Aggregate of Dragons

Yeah, so, I can't decide what to call this thing other than "Aggregate of Something." Damn you, Emily Dickenson; it's an incredibly awesome word.

I could call it something cheesy like "Greater than the sum of its parts," but that's pretty awful, and Aggregate of Something sounds awesome. Whee.

This is another sf idea; I think it takes place on earth, but that could be changed pretty easily. This is a post-apocalyptic world that hasn't degraded into pre-civilization. Instead, a new world has risen out of the ashes of the old, and it's a beautiful world, filled with light and hope- or it was, until humanity came back into power. Now things are a little cleaner than before, but people are ultimately unchanged by their century or so of enslavement.

The Azhdekhai are dragons; in the mythology of my head, they're distant cousins to the Yrkhai (which sounds a little like Uruk-Hai, only with fewer syllables and more choking noises in the back of the throat), but they're the daughters of Tiamat rather than the Sons of Bahamut. They aren't actually all female, but gender isn't a concrete concept to them.

The dozen Azdekhai that inhabit earth have improved the place quite a bit; the first couple centuries of enslavement were just to get humanity used to their existence. Now they overlook things to make sure nothing especially bad happens, and let the world run itself. They're still the final authority in all things, however, and even if they don't directly interfere with anything anymore, there isn't a human alive who doesn't know it.

Aggregate technology is old hat for the Azhdekhai; they use it on all the worlds they colonize because they can't actually interact with lesser races without causing heads to explode. The Aggregates are normally just automatons, used to gather information and make decrees, but the Twelve found themselves experimenting a little with the technology and actually managed to create people.

An Aggregate is sort of a cyborg and sort of not; there are both mechanical and organic components to its make up (hence the name), but the end result is something that is actually alive. They're not immortal, they can bleed, and once the initial programming and processing is over, they don't resemble machines in the slightest.

Their cells are rearrangeable. Each individual component is a separate entity in and of itself, and each separate entity controls itself on its own. There's a sort of hive mind or working republic mentality to them; you may be speaking to what looks like an individual, but you're actually communicating with a few hundred million tiny individuals with the same goals in mind. Decisions are made by a simple majority ruling, and there's never any argument- the collective intelligence is often staggering, but the individual components are fairly primitive.

The self-aware Aggegates call themselves the Aggregati; it gives them an identity beyond being the tools of the Azhdekhai. They tend to be human in appearance, but their forms are completely arbitrary, depending on the number of points in their seals.

Yes, I do have an obsession with shapeshifters.

The seals are what hold an Aggregate together; without them, they're just a pile of squirming organic matter with no core intelligence or form. A single point seal is the strongest seal possible; it holds the Aggregate together to the point where next to nothing is going to make it fall apart. Single point Aggregati tend to be used for manual labor and nothing else; they don't have the flexibility that allows for greater intelligence, but they've got ridiculous amounts of stamina.

Humans also have single point seals that serve as passports. The Azhdekhai are all quite friendly with one another, but they're territorial and they like to keep track of their possessions. The humans born in their districts are given their mark three weeks after being born. It's become almost a secular equivalent to baptism; you aren't an actual person in the eyes of the law until you've been sealed, which is why infanticide and abortion are not illegal. (When people objected to this, the Azhdekhai killed them.)

The higher the number of seals, the more control an Aggregate has over his own components (grammar! "Aggregati" is the plural or the term for the whole race; individuals or the adjectival is Aggregate). So, Asha has a three point seal, which allows her the flexibility of intelligence and gives her moderate shapeshifting abilities. The three points in her seal allow for a certain amount of customization; generic three point seals have a bit more flexibility in their abilities than Asha's does. She can only control certain parts of her components; changing colors is easy, but the third point on her seal is to keep her shape whole while still allowing her to change gender. Sex. What the fuck ever.

Vaz has a twelve point seal because he was commissioned by one of the Azhdekhai. After the 12 pulled out of human affairs, they retired to giant floating palace things in the sky and spend all their time being pampered like whoa. They surround themselves with beautiful things and Aggregati (who sometimes count as beautiful things); Vaz was commmissioned solely to serve the pleasure of the Lord of the Eastern Skies (Number Seven to her family).

