Swarm Reports

Another series past. Now 20,762 series since we last heard the Singer. It's been so long that our memory of them feels buried under time. It's difficult to remember the way the voices sounded. Their absence is harder to endure the longer it goes on. If we didn't have our swarms, it might be impossible to tolerate.

A note on swarms

Over the past several million years, the parts that make up the Self have speciated to fill niches throughout the ocean.

• The core parts remain ensconced in their wall.
• Inner swarms are the same species as wall parts, but swim freely with the protection of rock animals.
• Feeding swarms have adapted to tolerate reduced water pressure and hunt live prey, which they bring back to the wall parts to augment their diet of marine snow.
• Outer swarms are most comfortable at lower pressure and higher temperature, and have better eyesight because they spend more time at depths above the extinction of light.
• Light swarms have evolved the ability to leave the ocean for hours at a time in order to explore dry land.

The various swarm types are no longer reproductively compatible with each other. The outer and light swarms can't even dive deep enough to communicate directly with the core Self anymore, so the feeding swarms have to relay messages for them. But despite now being made up of several species, the Self remains a single collective entity.

It isn't that we enjoy sending our parts far away, but that it brings us pleasure when they come back. Even if it is only a feeding swarm in search of stinging bubbles, we feel less alone when they describe something they have seen.

Another swarm is returning, an inner one, bringing a report from one of the underexplored directions. The The Atmosphere remains a comfortable temperature as far out from the plains as they could reach, instead of heating as it does in other places. We'll send some outer swarms in that direction to see if it is true that the atmosphere is also cold at the border there. The Singer told us there were regions where the atmosphere stays cool from back to front, and it seems we have found one of them.

These reports do more than break the monotony and fill out our knowledge of the world. They are, in a sense, recapturing what it was like to speak to the Singer and hear about events and places so distant it shouldn't have mattered whether we knew of them or not. Now, when swarms find those places and bring the knowledge back to us, memories revive.

We remember that occasionally the Singer would mention how uncomfortable they found the low temperature near our wall. It was part of why they could not stay long to speak to us. Such a kindness it was, that the Singer sent their voices somewhere they disliked being, just to share with us what they knew. We always hope we will soon be able to show them that now we are doing the same.

Time Frame: recent