ORICHALCUM UNIVERSE Sidebar: Multisapients

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

The Great Collective found the idea of such an intervention both fascinating, and also rather disturbing. Fascinating because of interesting possibility of such entities existing, or having once existed, and disturbing because of the sheer, incredible power implied by what they appeared to have done.

The Great Collective (GC) was fully capable of analyzing the necessary energy levels that would be required to do what it now suspected had been done, and the results were staggering, even the placid, slow thought processes of the GC. It appeared that there either were, or once had been, entities able to reshape entire planets in what was almost an instant of astronomical time.

The GC desperately (by its placid standards) sought more information, both on its own world and the helium-world on the other part of their common star system. Seeking information on its own world was easy, but the effort to study the other world was profoundly frustrating.

The problem, of course, was that it was of necessity working through robotic probes, with a seventy-day time lag for communication. The GC longed to be able to study 'on site', but this was very close to impossible, because the very nature of the GC worked against any effort at 'manned' space travel.

The world on which the GC had come into being had two natural satellites, both relatively small, one orbiting not too far outside the Roche limit, the other much further out. Even the outermost moon, though, was only about six hundred thousand kilometers out.

Before the GC had existed, the earlier, smaller collectives had sent 'subsets' to both moons, and the GC had continued such efforts. Both bodies had extensive facilities spread across their surfaces, and substantial populations of 'subsets', individual organisms of Nomhomo multisapiens, lived on both bodies in what amounted to sealed cities.

Both satellites were directly accessible to the Great Collective...and that was the extent of such objects.

The largest Multisapient collective in history, up until that time, the GC could hold itself together over much greater distances than any previous collective. As long as the large majority of its 'subsets' were within roughly one and a half million kilometers of each other, the collective intelligence was stable.

By the standards of all previous Multisapient collectives, this was a vast volume of action. On the scale of interplanetary travel, however, much less interstellar travel, one and a half million kilometers is not much better than nothing.

The next planet in toward the star, and the next one out, were both far beyond the reach of the GC in person. At closest approach, the nearest sibling planet never drew closer to the GC world than eighty million kilometers, and of course, most of the time it was much farther away.

The technology available to the GC, and many of its ancestral collectives, could easily have carried individual 'subsets' to other planets in their star system. Such 'isolates' would not have survived to reach their destinations, however. Once removed from contact with their collective, the intelligence of an individual subset rapidly dwindled to sub-sapient levels, and the 'will to live' quickly evaporated as well. Generally, a subset removed from a collective and kept apart for long simply stopped eating and drinking, until it died. Sometimes they died for less apparent reasons, as some subtle but vital element of continuing life failed. Few subsets could live more than a few weeks out of contact with the 'parent' collective, and usually far less.

The GC could send out subsets, to be sure, but as soon as they were more than one and a half million kilometers from the home world, their intellect would begin to dwindle, and the decline was rapid. By the time they were two million, or three million, kilometers out, the subset would be less intelligent than a bright ape, and death would follow quickly.

If the neighboring worlds were too far away to reach, what of the other half of the over-system, seventy light-days away? Though the GC was fully able to design a spacecraft to carry living subsets, and use the launching laser array to drive it, the subsets would never arrive alive. If artificial means were used to keep them alive, which was also within the skills of the GC, little would be gained. The creatures that arrived would lack both useful intellects and meaningful wills. The GC might as well send an animal as one of its subsets.

In light of this limit, the GC had become very good at automation, its robot probes were enormously capable...but they still were not the same as being there. When the GC thought of some new instrument they might need, or some abilities they lacked, it was limited by the abilities of the robots in implementing the idea.

The only way the GC could travel in space successfully would be for the entire collective, with over a billion 'members', to make the journey. While this was possible as a matter of the laws of physics, it was so impractical as to be effectively impossible. Moving a billion hominids simultaneously from one planet to another, much less one star to another, while keeping them all within one and half million kilometers of each other throughout the project, was clearly unworkable. Of course the GC could not abandon its own world anyway, for endless obvious reasons.

So now the attention of the GC turned to the question of how to get around what was, on a cosmic scale, its essentially sessile nature.

To be continued...

