Alien De/Re-Construction

[RTM]

This is not about Ridley Scot's film. This is about a race of humanoid cyborgs my adolescent brain created in one of it's first PbP roleplaying forum games, called Galaxy at War. In the game each player controlled a race (or a conglomerate of races) that reached Space Travel. The purpose of the game was basically to create a space opera story overloaded with interstellar war, in my opinion at least. As far as I can remember, that goal failed either because of the players themselves or the mods that also played GaW.

Anyway, most of my races were either robotic or cybernetic. I called the most recent version of the as 'The Rylan' or just 'Rylan'. The came from another galaxy, fleeing from a race that destroyed their intergalactic empire. Most of the time that race was either without a name or called as 'Replicators'. The remnants of of the Rylan came to this galaxy in either multiple or a single super-carrier space ship with the help a super-advanced Warp/Wormhole/Jump engine or a malfunctioning W/WH/J engine.

After the transition the super-carrier/s appear in orbit of 'Khasan', a lifeless planet or lifeless planetoid (very large asteroid) and crash land, no reason for which has ever been thought of. The Rylanites spend few short months or years living of supplies and the like before coming to the realization that they are going to die. And so, an unnamed scientist proposes full-body cybernetics as a way to save their lives. After some consideration most if not all agree to the process and become cyborgs who seem to have no need for power sources now that I think about them more carefully.

After some thousand or ten thousand years comes the Space Travel age (GaW Start) and the Rylanites became completely emotionless, forgot everything about their past before 'The Crash' and mastered Halo series UNSC level of tech, though mostly focused of perfected fusion power and railguns.

After that point ends everything concrete about them, after that I started fantasizing about them conquery entire galaxies, use spatial and temporal anomalies as power sources and ultimately ascend into godhood through the mysterious (only because I haven't though about it much) Project: Apotheosis.



Anyway, discuss/ask/criticize about the Rylan and help me to flesh them out... that is if this topic is allowed on this forum.

[dworkin]

They sound like cybermen. So long as they stay away from the BBCs favourite Outside Context Problem and angry pepperpots they should be fine.

[RTM]

I sort of get, what the OCP concept means. But what do pepperpots have to do with anything?

[Simon_Jester]

Daleks, from Dr. Who. An extremely powerful race of cyborgs-verging-on-robots, with very advanced technology including casual time travel, and weapons of sufficient power to overwhelm nearly anything else in fiction.

[The Romulan Republic]

To elaborate further, in case you're unfamiliar with them, the Daleks (though formidable) have a rather odd appearance. They basically look like pepper pots with a plunger sticking out of them.

[Rossum]

Here's the articles for the Daleks and Cybermen on Stardestroyer Wiki (you can read alot more about them on other sites).

The cybermen are really old in terms of sci-fi (They were in Doctor Who before the Borg were in Star Trek) and have gone through various iterations. Their first appearance had them basically people with prosthetic replacing their limbs and life support systems keeping them alive, later on they got more robotics, in the new series of Doctor Who they are basically mechanical bodies used to house a human brain. They all started off as a way to let people live longer but since the conversion renders them unable to reproduce normally they have to convert others into cybermen to propagate their race.

Oh, and the old series cybermen had little machines the size of mice called Cybermats that could hunt down people and inject poison into them. The new series cybermen have devices that hook onto peoples ears that let the cybermen control them and either infiltrate human organizations or to mind control people to sent them to factories to be converted into cybermen.

Here are two youtube videos:

This shows a rather memorable battle against a cyberman in The Pandorica Opens



And here is a Cyberman Tribute to let you see how they've looked over the years.



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Anyway, if these aliens are a race of cyborgs who were origionally organic and changed to extend their lifespan, and they replace the majority of their organs. Why not build something like a robot or a suit of powered armor that is equipped with life support functions in addition to its normal function?


Basically, the goal of the conversion process is to replace the organs and body parts of a person with more efficient mechanical organs. These would all be housed in a mechanical body (once you replace all their limbs and such). Why not just build a robot with the life support systems necessary to house the brain itself? You could build an whole bunch of robots who act autonomously (although not as intelligently as a true cyborg with an organic brain) and perform all the menial tasks that the people/cyborgs don't want to do. Then, if an organic person wants to become a cyborg they basically select one of the empty suits and have their brain transferred into it.

The empty suit is effectively given an organic brain that makes it a cyborg with free will and then it gives orders to the lesser empty suits.

The cyborg race could consist of a relatively small number of actual cyborgs and a much larger number of empty suit robots perform simple menial tasks, fight in battles, or in emergencies act as spare parts for the cyborgs. The empty suit robots are basically cyborgs without brains in them so if a cyborg needs emergency parts they can get quick replacements. When dealing with other friendly races, the empty robots could be offered as servants or medical equipment. In combat, an army of empty robots (preferably more numerous than their enemies) could march into combat, kill or main their enemy, and once they find the wounded enemy they perform a quick brain transfer to put the enemies brain into their robot body.

In the case of converting organic enemies into more cyborgs, it might not be that that they magically convert people over to their cause and turn them into mindless zombies. Its just that the automated robot is still fighting but chooses not to listen to the brain its installed in its head. People 'assimilated' by the robots basically have their head cut off and hooked up to life support where they get to look through the eyes of the enemy robot as it continues to fight. These assimilation robots might keep the enemy brain alive and then return back to base where it can be properly brainwashed or interrogated for information (assuming it doesn't have mindreading equipment installed in its head anyway).


In fact, if the robot bodies are capable of operating semi-autonomously with only minimal input from a cyborg manager or its own brain, then the actual organic brains could be sitting inside their cyborg head checking E-mails or playing video games while occasionally checking to make sure the robot body is doing its job.