#runaway to the stars
Tailed Spacers
Average adult height (bipedal): 120cm / 3.9ft
Average adult weight: 30kg / 66lb
Tailed spacers, aka tailers, are the oldest successful clade of GMH. They were engineered about 200 years ago as part of a corporate vanity project seeking to create the ‘ideal’ human worker for life in micro/low gravity environments and generation ships. The Martian hypercapitalist state that created them did not survive WW3. In modern RttS there are about 2 billion living tailers, many living in tight-knit communities onboard space stations. The largest ground-based community of tailers is on Luna, where they outnumber typ humans 20 to 1.
The primary pigment in their skin is selenomelanin, a reddish artificial pigment that’s effective at blocking most forms of low level cosmic radiation. It expresses much more uniformly over their body than melanin in a typ human, and can even be found lining their organs. Their skin tone ranges from red to purple-brown to dark purple depending on the amount of eumelanin and pheomelanin they have in addition to selenomelanin.
Much of their body has been altered for their intended microgravity lifestyle. Tailed spacers have a bi-quad bauplan, because moving through spaces in microgravity is usually done head first. Their thumbed feet and muscular prehensile tail allow them to form a stable tripod grip on surfaces, and their hyperflexible lumbar spine allows them a huge range of access for their arms and upper body while gripping to a surface. Their supraorbital, genal, and carpal whiskers give them greater spatial awareness in cramped quarters and detect airflow in spacecraft compartments. Their diminutive size means less fuel mass needed to push them through space, less food and water weight needed to sustain them, and less room needed on spacecraft to keep them sane.
Tailed spacers also have genes that prevent muscle and bone density loss and cranial pressure buildup from life in microgravity… but, modern gene therapy regimens have made it so that most typ humans, especially in space-dwellers, have these genes too.
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