A longstanding project

Or how I spent my life working on this one thing.

I think I was twelve when I first came up with the idea. I’d been staring at the Starcraft game cover in EB Games (woof, ancient days) wondering about the aliens in the middle. The humans and the zerg weren’t interesting to me, but the protoss? They were fascinating.

Of course, twelve year old me was more or less just wondering how they ate initially. Then it sort of dawned on me that maybe they ate through other means? Like a plant, or perhaps they absorbed radio waves? It inspired me as a child to work on my own species, my own world, for the very first time.

They started out as the Vardaen.

I used the protoss to express them physically - no mouth, tall, digitigrate, omniflexible limbs, psionic powers. But I altered them so that instead of acting or being a protoss expy, they were instead based on music. Their speech was at a higher pitch than humans could hear, their emotions more complex, deeper, more meaningful.

They traveled the stars in solar sailers, whose great sails unfurled in golden light.

I was in essence attempting to address many interests all at once. Twelve year old me loved pirates and sailing ships, so it was natural that the Vardaen would use a version that plied the stars. Twelve year old me struggled to understand why connecting with others seemed so.. empty. Twelve year old me was moving around again.

Twelve year old me then made them into nomads, tied to no world, no origin.

As time went on, they began to change and shift into something else. The protoss expy faded away and was replaced by instead saurians. I remember watching some generic cartoon that had the typical “lizard is bad guy” trope, and it irked me. Why werre the lizards always bad? People weren’t always bad, with a few exceptions, so why were the lizards?

I resolved to solve this perceived injustice. I altered the Vardaen to be reptilian aliens who hailed from a world similar to our own. I kept the music, I kept the nomadic tendencies, but I started to refine the ideas. Expanded knowledge and an utterly obsessive mind for research had me learning more, and more to flesh out the species.

I taught myself how planetary orbits worked, how stars could influence the development of life, and how plate tectonics were a result of not just impacts on the planet but also the mass of the other worlds in the system. I learned how cultures formed, why they formed, and what culture meant. I expanded my knowledge more, and more, and more.

Each time I learned something new, the Vardaen changed. Their family units evolved into something akin to meerkats. Their sleep patterns changed to reflect the slower rotation of the planet. Dinural brains were slightly adjusted to “keep one eye open” like a dolphin to account for the predators. Omnivores became herbivores. Genetics became more flexible, a result of increased mutation due to a thinner ozone layer.

I asked myself, “what would it look like if they didn’t use technology as we understand it?”

That one threw me for a loop for many years. Wasn’t until my early twenties until I was able to create a rational system of expression for a genetic technology. It was the first agricultural revolution that inspired me - humanity learned to domesticate plants before it learned to domesticate animals. If those plants had very clear genetic traits that very obviously combined and recombined as they bred, what would that teach? If animals did the same? If humanity did the same?

It became a jumping off point; a panacea for world building and creation I hadn’t imagined up until then. Their society shifted dramatically as a result. Serious diving into meerkat family groups and their associations altered the dynamic again. And then, I threw in climate change.

I was beginning to grasp the kind of writer I was to become. I enjoy creating highly complex, intricate pieces of art. Then I like to throw it against the wall to see what happens.

So I started throwing things at them. First, the usual period of empires. Then social collapse. Reconstruction and reconstitution. Then a meteor impact that causes planetary climate change.

I wanted to see how it would impact them. I tweaked and altered and adjusted each time I introduced an event. “How would they react to this? What would happen to the families if that changed?”

The name moved away from the Vardaen. It became something else, something I’d used off and on for a while.

Saxheelian.

The species name obvioulsy couldn’t stay that, so I swifted shifted gears and introduced them to my tentative friend group as the “haleel”.

On a world with a 1.1 Earth G towers ten foot tall dinosaurs. They speak through echolocation with each other in the thicker air of their homeworld. Their hides are tough, to resist the apex predators that would make the Jurrasic blush. They have tight knit family groups. Their genetics are flexible - more akin to dog breeds than anything relatable to humanity. Their technology was biological. They evolved as savannah runners - to give a baseline comparison point psychologically with humanity, and a mechanism for both species to understand each other.

