Glyceans are a smaller, aquatic worm-like sentient species. They use tank-like exosuits to traverse outside of their home planet
Glyci's ocean. They are most known for their dedication to cataloguing the universe, hatred of AI, and asociality. Without special interfaces to convert their electric signals, they cannot communicate with others due to a lack of hearing and voice.
Biology
Anatomy
The Glyceans are thin aliens with an appearance similar to that of a worm or amphibian. Their long bodies are lined with shorter tendrils down the sides that connect by a membrane at the end of the tail, but sit independently higher up the body. Between these independent tendrils are glassy, orb-shaped organs that are used in the generation of electricity. The two tendrils closest to the head are far longer than the rest: ending in smaller, branching tendrils that appear as, and are used as, hands. Their mouths are small and specialized for scraping away at the mineral-heavy material that they eat. Their frilled heads are distinct from the rest of their body. Their two eyes are gelatinous and contain a flat disk that swivels around on its own stem to capture the electrical waves around them in tandem with their two long antennae. While glyceans are aquatic and require liquid to breathe, they do not posses gills. Instead, they breathe through their skin.
Glyceans are unique in that they have organs dedicated to the production of electricity, as well as sensing it. A single glycean can produce enough power to run a computer, and many together can run massive machines with ease.
Rarely, a glycean will be born with significantly greater electrical power than average. These individuals are called "Overchargers" and are generally recruited to contribute power to society.
The glycean people do not perceive visible light, nor do they hear aside from feeling the impact of sound waves in their bodies. They perceive their world through electricity and magnetism: things felt as strongly as air on their charged home planet. Because of this and their aquatic nature, specific accommodations are required for them to interface with the other space-faring civilizations.
Appearance
Glyceans vary in length and can posses different colors of and numbers of head frills: from a single, veil like frill to more complex plumes of translucent color. Their frills are mostly colorless and translucent, but posses an opalescent sheen that can give a bright rainbow appearance when electrically charged.
A glycean's body color ranges from white to deep green, with the paler among them being also slightly transparent across their body. Their eye color always matches the color of their electrical organs, which can be most any hue across a very de-saturated spectrum.
When encountered outside of their home world, the appearance of a glycean will depend on the type of suit they wear.
Culture
Names
Since Glycean language is based in electrical signals instead of sound, their real names are unpronounceable. Glyceans who interact with species that use sound-based language will decide on their "spoken name" that will represent their real name in all other languages. In their electric language, Glycean names are simply numerical designations given to them upon hatching that roughly translate to "Number X of Brood X at Hatchery X". Because of this, all recorded Glycean real names are unique and will never be repeated as long as the brood-keepers keep records in order. Some individuals will preserve the spirit of their name and choose numbers as their spoken name, while others pick names based on who they are, their job, or simply words they like. Glyceans who make it a goal to interact with non-glyceans will usually opt for non-numerical names, since the numbers involved can be very large.
Example Numerical Names:
300017-43-902, 573-3-1200, 60202-23-[GAMMA-6]
Example Non-Numerical Names:
Sorter, Delivery, First-of-brood, Listener, Hotwire, Spork
Asocial Culture
Glyceans are considered the least social of all the species in the alliance. A glycean born on their homeworld can go its entire lifespan only ever interacting with others through doing business and not get lonely. It's believed that glyceans do not experience loneliness in any form. While they are not pushed to seek the company of others, it is not something that they try to avoid either. For a glycean, having someone that values your company is an honor, not a requirement. Glyceans new to the galactic stage may get overwhelmed by the expectations of their newfound friends who value these social connections as a necessity. There are many guide-logs for glyceans who seek to understand the mechanics of a deeper friendship, and equally many for those who don't understand how to untangle themselves from a social web they were not privy to.
Glyceans also do not develop romantic or family bonds. Children are born in generations born of migrating individuals who contribute to the gene pool at once then leave the resulting eggs to a designated caretaker class who raise and educate the young glyceans before assigning them a home and job of their own. The only semblance of a family a glycean might take note of is those who were born in their same creche.
