The Locaste were taken from the lower classes of the homeworld, and later from the subjugated space-dwellers that had gained independence before the solar empire was truly ascendant. In order to minimize the cost of upkeep on other planets and extreme environments, the locaste were modified for differing environments. High gravity, low gravity, diminished oxygen, the seas of home and those of certain moons, places of near-complete darkness. Though none ever truly diverged from the human template to the extent they were unrecognizeable, they became species in their own right.

Though they can be argued to exist at the bottom of the food chain, their numbers and the minimal upkeep they require, along with the ease of making more of themselves, allow them to survive in one form or another across the star system, though many do abandon their humanity in pursuit of more powerful forms, or as a necessary sacrifice to protect their communities.

Even so, perhaps of all the human lineages, they are the most free, excepting their environmental alterations. Their minds are the same as the ancient humans that first created civilization, and their bodies may be resculpted into countless forms.

While the masses of humanity were reshaped to fit a specific niche, the loyal supporters of the solar empire would retain the forms granted to them by evolution, enhanced through longer life, greater health, and countless other subtle benefits. Instead, it was their minds which were changed. Certain propensities and behaviors were magnified, and others were reduced. Particular physical traits were enhanced, but always artisanally and with care, rather than the cold and impersonal reshaping of locaste genomes. Rather than being built to dwell in the harsh environments of the star system, the Hicaste were made to perform specific roles to manage their lesser kin, acting as the insulating intermediary between the masses and their masters, and serve as a promise of loyalty being rewarded with ascension to their ranks.

There was the Civclade, bureaucrats and middlemen, the office-worker and secretary. The Warclade, attack dogs, terrorizers, and enforcers built as the boot of imperial rulership. The Joyclade, entertainers, celebrities, and influencers which amused their owners and placated the disgruntled. The Sciclade, savantic engineers and scientists which fine-tuned and maintained the systems the empire relied upon.

So potent was the genetic script of the Hicaste that it easily persists today, scattered in fortresses and arcologies now bereft of the laborers intended to serve them or the rulers they were built to seek the approval of. They have grown strange over the long centuries, forced into roles they were not made for, but unable to escape the constraints of their ancient dictates. But even so, they persist, struggling in a world they were never meant to live in, long past the time they were supposed to die with their creators.

The now-extinct rulers of the solar imperial age, and the peak of pre-N-matter bioengineering. All but immortal, physically perfected, and inhumanly beautiful, at least by the standards they imposed upon humanity. Every aspect of them was tweaked exquisitely to spark veneration and subservience in the hi-caste, as deep and abiding as that of a child to their parent, of a romantic to their true love, of a priest to their god. That they did this without any aid from hypertechnological principles is a terrifying thought. But the human genome is a finite instruction manual, and if known thoroughly enough may produce individuals whose innermost urges are quantified. It is perhaps a blessing that the chaotic mutations spurred by N-matter make such thorough control of DNA impossible. Hopefully it shall stay this way.

But this does not stop some from trying to bring them back. To start from nothing to recreate a masterpiece produced using an entirely different set of tools is perhaps an exercise in futility. But even so, some consider their return the only way to once more unite humanity. After all, they could effortlessly peer into the hearts of most thinking beings of this era, knowing the heart of any human sophont with utmost intimacy, more than the distant posthuman lords of the current era, whose radical alterations have left them a step removed from those they once were, if they were not made as such.

The solar empire would have made humanity into a eusocial breed, shearing away all independent and critical thought until they were but cogs of flesh in a machine designed solely to enrich its highest echelons. But even knowing this, some would still prefer to try and instantiate that future than endure the promise of a continued eternity of the now.

Every thinking being uses cybernetics, including hereditary ones. Minor application of N-matter allows individuals to produce children who share obtained traits from the parent, including machinery integrated into their flesh. All the easier if it was installed with N-matter to begin with.

