Emotional Labour
Captain harrumphed magisterially, deeming it time once again to let Techy and Techie know his displeasure at their failure in trampling the laws of physics. After all, they'd ripped the universe a new one just to reach this solar system, and now what was holding them back from the brink of first contact? Fog. Plain old 7:00 a.m. highway-clogging fog and mist and clouds and flouncy gassy water, sheets and banks and roiling tumults of the stuff. The planet below their orbiting vessel looked like someone tuned a hothouse's parameters to "boil" for a few million years. Over worn continents and doughy, sanded shorelines and silty archipelagos twisted ten layers of tropospheric madness, rising hydrosphere blending into vegetative transpiration into competing monsoons topped by cumulonimble albedo topped by high-atmosphere bands of freezing vapor the likes of which Earth had never seen. Had they been searching for Rio de Janeiro, they could've spotted it well enough regardless. But if there were chunks of intelligent life down in that soup, they certainly had not reached industrial development. They provided no city lights on which to zero in, no smog-belching factories to sniff out.
It took two nail-biting days to track down the crashed drone which had instigated this whole mess with one photo of something which could be a hut—or maybe just crashed logs—before flying into a thunderstorm. Most of that time was spent having to leash Goopy so he wouldn't try to parachute down in his excitement. At long last Techie located the crashed and burned transmitter. Captain waited for them to beg, waited for Second to grudgingly support their requests, then adjourned the meeting for an hour while he had his coffee. Wouldn’t do to let them forget his critical role in the process. Then, based on biological arguments he did not understand, assured of the viability of machinery he did not understand, gauging his importance had been sufficiently recognized (which he understood thoroughly) he performed the vital function of leaders of every great project in history: he approved that others should work.
The package disappeared into swirling clouds. It telemetry held up. Jets fired, chutes opened. It powered up. Nine pairs of eyes watched enraptured the drone’s video feed. The sea of vaguely blue-green vegetation greeting them twisted and eddied in accelerating wind. Techy wouldn’t chance the rotors. They’d feared the ground would be too muddy for driving, but every stretch of landscape stretching inward from fog banks encroaching from every direction lay thatched over in minuscule shoots and tendrils. Sparse banks of small, chittering fluff drifted past them as the rover worked its way up the river valley, content to drift with the constant yet ever-shifting wind instead of fighting it. But these clearly did not build huts. Nor did the snaking, flaring feathery things investigating the drone and quickly moving on. Nor did the plants twisting down to try gnawing on the rotors with their spongy, dripping maws. Well at least each fresh negative kept Goopy and Talker busy cataloguing.
The first structure, they almost passed by unnoticed. Massed segments of semi-flexible vines had collapsed where they’d obviously sat stacked around a flattened floor. But their sawed ends confirmed they’d been deliberately worked, and fungus-like hollowed caps, polished into tiny bowls and tinier grooved, elongated utensils, confirmed it.
Unfortunately the house was abandoned, and not part of any wider habitation. It took another day of wandering, interspersed with storm interference downtime, to run across another. Funnel-shaped, like a dwindling lean-to, shoulder-high on a human, the bits of hollowed-out plant matter littering its floor spoke of a current occupant… nowhere to be seen.
From there, at least they knew what to look for. Toss down another drone, work in shifts, rain permitting. It wasn’t too hard: with the planet’s vigorous growth cycles, the only patches of bare dirt were deliberately created floors or trails. One by one, hut by hut, a nascent civilization began to take shape, but a frustratingly decentralized one. No towns, no villages coalesced, only solitary funnel huts or at most a cluster of three or four, though these as often as not showed the only signs of deliberate destruction, walls torn down and crockery trampled. The creatures’ works displayed no social organization to speak of. The creatures themselves remained skittish. Once in a while, a glimpse: movement in the underbrush, a half-visible many-legged retreat at the drone’s whirring approach. Several times they heard thuds or clinks only to turn and realize their machine had been pelted with a piece of offal or a long, slender, sharpened dart.
