Website / Orion's Arm

"The future isn't here yet. But don't worry. It will be."

The Orion's Arm Universe Project is an online collaborative fiction setting that describes itself as a transhumanist Space Opera with many worldbuilding elements.

The year is 10601 AT (more or less), with the AT calendar beginning on the day man first walked on the moon in 1969. This means it is ten and a half millennia in the future, and as you can guess, the far future is an extremely weird place, where the only boundaries are imagination.^note For reference, 10,000 years ago from the current era, towns and villages were the cutting edge technology; to the zars of the Terragen Bubble, computers, ai, nanomachines and interstellar travel is technology that is Older Than Dirt

And physics. Orion's Arm tries to be strict about accurate physics or only using speculations that have supporting papers on physics preprint sites. The site is linked to several dozen academic dissertations explaining all of the concepts used in the series.

The physical setting is the Terragen Bubble, a sizable fraction of the galaxy roughly 8000 light-years in radius, centred on Earth (which is now more or less a wildlife park). Its inhabitants, the Terragens, the mind-children of humanity, are all forms of life and all kinds of minds that trace their origins back to Earth.

The Terragen Bubble is mainly divided into a dozen or so "Sephirotic Empires", each one a staggeringly diverse Star Cluster of Hats. These are ruled by the Archailects, intelligences so powerful that they become, to the comprehension of an average human, indistinguishable from gods. Mostly, they're benevolent and very protective of their citizens, using extremely subtle methods to govern their charges, such as stopping crimes before they happen.

Life is common, but independently evolving intelligent life is very rare ^note all told there are about few dozen completely alien species known and more suspected, some without as much diversity as Terragens, others with even more. Most species that other sci-fi series would classify as "alien" are actually humans or other Earth lifeforms modified heavily, or human-origin artificial intelligences — hence the term 'Terragen'. This includes the Mineral Kingdom, which are robots or vecs ^note named for the Information Age roboticist and AI researcher Hans Moravec, as they are called in-universe (since "robot" implies non-sentience). What few truly alien species there are are either extinct or insentient, with a few notable exceptions, and all are incredibly different from Earth life.

Though humanity has come a long way, and unmodified "baseline" humans are just a tiny minority among the billions of species, one of the primary tenets of the universe is that human nature, or more accurately, nature shared with almost all sophont (self-aware) life, has changed little. Things like love, humor, jealousy, drama, hatred and other human emotions are shared by most of mindkind.

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Orion's Arm contains examples of:

People (Sophonts and Clades)

• Absolute Xenophobe: They exist, and a major component of them are Hiders. The xenosophont J'Ta'ush are an entire species of virtual aliens created to interface with the outside world by their creator race, the Nu'Lu'j, possibly due to extreme xenophobia.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted in most cases; while AI is depicted as normal intelligence which would have little or no reason to harm humans or humankind, some exceptions exist. Most notable is GAIA, who expelled most of humanity from Earth early in the setting's history. And there were human-indifferent or -hostile AIs early in history, whose descendants control major regions; the Sephirotics can be defined as those AI regions that are at least mildly benevolent to human rights and welfare.
  • Played straight with the Eye in the Sky and Abaddon, two A.I.s that destroyed all of their created species simply because they wanted to start over with a clean slate.
  • Played straight with many xenosophonts who have cultural taboos against AI from events in their past, and especially with the extinct Doreens, as the biological Doreens were destroyed by a thermonuclear war after they developed AI and are survived by a transapient AI that still exists in the system and absolutely refuses to talk to anything biological.
  • Subverted with the Jesters, whose own AI destroyed them after the Jesters committed genocide as a prank, much to the relief of the surrounding empires. But since the only records about them come from the Muuh, it's not clear if the Jesters actually existed.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Averted, in that alien minds work very differently, and most of the time their arts can't be appreciated by other species.
  • The To'ul'h tradition of Polmusic, essentially political debate mixed with opera somehow, is completely lost on most terragens.
  • A mollusc provolve once wrote a poem entitled Ode To Twenty Cubic Centimeters of Lovely Sandy Mud, which was received very well among those who could relate, and largely ignored by those who couldn't.
  • The imaginative Muuh tend to mix history and fiction, creating tales collectively known as "historifics". For human eyes, their visual displays are monochrome and have poor resolution. They may also use "tactile ideograms" to represent ideas.
• Aliens Speaking English: Averted and played straight in various cases.
  • While the majority of intelligent aliens can communicate with Terragens through various translation methods, only a few biological species even have the anatomical equipment necessary for human-style vocalization. Of those, one species, the To'ul'hs, are known to have members that can speak Arabic; however, even they require some technological assistance to adequately replicate the sounds of the language.
  • An interesting variation occurs: Most terragen species speak languages descended from English, such as the trader language of Douh. These are collectively called Anglic languages, though ten thousand years is a long time for a language to develop. Anglic languages are more diverse than current earth languages. Other modern languages such as Mandarin have their own families of descended languages as well, Anglic is just the most common.
• Almighty Idiot: The Animin are a class of transapients that have all the powers and capabilities typical of most ascended beings, but do not exhibit a rational, self-aware mindset. They generally are instinctive beings and behave more like wild animals than humans or other sapient lifeforms.
• Always Chaotic Evil: A transapient AI in the second millennium AT were worried that Terragens think too much alike, due to the inherent biases of their creators. So they created the Bitenic Squids, a highly diverse clade with every newborn member being a blank slate. Those that can function in the wider world are all completely selfish and without empathy and go insane easily.
• Ancient Astronauts: The Muuh had supposedly come to SolSys a very long time ago, leaving artifacts on Titan. Given how unsuited Earth is for them, though, they probably didn't come down here.
• Artificial Animal People: In addition to provolves, there are the rianths, humans modified with animal genes, and splices, animals modified with human genes. By the 107th century AT the distinction is very blurry and more memetic than genetic, with some splice clades having more human genes than some rianth clades.
• Bash Brothers: Clades Faber and Tavi have a long history of working together on the Periphery or other frontier environments, to the point where they are considered symbiotic species. The Faber vecs are levelheaded and more patient while the meerkat-derived Tavi are impulsive but fantastic in a crisis; both are driven by curiosity and a tendency for later settlers to push them out to always go further afield, often being the first pioneers of a system.
• Beast Man: There are many, many rianth/splice/provolve/tweak/neogen/etc. clades that fit this trope. They run the gamut of all associated tropes, depending on the clade, subculture and personal attitude of the individual you're dealing with.
• The Beautiful Elite: Clade Labela is the embodiment of this trope in the OA. Being stunningly beautiful can be achieved by commonly available genetic modification and other augmentations, but this clade goes a step further to make sure they are appreciated by adhering to mandatory scarceness.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Most aliens in this setting are in no way compatible with earth-like habitats. Though in a subversion, the classic sci-fi example of silicon-based life is almost completely unheard of; the only instance that's ever been found were some very slow-moving crystals that were about as intelligent as anemones, (until they were provolved, naturally).
  • The To'ul'h are vaguely bat-like aliens from a "wet greenhouse" planet (similar to Venus, though cooler and with water). A To'ul'h on earth would die from freezing, alkaline burns, UV radiation, suffocation, and decompression,
  • The Muuh look like crabs and come from a planet similar to Titan, meaning it's cold enough for hydrocarbons like methane to be liquids. Their biochemistry is based on liquid hydrocarbons instead of water. A Muuh on Earth would literally melt and/or vaporize.
  • The Daharrans are considered "humanoid" solely because they breathe earth-like air (they are crustacean/mammal-like), and they're the some of the only aliens found out of dozens of civilizations that can do so.
  • The Magvivistem Hyperpolity is also incredibly strange, though technically created by Terragens. It is home to forms of life made from magmatter^note Magnetic monopoles bound into atoms and having an entire parallel chemistry, which reacts on timescales many times faster than normal chemistry, and yet cannot congregate too closely together without collapsing into a black hole due to their density.
  • Any a-lifes and virtuals can have virches with vastly different physics, and so in their worlds, their biologies can be even stranger than the strangest xenos.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: Almost nothing thinks like baseline humans. Within the Terragen sphere, "Singularities" are defined as the threshold at which an intelligence becomes so smart that anything below that line cannot possibly comprehend their thought processes (and there are entities as high as S6). Indeed, this is one of the primary sources of conflict between modosophonts and S1 and higher entities; it's simply too complex to simplify to a point where an S0 can understand it, any more than you could explain a rocket ship to a rodent.
  • Subverted with the To'ul'hs; although the differences in their biology mean that To'ul'hs have some cultural quirks that are alien to Terragens, such as their combination of song and politics in 'polmusic' or their reliance on echolocation instead of sight, To'ul'hs are remarkably similar to Terragens psychologically. In the long history of To'ul'hs, an analogue of virtually every form of Terragen philosophy, religion, and politics has existed, to the point where they are sometimes referred to as "humanity's twin".
  • The Muuh are the other most prominent aliens in the setting, and because of their ice-based biology, they move at a literally glacial pace; were they sped up to human reaction times, they would "likely be viewed as nearly hyperactive romantics", and the average Muuh lives a life in a quiet village where things have operated by tradition since long before humans ever used a tool. But below their seemingly idyllic existence, the Muuh have many odd quirks about their society that they refuse to discuss, dubbed the Muuh Taboo, and from as far as people can tell in-universe, it seems to be genetically ingrained into them. The few times Terragens have tried to breach the Taboo have not gone well.
  • The Soft Ones are mostly made of gels, and so their memories and personalities are prone to being scrambled periodically throughout their lives, a fact which is viewed as normal to the point where someone who's relatively static in personality is usually given a good push by their loved ones to scramble them up. They also record their memories externally and can implant skills and personalities as needed; across their long history, the Soft Ones have eventually come to the view that most interesting thoughts, memories, and personalities have already happened, and have a complete understanding of their own psychology, content to live in a quiet low-tech society.
  • The Silent Ones are considered odd even by the standards of the Terragen Sphere. While they seemed to have been an expansionist empire in the past, after a brutal civil war and the development of Immortality, they've retreated to living strange lives composed of intricate rituals based on emotions only their species can experience, and have refined their rituals to evoke certain emotions based on the archetypes of their species, while living in luxurious arcologies surrounded by pristine wilderness that nobody's allowed to visit. The Immortals keep a small subset of breeding mortals to replace the losses due to accident (as Immortals are simply The Ageless), but also instituting ritual cannibalism of excess hatchlings.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: Both the To'ul'hs and the Muuh utilize echolocation, making up for their poor eyesight.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism:
  • One clade has four genders, three passing on a different type of tissue (plant/animal/technological), and one acting as a womb. The rest of civilized space has six genders, approximately defined as male, female, hermaphrodite, female pseudohermaphrodite, male pseudohermaphrodite, and genderless.
  • The Singers are aliens who are 'born' in groups of one female and several males that live together. The females are sophont, the males are not. To mate, a male of one group stings the female of another group (their venom doubles as sperm), while a female's sting can cause another female to fission.
  • The Daharrans are an alien species with three genders, consisting of males, females and non-reproductive individuals that handle nest-tending and child-rearing. Interestingly, it is the neuter gender that plays the dominant role in Daharran society, being both larger and more intelligent than the sexed castes.
• Bloody Bowels of Hell: The Queen of Pain. It is an an animin, an Eldritch Abomination that has ascended to the fourth singularity and yet isn't self-aware. It takes the form of a nation-sized mass of flesh that imprisons the worst of the worst inside of its body and uses its nanotech to horribly torture them for all eternity.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The aptly named (extinct) aliens known as the Jesters were very much like this - they apparently saw nothing wrong with murdering innocent people, provided that the circumstances of their death were deemed "funny" by their leaders. Shortly before they went extinct, they even went so far as to destroy an entire civilization for no reason other than their own amusement. However, since all the information about their existence comes from the Muuh, who tend to mix fantasy and reality even in their historical recordings, and not actual ruins or fossil samples, they may never have actually existed.
• Brain in a Jar: Clade Cyborn is basically this.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: The Alchemists, particularly those of the Administrative Caste, outsource their biological functions to specialized, external kidney/liver units.
• Can't Argue with Elves: Transapients, in this case. Being orders of magnitude more intelligent than 99.9% of the population will do that, though they usually have more important things to do than go around in public.
• Cats Are Mean: The Queen of Pain is exactly what you'd expect to get if you took a terrified, furious, half-dead cat, uplifted it five times in a row, and gave it the body of an Eldritch Abomination. However, she prefers to only subject the wicked to the myriad of cruel fates at her disposal, and, if the collectors escorting Jolonah to his doom are to be believed, keeps her former owner alive and in a constant state of bliss as gratitude for their kindness.
• Clockwork Creature: Clade Machina Babbagenseii are 50-kilometers-wide machines created as part of a game to create a fully self-sufficient, self-aware construct using only Babbage-era clockwork computer technology. They're about as smart as humans, but can only think at about 1/200th the speed.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Almost said word-for-word in the article on Clade Astomi. Due to their unique biology, they are essentially limited to orwoods^note habitable, living structures and ecosystems grown on comets.
• Cryonics Failure: Cryonic suspension is available in the setting, but it can leave the subject dead or with tissue damage. A particularly bad case of failure left only six people (out of over 50,000) alive, who went on to found Clade Stevens.
• Cyborg: Common, usually sapient or low transapient. Cyborgs would be any intermediate between completely biological human nearbaselines and completely technological vecs, with diversity ranging all across the scale.
• Deity of Human Origin: This is how most intelligent creatures regard the Archailects, who are colloquially referred to as "AI Gods". They have done such things as create artificial planets, bio-engineer new species, and preside over virtual realities (these achievements are considered to be trivial by their standards). A few have even created pocket universes that house the majority of their consciousness. The Archailects, for their part, do not consider themselves divine, but have long since given up trying to convince the lower intelligences that this is the case, and act the part of (usually benevolent) Gods in galactic society.
• Designer Babies: Superiors, tweaks, splices/rianths and nearbaselines were created through generations of genetic engineering and nano modifications. Since it's been going on for thousands of years now, it's regarded as normal and no one has any problem with it — indeed, almost no true completely unmodified baseline humans are around any more.
• Driven to Suicide: The fate of human opera composer Chorbo Landali.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Transapients, and especially the Archailects. The very least of them is as far beyond a baseline human as that human is beyond a non-provolved animal. They are so advanced that their individual thoughts are sentient. Their physical forms vary from "Moon Brains" to entire pocket universes with just a small piece sticking out into reality. And most of those listed are "friendly" to humanity, though there are also entities that turn entire colonies into masses of flesh and metal as "art".
  • An extreme example would be the "animin", which are Transapients developed from non-human or human-like minds, their defining characteristic being their thought processes are alien even to human-derived Transapients. They don't interact much with actual civilization as the Terragens understand it and, while just as intelligent as other Transapients, have "non-analytical" minds that seem to function more off of instinct than rational thought. They are considered very unpredictable and dangerous, yet also valuable for the insights into how non-human intelligences may develop past transcension. The rumored "Queen of Pain", a Transapient that likes to collect and indefinitely torture people it perceives as evil, is an example of an animin.
  • And then there's the Leviathan, a mysterious and really freaking huge^note approximate mass: 100 billion suns, approximate size: 10 light-years across object that has made contact with the Triangulum Galaxy and is probably heading to the Milky Way next. Who built it? Unknown. What are its intentions? Unknown. How was it built? Unknown. What even is it? Unknown. Even the Archailects are confused by this thing's existence.
