Velan Drones

Excerpts from Introduction to Xenology by A. Segin, O23 (2188 CE) Chandrasekhar University Press

Introduction

Nearly one hundred million orbits ago, life emerged from the oceans onto exposed and barren rock. It seemed a cruel and absurd place to live, but it was a necessary part of achieving the next step in development, of overcoming animal instinct and building a new world of faith and reason.

So it is with us today. Mankind has begun to use those two tools to lift himself from the comfortable but entrapping cradle of his birth into the new world beyond. It falls to us to continue this work and bring him yet another step closer to union with the Divine. The challenges facing us are enormously greater than those that faced our distant ancestors on old Earth, but we have three advantages that they did not: The tools of faith and reason with which to build, and the privilege of access to those that already live in the world we seek to reach.

To be a xenologist is not just to develop new weapons for our soldiers, or new techniques for construction. It is a sacred duty to the forefathers that gave us the blessed life we have and the successors who will pass beyond us into the next world. It is a profound honour that places one in the presence of those who live closer to the Divine than we have ever touched. It is both scientific field and religious commission, the union of faith and reason and the gateway to ascension.

This book gives a broad introductory treatment to the biology and ecology of Velan drones.

Drone Biology

Velan drones are often called 'life-mimicking', though it is simpler and rather liberating to simply call them 'alive'. They have blood and organs, complex nanoscale structures performing macroscale tasks, self-growth and self-repair. They have biological cycles and reproductive systems. They are, if not life, something to be treated with the same reverence. It is a reverence that befits them, as the study of Velan technology is been a central strut of Minkowski's power and continued growth today. But despite this importance it remains poorly understood. Drone biology has been a topic of empirical study for a fraction of the time of that of humans, and is far more sophisticated than the weak flesh needed to survive on a balmy cradle like Earth. All the fragments of 'xenotech' found in our fleets and factories are the simplistic vanguard of a mass of enigmas at best irreproducible and at worst completely opaque. Digging into this mass will not just provide new practical technology, but will push back the frontiers of our understanding of the universe.

Nanomachines

Nanomachines are perhaps the iconic element of xenotechnology, even more than plasma weaponry. Every drone or drone structure contains many trillions of machines which together form a viscous fluid called gel, frequently analogised as the drone's 'blood'. This gel permeates the entire structure and is responsible for constructing all the drone's systems. Drones begin their life as an egg filled with nanomachines, and end it when their gel turns dead and useless, good only for recycling into the bodies of the young.

Mechanocytes

The fundamental element of drone technology is the mechanocyte, also called a 'drexler'. Mechanocytes are 10^-9m-scale molecular machines, consisting of six effectors arranged at right-angles around a control and power core. Each effector can act as an atomic manipulator, connect to another effector to exchange energy and commands, or reject all connections and allow the mechanocyte to move freely. This ability to select connections means the viscosity and conductivity of mechanocyte gel can change drastically as required, and control of temperature expansion and electrostatic potentials in the gel enables it to move autonomously if free from external pumping.

It is rare for a task to be performed by a single mechanocyte. For most functions, thousands or even billions of nanomachines will link together to create a computing network and factory floor, often going on to construct, control and then dismantle an intermediary device that performs the work itself. This degree of emergent and flexible computing, especially in such small machines, is far beyond modern human technology and the clearest indicator of how far it is we still have to go before we can match our forebears.

Mechanocytes, importantly, can reproduce. Groups as small as a ten machines have been observed to be able to autonomously construct new ones given access to materials. Fortunately for those who worked with xenotechnology before mechanocytes were properly understood, this process is too inefficient to lead to 'grey goo' disaster scenarios outside of certain special situations.

Nuclei

Mixed in with the mechanocytes are the nuclei, 10^-7m-scale nodes of instructions, data and conventional computing architecture. Every mechanocyte collaboration with structure larger than a few hundred machines will contain (or share with another such structure) at least one nucleus that organises and directs the action of the entire apparatus. Involved nuclei will also communicate with others and the drone's hard physiology via mechanocyte chains to create a distributed computing network to manage the task at hand.

The instruction set of a drone nucleus is, appropriately, analogous to the drone's DNA. The nuclei do not (contrary to popular misconception) exert any direct influence over the drone's actions, but the control they exert over the mechanocytes is what builds the organs the drone has to act with and the brain it uses to control them. However unlike their biological namesake, nuclei cannot reproduce. The only known source of new nuclei is the ovary of a Queen, which produces the 'royal jelly' of pure nuclei that is so famously valuable a prize for whaling crews. The gradual depletion of its nucleus count through direct destruction and loss of gel through injury is one of the central causes of drone aging.

Nuclear study is one of the most important areas of xenology today.

Organs

While the gel is the life-giving blood of a drone, it is the organs that perform the functions for which a drone exists, and which we study in the hope of adapting into tools for our own use.

Brain & Gangila

Drone cognition is not centralised. Data processing is divided between a brain that makes primary decisions and ganglia that execute the brain's orders.

The brains are not totally unlike the brains of Earth-derived life in basic principles. They are a web of silicon nodes which define neutral structure by the way they are connected. Their structure, however, is radically different. They organise radially with anywhere from three to a dozen individual lobes being observed in drones of various types, and some large specimens have multiple brains distributed throughout the body. The purpose of these divisions remains opaque, however, as does much of the internal architecture. What we do know is that even brains larger than humans have no advanced rationality, being comparable in the most impressive cases to a particularly intelligent couatl (tl: equiv. a dog), albeit one that can thinks and reacts an order of magnitude faster in some situations.

Ganglia are much better understood. They are structured more like conventional computers, with discrete processors, memory and hardcoded instructions for executing their function. Each major organ has a ganglion attached that handles the processing needed, and most drones have several more that control functions such as targeting and route optimisation. Interestingly (and alarmingly), the decades since first contact have seen the appearance of several new ganglion types that appear designed to deal with human, such as ECCM modules and human signal interpreters. How these devices are designed is unknown, but reverse-engineering has been instrumental in advancing Minkowskan electronics.

Important to note is that the ganglia can act independently once instructions are received, to the alarm of early whalers who destroyed the central nervous system and found the drone in question continued ruthless attacks. Such 'zombie' drones are however completely unable to deal with qualitative changes in a situation.