MorningLightMountain amalgamated its twenty-ninth immotile a decade after it began sowing crops. Twenty years later, a thousand years after it had begun its original singleton life, the number of connected units in the group reached forty, an unheard-of rate of expansion. Its linked brains were abuzz with ideas and thoughts as it observed its immediate universe with ever more scrutiny.
On the edge of the tropics, Prime immotiles were pushing farther and farther into the temperate lands, armed with their new knowledge and understanding of nature. Fire made it possible for them to live farther and farther from their original climate. Heated buildings, cultivated fields, canals, bridges, saws, and axes helped them travel farther and farther to establish allied territories.
Inevitably, as they began to grasp the principles of construction, and strength of materials, mathematical tools were developed to aid fabrication. For creatures that were essentially a giant brain, mathematics pushed them into their primacy—it was the key to understanding everything. They devoted themselves to it with a devotion that was almost religious. All the elements were now in place for the mechanical age to begin. When that happened, the pace of change was very, very swift.
After a thousand years, MorningLightMountain was now a group immotile comprising three hundred seventy-two separate units. Few had ever grown to such a size before. Its individual bodies had formed a living ring around the conical mountain. The spring that bubbled up at the top of the mountain was now channeled through clay pipes into the crown building that housed the immotile group in their entirety. They lived inside a single giant hall with a vaulting glass-topped roof letting sunlight shine down. During the night, iron braziers were lit, keeping the inside of the building illuminated, allowing the immotile group to keep working, instructing their motile herds, producing their nucleiplasms, and scrutinizing experiments and projects. Little shower nozzles sprinkled the immotiles several times a day, helping to keep them clean. Waste products were carried away via a network of culverts down the mountain, while dedicated channels swept nucleiplasm batches into the necklace of congregation lakes that had been dug below the building.
The air outside still steamed every day from the nightly rains. But this mist now mingled with smoke from the furnaces that were permanently alight. MorningLightMountain imported coal from several territories to the south, a hilly district where food was hard to grow. It was now cultivating two of the neighboring valleys, after a short series of wars wiped out the immotiles and their herds who used to occupy them. Control over such a huge area was difficult. Motiles needed to be constantly updated with instructions, and they lacked the ability to respond to any unexpected situation. MorningLightMountain knew it would soon be subjected to invasions from the west by immotiles who were worried by the size of its territory, not to mention its aggression. Its use of newly developed chemical explosives to destroy buildings, dams, and motile herds was regarded with considerable alarm.
That was the year Primes found out how to use electricity. While some immotiles studied how to use the new power for lighting, or engines and other industrial-based applications, MorningLightMountain investigated how it could carry signals; specifically the neural impulses that nerve receptors exchanged. It took over a decade; even for that much concentrated brain power inventing an entire technology from scratch was difficult. During that time, it accepted strategic defeats, losing its two additional valleys and agreeing to unfavorable trade terms for its coal and other raw materials absent in the valley. What it developed in that interlude was basic electronics, from simple resistors and capacitors right up to thermionic valves. With those principles established, a whole new chamber was annexed to the crown building on the mountain, the world’s first electronics lab, with eight immotile units devoted to nothing else but instructing the motiles who assembled the new systems and ran experiments with them. It took MorningLightMountain another three years before it successfully inputted signals to a nerve receptor. Primitive tactile impulses were first, such as hot and cold, which it followed up with simple black and white images from a camera. The images were something of a revelation for it; although it could always see what was happening outside by summoning a motile and accessing its visual memory of events, such knowledge was always secondhand, time-delayed. This was instantaneous. Within a matter of months, the entire valley was ringed by cameras that constantly scanned back and forth across the landscape, allowing it to see its entire domain in real-time. Another five years concentrated research advanced its analog signal transmissions to a level where it could finally instruct a motile by remote. It would be decades until the electronics were sophisticated enough to carry the full range of nerve receptor impulses, but that first ability to communicate at a distance was enough to give it a massive advantage over the other immotiles.
MorningLightMountain began to expand its territory once more. Herds of motile soldiers, armed with explosives and rudimentary cannons, overran the two valleys it had conquered before. With soldier motiles trailing long multi-core cables behind them, MorningLightMountain could react to the flow of battle instantaneously, easily outmaneuvering its opponents. Those first victories were followed up by a series of swift advances across the countryside until its herds had established a broad channel of land leading directly to the southern temperate zone. The remaining immotiles reacted cautiously, knowing that holding on to such huge areas was impossible. It wasn’t until months had passed that they realized their error as MorningLightMountain consolidated its grip on its annexed lands. With a grouping that now consisted of over three thousand individual immotiles, MorningLightMountain was easily capable of congregating enough motile herds to occupy its lands, mining and farming them in an operation as tightly controlled as the original valley. For the first time, captured industrial facilities were pressed into service, increasing its manufacturing base relative to the size of its budding empire.
With a direct route from its valley to the fresh temperate lands, its expansionist ambitions could now be realized. A torrent of motiles and machinery were dispatched south to exploit the new resources there, setting up the pylons and cables that knitted the whole edifice together.
It took the remaining immotiles years to build the grand alliances that finally limited MorningLightMountain’s growth, although it could never be completely halted. In typical imperial fashion, MorningLightMountain formed its own alliances as a counterbalance.
Within another fifty years all the immotiles had the ability to send their nerve impulses via cable and wireless relays. This development in conjunction with new and powerful weapons derived from the Primes’ increasing knowledge of chemistry and physics led to an era of consolidation. The smaller immotile territories were invaded and taken over by more powerful neighbors. Temperate wastelands were colonized, with mining and manufacturing operations extending into the polar regions. It was only when nuclear weapons were developed that a kind of equilibrium returned. Fission and fusion bombs allowed the smaller territories to hold their larger brethren at bay with the threat of total annihilation.
Spaceflight and offplanet colonies were the next logical development, and one that the Primes pursued vigorously. MorningLightMountain was one of the earliest immotiles to send ships out to the asteroids and planets to catalogue their resources. Given the distances involved, the old problem of time-delay emerged again. Direct electronic linkages were difficult to sustain, control slipped, and without it the motiles were utterly incapable of responding to any technological situation. They simply weren’t smart enough.