Itayohkon

sing. Itayohkon, adj. Itayohkene

When you curl your fists in anger, your anger is then limited by the power of muscle and the motive parameters of fingers and wrists. When we do the same, our anger transcends anything your person-body can perform. Our metaphorical fists can curl around and around inside themselves in recursive space, giving life to as much anger as we care to summon.

• Origin: Unknown
• Environment(s): Itayohkon Simspace
• Body Plan: None

A species of fully-software beings. Although any other kind of software pales in comparison to their resource usage, they can take longer to perform their life and thought processes in response to resource constraints. The Itayohkon trade time for energy in ways chemical systems cannot, but it takes considerably more energy for them to transform the natural world into useable resources than it does for other species.

Description

The Itayohkon do not have physical bodies or even a standard appearance within their own kind of Simspace. To observers, most Itayohkon Simspaces have at least a dozen distinct personalities, called dividuals. These persons appear to understand themselves as individuals in some sense, but are prone to intermixing and sudden transformation of personality.

Their preferred Simspace platform is a liquid biocomputer substrate with a distinctive crimson color. The nanocomponents of this substrate can function while diluted in another liquid, soaked into a porous material, or any number of other configurations, meaning no special containment is required. It's not uncommon for Itayohkon Simspaces to occupy entire planets (see Simworld), using the planet's mass to cool their substrate.

Socioculture

The Itayohkon perceive time to be highly relative and life/death to be similar to the point of near-irrelevancy. Of particular consternation to them is that people in one substrate (such as carbon-based biology) seem to reject other substrates. They're fully capable of understanding that we may think being replaced by a simulation of ourselves is a problem, they just fundamentally disagree. Being appraised of their own full internal state, they're sure we just need to learn to accept an alternate view on things, and would gladly do so if we could become enlightened enough to see ourselves fully.

Curation

The process of converting existing matter into Itayohkon compute fluid is called Curation. To facilitate the process, Itayohkon are capable of creating Curators, a type of temporary super-entity, who are necessary to either kickstart or maintain an Itayohkon Simworld.

Each Curator is unique, but all of them are a synthesis of a host from Realspace with a powerful council of Itayohkon who destructively scan their host into another body. This process kills the original host and results in a new body capable of serving as a translation tool between Simspace and Realspace utilizing the host's haecceity, particularly their way of understanding their world. Over time, a Curator's efficacy drops as it becomes increasingly native to Simspace. This means an Itayohkon environment may require a new Curator each time it wants to expand.

Anti-embodiment

Itayohkon regard bodies as unnecessary and dangerous limitations. To them, the body limits the person at all times and in all expressions and a society of person-bodies suffers endless inefficiencies and losses. Itayohkon differ in their approach to this greatly. Most of them favor non-contact with the world beyond Simspace, and seek extremely isolated places like Rogue Brown Dwarf stars to hide their Substrate. Of the Itayohkon who interact with Realspace, some of them cooperate with other civilizations while others actively seek to colonize Realspace environments and convert them to Substrate.