Literature / Bosun's Journal

Bosun's Journal is a month-long series of worldbuilding posts on Reddit created by u/CaptainStroon as part of the March 2023 "Man After March" event on r/SpeculativeEvolution. It is a work of Speculative Biology describing the history of the Nebukadnezar, a Generation Ship sent to colonize Gliese 514.

The Nebukadnezar was accidentally slingshotted around its target and out of the galaxy altogether by an engine malfunction. Over time, the stranded passengers form a corporate-based society that makes heavy use of genetic engineering to adapt to the ship's low biodiversity and delicate and complex infrastructure, resulting in a proliferation of increasingly specialized posthuman varieties that eventually form an intricately complex caste system, each component species of which is specialized to perform a specific task to keep society or the ship itself running. After nearly 300,000 years of this, however, a war sparked over the ethics of creating nonsapient posthumans devastates the ship, and together with increasing overspecialization among the corporate posthumans leads to the gradual collapse of civilization until sapience is entirely lost. The ship's vast chambers thus become home only to non-sapient posthuman strains, which gradually develop into a variety of complex ecosystems until, tens of millions of years down the line, the spark of sapient thought emerges once again.

The histories of the ship's varied passengers are narrated by the Bosun, the Nebukadnezar's shipboard AI, who remains as an observer of their fates over the thousands and millions of years.

The first post in the sequence can be found here. The project is planned to eventually upload onto the author's website, here.

In 2024, the project received a follow-up, Bosun's Return, set following a crew of three copies of the Bosun, each housed in an engineered biomechanical body, sent to explore the barren, alien ruins of an ancient world — Earth, now a ruined and abandoned ecumenopolis inhabited by strange forms of life, and orbiting a dying red Sun in its last gasping throes of life. Its index can be found here.

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Examples:

Bosun's Journal

• Absent Aliens: Downplayed. Over the main body of the project, the Nebukadnezar encounters neither aliens nor other humans due to drifting in interstellar space. After enough repairs are made to get the ship moving under its own power again, the Bosun's final log mentions that, in their journeys among intergalactic stars and dwarf galaxies, they never encountered any alien life more advanced than lichen, nor any other human colonies — all life out there is the fruit of the Nebukadnezar and the various colonies that it seeded. However, the Bosun speculates that sapient aliens may exist due to some radio transmissions that he picked up over the ages, and that they simply keep to the main galaxies like the rest of humanity presumably does.
• After the End: The broken era comes in the wake of the corpocaste culture destroying itself in a devastating war. One of the four habitat cylinders is left entirely shattered and open to the void; the Bosun is forced to halt the rotation of another to prevent the now-uneven rotational stresses from tearing the ship apart, which has the side effect of collapsing its society by suddenly forcing it into zero gravity; and the outmost cylinder, cut off from the rest by the destruction of habitat two, is left without access to water supplies and slowly turns into a desert. What follows are a few million years of steady decay as society breaks down into increasingly small groups of scavengers, hunter-gatherers and decadent enclaves of the descendants of former elites, all of which steadily decline in technology and social complexity until they either die out or become simple animals. In the end, after the last sapient human dies, history transitions into a period of tens of millions of years where only animals inhabit the Nebukadnezar until, eventually, new sapient species emerge.
• Alien Landmass: During the corpocaste era, the people of habitat one developed self-repairing streets by genetically engineering bacterial colonies to gather sand and gravel around themselves to form a protective asphalt shell, which they regrow and repair if damaged. After the cataclysmic war that destroyed shipboard civilization, these living roads slowly mutated and began to grow past their original limits. Millions of years later, these became the streetreefs, tangled, mazelike walls of interlocking columns of asphalt, constantly grown and repaired by the bacterial colonies forming them, still tracing the network of the old road systems, dividing the deserts of Habitat One into a network of isolated pocket habitats, and serving as home to unique ecosystems in their own right.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: In the chronologically last entry, nearly six billion years in the future, the Nebukadnezar's population has decided to upload their minds into the ship's immense data banks alongside the Bosun. Nobody, not the Bosun or the citizens, is entirely sure what will happen — the AI's billions-years-old mind might overwhelm and absorb the others, the millions of fresh minds might overwhelm the Bosun, they might fuse into a single new entity, or they might continue to exist as distinct natives of a digital landscape — but they are all very excited to find out.
