Tyranids "R" Us [40k Tyranid Hivemind SI]

967 M05
Budu was nervous, but tried not to show it, resisting the urge to run his hand over his head-ridges. No sense spooking Shupa or their hunting-lizards. His apprentice was prone to worry enough without the worries of the tribe elders added on top.

“Alright, Shupa. Tell me why we stopped.”

The adolescent looked around carefully, before answering. Good, he was slowly breaking the boy of his habit of blurting out answers.

“Um. I can see crushed long-grass and some skipper tracks. We stopped because we need to learn their direction of travel before we muddy the trail. And because of the strangle-weed, the skippers would all have to move through this clearing, so we can count them.”

Budu nodded. “Good. Why don’t you investigate the tracks and tell me which way they were heading and how large you think the herd is. I’ll stay here with the lizards.”

With a brief half-salute that stopped just short of being lazy, Shupa moved forward to study the overlapping tracks carefully. What Budu didn’t say is that he was staying back to stand guard. Despite the relative lack of large predators in their tribe’s hunting grounds, Budu was keeping his eyes peeled, and not for the rare migratory kori-snake that made up the only real natural danger they would normally face out here. He was keeping his eyes peeled for unknown dangers. For weeks, the soothsayer had been on edge because the stars-that-move were missing or not following their normal patterns, and just last cycle, several tribes had all spotted many slow stars-that-fall on the same day. Just as in their oral histories.

Of course, what the tribe elders could not agree on was if it was a good thing or not. After all, the last time stars-that-fall had descended, it was to destroy the scourge of the bander-beasts. Nobody in living memory had seen one, but his tribe was not the only one that kept fragments of a bander skull near the sacred pillar for demonstrations on story nights. The giant tooth, as long as an adult arm, was ample proof for young ones that their ancestors had great wisdom in always staying on the move. Despite being harder to find consistent food, it kept them mostly safe from bander-beasts. The question was… did the stars-that-fall herald a good change for their people, or did they herald endings?

His hunting-lizard turned towards the strangle-weed forest moments before Shupa’s did the same.

Despite the terrible racket normally produced when struggling through strangle-weed, he could not yet hear what the lizards had noticed. His eyes widened and he gave an involuntary blink of his second eyelids when he spotted something striding their way.

“Shupa! Get over here!” He was proud at keeping the tremor out of his voice.

“Keep your shirt on. I’m coming, old man.”

Budu swallowed as the being, no, beings plural neared. They were nearly a mirror of a man and his lizard other than being half-again larger, but there was an unearthly grace as they casually strode through dense strangle-weed, certain footsteps choosing the perfect locations to avoid disturbing the tangles around them even without looking down. Even as the beings got close enough to get a good look at them, they still made no sound, their movements practically dancing through webs that would take Budu a sturdy stick and half a period to make headway into.

It was as though the gods had taken the fur of a man and given it to his hunting-lizard instead, and while the man lacked scales, he had the smooth skin of a glider. Budu had to place a steadying hand on Shupa’s shivering shoulder as he stared wide-eyed at the aliens.

Finally though, the aliens were through the strangle-weed and in the clearing with them.

There was a faint itching between Budu’s ears as several nonsense phantom sounds seemed to come from both of the aliens at the same time.

“こんにちは? Здравствуйте? سَلام? 您好? Hello? Ah! I see I finally found the right [frequency]. Kedric? Could you let the others know?” The nonsense finally resolved into perfectly understandable speech.

The taller being nodded to them, before giving a significant look to their hunting-lizards. “I see we may have more in common with some life in the galaxy than people feared. May I know your names, and the name of your people?”

Despite his shivering, Shupa was actually the first to speak. “I am Shupa, apprentice of Budu. We are of the Matouli people.”

A feeling of approval came from the beings. “Greetings Shupa and Budu. We are Jata and Kedric, of Humanity. We have recently come to this world, and we hope to live with your peoples, in partnership. I think you will find we have a lot to learn from each other. There exist beings out there that would do you harm, but I suspect we will not be among them.”

 

340 M06
“So based on what we know now about New Common, can anybody tell me when the language describing pair bonds shifted to the current nomenclature of mind and heart being a pair?” Acha looked over her class of a dozen pairs with a smile. She was still new to teaching Secondary, but even just in her first decade, she was enjoying it more than her century as a Primary teacher. Perhaps the shine would wear off, but the tempering that even freshly bonded went through matched her disposition more than the slightly manic energy of children.

