Thoughts on Castes
What does every hive need? Its pair of mated queens, of course. Feral queens must attend all the needs of chrylurk biology by their own hand, but this is demanding work. Once she bears a brood, that burden can be shared.
At first each chrylurk drone would have the same gamut of responsibilities — casting their own shell, weaving their own webs, securing their own prey, constructing their own quarters. All save the conceiving and laying of new entiotes
The queen’s industry will soon naturally turn itself upon the task of prefiguring the role — and the very anatomy — of her daughters not yet born, adapting them castelike to a set of responsibilities.
Even that task unique to the queen — oviposition — can be delegated to a court of surrogates to carry and inject those eggs into new thralls. What of the bugs sent out to mind the new thralls — would they be nurses or simple collectors? Perhaps those roles, too, can bifurcate given sufficient development.
Another caste often on my mind are the reapers — the bugs tasked with such grim work. But what work specifically? Just what do they reap — they nectar from productive thralls? The imagos from hosts resisting their pupae? Or perhaps they retrieve larva deemed unable or unfit to progress the life cycle. But that’s not reaping, is it?
Infiltrators, likewise, are an iconic role for chrylurks to adopt. Those skinwalkers and masterful imitators of the mortal affect.
And no hive would be complete without soldiers or generalist workers. Chrylurks in particular would have need of weavers and sculptors, as suits their unique biology.
Perhaps most distinguished, exalted above all other castes, are those angels, tasked by the hive queen with maintain order in the sprawling tapestry of their collective mind. All chrylurks are extensions of and servants to the queen’s design, but none know this so intimately as the angels.
Must they ever leave the hive? Must they even move? Perhaps their role entitles them to be more monolith than bug, vast fixtures ever computing a finer order.
Parascixion (n.)
Parascixion (n. verb: parascize; adj: parascise)
- perfection
- parasitic fusion; paroxysmal abscision; paradoxical precision
- the resolution and subsumption of contradictory desires or components into a zealous whole; adversarial evolution
- maturation or metamorphosis, especially as part of the chrylurk lifecycle
The antonym is exscient: Nascent existence, nescient exclusion, noxious excreta.
The note of exclusion deserves particular emphasis. Chrylurks have a particular disgust for the isolation and ignorance innate to mortal existence, I’ve found.
When you think about it, isn’t just plain rude to not invite parasites into your body?
You Are A Chrylurk [WIP]
You are not an alchemist. You are a chrylurk — a insectoid parasite and a living transmutation. You devour the chimerical hopes of mankind, sustaining yourself on their dreams and their flesh.
Alchemy is mankind’s only hope to resist the encroach of these parasitoid usurpers — therefore alchemists are your most hated foes. But even your fellow chrylurks are no allies; you’re competeing for the same hosts, after all.
Your only hope to survive in this dark, brutal world is being cunning and efficient with what few gifts the world spares you. What are they? And what do you plan to do with them?
Your life begins as all entiotes do: a larval worm wriggling from your egg and into warm flesh. Perhaps your mother oviposited into your host, or perhaps your eggs lay in wait, indefinitely patient, for skin to cling to and colonize. Even these humble origins shape your eventual destiny. You multiply asexually, clonally, and overtake your host. But how?
Tapeworm: you emerged in your host’s digestive system or migrated there, thus securing a continuous source of food.
Flystrike: you burrowed shallowly into your host’s flesh, leeching blood and sucking fat.
Mimickry: (requires Flystrike) whether you grew too conspicuous or too ravenous, you could not survive without fitting in. This goes beyond fooling visual inspection or the immune response. Worms replace muscle fibers, veins, nerves. You bend, beat, and think in step with your host, replacing the ship plank by plank.
Craving: (requires Tapeworm) you can subsist off of a human diet, but it’s hardly ideal. The stomach has its own microbiome, its own neural net to signal the body’s appetite. Your signal, now, and soon you demand what meals come your way through punishing influence on the hosts’ mood.
