Introduction

Cloud-based software solutions have revolutionized the way businesses operate and leverage technology. With the power of the cloud, organizations can access and manage their software applications, data, and resources over the internet, without the need for on-premises infrastructure. This blog will provide an introduction to cloud-based software solutions, highlighting their benefits, impact on businesses, and future trends.

Cost savings and scalability benefits

One of the significant advantages of cloud-based software solutions is the potential for cost savings and scalability. Instead of investing in expensive hardware infrastructure, businesses can leverage the cloud to access computing resources on-demand. Cloud providers offer flexible pricing models, allowing organizations to pay for what they use and scale their resources up or down as needed. This eliminates the need for upfront investments and provides cost savings in terms of hardware procurement, maintenance, and upgrades.

Increased accessibility and collaboration

Cloud-based software solutions provide increased accessibility and collaboration capabilities. Users can access their applications and data from anywhere, at any time, using internet-connected devices. This enables remote work, facilitates collaboration among geographically dispersed teams, and promotes real-time communication and document sharing. Cloud-based collaboration tools enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and foster innovation through seamless collaboration.

Improved data security and disaster recovery

Data security is a critical concern for businesses, and cloud-based software solutions offer robust security measures. Cloud providers invest heavily in security infrastructure, including encryption, access controls, and threat detection systems. They implement stringent security protocols to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access and ensure compliance with industry regulations. Additionally, cloud-based solutions offer reliable disaster recovery mechanisms, ensuring data backups and business continuity in the event of disruptions.

Flexibility and customization options

Cloud-based software solutions offer flexibility and customization options to meet the unique needs of businesses. Cloud platforms provide a range of services and resources that can be tailored to specific requirements. Organizations can choose from a variety of software applications, storage capacities, computing power, and other resources to align with their business goals. This flexibility allows businesses to scale their operations, adapt to changing demands, and explore innovative solutions.

Integration with existing systems and applications

Cloud-based software solutions enable seamless integration with existing systems and applications. Cloud platforms offer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and integration tools that allow businesses to connect their cloud-based software with other software systems, databases, or third-party applications. This integration capability facilitates data exchange, process automation, and streamlines workflows across different software solutions.

Enhanced performance and reliability

Cloud-based software solutions provide enhanced performance and reliability compared to on-premises solutions. Cloud providers operate in high-availability data centers with robust infrastructure and redundant systems. This ensures minimal downtime and offers reliable access to applications and services. Additionally, cloud platforms leverage advanced technologies, such as load balancing and auto-scaling, to optimize performance and handle increased workloads effectively.

Streamlined maintenance and updates

With cloud-based software solutions, businesses can offload the burden of software maintenance and updates to the cloud provider. Cloud platforms handle routine maintenance tasks, including software updates, bug fixes, and security patches, ensuring that businesses always have access to the latest features and improvements. This frees up internal resources, allowing organizations to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance.
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Case studies of successful cloud adoption

Case Study 1: Netflix
Netflix is a prime example of successful cloud adoption. As an online streaming platform, Netflix relies heavily on cloud computing to deliver its content to millions of users worldwide. By migrating its infrastructure to the cloud, Netflix gained the flexibility and scalability needed to handle massive amounts of data and traffic. The company leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store and process its vast library of movies and TV shows, as well as to deliver a seamless streaming experience to users on various devices. The cloud infrastructure allows Netflix to dynamically scale its resources based on demand, ensuring high availability and performance for its users.
Case Study 2: Airbnb
Airbnb, the popular accommodation rental platform, turned to cloud technology to support its rapid growth and global presence. By utilizing cloud computing services, specifically AWS, Airbnb was able to scale its infrastructure to accommodate a growing user base and handle a significant volume of transactions. The cloud-based architecture enabled Airbnb to quickly expand its services to new markets and ensure high availability of its platform around the clock. Furthermore, Airbnb leverages various AWS services, such as Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon EC2 for compute resources, to deliver a reliable and seamless experience for hosts and guests worldwide.
Case Study 3: Spotify
Spotify, the leading music streaming service, has embraced cloud technology to deliver personalized music experiences to millions of users. By leveraging the cloud infrastructure of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Spotify can store and process vast amounts of music data and deliver it to users in real time. The cloud-based architecture allows Spotify to analyze user preferences and behaviors to provide personalized recommendations and playlists. Additionally, the scalability of the cloud enables Spotify to handle traffic spikes during peak usage periods, such as when new albums are released or popular events occur.
Case Study 4: NASA
NASA has adopted cloud computing to support its extensive scientific research and data analysis. By utilizing the cloud, NASA can efficiently store and process vast amounts of space-related data collected from satellites, telescopes, and other instruments. The cloud infrastructure enables scientists and researchers to collaborate and analyze data from different locations, enhancing their ability to make discoveries and advancements. NASA leverages cloud services from multiple providers, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, to meet its diverse needs and ensure the security and accessibility of its valuable data.
Case Study 5: Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, one of the world's largest beverage companies, has embraced cloud technology to streamline its operations and enhance efficiency. By migrating its IT infrastructure to the cloud, Coca-Cola was able to consolidate its global systems and improve collaboration among its employees. The cloud-based solution enables seamless access to data and applications from any location, facilitating better decision-making and faster response times. Furthermore, the scalability and flexibility of the cloud allow Coca-Cola to adjust its resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency.
These case studies demonstrate the successful adoption of cloud computing by organizations from different industries. By leveraging the power of the cloud, these companies have gained scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency, enabling them to focus on their core business objectives and deliver exceptional services to their customers. The cloud has proven to be a transformative technology, revolutionizing how businesses operate and providing a competitive edge in the digital age.

Future trends in cloud technology

Cloud technology continues to evolve rapidly, and several future trends are shaping the landscape of cloud-based software solutions. Some key trends to watch out for include:

1. Edge computing: Edge computing brings computing power closer to the data source, enabling real-time processing and reducing latency. This trend allows for faster and more efficient data processing, especially in applications requiring immediate response times.
2. Serverless computing: Serverless computing abstracts away the infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus solely on writing code. This trend simplifies application development, enhances scalability, and reduces costs by charging based on actual resource usage.
3. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud: Organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies to leverage the best features of different cloud providers and maintain flexibility in their infrastructure. This trend allows businesses to distribute workloads across multiple cloud platforms or combine public and private cloud environments.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): Cloud platforms are incorporating AI and ML capabilities, enabling businesses to leverage intelligent algorithms, data analytics, and automation. AI-powered cloud services provide advanced functionalities, such as natural language processing, image recognition, and predictive analytics.
5. Serverless databases: Serverless databases eliminate the need for managing database infrastructure, enabling developers to focus on application logic. These databases automatically scale based on usage, providing cost efficiency and eliminating operational complexities.

Conclusion

Cloud-based software solutions offer numerous benefits, including cost savings, scalability, increased accessibility and collaboration, improved data security, flexibility, and streamlined maintenance. Organizations that embrace cloud technology gain a competitive edge by harnessing the power of advanced computing resources, seamless integration, and reliable infrastructure. As cloud technology continues to evolve, businesses should stay abreast of emerging trends and leverage cloud-based solutions to boost efficiency, drive innovation, and unlock new opportunities in the digital landscape.
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I just watched this and it was pretty funny!! I haven’t heard anyone talk about it before,so I thought I’d post it on here incase anyone is interested. I definitely recommend it! :)

Hi everyone,
It's basically as the title says; I'm in my early 20's and yet I find myself frequently anxious about my inevitable death, at least a few times per hour and occasionally for hours at a time. It's not exactly a passive thought either, it gives me a thick sense of anxiety and a strong tightness in my upper chest to the point where I'm afraid it's getting out of hand. If I really go down the rabbit hole with it, I can give myself a panic attack, which feels really silly because of how powerless I am in the face of death. I know worrying about it won't change anything, but of course that provides me no solace.
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For a bit of context, I've only recently come out of a deep three year depression and started really appreciating my life. However, I've noticed that as the depression goes away, more new issues seem to grow in it's place. The way I perceive myself in the world is changing rapidly, often in ways I can't understand just yet. As far as I can tell, I'm a lot more anxious than I was even 3 months ago, and this whole fear of death thing is relatively new to me as well. I've used death as a motivating factor for years now, knowing my time is immeasurably valuable pushes me to try and make the most of it, but only recently did it turn into true fear. I think it started when I had a conversation with my friend about nuclear weapons strangely enough. We live near a big American city center, so he made the observation that if we ever went to nuclear war, we'd be one of the first people blown off the map presumably. It's normally the kind of what-if thought that I'd quickly dismiss, but for some reason I chose to really stop and consider what he said and I very nearly incited my first panic attack on the spot. The thought that it could all go dark at any moment, not when I'm old but truly any moment now, and that I wouldn't even be able to perceive or understand my own death is just terrifying to me. I feel like many young people have the perspective of death as something that will happen eventually, but not right now, when really that isn't a guarantee. Since then, I feel like I'm constantly trying to keep those thoughts at bay.
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I have many regrets about the way I spent my time in the 3 years I was depressed, many of the best days of my life were wasted wallowing in it, so maybe some of my fear is related to that. I feel like I'm all too aware that each second that passes is time I can't get back, each second I spend scrolling through Reddit or YouTube shorts is time I could've spent more meaningfully, and each moment of my early 20's are particularly valuable since I have so much opportunity in this phase of my life. I often think about how I'll feel on my deathbed - will I resent myself about the way I spent my time when it's finally run out? Hell, how will I feel when I'm 30 about my 20's? Can I really live with myself knowing how much time I've already wasted on Youtube shorts, time I should've spent enjoying my one and only chance at youth? What used to be a useful motivator has turned into a crushing weight on my shoulders it feels like and I can't really see a way to cope here. And even if I can cope, I'll still die either way, that part of the story won't change.
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I'm sure meditation and being more present focused will go a long way towards helping me out here as Dr. K has said many times that anxiety comes from a future focused mind, but I'm hoping there's some healthier perspective I can gain on this as well that will be useful. I've really only seen Dr. K cover death broadly in the first Ludwig interview, so I'd be really curious to understand his perspective more fully. Also just wanted to say thanks to everyone here in the community as well, been lurking since the first Bobby Scar interview and this community has been everything in helping me conquer my depression. Hopefully you all can help me out a bit here too, thanks!

