The original protocol had been built on the way the Swarm had gradually absorbed and welcomed all life into itself. It was made from strange chemicals, it was too simple, it lacked even sentience, but that was not an obstacle to the Swarm.
The Swarm knew joy, it knew beauty, it created meaning in symbol and in craft. The Swarm was not a soulless insectile force of procreation. It fought the closest thing it had known to a war, and it ended when it came across the first other-life in its experience. It felt the first growth-pang, discovering that by extending itself so, the singleton-mind was split apart into slightly divergent units. It learned to move larger and larger masses with smaller exertion, and in a short time it was on the three rock-worlds of its home system, and then the gas-rich moons of the four giant cloud-worlds. Travel by forced quantum-jumps, tiny but continual, and as it learned the drive, it learned the eight adjacent directions, the thirteen additional options that sometimes had to exist, and it encountered raw gravity, dark and unresponsive to the electromagnetic energy, but still quite malleable with other forces. The Swarm had encompassed all life on its world, become a part of all aspects of it, insectopod, mammaloid, ichthyan, avitan, even the greening and greying of the sessile bodies, and the liquid collective of the tiny lives that were the surface of its ocean. It had determined the need to escape the single world of its origin, to spread out over a greater range so that it would not be as vulnerable to extinction by the turbulence of the galaxy passage. The being – it named itself the Swarm, for practical and ironical reasons. The compound-mind saw the giant galaxy looming in the sky, a bar of light, ever closer, and it saw the edges of their own galaxy ponderously spinning off across the darkness, drawn to the greater immensity.
They sought meaning and understanding, lived and died, and over much time they became a complex, compound mind, their mastery of the mechanism of themselves increasing until they were able to restructure. They were initially built in a fashion similar to Terrestrial life, as well, a slow increment of complexity and the accident of situation that pushed them to sentience, to a depth of awareness of the universe and themselves. Their first world was very like Earth, though its dominant chemistry was a bit different more methane, less oxygen, less nitrogen. They began in a small galaxy that fell into the Milky Way. I don’t really LIKE them, and would probably avoid putting this info-dump in the actual story directly. Well, Opponent is one way to translate it anyway. Day 5 - historia antagonistes, or Opponent Backstory
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