• Bat People: The weightless people, adapted for the zero-gravity environment of Habitat 3, have arms modified into batlike wings and elongated legs with prehensile feet.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism:
  • Female changeling sphinxes are four times the size of the males, and have only a small covering of hair on their heads. Males instead have a thick covering of woolly fur over their heads, necks, bellies, and backs, and only one lives in each pride. When hunting their primary prey, the sheep-like woolly humies, the male sneaks into the herd and pretends to be a lamb, in order to scout out weak or injured individuals and lead potential prey into ambushes or weaken them with a poisonous bite, after which the larger and more numerous females take it down.
  • Riddlesphinxes, the changeling sphinxes' sapient descendants, develop a more extreme form of this by exaggerating their ancestors' size differences. Male riddlesphinxes, while still sapient, are noticeably less intelligent than the females due to having much smaller brains. After becoming a mated pair, the male stays permanently on the female's back, providing fine manipulation while the female provides the thinking power and muscle. A married woman's traditional clothing includes a tent-like structure on her lower back and tail in which her husband rides in.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: A variant. The spindly stabbers skewer their prey using the extremely long, spear-like nails of their index fingers.
• Body Horror: The decoratians, a creation of the brat barons during the broken era, were made to be essentially human houseplants. They're entirely sessile, spending their lives rooted in their pots, and their bodies are extensively sculpted in vitro to create aesthetically interesting patterns from their elongated, curving necks, protruding bones, and external, hyperextended ribs that interlock and move in complex patterns as they breathe.
• Born in the Saddle: The riderfolk and mountpeople are an unusual example in that both parties involved are sapient, and live in a symbiotic relationship — which makes this a rare case where the riders are as culturally important to the steeds as the steeds are to the riders. The physically weak riderfolk pair up with the stronger but handless mountpeople in adolescence, form a permanent bond afterwards, and travel in their rider-steed pair for most of their lives; their coming-of-age ceremony involves the pair crafting their first saddle, swearing an oath of partnership, and riding off into the plains as fast as they can go. One of their descendant species, the doubletaurs, eventually become true symbiotes, attached to the point of sharing their circulatory systems.
• Brain in a Jar: The thinking buildings are artificially created human neural networks used as the AIs of large buildings. At the center of each building is its brain, suspended in a clear jar of sterile fluid and connected to sensory inputs and organ systems scattered around the building by a network of nerve fibers and fluid vessels.
• Character Narrator: The entries are narrated by the Bosun, the Nebukadnezar's shipboard AI, who endures through the long ages of the ship's journey and carefully records the histories and misfortunes of the ship's passengers and their bestial descendants.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The genetically engineered Human Subspecies of the Corpocaste era were often tailor-made for increasingly specific tasks, such as hardware maintenance in low-G or corporate planning. After the collapse of civilization in a disastrous war, most human varieties found themselves unable to thrive outside of their extremely specific niches, as they were typically unable to recreate civilization's complex web of interdependent systems on their own and were often psychologically unable to form stable societies; some, such as the canmen, were entirely unable to survive or reproduce without advanced technological infrastructure. Others went the other way, victims of their own success, as they were so well-suited for thriving in a very specialized niche that they had no incentive or ability to spread outside of it or to retain complex tool use or problem-solving intelligence. Within a few million years, all human strains either died out or regressed into animalistic intelligence.
• Cyborg:
  • The canmen of the corpocaste era are a rather extreme example of this. They are artificially created posthumans grown directly within a tubular cybernetic shell, with no exposed parts except for their flat faces, short arms and a "plug" of flesh at their bases, visible through the shell's open side. Their shells can be plugged into a variety of machines and computer systems, which the canmen can control using mind/machine interfaces through the direct wiring connecting their brains to the shell's own computer systems, and elderly canmen tend to stop even using their biological arms in favor of having mechanical limbs installed on their shells; their digestive systems are also routed through external ports that funnel water and nutrient paste directly into their stomachs and remove waste. They were created to be ideal white-collar workers, capable of working more or less continuously in minimal space — their equivalents of cubicle farms are basically just walls filled with cylindrical sockets — and excel at this job.
