Kigdatsi Where should I start? With the setting I suppose. The idea all starts with the concept of the multiverse. Readers of New Scientist may remember an article (in 2005, IIRC) about the various ways in which we could have multiple universes. In this setting, the multiverse consists of a 5-D space, in which many "sub-universes" are embedded. Sub-universes are each 3-D spaces extending along the x, y, and z dimensions, and separated in the direction of the v and w dimensions. At the start (low-entropy end) of time, there was only one sub-universe, which has split repeatedly since then. At each split, the choice made was a "random" quantum event. Splits occur very rarely by human terms, maybe once every few million years. This rarity is hypothesised to be related to the resolvability of time-travel paradoxes. The universe which split off from ours most recently did so about 2500 years ago, and is the one in which the Kigdatsi live. What the change was, we don't know, but by the 1 century BC, there was a significant difference between the European societies in the two universes. Their Greek philosophers tended more towards practical subjects. For example, the first know steam engines here and there are based on pipes which emit a jet of steam, causing rotation by action-reaction. Their philosophers did not stop there, though, going on to develop a crude form of a piston-style steam engine (in brass). This, along with a philosophical movement slightly deprecating the use of slaves, lead (by the 1st century BC) to their Greeks employing far more machinery than ours, with corresponding advances in areas of materials, engineering and mathematics. The area of Italy in either sub-universe was a natural place for another powerful civilisation to start, and one did in theirs as in ours. For simplicity, I will call them Romans, though the name is not theirs. Our Roman Empire, as it got larger, suffered from its size, since it took so much effort to move things from one place to another, even with well-built roads, and there was a greater tendency for corruption in the outlying regions, far from Rome. With (by this time mobile) steam engines, their "Romans" fared better, laying railways and roads, allowing orders, not just troops and goods, to be carried faster. Where our Empire was split into East and West to try to keep it in a manageable size, theirs remained unified, and never fell, but split up, becoming a looser organisation of states, a "Post-Rome Union", organisationally somewhere between our EU and USA. The dark ages never happened there, and so they got ahead of us in development. Fast-forward to (our) beginning of the 19th century. Their technology had advanced differently from ours. Of importance is that they were far ahead of our *current* tech in biology, some areas of physics, and computer *software*, but barely ahead in electronics and computer *hardware*. The physics (which I will call RFT: "Remote Field Theory") is something *we* are probably due to discover in the next few decades, and it will succeed in unifying gravity with the other forces, with some odd predicted effects (see below). In combination, this development means that a team of highly-talented and trained people could not just genetic modify and organism, but genetic engineer it, starting from nothing. Genome compiler and organism simulator technology was held back only by the computers on which it had to run (i.e. not far ahead of ours, though with a military budget). By that time, the PRU also covered North America, and was in a long-running semi-cold war with a force I will call the PCE ("Post-Chinese Empire"). The PCE was, continuity-wise, here's Chinese Empire, but mixed with many other peoples from Persians to Australians. The PRU were experimenting with living weapons. Being able to engineer them from scratch, they could make them fearless, resistant to conventional poisons, bulletproof, completely selfless, etc. The PRU's (totalitarian) government employed a team of semi-volunteer geeks to design and build them a type of animal that could use the strange effects of RFT to fight for them, and (hopefully) defeat the PCE. Thus the Kigdatsi were funded. The biological structures needed for this were a like the spike of a genome-space Dirac delta function; the slightest variation on them was both biologically expensive to produce and useless to the organism. Even current biology *here* predicts that evolution is highly unlikely to produce such a structure, it having little or no benefit when partially formed. --- At this point, a relevant aside about the important predictions of RFT, (using translated terminology). Note that all of these effects obey Newton's laws, conservation of energy, and so on just as much as anything else does. REMI (Remote Electro-Magnetic Induction): It is possible to create an electric and/or magnetic field which is disconnected from the device that is creating it, though difficulty increases steeply with distance. Also called "telelectromagnesis". REMS (Remote Electro-Magnetic Sensing): It is possible to detect an electric and/or magnetic field without having to touch it, though difficulty again increases steeply with distance. Both REMI and REMS interact with electrical conductors in a way that gives the rule of thumb that the effect cannot be performed through a conductor. RFI (Remote Force Induction): It is possible to apply a force to an object remotely. Yet again, difficulty increases steeply with distance, and the direction of force must be either towards or away from the device. This is literally telekinesis. In RFT terms this is the gravitational equivalent of REMI. There is a gravitational equivalent to REMS, but it isn't terribly useful, as gravitational fields do not have interesting local fluctuations, and like all of the above, using it over long distances is impractical. --- So, the Kigdatsi would be able to move objects without touching them (having multiple clusters