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we screw like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.
____________________________________________
By The Vesper's Bell

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

Overview
In electronics, AI (artificial intelligence) chips are dedicated processors used to run AI algorithms. The difference from normal chips (CPU/GPU for general purpose) lies in the emphasis on specificity and versatility. CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC chips can all execute AI algorithms. And to a certain extent, GPU and FPGA can also be regarded as AI chips, but ASIC has more distinctive features, so it is also the most representative. So what they are and why they matter?
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What is AI Chip?
The so-called AI chips generally refer to ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips. Both traditional CPUs and GPUs can be used to execute AI algorithms, but their speed is slow and performance is not good enough, making them impractical for commercial use. For example, automatic driving needs to recognize road pedestrians, traffic lights and other conditions, but if the current CPU is to calculate, then the car may overturn into the river before calculation results, which is a slow performance. If you use a GPU, the speed is indeed much faster, but the power consumption is high, and the battery of the car may not be able to support normal use for a long time, and the GPU is not economical, that is, ordinary consumers cannot afford it. What’s more, GPUs often out of stock. In addition, the GPU is not an ASIC specially developed for AI, so the speed has not reached its limit, and there is still room for improvement. In fields like intelligent driving requires fast calculation; in mobile terminals, AI applications such as face recognition and voice recognition must have low power consumption. Obviously, GPUs cannot meet the requirements, so the development of ASIC has become inevitable.
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Why It Matters?
So why do we need AI chips? For AI algorithms, CNN (convolutional neural network) is commonly used in image recognition and other fields; RNN (recurrent neural network) is mainly used in speech recognition, natural language processing and other fields, which are two different types of algorithms. However, they are essentially matrix or vector multiplication and addition, and then cooperate with division, exponent algorithms.
A mature AI algorithm, such as YOLO-V3, is a large number of calculations such as convolution, residual network, and full connection, which are essentially multiplication and addition. More over, if the specific input graphic size is determined, then the total number of multiplication and addition calculations is determined, like one trillion times, of course, the real situation is much larger than this. If you want to execute it quickly, one trillion additions and multiplications must be performed.
Let’s take another example, such as IBM’s POWER8, one of the most advanced superscalar CPUs for servers, 4GHz, SIMD, 128-bit, assuming that 16bits data is processed, that is 8 numbers, and a maximum of 8 multiplication and addition calculations can be performed in one cycle, performing up to 16 operations at a time. But this is theoretical, it is unlikely in fact.
At this time, the peak calculation times of the CPU in one second = 16X4Gops = 64Gops. In this way, one CPU calculation time can be calculated. And the execution time can also be known by switching to GPU calculation. Let’s talk about AI chips, such as Google’s TPU v1, which is about 700MHz and has a pulsation array of 256X256, as shown in the figure below. A total of 64K units, and each unit can perform one multiplication and one addition at a time, that is 128K operations.
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Systolic Data Flow of the Matrix Multiply Unit
In addition to the systolic array, there are other modules, such as activation, etc., which also include multiplication, addition, etc. Look at the peak calculation times of TPU v1 in one second is at least = 128K X 700MHz = 89600Gops ≈ 90Tops, compared with the CPU, you will find that there is a gap of several orders of magnitude in computing capability. Of course, the above data are completely ideal values, and the actual situation may be only 5%. Because the storage on the chip is not large enough, the data will be stored in DRAM, and the data extraction is very slow, then the multiplication logic often has to wait. In addition, the AI algorithm consists of many layers of networks, which must be calculated layer by layer. However, when switching layers, the multiplication logic is free. Therefore, many factors have caused the actual chip to fail to reach the calculation peak.
Although it can be used with slow calculating speed. But at present, the size of the neural network is getting bigger and bigger, and there are more and more parameters. When encountering a large NN model, it takes a few weeks or even a month or two to train, which wastes too much time. If you encounter a sudden situations, such as power outages, have to start all over again. Moreover, if the model is modified, it will take several weeks to know whether it is right or wrong, and no one has so much patience to wait. But with TPU, then you find that you can continue to run by optimizing the parameters during a meal. That is, fast calculation speed enables rapid iteration and development of a stronger AI model.
A deeper comparison can be made clearly for the kernel structure of the GPU. To be sure, the GPU is still relatively fast, at least much faster than the CPU, so most of them currently use the GPU, but don’t forget the GPU disadvantages mentioned earlier, so it is not suitable for large-scale use in data centers. Generally speaking, CPU and GPU are not AI-specific chips. Because they have to realize other functions with other logics inside, which are completely useless for the current AI algorithm. Their performance cannot be used optimally. So it can be seen that it is reasonable for Google to spend money to develop its own AI chip TPU.
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AI Chips Design Principles
AI chips follow a hardware design rule: Sacrifice certain versatility to improve the efficiency of specific services. A well-understood example is Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin's basic algorithm is the SHA256, which is based on the hash algorithm, so there is no reverse formula, and it can only rely on mining machines to exhaustively enumerate a large number of possible values. For each block, the miner who first tries to get the correct value will be rewarded. So the faster the calculation, the higher the expectation of winning the reward.
For mining chips, both CPU and GPU have become the mainstream ever. However, as time goes by, GPU mining has become less useful. For example, the RTX3090 graphics card can perform 126.5M SHA256 calculations per second under overclocking conditions, and the total computing power of the entire Bitcoin network has exceeded 178.6EH/s, which is equivalent to the sum of the computing power of 1.4 trillion RTX3090 chips. Therefore, the current mainstream is ASIC mining, which are designed for the SHA256 algorithm, so ASIC mining far better than GPU, and even a single mining machine can overcome supercomputing centers. However, ASIC mining sacrifice generality in hardware, making it impossible to perform other computing tasks, and even unable to mine non-SHA256 algorithm blockchain currencies, such as Ethereum (which is a technology that's home to digital money, global payments, and applications. ).
In the example of Bitcoin mining, it can be seen that a dedicated chip is the most suitable: the algorithm or operator is fixed, and it is relatively simple in the application scenario. The AI chip has the same characteristics as the mining machine, emphasizing the computing efficiency in special scenarios, but the implementation scenarios are different.The purpose of the AI chip is to execute AI algorithms efficiently, so it is also called an AI accelerator. In addition, a bunch of other names are derived, such as NPU (neural network processor), TPU (Google’s tensor processor), APU ( AMD’s accelerated processor), whose properties are very similar.
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AI Chip Classifications
AI chips can be divided into two categories. One is for both training and inference, and GPU or CPU can also do it, FPGA (Altera's Stratix series) either, but the TPU v2 and Bitmain's sophon may have an advantage in energy consumption. Compared with GPU, it retains a considerable number of floating-point processing units (or building a lot of tensor computing units), discards some useless graphics pipelines, and improves the energy consumption. There are fewer players in this part, but they are more interesting. For example, ICLR is also thinking about training with fixed-point devices, while Xilinx hopes that XNOR-net can allow fixed-point devices to participate in training.
The other type is the inference accelerator chip, which simply means running the trained model on the chip. This piece is really full of flowers, such as the Cambrian NPU, Intel Movidius (there is also a Nervana that should be similar to XeonPhi for training), Shenjian DPU, Horizon BPU, Imagination's PowerVR 2NX, ARM's Project Trillium, etc. This type of product provides IP for all developers to integrate deep learning accelerators into SoCs.
In addition, we need to talk about Tegra X2 separately. This is equivalent to a small desktop platform. The ARM processor plus Nvidia GPU can provide complete training and inference capabilities. Of course, the power consumption is also high. For other acceleration chips, I think it is best to divide them into two categories, floating-point and fixed-point. Floating point is only FP16 half-precision, of course, it supports FP16 and INT8, such as Cambrian’s NPU and Intel ‘s Movidius. In terms of fixed-point, it is easy to think of Horizon BPU and Imagination's PowerVR 2NX.
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Development of AI Chips
Here we will take Google TPU as an example.

1. Parallelization

In order to better accelerate the reasoning of the model, it is necessary to summarize the characteristics of the actual model, find problems, and then make targeted optimization. The algorithm of the AI chip is usually based on the convolutional neural network. Faced with its huge amount of calculation, the CPU can only perform limited calculations in a single clock cycle, and calculation bottlenecks are prone to occur. Where the GPU improves the performance of parallel computing, and converts the equivalent transformation of the convolution operation into a multiplication and addition operation of the matrix, which has become the mainstream hardware for neural network training.
The core of model acceleration is to increase the level of parallelization and perform as many operations as possible in the same clock cycle. So the TPU redesigns a dedicated hardware architecture: the systolic array.
See the figure below for the systolic array of the TPU. The calculation results are not directly output, but "flow" in the array according to the law, and saved after the calculation is completed. It not only increases the degree of parallelism, but also realizes the reuse of parameters and avoids repeated loading. And this array can perform 65536 multiplication and addition operations of 8-bit integers per clock cycle. Under the main frequency of 700MHz, an amazing computing power of 65536 * 700,000,000 * 2 [email protected] is realized.
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TPU-Systolic-Array
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1. High-speed On-chip Storage

Google mentioned that in the neural network it deploys, the number of parameters ranges from 5 million to 100 million, and the intermediate results also have a large amount of data. If the convolution operation unit (such as a systolic array) is frequently performed from DDR:
1) Load parameters
2) Read data
3) Write results
Similar to the barrel effect, it is the shortest piece of wood that determines the water capacity, which is the performance bottleneck. The above-mentioned intensive DDR read and write operations make the IO speed easy to become the performance bottleneck of model reasoning. Therefore, TPUv1 is equipped with 28M bytes of on-chip memory (OCM). Although the cost is relatively high, the read and write speed is far superior to that of DDR. What’s more, the TPUv2 is equipped with 16GB of HBM storage, and its IO speed reached 600GB per second.
With a cache (OCM or HBM), frequently used parameters can be loaded into the cache in advance at runtime, and then the convolution kernel can quickly read the data without repeatedly loading from memory. Not only that, the on-chip memory can also save the intermediate results of the network operation, avoiding transfer (write + read back) on the memory, thereby significantly reducing the IO pressure of the memory.
The role of the cache here is similar to the L3 in the traditional CPU. The purpose is to effectively lower the pressure on the memory, so that the powerful computing power of the convolution kernel can be fully utilized, to avoid the situation of invalid waiting for data loading.
And the paper 2 experiments and counts the running performance of several mainstream models on TPU/GPU/CPU.
The horizontal axis is the required computing power divided by the amount of data that needs to be counted from the memory, which represents the computing density corresponding to the unit memory data loading, while the vertical axis is the actual computing power. Therefore, the slash part represents that the computing performance is restricted by the memory IO bandwidth, while the horizontal part represents that the performance has been fully utilized.
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Operational Intensity: Ops/weight byte (log scale)
As shown in the figure, TPU is significantly better than CPU and GPU at high computing density. It can be seen that under high computing density, TPU can play a greater advantage.

