Androsynth

Historical Origins

The story of the Androsynth is a strange and tragic one, intimately tied to that of their progenitors, the race known as Humans. Their story begins in the initial Renaissance of peaceful human development of science and technology in the first days after the Small War, when the warring nations of Earth were united under the United Nations. The UN, fearing a future global holocaust of the development of superweapons like nuclear warheads and orbital lasers continued, began forcibly trying to steer human innovation away from the fields of warfare and destruction, toward peaceful applications that could benefit a unified, cooperative human race. They put tough government restrictions on work in physics and mechanical engineering, preventing the development of high-energy technologies that could be used for weapons. With human creativity thus stymied in the areas it had been strongest for most of its recent past, humans began exploring the new and fruitful field of biotechnology.

A brilliant Swiss scientist at the Zurich BioTeknik, one of the new research institutions that sprung up in this new environment of biological research, did an extensive study of the completed map of the human genetic code that the Human Genome Project had finished decades before. Modern technology now allowed him to use this information to edit human genes at will and then develop a reliable, cost-effective method of parthenogenesis to grow living individuals based on those genes. Hsien Ho had realized the dreams of generations of gengineering and cloning researchers -- being able to produce artificially designed human beings.

In the year reckoned 2019 in the human calendar, Ho began his project of creating a series of genetically modified human beings. None of their genetic traits were outside the normal capacity of human beings -- they were, by any reasonable definition, as human as anyone else -- but Ho's genetic engineering created an improbably "perfect" genetic code, with any possibility for disease or disability wiped out and the chance for physical health and fitness, very high intelligence and a strong, balanced personality maximized. The new humans were all genetic near-clones of each other, with only slight differences between each individual in the group. In order to prevent the various potential complications linked to reproduction (both flaws that might show up in his genetic sequencing if the clones' cells underwent meiosis, and political opposition from those who saw the clones as a threat to "normal" humans) Ho made his clones all male and all congenitally sterile, greatly reducing the risk of any sexually-related complications.

The original hopes of Hsien Ho were that as the clones matured they would be slowly integrated into human society and, serving as great scientists, artists and engineers, open the door for future improvement of the human race through biotechnology. Unfortunately, these hopes would not be realized, thanks to the vagaries of human politics. Many human beings, still traumatized by the near-brush with total destruction of the human race in the Small War, found themselves bereft of spiritual solace, as many of the world's oldest and most powerful religions had collapsed or found their foundations deeply shaken as their most sacred sites in the Middle East had been melted to glass by nuclear weapons. Filing this vacuum came the teachings of one Jason MacBride, a man who had formerly made his living selling used ground-transport vehicles before he received what he believed to be divine revelation.

He believed the Millennium was near, a concept whose name came from Christianity but was common to many human religions, a mythical universal shift of the nature of existence -- an end to the metaphorical "thousand years" of ordinary human history and the beginning of a new "thousand years", after which humans would ascend to a godlike, wholly spiritual existence free from struggle or doubt. MacBride, like others before him, predicted a specific date, March 11, 2046, on which normal human existence would end, and claimed that any of sufficient faith and virtue would arise beyond their corporeal human status. Whether it was MacBride's strong personal charisma or just the novelty of a sincere religious leader, separate from the discredited traditional religions, unafraid to make bold claims in the aftermath of such a universally disheartening global event, MacBride's influence spread like wildfire and he soon became one of the most influential humans on Earth.

MacBride claimed that he and his followers were the Homo Deus, or "Godly Men"; the use of the Latin term was a conscious implication that his followers would become a new human species superior to ordinary men and women at the time of the new Millennium. MacBride's religion, acting as a cultural opponent of the United Nations' humanist, materialist, technology-dependent plans for a future utopia, thus saw the creation of an *artificial* race of humans, seemingly also planned to be a new, superior version of humanity using cold, godless technology, as the ultimate threat to his own beliefs. If science could cure humanity's ills in as dramatic a way as remaking the human race, it was a direct blow to people's need for divine intervention to do the same, and therefore a blow to their desire for religious devotion and faith.

