Ultra-small and lightweight Human clade |
Image from Arik
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In the past human baselines could, as a species, vary in height by as much as two metres. This was due to several medical conditions that usually came with complications that also shortened the lifespan and were weeded out of the nearbaseline genome in timely fashion. However as humanity spread to the planets and stars variance in the human form was found to be useful and the gengineers began creating new clades of man that were even taller, like the Goliaths, and smaller, like the Nisse.
History
The Nisse actually started out from a natural drift in their genepool. During the Early Interplanetary Period their forbearers settled on a small asteroid with limited volatiles. As their population grew the process of insular dwarfism (also known as island dwarfism) shifted their genepool to smaller sizes. Rather than fight this trend they chose to guide it and used their gengineering to keep ahead of the negative effects of reducing size.Spreading out from their home later in the Interplanetary Period these pre-Nisse found gainful employment as ships' crew (in microgravity they could do as much work as a larger crewman but they needed much less living space and life support) and were soon a common sight in the Solsys. Using their new wealth to buy the latest in superturing computers and nanotech they were able to improve the living conditions on their home while also slowly moving it outsystem during the Nanotech Window. These pre-Nisse had been watching the Inner System with great concern for many years and they could see bad times ahead. Outbreaks of goo and nanotech attacks, new clades of heteromorphic humans and provolved animals being subjected to fear and abuse, old political powers being overtaken by new polities, interstellar colonization and, most worrying of all, vague reports of transapient intelligences were giving them cause to believe something "bad" just had to happen. They were right of course but due to their foresight they were also well protected and when the Interplanetary Dark Age hit they just hunkered down behind their blue goo defences and waited it out. It was during this period of isolation that they would become the Nisse.
Image from Steve Bowers
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| Members of the subclade Homo tantillus tenuis often wear customised wingpacks; this increases their faerie-like appearance | |
Biology
Even before gengineering became possible nature-induced flaws in the human genome had produced humans as small as half a metre tall. These were created by a rare form of dwarfism called Primordial Dwarfism, a condition that results in a smaller, but proportionate, body size in all stages of life beginning from before birth. With advanced gengineering, nanotech and superturing AIs to guide them the soon to be Nisse could not only match this but better it. What they created was a beautifully proportionate human form in miniature, a clade of tweaks that were not only a mere 30 cm, on average, but also healthy and free of negative side effects.The "healthy and free of negative side effects" part was more easily said than done; the human form simply could not accommodate such a small size and not produce negative side effects but the Nisse took a staged and step-by-step approach to the task and were able to work through each problem as it came up. One big problem was procreation. If an adult Nisse is tiny then a baby Nisse is minuscule. Even something as simple as heat loss can threaten a newborn's life.To delay childbirth and give the foetus more time to grow, the Nisse use a range of alternative reproduction strategies. Another problem was keeping their intelligence level up. A proportionate human form means a proportionately sized human head and at only 30 cm high such proportionality produces a brain too small for baseline intelligence. However, as their size decreased with each generation the Nisse were able to counter this using various tricks; Some were the same tricks the provolvers of the African Gray Parrot used. (Bird brains are naturally more efficient from the need to keep mass low for flight.) They had also used some su genes. (If the Superiors could have superbright intelligence in normal sized brains why couldn't they have normal level intelligence in smaller brains?) Additionally the Nisse brain is not fully developed in all regions, to make room for other regions that have to be more developed. It is most developed in the prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for Executive Functions [1], while the functions in the underdeveloped regions are augmented through the use of compubones, produced by bionano that is now passed on to the child in its mother's milk. Finally the compubones, and its related DNI, allow the Nisse to outsource their higher brain functions to their habitats' computronium nodes; this gives them various superior abilities, like a superbright level Knowsense. Then, there are their physical abilities.
