CHAPTER 1
It was 8 onts past planetary alignment on the huge Space station. The huge creaking hulk of the orbiting vessel turned in a clumsy pirouette as it moved out of the world’s shadow. In the centre of the stations choral mind, churning over the interminable calculations of the most recent findings of its many field teams and research teams. The great, semi-electrical semi-organic compound mind singularly dedicated to the station’s centuries long mission. The Stations mind, a brilliant ornately arranged union of computer technology and organic neurological tissue, finished transforming the results of the last five months of experiments, tests and observations into a new set of conclusions, projects, experiments, and tests.
Because the mind itself was immobile, it needed to release one of its many component minds to deliver the conclusions to the other denizens of the station. After a hair’s breadth of its vast thought was allocated to remember which mind was scheduled for this duty, the Tindruilite mental construct which called themselves Effie was reassembled from the bits and pieces of personality and memory distributed across the choral mind and emerged, stretching from the warm depths of their choral integration pod with the relaxed ease of someone who knows that they have a predictable day ahead of them and they didn’t need to rush to keep on schedule. The complex calculations of the communally integrated sleep fading like dreams from their renewed mind and their remade body, leaving only the conclusions for the day’s activities.
Effie extended their arms out of the dry, leafy embrace of the pod’s outer layers and eased themself onto the cool rubberised surface of the stations computational centre. Newly formed limbs and reassembled brain matter sparking with the sensations of new life as their identity stabilised into something approximating the organism which had entered the choral mind a week earlier. It was a new day, a new life, and there was work to do. They braced their arms on the sides of the pod as they prepared to fling themselves into the space between the computer core and the computer centre’s outer walls. The term computer centre was somewhat literal, as it was at the very core of the stations gently spinning bulk. This meant there was not technically a floor, as the spin which simulated the stations gravity was not so much a force as a gentle suggestion gradually guiding the renewed buffer scientist towards the outer wall of the room where the entrance opened to greet them. It was helped along the way by Effie’s legs, which adhered to the all the surfaces on the station without much difficulty. Many Buffers whose chosen vocation would take them out into the void for extended periods chose to acquire traits that allowed them to more easily operate within low or zero gravity environments. Effie, already what would be considered octopus-like in shape by any human who happened to see them, had a series of suckers on the pads of their four zygodactyl feet. These let them adhere easily to the floor, even in the low gravity environment. For the purpose identifying the floor, Effie liked to judge the direction down based on the stations orientation relative to the planet it orbited, down was towards the surfaces of the station which were perpendicular to both the planet and to the narrow spire that housed the stations assorted communications systems.
The Station was alike to a spinning top, the wide section of which was split into three triangular compartments with the spire and Computational Centre in the middle. The crew had their own sleeping quarters for members who required more dormancy than the Choral cycles allowed, but they were empty right now. The stations compliment of engineers, ecologists, and life-weavers (geneticists who are also like, medical professionals, and bioengineers.), once numbering over a thousand on the station, plus twice that number in ground side workers, in the early years of the program, had been whittled down over centuries as more and more of the program became standardised, or automated and the construction of the groundside infrastructure finished. The total number of buffers working either on ground or on the station right now was about seven hundred. Most of the crew not in Choral shift were planet-side either on conservation or specimen gathering deployments.
Effie casually made their way across the downward floor to the spinning side floor and put two arms to the handles on either side of the exit hatch, drew the handles up and then out with a mighty heave, triggering the hatch to slide open with a pneumatic hiss sound. The doors to station compartments were all small air locks designed to seal off in event of a hull breach, on account of micro-meteors or just wear and tear on the materials. The latter event had not happened in at least a century however, the station was old, but well maintained.
As Effie made their way slithering down the short tubular corridor connecting the central column to the triangular outer sections, they wished most fervently that the technology was kept as up to date as the crew and the stations hull, but no. New shipments of food and materials might come every month with maintenance crews; a new wave of bright and lively Buffer Life Weavers and xenoecologists might come along every year or six to bring a fresh perspective on the stations delicate, slow, but moral work, but the only technological updates which came along to this old and perhaps deliberately forgotten corner of the Mileu would be more powerful computers of devices for analysing biological matter. Creature comforts, such as artificial gravity, or a better electric kettle, for the heating of the hot drinks, were neglected. Still, Effie thought, it was an alright standard of living. The station had been built with long term habitation in mind, their work here was slow going and vital for the moral integrity and if necessary, any further expansion of the Milieu. Or at least, that is what they liked to tell themselves.