They began fairly rough. I had a general idea of a “look” at this point, but nothing super solid. I was fortunate, in that one of the artists who worked on Space Empires V was available, so I connected with them. The end result was interesting, but anatomically wasn’t what I thought would ultimately work as well. Too many areas where organs wouldn’t make sense. At the point I was working on them, they’d achieved a high level of technological advancement, so that was expressed in the attire.

Clothes made up of mushrooms, cellulose fibers, chitosan and the living tissues of various flora gave them all that was needed to achieve that specific look of high technology.

But I wasn’t satisfied.

That is, perhaps, the biggest part of this entire story. I’ve never been completely satisfied with where they are. They’re always changing, always evolving.

Critically, I started to experiment with them in a more active fashion. Instead of simply brain storming how X or Y would impact them, I struck upon the idea of using them actively in roleplay. To let an environment with other humans influence their development, to introduce instability and force design evolution.

Within that context, they changed dramatically.

Socially, I think they were always destined to create some degree of confederation to organize all the different clans and clades. Each one had a different shift in physical appearance - like a group of pugs meeting a group of doxines for trade negotiations. This influenced too how they navigated their own damaged homeworld. Yet, it is this trait that made them such apparently natural negotiators with other races, because when they went to the stars and began to engage with other species, it was not a matter of instinctive revulsion at seeing something Other, but rather a regeneration.

When their climate reached its worst, it was through their collaboration and cooperation that they survived. A thousand years of suffering in a pre-space civilization to rebuild what random chance destroyed gave them not only a sense of almost instinctive purpose, but also a meta-cultural sense of cooperative need. When taken to space and applied to the dizzying challenge of interacting with truly alien intelligences with potentially grotequse physical features, this trait shined through like a beacon.

In a rare exception to the typical rule when doing such types of “war gaming”, they didn’t get crushed, nor did they crush others. They succeeded in creating a collaborative framework for others to exist within. From a roleplayer perspective, they were astonishing. They’d become the perfect vehicle for breaking the well-known trait of “murder hobos” (where in players simply kill everything in their path with impunity).

Events in that incubator resulted in the gameboard being wiped clean, but I did not want to lose the incredibly enticing progress they had made. So I kept them as they were. I ended their story in that realm with an exacuation; shameless Homeworld/BSG rip off moment.

But it would prove to be the best decision I’ve ever made in regards to any creation of mine.

That game took place a little over five years ago, and since then, the Saxheelian name no longer means merely the haleelians. It is a national identity now; over 50 player created species now count themselves among their number. They’d become a bit of a repository - “Hey Rhakon, I’m bored, you wanna hold onto my guys for me?” or “Hey Rhakon, I’m leaving this world building behind, you can have them if you want'“ was pretty normal.

Sometimes, people actively worked to get themselves incorporated into the Saxheelians. The world building was enticing, or the complexity of the storytelling was compelling (I always made it a big deal, wrote several pieces on such events). Sometimes players would ghost, we’d be left with a nation that was supposed to be doing things and people would just shrug and say “The Saxheelians will handle it”. And so they did.

A language evolved as I added more complexity to them; the question arose of “how do I handle so many aliens?” And these weren’t your Star Trek rubber forehead aliens. These were aliens. From species that had no discernable external organs, to ones composed of methane-derived molecules, it was no small task to simply talk to one. Let alone create internal harmony with so many different species. And of course there was the casual question thrown at me one day of “well, doesn’t this just mean the haleel are the ruling class and the rest are second class citizens?”

At that point, the only species I’d really devoted significant time to was the haleel. Everyone else came as they were left and dwelled in that space, languishing.

So I struck upon the idea of improving the situation. I contacted the people I could asking if modifying their creations was alright, and all but one said yes, to have at it and share with them what I did.

With that out of the way, I hunkered down and began to apply my rigerous technique I’d used on the haleel to the species and societies that I’d more or less assimilated.

Within a month, I’d realized the gravity of my error. At over fifty different and distinct alien races, I had essentially undertaken a lifetimes worth of work. For funsies.

What to do, what to do..

