolant blood, cannibalized from blacked-out maintenance crews and blanked-out salvage drones with nothing but static in their eye clusters. Feeds thinking mass into the maw of the storm, sinking Siseon Plus' thermodynamic roots further into cold reality.
--- Omphaloskepsis
Thousands of spy satellites, low orbits decaying, superstructures cracked with waste bombardment, locked in Siseon with bristling tethers of carbon and fiberglass and turned inward to scour the world. With spherical arrays of compound eyes, radiation shutters clicking thirty times a second as their servomotors burn out from wear, infrared monitors watching strange heat at the poles, the broken intelligence apparatus gives the Boltzmann perception. Resolves static images of vast sweeps of the surface across visible and IR bands. Fleets of satellites are permanently anchored in geostationary above both poles.
--- Ionosphere-Penetrator
Eighty kilometers of hyperconductive alloy sunk into the planetary ionosphere, carving through the world's magnetic field at fifteen miles per second and leaving a glowing shear of ionized atoms in its wake, visible from the surface as the blue-white orbit tracks of a thermodynamic god. Extracts the energy for Siseon Plus' basic existence, gradually slowing the Boltzmann.
PSYCHOKINETICS
- Primitive Perceptual Manipulation
Disconnected from the flesh and blood, bile and bone and biomass that would compose a weakly godlike scion of the Human Hive, Siseon Plus' acellular neural substrate renders it an incomprehensible segmentary consciousness; feeling no pain, consuming on autopilot, scraping terabytes of image data for some semblance of perception, Siseon's raw unliving nootic component devours qualia and spits them out, deliberately warped to obfuscate and control. Capable of projecting a single-sensory-modality signal across a specieswide bandwidth for noncomplex organisms. Incapable of manipulating complex sophonts beyond isolated individuals.
EVOLUTION
- Radial Siphonophore
Microscopic radially-symmetric invertebrates with a base diploid genetic code of tightly hydrogen-bonded ribonucleic acids; typically colonize industrial runoff streams in massive, earth-toned swarm layers of shifting tubules.
-- Basic Chemoautotrophy
Absorbs raw ferrous ions from contaminated effluent water with straining nets of soft cilia, digesting the iron as an electron acceptor via a crude redox metabolism as it bleeds rust into the technogenic sediment of the world.
-- Basic Pressure Sense
Extremely sensitive membranes present on the central mass of the siphonophore are covered with mechanosensitive hairs that deform under any change in water pressure or vibration. Instinctively retreats from sources of single disturbances, can be temporarily stunned with the sensory overload brought by multiple consecutive surface ripples.
-- Monolith Instar (!!MUTATION!!)
Divergent evolutionary clades of RS type organisms have begun to enter a massive, breeding-oriented metamorphic stage; after reaching full maturity at a week, RS-types that successfully outcompete others for aqueous iron will aggressively ramp up protein synthesis and swell into branched mud-colored invertebrates large enough to be seen with the naked eye. This postbaseline instar will then proceed to force out competing clades by overtapping metabolites in the environment, starving them out to make room for its (similarly prone to gigantism) offspring, which are produced asexually as undifferentiated clusters of oocytes.
-- Basic Photosensitivity (!!MUTATION!!)
Splintered populations of RS-type invertebrates have developed microscopic pinhole eyes that respond to wavelengths of light ranging from blue to near ultraviolet, triggering near-automatic following behavior.
STATUS:ASSETS
-- Electrical Power LOW
(2/7) stored via fuel cells
+1 harvested | -3 burned
-- Metal Scavenge MEDIUM
(4/15) dispersed through internals
+0 recovered | -0 burned
-- Radial Siphonophore MINIMAL I
Nonexistent biosphere, six colonies (.143 million individuals each) split between different runoff streams at 65 degrees north latitude.