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Cybyota Cybiotan seedships are made primarily from
organic materials. They are Daedalus-like Fusion-pulse ships. A series
of independent sacrificial shieldcraft travel in front of the seedship
to protect the main craft from damage.
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Far beyond the current extent of the Wormhole
Nexus many independent
exploration concerns are engaged in the establishment of pioneering
colonies. These colonies will generally exist for several hundred years
before they are connected to the mainstream Orion's Arm civilization
and the interstellar Net.
Many never are; often the colony declines to participate in the wider
consensus, or is too resource poor to attract
a wormhole linelayer. Many others prosper, however, repaying the
development corporation with an enlarged sphere of influence.
The Velpup Borderers, a colonization start-up affiliated to the Non Coercive Zone has been engaged
in exploration/exploitation of
the
worlds of the Vela Puppis border for several millennia. In 10019 a
Borderer ship found a complex garden world with a silicon/carbon
symbiotic biology. Another was found in 10034, then another, and
another. To date thirty-one such worlds have been found, apparently all
seeded from a single world, which was finally located in 10297. This
world has been named Seedworld or Mik's
Planet. The silicon/carbon biology that these worlds share in
common has been given the name
cybyota (or cybiota) by xenobiologists.
The cybyota were originally a swarm of biological/mechanical
terraforming agents, which were sent out by a civilization apparently
far from the Terragens sphere. They have evolved to fill each world
with non-intelligent but very alien biological life forms, and most
biological species in this artificial ecosystem are genetically
engineered to grow a silicon-based processor shell. These processor
shells store and process data, and each processor shell is capable of
transmitting this data to the processors of other nearby cybyotan
organisms, particularly those of related species.
The datasphere contained within the collective silicon substrate of the
cybyota contains many apparently pre-programmed behaviours and goals,
consistent with the artificial nature of these organisms. The most
important imperative consists of instructions to build pre-designed
interstellar seedships, and to spread their silicon/carbon biology to
distant worlds. In theory the cybyotan biology should have become
widespread in the Orion's Arm volume because of these pre-programmed
behaviours, but the strategy has only been successful on a relatively
small scale.
Data is transferred between generations of the various cybyotan species
in three ways;
As each new world is seeded, the terraforming routines embedded in
the
biota's cybersphere are activated, and the different conditions on each
new world cause the cybyota to adapt and evolve, by genetic and by
programming drift. The expansion of the cybyota occurs in a cycle.
First a world is seeded and terraformed. The cybyota then build the
seedships, and launch them to a new set of suitable nearby stars, with
variable results. However, with each cycle the genetic and programming
drift causes the ecology to diverge from the original pattern. After
several cycles this drift results in poorly built mutated seedships,
which are launched at periodic intervals but are no longer adequate to
convey the cybyota to new worlds; these "dead end" worlds, blindly
repeating faulty instructions, are in fact the most common type among
the thirty-one worlds found so far. Other worlds where the cybersphere
has atrophied after successfully launching one or more seedships are
also common, and these rarely support complex cyberecologies.
Most of the design for the seedships and for the ecology as a whole is
carried by the datashells incorporated in the plant-like organisms.
Behaviours for maintenance and assembly are carried by the animal-like
creatures. Genetic analysis of the cybyota shows that animal-like and
plant-like organisms are closely related, and could perhaps be regarded
as a single phylum, as photosynthesis is carried out by symbiotic
microbiota which are usually present in the tissues of the mobile
animal-like organisms as well as in the plant-like organisms. Several
other domains of non cybyotan microbe are also part of the biosphere of
these worlds, apparently carried with the cybyota in the seedships.
Because the ecology program has to be adaptable this requires the
system as a whole to change over time. The process in its original
unmutated state does not seem to have any controlling intelligence to
guide it, but rather is a self-organising epiphenomenon. Perhaps for
this reason it is unstable, and cannot retain the original purpose
after too many stages. It has been suggested that an extremely alien
transapient entity could conceal itself within the complex datasphere
of each of these worlds, but there seems to be little evidence of this.
The nonsentient datasphere has nevertheless allowed the emergence of
various kinds of sentient process to develop on several of the cybyotan
worlds. It is possible that this process is part of the intended course
of development of such worlds, although the results seem to be
excessively diverse and random.
On a few worlds with cybyotan ecospheres the easy transfer of mutable
code and data leads to the spontaneous development of a rich culture or
datasphere. Very often this is not an intelligent race as such but
rather a self-organising series of virtual entities or baroque
simulations, which may or may not contain individual separate entities.
On the world of Clive's Brain, for example, the datasphere appears to
have formed a single vast, slow-thinking entity. Other dataspheres
contain many virtual entities shared between locations within the
processor shell network. On yet other worlds the animal-like and
plant-like organisms have become isolated from the datasphere, and are
rarely or never affected by it. Some of the "broken down" ecosystems
that have drifted away from their original programming but have not yet
found a successful new equilibrium; many show very strange loops of
behaviour: species and constructions related to space travel
manufactured and then destroyed in an endless cycle, species
replicating to cover the whole planet only to die off and be replaced
again, and so on. Software wars sometimes make otherwise identical
species incompatible datawise; many species are only discernible on a
programming level.
Only a very few cybyotan planets have developed physical cultures with
any resemblance whatsoever to human societies. These are generally the
worlds that have come to develop the most profound relationship with
humanity. The dominant species of cybyotan on these worlds is a large
multipurpose construction and repair morph, with a large and complex
biological brain. Because of the broad range of adaptability shown by
this dominant species, the Border Contact Committee has given them the
label General Purpose life forms, or GPs. The subspecies which has
arisen on the first and oldest cybyotan world, the seedworld, a.k.a.
Mik's Planet, is fully sophont and are known as the Jeepers.
Some low energy emission civilizations detected outside the Terragen
sphere by the Argus Array
have certain characteristics in common with
the cybyotan worlds discovered so far. It is certainly possible that
clusters of seeded worlds exist elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Related Pages:
The Jeepers of Mik's Planet - The Jeepers evolved self awareness and sentience spontaneously as the genetic and stored-data they inherited from their precursors mutated and changed due to information drift.
