The Pronna are hard for humans to relate to because they are such a different form of life. They are one of the most common technological forms of life in the galaxy, and actually one of the easiest for a human to relate to. Unlike a cryotron, humans and Pronna individuals can interact with each other on a physical level.
Genetically, each object that looks to a human to be 'a Pronna' is four individuals. The eyes are each actually separate creatures, and each half is actually a separate creature, attached at the fin. One half is the child of the other, by the half that used to be there, making them totally inbred if they didn't exchange genes technologically.
The Pronna concept of individual is not quite the same as it is to a human. In a certain sense, what we would identify as one Pronna body contains two compound individuals. In another sense, all members of the species in a Pronna world can become a more unified whole than a single scatterbrained human. Their interpersonal communication has ten thousand times the bandwidth that humans have, their neurons conduct impulses at .998c. Those individuals interested in participating in the 'mind' of the entire world do so as they wish.
Their genetic, molecular and nanotechnical science allows them to go far beyond what conventional species think of as biology. Their science allows them to grow electromagnetically controlled titanium muscle rods in their fins. Their senses run at quantum levels, their muscles flex with kilovolts. Their four arms are thin as those of spiders but have the strength of machines, being mainly a titanium/tungsten alloy with a tough leather coating. Its skin has the texture of fine leather but is incredibly tough. The skin is also an antenna that can feel the shape of the 10-200Mhz wavefront that it 'sees' in all directions. It is also the organ that transmits the shaped waves of its 'language'. A Pronna brain is a quantum processor running at the atomic level with hundred-way redundancy.
The rays of its seven foot fin extend in a complete circle over the poles of its egg-shaped, forty two inch long body. Its narrow pole grows the most and largest rays in the fin, that whole point is the main swimming muscle. Each has what we might call a male side and a female side, or we might call a mature side and a childish side. We might call it a ying side and a yang side, but over the billion years the Pronna have known literature, much more than we can comprehend has been written about the two eyes and two bodies that make a Pronna whole.
The eye of a Pronna is complex. It has billions of receptor cells, each with hundreds of frequencies. It can pan in spectrum as well as focus and zoom. Pronna eyes have their own previsual processing ganglions and their own genome. The eye is very large, nearly a foot in diameter, if there are photons, it will find them. Each swivels independently in all directions and is housed in a solid clear shield that would damn near repel a bullet. The surface of the eye changes in clarity to admit more or less light, to admit less, it becomes more mirror, so in sunlight it looks like a polished sphere.
The eye is a separate creature, maybe not as advanced as the body. They cannot run simulated universes in their minds and they do not have the ability to run multiple personalties at a time. They do have their own culture and folklore. It is legend that the eye and the body were once the same species, but some became seers and some became doers.
Both the eye and the body reproduce the same way. They are hermaphrodites that impregnate their descendent or parent when they separate, and are impregnated by their child or parent in return. The child eye will grow in the child body, which will grow an armored transparent lens around it. The parent eye will maintain a nerve fiber and blood vessel to its child thruout their life together, just like the body will. These connections become symmetric when the child side reaches adulthood.
Pronna get their nourishment in the form of nectar that is secreted by plants that grow in the sunpassages of the Pronna worlds. The genetics of the plants that grow it have been under Pronna control since long before multicellular life evolved on Earth. Unlike cryotronic life, Pronna do require nourishment. The nectar vines have been engineered to produce perfect nourishment for so many millions of years that it is taken completely for granted. Pronna do interact with the plants, adjusting the flavors from time to time or adjusting the molecular content to suit that particular body.
Most Pronna agree that if they ever started as a life form it was in gravity because there is no known natural system that can produce a zero-g liquid-water environment in air. So it was a given that Pronna were technological before they assumed their present form. There was also the fact that no known natural genetic system used eight nucleotides with error correction and only one in forty used six.
To be fair, most consider the chance that the Pronna had never started as a life-form. Most of the thinking in the galaxy is actually done in superconducting cryotronics out in the ice chunks between the stars and in the galactic halo. It is generally believed that the beings out there have not evolved spontaneously but originated as logic devices invented by protoplasmic or kayoplasmic natural life in the distant past. They could have created Pronna as a means of better utilizing the energy of stars. This is not a common theory, but it has not been disproved, there was just too much time in the way to make any meaningful analysis.