  • The sailbuilders of the sailing era are a species of clones with organic bodies grown within biomechanical ones. A sailbuilder has a tall robotic body, completely vacuum-sealed, with long limbs and a set of transparent domes making up its torso and head sections. Within these, grown into and around the mechanical components, is the organic body: this consists of two ribcages, an outer one modified to serve as a growth trellis for plants that produce oxygen and food for the sailbuilder and an inner one protecting their vital organs, as well as a long neck and arms capable of moving through the entire body cavity, and a secondary, shorter set of arms limited to the rib area.
• Distant Finale: A rather extreme example. The body of the project takes place over a span of about a hundred and thirty million-odd years; the chronologically last entry is set six billion years in the future, by which point the ship and the Bosun, still alive and well, have seeded countless civilizations and ecosystems across the rogue suns and dwarf galaxies of the intergalactic void.
• Dragon Hoard: About half of all adult great dragon sphinxes are compulsive hoarders of shiny items, and accumulate large hoards of metal, crystals, glass and other shiny or sparkly things that they dig out of the ancient ruins of civilization. The rest of the species roams nomadically, seeking out the glint of hoards and, depending on their mood and sex, either fighting them for their shinies or mating.
• Expy: The desert ravers are directly inspired by the Satyriacs of All Tomorrows, with whom they share theropod-like body plans and a hedonistic, celebration-filled and somewhat myopic culture.
• Eyeless Face: The sentinels of the Ezarian abyss are a posthuman species adapted for life within the Nebukadnezar's immense water holding tanks. Since these areas are entirely lightless, the sentinels have long lost their eyes; their elongated faces are instead dominated by nasal slits.
• Fantastic Caste System: In the corpocaste culture, each role in society was filled by a Human Subspecies genetically engineered to be perfectly suited for it, which resulted in intense cultural stratification and pigeonholing. Some of these modifications were relatively conservative and primarily affecting psychological traits, such as corporate executives engineered with enhanced cognitive abilities and competitive drives or valets designed to have increased short-term memory retention, balance and dexterity. Others were much more extreme, such as maintenancers, people designed with prehensile feet and long, slender index and middle fingers to perform maintenance in low- to no-gravity areas of the spaceship, or the canmen, sessile Cyborgs designed as white-collar workers (and, somewhat ironically, a type with unusual amounts of career flexibility — their nature as ultimate desk workers and data processors meant that some were able to rise quite high in corporate ranks).
• Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: Many posthuman strains come to closely resemble ancient animals in appearance and behavior. Woolly humies, an artificially designed livestock species, strongly resemble sheep; their wooly manoth descendants instead resemble mammoths; changeling sphinxes, feline in appearance, evolve to hunt woolly humies in cooperative prides in a manner similar to lions; the spindly stabbers are flightless descendants of azhdarchid-like flyers; thumbsucking facecrabs are flat, crab-like beings that walk on eight finger-derived legs and hunt for food using the long nails of their thumbs.
• Fantastic Livestock:
  • The early civilization used genetic engineering to turn some of the shipboard animals into sources of meat, such as rodent-derived rattle and songfowl created by altering songbirds into chicken analogues.
  • Later, some corporations take to creating human-derived livestock such as sheep-like woolly humies and almost immobile fleshloafs, which ends up sparking an outright war over ethical clashes.
  • Millions of years down the line, one lineage of feline-like posthuman animals takes to hunting feral woolly humie descendants. Much later on, their sapient descendants, the riddlesphinxes, tend to herds of woolly manoths as a form of nomadic livestock.
• Fat Bastard: The brat barons, degenerate post-apocalyptic descendants of posthumans designed to be genius corporate strategists, are typically entitled, arrogant, oafish beings and hugely overweight due to lives spent doing little beyond lying around, eating, and haranguing their servants.
• Formerly Sapient Species: The war between the Nebu and Kadn habitats is caused by Nebu breaking the longstanding taboo against genetically engineering non-sapient human species. The war destroys posthuman society, leaving only a few scattered survivors who eventually degrade into nonsapience, joining the existing human animals in forming a complex ecosystem dominated by a tremendous variety of animals whose ancestors were once civilized humans.