Communion: (reuqires Mimickry and Craving)
Starving host
Strangler Vines & Djramulji
I thought some more about the nonhumans in the alchemy setting. I probably shouldn’t be making them as wildly interesting as they’re shaping up to be given that I have no intention of focusing on them, but I don’t know if I have it in me to create normal races or care about a world with just humans.
Anyway, first was a thought about the big vine guys. This is a race of carnivorous, migratory air plants, vines that grew domesticated to humans through their ability to wrap around animals both for transportation, and to strangle and drain the life from them.
I had already considered them almost impossible to talk to (at best, you can correspond), given that their minds operate on an entirely different time scale. Excluding the instinctive contraction of traps for prey, the lag between thought and action is probably like, minutes. Hard to say because it’s very low attack, in envelope terms — and high sustain to boot.
The vines can move under their own power, but at a rate that would mean transversing across meters in days. They’re slow, this is why they rely on animals to move them around.
But it’s not just a matter of scale. I’m thinking ontologically, time is just different — it is as if they contemplate the fourier transform of the world.
To them, cycles and patterns have the primacy, not the events that compose them. (Really, what is any “singular” event but a different note played by its causes, flowing into the melodic line of its effects?)
Asking them what’s happening “now” or even what’s happened today, makes as much sense as holding up a pen and asking a human to describe its worldline — which desk it sat on, which ink flowed through it — without so much as a mention of whose pen it is or what it was used to write.
They dont have a concept of choice, either. You play your part in the dance of sense and response. What are “decisions”? Nothing you’ve done could have been otherwise. At best, there are different melodic lines whose typical progression have been interrupted; perhaps they will play out in full in a different configuration of the timeless cycle.
At best, you might be able to get them to categorize the events of the day into a “chorus” — predictable and recurring — and a “verse”
If the natural human story is the three act structure, then the natural vine person story is a four chord loop.
This leads to a funny idiom that if you want to tell something to a vine, you have to say it three times. Human gibbering doesn’t really register unless you make a song out of it.
Second thought is cooking up a new race: big elephant-like creatures, except perhaps closer to the size of a horse, and probably capable of decent running. The ends of their trunks of developed into pretty precise manipulators.
When thinking about their social system, I had the idea for something like those rock-paper-scissors lizards. Big dominant males who keep a harem of females, normal monogamous males, and femboys who sneak into the harems.
But because they’re social, they all share territory, so the general structure of their society is one chief who gets to have a harem and a bunch of guys who get to keep their wives as long as they submit to the chief.
Since there’s so much dominance and competition, they’re a pretty warlike race. Chiefs want to raid other groups, especially to grab mates for his harem or to reward his followers who are fighting over what’s left.
But also just for resources, since they’re so big they eat a bunch and need lots of space. Lot of drivers for conflict.
And you can easily imagine a human village would not be having a good time if a bunch of elephant-horses ran up to ransack their shit.
But I digress. One of the things they don’t talk about as much with those rock-paper-scissors lizards is that the females also have different morphs, some invest more resources into few eggs, some lay a bunch of eggs.
And I thought it would be neat if these guys have a ton of size morphs. Like, it takes a lot of time and food to grow some really fuckoff big dude, the sort who would be a shoe-in for becoming chief or at least high ranking.
But it’s risky if your big boy dies (which is more likely if everyone is competing for the biggest boy), and your big boy will put a strain on the group’s resources.
So if you instead raise a small child, they can grow up quicker, they can have more siblings, and when you’re going hungry, they’ll take less to survive.
Of course, if everyone’s raising small children then the big boys have an even easier to time standing above them, so you’d get this whole cycle throughout the generations.
And this isn’t even what’s interesting about this guys.
Because like. How much tool use are you really getting out of one, albeit finely evolved, trunk?
No, you see, these guys have pets. Little monkeys that climb all over them, keep them clean and dress them up with cool decorations. The beasts keep them safe and fed and play with them. The monkeys have an intricate system of calls and able to relay information to and take orders from the big beasts, but they don’t have as much intelligence or initiative of their own, they rely on the beasts telling them what to do.
