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Titanian Flatworm

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Titanian Flatworm hovering/resting (bottom) and flying (top), with seismic survey charges, and a robot with a modified, automatic 8 ga. kiln gun in a rotating mount is also shown. A Titanian in the standard heated envirosuit of the Communes Government is included for scale.

By the end of the 30th century, Man has fully spread across the solar system, with every major celestial body from Mercury to Saturn graced by His presence.

Venus, partly terraformed over five centuries of sustained industrial effort, going from a muggy, thickly atmosphered planet to almost Earthlike in conditions, and improving by the sol. Mars, perennially challenged by its small size, has benefited from this thanks to CO2 exports from Venus towards improving its own atmosphere, although it remains a harsh and inhospitable place. Numerous species of lichen and algae mottle the red planet, turning its surface a menagerie of shades of brown, purple, yellow, and green. Numerous strains, subspecies, and clades of mankind, developed variously by deliberate tampering by governments, eccentric biotechnics, or mere environmental change, exist in known space. Venusians and Earthmen, nearly identical, contrast sharply with the Celestials, a species of Man factory-built for working and surviving in zero-gravity vacuum. Martians, owing to their planet's unique conditions, tend to be lanky and weakly boned, and the problematic concerns of 1/3rd gravities on embryonic development have meant that interbreeding between Homo s. sapiens and Homo s. martius is impossible, thus fully completing the artificial speciation. Even more radical humans exist in Saturnian and trans-Neptunian space.

Perhaps the most unusual species of Man, however, is the "Titanian flatworm".

Inhabiting a portion of Titan approximately 1600 km^2 in area, located on a peninsula surrounded by an ethane lake, the Titanians appear less a man and more a rippling blanket of flesh. They move by undulating through the air, held aloft by methane lake updrafts or their own cyber-musculature (much as more conventional Titanians locomote using nanofiber wings), or slithering along the ground like a snake, resembling a flatworm. They are the result of eccentric cyberization and post-human body modification taken to its limit. No longer bound by lipids or carbohydrates, their bodies are composed of azotosomes, their flesh slaked with liquid acetylene and ethane, and their minds held within cybernetic spools of metallic filaments and DNA bundles wrapped in protein sheaths. Possessing little to no natively crewed industry they are serviced primarily by von Neumann production systems that were brought to the moon centuries before, and can be operated using a variety of kludged haptic feedback methods. Most of these production systems originally began as older, typically unrelated, models of colonization equipment, of the sort established in more terrestrial biomes for hydrocarbon cracking or glassmaking, although some machines are so heavily modified they scarcely resemble their original forms.

Accompanying this surface infrastructure, a complex array of solar mirrors, self-repairing and autonomous, provides meager warmth to the moon, providing some manner of electrical generation and allowing for somewhat more complex lifeforms, giving the large blanketed bodies of the Titanians some purpose: they evidently take in acetylene and ethane, their cells crack the molecules into methane, taking in oxygen and carbon for energy, and excrete liquid methane. Solar power and geothermal heat is used in combination as the prime energy source, although this is somewhat relative given the cryonic nature of Titan's surface. What remains of their human minds is an eternal question, as Titanians are somewhat loathe to speak to other species of Man, and their habitat makes them rather difficult to reach. Communicating solely through ultrasonic chirps, which carries far in the methane lakes and oceans of Titan, and spending their time lying in pools of hydrocarbons, evidently respirating, the Titanians rarely seem to have much to speak about and little reason to talk regardless of the fact that they possess no long-range communication systems.

What created them is somewhat mysterious, as no private benefactor or utopian commune ever reported such unusual passengers. The life support equipment alone would be so different from Solar standards that it would have to be absolutely bespoke, which rules out any sort of deliberate attempt at seeding Titan.

The most common accepted origin, in absence of asking the Titanians themselves, is that they were remnants of a partially forgotten colonization effort. An attempt by one of myriad trans-Jovian energy corporations to tap the moon for fossil fuels and hydrocarbons. Ordinary hydrocarbons in the modern era are typically produced through the use of nuclear energy and cracking farms, taking in liquid water and carbon from wood, and turning this into hydrocarbons. Plastics, solvents, and numerous industrial precursors are produced in this manner, along with naturally occurring clathrates under Martian crust and various Venusian Moho Mines.

This is supported by the fact that much of the documented, known machinery dates to the first major attempt at colonizing Titan from the late 2700s.

