Lutum is a gentrified consumer grade form of structol, formed of modified structol and pico jelly. Its purpose is to create a simple smart responsive programmable surface acting as a simple computer, battery and tactile display all rolled into one shape-changing package. It has zero defensive properties. It is commonly used with altex and used to create interfaces and displays.

• Lutum entered the market in YE37 and is designed, engineered and manufactured exclusively by the Lazarus Consortium.

Lutum is engineered from a “safe” lobotomized form of structol with no dangerous free-replication behaviours. It incorporates microscopic ballbearing chains of quasicrystals, typically euralis, volumestrice, phollux. Other structol structures are also found, forming a kind of skeleton from a gentrified form of structol substrate.

Lutum is typically farmed in large bio-reactors to form precursors and then mixed into a kilm of sorts where the additional heat vaporizes portions of the components which then are cooled or 'trapped' into one another, constructing the base mould one atom at a time, a process which can take many hours, weeks or even months depending on the requirements and complexity.

Able to self-repair but not free-replicate, lutum is able to change shape using electrical and mechanical forces similar to those of a chemical bond. As such, lutum can create many complex shapes and even simple machines and tools.

It can help to think of a colony of lutum as being like a large game of snake, of long rope made of spheres which orient themselves into complex geographical shapes for the purpose display, circuitry and chemical/magnetic energy storage.

In doing so, for example, lutum can create physical keys with moving parts similar to a keyboard, a control stick or emulate a large variety of different input devices. The material can also be painted onto a surface in its raw form, forming complex displays and interfaces and is able to yield with that surface, making it ideal for advertising, augmenting clothing or as a large display. Lutum is also able to communicate with more conventional components such as microchips and computers or form ports or plugs to interact with devices and is ideal for maintenance and debugging purposes as it is able to form simple tools with moving parts (such as a powered screwdriver).

It is also often engineered to eventually incorporate a IRI-Type Hard light Apparatus in specific applications, acting as a prism and projector support system.

Quite importantly, lutum is actually very brittle and inflexible but is programmed to be yielding: not altering due to natural process but changing shape to match the shape it is forced into or instructed to become. In this way, it is hard at all times but as water is able to, can be “poured” in special cases, appearing to be a liquid when it is infact a solid. Applications of lutum are usually no larger than a fist or a book and at their largest, the size of a basket-ball.

If lutum experiences power failure (which is difficult, seeing as it can maintain emergency power provided the environment is warmer than it is or if there is enough electromagnetic interaction with the environment, such as a planetoid), it is locked in shape and becomes brittle like crystal and may be mistaken for a gemstone.