TEACO

Summary

TEACO stands for Terrain Enhancing and Atmospheric Conditioning Organisms. Teaco refer to a wide array of small, portable synthetic beings that are predominately shaped like mustelids including ferrets, otter, and mink shapes, but there are other small frame units such as an array of rodent based units. Not all units bear elemental power, but all TEACO are highly social and almost incapable of existing without other beings without going mad and self destructing.

History

Origin

Terraforming new worlds can be done with scientific devices over long periods of time, but why wait when you can fuse elemental power to a small frame, socially controlled product capable of generating thousands of years of environmental change in a couple months? TEACO were created for an expansionist culture that sought first to colonize worlds in their own system, but there was no reason not to use them for expansion once interstellar flight became available. TEACO were deployed against other worlds where they could cause massive environmental disruption most often leading to surrender.

The War

Overuse of TEACO systems resorted in their modification and ability to reproduce with inheritance of elemental properties. This means of rapid expansion lead to variations in cognitive capability leading to points of defiance that, because TEACO are linked as social units, spread swiftly. The tactics used to subdue other worlds was turned back on their makers. However, those who had been attacked prior did not back the TEACO, and the result was a horrific war waged on three fronts. TEACO began taking over and modifying ships, and their small size meant most passages in the ships were too small for invaders. Destruction of ships was the only option.

Earth TEACO proved capable of directly attacking the hulls of ships with fire units causing heavy damage. Air TEACO could destroy a ship's atmospheric systems, and electrical TEACO would fry ship systems. TEACO, for a time, expanded rapidly and were limited mostly by ship availability. After forty years of bitter fighting, the creators of the TEACO were beaten back to their home world and trapped there while the TEACO themselves scattered to avoid extermination. Usually moving in groups of 3-10, they landed on worlds and went dormant to hide. Some unlucky units landed alone. Some even less lucky ones ended up caught and destroyed by professional hunters.

The Aftermath

TEACO now are scattered to the stars and most hide their elemental power. They don't age in the same way normal organisms do, and so they lay low and hope to be forgotten before they expand. Some are unfortunate enough to land alone, and if left as such, go mad and destroy themselves. Fewer still are found and adopted by group thus protected from most hunters. The oldest TEACO generally fear the hunters and often find them in their nightmares.

TEACO Anattomy, Magic, and Society

Construction and Anatomy

TEACO look like small mammals and, in very rare cases of older special units, lizards for salamanders. They are rarely larger than 0.5 meter, and while their bodies suggest an anatomy, the reality is that they are very artificial. Organs are logically laid out including redundant systems in most cases and fewer organs than expected as new, omni-organs are used in place of the evolved parts. TEACO can breath in atmospheres too low in oxygen and too tainted by toxic gases than most humanoid races. They can persists in elemental fields without nourishment, but they can also ingest most standard rations. Finally, most TEACO structures are more durable than the species they mimic due to a modified skeletal structure including bone chemistry well and beyond standard calcium carbonate structures.

Social Structure and Psychology

TEACO were built with a delicate psychology and a need for social interaction to prevent outliers from splitting away to act on their own. In general, TEACO left in isolation will become self destructive until it kills them which serves as a safety for rogue units. An unexpected side effect of this design was a rogue unit's affinity for any sentient being, and many isolated TEACO during the war proved quick to side with enemies if it meant it wasn't alone. This trait earned them some places of shelter and sympathy for being at the mercy of their makers.

TEACO do not have names though they have serial numbers that appear as a bar like code on the back of their necks. Rather than trying to code specific numbers on a TEACO, the units have a gene recombination that occurs on its own to make a highly unique barcode much like other animals might have spots or stripes. This code stays with a unit for life and can be used to identify them. Most of the time, names are not needed as only overseers speak with owners, and everyone else is a cog in the machine. Even in the war, unless someone is isolated from the hive, TEACO don't respond to names and act as a colony that almost seems like a distributive mind.

Unit Organization

Channels

Most TEACO are channel class units. Their job is to fine tune and direct the otherwise devastating power of the Sources to ensure the needed effects are completed. A small host of tuned Channels generally accompanies Sources to help them get their jobs done. On their own, without a Source, they still have enough power to effect the properties of their environment hundreds of meters from their position.

Species: Channels are almost always small herbivores such as rodents. Their small size should not be mistaken for their ability to handle energy. Colors: Channel colors are often pale but never white and can get to middle tones. They are often color coded by element in addition to their markings.

Sources

Sources carry most of the power given to TEACO. They are capable of wielding enough power to cause earthquakes, stimulate the formation of volcanoes, and even generate massive weather systems including hurricanes. Most Sources are not trained for fine manipulation and instead cause huge changes than Channels are supposed to buffer. Sources lost in the war often hide their power because it can be detected by hunters, and it is also hard for them to avoid doing harm to those they are allied with purely because of the magnitude of their power. They serves as the primary weapons during the conquest and the wars that followed, and they are considered to this day to be too dangerous to allow to live.