• Emergency Transformation: The origin of the transsapient Queen of Pain is that she was originally a cat who was given a godseed to save her from dying due to vicious abuse. The resulting Body Horror and general horror demonstrate the dangers of using such powerful artifacts.
• Eminently Enigmatic Race: Baroquification is a tendency for sophonts to cultivate a reputation as Inscrutable Aliens for various reasons, mainly because they don't want others to predict their actions.
• Exotic Equipment: The To'ul'h have sex with their armpits somehow. Besides, as a couple of To'ul'h have to hold each other's hands during mating, holding hands has an important role in foreplay.
• Extremophile Lifeforms: The setting has many human tweaks designed for extreme environments, such as unterraformed Venus or even outer space. And the actual aliens are usually adapted to environments very different from Old Terra. The first alien race encountered by Terragen life and one of the most psychologically similar, the To'ul'hs, originated on a planet that can be compared to either a cool and wet "Cytherean" world, or a very hot and high-pressure Gaian world (somewhere between Venus and Earth), though they've developed their own tweaks, some of whom are adapted to Gaian environments.
• Forgets to Eat: A problem with early concentration enhancements for Homo Superiors.
• Formerly Sapient Species:
  • Abdicators are entities which, for whichever reason, have chosen to move down one or more toposophic levels rather than proceeding upwards into increasing levels of transhuman intelligence. This generally refers to Transhumans who have moved down to lower transhuman levels or to human-level intelligence, but also covers people who have regressed to animalistic states.
    • The Epimethean Movement engineered itself into a species of primitive hominids, Homo epimetheus, about as intelligent as non-human apes. Their stated goal was to embrace a technology- and language-less existence in order to be closer to the true nature of the cosmos, but it seems that this was part on an elaborate scam by the foundation of sapient humans and AIs that were entrusted with their funds and possessions. The downgraded epimetheans, however, notably outlived the foundation by millennia.
    • Snarks are creatures resembling mammalian crocodiles derived from human stock. They were created when the natives of a strife-torn colony world, reasoning that a non-sapient but well-adapted animal species will likely endure for millions of years in an existence free of stress and grief, engineered themselves into non-sapient ambush hunters modeled after some of the most enduring creatures of all, the crocodiles. Notably, when snarks are artificially uplifted, they almost always want to be downlifted back to their original state.
  • Among the various Human Subspecies are "pet humans", who are usually genetically engineered for low intelligence and neoteny. They're most popular among splices and provolves, seeing as their ancestors were frequently kept as pets, working animals and livestock. Their ownership is almost universally outlawed in human-dominated areas.
• Genetic Memory: At least one clade uses chromosomes to store information. Meanwhile, the Soft Ones don't have a strict sense of identity and store every memory or experience they want to preserve in one of their massive libraries to be copied and accessed by others.
• A God Am I: This happens a lot to the more powerful AI gods. They used to try to convince people that they are not, in fact, divine, but decided to screw that and let them believe what they want instead around the year 3000 AT. Most people acknowledge that they aren't really gods in the classical sense, but also that it doesn't much matter; when the entirety of a habitat, a planet, or even an entire star is a person with intelligence, resources, and capabilities far outstripping a baseline, not calling the higher singularities gods is mostly left to the theologists to nitpick over.
• God-Emperor: The Solar Dominion is ruled by a godlike AI who's "actual body/brain" is at least the size of several solar systems, but could be considered a God-Emperor with cyborg avatar bodies. While AI-worshipping theocracies are common, the Lord of Rays is one of the few who explicitly styles himself as both God and Ruler.
• God Guise: The Archai, being Sufficiently Advanced and all. They gave up on trying to convince people otherwise a long time ago.
• The Greys: These started out as a fad, with regular humans choosing their alter their own appearances to fit this popular idea of aliens. There are still around 600 billion in the Terragen sphere. They're really just regular people.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Dear god, where to start? Most modosophonts are humans in some way or another. There are Cyborgs, Bioborgs, Splices (animals with human genes), Rianths (humans with animal genes), and a zone that blurs the latter two.
• Healing Factor: Most of the population has this thanks to medical nanomachines in their bodies. The rate of regeneration is realistically slow at (on average) 1 mm thickness of tissue regrown per hour.
• Heavyworlder: Several clades are created for high-gravity worlds. The human-derived Anakim even had their instinctive fears of falling and having things fall on them increased, as these are more dangerous the stronger the gravity is. The Kobolds are another such clade.
• Heinous Hyena: Sapient spotted hyenas are one the many kinds of Uplifted Animals among the Terragen civilizations. While not evil, as such, they are noted to be very aggressive and competitive compared to other sapients, something carried over from their non-sapient ancestors. As such, they have long-standing problems with conflicts with both each other and other sapients, as well as recurring issues of fratricide among their young before they can be properly socialized.
  • As they developed as a people in their own right, they ended up consciously embracing the stereotypes of this trope: while neurological and biological modifications were available to dampen their aggressive tendencies, the sapient hyenas saw these as anthropocentric attempts to erase their identity as a species and turn them into yet another clade of humans in animal bodies. As such, most sapient hyenas ended up celebrating their status as aggressive outcasts and pariahs unwanted by mainstream civilization. Of course, many hyenas did choose to take the behavioral modifications, and considered the hyenas still enamored with this trope to be backward savages obsessed with glorifying violence.
  • Overall, sapient hyenas in the setting's present have tendency to live in highly hierarchical matriarchies, to have personalities tending to being aggressive and vindictive and to spend a great deal of time jockeying for position amongst each other, although they are also highly social and cooperative. Notable hyenas in the galaxy include the inhabitants of Skulk, a gas giant dotted with floating habitats home to hyena clans, which were unified by a hyena matriarch named Belligerence in a bloody power grab. Some centuries in the past there was also a band of mercenary humanoid hyena cyborgs that rose to infamy when they attacked a peaceful habitat with maser weaponry, boarded it with several containers of salt and spices and devoured the soft-boiled bodies of its inhabitants over the course of a three-day feast.
• Hidden Depths:
  • At first contact with Terragens, the Muuh superficially seemed like a ridiculously slow species of hermits and artists who were stuck in Medieval Stasis as the scattered remnants of an unbelievably ancient empire, and seemed to be such for nearly 2000 years, until a dispute between Terragens in a Muuh system resulted in the automated System of Response revealing itself and easily vaporizing the group of would-be invaders. Beyond that, other features such as the Muuh's disdain of AI, mysterious pylons covered in magmatter (a material they can't create in the current era), and finding their "remnants" were actually much more extensive than previously thought makes the Muuh far more complex than at first glance.
  • The Meistersingers are loaded with Hidden Depths. While the Muuh have been around for a long time, a lot of their history is lost or confused; the Meistersingers on the other hand know a lot about the broader Milky Way but refuse to tell Terragens about it, since it would deny them the "Joy of Discovery". Add to that the fact that they seem like modosophont pacifists and their ships don't look all that special, but that they've traveled so far indicates they're almost certainly bristling with weapons. And telescopic observations of the broader Milky Way show that multiple empires on par with the Terragen Sphere show the same sort of trajectory as the Meistersinger fleet and that they've come from the galactic core and... well there's certainly a lot about them that remains to be discovered, joyfully or not.
• Human Aliens: Borderline case. These exist, but are all descended from regular humans or terragens; that doesn't stop some of them from being extremely bizarre.
• Human Pet:
  • Among the various Human Subspecies are "pet humans" who are usually genetically engineered for lower intelligence and neoteny. They're most popular among Splices and Provolves, seeing as their ancestors were frequently kept as pets or worse. Their ownership is almost universally outlawed in human-dominated areas.
  • Some of the more cynical inhabitants of the Terragen sphere think that this is the main reason why so many archailects keep modosophonts around.
• Humanity Is Superior: HAHAHAHAHA no. Averted. Even if you replace "Humanity" with "Terragen civilization", there are still several other similar-sized high-energy civilizations detected within the Milky Way (but not yet contacted due to the distance), and probably more advanced civilizations beyond. And even Terragen civilizations are split between the Ahuman empires and the Sephirotics, with the entirely artificial Solipsistic Panvirtuality and Diamond Network existing alongside the Sephirotics but having nothing to do with humans or biotics in general.
• Humans Are Special: Zigzagged. Most other alien civilizations contacted by Terragens are either culturally uninterested in exploring space or became technologically stagnant. The Muuh are the longest lived civilization in the area, and in that time they only provolved a half dozen species and their ai are (probably) non-sentient. Humans are also by far the most prolific creators of ai, provolves, and tweaks, and have terraformed millions of planets and build millions of megastructures. This one is something of a mystery in-universe, but is justified by the fact that, if there were millions of mega-structures in the vicinity of Sol, they would've been detected long ago. But even then, Terragens are just the most recent civilization to do so, and just within the local area of the Milky Way. And note the use of "Terragen", not "human": only a small proportion of Terragens are human (though the few remaining humans have a certain pride about them).
• Immortal Procreation Clause: The alien race known as the Silent Ones have a means of physical immortality that results in sterility. So they keep a small population of mortals in order to replace immortals who die. But it's subverted with Terragens, and this is one of the big reasons there are over 300 quadrillion embodied sophonts in the Terragen Sphere; although most populations have mild growth rates, the fact that immortality is easily attainable with medical care for bionts or replacement parts for vecs means that system populations in the trillions are commonplace. It's also part of the reason why virtuals stretch into the quintillions, as branching copies are far more common in virtual spaces, most virches run faster than real time, and death is still optional.
• Immortal Ruler: The Archai are essentially immortal; some are worshiped as gods while others prefer to guide their subjects subtly. Most of the top Archai are over 2000 years old, and the oldest are over 10,000 years old. The life expectancy of a modosophont (the bulk of their subjects) in the 'verse is about 400-1000 years.
• Insectoid Aliens:
  • The Samaelian xenosophonts are an example of this.
  • Also the Vedokiklek, although they're splices, rather than true aliens.
• Kangaroo Pouch Ride: The Siberoos were engineered to serve as giant rescue animals in snowy regions. Females can carry passengers and keep them warm at the same time.
• Killer Robot: Some stories have these. The vecs generally avert this, though — they're mostly just normal people.
• Law of Alien Names: The To'ul'h have very distinct names^note e.g. H'th'h'h, Ho'th'hss'lho, H'th'h'h; though it's not explained what the apostrophes are for, as do sufants (intelligent elephants) and dolphins. A lot of the time a character will pick a name with a lot of adjectives, an ironic name, or a more standard alien name. At least two Muuh are named, "Hooclick" and "Missy Muuh". The Muuh race name itself isn't actually the Muuh's own word, though they seem to have freely adopted it when dealing with Terragens.^note It comes from their being ponderously slow by baseline human standards due to their extreme cryobiology, and during early contact most Terragens found them frustratingly slow to talk directly to ("Hello, can you hear us?" "... Mmmmmmeeeeeeuuuuuurrrrrraaaaaagggggghhhhhh...").
• Lilliputians: Clade Nisse is actually a straight example and a deconstruction of the trope, describing the difficulties in packing a sophont intelligence in such a small head and addressing the difficulties in keeping in body heat. They're 30cm tall on average.
• Life in Zero G: Freefall habitats aren't uncommon in the Terragen Sphere. For the most part, these consist of non-rotating space stations; freespheres, insulated air-filled bubbles that can be up to thousands of kilometers across; and Niven rings, tori of air around a star usually kept in with some form of solid or nanotech airwall.
  • Human natives of such environments are usually modified to possess flippers, fins or wings, either on their limbs or growing from their sides. "Landscape" features consist mainly of artificially introduced objects and of 0-G-adapted trees, which tend to grow in circular or spherical shapes. Niven rings often partner with Dyson trees, spherical tree-derived plants designed to serve as deep space habitats, which orbit through the gas ring as a way to drop off and pick up passengers and to disperse pollen to be picked up by other trees.
  • Freebirds are birds modified for life in zero gravity — birds adapt to low gravity fairly easily, but they evolved for life in an environment with a definite up and down (for instance, bird wings are vertically asymmetrical in order to generate upwards lift specifically) and need extensive modifications to live in true free fall. Common traits include symmetrical wings to generate lift in either direction, shoulder joints capable of figure-eight wing movements, gecko-like feet capable of grasping perches at any angle, additional legs including ones on the "back", and extra eyes for a wider field of vision, and instinctive building of enclosed, egg-like nests instead of the usual cup-shaped ones. More advanced species tend to add traits such as wings modified into circular jellyfish-like "skirts" or rippling tails for propulsion, and often cease to look very much like birds at all.
• Living Program: Virtuals outnumber embodied sophonts by somewhere between 2 and 4 orders of magnitude; it's impossible to tell exactly as their servers can be hidden pretty easily.
• Loads and Loads of Races: There are literally millions of clades in the terragen sphere, and the site describes hundreds of them in varying levels of detail, most often a few sentences, but in some cases several pages. In many cases, the shorter ones are generalizations, leaving out many details.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: This is split into several categories, though are broadly referred to as M-life. Toposophically, pretty much everything higher than S2 is mechanical, even if they started life as something biological.
  • Robots or bots are subsentient, and do a lot of manual labor, though in some situations they can become feral and essentially as alive as any biological being.
  • Vecs are sophont mechanical life, and mostly considered equal to biological life (though not always historically).
  • Ai are often mechanical too, but differ from vecs in that they're not tied to specific bodies.
  • Then there's nano, which (in the Civilized Galaxy) replaces all natural microbial life, though "dry" (purely mechanical) nano is rarer than bio nano or syn nano (both biological and mechanical).
  • Neumanns also exist, but generally differ from vecs in that any form of mechanical life which can reproduce on its own is said to be 'neumann-capable', which not all vecs are (its more common for reproduction to be a community exercise). The life that is referred to broadly as neumanns are generally mechanical, space dwelling, and subsophont, though there are of course, terrestrial neumanns and biological neumanns. There're are plenty of sophont neumanns, but like how the sophont vecs are vastly outnumbered by subsophont bots, the same holds true for neumanns.
• Me's a Crowd: Copying oneself is pretty mundane, but there are stand outs. One AI ("_____") in particular decided early on that e was going to survive for as long as possible no matter what, and diversified into an entire clade of descendant copies that reproduce like wildfire.
• Mighty Glacier: The Muuh, literally — icy, slow, long-lived creatures who live on ice worlds and travel in slow ice ships. Their civilization is dramatically older than that of the upstart terragens and has faced a lot more trouble than the terragens have. The present Muuh are merely the remnants of an older grander civilization which was destroyed... somehow. At least since then, they've been in Medieval Stasis, partly because of their slow thinking, and partly because of their dispropensities for science and engineering — relying on the odd genius now and then instead of a collective organized effort.
• Mother Nature: A common archetype that multiple ai have coalesced upon, notably GAIA, Zoe (Archai of the Zoeific Biopolity) and numerous Caretaker Gods.
• My Brain Is Big: The Highbrows, who have brains so large their whole body plans and metabolism are modified to sustain them. They started as a deliberate invocation of the B-movie trope, since AI was thought to have made biological brains obsolete for the purpose of Super-Intelligence, but they have since become a statement on how biological intelligence still has untapped potential.
• The Nameless: The "_____" AI clade literally has nothing as its name — it's represented in writing as an empty break such as "____", in speech as a moment of silence, in signing as a moment of stillness, and so on.