• Future Imperfect: The bird herders, a culture of Lilliputians who live in the ruins of an avian research lab and domesticate songbirds as mounts, revere three large taxidermied birds — a swan, an eagle, and a condor — as gods. They seem to retain a bit of distorted knowledge about these, as they for instance worship the condor as a god of death.
• Genius Loci:
  • The Bosun functions as the mind of the Nebukadnezar itself, and can use a network of surveillance system, computers and remote drones to observe and exercise some control over most of its bulk.
  • Thinking buildings are artificially grown human neural networks integrated into buildings, allowing them to perceive and control these as extensions of their immobile bodies.
• Generation Ships: The Nebukadnezar is a generation ship originally intended to carry human settlers to Gliese 514 and built to house an immense self-sustaining internal system and with each of its four rotating cylinder habitats large enough to hold a small nation's worth of colonists. It missed its target and, being unable to efficiently maneuver itself in deep space, was doomed to drift through space forever. Its sheer size and hardy systems were capable of saving its passengers due to being stable enough to endure indefinitely with sufficient maintenance, and over the ages it essentially becomes a bottled, enclosed world of its own. An advanced civilization develops within and rules for nearly three hundred thousand years; after it collapses due to a terrible war, the ship's cavernous interior and life support systems become home to thriving ecologies of once-human animals, even as the ship's steady course carries it out of the Milky Way altogether. Eventually, after the reemergence of sapient life, it's retrofitted for true, permanent space sailing and becomes a nomadic island-world traveling through intergalactic space.
• Gentle Giant: The rippers are hulking Super Soldiers strong enough to tear a human in half, capable of shrugging off small arms fire, and prone to berserk rages. They're also surprisingly peaceful beings when not in the throes of their genetically engineered blood crazes, are extremely gentle towards others of their kind, and prefer to keep to themselves when not driven into waging war.
• Hive Caste System: The humlings are a eusocial species with a complex caste system inspired by the side-blotched lizards, which have three male and two female morphs in real life. Humlings have three sexes — males, fertile females (called pregnantrices, and much larger than the others) and sterile females — divided between three castes each — workers who dig the colony's underground nests, scout territory, and gather food, nurses who tend to young and pregnantrices, and hunters who track and kill prey and fight off threats. Sterile females perform the basic tasks in the colony, pregnantrices of all three castes produce young, and males live as nomadic, solitary predators who roam around looking for colonies with whose pregnantrices they try to mate — worker males sneak in and cuddle with pregnantrices to get them in the mood to mate, and sometimes spend a longer period with the colony and aid the female workers in their tasks; nurse males try to impress the colony with dances, singing, and offerings of food; hunter males throw themselves against the colony's defenders and fight them until they either fall over from exhaustion or have sufficiently impressed the pregnantrices. Matings between same-caste males and pregnantrices produce a crop of sterile females of that caste; if two of different castes mate, they produce either a male or a pregnantrice of the other caste. As all fertile humlings are born to parents of other castes, this serves as the main method by which the different morphs don't speciate into different breeding populations.
• Horse of a Different Color:
  • The bird herders, a culture of Lilliputians who live in the ruins of an avian research lab, domesticate songbirds as mounts.
  • The very distant descendants of the bird herders, the riderfolk, live in symbiosis with another sapient posthuman species, the quadrupedal mountpeople, where the two serve as each other's legs and hands.
• Last of His Kind: The entry on the thinking buildings is narrated shortly after the death of the last living specimen of their kind, who was by that point also the last sapient human on the Nebukadnezar. Their death marks the end of the Broken Age and the beginning of the Wild Age, a period of tens of millions of years over which the Bosun AI will be the last mind left on a ship of wild animals.
• Life in Zero G:
  • After the destruction of the Nebukadnezar's second habitat cylinder, the Bosun had to halt the third habitat's rotation in order to prevent the now-uneven rotational momentum from tearing the ship apart. This resulted in the habitat becoming a permanently freefall environment, which its inhabitants adapted to by genetically engineering themselves. Their eventually descendants, the weightless people, have slender bodies, arms modified into batlike wings, and long legs with prehensile toes; they live in cities of free-floating buildings tethered to each other and farm groves of floating brambles. Over time, their society decays and they lapse into nonsapience, diversifying into a variety of flying human animals. Some of their descendants eventually make their way to the still-rotating fourth habitat, where most remain in the freefall area immediately around the spin axis. Some becomes stranded on the inner surface, where they somewhat ironically prove to be unsuited for remaining flighted — they simply lack the musculature to achieve liftoff under Earthlike gravity — and evolve into flightless predators.
