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Description
By popular demand, here's a supplement to my "All Other Tomorrows " post, this time presenting a possible alternative fate for the long-suffering Mantelopes. Hope you enjoy.

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Processors (Descendants of the Mantelopes)

After the Qu left, a marginal group of Spacers dared to explore one of their abandoned star systems. There they found a horribly twisted world populated by the insectoids' morbid creations, of which one species seemed to retain some semblance of sentience. Those were the Mantelopes. And their existence was miserable.
Having bred them for the purpose of recording information, the Qu made Mantelopes extremely curious, eager to fit as much knowledge into their brains as humanly possible. The species retained this need after the Qu left, but, stuck in a far simpler environment than intended by their creators, were tormented by intense mental hunger, understandable only to the species designed for mental labour. The only way they could partially sate it, was by retelling the old stuff - so they endlessly passed on strigs of genetic code, entries from old trade reports, strange lyrics of chirping Qu songs - anything they remembered - from generation to generation. As the stories began to lose details over millenia, depressing philosophical and religious commentary started being added, expressing the race's shared frustration, sometimes even describing the Qu reign as the Golden Age, "the times of brain-satiety".
Being a species from a completely different background, Spacers didn't really empathize with them. But Mantelopes' excessively detailed folklore, preserved by the race's desperate need to remember something, caught their attention - it could come in really handy in researching the Qu legacy... and technology.
Not out of pity, but of practical benefit, Spacers intervened. They began to trade with Mantelope herds, offering protection from predators and elements in exchange for stories about the Qu and their machines. They became the planet's gods, residing in heavens and patronizing their "chosen peoples" via remotely controlled robot guards, in return collecting tribute of detailed accounts of this world's past. The planet became dotted with shrines built by the machines, where herds of Mantelopes entered to tell tales and sing songs about the times long gone. The most intellectual and curious ones were granted the opportunity to stay to become their gods' servants, helping to reconstruct the past from other herds' stories and decipher the principles behind some of the Qu technologies. This worked - the hints from the race's detailed tales helped to fill a lot of gaps in the data, sometimes salvaging entire research topics cornered by the lack of preserved material evidence, and accelerated reverse engineering of many useful artifacts.
In the process the "gods" quickly noticed how well the natives memorized every bit of trivia they told them. This made it clear that it was their inhumanly capacious brains, not some shared genetic memory, that were responsible for such unnaturally preserved folklore. Some exceling individuals were invited aboard the space ark to test the race's capacity for memory retaining, exceeding their gods' every expectation. So, when the well of ancient Mantelope knowledge finally started to empty out, Spacers quickly found a new role for the race, the one that it has been created for and made to crave like any other biological need - recording and storing information.
What started as a simple "trading agreement", gradually became a tight symbiosis. The memory shrines grew in population and turned into giant automated cities, where millions of Mantelopes worked as regenerating bug-prone computers, recording and storing every contract or scientific article that their orbital partners deemed important, in return being nursed by machines 24/7. The planet's star system became the prime information hub and the unofficial capital of the Spacer Empire, and communities of Mantelopes spred all across the Galaxy aboard their masters' asteroid arks.
After tens of millions of years of such close cohabitation, the species fully adapted to their role in the symbiosis. Their brains expanded drastically, in some breeds taking up more than two thirds of the body weight, while their bodies, no longer necessary in a wholly artificial environment, atrophied, becoming immobile and fusing with their life supporting cradles (much like female Puppeteers ). Their world, by then a full-blown Ecumenopolis, accomodated trillions of such sessile citizens, each spending their life rooted to a small yet fully equipped pod room, with their minds lost in the expanses of both species' joint info-sphere. Large sections of the interstellar asteroid arks were made into sprawling networks of honeycomb-like nests housing even bigger-brained breed, modified for the 0g environment and catered to by their former gods themselves. Finally, the whole race was connected to a "telepathic" network via neural technology, becoming essentially a biological supercomputer capable of performing the craziest calculations, storing exabytes of information, and even simulating Matrix-like dream worlds for Asteromorphs to connect to.
These biological thinking machines, no longer resembling a man or an antelope, came to be known as Processors.
And with their symbiotes, they absolutely dominated the Galaxy.

Depicted is a space ark Processor being carried from one information storage facility to another by two alternate Asteromorphs. With such powerful mental machines to rely on, the individual Asteromorphs' brains are not as big and complex in this timeline, but their civilization, contrarily, is much more advanced. Other differences in their anatomy, such as extant toes and more hair, are due to the butterfly effect.