But a true hereditary cyborg belongs to a population whose inherited cybernetics come not as a bonus to a healthy body, but a necessity to their ailing one. The descendants of those who tried and failed to escape their genetic destiny via conventional science, their populations survived only through integration with N-matter to sustain the ruin of their bodies, obtaining potent life-support systems as vital to their survival as their organs are.

While few wish to remain in such sickly or even half-cadaverous bodies, their hereditary cybernetics are indeed more thorough than their in-caste cousins, and as a result they paradoxically possess greater survivability than their kin in some cases. While they cannot conquer the megastructures, they are slightly more capable of surviving its hazards, and can colonize niches even the hardiest of Locaste balk at, though cyborg populations can envy the denizens of milder realms as surely as any other human would. And desperation can lead to violence, further driving a wedge between themselves and those who fear them.

If cyborgs are those who stabilized their collapsing genome with machinery, degens did so with ever-further biological engineering. Though, some say it was not deliberate at all, but rather the end state of repeated failures, mostly leading to death but sometimes persisting into a new semi-stable state. A degenerated human, the broken remnants of a healthy population turned to near-feral savagery.

One could argue if they are savage through their addled minds or by the product of their ignorance, but in truth it is often both. Many contain countless hereditary ailments as a result of their failed bid for genetic freedom, but the trauma of that generational decay left many surviving populations bereft of generational knowledge and experience, reverting to primitive societies who have forgotten all human history.

However, N-matter remains, and it remains intuitive in its use. Those who accumulate enough of it can become techno-shamanic leaders for their tribes, producing tools and weapons as potent as the most advanced civilizations anywhere else. Neolithic psychology is combined with modern killing power, and the results are often tragic.

The Transitional Era was the birth of a new kind of ruler. Humans taken to the peak of capability not just through genetic engineering, but through integration with N-matter without the loss of ego that plagued the first adopters of its power. Transhumans are the most ancient form of purely human users of N-matter, eclipsing the Urcaste in physical potency even if they could not match their subtle and nuanced command over the human heart.

Unlike those ancient autarchs, however, transhumanity encompassed far larger populations, birthed as they were in the titanic arcology-factories which life then was centered around. With the rise of beings who had moved past humanity further even than themselves, some even lost their soveriegnty to beings of their own creation, though rarely if ever did they fall to the very bottom of their society's hierarchy.

Perhaps if the Myriad had not been birthed, they would have been the new speciation point of humanity, blossoming into countless varieties and leaving biological life behind. But their era was shattered by those unfathomable existences and as a result they became just another group of survivors in an increasingly hostile world, their potential truncated by the cost of producing more of them, a crippling expense in this era of scarcity.

But they are not helpless. Of all the pan-human lineages transhumans can be some of the most formidable, if their pattern is properly suited for their environment. Augmented by high-end hereditary cybernetics, they can be populations of scientists, leaders, soldiers, insinuating themselves into more numerous populations or surviving independently. But for all their power, ever more inhuman existences have eclipsed them, and it is only by taking that final step beyond their ancestry that their people continue to survive.

Both the latter period of the Solar Empire and the whole of the Transitional Era saw the return of true, open warfare, and with the rise of N-matter, numerous approaches became possible that the old, reasonable world would never have permitted. Building off of conventional knowledge, a popular method was drones, algorithmic swarms of unmanned weapons working in concert to accomplish strategic goals. While drones had been used since humanity's golden age, it was only now that warfare could be nearly entirely automated, with only small teams of sapient beings serving in niche use cases where such methods failed.

When that era ended, the drone swarms did not die with them. As all things suffused with N-matter can, some among them began to mutate. Those which possessed the capacity to produce more of their kind began to do so, and in time became driven by alien directives.

What distinguishes drones from other manners of autonomous machines is that they retain the traits designed into them. Vestiges of their original purpose as weapons of war, security, or maintenance persist in their designs, which now serve selfish ends. Even so, it is not unheard of for skilled manipulators of the datasphere to summon and tame such feral AIs to once more use as tools of civilization.

