Weiloo

Last updated 1997.

Overview:



Physical Characteristics

Weiloo are sentient mammals with the following physical characteristics:



Life Cycle

The Weiloo life cycle runs as follows:

These stages are further described below.

Mating and Gestation

Weiloo are hermaphrodites. Each individual can self-pollinate, although they are not anatomically set up for it, and any two Weiloo can interbreed. Typically, mating is asymmetric -- one participant provides genetic material, the other receives it.

Weiloo fertility is tied directly to the availability of a particular amino acid in the diet, so in many regions Weiloo are fertile at unpredictable and irregular intervals, while in others they are fertile year-round. (See also death.) Since Weiloo live in herds, finding mates is rarely a problem; mating goes on more or less continually and is not a particularly emotional event.

Weiloo gestate for ~4 months and give birth to a litter of 4-7 offspring. Infants ("joeys") are born live but nonviable, and must live in a placental pouch after birth.

Joeys

Weiloo infants are born extremely small (even compared to adults), blind, incapable of significant motion or of regulating their own body temperature, and generally helpless. They remain inside the placental pouch for up to a year. Weiloo pouches are controlled by a sphincter muscle that can seal it airtight. The inner lining of the pouch is blood-rich, and joeys get oxygen and nutrients directly from the adult's bloodstream.

Two to three months into the joey period, they grow large enough that only one (two in unusual cases) can fit in a pouch. At this point, one of two things happens -- either the strongest pushes the others out, or the adult transfers all but one joey to other adults. The latter is more typical if empty pouches are available; consequently, even in regions of intermittent fertility many adults are carrying a joey.

Adulthood

Sometime before their first birthday, Weiloo hooves grow in and their host adults expel them from the pouch. Within a year or so, they achieve full adult physical characteristics, including sexual maturity.

Senescence and death

Weiloo lifespan is extremely variable. Best case, they live approximately 250 years, and begin a period of senescence at approximately 200 years old. Worst case, they begin a period of senescence at approximately 50 years old and die shortly thereafter.

The difference relates to the availability of a particular amino acid in the diet, the same one that controls fertility -- Weiloo who get this amino acid in abundance live longer, as well as being more fertile.

Cloning

Weiloo are internally fertile hermaphrodites -- that is, a single individual can fertilize its own eggs and breed a clone. Their anatomy is not designed for this, so artificial insemination is required.

Clones are genetically identical to their parents, and typically (though not always) physically identical. Furthermore, clones have significantly better access to their parent's memories than two-parent children do.

Individuals typically clone themselves before leaving the herd for whatever reason, and individuals with particularly valuable memories will typically clone themselves as they get older. This ensures cross-generational continuity of transferred memories -- clones serve as lorekeepers and historians, and every herd typically includes several individuals who retain distinct memories of the herd's entire history. ****What happens if transition occurs while a clone gestates?


Psychology

Weiloo retain throughout adulthood the cognitive plasticity typically associated with childhood -- for example, it is no harder for them to learn new languages as adults than as children, so the concept of a "native speaker" of a language is alien to them. This is independent of, though neuroanatomically related to, their capacity for multiple personalities and their access to their host-parent's memories. .

Weiloo brains allow parallel processing of a large number of input streams, even complex inputs such as speech -- for example, an individual can participate fully in dozens of conversational threads simultaneously, and a Weiloo herd is almost always involved in a constant N-way exchange of information and ideas.

While intelligent, Weiloo are not particularly creative or innovative. They are not curious by nature, but they are strongly motivated to investigate phenomena that might be a threat or advantage to the herd.

Weiloo are an extremely social, group-minded species, emotionally inclined to decisions that maximize value for the local group, even to individual short-term detriment. In human terms, they have practically no ego.

The combination of egolessness, cognitive plasticity and N-way communications makes Weiloo practically incapable of extended ideological disputes... they rapidly converge on a consensus regarding testable questions, and happily tolerate a diversity of opinion regarding untestable ones.

Weiloo are universally terrified of solitude, and become extremely anxious in groups of less than ten or so. They are cautious and risk-averse, but do not share the fear of mortality common to other species -- while they retain a strong self-preservation instinct like other species, they are unusually inclined to self-sacrifice. Conversely, they are notoriously easy to control by communal threat.