MacBride thus began a public campaign attacking the adolescent clones. He named them "Android Synthetica" or "Built Man-Like Things" ("Artificial False Men"), a conscious parallel to his "Homo Deus". This name, interestingly, uses Greek roots rather than Latin; whether this was intentional or not is questionable (MacBride was no scholar), yet it soon gained the connotation among the Homo Deus of defining Androsynth as not only not being a part of the human species Homo sapiens or the genus Homo, but not even being defined by an ordinary Latin genus-species name -- not being part of the taxonomy of "natural" animals. Interestingly, the practice of using Greek terms rather than Latin by human xenologists to name alien as opposed to terrestrial species and objects when using the species' term is difficult or inconvenient (see, for example, the use of Slylandro ("Sky-Men") as a name for a gas-giant species, or Ultron ("Beyond One") for the difficult-to-translate Utwig term for the central artifact of their religion).

The rest of the world, grown complacent in their material peace and prosperity after the Small War, allowed the Homo Deus movement to win legal battle after legal battle, stripping away the clones' rights and increasingly defining them as nonhuman. The "Android Synthetica" term used by Homo Deus, shortened to "Androsynth", eventually became the commonly used name for them, and by the time the clones reached adulthood they had attained a legal status more or less parallel with slavery. They were immensely valuable both as scientific curiosities and for their native genetic talents that made them excellent researchers, engineers and designers, and therefore were pampered and sheltered wherever they went. However, the corporations who had sponsored their development effectively owned them as chattels, having direct control over what work they were assigned to do, where they were allowed to live, and every other aspect of their lifestyle and treatment. They lacked the basic human rights to bargain for their wages, choose what projects they wished to work on, freely express their views and participate in governance and independent economic activity, a state that the enlightened governments of Earth would never have tolerated for any other human beings had not the dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at them by the Homo Deus not infected Earth's culture to such a degree.

The day March 11, 2046 came and went, and no detectable change in the human condition took place. MacBride, shamed and discredited, claimed that the devotion of the human race had been lacking and that the vast majority of his Homo Deus followers had been deceiving him into thinking their level of faith and commitment was much higher than it actually was, and that their faithlessness poisoned the movement and prevented the Millennium. Soon, the Homo Deus movement dissipated, and MacBride faded from public life, leaving the legitimacy of his most enduring political legacy, the definition of the Androsynth as non-human non-citizens, in question. Nonetheless opportunistic corporations continued to finance the creation of new generations of Androsynth to join Ho's original creations. Whatever the ethical isssues involved, the prospect of having preternaturally talented and competent high-level workers whom one could legally control with absolute, unchallengeable authority was irresistible. By the 2070s, tens of thousands of Androsynth existed all over the world, and the cutting edge of human technological research was dependent on the Androsynth as a self-contained, infinitely exploitable intellectual resource. In particular, Androsynth researchers were deeply involved in humans' most ambitious technological project to date, the creation of a hyperdrive that would allow them to break the speed-of-light barrier and reach the stars.

It was, in retrospect, inevitable that a group whose usefulness came from their high levels of education, intelligence and resourcefulness, with a cultural sense of ethics and morality that was, after all, essentially human, would grow to understand their uniquely subjugated position in the world and find it intolerable, and would be able to find a way to escape it. This was reinforced by the Androsynth's knowledge of their own original purpose, designed as humans who would be superior to the ordinary human population in every way, by human standards. Finding themselves slaves in a society that they increasingly began to see as beneath their level, they began an intense series of secret communications with each other and with a worldwide network of human sympathizers who saw their people's oppression of the Androsynth as a deep injustice. The last humiliation was when a group of scientists in the Eurasian Region of the United Nations used several Androsynth as disposable guinea pigs in a highly dangerous physics experiment -- an experiment that would have been impossible to conduct without human subjects whose legal status allowed their owners to send them to their deaths without penalty, and that even then would have been unthinkable in earlier decades when Androsynth had been rarer and more valuable. Outraged Eurasian Androsynth responded to news of these abuses with riots in the abortive Hamburg Revolt, in which isolated Androsynth rebels briefly seized control of that city before they were violently suppressed by UN military forces. It was this incident that crystallized for the Androsynth community just how impossible it would be for them to live in peace with human masters who saw them as property, and drove them to universally commit to a workable plan for revolution and escape.

