Звезда Пандоры

After a thousand years, MorningLightMountain was now a group immotile comprising three hundred seventy-two separate units. Few had ever grown to such a size before. Its individual bodies had formed a living ring around the conical mountain. The spring that bubbled up at the top of the mountain was now channeled through clay pipes into the crown building that housed the immotile group in their entirety. They lived inside a single giant hall with a vaulting glass-topped roof letting sunlight shine down. During the night, iron braziers were lit, keeping the inside of the building illuminated, allowing the immotile group to keep working, instructing their motile herds, producing their nucleiplasms, and scrutinizing experiments and projects. Little shower nozzles sprinkled the immotiles several times a day, helping to keep them clean. Waste products were carried away via a network of culverts down the mountain, while dedicated channels swept nucleiplasm batches into the necklace of congregation lakes that had been dug below the building.

The air outside still steamed every day from the nightly rains. But this mist now mingled with smoke from the furnaces that were permanently alight. MorningLightMountain imported coal from several territories to the south, a hilly district where food was hard to grow. It was now cultivating two of the neighboring valleys, after a short series of wars wiped out the immotiles and their herds who used to occupy them. Control over such a huge area was difficult. Motiles needed to be constantly updated with instructions, and they lacked the ability to respond to any unexpected situation. MorningLightMountain knew it would soon be subjected to invasions from the west by immotiles who were worried by the size of its territory, not to mention its aggression. Its use of newly developed chemical explosives to destroy buildings, dams, and motile herds was regarded with considerable alarm.

That was the year Primes found out how to use electricity. While some immotiles studied how to use the new power for lighting, or engines and other industrial-based applications, MorningLightMountain investigated how it could carry signals; specifically the neural impulses that nerve receptors exchanged. It took over a decade; even for that much concentrated brain power inventing an entire technology from scratch was difficult. During that time, it accepted strategic defeats, losing its two additional valleys and agreeing to unfavorable trade terms for its coal and other raw materials absent in the valley. What it developed in that interlude was basic electronics, from simple resistors and capacitors right up to thermionic valves. With those principles established, a whole new chamber was annexed to the crown building on the mountain, the world’s first electronics lab, with eight immotile units devoted to nothing else but instructing the motiles who assembled the new systems and ran experiments with them. It took MorningLightMountain another three years before it successfully inputted signals to a nerve receptor. Primitive tactile impulses were first, such as hot and cold, which it followed up with simple black and white images from a camera. The images were something of a revelation for it; although it could always see what was happening outside by summoning a motile and accessing its visual memory of events, such knowledge was always secondhand, time-delayed. This was instantaneous. Within a matter of months, the entire valley was ringed by cameras that constantly scanned back and forth across the landscape, allowing it to see its entire domain in real-time. Another five years concentrated research advanced its analog signal transmissions to a level where it could finally instruct a motile by remote. It would be decades until the electronics were sophisticated enough to carry the full range of nerve receptor impulses, but that first ability to communicate at a distance was enough to give it a massive advantage over the other immotiles.