Tool Breeders (Descendants of the Swimmers)

A Breeder huntress on a garden reef. Living tools are an indispensable part of these beings' daily lives; she manages to breathe underwater through an oxygen-filtering crustacean fitted over her blowhole. She holds a mollusk-derived rifle that shoots out specially-modified fish teeth, and her companion is a brain-augmented fish that has been hardwired to return kills. Buildings made from calcified shells glitter in the background, ablaze with bioluminescence.

They used to be simple creatures, descendants of a battered people that had taken to the sea. Their remote sapiens ancestors would have given such beings no chance of a sentient comeback, for they thought that technological advances were impossible in the fluid medium of the oceans. But the Swimmers disproved such predictions by founding one of the most advanced and most outrageously alien cultures of the entire human lineage.

Fire, the cornerstone of industrial engineering, was almost impossible to sustain and use underwater. But the Breeders simply choose another path when complex toolmaking proved impracticable. They began to breed their tools and machines for them.

It had started long before the species was even intelligent. In the endless variety of life in the seas, the Swimmers always adopted and controlled the organisms that were useful in some way. Once domesticated, these creatures were willingly or unintentionally modified through artificial selection and conditioning. The process was slow, but once underway, its effects were formidable.

A modern city of the Breeders was a sight to behold. Huge, heart-like creatures pumped out nutritious fluids to a network of self-repairing, living conduits. This was their equivalent of a power grid, and it reached every single one of the Breeders' huge, exoskeletal dwellings; "powering" bioluminescent lights, flickering cephalopod skin-televisions, medicinal sea-squirts and countless other devices that had been bred from living creatures. The advances in biology had risen exponentially, until genetic engineering was completely mastered. Modern Breeders did not even need to use animals; a simple manipulation of cultured tissues and stem-cells could give solutions to any problem at hand.

The mastery of genetics had conquered many obstacles. The yawning ocean depths, as well as the Planet's few tiny landmasses were now firmly within the Breeders' grasp. However, they were not contempt with mere planetary dreams. New forms and bizarre creatures were still being developed, in daring attempts to conquer the one realm that was most hostile to life.

Sealed in their living ships, the Breeders wished to return to the stars.