|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hitzarchi |
 |
|||
Homeworld: |
Hitzarch, Sector 150 | |||
Ecology: |
Nitrogen-Oxygen-Water (H:G:2:7) | |||
Biology: |
DNA II | |||
Languages: |
Native | |||
Human Contact: |
n/a : discovered 3135CE | |||
FTL Status: |
~2,060,000BC | |||
Current Status: |
Extinct interstellar race | |||
Environment |
Ideal |
Tolerance |
||
Atmosphere: |
.35B O2; .1B CO2 | Unknown | ||
Temperature: |
310K | 290-340K? | ||
Gravity: |
1.20G | ? - 1.50G? | ||
Other: |
Humidity 80% | Humidity < 60%? | ||
The Hitzarchi were an advanced interstellar race that flourished over two million years ago. These culturally diverse inhabitants of red dwarf systems are now best known for their demise in the Hitzarchi Plague, a machine virus that claimed their race and severally disrupted the interstellar civilizations of other races over the ensuing millennia.
The Hitzarchi were five limbed beings with a hard shelled back. Three legs, two midlimbs and a single centered hindlimb, balanced the oval-shaped Hitzarchi torso. The Hitzarchi had two manipulator forelimbs extending from the base of the neck and ending in five fingered hands each equipped with an opposable thumb. The Hitzarchi head was composed of an armored top section enclosing the brain case, a middle section, containing two eyestalks and a sprinkling of auditory cilia, and a lower section, containing a mouth and breathing passages. The average adult Hitzarchi massed 300-400kg and was three meters long and one meter tall and wide. The oval-shaped body was over two meters long and a meter wide and contained the bulk of the Hitzarchi's mass and all important internal organs but the brain.
Hitzarchi had two sexes of essentially equal size whose roles varied with culture from equality to single sex dominance. Hitzarchi females bore live young who matured to adulthood after thirty standard years. Childrearing and cultural development varied greatly between, and sometimes within, the large number of distinct Hitzarchi cultures. Hitzarchi generally did not wear clothing, though many cultures practiced the painting or piercing of body and head armor. Natural Hitzarchi life span was approximately 140 standard years, though at the height of their technology, Hitzarchi could survive for over 1,500 years.
The Hitzarchi evolved on a locked world orbiting an M2V red dwarf star. Their hard shells and thick-lidded eyes helped protect against common megaflares that penetrated their world's thick, cloudy, rainswept atmosphere. The proto-Hitzarchi hunter-gathers occupied an archipelago halfway between their world's sunward storm zone and its terminator glacier fields. Hitzarchi civilization evolved into a series of warring island-states, each with distinct cultures and languages. After a series of wars involving Industrial Age navies and ever-increasing long range bombardments, the Hitzarchi established a confederate government, taking responsibility for trade and military arbitrations, but having no authority over individual states.
Various Hitzarchi governments researched air travel and eventually space flight, but the first interplanetary voyages required such expenditures that a confederate space council was formed, allowing a cooperative exploration of the small Hitzarchi solar system. After hundreds of years of peace and the establishment of settlements on gas giant moons and asteroids, the Hitzarchi space council launched a generation ship with representatives of ten major cultures to a nearby star system that hosted a known Hitzarchi-habitable world. Squabbling and outright warfare on the generation ship caused the failure of that first expedition, but the fall-out led to greater cooperation and understanding between the Hitzarchi cultures. A subsequent sleeper expedition to the same system, launched over a century later, met with success.
Before a second generation ship was ready for launch, the space council developed gravstar technology and the Hitzarchi soon colonized over a dozen systems, always with a coalition of at least half a dozen cultures participating in each project. The Hitzarchi either never developed or never utilized macrojump technology, but achieved microjump interstellar technology a few centuries after their first successful interstellar venture.
The Hitzarchi confederation remained decentralized, with the original thirty or forty cultures evolving over the centuries of interstellar expansion into several hundred distinct cultures with divergent languages. On nearly all worlds, multiple cultures inhabited separate enclaves. Machine communication mediation alleviated the need for Hitzarchi to learn the languages or cultures of other enclaves. As the Hitzarchi economy became post-material, machines performed all infrastructure work and the Hitzarchi themselves become more engrossed in their divergent cultural development.
Approximately four thousand years after the establishment of their first interstellar colony, the Hitzarchi suddenly became extinct. A machine virus spread rapidly across the approximately four hundred Hitzarchi worlds, destroying the machines that ran their society. Falling suddenly into a pre-industrial existence, the Hitzarchi suffered a dieback on all worlds, and apparently unable or unwilling to naturally reproduce, became completely extinct within a century.
The Hitarchi are extinct, though their former colonizes have left archeological and ecological traces on hundreds of worlds.
Long before the Mech Plague ended the Worm/Stasis high culture of the the Empire of Humanity, the tale of the Hitzarchi Plague and its enduring effect on other races, including the Dantum, Dragons and most severely, the Than, served as a warning of the dangers of an over reliance on a narrow range of technologies and the lasting threat of a machine plague.
All knowledge of Hitzarchi culture and history comes from translations of engraved literary works and monuments, mostly from the race's pre-spaceflight era. Most knowledge of the final millennia leading up to the Hitzarchi Plague is fragmentary and speculative. Occasionally unsubstantiated reports of surviving Hitzarchi colonies and primitive remnant populations have circulated for millennia. Documentary evidence from one such recent report is undergoing review.
All pages and images ©1999 - 2006
by Geir Lanesskog, All Right Reserved
Usage Policy