Their first sighting came by chance, and they almost wished it hadn’t. They’d ordered the drones to shut down during one of the endless rainstorms slamming through the tangled forests. It came to, water still dripping over the lens, upside down. A stubby, four-fingered hand retreated from the objective. What replaced it might have been a face, a dirty, greenish mottled gray all over. Four matte black eyes, of different sizes, sunken or bulging in fatty pads, framed a round, multi-hinged maw lined with minuscule, flat, randomly sprouting teeth whenever it gasped and spoke, clacking and squeaking seemingly to itself while it surveyed this strange metal animal it had caught.
“No motion” warned their Tamer, breathless at the sight. They just recorded. Over the coming day until the battery ran out, he listened and watched breathlessly with Talker, helping her cobble together some understanding of the beast’s language. By the time the second rover had trudged its way over the vine cover, they surprised their contact with an imitation of what they hoped would register as <not food> and to their surprise it neither attacked nor approached, but pushed its first catch out of its home and some distance away on the sole cleared dirt path.
Frustration overtook them again. They had been prepared for excitement, aggression, gradual rapprochement, but indifference to an alien invasion was just not in the first contact scenario list. Word appeared to be spreading somehow. One after another of the aliens would crawl up to inspect one or another of the rovers. Some even tried exchanging a few words, waving their front limbs in complicated montages as they did so, accompanied by disquieting tectonic shifts in their hideous visages. But there was no welcoming committee, no defending army, no big chief in a feather headdress brought to greet the incursion. One by one they came, stayed for a few phrases then trudged off again, knee-high caterpillar things boasting ten limbs total, three pairs larger and downward-facing alternating with two pairs of more slender, upward angled, all with an extra joint compared to humans, ending in four splayed fingers bulkier on their feet.
Any expectation that progress would accelerate was again stymied. Rare sun breaking through the clouds provided little power to recharge the drones, ceaseless alternating downpours and morning mists hindered their progress, and even when they did communicate, the Centipoots’ (work in progress) reticence provided no feedback. Tamer gave them the first hints that more sense organs than hearing appeared active during speech, but even conversations between their own kind came hopelessly truncated. Maybe once every two days another would stop by its distant neighbour’s hut. They’d wave, twist and twine their upper limbs in complicated patterns, contorting their faces at each other as they squeaked and snorted, but such interactions rarely lasted more than a couple minutes. There were no sagas recited, no standardized formulae and relational standards underpinning social structure. If anything, Talker speculated, they derived more from empathizing with each other than formal speech.
There were, in fact, no families. Smaller presumed youths could be seen and followed once in a while, but even these lived solitary lives in scrapes and dug-outs of their own, learning how to find better food, build and carve their own funnel huts and utensils by visiting their elders. While they engaged in slightly longer contact, this nonetheless amounted to no parental care as understood by humans. They were tolerated, and soon shooed away. Goopy sussed out a clutch of eggs for the first time, watched the young disperse by the hundreds into the woods, where their helplessly wriggling forms became easy fodder for the manifold hungry mouths teeming among the vines. Later, if the few survivors returned eager to learn the timeless arts of whittling and log bundling and spear-tossing, they were accepted readily enough… but only for short stretches, and never by the same adult twice.
Painstakingly, they mapped out first a dozen, then over a hundred, then more and more huts among the rain-battered valleys, all spread away from each other. Tamer and Goopy staked out the likely extent of the species’ habitation. Not huge. Olduvai gorge, early dispersal. They tried other locations. Some held similar subspecies, but no hut-builders. Intellect was burgeoning, in its own odd way, solely at one end of one continent. And here they had a chance to nurture it, Second recited from the company handbook, to save the Assfaceholes (work in progress) aeons of painstaking setbacks, guard against the dangers of self-destruction and ready them to join humans as equals in eventual cohabitation. If only they could get them to sit down for a pow-wow.
