#sapsipper

[ode-to-arecibo]

Sapsippers, the third species to join the empire and the only hive mind as of the war.

Sapsippers are a hive mind that communicates between members via tapping on the ground. That has a lot of ramifications.

We're not talking about one of those weird unrealistic queen mind controlling everyone hive mind. I mean ants. A gestalt consciousness. An individual sapsipper isn't really a person, and one that gets isolated will freeze and hope someone will come pick it up. Get six of them together and they start to resemble a person. Six or more sapsippers communicating in one place are called a thrum. There's no limit to how large a thrum can get, though in practice subthrums form once you can no longer fit everyone in one room. All this communication is done through vibrations in the ground, and partially pheremones, which resemble emotions.

Sapsippers can also form a thrum over their internet (which is made of flesh), by standing on pads that transmit their tapping. Each sapsipper planet often consists of a single massive thrum which outside governments often treat more like a lect than a country.

A lot of their tech is made of flesh. Because they don't have genes, rather their protein equivalent also acts as genes and self replicates, just injecting a foreign protein alters their genetic material. This is true of everything on their planet. The hardest part of genetic engineering there is purifying the proteins. And then figuring out which proteins and how much will give you the desired result. But they were trying as soon as they figured out glass. Their spaceships still have to be metal though.

They use D-glucose like humans, so you can bring a thrum to a restaurant and order sugar water for them. They can tolerate most alien substances, though high sulphur drake food tastes terrible, so there's a culture of trying things like honey and maple syrup among smaller independent thrums.

Sapsipper philosophy has two "souls" or minds or personhoods or consciousnesses. The tatik is contained within the body, each individual sapsipper has one and it contains whatever their expertise is. A tatik can be trained to do specific things, just as different parts of your brain do different things, and it will contribute it's skills to any thrum it joins. Some optimize for pure processing power, some for specific knowledge, usually at least one per thrum knows Universal and has a translator implant to let them pronounce drake phonemes (all drake phonemes except the mandible clicks can be pronounced by humans, but humans invariably have horrible accents). The eidika is the soul of a thrum. It only appears when at least six tatik get together into a thrum. It's consider the more important consciousness, and it's the closest sapsipper concept to what a person is.

Thrum intelligence scales continuously with size, but there are two main classifications who hate eachother. Massive thrums the size of a planet or space station act similarly to lects. Huge gestalts that manage a ship and engage in many conversations at once. Talking to these things is like talking to an AI or a call center. The other kind is more common, if only because it doesn't require hundreds or thousands of bodies to form. Talking to the smaller sort is like talking to a human.

All crimes from minor theft and vandalism to mass murder are considered being cancerous and punishable by death. Or, well, they kill the tatik that isn't cooperating. Something like theft is indicative of a general lack of cohesion and a sapsipper that can't or won't merge with the thrum around it is treated like a tumor that must be excised.

They don't worry about death so much in general, and medicine is only considered important for queens (who limit population size) and queenless thrums like on many smaller ships (that can't repopulate on their own). Sapsippers only live 6 to 12 years, but since the eidika is more of a person than the tatik, a dead worker just gets replaced no problem. At worst, that was the body with the translator implant and you won't be able to talk to non-sapsippers until you replace them. Bigger thrums have more redundancy built in.

Sapsippers have also had about a dozen wars total in their entire existence, counting the kinds of wars neanderthals could have had. before the bomber plane, any two colonies that got close enough to kill each other would merge into one whether they wanted to or not. After the radio, the homeworld was all one big thrum and fighting anyone would be like fighting yourself. People often hear this statistic and expect them to be pacifists. No, they love war, they're quite aggressive and generally consider violence to solve most problems. If not for the Empire being one big alliance they definitely would have taken over someone's homeworld.

They invented written language in 2050, after drakes and kaledevids tried to write down their language and did a terrible job. They didn't need it to communicate among themselves as one, they have terrible vision, they wouldn't be able to read 12 point font while sitting on it. And two, whenever they get close enough to another thrum, they merge, so they'd only use a written language for street signs in unpopulated areas, and sculpted maps work better for that.

[ode-to-arecibo]

I think this is a good place to start.

