The destination of Nest messages is the adjacent star system, Etro. Messages are addressed to the Goddess Yeb. Chit ponders on the strange events it has witnessed, and reflects upon its own colonization of Snowfall: A storm that contains multitudes sends out smaller storms to expand itself to other planets. It sends minions magnitudes smaller than itself to investigate Pleasant Winds.

What if the Goddess Yeb is the true name of the enormous ship that blazed past when the Gate reopened? What if the Credo is one of its badaal; the Nest its Samoohik, and these creatures within the Nest its own version of Ke Kan?

The idea of fragmented and subdivided solid creatures is one that Chit has only a little familiarity with, but it is listening to Fanion explain the repairs of the Pleasant Winds. Basic to Fanion’s assumptions, the very structure of his speech and syntax is the notion that the smaller units are the seat of consciousness; that the large ship encompassing them is directed by their will, not the reverse.

From this, Yeb feels a jolt like lightning. What if the Goddess Yeb is not the ship, but the small one whose will directs it?? Behind this flash like rolling thunder comes another series of insights. Such persons will look to solid beings as the seat of minds. They would conclude that a samoohik carrying Ke Kan keeps its mind in the beetles. There is safety in this thought and also, a form of dread. For how can Chit be certain, in itself, that the Ke Kan do not shape its will and influence its thoughts?

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Next Week: Brave New Umwelt

*Hunger*

From Beyond Etro, faintly

*The sound of a rooster, crowing in distress, cut off by static.*

From Academe

This is an open invitation to all historians within range. The Interstellar Information Vault of Academe is organizing the first ever Conclave of Conferences, to occur on the seventh Pulse of the New Era.

We encourage submission of papers covering your respective local histories during the long closure of the Gates, and will prioritize presentations based on those researchers able to donate the largest volume of information to the Vault. Original documents and artifacts will receive treble the weight in the competition for rank and speaking order.

RSVP is required for presenters but optional for attendees who wish merely to observe and learn.

Due to campus rules we must request that attendees submit to a weapons search upon arrival. We look forward to a history-making event!

Message from Etro to Arslan Goldfeather of Nest (intercepted)

The Goddess Yeb desires that you should make contact with leaders in the Peare star system. Inform them that you saw their lost relations leave with another rescuer. Attempt to establish friendly relations and trade for resources. Do not mention Yeb. Example text included, adjust if needed to conform with what you have told your people.

>Message to Peare from Arslan Goldfeather of Nest (Intercepted)

>A message from kindred castaways, who floated on the clouds below while your sister stood on moonrock above. Gravity as firm a barrier between us as the dead gates were to you. Your kin are rescued by another, we saw them go, we wish to chase. It is time for our bravest Savs to leave the Nest and take flight, to reach for the stars now that the stars once again reach back. Share your tools of travel and we shall repay you with our journeys.

>The transmission is accompanied by diagrams of Nest, a multi-aerostat settlement in the upper atmosphere of Heffa’s gas giant, as well as pictures of the tool-using avians who inhabit it. It contains a request for resources, 2 gas and 1 ore, in order to construct a simple interstellar scout ship (blueprints attached), and promises future transmissions if aided.

Report from the Nest (Intercepted)

The Nest is now fully operational! We still have some folks in hibernation, but have balanced their numbers against expected mortality. Incubators are up and running with fresh-laid eggs -- between remaining awakenings and new hatchings we anticipate that we will be able to sustain a steady adult population through at least the next ten pulses.

Gas production is now underway. Expect deliveries next Pulse. I have told personnel here that we will be selling Gas on the open market in Etro, but of course I defer to the Goddess about how to dispatch resources. I would note that the Nest has no access to new Ores or Rares here on Edura and will be dependent on traders for resupply, unless the Goddess should choose to arrange matters otherwise.

We continue to be visited by the large beetles mentioned previously, and have established communications with them. They call themselves “Ke Kan,” both individually and collectively.

Individually they do not appear to be especially intelligent, and there seems to be only scant lateral communication across individuals. One beetle lands and asks a set of questions. The next beetle lands and asks the same questions again -- where are we from, what do we call ourselves, can he/she have a “beautiful” to take away, and so on. We have experimented with giving them various materials -- plastics, glass beads, graphite chunks, iron filings, mylar sheeting, feathers, etc. They seem to care most that they receive something different from adjacent beetles, but when presented with A/B choices tend to select more reflective substances -- gold, silver, platinum and chrome were preferred over iron or nickel, even if offered in tiny flakes.

Toward the end of this Pulse we began to see a new behavior, demonstrating what is either a form of gratitude or greed. I had mentioned plans to collect and export Gas, or if we could harvest enough, Ice. Visitors who previously received a “beautiful” returned carrying globules of condensation -- as much as half a liter at a time -- and presented these to us as gifts. Just this morning, several individuals who had not previously visited also arrived carrying such globules, saying they “heard on the wind” that we like Ice and have many pretty things to give away.

At present the quantities exchanged are negligible, but if allocated a unit of Ores (or better, Rares), I believe I can build a trade economy. Currently the beetles are giving us an exchange rate that amounts to 5 Ice for 1 Ore or 2 Ice for 1 Rare, which is obviously very favorable for us. Scaling up operations will doubtless crash the local value of Ores, but our accountants have done the math and believe that at an exchange rate of 3 Ore to 2 Ice or better, a Ke Kan trade exchange would be more efficient than building and operating a mechanical Ice-mining facility. I assume you would not be willing to exchange Rares for Ice in significant quantities, though the insects would accept it.

This is the reward of serving Life! Praise the Goddess Yeb!

P.S. I trust this message will find you. Please advise where to send subsequent messages.

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Next Week: Interference

Chit meditates on the influx of information,
    *matriarchal* 
        *heredity* 
          *life support systems*
a *Pleasant Wind* blows 
the scent of the gale to come.

...kala ka kul kaam...

Is as always will, intention is action,
vacuum makes motion, friction and dissonance mixed with inaction
   foreboding the rumble
of a future dramatic consonant consequence.

It seems too that the universe conspires to make Chit its instrument,
kala ka poora kaam, how could Chit have been satisfied? The only justification for
prior inward splendor was that it was mere prelude:

for what shall be drawn forth to bear,
   (what does shk draw forth?)
harvest the whirlwind; intact ships ideal, or broken into Rares

from endlessly shifting to all out eclipsing.
What is the true scope of Chit? 
Storm clouds gather,
ponderous, pondering
lightning-quick thought 
illuminating arguments
focus, deep, on the structure of clouds

We listen to others, speaking.
We expand, diffuse
Baffle the listeners listening to us
Our minds obscure as thickened fog
No one smaller than a saamoohik
Able to see the whole.

