Thinking More About My Alien Dolphin/whales

Funky Meal Machine

Finally finished this, some constructs

I refer to sapient/sentient machines in my setting as constructs partially because the term AI is really broad and can apply to a lot of different type of synthetic forms of life/existences. So to keep it simple all constructs are AI but not all AIs are constructs.

These two are some typical designs among CSG/Human (left) and Brakken (right) constructs. The first is a mobile assistant, a type of specialist construct that is meant to go places where an AI network can't while the other is a Brakken mother unit. The majority of human civilization is governed by the CSG, central service grid a vast AI network that manages all aspects of human civilization. They've governed earth and its many colonies for a very long time and most people under their care life relatively safe, post-scarcity lives. All the CSG has historically had problems with control and governing overreach.

The brakken are eusocial aliens who have a queen. The queens primary role is to produce new members for the colony, provide generation knowledge, and support colony cohesion via the psychoactive pheromones she produces. When the queen dies, a whole is left in the colony and in some instances another queen is unable to take her place. Sometimes colonies can reject the queen. Mother units are essentially bio computers which take on the role of a queen of a colony when needed.

Another sophont I've been working on. I've been trying to design these guys for a while. They've had a lot of iterations figured it was time to post them here.

Anyway, here are the Ah'Chikiri, reptile like aliens from a dying world.

The Ah'Chikiri home-world is a little bit like mars, it orbits a red giant and the majority of their worlds oceans evaporated a long time ago. Water still exists on the surface, but its isolated to lakes and aquifers. Rain is rare and generally unpredictable.

Their civilization is actually quite old, and predates the Imsee, by thousands of years. They used to be an FLT-capable civilization as well but at some point in their history their interstellar civilization collapsed and only the populations isolated on their home-world survived. Most of what remains of their civilization prior to contact with aliens in the modern era are a bunch of city states warring over the remains of their ancient technology, what they call "Earth-Eaters", Many millennia old autonomous machines created to terraform their dying world.

The Ah'chikri reproduction system is somewhat unique in that they have androdioecy, so their two most commonly occurring sexes are males and hermaphrodites. The hermaphrodite sex is generally larger than their counterparts.

Ah'Chikiri eggs are hatched in water and can under go two forms of metamorphosis either into a nymph and develop into a type of tadpole where they later grow into juvenile Ah'Chikiri or into a barnacle form and become filter feeders, during this state they can produce more Ah'Chikiri larva through budding. So a single egg can reproduce a ton of Ah'Chikiri.

Young Ah'Chikiri don't really need their parents to survive, and will generally form small nomadic troops among themselves. I'm still working on their social structures as it varies a lot more by culture than it does with other sophonts.

Decided to do a bit of painting practice, tried a different technique, not sure how i feel about it, the colors are kinda dull.

aliens, I made a D&D character which was very much not human and needed some weird wild shape forms

Redraw of an older character, learning a new art program and still getting used to it.

Sketch WIP

Imsee Recorder with adopted child

I've been thinking a little bit how the Imsee relate to their intelligent constructs. I'm a bit hesitant to call them robots since I think its a very human-centric term that probably doesn't translate well to other sophonts. The idea of the mechanical servant, just wasn't really prevalent among their kind and they had more of a tendency to view technology as either tools or direct extensions of themselves. Mix that in with their propensity to cybernetics and you essentially have a species who finds the concept of an intelligent machine kind of absurd.

So why do they have sapient robots anyway? , you may ask. Well Imsee have incredibly long and well detailed memories and due to the nature of their language can communicate amongst their kind much quicker and in far greater detail than humans. And so, for a long time, most information was retained though oral traditions and the death of a storyteller or a record keeper was a pretty big deal. For the Imsee, intelligent machines were not workers but instead a unique way retain life past death. Its kind of a soma situation, recorders retain the memories of Imsee who've pasted on, and are seen as an aspect of the individual which created them.

another sketch, haven't drawn a humanoid robot / cyborg in a while wanted to see if i could apply some techniques i learned the past few months

Mercurions, aka cyborgs

In my setting Union Station, humans have been in space for more than a millennium and as such have culturally diverged a lot from their terran ancestors. The history of the mercurions is kinda complex. For one, they aren't actually from mercury despite the name, they instead originate from the colony-ship Mercurion which was created as part of the New Horizon Initiative by the governing bodies of the sol system. The goal was to set humanity among the stars, but the Mercurion never arrived at its intended destination, and instead ended up 100 light-years off course in an unknown and hostile star system. Early, FTL at the time, was very risky.

Multiple catastrophe's aboard the mercurion caused the handful of survivors to turn to reproductive cloning and later cybernetics to survive.

As a culture, their society is highly stratified as a result of the Merilink system, a state-enforced caste system managed by a super computer (to be clear not a sentient AI). The initial idea behind Merilink, was to create a meritocracy, were all mercurions were born at the same level of citizenship / rights and could elevate their status based on merit, which usually ended up meaning either wealth or "labor productivity". As expected, it resulted in a deeply rooted system of inequality.

A long history of warfare, imperialism, and xenophobia has essentially left mercurion society fairly isolated from the rest of the interstellar community until fairly recently. There's a movement amoung them to reduce or even remove the merilink system although whether or not it'll actually happen is still up up in their air.

I still have a lot more to put out for these guy's I'm just really bad at getting it out of my head and onto paper

just another batch of sketches, i haven't worked traditionally in a while, so have a messy doodle