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The Hov’s’sa (HIE-015-PZE, the Bentharis II Civilization)

Extinct Aquatic Xenosophonts

Hov's'sa
Image from Aaron Hamilton

Quasi-historical records originating from multiple extant and extinct xenosophont cultures attest to the existence of an ancient, long-vanished aquatic civilization on the Pelagic Gaian world Bentharis II. According to these accounts, this species was involved in an interstellar military conflict with the far more advanced Tkzeph Empire, which culminated in an extraordinary event that apparently resulted in the mysterious disappearance of both civilizations. Designated by the Hamilton Institute of Exopaleontology as HIE-015-PZE and labeled by other xenoarchaeology institutes simply as the Bentharis II Civilization, they are more commonly referred to using the Tkzeph's name for them, the Hov's'sa.

Biology

Most detailed information about the Hov's'sa comes from the Muuh, who have maintained records from a now-extinct civilization that visited Bentharis several centuries prior to the Tkzeph invasion. According to these records, the Hov's'sa were a eusocial species with multiple specialized castes, similar to several clades of Terragen insects, with the notable difference of lacking a centralized reproductive "queen" caste. Instead, members of any caste were capable of transforming into "breeders" in response to chemical or environmental cues, and would produce offspring asexually. The caste of a newborn Hov's'sa would be determined by temperature during the incubation period, which breeders would control by placing eggs at various distances from geothermal heat sources. Four additional castes have been identified, labeled as foragers, warriors, builders, and strategists.

Individual Hov's'sa varied widely in size and shape depending on caste, but all exhibited a compact body with four pairs of articulated limbs, a long tail ending in fins or flukes, and a cluster of sensory organs around a set of mouthparts at the front of the body. Having evolved in a lightless deep-ocean environment, they were completely blind, and instead navigated using thermal and electrosensory organs, touch, smell, and echolocation.

According to data collected by the Hov's'sa's early visitors, the Hov's'sa and other lifeforms native to Bentharis II were for the most part quite similar to Terragen life on a biochemical level, being composed of cells made up of lipids, proteins, and polysaccharides. A major point of difference was their genetic material, which consisted of quasi-periodic silicate crystal structures encoding genetic information that could be read and written by complexes of proteins. Along with exotic barocapnic biota found on a handful of Cytherean worlds (most notably Scaramouche in the Pantalone system, home to the primitive xenosophont species known as the Riposte), the Hov's'sa and other described organisms from Bentharis II are among the few known examples of naturally-occurring bionts with crystal-based genetics.

Many other aspects of their biology also incorporated silicon compounds, with their endoskeletal structures being composed primarily of silicon carbide (carborundum), their outer integument containing subdermal silica plates and spicules, and their "muscles" consisting of arrays of tiny quartz crystals which used the piezoelectric effect to expand and contract, acting in a similar fashion as artificial piezoelectric stepping motors. Their biology also apparently implemented electricity for various functions not seen in Terragen life-forms, especially in their nervous systems, which consisted of networks of primarily-silicon "wires" rather than more "traditional" cellular neuronal analogs.

The Hov's'sa were omnivorous, subsisting on a diet of both sessile and motile organisms living around hydrothermal vents, supplemented with minerals scraped from rocks. Their metabolism heavily relied on fermentation as opposed to aerobic respiration, thus making them facultative anaerobes (i.e. they did not require ambient oxygen to survive).

History

In their ancestral state, the Hov's'sa subsisted on communities of chemotrophic organisms located around hydrothermal vents. The builder caste would construct elaborate hive-like structures around these vents, redirecting their heat and nutrients to feed "gardens" of vent organisms within cavernous interior spaces, which would be tended to by the forager caste and jealously guarded from predators and rival collectives by the soldier caste. Members of the forager caste would also frequently scout the surrounding seabed for new vents to colonize; the constant volcanism and shifting continental plates of their homeworld meant that any given vent would only be safe or active for a few years at most, forcing the collective to be prepared to find a new home on short notice. In times of particular stress imposed by the unstable environment or other factors, members of the strategist caste would be birthed to help navigate the situation with their creative problem-solving abilities. This caste was apparently the only one to ever develop sophonce comparable to that of baseline humans, with the others being driven entirely by instinct and pre-programmed behaviors.

