Kloom

The Kloom are a race of intelligent airborne bacteria that were discovered on a massive gas giant of the same name by the Coalition of Intelligent Organisms around 2300 C.E. They are a nihilistic species that have gained a reputation for being uncaring and ruthless, though their extraordinary intelligence is believed to compensate for this.

Biology
Kloom, as a species, are aerobic bacteria, spending their lives suspended in the heavy gas clouds of their homeworld as opposed to bodies of liquid. They share many traits consistent with unicellular organisms throughout the galaxy, having very basic systems for consumption and locomotion. Kloom engulf pockets of gaseous organic compounds to feed themselves, and use specialized air bladders suspended throughout their cytoplasm to maintain buoyancy. By ejecting gas from these pockets, Kloom are also capable of limited movement through the atmosphere of their planet. Alone, they cannot see or sense noise to any significant degree.

The most profound ability of the Kloom, however, is that their exterior cell membranes can conduct electricity and shunt various chemicals when nearby other Kloom in a similar fashion to neurons in a brain. This is how the Kloom gained sentience. As larger and larger clouds of Kloom gather together, the electrical signals sent between the individual cells become stronger and more frequent, creating the equivalent of a single, unified consciousness. When the entity formed by the Kloom cloud gains sentience, it then gains complete control over every Kloom cell it is comprised of, manipulating them as parts of its body. A Kloom cloud only retains sentience as long as it stays above a certain size threshold. If a Kloom cloud is below this threshold, it does not have the necessary electrical capacity to generate sentience and remains inert. Inert bodies of Kloom that combine with larger, sentient bodies will be added as additional brain mass to the sentient Kloom, heightening their cognitive abilities. The intelligence of a Kloom is solely dependent on the number of Kloom that are interconnected in the cloud.

Once a sentient Kloom cloud forms, their control over all Kloom cells inside the cloud gives them numerous abilities. Kloom clouds can move through their dense atmosphere by coordinating the gas jets produced by their cells, and are also capable of adjusting their volume and shape by contracting or expanding the gaps between cells. They can communicate with other sentient Kloom clouds through exchanges of electrical signals and chemicals, which is not so much the Kloom equivalent of conversation as it is a temporary merging of two Kloom consciousnesses, which allow them to briefly sample the thoughts and emotions of each other without risking their cloud's integrity.

Being bacteria, Kloom cells reproduce asexually through binary fission, producing genetically identical offspring. Despite this, sentient Kloom clouds can control their size by using electroshocks to rapidly destroy any cells in their cloud that they wish. This can be used to destroy the cells of other Kloom clouds, too, allowing the Kloom to "fight" in a sense using their electrical output. If a Kloom cloud wishes to create a "child", they can sacrifice a portion of their current cloud to create a new, non-sentient cloud that will grow to eventually become a sentient cloud, as long as they are given enough nutrients to allow the Kloom cells inside to grow. Because this process causes the Kloom "parent" cloud to lose a portion of their own mass, many Kloom see this as a very intense and monumental occasion, as it means they will have to sacrifice a portion of their intelligence/memories in order to produce a "child". Likewise, Kloom reproduce very infrequently.

Thin Kloom clouds are mostly colorless, but they do have a pale red hue that is visible when they become dense enough. Electricity is the only thing Kloom can use to manipulate external objects, making it hard for them to communicate or interact with other lifeforms without the aid of special devices.

Homeworld
The planet Kloom is rather standard as gas giants go. From orbit, it has a orange/red coloring, and mostly made of lighter-than-air gaseous elements. The star system it resides in is only comprised of gas giants, orbiting a pair of white stars from a great distance. Kloom has numerous moons orbiting it, along with a thin, barely visible ring of dust. It is frequently showered with meteors and space debris, usually from the thicker belts of asteroids that orbit other gas giants near Kloom. Though much of its atmosphere is made of harsh currents and storms, there are small areas where the air is relatively calmer. It is these areas that the Kloom tend to propagate near.

