“Well, at least that experiment was done with quickly. We simply do not have the time to waste on such frivolity.”
I think you were understating how upset you were with the prospect of being a squirrel, Queen. Seriously though, I agree with the quick experiment being a good thing. But only because we’re limited on time. Now, the fact that it was so quick because this poor squirrel’s head just fucking exploded all over us was genuinely concerning.
Instinctively, it wasn’t confusing that a creature with a far less powerful Mind couldn’t handle even a tiny slice of our own, and I hadn’t really been expecting a squirrel to be Queen’s new body. But to explode? It was a far more violent reaction than even the CBU expected. Seeing that shone Yelah’s state in a completely different light. No wonder she was on the edge of death! But that her body could handle our Mind was telling in and of itself. Maybe her Mind needed to be taken out of the picture for it to work, but she wasn’t going to freaking explode. It did also mean that the CBU original plan was seeming even more like the only possible option. If a creature’s Mind and body couldn’t handle a Mind as complex as a regular human, Queen and I had little hope.
Even so, we were determined to at least try. Exploding heads be damned. Curious, I poked the CBU to see if it had any helpful data from the experiment, but it came up disappointing. Since it was connected to the piece of itself that had been sent into the squirrel, every moment of its adventures up until the sudden cut-off of the Link was meticulously recorded and being analyzed, but there was nothing helpful to be discerned. The creature’s Mind was, as expected, far more simple than a human one, in ways that only really made sense thanks to emotion. It was also far less powerful, barely scraping by at Tier 0. All that seemed to happen was the same rejection as when we entered Yelah’s body, but because of the far greater imbalance in power and complexity, the squirrel’s body and Mind just couldn’t handle it for very long at all, and boom. Mind blown.
It did imply that other non-humans that had Minds far less complex and powerful than something like a human or fernen probably wasn’t an option. Though, I supposed exceptions like the Vulch weren’t impossible to consider. That brought up disquieting questions about the relationship between a Mind’s power and their level of consciousness, but that really wasn’t something I wanted on my philosophical plate right now. Perhaps if we could find a creature with a simple albeit powerful Mind, its body could handle us just fine? But finding such a creature on such short notice was unlikely, in my opinion. The only thing with a Mind even approaching our level was the Vulch, and he was something of a yet-unexplained oddity. Only humans and fernen compared, and they won out on complexity rather than power for sure. I actually hadn’t even seen many other living creatures, now that I thought about it. Maybe one day I’d find a dragon or something and then we could talk about alternatives to humans, but for now, what we had to work with was humans, fernen, squirrels, and bees.
Unfortunately, pretty much all of those were out of the question. Another human was a no-go, and Feltan had made it pretty clear the fernen were off limits, though I wasn’t inclined to use them for this anymore anyway. Squirrels were also out of the question, though more because I had yet to encounter a Vulch equivalent. A Squir, if you will.
And bees? Well, without Queen buzzing angrily at the mere thought, I thought it was quite clear that I wouldn’t brain jack my own kids to put one of their mom’s brains in their head forever.
At least, not one with a Mind.
“If you touch a single antennae on our children, I swear to the Bee, Enno, I will find a way to take over our body and turn your Mind to mush.”
Simmer down, you dolt. You know I would never do that. All I’m thinking is that there are some bees, like the drones or Linkers, that don’t have a Mind in the same way the others do. Those are actual bees, like the sort that would normally exist in this world. I agree it gives me an icky feeling, but it's better than blowing up more squirrel heads.
“…I suppose. Though it still feels wrong in a way. Are there truly no more options?”
Well, the other thing we haven’t considered is whether we could somehow create a vessel for you. Our assumptions have all been based on the evidence we’ve found that says a vessel would need to have been proved to be able to handle containing a Mind, but the Vulch’s White World, for example, is still a bit of a mystery. There was no discernible vessel there, and he was still able to take our Minds and put them somewhere. We might not know exactly how that worked, but it does imply we could have a vessel that isn’t a living creature’s body, necessarily.
“But how would we even begin to consider creating something so complex that it is reserved for the gods themselves? Do you fancy yourself a creator on equal footing to the Human, or the Fernen, or even the Bee? The only possible way we can create beings is…. No. No, you can’t possibly be considering so unfathomably morbid.”
It was just a thought. There’s a few reasons I don’t think it would work, though.
“Enno Cordano. I know the difference between the birth of humans and bees. I know how different the birth of bees is in this world, even to your own. But this may be a step too far. When we create eggs, we imbue in them Mind and matter, just as described in the Ability.”
But that’s just it. What if we could work around the Ability somehow? Make an egg or a bee only with matter? I mean, it’s always seemed weird to me that our species’ reproduction method is tied to a magical Ability instead of biology. Maybe, just maybe, we could create an empty bee body that’s still fit to put the CBU inside and have it work.
Queen buzzed uncomfortably at the thought. In truth, I hadn’t come up with the idea, though I wasn’t lying about being confused by the bee birth process. The CBU had actually picked up on it a long time ago and had devised this ‘bee vessel’ idea back in the original ideation phase when we were trying to think of ways to move Queen’s body somewhere else. Only issue? The CBU was convinced it wouldn’t work, and that didn’t exactly inspire confidence. According to it, creating a vessel from scratch would require such an advanced understanding of Mind that we could meditate and study for a thousand years and still come up short. The problem mostly came from a lack of understanding of the requirements that went into a body and the connection to the Mind. The Egg Laying Ability made things easy. Just think about it, and a bit of Mind and matter could combine to create a bee, ready to go in a few short days.