Over time, as the most successful collectives of Hov's'sa grew to encompass larger areas of seabed, their territories encroached upon one another, leading to vicious fights over food and living space. These intra-species conflicts were a major driver of the Hov's'sa's early technological advancement, in particular the development of metallurgy - facilitated by the abundant volcanic heat sources in their environment - which allowed for the crafting of tools, weapons and armor.

By the time they were first contacted by another intelligent species, the Hov's'sa had become a world-spanning civilization with technology comparable to that of Earth's Industrial Age. Their society was essentially a single extended hive, grown out of numerous smaller collectives that had merged together through conquest or willing collaboration. Almost the entire abyssal plain of Bentharis II was covered with their structures, consisting of maze-like warrens that extended both above and below the seafloor, interspersed with geothermal power-generation facilities and pumps for circulating water through underground tunnels. The closest equivalent to a central government was a body made up of millions of members of the strategist caste, which worked tirelessly to plan the expansion of living spaces, allocate resources, address threats posed by the environment and invent new technologies to improve various aspects of society.

The Hov's'sa apparently had very little in the way of art or culture, with almost all of their activities being dedicated to maintaining the infrastructure of their civilization. Despite this, they were evidently a highly spiritual people, with a species-wide religion dedicated to a personification of their world's volcanism. This belief system likely grew out of early Hov's'sa's attempts to manipulate their world's fickle geology with superstitious rituals, hoping to prolong the lifespans of hydrothermal vents or prevent destruction by volcanic eruptions. In the modern era, even after having gained an impressive measure of control over their world's volcanic activity through ingenious large-scale geoengineering projects, the Hov's'sa continued to supplicate their volcanic deity for continued peace and prosperity; within their "smithing temples," massive structures built atop undersea volcanoes that doubled as manufacturing hubs and houses of worship, swarms made up of hundreds of foragers would ceaselessly crawl and swim around the central calderas in elaborately choreographed "dances," which were never allowed to stop lest the Hov's'sa's volcano god awaken from the trance induced by the dancers' movements.

Fragmentary Tkzeph records kept by both the Muuh and Silent Ones, as well as information retrieved from a handful of archives discovered within the planet-spanning alien megastructure known as Miracle City (located in orbit around YTS 6771819015-1), indicate that at the time of their discovery by the Empire, the Hov's'sa had been contacted by at least two other species, who used a radio beacon left behind by the first visiting civilization to communicate with the Hov's'sa. Despite this history of contact, the Hov's'sa appeared to be almost entirely incurious about the universe outside their world. This insularity seemed to be partly the result of a deeply-ingrained psychological barrier, perhaps a result of their physiology restricting them to the depths of the ocean; they appeared to be fundamentally incapable of truly grasping the concept of interplanetary space, much less the scales and distances involved.

This mental block was coupled with a belief that nothing of value could possibly exist beyond a few hundred meters above the abyssal seabed, as their volcanic god provided them with everything they could ever want or need. To the extent that they understood that there were places apart from their world inhabited by other intelligent species, every additional piece of information they learned served merely to strengthen this conviction: no other race, it seemed, had been so uniquely blessed with a home of such endless abundance, warmed and fed by the very ground beneath their feet, challenged and provided for by their environment in equal measure, and sheltered from the outside universe by a protective shroud of water. Surely, they reasoned, they had been chosen by their god as the universe's most favored beings.

This belief resulted in considerable friction when the Hov's'sa were eventually contacted by the Tkzeph Empire, who had sent a missionary probe toward Bentharis as part of their expanding wavefront of evangelism and colonization. The Tkzeph, themselves a religious hegemony who worshipped a pantheon of "divines" (generally believed to have been a collection of ruling transapient AIs), sought to bring every intelligent species they could find into their fold, either through willing conversion or through conquest and "re-education".