Arriving through the connecting tube and dropping through the door of the habitation section onto its rubbery floor, Effie visited their personal quarters to see how their personal project was getting on. The quarters were relatively spacious, wedge shaped with a storage cupboard on one end and a sleeping cot which could be rearranged to suit near any Buffer’s body type, in the middle there were shelves with little straps so anything on them could be prevented from floating off in the event the station stopped turning. The quarters were about 10 metres long from the end to the corner, and 5 metres wide in the arms. They drew themselves up to an approximately upright position atop three of their limbs and uncovered the crate in the middle of the room. Therein lay their personal project for the last month, kept safe in this box for the last ten days filled with a special oil to draw out the salt water and other impurities. It was a piece of wood dredged up from the ancient seas of this planet, it was their intent to carve this into a piece of furniture as a matter of personal catharsis.
This wood was untainted and old beyond belief. Effie hoped that this great dead thing, from this world so wronged by their people might mutually contribute to something beautiful. So they bulked their arms, wrapped all of them around the block of wood and heaved it up out of the fluid. It would have to be dried for a few hours before a new, somewhat lighter oil was layered over it.
they struck out in the direction of the sun-drenched dining quarters. It was one of the most beautiful sights on the station, the looming shadow of the planet in front of the great view-port, with the morning light of the nearby star peaking over the rim of that world.
This dining quarters were home to the largest windows on the station, though they on what was technically the ceiling and were reinforced and many layered to provide protection from the void of space. At hours like this they were turned towards the sunlight, so that photosynthetic organisms, both sapient and non-sapient, could replenish themselves, but Effie, still planning out the order of the coming days events, went to the food cupboards instead. Pulling sustenance out of the air and soil was helpful, but time consuming, and somewhat less stimulating in Effie’s mind than allowing more stationary, non-buffer life forms to do it, and harvest their extraneous organs to consume the energy all at once.
They collected two high sugar stalks from the fresh food section, and a cleaned, freeze-dried meal of protein and vitamin rich flesh from the birth world, and went to one of the nice, round, cushioned dining booths. Sitting down, they tried to schedule the days tasks in their mind. ‘Right, so first I’ll go to the communications centre, give everyone the new schedules, write up the final analysis for the life weavers and genome designers, they need to know what we’re working with after all, then it’s a spacewalk to do repairs on the outer hull on the habitation section, then I need to go to external communications to deliver alterations for experiment parameters to the ground teams.’ By this time, another buffer had entered the space. He walked through the entry-way with a square-shouldered confidence which was just a little too tense to be genuine. He was very large, nearly twice Effie's height, with long, shaggy fur on his larger, more muscular arms which ended with green, 3 fingered hands, as well as down his three, tripodal legs, to just above his webbed, two toed feet and most of the way down his powerful, split ended tail. His eyes, which were yellow, somewhat convex and had "w" shaped pupils, were one of the few traits that implied he may have some, distant relation to Effie. Well, that and the smaller, hairless arms, hugged close to his chest, which were clearly the same as Effie's own shorter arms. Effie raised one of these shorter, many cilia’d forelimbs in customary greeting. Uffthit Fenbrily Fenacril Fenunmdar Ditruflee, or Uffers as he preferred to be called, raised his own in response.
“New treatments to administer today Effie?” he asked
Effie raises the leafy stalks on their back, showing enthusiasm as they replied “almost, Uffers, We nearly cracked the case, came up with a new method of administering the viral agent without risk of contamination, had to design a whole new antigen for ourselves and we need to make that before we can even start making the virus itself”
Uffers grimaced, “Doesn’t sound like almost to me” His powerful legs folded in on themselves as he sat the base of his tripodal frame onto a stool on one side of the table.
Preferring to produce rather than consume, Uffers had brought a pot of nutritious soil over to the table and emptied it onto a carrying pouch on his abdomen.