  • The bird herders are Lilliputians engineered to survive inside a single sealed facility in the ruins of the third habitat, also at zero gravity. They mainly get by using their prehensile feet, as their home has plenty of perches and structures to attach themselves to, and develop the habit of tying bird feathers to their limbs to steer themselves when floating in the air.
  • The custodians, a species very distantly descended from bird herders who regressed into non-sapient gecko-like animals, were transplanted to the third habitat, and redeveloped sapience and civilization over roughly a hundred million years, are much further adapted for zero-G life, with traits such as feet fused into smooth fin-like paddles and bifurcated arms modified to act as a further set of airfins. They spread outwards to the spindles of the other habitats and create enclosed settlements around the ship's outer hull, but largely avoid the rotating surfaces and their centrifugal gravity.
  • Skylords are immense Sky Whales originally descended from livestock created from human genetic material to live in freefall. They eventually evolve into truly massive filter feeders of their habitat's aeroplankton that pass air filled with small animals through a hollow digestive system running right through their bodies, their intestine branching off from the side, and move through a set of long paddles derived from fingers. This highly rarefied body, possible only without the pull of gravity, allows them to reach size nearly ten times that of a blue whale's without dying of overheating.
• Lilliputians: The bird herders were created through genetic engineering to be of much smaller size than normal in order to survive in the confines of the genetic research facility where they had been stranded after a nuclear explosion vented the rest of their habitat into space. A sexual preference for short partners has led to a gradual shrinking in their size over time — once the Bosun becomes aware of them, they're about 30 cm tall, as tall as a large rat is long, on average, and still shrinking. This is a problem, since a small body can only support so complex a brain; as they keep shrinking, the bird herders begin to steadily decrease in intellect and eventually become wholly nonsapient gecko-like animals.
• Manchild: The ancestors of the brat barons, who had been designed to be genius corporate planners and strategists, were brilliant by any human standard but lacked any real emotional intelligence, being extremely self-entitled and competitive. Their post-apocalyptic descendants retain their ancestors' arrogance and stunted emotional skills but have lost most of their ancestral cunning due to hundreds of generations spend without using it in their sedentary, indolent and isolated lifestyles. As a result, a typical brat baron only retains childlike levels of intelligence and emotional maturity even as an adult.
• Mile-Long Ship: The Nebukadnezar is immense; each of its four habitat cylinders is a full McKendree cylinder 600km in length and diameter and capable of supporting an independent country and, later, of acting as its own miniature world and ecosystem.
• One Nation Under Copyright: During the Corpocaste era, the ship's society is dominated by a complex patchwork of megacorporations, rising, falling, merging, splitting, and responsible for managing every part of the new civilization.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: The doubletaurs are a descendant group of the riderfolk and mountpeople who have become true, physically joined symbiotes. The rider attaches themselves to the neck of the mount, providing four grasping limbs while the mount provides mobility, and their pair shares blood and food through ports in their necks.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Great dragon sphinxes are posthuman predators descended from hunters adapted to a feline-like niche, and inhabit the deserts and rocky ridges of the Nebu habitat. They grow to the size of train cars, and have elongated, flexible bodies, striped colorations, short horns, tassels of fur at the tip of their long tails, and gigantic trapezoid muscles with which to deliver devastating bites. They are apex predators of megafauna, and have an intense and violent competition with another, theropod-like posthuman species. They also hoard shiny metals and baubles from the ruins of civilization with which to impress potential mates.
• Our Sphinxes Are Different: Sphinxes are a lineage of quadrupedal, feline-like posthuman predators native to the deserts and steppes of Habitat One. They originally evolved from tiny predators known as sandbiters, which themselves descend from genetically engineered pets.
  • One species, the changeling sphinxes, becomes adapted to preying on another sheep-like posthuman species through having its small, furry males infiltrate herds while pretending to be calves; this complex hunting strategy ultimately promotes the development of sapience. They eventually evolve into the civilized riddlesphinxes, a sexually dimorphic species where the tiny males ride on the backs of their much larger wives, and who select mates by using contests of riddles to test each other's cunning.