1. CNN Quantization Algorithm

In addition to hardware design, in order to make the AI chip run the model more efficiently, it is necessary to perform lightweight processing on the AI algorithm, which can significantly reduce the size of parameters and the amount of calculation. The current neural network training is basically based on floating-point operations. When training and reasoning on the GPU, 32-bit or 64-bit is usually used to represent a floating-point number. If a lower number of bits is used, such as using 8 bits to represent numbers, the parameter size and calculation amount will be greatly reduced.
The figure below uses an 8-bit integer Q to approximate a 32-bit floating-point number.
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32 bit float
This operation brings a certain quantization noise, and a good neural network will have a certain anti-noise ability, so the accuracy loss of the algorithm after quantization will be limited and controllable. Another advantage of quantization is that if the input and parameters of the model are quantized into integer numbers (such as int8/uint8), there is no floating-point calculation, which can simplify the hardware design. As mentioned above, the first-generation TPU only supports integer operations, not only because integer operations are more efficient in hardware, but also because the circuit is much simpler.
At present, there are two mainstream quantification methods:
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Mainstream quantification methods
QAT uses the quantization operator when training the model. It can avoid the loss of precision to the greatest extent, but it cannot use the existing floating-point model and needs to retrain the model from scratch.
PTQ is to quantify the existing floating-point model, although the accuracy and efficiency of the model are not as good as QAT, there is still a great demand for use because there is no need to retrain the model and the threshold for use is lower. Here is a point, how to reduce the loss of accuracy is the goal of the PTQ program, and it has also produced a variety of ideas, such as linear quantization and logarithmic quantization.

1. Efficiency and Cost

In addition to the essential 3x3 convolution, there are dozens of common neural network operators. Because of the chip cost, design difficulty, and operating efficiency, existing AI chips can only support some operators. Therefore, it is necessary to understand and consider hardware capabilities during model training, and try to use operators that can be efficiently supported by AI chips to improve efficiency after deployment. Conversely, when designing the hardware of the AI chip, it is also necessary to consider the needs of algorithm design, and try to support more commonly used operators to improve the degree of freedom in model design.
If the manufacturer has the collaborative development capability between hardware, it can achieve a very good balance between model accuracy, chip cost, and inference speed. This is why more and more terminal manufacturers choose self-developed chips, and AI chip manufacturers often package algorithms for sale.
Note: This original content is from my blog KUKE Electronics.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

I am 18+ and all characters and participants must be 18+
Looking to do a fun, rapid fire text rp (meaning in the form of people texting back and forth, not paragraphs). Although I’m requesting a “text” form of rp, i also request that there be detail and enough for me to reply to. No one word responses (unless the rp calls for it)
The idea I have for this rp is extremely vague and I’d like for it to just build as time goes on.
I’d like for this to be centered around exes. Maybes exes who are on good/bad terms, they talk/haven’t spoken in years, etc! Maybe one ex is married or another is single ! The possibilities are endless and I’d love to brainstorm this with someone! I do prefer mxm pairings but I’m willing to do another gender if the plot is appealing !
Plz plz PLZ do not message me asking if I’m looking or if I would like to rp. Just send something about your writing style or interests/ideas, anything !

I am 18+ and all characters and participants must be 18+
Looking to do a fun, rapid fire text rp (meaning in the form of people texting back and forth, not paragraphs). Although I’m requesting a “text” form of rp, i also request that there be detail and enough for me to reply to. No one word responses (unless the rp calls for it)
The idea I have for this rp is extremely vague and I’d like for it to just build as time goes on.
I’d like for this to be centered around exes. Maybes exes who are on good/bad terms, they talk/haven’t spoken in years, etc! Maybe one ex is married or another is single ! The possibilities are endless and I’d love to brainstorm this with someone! I do prefer mxm pairings but I’m willing to do another gender if the plot is appealing !
Plz plz PLZ do not message me asking if I’m looking or if I would like to rp. Just send something about your writing style or interests/ideas, anything !