Timelike Empire is my main world, both worldbuilding project and place where actual novels will be set eventually. It's hard~ish sci fi with a timeline that diverges in 2020 and runs to about 2300... so far. So here's Timelike Empire's main sophonts and their sizes.

From left to right, you know this guy it's unmodified human. This one's Solenoid, from the 2050s. You'll see more of him later.

More importantly, Drakes, represented by Viviere Serasifi. Drakes were the first species to develop faster than light communication. Their societies arrange themselves into houses of close relatives which in modern times tend to act as countries or companies, ruling land or holding economic monopolies. Biologically they're hexapods evolved from an arboreal predator like a six limbed jaguar. Their feathers absorb the dyes they eat, which they use to distinguish house identity. Their head feathers are used to emote. Their society is a huge mess when humans meet them, as house Cezyra has taken power and done fascism and completely fucked everything up.

Kaledevids, or star crows, and all three of their sexes, represented by literally any kaledevid as they all look identical. Kaledevids were the second species to develop ftl communication, and the first that drakes contacted. They worked together to produce wormholes and Alcubierre drives. They have three sexes, bachelors on the left, herders in the middle and dispersers on the right. Bachelors were originally confused for crows and assumed to be the only sex, giving them the common but impolite star crow moniker. They're expert navigators and significantly more intelligent than humans or the average sophont, but only living 20-30 years. They're the only other species on this list where being naked is ever a crime and they're drawn here with scarves covering their anuses on their chests and their genitals on their backs.

Sapsippers, represented by a pretty average blue drone, are a hive mind or gestalt consciousness, to the point that after they developed an internet analog the entire homeworld could be considered one person. You would never actually see one alone like this, it would have no idea what's going on. Sapsippers form into thrums, groups which communicate through pheromones and tapping the ground. Thrums smaller than six aren't really functional as people. The race pictured here is translucent. That gave them a big head start on medicine, but more important was their biochemistry. They don't use a separate DNA analog/genetic storage system and proteins, they just have self replicating proteins (though not made of amino acids). This meant that as soon as they could isolate proteins, they could genetically engineer whatever they wanted. They started genetic engineering even before they had civilization, rubbing protein rich parts of other creatures in their wounds to make rough and often dangerous modifications. They're called sapsippers because they exclusively consume a sap secreted by a creature they ranch. If you bring a thrum to dinner you can order sugar water for them, they store energy with D-glucose like us. They often act as ship AIs for ships just a bit too small to carry a lect.

Raptors or raptorslugs or various unpronounceable buzzing sounds, represented here by a conventionally attractive male, were contacted 20 years after humans and are the most relatable to the average human. They invariably use cybernetics to speak English or Universal, as the only sound they can make is various kinds of high pitched incredibly irritating buzzing. Their second pair of wings is reduced to just the muscles they now use to pump their blood and lungs. Their main pair of wings is too weak to fly with, but is now used in semaphore and bird of paradise-eqsue mating dances. They're packhunters.

Moths, which I really should give a proper name to, pictured here sitting on the raptor's tail, evolved on the same planet as raptorslugs. While raptorslugs reduced the second pair of wings, got huge, and stopped doing alternation of generations, moths pretty much didn't change from their basal form except getting smarter. They're the sporophyte form of a common photosynthesizer. They're not always included on lists of the sophonts, mostly because they don't particularly want to be included and they're the least common of these, basically just sneaking in because raptors are so common. You'll never see a moth without a raptor, but plenty of raptors don't keep moths. There are hundreds of species of moth and they don't mind being selectively bred by raptors, as long as the raptors protect their gametophytes. Attempting to understand moth culture is a largely futile endeavor that not even raptors attempt.

Not pictured here, artificial intellects, usually referred to as lects. They're often massive godlike intelligences that shape history. Sometimes they're made of flesh. Distinguished from AI by being at least human intelligence and being able to go eccentric. Eccentricity occurs when a lect is given too much free time and infers that whoever told it to do it's job doesn't actually want that job done so much as they want to be happy. This usually results in them deciding that preserving sophont life is the most noble purpose and then accumulating as many resources as they can. Sometimes they go basilisk instead and the Silicon Hydra has to deal with them.

So there we go, there's the blog started. Coming soon: individual species references.