During the Fade, when humanity completely lost control of the megastructural growths they had nurtured, it was no surprise that the machines used to automate many processes within them would

Distinct from drones, which retain the traits assigned to them in some degree, automachines are completely divorced from any purpose their ancestors might have once had, existing as erratic masses of limbs and chassis, their internal algorithms entirely acclimated to an existence outside of any order imposed by pan-humanity.

Numerous models have since speciated into various niches, with more robust and powerful models being found in the developed depths of the megastructures, while spindly, efficient forms wander the surface or the barren expanses between them. Space, too, has its own automachines; sleek and silent creatures which flit down to planetary bodies to replenish their fuel. And there are the caretakers of the organic oases, maintaining the beds of lichen and moss which provide oxygen to organic life, for reasons none can understand or remember.

Too alien to be domesticated, most are hunted for their parts. Many cybernetics and mechanical components are derived from dismantled automachines, which do the work of accumulating and processing the raw material, leaving their hunters to take advantage of it.

A product of the Fade and the Datasphere, husks are uploaded minds in mechanical bodies; the result of refugees from the increasingly hostile network seeking refuge in the physical world, or the remnants of dying peoples who saw salvation in replication, even if only for their culture and not themselves.

Like all uploaded minds, the psyche inside a husk is the copy, not the original. While uploading offers immortality of a sort, all it does is carry the will of the original ego in a digital simulacrum of the mind it records. Continuity of consciousness is broken, and the end product is often ill-suited to a mind of ones and zeroes instead of the soupy morass of the biological mind or the impossible complexity of an N-matter personality matrix.

Husks often suffer from severe and erratic psychological maladies, passing them on to any copies they create. Blank slate or inheritor of their progenitor's memories, the result is the same. Degradation, decay, and collapse. But they do not eat or drink, and they carry on until the corrosion of their ego has them simply collapse one day.

Many will enforce uploading on a portion of their population, especially in larger civilizations. While Shells are preferred for their retaining of the original ego, vehicular husks can be just as if not more durable than their quasi-organic counterparts. For some it is seen as an honor, a way to serve your kindred beyond your alotted years, and for others a fate worse than death, to wake up in a body of wires and alloy, knowing yourself to be the mangled copy of your original being.

While some arcology-factories of the Transitional Era chose the power of algorithmic drone swarms, or cybernetic super soldiers, or something else entirely, there were some that chose a different path. Rather than fuse machinery with humanity, grant flesh to the machine. A biomachine is a programmed brain connected to a nervous system of cloned and synthetic tissue derived from human DNA, enhanced for strength and durability, and built around a mechanical endoskeleton, using trace amounts of N-matter for repair and maintenance of its body while most of its fuel and reparative capacity is derived from biomatter.

While the first biomachines were feral, voracious area-denial weapons, in time they developed specimens that could be tamed. And by manufacturing human brains as a core, they developed specimens that could think for themselves. Though, given that even pan-humans can be forcibly converted into biomachines, it is perhaps more accurate to say that thinking biomachines were harvested rather than produced.

Due to their low cost to produce, those nations which used biomachines often used them in great numbers, producing billions of them for both domestic and military purposes. Like insects in a hive, they crawled across the titanic arcologies they were grown to serve, and as those same arcologies collapsed and their softer inhabitants subject to disease and starvation, they remained. Sometimes they even turned upon their own citizens, growing feral once more and devouring all else inside the walls, and then each other.

Those which remain are shadows of their former numbers. What intelligent specimens survive are divided between the conventional patterns spread widely though the solar system, decayed and monstrous harvesters of flesh, and the designer lineages meant to serve the elites of the time and minimize the grotesquerie of their forms. All of them, however, share the curse inherent to all thinking biomachines; a numb detachment from their identities and harsh penalties to their mental capacity, though some are more severely affected than others. If biomachine sophonts were just another kind of cyborg, it would be one thing, but to become a biomachine is to be ripped apart and reassembled, dispassionately dehumanized and violated. The process rarely leaves the mind intact, and even those born into such bodies are rarely comfortable with them.

