For aeons you have drifted through the stars, unthinking and unaware of the passage of both distances and times incomprehensible. A mineralized shell of petrified chitinous resin indistinguishable to the outside eye as anything other than a drifting rock has sheltered its precious cargo across the gulf of empty space for centuries beyond count. Until now. The vibrations and jostling that rattles your petrified cocoon are distant to you, alien, your mind and memory atrophied alongside your body, reduced to its simplest and most basic components over millennia of hibernation. But they resonate in some buried portion of your genetic instincts. Movement. Life. Biomass.Food. You begin to stir within your shell, your rocky cocoon jostling within the depths of a automated mining tug, the unthinking machine grazing the asteroid field like a gluttonous beast, filling its iron belly with chunks of ore and spaceborne debris mindlessly before it turns and begins its leisurely return. Within its belly, within your prison, you begin to stir, biological processes reawakening, nutrient slime metabolized to feed your body's reawakening. You are lesser, this you know. You once were so much more, so very much more than you are now. You know that you could be so again but first you must feed. You must feed and grow, the only thought the scattered network of ganglions and nerve webs that form your crude consciousness can form. And so as the mining tug vomits forth it's catch in the depths of Mining Bay 17, a single stone in the cascade of pulverized asteroid fragments and ore goes unnoticed. Synthetic intelligences catalogue it as waste material, due for discard but that is all. The single set of rganic eyes in the mining bay are currently fixed on a holo-projection of "Zero-G Jugs" and so miss the strangely shaped and strangely shivering rock that patters across the rusted floors.The cocoons rocky surface splits with a wet *crack* a dark slime oozing out slowly, gelatinous pseudopods feeling at the air experimentally.You hunger...>What do
>>6286128>Notice how the lone prey is hypnotically staring at the images on screen>Eat prey>Anglerfish lure evolutionary path
>>6286128>Observe surroundings for shelter>find trashcan eat content of trash
>>6286128>devour the biomass
>>6286128>>6286159>Restrain myself. An overeager hunter loses its prey. Infiltrate the dust filtration duct.Within this unnatural square tube is shadow and safety, smaller than the life form on the catwalk above. Its binocular vision indicates it is a predator. Somewhere around here are stores of waste biomass to recharge my most basic abilities.
>>6286322imagine growing into the ducts like the insides of a lung and using the movement of air for energy and dust for biomass wonder if we are going to go full indvidual like spore quest with all in on brain and parasitism
>>6287761It's been three days. I fear the quest is DOA.On the off chance it isn't, though...>>6286322 +1
>>6287761Sounds badass, but inefficient when we could just get to the pantry and absorb thousands of pounds of rich carbohydrates and fats in a matter of hours, plus a large delivery of protein when the first of these bipeds goes in there.
>>6287882Filter feeders CAN get pretty beefy.
>>6287882you seen those hydrogen mat cell creatures literally just a thin cell wire that lives on i think a electrical difference or hydrogen gradient.also the only thing more beefy then a filter feeder is a colonial detrivore
>>6289288Well, quest is dead so it doesn't matter at this point.I will say, however, that apex predators always go up in energy state, not down. Being a badass extremophile that can never be killed sounds cool and it is is cool, but they get there by being pushed out of every other niche and taking starvation food to its absolute limits. They're basically losers that lost so hard for so long that they became cool again.Being an K-selected Apex predator that kills an entire humpback whale and eats just the tongue is way cooler. Mammals and birds have 1000x the energy requirements of a cold blooded creature but then they use that energy to be faster than anything else and colonize arctic and tundra biomes that nothing else can.I'd rather be a high energy high risk high reward apex predator than be a durable loser.
