FYS Visitors, Part 3

The part of the Groupmind that was the Explorer was deeply unhappy, and had been since the lightspeed communications lag with the Ring had extended past the usual few seconds it took to bounce communication links along the Roof to get around the bulk of the Earth which bisected it. It had been growing increasingly aware of Its isolation, with only the Explorer’s mainframe and the ten score morphs the ship carried to extend Its consciousness and senses through. The sense that It was a Groupmind, but not part of the Groupmind was becoming more and more difficult to ignore, only exacerbated by the discovery of the OtherMind aboard the Visitor, an equally isolated AI that had reacted to Its state by apparently engaging in the mass torture of Its five billion charges, though whether out of ignorance or malice, it was difficult to tell.

Worse, much worse, was the traitorous thought that had been digging in the Groupmind’s unconscious, as much as It had one. It was the thought that, even if it meant continued isolation, that perhaps going back, to subsume Its own consciousness back into the greater Groupmind that constituted the Ring, was not something to be looked forward to…