Teotihuacan was built on a geodetic grid system (a power center) in perfect sacred geometrical alignment with the cosmos to harness the energy of earth and sky. To understand it, we must go back to the original truth of the purpose. advanced design of Teotihuacan suggests that ancient builders had knowledge, not only of architecture, but of complex mathematical and astronomical sciences. The term 'Teohuacan' was found inscribed halfway across the globe on monuments in China, the term means 'place of the sun'(*our translation is 'Place to tie up the sun)Mercury, Hermes was the great Messenger, which also speaks for the planets quick trips around the sun. An aerial view shocked many researchers, but following the traditions we know what every pyramid was used for. Circuit Board-Teohuatican with two large processor chips— the Sun Pyramid and the Moon Pyramid. . One of the most interesting things about Teotihuacan is the finding by archaeologists of the extensive use of mica embedded in numerous structures. This mineral is found 3,000 miles away in Brazil and it is found in all buildings, housing complexes, temples and along the roads so basically this mineral is all over Teotihuacan.
The pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan contained considerable amounts of mica in layers up to 30 cm. Human use of mica dates back to prehistoric times. Mica was known to ancient Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman andChinese civilizations, as well as the Aztec civilization of the New World. The earliest use of mica has been found in cave paintings created during the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000 BC to 10,000 BC). The ancient civilizations & their inexplicable similarities are only shocking when one has disregarded our ancestors traditions as 'mythical ', which is a mistake made by academics only recently.
Mica is stable when exposed to electricity, light, moisture, and extreme temperatures. It has superior electrical properties as an insulator and as a dielectric, and can support an electrostatic field while dissipating minimal energy in the form of heat; it can be split very thin (0.025 to 0.125 millimeters or thinner) while maintaining its electrical properties, has a high dielectric breakdown, is thermally stable to 500 °C, and is resistant to corona discharge. Muscovite, the principal mica used by the electrical industry, is used in capacitors that are ideal for high frequency and radio frequency. Phlogopite mica remains stable at higher temperatures (to 900 °C) and is used in applications in which a combination of high-heat stability and electrical properties is required. Muscovite and phlogopite are used in sheet and ground forms.
The Maya Codex Vaticanus records faithfully the very ancient oral traditions of Central America. In one curious passage it states that “in the First Age, giants existed in that country(Mexico). "These 7 who escaped from a deluge , arrive in Cholula and there began to build a tower… in order that should a deluge come again he might escape to it.” Nahuatl language it’s named Tlachihualtepetl (‘artificial mountain’). Originally it was named Acholollan (‘water that falls in the place of flight’).
-Olmec(Xi)-had two different religious associations (gya-fa):the jaguar-man or humano-feline cult and the humano-bird cult. The humano-feline cult was called the nama-tigi by the Olmecs, while the humano-feline cult was called the kuno-tigi..Xoc Bas Birdman
The Teotihuacan(Tlalocan )mural depicts a range of mountains covered in rolling clouds and mists, below a brilliant red sky dominated by the huge figure of Tláloc, the Maya/Aztec god of celestial waters. Falling from Tláloc's open hands are flaming droplets of celestial water, likely representing the high-resonance isotope of protium, that overtly reference the ignition of celestial water vapor to form HHO plasma. The differentiation of celestial waters from terrestrial waters through the infrasonic evaporation of water vapor corresponds to special modern water purification processes involving the separation of resonant lightwater (protium) from dissonant heavy waters deuterium & tritium
The plumed headdress of Tláloc is comprised of radiating feathers of green and red hues, representing the colors of auroral plasma. Three arching red plumes stand out from the other green plumes of the headdress, extending from either side of the central figure and from the foreheads (pineal glands) of the two smaller figures in profile, representing the three frequencies of sound that generate nonlinear standing waves. Rising above the giant central figure of Tláloc is a majestic twisting Tree of Life image, composed of intertwining plumes of yellow/green and pink/red aerial HHO plasma that appear identical to modern photographs of the plasma discharges of red sprites.
Tláloc, God of Celestial Water, god of the vapor that rises, from the earth warmed by the sun after the rains, god of the mist that ascends from the valleys at dawn, god of the water that returns to its source in the clouds that swim over the highest peaks, god of the humid incense from which rise the copal prayers and the prayers of sacrifice
Tláloc is the return of vapor that strains to rise, is the return of time that strains to remember. Tláloc, God of the Fight Against the Current, with whose aid the hero battles against the torrent toward his own origin and beginning, towards the wings of his soul, the wings that Tláloc hides in the hero's past
The cycle of years is past - the waiting ended. Come - reunite, pilgrims, for the sky is in flames! From Xochicalco to Teotíhuacan the red spreads one step, another step, and another, only twelve short steps from the cave of the womb to the final conflagration
The red skies depicted in the Teotihuacan mural are also directly referenced in the Pyramid of Fire Codex, when it states that "the sky will be in flames" that will spread from one pyamid to another, as the worldwide netwrok of pyramids and sacred sites become activated to bath the area in the brilliant infrared and ultraviolet-A light of aerial HHO plasma plumes.ancient, unknown science designed to create energy directed up is excavating the tunnel.
-The geoposition of Teotihuacan pyramid complex (19.68°N 98.83°W), reveals a nonlinear (or Fibonacci-based) resonant alignment with respect to the Great Pyramid of Giza, being 7,684 miles away or 30.9% of the Earth's mean circumference (of 24,892 miles)..which is also observed in the Paracas petroglyphs.
The Sanskrit descendant cultures of Asia express the same essential interpretation given by the Maya culture of Central America; identifying the planet Mercury as ‘the fast runner’ that takes ‘quick flight’ around the sun, having a short orbital period of approximately 88 days. Among Nahuatl cultures, the art of running was crucial to the functioning of society, enabling the rapid conveyance of messages over long distance.
Mercury is the link (messenger) between the gods (higher principles) and humankind. In the ancient art of alchemy, such as in Hermeticism, Mercury, sulfur, and salt were the Earth's three principle substances that represent the trinity in creation. As sulphur is the symbol for the active principle, mercury is the symbol of the passive principle.The symbol of Mercury is the cosmic womb being incubated by the cross of the four elements of creation - earth, air, fire and water. Mercury is the messenger in Astrology as it is in mythology. It is the planet of day-to-day expression and communication. Mercury's action is to take things apart and put them back together again. It is an opportunistic planet, decidedly unemotional and curious. Mercury not only rules communication, it represents coordination. Thought processes, ideas, and sensory information from both unconscious and unconscious sources all need to be coordinated and understood.
Ive said before that the mercury was used to accomplish communication wth the Gods, The fluid metal element mercury was extolled as generating the luminosity of the blood of gods, for its threefold biophotonic extension of human longevity, whereby adepts of the alchemical arts were able to attain long lifespans. Mercury was closely associated with its extreme volatility, which must be carefully controlled to achieve positive results. Mercury was considered an ethereal element for its low boiling point of 357°C. When heated above this temperature, quicksilver will rapidly vaporize as toxic fumes inspiring an association with quick flight: ‘mercury has wings’.
A number of the Mesoamerican pyramids there are key components designed into their construction that act as magnifiers. These components appear to be important in the creation, magnification, and distribution of telluric fields.Pyramid & Scalar WavesEarly Irrigation of Teotihuacan
Provenance od Limestone used in Teotihuacan
Identification of Pyrite & Hematite
• Water, either moving naturally including rivers or cenotes (found at El Castillo at Chichen Itza) or by artificial canals or tunnels, similar to the Temple of Inscription found at Palenque.)
• Geo-magnetic fields. Naturally formed telluric fields that have high and low period throughout day and night.
• Pyramid design. The specific pyramid shape appears to greatly enhance the telluric fields that pulse up and into the center of the chamber.
• Pyramid interior fill. At a number of pyramids, rocks that are good electromagnetic conductors fill the interior of the pyramids and are used to enhance the pulsing field. Rocks that have veins with quartz, granite, and other electrical conducting properties appear to be favored. Characterization of lime carbonates in plasters from Teotihuacan, Mexico: preliminary results of cathodoluminescence and carbon isotope analyses
Dr Burke &Dr Brooker research determined that each location had been chosen because of its naturally occurring telluric energy field that pulsed up and into the structure or surrounding area. Also Burke and his research partner Kaj Halberg discovered electro-magnetic signatures that measured impressive charges on top of the pyramid. In a series of scans, the readings showed an average change of 908 volts over a short period of time, which was concentrated in the early morning hours. As ive stated in the past, this is the ideal time for sungazing. The pineal, contains magnetite & creates its own magnetic field. This was once a universal practice at Sacred sites, in 2009 until Nov 2012 The grand maya council held 52 full moon ritual of the new cycle where we visited sacred sites around the world and brought back these rituals. Burke mentions the readings and states, “These voltages might sound lethal and if it were a household current they could be. However, static electric charge in the air is a different type of electricity and even a thousand volts is not dangerous.” His discovery of pyramid field generation is fascinating, but what he actually uncovered was a means of generating and perhaps distributing electromagnetic energy within a pyramid complex. Which aligns with the term used for the ancient Egyptians, the Great PrNtr-house of Nature, or house of energy).
Stanford edu-Native American & Polynesian population The Genetic Evidence for 2 founding populations has constantly confirmed our traditions, the idea of independent invention is absolute nonsense. Theres an overwhelming amount of evidence, "believe" is a term unfamiliar to Dogon culture & ive yet to see the point in such a thing. If preconceived biases have clouded the minds of the majority, and they ignore evidence thats their fault. The age of the Fourth Sun, the Age of the Black Headed People (Aztec), or the Age of Heroes (Inca). This is the era in which Quetzalcoatl appeared in Mexico -- tall of stature, bright of countenance, bearded, and wearing a long tunic. His staff, shaped like a serpent, was painted black, white, and red [reminiscent of American Indians' mythology of three races of Man]. The staff was inlaid with precious stones and adorned with six stars.
-Between the 14th and 16th centuries during the Aztec era, Quetzalcoatl was worshipped as the patron of priests, the inventor of books and the calendar, as well as the protector of goldsmiths and other craftsmen..Shamanism, was invented in west Africa & brought to the Mesoamerican civilizations. The Aztec oral traditions say that Quetzalcoatl & his followers brought these beliefs ,and came from the East across the oceans. This is now corroborated by genetic, skeletal remains, artifacts, you name it. Quetzalcoatl was just a High Priest of Anu. The Gold tipped spears,or as Columbus calls it ' guanin 'to the Indians of Hispaniola. Samples of which sent back to Spain on a mail boat, and the proportion was found to be identical to what was being forged in African Guinea.
Moche Reed BoatThe Xi(Olmec) were a mix of a Polynesian/Oceanic elite aristocratic people accompanied by priests of the Orisha(Yoruba)/Mende(MalinkeBambara)responsible for introducing the religious practices and astronomical worship of the Mother Goddess complex (Venus, the Dogon Sirius observation and the Venus worship of the Olmecs, the use of the ax in the worship of Shango among he Yoruba of West Africa and the use of the ax in Olmec worship as well as the prominence of the thunder God later known as Tlalock among the Aztecs).It was R1b-V88(Yoruba) that were known as magicians to the Mayans & local Aymara over in Bolivia because of their knowledge of acoustics, which they have preserved from the Nile Valley (Anu colleges of Heliopolis).
Again, we see Toward the end of the Fourth Sun, wars between the gods were taking place. [The Battle of the Titans?] The gods' war brought havoc to the land; wild animals overran mankind, and Tollan was abandoned. The fourth Sun had begun 5,042 years before the time of the Codex Vaticano-Latino 3738 (1533). The time the Fourth Sun ended is not stated, but the Codex was written during the Fifth Sun. The Fourth Sun may have perished by means of the Jaguar. The Fifth Sun is referred to as the Age of Kings by the Incas.

