Catalogue of Known Alien Races in Andromeda (~22,500 A.A.)
E. Engineered Human Sub-Races
1. Stockborn
The original template, still doing the actual work. Stockborn are the unmodified backbone of the species — farmers, soldiers, dockworkers, colonists, the people who get born, grow old, and die in the same gravity they were made for. They’re the most numerous and the most fertile, and every exotic strain in this catalog eventually traces its blood back to them. The galaxy calls them ordinary. The galaxy forgets that every throne, empire, and god in this book is standing on their shoulders.
2. Daimons — The immortal supersoldiers, fewer than a hundred, enhanced in every dimension and sterile as a dead star. They are the template every engineered line dreams of and none can reach. Gods in battle, myths in the telling, and, underneath all of it, the loneliest people in Andromeda and the only ones not born in Andromeda.
3. Auric-Born Lineages
Aristocracy grown in a vat and polished to a mirror shine. The Auric-Born are engineered for longevity, charisma, and the kind of beauty that makes people hesitate before they inconvenience you — and, tucked behind the temple, a neural implant that quietly ensures you never inconvenience the house that paid for your face. They rule the Ascendancy’s dynasties, lovely and doomed in equal measure. Their freedom is a gilded one. Their leash is just harder to see.
4. Concord Engineers
Brains first, everything else a distant second. The Concord Engineers were optimized for cognition — expanded prefrontal cortices, metabolisms tuned for shipboard life, and a memory for systems that borders on the supernatural. They’re the Federation’s scientists and ship-minds, the ones who keep the starliners flying and the wormhole tolls honest. Put one in a firefight and you’ll watch a genius die awkwardly. Put one in a control room and watch a civilization run itself. Know which room you’re in before you pick the fight.
5. Seykar-Hybrids (Droneborn)
Born of a war, marked by a war, hired to fight other people’s wars. The Droneborn carry chitin reinforcements under their skin and a hive-pheromone sensitivity that makes crowds feel like weather, and they’ve been mistrusted for it since the day they were born. They’re fertile — the Seykar’s one great genetic gift to their conquerors — and they make exceptional mercenary legions. But half the galaxy still wonders which mind is answering when a Droneborn goes quiet. The answer usually isn’t flattering to the question.
6. Turcus-Blooded (Gilded)
The prettiest scar in human genetics. The Gilded are the children of Turcus hybridization — tall, symmetrical, graceful, and beautiful in the way a polished blade is beautiful. Some are born in the Flesh Markets as inventory; others were freed and folded into Auric houses as ornaments, agents, and heirs. Their genetics make them compatible with both species, which is exactly why their ancestry is a stigma nobody lets them forget. They’re not corrupted. They’re just the living receipt for a transaction humanity would rather not discuss.
7. Graveborn
Space-scavengers who look like the ghost story they became. The Graveborn grew up in low gravity and made their peace with it — elongated frames, modified bone density, eyes that read the dark like a contract. They’re void-pirates, station-dwellers, and salvage rats, feared by surface folk the way the sea is feared by people who’ve never left the shore. On a derelict ship, in the black between stars, the Graveborn aren’t just at home. They’re the only thing that can go home. The surface doesn’t want them, and they’ve stopped asking.
8. Ocean-Born
Humans who traded their lungs for the deep and got called monsters for it. The Ocean-Born carry gill-slits and webbing, bred to colonize water-worlds after the Myrrax wars — which means half of them were born into Myrrax chains and the other half grew up hearing about it. They’re cold-resistant, amphibious, and the best swimmers the species ever made, and baseline humans still flinch at their faces. The deep doesn’t care what you look like. That’s why they went there.
9. Stoneborn
Built like the planets they were made to mine. The Stoneborn carry dense skeletons and immense strength, engineered for high-gravity colonies and the kind of work that would pulp a baseline human’s spine. They’re miners, heavy infantry, and the reason certain worlds have functioning economies. The cost is written in their joints — low gravity rots their bones, arthritis hunts them early, and they age faster the farther they drift from the heavy worlds that made them. They don’t complain. Stoneborn were never built to.
10. Radiant-Blooded
People who came back from the irradiated dark glowing. The Radiant-Blooded were Auric experiments in radiation resistance that went one step further — their skin blooms with bioluminescent patterns, and sunlight literally repairs them. They’re the navigators and long-haul explorers of the poisoned zones, charged up like living batteries, exotic and admired and, in certain corners of the empire, fetishized in ways that make their patterns crawl. They glow because they survived something. The galaxy keeps forgetting that part.
11. Neural-Woven
A mind with roommates. The Neural-Woven were grown with lattice-augmented brains, linked, memory-sharing, wired into ships and databanks like living processors. They remember things they never lived. They hear voices that were never born — the ghost-echoes of the old mental biofarms, or so the rumors say, and the rumors have a way of being right. They’re feared, and they know it. Ask a Neural-Woven a question and you’ll get four answers. Ask which one was theirs, and watch them count before they answer.