Yet still, Talker was tearing her hair out at their seemingly nonsensical communiques. She and Tamer had identified a few rough formulae: greetings, speculation about the weather, directions to food sources, accusations of threat or guilt. But for true progress, they insisted the rovers' sparse up-time between cloudbursts was simply not sufficient. They requested a landing. Muscle and Muscle both strenuously (if not very eloquently) opposed, despite it being painfully obvious the knee-tall creatures posed no physical or technological threat. Goopy promised the most thorough sanitary measures. The eggheads pleaded and argued, hurrying to placate their social betters and chiming in encouragingly with the slightest encouraging concession, smiling eagerly back at the slightest smile, until Captain at long last let himself be thrown in the briar patch.
Their ingress was the stuff of legends. Battered by an unexpected cyclonic surge, Second, Muscle, Tamer and Goopy careened through layer after layer of leaden tempest in the first lander, banking off the thick atmosphere, until the craft half-parachuted, half-plowed through the trees to rest midway up the most populous river valley. It took a week for the terrified natives to come back out of hiding, by which time they'd secured a quarantine tent and were well on their way to setting up several remote observation posts. The Shitterpillars (work in progress) would still run from their huts and shelter in the jungle whenever a gargantuan spacesuited biped would exit the lander and lumber painstakingly over the muddy thatched ground cover to plant another camera or signal relay.
The crew gradually got to know the neighbours. Most nearby huts had been abandoned at sight of extraplanetary incursion. Closest to the lander remained a spindly specimen that liked to drape grasses over its upper limbs, but it skittishly dodged any attempted rapprochement. With the aid of an infographic and recording by Talker, displaying what they hoped were both the verbal and nonverbal components of 'welcome food' Tamer had better luck bribing a muscular, puffy-eyed beast downstream with offerings of blooms and shoots from the jungle. That must have kicked off the right rumours. With leaves on their arms or heads or trailing tied to their legs, with mud streaked between their eyes or down their flanks, crawling stealthily through the trees or singing as they sauntered down the road, the decapods resumed their surveillance, albeit still one by one, always one by one. So long as the humans themselves stayed out of sight
"This is weird" said Goopy one day, reviewing a camera feed. "Looks like 23 has an unrequited crush on 17."
"Neither of them is digging a hollow for an egg clutch though." Tamer furrowed his brow, checking his notes. On screen, a native with its knees decorated in reddish mud made welcoming sweeps of its front and rear hands, trilling insistently at a skinny young specimen with large, uncomfortably expressive eyes. The youth hesitated, returned the gesture and sound, then made to leave. The first switched to more ample movements, more nuanced vociferations. Gradually they paced together. Gradually, the youth changed its path to match the elder's. Then by some indiscernible signal it lowered its head, mumbling something new, its four eyes blinking in sequence, and walked back the way it came.
"They've been at this for a few minutes. 23 keeps coming back."
"Nothing'll come of it. 23 was doing the same with 1 the other day, and 1 did the same, walked and talked for a while then walked away. Pass it along for translation, not that it'll help. They're just making conversation. Nice house, help me carry this, grass is good, so on. None of them ever talk about anything long-term."
The next day it was 23's turn to get accosted by 2, the puffy-eyed burly specimen who'd first accepted food left out in the open. Their conversation appeared aimless as always. The only outstanding element was Talker confirming that after a few gesture-noises about mud, 23 took the first opportunity to blot and scrape its mud decorations off its joints. The day after that they met again. 23 sounded more strident and this time it was 2 who slapped some mud onto its second, redundant knees.
"Can you make heads or tails of this? They're not saying anything differently that I can discern" complained Talker to Tamer. "They mix-and-match lines about an object or a house being good or bad, or they say they need or want an object, but the conversation always ends before they reach any sort of conclusion. Either they run off and do something together or one just leaves before answering."
"There's no stable hierarchy I can find. If they're exchanging favors, it's not by any predictable tit-for-tat."
"Does it have to be tit-for-tat?"
"Basic game theory. They must know they're getting something back, otherwise any energy they spend on another is theft."
"That's not necessarily the case if they're closely enough related" said Goopy, and ran off to sample piss puddles and sloughed skin in the woods. They left him to it.