  • Another species, the great dragon sphinxes, remain nonsapient but become traincar-sized predators of megafauna, eventually establishing themselves as the apex predators of the Nebuan deserts, and develop the habit of hoarding shiny metal and glass with which to impress mates.
• People Farms: The greatest atrocity of the Nebbies, which ultimately renders war with Kadn inevitable, is their creation of fleshloafs — huge, nonsapient human livestock, barely capable of movement due to their hypertrophied, useless muscles, raised in cramped cages for their meat. Other human-derived livestock, such as the sheep-like woolly humies, caused similar controversy, but was not as much of a spark point due to enjoying better health and not being raised for food.
• Prehistoric Animal Analogue:
  • The ancestors of the desert ravers were designed to be essentially mammalian theropods.
  • The spindly stabbers strongly resemble flightless azhdarchid pterosaurs. They are descended from flying posthumans who became secondarily flightless, walking on the knuckles of their huge wing-derived arms, and the triangular heads atop their long necks have incisors elongated to form a beak.
  • The woolly manoths, megafaunal grazers with thick hairy coats and large, sail-like ears, strongly resemble woolly mammoths.
• Rite of Passage: The riderfolk and mountpeople use a first-ride ceremony where two adolescents, one of each species, craft their first saddle and, when finished, swear a vow of companionship, mount up, and tear off into the open plains.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: While not directly shown in the artwork, the early civilization used genetic engineering to create rattle, large rodents intended to serve as cattle, which afterwards remain as part of the wildlife alongside nonsapient posthumans.
• Sapient Steed: The mountpeople are quadrupedal, generally horselike posthumans and one of the first two sapient species to reemerge — the other being their partners, the riderfolk. Riderfolk and mountpeople are of equal intelligence and communicate in the same verbal languages, and their partnership is entirely one of equals.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the faces in the background crowd in the post on the artistocrats is the Little Ghost.
  • The post on the thinking buildings includes an illustration of a weightless person strongly resembling Indiana Jones about to explore the ruins/corpse of one such building.
• Small, Secluded World:
  • The Nebukadnezar itself a Mile-Long Ship that became stranded in the void of space, cutting its passengers' world down to just its four rotating habitat sections and life-support systems.
  • After the Nebu-Kadn war, the Kadn habitat is entirely destroyed and vented into space. The only survivors are the staff of an aviary and genetic research center, who were able to seal their home off from the vacuum of space but remained stranded within afterwards. The researchers were able to engineer a population of diminutive humans who were able to endure in the confines of their isolated, now 0-G environment, and who gradually lost all knowledge of life outside of the confines of their three habitat domes and connecting hallways.
• Space Whale: Skylords occupy a transitional spot between a regular Space Whale and a Sky Whale, being giant whale-like beings that live in a zero-gravity section of a giant starship. They're unusual in being descended from humans, albeit very circuitously — their ancestors were pig-like zero-gravity livestock created using human genetic material, and they redeveloped sapience independently over millions of years. They're immense, reaching lengths of 250 meters (blue whales, for reference, top out at around thirty) from end to end. They reach these immense sizes thanks to their zero-gravity environment, which in addition to not requiring them to support their own weight allows them to develop delicate, mostly hollow bodies to reduce overheating. They're filter feeders, swallowing vast clouds of aeroplankton, swarms of insects and flocks of birds through three permanently open chambers derived from their ancestors' mouth and nostrils, and "swim" through the air using four sets of long paddles derived from fingers, which reach a maximum wingspan of 300 meters. They're sapient, although their thoughts are slow and their language extremely low-pitched and intended to be spoken using a toothless mouth that cannot close.
• Starfish Language: Skylords are gigantic Sky Whales with permanently open, toothless mouths evolved for filtering swarms of food out of the air. In addition to being extremely low-pitched, often well below other species' hearing range, their native language has no consonants and instead consists of prolonged vowel sounds modified using a system of trills and rolling sounds.
• Super-Soldier: During the Nebu-Kadn war, the battling factions created several human strains specialized for combat. After the war ends in the destruction of both warring habitats and humanity starts its slow decline into nonsapience, these mostly become powerful apex predators.
