The Panplanetary Resource Cooperative

[Phorcys]

The Panplanetary Resource Cooperative
E4 Client of the Iridescence

a mandelbrot fractal, symbol of Iridescent unity

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Population: 9.4 billion symbiotes
(/1 superorganism)

Government: None, interpolity forum of
planetary interests

Ideology: Iridescent Totalism, Transsymbiotism

Capital: Advent-of-Night

Languages: None official. Low Ephemeric,
Conveyance and Impathic most commonly spoken

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Homeworld: Ascomy
Planetary Class: Terrestrial
Star: O class (Blue Giant)
Distance from star: 2.9 AU
Day length: 18 hours
Year length: 521 days
Average temperature: 2°C
Diameter: 0.7 Terran (8,919km)
Surface Gravity: 0.5g
Hazards: extreme brightness and
UV radiation during daylight hours

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The Panplanetary Resource Cooperative

With the advent of global communications, the unification of the Iridescence’s uplifted servitor race was inevitable - preordained by the hardwired purpose it gave them. Just as its kilometre-spanning masses knit themselves together across oceans and continents, so do outlying communities of its symbiotes enter the great communion of their kind.

The Panplanetary Resource Cooperative is the forum of forums, a global body in which all Ascomy's interests are represented, and which speaks for all Ascomy. It is not a governing institution as such, for leadership is an alien concept to so alien a species. When every member of society has always shared the same sole and overriding desire - to spread the Iridescence everywhere, ever further and by every available means - there is little disagreement that would require leaders to adjudicate. Symbiote polities, insofar as they can be said to exist, have always been loose cooperatives; whether of associations, guilds, clans or sects, whether directed by priests, oracles, scientific advisory councils, or their own mutual accord.

Now the PRC serves that purpose to a thousand symbiote societies, and ever more put their resources at its disposal with each passing year. Planetary engineering works are organised on a scale never before seen in history, levelling mountain ranges, burning jungles, draining lakes and inland seas. Tunnelling under the ocean and carving a network of channels through every landmass of Ascomy.

They rejoice as the Iridescence poisons and devours their world, and many clients, even the Owners themselves, have observed the rise of the PRC with dismay and sought to peaceably intervene. But a symbiote can no more be convinced it should stop serving the organism that destroys its planet than a human could be persuaded to stop caring for her children for the sake of the environment. It is programming, utterly self-evident and irrefutable to them. This single-minded unity allows them to wreak ecological catastrophe on an ever-vaster scale.

► Ascomy, the Devoured World

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Burning bright under the hyper luminosity of a O class star, Ascomy is a world where the sun is a wall of light enveloping half the sky, and every lurid colour blazes back as fierce. The surface is lush with tough, dense vegetation hardened against the UV glare, glittering with highly reflective pigments ranging from neon pink to the red of fresh arterial blood. Whether you can stand to face the horizon or turn away from the sky, Ascomy is blinding and the daytime offers no respite.

By night most creatures emerge from the foilage - still brightly, but bearably lit by the glowing masses of Iridescence that sprawl across the land. Its heavy metal composition is highly toxic to most other life, and great die-offs of vegetation ensue for kilometres in its vicinity as the soil itself is poisoned. Visible even from space, the matte red of the surface is discoloured by its luminous tendrils, snaking ever further with each passing year. Knots and clusters gradually conjoin as they reach together across the landmasses of Ascomy. Eventually, the entire globe will be whorled in its shifting, scintillating patterns.

A noxious atmosphere of carbon-dioxide is the great limiter on multicelluar life besides the core-drinking Iridescence itself. Most lifeforms are simple, uncomplex, surviving off low-energy anaerobic metabolisms. The low gravity allows for a multitude of suitably diaphanous and insubstantial forms. Higher organisms are either photosynthetic, relying on the abundant and powerful light of the sun for energy, or else are kleptoplasts that steal photosynthetic cells from such creatures and plants they consume. Every large animal on Ascomy must use these abilities to generate and carefully ration breathable quantities of oxygen for itself.

The symbiotes, of course, are beyond such concerns. At least until their god rejects their fragile forms.

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Ascomy by night, its vast cities lit by the scintillating light of the Organism

Indeed despite a relatively low technological grade of E4, they have accomplished more through sheer singularness of purpose than many more advanced clients have. Post-humanity clings to a few airless moons, the Church of Autology too preoccupied with its endless factionalism and bitter power politics to reach beyond the solar system. The oizys stymie their own interstellar colonisation attempts with self-destructive violence even as their homeworld's biosphere collapses. Even the Great Ones themselves, unfathomably ancient and powerful though they are, are but solitary solipsists building towards nothing.

