The demons

After the Crucians, demons are probably the alien species which has had most effect on humanity. For that, they remain stunningly hard to describe. Not only are they the most alien form of life known, they are so alien they forced humans to reconsider their definitions of life. Physically they resemble rocks or chemical blobs, and were often mistaken for rocks. Their most noteworthy characteristic is the use of psi, and along with that it is difficult to know exactly what we know about them. While humans have been studying them for hundreds of years, there remains the highly-debated possibility that much or all of what we think we learned was implanted by the demons themselves. Ultimately, the story of the demons is less about the demons themselves and more a story of humans, and how we learned psi.

History and culture

In IY 6047, a mining survey began exploration of a relatively young star system which showed unusually high quantities of rare elements. The second planet of this system was a sample of absolute harshness, barren and dry with extreme temperature variations in latitude and time. Probes reported that, as suspected, the planet was a rich source of several rare elements, and so a human expedition landed on the planet. They saw an eerie landscape with rocks and chemical seas rich in dissolved minerals. There were no signs of life, which was hardly surprising in such an extreme environment. However, they did notice a strange sort of soft formation accreting to the rocks, which looked vaguely like some sort of fungi. In other places they noticed these blobs being washed by currents or even blown by wind. Curious about them, one of the surveyors prodded one with a gloved finger, and in a literal stroke changed the course of history.

Little happened at first. The blob looked like simply a soft blob, although the surveyor felt unaccountably anxious. His fellows picked and pulled at them further, noticing litle more about them. They took samples and moved on. Later, all began to feel strange anxious moments. These grew into more definite feelings of an outside presence, and then they began to experience vague and semi-clear visions, of strange undefinable things. The surveyors were alarmed; they had taken all precautions in collecting their samples, and knew of few things that could influence them through their safeguards. They quickly packed and fled, carrying reports of what they had found back to headquarters.

Still, such an interesting find could not be ignored, and the brief results they had obtained suggested the planet had great potential if the contamination problem (as they saw it) could be solved. The company invested funds and sent a proper research mission back to the planet. This group came prepared physically and mentally, and all were volunteers willing to risk their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and profits. They repeated the steps of the first mission but did not run away when they began to see visions. Gradually the visions solidified into definite shapes, and the researchers found the shapes changed according to their reactions. They experimented, trying to learn to control their experiences, and quickly realized they could not. The visions continued to evolve and react, becoming more elaborate and familiar, as if they were probing the humans the same way the humans had seen themselves experimenting. The researchers realized they were dealing with intelligent life forms.

The direction of the research mission changed at that point. With their fears of chemical poisoning gone, it was easy to find more volunteers, and xenologists flooded in. Within months they were able to communicate in simple gestures, and within a few years they codified these into a minimal common language. Communication was difficult as the aliens seemed to totally lack human concepts of time and space, but they worked at it and gradually improved. One particularly talented researcher, Wayan Chen, made quantum leaps in progress and learned to converse with them relatively freely about the very few common ideas they held. Her greatest discovery, however, came by accident one morning. The researchers had always contacted the demons by physical contact, at a special facility built near one of their "mounds" where many had stuck together. (It was observed early on that communication was easier with the large masses than small blobs). Chen was exploring the sorts of questions that might make sense to a demon. She asked them, in one of hundreds of variant ways she had tried, how they communicated and what touch had to do with it. She got back an unusual empty, querulous response which the humans had labelled as a "non sequitur". By these, the demons seemed to be expressing that their discussion had hit some sort of contradiction which needed to be resolved, and from experience the researchers knew it was best to quit at that point and regroup. She did so, going back to her quarters. To her great surprise, when she was there the demons appeared in a vision and continued to converse. Apparently physical contact was not necessary to communicate with them. Chen stayed on a few months longer, experimenting with this notion, then left to deliver her results at a scientific conference several spacefolds away. To her great shock, while she was at the conference the demons appeared to her again and launched another exchange, at a distance of hundreds of light years apart with no noticeable time lag between their expressions.

It is hard to underestimate the tremendous significance of this discovery. In close to fifteen thousand years of human discovery, one of the few constants was that nothing could move through space at faster than the speed of light. Even the discovery of spacefolds had not changed this; it had simply changed our notions of space and how it was connected. Now, all at once this entire fundamental notion simply fell apart. The demons had revealed an entire other layer of reality which bypassed our rules of space and time. Naturally, this aroused great interest in human scientific circles. Virtually every government that could mounted a scientific expedition to the demon world to learn more. The Emperor was forced to step in and seize direct control, sending a fleet of his personal guard to patrol the system and limit access with the general goal of maintaining order. Rogue "expeditions" attempted to carry off demons and samples, and battles ensued. Entire factions rebelled, claiming the Empire intended to cheat them and hoard discoveries for itself. These rebellions were quickly squashed; in a rare instance of unity, the Imperial trinity of Spacers, Founders and Spartans all backed the emperor with their own military forces. Treaties were drafted and the demon system became a protected zone with intense patrolling. All visitors had to be authorized or report immediately for inspection upon arrival. Violaters could be, and were, summarily destroyed.

After this excitement had died out, decades later, the study of the demons continued in its methodical way. Despite practically infinite funding, progress was slow. Early on the researchers learned how to shield against psi influence, a discovery with much more political value than practical. This allayed the fears of a section of Imperial society that was deeply distrustful of the demons. Demons learned from humans and humans learned from demons until their exchanges became something like real discussions. After hundreds of years the demons came to understand something of the structure of the universe, and humans came to learn more of the demon view of life. Progress stalled here for a long time, until a consensus emerged among scientists that this level of mere understanding was not enough and humans would have to make greater steps to become more like daemons, learning psi ourselves.