That theory aside, the Pronna considered themselves biological but godlike because they had made themselves what they are. They often address other species as if the world is a single individual because in many cases, all individuals in a Pronna world who are interested can participate in the conversation as part of the mind having it. When Pronna encounter a life form with inter-individual communication bandwidth like their own, such as a Rikavik, they have to act more as individuals, but not when addressing humans or kedas.
The Pronna, like all technical species, know what the laws of physics are. No species is considered an 'emerged' technical species until they have worked that out. It pretty much takes that and lots of laborious engineering to get from one star to another. Emerging technical species sometimes try to do it with brute force but multistellar civilization isn't practical without singularity engineering and particle-pair messaging.
Pronna actually state time as time quanta since the instant of the big bang but in any tales they appear in, we will translate into Earth dates in spite of the number of digits required. It really isn't possible to translate anything more than the broad outline of what would be conversation and dialog between humans.
Their nanoprobes are atomic nuclei made up of paired particles who's anti-particle is in a read-out trap kept by an interested researcher in a laboratory in the Pronna world using them. All of the devices used in this research are up on the outside of the collapsed metal cages that hold the neutronium rings, so they don't add to the mass in the interior, and they have access to the objects to be studied. The accelerators where the probes are launched usually circle a ring-cage, which is the assembly holding a neutronium ring and the coils to spin it. The relativistic gating is mounted to the collapsed metal pylons of the cage where the accelerator ring crosses the pylon.
The traps are located among the roots of the surface trees. With them every signal impinging on those atomic nuclei as they make their way thru space, atmosphere, water and a few miles of rock, can be recorded. They can read out the chemical composition of everything they pass thru, all its quantum states, the electromagnetic waves they pass thru, the density, the magnetic alignment, even the amount and distribution of charge.
There are mechanisms we'll call 'digesters' that maintain the water and carbon cycles in their worlds. The air is sucked to them to be filtered, wastes come here to be purified. The recycled carbon is fed back into the food chain, the water is given off thru the piping that laces the whole thing together. The digesters and their piping provide the framework that all the life inhabits. Everything else is grown.
On well maintained worlds, all the digesters are working and a controlled environment is maintained thruout the entire world. Not all Pronna worlds have been as well maintained as they should, and even some of the oldest and grandest Pronna worlds have impenetrable 'dead zones.' Those zones are far from dead, but it is certainly true that the environment is not up to code. Suns cannot get thru for miles and oxygen is depleted, poisonous gasses build up and forms of life the Pronna really didn't want in their worlds can take hold and spread infection to other areas.
The 'suns' in the Pronna worlds are some of their most advanced science and the Pronna are most secretive of their method of operation. Nevertheless it is a simple enough device to deduce. It is a simple heat dump across a wormhole connection. The inside surface of the sun is exposed to the cold of space, any remote location will do and most Pronna worlds park their suns in shady dense concentrations of dark matter well away from the heat of stars, most of them are beyond cryotronic races. There is a simple heat trap across this gradient that generates power for the luminescent coating of the sun in a relatively direct heat to light reaction. The suns are about an eighth of an inch in total thickness, except for the locating coils that move them thru the passages that are located on their inner surface, the one exposed to the cold of space. Thus the maneuvering coils are superconducting.
The real science is in building the ball singularity that houses it. That is the only part of the Pronna sun that isn't in the repertoire of most technical species, and all that is known is that the device is on the superconducting side. It is known that the superconducting sides of the suns are armed, primarily to defend them against the cryotronics. Many continue to recede into the dark at .667c so the back sides of some suns are halfway to Andromeda by now.
The 'work' of a Pronna world is done by the neutronium rings and the gravity waves they produce. Neutronium is solid neutrons and has incredible mass. It can be drawn into rings using the magnetic confinement produced by immense currents inducted by the confinement coils and the centrifugal force built up by the relativistic speed of their rotation. This angular momentum and the stored current, is the energy 'supply' of a Pronna world. These rings are synchronized to produce gravity waves that focus to form the ring singularities that are projected by a Pronna world at the speed of light when it wishes to move to a new location. Other gravity waves are used to move the world itself thru the hole once it is woven.
The neutronium rings must be precisely controlled, and only a quantum processor is able to keep up with it. There is a Pronna on duty at each ring at all times who must concentrate at least a third of its brain on it at some times to keep it stable. Every Pronna has a connection on their straw that can interface with a neutronium ring.