They had a bigger concern. Captain was getting impatient. Every day he was demanding longer meetings, demanding progress, demanding first contact, real first contact. They knew what he wanted. It took another week of miserable monsoon hikes to convince the natives they were harmless. Sitting there in their spacesuits, rain battering their visors, letting themselves be seen cutting food from the jungle and bringing it to offering places. Gradually a few Creepyjanglies (work in progress) stopped running out of sight, then merely kept their distance. Then the distance shrank. Then came the fateful hour when Second walked out, dressed only in a light protective cover and a breather, and stretched his hand to 15, a saggy-skinned elder, who returned the gesture. The other three crew stood spaced equidistantly, recording the moment from all angles. By the next day, they'd gone through two dozen sessions of Captain posing in front of a green screen up in orbit so he could be spliced in. But the finished image was a work of beauty, the most inspirational touch of a finger since Michelangelo's creation (and ripping the latter off more than a little.) Captain rubbed his hands together ecstatically. He was already composing his thirty-fourth speech draft. Which is to say he had received his latest draft from his superiors.
"Good, good, beautiful, that looks great, just, uhhh, you and the techies take some time, fix it up, fill in some sun shining on our meeting, that’s too somber, and edit my waistline back a few degrees, fill in my hairline, smooth out my wrinkles, the whole pop-star, and punch up the color on that ee tee, give it some style, looks like I'm shaking hands with a cold cut. Like they're not ugly enough already."
With the affair given its due pomp, Captain's interest shifted to arranging himself a media circus on their return. And with Second sitting in quarantine pumping himself full and slathering himself all over with Goopy's entire arsenal of antibiotics and immune boosters, the crew was finally free to resume their halted research. It was Muscle who threw in the towel next, sick of running back and forth fixing the finicky relays. Techy offered to parachute them down enough equipment for a second field station. Thus Tamer took up a new post half a day's walk uphill.
Their routine relaxed. He and Goopy spent more and more time outdoors, teleconferencing with Talker in orbit. After all, they could plop down a laptop anywhere they were. They witnessed murders, and collaborative building projects, and partitioning of garden produce, and lessons taught to wide-eyed children having survived the horrors of the woods and now ready to whittle wood into bowls and bend reeds into thatching. But social organization still eluded them.
One unusually sunny afternoon, mist eddying in the background behind him, Tamer swiveled the screen jokingly to show 78 twisting reed strands absentmindedly behind him into rope, having become acclimated enough to the human's presence to simply go about its business. Goopy laughed and leaned to one side, zooming in on 23 walking by in the background of his shot, similarly unconcerned with the presence of a giant from outer space. 78 paused and stared at the image. Curiously, it approached, gave a little sussurating exclamation of surprise and twisted and slapped its four hands. At the other end, 23 turned its head, set down the glob of clay it had been carrying to imitate the gesture. Their species' first video call took only a minute. Then, just as usual, 78 broke off and left.
"Did you catch all that?"
"There wasn't much to catch" replied Talker "unless you count the usual babble about their huts. At the start they checked whether it was real. Moving painting. Not here. There. Are you there by your house I am here by my house. Amazement. Fallovers see there from here."
"Fallovers?"
"78 and a couple others call us that. They're afraid we'll topple over and crush them. I guess we look unstable."
"The rest still call us two-legs?"
"That was just 2 and the houses around it. There's no one single rest to talk about. Some call us two-legs, others call us no-mouths. Probably because of our vis..."
"Yeah?"
"Holy shit I'm an idiot! Get me one of them! Put me on full screen."
Goopy managed to find 17 and showed it the image. It squinted and fluttered its fingers indecisively, watching Talker on screen flailing her hands and wiggling her fingers, screeching herself hoarse trying to imitate their speech, squinting and pursing her lips and gaping her mouth until she would've made the most amateurish children's party clown look self-composed by comparison. Slowly, realization seemed to dawn on 17. It began talking back at her, then tried addressing Goopy as well, then cackled and waved goodbye and ran off.
"They couldn't see our faces-"
"- because we use polarized faceplates" said Tamer. "Shit. And to them, all communication is direct. They're talking to another person, always. Putting up signs won't mean a thing."