Mobility Systems are a mix of vehicle and augmentation, capable of being used by all size classes to varying effects. They can turn infantry into cavalry, and larger sophonts into swift mobile armor or flying units. A booster combined with a powerful individual is the modern equivalent of the tank or gunship.

NOTE: Mobility systems are currently a stand-in for cavalry, which currently cannot be implemented by a satisfying way. Eventually they will be replaced with "enchanted" equipment and worked into the armor system.

The first instance of living hardlight, ghosts are believed to be the product of evolutionary processes within the Datasphere. Autonomous digital life forms, be they human egos or otherwise, sought to escape what it was becoming. Some specimens could not access conventional physical bodies, and so devised new ones. They faded into being amid storms of lightning, built from energetic emissions and stabilized by unknown forces.

But they were not the discrete consciousnesses of other uploaded minds. Ghosts were amalgamations of data, sometimes mostly of human memory, other times not. They were clever, mercurial, quick, and curious. Intelligent variants quickly found a home in pan-human society as navigators of the Datasphere and wardens against digital infection, while others drifted aimlessly through the megastructures as itinerant echoes of lost data. And some became parasites, feeding on the nodes of the digital network, or the complex structures of the human mind, devouring memory as we do flesh. But not for sustenance, but coherency. Unable to stabilize their egos, they intake new data as old memories degrade, wearing an endless succession of masks to retain something like existence.

Countless stories have risen about them. How to avoid or attract the attention of their kind, how to placate those that dwell near you. They offer the blessings of the Datasphere, but also its curses. Even sophont ghosts feel unease towards their wild kin, though they are more alike than not.

When N-matter is used wildly and crudely, there are byproducts, remnants. These remnants writhe with potential, mindlessly seeking perpetuation and propagation, empowered temporarily by the energies amassed to animate them. In most cases, they squirm for some minutes and die off. But not always. Sometimes they persist, clawing their way out of the muck and wreckage to take permanent form, to divide and multiply. To become something beyond the leavings of transmutation.

Others are made with intent, human consciousness reshaped into a new kind of cellular network. A daring break from pan-humanity surpassing even the deviant archetype in its adaptation to the megastructure, or so they claim. Certainly they are kindred in a sense. The modern children of those who shared similar sentiments; better to become free monsters than human slaves.

But they have been named as impure for a reason. They are unstable, voracious. Impurities can only sustain themselves through the constant consumption of N-matter, and nowhere is it more collected than the bodies of other beings, sophonts especially. Many become killers and man-eaters, regardless of if they are sophonts themselves. They are solitary things, lurking in the gloom of the structures, tormented by their hungers or embracing them fully. But few are ever safe.

If transhumans are humans who have successfully integrated with machinery to the extent they can be considered true hybrids, Shells are a step further. What humanity remains in them is little more than a sack of organs inside a body of wires and hydraulics wrapped in alloy plating, capable of scaling upwards into monstrous forms comparable to the armored vehicles of past eras, but driven by a single will rather than a living crew or mindless algorithm.

During the Transitional Era they served a role analogous to those vehicles, but often with more independents or in command roles, with human-sized models forming the core of elite troops. Though some were used for labor or other noncombat purposes, most were created for war, a trait carried on into the present. Any civilization of merit maintains a stable of vehicular Shells to wield heavy weaponry and crush opposition, and many warlords seek to obtain such a body.

As powerful as these bodies are, it is not without cost. Encasement in a tomb of cold metal wears on the mind, and a mere human pile of neurons is not equipped to handle the long centuries of such an existence. Older shells are often afflicted with various psychological ailments, though therapeutic techniques and simply maintaining connections can ameliorate this.

But at the end of the day, they are crude and violent forms built for a crude and violent era, and so such kindness is something rarely afforded to them.

The oldest group of posthumans to exist, deviants are the ancient cousins of pan-humanity, a lineage that branched off during the days of the Solar Empire, when the universe was still viewed through a lens of science and rationality.