Listen to the Nest
Bottle their waves and bend them
To say what we wish
Speak for the Nest
Seek out the locus of their spiral
The larger structure in their branched fractal
Know who and what they are.
Perhaps these birds
   Will catch wind
Weigh upon the Nest with laden swarms
Bust their bubbles and send them plummeting
The instant they suspect
Communications compromise
The wind catches them

So long as relations remain sunny
Make them sunnier
Learn
Shower gifts upon these Savs, these Arts
  Let it seem natural
     Winds of fortune
Encourage exchange and mutual benefit
Are they from Resumption?

see the ke khan, how they come together, they are not us,
but they are *of* us,
   band together 
     fly together,
waves to save the others
brothers, mothers, others,
waiting for coming together again.

Their art artefact old old down town,
is the measure of motif awaiting its call
to react, reactor factor packed.
Chit shall be mothers, be brothers...*be others*,
Snowfall, an apéritif
We come we stay
We settle in the snow.

The *tik tak* percussion of the Ilkworm’s teeth,
when it snapped the badaal, became auburn! it
Understood the words of Chit,
though it painted an abhorrent vacuum
that begets more vacuum,
It understood the Words of Chit,
a lesson both in becoming many and more
and of the dimness and quiet that follows
in the scarcity born of over-obsession with its begotten.

Electric friend, electric fiend
Pleasant winds take pleasant journey
   Over Tik
Where first we heard from solid life
Can a saamoohik board a ship, in body or in mind.
Send what Chit can, with Fanion

Next Week: Missives… Misleading?

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The ship Chit calls Resumption vanished through the Gate last Pulse and, while it’s not exactly visible when the Gates reopen, it has left traces that even a brain smaller than a planet would have no trouble understanding. The lights of Etro have a hole in them where the enormous ship punched through at high speed. Chit shudders at the thought of a collision of this magnitude -- its own experience with the arrival of the minor “Nest” structure now floating amid T shows just how destructive this must have been.

Fanion, Flourishing

Chit sends a baadal to Pock. The baadal exerts itself to align its magnetic membrane precisely to the rim of the crater that Fanion has made its home. The baadal then squeezes itself, achieving an extreme (for baadal) density. As a result, it rains on that tiny moon for the first time in an eternity. The droplets fall, large and round and slow, like marbles through a swirling red-orange smoke. Soon puddles form around the robot, rising to cover its wheels.

Fanion extends a hose and drinks. Vents in its underbelly and upper carapace open, and compressors intake gas. Lights illuminate. Components begin to thrum. Appendages flex. The diminutive creature -- measurable in meters -- is grateful to the point of worship.

“Ask and I shall obey,” Fanion declares.

The baadal strikes Fanion with a bolt of calibrated lightning, imparting to the robot’s circuitry all information known about the Pleasant Winds, along with an intense hunger for more information.

Mission accomplished and energy spent, the baadal’s overtaxed membrane pops. Its gas escapes to space, as true a death as any storm has ever had. In time, its constituent atoms will fall back to Chit. And of course, its last rains and winds gave new life to Fanion.

Pleasant Winds

Meanwhile in a sunny crater a quarter-turn around the moon from Fanion, a different saamoohik moves to interface with the Pleasant Winds. The ship is shielded against intrusions from outside actors, thwarting the saamoohik’s limited tools for connecting to electronics.

The arrival of a third party changes matters. A small ship arrives through the Gates just before the second Pulse closes. In signal exchanges, the new visitors identify themselves as followers of Yeb the Goddess Incarnate, in the scoutship Credo. When they land near Pleasant Winds, the backwash from Credo’s thrusters disturbs the proximate baadal, and by the time the saamoohik reasserts itself, Yeb’s four-armed, four-legged devotees have disembarked to approach the Pleasant Winds on foot. The saamoohik sends a breeze into the Pleasant Wind’s airlocks when they open -- not a full consciousness, but enough to breach the electronic perimeter from the inside.

The resulting information flood is too much for the saamoohik to process. But help is on the way -- Fanion is on the move. The robot races toward the site on eight long lever-like limbs, each triple-jointed. Wheels make for the fastest transit, but Fanion also leaps like an insect even as it drives. In dreamlike bounds that seem to arc almost forever, Fanion arrives at the Pleasant Winds. Gouts of moondust spring up wherever Fanion touches down; they sparkle and linger in the low gravity.

Fanion’s incipient arrival elicits a reaction from the ships. Yeb’s devotees dash from the Pleasant Winds in great haste, leaving the airlock open behind them in their rush. Their space suits are strangely distended, and between them they carry a stretcher with a compartment -- more like a palanquin than a medical emergency.

They wait only long enough to see Fanion reach the Pleasant Winds and plug his cabling into ports on the hull before the Credo launches.

The Pleasant Winds has been left entirely open, and the Saamoohik is free to move itself in and out. It understands only a little, but Fanion is a good translator, providing imagery and explanations.

The Pleasant Winds was the property of a particularly powerful and wealthy individual, one of the Peers of Peare. Peare is a star system one jump beyond Junxn 4, and contains at least one gas giant. When the Gates closed, Peer Jorun Carvanian of House Trogondor invited many other stranded visitors to shelter with her. Some declined, while others accepted. Four survivors have now departed on the Credo, believing that Fanion intended them harm. They wished to return to their homeworld, (homeworlds?). Jorun herself was not among the survivors, but at least one of the survivors was her progeny. Over the course of explaining this, Fanion conveys huge amounts of context, like matriarchal society, feudalism, heredity, life support systems and horse.

Fanion believes that with parts from other derelicts on Pock, the Pleasant Winds can be restored to working order by the time the Gates open for Pulse 4. Records of those who lived here could be salvaged but must be decrypted. Alternatively, Fanion can attach its engines directly to himself and scrap the remainder of the ship for an estimated gain of 5 Ore and 5 Rares. Dismantling the ship means foregoing the opportunity to learn more about its inhabitants.

In either case, Fanion will be spaceflight-capable next Pulse, but must remain on Pock for Pulse 3.

The Credo meanwhile rockets toward the PulseGate in time to see it open for Pulse 3. It sends messages through the open Gate and adjusts course before passing through.

The Nest: Redux

T observes exactly one blast of high-powered radio transmissions from the Nest during the entirety of this Pulse. It is aimed not at the Gate, but at the scoutship Credo.

