back, they aimed high. They were m eant for the stars, and every single one of them knew it.
If only they had known what we would find , he thinks now, even as he sifts through perfect memories of the last twelve hours. He manages them, weighs them, labels them, and files them away in the appropriate brain. If only they had known .
Stars. Endless seas of them. And nebulae. And more stars. And comets and asteroids and gas giants and more stars. They searched for meaning, found none. Other sentient species emerged in star systems around them, others that were no more intelligent than their lowest worker, and yet they discovered space travel in their own time. The audacity of it was…
The Conductor’s people saw what happened when other beings went through their own industrial revolutions, pushing past the borders of their solar systems. Idiots in charge of technology they have no true mastery of, all of them using concepts they have no command over . All apparent by these species’ rapid expansion. Without the wisdom of Calculators to manage their size and establish a critical limit, or the leadership of Conductors or Directors to carry out actions with the exactness of a proper civilization, all other species faltered and fell.
We must be as careful here as we were around Rook. The Conductor is quite in control of his faculties, at least for the most part, but what he is carrying is the weight of an entire race’s ego, one built and emboldened by its inability to fail, and one that finds umbrage anywhere, especially in the act of an inferior race to achieve a destiny they haven’t yet achieved themselves. This is every bit as contagious as the despair the Sidewinder is saturated with.
Breathing, breathing, breathing…analyzing one thought here…measuring another thought over there…judging it…labeling it…filing it.
Down through the centuries, hormonal shifts and rapid changes in his people’s diet—and even breeding experimentation—brought about three- and four-tiered anomalies. Then came more hearts, because a body with more brains needed more blood and oxygen pumping to them.
In time, the four-tier brain people became the great sages of their society, the Calculators and the Architects, the Engineers and the Directors, the Gatherers and the Builders. The Calculators came up with the exact number of people, food, water, and resources they would need to be sustainable and maintain optimum efficiency, constantly recalculating as the Architects and Engineers used their findings to utmost efficiency, and the Gatherers augmented their resource supply. The Directors heeded the words of the Calculators, planned out their exponential growth, and devised the necessary system to keep it all working. Everyone knew their place in the grand scheme of things. To this day, historians speak of how it seemed their entire race knew it was destined for the stars, and hadn’t stopped after that first spark of intelligence granted them the vision.
A caste system formed, and those cursed with the ancient single-brain were set to manual labor, yet even they were too stupid to see that they would eventually work themselves out of their own jobs by helping to build the machines that replaced them. Genetic experimentation gave rise to the Strategists, those of the five- and six-tiered brains. Then came the Advent Children, the Conductors, they of the seven-tiered brain, augmented by advanced implant technologies, and currently the greatest organic thinking machines in the known universe.
There is a tremor just below him. As humans , and especially as apparitions, we do not sense it directly, but the Conductor surely does, and we sense it only vicariously. Not only is he vastly more intelligent than most members of his species, he is also a dozen times more sensitive to changes in the atmosphere, and to his general surroundings.
Slowly, he opens his eyes. The floor trembles
If only they had known what we would find , he thinks now, even as he sifts through perfect memories of the last twelve hours. He manages them, weighs them, labels them, and files them away in the appropriate brain. If only they had known .
Stars. Endless seas of them. And nebulae. And more stars. And comets and asteroids and gas giants and more stars. They searched for meaning, found none. Other sentient species emerged in star systems around them, others that were no more intelligent than their lowest worker, and yet they discovered space travel in their own time. The audacity of it was…
The Conductor’s people saw what happened when other beings went through their own industrial revolutions, pushing past the borders of their solar systems. Idiots in charge of technology they have no true mastery of, all of them using concepts they have no command over . All apparent by these species’ rapid expansion. Without the wisdom of Calculators to manage their size and establish a critical limit, or the leadership of Conductors or Directors to carry out actions with the exactness of a proper civilization, all other species faltered and fell.
We must be as careful here as we were around Rook. The Conductor is quite in control of his faculties, at least for the most part, but what he is carrying is the weight of an entire race’s ego, one built and emboldened by its inability to fail, and one that finds umbrage anywhere, especially in the act of an inferior race to achieve a destiny they haven’t yet achieved themselves. This is every bit as contagious as the despair the Sidewinder is saturated with.
Breathing, breathing, breathing…analyzing one thought here…measuring another thought over there…judging it…labeling it…filing it.
Down through the centuries, hormonal shifts and rapid changes in his people’s diet—and even breeding experimentation—brought about three- and four-tiered anomalies. Then came more hearts, because a body with more brains needed more blood and oxygen pumping to them.
In time, the four-tier brain people became the great sages of their society, the Calculators and the Architects, the Engineers and the Directors, the Gatherers and the Builders. The Calculators came up with the exact number of people, food, water, and resources they would need to be sustainable and maintain optimum efficiency, constantly recalculating as the Architects and Engineers used their findings to utmost efficiency, and the Gatherers augmented their resource supply. The Directors heeded the words of the Calculators, planned out their exponential growth, and devised the necessary system to keep it all working. Everyone knew their place in the grand scheme of things. To this day, historians speak of how it seemed their entire race knew it was destined for the stars, and hadn’t stopped after that first spark of intelligence granted them the vision.
A caste system formed, and those cursed with the ancient single-brain were set to manual labor, yet even they were too stupid to see that they would eventually work themselves out of their own jobs by helping to build the machines that replaced them. Genetic experimentation gave rise to the Strategists, those of the five- and six-tiered brains. Then came the Advent Children, the Conductors, they of the seven-tiered brain, augmented by advanced implant technologies, and currently the greatest organic thinking machines in the known universe.
There is a tremor just below him. As humans , and especially as apparitions, we do not sense it directly, but the Conductor surely does, and we sense it only vicariously. Not only is he vastly more intelligent than most members of his species, he is also a dozen times more sensitive to changes in the atmosphere, and to his general surroundings.
Slowly, he opens his eyes. The floor trembles
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