Description
By popular demand, here's a supplement to my "All Other Tomorrows " post, this time presenting a possible alternative fate for the long-suffering Mantelopes. Hope you enjoy.

---

Processors (Descendants of the Mantelopes)

After the Qu left, a marginal group of Spacers dared to explore one of their abandoned star systems. There they found a horribly twisted world populated by the insectoids' morbid creations, of which one species seemed to retain some semblance of sentience. Those were the Mantelopes. And their existence was miserable.
Having bred them for the purpose of recording information, the Qu made Mantelopes extremely curious, eager to fit as much knowledge into their brains as humanly possible. The species retained this need after the Qu left, but, stuck in a far simpler environment than intended by their creators, were tormented by intense mental hunger, understandable only to the species designed for mental labour. The only way they could partially sate it, was by retelling the old stuff - so they endlessly passed on strigs of genetic code, entries from old trade reports, strange lyrics of chirping Qu songs - anything they remembered - from generation to generation. As the stories began to lose details over millenia, depressing philosophical and religious commentary started being added, expressing the race's shared frustration, sometimes even describing the Qu reign as the Golden Age, "the times of brain-satiety".
Being a species from a completely different background, Spacers didn't really empathize with them. But Mantelopes' excessively detailed folklore, preserved by the race's desperate need to remember something, caught their attention - it could come in really handy in researching the Qu legacy... and technology.
Not out of pity, but of practical benefit, Spacers intervened. They began to trade with Mantelope herds, offering protection from predators and elements in exchange for stories about the Qu and their machines. They became the planet's gods, residing in heavens and patronizing their "chosen peoples" via remotely controlled robot guards, in return collecting tribute of detailed accounts of this world's past. The planet became dotted with shrines built by the machines, where herds of Mantelopes entered to tell tales and sing songs about the times long gone. The most intellectual and curious ones were granted the opportunity to stay to become their gods' servants, helping to reconstruct the past from other herds' stories and decipher the principles behind some of the Qu technologies. This worked - the hints from the race's detailed tales helped to fill a lot of gaps in the data, sometimes salvaging entire research topics cornered by the lack of preserved material evidence, and accelerated reverse engineering of many useful artifacts.
In the process the "gods" quickly noticed how well the natives memorized every bit of trivia they told them. This made it clear that it was their inhumanly capacious brains, not some shared genetic memory, that were responsible for such unnaturally preserved folklore. Some exceling individuals were invited aboard the space ark to test the race's capacity for memory retaining, exceeding their gods' every expectation. So, when the well of ancient Mantelope knowledge finally started to empty out, Spacers quickly found a new role for the race, the one that it has been created for and made to crave like any other biological need - recording and storing information.
What started as a simple "trading agreement", gradually became a tight symbiosis. The memory shrines grew in population and turned into giant automated cities, where millions of Mantelopes worked as regenerating bug-prone computers, recording and storing every contract or scientific article that their orbital partners deemed important, in return being nursed by machines 24/7. The planet's star system became the prime information hub and the unofficial capital of the Spacer Empire, and communities of Mantelopes spred all across the Galaxy aboard their masters' asteroid arks.
After tens of millions of years of such close cohabitation, the species fully adapted to their role in the symbiosis. Their brains expanded drastically, in some breeds taking up more than two thirds of the body weight, while their bodies, no longer necessary in a wholly artificial environment, atrophied, becoming immobile and fusing with their life supporting cradles (much like female Puppeteers ). Their world, by then a full-blown Ecumenopolis, accomodated trillions of such sessile citizens, each spending their life rooted to a small yet fully equipped pod room, with their minds lost in the expanses of both species' joint info-sphere. Large sections of the interstellar asteroid arks were made into sprawling networks of honeycomb-like nests housing even bigger-brained breed, modified for the 0g environment and catered to by their former gods themselves. Finally, the whole race was connected to a "telepathic" network via neural technology, becoming essentially a biological supercomputer capable of performing the craziest calculations, storing exabytes of information, and even simulating Matrix-like dream worlds for Asteromorphs to connect to.
These biological thinking machines, no longer resembling a man or an antelope, came to be known as Processors.
And with their symbiotes, they absolutely dominated the Galaxy.

Depicted is a space ark Processor being carried from one information storage facility to another by two alternate Asteromorphs. With such powerful mental machines to rely on, the individual Asteromorphs' brains are not as big and complex in this timeline, but their civilization, contrarily, is much more advanced. Other differences in their anatomy, such as extant toes and more hair, are due to the butterfly effect.