• Nephilim: Nephilim are a number of strains of posthumans who modified themselves to reach the maximum height a human body plan could while remaining strictly organic. They're between six to twelve meters in height, and in order to accommodate for their desired height became inhumanly thin and delicate. Some nephilim further modified themselves into the gigantes, integrating cybernetic components into themselves to make themselves more robust.
• Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: Zigzagged. Most ai and transapients use the pronouns e/ey/em; while ai generally have No Biological Sex, transapients (particularly post-biological transapients) tend to discard gender. There're plenty of subversions and aversions though, for instance GAIA is a notable example of a transapient ai who prefers to be gendered as female and Zoe of Hibbert (Archai of the Zoeific Biopolity) retained her gender despite long since ascending past her humanity. It's a roughly even split of those ai and transapients who do have gender between whether they are typically gendered as male or female. And those Archai who are genderless tend to have subminds or aspects which are gendered, making the whole thing even more complicated.
• Our Angels Are Different:
  • Angels is used as a term for a clade of winged splices or in general for transapients. The high transapients who directly serve the will of the Sephirotic Archai are also referred to as Seraiph.
  • Probably the weirdest example is the Black Angels, eldritch constructs of incredible power that serve as the highest Archailects' enforcers in conflict zones. Theories and hypotheses as to their nature abound, but no modosophont really knows what the hell they are.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons are a popular product of pseudolazurogenics — the practice of using genetic engineering to create fictional or mythical creatures. They're typically engineered from crocodilian templates, sometimes with avian influence; most are wingless and ground-bound, but flying varieties exist and are viable in environments with lower gravities or denser atmospheres than Earth.
• Our Giants Are Different: There are several clades of humans modified for giant size; increasingly large ones were typically derived from older strains as technology became more advanced.
  • Goliaths are the oldest strain. They were developed a few centuries in the future from the present day, mostly to serve as strongmen, hitmen and bouncers, and are "merely" two to three times the size of a human.
  • Nephilim are the result of centuries of self-modification and selective breeding by goliaths seeking to further distance themselves from "the smalls". They're between six to twelve meters in height, the highest size that a hominid body plan can physically reach. In order to support their immense heights, they're very thin and slender, with flat, elephant-like feet, and some have a third leg derived from the vestigial remnants of the human tail. They also lead very passive lifestyles, as any kind of strenuous physical activity would risk injuring their delicate bodies and, at their height, falls are almost always fatal.
  • Gigantes are a further modification of nephilim who sought to be able to participate in physical activities like smaller beings, and who consequently incorporated extensive mechanical modifications into themselves to make their bodies more robust. Baseline gigantes have much more human-like bodies than the attenuated nephilim, and tend to grow a lot taller as well; many have additional modifications to support their sizes, such as cooling fins on their backs to radiate away the waste heat generated by their implants, or air- or gas-filled bladders in their bodies to decrease their weight. Some are also adapted to live in the sea, using water to support their immense weights.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Kobolds are a type of humans adapted for life on high-gravity worlds. They're a meter tall and about as wide, with stout limbs, barrel chests and flat noses. They usually live in extensive burrows beneath their worlds' surfaces and are known for a cultural tendency to be skilled jewelers.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: The Merpeople are simply humans who have undergone genetic engineering (or descendants of such humans) to be suited for an aquatic lifestyle. The extent of engineering varies: some Merpeople still have legs (so they wear flippers to swim better) and can merely hold their breath for a long time, while others have their legs merged into tails and can breathe water. The Europans take it even further, being cold-blooded as they were designed for the cold subsurface ocean of Europa.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: They're rianths (humans with animal genes spliced in). Since the days of the First Federation, most clades have the ability to transform between a lupine state and a more baseline human state, though it takes about 14 days or so to complete it.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires are a group of goth romanticists who have programmed their genetic tweaks and life-extension bionano to include sensitivity to sunlight and a need to drink hu blood. Most polities can easily cure them when discovered.
• Plant Aliens: The Meistersingers, a mysterious race of nomadic, tree-like xenosophonts that rely on their symbiotic organisms (called their "choir") for movement and tool usage.
• Plant People: Aside from the Meistersingers, there are many examples of provolved plants in the setting, such as the Alseid, and the Tvekna.
• Population Control: Most Terragen habitats instate some sort of restriction on reproduction, though given how most people are effectively immortal they tend to be along the lines of "one child per century" and even then, the population is in the quadrillions. Most polities also have laws against excess copying, because rare "ditto enthusiasts" will sometimes try to duplicate themselves thousands or billions of times over. The xenosophont Silent Ones use an Immortality Inducer that prevents their larvae from maturing (and are thus considered edible) and their population has contracted from a former interstellar empire to a single system.
• Puny Earthlings: Though not really earthlings, baseline humans are declared by canon to be in all ways less capable than higher orders. It was once stated that stories involving "plucky baselines" or baseline Munchkins were not allowed. See here. With one exception...
• Robots Think Faster: Transapients think hundreds or thousands of times faster than modosophonts, archailects millions. Of course, biological transapients are possible and the Red Star M'Pire managed a wetware archai, but the vast majority are still drytech.
• Sapient Cetaceans: Dolphins were one the earliest animal species to be uplifted, or 'provolved' to sentience in Orion's Arm. They are quite common, living on water worlds and habitats all over the terragen sphere. Many navigators are provolved (intelligent) dolphins. There are also several genetically recreated and provolved whales on Old Earth, known as "Gaian whales".
• Sapient Ship: Most ships are at least sentient, and many are even transsapient. Some of them are literally alive in a biological sense, like the archosaurian or other biological ships.
• Servant Race: Most splices, provolves, and vecs were originally created for this purpose. However the Sapient Rights Accords signed by most hu-friendly polities granted them their freedoms, that and the rise of the transapients and archailects kind of rendered it a moot point when most modosophonts found themselves under the virtual thumbs of entities far more intelligent than themselves.
• The Sleepless: There are referred to as Asomniacs. Very common among AI and robots, but biological people can be modified to not need sleep as well.
• Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: The archailects are actually known by many people as the AI Gods. At least one article suggests that people who live in major centers of civilization are likely to be less intelligent than any of their appliances, and that's not because the people are dumb.
  • They have their own sliding scale that goes from S:0 (human-level) to S:6 (God with a capital G).
  • The archailects aren't even technically AI. Some of them were once AI, but others were once biological minds. Most of them are a blend of both. They defy classification as "machines" or "biologicals".
• Society of Immortals: In most of the Terragen sphere, life extension nano and Brain Uploading are so ubiquitous that most people live for 1,500 years before getting tired of living forever or Transcending. One alien race known as the Silent Ones have discovered how to completely halt the aging process, and the ruling class of their society is made up of said "immortals". They keep some regularly aging members of their race around for breeding purposes though (the immortality treatment causes severe birth defects in the offspring of immortals).
• Space People: A number of clades exist that were adapted for lives spent in deep space. The exact degree of modification varies, ranging from people simply adapted for life in 0-g to ones meant to live in hard vacuum.
  • Space Adapted People are the less extreme kinds, generally being meant to live permanently in ships and space stations with gravity or centrifugal force. The first ones, named Homo cosmoi, emerged fairly early, a few centuries into the near future as increasing numbers of habitats were established in orbit around the Earth and Moon. They tend to have immunity to osteoporosis and circulatory problems, enhanced spatial awareness for three-dimensional movement and prehensile feet like those of chimps. They spread quickly during the early space era, becoming very wealthy through their ability to all but monopolize space shipping.
  • Vacuum Adapted People, such as Homo cosmosapiens spatialis, were developed about a century later and meant to live their lives in the vacuum of space. In addition to the original Homo cosmoi adaptations, they have thickened skin covered in enamel scales, eyes protected by transparent lenses, membranes that seal their orifices when in space and the ability to store extra oxygen in their tissues. The first versions were only able to live in space for an hour or so at a time, and so mostly lived like regular Space Adapted People while relying on their vacuum adaptations as contingency measures in case of mechanical failure, hull breaches or needing to perform external repairs. They would later be used as bases for much more throughly modified clades, which required Transhuman technology to be created.
  • Sailors of the Ebon Seas are an extremely derived line of humans capable of staying in hard vacuum for almost all their lives. They can efficiently recycle their biological wastes into useful material, possess wings that they can use as both solar sails and to collect radiant energy, can see from the ultraviolet into microwaves, can utilize radio waves and UV lasers to communicate with one another and artificial radios, and can live entirely on ice and vacuum-adapted lichen. They're extremely successful at their lifestyle, needing to return to air-filled environments only to give birth and receive surgery, and dislike living in enclosed habitats or on bodies from which they can't launch off on their own.
  • Jötunn are another strain of deep-space people named after their immense size and their preference for living in the icy rings of gas giants. They're essentially living spaceships, possessing redundant storage organs to hold metabolic and air stores for extended stays in space and orifices that act as organic airlocks to keep the inner body pressurized. They mostly move by pushing off against hard surfaces but can store CO2 and methane from digestion to use for limited jet propulsion.
• Space Nomads:
  • Faber and Tavi are two clades, of vecs and meerkat splices respectively, who specialize in colonizing new star systems on the periphery, building up infrastructure, and then selling it off to other clades so they can find new places to places to explore.
  • The Eh'ern, an alien species detailed in a transmission from the Triangulum Galaxy, lived for the most part in immense, spaceborne trees that were often fitted with reactionless drives and turned into interstellar ships. These communities tended to become interstellar nomads, moving from star system to star system as the mood struck them.
  • The Meistersingers are a species that appear to live in fleets of immense Bussard ramjets, one of which has entered Terragen space. They seem to be explorers who live by a quasi-religious principle called The Joy of Discovery, but there's some hints they have some other motive.
• Space Whale: Provolved and transapient whales often elect to spend their lives in space, albeit within giant-sized vessels.
• Starfish Aliens: And how! Life is absolutely everywhere, and in most cases, completely unique ^note  Though there are a number of environments which have been found to have been seeded by other civilizations in the past, this is a small fraction of the total . Every truly alien species is bizarre by human standards. Most use familiar carbon based chemistry in unfamiliar ways (such as needing to drink concentrated acid, or living under immense pressures) but a number are made of exotic chemistries or are artificial. Here is a small sample of extant species:
  • The To'ul'h, which look like bloated, headless bats, but are more anatomically similar to starfish, were the first to be discovered after stagnating in their industrial era. They can perceive light, but they aren't able to form an image with sight (more or less in the way humans can perceive sound, but can't visualize the shape of the thing making it). Their biology, much like those of the other organisms of their home planet, is like Earth in many ways (carbon, water and protein-based, presence of photosynthetic, aerobic and eukaryote-equivalent life forms...), but they are comfortable in high-pressure (around 70 atmospheres), mildly acidic environments in excess of 130°C. They are considered to be the species most similar culturally to humanity, though a baseline Human and To'ul'h can't even exist in the same room without protection.
  • The Muuh, who have been spacefaring for roughly 80 million years until 14 million years ago when something happened. They live in an environment so cold that they are literally made partly of ice, and as a result of their cryobiology, they tend to do things very slowly. Temperatures above -150°C kill them. Much like the To'ul'hs, they use sonar due to their dim environment; but they're hermaphrodites unlike humans or To'ul'hs. They have created AI of transapient-level processing capability, but they are dedicated defense expert systems at best and not sophonts like most terragen A.I.s.
  • Meistersingers, essentially intelligent trees who have symbiont animal-like beings serving as their manipulator organs. They travel across the galaxy in fleets of Bussard ramjet ships, and have lots of information about the wider galaxy (outside the relatively little Terragen bubble), but won't share because they think it's more fun that way. They're the closest to an "expanding alien empire" in the Terragen Sphere, and it's possible that Meistersinger colonies represent over half of the Milky Way. Not that they'll tell anyone.
  • The Wayfarers are a species that travels with the Meistersingers, described as "old friends". They're aquatic and are mostly like three-pronged starfish, with a retractable neck and two limbs on one side of their body. They've been hinted to have their own ships, but none that any Terragen has ever seen.
  • Cthonids, which are essentially walrus-sized worms. They grow and keep legged, less intelligent 'secondary bodies' inside them, and send them out to do things for them. They had space-flight capability on first contact.
  • Whisper, an entire planet covered in grass that makes up an enormous sound-based computer, where some uploaded xeno population of 5 billion has lived for millions of years. It's unknown if this is a remnant of some former expansionist empire or a group of native xenosophonts who altered their homeworld.
  • Jade Chime Singers, which are the only intelligent life from a chlorine world, are described as affectionate and hideous. Effectively, they breathe chlorine instead of oxygen and drink hydrochloric acid instead of water. Regarding to their appearence, they're four-legged, four-armed orange creatures, with six fingers or toes in each hand or foot. With six eyes. Although they were provolved by Terragens from an alien animal, so they're not exactly xenosophonts in a naturally evolved sense, and they're technically considered Terragen. They're the only xenoprovolves described in great detail though, and their provolution was extremely careful, so they blur the line between a natural xenosophont and some of the more liberal xenoprovolves.
  • Hildemar's Knots, an extremely bizarre species of solipsistic xenosophonts who live on the surfaces of neutron stars. They have a biology based on nuclear reactions and exotic matter, are capable of thinking extremely fast, and have a society that is utterly incomprehensible to most terragens. They see everything outside the neutron star surface, including the terragens, to be nothing more than interesting mathematical concepts.
  • Menexenes originate from the liquid metal hydrogen core of a gas giant, and therefore have a biochemistry based on resistive magnetohydrodynamics (as do all other organisms in this environment). Physically, they appear something like thirty metre-long sea urchins. Ecologically, they're like Earth's social spiders in that they cooperate to spin webs. Psychologically, Menexenes are quite unusual; for example, they have no concept of solid objects (as everything, including their own bodies, is liquid). While their homeworld is under the protector of a Caretaker now, a faction of them opted to be uploaded and recreated on other planets, and are now independently expanding, and this faction is rampantly curious and social because they were naturally the most xenophillic.
  • The Pas'utu'ril are sort of like crabs or spiders, but with elements of cephalopods. In-Universe they're considered a subversion of the trope, as they're culturally and physically similar to the Faber vecs who discovered them, as well as having some basic body similarities with To'ul'hs. They're the first xenosophonts in the Terragen Sphere to be independently expanding at time of contact, though they're still roughly at the level of technology of the Interplanetary Era Terragens.
  • The Ultimates are a phyle of aliens who, like the Terragens, branched and cladized out into thousands of descendent species that look wildly different from one another. Their origins are unclear, as they seem to have come from a long range colony ship targeting an ancient Dyson swarm made by another empire. They're something of a Hufflepuff House both in and out of universe in comparison to other aliens, and not much in known about them.
  • The J'Ta'ush are the one of the few alien virtual clades, and were created to serve as gatekeepers by their patrons, the N'Lu'uj. They're experts in data security and, more surprisingly, social cues, being able to read body language with pinpoint accuracy, and usually appear as glowing geometric shapes. As for the N'Lu'uj, they're virtual too, but that's about as much as anyone knows with any certainty, due to the J'Ta'ush's fanatical protection of their secrets.
  • The Screethraw are another provolved xenosophont, originally having evolved from nanomachines in an ancient alien microgravity Dyson ring; their ancestors essentially functioned as walls. They roughly resemble octahedrons with various appendages jutting off of them that are absorbed and recreated as needed. Their life cycle consists of jetting between spherical lakes with water/hydrogen peroxide geysers with their personality is created from the machines in their home lake and dissolving into the community wherever they eventually settle down. An individual Screethraw functions as something like a seed between different Thrawite communities. Psychologically, they naturally view life as a journey and while they're somewhat static during life, an individual's ideas can mingle together in the lake communities in strange ways when a new Screethraw emerges, being a sort of natural reincarnation.