Next Week: I, of the Storm

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Shk’s baadal rise and plunge through cloud layers, gaining and losing altitude in thunderous hailstorms as they wrack their collective minds for ideas about how to haul Ice from a frozen world too dangerous to harbor their living breezes. At long last Shk calls for Chit’s attention, bringing forward four specific concepts.

Firestorm: This plan calls for Shk himself to travel to Snowfall loaded with many baadal carefully cultivated from winds that when mixed will burn hot and bright to sustain himself while gathering steam into his person and returning to Chit with the new supply of Ice. It is an expensive method and requires the full attention of a flaming Saamoohik. At present only Shk qualifies.

Chain Lightning: This plan calls for baadal to imbue themselves with particulate matter, then position themselves in space like a bridge from Chit to Snowfall. Sending the full power of Chit as lightning strikes from the Gas planet to the Ice world will thaw ice and allow the resulting steam to be passed back along the baadal bridge. This can only be accomplished when the orbits of Chit and Snowfall align enough that the star Heffa is not between them. This means Chain Lightning can only work for 5 Pulses at a time, then must wait another 5 Pulses to become viable again.

Ice Lensing: This plan calls for a small number of baadal to carry Ice into space with them, then crystalize that ice into one or many lenses that focus Heffa’s light onto the surface of Snowfall in such a way that it will send up spray high enough to be quickly collected by other baadal.

Colonize: The problem with Snowfall is that it is too cold. A full-out effort to induce greenhouse gas effects and supplement with more extensive lensing and chain-lightning injections could permanently increase the average temperature enough to allow survival.

Worms and Their Ilk

Chit sends his scouts back to the place known as Peril, with instructions to investigate and attempt communication with the Ilkworms. They endure unclean feelings as they take a new tactic, rendering themselves as diffuse as possible to encompass truly enormous volumes and search the many nests until they find the largest and likely oldest of all Ilkworms. Its nest is near-planetary in size, but egg-shaped and open at its fatter end.

The scout-saamoohik densifies a sacrificial baadal to draw out a truly enormous Ilkworm. The creature is replete with teeth, pale and white, glistening as if wet and clammy in the dim environment. Unsure what else to do, the saamoohik speaks -- much the same as it would to Chit.

“Greatest Ilkworm of Peril, I come to parley with you,” says the saamoohik, awash with fractal lightning and swirling currents.

The ilkworm tilts its toothy end. A ring of eyes -- sixteen in all -- open around its head.Suddenly it shoots forward, opening its mouth with such speed that the baadal vanishes down the leviathan’s gullet. The baadal’s mangled magnetic membrane flickers and dissipates.

The ilkworm changes color, taking on an orange hue. It exhales, and the baadal, diminished by half, pours forth. It is shaken, and its mind bears the imprint of the ilkworm’s will. The local star system has been played out -- what there was here to eat has been eaten. Nothing remains but ilkworms and their cocoons. The Leviathan, now awakened to the reality that the Gates have opened, is more than willing to travel to other stars and worlds and to smite enemies. It expects -- among other things -- to feed corpses to its young. It is large enough to swallow ships and asteroids whole.

Above all, it hungers.

Next Week: Crash Sites

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The ke kan are cagey about their origins -- always have been. That is to say, they’ve always been here, with Chit *false memory*. Chit feels its falseness the way an animal might feel a missing tooth with its tongue, not understanding, exploring the strangeness, unable to set it aside.

Chit spins off a whole hemisphere’s worth of Saamoohiks clean of ke kan -- which anyway have concentrated around Shk and T -- to think upon the matter, then return to Chit to guide the probe into ke kan origins. Without the insect influence, Chit can clearly recall a time before the ke kan. They have grown in number over time, it’s true, but they definitively arrived during the earlier era, before the Pulse Gates fell silent. Only during the long years when no new visitors attended Chit’s planetary concerts did the world-saamoohik turn its mind toward understanding the tiny beetles. So small! Less than a meter! Delight, discovering their minds. Concern, a transitive expression of their obsession with the concept that one day they would die, dead, to death, not only each individual, but the whole, the species, everything they’d ever been, ever seen, ever consumed, ended, ended, ended.

Chit returns to itself whole, with questions flaring bright and purposeful. Answers come buzzing but enigmatic, oblique, repetitive, and oddly haunting as Chit moves determinedly from one question to the next, always unsatisfied.

Where are you from?

From swarm, warm, we form swarm, one and all one for all, all all all.

Why are you found frozen on Snowfall?

Cold town of old town of old cold, warm swarm same came cold all cold all all. Art artefact old old down town frown cold all all doze froze all all art artefact intact react reactor factor packed.

Far sent star scent went bold down told town render ender defender, waves to save others brothers mothers others, but we failed we paled we bailed, foe go before tore poor hurled world; drift drift drift snow drift blow drift go drift snow drift drift twice ice drift drift drift thrice ice. All all all fall fall. Sold gold fold old town cold, mold town, old cold bold cold town ice price.

What do you fear?

Death breath puff snuff froze doze brain drain ill chill. Disarray. Assailed failed paled bailed wailed. Foe go gates fates foe show willed killed skilled made shade hurled world twice ice old cold over all, all, all.

How did you come to Chit?

Chill ill still until eyes wise surprise curled world whirled world swirled fair pair there did hid bid kid, did kid, own grown swarm form warm whirled swirled world endowed proud cloud, loud cloud peek speak seek old cold end friend weep sleep keep thing bring dig big art artefact factor fact.

Chit attempts to withdraw his attentions to consider their scattered hail of words, but the ke kan have not finished speaking:

Loud cloud dig big dig rig big dig rig, warm swarm, re-form, we arm, we farm we grow we go we foe we find we bind, packed art artefact. Flash clash slash splash flood blood foe slow go no, no, no. We all all all ae all all all ae all all all art artefact are in fact art intact are art ae all seek speak peek seek. Warn born warn torn all all ae ae all all. All fall. Dead to death all fall.

Next Week: Worms and their Ilk

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Sucked deep down through layer after layer of turbulence and laminar flows, the baadal confirms (by flashes of lightning insight) that there are indeed many wrecks in the depths -- some in fact float partway down, incompressible shells or other components intact and internally buoyant. Some flutter sluggishly, borne up by viscous winds that feel thick and heavy to the touch continuously flowing over aerodynamically stable shapes. Other shattered ships and subcomponents reach all the way down to the layer where, under extreme pressure, metallic hydrogen falls as rain.

The upper ships are readily recoverable; lower ships initially seem impossible to retrieve. Yet after considerable thought, the saamoohik so assigned comes up with several potential methods. Each ship being made of different materials and in different contexts will have to be excavated differently, and will yield widely varied quantities of Rare material or ore. Yet by borrowing fire tornadoes from Shk, or concentrating thunderstorms with lightning strikes and powerful updrafts, local liquids could be explosively boiled and debris wafted up into the useful heights where it can join Chit’s conscious economy.