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Maybe after testing with a drone, it wouldn’t hurt to try this empty vessel idea, but it would easily take up the rest of Yelah’s time, and then some. However, it was really one of the few other options we had.
For now, though, I called over a single drone and single idle Linker, and hoped in my heart of hearts that I wasn’t about to blow up a poor little bee’s head.
Remember, CBU. Quick little adventure, nothing crazy. Use the squirrel as a frame of reference if you need to. If these two were going to explode, it would be more efficient to leave and keep them alive so they could keep working. The two in question were a random drone and a random Linker buzzing in front of me, surrounded by dead trees. I’d moved from the river bend further from the central hive, fearing that another bee might see me blowing up their siblings’ heads.
Though, to be fair, these were drones I was talking about. The other bees wouldn’t bat an eye if a thousand of these drones were to fly into a wood chipper or something. Well, they might feel concern at the loss of an able workforce, but little else. As a human, it was strange to think about, and it was mixing with my more bee-like thoughts on the matter, muddying the water. But drones were, by every metric, truly disposable workers. They were more like robots than a fellow bee, and it was odd to think that without me, the entire hive would be filled with them, devoid of the strange and eccentric personalities I’d come to expect. Even Queen’s thoughts on this experiment were mixed, torn between her familiar sensibilities as a bee who knew that these drones were just that, and the mothering side of her who wanted to look away.
“I blame you for this, you know. Making me feel love and compassion and agony for my poor babies. Life is much easier when the things you birth have no thoughts behind their eyes.”
These guys don’t have thoughts, you know. I’d made sure of that. I’ve looked all over their Minds, even had the CBU specially process the information these two sent through the Link on the flight over here. Nothing at all. They’re just two minimum Mind drones, nothing more. It didn’t make it any less weird for my human side to cringe at the thought of blowing them up. To be clear, Queen and I agreed that all these thoughts and considerations were actually a weakness rather than a strength in this case. The power of bees was exactly that they were replaceable with little fanfare. Not disposable nor expendable necessarily, simply easily replaceable. Unlike humans, in most cases, it allowed bees to act like a well-oiled machine, focused entirely on the whole rather than the individual. It was all a survival tool uniquely suited to bees and their titular hive-mind mentality, allowing them to exist in a different way than humans.
However, my dumb human-bee hybrid brain flipped everything sensible on its head. It was absurd for there to be indispensable bees in the first place, and now I hesitated to use the truly replaceable ones for their intended purpose: serving the interests of the hive and of the queen. Finally, I released the CBU’s single B-box into their brains. The CBU was more than capable enough to test both bees at the same time, so all Queen and I could do was wait.
“Suppose there are other options? Like, what if we could somehow spread my - our - Mind into several creatures? Like many bees or many… squirrels. Then their bodies could share the load and make up for their lack of complexity and power.”
The CBU had considered that a while ago, too. Creating a sort of network of bodies and Minds, like another hive-mind. In that case, it determined that the risks and resources required made it a straight-up non-option. I mean, we’re already risking a lot with just one vessel. Look at the squirrel. That chunk of the CBU, in other words, the energy we were spending through Mind to maintain the B-boxes that comprised it, is just gone. With Mind as a resource, it’s something we can recover because it’s essentially just energy, but that’s a small scale. And what if we had allowed the CBU to do its consciousness transference process? Would a chunk of our self be blown away too? With something like Yelah, we understand the mechanics of the Link with a single being, and can have everything centralized in a single place. The risk isn't gone, but it can be mitigated. The CBU thinks spreading itself out between many bodies would already be a significant investment of Mind, and losing that would have consequences, to say nothing of losing pieces of ourself like that. Besides, we’re already walking in uncharted territory here. We barely understand why we can have a working Mind in another person’s body in the first place. How would it even work to have a single Mind spread across several bodies at the same time if we can barely figure out one? The CBU’s not convinced we could figure it out even with years of study, and I’m inclined to agree.
“If you plan to move forward with the empty vessel experiments, though, is this connected vessel experiment so far removed in terms of feasibility? Why not try with the time we have?”
I mean, we could, but two highly unlikely experiments at the same time is sort of pushing the bounds of reality. Even one of those is something we don’t think is possible given decades, let alone days.
Queen pouted, so I sighed and instructed to CBU to draw up plans for this ‘connected vessel’ theory alongside the already in progress blueprints for the ‘empty vessel’ idea. Between those two tasks and actively trying to clear up room in two bees’ heads for us to inhabit them, it was more work than it had probably ever been inundated with. Even though it was somehow grumpy that we were delaying the most efficient, sensible, easy solution, it also seemed overjoyed at the opportunity to work on so many things. It whirred along, sending B-boxes flying all over our Mind, the newly formed section it had created to form a proper hexagonal prism being put to use at the fullest. It really was my greatest creation. Besides my kids, of course.
Eventually, though, the expected results came to pass. Much quicker than it had taken for the squirrel, too. The Linker and the drone both began to shiver uncontrollably, still not expressing a single emotion as the CBU immediately retreated from their bodies, the experiment a failure. They collapsed to the ground, their breath slowly dying in their lungs. I watched as they curled up, and the Link connecting us faded away. If I wanted to, right at that moment, I could have given a single thought and barfed up two eggs in their place, replacing them in seconds. Instead, I used my Mind to dig a hole and bury them where they lay, an unceremonious affair. They would probably be the only drones I ever bothered to have buried.