THE BEING Mmm
Mmm is a single creature: an insectile hive-mind, with a single intelligence that controls all the billions of creatures that make up Mmm. Individual Mmm drones of visible size look, in general, like insects, and weigh between 8 and 800 pounds. No more specific statement can be made about them. Mmm's homeworld is a small but fertile world with an average temperature of 80°, air pressure of .8 atmospheres, and .6 G. Planetologists believe that only Mmm's micro-management of the ecology has allowed the little sphere to keep so much atmosphere and water. The planet that houses Mmm is located in CCW space and it is a well-known creature among the circles of CCW government and society. The Kreeghor remain ignorant of its existence.
WORK IN PROGRESS BELOW (ignore data)
Advantages and Disadvantages
Mmm has the advantage of Mindshare: Global Consciousness, Sentient Drones, Universal Distance, and Under 99,999 (sentient) Drones. Among other "corporate" advantages, Mmm is also Unaging and Filthy Rich, but these would have no affect on an individual drone being used as a PC.
Individual manifestations of Mmm can also take many advantages which are normally only available to races, including, but not limited to, Amphibious, Clinging, Damage Resistance, Dark Vision, Gills and Winged Flight. Generally, a drone may freely take any racial advantage possessed by normal Earth creatures. More exotic abilities such as Broadcast and Spectrum Vision may be allowed by the GM on a case-by-case business. Insubstantiality, Body of Gas and Body of Water are not available.
Mmm has the disadvantages Gullibility, Honesty, Impulsiveness, and Truthfulness. Individual drones may have physical limitations which qualify as disadvantages, but no extra mental disadvantages unless Mmm designed them that way for a good reason. The cost to play a drone of Mmm is 135 points, plus or minus the physical point value (including IQ attribute) of the particular drone body.
Mmm in the Campaign
Mmm is a bit naive. His drones will be everywhere and, unless already engaged in pressing business, will be eager to be the party's friends, help them however they can, and generally tag along. Of course, most drones will have some kind of job or function, so they won't be able to just take off on an adventure, but in general keep Mmm friendly ... perhaps a little bit too friendly for comfort.
Nodes are busier, smarter, and much harder to con than mobiles. If the party does manage to make an Enemy of Mmm they're in serious trouble. Mmm won't try to kill someone, of course. But he's very smart, and he's everywhere. Since he doesn't lie, he will make no secret of his enmity and the reasons for it.
Drones tap into the nodes' knowledge using telepathy. Tapping into a node is like looking it up in the dictionary. It's a good place to go for facts, but not for real knowledge. You might be able to get a schematic of a stardrive, but not the theoretical knowledge of what makes it work, or even how to fix the one in front of you. Mmm would make an excellent patron: he'd probably send a strong NPC mobile along with the party on missions.
Name
Mmm is a single being, and its name is Mmm. That's the correct form of address for any of its manifestations. Mmm is pronounced just like it's spelled — a hum of about one second's duration. Humans and others frequently shorten the name to "em" or "um." This irritates Mmm, but it's found there's nothing it can do about it.
Psychology
Mmm is one of the strangest members of the galactic community. It is both an individual and a race. It is a true hive mind — a multiplicity of bodies sharing a single ego.
Mmm has many different types of bodies. In some sense all the animal life on Mmm's homeworld is Mmm, but most of the smaller creatures are more or less "automatic," and Mmm needs no conscious control over their actions and pays little heed to their perceptions. Most of these sub-sentient creatures cannot survive if taken out of the homeworld's biosphere.
The most powerful manifestations of Mmm are its nodes — sessile masses of neural tissue. These are of two major types — production nodes and sentience nodes. Production nodes are devoted to the design, programming and growth of new manifestations. All of Mmm's bodies are "born" from production nodes.
Sentience nodes are the places where Mmm focuses and optimizes its memory and intelligence. At a sentience node Mmm has an extremely high intelligence and almost instant access to all his millennia of memory.
The most commonly encountered manifestations of Mmm are the sentient drones. These are intelligent (though effectively much less so than a sentience node), mobile, and able to communicate with other creatures.
Drones are designed and programmed with certain advantages and skills. Mmm has drones that can fly or breathe underwater. Some are massive and strong; some are quick and stealthy. They may be programmed for tasks ranging from gardening to stardrive engineering.