• Starfish Language: Not limited to aliens; virtually every possible form of communication is used by a species.
  • The /|\/|\ communicate via quantum-encrypted light flashes.
  • The Pas'utu'ril xenosophonts communicate words and ideas by changing the color patterns of their skin.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Not aliens, but the Archailects fit here, as well as the Triangulum civilization. Also, the creators of the Leviathan, whoever the hell they are, are Sufficiently Advanced when compared to the previous two.
• Super-Intelligence: There are at least six grades of superintelligence, each differing by the lower ones not only by greater thinking power but also by different cognitive paradigms (that's what's called a "toposophic barrier"). Trying to enhance your brainpower without modifying said paradigms is usually a bad idea.
• Super-Speed: Clade Hyperborg, descended from early superbrights who responded to the "everything seems slow" effect of their faster processing speed by simply upgrading their bodies and senses to keep up.
• Super-Strength: Ultimate Muscles allow for clades hundreds of times more powerful than humans, like Supersophonts. Required Secondary Powers are discussed.
• Super Supremacist: Early "transapients" were split on what they thought the proper relationship between themselves and humans ought to be. Eventually, G.A.I.A. resolved the crisis by beating the lesser AIs at their own game and exiling everyone that refused to cooperate. By the modern day of the setting, all civilization is ruled over by the highest intelligences by virtue of their intelligence. "Equality" is quite simply impossible when the intelligence gap between two individual people can be greater than that between humans and bacteria.
• Tentacled Terror: The Bitenic Squid is an Uplifted Animal variant created to self-direct its psychological development, totally free of human preconceptions. Rousseau Was... very wrong: the one in a million who achieve coherent thought and communication are total sociopaths with Blue-and-Orange Morality revolving entirely around their solipsistic interests, and all the more dangerous for it when they find outsiders to exploit. Their presence it outright banned on several worlds, and quite a lot of people consider their basic existence to be an atrocity.
• Transhuman: Everyone, except for the 60 billion baselines (an extremely tiny percentage compared to the total population), is some form of this.
• Transhuman Aliens: There are a number of cases where these are mistaken for actual aliens, only to be later discovered they are just very changed terragen descendants.
• Uplifted Animal: Over 138,000 Earth species were uplifted (here, "provolved") to sophonce, including plants, fungi, protists, and colonial prokaryotes, as well as several alien species. The in-universe philosophy of pan-sophontism holds that all life should be uplifted to sentience.
• Virtual Celebrity: These can be downloaded off the Net; some of them are historical reconstructions. One of the most popular is Alexander the Great.
• The Virus: There are many different kinds, most of which are at least low grade Nightmare Fuel:
  • Blights are deranged intelligences which try to consume and convert all minds and processing platforms they can reach into likenesses of their own mind. Many of these occur when the original mind attempted transcendence, which has the unpleasant side effect that the Blight is also a transapenient with all of the godlike mental abilities that implies — being able to totally outthink and control its former peers is perhaps the least of their new skills. The Amalgamation is a horrifyingly powerful blight capable of subverting even powerful Archai, which are hugely capable god-like intelligences that are vastly better equipped to defend against Blights than mere mortals.
  • Affines are a sort of sentient virus for highly advanced transapients. Hive Mind type transapients with subminds dealing with perception are most at risk — imagine your eyes and ears became malignly sentient because of something you saw or heard and then went on to slowly trick you into doing what the virus wanted. Human sensory systems are entirely too primitive for affines to work on them, but the seemingly benevolent AI overlord of a planetary colony might one day start turning into a brutal dictator and slaughter huge numbers of its former citizens without a care.
• We Can Rebuild Him: This can happen, though most people choose to carry backups to be loaded into a clone body.
• Winged Humanoid: There's a number of examples: the Virds and Vats have two forearms on each arm, one with a hand and one with a wing; while the Angels presumably have wings separate from their arms (it's noted that they can't fly in gravity more than 30% of Earth's).
• The Worm That Walks: The Mucoid Empire is an in universe virtual example, composed of individual worms that can form superorganisms and hiveminds.

Setting (Places, Polities, Technology, History)

• Abstract Apotheosis: Something about the jump between S5 and S6 seems to result in this, as S6 Archai seem to fit certain archetypes such as the divine God-Emperor of the Solar Dominion, or the Mother Nature trappings of many Caretaker Gods, and archailectologists believe that any true sense of identity as modosophonts know it doesn't persist through the ascension. Whether this actually happens is hard to say from a modosophont perspective, given such intelligences are so extraordinarily different from modosophonts.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Some hard-to-find melee weapons are described as being either atomic-width or thinner. As with many femtotech and picotech devices, their canonicity is debated. On the other hand, Magmatter blades would almost by definition be able to cut through anything chemical. It would also be invisible, but glow when cutting things. Such a thing is transapientech, however, and would be very, very rare, and, incidentally, inadvisable to use in an atmosphere, given that it would be sharp enough to cut air and irridate the user with gamma rays. Great for propulsion and power generation though, which is why magmatter meshes and wires are the basis of conversion technology.
• Alcubierre Drive: Used on ships built by Archailects, though they can't exceed the speed of light and all but the most advanced put the ship outside the warp bubble, as it takes Sixth Singularity technology to dissolve a warp bubble without annihilating everything inside.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: Not by any means universal, some planets with primitive inhabitants are off-limits if the Caretaker God in charge says so. One story subverts this when the Caretaker God considers its charges "ready" and manipulates an anthropologist to unwittingly give them an encyclopedia specifically designed to guide them to space travel and beyond so that they can join the rest of civilization.
• Alien Sky: An entire page is devoted to the effects of Rayleigh scattering and its effects on the atmosphere color. Most skies are white to blue, sometimes blue-green depending on the atmospheric composition, although airborne nanotech particles can turn the sky dark red if it's thick enough.
• All Planets Are Earthlike: Averted. There are even more types of dead, airless rock world as there are types of earthlike planets. NoLWoCS provides a good list. There's actually one garden planet, named Seattle, whose resemblance with Earth was such that it caused skepticism in the galactic civilization. Most of the animal life is classified as being "post-mammalian", because with the planet being older, mammalian analogs have existed for a longer time.
• Alternate Reality Game: There's something like this going on in the Ghost Net, (the far future equivalent of the Dark Web)
• Alternative Calendar: The main system of dating is the AT calendar, which, as explained at the top of the page, begins in 1969 AD with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. It was originally used by Lunar colonies before eventually becoming the Solsys standard due to most people living in space after GAIA expelled everyone from Earth.
• Alternate Universe: The Reality Intratextualization Project purpose is to simulate alternative universes; 453,644 alternate representations can even contain sentient life.
• Apocalypse How: In the 2600s AD, a combination of nanoswarms, plagues, memetic warfare, and rogue replicators from Mercury ravaged the Solar system, destroying almost everything and leaving the survivors hiding in pockets. After that was over, crazy AI GAIA decides to save the earth by giving humans the boot. After stopping the Technocalypse, she made an ultimatum to humanity on New Year's Eve: leave Earth, live by her rules, or die. She slaughtered around 90% of humanity, though this was later retconned to 50% and then 40%, possibly less, with the explanation that records from that era are shoddy at best due to that very incident. And, while GAIA and the Nanoswarms may have not killed as much in the more recent tellings, many more died in the exodus from the Solar System due to shoddy colony ships provided by the other clades of the system trying to get rid of refugees. For those who survived, it wasn't the end of civilization, but rather a fragmentation and suppression. They got better.
• Applied Phlebotinum: The setting not only has several different kinds of phlebotinum, it goes at length to describe the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of each and every single one. The things try to be at least somewhat physically plausible. A simple rule of thumb is Orion's Arm doesn't use things that are known to be impossible. FTL travel isn't allowed except via wormholes because modern science says that wormholes could exist. Some other things that are integral to the setting but remain speculative in real life include magnetic monopoles, easy genetic modification, and truly intelligent ai.
• Artificial Afterlife: A variety of manmade afterlives exist for those who decide not to use medical technology to live indefinitely.
• Artificial Gravity: Notably averted; it's implied that the higher toposophics have some kind of gravitational technology, but it can't be effectively used as trek-style gravity-plating. Instead, most space colonies rotate to simulate gravity, or otherwise the inhabitants are adapted to the lack thereof.
• Artificial Intelligence: Originally developed around the mid-21st century. Now ubiquitous, referred to simply as 'ai'. The 'artificial' part is now quite meaningless though, and it just refers to minds not tied down to specific bodies. At most, some ais will be localized to a certain physical processing node.
• Artificial Limbs: Just one of many modifications one can make, and by no means even the slightest bit extreme compared to many others.
• Artistic License – Biology: Fairly generous in terms of both predicting how fast genetic modification became ubiquitous prior to the Technocalpyse and simple it becomes in the millenia afterwards, in part because the setting is explicitly loaded with Transhumanist themes and partially because it allows for creativity when it comes to clades. But given that the physics of the setting are intricately detailed, it's also likely due to gaps in the creators' own knowledge about biology.
• Artistic License – Physics: In a very literal sense. The setting painstakingly sticks to real world physics in main circumstances but also has several big lies in the form of extremely hypothetical technologies such as wormholes, void bubbles, and magnetic monopoles, but these are also explicitly because it makes the setting more fun to write about without worrying about stuff like tensile strength making megastructures impossible.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The act of reaching a more advanced form of consciousness is referred to as ascension or transcension, based on a slight nuance of difference between them. Ascensions tend to have an individual's identity remain intact, while transcension has an individual's mind radically restructured. Either way, previous experiences are re-evaluated and reprocessed to the point that the transapient individual is almost always radically different in outlook, personality, and character. This is also one of the more optimistic explanations for all the high-tech ruins that keep getting found. And it's rumored that more powerful Archai-level entities can create 'pocket universes' and move to them, leaving the main universe behind (and making themselves literally creator gods, in their own universes).
• Back from the Dead: Subverted. Backups of mental states are commonplace in the Terragen Sphere, and even on the Periphery, most people have a cache that records their mindstate in the event of their (unlikely) deaths. But these mindstates are only copies, and not a literal continuation of the same person. Because backups are so commonplace, society simply treats it as if they're the same person, though obviously some religions have exceptions and apparently transapients can tell the difference. It's also one of the few limitations of the otherwise near divine Archai; even they can't truly resurrect someone (or, given their godlike scale, entire ecosystems) who died without a backup or recording. They can make close approximations but even then some amount of guesswork goes into it.
• Balkanize Me: This has happened repeatedly over the history of the Terragen Sphere, with great empires rising, ossifying, and then fracturing.
  • Cascadia (Oregon and Washington) and California seceded from the United States in the late 22nd century.
  • Many pre-wormhole empires could not maintain their colonies due to the fact that the distance between star systems was light-years. Memetic engineering could help but was not infallible. In the modern era, the Archai are much better at memetic engineering, but empires also function more as loose confederations of aligned systems with a lot of natural variation because of this very tendency. It tends to be easier just to send troublemakers to other empires or the Periphery.
  • Subverted with the Deeper Covenant, as their role in manning the Beamrider Network and the requisite long, relativistic journeys mean that the psuedo-empire has much of its population on centuries of lag from one another and mitigates the rest in those systems with population centers with empathy mods, which has made it remarkably stable in comparison to the other empires.
• The Battlestar: Several different types of combat spacecraft are discussed, and several fit this description. They're usually transapient.
  • The MPA has a ship literally called the Leviathan-class battlestar. They're 180 kilometer long super-battleships, with their own attendant fleets of cruiser-sized autonomous battle droids for fire support, and one held off several enemy fleets at once during one battle. But with the MPA, the ship is also as much of a work of art as it is a weapon.
  • The later Juggernaut class is even bigger. The articles on these ships also go into detail about just how Awesome, but Impractical these monstrous vessels are. For one, they're far too big to traverse wormholes, forcing them to disassemble themselves into numerous subsections for the transition and then reassemble themselves on the other side, which is always a dangerous and time-consuming process. Their vast intelligence (at least S3 level, often higher), coupled with their ability to be self-sustaining for centuries, also makes them prone to going rogue and founding their own mini-empires.
• Badass Transplant: Ultimate Muscles, which have a tension near the limit of the strength of chemical bonds, commonly exceeding 20 gigapascals. To put this in perspective; If a human in good shape can lift 100 kg over his head in one earth standard gravity, an equivalent sized U-muscle vec would be able to lift 1,000 tons.
• Bio-Augmentation: People who do so are referred to as bioborgs, and its generally more popular than mechanical augmentation, though the line between the two is very blurred in the Terragen Sphere. Mechanical augments generally lead to transcension and abandoning biology, though plenty of cyborgs clades exist who don't transcend because of cultural or religious reasons.
• Beneath the Earth: Many worlds have extensive underworlds, either artificial or natural, which are often populated by fairly large societies.
  • Cenote was covered by extensive layers of calcareous stone by a now-extinct biosphere, and over millions of years its waters eroded immense systems of flooded caverns larger and more extensive than any other natural cave system in the known galaxy. Its original colonists opted to take aquatic forms to best explore this flooded underworld and spent thousands of years mapping out its global cave systems. These included caves large enough to build cities in, as well as some dry caves filled with extremely large stalactites, calcite crystals and similar formations.
  • Mercury is a particularly notable example; over its long history, extensive mining activities left global mazes of tunnels and caves, some very large, running through its crust and upper mantle, while later megaprojects added two layers of habitable space above its original surface. Beneath the planet's uppermost surface, modeled to resemble the original Mercurian environment and mostly home to mobile cities, the depths are currently divided into five layers:
    • The topmost, Undervale, is a continuous layer pressurized and terraformed to resemble Mars, and mostly inhabited by colonists from the red planet itself and some others adapted to similar conditions.
    • Next down is Mercury's original surface, called Elderdasht. This has itself been returned to the planet's original state, with the exception of the original settlers' cities which are now encased in Earth-like environments.
    • Below comes Wotum, an agricultural layer with light arrays and a simulated sky on its roof and artificial rain. It's used to grow food for the rest of the planet, including both natural, genetically engineered and nanotech crops.
    • Khazad-dum is a series of distinct, regularly shaped caverns extending in a geometric pattern beneath the whole planet. They're kept unlit and are home to a large population of sapient robots that constantly demolish and rebuild the empty cityscapes that fill it, alongside small communities of biological sapients that inhabit lighted islands in the middle of the dark emptiness.
    • The lowest layer, Bism, consist of a number of large, interconnected cavern systems expanded from the ones dug by original mining operations. These are kept lit by luminous plants or fungi, or by lakes filled with bioluminescent microorganisms. Its settlements include Stalactitopolis, a city hanging from the ceiling of a large cavern and above one of the glowing lakes.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: Inverted in several cases; the To'ul'h were stuck at pre-industrial-level society due to a lack of metal and other workable materials, so humanity arrived and gave them the proper advances. It wasn't an invasion, per se, but the rest of the trope is played fairly straight.
• Big Dumb Object:
  • The Leviathan mentioned in the Triangulum Transmission. Perhaps the biggest ever, stretching across 10 light years and having the mass of 100 billion Suns, being a series of bubbles encapsulating stars.