They have much more nimble hands, so they can put together tools if given instructions and are really good at copying and repeating tasks among themselves.
Most importantly, though, they have a special structure growing the back of their neck, like a hypertrophied scruff but with its own tiny musculature. The purpose is allowing the elephant beasts to grab them by the scruff with their trucks, and through very very precise squeezing of this scruff, they can essentially do a reverse ratatouille and use the monkeys like controllers. Each squeeze instinctively triggers response elsewhere in the bottom, and each twitch of the scuff-muscles sends feedback back to the elephant beast.
This isn’t evolved per se — instead, the elephants and monkeys have plasticity to translate the squeeze-twitch language into intention as if it were a language. It’s very difficult to grab someone else’s monkey and do more than crudely direct it. (e.g., an artist is going to have a lot of very specific shorthand for brushstrokes)
…Something that would be pretty funny, is calling these two “orcs” and “goblins.” Maybe those will be slurs, but for now I’ll go with djramul and djits.
Larva Stages
Larval entiotes have three instars.
- L1 larva are tiny and speck-like, designed to burrow into flesh unnoticed. They rapidly asexually proliferate.
- L2 look like maggots, several times larger and substantially longer, reaching the limit of what can hide under the skin. Beyond this point, the lifecycle branches.
- L3a is a form subject to replacement-mimicry, integrating functionally into the host’s anatomy (muscles, veins, etc.).
- L3b is a tapeworm-like form that occurs in the intestines, remaining soft and growing long and fat.
- L3c is a slug-like, highly motile form that arises late into the lifecycle, designed to crawl across the skin, cannibalizing any remaining L1 or L2 larva into a single body.
Why Chrylurks?
Here’s the vision. Just like how the godvines have a domesticated species of bee to pollinate their flowers, they also have mycorrhizal fungus.
Specifically, these fungi are adapted to attune their alchemical essence to compatibility with a given vine, intimately integrating with potentially multiple vines.
However, these creates a powerful niche for parasites.
You see, how the Manton Effect equivalent functions in this setting is alchemical essence cannot coexist with transmutation — that’s the second law of alchemy.
If you try to move a transmutation into volume where the metamyric field is polarized toward alchemy, they both repel and mutually annihilate (the alchemical field burns itself to cancel the invading matter). Since humans continually generate essence that builds up throughout all their tissues, this means the alchemical field exists in a weak aura around them, the liminal body. (A soul, if you will.)
Importantly, alchemical fields are not equivalent; two disjoint circuits of essence flux have unique “identity values” that makes them non-fungible.
This matters, because two alchemical fields of unlike identities will expel unlike fields. This is why the fungi’s ability to attune is so significant.
So, a prospective fungal parasite upon godvines is equipped to approach the problem is a clever way: by attuning to them and then transmuting matter inside this field, it will be promptly combusted and alchemized. So if you adapt to metabolize this interaction, you can attach to godvines and then drain them, and any attempts to use alchemy against you will only feed your own metabolism. In a sense, you practice anti-alchemy.
(The second law is generally considered a force for balance in conflicts between alchemists; you cannot destroy without in turn being destroyed — this blight sidesteps this balance.)
Generally, the treatment for this has been to cease alchemical activity and minimize essence to starve out the fungus. The godvines are clever, they have worked to mitigate the threat, though it persisted among them.
When mankind rebelled and the godvines sent the first plague to punish them, it was a modified form of this fungus designed to blight croplands specifically; it grew most effectively in the regularly spaced fields of farms, and was able to bind spores to the essence of creatures that worked the field to propagate itself.
The first plague was meant to decimate, not destroy, and humans are clever anyway, so fungicides and treatments were developed.
I could touch on how the first plague was harnessed and leveraged to counteract the second and third plagues, but what’s important is that human alchemists studied its properties and researched gain-of-function.