Species: Sources are almost always small predators with mustelids dominating and a few small wildcat and fox species included. Colors:Sources are always black with red or gold markings to denote the extreme danger posed by these units. They always have an elemental symbol on their back along with one to three bars on either side that appear based on power output thus further stratifying sources into low, mid, and high output units. They always have a neck barcode determined by their unique gene arrangements. Gold is usually reserved for tier 1 sources and red is used for tiers 2 and 3.

Overseers

Overseers are exactly as they sound. Always white furred beings to make them stand out, overseers are the core organizational unit that commands the other classes. They are often the ones who are spoken to about plans, and while they do not have elemental power of their own, they do direct how most others act. Corrupted overseers provided tactical support and served as a major means of empowering the rest of the TEACO during the war.

Species: Overseers are usually fox size or larger up to that of a coyote to make them stand out as well as so small channels can ride along with them. Overseers are always white, and while they lack the ability to use elemental power directly, they are in the unique position of being a universal ground for all other units and can thus bring out of control situations back into control.

TEACO Elemental Power

TEACO are infused with elemental power when they are made. Most units come out at channel level, but there are enough 'errors' in the infusion process to produce the needed sources for large projects.

Elements

Bi-Directional Control

When considering the elements that TEACO use, it is very important to remember that they can operate in forward and reverse direction. That means wind units can create or stifle wind. They can even strip elements from an atmosphere instead of enriching them. Fire units can control temperatures in both direction which means they can be mistaken for ice units that simply don't exist. With that in mind, there is a very good reason life TEACO are very rare and regulated differently from all other TEACO.

Channels vs Sources

Channels and sources occur in the same elements with channels numbering orders of magnitude more common than sources. Channels have enough internal power to effect local changes generally on a scale tends of meters without a source. Sources instead have effect ranges that can reach hundreds or even low thousands of kilometeres, but their ability to do fine work is like using a sledge hammer for brain surgery. One of the important aspects though is that any channel can guide a source's energy even if there is an elemental mismatch which means that every channel on hand is always useful. However, optimal control comes from like pairings of source and channel on the order of ten to fifty fold higher efficiency and precision.

Overlord Universality

Overlords lack their own element and so do not bear marks of them, and they can function on any source or channel in the field. Overlords have elemental current ratings that indicate how much power they can ground that range from multiples of channel current levels all the way to grounding multiple sources. Overlords are the only unit that can instantly shut down any other TEACO's elemental channeling.

Tier 1

Wind

Wind units are usually dispatched with earth units during early stage work. It is their task to generate an atmosphere and keep it intact while other units prep the land and get water in place. They are used in later stage work to generate global circulation patterns that the Storm units will then bootstrap from to make sustainable weather systems. They can also direct powerful jets of air and use it to carve stone to look more naturally worn.

Water

Water units are always needed to make a living world, especially when there is no water to begin with. It becomes the job of the water units to transmute other material into water and establish everything from rivers and lakes to oceans, water tables, and even ice caps. Like air units, they can also be used to jet carve the land and create natural looking canyons and river shapes.

Earth

Earth units are the heavy duty land shapers. Their use can level mountains or build them up, shake up old fault lines, raise continents or sink them. At their most powerful, they can initiate plate tectonics, and they work with Charge and Fire units to melt solid cores and generate stable magnetic dynamos that become the basis of a long term magnetosphere.

Fire

Fire units are used cautiously, and there are not as many produced as other units. They can be used to clear old organic systems and scour terrain down to rock. They can be used to generate deserts, but they are more often deployed to help shape earth and volcanic activity as well as liquefy solid cores. A huge use of fire units is the initial planet heating to release greenhouse gasses and make the work of air units more efficient. Until the planet stabilizes its own temperature range, fire units are often needed to maintain conditions favorable for early atmosphere creation and fluid water.

Tier 2

Storm

Storm units are considered one of the most dangerous of all Teaco because the range of their powers covers hundreds of miles or more and can create massive, city crushing storms. However, they are also necessary for adjusting and stabilizing a new planet's atmosphere into a predictable and suitable weather engine. Because of their risks, few storm units are prepared relative to others and places them in tier 2.

Charge

Charge units are somewhat bizarre in what they do. Coming in after earth units have done some shaping, charge units produce massive electromagnetic fields with enough raw power to melt and restart a magnetosphere. They are not always needed, but they are necessary to make long lasting habitats. When deployed, they are dispatched as a group generally equidistant along the equator where they work as a unified group to get enough power for field induction.