The Nisse are of course much weaker, physically, than larger bionts and can't lift heavy weights, in absolute terms. However in proportion to their size they are much stronger than larger bionts due to the effects of cubic geometry [2]. The Nisse are about 1/6 as tall as a baseline. They have at best only 3% his physical strength, but because their mass is so much more reduced they are far more agile. A Nisse could do chin-ups one handed with two fellow Nisse hanging on to his legs. Proportionate strength isn't the only thing that makes a Nisse so agile. Because of their small size their neural pathways are also far shorter, this gives a Nisse the reflexes of a cat.
Although later Nisse would take a different view, when the original Nisse began their gengineering their goal was not just to create a functional miniature of the human form but also to create a beautiful one as well. As such they followed the classical standards of body proportions. As a result their form was not what it would be if they had evolved to their small size. Their eyes for example, while not quite proportionate to their heads, were smaller than they should be for a being their size. At that time their eyes were just large enough to give them a child-like charm. This was a trade-off, the smaller eyes allowed for more room in their head for a larger brain but their resolution suffered. However with DNI linkage to their habitat's sensors they didn't suffer too much for it. Another trade-off could be found in their bone structure. At that earlier time their bones were thicker than they needed to be for the loads they were normally put under, however these thicker bones could house more computronium and made the Nisse more robust. These Nisse functioned well in high acceleration spacecraft.
Current Era
The Nisse have spread far in the Terragen Sphere, they find it relatively easy to get passage on ships of all kinds. If a ship can carry even a single neb it can carry a small breeding group of Nisse. The Nisse adopt the memes of the polities they live in and get along well with other races because they are almost never seen as a threat. Interestingly enough, one race the Nisse get along with particularly well are the Goliaths. The two races share similar views on living in an off-sized world. The Nisse have also sub-claded several times to adapt to whatever world they settle on and are now a superclade in their own right. For example:Homo tantillus tenuis have less muscle mass, slender legs, arms, and torsos(and thusly weigh less for a given height) and have much larger eyes in proportion to their head compared to baselines. And while they are still relatively more agile and athletic than baselines, it is less extreme than predicted by uniform scaling rules. This sub-clade look very much like faeries and make great play on that fact, even to the point of wearing customized wingpacks as part of their every day attire.
Homo tantillus blefuscu are small, stocky humanoids, adapted to the heavy gravity and helium-rich atmosphere of their home planet.
Notes:
[1] Executive Function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially-unacceptable outcomes). There is also an integral link between self-awareness (a person's personality) and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.[2] Take a shape, like a sphere, and double its diameter. Its width increases by a factor of 2, its cross section by a factor of 4 and it's volume by a factor of 8. Now do this to a man: a Goliath is twice as tall as a baseline but 4 times as strong because his strength is a function of the cross section of his muscle tissue. However he should also weigh 8 times as much. Of course in the real world scaling is not this simple: Instead, among similarly shaped creatures, you find scaling according to the principle of elastic similarity. An elastically similar strut or cantilever will experience the same relative deformation under the load of its own weight. This ensures a constant resistance to buckling (the primary mode of bone failure, as well as buckling about a joint due to overloading the muscles) under athletic activity. This form of scaling requires thickness to increase faster than length, but then mass also increases faster. The same thing happens with muscles so there's no question that a Goliath can lift greater weights than a baseline, but he can't do chin-ups. The opposite is true for scaling in the other direction.
Source : http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47f42fd2915ba
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Goo, Blue
Nanotech replicators that are used as protection against adverse forms of goo such as Grey Goo, Khaki Goo, Golden Goo and so on; a mechosystem's equivalent to biological immune cells. The most powerful forms of Blue Goo have wide-ranging abilities, and can adapt as the hazard they are designed to counter attempts to evolve around whatever countermeasures the Blue Goo is using. 'Blue Goo' is sometimes use to denote any form of benign and protective neumann-capable technology.
Direct Neural Interface (DNI)
Ubiquitous technological implant for connecting a sophont's brain to their exoself, the Net, equipment, and other beings.