Progress at this went very slowly at first. For centuries humans experimented on themselves, learning to measure psi activity but with little progress how to stimulate it. They searched for humans with innate talent, with limited success. They tried genetic modification, cyborg implants, grafts from demons and myriad other techniques until finally they grasped the holy grail of their work and one day produced a pair of humans capable of exchanging simple psi visions with each other. From there, effort shifted with the goal of developing and articulating this talent. The Human Psi Institute was founded in IY 6505 to achieve this goal. Its charter has always been as broad as its name; the single purpose of the Institute is to develop psi capabilities in humans. It made stunningly rapid progress, in part achieved by the nature of psi and part achieved by good organization. Once they had learned the proper techniques to produce human psi communicators, they trained them as quickly as they could, and as quickly as they could train them they dispersed their graduates out across human space to teach and train more people.

Some humans were discovered to have more native ability than others at psi, although none have ever been found who can use psi without technological help. Reactions to psi varied greatly across the Empire. Some people adopted and embraced it, training themselves as quickly and thoroughly as they could. Others despised everything related to psi, and still more came to worship the demons. Many of these went on pilgrimages to the demon world, and an interesting phenomenon developed. The name "demon" appeared around this time, referring to the way they operated invisibly in people's minds. Some "merged" with the demons, living among them and disappearing from human sight. Occasionally researchers would discover bodies of one of these people, starved of life support and mummified in their environment suits, with a contented pacific look n their faces. Others were never seen again, a mystery that remains to this day.

The story of the demons practically ends here. Humans continued to develop psi and achieved the goals for which the HPI was formed; they learned to communicate closely with the demons, while changing themselves. On planets where psi technology spread, the psi followers became more and more a faction to themselves. Unsubstantiated rumours spread that they could not only communicate but make physical changes to the environment. These stories were widely sneered at until the Disappearance, which was well-known to have hit hardest the worlds where psi had spread most. Unfortunately, we may never know what exactly the connection was between the demons, psi and the Disappearance, since psi researchers nearly universally disappeared themselves.

The demons today

Since the Disappearance, anti-psi factions have gained considerable strength and the demon homeworld is now strictly sealed off, not just to unauthorized visitors but to everybody. All research missions to the planets have been broken off, all demons who had been carried off-planet were returned (or so it is claimed) and all physical contact has been focibly ended. It is unclear how many humans remain who are capable of communicating with the demons through psi. The Human Psi Institute deliberately destroyed its remaining records after the Disappearance, and its remaining members have gone underground, as much as they can.

Theories of the Disappearance run the entire spectrum from convincing to lunatic. There are those who believe that humans were ultimately successful at seeing the different layer of reality the demons operated in and simply "went there," whatever that means. Others believe nobody has moved anywhere and that the humans who disappeared have learned to hide themselves using psi. Still more question whether humans ever really learned psi, or whether it was all a giant vision implanted in humanity by the demons. Continuing in this paranoid line of thought, others wonder if psi shielding was also an implanted fake vision, and if in reality the demons have been steadily learning to control us more and more until we can no longer separate reality and vision.

In the midst of this human chaos, the demons themselves probably continue much as they ever have. They have never been discovered on any world but their own, and no doubt continue to blow and be washed around their planet, accreting and living in their unique way.

Biology and ecology

The demons, like all life forms, are products of their environment. It is thought to be their rare and extreme environment that created their peculiar structure, and that in turn is thought to lead to their psi ability. Demon bodies do not have cells or complex internal structures. They are conglomerations of complex molecules, built on the rare elements found in their home world. The extreme changes in temperature and pressure are thought to encourage a strange sort of molecular evolution leading to larger atomic chains and complex stable structures that would have no opportunity to form in other environments. These react to stimuli and are able to both hold and switch electric currents at a low level, so that when large numbers of these molecules collect together they can form networks, and those networks can react to and change each other. Demons are totally immobile, possessing no way of causing or limiting motion. They literally depend on their environment to sweep them from one place to another, although they do stick together when contact occurs and historically demons have usually seemed grateful when humans brought them into contact with each other.

With such a radically different structure, it follows naturally that demons would also have radically different thought and communication. Since they have no sense structures beyond the atomic scale, they do not perceive space and time in the way we do at all. Instead they perceive the universe as a giant network of connections and disconnections. The similarity between this and the network of spacefolds has been noticed and commented on many times although serious philosophers dismiss it as mere coincidence. Exactly how the demons learned psi is difficult to explain, not least because the fundamental concepts of it are entirely alien to our way of thinking. Where humans perceive themselves as individuals, it is doubtful if demons have any concept of individuality at all, and they may be one demon rather than many. It is thought that with the massive brain network they form together, they perceive patterns at the level of fundamental particles in a direct way we cannot. and so that they have a native ability to "see" strings and other fundamental physical structures, a barrier which has stopped human scientific progress since time immemorial. So the demons are not seeing a different reality from us, but seeing reality from a perspective humans can not normally reach. They are an extreme expression of the ancient philosophical principle that reality and perception cannot be separated. Since the demons perceive reality through structures unrelated to our bodies, they perceive it very differently and see things we do not.