He raise the up the long flat stalks sprouting from his back, which faced the view-port, drinking in energy from the dawn sun. “I had hoped to make a real breakthrough this month, get this job close to wrapped up by the end of the local year”
“leaving work aside for the time being” Effie replied in their preferred, diplomatic tone, “how has your skill at Assar-weaving improved, you were very eager to make a stone tapestry for Brily when you next saw her”
For a moment disarmed by the change in topic and pleased by this display of interest in his personal affairs, Uffers flushed a warm yellow about the head in a sort of chromatic smile. “Getting the different layers of quartz and the hematite to bond without changing form is challenging but the lines are getting smoother and with a few more tries, I think I might be able to start on the image I want to surprise her with”
“And what has FenBrily said about this?”
“She thinks it’s a nice thought, but also thinks it is kind of cheesy to make a tapestry of the day we met, that said, she never fails to remind me when to work on it.”
This was not the first time Uffer’s had made reference to his life partner, Brily FenInshrix Fenunkleer Fenuffthit Anthrumbar, they had met whilst he was still in first form, on a camping trip to the forests of Tindruit’s smaller southern continent with his brood mates and several of their closest friends, but that was all Effie had been able to get him to recount so far, between the spells in choral sleep, the surface missions and the engineering of new treatments for maladies both general and specific.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
“How very thoughtful of her, I never got the hang of Assar-weaving, the inorganic molecules are too fiddly, but my carpentry efforts are improving, I made a whole cot last week.” They replied.
“Last week? You haven’t done any more since then”
“I spent the rest of that week taking field notes and the rest of this week in choral sync processing the data to find a solution to the new air born strains.” They explained.
Uffers took this opportunity to round back to his initial grievance. “All the more reason to accelerate the pace at which we move to live testing, the faster we get a treatment the more free time we will have”
“Even if we had a treatment ready to go,” Effie reminded him. “we would still need to find a way to disperse the thing over the entire planet, and then a second treatment to undo the damage already done.”
“My point exactly,” replied Uffers “if we keep delaying the field testing of treatments by trying to check for any possible shortfall of alien biology, this effort might take another century”.
Effie’s voice rose slightly. “that’s a bit of an exaggeration, we are mostly finished with the main work, we have successfully mapped 98.9% of the entire planetary genome, now all that’s left is finding a way to separate the intrusive genes from the native ones or to deactivate them”
“But we won’t ever do that if we spend all our time looking for extraneous possibilities for things that might go wrong.” Interjected Uffers, “there’s much more we could get done if we didn’t spend so much time doing mental and computerised simulations”
This prompted Effie to breach their composure somewhat. It was early in the day, they’d been processing the next set of tests they’d have to do today and now Uffer’s, one of only 4 crew members still on the station was distracting them with sentiments contrary to the very foundations of their mission.
“It is exactly that sort of mentality that resulted in this mess to begin with” They punctuated the statement with a hearty thump upon the table with all 4 arms, smaller and larger.
