The universe is a living organism – the Biocosm. For eons, enwombed within the viscid gel of amnion suits, lone travelers have ridden the great nerve impulses from star to star. This time of haphazard exploration ended when Ôb’s prophet wrote her miraculous book, and thus initiated a new age. For the first time the complex anatomy of the Biocosm and its evolving fractal intricacies were revealed.

“Ôb’s prophet’s tome’s translators took tendentious tilts for total truth – came they then clued to looming doom too. This why this way and usually worse riddle we: the crypto-glyphic art elaborately advanced in avoidance of info-slips. Perform we pose of a people into pointless puzzling lapsed; compose dense convoluted essays to confuse, lead astray, no other purpose. …But, to throw off the Ôbic habit and speak plain, even we ourselves are misled… 73, my age, when to the guardians I was called and into the stupendous truth initiated: the Ovoid is real, and, occluded within our conclave, its reality obscured by the mists of mythinformation, it is safe. I am the last on the scene – the only guardian left standing. How was it that my fellows managed not, against the intruder, to take up their secret weapons? What inspired mind has finally seen through centuries of careful concealment? A faint rasping chuckle from the prone form of elder guardian Certsl Ongte now tells me something… She herself was the thief’s enabler; she hid the weapons; showed him inside. Incredible! I search her eyes for explanation. With her dying breath, in the inscrutable spirit of Ôb, a single word forms on her cracked smiling lips – it is one of the prophet’s compound synergetic words – the one word that could be said to hold even more mysterious attraction for the imagination than the name of the Ovoid – The word that more than any other seems to encapsulate the very nature of our Biocosm – ‘chaosmos’…”

“Ôb… a misty, superstitious backwater infested by a degenerate race of post- civilizational primitives. The opposite of my home world – No gleaming skyscrapers; no bustling shopping complexes; not one damn place you could get a decent drink (not that I could back home either without being mobbed by a dozen eager fans)… So why was I here? I was on a quest to discover the truth about the legendary Ovoid! They said it was a myth, the fantastical figment of a fevered galactic imagination… I was here to prove them all wrong! Trouble was, I had no clue where to look. Every squalid, huddled hamlet was exactly as squalid and huddled as every other. No social hierarchy either – they were all equally anonymous and unimportant. I’d been fishing around here aimlessly for nearly two months (not a total loss – it had given me time to edit some thrilling footage from a previous exploit) when I suddenly stumbled into the best-kept secret in the Biocosm! I could tell that the old woman didn’t want me to enter her hovel – I saw panic in her bleary cow-eyes – she broke off from muttering mumbo-jumbo and started going all ‘No, sir, please to be buzzing off!’ in broken Guriwani. I turned my recording robot on. “Stand aside, crone!” I commanded as I thrust my way past her into the dark interior. Scrambling in after, she put herself defiantly between me and a small alcove lit by crypto-glyphic illuminations. I shot from the hip and floored her, stepped over her groaning woolly bulk and grabbed the round stone box displayed in the alcove. Without even stopping to look inside I bagged the trophy in my kibisis and, after dispatching a few more protesting savages, headed out, and up, toward a destiny of high renown.”

“The day I slashed the gullet of My Beast-Mother – from whose black dugs, as Cuckoo-Pup, I took My suck – that day My penetrating Will ransacked the House of True Overstanding. It is said that a whelp seizes his Cphovdom on that day. I swelled Big-Cphov after the slaughter, but greater was the Overstanding that I attained: I caught sight of the tactic by which Cphov may dare to conquer the stars! The hunting party, My Self and My Brothers-in-Contention, occupied the high ground and surveyed the plain below. I burned to prove, once and for all, My supreme lack of anti-loathing; I would defy their barbed tongues and show them that Atturnuk was no nurse’s boy. And soon My eyes plucked her from the crowd. Ah-ha reviled Mother! Your strange hairless son is returned! In the instant of the kill, at once I grasped the overarching Cosmic significance of this liminal ritual – the central and defining event of the Cphovic struggle. I Overstood: Cuckoo-Pup is to Beast-Mother as Cphovic-Race itself is to Biocosm. But also this: the Biocosm is twofold – both dumb dwindling antique, and imbecilic infant (I allude to the fabled Ovoid). Thus the tactic: If I can win through to catch and act as Monster-Surrogate to that budding baby, total domination of the resulting Universe and its chattel- inhabitants shall ultimately be Mine! I, Atturnuk! Eternally Cphov-Almighty! Thus, as My first great hunt concluded, My final great hunt commenced!”