Altruism was delighted, their investments in time at the exterior interfaces and in the planning process of the Terran and Clerical maintenance and rehabilitation was rising strong on the prediction markets!

“We were of the flesh of Terra then, riding her beating blood and the many esper and guardian fairy of her tender muscles. They were not all wise or clever things, but greedy and covetous of their courts and places within the meat and bone of the world besides. Still I and my descendents found manner now blessed as we were in the insights of our great trade with the deep trader of Obbie’s kin”

There were a few political maneuverings to try and discredit them but the Tough Love counter initiative of their coalition with Reproduction had grappled and drowned out the attempt to undermine their current handling of Omega.

As Quarti had said, it did no one any good to overly coddle them!

“It was worth it, giving Obbie’s life time of gluttony and fat for the secret of a sight beyond mere sight. To hear the voice of the world and know its reaches. To see the direction of its curves and the layers of the meaning. My friend was a willing participant in it, Although he was so much reduced by it as to be a thin wisp of a mantle around me. Shivering and vulnerable”

Some of the other demiurges had tried to argue a far too oversimplified interpretation of their charter and rules of operation. It was transparent filibustering, none of the demiurges were that stupid as to think they could bend Altruism to such idiocy. But it had required counter motions and resources be used.

“Still we searched, we bled and flowed and became all to seek them. We could touch upon every tree and river grotto upon terra’s skin. We could dig and wriggle with worm in the soil. We could dance sparse flashes of instantaneous hollowing terror through the rarities of wind motes to taste for smoke of fire. In those first MOMENTS after we secured ourselves we apprehended Terra in her entirety and found ourselves alone.”

The great market of opinion needed to be greased. And this was just one of the many actions taken by the others to test and hone Altruism, to check and balance that they were true to themselves!

“It was a harrowing absolute then that we knew we were alone. And we began a new search. My children and I sought a rarified pattern, we stretched our conception of man to try and feel a refuge in potential. Some of us reached too far, some of us tried to enkindle in beasts and their souls became inhuman or were utterly destroyed.”

There were of course several aggressive anti-trade pushes after the involvement of the Ship Mistress in the market as a distinct and self represented embassy onto herself. And it was a bit of a rough spot when she was throwing a tantrum with the markets, but emergency legislation was able to be put into place with enough safeties to placate the overly xenophobic of the Demiurges.

"At all times did we have someone on watch, spread thin across all of terra so they'd feel any spontaneous appearance of man. For those ventures too dangerous for that, like the tasting of the wind, we paid more suited spirits to survey for us again and again despite the answer always being the same."

Now everything was working well and they were even getting a more solid and coherent sampling of the lex from the least scrutable of the Terrans! That on its own was paying enormous credit out in several linguistic and cultural processors and their more directly overseeing urges and Demiurges.

“We had to find new ways to count the time in our search. Terra swam round and years could be a caught if you payed attention but they blurred and warped together, they were easy to forget. And memory could become strange as a spirit. So we counted the insides of trees, the dirt and dust settling in the rivers upon Terra’s crevices.”

Even Survival had some respect for credit with the cultural and linguistic processors and their credit would be an excellent shelter if there were any upsets with the embassy motion for the ship Mistress.

“Terra remained bereft even after long decades of scouring ourselves and mutilating ourselves and the beasts there were no humans. A thought took hold in time that perhaps beyond terra could hold our people. So we tried to reach further. Fattening first and then probing ourselves into the insinuations of strange forms beyond the familiar. We found our way to ride the wild horror and wilderness of the great garden upon which Terra herself supped.”

Quarti shivered and shook up and down her body at a memory, or perhaps to convey the idea of a memory. Several cultural and physiological predictors put paltry weight to a dozen different interpretations on just what could be the full meaning behind the action. Altruism held onto their credits, without more time to mull it would be of little value.