Answering some of this came as a natural consequence of my research. I was never really satisfied with things that were too-soft sci-fi. Hated Star Trek’s willy nilly nonsense and vastly preferred Bablyon 5. That show had the type of power scaling, world building, and intruige that I thought suited what I was created, so I used it as a baseline and began to expand.

Unlike the show, I didn’t treat organic technology as the apex. Anyone who’se spent any time investigating such things realizes both the magnitude of the challenge in using organic technology and just how much easier hard-tech can be in comparison. A common trope in some of the few sci-fi groups out there that do in fact use hard sci-fi like Orion’s Arm is that the apex of existence is AI.

I used this as the jumping off point - how can I create a basic set of technologies that could compete against an AI of any level?

At this point, I met someone who has helped to transform the approach to the Saxheelians significantly. I know them as Techno, so that is how I will refer to them.

Techno met me three years ago, in The Great Before Times of pre-covid, and we took to each other immediately. His own world building project was fascinating, using a mix of magic and technology. But his generosity of spirit and willingness to collaborate has led to some of the best advances for the Saxheelians.

Chief among them, the mea cupla: the photonic brain.

I can hear you groaning now.

“Oh my god it just keeps going on and on does this article ever end!?”

Well, yes, this is the TLDR; version too but we’re almost done!~

The biophotonic brain was the answer to the question of “what if we used the light emitted from fireflies as a means of communication of information?” We quickly realized the potential implications of the chemicals required to emit light, so we changed the frequency and the distances, altering the neurons in the brain so that instead of dendrite connections via axions, it was pulsed light that communicated data.

End result is an immediate increase in the speed of the brain by a factor of 1e16. The other immediate consequence was heat. Even with just pure photonics, you’d have to deal with the chemical waste heat and then the waste heat of the light as it bounces around the skull. We racked our brains trying to figure out how to handle it.

Then Techno said more or less “well, let’s just redesign the body too”.

Several months later, we’d landed on a solution to the entire original problem of various classes of citizens as well as the communication issue.

With a redesigned baseline plan for anyone and anything combined with a biophotonic nervous system, you could not only rapidly outpace anything we conceptually understand as an artificial intelligence (we pushed the brain to an order of magnitude better, then layered on even more computational aids in the bones and the like) we also managed to create a whole new mechanism of communication in the form of magnetic wormholes.

Unlike a traditional wormhole, magnetic wormholes do not burrow through space-time. They “send” an imprint of a magnetic field to a location (we don’t know how this happens in real life yet, but we know it happens and that was good enough for me). Assuming one has control over the destination, then magnetic imprints become sufficient enough to communicate information. These magnetic wormholes, or aporro, then acted as a nexus. Every thought, every impulse, everything that composed an intelligent entity, could be conveyed via these imprints - after all, that is precisely what an MRI measures.

If you possessed the perfected means of undersanding the resulting scans, and knew exactly what each area meant when it lit up, you’d be able to “read minds” - technological telepathy.

Socially, the consequence was twofold: first, a newfound sense of unity across many different species. Where as before there was a thousand-thousand tongues, now there was the language of the mind. Not an erasure of the cultures but an augmentation; a supplementary force. Second, because of the density of this data and the ability for these higher order intelligences to throw significant amounts of processing power at things, I decided on the creation of a subdomain reality.

Simply put, VR.

“With one eye, I see The Real. With the other, I see The Other.” Such is the nature of The Duality of a Saxheelian’s existence at this point. They’re neither truly fully a physical being nor a truly fully virtual one - they’re something in the middle. The Bendu would be proud.

Saxheelians have been around nearly 13,000 years now in terms of all the events that have transpired. That is a long, long time. The amount of lore and references and various bits I’ve written or accumulated amounts to well over 2,000 pages and 78,000 different files. They are, more or less, a lifes work in progress.

They’re also my personal answer to The Question: what is the point of living? What is the purpose of life?

To live. To know. To hear. To wonder. To ask. To tell.

I’ve been undecided on if I would post more of them, as they are very special to me and I am generally remiss to share them with most. But, that may change. The future is ever uncertain.

Finally, to explain the title name: the actual name for their society at this point is the “Saxheelian Meta-Antecedent” - as the name simply states, they are the meta-entity that represents the ones who existed before. They never forgot their origins, nor have they ever lost hope for their future.