Kloom's unique properties only emerge at lower depths in the planet's atmosphere. Due to the immense weight of the planet's atmosphere, temperatures are just high enough to support life at lower elevations. The presence of basic organic compounds, suspected to have been deposited by meteors, allowed rudimentary mircoorganisms like the Kloom to emerge. Because they remain in a gaseous form in the Kloom atmosphere, Kloom bacteria do not have to change elevation all that much to acquire nutrients. The thick gases above make the lower parts of Kloom's atmosphere very dark, especially on the night side of the planet. It's extreme distance from its star and large size mean a day on Kloom lasts an average of 65 Terran years.

After the Kloom were brought into Coalition society, their planet was ruthlessly mined for the precious Hydrogen and Helium resources it contained, much to the dismay of the Kloom themselves. It became a major source of these resources during the early years of the Coalition, and was mined so intensely over the course of their history its planetary diameter shrank slightly. After Dyson Spheres and atomic transmutation made Hydrogen and Helium easily accessible, mining operations on the planet ceased and it was eventually turned into a heritage world for the Kloom, allowing them to reform ancient Kloom communities and practice their rituals once again. Kloom that are allowed to live on the homeworld after this conversion are considered to be highly privileged, though they are still kept under careful supervision by the Coalition.

Psychology
Without the ability to manipulate hard matter, the Kloom were unable to develop any forms of technology on their homeworld. They understood the concept of solid matter, thanks to occasional meteor showers, but were unable to interact with it or study it further. It is likely the Kloom would have never been able to develop any form of space travel without the aid of the Coalition. Without the ability to build or progress, the Kloom were left with plenty of time to philosophize and ponder the universe. It is believed this prolonged period of critical thinking, combined with their self-damaging reproductive methods, is what gave the Kloom their cynical and uncaring nature that became renowned throughout the galaxy.

Prior to contact with the Coalition, Kloom society was a tightly controlled hierarchy in which the dominant members maintained their power through the only recognizable trait of a Kloom cloud: its size. The largest Kloom cloud in a certain area was always the leader, as it was always the most intelligent due to its size. The second largest clouds were always the direct children of the leader cloud, and the third largest the grandchildren. As a result, a single community of Kloom are all related as they all can trace their heritage back to the leader cloud. Kloom communities are usually small, however, as it takes a very long time for the leader cloud to regain the mass they lose when reproducing.

Because of their massive size, Kloom leader clouds can usually keep their subordinates under control by harming them with electric shocks or absorbing them completely. To be absorbed by another Kloom is considered to be a fate worse than death by most Kloom, though this is not always the case. Many Kloom communities conduct elaborate rituals to honor their leader clouds, in which case being absorbed by the leader cloud is seen as a respectable and brave undertaking. There are cases of rebellion in certain Kloom communities, as well, in which the smaller clouds attack the leader cloud by crowding around it and unleashing several electroshocks to rapidly reduce the size of the leader. One the leader has been damaged enough, the Kloom either respectfully bequeath the remaining mass to whichever cloud they believe should become leader, or they fight viciously over it. Whichever cloud manages to absorb and hold the remaining mass becomes the largest of the remaining clouds, and thus, the new leader.

When the Coalition encountered the Kloom, it took much longer than normal to officially incorporate them as part of society. This was mostly due to the difficulties the Kloom's highly specific communication system posited to xenolinguists. Before any official contact could begin, the Coalition "harvested" intelligent Kloom clouds and put them in specially designed tanks that could analyze the electrical signals produced by the creatures and piece together a basic language that allowed the Coalition to communicate. After communications were established, the Coalition found the Kloom were actually very intrigued by "hard-bodied" organisms, having never seen anything like them in the past. During their incorporation into Coalition society, Kloom culture underwent a massive shift as the Kloom learned to understand values other than their physical size and their importance in a larger society. Pressurized canisters with electrical sensors were integrated with the linguistic data collected on the Kloom, allowing Kloom to use their electrical impulses to produce synthesized speech as long as they were inside such a canister. These canisters, nicknamed "K-Tanks", were later on improved and upgraded into flexible, humanoid machines that allow the Kloom to move and communicate just like any other humanoid alien species using nothing but their electrical output. K-Tanks limit the total size of the Kloom cloud inside them, removing the previous role size played in Kloom culture.