by John McCrae
This was the stage in the cycle when the entity is most aware, most focused. It observes the possible worlds and judges which would be best.
Colony, the entity voices the idea.
With that same signal, the various nuances suggest countless worlds that are to be removed from consideration. Worlds without enough population.
Agreement, the response comes.
The entity’s counterpart is taking a passive role, investigating only to confirm, to validate. This is concerning. Where is the counterpart’s focus, if not on this vital decision?
Study reveals worlds with dominant belief systems, peaceful worlds, worlds crowded with twelve billion individuals. Worlds with almost none.
The entity pares through these, deciding.
It investigates, and in the doing, it prepares some shards for analysis and understanding of this particular society and culture. Language, culture, patterns of behavior, patterns of society. This is something the counterpart should be emphasizing.
The process is interrupted by an arrival.
A member of their own species, approaching. It was smaller, took a different form. It used different means to travel.
This was what had distracted the counterpart.
Its ancestors had traveled a different path, easily hundreds of cycles ago, before the entities had begun traveling in pairs. This new arrival had encountered different worlds, less worlds, and it had developed differently.
The lesser one crossed paths with the entity’s counterpart. For a duration, they intertwined, meeting through multiple realities, their bodies rubbing and crushing against one another.
A sharing of details, a wealth of knowledge, from hundreds of cycles. A sacrifice of the same.
The lesser one moves on, bloated with new shards and knowledge, but the counterpart flounders.
It sacrificed too much.
Concern.
Confident.
The counterpart is not worried. The signal carries notes of hope for the future. The counterpart will replenish its shards, its stores of knowledge, memories and abilities at the conclusion of this cycle, reuniting with the entity.
The counterpart is supposed to be the passive figure, the thinker, the planner, while this entity is the warrior, the protector. The entity is forced to make up for the counterpart’s disability, to slow its advance through the void as they approach their destination and devote resources to analyzing, something the other should be doing instead.
The focus is on one reality. They will subsume it first, then expand to others. The most efficient route, achieving maximum amounts of conflict. By testing their own shards against one another, they gather information. The entity’s shards will fight among each other, and they will fight the counterpart’s, and they will steadily learn.
With a species such as these social bipeds, the entities can draw new conclusions, come up with new uses for shards. It tracks and records details that allow it to shape new shards at the cycle’s conclusion.
But their new hosts are a weak species, fragile. The abilities must be limited in scope. Worlds that are too advanced would be too fragile, as advanced weapons eliminate too many, cut the process short.
Destination.
Agreement, the response is not so complex, is expressed in a softer, quieter manner.
Still, the pair have settled on a set of realities.
The entity focuses on one. Enough individuals, natural conflict and confrontation. A balance of physical and emotional stressors. The environment is damaged, but not so much it would inhibit growth.
Hive. The entity communicates the decision.
Agreement. The counterpart grasps it immediately, knows which reality he means.
The focus changes. An interplay of communications, one bouncing off the other, as they designate realities. Each shard needs one, some shards need to cluster and reside across multiple realities. They draw on these worlds for power, for energy, and thus fuel the techniques they have been coded with.
Each shard, in turn, needs a target. The entity’s focus expands, designating likely partners. Past mistakes have been accounted for, and the shards will connect in a covert manner. They will reside in other worlds, uninhabited worlds, and they will remain cloaked and concealed in areas this new host species is unlikely to explore.
It is a negotiation.
Ownership here.
Claim there.
Territory here.
With each statement, they each catalogue the realities. Similar realities are included together, for both the entities and the shards. Too many complications and confusions arise when interacting with worlds that are exceedingly similar. Not an effective form of conflict, when it is the same lessons learned over and over again. It is better to connect them into groupings, limit exposure to each set of worlds. One shard is capable of settling in a grouping of near-identical worlds, drawing energy from all of those worlds at once.
The entity looks to the future to check for danger.
Plague.
All signs point to the shards murdering their hosts.
The hosts must be protected, or this will be disastrous, counter-intuitive. The entity adjusts the innate safeguards, protections to reflect the host species and their tolerances. The bonding process will protect the host, where the host needs protection. Shards that are capable of providing flame at will cannot burn the hosts, now. Shards are reorganized, combined and clustered where necessary, to grant sufficient protection.
Infestation.
Better, but not perfect. The entity refines the process, limits certain abilities, so they will not eradicate too many at a time.
Soft. The broadcast is sent out to the counterpart, along with suggestions and tips on how to refine the shards.
Agreement, the counterpart accepts.
But the entity can still see fallout effects. There are parallels in memory storage. Not many, but there may be glimmers where the subject is capable of perceiving the information stored in the shard as the connections are formed.