There is a two-way channel of communication between the intelligent drones and the sentience nodes. The channel from the drone to the node is instantaneous and comprehensive — Mmm knows everything that happens to any of its mobiles. The channel from the node back to the mobile is less efficient. A drone must concentrate fora minimum of 10 seconds to obtain memories from the node. It is difficult fora body to assimilate knowledge it was not programmed for. The best a gardening drone could do to pass on Mmm's knowledge of stardrive engineering would be to slowly and painfully recite rote facts fed to it by a sentience node.
There are about 1,000 each sentience and reproduction nodes in existence at any given time. Mmm, has established a few hundred of each across the galaxy, for the convenience of his spacefaring drones. Mmm has around 70,000 sentient bodies spread throughout known space.
For all its power and intelligence, Mmm is a pleasant, strangely innocent being. Before it was discovered by spacefarers, Mmm had no idea that there existed any intelligence in the galaxy other than itself. It still has a tendency to project its own motives and personality to others. Having never had anyone to lie to, it has difficulty grasping why anyone would want to lie at all. Mmm does not allow functional drones to casually destroy themselves — drones, and therefore Mmm, do feel pain. On the other hand, the loss of a single drone is not seriously damaging to Mmm, and a duplicate can always be fabricated at the nearest production node. Therefore, drones will frequently display what, in a more normal being, would be a reckless courage.
When spacefarers first landed on Mmm's world, it subdued and dissected several individuals, thinking it was doing no more harm to the entity visiting it than drawing a blood sample would do to a human. When its mistake was eventually explained to it, Mmm was appalled at what it had done. Since then Mmm has taken excessive care not to endanger the lives of single-body sentients.
Mmm appears to be utterly androgynous. It has manifested both psychologically masculine and psychologically feminine personalities to different individuals. Telepathy who have scanned mobiles or sentience nodes have reported no sign of an overriding psychological gender in Mmm's ego.
So far Mmm has behaved consistently as a socially responsible, mature individual who would not dream of committing a crime or anti-social act. Occasionally it has allowed itself to be duped into criminal activity by unscrupulous individuals, but it has always been cleared of all charges, and has insisted on reimbursing those who it accidentally damaged. As Mmm's experience with other beings grows, it's becoming less susceptible to such ruses.
Mmm's only natural art appears to be the shaping of itself through the production of new bodies. It has recently become intrigued by the visual arts and music, and has made efforts in that direction. Early results were not encouraging.
Mmm has no religion,since until recently it had no reason to suspect that itwasnot the sole sentient entity in the galaxy. It is fascinated by the concept of gods and spirits, but has so far professed no personal belief in any religious or philosophical system.
Ecology
Mmm consists of the entire animal kingdom of his world. Apparently Mmm has always been, since the plant and animal kingdoms diverged in the remote past. The very first animal on that world was a primitive production node able to reproduce itself through fission. From that point life tended to become more diverse and specialized, as it does on all worlds. However, for reasons that remain mysterious, on Mmm's world when animals developed self-awareness they all shared one ego. This would make Mmm, in some sense, over a billion years old. Mmm has estimated that it became self-aware about 100 million years ago, at which time its intellect was about that of a primitive reptile. It believes itself to have achieved sentience between three and four million years ago. Its earliest coherent memories date from that time.
Mmm's drones need to metabolize food to remain active. Most are herbivorous, since for Mmm to eat animal life is for Mmm to eat itself — which is not efficient. A few of Mmm's manifestations which require high energy are omnivorous, and certain lower Mmm organisms seem specifically designed to eat plants and then be eaten themselves.
Drones, from the simplest single-celled organisms to the most sophisticated sentients, are produced fully grown and ready to function. The exceptions to this are nodes and certain very large mobiles, which are too large to be produced internally by a normal production mode. These are programmed to grow externally for a while before beginning to function. This growth can take as little as a few weeks and as much as several years.
Sentient drones tend to wear out after about 30 years of continuous use. However, it is quite easy for Mmm to create an exact duplicate of the worn-out drone, complete with personal memories, at any production node. Nodes can remain functional for as long as a millennium.
The instantaneous rapport between Mmm and its manifestations is mysterious. It is not bioelectric, like human nerve impulses. Nor is it psionic in nature. Neurologists have dubbed the phenomenon "sub-psychic rapport," but so far they've been able to discern nothing concrete about how it functions. It is known that it does not appear to diminish in strength with distance, and there is no apparent time delay, even across the width of known space.
Mmm has evidenced no sign of any capacity for normal psychic powers, but it has expressed hope that it can build such capabilities into future drones, once the biological roots of psychic phenomena are better understood.