Whereas the Panplanetary Resource Cooperative, though it has not yet discovered nuclear fusion, has already spread to its closest star system. Iridescence powered colony craft are able to accelerate up to almost a sixth of the speed of light, reaching Ekta in just over thirty years. They have brought their god with them.

The Owners monitor this remarkable expansion with growing concern. For though it appears to be a very slow, living superorganism rather than an artificial nanotech catastrophe, the Iridescence fits the definition of a 'hegemonising swarm' nonetheless. Its symbiotes possess the trappings of sentience, of civilisation and culture, but perhaps they nothing more than extrusions of the Iridescence, the tools by which it harvests natural resources and energy. Unprecedented action may have to be taken to put a stop to this. But there is no consensus in hub, a vanishingly rare occurence, and what the Owners decide will very much depend on how the symbiotes make use of the Nexus.

The Impact of the Nexus

Colonyworld: Ekta
Planetary Class: Super-Earth
Star: G class (Yellow Dwarf)
Distance from star: 0.2 AU
Day length: 3440 hours
Year length: 66 days
Average temperature: 200°C
Diameter: 4.3 Terran (54,790km)
Surface Gravity: 3.9g
Hazards: extreme temperatures
and active voclanism

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The discovery of universes beyond is a source of both great joy and great frustration to the emerging global civilisation of Ascomy. For it holds the promise that one day the Glory will expand vastly beyond any projections hitherto conceived. And yet it also means that the Work is so very far from complete. That it will be so very many more lifetimes before the grand purpose of life is fulfilled.

More pressingly, the Nexus also appears to be occupied by a variety of biochemical systems, some comparable in complexity to symbiotekind itself. Most of these are obstructive, or even inimical to the spread of the Iridescence upon their worlds. These systems are a direct impediment to the Work, and yet they possess technologies presently superior to Iridescent power. This in itself is a traumatic shock to all symbiote culturefaiths, and to the unanimity of the PRC. For the one unquestioned axiom that has anchored every symbiote worldview across every inhabited continent from the dawn of time is that It is the supreme power of the cosmos.

► Ekta, the Reborn World

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Three light years from Ascomy, reaching Ekta is the pinnacle of symbiote technological achievement - and commitment. Many clients have wondered why such vast resources are dedicated to colonising the most inhospitable planet of its system. For Ekta is a ruin of a world, ravaged by a vast primordial impact that annihilated most of the crust down to the mantle and glassed the remainder. But of course habitability for themselves was never the symbiotes' concern.

The Iridescence flourishes on Ekta, growing at an unprecedented rate. That is all that matters. In mere decades and with the support of only minimal infrastructure, it has outstripped a millenium of expansion on the homeworld. The vast energy radiating from its exposed mantle far exceeds what the Iridescence must burrow its roots through miles of rock for on Ascomy. The heavy metals it feeds upon, which the homeworld must painstakingly accrue from the deepest mines, are abundant in Ekta's upper crust. And even though the brightness of its star pales in comparison to Ascomy's own the sheer length of its days compensates - vast amounts of solar power able to be stored for the long rotation through night.

Symbiotes can eke out only a harsh, painful existence here, confined even within their domes to cybernetic exo-suits that allow their fragile, diaphanous bodies to survive the crushing gravity. But they serve with joy. For the Ektans know that their new world is the future of the Iridescence.

Now it emerges that, while Iridescent technology is versatile and effective, it is markedly less advanced than the Nexus standard. It suffers two essential shortcomings. Firstly that it is energy intensive, more suited for Ascomy than space due to its Iridescent power source. Secondly that their understanding of its actual principles is rudimentary at best. Given that the Iridescence adapts without any effort on their part to symbiote needs and desires, many technologies that might have been fields of scientific endeavour are instead just a matter of thoughtlessly applying it. Medical science for example, has since time immemorial extended little beyond jabbing a wad of Iridescence onto an affected area, or at most injecting it. Most advances have occurred in a similar vein. Little is truly studied beyond the nature of the Iridescence itself, and while it is a source of much chemical and physical knowledge, it does not, as the symbiotes are now forced to accept, contain everything.