The next few days were filled with elocution lessons. Goopy found the routine both ridiculous and impenetrable, so resigned himself to autopsying the various specimens they'd found dead and were keeping frozen. It was easier than expected to find dead younglings and compare their brain development, localize higher reasoning in their elongated, ropey brains.
Meanwhile, 78 and 23 resumed their conversation the next day. This time it lasted longer, and the more they talked the more they seemed in sync, matching each other's gestures. The day after that they spoke even longer. Then 78 failed to show up again. Tamer was afraid he'd scared it off until a day later Goopy showed it and 23 fiddling with 23's hut, pulling up some sticks, replacing them with fresh ones, polishing bowls and squeezing fruit into them to ferment. The two went hunting and gathering together until everyone started joking it was a love story.
"That... doesn't really apply here" corrected Goopy. "They don't need mates, strictly speaking. I checked 14's skin scrapings against the eggs in its nest. Half of them identical to 14's genetic material as far I can tell, half of them different after 50 came and fertilized them. Didn't matter. They all hatched the same, the fry all crawled off into the forest the same, neither 50 nor 14 gave more than half a damn. They deal in volume."
The romantic comedy turned to crime drama two days later. According to Muscle, the two got separated by a rainstorm, 78 left behind by the hut. It grew more and more agitated the more it was left alone. But when 23 returned, 78 hid behind a tree and ambushed it with a spear into its brain, before 23 had even gotten a chance to speak. On its way back uphill, 78 was itself caught by a flying raptor and mortally wounded. Goopy stockpiled both their bodies. Captain shrugged the event off.
"Look, they've killed each other before, no reason to think we had anything to do with it. If they love the screens, set up more of them. Let's wrap this up and get back home."
"Maybe that's why they avoid each other" opined Second, still stuck in his quarantine tent, a blueish rash receding week by agonizing week over the left side of his face. "Maybe longer interactions result in violence. Video phones are exactly what they need to talk safely."
"Exactly" nodded Captain, and Second nodded again, and Muscle and Muscle nodded after that, and Techy and Techie shrugged and nodded along until finally the researchers felt their own heads nodding in sync. That might be true. It must be true. "They can't stab each other with pixels. Drop down more screens."
So they did. After a short adjustment period, they seemed a big hit. Some used them sparingly, others kept returning, and of those many then called each other to meet in person. Loud, angry violent spats later erupted in some cases, with murder thankfully being rare. Others became inseparable. One would convince another to move and build its hut next door. Then the two would sometimes meet with others in video. For the most part, a burgeoning community spirit rapidly began taking shape, heightening day after day. When Tamer tried pumping the brakes on their project, alarmed at the rapid change, Captain pointed out the natives themselves were requesting this service. Where the entire valley had shown no organization whatsoever, now minuscule hamlets were streaming, clumping together.
The antics of one in particular, 358, caught their attention. It was a flamboyant one to be sure, vines looped about its torso, chalky sediment from up in the hills streaking its four arms, points of red and blue dye adorning its four fingers. It had a deliberate, fluid motion to its limbs, as if it was enunciating each phrase carefully while it angled its eyes for maximum effect toward its listener, its voice rising and falling dramatically. When first encountered it was living in a hut that looked deliberately destroyed, its sticks pulled up from the ground, its wattling torn asunder. But soon it had gotten help rebuilding right next to a research station, in a smooth, thickly thatched style, and spent longer and longer chattering away at whoever of its peers deigned to give it attention, calling them to visit.
They visited. The humans could only watch, wondering what spurred them.
It was Techy who contacted them, alone one evening, feeding them grainy grayscale images of streaks and shading.
"What're we looking at?"
"Little archaeology project of mine. I kept looking at you getting muddy down there, and thought, hey if the mud keeps flowing, maybe it's covered up some good stuff. So a few weeks ago I dumped a few ground-penetrating radar probes here and there. Been a bitch getting it to work in this waterlogged clay, had to drill them in, but here. This is just downhill of you guys."