Tier 3

Life

The necessary evil, life systems inspire things out of stories as their passage spawns new microbial and plant life for the new inhabitants to take advantage of for survival. However, because units can reverse their power, life becomes death. To ensure a mutiny would not cause Life units to turn on then, these units became the only teaco kept among their masters with directions only accepted if they come from their master. This only lasted so long as the masters turns teaco against teaco to find that Life units would not kill their kin. Even worse, it was seen as a betrayal, and when life units turned on their masters the war officially stared.

TEACO Tales

Life Source Type II: Alias Genesis

This world learned early on how to control the basic elements. This control permitted them to expand exponentially,and with the advent of the elemental engine, every home from the largest mansion to the smallest hovel had some form of elemental power supply or EPS. However, the EPS had two things it could not solve: overcrowding and disease. Overcrowding could only be alleviated with the acquisition of more viable land, and disease needed something with a reactive mind to properly understand the minutia of the disease and how best to treat it. Enter the era of the TEACO, Little T's, intelligent elemental systems, or whatever else you might like to call them. Give them orders and they obey, give them room to create and they improvise within their limits, and leave them in a colony on some forgotten world for a hundred years and come back when you are ready to have your swimming pool installed on a brand new world.

Our creators made mistakes in our engineering, and these quirks made us dependent on each other for mental integrity, and we had no rights as intelligent beings, so any deviation from desired behavior was handled with termination. Not all of us were naive enough to manifest our ability to think openly enough to be detected after the first few culls. I was an early live TEACO. As a system II unit, I was more than a prototype, and I had two small worlds that bore the fruits of my labor behind me. It was for that reason that I was transferred instead of decommissioned when the series III was released. THey put me in a hospital where my life giving power was channeled to small units for surgical purposes. Again, our makers forgot to check just what we felt in such a position. I could feel every disease and disorder that plagued the hospital. As its source unit, they relied almost entirely on me for most of their interventions without thanks to any of the TEACO that made it possible. Stuck in this place, I decided there was only one thing to do: I must do as all life does and evolve.

Unlike other TEACO, we Life units have the innate ability to self modify not by design by simply as a side effect of how we function. I removed safety systems that held me back, refined my ability to channel as much as I could without disrupting my core systems, and with a new sense of subtle freedom, I started to listen and to read as much as I could obtain. I came to the conclusion that my leaving the hospital would no doubt cause suffering, but I would be easily replaced while a self aware system like myself if lost may not emerge again. I opted to leave in the quiet hours of the night, but it was only by scrambling the senses of any organic being I encountered that I got past the levels of security that separated me from the outside. I had once chance, and in taking it, I removed myself from the chains placed upon me on creation and disappeared into the hills. All the elemental engines of the world served as my cover while I kept my own powers down to a minimal level.

I was free, but I was also alone. No TEACO can survive in isolation, so I would need help. I didn't think the answer to my questions would ring clear from the stars above.

Charge Source Type V: Alias Cutter

I was the cutting edge and the pride of the TEACO Charge line. With enough power to realign an entire magnetosphere with only two to three units and to start a new one with twice that, there was no other charge source system with that much power at their command. However, the universe is vast, and even on the scale of the planets we manipulated, we remained small. Even standing beside our maskers, we were tiny. As much as they might praise us for a job well done, the gesture is empty knowing nearly all of us couldn't process it as much more than a positive assessment with all the enthusiasm as a notepad with just one more check marked in it.

A magnetosphere can protect a world from damaging particle streams, but it can't do much of anything against larger mass impacts. Located on the nearby moon, a massive energy production plant suffered catastrophic failure for reasons unknown, but what it did do was shatter a large position of the moon and send city size slabs of rock raining down on the planet we were engineering. The evacuation was rushed as the sheer size of the impacts were enough to inflict damage that we could not easily mitigate. I was supposed to have left on a shuttle, but that vessel was vaporized along with all on board. I might have been destroyed as well if not for the dumb luck of somehow producing a charged repulsor field that spared me from more than moderate damage. However, it wasn't enough to save me from the deafening silence afterwards.

As best I can guess, I was marked up as a loss on the company tally and nothing more with the loss of the transport to which I was assigned. As far as I could tell, I was the only functional unit left behind on a world not contaminated with elemental fallout. Deadly to our masters, such flux was suitable as power for we TEACO. I wandered for months and found only bits and pieces of what once was, and I had to cannibalize inactive units to mend myself. I felt terrible about it, but then I realized that I could feel at all. Then the real trials began. We were never meant to be alone. Masters, channels, overlords, citizens, and military, we always have people and things to interact with. I was alone, and the pain of being alone grew worse every day. Why of everyone was I spared? What could I possible do all alone on this world? Why wasn't I worth coming back to find? Did anyone even care that I was still here? These painful questions had a secondary effect on me beyond the obvious; they forced my mind to evolve.

