(BioEngineering SOLutions Group - BESOL)
Homines Ex Machina
History
It started with
Organ Farming. Simple organ farming and harvesting, a technology that was made possible with the advancements of genetic manipulation, and the humane necessity for cheap organs on the market so that more people could be saved. Back then, the company was called Biotech Renewal, and ran several plans for upkeep or fresh healthy organs for its richer customers, and sold cheaper organs to hospitals in bulk. It was not a megacorporation by any means, but it was competitive enough and relevant enough to earn its name in the populace and to meddle amidst the politics of its home planet.
Augmentation
Biotech Renewal was big enough to hire its own scientists and sell out its own politicians to look away at what could increase their bottom line. This, in an increasingly corrupt world, allowed them to bypass normal ethics laws and focus on what’d increase their bottom line.
The highly industrialized pre-BESOL society was ripe with misfortune from their ill treatment of the environment, which brought disease and strain into their bodies. BR’s line of “affordable” enhanced organs, which verged on legality, allowed them further life, and further profits for the corporation. And so it grew and festered, its technology slowly started to blur the lines between men and machine, so much so that it became a core vision within the company, to keep up with the increasing toxicity of the world and the environment, they’d need to enhance themselves.
Ascension
War eventually swept the lands. The reasons for such are of little importance to the new recently renamed BESOL group, however, a whole new market opened: Combat-Capable Adaptations. New man-made horrors were secretly funded by different governments. In response to these new technologies, the world fell into a state of maelstrom, an all-out arms race took place with little to no distinction on the usage of weaponry, nuclear, biological, chemical in nature.
The downfall of organized government was the Ascension of BESOL, its ruthless augmentation survived the wasteland of its benefactors’ making, and as they wrangled the market of power itself into submission by the means of consolidating the very means of basic survival, the bodies and genetics of humankind were now assets of BESOL.
Enlightenment
There was an ideological shift after the war, one that started early in BESOL’s history but only culminated when the tides of the world started to rise, and when corrupt oceans took upon the cities. BESOL’s leadership needed a change that united the people under their now permanent hire and motivated them to improve themselves, keep within the corporation, and strive for its perpetuity.
As such, the Tri-Faceted Truth became reality. The changes were slow and subliminal, but with a lack of alternatives they clung on. The top brass of the corporation thought their bidding was done and successful, but they only planted seeds of what’d become their eventual corruption.
Contemporary Age
Now, we see the seeds of the Tri-Faceted truth ripen. This initial lie was perpetuated through the decades of isolation and BESOL sovereignty, their resilient bodies and internal structure saw this shift slowly crawl upwards, and soon it reached even the position of their gone creators. The lie doubled down and became the Truth that BESOL knows today, which drives its insatiable greed and horrible twisting of their humanity.
Their purity is their twisted augmented forms, hulking and inhuman. Their profit is their greed, polluting their worlds into wastelands, their success is their downfall, their retribution for their folly.
Enhanced BESOL Organism
Capabilities
The operating ranges of a BESOL Organism are wide. The least specialized Organism might even be mistaken for their original form as a commonplace human, however, the more pure and successful any of the BESOL employees are, the greater their capabilities.
These augmentations that are as commonplace and adaptable as if they were parts of the original body range wildly in function, from survival in the toxic wasteland that is BESOL planets, to specialized bullet-resilient skin, wavelength scanning eyes and integrated processing banks. BESOL augmentation is further explained in their technology section.
Anatomy
The average BESOL-O will follow anatomy generally similar, or at least resembling that of a normal human. Purer BESOL-O will possess more limbs, different bodily proportions, up to, sometimes, full body modifications which alter almost every facet of their physical being.
A closed circulatory system that transports vital resources, as well as an internal structural grid and even armor for vital organs is commonplace for most BESOL-O.
Reproduction is possible, though it does not happen often. A good portion of BESOL-O are produced via growing vats on large production runs, generally augmenting their genetic code with enhanced material recently acquired. These can be funded by other BESOL-O, which may choose to raise them.
Culture
Overview
BESOL Organisms, or BESOL Employees, aka as whoever is indentured to the corporation or was entirely raised within it, often demonstrate a tremendous devotion to their Tri-Faceted Truth and to the survival of themselves within the corporation, as well as the corporation itself. This devotion is born out of a culture perpetuated and twisted from a period of intense brainwashing, a necessary step for the survival of the human species within an utterly broken ecosystem of their own making.
Most Employees are not known to have family units or great rites, they are taught at standard courses to look upon their isolated lives within their own living blocks, or to the few that trade and go exterior to BESOL property, to respect their boundaries and do well by the company’s image. This lack of a family structure generates an indifference of Employees in their relation of blood, often seen contractually rather than empathetically, seeing as the majority of them are grown by BESOL itself.
