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Old 01-20-2020, 10:58 PM   #41
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: ORICHALCUM UNIVERSE Sidebar: Multisapients

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

The GC would not be there to 'see' this, of course, but Multisapient collectives did feel a sense of obligation toward their descendent collectives. The GC had tens of thousands of years yet before the matter would become immediate, but now it began to ponder possible ways to prevent the tragic outcome it could foresee in the distant future.

For a thousand Terran years or more, it pondered this problem, dedicated enormous resources of thought and science to the matter, before it achieved what it thought might be a possible solution. It was somewhat drastic, involving an active modification of its own natural life cycle, but in theory, it could work, and what was a further benefit, if it worked it could greatly extend the natural 'lifespan' of the Great Collective itself.

The GC determined that it was possible to 'artificially' split off smaller 'collectives' from itself, by a process not exactly similar to natural reproduction. These 'collectives' were not new entities, but instead were more like a 'fractal reproduction' of the Great Collective itself, albeit on an incomparably smaller scale. They usually numbered no more than fifty to one hundred subsets in 'membership', and though they had in theory all the knowledge of the Great Collective, like a subdivided hologram this was 'blurry'.

What made this process useful was that it could, in theory, stave off the stage of natural reproductive fission, and thus the end of the GC proper, indefinitely. If done sufficiently often, it could relieve what might be called the building 'pressure' toward fission. The GC could need to do it regularly, but it could work.

Moreover, another fascinating possibility was made visible by this new process. In principle, such a 'cutting' of itself could be transported to a new world, and grow into another world-filling collective. This would not be an offspring per se, but rather something more like a mental clone, a second GC, with the same personality and nature.

When the actual experiment was performed, the first few attempts failed badly, but eventually the GC worked out the details, and successfully transplanted 'cuttings' of its own collective to carefully selected new worlds, worlds chosen by Multisapient-collective crewed starships. Worlds with 'native' biospheres but no sapient life. [1]

Not all of the 'cuttings' thrived, but several did, and once they took solid root on their new worlds, they grew swiftly, and as their populations rose the 'fuzzy' information inherited from the GC became clearer, enabling them to industrialize their worlds in an amazingly short period of time. A surprising development accelerated the matter, and made the task faced by the GC and its 'clones' easier: they discovered that as they new 'copies' grew and increased in power, they could actually communicate telepathically across interstellar distances!

This was not precisely normal telepathy, it was more like a variation on the mental union that bound Multisapient collectives together. These world-sized minds were so similar in ego and nature, so structurally alike, so fundamentally similar, that as the new 'copies' grew, they were able to loosely merge with the GC itself, though separated from each other by light-decades!

Meanwhile, the fleet of starships serving this distributed mind, crewed by smaller independent Multisapient crews and growing in number, were exploring ever more star systems and worlds. They discovered more worlds with thriving helium-based biospheres, and worlds with thriving Solarigen biospheres. They found worlds of both sorts where the biospheres had died out long before.

What they did not immediately encounter was sapient life other than themselves. The reason was partly simply luck of the draw. As it happened, the Familiar Eldren had placed the Multisapients in a part of the galaxy where they had placed few Homosapient settlements. Even after various Homosapients had developed faster-than-light travel, it so happened that they mostly had not expanded into that area of the galaxy at that time.

It is a very, very, very big galaxy.

To be continued...



[1] Planets, in other words, that had long before been 'terraformed' by the Familiar Eldren, and seeded with Solarigen life.
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Old 01-21-2020, 09:53 PM   #42
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: ORICHALCUM UNIVERSE Sidebar: Multisapients

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

The process of making a 'cutting' was by no means simple. The GC had to select a group of its subsets for the purpose, and apply the internal process that severed them from the overall collective mind. This was a variation on the reproductive process, and was a very delicate procedure.

As soon as this was done, the 'disconnected' subsets, since they had no separate collective will of their own, would naturally tend to either die or go irreversibly catatonic. To prevent this, the selected subsets had to be placed in a medically-induced state of deep unconsciousness. This process had to be performed at the same time as the 'excision' process was happening within the mind of the GC, and the timing had to be precise.

In this state, the excised group could maintain a mindless integrity with each other, as long as the bodies were kept within a very short physical distance of each other. Separate them too far, and the subsets would still die as their mental linkages broke down. Thus the entire group had to be placed in suspended animation at once, and loaded together onto a starship for transport to whatever planet the GC had selected as destination.

Such a ship, crewed by a genuine, functional Multisapient collective, would then transport the 'cutting' to the destination world. There they could be safely (if carefully done) revived.

Creating a 'new' world-mind required many such 'cuttings' transported to a new world and revived at once. Once such a supercollective was initiated, though, individual 'cuttings' could be brought from GC-Alpha and easily 'merged' into the new world-mind, because they were all mental 'clones' of each other, so to speak. As the new world-mind grew, 'cuttings' from it could be returned to GC-Alpha and merged back into the original. This process helped prevent divergence in the 'cloned' world minds. [1]

Even as the fleet was founding the new world-minds, it was also engaged in other activities for the GC as well. This included exploration and survey missions, an ever-growing task because the number of star systems accessible to the fleet grew exponentially as the radius of the sphere of explored space grew. Scientific research, scouting for habitable worlds, seeking more of the cryogenic-life worlds, all were ongoing projects.

Another ongoing task, indeed a task that made all the rest possible, was the ongoing search for new sources of orichalcum. The faster-than-light drive, the FTL sensing technology, and many other elements of the cutting edge technology available to the GC and its allied collectives, all depended on the availability of orichalcum. Most applications required very little of the substance in absolute terms, but require it they did.

The GC had harvested a few kilograms of the material from asteroids in its own star system, and now it found more in asteroids in some other star systems. Not every star system had such orichalcum-deposits to be found in its asteroidal debris, however, and when it occurred it was always in minute amounts. It was a rich star system that provided more than ten kilograms, and that always after intensive and very time-consuming search.

So it was that when an exploratory ship of the fleet finally discovered a starship that had belonged to the helium-cold aliens, it was both a profound scientific and historical discovery and a treasure trove.

The ship was found in a parabolic orbit around a G class sun, drifting amid the outer cometary shell. The discovery was more or less a freak accident, but it was tremendously valuable. Preserved by the intense cold, following an orbit that never brought it closer to the star than a hundred astronomical units, it was all but unchanged over the hundreds of megayears since it was lost.

Moving it back to GC-Alpha was a major project, but when it was complete, the wreck provided both a trove of knowledge and a trove of precious orichalcum, because the wrecked vessel, old beyond old, had been a freighter transporting a load of the miracle-substance. There was more orichalcum aboard the wrecked ship in its hold than the GC and its allies had discovered in all their centuries of searching. Stored in the hold was over two tons of the material.

To be continued...



[1] Keeping in mind that use of the word 'cloned' here is not literal! The subsets are not clones of each other, but naturally-born Multisapients.
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