The words ‘glitz’ and ‘filth’ are commonly used to refer to the fundamental base components of the Inrisus. These are two complementary forms of programmable matter: glitz is a wholly inorganic and ‘dry’ form of nanorobotic technology, whereas filth is an organic, water-based form of synthetic biology. Most Inrisus are primarily made of filth with a minor residue of glitz, but the caste known as Devas has a significantly larger fraction of glitz.

Overall, glitz and filth compensate each other, working together to create both the horrifically diverse bodies of the Inrisus beings and the sickeningly creative tools that they wield. Filth possesses the inherent flexibility, reproductive and regenerative properties of biological beings, but it has the same environmental requirements as terrestrial life: it will freeze and boil, and it needs oxygen and water. Glitz is free of these environmental restraints, able to function in the cold vacuum of space or under pressures and temperatures that would destroy conventional metals, while having a more limited repertoire of potential forms and requiring more energy and time to reproduce and regenerate.

Glitz

Purely-synthetic nanorobots are unknown in the public science of the Austral Unity, and their attempted invention is so regulated as to be effectively outlawed. All self-replicating entities in legal Unity technology (outside computer viruses) are GMOs, which can produce and maintain inert inorganic components, analogous to the bones and shells in natural lifeforms. Modified diatoms are the core workhorse of Unity bionanotech, and other forms of synthetic biology invented or discovered by the Unity still have a recognizable natural base: spiders, trees, crustaceans, extremophilic bacteria, etc.

But Inrisus glitz does not have any obvious ‘natural’ core. In comparison, all other synthetic replicators are minor variations of natural replicators, like dogs made from wolves. Glitz is a mass of microscopic robots that conduct chemical/electrical/mechanical/photonic processes unlike anything known in biology, natural or synthetic. To most Unity researchers this demands that glitz was invented by a super-human intelligence, or a process of artificial evolution so laborious it must have required trillions of simulated years. Even the artificial intelligence known as ‘Lord Fa’ is thought to be incapable of such engineering.

As impressive as its products are, glitz falls short of biological replicators in at least two essential ways.

Firstly, it cannot be made to reproduce without a very specific feedstock of elements delivered in a precise order. Without this feeding schedule reproduction will occur exponentially slower, or require exponentially greater amounts of energy to speed up, quickly becoming infeasible. This is apparently a computational limitation, suggesting that a glitz unit of n atoms only ‘knows’ how to copy itself in one specific order of the n! possible orders, and every other order of atomic bonding requires a re-calculation in the moment.

This bottleneck down a single assembly path might be an unavoidable limitation, or a deliberate handicap to prevent runaway consumption of external matter. A glitz mass that has been damaged can regenerate, but it does so by digesting its injured units and feeding the resulting mass to surviving units in the precise feeding schedule. This bottleneck/safety feature introduces a stupendous barrier to repair efficiency: if a damaged unit had only one atom out of place, but it wasn’t the last atom in the assembly sequence, the glitz would be forced to completely destroy that nearly-intact unit to create a new intact unit, as it only ‘knows’ how to replicate down that one path.

Obviously, the workaround is then to create structures that are very hard to damage, which glitz excels at. It also excels at making devices that break ‘in the right way’. Most attempts to destroy an object made of glitz will not damage the individual units; usually if the object does break the units will simply be disconnected from each other, and regeneration from this level of damage is frighteningly trivial.

The second limitation that glitz suffers from in contrast to biological replicators is its range of ‘organs’. An object built by glitz must conform to a ‘library’ of hypothetical designs, because the units of glitz are ‘stupid’ compared to living cells, just phenomenal at following orders. Additionally, each part needs to have an assembly path programmed in to avoid the bottlenecking that applies to individual glitz units (e.g. there must 100 thousand ways to make a lightbulb, or else the glitz will keep smashing near-done lightbulbs to finish lightbulbs in one particular way).

Since the Inrisus part/path library is so huge this issue is not practically relevant in most circumstances, but it is hoped by some Unity researchers to be a problem that could allow for a confounding strategy to be developed: in a sufficiently ‘noisy’ environment the parts will always jiggle in the wrong place according to the strictly programmed path and the glitz will keep re-starting assembly, never finishing. ‘Sufficiently noisy’ is hard to specify.

The library should also still have some ‘gaps’ despite its huge size, like missing intermediate sizes of hammers or wrenches, gaps that a non-modular biological assembler might not suffer from. The fact that glitz is never seen independent of filth suggests that there are some important gaps in its part library as well as circumstances of reduced efficiency in reproduction and part assembly that still require biological replicators as a partner to create the frightening whole of Inrisus nanobiology. In the presence of filth glitz will designate some parts or fabrication steps as more suitable for its organic, water-based counterpart once it becomes sufficiently ‘frustrated’. Symbiotically, glitz will work to maintain an internal environment that its more delicate counterpart can thrive in.

Filth

Like all synthetic replicators beside glitz, filth has a traceable natural origin, but it is not diatoms or bacteria or spiders or trees. Filth is memorably described by its earliest Unity researchers as ‘fucking cancer’.

Ordinary cancer cells can possess a horrible resistance to chemical and radiological attack and can even adapt to repeated cancer treatments. The tenacious resistance and adaptability of cancer cells has been extracted and installed into the functional ‘cells’ of Inrisus filth, making something that is at least as difficult to kill, reacting to damage in the distinctive metastasis of aggressive tumors, able to infest new organic matter at a whim and transmute it into more filth. The regeneration limits of glitz are unknown to filth; it would conceivably be within the power of the Inrisus to simply transmute all organic matter on a Scape into new filth from a single point of contamination, a purple and pink apocalypse that could be complete in about 27 thousand hours. Inrisus ‘boredom’ following such an event is the Known World’s only security against it.

Nevertheless, smaller outbreaks to convert landfills and sewage into new filth that can in turn solidify into new Inrisus bodies are routine to those who patrol the Known World’s edge. These ‘spurts’ can create a new Inrisus horde in a matter of hours, often outside the notice of potential victims, striking from uninhabited directions or up from the sewers. Slow infiltration would almost never ‘amuse’ the Inrisus sufficiently, though the Devas might be capable of a longer game.

There is essentially nothing in the biological world that filth can’t recreate, though often functionality will be heavily compromised by the Inrisus sense of ‘art’ or ‘fun’. Inrisus beings can quickly personalize their anatomy with extra limbs, eyes, mouths, claws, genitals, etc. When offering their coercive medicine the Inrisus Devas are able to introduce radical modifications to a patient’s anatomy beyond any other known medicine, correcting Down syndrome and autism and dementia as well as natural cancers that defeat Unity prosthetics or transplants. However, there is no comfortable way to be assured that the patient has not been contaminated or otherwise altered by the Inrisus beyond what is strictly necessary for treatment, making this immortality come at a potentially devastating price.

Inrisus beings are generally stronger than any other biological or robotic being of equivalent form, with an extreme power to weight ratio that is hard to explain. The purple coloration has been theorized to be caused by an abundance of modified mitochondria, and these ‘cancerous mitochondria’ might in fact be the fundamental replicating units of filth, but the ultimate power-source that sustains filth is very mysterious. A variety of energy harvesting options seems possible, from photosynthesis to thermoelectrics to simple eating, but Unity researchers are generally forced to watch recordings of filth in action: the material will reliably self-destruct to avoid sampling and study by non-Inrisus beings. This suggests that the filth has weaknesses could be exploited by groups with their own advanced synthetic biology; in contrast, glitz rarely self-destructs, and its reverse-engineering to find weaknesses is assuredly beyond Unity science.