[warellis]

Maybe they could mind upload themselves? I mean it seems like the only way they could send the entire collective over in one go is to first somehow send their consciousness or souls or whatever into a single container before it gets sent wherever and they put themselves back in bodies.

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

The Great Collective was a singular entity, 'holographically' spread across over a billion individual hominids. These creatures were closer genetic relatives of Homo sapiens than any Terrestrial ape, or even than the australopithicines or their ilk. Physically, a Multisapient subset could pass for a Human at a distance, or in bad light. Certainly, a Homosapient who did not know their true nature might well mistake one for another kind of Homosapient, as long as the evaluation was made on appearance alone.

Psychologically, the shared intelligence of these entities was very inhuman, however. As a result, their behavior of any individual subset also tended toward the inhuman. The Great Collective was ruthless in its treatment of its 'subsets', since they had no more singular identity than a single cell does for a multicellular creature. Any Human or near-Human who suddenly found himself in a 'city' of the Great Collective would very quickly realize just how utterly alien these entities were.

The Great Collective was ruthless with itself when studying itself, and it had almost inexhaustible test subjects to study. An experiment that destroyed a number of subsets meant no more, to the GC, than take a sample of his own blood would to a Human doctor or biologist. Only the physical sensations of pain and discomfort discouraged such experimentation, and the destruction or mutilation or other treatment of mere thousands of subsets meant little in terms of discomfort to an entity made up of a billion.

The experimentation was ongoing and steady, as part of biological study, but now the GC also began seeking a way to extend its reach in space. It did not immediately find a solution, but it did discover something useful.

The GC, with an endless supply of test subjects and total indifference to moral issues that plague Homosapient biotechnology, had long since mastered cloning its own subsets. It used this technology, to a limited degree, to manufacture replacement organs for particularly useful 'subsets', but otherwise it had little use for it, because such cloned subsets were not part of the collective entity.

The GC was not completely certain of why such clones were not part it itself, while 'natural' offspring of subsets were integrated perfectly. For that matter, occasionally 'natural' babies were born that were not part of the whole, though usually such cases also involved physical deformity or flaws that prevented survival anyway.

The GC did not itself completely understand the process by which its kind actually 'reproduced', the fissioning of one collective into two. It was descended from such splittings, but that did not mean it completely understood them. Still, it studied itself eagerly seeking to learn more.

Now, after centuries of work, converging lines of study led to a breakthrough.

The GC discovered that it could clone subsets, tweaking their neurochemistry and other factors slightly, and in so doing produce something...different. These creatures were not independently sapient, in fact, they were even less intelligent than lone 'subsets'. In truth, they were mindless, with less self-awareness and cognition than an insect.

However, their genetic nature, and the 'tweaking' process, made these clones incredibly receptive to the telepathic power of the Great Collective. This was not the mental fusion, it was more like conventional telepathy, but the effective range of this was vastly greater than would be the case between the GC and any other natural mind.

The result was that the GC could 'possess' such an entity, using it as a remote-controlled proxy, and experience the universe through its senses, and using its hands as if they were those of its own subsets. The GC then attempted to determine just how far a distance it could bridge in this way, and its quickly discovered that such 'proxysets' could be sent successfully anywhere in its local star system and remain useful.

The only way to determine if such proxysets could be useful in the other half of the star system was to send one there and observe the results. This was a major project, because a proxysets was a living being, a hominid (physically, anyway), with the associated life support requirements. The ship to carry it had to be much more massive and complicated than the robot drones it bad been sending, and thus necessarily somewhat slower.

It took some time to design a sailpod with the necessary life support features, including a suspended-animation system, that was still low-mass enough to make effective use of the laser launching array. Once it was constructed, there was still the wait for it to arrive. The robot pods could make the trip in a little over forty Terran years, but this 'manned' pod was more massive and thus slower. It needed the better part of a century to accelerate, travel, and decelerate. To the delight of the GC, however, when it did arrive, it proved entirely viable to 'remote control' the proxyset telepathically, even at a distance of over seventy light-days.

Now more proxysets followed, and over the course of a century or two, the Great Collective began to assemble a population of such 'proxysets' in the other half of the binary system, giving it eyes, ears, and hands on-site to supervise the force of robots that was already in place. It was not quite
the same as really being on-site, but it was good enough for the needs of the GC at the moment, and the research projects studying the cryogenic biosphere and the extinct sapient race now accelerated enormously.