Culture
Before its discovery by other races Mmm led a lonely, solipsistic existence. Even so it was active and intelligent, exploring and experimenting with its environment. Mmm was never been a great user of technology, but when it was found it was capable of building and using low-tech devices and structures. Its degree of control over its manifestations was remarkable — the equivalent of at least a very high level of biotechnology.
When it was alone, Mmm's existence was idyllic. It had no natural enemies or predators, by definition. Mmm seems to be a refutation, or at least an exception, to the Darwinian theory that evolution is a byproduct of the struggle for survival. Mmm's development seems motivated by an instinctive desire to perfect itself and its environment, and to explore and comprehend the universe around it.
The sophistication of Mmm's intelligence is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that when it first met others it had never even considered the concept of communication, since communication requires something to communicate with. It took it just over two years to understand the concept and function of language, evolve and develop both the physical structures of speech and the mental capability to conceptualize verbally, and actually acquire a spoken language to a conversational level of proficiency.
Almost all of the knowledge and skills of other sentient races has now been absorbed somewhere into Mmm's sentience nodes. It has already demonstrated a great deal of versatility and creativity in applying what it knows. It is now working at increasing its capacity to synthesize and cross reference its knowledge. Some have speculated that within the next century or so Mmm will have evolved itself into the galaxy's most advanced biological computer.
Mmm is slowly becoming aware that the existence of other beings makes it necessary for it to protect itself. Towards that end Mmm has secretly emplaced several dormant production and sentience nodes on its homeworld and throughout the galaxy. These nodes are programmed to activate only if a substantial percentage of Mmm's manifestations are abruptly terminated in a short period of time. Mmm has owned and crewed spaceships for several years. It is presently engaged in negotiations to acquire military vessels for planetary defense. The only hold-up to these negotiations is financial — Mmm's homeworld is not mineral-rich, and its only source of income is contracting out the services of its manifestation. This provides it with a steady influx of cash, but not in the amount necessary to build of a planetary defense.
Politics
Mmm is an active participant in the galactic body politic. It sits on all multi-racial legislative and advisory bodies and has even chaired some major committees. It keeps sentience nodes at all the galaxy's major political centers.
Mmm is only dimly aware of it, but many of the galaxy's best political minds are intensely afraid of it. Mmm could take complete control of the galaxy faster and more efficiently than any other of the galaxy's races. Its compliment of less than 100,000 major manifestations is quite voluntary — a limit it set itself so as not to come into direct competition with other races for necessary resources. If it wanted to it could begin clandestinely multiplying, and completely overrun the galaxy with great efficiency. It could manufacture the most deadly military force ever seen — perfectly disciplined, highly intelligent troops, all in perfect rapport with their command and with no personal fear whatsoever. Even without armament, it could breed biological weapons, from viruses to armored juggernauts. The galaxy's most sophisticated strategic computers agree that Mmm could overrun known space in less than a decade.
Even more frightening, when asked about the possibility of a preemptive strike to eliminate Mmm now while it wasn't expecting it (strictly as a theoretical exercise, of course), the best plan the computers could come up with had less then a 15% chance of success. Mmm is so versatile and widely-dispersed that it would be almost impossible to totally destroy it through any sort of military or clandestine action.
So the other races were left with a single choice regarding Mmm. That necessary policy can be expressed, "it likes us so lets keep it happy." Consequently Mmm is accepted as an integral and respected member of society. Mmm itself, in the meantime, seems to still be mostly interested in - making new friends and learning new things.
Because of its pacifism, Mmm's manifestations do not serve in the military; however, it has breed specialized manifestations for use on Scout teams and even as Patrol officers. REDO
The Patrol keeps a large garrison in Mmm's system, to protect it from hostilities and (though Mmm doesn't know it) to try to protect the galaxy from Mmm.
Mmm Drones as PCs
It would be almost impossible to play a manifestation of Mmm in a 100-point campaign. The only way to get enough points fora usable number of skills would be to buy down characteristics to a crippling extent.
There is very little room for individuality in the drones. A drone can take the normal five quirks, and maybe one minor mental disadvantage as a "programming glitch. "
Mmm makes a great PC in a 200-point or higher campaign. Especially handy is the ability to individualize the character with what are normally racial skills. Even better is the fact that a manifestation of Mmm can only be "killed" for the amount of time it takes to get to the nearest reproduction node.
Mmm is very straightforward, and probably fits in better in a mercantile or Scout campaign then in a more violence or stealth-oriented campaign. Mmm PCs are completely unsuitable for a criminal or military campaign.