Elders

From ManMachine

                          Deep space cetacean

The Elders were deep space cetaceans with potentially limitless lifespans. Although the calves were no larger than an adult human, after a mere 100 years, they could grow to lengths exceeding 1609 meters, or one mile. The largest recorded specimen was nearly two miles long. The parallel of their physiological structure to their extinct earthly counterpart has not yet been explained, although genetic analysis reveals that their genetic code is a set that contains the entire set of DNA information of all known earthly cephalopods, even including analogues of epigenetic data structures encoded in compressed form by positron density readouts.The near simultaneity of their discovery with the dark matter anomaly (see First Delphi Transmission) suggest their existence is a result of a "hyper-anomaly. The term "Elders" was the codename applied first by Vatican theologians. The Vatican kept the existence of the extraterrestrial lifeform confidential, after verifying non-divine origin. The Vatican leadership took great pains to maintain this secret from their Cartel patrons, in order to maintain underwriting of the Delphi space probe program. However, Manmachine intercepted a scrambled transmission of the pod's coordinates and deduced that it was on a faster-than light speed course for the earth.

In Book 1 of Manmachine, he recounts to Echo the 10 years he spent in deep space to reach and meet the Elders in an attempt to gain their alliance in a war against the Cartel elite. The story illicits feelings of jealousy when he reveals that the Elders, lacking language themselves, breed a female cetacean with a hominid cortical structure that could mediate language (see Cetacean Cognition). Her genetic code included a DNA cassette containing 99% of the human genome, permitting language learning. Her human name was Anouk. Through her, Manmachine was able to understand the Cetacean purpose in approximate terms. Through him, the Cetaceans were able to understand the crisis that was to come on Earth, but voiced their unwillingness to interfere in its affairs. The peaceful, empathic bond between Manmachine and Anouk however appeared to move the Pod to change course, with Earth as the designating gathering point. The entire pod, generations of the ancient and vast numbers, was to come to a single, dense point in the universe. Manmachine was forced to leave Anouk with her Pod, leaving her to fate that he understood all to well: to be an outsider in one's own home, a wanderer. The story aroused intense feelings in Echo, which she did not voice but tried to sit through. Manmachine meets Anouk again, when the cetacean pod is infested with a brain-eating parasite sent from Earth. This is the subject of Book 9.

                               Anouk, "The Small One," the voice of the Elders, and uniquely able to understand and speak human language.

Cetacean cognition was not like its humanoid counterparts. It was mediated purely by an electromagnetic representation, dynamically projected into three dimensional space. Communication between pod members was limited to passive participation in the process. In actuality the cetacean brains were the vastest computing machines in the known universe; their collective network was thought to outsize Cartel and AI in computing power by at least a power of 10.

In Book 2 it is revealed that Manmachine's mind resides in this vast network, and is projected into his head. The transmission of the signal is reversed and phase advanced: this seemed to suggest that free will in Manmachine was asymptotic with zero degrees. It is also revealed that the technology making this possible was a modification of the cetacean fat pad, switching it from a 3D sonographic sensor to a phased array EM transmitter. In later books, it becomes apparent that the use of biotechnology in the Cetacean body makes it vulnerable to variants of I/O disease (see Book 9).

                                          Reverse engineered spermaceti organ