Root Beckon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Classification | |
|---|---|
| Type | Beckon |
| Structure | Nexus |
| Class | Nexus |
| Characteristics | |
| Height | 80–150 m |
| Body temperature | Self-regulating (warm-blooded) |
| Trunk | Hollow, pressurised with sulfur hexafluoride |
A Root Beckon is a species of Beckon that commands an entire genome. It is the largest of the Beckons common on Earth, standing 80 to 150 metres tall, and carries an ingrown Dispatcher through which it signals across its genome's range. In the parasites' chain of command, the Beckons of a genome answer to its Root Beckon, and Root Beckons answer to the Supreme Beckons.
Description
The Root Beckon is a distinct species from the Primitive, Adapted and Supreme Beckons, and does not develop from them. It is built on the plan of the Adapted Beckon at a larger scale: a flexible spine braced by sealed cells of sulfur hexafluoride, wrapped in fibre and coated in near-black tissue and membrane gel. Its gas cells are up to about a metre across, and the trunk of a large specimen holds tens of tonnes of the gas. Its bulb is 10 to 20 metres across.
Its root mat extends for about a kilometre around the trunk and joins the mats of the Beckons and Dispatchers around it.
Like every Beckon, it is warm-blooded and stationary, and its bulb is its most vulnerable part.
Only one Beckon on Earth has been recorded larger than the largest Root Beckons: the proto-Supreme Beckon destroyed beneath Hiroshima in 2025.
Ingrown Dispatcher
A Root Beckon carries a Dispatcher grown into its own body: the flower and its feed horns emerge from the upper trunk below the bulb, and the Dispatcher's tissue is joined to the Beckon's nerve cord. Through it the Root Beckon sends and receives signals across its genome's range without relying on separate Dispatchers. The flower is the most reliable feature for telling a Root Beckon from a large Adapted Beckon at a distance.
Role
A Root Beckon directs the Beckons of its genome, and relays commands between them and the Supreme Beckon of its lineage.
The Apex organisms of a genome, the most expensive organisms the parasites produce, can only be made with a Root Beckon. Each genome has a single Apex species.
A genome continues after its Root Beckon dies. Its organisms remain and go on reproducing, but the genome stops adapting and developing.
In the defining genome of each lineage, the Supreme Beckon or Vagrant at its head takes the place of the Root Beckon. The Alclidic genome, the defining genome of the Iris lineage, has no Root Beckon of its own on Earth, and its organisms in Australia answer to the Iris.