Salaric

The Punk’s Universe is a series of stories, ranging from flash fictions to novel series and graphic novel – comic books which cover the origin, existence and coming of age of the human species. All the human species that is. It spans our pre-history to deep in our space faring, argumented and upload futures with branches of humanity cropping up all over the place. The main character is The Punk, a teenage/early twenties female who just happens to live for thousands of years thanks to life extension tech, she is one of a group of genetically engineered and grown hybreds and spends a lot of time with no memory of her origin in the City of Babel where she was beginning her training as an optronics programmer. Optronics is sort of electronics but using light, the Aquatic Apes who made “humans” as we understand the concept and grew Punku and Itsu on the placenta Trees happen to have diverged from the other primate species on a series of volcanic islands and learnt to manipulate glass and therefore light early on.

The project was originally started as a NaNoWriMo and then a ScriptFrenzy – writing challenges, but the concepts belong to a set of stories I was trying to write as a teen.

Notes, short stories and the like can be found here.

Punku – out going, quick to respond but doesn’t always think about consequences, athletic, she has the emblem of a pheonix in a spiral on her chest to represent eternity and rebirth. She has curly blue hair and mid skin tones whilst in Babel but she absorbs DNA and adapts to cultures and climates so varies and hair is initially dyed.

Later in the story she is a space faring punk with magenta hair.

Itsu – sensitive hippy type, more reserved and worried about stuff, his symbol is three snakes eating their tails in a celtic three point knot.

Placenta trees – a form of stem cell technology that allows cloning, the main form of reproduction used by the Aquatic Apes or Masters for themselves and for mass production of slaves.

Cover idea – Punku sits and weeps outside of the Tower of Babel where the optronics (glass/fibre optics) super computer lives, she holds her light/laser pen which has helped set fire to the city with it’s shell and coral inspired buildings, survivors flee over the sand dunes into the desert, they are a mix of the Aten and Punku, Itsu and a few others. Above them the the moon glows with a red star that is a space station.

The Optronic Light Core – the super computer and system back up for the sea Empire’s which have warred themselves into extinction and infertility. It is verging on self awareness and is also the beginning of mind upload and direct bio-tech interfacing.

The City of Babel – the buildings are all based on reef and sea creatures as is the air craft. Having observed under water gliding techniques the Aquatic Apes developed air flight before road travel. The Tower of Babel dominates the landscape and is a push towards reclaiming what they have lost as a people due to a war of attrition. The tower is based on the structure of certain corals as they grow up from the reef and then spread out to collect more sunshine – there are radio receivers on the top of the tower.

Typical Aquatic Ape dwelling in Babel.

An Aquatic Ape from before the first Empire War – these have very large heads and were destined to die out due to inbreeding, genetic engineering and splicing of land ape DNA saved them but made the physical characteristics slightly different and sparked later eugenics wars.

Lady Chaos or Tiamut/Tiamat – she is an Aquatic Ape elite and Master and genetic engineering genius, she is Morlock’s mother and Aten’s ex-wife. She is deranged and viscous and obsessed with fish. Her symbol is a butterfly with fish for scales to represent the eternity/mobius strip/figure of eight on it’s side and chaos theory.

Aten Baal – is the chief engineer and was responsible for the building of Babel and an attempt to save the Aquatic Apes through fertility treatments, space travel, life extension technology and mind upload. He is a polymath and brilliant though lacks a certain amount of focus and his intellect is broad but not as sharp or bright as Tiamat’s. His symbol is the sun made out of bulls/ox’s heads which also symbolised a cog representing interconnectivity and the never ending circle.

Morlock – socio path, narrow minded like his mother but of lower intellegance, still brighter than pretty much everyone and has a diverse skill range. He was grown on a placenta tree which was not yet adapted for the Aquatic Apes and was the only survivor of his tree. He is nasty and manipulative and both parents fail to see how dangerous and an unloyal he is.

Emblem is a ying and yang type design made out of dolphins with a colours wheel/rainbow underlaid.

Aquatic apes have a blue/grey skin tone similar to dolphins and other fully aquatic mammals.

Emblems all tend to be rainbow in colour and also act as a kind of totem. The emblems are also tattooed onto the Aquatic Apes when they come of age – Punku and Itsu do not yet have tats.

Punku and Itsu are genetically engineered half Land Ape (us/humans) and half Aquatic Ape though the genetics are far from straight forward!

The u at the end of names marks them as juvenile.