The first commercial DNI system was invented in antiquity by medical start-up Biotronics Incorporated and the VR-entertainment megacorporation Inscape. This was the "Gibson neural jack" (named after the famous writer of cyberpunk). Incredibly exclusive the Neural jack could only be afforded by the rich and had to be implanted by specialist neurosurgeons. It was also very simple, offering little more than an Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality and sub-vocalisation interface. Despite these limitations the neural jack stimulated interest in the field, particularly as neurosoftware advanced and allowed DNI users to massively increase their productivity. Once self-inserting models were developed during the Nanotech Age their widespread adoption was all but assured, with only temporary halts during the Technocalypse and Amalgamation crises. Over the millennia, DNIs have advanced and been refined to near perfection (from a modosophont perspective at least), offering a plethora of capabilities and functions to their users.
DNI installation is one of the most common augmentive procedures in the Terragen Sphere (alongside medisystem infusion). There are many ways a sophont can have a DNI inserted depending on their requirements; some clades (particularly Biopolity superiors) have gone so far as to engineer biotech versions into their genome to benefit from the technology from birth.
For all other bionts the three most common installation methods are:
In situ assembly: Technocyte spores are introduced into the body in the form of a nasal spray, small injection or consumable food or beverage. Following their programming, the technocytes migrate to the central nervous system (CNS) via the vascular system before carefully crossing the blood-brain barrier and distributing themselves to key locations, where they begin to replicate. As they do so they differentiate and organise themselves into complex fibrillar components. Different growths develop into different DNI components, eventually linking up into one connected system. This method is the simplest and most comfortable, but also the slowest, taking weeks or months to complete. Nefarious uses of this method include covert DNI installation on third-parties for bodyjacking, neural rewrites, and bindings.
Whole self-insertion: The key phyisical components of a DNI are embedded in a surgiconic delivery system. This unit is then applied to the head or neck of the user where it inserts millimeter-width tendrils through an available entry point in the skull (for baseline humans this includes the foramen magnum, ear canal, and optic nerve). The tendrils numb the nerves along their point of entry to remove discomfort as they penetrate into the CNS before implanting DNI components. This process can take a few hours after which the tendrils retract, plugging their entry passages with regenerative tissue scaffolds. After a few days to a week the components have sufficiently integrated with each other and the surrounding neural tissue to activate. It is very common for this method to be bundled along with the surgicons used in a medisystem implantation.
Docbox surgery: The fastest possible means of installing a DNI requires a docbox. After sedating the user, the autodoc performs several major craniotomies, removing sections of the skull for bulk access to the brain. Thousands of assembly and support fibers infiltrate the brain to rapidly build a complete DNI. To avoid fatal heat damage, the majority of support fibers pump coolant to maintain optimum temperature. After a few hours the surgery is complete and the sophont is woken up ready to use their DNI (operational tutorials are often installed as knowledge grafts during the procedure). Mild side effects and fine surgical scars fade in a few days as the user acclimatises and medicyte clusters perform final tissue remodelling.
Neb = Near-Baseline Human
One of the most common clades in the Terragen Sphere, Nearbaseline humans can be found in every major Sephirotic empire and most minor polities on the Periphery. Nearbaselines have been part of the Terragen Expansion from its earliest days, and in the millennia since then their vast numbers have given them enormous influence over modosophont societies. They slowly separated from Baseline humans over time, adopting the most popular genemods for themselves and their children, while not carefully controlling their development as Superiors do. The result has been an astonishingly diverse collection of human-derived cultures with many advantages over Baselines, though which ones they possess varies from one Nearbaseline clade to another.
Blefuscu
Superterrestrial world with a population of minaturised humans
Originally a dry, anoxic superterrestrial, this planet has now been terraformed and has a helium-rich but breathable atmosphere
First reached in 6110 by a Nisse colony ship, this large world in Pyxis, 2105 ly from Sol, was originally a dry SuperGaian type world with very little water. Several thousand water-ice outer-system objects were diverted to impact with the surface of this world, increasing the ocean cover to 50%. The high gravity of this world means that elevation differences betweeen highlands and lowlands are quite small, and the ocean is generally shallow. There are fifteen major continents, with many smaller islands.
