If my memory on nomad/cardamine lore serves, it goes something like this:
Nomads are creatures akin to the very substance that is cardamine, a substance that is present on Planet Malta, where the Outcasts first settled. The Maltan air, ground, flora, and presumably fauna (if any) transmute the very fibres of the outcasts to the end that they are 'fused' with the Cardamine substance (hence the DNA change, addiction and what-not) and thereby more like the nomads themselves (explaining nomad pseudo-neutrality with the Outcasts). However, liquid Cardamine, is, to the best of my knowledge, not the form of cardamine that the Outcasts harvest/manufacture, but is actually a more pure form, derived in some unknown way by the nomads themselves.
If anyone else has a better or even conflicting explanation, I may well be wrong here, and haven't double-checked my facts, but I think I've got it about right...
Actually, some clarification would be nice if anyone knows.
"Chris Roberts - Original Freelancer Nomad faction lore document Wrote:What the Liberty scientists failed to grasp, however, was that the Daam-K'Vosh had eventually pushed their technology as far as it could go and had then turned their attention to mastering the far more subtle techniques of life itself. The Sirius Sector was a laboratory for the life they created, and many of the planets in the sector still bear the marks of tinkering by the Daam-K'Vosh. They played with genetic material as easily as we might move words around on the page, sometimes as much for their own abstract and alien amusement as for any tangible purpose.
One of these creations was the Slomon-K'Hara -- what would later erroneously be named "the Nomads" by human beings. The Nomads were specifically created with a high-degree of genetic adaptability. Possessing almost no fundamental genetic structure of their own, the Nomads were able to absorb and decode the genetic structure of other organisms; they were in effect living machines, crawling analysis tools that supervised the many different experiments of the Daam-K'Vosh. In some ways, the Daam-K'Vosh were surprised and even delighted by their creations (if such emotions can be applied to anything so alien), and gifted the Nomads with both increasingly sophisticated intelligence and a larger degree of autonomy.
But at some point the Daam-K'Vosh departed Sirius and the Nomads were suspended, frozen in time. Perhaps the Nomads attempted a rebellion against the Daam-K'Vosh, or perhaps the Daam-K'Vosh realized that the Nomads had matured to the point where they were ill-served by the meddling of their makers. Perhaps -- and in some ways, this seems the most likely explanation -- both events occurred.
The Daam-K'Vosh could not blame their children for desiring their independence: it was a natural if unexpected outgrowth of their origins. In engineering, it is called "exceeding the design specifications"; in life, it is called evolution. Whatever the case, the Nomads were placed into hibernation and the Daam-K'Vosh left the Sirius Sector -- but before they did, they created an incubator, a cradle in which their nascent successors could awake, grow, and learn, away from the shadow of their creators. The Sirius Sector was intended as an elaborate school for the Nomads, and the Daam-K'Vosh had left gifts scattered around it like toys -- the cardamine grass on Ishmael with its life-prolonging genetic code (and unexpected narcotic dependence when absorbed by human beings), the terraforming bacteria intended to open vast numbers of worlds to the Nomads, and at the center of the sector, Valhalla 1, a library from which the Nomads could receive the wisdom of their creators when they had grown advanced enough to unseal it. What humanity has never realized is that in colonizing the Sirius Sector they had stumbled onto the playpen of an alien lifeform with a dangerous combination of advanced intelligence and emotional immaturity.
It was our mistake to think that the Nomads came from elsewhere, when in fact, they had been there first. Our relentless expansion throughout the Sirius Sector disturbed the Nomads from their long sleep and they awoke early to find the Daam-K'Vosh gone, their worlds overrun, their birthright stolen. Rage coursed through the Nomads -- they had been abandoned, worse, they had been left to the mercy of these aliens -- and they wailed like petulant children screaming to hide their anguish. But the Nomads were not children in any human sense of the word: they were intelligent and devious. They had once waged war against the very beings that created them, and they had learned to bide their time.
Planet Ishmael was later renamed Malta. Liquid Cardamine likely represents the substance purified through the Nomad's ability to absorb genetic material.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
