Starfish Aliens: Most of them. Digisapiences, of course, have no bodies at all. The galari are sophont crystal-virus hybrids with inbuilt techlepathy and mechanical psychokinesis. The codramaju are pseudo-fungoids which can merge, exchange, and separate bodies and minds at will. The kaeth are vaguely draconic pseudosaurians with a metal-rich biology.
The nodes of the public notification channel had snapped back to full operation within milliseconds of the pinch going off, and geotags bloomed in carmine distress across the wreckage below. She noted approvingly the grounded flitters upstream of the wrecks, their drivers already moving in with unpacked emergency kits, foamsteel
Bi the Way: Actually, pretty common. While the original distribution of sexualities along the Kinsey scale (for the eldrae) would have been pretty close to that found in humans, the brain modifications done under the general category of “xenophobia elimination” seem to have compressed the scale at both ends a
Everyone Is Bi: Or at least can be, thanks to advances in sophotechnology making gender identity and sexual orientation as editable as any other mental properties, and reinstantiation in general making actual sex changes not all that much more complicated than flipping a few switches in the preferences screen of
“On the one hand, yes, we do find it repugnant to restrict the freedoms of speech and information, even to this limited and circumscribed extent.” “On the other hand, since we have an entire ward filled with babbling lunatics who thought that the Silent Library was ‘where we’re hiding
(So, yeah, this is what you get today – not instead of a fic-a-day, because I will catch that up tomorrow – but before the fic-a-day because I’ve been trying to get it finished for three weeks and Never Quite Found The Time. So, today, I sat down and made it
Bioluminescence Is Cool: And available in several varieties from your local bodysculpt clinic, along with some interesting variations on the theme of chromatophores. Ah, fashion industry, what will you bring us next? Also used for some more practical purposes, like non-electrically dependent emergency lighting, engineered glowing trees for streetlights, detectors
CS Extropy Rising, one light-day outside Galáré system. Sophont intervention required. Supercargo processor: Engage emergency revival sequence for Command Conference in accordance with protocol 1030. Core, Cryobay Ess Zero. Fire and ice. Microwaves hammered at the frozen bodies hanging in the thick blue gel that filled the cryotubes, bringing them
Bio Augmentation: And how. While not exclusively their preserve by any means, the Imperials are so aggressively transsophontist that pretty much everyone you meet is a walking treasure-trove of millennia of biotechnological advancement. Not that the original bioengineers, or the later nanoengineers, knew exactly which direction apotheosis lay in, but
“The Microstatic Commission is the Impies’ bad joke at the expense of the rest of us. You don’t really think they care about thousands of tiny freeholds, do you? It’s just another means they use to defeat anyone’s attempt to build real institutions and real stability in
…and to push the bounds of my “relevant” category a little, but what we see here at, oh, 3:45 through 4:12 is now totally part of the mental image in my head when I imagine the Glorious Imperial Sky-Ship Fleet, back in the Age of Steel and Steam.
Binary Suns: Reality may be unrealistic, but that’s the way it is. Quite a decent number of the systems of the Associated Worlds, including many of the inhabited ones. Most prominent among these is the eldrae homeworld, Eliéra, which orbits one component of a far binary, with (essentially) the