For good measure, the entity breaks up one shard cluster, tunes it, then codes the effect into each and every shard. It studies the host species further, refines, attunes.
It takes time, but the entity forms a sufficient safeguard. The host species will forget any significant details.
The broken shard is cast off, joining countless others. It will bond to a host. The entity looks forward, checking.
After the target planet has revolved thirty-three times around its star, this shard will connect to a host.
A male guards his offspring, a female, with his size and bulk. A group of hostile bipeds cluster around them. They call out, making unusual loud sounds, suggesting intoxication. One of the hostile ones gestures, gripping its male parts, pulling them free of their coverings. A sexual gesture follows, waving the organ left and right, thrusting it into the empty air.
Sounds of amusement, laced with hostility.
The male and his offspring retreat as far against the nearest construction as they are able.
The shard connects, attaching to the male.
No. It is ineffective. The female is clearly more distressed.
Prey.
There is a way to maximize exposure to conflict.
The entity taps into its understanding of the bipeds and how they operate, recognizes the signs of distress, the nuances such things can have.
It views the future again, with changes made in the code.
This time, the shard settles in the male, then immediately shifts to the more distressed female.
Insinuation. The shard connects to the host’s neural network.
The bond is created.
The shard opens the connection as the stress peaks, and the host doubles over in pain, bewildered, stunned. The shard then forms tendrils that contact each individual in the area. It retains traces of the entity’s tampering, of the studies in psychology, awareness and memory, and is quick to adapt. It finds a manner in which it c
an operate, then alters itself, solidifying into a particular state. The remainder of the functions are discarded, the ones in the shard itself are rendered inert to conserve power, while the ones in the host fall away, are consumed by the shard. The host’s neural network changes once more.
The female disappears from the awareness of the hostile ones that surround it.
The entity looks to the future, to see if this is sustainable, efficient.
All seems well.
A view of other bondings suggests this emphasizes younger targets, particularly those in a middle stage of development, between a lesser phase and an adult phase. Emotions are higher at that juncture, and the possibility of conflict increases further.
The entity allows for deeper connections to foster more conflict. The underlying instructions are already present from previous cycles, and can be left largely alone. These bipeds war with each other enough. It will only serve to assist the most extreme cases.
Forget. The entity informs its counterpart of the changes it made.
Agreement. The counterpart acknowledges.
Emotion. More changes.
Agreement.
Before the last response is received, the entity has already begun shedding shards that won’t prove useful or particularly problematic. Shards for attack and defense, distributed over an even geography, an even timeline.
More complicated shards require more focus. Ones that harbor stored memory of technology and development in past cycles are prepared so they might bond with a host and transmit that knowledge.
For others, there is no easy way to apply the contained knowledge, so they are coded to draw from the host’s recollection and awareness, or to search the entire planet for details and information on what it might be able to do.
Ones that alter the nature of the host in fundamental ways are planted throughout, so as to add more variables in how the others must adapt to them. A host that chooses how gravity applies to it. A host that can become a storm of friction, intensifying all friction in an area around it. One that becomes immaterial. Another that can make paths between realities, with safeguards to keep it away from ones the shards are rooted within.
The entity is approaching the galaxy cluster in question now, and it sees its counterpart doing the same, if at a slightly slower pace. Both are trailed by a cloud of shards now, each cast off in such a way that it won’t reach its target location until a set time and date.
The entities begin to close their spiral dance, drawing together as much as they can with the counterpart struggling.
They approach their destination, and begin to disintegrate in great quantities, until thirty percent remains, twenty, ten, two…
It will take one hundred and sixty revolutions before their destination reality hits critical mass.
Three hundred and thirty-one revolutions before the shards reach a critical mass and enough information is gathered. To look to the future and seek that information in advance would take too much energy. To do this and fail would be a catastrophic setback in the cycles.
This suffices. It spends the least energy for the maximum result.
The counterpart is descending, having selected a destination world. It is hemorrhaging shards in clusters, due to the excessive exchange of shards with the lesser one, too soon before their arrival at their destination. These shards are breaking off in huge volumes.
A check confirms these shards are coded, that everything is technically well.
Danger, the entity broadcasts.
Confident, the counterpart replies.
The counterpart remains secure. Nothing to be done.
There is no more time to devote to the crisis. The entity focuses on its destination, on the next part of the cycle.
The shards have largely been assigned to hosts. They will remain latent, they will wait for the first crucial moment of crisis and use that to shape their function, to better assist their host.
It is impossible to check the exact circumstances for each event. Some shards harbor particular concepts, and will shape their application to the host’s needs. Others are coded with particular applications, and will either scan viable realities or the host’s frame of reference for how that application will come to pass.