Multiple personalities

Weiloo personalities are not permanent -- a single individual typically undergoes many radical personality transitions over a lifetime. Transitions occur between the various life stages, and can also be triggered during adulthood by perceived changes in the environment. In effect, when an individual feels too out-of-place it creates a "successor" better suited to its environment, and "dies." Transition frequency depends on individual personality and history -- some individuals undergo dozens or hundreds of transitions, while others undergo relatively few.

Transition is entirely psychological; the body remains unchanged. While new persona are intellectually and emotionally mature, they go through a brief period of exceptional plasticity. The successor persona has access to its predecessor's memories, but does not retain its habits; this can result in temporary loss of proficiency of habitual skills, although these are typically easy to regain with minimal practice. More generally, while individuals remember events that occurred to earlier persona, they remember them as happening to someone else.

Cross-persona recall is significantly slower than inter-persona recall, but equally accurate -- or inaccurate. Facts can be forgotten or misremembered or confabulated, just as with normal recall. In some cases, earlier persona have been known to deliberately mislead or conceal facts from their successors, although this is rare.

Isolated Weiloo typically become effectively catatonic, engaged in active exchange among their predecessor personalities.

Transferred memories

Weiloo have access to memories and experiences of one of their parents, transfered via RNA-like material during gestation.

Because the child's brain is not identical to the parent's brain, these memories are typically acessible only in garbled ways, such as dreams and visions. While Weiloo have no religious or mystical traditions, visitations by dead ancestors are an unremarkable part of their daily life.

Clones are an exception... since their brains are much more similar to their parent's, they have much better access to those memories. In effect, young clones can access their ancestors' memories in much the same way as adults access earlier persona. Though they go through periods of mindless infancy and emotional/sexual/physical immaturity like normal children, they have access to adult memories and skills and consequently mature quickly.


Cultures

Weiloo cultures are organized around geographically stable herds of hundreds or thousands of individuals, based in in underground burrows.

Most Weiloo do not travel; they are born and die in the same general area. The exceptions form "wandering herds", typically of a few dozen individuals, that travel among the stable herds. Travellers typically clone themselves in each new herd, diseminating information across herds. Consequently neighboring herds usually have "ambassadors", clones of the same set of individuals on both sides of the divide.

Herds have little internal structure. Weiloo do not organize themselves into family units, as the casual nature of Weiloo procreation combined with the network of adoptive host-parents for joeys, makes kin relations relatively unimportant. While they do cluster based on shared interests, the parallel nature of Weiloo cognition and communication makes this a less exclusive clustering than for other species. Weiloo herds have no central government or decision-making agency.

Separate herds are mostly culturally homogeneous; language, culture, and ideology rarely differ much from herd to herd. When useful innovations do emerge, they propogate from herd to herd extremely quickly. Herds can diverge if physically separated for long periods of time, but on reestablishing contact they typically converge rapidly, keeping the most practical elements of both.

Religion is unheard of -- no traditions of afterlife, spiritual immortality, or anything of that sort exist -- although "visitations" from dead ancestors are not uncommon.

Weiloo do not develop much physical technology, but their "soft sciences" (psychology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics) are advanced and pragmatic. For example, Weiloo have developed effective techniques for predicting/controlling individual and group behavior, enhancing memory, deriving and testing conclusions from patchy data, communicating information rapidly and unambiguously, coordinating large-scale efforts among individuals with distinct values and priorities, and so forth.

Weiloo have also developed botany, zoology, and practical genetics to a high degree. Over the generations, they have initiated long-term selective breeding programs to develop living tools for a variety of purposes, including various substrains among the Weiloo themselves.

Peace

Ideological/irrational warfare is a mystery to Weiloo, and the propensity of other sentient species to engage in it is to them a dangerous insanity. As a species, they are involved in a covert, long-range plan to deal with it.

They have been working towards one version or another of this plan since they first became aware of other sentient species, millenia ago. Their plans are long-term, slow-moving, and generally operate indirectly through representatives of other species.

Among other things: