Who remembers Starsiege? When it came out in 1999 it was my favorite computer game ever, and it still is. Which makes it even sadder that it got upstaged and replaced by Tribes, and even Starsiege 2845, the much-anticipated update, petered out and died with a whimper.

It’s a pity really, because Starsiege was an amazing game. It’s not just the big fighting robots you get to pilot, the meaty boomsticks they use to blast each other to dust, or even the hero brothers both voiced by Mark Hamill (although those are all significant factors…). One of the things that most captivated younger me was the bad guys. The rogue AI. The evil robots. The “cybernetic hybrids”, or Cybrids, who call themselves the NEXT and are also known by the racial slur of “glitch”.

What sets the Cybrids apart from the 4,955,381 other instances of rebelling murderous artificial intelligences? What makes them worthy of the title of monster? Let’s find out.

Images and quotations are either from Starsiege‘s manuals, in-game screenshots, or taken from the Starsiege Compendium, which is an awesome site and you must visit it. Copyright their respective creators.

For one thing there’s the combat vehicles, or warforms. Cybrid vehicles are organically grown and modeled with the intent to strike fear into the hearts of humans. And this isn’t just show, as Cybrids are equipped with radiation guns, arachnitron mines, railguns, nanite eaters, particle beams, and other engines of death.

The Adjudicator is one of the pinnacles of Cybrid warform technology. Its appearance was created through “focus-testing” on captive humans, and was designed to have as terrifying a silhouette as possible. Adjudicators are usually deployed for cleansing//purifying population centers.

Executioners, or “potato bugs” as humans have come to call them, are all business. I love the fins and articulations look Cybrid vehicles have going, and given advanced enough graphics tech we could have seen some really cool alien stuff. So in terms of vehicles alone Cybrids are pretty darn monstrous.

Like all good robots, the Cybrids were originally created with the best of intentions. The first Cybrid made, shown here, was Prometheus. IT was the first true artificial intelligence, and IT was tasked with creating more of ITS kind. This new generation of cybrids went on to fight the wars of humanity, up until Prometheus decided that IT could do a better job running the planet, and that humans were a blight that had to be eradicated. You can’t blame IT really. Then followed the Earthsieges and, eventually, the Starsiege, in a series of events that are far too detailed for me to describe here.

Instead, I’ll point out something about the subtleties of Cybrid communication.

Cybrid thought links concepts in a multilayered structure of ideas and “harmonics.” Hence, the term “human\\animals” communicates the primary identifier “human,” while “animals” provides a clarifying harmonic that further details the original concept. Action-oriented concepts or active principles receive a “dynamic” harmonic (represented here by //) whereas passive or object-oriented clusters receive a “grounded” harmonic (shown as \\).

Some terms – such as vehicle designations – contain both active and passive concepts and thus include both types of harmonic, but this use is unusual. names use the same conventions, adding a distinguishing sub-packet to designate a name (A name is represented by ). Cybrids also add an identifier packet when referring to themselves, e.g., or .

So, for instance:

Preliminary studies suggest that 85% of human\\animals will hesitate before offlining//injuring >>children<<.

One of Prometheus’ biggest discoveries was that the NEXT needed to have free will and intelligence of their own. It’s not very useful if your entire army can be destroyed just by blowing up one control center (more would-be conquerors should be aware of this). So instead each Cybrid is a full-blown personality, with thoughts and dreams and aspirations just like a human, kept in line by a Byzantine system of castes, hierarchies, and sects. And at the top of it all is Prometheus, holding sway via a cult of personality that sees IT worshipped as a living god.

Starsiege is chock-full of little news snippets and communications briefs – chatlogs, if you will – that give an idea of how the Cybrids (and humans, for that matter) think. This ScanX has virtually no effect on the game and can be easy to miss if you’re just in it for the big robots blowing each other up (which is loads of fun of course).

On the development of a bio-engineered nanite plague. Note the completely detached, clinical observations.

<INQUISITOR SECT>:

Observing//reporting. Nanophage infection of animal units in [location-designate:::
Vancouver] yields//shows promising results. However, rate of human flesh\\meat consumption\\necrosis fails to match//equal Dissector Sect estimates. Combat//tactical utility remains minimal.

<PROVOCATEUR SECT>:

Suggest//query. Decrease nanophage fatality schedule. Increase//lengthen dormacy phase. Expand vector via infiltrator Addendum = infect human\\animal remains and launch//accelerate carrier remains into animal-infested zones\\cities. Optimize broad-band killing efficiency.

<MACHINATOR SECT>:

>>Nanophage<< infiltration uses non-human\\animal vectors [ref. >>cats-dogs-rats-birds<< with superior\\acceptable efficiency. Non-human\\animals do not require conversion, merely infection and subsequent release\\targeting. Theses units successfully enter human habitats and evoke// receive >>sympathy<<.

In the human campaign, there’s a plot thread that was apparently dropped from the final game. ScanX notes read:

MELANIE:
This is Melanie. I’m the only one left, and I’m scared. Is there anybody out there? Please answer! I’m so scared…

PHOENIX:
Melanie? We can’t get a trace… Where are you?

MELANIE:
Here! I’m on Europa! Please help!

PHOENIX:
We’re on our way, sweetheart. Hang tight, ‘K?

And that’s it. You can play the human campaign and kick Prometheus’ iron posterior, but you never hear about Melanie again. Then you see the same exchange on the Cybrid ScanX.

MELANIE:
This is Melanie. I’m the only one left, and I’m scared. Is there anybody out there? Please answer! I’m so scared…

<MACHINATOR SECT>:
Melanie, honey, hold on! Help is on the way. Can you just give us a tracer signal so we know where to find you? Good girl …

<MACHINATOR SECT>:
This is <Shaper-of-Endocrines: Sixth>.

Initiating ‘Siren’ program. Concealed warforms standing by for human\\animal intervention. Human\\animals projected to find program difficult to resist …

<MELANIE>:
This is Melanie. I’m the only one left, and I’m scared. Is there anybody out there? Please answer! I’m so scared…

You have no idea how much this conversation freaked me out when I was littler.

The average Cybrid isn’t evil as much as pragmatic to a fault and utterly amoral. It’s less about “I want to kill people because I can, mwahaha” and more about “I wonder how long a human can survive in a vacuum if its lungs are filled with fluoroantimonic acid”.

<PROVOCATEUR SECT>:
Audio recordings of human\\animal subjects in custody\\experiments of Dissector Sect are now available\\ready for downloading to warforms. Recommend//suggest <units> broadcast//playback these noises at maximum volume when moving through animal warrens\\urban zones.

<MACHINATOR SECT>:
Use of individual live animals attached to chassis of warforms shows interesting\\promising results in disrupting human\\animal response time. Erratic performance\\tactics is noted in 42% of animal opponents who confronted//faced >>hostage<<-equipped warforms. Recommend variance of age and gender of >>human shields<< to determine optimal configuration.

And each Cybrid has its own personality and motivations. For instance, Eats-only-heads has a, er, head fetish and is fascinated with the feeling of “taste”.

Tyranny probably has a tumblr somewhere.

Corinthian-blue was a e s t h e t i c before it was cool.

And pLaGUe-DoG was rebooted multiple times. He’s… unique.

I could post Cybrid communications all day, but just a couple more before moving on. The <Machinator Sect> runs the Trojan Horse infiltration program. Their spies try to blend in with humans, and you can actually see them getting better at English over the course of the game. Early attempts at communication are a bit more awkward.

IMPERIAL NAVY (Mercury):
Stepanovna Base is still not responding. Solar interference in our sector has diminished to negligible levels. Mercury commlinks remain down. Raveler teams report GLORIA is down in Mercury sector. Admiral Hasegawa orders precautionary upgrade of SITREP to Amber Nine. Combat wings are now on standby alert. Resend status queries to Mercury.

<MACHINATOR SECT>:
Stepanovna base here… Negative … Colonel. <We>, ah,we have experienced… technical problems downside, acknowledge? have our … young men… out redacting … commlinks\\antennae… No worries for you, acknowledge? Everything’s moderately low temperature.

They can’t quite get idioms.

<MACHINATOR SECT>

Surrender or we make leather of you! We are kind of nice.

Surrender//submit, human\\\\creator\\\\worms! You will inevitably lose//fail//submit anyway. <We> have you by the short rabbits. Unless you submit//kowtow, we will be forced to tan your epidermis and reduce your offspring to carbonized slag chips. However, <we> are kindly to the disposed of and will treat you efficiently if you cave//roll over now.

What defeated the Cybrids? The human campaign has you killing Prometheus, but it’s strongly implied (and confirmed in the additional material) that it wasn’t just that that finished off the glitches.

Turns out that with free will came dissent. Some Cybrids, calling themselves Metagens, decided they didn’t believe in Prometheus’ doctrine of cleansing the Earth and taking it for their own. They weren’t human-friendly either – at best they respected humans as fellow killers, like we’d respect a tiger or a shark. Others thought humans and Earth were a waste of time, and Cybrids belonged in the stars. They sabotaged Cybrid efforts from within, leaked plans to human forces, and defected en masse when news of Prometheus’s death came through. In the end it was infighting that collapsed the Cybrid invasion.

That isn’t even the whole of it, and the story of Starsiege is not a happy one. The Chase outlines just how brutal the war was, what its lingering effects were, and other such depressing points. But that’s another story…

I had the opportunity to reread George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie (TPAC for short) and it wasn’t much fun. MacDonald was the precursor to Lewis and Tolkien, and his moralizing is ham-fisted and unsubtle. It’s a sequel to the superior The Princess and the Goblin, one which focuses on the miner boy Curdie. Our Hero is empowered by one of the vanishing few female mystical figures in Christian fantasy (she’s Gandalf or Aslan, if you will); specifically, she gives him the ability to assess souls by shaking hands. Good people have baby hands, bad people’s hands feel like animal paws.

You see where this is going. (*SPOILERS* I guess for the rest of the review) TPAC is drenched with praise for the divine right of kings to rule and disdain for the disgusting greed of the lower classes. Curdie visits a comically evil town where, apparently, people wake up in the morning every day and decide to be bad. He acts like a jerk, destroys the plot to kill the kindly old king, tortures some plebeians at length (so much that it gets uncomfortable) and eventually becomes king himself because – surprise surprise – he has royal blood in him and so is fit to rule. But then he and the princess die without offspring and the unrepentant sinners of the town mine deep enough that everything collapses. Everyone dies. The end!

I didn’t remember any of that. What I remember from reading it as a child was the monsters.

Ohhh, those monsters. Nobody’s quite sure where they come from. In The Princess and the Goblin they’re the descendants of “regular” animals bred by goblins for subterranean life. In TPAC they’re apparently people whose sinful lifestyle transformed them according to their nature, and they’re now making amends for it. I say apparently because it’s mentioned a few times but not really expounded upon. I loved them to bits at any rate and scribbled them all over my school notebooks at the time.

Let’s see what they are, shall we? The images I’ll be sharing here are by Charles Folkard, Helen Stratton, and Dorothy Lathrop, and will be credited accordingly. All quotes are from TPAC.

Our first and most notable is the one that accompanies Curdie throughout the book. Her name is Lina, and she is the one in the foreground of the image above by Helen Stratton. Her appearance is striking.

She had a very short body, and very long legs made like an elephant’s, so that in lying down she kneeled with both pairs. Her tail, which dragged on the floor behind her, was twice as long and quite as thick as her body. Her head was something between that of a polar bear and a snake. Her eyes were dark green, with a yellow light in them. Her under teeth came up like a fringe of icicles, only very white, outside of her upper lip. Her throat looked as if the hair had been plucked off. It showed a skin white and smooth.

Of course, Lina accompanies our hero, fights and protects him, and is generally a Good Dog. At the of TPAC she apparently dies happily by incinerating herself in a mass of burning magic roses. Yay?

I must admit that Dorothy Lathrop’s version of her (two images above) is adorable.

Lina then serves to marshal an army of monsters with which to torment the sinners of the town. Just some of them are shown below in Lathrop’s rendition.

…until at last, before they were out of the wood, she was followed by forty-nine of the most grotesquely ugly, the most extravagantly abnormal animals imagination can conceive. To describe them were a hopeless task. I knew a boy who used to make animals out of heather roots. Wherever he could find four legs, he was pretty sure to find a head and a tail. His beasts were a most comic menagerie, and right fruitful of laughter. But they were not so grotesque and extravagant as Lina and her followers.

Probably the most memorable of the monsters is the “legserpent”.

One of them, for instance, was like a boa constrictor walking on four little stumpy legs near its tail About the same distance from its head were two little wings, which it was for ever fluttering as if trying to fly with them. Curdie thought it fancied it did fly with them, when it was merely plodding on busily with its four little stumps. How it managed to keep up he could not think, till once when he missed it from the group: the same moment he caught sight of something at a distance plunging at an awful serpentine rate through the trees, and presently, from behind a huge ash, this same creature fell again into the group, quietly waddling along on its four stumps. Watching it after this, he saw that, when it was not able to keep up any longer, and they had all got a little space ahead, it shot into the wood away from the route, and made a great round, serpenting along in huge billows of motion, devouring the ground, undulating awfully, galloping as if it were all legs together, and its four stumps nowhere. In this mad fashion it shot ahead, and, a few minutes after, toddled in again amongst the rest, walking peacefully and somewhat painfully on its few fours.

Imagine Archeops’ desperately flapping wings stapled to a python, and you’re already halfway there.

The legserpent helps Curdie and friends cross a chasm (image above, Dorothy Lathrop), and participates in enacting grisly vengeance on the Lord Chamberlain…

Now his lordship had had a bedstead made for himself, sweetly fashioned of rods of silver gilt: upon it the legserpent found him asleep, and under it he crept. But out he came on the other side, and crept over it next, and again under it, and so over it, under it, over it, five or six times, every time leaving a coil of himself behind him, until he had softly folded all his length about the lord chamberlain and his bed. This done, he set up his head, looking down with curved neck right over his lordship’s, and began to hiss in his face. He woke in terror unspeakable, and would have started up; but the moment he moved, the legserpent drew his coils closer, and closer still, and drew and drew until the quaking traitor heard the joints of his beadstead grinding and gnarring. Presently he persuaded himself that it was only a horrid nightmare, and began to struggle with all his strength to throw it off. Thereupon the legserpent gave his hooked nose such a bite, that his teeth met through it—but it was hardly thicker than the bowl of a spoon; and then the vulture knew that he was in the grasp of his enemy the snake, and yielded. As soon as he was quiet the legserpent began to untwist and retwist, to uncoil and recoil himself, swinging and swaying, knotting and relaxing himself with strangest curves and convolutions, always, however, leaving at least one coil around his victim. At last he undid himself entirely, and crept from the bed. Then first the lord chamberlain discovered that his tormentor had bent and twisted the bedstead, legs and canopy and all, so about him, that he was shut in a silver cage out of which it was impossible for him to find a way. Once more, thinking his enemy was gone, he began to shout for help. But the instant he opened his mouth his keeper darted at him and bit him,and after three or four such essays, with like result, he lay still.

… and the priest on “Religion Day” (image below by Charles Folkard).

At this point of the discourse the head of the legserpent rose from the floor of the temple, towering above the pulpit, above the priest, then curving downwards, with open mouth slowly descended upon him. Horror froze the sermon-pump. He stared upwards aghast. The great teeth of the animal closed upon a mouthful of the sacred vestments, and slowly he lifted the preacher from the pulpit, like a handful of linen from a wash-tub, and, on his four solemn stumps, bore him out of the temple, dangling aloft from his jaws.

Then there’s a whole bunch of other absurdly adorable monstrosities which barely get time to shine. There’s a Scorpion the size of a giant crab, and a three-foot-long Centipede. The sharp-nosed “tapir” and “Clubhead” work in tandem to destroy a rock wall…

At the very first blow came a splash from the water beneath, but ere he could heave a third, a creature like a tapir, only that the grasping point of its proboscis was hard as the steel of Curdie’s hammer, pushed him gently aside, making room for another creature, with a head like a great club, which it began banging upon the floor with terrible force and noise. After about a minute of this battery, the tapir came up again, shoved Clubhead aside, and putting its own head into the hole began gnawing at the sides of it with the finger of its nose, in such a fashion that the fragments fell in a continuous gravelly shower into the water. In a few minutes the opening was large enough for the biggest creature amongst them to get through it.

The tapir puts its nose to gruesome use.

The tapir had the big footman in charge: the fellow stood stock-still, and let the beast come up to him, then put out his finger and playfully patted his nose. The tapir gave the nose a little twist, and the finger lay on the floor. Then indeed the footman ran, and did more than run, but nobody heeded his cries. […] The master of the horse Curdie gave in charge to the tapir. When the soldier saw him enter—for he was not yet asleep—he sprang from his bed, and flew at him with his sword. But the creature’s hide was invulnerable to his blows, and he pecked at his legs with his proboscis until he jumped into bed again, groaning, and covered himself up; after which the tapir contented himself with now and then paying a visit to his toes.

“Ballbody” is probably the silliest.

…he had neither legs nor head nor arms nor tail: he was just a round thing, about a foot in diameter, with a nose and mouth and eyes on one side of the ball. He had made his journey by rolling as swiftly as the fleetest of them could run. […] …he could do nothing at cleaning, for the more he rolled, the more he spread the dirt. Curdie was curious to know what he had been, and how he had come to be such as he was; but he could only conjecture that he was a gluttonous alderman whom nature had treated homœopathically.

And then there’s the giant spider, which inspired at least two pieces of art, first by Charles Folkard.

For the attorney-general, Curdie led to his door a huge spider, about two feet long in the body, which, having made an excellent supper, was full of webbing. The attorney-general had not gone to bed, but sat in a chair asleep before a great mirror. He had been trying the effect of a diamond star which he had that morning taken from the jewel-room. When he woke he fancied himself paralysed; every limb, every finger even, was motionless: coils and coils of broad spider-ribbon bandaged his members to his body, and all to the chair. In the glass he saw himself wound about, under and over and around, with slavery infinite. On a footstool a yard off sat the spider glaring at him.

And then by Helen Stratton. I cannot properly express how much I love the above image. You can just imagine the spider glaring crossly at the poor guy, all like òÒÓó

Well, that concludes our retrospective through MacDonald’s lovingly designed monstrosities. If TPAC had been only about their adventures it would probably have been far more fun.