Teotihuacan was built on a geodetic grid system (a power center) in perfect sacred geometrical alignment with the cosmos to harness the energy of earth and sky. To understand it, we must go back to the original truth of the purpose. advanced design of Teotihuacan suggests that ancient builders had knowledge, not only of architecture, but of complex mathematical and astronomical sciences. The term 'Teohuacan' was found inscribed halfway across the globe on monuments in China, the term means 'place of the sun'(*our translation is 'Place to tie up the sun)Mercury, Hermes was the great Messenger, which also speaks for the planets quick trips around the sun. An aerial view shocked many researchers, but following the traditions we know what every pyramid was used for. Circuit Board-Teohuatican with two large processor chips— the Sun Pyramid and the Moon Pyramid. . One of the most interesting things about Teotihuacan is the finding by archaeologists of the extensive use of mica embedded in numerous structures. This mineral is found 3,000 miles away in Brazil and it is found in all buildings, housing complexes, temples and along the roads so basically this mineral is all over Teotihuacan.
The pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan contained considerable amounts of mica in layers up to 30 cm. Human use of mica dates back to prehistoric times. Mica was known to ancient Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman andChinese civilizations, as well as the Aztec civilization of the New World. The earliest use of mica has been found in cave paintings created during the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000 BC to 10,000 BC). The ancient civilizations & their inexplicable similarities are only shocking when one has disregarded our ancestors traditions as 'mythical ', which is a mistake made by academics only recently.
Mica is stable when exposed to electricity, light, moisture, and extreme temperatures. It has superior electrical properties as an insulator and as a dielectric, and can support an electrostatic field while dissipating minimal energy in the form of heat; it can be split very thin (0.025 to 0.125 millimeters or thinner) while maintaining its electrical properties, has a high dielectric breakdown, is thermally stable to 500 °C, and is resistant to corona discharge. Muscovite, the principal mica used by the electrical industry, is used in capacitors that are ideal for high frequency and radio frequency. Phlogopite mica remains stable at higher temperatures (to 900 °C) and is used in applications in which a combination of high-heat stability and electrical properties is required. Muscovite and phlogopite are used in sheet and ground forms.
The Maya Codex Vaticanus records faithfully the very ancient oral traditions of Central America. In one curious passage it states that “in the First Age, giants existed in that country(Mexico). "These 7 who escaped from a deluge , arrive in Cholula and there began to build a tower… in order that should a deluge come again he might escape to it.” Nahuatl language it’s named Tlachihualtepetl (‘artificial mountain’). Originally it was named Acholollan (‘water that falls in the place of flight’).
-Olmec(Xi)-had two different religious associations (gya-fa):the jaguar-man or humano-feline cult and the humano-bird cult. The humano-feline cult was called the nama-tigi by the Olmecs, while the humano-feline cult was called the kuno-tigi..Xoc Bas Birdman
The Teotihuacan(Tlalocan )mural depicts a range of mountains covered in rolling clouds and mists, below a brilliant red sky dominated by the huge figure of Tláloc, the Maya/Aztec god of celestial waters. Falling from Tláloc's open hands are flaming droplets of celestial water, likely representing the high-resonance isotope of protium, that overtly reference the ignition of celestial water vapor to form HHO plasma. The differentiation of celestial waters from terrestrial waters through the infrasonic evaporation of water vapor corresponds to special modern water purification processes involving the separation of resonant lightwater (protium) from dissonant heavy waters deuterium & tritium
The plumed headdress of Tláloc is comprised of radiating feathers of green and red hues, representing the colors of auroral plasma. Three arching red plumes stand out from the other green plumes of the headdress, extending from either side of the central figure and from the foreheads (pineal glands) of the two smaller figures in profile, representing the three frequencies of sound that generate nonlinear standing waves. Rising above the giant central figure of Tláloc is a majestic twisting Tree of Life image, composed of intertwining plumes of yellow/green and pink/red aerial HHO plasma that appear identical to modern photographs of the plasma discharges of red sprites.
Tláloc, God of Celestial Water, god of the vapor that rises, from the earth warmed by the sun after the rains, god of the mist that ascends from the valleys at dawn, god of the water that returns to its source in the clouds that swim over the highest peaks, god of the humid incense from which rise the copal prayers and the prayers of sacrifice
Tláloc is the return of vapor that strains to rise, is the return of time that strains to remember. Tláloc, God of the Fight Against the Current, with whose aid the hero battles against the torrent toward his own origin and beginning, towards the wings of his soul, the wings that Tláloc hides in the hero's past
The cycle of years is past - the waiting ended. Come - reunite, pilgrims, for the sky is in flames! From Xochicalco to Teotíhuacan the red spreads one step, another step, and another, only twelve short steps from the cave of the womb to the final conflagration
The red skies depicted in the Teotihuacan mural are also directly referenced in the Pyramid of Fire Codex, when it states that "the sky will be in flames" that will spread from one pyamid to another, as the worldwide netwrok of pyramids and sacred sites become activated to bath the area in the brilliant infrared and ultraviolet-A light of aerial HHO plasma plumes.ancient, unknown science designed to create energy directed up is excavating the tunnel.
-The geoposition of Teotihuacan pyramid complex (19.68°N 98.83°W), reveals a nonlinear (or Fibonacci-based) resonant alignment with respect to the Great Pyramid of Giza, being 7,684 miles away or 30.9% of the Earth's mean circumference (of 24,892 miles)..which is also observed in the Paracas petroglyphs.
The Sanskrit descendant cultures of Asia express the same essential interpretation given by the Maya culture of Central America; identifying the planet Mercury as ‘the fast runner’ that takes ‘quick flight’ around the sun, having a short orbital period of approximately 88 days. Among Nahuatl cultures, the art of running was crucial to the functioning of society, enabling the rapid conveyance of messages over long distance.
Mercury is the link (messenger) between the gods (higher principles) and humankind. In the ancient art of alchemy, such as in Hermeticism, Mercury, sulfur, and salt were the Earth's three principle substances that represent the trinity in creation. As sulphur is the symbol for the active principle, mercury is the symbol of the passive principle.The symbol of Mercury is the cosmic womb being incubated by the cross of the four elements of creation - earth, air, fire and water. Mercury is the messenger in Astrology as it is in mythology. It is the planet of day-to-day expression and communication. Mercury's action is to take things apart and put them back together again. It is an opportunistic planet, decidedly unemotional and curious. Mercury not only rules communication, it represents coordination. Thought processes, ideas, and sensory information from both unconscious and unconscious sources all need to be coordinated and understood.
Ive said before that the mercury was used to accomplish communication wth the Gods, The fluid metal element mercury was extolled as generating the luminosity of the blood of gods, for its threefold biophotonic extension of human longevity, whereby adepts of the alchemical arts were able to attain long lifespans. Mercury was closely associated with its extreme volatility, which must be carefully controlled to achieve positive results. Mercury was considered an ethereal element for its low boiling point of 357°C. When heated above this temperature, quicksilver will rapidly vaporize as toxic fumes inspiring an association with quick flight: ‘mercury has wings’.
A number of the Mesoamerican pyramids there are key components designed into their construction that act as magnifiers. These components appear to be important in the creation, magnification, and distribution of telluric fields.Pyramid & Scalar WavesEarly Irrigation of Teotihuacan
Provenance od Limestone used in Teotihuacan
Identification of Pyrite & Hematite
• Water, either moving naturally including rivers or cenotes (found at El Castillo at Chichen Itza) or by artificial canals or tunnels, similar to the Temple of Inscription found at Palenque.)
• Geo-magnetic fields. Naturally formed telluric fields that have high and low period throughout day and night.
• Pyramid design. The specific pyramid shape appears to greatly enhance the telluric fields that pulse up and into the center of the chamber.
• Pyramid interior fill. At a number of pyramids, rocks that are good electromagnetic conductors fill the interior of the pyramids and are used to enhance the pulsing field. Rocks that have veins with quartz, granite, and other electrical conducting properties appear to be favored. Characterization of lime carbonates in plasters from Teotihuacan, Mexico: preliminary results of cathodoluminescence and carbon isotope analyses
Dr Burke &Dr Brooker research determined that each location had been chosen because of its naturally occurring telluric energy field that pulsed up and into the structure or surrounding area. Also Burke and his research partner Kaj Halberg discovered electro-magnetic signatures that measured impressive charges on top of the pyramid. In a series of scans, the readings showed an average change of 908 volts over a short period of time, which was concentrated in the early morning hours. As ive stated in the past, this is the ideal time for sungazing. The pineal, contains magnetite & creates its own magnetic field. This was once a universal practice at Sacred sites, in 2009 until Nov 2012 The grand maya council held 52 full moon ritual of the new cycle where we visited sacred sites around the world and brought back these rituals. Burke mentions the readings and states, “These voltages might sound lethal and if it were a household current they could be. However, static electric charge in the air is a different type of electricity and even a thousand volts is not dangerous.” His discovery of pyramid field generation is fascinating, but what he actually uncovered was a means of generating and perhaps distributing electromagnetic energy within a pyramid complex. Which aligns with the term used for the ancient Egyptians, the Great PrNtr-house of Nature, or house of energy).
Stanford edu-Native American & Polynesian population The Genetic Evidence for 2 founding populations has constantly confirmed our traditions, the idea of independent invention is absolute nonsense. Theres an overwhelming amount of evidence, "believe" is a term unfamiliar to Dogon culture & ive yet to see the point in such a thing. If preconceived biases have clouded the minds of the majority, and they ignore evidence thats their fault. The age of the Fourth Sun, the Age of the Black Headed People (Aztec), or the Age of Heroes (Inca). This is the era in which Quetzalcoatl appeared in Mexico -- tall of stature, bright of countenance, bearded, and wearing a long tunic. His staff, shaped like a serpent, was painted black, white, and red [reminiscent of American Indians' mythology of three races of Man]. The staff was inlaid with precious stones and adorned with six stars.
-Between the 14th and 16th centuries during the Aztec era, Quetzalcoatl was worshipped as the patron of priests, the inventor of books and the calendar, as well as the protector of goldsmiths and other craftsmen..Shamanism, was invented in west Africa & brought to the Mesoamerican civilizations. The Aztec oral traditions say that Quetzalcoatl & his followers brought these beliefs ,and came from the East across the oceans. This is now corroborated by genetic, skeletal remains, artifacts, you name it. Quetzalcoatl was just a High Priest of Anu. The Gold tipped spears,or as Columbus calls it ' guanin 'to the Indians of Hispaniola. Samples of which sent back to Spain on a mail boat, and the proportion was found to be identical to what was being forged in African Guinea.
Moche Reed BoatThe Xi(Olmec) were a mix of a Polynesian/Oceanic elite aristocratic people accompanied by priests of the Orisha(Yoruba)/Mende(MalinkeBambara)responsible for introducing the religious practices and astronomical worship of the Mother Goddess complex (Venus, the Dogon Sirius observation and the Venus worship of the Olmecs, the use of the ax in the worship of Shango among he Yoruba of West Africa and the use of the ax in Olmec worship as well as the prominence of the thunder God later known as Tlalock among the Aztecs).It was R1b-V88(Yoruba) that were known as magicians to the Mayans & local Aymara over in Bolivia because of their knowledge of acoustics, which they have preserved from the Nile Valley (Anu colleges of Heliopolis).
Again, we see Toward the end of the Fourth Sun, wars between the gods were taking place. [The Battle of the Titans?] The gods' war brought havoc to the land; wild animals overran mankind, and Tollan was abandoned. The fourth Sun had begun 5,042 years before the time of the Codex Vaticano-Latino 3738 (1533). The time the Fourth Sun ended is not stated, but the Codex was written during the Fifth Sun. The Fourth Sun may have perished by means of the Jaguar. The Fifth Sun is referred to as the Age of Kings by the Incas.

If you are interested in learning how to shoot,I am more than happy to help you.In today’s climate of harassment and hate against gay people being prepared to protect yourself is important.Always willing to help a newbie get into the sport.