However, there are exceptions to the rules. Those that do not conform to BESOL’s social norms are segregated from the populace and forced to writhe outside of the safety of the living blocks. Although certain actions are forbidden, higher-ranking enough individuals (generally Immaculate or above) will see to doing questionable actions in the face of BESOL’s culture, all in seeking their own individual success.
The Tri-Faceted Truth
BESOL subscribes to a pseudo-faith that most of them follow as a core principle. It is not so much of a religion as it is a means of living and surviving within the corporate hellscape, rather it is a philosophy that permeates the whole structure of the corporation, it makes BESOL what it is and perpetuates its flaws and strengths.
Success brings Profit: “Success” is a term that is ambiguous, although most directly tied to the accomplishments of the person. These accomplishments can be many, such as working hard, keeping a stable contractual status, and going above and beyond for the good of BESOL.
BESOL, in keeping a tight leash on most employees, can monitor their stalwartness to this ideology and the company, thus rewarding the most ambitious of its people with the means to go higher.
Profit brings Purity: “Purity” is almost paramount to augmentation. Initially, it was not a reward but a necessity to augment oneself to survive. Contemporarily, augmentation is seen as a purification of an inherently flawed body. Those higher in the chain of BESOL command sport more specialized bodies, augmented into a twisted sense of beauty and purity. To human standards, the purer the BESOL-O the more twisted and inhumane their vessel is.
Purity brings Success: Their newfound, powerful and augmented bodies can perform functions their past selves could not. Purer BESOL-O are not only favored but praised, large augmentations gain approval amongst peers and even promotions within the group.
Hierarchies and Classes
Khrintak: Meaning a combination of “Godly” and “Leader”, though it comes from a word that initially meant pure. They occupy the top management positions within BESOL. They hardly appear away from their normal residence generally deep within a Block that they either directly manage. They are elder Immaculate, who have grown and modified themselves with the toppest notch of augmentations, allowing them to completely eschew their humanity, often becoming superorganisms of their own league.
Immaculate: Immaculate have been brought up from the growing vat in an isolated environment, with special growth procedures and purpose. The majority of them are meant to directly assume management jobs within the higher ranks of BESOL administration, as such, they are mostly fragile and adapted to process tremendous amounts of information mentally, allowing them to keep tabs on large amounts of tasks within their functions.
Most Immaculate will be tasked with coordinating and running a Living Block,
Illuminated: Not too similar to Contracted, but far from Immaculate, Illuminated are the dream of the Contracted, and oftentimes the height of what they can achieve. Illuminated already share very little to none of their original bodies, with the general exception of the nervous system, as it is the hardest bodily part to adapt.
They will seldom do manual labor, but whenever they do, they will be excellent at it, with their majorly augmented bodies and highly purposeful functionality. Illuminated are the “Special Operations” of BESOL, able to perform niche tasks with excellency, but never quite breaching into the top social and management ranks.
Contracted: Minorly augmented humans are Contracted, simply meaning “hired”. They might even be passable as normal, but resilient and ugly humans. A normal contracted will have a life seeking ascension within the internal BESOL ranks.
They are born generally from growing vats, their aging is sped up artificially until a few years of age. They will work technician’s jobs whilst learning the operation of their assigned profession until they pay their growth fee, this generally lasts up until this education phase is completed, at which point they are allowed a greater degree of freedom.
Their adulthood is spent seeking ascension. It usually starts with their choosing of a profession within BESOL, with further augmentation and success they might even become purified.
The end of their life is marked by a short period of rest where they do what they see fit with their amassed wealth and augmented body. Those successful enough are even able to purchase their way out of BESOL to live the end of their lives amongst the galaxy, the majority however die of old age at around 70 years of age, at which point their organs and the rest are reprocessed either into BESOL’s property, or to whoever it was appointed to.
The Rejected: Those that reject the ideals of BESOL will be thrown out of their monolithic Blocks, forced to survive clinging onto their lives, in the external and corrupt world. It is tremendously rare for one of the Rejected to return back into BESOL, and oftentimes, many will choose bio-organic reprocessing over such a tormented life.
Government
Government Type
BESOL is led much like any other megacorporation, with a board of leaders coordinated by a CEO, and several divisions further down the line to keep everything under control.
Leaders
CEO “Khrannatek” has led BESOL for the past 45 years.
Structure
BESOL’s internal division is set up in “Living Blocks”. Those will be more detailed within their own section. Living Blocks survive as their own isolated environments, coordinated by the Overarching High Consultative bOdy (OCHO), which regulates overarching standards within BESOL.
These Isolated Units known as “Living Blocks” are controlled by a Sustainer, a role that often lasts a lifetime. They keep tabs within their own unit and coordinate their efforts internally, responding to OCHO’s demands, and specializing their unit to the role they see fit. A Sustainer may be promoted to partake in the OCHO if their “Living Block” is successful enough.