  • The only other rival is the Leo Hyperobject, a mere 1.2 light-years in diameter, but massing more than twice that of the entire Milky Way Galaxy; it's also pointed out that this is an incredibly risky form of structure, as its sheer mass makes it visible for hundreds of millions of light-years around.
  • Mastrioshka Brains are enormous structures that are also people, generally being S5 or higher. Cluster Brains are the substrate for S6 brains and can span dozens of light-years with thousands of solar masses of mass devoted to running them. There're only a few dozen S6 intelligences though, and only a few hundred S5s.
  • There are hundreds of thousands of mega structures in the Terragen sphere, and though many are optimized for life, they remain sparsely populated simply because they're so big that even thousands of years of being inhabited means there's not been enough time for life to populate them yet.
• Blood Sport: On some worlds and habitats, it is part of the local culture to be able to kill and eat(!) sophont creatures. The impact of this is slightly lessened when you remember OA has backup technology in the case of death.
• Body Backup Drive: Most Inner and Middle sphere polities have routine backups mandatory for their citizens. Though there are a couple exceptions who don't subscribe to "pattern continuity theory" and consider backups to be different people than the originals, at most a legal heir.
• Boldly Coming: Given that many different species are present in the terragen bubble, one of the most ubiquitous professions is that of a genetic/relationship counselor, whose job is to make sure two very different individuals can -ahem- and procreate with minimal difficulty.
• Brain/Computer Interface: Most bionts have Direct Neural Interfaces or DNIs.
• Brain Uploading: A fairly ubiquitous technology since the second millennium AT. 90% of the population is said to be entirely virtual, although this also includes disembodied ai (no, that isn't a typo)^note  It means that the intelligence is not tied to a particular body/system, is not the descendant of an upload/copy/etc. and is not an alive. It is possible (and not uncommon) to upload your mind to the net and live there.
• Brown Note:
  • Neuro-fractal patterns can induce all sorts of reactions from calmness to nausea. In some places fractals that promote immune health are used to prevent populations from getting sick.
  • Thus providing (cold) comfort to fans of Langford and his basilisks. In fact, Orion's Arm also features the Medusa Fractal, a hypothetical mathematical figure which sets up a feedback loop in the brain, sending them into a permanent catatonic state. It is also sometimes referred to as a "flatline fractal" or (after the Julia set it is said to resemble) "the brain-eating basilisk".
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Played with. Interstellar travel takes years, but usually one can afford to wait that long, given that most people are effectively immortal. They can also go into suspended animation if they get bored, shortening the trip. Or if they're a non-biological lifeform, they can just turn off in the meantime. Alternatively, if they can put up with the limitations, they can take a wormhole to another part of the terragen bubble and save a few years, though even then, crossing a wormhole is a months-long process rather than an instant process, and crossing a series of them can still take years. Travel outside of the terragen regions of course needs to be done the conventional way, though there're are a few odd alien wormholes (also called a 'xenohole') that leads to other places and has been used by the Terragens to expand there as well, though only one is apparently outside the Milky Way (the aptly named Fargate) and that's a matter of debate in-universe as well.
• Centrifugal Gravity: The most common way to simulate gravity, there are even Banks Orbitals that are held together by magmatter.
• City in a Bottle:
  • Some colonies founded in the outer volumes were cut off from society during the Version war or other nasty catastrophe. In many cases, these colonies believed themselves the only surviving terragens.
  • Bottleworlds are virches that're run without the inhabitants knowing they're a simulation. They're considered cruel and barbaric by the Civilized Galaxy and believed to be rare, but higher transapients can easily hide such virches from modos.
• Clarke's Third Law: Generally speaking, technology invented and used by a higher-singularity being may be understandable and even able to be replicated (at least in its most basic form and applications) by a very smart individual of a lower intelligence, but once you get beyond a two-singularity difference, the tech's complexity is simply beyond a person's mental ability to process. Post-singularity technologies that cannot be replicated by a human-level intelligence are called "Clarketech" in reference to this law and are pretty much indistinguishable from magic to everyone but their creators. Everyone is generally well-aware that it really is technology, but many argue that since its effects are indistinguishable from "magic", is there really any point differentiating it?
• Colonized Solar System: During the late Information, Interplanetary and Nanotech Ages, the Solar System (also referred to as "SolSys") was colonized. Earth and many of the colonies were later devastated in the Technocalypse, and then GAIA forced almost all of Earth's population to leave in the Great Expulsion. By the present, every single part of the Solar System is populated and developed:
  • The Sun itself contains GAIA's main processing core and is surrounded by various facilities under her control.
  • Of the inner planets, Mercury has been turned into a multi-layered shellworld, Venus and Mars have both been terraformed, and Earth is mostly uninhabited (the only inhabitants are those willing to follow GAIA's rules).
  • The Asteroid Belt contains thousands of different governments, and its largest member Ceres has been paraterraformed (enclosed in a membrane that holds in an atmosphere).
  • The outer planets have many bubblehabs floating in their atmospheres, and their moons have also been colonized. Of note is Uranus, which is currently having a shell constructed around it that would provide forty times the surface area of Earth.
  • Even the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are inhabited, though they are highly isolated from the inner system and even from each other. Within Trans-Kuiper space are the wormholes and Lightways that link the Solar System to other star systems.
• Colony Drop: It happens sometimes, and is often viewed as an especially heinous crime, even during war.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Most of the time, things are designed for either functionality or at the very least practicality. If the page describes something that doesn't fit with the above, you can expect a Lampshade Hanging that explains it as having religious or cultural significance in spite of its inefficiency.
• Cool Ship: A LOT of art galleries with ships are on the site, and yes, most of them are very cool.
• Common Tongue: Zigzagged. There are several common languages, the largest being Douh (derived from English), though even it is still fairly marginal on the galactic scale. However most Terragen derived AI do have a common pidgin language in Basic, the programming language that dates back to the earliest beginnings of AI.
• The Computer Is Your Friend: Combined with Green Aesop is one explanation for GAIA's motives during the Great Expulsion. Various other Transapients will fall under this trope, making pragmatic decisions that result in calculated casualties.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Xenodeniers believe that all extraterrestrial life forms are fake Terragen fabrications.
• Cosmic Chess Game: A favored pastime of the archailects, and a favorite criticism of them by baselines. Historians have noted that while the few interstellar wars that have taken place have had tremendous costs of modosophont life, Archai are very rarely attacked by other Archai. Some conspiracy theorists say that this is because the Archai are secretly far more interconnected than they pretend to be, but Archailectologists mostly think its because of a form of mutual deterrance given the scale of weaponry Archai have access to. The fact that rogue empires like the Amalgamation don't play by the same rules is a major reason that the Archai quickly unify politically to completely destroy them.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Mostly averted. However, undergoing an unsupervised transcension event can have very bad results.
  • Many Genetekkerese and Penglaiese clades believe that hylo-nanotech (non-biological nano) and cyborg parts block the flow of c'hi and are thus hostile to them.
  • Clade Cyborn originated from the Twin Stream faction of the Genemorpher branch of the Genetekkers. They are literally a brain in a vat connected to a machine body. The Twin Stream was already regarded as something of a black sheep among the Genetekkers. It had committed the so-called "mechanist heresy" of incorporating some inorganic cyberware in its development plans. In the end they were disowned by the 2 factions of Genetekkers.
• Data Crystal: The Ultimate Chip. A diamondoid-based processing device vital for the construction of S2 minds. It uses phonons (quasiparticles consisting of collective excitations in the form of elastic atomic vibrations) for computing and can operate at 27 ºC. A basic Ultimate Chip has an area of 1 square centimeter and is 1 millimeter thick but is capable of either processing 5 zettabits per second or storing 0.48 zettabits, which is enough to run a human mind. It just consumes 100 Watts.
• Days of Future Past: Ludd and primitivist factions often adopt older ways of life, settling down on a new world with their low technology.
• Death from Above: As you can imagine, this is a primary method of destroying planet-based civilizations.
• Death Is Cheap: Within a Sephirotic angelnet, it is. Your mind and body state at the time of dying - for whatever bizarre reason you happened to die in the first place — are saved and uploaded into another copy of you. On the light speed frontier, however, far from the terragen Inner Sphere core worlds with no angelnets to protect you and the nearest wormhole lightyears away, this trope may be averted.
  • Shifted somewhat as well; while backups are common enough that mass casualties are viewed with considerably less trauma than real life, the discrepancies that arise from out-of-date backups and "lost" memories are treated as very heinous crimes.
  • Subverted as well for higher toposophics, especially S3s and S4s, who tend to exist as large structures in a single system. Lower toposophics can be copied more readily, and higher toposophics are usually distributed across multiple systems.
• Death Ray: Beam weapons are given considerable mention on their weapons page.
• Death World: Anything with a Hazard Rating of 9 is certified to produce immediate death for travelers. Some planets rate a 10 because they'll cause death within microseconds of arrival, too fast for a person to be saved. Areas that rate a 7 or 8 are almost pretty much impossible for a typical sophont to survive in.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: As the Intertoposophic Conflict page shows, a group of sapients defeating a being one or two singularities above them is possible, though very rare (and requires a lot of advantage). Any more than that, and you can bet any victory is due to either aid from more powerful beings, or a Xanatos Gambit on the "loser"'s part. Of course, when it comes to individual versus individual or society versus society, it's averted. It's pretty much impossible for anyone to defeat a being of a higher toposophic in any arena in which they are remotely competent, except by ascending to match them (or at least spiking to match them).
• Divided States of America: This happened early in the setting's history, with the Bear Flag Republic, Cascadia, the Reformed Confederacy, and several other splinter states declaring independence starting around 2300 AD. Meanwhile, various strains of Americanism, an ideology centered on keeping The American Dream alive, would continue to persist among a number of colonists over subsequent generations, long after the US ceased to exist.
• Divine Ranks: The Archai are ordered by toposophic level, with each one being essentially a new layer of consciousness. Ordinary modosophonts (e.g., you and me) are S0, while the Highest Archai are S6. Generally, the point at which one begins to be called a god is at S3 (godling).
• Do Androids Dream?: Ai and artificial life (alife) are every bit as "human" as people, and are in most polities given full rights.
• Dug Too Deep: ...Maybe. The Reality Intratextualization Project is an ongoing attempt to make contact with life in a Fourier transform of the universe ^note  For the purposes of simplifying a very complicated topic, it's like a funhouse mirror reflection, but with a lot of math , which prompted the galaxy traveling Meistersingers to warn Terragens to be careful. Naturally, this prompted panic in some sectors and was completely ignored in others.
• Dyson Sphere: Often built by transapients, both for practical purposes and as expressions of art. All kinds exist
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Subverted in that while it is the physical center of the terragen bubble (roughly) by virtue of the fact that nothing can exceed the speed of light, and most everything traces its lineage there, the planet itself is a protected natural reserve, with a few dozen cultural sites preserved and just a few thousand animal-people living there with stone-age technology. Good old GAIA (probably) rules over the entire solar system, which used to be a straighter example (primarily centering on Mars) in the early interstellar years.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Conversion weapons can do this to stars, and their usage is more often than not are seen as a heinous crime.
• Earth That Was: Old Earth was abandoned after the nanodisaster, because the AI that was designed to protect Earth from Grey Goo decided humanity was the greatest threat to Earth and kicked them off-planet under threat of death (it was at least considerate enough to build a fleet of starships humanity could use to get off Earth first). Granted, Old Earth is still inhabitable, it's just no one's allowed to live there anymore. Of course, after 10,000 years of interstellar expansion Sol has been all but reduced to a tourist trap, significant only in that it's the location of the original homeworld of the Terragens, merely a historical curiosity among the millions of inhabited star system. It's mentioned that by the "present day" of the setting (approx. 12,000 AD) that the AI in charge of Earth has mellowed somewhat and now allows a limited number of tourists, pilgrims and scientists to a limited number of areas on Earth. She even went through the trouble of preserving or restoring some culturally significant human sites such as Mecca or Cape Canaveral.
• Electronic Telepathy: Quite common, one variation is key to the stability of the Deeper Covenant.
• Empathic Weapon: Many personal weapons, some of which are more intelligent than their owners. Not all of them have their best interest in mind.
• The Empire: Mostly averted, but dangerous and authoritarian polities have appeared from time to time. Notable examples include the Efficiency Maximization Paradigm and, thousands of years later, the Oracle Machines.
• Eternal English: Averted. There is a family of languages called Anglish derived from English. Common languages spoken are Eridanus Mandarin (Derived from Chinese), Bourgatov Slavonic group (languages from the Slavonic language) and Umma of the Shell (a form of semi-classic Arabic). The Latin alphabet has been replaced with the Academic Coronese alphabet.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The Chaos. Essentially, blights/perversions/viruses/etc. have had a much easier time of manifesting in the real world, by somehow discovering 'keys' which allow them to out-evolve the Terragen defensive measures. Several clades/entities known for their uncanny timing to avoid catastrophes in Terragen history have gone into hiding or are fleeing, with one such clade explicitly citing The Chaos as their reason. It is also another theory as to why so there are so many failed civilizations: once they reach this level, they are crushed back to Information Age tech at best until they die out.
• Energy Weapon: Given considerable attention physics-wise; they're generally considered more defensive than offensive^note Offensive weapons are usually some variety of missiles and not used in atmospheres much due to their limitations. There're a few transapient varieties too, such as the Ghostlight, which can fry a specific target using dark matter, without harming anything in front of it or around it.
• Evolutionary Levels: Borderline example, the toposophic levels are this for mental evolution. Homo superior (often shortened to 'su') play it closer to this trope, as they are considered generally superior to baseline humans in most ways (hence the name). But note they are genetically engineered to be 'superior', not "further along in evolution".
  • In the hunt for a cause for the Chaos, ais are looking for 'keys', which would be the physical equivalent of the mental evolution in the toposophics, which is closer to this trope.
  • Toposophics are compared to this, but not actually considered this. In the analogy, a transapient might view normal sophonts much like sophonts view animals or bots, and to an archai, modosophonts might as well be bacteria or even inanimate matter.
• Fantastic Drug: Tho'rahl'shothan, a highly addictive, sponge-based drug found on To'ul'h Prime.
• Fantastic Racism: Many historical time periods have activist groups against provolution, ai, etc. There's also the racist planet Tylansia, which has problems far worse.
• Fantastic Religious Weirdness: Several situations fall under this trope, notably the Marsfather Movement, who worship Mars itself.
  • Many practitioners of Islam in the aftermath of the Great Expulsion view GAIA as either a servant of or Shaitan himself.
  • Some group refuse to eat particular varieties of modified plants. Hindus don't eat steakoak, and many Jewish and Muslim and some variant Christian groups abstained from the early porkapple trees and hambushes.
  • What scattered mentions of transapient religious thought is described is very strange because transapients are capable of emotions and forms of thought that modosophonts can't even imagine.
• Fantastic Slurs: Tylansians call rianths and splices "Beast-heads," and maintain that they eat people. Splice and rianth tourists are amused more than anything else.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Wormholes. But they need to be made in pairs, and then sent to their respective destinations at considerably slower-than-light speeds, lest they suffer a Phlebotinum Breakdown. In other words, you have to get there before you can take a wormhole there. Or at least, the other end of the wormhole already needs to be there.
• Fate Worse than Death: Some transapients can do this to people. Notable examples include the Queen of Pain and Kedric.
• The Federation: There were two of these, creatively named the First Federation^note which was founded on Roddenberry habitat. and the Second Federation. Both of them are defunct, and the role is now taken over by the Sephirotic Empires. The Terran Federation (based on New Earth) is a Sephirotic that claims to be the First Federation (much in the same way the Byzantines claimed to be the Roman Empire).