Utilizing their highly refined organizational skills and a number of technological breakthroughs they had carefully kept secret from their human masters, in the spring of 2085 the Androsynth and their human friends staged the violent Clone Revolt; with quick and deadly precision, the Androsynth captured almost every spaceport on the planet. Androsynth engineers and managers had been integral to the operations of the world's largest spaceflight centers, and had used their influence there to secretly siphon off over a thousand spacecraft from the world's shipping, keeping them fueled and ready in preparation for a mass Androsynth exodus, completed within a second 24 hours, after which all Androsynth had left the Earth's surface and seized control of all of Earth's orbital and lunar stations.

Shocked and terrified, the authorities of Earth mobilized Star Control, a wing of the United Nations military created to maintain order among humans in extraterrestrial space. Facing the greatest breakdown of order in space imaginable, Star Control forces launched strike after strike against the Androsynth. However, the Androsynth, in defiance of the UN ban on exploring the engineering of weapons-grade radiation-project devices, had earlier researched a cheap and effective means of converting ordinary radio transmitters into laser-like coherent-radiation projectors (MASERs) far more powerful than anything available to the stagnant Earth military-industrial complex. They jury-rigged a large arsenal of MASERs from the peaceful stations' formerly benign communications arrays, and used them to effortlessly demolish Star Control invasion forces for two months.

The Androsynth, rejected from the human race and now no longer considering themselves human, now blockaded vital traffic between Earth and its mining and manufacturing outposts in the inner system and were in prime position to attack their former masters with whatever weapons of mass destruction they might possess or eventually create. A numbed United Nations now faced a dangerous, unpredictable, *inhuman* enemy outside their jurisdiction; seeing no other options, they steeled themselves to break their most sacred pact with each other and unlock the Peace Vaults, where Earth's ancient stockpiles of nuclear warheads and orbital lasers had been kept in reserve for an event such as this.

Whether the Androsynth became aware of the UN's plans or not is unknown, but in all probability they, too, recognized that their hold on near-Earth space was not tenable in the long term. Before Earth's arsenals could be refitted for duty, Star Control observers found eight of Earth's largest orbital stations, including the recently finished StarLight Hilton, an exotic luxury hotel, accelerating toward the outer system.

The Androsynth engineers had somehow modified huge, ungainly habitat structures intended to stay in stable orbits their entirely lifetimes into fast, powerful spacecraft. Despite the stations' great mass, their new engines were able to accelerate them quickly enough that Star Control's fastest interception vessels were unable to stop them or even catch up with them. However, one of the faster ten-thruster freighters, taking advantage of the Androsynth's abandonment of their near-Earth strongholds to return to Earth with its cargo, detected the Androsynth fleet passing it and was able to push its acceleration capabilities to its limits, intercepting the Androsynth long enough to observe their next actions. The freighter's pilot saw the Androsynth vessels surround themselves with a glowing, rotating energy field, which then suddenly projected to a point 500 meters ahead of the vessels, creating a huge glowing red region of space like a "great hole"; the vessels accelerated into the hole, at which point vessels and hole suddenly vanished.

In the years to come, humans would correctly identify the Androsynth's disappearance as bearing all the marks of a standard hyperdrive "pushing up", warping space-time constants to create a region of overlap with Hyperspace or "Hyperspace portal", a sight familiar to all spacefaring races. Not only had the Androsynth created a working hyperdrive in secret, they had managed to fit all eight of their habitats with hyperdrives powerful enough to carry those huge structures out of the Solar System. The humans of Earth would never make that last leap into technological modernity on their own, only acquiring hyperdrive technology when given it by the Chenjesu at the founding of the Alliance. The eventual fate of the Androsynth would remain a mystery to their human ancestors, until the unwelcome surprise of encountering them as battle thralls for the Hierarchy during the Great Crucible of Sentience.