The antiblight catastrophe was an attempt by humans to unleash their own plague against the gods, turning the blight back against them with amplified virulence. (The nature of the final plague gave them a perfect vector)
And it worked — godvines withered and died. Except, remember, this wasn’t the blight that had first afflicted them, this is one that was already bred to use rely on human souls to spread its spores. It’s only a few mutations, then, before this extra-virulent biological weapon adapts to attack human alchemical fields, not just godvines’
…But why only humans? Every animal (a few non-animals, as you’ll see) generates them, though exponentially lower in magnitude.
So congrats, humanity created a disease that poses a threat to all life on the planet!
But as i said yesterday, there was another plague which began development in tandem with the third plague, but due to its intractable ambition, it was never completed. Chrylurks were parasitic organisms, feeding on human essence in an ironic reflection of how humans fed on godvine essence.
And the nature of their parasitism means that their essential body functioned in an entirely different fashion than natural creatures. They do not generate essence from their emotions, and they do not have the ablative liminal body this would generate.
This makes them near-impervious to airborne infection from antiblight spores; they would need to penetrate to alchemical organs deep within the carapace. Even success poses its own difficulties; for other species, compromising the liminal body means you win. But the nature of chrylurk biology means there is no part of the body that relies on essence flux.
Chrylurks can suffer ill-effects from exposure to antiblight, but it’s more like indigestion than cancer. They are just profoundly more equipped to shrugging it off.
Clay Men
The greatest alchemist who ever lived was a dude whose innate transmutation let him create living clay. He used it create a bunch of animate statues that were capable of drawing their own transmutation circles, though thesee clay men still required a source of essence as fuel. Also, all his statues took the form of strapping lads, which could mean nothing.
He spent all his life refining the craft of them, teaching others the technique, etc. by the end they were very complex and autonomous and the empire he worked for got rich off them.
In the end he might be the only person in the history of the world goated enough to have ascended to effective godhood and immortality.
(Other than the great chrylurk queens, of course.)
But unfortunately his clay men were devised in a paradigm of what is essentially fossil fuel magic, which is neither as plentiful nor as acceptable as it once was. Worse, the empire in question fell to ruin and many teachings were lost.
As a result, the clay men are relics mainly employed by the especially rich or academic or niche, and new clay men can only be created by painstaking copy.
Which means their masculine forms persist. It’s not easily altered, since the statues have a capacity for self-repair creating hard to disentangle dependencies.
Metamind
Note: not originally about chrylurks per se.
Thought about hive minds some more today and a model is clicking together in my mind.
Basically, this all hinges on the concept of the metamind.
Each member of the hivemind has region of the brain dedicated to psychic processing. Obviously, right? But let’s be specific about what it’s processing.
As the drone goes about its day, and especially during memory consolidation at night, the metamind’s task is to maintain an accurate index and cache that summarize the drone’s state and pointers to the activation patterns needed to retrieve more detailed information.
Which is to say: it’s called the metamind because it maintains metadata.
So, in the background this cortex will keep a running tally of things like what is this drone’s mood, what is this drone doing, and so forth.
But again, this is not just an index, it’s a cache, and part of what happens when a new member is integrating into its hive is the metamind learns the culture — the neural net gets trained to anticipate what queries it will receive and the responses it expects.
Some of this is the obvious stuff — if a drone witnesses a disastrous collapse in the lower hive tunnels, the metamind quickly discovers that lots of minds are going to be requesting info and so it keeps the answers ready to go in the cache.
But a lot of it subtle and pervasive. How should an index be organized? What facts are most important to keep on quick access? You only need to cache an answer to “What is this drone’s mood?” if someone asks; it’s extraneous if they only ever ask “Is the current task going well or poorly?” or “Will future tasks encounter difficulties?”
But anticipation is where the real magic of the hive mind starts. Because the metamind exists for prefetching.
More than just maintaining the indices and caches: it’s the nexus of interpsychic processing, so all external input/output is routed through it. Still, it exists to operate in the background, autonomously.
So, by the time you even feel hungry, the metamind has already sent out a request for food. When you realize you forgot your wrench, the metamind has already asked someone to grab it. When you wander to a part of the hive you’ve never been, you don’t need to ask for directions, you just wonder “wait, where am I?” and then the metamind answers.