Let's say that after the ending of Prototype 1 and almost at the ending of Infamous 2 Alex went to New Marais to conquer it
The battle is 1v1 so alex can't create enemies using the virus
Alex Mercer powers: Sentient Biomass Physiology: Upon being infected by the Blacklight Virus, Alex Mercer’s body was converted into living biomass. His body is now stronger than it has ever been before, lacking many of the weaknesses that comes with a normal body such as internal organs, the issue of stamina and much more, while at the same time gaining a vast array of abilities that comes with his new physiology, such as shapeshifting and enhanced stats. Near Limitless Potential: Mercer is pretty interesting, even among other fictional characters, and even those within the video game media, being one of the few characters showcased to have near limitless potential due to how his powers work. When the blacklight virus first infected Mercer, and later reforming it. Mercer was shown to be many times stronger than normal, this isn’t where his limits are however. Upon consuming other biological entities, Mercer is capable of converting them into biomass which is then added to his own, increasing his stats, such as strength and durability, with each body that he consumes. So long as there is enough biological materials for him to consume, Mercer’s physical potential is almost limitless. Similarly, due to his ability to assimilate the memories of those he consumes. There is no real limit to Mercer’s own intelligence, so long as there are living beings for him to consume, lastly due to the blacklight virus within Mercer’s body constantly evolving. There is a chance for Mercer to develop various new abilities simply due to a random mutation at some point down the line. Evolutionary Adaptability: Due to the Blacklight Virus’s ability to constantly evolve based on the situation and the information presented in consumed biomass. Mercer is capable of adapting to nearly any situation, forming Claws, and other such weapons from his body in order to better combat his foes. Developing resistances to things such as elemental damage like fire and electricity, and even developing a degree of immunity. In one case after being in a situation where Mercer was under 10gs of gravitation force. Mercer’s body quickly adapted by increasing his strength levels, allowing him to walk out of that situation as if he was never under that level of extreme pressure. Potentially Limitless Superhuman Strength: Mercer’s is shown having vast levels of superhuman strength, being strong enough to lift and toss heavy objects such as cars, helicopters, and buses, to objects as heavy as tanks several tens to hundreds of feet awaym and even being able to run with these objects without his speed being impaired. Mercer’s strength is on such a level that he could overpower other superhumanly strong characters such as the infected hunters, Elizabeth Greene, the Supreme Hunter, and even James Heller at times, despite their superhuman durability being at a level where even missiles and tank fire can’t hurt them. In the first Prototype game. Mercer demonstrates an insane level of strength, being able to create a concussive shockwave just by thrusting his fists forward, uplifting cars, tanks and throwing people several tens of feet with enough force to kill them if not outright vaporize them. Mercer’s strength can continuously increase as he consumes more and more biomass, even mutating and becoming stronger when consuming other infected individuals, and whatever potential mutations their variant of the Blacklight virus may have. Making his potential for strength virtually limitless so long as there is enough organic material for him to consume. Superhuman Leaping Ability: Mercer’s strength is shown to extend to his legs. Allowing him to jump several hundred feet into the air, allowing him to clear barricades, get on top of buildings, and even leap high enough into the air to catch helicopters. Due to his increased mass. Mercer is capable of producing shockwaves when landing after leaping from large heights. Superhuman Speed: Mercers speed is far above that of a normal human, being able to run far faster than the average car, making them appear as if they are standing still. He has been shown to out run helicopters chasing him at times, putting his speed around 200 to 500mph. He has even kept up and outpace other infected entities such as the Leader Hunters, the Supreme Hunter and even James Heller to a degree. Superhuman Agility: Due to Mercer’s enhanced physiology. He is capable of moving around far better than the average person. He can leap tall distances, perform various kinds of flips with the greatest of ease. This, combined with his constantly evolving parkour skills, allows him the ability to escape and move around the tightest of spaces without so much as losing his balance. He is capable of twisting his body in midair in order to quickly recover from being knocked back and landing on his feet in a battle ready stance. Superhuman Reflexes: Mercer, upon his mutation into the Prototype, had his reflexes enhanced to superhuman levels. He can dodge gunfire, and other projectile base weaponry at point blank range, keep up and overpowered various evolved infected creatures such as the Hunter, and Supreme Hunter, and even combat and overwhelm the military’s super soldiers with ease. Potentially limitless Superhuman Durability: Mercer’s durability, much like his strength, is potentially limitless as he absorbs more and more biomass. His body is capable of compacting the excess within himself, making his flesh far denser than that of a normal human. Similarly he can alter the density of his biomass to even stronger levels. He has tanked gunfire from all angles, survived being shot with missiles and other explosives, tanked and survived hits from other infected individuals such as Heller and the Supreme Hunter. He has survived dismemberment, being inside clouds of the bloodtox chemical, and more, and still continues fighting. Superhuman Healing Factor: Mercer’s healing factor is on an insane level. Being able to heal from bullet and shrapnel wounds nearly instantaneously, He could regenerate from having large sections of his body torn out, regenerate lost limbs just as fast. So long as there is still a single bit of the biomass that makes up his body. Mercer will continue to regenerate back to full health. Even regenerating from a few pieces of tissue flesh after being caught at ground zero when a nuclear warhead exploded. Immortality: Due to Mercer’s body being made up of biomass. Mercer’s aging process has come to a halt. Due to his body constantly healing and replacing any damaged biomass. Mercer is in a sense, immortal. It was shown with Elizabeth Greene that after she got infected with the Redlight virus. Her physical body was shown to still look around the age of twenty. Having not changed even after nearly forty years passing since she was infected. Elemental resistance: Mercer is shown to be resistant to fire and electric attacks. However, being exposed to either high enough heat or voltage can still cause him harm. Superhuman Senses: Mercer’s sense after his mutation is shown to have evolved to far higher levels than that of the normal human. He can hear far better than the normal human and his eye-sight has evolved in a way to allow Mercer to see through several different types of visual ranges. Infrared Vision: One of two known vision powers that Mercer is shown to have. By using infrared vision, Mercer is capable of seeing the heat signatures radiating from various living beings. By using this vision power. Mercer is capable of seeing in environments and conditions that would normally limit or blind a normal person’s eyesight such as total darkness or thick smoke and fog by tracking the heat signatures of living beings within the surrounding areas. It should be noted that Mercer is capable of using infrared vision despite the fact that those infected tend to generate enough body heat to blind other infrared vision devices. Showing that there are some differences between Mercer’s infrared vision and other devices capable of allowing users to see in infrared. Infected Vision: After connecting to the hive mind created by the blacklight virus. Mercer gained the ability to see and recognize individuals infected with the Blacklight virus. Superhuman Intelligence: Upon consuming the biomass of an intelligence entity. Mercer’s own intelligence is shown to increase dramatically as he will know what the person he consumes knows. Given the numerous individuals that he had consumed over the course of the Prototype series. Mercer’s intelligence is at superhuman levels. Making him one of the smartest if not the smartest person within the Prototype universe… at least until James Heller had consumed him. Superhuman Mental Processing: Due to Mercer’s physiology. Mercer’s mental capacity and processing is at a superhuman level. He is shown being able to understand and process massive amounts of information that he gains from consuming his targets. Similarly during the events of Prototype 2, Mercer was capable of controlling and directing various individuals infected with the blacklight virus through the hive mind. Matter Manipulation: While not really shown all that much. Mercer has the ability to alter the environment using the Blacklight virus as a catalyst. Through this ability. Mercer is capable of deteriorating concrete. Converting and absorbing the biomass of living objects such as living creatures and trees. Strengthening and converting even inorganic structures such as buildings into hives to fit his needs. Even converting inorganic material into layers of biomass over large areas which can be used to slow down his enemies, while not hindering his own forces or himself. He gains this ability after consuming Elizabeth Greene. It should be noted that even though Mercer is capable of altering the surroundings around him. His version of this power is very limited when compared to others such as Edward Elric from FullMetal Alchemist or Silver Surfer from Marvel Comics. As while he can make and convert things into organic matter. He can’t make inorganic matter like breathable air, or metal. Biokinesis: Due to Mercer’s ability to produce the Blacklight Virus within himself. Mercer is capable of controlling and altering the biomass both within his body and that of others infected to various effects. Being able to increase his physical stats to create various weapons abilities with his biomass. Similarly, due to his ability to constantly make new strains of the virus itself. Mercer is capable of infecting others with this virus. Allowing him to alter and control infected individuals by granting them a similar power set to his own or even morphing and transforming these individuals into monsters of various sizes and powers. Disease Manipulation (Blacklight Virus): Due to being infected and bonding with the Blacklight virus to the extent of becoming an entity called a Prototype. Mercer’s body is capable of constantly producing the blacklight virus. Even creating various strains of side viruses which can grant or evolve various abilities that he may not have had before. Similarly due to this virus production and the various strains he can make in his body. Mercer is capable of infecting others with a variation of the virus. Either turning others into infected drones which he can control or granting the infected individual a similar subset of powers as his own. Viral Gas Generation: Caught on a CCTV camera. Mercer is shown having the ability to generate and expel a cloud of gas from his body containing the Blacklight Virus into the surrounding area. Rapidly infecting and mutating those located on ground zero, caught within the cloud. Biomass Conversion: Mercer has the ability to nearly instantaneously consume and convert any organic organism into biomass which is then added to his body. Through this process. Mercer is capable of enhancing his overall physical stats and quickly recovering from any damage that he may have suffered during battle as well as gaining the memories and skills that the consumed individual may have had. Critical Mass: Upon consuming enough biomass. Mercer is capable of entering a critical mass state. Due to this extra mass, Mercer’s durability increases, allowing him to tank more damage. Similarly, due to having more biomass at his command. Mercer is capable of using his strongest attacks, called Devastators, moves capable of clearing and killing anyone and everyone within a certain range of Mercer. Upon gaining critical mass. Mercer’s body gains a defense mechanism in which upon taking enough damage. This extra mass would harden to an extreme degree. Making Mercer almost completely invulnerable to most forms of physical damage for a short time in order to allow him to either escape a battle or try and consume another organic organism in order to recover from the near fatal damage. Memory Assimilation: Upon consuming an individual. Mercer gains access to all the memories and skills that that individual may have had. Allowing Mercer to suddenly master various new skills such as weaponry, vehicle usage, and even military tactics and plans. Shapeshifting: Due to Mercer not having a stable form like most other organic organisms. Mercer is capable of shaping the biomass within him into virtually anything he can imagine. He can shape his arms into various weapons such as blades and whips. He can change his form to match the form of anyone he consumed no matter their gender. Even morphing the biomass within his body to form mundane items such as clothes. Mercer's shapeshifting abilities are only limited by his imagination and the amount of biomass he contains. Voice Mimicry: Due to both of Mercer’s abilities to shapeshift and assimilating the memories of those he consumes. Mercer is capable of altering his vocal cords to match the voices of the people that he has consumed. Allowing Mercer to move around in areas with more heavier security. Mercer has even been shown being capable of using this power in battles. Taking the forms of high rank officials to trick various Military forces into fighting themselves. Similarly, depending on who Mercer is fighting at the time. If Mercer is aware of himself having consumed someone close to his opponent. Mercer can alter his voice in order to mess with his opponent’s mind. Getting them to drop their guard enough for him to score a kill, or at the very least, land more easier hits on them. Shield: Mercer due to his shapeshifting ability, much like most of his other powers, is capable of manipulating his biomass to form various weapons