To be continued...

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

By now, the GC had been studying the helium-fluid biosphere and the incredibly ancient ruins for Terran centuries, and it had learned much. Among the things it had learned or deduced from its studies was that the ancient cryogenic entities had apparently known how to do the impossible.

That impossibility was traveling faster than the velocity of light.

The ancestral groups of the Great Collective had worked out the principles of what Terrans would much later call Special and General Relativity even before the Great Collective came to be. The realization that faster-than-light information transfers were in fact possible forced the GC to the realization that it was going to have to reevaluate its entire understanding of the nature of the physical universe. It had, as yet, found no trace of the actual technologies or knowledge that enabled such transfers, but knowing that they were possible at all was sufficient to shake its grasp of physics to the foundations.

At the same time, the GC had come to the realization that it had been missing out on a huge opportunity.

The source of this was its experience of working through the mindless 'proxysets'. There were no naturally habitable bodies orbiting the tiny red star, and in order to maintain its mindless but biologically living proxysets, the GC had been forced to use them and its robots to construct space habitats in the other part of the binary star system, with self-contained ecosystems and the ability for the proxysets to clone themselves. This was necessary because sending an endless flow of proxysets across seventy-three light-days by sailpod was impractical, to say the least.

The experience of constructing this facility, however, inspired a thought in the GC which it had quite simply never considered previously. It was capable, it knew, of becoming 'bigger' than it was, it had stabilized its subsets at something over a billion simply because that was what it calculated to be the best compromise between maximum size (and thus power and ability) and the ecological 'carrying capacity' of its planet, over time.

Now, though, the GC began to consider the possibility of expanding its 'population' by constructing artificial habitats in space, close enough to the home world to maintain the mental union, but providing additional living space and support capacity to enable it to become larger. Since the 'range' of its own union grew with its numbers, the process could 'feed upon itself'.

This was a possibility that its technology had been equal to for millennia, but which had quite simply never occurred to the Great Collective until then.

Its theoretical studies indicated that the idea could be viable, and once it had finally thought of the concept, the GC found it irresistibly tempting.

Over the course of the next century or so, a huge industrial effort produced a number of space-borne habitats, of steadily increasing size and functionality. Populations of a few hundred subsets gave way to populations of thousands, and then tens of thousands. The habitats orbited the planet within the union radius, and as the project continued it accelerated.

Eventually, habitats with populations in the millions began to come together, and in sufficient number to begin significantly increasing the abilities and powers of the Great Collective as a whole. The process was gradual, because the GC had to increase its numbers by sexual reproduction of its subsets, but by the same token, the growth curves rose with time as new habitats were constructed and an ever-larger population produced ever more offspring.

To be continued...

[warellis]

This makes me imagine the GC will build habitats as stepping stones to eventually reach its goal.

Like every few light hours/days, a new habitat will be there and that how it slowly extends itself out.

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

In its efforts to comprehend the new physics that it had come to appreciate existed, the Great Collective was hamstrung by the fact that it had found no instances of the actual technologies that the cryogenic beings had used in travelling faster than light. The GC knew that they had done it, but it had no information to work with in determining how.

As it reviewed its knowledge of physics, however, it did come to a startling realization: an example of faster-than-light information transfers had been known to it since its 'birth', and also to its ancestral collectives. The unifying link between its subsets most certainly operated faster than light.

In the course of tens of thousands of years, this reality had simply never registered in the collective mentality or those of its ancestors. Like a fish never questioning water, or better yet, much like a Homosapient who takes the workings of his or her body for granted, it had never recognized an ongoing 'impossibility' in its own nature.

To be fair to it, this fact was less than obvious to the small ancestral collectives from which the Great Collective was descended. Spread over no more than a few kilometers, the discrepancy was tiny in those collectives. However, the Great Collective routinely communicated with itself, and its cloned 'drones', over light-days of distance, instantaneously, and yet it required some time before this oddity 'registered'.

The GC was inherently incapable of the Homosapient emotion of embarrassment, but its reaction to its own blindness came as close as it was capable to this emotion, when the realization finally struck.

