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« on: July 14, 2009, 02:56:10 pm »
The Flow is a race of fur-covered creatures. They vary to some degree in appearance, but in general all of them have the following in common:
-Covered in fur
-Has an exoskeleton
-About three inches long minimum
The Flow do not consider the existence of an individual and group, because of their alien sense of self. They do not have one self with which they remain for their entire life, but merge and demerge from other selves. (From the point of view of many theologians, this would mean that they do not have souls, or perhaps have some sort of alien soul.)
The Flow function like a hivemind in that an individual member posesses little intelligence, but when put together, they have intelligence. The Flow are divided into three Types, Ends, Connectors and Splits. The Ends are divided into thousands of niches, though only a few niches are very common. Splits are only divided into about three niches, and connectors only one.
The Flow have a sort of organ on them called a Dot. You can tell what Type an individual is by how many Dots it has. Ends have one Dot, Connectors have two, and Splits have three or more. When the dot of one individual touches the dot of another individual, they think as one being. Furthermore, energy can be transmitted through dots, meaning that only one part of such a being needs to eat food (though it needs to eat enough food for all of them). Beings made from more than one Flow individual are called Chains.
The purpose of an End is to carry out some task. One niche of End is the Seer, these detect light and comprehend the resulting image. Another niche of End is meat-consumer. Yet another is plant-consumer. Specialized niches exist for eating things that the generic meat and plant consumers cannot eat. One niche is devoted to creating all the other niches, including itself. This is relatively common for obvious reasons (the species would go extinct if it died out). When intelligence became common, a niche developed for manipulating things in order to create tools.
The purpose of a Connector is to connect Ends to Splits and other Ends, and also to move. Every connector has twelve legs (it has three rows of legs. At all times it has three legs under it, three legs to its left, three legs to its right, and three legs above it. This means it does not matter how it is rotated. The legs are retractable, and it retracts whichever legs it is not using.
The purpose of a Split is to make the Chain two rather than one dimensional. With Splits, a Chain can have more than two Ends. A Split has more than two Dots and as a result does not create a centipede-like line.
Every individual has a small bit of intelligence, and as a result the larger a Chain is the smarter it is. A Chain has recognizable sapience at around one thousand individual parts. A larger Chain could potentially be even smarter.
Culturally, Chains have invented an incredibly unusual concept. For most of their history, there were no documents, but rather a Chain would keep information on one of its parts, and then give that part to another Chain if it needed to know the information on it. Within the last few centuries, this practice has phased out in favor of using computers with artificial dots on them to store information.
Chains also keep pets, but their relation with them is rather odd. The pets are themselves Chains, but smaller and unintelligent ones. Sometimes, an owner may "incorporate" its pet, by connecting to it.
The Flow societies do not recognize murder as a crime, but purely assault. The penalty for assault varies depending on how many individuals were destroyed, which generally DOES mean that slayers of entire Chains will get larger punishments.
It is generally considered rude to forcibly incorporate another Chain, but it is not criminal as after the event there are no complaints.
Technologically, the Flow have left their solar system three times as of this writing, but have yet to encounter alien intelligence.