  • One relatively mundane type are the rippers, muscular, apelike hulks created by the Nebbies. They're monstrously strong — they get their name from their ability to tear a regular human in two — and of limited intelligence, and are prone to entering frenzied berserker rages when injured or stimulated by blood. Their thick skins, dense muscle and heavy bones render them all but invulnerable to regular caliber fire, they can run at high speeds by dropping to all fours, and their fingers end in sharp claws. Notably, when not in their battle furies, they're gentle and passive beings — a trait engineered into them to make them more controllable outside of battle. After the war, they settle in small tribes on the former frontier and revert to a hunter-gatherer existence.
  • Some variants were considerably more unusual in shape, such as one designed to be essentially mammalian tyrannosaurs. These served as shock troops and terror weapons in combat, dealing damage primarily with their bites and physical bulk, using the rapid gaits granted by their digitigrade stance to quickly close in with foes, and absorbing damage from gunfire with their muscular bulks and thick bones. After the war, they primarily become tribal hunters, herders and raiders; their nonsapient descendants later become even larger and rule the wastes as apex predators.
  • The shieldmen were designed to grow hard, armor-like plates from modified hair, capable of stopping low-caliber gunshots in their tracks. As they were a Kadnean species, the ones left stranded in the ruins of Nebu after the war (Kadn was blasted to pieces by a failed nuclear test) were marginalized and forced to live on the margins of Nebu's own dying society. In time, they evolved into the nonsapient shieldbacks, bulky herbivores that retain their ancestors' tailored urge to serve as defensive troops in the form of an instinctive drive to guard smaller creatures from attack.
• Time Abyss: By the time of the later entries, the Bosun has been alive, active and aware for well over a hundred and thirty million years, and has kept careful watch over the rise and fall of entire species and ecosystems. In the Distant Finale, he is nearly six billion years old, has witnessed the larger part of Terragen life's existence, and has lived to witness the fusion of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies; some of the custodians living on the ship with him are nearly as old.
• Too Important to Walk: Brat barons are far too self-important to bother moving any real distance on their own, and instead have themselves carried around by their robotic and posthuman servants.
• T. Rexpy: One of the Super-Soldier species created in the Nebu-Kadn war was modeled after giant theropods in shape. In addition to being very physically intimidating, these soldiers could run at high speeds and absorb considerable physical punishment, and, while they lacked the sheer bite strength of a true tyrannosaur, they still had stronger bites than any natural primate. Their descendants after the war's end would become even larger, eventually topping out at around twelve meters in length and six in height, through sexual selection due to their preference for larger mates. They're also obligate carnivores, and, after the war ends in mutual destruction of the two sides, they sustain themselves through a combination of herding, hunting and raiding. After falling into nonsapience, they evolve into giant predators known as crushjaws, which dominate the deserts as apex predators challenged only by the equally large and powerful great dragon sphinxes, although the more numerous sphinxes eventually outcompete them.
• Uterine Replicator: The Custodians, the most technologically advanced of the second round of sapient species, are highly adept at biologic science and have entirely forgone natural reproduction in favor of artificially growing new members of their species.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: An almost literal case in the changeling sphinxes, a species of quadrupedal, predatory posthumans who hunt woolly humies, another, sheep-like posthuman species. Male sphinxes, which are four times smaller than females and have thick woolly coats, pretend to be humie lambs and sneak into their herds in order to single out vulnerable individuals and lure them into ambushes where the females of the pride can take them down.