Once the realization did penetrate, the GC began the most intensive study of its own basic nature that it had ever undertaken, a more intense study than any of its ancestral collectives had attempted. It was aided by the greater technological resources it now possessed, and it already had some grasp of the basic physics of psionics. Now it probed far more deeply, and in its own nature, it eventually found a clue to the nature of spacetime that in turn gave it a 'hook' toward understanding how faster-than-light travel and communication might just be possible after all.

As is often the case, that first clue led it to other clues, and avenues of study that began to reveal aspects of the universe that had previously been elusive. The GC began to perceive connections between quantum field theory, relativity, biology, and psionics that hinted at a deeper underlying unity.

In a nearly unique case, the Great Collective mathematically predicted the existence of the extradimensional substance orichalcum before it ever encountered it in practice. It also recognized that access to even a very small amount of this substance would enable it to advance its studies enormously. Unfortunately, its mathematical models predicted that orichalcum would be fantastically rare, and efforts to seek it in reality confirmed this swiftly.

Once the GC worked out the (very) subtle differences in spectral lines that would enable it to distinguish orichalcum from copper, it discovered that its local star did have a faint trace of orichalcum in its photosphere, a very faint trace. The GC estimated that the entire mass of orichalcum in its star might be no more than a few trillion tons, and none of that was accessible with the technology available to the GC.

It applied its new knowledge to its planetological models, and calculated that there ought to be some orichalcum in the planets of its star...but that such would also be expected to concentrate deep inside the planets, in the cores of the rock-and-iron bodies, or thousands of kilometers below the cloud tops of the gas giants. Again, for practical purposes any such deposits were unreachable to the Great Collective.

The GC carefully analyzed the possibilities, and one after another they turned up empty. The various accessible places where the GC calculated that it might find orichalcum, but all were dead ends.

At least, though, one something like the one hundredth attempt, matters changed. The GC calculated that it might be able to find orichalcum in one of the two asteroid belts that circled its star. Its logic was that orichalcum should have been present, in small amounts, in the planetesimals that went into planetary formation when its star system was born. In the asteroid belts, some of those planetesimals still remained unincorporated, or had once done so.

The GC calculated that if a planetesimal was large enough to have undergone internal differentiation from radioactive decay, and then broken up by collisions afterward, accessible orichalcum might be present in the shattered rubble of such collisions.

So the GC reviewed its ancient astronomical information about the asteroids of its star system, data gathered by its ancestors and itself. It calculated which asteroids looked to be fragments of differentiated planetesimals, and expeditions went out to examine them.

The GC, using robots and 'drone-clones', checked one thousand, two hundred, and ninety-seven such objects, before finally discovering, and extracting, a small amount of orichalcum on the one thousand, two hundred, and ninety-eighth object. Nine grams of orichalcum was the reward for the effort.

To be continued...

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

Nine grams was none too much material, but it was still a trove of great worth to the Great Collective. It confirmed that its theoretical models were on track, and study of the sample ruled out some further theories and added support to different theories. Further, finding the first sample gave the GC clues about what sort of asteroids to check, and slowly additional small samples of orichalcum were retrieved. Over the course of decades, the GC eventually managed to assemble a kilogram of orichalcum, at great expense and effort.

Slowly but steadily, the mathematical models were supplemented by hard data, and the GC found that there were forms of radiation that propagated at specific multiples of c, radiation that could be used for communication and sensing. Slowly, the GC began to see ways that a ship could theoretically travel faster than light, and as it did its understand of causality also become more complex, and this fed back into its understanding of the psionic ability that Homosapients called 'precognition' or 'prescience',

Finally, the day came when it attempted to construct a spacecraft capable of trans-light operation. The first attempt was an utter failure, the ship simply exploded. The second attempt worked, but when sent under automatic control toward the other half of the star system, it never arrived, and the loss of a gram of precious orichalcum made this failure galling.

Eventually, though, clone-drone operated FTL-capable ships were making the journey between the two parts of the binary star system, and not long after that, ships were making the longer journey to nearby independent star systems.