12. Voidborn
Spiders of the zero-G dark, and just as loved. The Voidborn were tailored for deep space — elongated limbs, huge dark pupils, redundant circulatory systems, and a comfort in zero gravity that surface-dwellers find profoundly unsettling. They’re smugglers, raiders, and explorers of the void between the voids, and they almost never set foot on a planet; gravity feels like a weighted blanket trying to smother them. Surface folk call them eerie. Voidborn call the surface the box. Neither side is wrong.
13. Hybrid-Lords (Auric Chimeras)
The empire’s finest weapons and its most expensive scandals. The Hybrid-Lords are deliberate crosses between human dynasts and alien lines — Kethari fractals folded into a courtier’s spine, Seykar chitin tracing a commander’s jaw, Myrrax traces that make the old houses pretend not to notice. They’re military geniuses, aesthetic marvels, and political abominations in the same body, and half the Ascendancy wants to crown them while the other half wants them in chains. They know it. That’s what makes them dangerous.
14. Marrow-Forged
Slaves who outlived their masters and kept the scars as a receipt. The Marrow-Forged are the descendants of humans once fed to the Ysrathi marrow-cults, reshaped by bone-memory grafts and ritual scarring into a warrior line that took its vengeance and never stopped. They’re mercenary clans now, bitter rivals of the Jade Clans, and they’ll fight anyone for the right price — but they’ll fight the Ysrathi for free, on principle, and they’re usually smiling about it. Their bodies remember every graft, every ritual, every ancestor who didn’t survive the table. The marrow remembers. So do they.
15. Pilgrim-Kin
Faith as a genetic engineering project. The Pilgrim-Kin were edited for endurance — enhanced immunity, slowed metabolism, sleep suppression — so they could cross the long dark between ruined stars and arrive still praying. They’re colonists, wanderers, and the galaxy’s most committed zealots, and a significant number of them revere the Daimons as divine beings who walked the same cold roads. You’ll find them in chapel-ships and frontier chapels, gaunt and serene, outlasting everyone around them. They don’t fight much. They don’t need to. They just wait, and they’re very, very patient.
16. Gene-Barons
Warlords grown to loom. The Gene-Barons are the Ascendancy’s experiment in controlled dominance — enlarged stature, hyper-dense muscle, and a jawline engineered to make subordinates say yes. They rule worlds as genetic aristocracies, their bloodlines the constitution and the standing army combined. The flaw is in the fine print: after generations of compounding selection, the genetics destabilize, and a Gene-Baron’s heir is a coin flip between genius and magnificent collapse. They’re built to be worshiped. They’re also built to fall, and the taller they stand, the further the drop.
17. Ashenborn
Children of the dead stars, and they know it. The Ashenborn were adapted for the entropy voids — the starless, near-dead systems where the Ozyth did their worst — with pale-gray skin, senses tuned to darkness, and metabolisms that squeeze a life from almost nothing. They colonize the ruins nobody else wants, and they’ve built cultures of survival, endurance, and a fatalism so complete it looks like serenity. They don’t hope. They plan. In a galaxy that keeps ending things, the Ashenborn are the ones who’ll still be standing when the lights go out, quietly running the numbers.
18. Splicer-Strains
What the black-market bio-forges produce when nobody’s watching. Splicer-Strains are illegal mixes of human and alien DNA — wings, claws, new senses, arrangements no ethics board ever signed off on. They’re gladiators, mercenaries, outcasts, and Flesh Market inventory, and they carry the illegitimacy of their own creation in every limb. Some of them are magnificent. All of them are somebody’s experiment, and most of them know it. The galaxy calls them freaks. The galaxy also pays good money to watch them fight, which tells you everything about which side of that word is really the problem.
19. Cat-Girls (Felis-Hominids)
The first successful indoctrination of a non-hive organism — and it shows. Cat-girls are engineered courtiers, assassins, and living ornaments with reflexes a hair’s breadth short of Daimonic and a behavioral genome that made them purr on command. They were built to obey, and the cost was their sanity: hormonal surges, psychopathic breaks, and a slow slide between affectionate pet and cold-blooded killer that has no warning label and no off switch. They were discontinued. The black market kept the molds. In the right light, a cat-girl is the most beautiful thing in the room. In the wrong light, she’s the last thing you’ll ever see in it.
20. Svens & Dans
The rumored Master Stock, and they’d very much like you to keep believing it. The Svens and Dans are tall, platinum-blond, and uniformly magnificent — stronger and smarter than baseline, with 200-to-250-year lifespans and none of the instability that plagues other engineered lines. They claim descent from an Arcship eugenics project, a template for posthuman leadership, and whether or not it’s true, they cultivate the legend with the discipline of people who intend to inherit the galaxy. They’re the most stable lineage after the Daimons, and the only one that’s fertile and scalable — which is why half the galaxy resents them and the other half is quietly trying to marry into them.