Economy
Economic System
BESOL holds their internal economy at a stranglehold, trading internally between a few currencies picked up by large swathes of Living Blocks. This maintains a healthy internal trading system that solidifies cooperation between the different, segregated parts of BESOL’s economic power.
Externally, they trade in a unified token which regulates the values of their internal currencies. This is done so that large oscillations within galactic currency will not directly translate into market crashes within BESOL’s interior system.
Focal Industries
BESOL, as their name suggests, focuses on biomechanical augmentations. More specifically, they focus on the blurring of the lines between men and machines, allowing them to “Grow” as much as they “Construct” objects and ships.
This, paired with their respectable knowledge of their BioMetallics, allows them to explore a market of high-end, highly adaptive augmentations, whilst still maintaining the same technology applicable to other ends such as construction, production, spaceship technology, etc.
BioMetallic Machinery
BioMetallic Machinery operates on special principles. Whilst they are roughly equal to other methods of production in terms of effectiveness, they often output large amounts of waste and toxic material, whilst needing to consume large amounts of coolant to operate under extremely high efficiency and speed for short bursts of activity. This renders most BESOL locations highly dangerous to local life.
Territory
Most of BESOL’s territory is horribly toxic and uninhabitable, as a side-effect of their industry and how it operates. This toxicity has dictated their manners of habitation.
Living Blocks
A dual name, it is both the name of the location where the majority of the Employees of BESOL live, and also for the fact that the structures themselves are “Alive”, being composed greatly of construction-oriented, grown BioMetallics.
Although there are no rules on what a living block is beyond a self-contained unit of production and habitation with its own internal logistics, there are common trends amongst their architecture. They generally assume large monolithic shapes that rise tall or have a bulbous, very volumetric design. They tend to have large underground facilities to shelter them from their own toxic environment, isolating them from a harsh external world.
Heindracht
The Homeworld of BESOL, Heindracht is a planet-wide wasteland, uninhabitable to almost any organism in the whole galaxy. Centuries of BESOL’s industrial activities have made the atmosphere filled with pollutants to the point that it is not breathable anymore.
Heindracht is famous for its seas of waste. Covering the whole planetary surface at 100 meters of depth, they ar, a highly acidic, toxic and even radioactive (depending on the location) liquid filled with extremophile organisms and Corrosive BM. The Seas of Waste are so toxic that BESOL does not field a navy out of an inability to maintain it. Adding to them, BESOL industry routinely uses over 20 meters of the sea level for cooling in their industries, releasing them in quick succession, which often causes torrential rains that last upwards of weeks.
This highly inhospitable environment, mirrored in every world BESOL occupies, drives them to live solely inside their Living Blocks, which connect each other through vast underground facilities.
Tech
Energetic
Radiophillic BioAbsorbers: Functioning much like RTGs, these individual cells will consume and naturally modulate their functionality according to inserted nuclear mass. Whilst less effective than a common nuclear reactor, they will generate constant current slightly larger than common RTGs, but last less, which is generally of very little concern given the half-life of radioactive isotopes is large.
Superconducting Networks: Automatically maintained wiring of an easily manufacturable high entropy alloy, these are thin strands of BM used widely across BESOL products.
Fusion Reactors: Imported or produced within BESOL Factories, standard-grade fusion reactors are used and integrated into biometallics, allowing them to easily be fused with vehicles and constructions, and, in some cases, even Organisms.
Medicine and Adaptations
BioMetallics: The core technology that makes BESOL able to exist. BioMetallics integrates Biology and Machinery into one coherent functioning organism. Unlike other adaptations, BioMetallics completely amalgamates organic and metallic material through the usage of adaptable genetics and bio-capable metallics, and, on higher leagues, the production of different alloys within internal microassemblies (organelles) encoded within crystallic matrices made to replicate DNA instructions within the metallic equivalent organisms.
In essence, BioMetallics are metallic-composition, configurable organisms, generally able to meld with normal organics, or even completely replace them, whilst offering greater resilience and ease of adaptability, as well as a wider range of effective function.
BioMetallic Grafting: A painful procedure that entails the removal or slow transformation of living tissue replacing it with their BioMetallic alternative, grafting can be done in any viable host, although some grafting processes are highly dangerous.
BioMetallic Augmentation Types
Musculature: Optimizing the usual muscular cell with different grades of elastic material allows potential energy to be stored and released in bursts with magnitudes higher than standard muscle tissue, or with far prolonged efficiency.
Epidermis: Interlaced HEA and other types of complex alloys, either created interiorly or simply imprinted upon grafting, or grown from growth vats, allow armoring of the epidermis as well as resilience against ballistics, radiations, toxins and eroding substances. These may also replace methods of interior energy transportation.