“yes, historically” responded Uffer’s “but we know so much about alien ecosystems now, and this one in particular”
The station was one of four scattered across the, at present quite sparse interstellar extensions of Buffer Civilisation, each one orbited world stricken by the same phenomenon, a disastrous result of the first efforts by their civilisation to colonise planets with existing ecosystems. The previous waves of colonisation had been centuries long terraforming projects starting out with sealed habitats in which a few thousand tindruilite organisms both buffer and wild, eked out an optimistic but dull existence, gradually methods were created to gradually introduce the microbes which sustained a life giving atmosphere to the planets with high enough gravity to contain such an atmosphere. The discovery of ecologically sophisticated, habitable planets one the other hand, promised to make the Milieu more vibrant and more numerous than ever. The real culture shock, however, was the discovery that these planets lacked a fundamental part of Tindruilite ecology, Horizontal Gene Sharing. On Tindruit, nearly all organisms habitually exchanged DNA with other organisms, it was a characteristic which had evolved very early on in the planets living development traced back to one of the early universal common ancestors in its fossil record. This had been considered an innate part of all life, a necessary part of sustaining complexity. Yet now with a dozen counter examples the creatures of Tindruit, or at least those with brains capable of having such thoughts, that they were actually the oddity in a galaxy, perhaps a universe that functioned by a far colder logic. On these new worlds, only small prokaryotes could freely exchange genes with each other, all complex lifeforms seemed largely stuck as they were, only changing their genotype through random mutation. The ecosystems sustained themselves, but through brutal selection and crude accumulation, the most useful traits did not disperse across the entire population once they emerged but rather only passed on if they occurred in the gametes of a complex organism and even then only benefitted its offspring. This meant that mortality had a much greater impact on the differences between populations, as the characteristics which linked two groups were lost, they eventually became completely unrecognisable to each other, no longer able to reintegrate their divergent traits[1]. This seemed such an inefficient system of evolution, and almost a tragedy to the tindruilites, who enjoyed the full bounty of all their planets phenotypes and genotypes. The decision had been mulled over, rethought a thousand times in the public speaking places of their home world, the ideas transferred from one mind to another through spoken word, chemical messaging, written systems and via communications technology. Eventually the four test worlds were selected for their similarity to Tindruit, and Buffer settlers landed upon them and started integrating their genes into the organisms, starting with the mechanisms which allowed them to acquire traits from others. This they integrated into the plants and other producer organisms around their settlements, as that would be consumed by animals and other consumers. In a matter of weeks it was clear the experiment was a failure, the Buffers hadn’t anticipated just how much more malleable their own organs and tissues were than those of the native creatures, it was an unmitigated disaster, random mutation plagued the planet and spread with terrifying speed. This planet, Orica, had been the worst, a single celled gelatinous organism started growing complex neurology, allowing it to consume at a much faster rate and grew to an unprecedented size and grew random organs and killed a lot of both native and introduced flora and fauna, eventually the entire thing had to be bombarded from orbit and other area contaminated with Tindruilite genetics were quarantined with massive walls, the other three planets didn’t have such drastic measures taken, but quarantine was require none the less. By the end of it, half a continent had been reduced to molten slag, the area still burned with volcanic activity and was pocked with craters well over 2 centuries later. These stations were established 30 years after the disaster, to replace the initial quarantine organisations and strict laws and regulations were passed to prevent tindruilite biology from damaging any more alien ecosystems. The stations job was to find a way of undoing all the damage done, ending the nuclear winter caused by the orbital bombardment, healing the mutations on the surviving contaminated organisms, and finding a way to eradicate the genetic taint they had left on the world, all the while looking for a method to make it safe for tindruilites to live on alien worlds once and for all.
Effie paused, this sort of outburst was a periodic occurrence with Uffers, and the other younger members of the crew, who had not yet learned the patience of a mature Buffer but this one seemed unusually impatient. They relaxed their arms and reset their eyes to the forward-facing position from the more arched over position they assumed when they were agitated, rising up on the subdermal tendrils of nerve and muscle which lay behind their eyeballs. The chromatophores on their head turned a quizzical orange and they asked “What’s agitating you Uffer’s, you been awake for too long?”
“did you get the news that came in on the shipment last week?”
“you mean the new art styles coming out of the Sintoch province on Tindruit?”
“No!, I mean the news that first contact happened a year ago”
“really? They found another inhabited planet?, is that such a big deal?”
“not just a planet, an entire civilisation of monoforms”
Effie started in surprise and said “what? How, when? What are they like?”
“Well I only know what the pilot told me” Uffer’s confessed, “in the 15th Ignatia (Red connotation) of last year, there was an anomalous reading on the long range telescopes in Orbit of Bineb, on the outer reaches of the system, upon investigation they determined it was a sublight engine from a vessel that had entered the system 8 ignatiae previously, survey vessels were sent to investigate whilst the science stations continued to observe the events as the images arrived.” He shifted his legs as he sat, his knees bending to lower him onto one of the stools bolted into the deck whilst his muscled tail curled around the pole connecting the seat to the base. “they managed to calculate its possible course and the ships were dispatched to intercept it, and when they caught up with it, it was filled with these large chitinous lifeforms.”
“Did you hear anything about what they wanted?”
Asked Effie, they were quite intrigued now.
“Best hypothesis is that they were looking for potential hazards from the edge of the system, Pilot didn’t tell me how they found out though, or why. All Buffers were ordered to engage quarantine protocols and contact only by long range communications, efforts to communicate have been a slog, so far we’ve figure out their language is pheromone based, not colour or sound based like most of ours”
Effie flashed pale blue in surprise “that must be tough to research without breaking quarantine”
Uffers rippled his smaller arms in agreement with them. “they have got the best scent based language experts working on it but getting new samples or delivering experimental messages without risking contamination is hard, so the planetary consensus put out a call to all buffers with relevant knowledge to come and help them.”
Effie nodded in understanding, “So that’s why we’re so undermanned recently, this station has been a ghost town for half of a local year, I thought people were just giving up on us”
“I can see why you might think that, the slow pace we’re working at, I might even have given up on us”
“Is that why you’re so worked up about this?”
“Yes!” He waved his larger arms in emphasis as he replied “Because the sooner we crack all the issues here, the sooner we can talk to these creatures, if we weren’t so caught up in our guilt for damaging this planet, we’d be well on our way to figuring out how to meet other thinking creatures without risk and we wouldn’t have to grow so many ecosystems from scratch when colonising new worlds, we could seamlessly integrate into lush, complex biospheres already”.
Effie chomped down on another spongy stalk and took in a deep breath. This was clearly important to Uffer’s and this was not the time to say anything brash, or angry. “Uffer’s, I know you mean well, you want to increase the knowledge and understanding we have of the universe.” They made a gesture with one arm to indicate a conciliatory tone, “but until we fully master our own biology and understand how alien ecosystems affect us and how we affect them, we have to be careful with all our interactions. As buffers it is our responsibility maintain the equilibrium of our world, we must restore what we have destroyed or what are we?”
“But that’s just the thing.” Uffer’s responded “the galaxy isn’t going to wait for us to deliberate over what the safest way to repair this planet is, we need to know how to prevent this from happening with the next civilisation we encounter, imagine what could happen if one of our expeditions crashes on a world of particularly vulnerable heterotrophs, they get smashed but not incinerated on impact they get eaten by some scavenger, but their metabolism doesn’t break down the cells enough, soon those cells start reaching out for each other, connect to alien cells suddenly the entire ecosystem gets wiped out by spontaneous growths of the wrong tissues in the wrong places, worse still when a buffer starts getting rebuilt inside every creature on the planet, the longer this takes the greater the risk to any other species we encounter”
Effie chuckled at this rather extreme proposition “Now that’s a bit of a far fetched concern Uffer’s, we’ve been out in the stars for centuries now and we’ve met one other space faring civilisation, space is very big and habitable worlds far apart, the odds of us encountering another one and crashing into one of its planets are astronomically low” They leaned over the table and patted Uffers on one of his large furry arms “try to relax about that concern at the very least”
They sighed and paused for a moment before continuing “I don’t know how much ancestral knowledge you have but…”
The conversation was interrupted by a loud honking sound, the proximity alarm for the docking bay airlock, heralding the return of the first ground crew to the station. Checking the time piece at the dining quarters entrance, it was 36 krots (krot= 80 tiks, tiks= circa 1.5 seconds 40 krots is an Ont[2] and 28 Onts is a Tindruit day) to Awanluash (the first seven Onts of the day) and they had to get the new schedule of tests written up. “Oh dear, that reminds me, I need to get the new treatments recorded and ready for testing, We’ll continue this conversation later”
They hurriedly brought their eating utensils to the washing room, then they left to get to the laboratory leaving Uffer’s to finish his photosynthesis and his thoughts in solitude.
----------------------------------------
[1] Species as it is thought of on earth is not a concept the Tindruilites have, since their world loses far less genotypes and phenotypes to mortality, distance is the main thing that separates gene pools. This is because an individual creatures death does not always remove it from the gene pool as its brethren may extract its genes and even the creature that ate it may take on some of its traits which on turn may be taken up by any number of microbes or parasites. This means that speciation doesn’t occur very often as whilst two individual creatures may not be able, by habit or by genetics to reproduce with one another, there will be other creatures in their populations which can produce fertile offspring with both of them.
[2] Coincidently, an Ont is, therefor about the same as an hour.
----------------------------------------