Stardust: Labyrinth
Credits
* MaxTheFox - writer
* JCT - some species ideas
* andrewthecoder - feedback
Chapter 0 - Prologue and Background
(in which two discoveries are made)
> "One man's trash is another man's treasure."
> --anon.
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The First Exploration of Hakošel
Dec 4 2178
The foggy atmosphere hung heavily in the command room, condensing in little beads of moisture on everything that was inside: the sparse grate of multicolored rods that comprised the floor, the sparking wires that hung overhead like vines in the jungle, and the rotund towers of the alien ship's computers, their screens and buttons curving at extreme angles. The lights above were warm, and hummed lowly and pleasantly, complementing the soft growl of the ship's fusion drives, but this quiet noise was drowned out by a cacophony of shrill beeping.
The air was filled with noise as the inhabitants of the vessel slithered all around, chittering excitedly. These aliens, the bquaa, were not human in the slightest. Instead, they distantly resembled slugs, if slugs' tails were as lengthy and sinuous as those of snakes. These round tails smoothly transitioned into a slightly wider torso with two paired tentacles on the front: evolutionary substitutes for arms. Their heads were vaguely reptilian, with round wedge-shaped snouts under two large, almond-shaped eyes. Aside from the ever-shifting patterns on their slimy, wrinkled skins, they were near-featureless, as if made from plasticine.
So many bquaa were packed into this small, enclosed room that the environment more resembled a bowl of spaghetti than a starship's command center. They clambered both over each other and on top of machinery as they hastily paced between the blinking, hissing, and beeping consoles. The reason for this commotion was displayed on the massive circular viewscreen at the front of the chamber.
This ship, named Unstoppable Spreader of Life II and containing thousands of bquaa settlers, was approaching a planet in the habitable zone of a bright trinary system, suspected to be a candidate for colonization. Alas, it was impossible to tell the hospitability of a celestial body from afar thanks to a combination of the Bquaa Collective's relatively backwards technology and damage to the sensors due to a pirate attack last month. Thus, they had to get up close.
The chittering gradually changed into disappointed squeaks and mewls as the planet's true nature was revealed: under a light and sporadic cover of wispy clouds that resembled shreds of cotton, was a vitreous, murky green-and-orange arid surface. According to the scans, the surface was indeed nearly pure, solid silicon dioxide. Glass. No signs of metal, and the only water seemed to be in the form of frozen lakes dotted around its deserts. This planet was essentially a cosmic-sized marble.
Not a good environment for a species that required lots of humidity to live, and terraforming a world without even a hint of metallic matter was out of the question.
The three bquaa who manned the navigation consoles noted down the data, and signaled to the five bquaa who steered the ship to turn around. They did not even bother with a surface scan, and none of them had a hint of scientific curiosity.
Thus, the colony ship trundled onwards into the distance.
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The Discovery of the "Koumanlan Enzymes"
Apr 13 2232
The cold off-white-off-blue sky loomed over the black-sand alien desert as the bright yet small sun rose from behind a mountain range on the horizon, its forest of lichen stalks appearing like hair from this distance. A stream, free of fish and free of flora, roared down from its crags, uniting with many other brooks and creeks to form a river that calmed as it cut across the semi-barren landscape. It did not evaporate, for this desert was very temperate, but nor did any visible life spring near it, for this planet was young, and only simple multicellular lifeforms existed yet.
Contrasting with the desolate surroundings, a glimmering city rested in a shallow valley, the river cutting right through it. Its architecture was a peculiar mixture of human and alien sensibilities: on one hand, the buildings were lattices of steel and reinforced concrete filled with glass, arranged in neat straight streets; and on the other, the windows were not blue or clear but were instead all in different colors, seemingly changing their hue depending on how one looked at them, and even the concrete seemed to scintillate with dozens of shifting shades. This was all punctuated by strobing colorful floodlights that swiveled from side to side, sweeping the sky with their beams that were not yet drowned out by the dawn.
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Both humans and relmai walked side by side in its streets, both species sometimes wearing apparel in the other's style... and often possessing phenotypical features of the other. Some humans had relmai tails and ears, and some relmai had human ears and no tails. People treated these 'pseudohybrids' as, overall, unremarkable. The experiment that was Koumanlan was a resounding success for its fifty years of existence.