Structural: Optimized interior load-bearing geometries, as well as structural composites, allow for the average body’s structural system to be optimized, or completely replaced. Structural functions may be combined with Epidermis BMs to allow for interior layers of defense, as well as external hard shells.
Neural: Neural BMs use superconductor alloys, as well as interiorised crystallic calculation matrices and replica neurons to amalgamate a large amount of processing power and storage. They are, however, energy intensive and highly fragile, making them a premium choice for management.
Regenerative: Intricate and unique, this type of BM system is focused on regenerative processes. Mirroring the functions of stem cells, they are able to regenerate other BioMetallics. They will draw from the tissue in question, or, in more advanced cases, absorb material themselves to reprogram into their objective tissue.
Adaptative: Meant to bridge the gap between completely artificial objects and BioMetallics, this interface tissue can often be linked up to serve as a new type of member or even a whole contained organ. This allows for the incorporation of machinery into the bodies of BESOL Organisms.
Corrosive: Whilst technically not a true BM augmentation, this is a sad byproduct of their industry. Corrosive BioMetallics inhabits the seas of Heindracht. These BioMetallics consume common metals to reproduce, and can provoke tremendous damage with enough time.
Mobility
BioDigestor FTL: A unique take on the Alcubierre method of Faster-Than-Light Travel, the BioDigestor is a large organism that processes the radioactivity of common FTL fuels such as Intermatter and injects it into an adjacent specialized chamber.
Secretion Engines: Special glands produce high-yield combustibles at efficient rates, excited by inputs from the ship. This creates a controlled burn within the chamber, which is often used as quick bursts of propulsion in RCS thrusters.
BM Fusion Drives: An amalgam or capacitors, a small fusion reactor and secretion glands, these will create plasma solely for outputting thrust.
Computation and Processing
Neural BioMetallic Networks: Large clusters of Neural-type BioMetallics serve as the communications and processing of the BESOL system. Integrating various sensors and other machinery, they are able to adapt different processing methods into their mass, with the neuroplasticity, integrating analogue, quantum, and common processing methods in large “Processor Pools” of delicate BioMetallic neural tissue.
Combat
Lasers: Lasers may easily be adapted into BioMetallic, either to the individual ground troop or to the ship. Lasers generally have the purpose of blinding enemy sensors rather than directly damaging the enemy, and may be integrated into different BioMetallic “eyes” spread across applicable organisms.
BioMetallic Infectors: Intrusive BioMetallic organisms invade their targets, consuming either organics with relative ease, or synthetic material with more hardship. This is similar to an infection, and it may generally be treated easily with most modern medical facilities, whilst other methods of decontamination may clean synthetic material.
These may be loaded into missiles, or even produced en-masse at beehive-like facilities, with the intent of swarming and hindering the activities of enemy forces, as well as actively targeting weak regions or sensors.
Gas Injection Weaponry: Due to the ease of digestion and production of explosive gasses within organic-replica systems, a modulateable gas-operation system is preferred within common ballistics. The shells used are high-end telescoping APDSFS projectiles, or other multi-variety projectiles.
This Gas Injection weaponry, in combination with amalgamated machinery, may also create low-to-medium plasmas for short range weaponry.
Cooling Hairs: A bundle of hair-like columns that cycle coolant, able to quickly occupy a large volume and retract on command for effective and quick cooling.
It is wise to keep in mind that BESOL sports a good range of common ballistic and sci-fi weaponry, including rockets, cannons, RKKVs, gatling guns, etc. The uniqueness in their equipment is that, whilst other doctrines may see that their combatants use their equipment, BESOL actively Integrates the equipment into the combatant, physically through BioMetallic Grafting.
Military
Branches
BESOL Personnel Processing: The Internal Security division of BESOL, it is a type of “Police Force” common to most living blocks. They are lowly augmented Organisms, composed majorly of Contracted with low levels of combat-able augmentations.
BESOL External Operations Division: The “army” of BESOL, these divisions are generally bound to their own Living Blocks of origin, though they still follow OCHO orders. They are composed of various Constractuated with standard issues of Grafted BioMetallic Augmentations. The higher rankings are generally Illuminated, with few leading generals being Immaculate.
BESOL Vehicular Operations: A combination Airforce and Space Force, BESOL Employees belonging to this force will oftentimes physically merge with their vehicle to better control it, sometimes irreversibly so.
Doctrines
BESOL BioMetallics grants their forces an edge on resilience in several types of warfare. With that in mind, they try to press their advantage and often use the environment in their favor for quick repairs, or even incorporating deceased allied troops or vehicles into themselves in order to increase their survivability.
This survivability-oriented doctrine allows them to fight wars of attrition against enemies, whilst their longer-acting weaponry takes effect and eventually allows them enough weak links to push through with volume of firepower. They prefer to reprocess enemy materials and technology rather than flat-out eliminate whenever possible.