The War

Little is now known about the Androsynth's history after the Emigration, as they called it. However, we can infer that they eventually arrived at the Vulpeculae constellation, the same place the long-dead Taalo race had made their home in the days of the Sentient Milieu. Finding the second planet of the star Eta Vulpeculae a suitably Earthlike world, they settled there and began expanding, soon having a bustling population and a colonial sphere of influence throughout Vulpeculae space, even establishing uneasy but peaceful interstellar relations with their Spathi neighbors.

Unfortunately, they had barely been free for thirty years when the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za Hierarchy, fresh from their initial defeat at the hands of the Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrrm's initial defense force that halted their rimward advance toward Sol, turned spinward to accumulate more local battle thralls for the war ahead. While the prized resources and industrial capacity of Earth were inaccessible to the Ur-Quan, blocked by Chenjesu forces who were already hastily recruiting the humans into their Alliance of Free Stars, the Ur-Quan saw an opportunity in the Androsynth, the wayward children of the phenomenal humans.

The Androsynth, upon hearing the Ur-Quan's demands of fealty, had no wish to once again be slaves to others and fought bitterly to retain their freedom, but their relatively small population and underdeveloped military was no match for the Hierarchy's might. Forced into humiliating slavery under the Ur-Quan in the year 2112, the Androsynth, as the Ur-Quan probably predicted, chose to accept the status of battle thrall and maintain the illusion of freedom. Cementing this illusion in their own minds, Androsynth culture accepted their place in the Hierarchy by rationalizing it, not primarily as serving their new Ur-Quan masters, but as an opportunity to wreak revenge upon their former human masters.

No protestations that humans, in the wake of the Clone Revolt, had after the fact almost universally denounced the unjust mistreatment of the Androsynth could satisfy them, nor could memories of the human sympathizers who helped them escape. Stoking the memory of past slights, only a few decades old, was the only tool Androsynth leaders could use to sublimate the shame at being enslaved again so soon.

The rebuilt Androsynth military thus became an enthusiastic supporter of the Hierarchy, demanding to primarily be placed in combat against the humans as a condition of their service; the Ur-Quan, glad that their predictions about Androsynth psychology had proven accurate, indulged them in this and found them to be a highly effective weapon against the humans. Androsynth ship designs and tactics were optimized for use against the comparatively more primitive Star Control forces, and Androsynth commanders, filled with bloodlust, would go outside their Ur-Quan-given orders and purposely seek out Earth-built vessels to hunt for sport.

Androsynth became humans' most feared enemy in the war, next to the Ilwrath; humans found it extremely difficult to deal with the nameless terror of fighting an enemy that they saw a genetically enhanced version of themselves, the "next step of human evolution"; moreover, human society experienced a deep sense of guilt at being asked to direct their strength against an enemy whom their own mothers and fathers had been complicit in cruelly oppressing, a sense that the Androsynth's hatred of humanity was justified and humanity's defeat at Androsynth hands would be deserved. These psychological factors, combined with the incredible speed and manueverability of Androsynth Guardian vessels in Blazer attack mode, making them almost impossible to detect with primitive human laser-scanning arrays -- a fact the Androsynth utilized to great effect in their hit-and-run tactics against human fleets -- made patrolling Androsynth-contested space one of the most stressful, draining and dreaded tasks for human commanders in the war. Human captains in Androsynth territory became obsessed with their enemies and their inevitable vengeance, constantly dreaming of Guardian ships lurking just out of sight or in disguise, and often madly destroying all nearby asteroids in bursts of what Star Control officers colloquially termed "clone fever".

After the war ended in 2134, the humans were defeated and Earth slave-shielded, the Ur-Quan left for their Doctrinal Conflict, leaving their slaves more or less unattended. The Androsynt, having participated in the defeat and humiliation of their former masters, thus re-embarked on their peaceful programs of scientific research and self-improvement.

Disappearance

A decade after the end of the war, an Androsynth Guardian, performing a long-range high-speed scouting mission in Blazer form, scanned and located Precursor artifacts in Alpha Lalande. The device used generated waves of alteration in normal space-time -- a phenomenon Androsynth scientists dubbed Dimensional Fatigue, or DF -- that allowed them to observe numerous other realities separated from our reality by dimensional barriers, aside from the previously discovered and easily accessible Hyperspace.