If Shk is ordered to focus on producing Rare materials, it will now produce 0-2 Rares per Pulse, and will occasionally reveal functional chunks of wreckage. Shk makes clear (by hurling blue-burning methane flares up toward the stratosphere) that it cannot harvest Rares and work their proposed Firestorm mining operation on the same Pulse.

Next Week: Frozen Friends

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The ke kan determine that the intruders are vulnerable to several attacks within T’s power -- a lightning strike could tear open the chambers that hold captive gas in the upper parts of the structure. The ke kan themselves, with the weight of a massed landing, could drag the structure down far enough into Chit’s depths that the pressure would crush certain components that seem essential -- including the captive gas chambers.

Within the structure many life forms toil, constructing further living and lifting units. From time to time these are brought outside and affixed to the existing structure. New flaccid chambers are created and filled from ambient atmosphere, then warmed. T takes note of this procedure, calculating that a typical baadal is too voluminous to infiltrate the structure through this pathway.

The visitors themselves are smaller than many life-forms, but larger than all but the biggest ke-kan. There are two types. Medium-sized flying insects live within the structure and venture outside frequently. They are striped, typically purple, and fuzzy. They are not heard to speak with each other and no attempt to communicate with them has been made. The other type are birds, with varied plumage, sometimes gold, sometimes blue, sometimes emerald green. The birds stay within the structure and mostly speak to one another in a rapid, chirping tongue with which T is unfamiliar, yet from time to time he catches a word or phrase in the galactic lingua franca.

More promising are the electronic systems. Slowly and steadily T probes his way into their outer ports and learns to parse some of their electromagnetic signals. Most but not all of the language used here is a common tongue Chit has seen before. T can’t penetrate far into the structure, but gathers enough to confirm that these birds call themselves Savs, call their insect companions Arts and call this place The Nest. They have crash-landed here; many are injured, others slumber. They intend to stay. They attempt and fail to eat a captured ke kan, but otherwise remain unaware that Chit exists. They know the star’s name is Heffa, but seem not to know much about Heffa’s PulseGate neighbors.

Next Week: Downed Deep

Snowflakes form at altitude, swirl and plunge, thawing as they go.
Down deep as droplets they encounter updrafts and hurtle upward.
Freezing, they fall, only to rise again, collecting condensation
Layer by layer, shell by shell/Solid hail forms in the storm; a firm resolve
Hire Fanion, the metal moon-marooned minion.
Satisfied thunder rumbles.

Elsewhere around the eye of certain saamoohiks tendrils draw down from clouds.
Whirls of air, high pressure around low, writhe like worms.
Bolt after crackling bolt illuminates the eyewall
Dangerous, glorious, purposeful.
The ilk worms must be investigated. Illuminated; communicated with.
What hath nature wrought, over there, in Peril?

Dwelling on death, T looks inward.
Life in dwellings, suspended by captive gasses, stopped their plummet through cloud and jetstream
But what if they had not?
Memory says, this has happened before.
Ships, hot and hard, fell downward and never came up.
What happened to past visitors
Down deep, buried in the planetary core beyond the touch of the lowest baadal’s caress
There must be something, no?

Snowfall, replete with beetles
Chill breezes and mind freezes.
How long have beetles been there?
They have always been of us *false memory*
The planet remembers a time of sterile clouds.
Inhabited only by itself.

Shk, the rain-maker
Make it rain
Or snow, or Ice.
Extract from Snowfall what we can. Bring it home to Chit.
An ill wind, death, must be avoided.

Beetles on the wing have taught us much; now with T will teach us more.
T attunes to learn as much as possible from these deadly visitors.
Short-term losses pale next to existential threat. Rapid learning will answer the need; face the
existential threat.
Hold back displays and appear dumb.
Send in ke kan; let the fate of knowing these visitors fall to their natural instincts.

Leap out, baadal. Flock to Pock.
Find the *Pleasant Winds*. Infiltrate as only passed gas can.
Learn as much as possible about its source, it’s technologies, Jorun Carvanian, life-support, “daughters,” and “horses”. Fanion may be of great help here.
If you encounter anything resembling “infinite contempt…”
(Which sounds quite useful and deliciously dangerous) avoid interfacing directly with it...but see if a way to… utilize it can be found.

Next Week: The Nest

Chit, having had time to think about it, can interpret certain oscillations emitted from the rocky moon known as Pock.

From Pock (automated)

Mayday, mayday. This is an automated message from the yacht Pleasant Winds. Engines disabled, Gate system has been nonfunctional for over 10 Pulses. Please assist. Reward offered upon return of craft and survivors to home system. (Alphanumeric code, likely a coordinate system designation of Pock).

After several seconds of silence, this message repeats. The cycle continues for the duration of the Gate’s open period. When the Gate closes, it stops.

From Pock (automated)

This is my last will and testament. I, Jorun Carvanian of House Trogondor, being sound of mind and body, do name as my sole heir my second daughter Jocasta Carvanian. She shall inherit my estates, titles and all their incomes. Let my death upon this moribund rock be a lesson to her on the perils of travel in pursuit of pleasure, and the need to invest in robust closed-cycle ecosystem life supports.

To my first daughter, the Lesser Duchess Jocinda Syweller-Carvanian of House Syweller, I leave the horse that slew her father, and my infinite contempt.

Interestingly, this message also repeats between intervals of silence. It fits into the several seconds of silence from the other intelligible message. Certain characteristics differ; certain are the same. Perhaps they are like storm fronts passing one across the other in different stratospheric layers, politely never touching.

Chit can hear additional transmissions, but cannot render them as anything understandable (to Chit) as thought.

Next Week: Make it Rain

The saamoohik T reacts more swiftly and decisively than any other to the stunning arrival of the Resumption ship. It swirls its way not only out of the path of initial impact, but toward the final splashdown location. By the time the artificial persons emerge from the ship and float it at a steady, stable level among Chits clouds, T has established itself around the area in a defensive perimeter, permitting no other baadal contact with the foreigner. T allows a few ke kan to buzz past from time to time, keeping the intruder under close observation. T takes the precaution of reducing local lightning strikes -- partly to avoid startling the visitor, and partly to ensure ample power is built up and ready to destroy them, should need arise.

T requests permission to recruit more baadal into itself and hold them ready to pursue the visitor back into space, should it choose to make an escape attempt.