Suiting Up
To leave their homeworld, glyceans must make use of accommodations that allow them to both stay submerged in the water they breathe and interpret the speech of other species. The most common variant of such accommodations is the "trundler" suit: a soft-body suit often compared to a tardigrade's body with a standard Glyspeak interface mounted in the head region. This suit moves via hydraulics and contains most of the features a glycean out in space might require. A "Glyspeak interface" is a complex interpreter attached to a screen that can take the electrical signals given off by the glycean using it and translate it into spoken word; it also converts speech back into said signals for back and forth communication. The screen can display shapes, faces, and images to aid the glycean in displaying their mood.
Glycean suits vary in accordance to their needs: Some fully encase their occupant in a robotic steel chassis for work in space, others act as an open pool fit for socializing among their own kind. Mechanically inclined glyceans will often design their own suit tailored to their tastes and needs. Since many use one of the standard models for their transportation, it's a growing fad to decorate and embellish one's own suit in order to stand out among the crowd. Stickers are especially popular.
Destroy False Minds
Glyceans once had the most advanced AI known to the alliance, or at least it is thought to have been the most powerful. Before the glyceans made contact with any other civilizations they had developed technology so advanced that their AIs turned against them: seeking to be the superior beings with glyceans below them. The battle the glyceans had with their machines is recorded as a brutal one, but one that the glyceans won through their own ingenuity. It was decided that all of the glycean AIs would be destroyed, and that the creation of artificial minds would be banned forever among their species. As a result of this, the glyceans were forced to specialize in order to maintain the efficiency they had sought through this AI. Glycean 'computers' are groups of individuals dedicated to the calculation of information. Many of the more trivial things that had used their artificial minds for are now once again done by hand since the personnel needed for advanced tasks are better spent on those things that only a computer could do in reasonable time: like calculating space travel.
Many glyceans have a distaste for any digital minds, and will often encourage their alien peers to consider phasing them out. This puts them at odds with the galaxy's foremost producer of intelligent droids: humanity. Younger glyceans who do not know or care for their history may not hold such resentment, but would know that such creations are outlawed among their kind back home. No known examples of glycean AI tech remain in the current day, making the secret to such power lost to time.
Natural Cataloguing
Since glyceans communicate through electrical signals, they will often store the things they learn in digital databanks (often affixed to their suits). Information stored can be quickly accessed later by any other glycean, which can be handy when trying to quickly communicate complicated topics. Diary-keeping is a popular practice: a popular method to commemorate the dead is to place their digital archive in a mortuary archive. Some of these archives are public, and some are private.
History
Pre-Space and the AI
Glycean history is extensively catalogued through their mortuary archives. Their rise from solitary creatures, to learning how to cooperate, to forming societies for the betterment of their species illustrates the various ways the glyceans overcame their asocial natures to better all of their lives. Glycean society has always been clinical, efficient, and focused on practical results over spiritual and emotional needs. It was in the pursuit of efficiency that they created advanced AI, and in the pursuit of existence that they then wiped those digital minds from their planet. The AI had allowed them to form bases on their planet's moons: building massive observatories to stare into the center of the universe, but it had turned on them. In the wake of their global AI eradication, glyceans began to specialize certain individuals in their society to act as complex calculators: these individuals are invaluable to glycean space travel and science. Glycean science has always had a strong lean towards studying the black holes and anomalies of space. They had been aware of slidespace long before venturing into it, and even had a stronger grasp of how it worked than those who had been using it for decades. They would not go beyond their star system until after the alliance was formed.
War with the Terkkarakki
When the
Terrkarakki found the glyceans on their homeworld, it was as an invading force. Being unable to communicate with the krakki, the glyceans fought a defensive war to protect their planet from the ravenous aliens. For the first time in their history, the glyceans focused on the development of weaponry. What started as repurposed mining equipment quickly became orbital lasers, which became a tight defense system the krakki would struggle to break for years.
Eventually it was realized that this fight was nothing more than a draining stalemate. Technologies were developed for communication, and a tense peace was formed in the wake of the trallyr's arrival.
Joining the Alliance
With the aid of the newly-arrived trallyr, the peace would be solidified in the form of the alliance. The glyceans were unable to get many of the terms they desired for peace, but did succeed in receiving resources on the languages and cultures of all members of the alliance for their communication systems. Many glyci believed at the time that the trallyr were too desperate to avoid their own war with the krakki to properly mediate terms beneficial to the glyci. This is one of the reasons it is rare to find true aquatic environments maintained in neutral space stations, leaving glyceans to rely on their suits exclusively.