Most artifacts are grown biologically. For instance, if they needed to supply an agent among Earth's humans with a supply of money, the bills would be grown on one of the plants that line the sunpaths on a Pronna world. Because currency is intricate, it might take several pronna-hours to generate the genetic programming for them. The final compile would be done by the individual with the injector, a nanotube in the straw that just fits the nucleic-acid strand that is being injected. This injector is an organ that certain Pronna individuals have manifested. It is used to inject the compiled nucleic acid sequence into a stem cell that would produce a new leaf, but in the shape, size and texture of a piece of local currency. They have to allow over a day for each resulting leaf to grow.
For emergency use the Pronna worlds do have fabricators at each Neutronium Cage. On most Pronna worlds they are all maintained and in working condition. A few test them regularly also. On some Pronna worlds it might happen that no fabricator actually worked when called on because it has been a million years since there was an emergency need to fabricate something.
The steelsnakes used by Pronna in the brush of their worlds are actually worms, they have DNA and life cycles. They do actually secrete metal shells, and they have no external sense organs other than what we have to call 'radio control' to translate properly into English. They are, of course, an engineered species, but have been evolving for 1.17 billion years.
The Pronna are perfectly aware of the economies of simulated life, as most believe the cryotronic devices of deep space to be. Pronna often retreat into simulated universes, but the laws of physics prove there is no better processor than the one in the Pronna brain on which to run those simulated universes, at least in this pressure and temperature realm. If the laws of physics of this universe, the base universe in the Pronna mind, allowed a better processor, they would adapt. Pronna had not used any separate processor hardware since Detector and Doer began their separate evolutions.
Because of that, Pronna run all their virtual universes in their head. As a matter of course, most Pronna keep a few different ones running different laws of physics, to play in as they wish, in their head. Their communication is such that their virtual worlds are able to interact as agreed on by 'who's playing' in each virtual universe, so that souls running in a virtual universe can interact with souls running in a different Pronna individual. The Pronna brain is capable of running billions of simulated souls within those universes, the Pronna soul is actually recursive, but these souls only 'run' as the Pronna who owns their universe thinks of them. If the next level 'in' of simulated souls was counted, the population of a typical Pronna world has fifteen digits. Note well that every simulated Pronna soul is fully convinced that it is running at base level and that its laws of physics are the real ones. Also note well that it is impossible to prove that the universe that includes humans is actually running at base level.
Only thirteen or fourteen thousand Pronna worlds have any wild humans in them at all. The humans of Earth did not know it, but it wasn't until 1951 that the number of feral humans infecting Pronna worlds surpassed that remaining on Earth. At that time the humans on Earth represented about 5% of the galaxy's known human population. Some Pronna worlds have millions of them, but only Mon has over twenty million of them. Most worlds have their humans under control, they occupy their ecological niche and no other. Their population could be controlled by selective sterilization of the least cooperative individuals. In civilized worlds humans answer a translator and try to make some kind of sense, at least on their level. But there were some Pronna worlds where the air reeked with human waste and they are rude in venturing into the right of way.
Even so, most humans in most Pronna worlds are pets, but because there are more than a billion Pronna worlds with a dozen to several thousand Pronna individuals keeping humans as pets, that will probably always be the largest percentage of the galaxy's humans. They can be trained to do things like decorating or cleaning. They are usually confined with neural fields if not being watched but they do get away now and then. On most worlds they are found by their implants and homes are found for them. That is, unless a male and female happened to meet each other before they were caught, the usual outcome in that case is the world will begin to have a feral human population sneaking around the digester tubes. That has already happened on hundreds of Pronna worlds.
Some Pronna worlds have biologically exterminated them, but that wipes out all pets also, so most refuse. Strict procedures are now in place to prevent humans from reaching any more Pronna worlds, but every few years another shows up. All in all, it has been the Pronna more than the Ces Quintayans that have aided the spread of humans. The Ces Quintayins infested their low gravity (.87) moon and never let them get any farther. So far. The Ces Quintayins are more outspoken human supporters because of it, but they spread them no further. It is only a matter of time till humans get loose from an infected Pronna world to another world from which they were gathering biological material at the time. There is a 'political movement' [very loose translation] to prevent Pronna worlds with feral human populations doing biological harvesting directly.