T’s intent is ambitious: he wants to create a saamoohik strong enough to carry solid objects into space and back, able to strike with lightning or with hailstones. Compared to Chit’s present abilities this is deluded fantasy. And yet… Chit can almost see how it might be done.

Research Research?

With multiple proposals now (Snowfall Ice-Mine, T’s Fighting Formation) now calling for some inventive thought, Chit must consider spinning up a research function. Like T and Shk, this would be an independent Saamoohik.

Creating new specialized saamoohiks for focused thought and consciousness becomes more complex with each endeavor -- stabilizing the next one will require an investment of Ice and at least two Pulses of effort.

Next Week: Howling from the Moon

The smaller Resumption ship slices through the vicinity of the emerging Saamoohik known as Shk, heating and spinning Shk’s outer layer of baadal, and bringing to them an unexpected, literal fire. The emerging, independent consciousness of Chit’s new economic advisor will carry a heat and character of its own. Observers from beyond Chit would be able to track the fire funnels to locate Shk, (though most would still fail to recognize that Chit bears any life larger than the ke kan)

Shk’s awareness takes in the current state of affairs around Chit, and enters the conversation between saamoohiks with powerful, incisive lines of thought: Memory says this is not the first time a visitor flew into Chit’s clouds. Memory says that many fell below the storms and did not return. What became of them?

On Snowfall

The follower sent to Snowfall determines quickly that it is unsuitable for free-range habitation -- the Saamoohik depend on the heat of Heffa to maintain their motion and with it, their intellect. Living long-term here on Snowfall would slow them to the point of stupidity. With sufficient research into heat sources Chit might be able to establish an outpost here, but for now this seems unlikely. The shivering follower does note that water-ice is abundant. This would be a productive Ice-mine site, if means of transporting it up from the surface could be devised.

In retrospect it seems obvious that the planet is hostile to Saamoohik life forms. Yet even as the follower recognizes this, it still feels some reluctance to depart. This reluctance stems from the ke kan -- immediately upon arrival at Snowfall, many of them plunged downward to the snow and ice, digging fiercely into the white crystals.

Curious, the Saamoohik directs gusts to the spot, blowing all loose debris away. Beneath the drifts are large crystalline swathes of Ice, speckled with many more ke kan frozen into their interior. Despite the best efforts of those that travel with the Saamoohik, none are reachable before the rotation of Snowfall brings local nightfall, and the Saamoohik is forced to depart or find its substance also turned to snow and ice. Some ke kan remain behind, benumbed, but no new ke kan have been retrieved.

There are indeed installations here, and many small, abandoned ships. Several of the signals reveal themselves as mere mindless machinery executing automated routines. Distress signals designed to indicate stranding and a need of rescue, that sort of thing. However two signals stand out:

One is rendered in an electronic demi-quantum trinary language and -- as soon as Chit contacts it, becomes a two-way communication. This is a life form entirely made of metals and rare materials. It has survived upon the surface on a diet of sunshine and moon-grit. It is named Fanion. Though it is swift to recognize that it speaks to another consciousness, Fanion does not initially understand the source, and has trouble with the conceptualization of gaseous life. Fanion concludes that it is communing with either a Gremlin or a Holy Ghost -- two entities apparently spiritually relevant to its kind. The Saamoohik believes Fanion may be able to serve as a translator between Chit and the small biological forms. Fanion requests one unit of Gas and one unit of Ice to restore itself to full power.

The other installation is a buried bunker, which broadcasts in three languages on a repeating cycle. This site is less accessible to the investigating Saamoohik, having been constructed using materials that create a Faraday cage around the interior.

The Saamoohik believes an unknown number of biological creatures may survive within this structure, and -- given the uncertainty -- declines to communicate with them until after consulting Chit at large.

Ice Screams

The Saamoohik sent to the unlabeled zone returns to Chit feeling unclean, and reports:

Upon arrival, this system appeared to be remarkable only by its relative coolness. It is not so much a star system really as an agglomeration of icy bodies orbiting something so dim it barely counts as a star -- it is a gas giant many times the size of Chit, sitting at the very brink of having enough mass to start fusion. It rumbles along at a slow simmer, leaking only a little infrared light beyond its own clouds.

We investigated those clouds and found nothing but chill winds built on a cycle of steam and sleet -- nothing lives or lurks there. We felt uncomfortable with those foreign winds gnawing at us, and moved outward into the chunks of orbital ice.

These, it turns out, are not solid ice blocks. They are filaments of spun-out frost, wrapped round and round in coils to make cocoons. The worms that live inside are each at least a kilometer long, hungry and vicious. They strike at heat sources, spraying out thin, sticky lines in spirals like minimalist tornadoes then cinching them back toward grasping many-toothed mouths. There are so many that even for our insubstantial baadal, it became difficult to continue moving about without our substance being torn away and drawn into their lairs. We believe the worms we saw are the smallest and the weakest -- this system is doubtless home to a Leviathan.

We believe any solid ship that arrived here would be captured and consumed. We propose to name it “Peril,” and its monsters “ilk worms.”

The scouts in Peril also mean that Chit gains further knowledge of local Pulse Gate connections.

Next Week: Fire and Ice

Chit watches the star it named Resumption with growing alarm. It becomes evident that it is not a star. It is an immense moving object traveling ever-closer at insane speeds. Over the course of several days it approaches Snowfall, careens past it and -- mere minutes later -- screams past the home of the Saamoohiks. The thing is more massive than any of Chit’s moons. Its gravity jostles everything as it passes, and then with exquisite timing it arrives at the PulseGate exactly in time for its opening. The whole of the object -- it is hard to conceive of something so large as a ship -- vanishes into the Gate. It is an unsettling thing to observe, as though a puny ke kan had swallowed an entire intact moon. Yet this is what occurs. The whole thing happens so quickly that had Chit not been observing Resumption already, the incident might have passed entirely unobserved.

Much of Chit’s mind is occupied with trying to understand what it has witnessed, yet some few saamoohiks remain alert to the fact that Resumption itself appears to still exist among the stars beyond Snowfall, flaring intermittently extra-bright. Yet this too, is no star. It is a second object, this time more obviously a ship. It recognizably maneuvers and decelerates before plummeting toward Chit.

Into the atmosphere it plunges, fast and hard -- too fast for any baadal in its path to avoid it. It crushes gas into hot plasma with its brutal momentum and tears a fiery path across Chit, erupting back out to space and falling again only slightly more gently. Wave after wave of lightning circles the planet, trying to understand.

Upon this second reentry the ship deploys all manner of aerobraking devices. As it slows, begins to inflate what looks to the nearest baadal (all local saamoohiks having been dispersed to their constituent baadal by shockwaves and actual fire) like artificial people in strange, rubbery skins.

