The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

OKay, just throwing it out there...

What do you guys think that the Orz REALLY look like? How about where they come from... what does THAT look like?

Any interpretations (and art-based interpretations) are welcome!

They're four-dimensional. We can't possibly imagine what they look like because we see in only two dimensions. The Orz "fingers" are the best we can do, because those are the 3D projections of them.

Same goes for the Arilou.

I don't know if that's official, but it's my opinion.

I'm not sure that I agree with onpon's dimension counts, but I do agree that the TRUE form of the Orz is basically indescribable.  I'm sure their realm is equally unknowable.

As far as the Arilou go, is there any evidence that their origin is extra-dimensional?  They use Quasi-Space most heavily than any other race, but their homeworld looks to me like it's still in TrueSpace on the other end of the portal.  I'm inclined to think that the Arilou's true form is exactly what we see in the game, unless I've forgotten some pertinent bit of lore...

Not directly, but the Orz mention that both the Orz and Arilou are from the *outside*, the difference being exactly where *outside* they are. Another minor thing, the Arilou never describe their comrades as "dying"; they instead say that they are "discorporated", and when you first address them, they refer to their species very personally: "I am Arilou Lalee'lay", as opposed to "We are Arilou Lalee'lay".

Good point about the *outside* reference.  I had indeed forgotten that. =)

WIkipedia's article on four-dimensional space has an image that I try and apply to this scenario, but it's really kind of mind-boggling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:8-cell-simple.gif.

That's a tesseract. It's what you get when, in four-dimensional space, you connect two parallel cubes together with perpendicular lines. It's hard to imagine because it's impossible for that to happen in three-dimensional space, and we see in only two dimensions. That image is not an actual tesseract, but a "shadow", a projection of the tesseract into three-dimensional space. You could make a similar projection of a cube into two-dimensional space by drawing two squares, one inside the other, and connecting the corners of the squares. As you rotate the cube, the two-dimensional projection would twist and morph in much the same way as the three-dimensional tesseract projection.

I suspect that they don't look like anything since light isn't a thing that happens in their home.

Unless I'm mistaken, the Orz didn't know about the Arilou until they came into TrueSpace, meaning that their assertion that the Arilou are from *outside* can't be taken as an indication of the Arilou's true origins. As far as the Orz know, the Arilou come from QuasiSpace; but the Orz don't know whether the Arilou have always been in QuasiSpace.

The other two references don't seem important, especially "I am Arilou Lalee'lay"; how is that any different from saying "I am Spathi" or "I am human"? It just means the speaker is a member of the named race.

The use of the term "discorporated" probably is significant, but it doesn't seem to be to be sufficient to imply anything about the Arilou's origins.

I'm still more inclined to think that the Arilou evolved in TrueSpace and moved to QuasiSpace, rather than being extradimensional beings. I do wonder how old they are as a race, though. Could they be older than the Precursors?

NO, definately not older than or even as old as precursor.  But way older than US, because in the game they say "we knew the first human."  They've been tinkering with our genes since the beginning, they may have even created us!  But I think they've been where the Orz came from for a long time, in fact they might have even been tinkering with our genes to protect us from the Orz or others like them.  At least they say something to that effect in the game.

I always thought that the Arilou might be us from the future. Perhaps something went wrong and they came back to fix it, studying us and fixing us so whatever went wrong never happened. Then, when we were tucked away behind the slave shield  (something which never happened in the previous timeline) they no long needed to tinker with us and as such they got on with other things, being unable to return to the future (as that future had gone completely).

It's just a theory, but I think it works well enough.

I actually thought of something sorta similar to what chenjesuwizard said as well, though I think it might be stretching it just a little... they're humanoid, but rather different from humans.

I don't think they've ever been where the Orz came from. The Orz are from *below*; the Arilou are from *above*. That doesn't suggest they're from the same place. I don't think they created humans either, though it seems to be true that they were tinkering with human genes to protect them from creatures like the Orz.

I thought that it was just a future form of humans, after thousands of years of evolution. I maybe an original attempt to tamper with their own genes went wrong.

Perhaps they, in the future, were attacked by something like the Orz. They attempted to alter there *smell* in their genes, they were already detected by the Orz. So, in a last ditch attempt to save themselves, they went back in time, to their ancestors, in an attempt to save them by altering their genes from the start.

When the Orz did... whatever they did, to the Androsynth, they transformed their race into an unrecognizable form, and displaced them through space, time, and dimensions... turning them into the Arilou.

Blew your mind, didn't I?

Precursors were at their height 250k years ago. Unless their definition for 'first human' is very different from ours, we were around back then.

Note, the 'distant past' timescales in the Star Control 'verse seem awfully short. I'd expect hundreds of millions of years if not a few billion (more than a few billion and there would be a lot less supernova remnant around to form life out of)

The wikipedia article for Homo sapiens sapiens lists them as emerging about 200k years ago, so it isnt far off.