Bitter Harvest by Jonathan P. Brazee & Lawrence M. Schoen

Author:Jonathan P. Brazee & Lawrence M. Schoen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan P. Brazee
Published: 2020-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

Interlude II: Passage and Illumination

Boarding the Meat vessels had been simplicity itself. Its consciousness was borne upon uncounted numbers of specks carried aboard each of three craft in the days before departure. Greater numbers of specks were left behind on the planet itself, but the Gardener simply withdrew its awareness from them, passing those portions along to bits upon the vessels. Initially, once it understood that the trio of arriving vessels would soon depart, the Gardener had considered maintaining its consciousness upon all three. It abandoned that strategy when it became clear that the Meat that had interfered with its garden on the earlier world would be leaving as well and traveling aboard a specific craft. That Meat had stolen its vessel, co-opted its purge agents, imposed its will upon a mega seed. None of its fleshy associates had given any indication of such capabilities. Obviously then, the greatest opportunity to nullify this species involved marshaling its powers in proximity to the only Meat that had demonstrated any intelligence beyond the simple destruction that defined all of them.

Much as it had withdrawn its awareness from the specks scattered outside of the three vessels, the Gardener abandoned its presence on the other craft and consolidated its intellect and cognition aboard the vessel that would transport the Meat it now considered its only real opposition. Once that had been accomplished, it applied itself to a better understanding of the Meat, the better to eradicate the pest from its garden and, potentially, the rest of space.

Gardeners did not measure time in the frenetic way of Meat. Time was subjective, different for different things. The life cycle of growth, the seasons of a world, the movements of planets, the generations of limbs and roots within every different plant and tree and shrub. None of these were the same, not like the units of seconds and minutes that so entranced these Meat, defining their lives at every step. The Gardener balanced both forms of perception. The rotations of this world, prior to the vessel’s departure, contained both a billion Meat busy moments but also, for it, only a single contemplative point, even given its consciousness distributed across so many specks throughout the Meat vessel. Each speck observed, recorded, sorted the data presented through its limited sensorium. Each passed every datum forward to be collated and compared and considered by the gestalt of all. The data flow might be vast, but it hadn’t yet yielded true knowledge. Nor had the Gardener expected it to; little learning occurred at the level of the microscopic specks.

Exceptions existed. It only required the loss of several tens of thousands of specks to the vessel’s crude atmospheric filtration systems before the Gardener’s consciousness learned of the brutal assault on so many of its components and steered its elements away from the numerous passive intake valves found in every space aboard.

In counterpoint, it also identified numerous, out of the way nooks where it could gather and reproduce its constituent numbers to more than make up for the losses from the vessel’s systems.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.