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A small restaurant was at the base of one of the octagonal-prism towers, its sign spelling out its relmai name above its English name: The Shuffle
This otherwise run-of-the-mill dining place had one gimmick to it: human food was served to relmai, and relmai food was served to humans. But there was a twist. Since the two species were biochemically incompatible, foods had to be carefully engineered to look like their counterparts from the other biosphere, while retaining the flavor and texture. This was a hard task, and the diner was on the verge of closing.
But Fernan Chen didn't care much. All he cared for was that his night shift was almost over, and he could sleep soon. The near-human's tail hung low as he paced around between the tables, collecting litter and mopping up spilled drinks. Considering the mentality of the inhabitants of Koumanlan, both happened with a certain regularity. One minute, Fernan had to pick up a hamburger wrapper some relmai tossed onto the floor beside the trash can. Another, he had to bend down with a rag and scrub the still-fuming residue of some neon-green beverage.
"Someone really went for the spicy stuff, huh..." he thought.
Suddenly, he noticed that the trash bin somehow managed to fill up despite the frequent littering. Fernan put on his rubber gloves and flipped open the lid, preparing to remove the bag from it to throw it into the dumpster outside.
He was greeted with a particularly large slice of pizza sticking out of the pile of garbage, and thought who in the world would throw away perfectly good food like this. Then he noticed a fluorescing blue spill on it.
"Ah, cross-contamination," he mumbled. "Probably shouldn't drink like a pig over someone else's meal."
He was about to tie up the bag when he had to do a double take.
There were stalks of some kind of mold growing on the spot where the spill met a slice of pepperoni.
Mold! On a pizza that was still warm!
...
...and between two biospheres!
Fernan shook his head. He had to have been imagining things. He looked closely at the slice. Indeed, there was a colony of ever-so-slowly expanding mold that seemed to be consuming both the relmai-adapted pizza and the human-adapted qatwujau. This was too notable to unceremoniously toss.
He took a few photos, struggling with the autofocus, then ran to the counter to take a large ziplock bag.
Of course, the human didn't care that the whole restaurant was looking at him stealing a highly contaminated pizza right from the trashbin. The Shuffle's manager, standing in the far corner, began yelling something, but it was too late.
Fernan ran through the street towards the university he spent much of his early adulthood in. He hastily explained everything to the relmai guard who was sitting on a table in the vestibule, who squinted at him but let him through.
The near-human, still wearing his colorful uniform and wide-brimmed cap, knocked on the door of the xenobiology lab.
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The mold relied on a kind of enzyme to digest relmai-biology proteins, despite being of the Terran biosphere. This type of enzyme was the Holy Grail of 23rd-century biological research, and many civilizations threw billions of umecs at solving the issue. And now, random chance simply happened upon the solution, all thanks to someone spilling their drink at a crowded table.
While the researchers wanted to try and patent the enzymes, they knew exactly how these complex molecules could revolutionize the whole Oval's society. The research was hastily open-sourced.
These enzymes were still extremely inefficient, however, resulting in a lot of waste heat that simply denatured them if they penetrated too far into a chunk of alien biological matter. But that was nothing that the finest minds of Koumanlan couldn't fix.
Or, perhaps, it was. The Protectorate informed its two benefactors of the situation, and teams of the two great powers' best researchers received samples of the mold.
Within a few months, enough basic optimizations were made that the enzymes were ready for the mass market; testing on animals and then volunteer humans and relmai showed no side effects. The method of operation of said enzymes meant that they could be modified to accommodate almost any carbon-based species' biosphere.
Within a year, the first compatibility package was developed. An initial supply of the enzyme, probiotics to produce more, and some mRNA to genetically modify the consumer to produce the enzyme by themself.
And with the combined resources of the Alliance's scientific-economic complex, the invention spread exponentially. The Oval was now more interconnected than it ever was before. Logistics was made far easier. Enclaves' borders became fuzzier and fuzzier. Friends of different species could share meals. And more, and more, and more…
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Fernan became famous in three whole stellar nations, and despite never even leaving his hometown he was continually beleaguered by a cascade of interviewers. But he was not angry; he was showered with awards and grants for helping solve what some deemed impossible.
Meanwhile, the Shuffle's gimmick became irrelevant in the face of increasing compatibility, and the restaurant was driven out of business.