What happened next is extremely unclear. The story only became known during the Second War, when The Captain of the SIS began investigating strange reports from the Spathi of the Androsynth's recent disappearance from interstellar affairs. What had once been Androsynth space was now populated by a new sentient race that seemed to have come from nowhere, a fish-like calling itself the Orz, speaking a bizarre tongue that human linguists had great difficulty in translating, even with Precursor computer technology, and singularly unwilling to discuss the fate of the Androsynth.

The Science Officer of the Vindicator, a man named Bukowski, led an ill-fated expedition onto Eta Vulpeculae 2 to investigate the Androsynth's fateFrom pieced-together computer records, he learned of the Androsynth's acquisition of the Precursor artifacts and their discovery of DF phenomena. Eager to potentially use newly discovered extradimensional spaces as media for transport and communication that allowed for even more compressed distances than Hyperspace, they began experiments only to make contact with some sort of sentient being living in another space. The entity or entities then began to make reciprocal contact with them, manifesting itself in the form of anomalous, supernatural-seeming physical events eerily similar to those described in Earth paranormal studies; fundamental forces like gravity experienced wild fluctuations in their strength, sensors began to inconsistently perceive nonexistent objects, and physical objects appeared to undergo motion and stress from sourceless, disembodied forces. The Androsynth frantically consulted their sketchy records of such phenomena, derived from a few Earth studies rarely seen as reputable, but to no avail.

Though we can never know the details, the Androsynth at some point appear to have waged some sort of massive ground war, with no sign of any opponents having invaded from space or even to have fought at all above the ground. With the cities devastated by nuclear explosions that somehow detonated from within, all Androsynth bodies appear to have mysteriously vanished -- no biological traces of the Androsynth remained on the planet. And then, somehow, there were the Orz.

We might have learned more had Bukowski not himself gone insane during his investigations, claiming that his increasing knowledge of "Them", the entities responsible for the Androsynth's disappearance, had allowed "Them" to make a psychic link with him personally, and that further research would draw "Their" attention and cause the human race to be destroyed as the Androsynth had. He was found by his team in the process of destroying all remaining Androsynth computer records, bleeding heavily from self-inflicted wounds (though some witnesses reported seeing wounds spontaneously appear on his body). He was rushed back to the human Starbase for psychiatric treatment and the expedition was scrapped; though Bukowski later achieved some level of recovery, he never again spoke of anything he'd learned on the Androsynth homeworld.

Speculation rages as to why the Androsynth vanished; it may be that human psychology, after ages of having been engineered by the extra-dimensional Arilou La'leelay, is particularly vulnerable to attack from extra-dimensional entities for one reason or another. Once the Androsynth left the fold of the main human race, they seem to have left whatever form of protection the Arilou claim to have placed on the human race to prevent an attack by "Them".

It may also be that they were unfortunate in their choice of a home. Zelnick confirmed speculations by xenohistorians that the Taalo homeworld had been the second moon of Delta Vulpeculae 3. If some translators interpret particular statements by the Orz correctly, the Taalo had some mastery of DF technology themselves and were able to use this technology to travel between realities, using it to escape destruction from the Dnyarri Slave Empire. This action in the past might have contributed to attracting the attention of extra-dimensional entities to the physical vicinity of the Vulpeculae constellation and put the Androsynth at greater risk, though our understanding of the relationship between physical places in our space-time and "Theirs" is hazy at best.

General Description

The original Androsynth were all created from a single genetic encoding of what was meant to be a physically optimal human being. Their shared genome causes them all to look very similar, if not identical; their features appear more or less like those of an average man of the Caucasian race, though part of Hsien Ho's enhancements were to make their features unusually regular and symmetrical, and therefore unusually attractive by human convention. Perhaps in defiance of their original creator's insistence on the perfect symmetry of their faces and bodies, the later generations of Androsynth on Earth adopted an asymmetrical hairstyle, all brushing their hair meticulously to the right of their heads. This was their one stylistic affectation; on Earth, Androsynth were constantly required to wear uniforms with a triangular insignia informing others of their Androsynth status, along with a headset keeping them constantly in radio contact with their work supervisors; this uniform was supplemented with a small tattoo under the right eye of the same Androsynth insignia in case an Androsynth escaped his supervisors and attempted to disguise himself.

