I guess you have a point there, but then any sort of machine could be made into a cyborg, including a starship. I'm interested in creating a race of people, to add some color to the setting I'm working on. The more I think about it, I think Merfolk would make an interesting interstellar race, they need help to become starfaring, as living underwater would prevent them from melting and working metals and so would keep them in the Stone Age. The Americans in this America sector have a Prime Directive which legally prevents them in theory from interfering with more primitive cultures. Well the Merfolk got around this stricture, because humans colonized their planet, thinking it was uninhabited by any intelligent race. Aquacia has 96% hydrographics and very little land, but enough for the few thousand colonists who settled there. The human colonists lived by fishing and small scale agriculture. The climate over most of the planet can be described as "Hawaiian" island chains that are really the tops of mountains over very large underwater continents that cover most of the planets surface. The life forms are suprisingly compatible with humans, including the fish, which are very similar to Earth fish. Towns were built and some humans spent some time at the beach. At some point the Merfolk became aware of these colonists, they were all telepathic and can read the surface thoughs of humans. When a human reads a book to himself, for instance, a merfolk situated offshore can sometimes mentally "overhear" what the person was reading. Sometimes these books were textbooks on physics or engineering, and it was through this telepathic ease dropping, that the Merfolk learned much more than they should of legally according to the American 'Prime Directive' Law. By the time humans discovered the Merfolk, the cat was already out of the bag. Merfolk knew the principles of the Jump Drive, how grav vehicles worked, computers, all sorts of things that American law forbid its citizens from revealing to these primitive cultures. It did not occur to the original American colonists to look beneath the waves for intelligent races, they checked only the islands and found no one.
After much acrimony, the colonists weren't about to leave, the American government decided that the damage was already done, and that the Merfolk culture was already contaminated by contact with the human colonists. The Federal government decided to grant US citizenship toe the 20 million Merfolk living on this planet. the Merfolk lobbied hard for this, and made plenty of friends with the human colonists. The human colonists in turn were able to customize technology for the merfolk. they modified gravbelts so they could carry merfolk out of the water, and various devices were used to keep the Merfolk's sensitive body parts wet or immersed in water. Merfolk get uncomfortable after spending more than an hour in the air. Numerous discomforts assault them. (Their skin chafes, their eyes dry out for example) after a time, merfolk were able to aquire robots that could work on dry land, and build the technology that could be adapted for underwater use, that they so desparately needed to advance their society.
Some merfolk formed romantic relations with humans, much in line with mythology, as standards of beauty are similar for both races. Human males often find themselves staring and the female merfolk (mermaids). You see merfolk don't wear cloths, clothes does them no good, when soaked with water it doesn't keep them warm, it increases drag when merfolk swim through water and most natural fibers don't last long when continuously immersed in salt water. Human males tend to be distracted by the mermaids.
Merfolk are large creatures because of their powerful fish halves, otherwise their torsos are the same size as humans. Because of this body form, merfolk have large lungs than their human counterparts, to take in enough oxygen for both their human and fish halves. When under water and using their gills, merfolk keep oxygenated air in their lungs. In fact merfolk blood exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide within their lungs, this acts as an emergency oxygen supply for when the merfolk enter a water layer without dissolved oxygen. this fact has allowed merfolk to rescue humans underwater on many occasions through 'mouth-to-mouth' contact and sharing of the oxygen in their lungs, which the merfolk can keep oxygenated while their gills are operating.
Dispite their half human appearance, merfolk have a diet that humans sometimes find disquieting. Merfolk eat their food raw, bones and all, and they eat quite a bit more than the typical helping a human has. Merfolk after all have no way to cook their food. (They could conceivably bring their food near an underwater volcanic vent, but there is no way to do this without also cooking themselves.) Merfolk also have long digestive tracts due to their large size, so they can handle alot more roughage than a human can.
Another trait of a merfolk is their ability to telepathically bond with a specific individual, they must really care about that individual, and that individual must really open their minds to them, but once a telepathic bond is established, a merfolk can communicate at a much greater distance with that one person than they could with anyone else, and this ability only works with other merfolk or humans, due to their similar brain structure. Once telepathically bonded the pair share each others dreams even at interstellar distances when they are both asleep, and can communicate when they are both dreaming once they become lucid enough to realize it is a dream. This feature is very valuable since this form of communication is FTL and instantaneous. know one knows precisely how telepathy works, but it allows for instantaneous communication while both minds are uncontious. In addition merfolk find the minds of nontelepathic humans to be like an 'Open Book' while fellow merfolk have all sorts of built in defense mechanisms that prevent this sort of intimacy between members of their own race.
Generally a human/merfolk telepathic pair can share the same dreams whenever they are within 40 parsecs of each other, which basically means anywhere within the America sector. this form of instant communication has military value, and is extremely valuable whenever the neigboring civilizations decide to invade American space. The main trick is to communicate meaningful messages while a lucid dream is taking place, and then actually remembering what occured in the dream. Usually the parts of a dream that are remembered are the parts that occur right before the person wakes up. Human/Merfolk pairs can't produce children, but they have proven useful on many occasions. Merfolk appear to be distantly related to the Zhodani, who live only a few sectors away, but these were genetically engineered to have Psionic talents rather than requiring training. Who ever did all this genetic tinkering is unknown, no artifacts of that race have been found, and the Merfolk have no native written language, they have adopted human written language instead.