“We were looking everywhere in madness chasing the figments of imagined human flesh and where it might hide. Seco, Third-a-tenth, Sevan... We felt both small, alone and desperate and yet fiercely sharp and clever then. Nothing upon Terra was anymore a proper danger to us with the gift to see and hear, or so we thought at the time. And we did not care then to be ratified and distant from matters that could be human housing. We stayed close to the hot tiny tumult of solid and groped the void”

Speaking of said samples Altruism double checked the record for anything useful for later. The educational initiative to properly prepare and uplift the terrans into something more resembling a functional sub-urban species was so far a wonderful flagship project to rally support and trade favors and influence with all the demiurges. But the unaware could still be surprised by strange things.

“It was terrible folly. More than half of us perished beyond Terra when we pushed too far. Not eaten as far as we could tell, just gone as if suddenly erased. Every dottir, gran-dot and great-gran-son riding those fields of void. That finally broke us. It took longer with some but that is when the hope died”

So far nothing precisely surprising. More resonance symbiota ventures and info form shenanigans, which to be fair was somewhat unusual to hear phrased in embodied concepts, by a single individual with extensive experience in both environments. It was a distressing history to hear accounted certainly but it was also something quite long past by the records available to the Demiurges and ▙◀ as a whole. As such not worth the weight of concern except as information about possible safety measures in the future. It did raise several possibilities in market niches for Quarti, but other more suitable demiurges were already cataloguing those.

“We went through the motions of our search. But though we sprawled thin over every mote of dust, every cave, every beast both familiar and strangely warped by the long past plague that had claimed all our mortal lives. We no longer hoped to find humanity. Some of us - I do not recall if I were myself among them - though we could affect some of the world with contracts of spirit and our own painful effort shaped the flesh of beasts out of habit at the futility. But though misshapen things were made none could harbor our souls or enkindle new ones.”

A curious use of resonance effect, highly metabolically wasteful and inefficient. There were MUCH simpler mechanisms of bioengineering that were far less crude and would have even actually succeeded. But then again this was the actions of a collection of ill optimized Stoccatamorph attempting to bootstrap ecological and biological mechanisms far outside their understanding and lacking the main cognitive symbiote they were hence trying to create.

“It was a century after the void field wanderers had ceased that a favored dottir of mine by name of Sevan did give up utterly. She despaired to ever see or be or be known by a mortal human ever again. The dead habits fell away and she saw nothing but slow erosion for her spirit. And so she tore open her soul and laid herself out to be devoured by the carrion things of the dirt”

The failures were to be expected. And without the crypto protocols they didn't even seem to consciously know about present in those bodies, they'd have been unable to properly "pray" and suffered similar cognitive degradation as was described when attempting to inhabit other species anyway..

“Many others of us suffered much the same, my sons and dottirs, they could not go on, they became other or found means to erase themselves. Some simply ceased to draw on the vital threads to live and stilled utterly dead in a moment. Some went feral and devoured each other merging into a single howling loneliness. One became obsessed with the burden of feeding her and cut off one part of herself after another as unnecessary until there was nothing left.”

Possible abstract nutritive pattern deficiency signs? It was worth looking into! Considering how much folk medicine seemed to be running rampant in the terran soul symbionts and their own self awareness this could be a problem. Altruism diverted credit towards commissioning some of the archive trawlers and extrapolation engines, one of which immediately pointed out that while traumatic for the gestalt entity, for the individual symbionts that composed it this might just have been adaptive behavior.

However further research would be best to ensure certainty.

“I, Obbie and one of the last of my sons were hopeless as well. But we sought a kind of peace in our despair. Though our species was utterly extinct and we had no hope to go on as we had. But we saw wonders beyond the thin skin of solid matter and flesh”

Interesting, a sign of mutation and hybridization from the earlier exposure and integration of foreign species? Or just a personality trait?

With so few individuals available and the dry and over-processed and many steps removed accounts regarding the terran gestalt species there was much complaining from the cultural and lexical sub systems for gross over-fitting of models.

“So we decided to journey weirdward. To find some meaning in the rarified abstractions beyond”

Altruism and the other Demiurges began to prepare further initiatives.