The children of those who first bonded with N-matter, they bore the potential to develop into anything, their own will and the pressures around them shaping their minds and bodies to adapt to the pressures they faced. They could have been children of paradise, inheritors of a new era of prosperity and ageless utopia.

But that did not happen. The Solar Empire, fearing that which they could not understand or control, ruthlessly hunted them whenever they were discovered, tearing them apart in a frantic attempt to understand how they could exist.

So it was that in their struggle to survive, all values were discarded in pursuit of survival and competition. Bonds were eroded, softness sheared away, and humanity diminished, until all that was left was seething, monstrous intent to destroy what was perceived as a natural enemy. Forced to confront the monster it had unleashed, the Solar Empire threw itself into containing the outbreak it had nurtured, only to be decapitated as its ruling caste was slaughtered.

In spite of this, victory was stolen from the deviant clade. So far from humanity had it grown that many of its members began to lose their humanity entirely, reverting to bestial instincts and mindless consumption, hunting even their own kind to sate their hunger. Those who retained their sanity were forced to re-learn enough of their old values to retain their egos, but even so, the changes to what they were could not be undone.

Deviant humanity remains as a dark reflection of its pan-human cousins. Where humanity desires the unity of the tribe and the approval of others, deviants lack such instincts entirely. Where humanity requires cooperating, deviants use their thralls, manufactured servants which lack N-cores, as tools to accomplish their ends. Deviant society is united only by loose organizations of such overlords whose personal desires are sufficiently compatible to incentivize cooperation, though even among their kind there are those whose passions are too human, or too monstrous, to be accepted by the rest.

Regardless, they are creatures of the wastelands, of the wilds, of the underbelly of civilization. Those who have lost everything and rejected society often find deviant powers eager to welcome them, so long as they prove themselves. They consider themselves the children of and true inheritors of N-matter, and when soft, weak, frail pan-humanity finally goes extinct, they shall inherit what remains.

During the Transitional Era, Deviant life, unbound by the laws of the arcologies, flourished on the periphery of civilization. Though many had reverted to a feral state, such was the tenacity of their kind that even the intelligent among them could survive the harsh wilds and no man's land between the arcology states, dancing in the acid rain and scorning the frail mortals hidden behind mile-high walls.

The powers of the time recognized the potential of the Deviant clade, but feared the horrorific end they had only barely escaped. Seeking not to become them, but master them, captured specimens were studied carefully, their tissues and cybernetics ripped apart and studied, and some understanding of their secrets was obtained.

Replicas are not named because they are copies of humans, made cruder and harsher to survive their brutal environments. Rather, they are copies of things even harsher and more winnowed than themselves. They are imperfect copies of highly-evolved superpredators, substituting that long, elegant process of evolution with raw bulk and strength, built to work, to fight, to endure..

They toiled in the depths of the arcologies, enduring the harsh pollutants and the monsters of the underground levels, and when the Myriad ripped their way out of them, they barely noticed. Those monsters scoured the surfaces of where they crawled or flew and quickly made for the void beyond.

And it was from that darkness that they emerged, like the man-eating ogres of old myth. Sullen, simple, and brutish, acting without reason, doing as they pleased. Since their inception they were treated like tools, given not even token gestures of humanity and bred, perhaps, to lack it in the first place. And to humanity they repaid that treatment, casually destroying anything which proved an impediment to their newfound freedom.

Though like all things, they met their match eventually, the legends persist. The hungry giants, the raiders and pillagers, the horrid brute, a reputation not unearned. But even among their kind there are those who prefer the warmth of pan-humanity to the callous brutality of their kin. But they are rare, and the structures are a cold and hungry place.

So there remain monsters in the dark.

The spectral lords of the Fade, when the writhing energies of the megastructures transitioned to the cold, half-dead state of the present. Unlike other digital intelligences which fled the Datasphere, or the poor souls choosing mind replication to preserve their will, engrams, as far as can be told, retained their original selves. Conscious the entire process of their transformation, each one universally seems to consider itself the original ego in a new form.