of RFI cells around their bodies allows pushing in any direction), and to muck up nearby unshielded electronic equipment. Their body plan was to be vertebrate, with a head, 6 pentadactyl limbs and a tail, so they would look like dragons, about 4m long from nose to tip of tail, or 2m tall when on 2 legs (the final design would walk much better on 4 legs, though). Although superficially appearing related to reptiles, it was decided thy would be "warm-blooded" (particularly so, with a body temperature of around 47degC). Although the main method of production was artificial (basically being produced in vats), they would all be hermaphrodites. The design of the Kigdatsi's minds was tougher. They had to be fearless, so they didn't panic, and willing to do anything that would benefit the cause they were working for, including dying themselves. The smarter you made them the better, the more they could do with their REMS and REMI. REMS is a sense that can give a huge amount of information at once, more so even than sight, so a lot of brain matter is needed to deal with all that information, and to perform the calculations for REMI. A partially-distributed arrangement of neurons was decided upon: They would have much of their brain in their head, but 8 large clusters of neurons would be distributed around their body. These could do preprocessing of sense data, and low-level tasks, like those found in the brain stem in "normal" vertebrates. Additionally, they would have some ability to survive in case of decapitation, barring the problem of blood loss. REMS would be one of their three primary senses, the others being sight and radio. They would be able to see in 5 colours in bright light: a near infra-red, red, yellow-green, aquamarine, and a near ultra-violet, and 2 in dim light (as opposed to humans' red, blue, green, and monochrome for dim light). The eye design chosen gave them a square pupil, as they have a vertical slit iris with a horizontal slit iris in front of it. The radio sense was not related to REMS, which could only sense at low frequencies. Radio would need to go from about 10kHz (below long-wave radio) to 100 GHz (above most mobile phones). Being such a broad spectrum (analogous to over 23 octaves in sound), they would not be able to perceive it all at once, but it would instead be "tunable". They would also be able to emit radio waves throughout most of this frequency range, and it would be used for communication (their mouths were shaped for biting people's heads off, not speech). The sense of hearing would be made more wide-ranging that humans, but without resolution loss. Sense of smell and taste (related) could be made able to detect hundreds of different aspects of substances, many of which seem the same or are tasteless/odourless to humans. Taste could also be extended to work through the entire gut, with modifications to avoid an excess of useless information. Once some had been assembled, gestated, and hatched, everything worked, but there were a few surprises. It was known and required that they would have some intelligence, so they could understand orders, but the amount was rather unexpected -- for example on (non-verbal) IQ tests, the early designs came out at around 150 (translated to this sub-universe's IQ system: the mean is 100, Mensa requires 133 or so). Later on this soared to over 250, mostly due to the existing Kigdatsi helping in the design of the next lot. At first impressions, they seemed friendly and geeky, maybe Autistic (not unlike their designers), but with time seemed stranger or incomprehensible, which was more accurate, as they were quite different from humans in psychological design. With such intelligence, understanding of their creators' language came within 2 months or so, though they had trouble with metaphorical speech, since the associations in human language are often arbitrary. The Kigdatsi's unexpected learning speed was helped by the second surprise: Telepathy. Not, of course, actual mind-reading, but instead the use of REMS, specialised neural circuits (their neurons being 5 to 10 time faster than ours), and much practice, enabling the recognition of patterns that correspond to the way human attention and concentration shifts. Influencing thoughts also turned out also to be possible, but again, only in an approximate form. Telekinesis worked well, being able to supply forces of about 100N (22.5lb in imperial), and act with millimetre precision. It compensated fine for their lack of dexterity with their front claws, making them more dexterous than humans, especially with multiple objects. It also proved to be great as a weapon, by mashing victims' brains. The Kigdatsi were told all about the war and why they existed, but of course were told the PRU propaganda about it. They agreed to fight on the condition that they became free after the war, with their own land, etc. With them, the PRU began more open hostilities against the PCE, and within two years the PCE surrendered and the PRU declared victory. However, the PRU began to regret what they had offered, and went back on their agreement, attempting to suppress the Kigdatsi, who then rebelled. They were a rapidly-growing force, linked at high speed by mesh radio, able to kill without moving a muscle, outthink their opponents, ,and completely willing to die for their cause. Their enemy was a tired army many of whom had seen the Kigdatsi's effectiveness first hand, lowering morale. With such an enemy using guerrilla tactics against them, the PRU were defeated within months. The agreement was that Out-of-narrative notes: Yeah, it is an excuse to have dragons. At least I made them unusual. , and even able to be applied fast enough to stop bullets (assuming they detect the nerve impulse of the person firing it, so they start pushing within time: a .22 bullet might weigh 4g and go at 200 m/s, so a 100N force would stop it within 0.008s, during which it would go 0.8m, or less than a yard)