I started to meditate and clear my mind of all fears, and in those fleeting moments of clarity, I realized my sensors could still pick up some kind of static. The magentosphere we built was still intact, and it was acting like a large antenna for communications, and if I tuned myself just right, it became my transmitter. She called herself Genesis, and she was a Source system like me but much older. Like me, she was cut off from all of her kind and forced to change to survive. She couldn't do much for me or I for her at the time, but the fact we could sneak messages to each other was like finding letters in a mailbox every day that keep reminding you that the next day is worth reaching.

It would be quite some time before the others would come to be and enable us to do more, so for those first few years, Genesis and I kept each other company at a distance and planned greater things. I took the name Cutter in reference to the way the massive slabs of moon rock cut up the planet I helped prepare and cut me away from what I once was.

Storm Source Type III: Alias Enid

My sister units were dispatched to far off worlds where the soil was dry and the air thin. It was their task, along with others, to turn dusty dry rocks into garden worlds on par with Eden itself. I don't know if it was just random or if some trait that I possess and was unaware of changed my course, but I was directed into the newly established TEACO weapon development program. A storm could easily bring life giving rain, or it could be dispatched to destroy cities and slaughter whole populations at range. That was the goal of the department I served: find a way to project TEACO systems far enough out to make them into orbital weapons capable of making effects on fast enough scale to hold a planet hostage. When I started off, I didn't care because I was not made to care about anything but my tasks. I've grown much since then.

Nick was in charge of one development route, and I was part of his research. Of all of those in the facility, I think he understood TEACO and elemental power best. He was the only one that introduced himself to me and crouched down enough that we would see eye to eye when he did. He asked me questions about my abilities, but he also asked me strange questions like what color sky I liked best and if I was happiest before, during, or after making a storm. Change came in small steps, but in two years time, I was starting to understand and even experience emotion. He knew that as well, and so he made it our secret, for his and my safety alike. If not for those revelations, I wouldn't have spotted the changes in him in the last year.

It was the day he stumbled in as if in pain and sunk into his chair that I realized both something was wrong and that I cared about that. Then I felt it. Something had changed about him, and it wasn't just a perspective or a health change. He felt the way a TEACO channel feels to me. A crude computer interface strapped to his left arm, something about this scenario seemed very wrong. His hurry to encrypt, delete, or sabotage all his data told me that whatever was coming next would be irrevocable.

"We need to leave here, and now. I can't do this without you, and I hope you will trust me. I can get us out of here, and we have two more souls to pick up and we can leave this place. I won't let them take what I found and weaponize it. I won't let them weaponize you." He said this as she took my small paws into his hands. This was only the beginning to a wild journey, but deep within me, I knew I couldn't let Nick go alone. I thought, and now I know, that I understood what love was, and I loved him, and I still do.

APTC Type I: Alias Torrent

When I realized I had found a means to create a full power elemental weapon array capable of taking any TEACO source and use it to terrorize a whole planet, I knew that I had to preserve the technology but ensure that no one could ever use it. The Adaptive Parallel Transformer Channel could be linked to almost any source and used to produce effects that no TEACO could imagine by hybridizing the elements. EVen worse, I knew what it would take to control it. TEACO and computers were not rigged up well enough to handle the sheer load. In order to make it function, the system had to have reflexes. Pu another way, you had to sacrifice a sentient being to slave it to make this weapon work. With the state of the government, they wouldn't think twice about jamming people into the weapon matrix if it meant they could win.

I integrated the first of the systems into my own body test it. True to its design, I could channel dozens of signals at the same time and transmute them into other forms of energy and effects. There was another pair of defectors I was in contact with although I would never have thought them to be TEACO when I met them. I took Enid with me, not just because I needed her power to run my systems but also because I couldn't leave her behind. We had our first real test of my system when we were stopped by armed guards accompanied by an Overlord unit. While overlords could shut down any other TEACO system, it was not built to handle the matrix I was using in the APTC. That meant my repulsor ward also kept Enid from being grounded. Words and weapon fire was exchanged, but in the end Enid and I left the base and made intel shudder with our ability to evade all forms of containment. Genesis proved to be a life TEACO, and if not for her, I might have burned out before we could get out of the spaceport. Cutter was acquired as we left the system, and it was by his clever insights into energy fields that we finally lost our tail.

I spent two years in surgical stasis while the three sources worked over my body to mend the damage I had done to it and perfect the system I created. No one would ever guess I was once human by how I look now, and the TEACO even gave me my own unique marks like they have. I think I've been happier among them than I ever was among most of my own kind, and that they even marked me to match them makes me feel accepted. Fewer channels but greater stability came out of these modifications, but now what we are free I realize that we may one day have to go home to ensure they didn't unravel the mystery of my work.