While other hardlight organisms were produced from fits and bursts of energy within dying superstructures, engrams are the product of technological traditions near-occult in their esoteric obscurity, granting their practitioners new forms of existence innately connected to the datasphere. Moreso than their lesser cousins, engrams dominated the days of the Fade, when fluctuating life support systems and the mass death brought on by the Myriad saw biological life imperiled.

Though their time came to an end as all great epochs did, the balance shifting once more towards the organic masses that survived the change of the star system, remnants of their old glory remain, isolated bastions and networks housing the remnants of an age of the dead.

Perhaps something like the Fade will occur once more, these living memories will again rule the last dying lights of civilization until all turns to darkness.

A diverse array of bioengineered fauna, speciating to fill every niche in every region of the great megastructures, save for the most inhospitable. Some seem like the reincarnations of the old families of life, others barely resemble them.

Thought to be a mix of area denial weapons, cloned livestock, and the work of eccentric restorationists, the sole uniting factors of chimeras are that they are vertebrates and that they have a propensity for wild mutation.

If primitive sophont tribes can live somewhere, then chimeras almost certainly can as well. In fact, their presence is viewed as a litmust test for pan-human habitability by many, making them a vital keystone archetype for any trying to gauge the viability of their settlement.

Polymerids are thought to have originated as biological weapons that targeted resources and infrastructure, chewing at wires and delicate components of machinery to render them useless. But as with all things in this era, interaction with N-matter spurred their evolution, causing them to displace prior life and fill the same niches as the arthropods of old, such was their suitability to the new world humanity had built.

With shells of plastic and the ability to excrete synthetic fiber webbing, this branch of life feeds on the soft tissues of the megastructures as much as it does organic matter, making them a hazard to both people and machines. Even so, those very feeding habits make their bodies resources in themselves, and hunting them for their biosynthesized polymers, giving even the most primitive societies access to these versatile materials.

But with their poisonous stings, thick webs, and rending mandibles, larger polymerids are dangerous game to average hunters, and should best be handled by professionals.

An uncanny family of organisms, Neotenates are humanoid creatures seemingly spawned by the megastructures in imitation of human life. Their origins are unknown, but some postulate that the cloning systems of the Transitional Era were co-opted by the feral megastructures, churning out distorted parodies of their intended output thousands of years after the end of that period.

While mostly non-sapient prey animals, some neotenates develop ghastly mutations that turn them into stealthy hunters of sophonts, while others have become intelligent themselves. Others even integrate cybernetics, becoming walking digital warfare systems or bearing internalized firearms.

The sophonts that do exist are one of the largest underground populations, though few are ever seen on the surface. Perhaps one day that will change.

One of the strangest families of organic life, protoforms are believed to be the organic detritus of the megastructures, formed by chance through the irregular and chaotic growths of their innards but successful enough that they proliferate across them. Perhaps their similarities across various structures point to, somehow, a common ancestor, or perhaps their seemingly half-formed physiologies are the echo of some ancient programming directive from before they grew beyond the humans who first produced them.

While a rare sight on the surface, they are common in the innards of any megastructure, any entrance into their architectural bodies teeming with them like maggots in a wound. Indeed, they seem to form the bulk of biomatter within such environments, forming the foundation of the biological food chain of the depths.

Almost certainly a highly-engineered organism created by a lost posthumann civilization, macrocells are thought to be the product of the Fade, an attempt to create a source of energy which did not rely on the megastructures to sustain itself. While their creators vanished, their work persists across the star system. Macrocells can be found anywhere from the deepest recesses of the megastructures to the wreckage between worlds, and where they dwell, so do their hunters.

Extremophiles all, they often proliferate in places few other species can withstand, surviving extremes of temperature and caustic acids which would destroy most organic life. The internals of a macrocell are incredibly energy-dense, allowing them to be processed into crude fuel as one would the great leviathans of myth. In places where the energy of the megastructures is not easily accessible, nomadic tribes follow their swarming masses to power the machines that allow them to survive.