and armaments. One of these powers is the ability to form a shield on either one of his arms. Taking some of his accumulated biomass and forming it into the shape of a kite shield. Mercer then hardens this shield shaped biomass to the utmost degree. Allowing him to block all incoming damage from the direction he faces his shield at. However, it should be noted that the shield’s durability is limited as enough damage can shatter the shield. Unlike his successor, James Heller. Mercer, when using his shield power, prefers having a mobile approach to his defense as opposed to being a solid unbreakable wall like Heller’s own ability. As such, Mercer is capable of moving around instead of being rooted in place, Similarly due to this approach. Mercer is capable of using this power with his other abilities. Adopting a similar fighting style to that of a knight of old, with a shield in one hand, and a weapon in the other. Armor: When faced with a situation where Mercer is either taking damage from all directions or facing a foe that rivals him in strength and power. Mercer is capable of hardening the outer layer biomass that makes up his appearance into an armor like texture. Giving his entire body a shiny black texture that blocks most damage and reduces all incoming damage to a large degree. This increase in durability allowed mercer to take on foes such as Captain Cross, the Supreme Hunter, and even tank multiple hits from high yielding artillery without suffering much damage from these encounters. Much like with his bio-shield ability. Mercer is capable of using his more offensive powers with this form. However, this form is not without its weaknesses, as upon entering this form. Mercer’s speed is greatly reduced. While still capable of moving at superhuman speeds. It's only about half of his normal speed. Similarly, while in this form. Mercer appears unable to use his bio-shield ability, however this may be due to this form providing potentially better defense and allowing him more mobility in combat. Claws: One of the first offensive powers that Mercer gains during the events of the first Prototype game. Mercer gained the ability to form massive, knife-like talons on his hand by consuming a hunter-type infected. These talons are sharp enough to cut through flesh and bones. Even being able to cut and destroy heavily armored vehicles such as tanks. When combining his Claws with his speed. Mercer can tear through hordes of basic enemies with ease, even developing this ability further into the ground spikes ability and the Devastator; Groundspike Graveyard Attack. Groundspikes: When using his claws as his main weapon. Mercer is capable of compressing his biomass into his clawed hands before slamming them into the ground. Upon doing this, Mercer expands the compressed biomass in his hands outwards towards the direction he wants. After either reaching their target or hitting a certain distance. The expanded biomass will erupt as sharp spires from the ground, impaling and cutting apart anyone and anything caught within eruption radius. GroundSpike Graveyard Devastator: An enhanced version of the groundspike technique. Upon entering critical mass. Mercer is capable of moving the extra biomass to his hands after a bit of a charge up time. Afterwards, Mercer will then slam both his hands into the ground. Sending the biomass out in all directions which would then track down any target within a certain radius before erupting out of the ground. This move is strong enough to bring down infected hives which were capable of withstanding the force of tank and missile fire. Hammerfists: When in need of some more brute physical force and attack power. Mercer is shown being able to move the biomass within his body to his arm. Covering them in the same fibers that make up his shield and armor form while at the same time enlarging them to the size of large warhammers, like those seen in games. With these new Hammerfists, Mercer is capable of dealing massive amounts of blunt force trauma to the point of even destroying a tank with a few hits. He is capable of doing this by pressing more and more biomass into his fist before compressing them. Increasing their density and weight in the process. However, doing so does cost him some attack speed, as he is shown having some trouble at times lifting and swinging his massive hands around. The attack power of these fist are shown to be on a level capable of inflicting massive damage to entities such as the Supreme Hunter, and even James Heller. He has even shown the ability to produce shockwaves and quaking the ground with a few hits, allowing him to stun foes with the aftershocks even when Mercer’s fist doesn't make contact with his intended target. Whipfist: Mercer’s main range attack. By moving his biomass to either of his arms. Mercer can morph his arm of choice into what could be called a grappling gun. By changing the normally rigid properties of his arm to be more elastic when compared to some of his other powers. Mercer can throw his arm forward, shooting out his clawed appendage at a target, allowing him to reel it back to him or him towards it. He tends to use this when dealing with airborne enemies or when he needs to reach a farther distance than normal distance that his jumping ability may not be able to cover. Similarly due to the whipfist’s elastic properties. It is a good power to use when dealing with mobs as it can swing his arm, extending it a certain distance and with his superhuman strength to cut nearly anything in his path in half. Tendrils: Mercer is capable of forming and using tendrils. While not really shown in the first Prototype game. Mercer does use them in dealing with foes, even creating two different devastator attacks with them. In the tied-in comics, Mercer is shown using the tendrils ability to impale and kill various individuals. In one case, killing Autumn with this ability after being shot in the head. Tendrils Barrage Devastator: Upon entering critical mass. Mercer is capable of condensing the biomass in his body, creating large amounts of pressure within himself before releasing it, causing an unknown amount of tendrils to burst from his body in all directions as well as impaling and dragging any organic being towards him. Anything impaled and killed by this attack is then absorbed by Mercer, healing and strengthening him. Bio-Bombs: While Mercer isn’t shown using this ability as it was one of the main attacks of James heller. As the ability came from one of Mercer’s Evolved soldiers, carrying a strain of the blacklight virus produced by Mercer. Mercer likely has access to this ability. The ability itself allows Mercer to implant a bit of his biomass into a target, before either allowing them to run off or simply throwing the individual at a group or target. The person in question will then explode in a mass of tendrils in all directions. Impaling, grabbing, and dragging all targets caught into a center mass. Crushing and killing anything caught in the center mass. Blade: Mercer is capable of shaping and forming the biomass in his arms to form a massive blade, capable of splitting humans in half, and piercing the armor of military vehicles such as tanks, and the thick skin of hunters and other infected entities. The Blade is Mercer’s strongest attack ability outside of his Devastator attacks. Not as fast as the claws nor as strong as his hammerfist. Mercer’s Blade ability doesn’t suffer from the weaknesses of either power, acting as a middle ground, allowing him a far greater dps, or damage per second when confronting enemies. Mercer’s version of the bio-blade is shown being stronger than that of Heller’s, being capable of dealing with crowds and more heavily defended enemies far easier than Heller’s version of the power. Density Alteration: Mercer, due to his shapeshifting abilities, is capable of altering the density of his body, allowing him to increase the damage potential of his strikes as well as altering the way gravity affects his body. In terms of offensive capabilities. Mercer has been shown being able to do sudden changes while in mid air and increase his density to the point of creating shockwaves and cratering the ground he lands on with enough height. Muscle Mass Increase: Mercer is capable of increasing his muscle mass in his arms and body, increasing his strength beyond his normal levels without suffering any loss in movement like many of his other defensive and offensive powers. Gliding: Mercer, by lowering his density while in the air, is capable of achieving a limited degree of flight by gliding through the air. He is capable of switching his body’s density on the fly to either slow his descent or rapidly falling. Similarly, it is due to this ability that Mercer is capable of clearing large distances as he can simply leap and glide over most obstacles in his way in order to escape his pursuers, or reach various locations far more quickly then simply running and parkouring his way there through the streets.. Air Dash: Mercer is shown being able to move the biomass around his body at such a rate that it is capable of slingshotting him in any particular direction that he wants. Mercer generally uses this ability to cover more distance, extend his gliding abilities and even dodge projectiles and other attacks in mid-air. Wall Running: While strong enough to climb walls using his hands, Mercer is capable of wall running at high speeds as his body will alter his feet in a way that allows him to cling to walls while running without the risk of slipping off due to lack of momentum or adhesion. As such Mercer can run at high speeds in any direction when on vertical surfaces Knuckle Shockwave: Using his strength, Mercer is capable of producing a massive shockwave by a double palm thrust. This attack is capable of cars and people down an entire street. Even potentially tearing apart the latter. Critical Pain Devastator: An enhanced version of the knuckle shockwave. Upon entering critical mass, Mercer can move the biomass in his body into his hands. Upon doing a palm thrust. Mercer creates a massive shockwave that uplifts and tears apart humans and vehicles alike. Adding insult to injury, Mercer, during the process of performing this attack, will also fire the biomass stored in his hands as tendrils into the shockwave, shredding and crushing anything unlucky enough to survive the initial shockwave itself
Cole Macgrath powers:Electrokinesis-The ability to absorb and control electricity in and out of his body. Over the last seven years,Cole has gotten much more powerful than in inFAMOUS 2. Able to deliver up to 15 supernovas of force. His maximum voltage is over 20 Gigawatts and the heat of his lightning burns up to 300,000,000,000 Kelvin,equivalent to three supernovas. -Immunity to electricity-Cannot be harmed by electrical energy. Any electricity that makes contact with his body is automatically absorbed. Electromagnetism-The ability to produce and manipulate electromagnetic fields and pulses. Cole can manipulate any object,no matter the size,using magnetism. Even non-metallic materials such as stone,ice,wood,and cardboard. Cryokinesis-The ability to manipulate ice and cold gas. Cole can deliver several cryokinetic attacks such as razor-sharp,steel-tearing Shatter Blasts,Ice Grenades,Freeze Rockets,Ice Pillars and Platforms for jumping great distances,Ice Barriers that can block missiles and knock up enemies. He can also produce freezing mist that freezes enemies in it solid if he hits it with a bolt. Superhuman Strength-Cole possesses superhuman strength. Able to easily lift up to 52 metric tons. His punches are on a Class PJ and he can regularly bench press giant monsters as heavy as tanks. Has even fought on par with Ares, the God of Warfare. Superhuman Speed-Cole is able to move at superhuman speeds. He can run up to 60MPH and during combat, he can move at Hypersonic speeds. He can react and fight at Massively Hypersonic+ speeds(Mach 1000-8810), able to easily dodge lasers and instant speed attacks and react to his own, natural lightning. Superhuman Durability-Cole is extremely durable. He can survive an attack that can level an entire island, ignores bullets, and shrugs off point-blank RPG's and grenades. Regenerative Healing Factor-Cole can heal extensive damage to his body in seconds. He can even regenerate lost limbs. If he absorbs energy, he heals instantly. Tactics/Leadership/Intelligence-Cole possesses increased intelligence. He regularly works out strategies during intense combat, he daily leads a team of superheroes into battle, he's able to logically deduce the outcome of any action he might take, and outsmarts incredibly clever opponents like Sasha, Alden, and Ray Zenji. Combat Experience-Cole is an incredibly experienced fighter. He was already he strongest Conduit alive, and now is even more so after training his powers in secret for 7 years. He has fought a multitude of foes stronger and more experienced than himself and won. And has survived impossible odds and has always come out on top. Even death. Electrokinetic Flight-Over the years, Cole has learned the ability to create a platform of electricity and surf on it through the air, granting him the ability to fly. Electrokinetic Constructs-Cole can create shapes of electrical energy and use electromagnetism to give it solid form. This can create several Electrokinetic weapons such as the Gigawatt Blades. Electroreception-Cole can pick up and read electronic frequencies and listen in on communications, he can also use this to read data as well. Electric Healing- Cole is able to release a massive charge of bioelectricity that heals everyone around him via hyper stimulating cells into a rapid state of regeneration. Precognition-Cole has the ability to see a few seconds into the future or see a whole future event. Mind Techniques-Cole can use neuroelectricity to manipulate people's minds. He can use this in a variety of ways such as mind-control, instant brainwashing, reading thoughts, and countering mental attacks. Lightning Dash/Dematerialization-Cole can turn his entire body into electricity and dash across short distances, he can use this to move at Massively Hypersonic+ speeds and travel through electrical power lines. Omnipresent Awareness-Cole can surround himself with an electromagnetic field that can give him omnipresent detection of his surroundings. Added by the fact that he can sense electrical energy in one's body, this makes him almost impossible to sneak up on. He can also use a Radar Sense that detects hostile intent, distinguishes friend from foe, sees through disguises, invisibility, and illusions, and scans for any electrical signals, anomalies, and sources.

