Designation: | Hyperuranian Hive | ||
Type: | Species (Semiorganic), Construct | ||
Anomaly: | Alien lifeform capable of anomalous matter creation and destruction and spatial manipulation | ||
Hazards: | Swarm members may cause explosions or unplanned disassembly of metallic or lithic materials. | ||
Required Gear: | Flashlights | ||
Dimensions: | Mites: 16 cm; Stratocolony: 5 ~ 7 m; Ixiocolony: 400 km | ||
Position: | Highly eccentric transatmospheric geocentric orbit; 10199 Chariklo; |
Usage

The stratocolony (top centre) near perigee over the arctic circle.
The Item's near-earth presence is limited to a singular object in high-eccentricity TAO designated the Stratocolony. The Stratocolony is being continuously monitored by Montgomery-9. Approach to it is best performed near its apogee, both due to its high orbital velocity near earth and the violent eruptions with which it stabilizes its trajectory.
Contact missions pose a challenge to perform covertly; besides the usual issues with space stealth technology, the Stratocolony is also a known enemy tracking target. In fact, it is occasionally used by Coalition forces for what can only be described as "target practice". The Item is capable of regenerating from such damages in time, but installed fixtures, even those robust enough to survive atmospheric entry, will not.
Individual specimen of the Item ("Mites") are to be considered secondary explosives and handled as such. They will avoid bright light stimuli and can therefore be trivially moved by shining lights on them. Harvested Mites are best kept inside of carbon polymer enclosures; whilst technically capable of destroying them, they get confused by the unfamiliar material and remain idle until removed. There is no known way to provoke or excite Mites with terrestrial stimuli, and due to the great inexpedience of cold welding inside an atmosphere, there is relatively little risk from handling live Mites.
No attempt to approach the Ixiocolony directly has been made so far. It has proven for more practical to access it via the relay inside the Stratocolony. Currently deployed interplanetary assets are likely to negatively disturb the Item upon contact and cause irresponsible damage.
Research into reproduction of the Mite's energy organs and the structures they create ("Wattles") is ongoing. The advances already made in material sciences and energetic compression justify the expenditure of further cislunar missions to rendez-vous with the Stratocolony. All currently available specimens are reserved for research use due to the limited amount of Mites that could be extracted from past drone drops.
The Hyperuranian Geocolony Project is an ongoing research project focused on creating a self-sustaining colony independent of the Ixiocolony on earth, maintained by Xenosymbiotics Development from Research Central Base: Three. Past attempts have failed from having too few Mites, necessitating new missions designed for specimen retrieval instead of network exploration.
Report
The Hyperuranian Hive designates an extraterrestrial eusocial species of Mites and the structures they create in the form of colonies. They are believed to be native to the centaur 10199 Chariklo, where their largest known colony is located, spanning the entire planetoid and its ring system.
Hyperuranian Mites have flat shells with quadrilateral symmetry featuring 12 legs in two rows, where the outer legs mostly serve for locomotion in low- and micro-gravity environments, whereas the inner row is specialized for chipping and cutting materials as well as a process similar to electrical discharge machining (see below).
Mites are not entirely organic, featuring multiple silicon compounds both in their exoskeleton and their energy organ. They also do not posses what is commonly considered a metabolism; instead each Mite is created with an fully charged energy organ that slowly drains over their lifetime. Young Mites are known to store at least up to 38 MJ of energy and are capable of releasing it all at once by detonating themselves (this equals the power output of 9,18 kg TNT). Fully discharged/dead individuals are reclaimed and disassembled by the swarm for resources.
When undisturbed, the Hyperuranian Hive will begin to disassemble suitable nearby matter into resources to grow itself. Small chunks of material will be reassembled into a lattice structure using vacuum cold welding. The lattice resembles hard coral skeletons, but has the internal layout and serves the same use as insect nests.
Besides being able to sense brightness and vibrations, Mites are also capable of chemically analysing materials beneath in a form of "tasting". Their "sight", however, also appears to be their only means to determine temperature. Whilst sensible in a space environment, this is maladapted inside atmospheres and thus allows to simply herd any amount of Mites with bright lights.