He zoomed in. Goopy and Talker stared in confusion. Tamer's eyes widened.
"Holy shit!"
"Yeah, and if you think that's weird, look here." Another image, more streaks, strangely patterned.
"Holy shit!" He rose and paced nervously, then pointed the others' gaze. "If I told you this is an individual hut, see it tapering, all the sticks pressed down by sediment, the dirt packed tighter during construction... then this first composite?"
"They're all together?"
"And this?"
"That must be hundreds... and a few, are those just bigger versions? Mansions?"
"A city. They had villages, cities, at some point not long ago."
"Maybe at lots of points lots of times ago."
By the time they got Captain's full attention, 358 had gathered a dozen-strong retinue. It gave speeches in front of a hut they themselves adorned ever more lavishly. It had laid two clutches of eggs in rapid succession, feeding from bowls of food they gathered, thanking its benefactors by profuse personal manifestations.
"How is it doing this?" Tamer asked, befuddled by a social structure which should've been generations in the making congealing right before their eyes.
"It's not even trying to convince them. It's speaking, and the rest repeat after. There's a word" whined Talker one day "it comes up rarely, toward the end of sentences. It's not analogous to our expressions and they don't use it in a single context. All four arms up, digits splayed defensively, major eye turning toward the-"
"What do you think it means?" Second cut her off before should could drive herself hoarse trying to mimic the little monsters' screeching again.
"It's... something that should not be. They say it when they first see our screens, most often. It's... wrongness, weirdness, maybe unnatural."
"Taboo." Tamer ground his teeth.
"Magic" laughed Captain, waving dismissively. "Well, yeah, sure, we're magic to them, any sufficiently advanced technology and all that."
"Nonono" Talker shook her head. "It's not the screen itself. They call that a moving painting, like when they spread dyes on leather and it's waving in the wind. They have other words for our technology. Chalk leather for our suits. Straight hut for our buildings. Screechers for our relays, apparently they can hear the electricity running through them. This... this sorcery thing, it's a conversation ender of sorts."
"So?"
It wasn't enough evidence to undo months' worth of work. Not now when their videos, heavily edited, were enchanting all of humanity with these tiny butt-ugly aliens' primitive antics. Not now when Captain's heroic first contact image was selling authorized copies by the billions.
"Can you get some magnetic dye into them?" Goopy asked.
It took days. 358's retinue had begun adorning themselves in its style, vines draping their limbs instead of leaves or grass, their gestures trying to imitate its mannerisms. It took weeks. Hundreds of funnel huts now sprang up around 358's. They were felling trees using grit and rope, rolling the logs to some new construction, working tirelessly. 1591 had started a cult much similar to this. Its followers wrapped their necks in grass scarves and painted blue circles around their second and third eyes. One morning they staged an attack on 358's compound. Before the humans could even consider intervening, hundreds lay dead, speared and arrowed through, bleeding orange in the mud. Goopy merely sawed off their brain-cases for analysis.
By the time they convinced a couple of newcomers to accept being injected in return for a large supply of food and stand between some large metal panels while they talked, the world outside looked unrecognizable. Every individual funnel dwelling was smoothly thatched in 358's style. Every Dancer (media-friendly designation, final approval) wore the same red points on its fingers. The forest was being depopulated of the vines now in singular fashion for adornment. An entire supply chain brought chalk down from the hills to draw lines along their limbs. Ever more gaunt and exhausted, they paid less and less attention to their own subsistence. They ate only the same food 358 ate, and if that was unavailable went without, congregated thousand-strong in a patch of forest they'd burned into a massive clearing to witness its speeches five times a day. By the forest's edge, clutches of eggs sat lined up in various stages of development, all laid by 358 alone.
"It's gone." Talker rested her head in her palms, exhausted up in orbit. "They no longer say it. The taboo phrase, the sorcery, it's like they've forgotten it altogether."
The rest watched, speechlessly. Captain squirmed. How could he explain this to the media?
"How?"
Tamer and Goopy sighed.
