“Well, Captain Seth. Here it is,” Dr. Min said, gesturing to one of the containment fields. “I had to pry one of these organisms off of the chest of LeCroy’s SA earlier.” It was a single organism of the species that Min had been studying. To Seth, it was just a clumsy, slimy, chubby spider. He was not impressed.
“This is the deadly intelligent organism that I’m supposed to be worried about?”
“Bare with me, captain. This is single organism. Individually, they’re simple.” Dr. Min showed him an isolated specimen, which appeared rather underwhelming. “Now watch what happens when I put it next to another one of its kind.” He put two of the cubes right next to each other, and let the side that connected them melt away so that two of the creatures could come in contact with each other. The two seemed to recognize each other. The two immediately flattened to the ground and extended each and every one of their legs. Two of their legs began to ‘grow’ towards each other. The two were connected. The outer layer of their bodies began to darken a shade of red and harden, and the center of their bodies began lighting up.
“What are they doing?”
“They are linking with each other, establishing a network. They can communicate with each other, share thoughts, and ideas. Watch what happens when I put it next to a few more.” Dr. Min added several more of the species and watched all of them connect with each other. He then pulled out a blue light and began flashing it several times. The ‘linked’ network began flashing the same number of times as Dr. Min had flashed it. First once, twice, then three times, then four times. “The fact that it can mimic my patterns doesn’t necessarily suggest intelligence, but…”
“It was something not seen by the creature individually.”
“Precisely. By itself, it has its own collection of neurons… a limited ‘brain’, if you call it that, but it’s not extensive enough to do anything significant. It’s just another organism that eats, breathes, reproduces, produces waste, and dies. In terms of intelligence, it’s really no more intelligent than, say, a small canine or a large lizard.”
“Dare I ask, Doctor, what would happen if many more were to link together?”
“I think you know where I’m going with this,” Dr. Min replied. He gestured the captain to move to another room, a much larger room. There was a huge curtain that hid something within the room. “Well, captain. I present to you…the face of your enemy.”
When he pulled the curtain, he unveiled a container much larger than the earlier one. It must have contained maybe a hundred and fifty or even two hundred of the organisms, all connected to each other.
“Put even just a few in proximity to each other, and they can create a small neural network,” Dr. Min explained. “Collectively, they can combine their abilities to form a major intelligence. Their physiology changes drastically when they are connected to each other. They can share information, solve problems, and come up with ideas. I determined through basic tests that they understood basic math and problem-solving abilities. That was when there were only about thirty of them. With increasing number, its complexity increases and its intelligence grows,” said Dr. Min. “I suspect that there are hundreds of billions of these on Draloos V. I suspect that that was the large mass we were detecting below the surface.
“We’re seeing the intelligence in this species as a sort of emergent property, a basic principle of biology, in which seemingly complex properties arise from the multiplicity of effects from many smaller, simpler components. You understand it as ‘the whole being more than the sum of its parts.’ It has even been argued that consciousness is an emergent property that is derived from the vast complexity of neurons in the brain. It’s a rather convenient way of defining it, and not altogether descriptive, but there is sometimes no other way to accurately describe it. In any case, this species we see here is acting in an analogous way as the neural connections in our brains.”
“Yes, I had a rather lengthy discussion about this earlier with Lieutenant Commander LeCroy about his toy robot,” Seth recalled.
“That’s right.”
“So, back to the subject at hand. You mean to say…that with enough of these organisms, there could be a consciousness on the planet?”
“Quite possibly, yes. At the moment, I don’t know how they exactly function on a macroscopic level, whether they are compartmentalized into regions that have specific functions, like we have a prefrontal cortex and a hippocampus, or just loosely distributed. I don’t know if they are divided as separate individuals, or collectively as, well, as you put it, one massive consciousness.” The doctor paused, and looked at the container. “What is also happening, captain, is that it is building an intelligence right here.”
“Can we communicate with it yet?”
“That’s hard to tell. Right now, on a basic level I am communicating with it using basic visual stimuli. I’m not exactly sure how they would communicate, even if they wanted to. If we wait, they could come up with a way on their own.”
“In other words, we will need to let it reproduce further if we wanted to talk with it.”
“I believe so, unless you want to go down to the surface and get sucked down into the ground like Ensign Ester nearly did.”
Seth raised a brow. “I was afraid you were going to say that. We might not have choice in the matter; we need to talk to it.”
“I might add that there is no way of knowing if they will be aware of what is going down on the planet,” Min noted.
“How fast is it reproducing?”
“At the moment, it’s approximating an exponential growth rate, although that won’t go on forever. Currently, it’s roughly doubling every three hours. I imagine on the planet they reach some sort of limit or equilibrium with the environment. Once it reaches a certain level, it appears to generate a type of ‘cocoon’ to physically protect itself. But because it’s in an isolated environment right now it’s going through an initial growth phase. Their number is manageable now, but in a couple of days or so, we’re going to have large problem.”
“And every three hours,” Seth realized, “they’re going to get smarter.”