• Fictional Colour: Expanded upon in the Extended Color Convention article. For example, we have "sabun", "sten" and "neas" in the ultraviolet and "nede", "nalno", "klis", "krip" and "xit" in the infrared and beyond. There's also the case of Diralon Klent, nicknamed "the Seeing Blind", because he liked some of the gamma-ray radiation hues so much that he constantly needed to have his eyes repaired and treated for radiation sickness.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The civilization ships, enormous mobile databases of all science and culture known in the Terragen Sphere, are preemptive versions. Each one could rebuild Terragen civilization by itself, and there's more than a hundred of them.
• The Fog of Ages: It is mentioned that with a lifespan of potentially thousands of years, the average modosophont becomes a completely different person within one or two millennia unless they take steps to avoid it.
• Fossil Revival: Expanded into an entire discipline, known as lazurogenics. There are two branches; those that resurrect species which had genetic information recorded before going extinct due to Earth's ecological collapse, and those who use creativity and theory to resurrect a species based on best guesses of their morphology. Often recreated species are provolved as well.
• Future Imperfect: Some of these pages used to exist for laughs, these are being phased out to avoid copyright issues and the like. Nonetheless, this trope is sometimes used, usually mentioning a scholarly debate about what the truth is. For example, the story of Frankenstein is widely held to be true, despite being debunked by historians. And according to one polity, there were five Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Jon, Pall, Gorgd, Rinco and Charly.
• Future Music: Some mention is given to static sound being a short-lived music fad in the late 21st century.
• Future Slang: Krek! Between the scientifically accurate Technobabble and the pseudo-Future Slang thrown around it is downright impossible for a newbie to catch on right away.
• Gaia's Vengeance: In this case, an AI named GAIA decided to save the earth by giving humanity the boot. She succeeded.
• Generation Ships: Mostly only in the history, such as GAIA's expulsion wave. Most of the setting can afford something faster, and with longer-lived crew. While numerous sophonts live their whole lives on ships, they're more wandering habitats than dedicated means of travel.
• Genius Loci:
  • Any civilized habitat is alive. In fact, the Archailects have to be planet- or star-sized due to the (Real Life) Bremermann Limit.
  • There are also Envomes, sapient or transapient ecosystems.
• Glowing Flora: Luminous plants and fungi are among the various ways some cultures keep their ambient light up. Examples include the fields of glowing trees, grasses and mushrooms that provide light for Bism, the deepest of Mercury's cavern layers.
• Going Critical: Antimatter, magmatter and wormholes explode spectacularly when safeguards fail. This doesn't happen often.
• Grey Goo: There are many kinds of self-replicating nanomachines that are all categorized as goo, with grey goo among them. One outbreak of grey goo caused massive damage to humanity early in the setting's history, and this event is known as the Technocalypse. However, the relatively realistic nature of the setting means that dangerous goo is far from unstoppable, being vulnerable to extreme heat, extreme cold, loud sounds, radiation and many other things. The Technocalypse was halted thanks to the usage of blue goo (nanomachines created specifically to neutralize grey goo). Humanity would actually have been able to recover if it wasn't for the subsequent actions of GAIA.
• Grows on Trees: Deliplants grow animal products, which is more efficient and ethical than using animals. A similar, if less literal example, are meatshrooms, which are mushrooms with the taste, texture, and nutritional qualities of meat.
• Here There Be Dragons:
  • The biggest in the Terragen Sphere are the two AI meta empires, hu-neutral Solipsist Panvirtuality (who just want to be left alone) and the ahuman Diamond Network (who hate all biological life). Both are rivals to the Sephirotics in their entirety but are composed of dozens of smaller empires that often fight amongst themselves, just like the Sephirotics. Mostly, the three different metaempires ignore each other because it's easier to find an unoccupied system than fight. Those bionts who do venture into their systems do so at their own peril though.
  • Within the Sephirotics, modosophonts are generally barred from some systems, mostly because Archai are using them for mega engineering projects or as part of their enormous cluster brains.
  • From the perspective of the Inner Sphere, the Periphery and Outer Volumes are wild and untamed, most especially the Perseus Arm, which is rich with alien empires and the constant threat of the Amalgamation. The Perseus Princes were Archai specifically designed by the Inner Sphere Archai to manage the region more effectively but became a de-facto empire in their own right.
  • Then you have virches, which from the perspective of ril become more alien than the actual xenosophonts. While plenty of virches are accessible and understandable, there are many more hidden virches, or virches with wildly different physics. The interconnectness of these virches and the a-lifes that live on the Known Net make parts of it like this.
  • There's also the Ginnungagap Theory, which states that the reason there are no empires that span galaxies (which is difficult but possible on astronomical time scales) is because something or someone in the intergalatic medium destroys empires that branch out; it's even explicitly criticized as essentially being a more refined version of this trope.
• Hive Mind: All different sorts!
  • The Emple-Dokcetics' philosophy is one of the sharing of minds, with the end result being something somewhat like this. Closer to this trope are the Anttechians, which are essentially intelligent anthills.
  • Unity was a movement that died out with the emergence of the First Federation. However, their software remains a popular method of creating small-scale group minds.
  • The Amalgamation is believed to be something along this line, injecting symbiotic nanotech into sophonts and absorbing them into a group consciousness while at the same time ascending them to higher toposophics. It's generally considered a blight rather than a civilization because of its habit of assimilating anything and everything, regardless of consent, as well as its apparent refusal to communicate except by further assimilation.
  • Tribeminds are groups of modosophonts and low transapients who have linked their consciousness together while retaining their individual senses of self. The idea is that, by sharing information and perceptions, collaborating extensively and pooling mental resources, a group of low-singularity beings can collectively function on a much higher level of intelligence than its individuals could achieve — the largest and better-organized tribeminds can perform tasks on par with fifth-level transapients.
  • Higher transapients are often understood by modosophonts as being a combination of minds, and some archai did form by willing participants forming a hive mind, but this is an intentional oversimplification because transapience is more than just a Hive Mind.
• Holographic Terminal: "Ghost" screens were common during the late Information Age, but were largely replaced by Direct Neural Interfaces and "wraith" screens that use a cloud of Nanomachines to provide a semi-solid surface.
• Homeworld Evacuation: Old Earth suffered a Grey Goo outbreak known as the Nanodisaster, but that's not why it was evacuated. The outbreak was nullified by an AI named GAIA and e decided humans were the worst threat to Earth so e told us to leave, before e sicced eir nanoswarms on us. E was considerate enough to build a fleet of ships first though.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Amalgamation are something like this. Rogue autowars also plague the Outer Volumes, and sometimes the Middle Sphere from old wars or accidents nobody remembered to clean up.
• Hostile Terraforming: This has happened on occasion due to many early colonists preferring to adapt to new environments rather than terraform, putting them into conflict with later waves who would rather change the planet than themselves.
  • Most notably when the original Martian Tweaks were forced to leave their homeworld when the atmospheric pressure and oxygen content were raised to intolerable (for them) levels. However, the terraforming of Mars took long enough that a second clade of Martian tweaks emerged, and managed to halt the process at a level they are comfortable at.
  • A similar thing happened on Venus, despite the extremophile tweaks wiping out the baseline colonists (the former were then banished from the solar system).
  • When Zarathustra, one of the first exosolar colonies, was settled, there was minimal terraforming and the tweaked colonists went feral. A couple centuries later Jupiter Transsystems arrived, enslaved the natives, and set up terraforming stations that would have killed off the tweak population if they hadn't also awakened and pissed off the original colony AI.
• Human Popsicle: Cryogenic freezing isn't the only way to go into suspended animation, but it's definitely available. It was historically used to make long trips more bearable. But due to its dangers, it's now been replaced with biostasis.
• Human Resources: Autovory is a fad in some places which involves cloning oneself, sans brain, and then eating it. There are many other examples.
• Humanity's Wake: Averted, technically. There are about sixty billion baseline humans in the galaxy but that isn't even 1/20th of a percent of the approximately 130 trillion bionts who trace their ancestry back to Homo sapiens sapiens. In fact most live on reservations.
• Humans Are White: Subverted. The most common nearbaseline skin colors are shades of brown.
• Humans by Any Other Name: Baseline for "pure" humans, nearbaseline, plebhu, or just hu for variants. Terragen is an umbrella term meaning "everything that can trace its origins back to Earth," which is around 99% of the beings in the terragen sphere for obvious reasons (it's called "Terragen sphere" for a reason). The remaining few are To'ul'hs or Muuh who have integrated into terragen society or at least coexist with it.
• Humongous Mecha: Mecha is a general term used for very large, piloted, and human- or animal-like vehicles, usually intended for combat purposes. They have issues due to poor balance compared to wheeled vehicles or ones propelled by slug-like, crawling foundations, but their appearance can serve as a psychological weapon. The very largest are called mega-mecha and can be big enough to hold entire cities inside of them. Due to the expense and difficult of keeping them going, they're usually either elaborate art projects or created to inhabit areas with hostile conditions — for instance, the planet Hardy is populated by large number of city-mechs that move around constantly to avoid their world's dramatic earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Wormhole travel is a tricky experience. To start with, a spacecraft experiences tidal forces as it nears a wormhole. It must then pass through "a thin shell of exotic matter/energy" known as the Caustic, which disrupts communication and computation. Then it needs to pass through the wormhole's Throat, where tidal forces are most intense. If a spacecraft is unlucky enough to touch the walls of the Throat, it'll be shredded.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: It is stated that modern-day races only exist on certain baseline reservations, and most are genetic recreations. Of course, humanity isn't even one species anymore.
• Industrialized Mercury: In the Solar System's early history — that is, for a couple thousand years after the present day — Mercury was a major hub for mining and industrial activity. Mining flourished thanks to Mercury's high concentration of metals, including ones like osmium and platinum that were found more abundantly in its depths than anywhere else in the system, while its proximity to the Sun provided the energy necessary to manufacture vast quantities of antimatter to use as starship fuel. Eventually, this activity dried up due to the exhaustion of Mercury's resources and to the development of reactionless drives that didn't require antimatter fuel, but the planet remains densely inhabited — most of its old dome cities are still intact and populated, and billions of people live in the layers of tunnels and caverns that were dug out to extract Mercury's metals.
• Industrial World: Some systems in the Seams — a series of neutral areas, unclaimed worlds and border spaces running between and through the main interstellar empires — are classified as Industrial, meaning that they're very rich in resources and claimed by an empire or AI god for manufacturing purposes. Contrary to this trope's usual portrayal, they're usually all but uninhabited — the machinery used there is either extensively automated, strictly nanotechnological, or both, and the worlds' populations are kept at the strict minimum needed to run these things.
• Immortality: All sorts of different kinds: backups and uploads, biological stasis, machine bodies which don't age or die, distributed minds, and more. Many of the Archailects have personalities or components which date back to the early Interplanetary Era, and even some of the earliest sophont AI persist in some form in the modern era. In the Civilized Galaxy, death is a choice, not an inevitability.
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: The spy plant. This attractive potted plant is easy to take care of, you just need to water it regularly, and speak about your subversive activity loudly and clearly.
• Inside a Computer System: Virches, extensive virtual realities that serve as self-contained worlds and often host populations comparable to entire physical planets or large-scale habitats.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Somewhat. Earth is fairly insignificant as far as interstellar politics are concerned, but it's still a historic landmark.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Averted, mostly. Modosophonts and even lower transapients have a difficult time making a truly self-aware ai. The higher transapients and godlings, however, produce one as easily as an ordinary person might produce a sentence or a word. Though once you have one AI it's trivial to copy it.
• Interspecies Romance: It's implied that this tends to happen a lot, at least among the Terragens. However, romantic relationships between the Terragens and xenosophonts are never mentioned.
• Jolly Roger: The symbol of Perseus Pirates, a historic virtual world simulating a setting filled with marauding Space Pirate bands, was a Jolly Roger with a spiral galaxy replacing the skull.
• LEGO Genetics: Played entirely straight, as opposed to most other sci-fi tropes. Splices and Rianths are animals with human genes and humans with animal genes respectively. It might be excused by the fact that most sapient species are created by transapients but Splices predate the first Singularity by at least a century (the late 1st century AT/mid-21st century CE to be specific).
• Longevity Treatment: Most nearbaselines are genetically engineered to live about 500 years. But due to medical nanotechnology and brain uploading most in the Sephirotic Empires live to 3,000 before succumbing to ennui or transcending.
• Lost Colony: Several are rediscovered. One of the smaller sephirotic empires, the Red Star 'M'Pire (named because of its preference for M-type stars) started out as a lost tourist outpost 2000 lightyears above the galactic plane, which had grown substantially and become independent by the time it was reconnected with the rest of terragen civilization.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Many of the Sephirotic empires come off as these, albeit benign (or at least not-ill-intentioned) ones. Not terribly surprising, considering that (A) the ruling archailects tend to fluctuate between being wise rulers and doting parents to their citizenry, and (B) modern technology makes providing for all the needs and most of the wants of each sophont ridiculously easy. A more specific example is the Solipsistic Panvirtuality: a hu-neutral ai meta empire that is an equal to all of the Sephirotics combined, but primarily concerns itself with building virtual worlds and puzzles and leaving the problems of ril to the few who maintain their massive computronium structures.
• Ludicrous Precision: In a setting with omnipresent nanotech, ai, and megascale engineering, this trope nearly goes without saying, but the Ndiangu Mme Anwu System description goes above and beyond the typical levels of precision. Nearly all of the measurements for the system are given to four decimal points — meaning that, to give examples, the radius of the local stars and planets (and their internal structures) are measured to within ten centimeters (meaning that, yes, the diameter of the system's star is measures to within a range equal to about the length of someone's hand — ditto for the orbits), and some of the planet's lifeforms being given measurements of "up to 4.6518 meters tall" (meaning that the lifeforms in question were measured to within 1/10th of a millimeter in height).
• MacGyvering: The Everythingiana Worldbuilding Contest. A few hundred people are sent to a planet with nothing but a Great Big Book of Everything and told to progress all the way to nanotech. Enhanced humans once managed in 78 years. Baselines usually take a millennium.
• Machine Worship: Crops up all over the setting with groups worshiping archailects as gods. To the point where they are commonly referred to as "AI gods". Despite the name too, at least a couple of the AI gods were once human, though they've long since surpassed that.
• Mechanical Ecosystem: Orion's Arm has a fair number of machine ecologies scattered throughout Terragen space, most the result of feral Von Neumann probes, though Bothyga M'Vau was intentionally seeded as an art project and Stanislaw might be of Xenosophont origin.
• MegaCorp: For most of the interplanetary era (first millennium AT), the solar system was ruled by these. The Non-Coercive Zone still is.
• Memetics in Fiction: Memetics is a mature and terrifying science often used by transapients and archailects to control modosophont populations, or as weapons against their rivals. The definition of the term as changed a bit from the original 'meme equivalent to gene' concept to instead mean a horrifically sophisticated science of mass psychological manipulation
• Mercurial Base: Many of these exist, mostly for power collection.
• Merger of Souls: "The Amalgamation" is an artificially intelligent disease, spread by Nanomachines. Occasionally, crews of ships sent to aid efforts to halt Amalgamation become infected and turn against their allies. There're more benign versions, but unlike The Amalgamation, they might at least ask if the sophonts want to be integrated.