"Ritual contest. When two competitors meet, it's wasteful to fight directly. So they strut, size each other up, shout each other down. The more impressive, the more dominant, asserts himself over the other. Runs him off, usually."
"Unless you don't need to run off members of the same sex, since you're not competing for reproduction, specifically. There are no females to fight over."
"And you can't live alone, not completely alone. You cooperate to warn each other of danger, spot resources. There's always some finicky two-man job to be done. But of course, you have to watch out for anyone trying to take the lion's share. At first I thought they might be hive creatures, like eusocial insects. But they're all unique. A single individual, if successful in gathering the appropriate fodder, could lay enough eggs to populate the entire forest. In fact, this has likely happened repeatedly throughout their history. Dig down through that mud and you'll find a lot more than seven Troys. They don't share."
"But how do they do it?"
"Ever seen someone yawn and just had to yawn immediately?" Goopy queued up recordings of his autopsies. "Mirror neurons. Our brains have a few. Dancers have an equivalent, and they're absolutely riddled with them. When 78 died so soon after interacting with 23, it gave me a snapshot, but out of context I couldn't interpret it. Slightly more similar than average, yes.... but here's the carnage after the battle."
Thin-sectioned, highlighted images flitted past, grouped by army, 358's versus 1591's. They didn't even need the computer synopsis. The similarities were visible with the naked eye, the repeating whorls and clusters helpfully pointed out in every case. Each army repeated its own pattern in every head. The last evidence came from the recorded fMRI conversation.
"The individual on the left is more dominant. I don't know why. Not my field. Maybe if we'd had more time... maybe it's cuter, or meaner, or a better talker. Now look." He zoomed in on the same tiny section of the creatures' brains as they talked, fast-forwarded... and as the seconds dragged on, the one on the right began shifting, matching the left's.
"Child-rearing" said Tamer. "It's the price they pay for a lack of organized parental care. They need to make good on every learning opportunity, make every lesson stick. Wormy see, wormy do. Unquestioningly. Permanently. No telling when another adult will be willing to teach."
"An evolutionary overshoot. Lightning fast, pervasive. There, in real time, you have one mind, one being rewriting another."
"Sorcery!"
"Well, in their case, perhaps such a strong term may be warranted..."
"No. No" groaned Talker bitterly. "The one on the right in your scan just said it. Valuable speech. Now sorcery. Leave. It knew... they know, they can feel it. It's more than following."
"Yeah. When 23 went missing for half a day, I'm guessing some of 78's original personality reasserted itself. It knew, could allow itself to know it had been in the process of getting... erased. Day by day, with every second of continued contact. It couldn't risk 23 speaking another word."
"Erased? But you're saying they can break free. Like 78 did. Right?" Captain wavered, clutching at straws. The eggheads, his eggheads, just stared at each other, averted their eyes from his tensing jaw, his heightening voice, the steely gaze for which he'd been promoted. Useless, how could they be so useless, and after all his work, all his sacrifice! "But we still have a valley full of live specimens!"
"You have a valley full of a single specimen. A single personality, repeated in thousands of brains rewired for a single ego. Normally I'm guessing they break contact naturally before too much influence accumulates. A defense mechanism. But when we gave them telecommunication..."
"They could no longer isolate" said Tamer. "It was fake, felt fake, but the triggers just sneak past their defenses. Slow poison. Keeping them talking, drawing them in, convincing them to come over in person, until the changes stuck for good."
"What are you? Favorite food, game, picture, song? How many of your concerns, fears, dreams, preoccupations can get overwritten before the ship of Theseus sinks?"
***
The lander boiled the mud out from under itself as it took off once again. Far below they could see rows of tiny figures in concentric semicircles. The same chalk lines adorned limbs by the fours of thousands reaching worshipfully to the gift from heaven, all in unison, all in unquestioning righteousness. But thankfully the disquieting tableau was quickly lost in the mists.
From atop a log temple built in crude mockery of the lander's shape, 358, now a species unto itself, blessed the gods for their bounty with its thousands of selves, then turned to worship of its own magnificence.
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