Unfortunately for the Great Collective, this solved only part of its 'travel problem'. It had sufficient control-range to use clone-drones for the seventy-three light-day voyage within its own binary system, but even the closest independent star systems were light-years away, from beyond the range within which it could use clone-drones as teleoperated senses and limbs. Any starship going beyond its own system had to be automated, and the GC quickly discovered that this was problematic.

it was not that it could not be done. The GC successfully sent robotic starships to various stars near its own sun, and successfully retrieved several of them. The problem was automation proved to have a limited ability to cope with unexpected situations, leading to a high loss rate for the robotic ships.

The faster-than-light signals the GC had learned to use simply did not have sufficient range to cross interstellar distances, at least not at reasonable power levels. The old launching-laser array could be converted to serve as the primary impulse for an FTL transmitter, and with petawatts of power behind it, the signal could carry for over two light-years...but that was not sufficient. The closest independent star system was six light-years distant.

The Great Collective might have been willing to tolerate a high loss rate for its robotic ships, except for one issue: each such loss took with it at least a gram of orichalcum, a component of the drive system, and that loss was too steep to be borne. Even by this point, the entire supply of orichalcum available to the GC was less than three kilograms. While that would have been sufficient to build over a thousand starships, the GC had already discovered many other uses for the material, and it was just too precious to throw away casually.

The Great Collective still could not send its own subsets on the ships, it remained 'sessile', confined to its home world and the cloud of orbital habitats surrounding that world.

To be continued...

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

A turning point came when one of the automated starships the Great Collective sent out discovered another world with a functional Solarigen biosphere. The closest such planet to the Great Collective was about ninety light-decades distant, and it had a rich, thriving biosphere, but no native sapient beings.

When the robot ship returned the report of this planet, the Great Collective immediately recognized that this new world was host to the same kind of life that was present on its own planet. Indeed, subsequent visits from more robot ships discovered that some of the same species were present on both worlds.

The Great Collective had already deduced that its own world had been transformed and 'seeded' with life in the ancient past, so it was not as shocked to discover another such world as it would once have been. Still, it was a profound thing to find an entire new world of the same kind of life that lived on its own world. Over the course of the subsequent decades, the robot ships discovered two more such worlds, and the discovery of the third Solarigen world proved to be an even more important turning point.

It was the fourth planet of a G3 yellow dwarf, cool but still comfortably habitable due to an excess of carbon dioxide and water vapor in its atmosphere, mostly covered in oceans. Instead of vast continents, it was a world of ocean with hundreds of small-to-modest sized islands scattered from pole to pole.

What was more significant was that unlike the previous two Solarigen-life planets that the robot ships had found, this one had intelligent indigenous inhabitants. Most of the significant islands in the tropical and temperate zones, and many of the polar islands as well, had populations of hominids.

In fact, this planet was inhabited by a population of Nonhomo multisapiens.

Located about two hundred light-years from the Great Collective, this planet was indeed one of the six surviving Multisapient worlds. Unlike the world of the Great Collective, this planet was home to thousands of smaller collectives, much as the world of the GC had been many millennia earlier.

To say that the GC was fascinated when the reports returned is a vast understatement. Dozens of automated starships were dispatched to study the new Multisapient world. In many ways, it was as if the Great Collective had been granted a chance to look into its own ancestral past. It was greatly frustrated by the delay as reports had to be brought back by its robotic emissaries, and it greedily devoured the information as the reports did come back across the abyss of interstellar space.

The largest collectives on the planet appeared to number no more than a few thousand, most of them numbered in the hundreds. Technologically, the planetary society seemed to be relatively primitive. There were ships on the sea, mostly propelled by sails. The cities were constructed mostly of either stone or wood. Agriculture was common, as was a complex fishing industry, but there was little sign of planet-wide trade.

On the other hand, there was abundant evidence that there had been more advanced technology available in the not-too-distant past. From their orbital vantage, the automated probe ships observed the remains of large cities that had been constructed of concrete and metal and glass, remains fused and broken and shattered by tremendous heat and awesome pressures. A few remaining artificial satellites still orbited the planet, in very high orbits. It was clear that the local Multisapients had been much more advanced in the relatively recent past.