The Hov's'sa were apparently completely unfazed by the Tkzeph's proselytizing, responding that the Tkzeph were obviously confused about their place in the universe, their so-called gods sounded thoroughly unimpressive, and that they had no interest in becoming a client species or dealing with the Tkzeph in any capacity. This total indifference and refusal to capitulate on the part of a far-less-advanced culture was apparently unprecedented to the Tkzeph; their annoyance is reflected in the Tkzeph's name for the species, "Hov's'sa," a pejorative whose etymology remains incompletely known but seems to translate roughly as "the puny/obstinate ones."

After receiving the Hov's'sa response, the Tkzeph followed their standard protocol for dealing with recalcitrant civilizations and sent a small fleet of transapientech warships to Bentharis. Despite the vast technological gulf between parties, it took several years to secure the Hov's'sa's submission, as the Hov's'sa withdrew deep underground to subterranean warrens and bunkers that even the Tkzeph's submersible probes had difficulty detecting. Eventually, the Tkzeph threatened to use ordnance that would crack the planet's crust and trigger cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions across the entire seafloor. The Hov's'sa immediately surrendered in response, mostly out of a desire to avoid irritating their deity rather than a desire for self-preservation. The Tkzeph invasion forces proceeded to round up the Hov's'sa and bring them aboard their ships to be "re-educated."

What happened next remains a subject of heated debate among xenologists, although one fact is beyond dispute: shortly after the Hov's'sa surrendered to the Tkzeph, both civilizations suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. Outgoing communications from the Tkzeph fleet at Bentharis ceased, as did all transmissions from Tkzeph worlds and habitats across the entire Empire. Multiple records describe a wave of silence propagating outward from Bentharis at close to light-speed, with new epicenters blooming across the Empire as the unknown vector jumped through wormhole links. Remote observation indicated that all visible activity within Tkzeph systems abruptly halted at the same time as local emissions ceased. Within a century, the entire Tkzeph Empire had gone dark.

As for the Hov's'sa, their disappearance was even more total, and even more mysterious. To this day, not a single artifact or fossil attesting to the existence of the Hov's'sa has been discovered, despite over a century of archaeological efforts. Indeed, no evidence has been found to suggest that Bentharis II ever harbored life at any point in its history.

Several explanations have been proposed for this event. A large fraction of xenohistorians believe the entire incident, as well as the supposed records of contact with the Hov's'sa themselves, to simply be a Muuh historific that was later passed on to the Silent Ones and other civilizations. Others suspect that the records were deliberately altered by an unknown party, ostensibly to conceal the truth of what actually happened to the Tkzeph, and to the Hov's'sa as well if they ever existed. A minority of researchers who take the accounts at face value claim that the disappearance of the Tkzeph could only have been the work of a powerful AI god or gods, who used their transapientech to annihilate the Empire and later systematically destroy all evidence of the Hov's'sa. Some in this camp have suggested that the Hov's'sa were rescued by the contemporary equivalent of a Caretaker God, perhaps having taken a special interest in the Hov's'sa given their rare status as a naturally evolved aquatic technological civilization. The Restorers, a semi-mythical group of beings suggested to be behind the posthumous erasure of multiple ancient alien civilizations, have also been implicated by various scholars.

The third explanation listed above seems to be closest to the one favored by Muuh "historians," who invariably assert that the Hov's'sa were saved by an act of divine intervention: the Hov's'sa called out to their god in their time of greatest need, and their god answered their prayers. According to them, the Hov's'sa were "spirited away" to some other place (suggested by the few Terragen scholars who take this explanation seriously to be a hidden/camouflaged star system or even a baby universe) where they would never again be bothered by outsiders. When asked about how they supposedly learned this information, the Muuh offer a variety of characteristically vague and equivocal responses.

The Silent Ones, who (true to their name) are not known for being forthcoming when it comes to discussing either their own history or their inherited knowledge of past civilizations, have declined to comment.
 
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Appears in Topics
-13.7Gy to -7000 AT: Preterragen Era Xenosophonts
 
Development Notes
Text by Andrew P., based on the original by Aaron Hamilton
Initially published on 07 November 2001.

changed link to 'baby universe' article June 2022

update added April 10,2025
 
Additional Information
A 3D STL file of the Hov's'sa by Andrew P. can be downloaded here (added January 2025)
 
 
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