(Original Post: https://omniamarkets.medium.com/the-role-of-data-analytics-in-the-cryptocurrency-industry-ad1c1958bcf6)
While analytics has come a long way in the cryptocurrency industry, it still has a ways to go. Initially, the only information regarding price fluctuations was displayed on historical price charts which had no information pertaining to potential causes or precursors explaining why those prices fluctuated. Over the years, different analytical sites popped up that did blockchain analysis for various chains/coins and would show the movement of each coin as well as additional information such as the number of wallets around the world for a specific coin, the average number of coins per transaction, and other transactional information. We are now at a point where more sophisticated tools, including Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms, need to be developed for advanced investment analysis. My company, Omnia Markets, takes this much further by combining different algorithms that measure various aspects of the industry to give our users a broader and in-depth look at factors influencing each coin’s price and the overall industry.
We are now seeing many companies utilize Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and by extension, Machine Learning (M.L.). These tools are beginning to help companies and analytical platforms, such as Omnia Markets, in combing through the vast amount of data in the cryptocurrency industry. It helps to eliminate unnecessary or inaccurate data (“data fog”) allowing us to show more relevant and reliable information. Some companies use A.I. to measure overall market sentiment pulled across social media, and while this is a good first step, it still does not truly explain what is causing prices to fluctuate; in other words, it is unable to answer the underlying cause behind the sentiment being measured. However, A.I. with Machine Learning (M.L.) is becoming able to understand market movements and our Omnia Markets Platform can create reports based on user-defined criteria to provide insight into the causes and trends for price movements. We intend to develop our own in-house journalism division, also backed and supported by A.I. and M.L., to bring out information that is currently unavailable elsewhere. This will make our analytical tools and offerings truly one of a kind.
Machine Learning (M.L.) helps in understanding the data moving through the cryptocurrency industry by being able to combine a multitude of factors and sources of information to understand the causes behind price fluctuations and industry trends and movements. While there is no tool that can ever accurately predict future prices of any cryptocurrency, M.L. can help create reports that give an industry-wide view on factors influencing prices through the data moving throughout the industry. These reports can be used by investors and researchers to determine their own theories as to whether a coin’s price will increase or decrease over time and come up with appropriate, well-informed investment strategies.
Will it be possible in the future to have a World where analytics takes center stage in the crypto-space? That is certainly our expectation and our game plan in response. As we have seen over the past year, people are beginning to notice irregularities from various analytical platforms in the data they display. In some cases, the data being displayed includes false data (recall my article discussing Wash Trading) and there is increasing scrutiny for analytical platforms to vet the sources from where they grab their data. As the “data revolution” in the industry continues and platforms such as Omnia Markets enter the industry to provide advanced and in-depth analytics, we believe that these analytics will take center stage — especially in helping to move the industry forward and bring traditional investors and investment banks into the industry by providing a tool that they can use much like the tools that already exist in the traditional finance space.
There are many use-cases for cryptocurrency analytics. One of the major use-case scenarios is in the adoption of cryptocurrencies around the world. As we have seen in recent years, there seems to be a split in countries accepting or banning cryptocurrencies. The countries that ban cryptocurrencies have done so due to their belief that it is a tool used for money laundering and illicit trading for investors to hide money. However, analytics has shown that this is not the case and over time countries that once banned or planned to ban cryptocurrencies have now moved forward with implementing legislation to govern this space (recall my article discussing China’s Change of Heart on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology). Analytics is responsible for investors adopting cryptocurrencies as a part of their portfolios as they are now able to access certain information needed for their investment strategies, as well as reporting on the overall size and movement of the industry. Without the growth of analytics, the cryptocurrency industry would not be able to grow as rapidly as it has and would not be able to continue growing at a stable rate and achieve mass adoption. Omnia Markets aims to provide the most reliable information that can be found in the industry and help achieve mass adoption and provide accurate reports on the industry to allow users and investors to become apart of it.
Analytics can allow us to make sense of what is happening in the blockchain community. As we have seen with Blockchain technology ever since its introduction alongside Bitcoin in 2008 and launch in 2009, this technology is becoming more broadly accepted and widely adopted and many companies in various industries have been looking at utilizing this technology for different purposes. As such, with rapid growth, it can be difficult to make sense of everything that is going on in this industry. We can take a look at the different companies and industries that have begun utilizing this technology to get a sense of its overall adoption as well as the different use-cases for this technology. For example, the real estate, finance, health care industries (and more) are now leading the way for the adoption of the blockchain industry. The community has been advocating for different uses of this technology which has allowed different tech-companies and startups to begin offering blockchain-related services — these fall under the BaaS — “Blockchain as a Service.” We can also make sense of what is happening in this industry/community by following the legislative efforts around the globe that have allowed and continue to allow this technology to become more widely adopted and utilized.
I expect the industry to be faced with regulatory hurdles, not just in the United States, but around the globe. This will certainly challenge the industry with moving forward and by extension will also cause my company to increase our efforts in building our platform as well as assisting global agencies with creating positive legislation to govern this industry as I have already been doing so. I also expect my company to be faced with challenges in creating the A.I. infrastructure side of our platform as the information we collect has to be heavily vetted for verification and reliability which can be difficult due to the massive amount of data and sources in this industry.
Bonus points if you made it this far into the article! Now, I have been asked in various interviews, “If I had 3-wishes for this industry, what would they be?” This is a tricky question to answer as I often view these “wishes” as short cuts that the industry can take to reach a certain goal, and I personally believe that there are no shortcuts for allowing this industry to achieve true, mass adoption. However, if I come across a magic lamp with a genie that would grant these three wishes for the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries, I would wish for,
1 — a clear, positive, and coordinated global legislation to govern these industries and bring a certain level of predictability and stability;
2 — the removal is all bad players/actors from these industries. Or more feasibly, to wish for enforcement mechanisms to minimize and control the bad players — such as hackers, false prophets (people that provide false or misleading information under the guise of being an industry leader in order to make a profit while others lose), and market manipulators. While you can never eliminate this problem, just like you cannot in any other industry, one can certainly wish for their minimization so their negative impact can become immaterial; and,
3 — for these industries to allow the broadest and most transparent information sharing so there is no information asymmetry and all parties have access to all of the information that leads to equal trading opportunities. It is my hope that Omnia Markets will help in democratizing this industry in these ways.
Mitesh Shah is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Omnia Markets, Inc. Mitesh extensively researched and studied the digital currency industry and blockchain technology, participated in leading industry meetings, conferences, and summits, and networks with dozens of industry leaders. Mitesh also provides regular podcasts on the trends and developments in the industry and communicates with the U.S. Congressional staff members on developing future regulatory framework for the industry.
Omnia Markets is committed to solving investors’ greatest concerns by providing unparalleled insights into the cryptocurrency market and individual coin offerings through a proprietary suite of analytical tools backed by Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Predictive Algorithms.
https://omniamarkets.io/index