Sahmson

Background

Sahmson is a member of a relatively out of the way species known as the Rinanovians. Rinanov was conquered by Romulus some 50 years ago and used as a source mostly for minerals and labour.

Rinanovian History

Rinanov itself has a somewhat peculiar history. A Federation expedition travelled to the world, under the supervision of the Romulan government, forty years ago and found that its population probably underwent a genetic bottleneck about 200 years ago. Because many Rinanovians were either averse to speaking with Terrans or had apparently been removed from any areas the Federation team chose to visit, the precise cause of the bottleneck was never quite determined.

Owing to recent testimony from Sahmson himself, and to analysis of tissue and blood samples he provided the cause became quite apparent. The bottleneck was artificial in nature, generated by an increasingly litigious population, whose members had splintered off into disparate gender interest groups. The result was a deep mis-trust between men and women owing to easily obtained lawsuits for any perceived injustices members of one gender might have committed against the other. Terran sociologists were struck by the similarities between that period in Rinanovian history and a similar period lasting from the 19th through late 21st centuries on Earth.

It seems the Rinanovians decided to engineer a solution to this problem, by modifying Rinanovian psychology. A labyrinthine secondary sexual characteristic was grafted onto all members of the species, which mesmerized them and drew them much more strongly toward one another. Records found along certain segments of Sahmson's DNA were successfully decoded and found to contain audio recordings concerning a "crowd sourced sex drive re-actuation" initiative. It seems the initiative had been scheduled to be terminated after 150 Terran years, but Romulan incursions into Rinanovian territory and political unrest at home resulted in the project never completing and all Rinanovians still being born with the so-called "marks" on their foreheads.

This discovery, not to mention the very achievement of the marks themselves, hints at what was previously an extraordinarily advanced society of genetic engineers and information scientists in general.