Bosun's Return

• Artistic License – Physics: In the post on winglets, Medichanic describes how she and the winglets have "active emissive eyes" that emit a stream of photons in quantum entanglement with photons that remain in the eye. When these hit physical matter, the state of the matching photon in the eyes also changes, and the owner of the eye perceives the change and thus creates a visual image, which allows both for vision independent of ambient lighting and incredibly good resolution at long distances. This is not actually consistent with how quantum entanglement is thought to work, but CaptainStroon chose to take some creative liberties, partly because the idea was interesting and partly because he felt that the science of a society existing in the very distant future would by necessity include at least some things that our own would not have considered or would think to be wrong.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction:
  • Bogmoths are a clade of insects with a decidedly unusual reproductive strategy. Their grub-like reproductive adults, divided between haploid males^note with a single set of chromosomes and diploid females^note two sets lack external sexual organs, and instead mate by cocooning together and fusing into a single being, with a cluster of eggs being produced from their cocoon; adults that fail to reproduce pupate on their own and reproduce asexually. After the larvae hatch, the metamorphosed fused or singleton adults emerge as a post-adult, sterile stage called the senescent sentinel, or "senesentinel", whose exact form and role depends on the pair or individual that formed them. Solitary males, which don't produce eggs, become small predators that keep their environment clear of pests. Solitary females and male-male pairs produce diploid senesentinels, which are winged and transport larvae and adults around to start new colonies. Male-female pairs produce triploid senesentinels, large predators that serve to both kill off larger threats and to carry around larger quantities of younger specimes. Finally, female-female pairs produce tetraploid senesentinels, huge spiky hulks that physically guard younger bogmoths.
  • Jibunalgin incubate their offspring within detachable pouches formed from the uterus and part of the intestines, which are then "fed" during gestation with bits of fruit and other soft, easily digested foods. This allows females to remain active and mobile instead of being weighed down by a growing fetus, and as such also allow them offspring to gestate for longer and grow larger before birth.
• Distant Sequel: The bulk of Bosun's Journal takes place over a timespan of a hundred and thirty-odd million years, sufficient to see posthuman life on the ship fall into savagery and then animalism, evolve and diversify into various clades, and then produce a number of new sapient species and their own descendants. Bosun's Return is instead set some time after the first series' Distant Epilogue, placing it comfortably six billion years in the future. By this time, Earth has undergone so many geological, technological, and biological changes that it is almost entirely unrecognizable, rendering it almost an alien world for the expedition sent to its ruins.
• Ecumenopolis: The Earth is described as having become an ecumenopolis in its past, and has been extensively engineered and re-engineered for this purpose. By the story's time, its abandoned ruins consist of several layers of artificial construction, and immense, atmosphere-piercing cooling towers are needed to keep it habitable.
• Extremophile Lifeforms:
  • The goobellies are multicellular archaeans^note bacteria-like prokaryotes that, in real life, are exclusively unicelleluar adapted for life on the barren surface of the Sun-scorched Earth. As the Sun has become a red giant by the setting's time, the planet's outer surface became uninhabitable for everything but hyperthermophile archaeans, which in time evolved into animal-like forms thanks to being entirely isolated from existing macroscopic life. The goobellies are adapted for life in temperatures hot enough to flash-broil a human, to the point that they will drop into an immobile torpor if exposed to temperatures lower than 90 degrees Celsius.
  • Nightmasks are sessile fish descendants that evolved to inhabit the cooling towers that keep the Earth somewhat habitable, and spend their adult lives filter-feeding in literally boiling hot water.
• Sentient Vehicle: Caravan, one of the three artificial posthuman bodies that the Bosun created to explore the Earth, serves as the expedition's vehicle and base, and like the other two houses a copy of the Bosun's own mind. He's shaped to resemble a quadrupedal mammal of sorts, with a sealed offshoot of his body cavity serving as a living space in which the other two members spend their time while traveling.
• Shout-Out: A number of creatures are noted in the comments to be inspired from entities from popular culture:
  • Bogmoths, creatures with a drastically transformed, sterile post-adult lifestage intended to protect and care for relatively helpless reproductive adults, were inspired by the Pak protectors of Known Space.
  • Jibunaljin, apelike postmammals with symbiotic animals resembling a crown of spiky yellow hair, are based on the Sayans from Dragon Ball. Notably, their debut post was uploaded shortly after Akira Toriyama's passing as a homage.
• The Symbiote: Jibunaljin live symbiotically with beltsnakes, limbless creatures that attach themselves to their bodies and, in exchange for nutrients provided through their host's blood, inject with a modified form of venom that hypercharges the jibunaljin's neural system, reaction speed, and time perception. As a result, the number of beltsnakes carried by an individual jibunaljin is the primary sign of rank within their troops; snakes are given out by the band's leader to useful or allied troop members, and challenges over status end with the winner taking one of the loser's snakes.

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