Chit prioritizes self-preservation in the wake of these events, re-gathering its baadal and saamoohiks.

Resumption Results

The saamoohiks assigned to observe Resumption report what they have learned. It was indeed blue-shifted, traveling at more than 20% the speed of light. Its exterior was similar to a rocky planetary body, made of mostly iron and nickel oxides, though significant amounts of Rare elements were detectable, and the mid-section of the ship included areas coated in water Ice. It was roughly cylindrical in shape, and spinning around its longer axis. Small gaps in the middle sections implied entry and exit to some interior spaces. It trailed thin wisps of Gas, likely the results of powerful thrusters, and a strange set of bulges toward the aft area carried incredibly strong magnetic fields that seem to serve no purpose.

It is by far the fastest, largest ship that Chit has ever seen. Later rumination makes Chit consider: such a ship came from somewhere -- from the stars beyond. At a high fraction of lightspeed, it is possible that such a ship has been traveling since the day the Gates first closed. Wherever it came from, Chit knows from observation and experience that its Gate approach would send it to Etro.

This revelation also explains the small ships Chit had previously observed; these were forerunner ships, sent to observe in advance of the larger’s arrival. They too, have leaped through the Gate -- some to Etro, others to the place known as Stanx.

Notably, these ships were not uniform in their shapes, sizes and arrangements. Chit knows from experience that such wide variations in design usually indicate differences of culture, perhaps even species. Naturally the largest ship Chit has ever seen will differ from all others. But it affiliates with ships of several designs.

Next Week: A search of Pock!

Comrades near and far produce spectacular patterns as always as the rain falls and the wind blows.

The baadal of nearby saamoohik are sucked into T, riptide.

The skies fragment violently into ripping sheets of light, T roaring in response.

It is as if the answer was known without having asked.

A new, grander work, on a scale never attempted before.

Of all that was, of all that will be, of all that could be.

A work that precludes death; that is all:

              Kala ka kul kaam!

And it follows...

...an excess of resources to pursue kala ka kul kaam will surely be necessary, but the immediate need is *information*. How else to guide this Artwork of the Future, to protect and ensure its sublimation?

...we must know, from where do we most sense threat, from where is there opportunity, from whence did these ships fleeing Heffa come and for what purpose (was it Pock)?

...are there new opportunities for greatness in the glittering shards of this new unknown gate? There is a kind of resonance in its glimmering

...on glimmers, what is the nature of this new light, Resumption?

...there are smaller, previously ignored splendors right here in Heffa; let us know Snowfall, breathe its essence, return thence with gifts.

T presents a metaphoric riddle with dangerous insinuations:

“How does a baadal ingest without exposing its mouth?”

Chit experiences the concepts of unwelcome intrusion, of defense against intrusion, and of the vulnerability inherent in information asymmetry. T will meditate on military concerns. Throughout Chit there echoes delight at the intensity and novelty of T’s ferocious overture. More impressionable saamoohik await the next verse with a morbid curiosity.

As the certainty of this decision comes into focus,

two large saamoohik 
       (with which T recently shared baadal)
           begin to swirl around each other, 
             produce a funnel pulling from above 
                    downwards towards Chit’s hot, swirling, dense interior.  
                Lifting once irrelevant materials outward, into baadal.
                       These foci will produce the quorum needed. 
            Establish knowledge and practice on material needs and their dispersion: 
    We must be prepared to enable the kala ka kul kaam.

Whatever saamoohik emerges will surely be significant. Though it has never been named, all of Chit know it to be called “Shk.”

Next Week: Something wingéd this way comes

The open Gate is not the only new light in the Heffa system. Chit has seen flits and flashes consistent with small ships, traveling toward the Gate. How they arrived or where they came from, Chit cannot rightly say. Because they are of types it has not seen before, Chit assumes they are somehow connected to Junxn 4. The notable oddity though is -- they arrived before the Gate opened. Logic says they must have been here in the Heffa system all along. Memory says they were not.

Spinning Off Storms

Chit takes the prompting of the new open Gate to commence a new and intentional effort for itself. It will organize saamoohiks dedicated to ensuring certain thought processes get appropriate attention, in much the way T has begun contemplating death, and how to avoid death. One of these, T, will be devoted to the avoidance of permanent death. Others will be organized as Chit thinks of how to subdivide attention, and what sorts of concerns warrant continuous, devoted thought.

Chit practices spinning off baadal into space in small numbers and recapturing them. These maneuvers will make it possible for Chit to more readily interact with new visitors -- and send some visitors of its own to other systems.

How Exactly to Not Die

Within the baadal that make T, those containing the most ke kan feel their death-avoidance mandate means setting up T as a planetary defender, equivalent to a military or defense ministry. This thought is clearly sourced from the ke kan, who have been known to bite and even eat one another.

T’s less ke kannish baadal feel the instructions as given are somewhat nebulous, and might also be interpreted as an instruction to assure that all the resources needed for life and related activities. If this is Chit’s intent, then its initial role should be to systematize the collection of disposable resources -- the gas, ice, ore and rare materials that Chit can draw upon to undertake great workings.

T asks Chit for a decision: Pursue military/defensive plans directly, or pursue economic measures?

Nice Ice Babies?

T makes another suggestion that flutters up from the ke kan -- perhaps Chit should send a baadal to Snowfall, the only other planet within Heffa’s orbit. Growth and procreation are known methods of death-avoidance. It seems worth knowing whether there is sufficient atmosphere there to sustain life as Chit blows it. Of course, perhaps Chit would rather send such expeditions to other star systems. The number of baadal that can be imbued with sufficient purpose is not infinite, but could sustain several such missions.

Dormant Neighbors

Although at first Chit attributed all unexpected waverings in the local magnetic fields to the effects of the reopened Gates, a few linger. These seem to be coming from craters on Pock. Many minutes of pondering suggest that perhaps Chit’s stranded visitors are not all dead. Arriving on the tailwind of this thought are further considerations. Biological life being fragile, electric devices sometimes remain functional without masters, perhaps with operating parameters triggered by the open Gate. What such devices might do, Chit hasn’t the foggiest.

A New Star

Beyond the current position of Snowfall there is a tiny pinprick of new light in the heavens. Chit allows this knowledge to percolate through all its Saamoohik and baadal, savoring the novelty of it. At long last Chit selects the name Resumption, to mark the coming of its light coinciding with the opening of the PulseGates.