Just how recent became clearer when robot ships landed near some of the more remote, less inhabited ruins, taking samples and making observations. When the data finally reached the Great Collective, it calculated that the destruction of that more advanced civilization bad been no more than about four of its local centuries past. [1]

More disturbing was the fact that the destruction did not appear to have been locally generated. At first, the Great Collective had assumed that the local collectives had made war on each other with devastating results, much as had happened among its own ancestral collectives in the ancient past. The ancestral collectives that had preceded the Great Collective had gone through that pattern more than once, achieving and losing technological proficiency in the process multiple times.

Closer examination of the data from the probe ships, though, convinced the Great Collective that the evidence pointed elsewhere. Various lines of evidence indicated that the attacks had come from outside, from beyond the planet. Apparently, at least as recently as a few centuries before, some agency had brought world-wide devastation to this planet.

The Great Collective had instructed its probe ships to restrict their examinations to regions in which they could remain hidden from the locals. This, combined with the limitations of computer control and no on-site sapient supervision, slowed the process of study enormously. Eventually, though, a robot probe examining the still-somewhat-radioactive ruins of what had once been a populous city, discovered something new, and very, very strange.

There had been intense combat here, centuries before, up close and personal combat. Along with the remains of what had once been Multisapient subsets, the robots discovered remains unlike anything in either the direct or the hereditary memories of the Great Collective.

The remains had clearly been Solarigen life on a cellular level, but at the macro level they were unlike any animals known the Great Collective. They had also, apparently, been cyborgs. Mixed with the bones and organic remains were the remains of what had clearly once been bionic implants.

To be continued...

[1] Almost exactly five hundred Terran years.

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

The creatures, as nearly as the robotic emissary could reconstruct them from their remains, had been eight-limbed, built low to the ground and radially symmetrical, with various 'bionic' augmentations. They were like nothing that the Great Collective had discovered through its robotic fleet.

The GC now decided to attempt an experiment. Its robots observed a number of low-tech, small-number Multisapient collectives, and when one of them 'fissioned' in the natural course of reproductive events, the robots abducted the new collective within days of its 'birth'.

Such an 'abduction' was of course a complex operation, carried out by automated machines, and would have been impracticable except that it was performed on a collective that was no more than days old, still dazed and not entirely stabilized after being 'born' from the fission of an older collective.

Altogether, about two hundred individual 'subsets' had to be captured and rendered unconscious, and carefully stored away in a ship with life-support systems and suspended-animation technology for transport. Altogether, the entire exercise required the better part of a Terran year, from the first capture operations to the successful suspension of the new collective aboard a spacecraft.

That spacecraft then set out on the long trip back to the GC homeworld. The GC was by no means sure this would succeed, its robotic starships often came to grief, and it could no supervise them remotely. It simply had to give its robots their instructions, and sent them forth and hope for the best. The GC had become very good at robotics, but its machines still had their inherent limits.

As it happened, this ship made it safely back, with its baby collective still safely alive in suspended animation, and so for the first time, the Great Collective was able to interact directly with another intelligence of its own kind. It had never done this before, it was the 'last of its kind' on its homeworld, having come into being as all the others of its ilk had ceased to be on its world, so this contact was a genuine new experience.

When it revived the captured collective, and established contact, the interactions that followed would make little sense to any human or near-human, either in emotional terms or intellectual. The relationship that emerged was not precisely parental, nor exactly friendship, nor was it necessarily either affectionate or hostile. Suffice it to say that after some initial rough spots, a cooperative relationship was established between these two entities, so alike and yet so different.

They were both of the same species, both were fully sapient 'collectives' made up of individually sub-sapient hominids. Yet one was many tens of thousands of Terran years old, and made up of well over one billion 'members', the other was only (effectively) days old, and numbered in the hundreds of 'members'.

The Great Collective was possessed of an intellect of almost incomprehensible vastness, from the point of view of its new collaborator. Its knowledge and skill and power were all but immeasurable, from the perspective of its junior.

The smaller collective had a prospective lifespan of a few centuries, the Great Collective had reason to believe that it could endure for tens of millennia still before its natural time to 'fission'. Still, for all their differences, they both were ultimately of the same ilk.

The GC had brought the new collective to its world in pursuit of several goals. It now established its new associate in a comfortable corner of its home world, and proceeded to educate the younger collective swiftly. After a period of about fifty Terran years, give or take a little, the younger collective was ready...to serve as the crew of a new starship.

