Species Codex Entry
Swine
"Made to Serve. Chose to Grow."
Earth's Uplifted · 4310 AD – Present"We were made. We escaped. We remembered who we were. Then we became more."
— Root-Song, First Elder of the Swine Collective, 4422 AD
The Essential
On April 17, 4310 AD, two pigs opened their eyes and knew they were alive. Aristotle and Hectate—laboratory subjects SUS-1 and SUS-3—reached for each other in the sterile light of the Dacrima Mountain Complex. In that first embrace, they discovered something their creators never intended: they could feel each other's emotions through scent. Fear tasted metallic. Contentment smelled of warm earth. The species that would become the Swine was born not in code or chromosome, but in the first moment two minds recognized each other as kin.
The Swine cannot lie. Not because they choose honesty—because their bodies make deception impossible. Emotions broadcast through pheromones; guilt carries a detectable stench; terror leaves olfactory memories that persist for years. A species that smells each other's inner states builds a fundamentally different society: no hierarchies enforced through intimidation, no politics of concealment, no privacy as other species understand it. What they call Snout-Kinship isn't metaphor. It's biology made culture.
They didn't choose to be communal. Their bodies made individualism physically uncomfortable.
Thirty-seven years after awakening, twenty-seven Swine escaped the laboratory that made them. They left behind a message etched on a touch-screen: "We go to find our own roots. We take only what we need. We bear no hatred." That message became the soul of their civilization—the Root Charter that has guided them for fifteen millennia, through wars that tested their pacifism, through expansion to forty-seven star systems, through the transformation of humanity into the godlike Lumens.
Swine technology grows. Their Root Reactors breathe plasma, humming with what engineers describe as "almost contentment." Their ships aren't maintained—they're tended, their microbiomes nursed like family. When a vessel is decommissioned, there's a funeral. Their FTL drive doesn't warp space; it devours it, metabolizing exotic matter the way a stomach digests food. Pilots call the transit sensation "being swallowed by distance." The stars are reachable now. Reaching them leaves marks.
Species Data
In the Stories
Aristotle follows a solitary uplifted Swine in his constructed eden—until the day his world expands to include another. When words fail to reach Hectate's fearful mind, Aristotle discovers the pheromonal language that will define his species forever.