In 2777, the Titan Molecule EJV, a joint venture between Jovian Antimatter plc and Enkelados II AB, launched a major colonization effort of Titan. The EJV collapsed sometime after 2779, as the amount of debt it generated combined with a great deal of over-capitalization due to inflated marketing projections, led to a rushed and ultimately untimely end for much of the project's employees. Little more than the delivery of the initial batch of self-replicating mining systems, fewer than a thousand employees, and a small constellation of orbital mirrors had been deployed before the project wrapped up. Unfortunately for Titan Molecule's investors, much hubbub about the ready accessibility of Titanian methane had been made, along with grossly exaggerated timelines. As these timelines ran up, were pushed back, and delayed, much of the funding began to be withdrawn, leading to little more than a few machines floating in space and some a large, unfinished refinery wasting away in the sand.

Its location on the edge of the Solar System, especially in Saturnian and Neptunian space, Titan would have provided for a much simpler method of transporting these vital precursors, as despite availability of simple hydrocarbons from fairly reliable biogenic production processes on Enceladus, the ability to scale such methods is difficult given the biosphere's limited capacity. Relatively little solar energy hits far out beyond the asteroid belt, making the space-based solar rectenna farms of Venus an unlikely option, leaving only nuclear and fusion power, for powering large algae farms. Typically the fuel for such is harvested from ice of various gas giant moons and kickstarted by Jovian antimatter, while heat generally comes from within a planet. However, such a rich find of readily accessed hydrocarbons would have led to a greater form of independence from inner system commerce for the separatist Saturnian Communes, which have been locked in a state of cold war with the Solarian Confederation, since the first major exploitation of Saturn began in the 2600s.

After the collapse of Titan Molecule EJV, the company left its personnel and equipment in orbit. A more conventional evacuation of highly capitalized equipment was considered unnecessary, the amount of modification the machines had to function in the heavily atmosphered Titan made it uneconomical to ship, and even if it were going to be donated, no one who had need had wanted the materiel. By 2081, the entire joint venture was fully wrapped up, leaving the thousand-odd strong habitation refinery and its orbital manufactory in the lurch. Thus, most people suspect that the various technical personnel working to establish the production network, who not only would have had to built up a substantial refining and orbital lift system, but also permanent habitation with cultured organisms and cybernetic infrastructures, may have instead engineered bioformed bodies for their own minds to reside in. These bodies would need to be adapted to living on Titan naturally, and as little light reaches the surface there would be little room for complex organs such as brains or energy draining methods of respiration such as with closed vascular systems.

"First contact" with the Titanians occurred almost a century later, when an illegal salvage team arrived, looking to harvest metals and valuables from the former colony. After a period of explorations and initial harvesting of equipment, the group was beset by a "flying column" of "flatworms" dropping small sticks of sounding charges (explosive devices used in mining, the seismic energy generated can be used to locate metallic or hydrocarbon veins, and carry sufficient explosive to act as a lethal hand grenade in standard atmosphere) and robotic mining drones, firing flechettes from heavily modified kiln guns mounted on their cybernetic apparatus, likely controlled by UV, mmW, or C-band signals from the flatworms.

The salvagers quickly retreated back into orbit with only modest pursuit, albeit taking with them nearly a day's worth of videos, images, a deactivated mining drone, and a single dead flatworm. Later analysis was difficult, as the flatworm rapidly decomposed, and the resulting toxic atmosphere required the capsule crew to wear their spacesuits on the way up to their mothership. The mining drone, evidently a conversion from one of the ore carrying robots, mounted a heavily modified, standard-type kiln gun used in industrial environments, firing 60 gram, 2⅓-in. long flechettes, produced from iron or zinc, with a onboard magazine of 80 8 gauge (~20-mm) shotshells. Twenty-seven recovered explosive devices, mounted on the flatworm's "underside", turned out to be standard zero-gravity seismic survey charges with a 250g RDX filler and the addition of an electrically activated impact fuse, and evidently used in crude carpet bombing tactics. After docking with the nearest station, the decomposition had long finished and the leftover biofilm was recovered by a medical team, analyzed, and found to contain bio-engineered viral proteins. An initial scare was later found to be unwarranted, as the capsids were found to contain no RNA, rather DNA matched with a space-rated welder from Jovian Antimatter plc, one S.M. Erik Andersson (b. 2741 d. 2081 [assumed]), with a complete copy of the man's DNA, various quaternary-encoded biographical and informational data, including snippets of autobiographical audio statements and a spoken and written last will, and standard template encoding information in Belter, Celestial, Middle Gallan, and Venusian, within into each capsid.