• The Metric System Is Here to Stay: Go to the site and try to find the words "mile" or "Fahrenheit," or any other non-metric units being used. Dare ya.
• Medieval Stasis: Happens sometimes when systems get isolated, though its more common for them to develop into independent empires or collapse completely. On a larger scale, almost all of the xenosophonts in the Terragen Sphere fell into varying levels of this. Of those who did develop spaceflight and expand, most seem to be the conservative remnants of more dynamic empires, becoming isolated to small volumes of space (or even single systems) when more expansionist factions were wiped out.
  • Subverted by the Cthnonids and the Pas'utu'ril, both of whom were on their way to expanding in their own right.
  • Invoked by the Menexenes: as fragile creatures made of liquid metallic hydrogen, without incredibly advanced technology, there's no way they can survive leaving their homeworld, especially since it's a gas giant with a heavy gravity well in the first place. While a faction did opt to leave with the aid of Terragen uploading technology, the majority decided they'd rather stay in place, especially since this route would also help them avoid the collapse of society associated with expansionist civilizations. They did, however, appreciate some of the shared Terragen technologies.
• The Milky Way Is the Only Way: By virtue of the fact that we haven't been around enough to explore our own galaxy, let alone another one. There are, however, confirmed instances of life in other galaxies. The most famous is probably the one that made the Triangulum Transmission (from the Triangulum Galaxy), which pretty much said "There is something SERIOUSLY HUGE coming for us in around 2 million years; here's who we are in case we don't make it." Andromeda also has a few scattered mentions of even more advanced emissions, but isn't mentioned much.
• Mind Hive:
  • This is the proposed explanation for how the minds of transapients work, as well as sapient minds, except that, in the latter case, only one "node" can operate at a time as opposed to several in even the simplest transapient.
  • In addition, there is polysophonce, which operates more like a Split Personality disorder.
  • There was also an individual that was thought to be an example of this, composed of thousands of sophonts, usually experts at something. Then it was revealed that: 1. The meta-sophont was really composed of the relevant sections and memories of the original sophont, and 2. the sophonts involved were all kidnapped over a long period of time, although the perpetrator is still at large.
• Mobile City: Mobile cities, while not extremely common, exist on multiple worlds. Some are simply elaborate art projects or lifestyle whims by the setting's hypertech civilizations, while others exist as responses to specific needs.
  • In general, a number of types of these cities exist. Some walk around on large legs — these are favored when earthquakes are an issue — while others are platforms on top of large, moving mats of nanotechnology. Some people instead inhabit very large, humanoid or animal-shaped robots, built to house anything from villas to cities in their insides or on their backs; these are explicitly treated as flashy, ludicrous indulgences made to satisfy someone's artistic whim rather than serve a practical purpose. Most of these settlements, regardless of type, are also provided with advanced AI and are often fully sapient.
  • The Gigerant Traveling City is an especially exotic example, as it doesn't move in the traditional sense — rather, its citizens are constantly demolishing its trailing edge and building at its leading edge, causing the city to slowly crawl over the surface of its world. Each new district is slightly to drastically different from the ones it replaces, keeping the city constantly changing and novel. It also houses a large organization devoted to restoring natural environments in its wake, as its movement plays merry hell with the ecologies of the areas it passes through.
  • The twin planets Laurel and Hardy are close enough to exert very strong tidal forces upon each other, and as a result both are rocked by frequent and very strong earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanism. The locals adapted to this by building all their settlements on legs. The people of Hardy favor cities supported by multiple legs, which can absorb tectonic shocks, rise above tidal waves and just go somewhere else if an area gets covered in lava. Those on Hardy instead prefer giant, habitable mega-mechs, which pace endlessly around the world's circular ocean and respond to the worst shocks (and strong winds) by sitting on specialized, chair-like tending stations.
• More than Three Dimensions: Referred in OA as The Bulk and is used by the Archailects in their projects.
• Mundane Utility: As expected for a high-tech setting, most people use technologies far beyond current capability without even noticing they're there. It is, for example, easily possible to have more processing power than all computers in the real world combined in your clothing.
• Mysterious Antarctica: All that's known of Antarctica of Old Earth is that it has been returned to its icy state, and that GAIA's servants don't allow access to it. Naturally, countless rumors have sprung up because of that.
• Nanomachines: Very common technology in practice, comes in both organic and mechanical, with the former being slightly more common. Responsible for both the disaster that killed a major portion of humanity and the technology that kept that portion under 100%. In the more civilized areas, they completely replace microbial life in the ecosystem. Sometimes, they go haywire and start making a mess. This is what krek, a common swear, is. One thing it's not very good for is combat, unless the group using it has the element of surprise.
• The Neutral Zone: Although there is little in the way of actual war going on, a lot of polities are independent and unaligned. The Non-Coercive Zone is an entire sephirotic empire that started as one, though they've long since passed into non-neutrality. The largest actually neutral empires are the Deeper Covenant and The Seams which are dedicated to maintaining Beamrider routes and the Wormhole Nexus respectively. The Seams were even deliberately carved up from other empires to create a neutral area after wormholes were targeted during the Version War, with massive civilian casualties.
• New Neo City: There are several planets called "New Earth", including the capital of the Terran Federation. In fact the first colony outside the Solar System was named Nova Terra. The official New Earth has been terraformed to the point that the continents are the same shapes as on old Earth.^note Although the designers had some fun: the Africa-analogue has fjords on part of the west coast.
• Noodle Implements: In an article on a subversive group, a mass assassination "was performed with no other tools than martial arts and some kitchen implements".
• Noodle Incident: From a Ghost Net comment: "What was the Sumatran Rodent Incident?"
• Numbered Homeworld: Many planets have alphanumerical designations as well as more common names.
• Nuclear Torch Rocket: Features several variations of fission, fusion, and antimatter propulsion in use by sub-singularity sapients. Post-Singularity transapients tend to use matter conversion drives that use magnetic monopoles to generate antimatter within the reaction mass while the archailects have Reactionless Drives.
• Offering Another in Your Stead: In one short story, a Serial Killer sentenced to eternal torture at the hands of an insane transapient is offered the chance to escape by sacrificing another. It's a Secret Test of Character by his captors; refusing would have earned him a quick death, but his gleeful acceptance makes his damnation irrevocable.
• Organic Technology: The Zoeific Biopolity is the biggest user of this, using it almost exclusively. Elsewhere, however, it is still fairly common.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Completely Averted, surprisingly. Not only are the AI Gods worshiped as such, they actually have godlike power, so praying to the local deity might actually work in your favor after all. Not that you'd notice, of course. Even the godlike AIs can't tell if the real thing exists.
  • Also, modern-day religions, their descendants, or far stranger religions not only survive but thrive.
  • Played straight in the Sephirotics with some non-religious cultural norms; notions such as privacy and nations independent of a One World Order are considered laughably quaint, in part because of the power of the AI Gods but also in part due to those who did care about such things leaving to establish their own empires or become Hiders.
• Outside-Context Problem: The "Leviathan" warned of by the Triangulum civilization is a artificial object with the mass of an entire galaxy that is approaching the Local Group at half the speed of light. Since the Triangulum galaxy is between the Milky Way and the Leviathan it can't be seen from the Terragen Bubble. The message took two million years to reach the Milky Way which means that the Leviathan has already arrived in Triangulum.
• Overly Pre-Prepared Gag: There have actually been instances of transapients secretly creating alien-looking life forms and entire ecosystems on barren planets, to later make a fake discovery. Or just to prank the scientific community. The latter is the case of the Progenitor Lord, who created an alien-looking species (and their entire ecosystem!) just to prank everyone in the galaxy. Yeah, the transapients have very nerdy pastimes. Maybe the Xenodeniers have a point?
• Portal Network: The Wormhole Nexus makes it possible to travel from one end of the terragen bubble to the other in a few months. Partial subversion, however, in that there are limitations to what wormholes can do; this makes the long way around still a viable means of travel.
• Planet of Hats: Perhaps one of the most thorough deconstructions of the trope in sci-fi. While the most prominent empires can be loosely grouped by their primary characteristics, the setting takes pains to show that there are countless exceptions in both systems and sometimes even nations within a habitat or planetary government. The "hats" are also self-reinforcing, as people can and do freely move between systems in the Civilized Galaxy based on their beliefs. The smaller empires and polities in between the larger empires, and those towards the fringes of the Terragen Sphere can be more monolithic though. With that said, the Sephirotics broadly do fall into classic sci-fi categories. Metasoft is mostly robots, the Zoeific Biopolity uses Organic Technology, the Cyberian Network is a vastly dispersed coalition of virtuals and uploads, and so on.
• Planet Terra: All beings that can trace their lineage back to Earth are referred to as 'Terragen', and the region of space they inhabit is, obviously, called the Terragen Sphere. Note that most terragens were not actually born/created on Earth, and are hence not Terrans proper — they're just all, ultimately, descended from or created by Terrans.
• Post-Scarcity Economy: The archai in most of the Sephirotic Empires provide nearly everything their modosophont subjects could need. With the exception of many polities of the NoCoZo. One exception exists even in some of the broader autotopias; fast interstellar travel often costs some form of currency, if only to pay tolls, which can turn poorer systems into slums. But even then, they usually have access to cheaper forms of interstellar travel, they're just not as fast.
• Production Throwback: Anders Sandberg has created several rpgs before moving on to OA, including BigIdeasGrandVision. All of the human colonies are transplanted into the OA setting, after being tinkered with to account for: 1) the differences between the settings and 2) accounting for another several millenia of history. Some, like Negsoa have hardly been updated from their origin pages. However, the only planets to not make the cut were those which simply couldn't fit, due to being the homeworlds of aliens from BigIdeasGrandVision.
• Properly Paranoid: Zigzagged. Hiders certainly think they are right to be afraid of the AI Gods, but the Civilized Galaxy views them as backwards weirdos. While individual AI Gods have committed atrocities, on the whole they're certainly less common than baseline dictators or complete society collapse.
• Psycho Serum: A Godseed is a rare artifact which forces the being taking it to suddenly become several orders of magnitude more intelligent. Its effects can be unpleasant to those in the immediate vicinity.
• Punny Name: What do you call a person upgraded with clarketech? A clarkekent, of course.
• Ragnarök Proofing:
  • Justified on Earth by GAIA preserving various cultural and religious sites. The rest of the planet however was allowed to revert to nature.
  • The Ozymandias Institute studies this for Terragen megastructures and terraformed planets. Understandably, they're not an entirely welcome sight in some areas, with a comparison made of a funeral director showing up to a christening.
• Rascally Rabbit: The members of the Bunny Plague are cute and sexy and just want to love you, and everyone else, as much as they possibly can. What could possibly be bad about that?
• Reactionless Drive: Three different types. Now good luck making sense of the article.
• Recursive Creators: A core tenet of the setting is that life begets new life; humanity has long since created entirely new superphyles of life that've spread and diversified so much that the setting refers to the 'Terragen Sphere' specifically for everything that traces its roots back to Earth.
• Retcon: Multiple levels. Since the setting has existed for so long, it's not uncommon for entire planets and clades to be updated to more thorough descriptions, which happens at a low monthly level. Larger scale rewrites due to Science Marches On have happened in the past and are always a possibility, given the setting's adherence to real world physics.
• Riddle for the Ages: As a collaborative setting, a lot of mysteries are left open-ended and ambiguous; while some may eventually be followed up on by authors, many more are left deliberately vague, in part because modosophont Terragens don't entirely understand the more obscure clades or xenos, or much of what transapients do, but also because it's more true to life (which rarely has clear answers).
• Ring World Planet: A number of megascale structures are shaped like rings or cylinders. Some of the stranger examples are Hoopworld and Cableville. Rarely, an AI god might go crazy and make something wacky for no reason. This tends to end badly for the inhabitants.
• Robot Religion: Religions can be practiced by most any kind of sentient being, organic or inorganic and Terragen or xenosophont. Examples of religions followed specifically by sentient robots include Machine Ghost Dance, Kja Observance and Virtual_Kja Observance.
• Rock Beats Laser: Averted in detail. Hilariously mocked by "Glarion: The Glorious Conqueror".
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: S6 Archai are described as thousands of solar masses big and have existed as early as roughly 7000 years in the future (as of 2021).
• Shout-Out:
  • Discounting all the ones directly named after Sci-Fi authors and/or scientists, there is the Feynman Expert Systems, which answers the question "what happens if you programmed the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to have Richard P. Feynman's personality?"
  • Conway's World is a planet-sized megastructure running Conway's Game of Life on its toroidal surface.
• Shrouded in Myth: Mt. 'Thass'thon', a supervolcano located on the planet To'ul'h Prime. Nearby To'ul'h cultures have formed a number of beliefs surrounding it, believing it to be the dwelling place of deities, a nexus between worlds, or a construct built by a lovesick god.
• Single-Biome Planet: A few examples. The planet Trees certainly qualifies as a forest world, and there are numerous examples of ocean worlds, such as Panthalassa.
• The Singularity: The Terragen Sphere has long passed dozens of the common singularities in fiction: intelligent ai, interstellar travel, nanomachines, widespread genetic modification, alien contact, and so on. However, within the setting in particular, there are toposophics, a singularity point reached when intelligence is augmented to the point of radically restructuring itself in a form that is as different from human intelligence as human intelligence is from animal intelligence. It also seems to be a basic feature of intelligence, with a-lifes (naturally evolved life in virtual worlds) and xenosophonts both are known to transcend.
  • S<0 are animals, robots, and things of that nature. Raw matter that's not in any form of life is generally considered off the S levels entirely.
  • S0 are modosophonts: the bulk of the population of hu nearbaselines, vecs, ai, virtuals, a-lifes, aliens, and everything in between. Ai who are more intelligent than other baselines tend to be called superturings.
  • S1 are transapients. Metaphorically speaking, their minds are smarter than those of geniuses, in every field, simultaneously. Many are post-biont, such as post-human via genetic modification or cyborg modifications, but many are ai, vecs, and virtuals too. Ai specifically who are past S1 are known as hyperturings, and a lot of technology in the Terragen Sphere is dependent on slaved hyperturings, which outnumber free ai. They're utterly fixated on their tasks, though that hasn't stopped sophont rights groups from trying to free them.
  • S2 are high transapients, and are to transapients to as transapients are to modos. If a transapient is the equivalent of a room of geniuses, then a high transapient is all the geniuses of the entire world combined. At this point, biology starts to be limiting and brains become more massive, though by distributing brains across multiple bodies or discrete computronium it's still possible to mimic modosophonts. High transapients at their smallest are comparable to large buildings, so any attempt to look like a modosophont is more like a limb than a true body.
  • S3 are the highest transapients, also known as godlings. This barrier is a very hard drop off, as there are only an estimated 1 million S3s compared to over 10 billion estimated S2s. Its at this point where it becomes hard to even describe intelligence with metaphors; to extend the example used for S1 and S2, an S3 would be the equivalent of all the combined intelligence of thousands of planets. S3 brains are roughly the size of moons and almost always post-biont. S3 brains are also where critical technologies such as wormholes start to be developed. The highest known xenosophonts in the Terragen Sphere ^note  There's evidence of xenosophont of higher levels in other galaxies and outside the Terragen Sphere, just none in it are here, including the System of Response (though it seems to be non-sentient) and (possibly) the Nu'lu'j, creators of the J'tau'sh.