<Sua> spoke Acha’s heart, Othun, after looking over the children with their hands up.

Sua nodded, before speaking. “It was 350 years ago.”

<Almost> Sua gave a slight frown at that.

Acha elaborated. “You could also say it was 280 years ago. Anyone care to explain the discrepancy? Lano? How about you answer this one.” She singled out the pair that was most likely to have their heads in the clouds, usually due to being slightly ahead of the class.

Lano ducked his head in embarrassment, but with encouragement from his heart, he spoke. “Um. Language drift?”

At her raised eyebrow, he continued. “It takes time for new words to be used.”

<Correct>

Acha settled in to lecture. “Despite having proven that humanity's language has a unifying trend due to the Greater pair network, our language is still a naturalistic one, which is to say it evolves over time, and it was not constructed to be perfect or precise. The reason why pairs are now called minds and hearts is, quite frankly, because the old system was getting too cumbersome. Three thousand years ago, you could describe them as human and partners, and be accurate. Two thousand years ago, you had AI and their partners, Synths and their partners, and humans and their partners, but because the all strongly identified as human-derived minds, the old nomenclature still functioned, albeit with a bit of extra specificity needed when you needed to refer to a synth but not a natural-born human.”

She leaned on her desk for a moment, to let that sink in, before continuing. “Roughly four hundred years ago, matouli were suddenly added into the mix, but because of their comparatively smaller population and the time it took to integrate into the Coalition, the old system still functioned, although the cracks started to show by the turn of the millennia” Here, she nodded to Sua, to indicate where her answer fit into the puzzle.

“And finally, two hundred years ago, the huzo were added into the mix as well,” She nodded at the only huzo mind in the class, the small reptilian glider slightly wide-eyed at the discussion of her people.

“-and by the time their population integrated, it was clear that the old system was broken beyond repair, so after a few years of trying out different terminology, the mind/heart dichotomy was eventually settled on and then it spread within months to all of humanity’s colonies. Now, the last part of that process is what we’re going to be covering in more detail today.”

And then Othun spoke, to emphasize her subject change. <Greater pair network>

“Precisely. Now, it’s been known since the very first days of extrasolar spaceflight that pairs could communicate with each other functionally instantaneously regardless of distance. At the time, it was believed this was a function of the heart; that the mind would compose the message, but only the heart could send it. Thanks to the works of Kasa Bhi two centuries ago, we know that it’s actually an inherent property of the bond formation itself. You may recognize the name Kasa from our unit on the bond-formation process. He was the one that proved that pairs could only bond once both heart and mind were mature enough to have a distinct sense of self-identity.”

Acha paused, and gave her class a chagrined look. “Now, the source of the discovery is actually rather amusing, because it had been looking us in the face for so long. Kasa simply went around to heart nurseries and worked with the hearts there to try to communicate over long distances. Despite being able to connect to the local Lesser pair networks, none of the hearts could reach out beyond their local environment with messages, regardless of how old they were. The record was a 231 year old heart that had never bonded with a mind, which is how Kasa proved that the only variable that changed was the bond formation itself.”

Acha’s easy smile dropped off her face. “On a much more serious note, hearts and minds interviewed were both capable of reaching out to the Greater pair network even after their partners died in an accident. While doing so was much more difficult, it was an ability that did not dull or fade over time, even among those that did not bond with new partners several decades later.”

It hurt to see the pained faces of her students. Everyone instinctively shied away from the idea of the loss of their partner, but the newly-bonded like those in her class were particularly sensitive to the thought of losing their freshly formed bond.

<Comfort> Othun sent her, in their private shared space.

With a shake of her head, Acha continued. “Now we will discuss the differences between the local, Lesser pair network, like Othun uses to speak to you in class, and the Greater pair network, which doesn’t have a detectable limit on it’s range. Can anybody tell me-”

 

502 M06
The canon tyranids were done dirty by their instincts. The ravenous hunger that drove them didn’t allow for many higher tactics, but more importantly, it drove the pace of everything the tyranids did.

