After four years and all those immunizations, I finally came down with covid. So I’ve been out of commission for a couple of weeks and just now am regaining my ability to think, read and write.It will take me a while to get back to book reviewing, but in the meantime I’ll be posting here more Stories of Elektra. People of Light 1 was a first glimpse into a world called Elektra, settled by humans in the past two hundred years, a past, of course, far in our future. People of Light 2 continues this series of interconnected stories that will appear here in draft form and will ultimately be published as a single book. Be sure to check out the other stories in the series, including Dead Memories and Time Islands (in three parts).
1.
K’Lin strummed the vast intertwining strands of tissue that touched and moved each being in this conclave. The music of her utterances first shook and startled with its intensity of warnings, then modulated and soothed the stirred awareness of her peers. She counseled caution and subtle infiltration through the neural webs of these new beings.
Her visible meanings appeared in streaks of charged particles in the fabric of the Recorded Mind, not a voice but a kind of musical flow. “We will blend our mind cells into the heavy matter of these humans to uncover their meanings. Slowly we will enfold them in our own intentions and open their being to our influence. We will infuse within them and blend their behavior to our symbiont patterns. They will see that we can expand their limited vision with senses and realities that have been closed to them until now. They will cherish our help that gives them unimagined capabilities.”
There came rumbling back to her across the sentient Sphere a clashing storm from her own other, the voicings of MroGlith, who always jangled his martial stamping through her choiring of peaceful strategies
“K’Lin draws out her fantasies as always. These humans are obsessed with power and control. They will react to her subtle infusing with fear and violence. We must meet them in the same way, or they will subvert and abuse our very being.”
K’Lin and MroGlith, both one and manifold, theirs a mating of forces rather than biological beings, a mingling of opposing but mirroring drives. Ultimately their now visible thoughts had to reconcile within the Sphere, to collapse into each other in a single embracing world-state for this expansion of the People’s life. Much as she had studied how humans behaved, she knew they had nothing like the bond of self and other in one being. And so it happened, their discord becoming one, as the great consensus of mind overwhelmed all division.
2.
They required a form of physicality to approach a new world, to explore the possibilities of symbiont life with its dominant species. The minds rippled the vast field around them with waves of energy across the entire sphere. These disturbances, like tides, gathered back at their point of origin, swelling into a vast mounding of light that sparks the fusion of matter into container shapes of their will. These fill instantly with microbian cells to form tiny intricate beings. Then the basal states begin bonding into the larger wholes, finding functions from the renderings of K’Lin and MroGlith, coalescing slowly into the bodily shape recognizable to others of this species, as they called it, humanoid in form.
It would not be capable of living among humans and learning about them, but it gave them a ground to play on, a shape to explore. The twins flowed into this form to activate its awareness, their own shapes blending into one, but after an instant separating again, splitting the human form in two.
To move within humans, to move among them required this breaking apart. Most of all it required the violent enclosure of their multiform being into the skin and bones, muscle and brain of these creatures. This agony of sacrifice would yield the inner knowledge of humans they needed to find the right symbiont balance, the right influence and control. But they need only flow into the electric web of neurons that made the humans function. Within that crackling electron signaling they could find the consciousness of a living mind.
And so they began the descent in a glowing streak of microbian forms that would appear to any humans who witnessed it as no more than a random flow of bright mist drifting through the air. They had isolated this stream of life and given it a name. but names were strange. She was K’Lin in much the same way that a halo of matter embraces a pair of galaxies. She was like one of those galaxies, MroGlith was the other. They were separate but together. They both suffused the halo and took part in the collision of matter in the way that galaxies collide, passing through each other but changing only slowly. That was the best way she could think about her named and separated self.
K’Lin descended to the surface of Elektra, grasping it at every scale from the unity of the Sphere surrounding it down to the level of one human whom she was to observe in detail. It should be a new arrival who had little knowledge of the planet and with a mind ready to explore and to be explored. She began her work.
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