

In reality they are not aliens at all, but akin to the mutants that SHODAN first engineered on Citadel Station, with forty years' worth of extra refinements. The crew of the Von Braun first assumed that the Many were some form of extra-terrestrial, alien life form which originated on Tau Ceti V. The annelids developed a hive mind, becoming a monolithic entity that called itself The Many. Beta Grove crashed on the fifth world of the Tau Ceti system after thirty years of traveling through space, and the creatures on board thrived and evolved further. During the events of the Citadel Station incident, the Hacker jettisoned Beta Grove, one of the four wildlife groves aboard Citadel Station, which SHODAN had been using for experiments with bio-engineered viruses.Īs the grove hurtled through space, the mutagenic virus and the mutated creatures stored aboard Beta Grove evolved at an accelerated rate, eventually coming to an apex as a species of parasitic annelids with distinct personality, telepathic mind control, and genetic modification abilities.

The Many is an indirect creation of the malevolent artificial intelligence SHODAN.
