a brief history of ooranye
18: the last great hive

[continued from 17: The Ghepions]

Unexpectedly, the Iodine Era was brought to an end not by a calamity but by the shock of amazingly good news.

The city of Ao suddenly achieved a breakthrough in the creation of a benevolent “hive” – a group mind which harked back to the old-fashioned, innocent and successful hives of the Phosphorus Era. The new Aoan Hive consisted of a moderate levy from all the minds of the city, allowing each individual to retain his full consciousness during a melding which created value that was somehow given back to the individual… rather as though it were possible to get something for nothing. In addition, as a kind of co-ordinating core to this group consciousness, the Ghepion administrative computer contributed its own mind. Plenty could have gone wrong, but did not. The combination worked.

If it can be done, this sort of thing is a good bargain for both city and population. The city-mind is exalted by the capabilities of its humans, and vice versa. Very occasionally, it is believed, the people may have joined with the city’s own consciousness to form a brief super-mind, but mostly the effect was a gentler, considerate sharing. And you could drop out whenever you liked.

Other cities had tried the techniques which led to all this, but only Ao ever succeeded. The success was realized suddenly, like an image brought into abrupt focus, and announced in triumph in a voice that could not be mistaken.

The triumph was bound to be temporary. Too many destabilizing forces existed to allow it to last. Remarkably, the Aoan Paramountcy (Era 54, the Xenon Era) lasted 1,735,700 U-days – 70.7 U-years, equivalent to 5,940 Earth years; one of the shortest of the Great Eras, but an impressively long time for a city hive-mind to have preserved the moral balance between the collective and the individual.

The precise mode of consciousness of the Aoan Hive is beyond our reach, yet we have reason to suspect that it knew roughly the extent to which its days were numbered; also that it knew the chief purpose of its Paramountcy, which was to stave off what we term the hylozoic powers.

These were powers which had been triggered like a cancer in the planetary subconscious by the fight with the Mad City. What the Aoan Hive actually did to shield Syoom we do not know; the answer may lie in the spools of the labyrinthine archives of Skyyon. What we do know is that the controlled death-throes of the Hive lasted 13 minutes (the Caesium Era) during which it transmitted as much as possible of its wisdom to the Sunnoad. These transmissions, known as the Aoan Blasts, fortunately amounted to a sufficient hand-over of the Paramountcy’s insight.

The following Barium Era (54 days, 7 hours) was occupied with the action taken by the Sunnoad based on information he received in the Blasts.

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