Of particular note was gestation time. Do you know why space marines overmatched essentially all tyranid units of equivalent size, and only started meeting their match with bioforms at least half again as big? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t the superior engineering capabilities of humanity. It was all about the development time. Tyranids made so many compromises to meet their self imposed deadlines. The fact of the matter was, tyranids consumed a world within a hundred days or so for large, well defended worlds, and the vast majority of the units used in the assault were born on the surface during the invasion. To be useful at all, the larger bioforms had to be fully developed and ready to fight within seven days, and the smaller ones within two. While such biological acceleration of growth is certainly possible, you have to give up so many other tradeoffs to do it.

The sheer innovation possible when not working to such an impossibly short deadline is staggering. Case in point, I was having loads of fun helping humanity uplift the matouli and the huzo on accelerated timescales to meet the augmented humanity on a more even basis.

The average human adult was now just over two meters tall, but still had strength more than proportional with ancestral humans. In fact, despite having better than ancestral dexterity and fine motor skills, humans were now slightly stronger than the great apes optimized for strength, like gorillas. That being said, there was a far broader range of sizes than occurred naturally, so there were still some adults shorter than 1.5 meters, and some perfectly healthy people as tall as 2.5 meters, although most chose to stick to two meters for practicality purposes.

The matouli were very slightly shorter than ancestral humans, and their current height was slowly trending up above 1.6 meters. The huzo, by comparison, were tiny, at just over 1.2m if they stretched out, like they did when gliding. They had evolved for squirrel-like bounding on all four limbs with an aerodynamic forwards facing skull when hunched over. With their powerful hind legs and wingsuit-like gliding surfaces, they could make some truly astonishing leaps now that their strength was augmented to near-human levels, and they could literally clear most smaller buildings in a single bound.

Despite my close association with humans, it was actually the huzo that were getting to know me the fastest. Without purposeful direction, the “revelation” about your friendly neighborhood hivemind (me) had turned into an informal second coming of age for humanity. Your first coming of age was when you had enough self-determination to pair with a heart, although the exact age varied slightly from species to species. Your second coming of age was when you put enough of the clues together yourself to realize that there was a third player to the game of hearts and minds. Of course, since the second metric was all about your observational abilities, there were some idiots hundreds of years old who hadn’t figured it out, and some not even in their second decade that already knew. The huzo were often in the latter category, because of their preferred habitats.

As I have said before, and will happily re-iterate, gravity wells are for suckers. As humanity spread, it was silently agreed upon that humanity was in charge of the planets, moons, and major stations, I was in charge of the minor solar orbitals, including artificial space habitats. Huzo loved gliding. Their survival had often been tied directly to their maneuverability in the air, so practicing that maneuverability was deeply satisfying to them. Even ancestral huzo often climbed tall trees in order to practice as often as practical. But the best possible place for gliding in the solar system? O’Neill cylinder habitats. With an exterior diameter of about 8 km and a rotational period of about two minutes, they had about 1g of artificial gravity on the cheap. More importantly, if you launched yourself from one of the ends of the cylinder, you could glide over the lands that made up your home for more than thirty kilometers before being forced to land.

While “stack of pancakes” layered artificial gravity habitats were still common, O’Neill cylinders were incredibly popular among the huzo.

The thing was, all the minor solar orbital infrastructure was ultimately a seat of my consciousness. It helped coordinate orbits and aided in easy communication between habitats around different stars. While they were largely mechanical, especially on the exterior, there were always “maintenance access channels” that were filled with, well, me.

So while humans and matouli slowly put together the occasional bit of evidence that I was around, in the general sense, most huzo had me around, in the literal sense, and familiarity does wonders for figuring stuff like that out.

In related news, several synths had started branching out into matouli and huzo body-plans, and occasionally even odder shapes. While the body assigned them at “birth” was predetermined, it was even easier for synths to do total body reshaping than organics could manage, and humans had figured that technology out centuries ago, it was just slow and fiddly.

It was kinda relaxing watching huzo and their flying companions just gliding around artificial habitats in space, free from worries in a way that was vaguely unnatural in the 40K setting. Oh, and let me tell you, huzo air races? Something else. They had full-contact categories, team-based competitions, variations of tag that looked like chaotic swirling masses of leaves, and more.

While I still identified with humanity, I’m no longer certain that I most strongly identify with humans.