Next Week: A Storm Decides

In the old times, the glory times, Chit built the Gate’s timing into its own rhythms, using its long glissades and sharp crescendos as counterpoints to its own melodious lights. The foreigners, they came from everywhere, they parked their ships in orbits; they touched down on Pock and Boon and told one another stories about what all the lightning meant. Chit could not always hear them, but gathered enough from those who ventured down into the atmosphere to understand that these, these little ones so dense and hard like rocks, also harbored intelligence capable of taking in the fine arts. How many guessed that when they touched the clouds of Chit, the clouds caressed them back? It could not be known, and -- until recently -- Chit felt indifferent to the answer.

With the long closing of the Gates, Chit has come to know death.

One by one the foreigners stranded in the Heffa system went silent. Their little lights went dark. Their bodies moved no more. For a planet where wind has blown in perpetuity, it was hard to comprehend. But the ke kan knew. The tiny mites blowing in brown breezes whispered to Chit about the game of life, the rule of death. All that begins, ends, they said. Only outward spread, only reproduction, only growth can make one safe.

And Chit -- Chit has been listening.

Gates Reopen

The sun never sets on Chit, whose face is a whole world. Yet the opening of the Gate feels like a long-awaited dawn warming the cloudbanks of a lonely baadal. Chit ponders this. Perhaps as the baadal feel toward the saamoohik, as the saamoohik feel to Chit, Chit feels to the universe. Chit has been long alone. Now the universe again is within reach, ready to trade its strange little baadal with Chit, and bear witness to thoughts written out in lightning and aurorae.

Through the Gate much can be seen. Most appears as Chit remembers:

• Junxn 4 was the source of many splendid visitors in large but fragile ships, never the same configuration twice.

• Karfoon is a cool, small star distantly orbited by three small worlds each with a handful of moons. All are encased in water ice. Despite its proximity, Karfoon sent few visitors.

• Fernia is a star system with mixed planets -- two modest-sized gas giants, one hot dry rock close to the local star, and one wet and green.

• Heffa is of course home.

• Mocoropoi is a system mostly consumed by its star, which has entered the Red Giant phase. The far reaches of Chit’s remembrances say that before this star grew it had more planets, flourishing with life and ships flying almost so dense as to become clouds themselves. In view of Chits new comprehension of death, these memories take a new and ominous feel.

• Tik is home to the creatures that first enabled Chit to understand that consciousness could come in small, hard packages.

• Etro in former days sent many visitors, including some of a troublesome sort that tried (and most often failed) to confine and compress baadal within strange jars and magnetic cages.

• Stanx sent a scant number of visitors in ships of great density, always wrapped in black paint that absorbed Chit’s friendly emanations, giving nothing back.

• Academe sent small numbers of visitors, but these were Chit’s favorite kind -- very often daring enough to descend into the clouds, they appeared to wish to participate in Chit’s performances -- sending out long wires, or rockets, broadcasting bleeps and boops of radio or light, and tickling gently at the membranes that hold a baadal together.

The unlabeled zone is entirely new, a Gate connection Chit has never seen before. Through it, light scatters and scintillates as if off the sparkling surfaces of a hundred thousand shards of virginal white ice.

Next Week: Foreigners

Chit’s alter-ego and the foil of many internal debates is a behemoth saamoohik named T. To the extent that T has an independent identity distinct from Chit, it centers on the handful of baadal where the ke kan concentration is highest.

A swirling storm, a thunderhead charged with electricity, an interweaving of supercell storms with helical roots reaching deep, deep, down into the subconscious murk below the lowest visible cloud cover… this is T. Ground zero for Chit’s observation of other lives, other minds, for the largest external cognitive inspiration seen on Chit since Chit became self-aware. Consternation is the word for it.

To the extent that Chit has tried to speak to the Ke Kan, the overmind has allowed T to serve as its “face”. Extrapolations from conversing with these insect life forms forcefully draw the baadal-saamoohik-Chit collective towards a new ideal of paranoid survivalism.

Chit, whose motion has never ceased in more than a million orbits around the local sun, has had difficulty grasping the permanence of death. The swift and lingering conclusion that comes next is a desire to avoid this fate. But how?

The locus of these thoughts, of what it means to know that Chit is a mind but not the only mind, that other minds can cease, that if other minds can cease, so Chit might one day die as well… form the new core of T.

A certain tension crackles between T and other saamoohiks less fixated on single stimuli. These other storms have begun to shy away from T, and speak to each other of how good and wholesome it is to return to the habits of long millenia, producing wondrous works of transient art, here and gone in flashing instants. Yet even here, in their very reaction against T’s influence, the other saamoohiks’ actions cannot help but show how T reshapes the mind of Chit.

Neighborhood:

The planet Chit orbits the star known as Heffa. The Heffa system includes four notable features:

1. Snowfall - An ice planet, distant from the sun and genuinely frozen.

2. The Starscent - A dispersed asteroid belt between the two notable planets.

3. Chit - The gas giant home to the entity Chit. It has three minor moons, known as Boon, Pock, and Longevity

4. The PulseGate - Previously visitors came and went through a point in space near the star Heffa. As our story begins, the Gate has been dormant for many many storm-cycles.

Next Week: An Opening

With effort, baadal can enclose themselves fully like smoke-rings, shedding high-energy ion trails to rise off-world. Depending on their configuration and the cultural references of the observer, a saamoohik traveling through space would look like a cluster of bubbles, a strange venn diagram, a flock of smoke-rings, or even a ghostly PulseGate.

When in space baadal are large -- on the order of ten to a hundred kilometers across and so diffuse that ships may sail directly through them without the ship taking damage. For the baadal, intersection with a ship causes strange sensations and may require some concentration to retain its constituent parts. They prefer to avoid such encounters when possible.

Charged with Meaning:

The badaal language is electric, it is visual, it is thundering, scouring, and biting. Arguably, it is not language at all, but more akin to the firing of synapses within a smaller, denser brain. To outsiders whose biology is oriented around the maintenance of warm sacks of meat whose slow but inevitable decay allegedly involves intelligence, it may seem more spectacle than speech.

Chit has learned to interface with communication networks of denser life forms, though the Samoohiks were initially slow to recognize that collections of gooey gelatin and rigid rods contained something like a mind or soul, whereas the electric and electromagnetic emanations from their devices mostly did not. Strange beings!

When large portions of Chit’s planet-scale mind are available for computation purposes, Chit can often understand the meaning and function of electronics. When and if Chit chooses to reveal itself, it prefers to induce outputs on displays that visiting life forms seem to value, and to translate majestic bolts and thunder into the visitor’s vernacular.