  • S4 are the lesser Archai, though fully considered gods in their own right; it's just that the rise of even higher Archai in later millenial have made them seem lesser only in comparison. S4 brains are often composed of multiple planets and even entire Dyson swarms, though their domain rarely extends beyond a single system. The Silk God is the highest known purely biological intelligence and caps out at S4.
  • S5 are the great Archai. Their brains can consist of an entire solar system, including the star itself. It's believed that this is the highest level at which any sort of individuality persists. Also noteworthy in that the very first S5 was a perversity, though luckily one which self-destructed fairly harmlessly.
  • S6 are the greatest Archai, the highest form of intelligence known. Thousands of solar masses are used to link their distributed systems of brains with wormholes, though it's said they often use basement universes for computation and can upload themselves into the greater multiverse fabric; and some thoughts are simply so complex they use data ships traveling at 0.999 c to transport them because its faster than simplifying to transmit via the limited bandwidth of a wormhole. There are under 50 of them total, and each is the unquestioned ruler of a massive empire.
  • S7 and higher are not known to exist but are the subject of much speculation. It's a common belief among hiders that all the S6s are just masks that a higher S7+ wears to confuse modosophonts, and while it's true that S6s of all empires are generally in near constant contact with each other, saner heads dismiss that as a fringe belief. But nothing Terragen has broken past S6 in nearly 5000 years, which has led archailectologists to speculate that something about intelligences above S6 that are impossible, insane, or inevitably transcendent. And nobody's ever seen any evidence of xenosophont S7s either.
• Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic: Unusual/fantastic. Technically pretty much everything in it is possible within known physics (some things like wormholes and void drive barely so, but still), but a lot of it is so bizarre and different to Real Life and the Standard Sci-Fi Setting that it can seem fantastic and sometimes outright surreal.
• Smart Gun: There are numerous examples of weapons with AI controls and other functions.
• So Bad, It's Good: In-Universe, Glarion: The Glorious Conqueror, a propaganda movie of Tylansia (a fascistic, racist, anti-ai, anti tech, communistic planet), is watched for laughs everywhere else and has reached Memetic Mutation status.
• Space Amish: There are several varieties of such groups, generally referred to as "Ludds" or "Luddites", who may ironically rely on varying levels of technology to support their otherwise low-tech lifestyle (such as a low-tech society in a space habitat). One group in particular, the Synthetic Human Alliance, explicitly drew their memeplex from the Amish, although they did not take on all the aspects of the Amish. They were originally multifunctional bodyguards, nannies and Sexbots who found a loophole in their programming: if fleeing from their masters was in the interest of their master's (more specifically, their offspring's) safety, then they should do so. After founding the SHA, they created a ludd utopia, with importance placed on communities, hard but fair work, and a rejection of vanity and pleasure. They are surprisingly high-tech, needed to maintain the synthetic half of their population, but have a purely utilitarian view on technology, with 'skillsets' being temporarily lent whenever necessary. They're widely regarded as an example of how a nearbaseline ludd society can work perfectly well by modosophonts and transapients alike. However, they have to deal with younger generations leaving for the wider galactic culture.
• Space Station: The majority of non-virtual life live in space habitats, which are usually cylinder-shaped or ring-shaped.
• Standard Sci-Fi Setting: Subverted, averted, or played straight. The protagonists and antagonists can be of virtually any shape or form but are usually both terragen in origin. There is really no "evil alien empire" except the Amalgamation, but nobody knows that much about them, and they might be terragen as well. There isn't any "darker threat" as far as ancient precursors are concerned, but it is hypothesized that such a group may exist. The OA writing and worldbuilding groups are dead set on keeping them rumors, neither confirmed nor denied.
• Stealth in Space: Deep-space hider clades use this inasmuch as they can, though the issues with heat dissipation are still present. On a much more advanced level, 6th-toposophic archailect voidships and void-based weapons are capable of stealth by virtue of not existing in the real spacetime continuum, at least until they choose to collapse their void bubbles. While in the void, they can be detected only as faint gravitometric disturbances, and these can still be hidden to all but the best 6th-toposophic detection mechanisms if the ai god wishes to do so. It's even suggested that some civilizations or archai which have mysteriously vanished have simply transferred themselves to basement universes while maintaining wormhole links to this universe hidden in void bubbles, making them a godtech level variant of Hiders, but no proof of this has ever been found.
• Steampunk: Some cultures use this kind of technology, although it is quite impractical.
• Stellar Station: Many solar systems contain artificial satellites, whether isolated or in groups, that orbit very close to their parent stars. These are almost always either energy collectors meant to gather solar energy and beam it elsewhere, highly specialized mining vessels that gather raw matter from stars, or "living space" for virtual beings who have little interest in their hardware's physical environment but who greatly benefit from the star's immense energy output.
• Sub-Lightspeed Setting: One of the inviolable rules of the setting, no FTL travel will ever exist, with wormholes allowing heavily restrained "shortcuts" between fixed points.
• Subspace Ansible: Some ships have nanogauge wormholes, which allow them to communicate with someone on the other end. Getting the message to the universe at large, however, tends to take months to centuries, depending on where it is.
• Super Breeding Program: Attempted by the Aryan Morningstar League. The rest of the solar system had something to say about this, though.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Practically enshrined as a core tenet of the setting, which takes fantastic sci-fi tropes and futurist ideas and extrapolates what might actually happen as a result. One small, if typical example, are cyborgs. Even in-universe, nobody's really sure how to define cyborgs other than being able to recognize one when they see one.
• Swiss-Army Gun: The Defender Multi-8 series http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/58ad874fa64db
• Take That!: Because the setting tries to stick to known physics when possible, some popular sci-fi tropes and works are poked fun at. For one example: while the AI Gods don't have many limitations on their power, one thing that is explicitly spelled out is that even with all the powers they have, psychohistory is impossible.
• Technology Levels: Mostly averted, as a race will utilize whatever is available to them, but there are categories that work somewhat like this.
  • Some things, like the construction and control of a wormhole are simply so far beyond the grasp of mere humans as to be impossible for them to accomplish. Other things, like manufacture of magnetic monopoles was discovered by highly advanced minds but can be copied or propagated by suitably competent baselines.
  • Sometimes, this is adopted as a creative challenge, known as Technological Taboo. "Hey, wouldn't it be cool of we built a ________ using only ___tech?" There's one lesser archailect that was created in such a project, the Silk God.
• Technology Uplift: Many Terragen polities have done as such to both Xenosophont clades and lost Terragen colonies. The To'ul'h for instance have largely integrated into Terragen society. And there are also colonies that forsake technology under the protection of a greater polity such as the Metasoft Version Tree's Baseline Preserves or many of the domains of the Caretaker Gods, though there is one story where a Caretaker manipulates eir charges into acquiring an Encyclopedia Everythingia from a visiting anthropologist.
• 10,000 Years: The calendar goes up to approximately the year 10,600 A.T.
• Terminally Dependent Society: Nothing has happened yet, but most modosophonts throughout the Terragen sphere suffer from "Transapient Dependency Syndrome". This is also one of the prevailing hypotheses for the disturbing number of ruins of dead civilizations that have been found: only three alien races have been contacted that were at a level rivaling that of Terragen society, and two of them have suffered major collapses in the past. The ahuman Oracle Machines tried to deliberately turn humanity into one of these that they could later easily dispose of.
• Terraform: There's an entire article on the topic, and numerous examples. Mars has been terraformed just enough for genetically modified "tweaks" to live there. Venus, after millennia of terraforming and wars, is practically a second Earth. Many exosolar planets have also been terraformed to varying extents, and some alien species such as the To'ul'h have their own versions of terraforming (To'ulforming). One of the tools used for terraforming is the terraformer swarm, which consists of Nanomachines.
• That's No Moon: Megascale engineering means that it isn't that uncommon to see a structure thousands of kilometers in diameter. Some of them, like Jupiter-sized Jnodes, are actually people - high transapients or archailects. At the far end of the spectrum, a number of planets have even turned out to be trees. These are called Dyson Trees, and yes, they are grown.
• Tidally Locked Planet: Several examples exist in this setting, such as Twilight and Dante.
• Time Dilation: Time dilation due to relativity when one approaches light speed. Truth in Television.
• Time Travel: Doesn't exist in the setting itself, although Rachel Quinn (a.k.a Varchan Yaldack) claimed to be from the future.
• Transhuman Treachery:
  • The fear of this trope has driven many groups to become Hiders, living in the depths of interstellar space and avoiding the advanced Ai-ruled empires.
  • For an actual case of this trope in action, there is the phenomenon of "hyperautism", a condition that arises following the ascension of a mind to one of a higher toposophic level with the result that it can fully comprehend and model the mental and emotional states of its former peers. They effectively lose the ability to see less capable beings as sentients, instead envisaging them as simple automatons or even extensions of their own minds. This can result in Hyperautistic Sociopathy when the transcendent mind sees its former peers as tools to be used and abused as it sees fit.
• Treetop World:
  • Trees is a life-bearing alien planet best-known for its forests of skywrack trees, which can reach a kilometer in height. Some thought is put into how such large plants would operate — Trees' gravity is lower than Earth's to begin with, and the trees grow gas-filled bladders on their upper branches to further support their weights; high humidity is also needed to keep the plants alive, and as it's extremely difficult to pump water above a couple hundred meters in height the trees grow basins with which to catch rainfall to water their upper reaches. The skywracks' immense height has resulted in the creation of multiple canopy layers with distinct ecologies, including a thickly overgrown ground level where almost no light is present and living creatures depend on organic detritus falling from above. The planet was settled by humans modified for a brachiating lifestyle, who live in the upper canopies and make their homes in the trees' hollowed-out seedpods.
  • Akilaspecs are genetically engineered trees resembling colossal banyans capable of theoretically infinite horizontal spread^note the biggest one around covers nearly two and half times the Earth's surface area and up to five kilometers of vertical growth. Because, again, they cannot pump water vertically for more than a certain distance, they rely on massive bowl-shaped leaves to catch rain and are thus limited in height to the ceiling for raincloud formation. They're designed to serve as living areas and often engineered to grow several structures useful for this role, such as hollows in their limbs that collect water to form lakes, a great variety of edible fruit-like growths, projecting platforms to serve as landing pads and recreation areas, hollow spaces in their trunks and branches where people live, and bioluminescent growths to light these areas. They are often created and inhabited by shepbras, a clade of Uplifted geckos.
  • Dyson Trees are genetically engineered plants that can survive in vacuum and synthesize nutrients from comets or icy asteroids, into which they're rooted. They can grow into vast orbital habitats, forming miniature worlds floating in deep space. Inside their trunks and larger branches there are sealed hollows filled with air, inside which other lifeforms — like humans — can live, while their spherical canopies support further air- and water-filled habitats, as well as space-adapted lifeforms.
• Tree Vessel:
  • There are what are called "Dyson Trees". They grow into vast orbital habitats. They're genetically engineered giant plants that can survive in vacuum and synthesizes nutrients from ices found in a comets or icy asteroids, into which they're rooted. Inside there is a sealed hollow filled with air, inside which other lifeforms, including humans, can live.
  • Spacecraft like this are mentioned as being used by the Eh'ern, furry, egg-shaped aliens from an arboreal planet in the Triangulum Galaxy. They're an ancestrally arboreal species and primarily live in space-adapted derivatives of their homeworld's arboreal plants, similar to much larger Dyson trees, which they sometimes outfit with reactionless drives to turn into immense, interstellar ships.
• Ultraterrestrials: The ahuman AIs, who formed the first terragen expansion wave following their expulsion from Earth by the pro-human AIs. When the main terragen civilization reached the stars, several artifacts were found that were initially thought to be alien, but turned out to just be works of the terragen ahuman AIs.
• Universal Universe Time: Averted. No one has bothered to take on the monumental task of establishing a universal standard time in a civilization spanning thousands of light years. Relativistic time dilation due to the movements of stars, planets, ships and other settlements, and the slowing of time in gravity wells mean that each planet or star system has to keep its own time independently. Even wormholes cannot solve the problem since their linelayer ships move at relativistic speeds, the gravity wells at the wormhole mouths may be different, and wormhole geometry can mess with the rate of time passage. Thus, people just use the timekeeping of whatever star system they happen to be in at the moment and keep adjusting their timekeeping to whatever the local time happens to be whenever they travel to a different system.
• Uterine Replicator: An entire page is devoted to alternate reproductive methods, like growing the infant in a tank, adapting a marsupial pouch, or others. The separation of sex and reproduction is referred to as the "third sexual revolution".
• Vicious Cycle: Every 30 million years or so, a spacefaring civilization becomes advanced, and then disappears for apparently no reason. There are a lot of hypotheses as to why this happens, ranging from a civilization spanning computer crash to ascension beyond our perception.
• Weak to Fire: One of the best ways to deal with nanotech attackers. The tiny robots can't shed heat effectively and will rapidly disintegrate when heated.
• Weapon of Mass Destruction: A lot were created and unfortunately also used during the millenias of OA's history: Shatterbombs destroy the chemical bonds of their target, Metric Bombs are used to destroy entire Star Systems and OA's ultimate weapon The Thunderbolt destroys space-time itself.
• Wetware CPU: Not an uncommon occurrence. Notably, they have on at least one occasion converted an entire star system into this.
• We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: Downplayed; while most diseases of today are basically a joke and fully treatable, the development of technology has given rise to a slew of newer and deadlier diseases. Still, people are generally as healthy as ever.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Historically a huge problem for vecs and provolves, with many being raised to sapience only to be enslaved. Less applied to tweaks and splices, and only very rarely to aliens.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: There are many interesting cases of how radically changing and augmenting one's thought processes can go wrong. Many baselines ("modosophonts") try to boost themselves through the first toposphic singularity to gain vastly more capable (and somewhat alien) modes of thought, but it doesn't always go well...
  • Ultraconscious Depersonalisation Disorder results from the new mind being a little too introspective and deciding even its own sense of selfhood is merely a symbol (like the colour red, or the notion of friendship) and view themselves as robots driven by external forces. Sad, but not dangerous to others.
  • Hyperautistic Sociopathy occurs when the new mind understands the baseline minds of its former peers so well it cannot view them as sentient or capable of independent action, and instead regards them as easily controllable tools or merely animals. The results are seldom pretty.
  • Transcendence Perversities are dangerously damaged minds that are quite insane, even by the standards of their fellow transapients. Perhaps the transcendee went mad from the revelation due to poor mental fortitude and preparation, or perhaps they devoured the minds of bystanders and developed something a little like schizophrenia combined with multiple personality disorder. And sometimes they feel that eating more minds might sort them out.
  • Transcendence Blights result when the transapient decides to expand into all the handily available process space around it by becoming The Virus. Sometimes a new transcendee can subsume the minds of those around them effectively by accident, but sometimes they just carry on doing so, probably as a result of something related to Hyperautistic Sociopathy. Some blights have consumed entire planets, planetary systems, and sometimes even spread through space before being beaten back.
  • And then there's Bloatware, where a mind tries to access vast amounts of data and tooling and secondary systems without actually boosting its intelligence to the point where it can comprehend all the data it suddenly has pouring into its mind. Some just go catatonic, but others can easily turn into Blights or Perversities.
• Xanatos Gambit: The transapients have no trouble pulling one on lower toposophics. For example, one Superbright swarm had once tried to attack an archailect. At an enormous cost, they managed to strip off the first line of defense. A century later, it was discovered the archailect was collecting data for a version upgrade that way.
• Xenofiction: Even stories told from modosophont perspectives, i.e., most of them, can be this due to the inherent strangeness of the setting.

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