Physical harm will grant physical assets, be it direct or abstract. Immediate danger will nudge the shard towards defensive abilities. Ranged attacks against living threats, an ability to shape or affect the environment against environmental dangers.
Successes will help refine the abilities, provide inspiration for the development of new shards. Failures will help all the same.
In hosts, too, there will be variations. The shards might seek out different hosts, if others are in range, as the perception-altering one did. They will fragment and transmit to other hosts, as they grow and develop.
The entity is satisfied. In terms of raw size, it is but a small fragment of what it once was, barely a cluster of shards now. Its part in this phase of things is nearly done.
The next part of the cycle begins.
It chooses an unoccupied reality. A barren planet. Its perceptions focus on the landmasses in idle curiosity. Different from the focus reality, but similar.
They have reached the solar system in question now. They brush up against one another, and the entity shores up its counterpart where it can, sacrificing its own shards in the process.
Acceptance. Gratitude.
The counterpart’s message is thin, but the entities are but a ten-thousandth of a percent of their original size.
It turns its attention to adapting.
In the course of thousands of cycles, the entities have refined their methodology. There are no true points where they are vulnerable.
As the whole, as the entity, it is safeguarded by countless abilities, defenses, perceptions and options. It is fat with the knowledge of every generation that came before, the mistakes, the problems, and the solutions. While it travels the void, it is virtually untouchable.
But there have been times where the shards were vulnerable, after bonding with hosts. Even now, there are dim possibilities that they might be rooted out. There are issues where shards that have been coded to generate conflict could do too much damage, disrupting the cycle.
This is something that must be tended to.
The entity turns its attention briefly to their target reality, observes the various life forms.
Always, in the course of its examination of the possible futures, it was evaluating, checking to see what was necessary.
A quick glance into the future, not so deep a look as to expend too much of its remaining energy. Conservation is key at this juncture, and from here on out.
The entity’s present configuration is satisfactory. The chance the cycle can be interfered with has become infinitesimally small.
The shard that allows the entity to see the future is broken up, then recoded with strict limitations. It wouldn’t do to have the capabilities turned against the entity or the shards.
The fragment it just used is sent off, directed to a small female.
The other fragments in that same cluster are retained. To see the future is resource intensive, but the entity will harbor it as a safeguard.
More abilities are used to check, investigate, and then cast off. The ability to communicate and receive signals is unnecessary now. To transmit signals across wavelengths. It, too, is intentionally crippled as an ability. It would not do to have that one being used with regularity. Such would be distracting for the entity and its counterpart.
When it knows the configuration is absolutely decided, it reaches for the last fragment it will cast off. This one, too, it cripples, even largely destroys, so as to limit the host from using it in the same fashion.
In a haste to decide matters before it enters the stratosphere of that barren planet, the entity casts it off to a similar location as the future-sight ability. A similar time, thirty-one revolutions from now. The destination is a male, thin, in the
company of strong males and females, drinking.
And with that, the entity lands on the barren planet.
The planet revolves around its star once before the entity even moves.
The entity rises and extends its perceptions across multiple realities.
It’s time.
Chrysalis.
The entity changes.
A star that burns twice as hot burns for half as long.
Not truly, but the entity is aware of the idioms and patterns of this world, is already thinking periodically in terms of the words and ideas of their languages, to frame thoughts for itself in this pivotal moment. It serves to help codify the messages and intent.
The entities burn as hot as any star, with their sheer mass, their scale, the power they wield. This is acceptable while traveling the void, when much of the body remains in a hibernation state. Stored energy is expended as a resource, to view the future, to perceive and communicate.
But this is not sustainable here, in this phase of the cycle, when the entity is so much smaller.
The entity has cast off all but the most essential parts of itself, distributing the shards throughout this reality. More shards will shower on other realities in time, likely around the point the first have started fragmenting in greater numbers
Cycle to cycle, the role changes. Direct involvement, watching from afar, being visible or staying out of sight. Different roles to shepherd the shards through different worlds.
The entity takes shape. It retains the capabilities it had when it first arrived.
Imago. Adult state.
Much of it is still too large for the target reality. It leaves that portion of itself behind, maintains a connection. A safeguard. The body it uses is but an extension, a tendril.
It codifies the thoughts and memories of the society it investigated into a usable fashion.
Then it waits.
Sentinel.
Time passes. A revolution of the planet around its star.
Something has gone wrong. It is time, but it has not received a broadcast from the counterpart.
The entity emerges, stepping into the target reality.
It can see its shards showering down from above like meteors traveling the void. The first to arrive.