A Diffuse Life

Chit’s appetites are few. Gas is easy to obtain, since it is the very stuff of Chit’s existence. Ore is little needed for most of Chit’s activities, though flakes and motes of these heavier elements are sometimes useful for dramatic effects. Where most beings require armor for protection against the elements, Chit embodies the kind of elements that create such need. Self-generated containment fields and currents enable travel even into vacuum. Hard-and-pointy threats simply pass through the huge volume of even a small Badaal.

A planetary leader

The political and social leader of the planet Chit is… Chit. It is unclear whether the planet is named after the being, or the being after the planet. The second seems most likely, for the planet’s name is old, and the scintillations of Chit’s open thoughts and swirling minor bodies drew tourists to the Heffa system long before Chit knew other minds could even exist in the Universe.

Chit has a literally brilliant mind, and people across the PulseGate network once loved that mind… without knowing it could think.

Chit doesn’t really understand or care to understand anything that isn’t Chit. Chit lacks strong instincts for understanding motivations outside its own. Chit only recently understood that misunderstanding could exist, having only met minds that were its own sub-storms. To the extent that it has any cunning whatsoever, it comes as a result of study. Chit is so naive it cannot conceive of the alternative, yet primed to ingest and synthesize information at huge pace and volume.

Harnessing millennia of self-knowledge, and countless creative sub-intelligences with their own highly developed heuristics for surfacing the most important ideas to the collective (its sole purpose in life up to this point), Chit is capable of ingesting and comprehending almost any body of knowledge in a few seconds if it is magnetically or optically encoded.

Thought for Chit takes a few seconds -- slightly longer than the amount of time it takes for light to travel all the way around its circumference. This adds up very fast if it must ingest information serially, but is usually not detectable due to powerful parallel processing through its many baadal. When an information transfer requires a continuous back and forth with Chit, as in the case of interfacing with a new saamoohik (or eg interrogating an alien computer system that is not actively trying to push information to Chit), the process of integrating is dramatically slowed.

Chit responds rapidly and adroitly to situations requiring the immediate manipulation of electromagnetism, light, or sound using heuristics developed over millennia of art-making. When provided with a body of knowledge (or the right tools to produce that knowledge, which Chit mostly lacks), to gain immediate insights and abstract capability for using that knowledge. Forming a comprehensive set of tools for both experimentation and for material manipulation are among its top priorities, now that Chit has some awareness that the universe might be full of other minds.

Next week: Generalized Existential Dread

The clouds on the red-brown gas giant known as Chit swirl with self-awareness. Casual observers would see the stripes, swirls and striations common to large planets experiencing coriolis-driven weather. The night side of Chit was once famed for the intricate, lace-like lighting storms that swept back and forth across cloud layers, sometimes illuminating the planet from within, sometimes reaching almost into low orbit, touching off cascades of aurorae. Few look close enough to notice that within the whirling winds, life abounds.

Like blood cells circulating the body, self-organized clouds scud across Chit’s skies. Each individual cloud is known as a baadal; they vary somewhat in form, but most commonly include a central twist of warm, humid, rising air, and an approximate circle, oval, or helix of falling rain like a curtain demarcating their edges. Certain apparatus would reveal toroidal magnetic fields that constrain the upper limits of the cloud and create a semi-permeable layer of currents just at the edge of each baadal. These magnetic layers are not static -- they pulse like the membrane of a jellyfish. Trailing rain and airborne detritus, rather than tentacles, baadal can steer themselves through the atmosphere.

Debris from Chit’s surface sometimes ascends and circles within a baadal; all manner of creatures that fly or float upon breezes may enter or exit a baadal, though only an animal with truly powerful wings can depart a baadal that wants to hold it back. It is not unusual for an individual baadal to carry unique subspecies of flora and fauna, and with it its own peculiar scent of spice, or moss, or sand. At times it has been fashionable to carry pebbles and lightweight pumice-like stones. A keen observer could detect and track individual baadal by their scent, hue, or contents.

The baadal speak one to another with sharp gusts and jabs of lightning. When baadal come close to one another, they form systems of systems, wheeling one around another, uplifting some, feeding others fresh moisture, exchanging bolts across wide gaps between thunderheads, joining magnetic membranes into shapes that fusion physicists would envy. With these motions emerge the strange property of matter most beings recognize as sentient consciousness.

A collection of baadal is known as a saamoohik. Saamoohik are definitionally intelligent, but the smallest collection of baadal that can result in saamoohik is unknown. While saamoohik can act with intelligence and in their collective self-interest, they lack self-identity, frequently swapping baadal with their neighboring saamoohik when they come into contact.

A saamoohik loses consciousness when it no longer able to connect its constituent baadal; that is to say, a storm of storms can disintegrate or die. When a baadal forms a connection to another baadal, whether from spontaneous interaction with nearby unconscious badaal or by joining a saamoohik, its memory is replicated across all simultaneously connected baadal. When two saamoohik connect to the same baadal, they become a single saamoohik.

The planet Chit is large, but not so large that any one saamoohik spends long in isolation. Among the saamoohik (or perhaps, the baadal), there is a saying “No wind blows alone.” Taken together, the rippling electricity and world-wide air currents form a singular mind synonymous with the planet: Chit.

Chit cannot recall a time when Chit was not, though logically there must have been a beginning, a time before the first breeze wafted. Chit has never had cause to examine the far end of its existence -- forward or backward -- until recently.

A handful of baadal in recent years gained new residents, the ke kan. These creatures are small and hard, compared to the baadal; yet similar enough that they have a friendly feel. The ke kan have six legs, each segmented, and are light enough to ride eddies through the skies. Like Chit, they seem to communicate electrically, though the ke kan must cluster close together to make their sparks jump from foot to foot or antenna to antenna. Sometimes they cling to one another in flat, symmetric patterns, like snowflakes. They are black, or reddish in color.

Ke kan have a variety of “dances” in much the same way that bees have dances to help align the swarm. The ke kan do not respond directly to the baadal; the baadal has instinctively retained them within its electromagnetic field (which is what attracts the ke kan in the first place). Memory is also retained within the baadal chemically, but new memories can only be imprinted in the presence of sufficient active electromagnetic forces.

The memory is stored in the baadal, the conscious mind is enabled by sufficient quantity of connected baadal, and the soul resides in the accumulation of memories. In that sense, while Chit and its sub-storms do not always share a mind, they always share a single soul.

Baadal can be somewhat compressed or decompressed without enduring harm, though after a time their memories may or may not be recoverable. The exact limits of baadal communication or compression are poorly understood -- such distances are generally governed by social norms and comfort, in much the way humans prefer to stand close (but not too close!) and speak quietly, rather than shout at one another across streets.

Next week: Passing Gas