Kigdatsi Where should I start? With the setting I suppose. The idea all starts with the concept of the multiverse. Raders of NewScientist may remember an article (in 2005, IIRC) about the various ways in which we could have multiple universes. In this seting, the multiverse consists of a 5-D space, in which many "subuniverses" are embedded. Subuniverses 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 subuniverse, which has split repeatedly since then. At each split, the choice made was a "random" quantumn event. Splits occur very rarely by human terms, maybe once every few million years. This rarity is hypothesised to be related to the solvability 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 subuniverse 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 tendancy 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 manageble size, theirs remained unifined, and never fell, but split up, becoming a looser orginisation 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"). They were, continuity-wise, here's Chinese Empire, but mixed with many other peoples from Persia to Australia. 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. Needing to understand some orders, and the sheer computational requirements of some of their RFT-abilities meant this was an *intelligent* species: the Kigdatsi. 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 were 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 vertebrate, with a head, 6 pentadactyl limbs and a tail, and their appearance was draconic. Although superficially appearing related to reptiles, there were significant differences. They were "warm-blooded", particularly so, with a body temperature of around 47 Out-of-narrative notes: Yeah, it is an excuse to have dragons. At least I made them