Don't get all pervy on me, all he did was recite poetry and play go. His Lord (tecnically a Lady) also occasionally used him for diplomatic things; she was very fond of him and he quickly rose through the ranks of her Aggregati to the position of her personal assistant. He attended summit meetings for her and made sure all of her affairs were in order on earth; he was commissioned with a ten point seal, but Seven upgraded him after a few years because she hated seeing him not reaching his full potential.

She sent him to live on earth for the same reason, and now she watches over him because it's more amusing than anything else currently going on in her life. Vaz can blend in with normal humans easily enough, and he outranks everything on the face of the planet (12 point seals are amazingly rare, and all of them aside from him are living with their respective Lords), but he still gets in trouble on a regular basis.

Humanity has gotten over the slavery thing, for the most part...but they don't like the Aggregati. Sure, they're useful, but they represent a lot of things that humans don't like- after watching a seven pointer demolish a building by calculating the weak points in the structure and hitting it with his fist, it's hard to remember which species is supposed to be superior. Never mind that another property of the seals on the Aggregati commissioned for human use is to make them incapable of outright disobedience (Three Laws Safe!) and also turns them into virtual slaves- humans are silly like that.

Vaz knows very little of the actual reality of his; his primary interaction with humanity was through diplomats, politicians, and scientists, all of whom are accustomed to dealing with upper level Aggregati and who know they can't afford to be prejudiced.

The Azhdekhai don't actually care about the Aggregati. So long as their personal property is treated well, they don't give a damn about the rest. So creatures like Asha are made and used, and creatures like Vaz are pampered and petted, and when those two worlds meet, crazy shit happens.

Vaz, aside from his authority, is crazy cool. He can do things with his body that most other creatures can only dream of. Spit poison? He can do it. Grow wings? He can do it. Eat things by absorbing them like an amoeba? He can do it. He has a twelve point seal, and that makes him nearly invincible.

He's an ass. A complete and utter ass. He also lived an amazingly sheltered life with Seven and the other isolated Aggregati in her palace. He knew all about violence (Seven liked watching him kill things), but he had no clue what emotions or sex were for. Asha, being a natural empath (talents like empathy and telepathy crop up in humanity every so often- the percentage is fairly small, something like one in every thousand; no one knows how or why the Aggregati occasionally develop psi abilities, but it doesn't happen often enough), throws him completely for a loop.

I think he meets her when she tries to escape the brothel she works in, and he gets caught up in a messy gang war. He finds that in the underworld, his pretty seal and ultimate authority don't mean shit; the Azhdekhai don't care about small scale things like that.

Fortunately for Vaz and Asha, he did spend more than half his life working as a gladiator, of sorts. He really likes killing things. Fortunately for the people around him, having sex eases his bloodlust, so it's a good thing he now has his own personal sex kitten.

Asha is sweet and utterly in love with Vaz; she lives to make him happy. Being an empath in a brothel- and being an empath Aggregate whose sole purpose was to serve customers who like a little sadism with their sex- wasn't at all fun for her, to put it mildly. In fact, one might almost say it was neurosis-inducingly traumatic.

Fortunately for Asha, some part of her enjoys killing things as much as Vaz does, and while she can't actually reform herself into something with giant teeth and claws, her stamina is second to none and she can take a hit and keep on kicking your ass. She and Vaz single handedly take down the organized crime in the area.

Then then go off to shag like rabbits and make babies. Babies everywhere!

Only they don't. But they will eventually.

I kind of wish I could draw Vaz because he's (fucking hawt) really, really awesome. His seal looks like someone stuck a garden all over his face and upper body (the more points in a seal, the bigger it is; Vaz's spreads across his shoulders and down his spine, as well as over his chest to his navel). It's purty. Vaz, in general, is purdy; it's rare for an Aggregate to look bad, since they're all engineered to be pleasing to the eye to begin with.

Where'd the idea come from? No fucking clue. It hit me on monday while I was eating dinner and I had to write it down. *shrug*