After the Slave Revolt and the Emigration, the Androsynth appear to have kept many of these markers of their former slavery as a conscious badge of pride, continuing to wear the uniforms and tattoos and use the headsets (later incorporating visors to add communication of visual data) in memory of their ancestors' way of life. They did, however, abandon the distinctive hairstyles; they also apparently made modifications to the base Androsynth genome, adding melanin to their skin and hair to make themselves more resilient against various degrees of solar radiation in their colonizing efforts.

The Androsynth, all male and without functioning testes, continued to produce new generations using their own version of Ho's parthenogenesis process. Rather than adopt the naming conventions of their human oppressors, they continued to wear the impersonal alphanumeric callsigns given to them by their masters as another badge of pride, with each clone identified by a set of letters corresponding to the "batch" in which he was created, then a number identifying the order in which he'd been born from that batch.

Sexual relationships and family structures among the Androsynth were, obviously, normatively "homosexual," as no female gender existed in their ranks. Androsynth revolutionary theory seemed to consciously identify itself with queer theory as expressed in the gay-rights movement of the late 20th and early 21st century, as the Androsynth, like homosexuals, had to confront and reject traditional religious and cultural definitions of "humanity" based on one's being part of an unbroken chain of sexual reproduction that defined one's family line. This may be why the Androsynth after the Emigration consciously changed the Androsynth insignia from a black inverted triangle to a pink one, imitating the 20th-century symbol of queer liberation.

This perceived parallel among both Androsynth and humans may have tied into perceptions of the Androsynth as a culturally refined blue-blood elite, effete and foppish and free of the coarser inclinations of ordinary human males (a stereotype often applied to homosexual male humans even in modern times). It is true that the Androsynth, due to their training and professions, apparently developed a desire for engineering elegance and aesthetic purity that appears extreme next to human culture. This perception is exacerbated by their choice to model their fleet of Guardian vessels after the original space stations in their escape fleet, so that each Guardian has the features of a complete, self-sustaining spaceborne habitat, packing in as much useful living and working space as possible using the StarLight Hilton's avant-garde intriciately layered architecture.

Rather than sacrificing this space for the increased acceleration and manueverability of a lower-mass ship when designing their military fleet, Androsynth engineers discovered a more intricate, complex and elegant solution (if a more unwieldy one). Perhaps the most amazing engineering accomplishment was the invention of the "Blazer", a retrofitting of Guardian vessels allowing them to change configuration in a deceptively simple manner, allowing for much more efficient thruster use and the ability to use their own large mass as a weapon and instantly changing the existing quasi-civilian Guardian habitats into one of the sector's most powerful battle fleets. The development of such an alien-seeming technology is perhaps the best demonstration of how far Androsynth scientific and cultural development diverged from humans' during their separation.

What little else we know of Androsynth civilization comes from our encounters with them in combat. Both naturally blessed with more analytical, better organized mindsets than the average human, and with a culture that encouraged constant communication with each other through the ubiquitous headset-visors, Androsynth were able to function in concert as ship's crews more easily than humans, a team of four able to operate a ship's basic command functions needing comparatively little computer equipment or verbal communication compared to a human bridge. They also required far fewer amenities in battle conditions, their bodies being physically hale enough to function under much greater stresses than that of the average human crewman.

Before their disappearance, they had a well-developed urban culture on their own planet, with several large cities, whose daily activities were all linked by a giant computer network based on an enormous central server, with smaller mainframes serving the central-computing needs of each city and dedicated research station. The Androsynth emphasized centrally coordinated research and information storage, and their intricate library system did not begin to break down until the early stages of their disappearance; the meticulous record-keeping of their computers is the main reason we have even as complete a picture of their last days as we do today.