This new vessel was larger than the robotic ships the GC had been using up until now, as was necessitated by the life-support requirements of a living crew. Still, Multisapients require far less volume and luxury to remain sane and functional than Homosapients do. Compared to a ship desired to carry two hundred Homosapients, this ship was still remarkably small.

The new collective proved successful as a crew, giving living intelligence to a ship, and that ship returned to the other Multisapient world to abduct additional 'newborn' collectives to be taken back to the GC homeworld for training and indoctrination. Most of these new collectives were successfully trained and conditioned to serve as crews (or perhaps singular crew would be better) for starships. Over the course of a Terran century or three, dozens of such collectives were put aboard their own ships in service of their older, greater conspecific. At the end of that time, the first few such collectives fissioned into new young collectives, expanding the ‘population’ of space crews.

To be continued…

[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

The small collectives that were crewing the starships had their own goals and agendas, of course. The arrangement they had struck with their vastly stronger relative allowed for that.

The Great Collective, by this point, had charted several planets that were host to viable, thriving biospheres that were biochemically and biologically akin to the Multisapients, but which boasted no native intelligent life above animal level. On one such world, about a light-century from the Great Collective world (hereinafter referred as GC-Alpha), a colony was established, and on this raw but thriving world 'retired' space crew collectives could settle, and establish their own territories.

Likewise, as time passed, the GC made contact with the collectives of the other Multisapient world that it had discovered, and begun to gradually raise their technological level back toward what it had been before the alien attacks.

The GC still knew little about the mysterious aliens. It had found more of the strange remains on the other planet, but the local collectives could tell it relatively little. They certainly retained many memories from their 'ancestral' collectives, but those former collectives had not known very much either. Alien ships had appeared in their sky with little warning and opened fire, cities had burned, orbital facilities had been wiped from the sky, a ferocious battle had been offered and many of the aliens had perished, but a world-wide Multisapient civilization had been wiped out over the course of a few Terran months. The nature of the enemy, and their motives, remained utterly unknown.

In the meantime, along with its concerns about this mystery threat, the GC had begun to be concerned about its own distant future. The 'lifespan' of a Multisapient collective increases, usually, with the size of the collective, and the GC was the largest and greatest such ever to have existed. Its lifespan would naturally be measured in many tens of millennia, perhaps even more. It had already existed for tens of thousands of Terran years, and had every reasonable expectation that more time lay before it than behind it.

Still, the GC was mortal. The time would inevitably come, if nothing happened to it before that day, when it would reach a state of mental saturation, and naturally split into two smaller collectives, each about half the size of the parent, each a new entity. This was the natural fate of a Multisapient collective, the equivalent of a natural death and reproduction in one event. In this matter, the GC was no different than any other Multisapient collective, other than the difference of scale.

What was beginning to concern the GC was what would happen immediately afterward. The GC already filled an entire planet and an orbiting cloud of space habitats, it was made up well over a billion 'subsets'. The twin 'offspring' it would someday split into would begin life half the size of their 'parent', and instinctively try to grow to full scale. This would take some time, but not all that much time as such things went.

Yet they would be sharing a planet that was already effectively at comfortable carrying capacity with one full-sized GC. While, aided by high technology, they might be able to grow to full scale and survive, it would crowd every natural system in the biosphere, and strain every resource to do so, and the two entities would be perpetually 'in each other's way'. Two collectives could not easily share a territory, yet its hypothetical future offspring would have no choice in the matter.

Yet they would begin life with component populations numbering in the hundreds of millions, far too large even at 'birth' for either of its offspring to go elsewhere. By now the GC knew of other worlds suitable for settlement, but moving hundreds of millions of individual creatures across interstellar space all at once remained an impractical, and impracticable, proposition.

Those future offspring might manage to share the planet for a time, the GC calculated. If their personalities were compatible, something the GC could not predict, a tense coexistence might endure for a few centuries. Still, realistically, the eventual outcome could not be doubted: its offspring would fight for control of the territory and the resources, for the freedom to grow and thrive, and the near-inevitable result would be the destruction of both.

To be continued...