The nitrogen/helium/carbon dioxide/neon atmosphere was modified over the next six hundred years to contain enough oxygen for easy respiration, at which point it became possible for the colonists to occupy the surface without breathing apparatus.
The Blefuscans
Already a highly modified species, the miniaturised human of Clade Nisse were further modified to live in the unusually high gravity of this planet. Only 22 centimetres tall on average, Homo tantilis Blefuscu are strongly muscled and compact.
A Blefuscan has a short thick neck that supports a small head, with a highly optimised neural structure within the skull to allow normal human-level cognitive abilities. Their heads are the same size as other members of the Nisse clade, but their bodies are shorter and stockier, an adaptation to the high gravity of their homeworld.
Due to the helium content of the atmosphere and their short vocal chords, they have unusually high-pitched voices, which drop an octave or two when breathing an Earth-standard atmosphere. Their small size allows them to cope with the higher gravity well, although their reflexes and sense of subjective time need to be considerably faster than those of humans living on planets with lower gravity. The high gravity acts to rapidly pull any fallen object to the floor, so a Blefuscan who falls over or drops something must react quickly or damage will almost certainly result.
Many or most Blefuscans wear helmets or reinforced hats and caps, to protect against falling objects and the heavy raindrops that fall from the low clouds. Knee and elbow protectors are also commonly worn.
Blefuscu has a large land surface area, more than three times that of the Earth, and the Blefuscans are one-eighth as tall as normal humans; as a consequence of this there are many small but relatively populous nations on the fifteen continents, subcontinents and major islands. This has resulted in a complex political situation on this world, rapidly changing in line with their faster experience of time.
Slave-ownership
One controversial development on this planet was the introduction of hereditary slavery and serfdom among many of the major nations, following a rapid but widespread series of wars. The victorious Tramecksan empire absorbed several smaller nations in 7988, and declared that the defeated population would henceforth be subservient to the victors.
At this time the only transapient in the system was a Sophic League Omega class ISO, the Jambudvipa, orbiting the star at 0.2 AU and deeply committed to ecumenism. This broad-minded entity expressed er concern at this cultural atavism, but agreed to refrain from intervention in the afairs of this world as long as the slaves were treated well. The Tramecksans adopted a policy of paternalistic slavery, where the slave owners were responsible in law for the well-being of their human property.
Slaves who did not obey their masters or whose work was judged inadequate were imprisoned, in conditions that were reasonably comfortable but far below normal living standard in the Terragen Sphere. In most cases slaves were obedient and performed their duties well, especially as those duties were not too onerous given that most tasks were automated to a greater or lesser extent.
Slaves were status symbols for the slave-owning classes on Blefuscu (who were distinguished by white or golden caps). The slavery system had originated as a way for the victorious Tramecksan empire to assert their dominance over the losers; this practise continued within that empire as a marker of status and respectability. Mostly slaves were drawn from nations defeated by that empire, or from nations which were economically indebted to them or their allies.
Slaves who were well-cared-for were particularly good markers of respectability; since the well-being of the slaves was the responsibility of the masters, many slaves did not actively desire change. Very accomplished masters might own a small army of slaves, who carried out many responsible duties within their households). A reasonable number of slaves were freed by their masters; a few freedpersons in fact went on to hold high office, but none of these appear to have been able or willing to change the system.
Paternalistic slavery persisted in various forms on Blefuscu for more than two thousand years, despite efforts by various liberation movements (including the Pansophontists) to free them. Eventually slave-owning simply went out of fashion; there were hundreds of countries on Blefuscu, and not all were slave-owning cultures. Over time the countries that did not own slaves became more influential, and by the 10200's slavery was an anachronism, practised only in a few locations for the benefit of tourists.
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