At any idle moment, the metamind can chatter with nearby metaminds as part of its continuous updating and retuning procedures.
The metamind’s caching doesn’t actually replace conversation, it’s only an FAQ of sorts, but it does means that before you initiate conversation with anyone, your metamind will have pinged theirs for a data dump. You don’t have to be nearly as anxious worrying if something you say will come off wrong when you can seamless reference a crowdsourced, battle-tested intuition for what talking to someone is like.
Of course, you won’t know exactly what they’ll say, so this amounts to a extremely high fidelity version of reading someone’s body language.
But I digress. the real experience of living in this sort of hivemind isn’t specifically any of that — it’s the cognitive illusion that results from it. Think about how your brain stitches together your constant saccades into a still image that appears everywhere colorful, everywhere clear, postprocessed for your convenience, nothing like the raw nerve firings.
An individual member of the hivemind doesn’t know everything the hive knows. They aren’t in perfect harmony with everyone they meet.
But how else can you describe the feeling of walking and intuiting the vibe of everyone just being in their vicinity? Of getting what you need being as simple as thinking it? Of knowing the schedules, the rhythms, your anticipation always one step ahead of reality?
In a way, the heart of the hive is akin to a waking dream, a world that bend to your whims, whose inscrutable logic is at once comprehended unquestioningly.
A consequence of this cognitive architecture is that any case of a human “assimilating” into a hivemind would probably in practice require actual hive member mediating all of their interactions.
Because they just dont have the psychology to truly adapt to it. (Though it might help if they were really into submission and hypnosis.)
The big exception is the special case of a feral queen founding a new hive without hailing from an existing collective, because then the result would still be stable via self-accordance.
Speaking of which, that’s probably a useful concept to have.
Accordance can be defined as stability under mutual domination.
A copy of you before divergence would have perfect accordance, because even if one wanted to change something about the other, both would make the same change.
Whereas an evil version of you would lack accordance, since what happens is a race condition, down to whoever exercises power first.
But more interesting situations would be different people with different preferences without prefering the other share that preference; complements.
So you could get diversity of thought in the hive mind as long as you maintain accordance.
Fragments
Little can bring a chrylurk as much comfort as the embrace of a wet cocoon.
Chrylurk so possessed by ravenous instinct that she takes deep, messy bites out of the flesh of her soon-to-be thrall even though she knows waiting for the venom and virus to flood thrall’s veins with delirium nectar would nourish her more — like a chef licking a spoonful of uncooked batter.
Antiblighted Wastes as a crucial part of hive ecology. Tainted altars whereupon gods rot. Roots drilling into the earth, bridging colonies into a countryside-spanning network. Chrylurks as the marriage of so many pathogens.
I perch on high and watching the drones construct new hive cells. The conquest of the city is complete; there was no need to hide our work any longer. I wonder if I could find some unclaimed meat to be my thrall, or if all the prey had found their way to a warren already.
But if the search fails, I suppose I could always find a surrogate to fuck my vermin into.
Chrylurks weren’t immune to our own venom, though the queen insists we save that fact for special occasions. A reward reserved. I admit I sometimes stare at the thralls in their dreaming pods, and wonder when I’ll next weave a cocoon for isomorphosis. Oh, I yearn.
Four plagues: the first, a storm of black nails from heaven above; the second, a blight upon every farmland; the third, thorns in the flesh of nonbelievers; the fourth, an army of angels with buzzing wings. Fifth and false: the parasitic contradiction.
Note: this outline became Restless, Enwrapped, Rotten.
Swaddled in silk, woven ropes cut into flesh. A hoarse throat whimpers. Things squirm between muscle-fibers. Numbness fades like walls eroding. Bone-gnawed agony.
Segmented fingers groping, squeezing, callously curious. Stridulations faintly-familiar formants. “Shush. Enough.”
A fang punctures flesh already blood-caked blood. More stone for the castle walls. Hoarse moans now.