Analysis of the cybernetic apparatus, which was safely disarmed, showed only a dead cyberbrain, with residual data traces of a primitive instruction set and time-slices of Andersson's mind. Unfortunately, there were few economical methods of "resurrecting" the people from raw cyberbrain data (modern cyberbrains tend to time-slice from implantation, but the hacked-together method of cyberizing the flatworm seems to use part of the holographic memory cubes for processing) or DNA strands carried in the capsids. Short of simple cloning in a birth factory, which would not exactly restore the conscious qualia of the individuals contained within the cyberbrain, there was little that could be. The Titanian's exoskeleton was interred in a safety deposit box in the Bank of Enceladus, along with H2S preserved DNA samples, for possible future revivification. Ultimately this indicates the "Titan flatworm" may be less a sentient organism, and more a living lifeboat, a vessel for transportation of human DNA in protein capsids, with a carbon copy of the human brain should it be required, although the latter preservation method seems to have failed in practice, as no large-scale mental engrams were able to be recovered from Andersson's cyberbrain. Whether this indicates damage to the flatworm itself and subsequent cannibalization of memory cubes, or something inherent to the cyberization process, is unknown. However, as this would have occurred in the late 26th century, this would easily make the Titanians the oldest humans in known space.

With the subsequent colonization of Titan since the 28th century, and establishment of permanent habitation centers on the moon, the achievement of readily accessed methane and plastic precursors was realized for the Saturnian Communes. Periodic attempts to scavenge bits and bobs from the failed habitat areas are generally sanctioned, with the exception of the Titan Molecule landing site, which is usually marked heavily on local maps. A small border outpost has been established, which has been respected (for the most part) by both the Titan Communal government, and the flatworms and their cybernetic thralls, with the tacit assumption that any individuals crossing the border zone are fair game. As of the current era, no communications have been received from the former colony, and the only "contact" between border posts and their inhabitants has been occasional glimpses in the distant, hazy atmosphere of the Moon, and occasional barks of gunfire or muffled explosions; typically the telltale sign of illegal prospectors attempting to plunder the former Titan Molecule site. No bodies have ever been recovered from the site, aside from the initial landing, and the recorded number of flatworms has never been observed to decrease, perhaps indicating a lack of natural lifespan.

Alternative theories, such as a rampant bioweapon infecting (or being subjected on) unknown parties for nefarious scientific purposes, a rogue von Neumann probe turning some cyber squatters into harmless meat blankets, or more radical suggestions such as extraterrestrial tampering for some long-forgotten slight, have also been proposed. These were rapidly dismissed as spacers' stories, tall tales meant to scare newbies, but remain not uncommon even today. None seem to quite match up as well as the idea that the Titanians may in fact be little more than a living, long-term storage method for an endlessly duplicated bundle of DNA strands and spliced-together copies of centuries old, time-sliced minds of long-dead, cyberbrain engrams. A self-moving, self-repairing, self-protecting solid state-liquid storage medium. Ingenious, but ultimately of little value to those who pinned their hopes on being rescued in such a manner.

An unfortunate fate, and certainly one that has befallen many of Man's many brethren since the permanent habitation of space (and even in the ancient days of terrestrial seafaring) is being trapped in a space capsule, thousands of hours from rescue, watching the little blue and red dots fade into nothingness. Only stale air, occasionally made more bearable by burning of potassium superoxide, and writing memos and last wills by the dim light of the candle, accompanies the vast majority of them in their final hours. Perhaps the Titanians thought they had found a way out, hiding their very essences and residual ghosts inside a combination of capsid-sheathed DNA locked behind 95 K nitrogenous membranes and cyber-exoskeletal apparatus, all rigged together for self-preservation at any cost.

On the other hand, the scavengers of the principal initial expedition had located functional and fueled orbital delivery systems. While they would not have had much in the way amenities, the standard cargo rockets that had been provided had more than adequate navigation capability and collective delta-v to fly to the nearest orbital station, within the limits of the EVA suits' oxygen supplies, which was still large enough to take the some 1,098 personnel stranded on the moon. These rockets, however, remained unused and apparently were not considered by the Titan Molecule expedition to be particularly valuable in that regard, as many EVA suits were left in their lockers or stranded near habitat modules, occasionally with their former owners ensconced within. Perhaps then, so the more utopian interpretation of the Titanian flatworms goes, they found something better than they were before. Now free from the drudgery of taxes, sustenance, and perhaps even thought, they exist in perpetuity, immortal and forever unchanging. A living monument to the scientific and technological advancements of Man.

Whatever is the truth is, it is a secret the Titanians choose to keep to themselves.

Shipbucket

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