On their own, Mites have no particular reasoning capabilities, but display swarm intelligence in groups. Besides being able to navigate building and using their anomalous Wattles, they also developed means to counteract the Stratocolony's orbital decay through the autothysis of thousands of young Mites on the underside of the colony in order to boost away from earth.
Hyperuranian Wattles are various anomalous substructures consisting of a mesh of the same lattice as the greater colony, but much denser and in a particular criss-cross patterns that differ between types and functionality of Wattle. Exact replicas of Wattle have been created under controlled laboratory conditions without exhibiting any anomalous properties, implying that being constructed by Hyperuranian Mites is an integral part of their anomalous properties. The types of Wattle are:
- Birthing Wattle: The most important type of Wattle, these lattices are build convex, cocoon-like shapes ranging from as small as 20 cm up to 190 cm in diameter. Before completion, the hollow Birthing Wattle is filled with dead Mites and various materials. After completion, the substructure will emit strong Ley fields in its immediate vicinity, as detected by the polarization of electromagnetic radiation passing through. After a time of around 20 h, the Wattle will be cut open from the inside by newly manifested fully charged young Mites. Their total mass usually exceeds the amount of mass invested into Birthing Wattle.
- Erosion Wattle: The most common type of Wattle, usually build in small pockets of approximately 8 cm diameter. The Wattle permanently creates a small amount of an previously unknown, but non-anomalous dielectric siloxane that is being used by Mites for "digesting" sturdier or more complex materials through spark erosion. The liquid is volatile and slowly evaporates under vacuum conditions. Mites will therefore de-assemble unused Wattle of this type to prevent unnecessary outgassing.
- Relay Wattle: The rarest type of wattle. It is rolled up in three dimensions, i.e. a helix twisted into a coiled, spiral shape, with a diameter of 28 cm. Wattles of this type are spatial anomalies that physically connect two apparently independent pieces across large distances. However, there exists a traversal delay. Objects only emerge on the other end after the time it takes light to reach there, with no subjective time having passed for the relayed object. The construction of Relay Wattle has never been observed, making it unknown how the distant ends came into existence.
- Dazzle Wattle: This type of Wattle is build approximately once every 10 m³ of colony volume and consists of hourglass or dumbbell shape of two solid, 11 cm wide icosahedra touching on a vertex. They cause mild headache, nausea or vertigo to humans and most higher animals observing them. This is assumed to be in fact a side effect of a highly potent antimemetic agent that targets a non-terrestrial cognitive topology, which has yet to be determined.
- Ephemeral Wattle: A type of Wattle mostly used in the construction of more complex shapes in a colony's lattice work. Ephemeral Wattle can have any shape. And will spontaneously disappear after some apparently random time (the observed minimum was 9 min, the maximum 70 h) after construction. It is mostly being used by the Mites for temporary struts or as a type of shielding against sunlight.
Furthermore, the theory that that the entire colonial lattice work could be part of some grand type of Wattle has been proposed, but remains lacking concrete evidence.
There currently exist at least 4 known colonies of the Hyperuranian Hive, with up to three further ones conjectured to exist from observation of swarm movement inside the Ixiocolony.
The Ixiocolony stretches through most of the centaur 10199 Chariklo and is assumed to be the origin of the Hyperuranian Hive. It contains at least three Relay Wattle meshes, one of which connects to a counterpart inside the Stratocolony. Chariklo's outer ring contains almost evenly spaced Dazzle Wattles, besides parts of broken lattice and other debris.
The other two Relay Wattles connect to locations to far away to have seen return of dispatched microdrones through them yet, ruling out any bodies in the α Cen, Luhman 16, Wolf 359 or Lalande 21185 systems, nor around any dwarf stars inside an 8,6 ly radius.
The swarm itself appears untroubled by the massive time delay to those Exocolonies, sending and receiving Mites across the Relay Wattle constantly. Similarly to the Stratocolony, the Ixiocolony is sending more resources towards these Exocolonies, leading to the assumption that it is the origin of the Hive's network of colonies. Between one and three additional Exocolonies are conjectured to exist by counting the number of Mites entering and leaving certain sections of the Ixiocolony, but the limited microdrone exploration has failed to discover their Relay Wattle before losing contact, either due to technical failure, traversal through a Relay Wattle, or being destroyed by a Mite for materials.