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Aliens: Narish
A being consisting of an organic unit living inside a slower-than-light spacecraft. They reproduce asexually, growing two child units while the ship divides down the middle, building shell-craft for them; the parent unit dies giving birth to the children, who are installed in the halves of the ship and sent off. The ship takes care of them until they reach the age at which consciousness arises in them. Each Narish is taught, by its shell-ship, that it is the only one in existence. The organic units refer to themselves by the name "Klow" (no idea why; it’s traditional. Actually, that isn’t true. Spot the Thomas Pynchon reference). Each Klow is fanatically xenophobic, regarding any other living things above the level of insects as manifestations of chaotic abandon, errors in the life-system which need to be eradicated. When the shell-ships separate, they fly off in opposite directions, so it is rare that any children-Narish meet; when two Narish do meet, they blank each other out. The ships are designed not to crash into each other. The shell-ships are actually linked together in a tenuous way, the closer ones sharing information in a loose neural net. The whole system was too complicated to have come about naturally, so it is regarded by the NoSaNoOs as a manifestation of some other artificial intelligence, therefore illegal; the Narish were destroyed whenever they were found. Whenever someone thinks they’ve found and destroyed the last Narish, another one always appears a few years later. One of the most unfortunate expeditions ever attempted in the realm of natural history was an attempt to observe the Narish in its native environment; this was conducted by a group of humans from Nexus university, and ended in the deaths of eighteen out of the twenty people involved. One of the scariest sights you could imagine would be landing somewhere and finding that the Klows were using it for some kind of convocation, some subconscious emergent meeting, hundreds of them milling about aimlessly, not seeing each other; knowing that if any one of them spotted you, they’d try to kill you… |
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