“You have no idea what you started as?”
There is some indirect evidence which allows reasonable reconstruction of our original forms.
“Please tell me.”
The evidence suggests is that we were a mound-dwelling hive species in a high-gravity environment. Ours was once a patelline race of gastropods, bearing shells of immense thickness and weight. Tendrils and tubules to sense vibrations, electrical textures, and chemical compounds were distributed radially around the shell circumference. We waded on our mouth parts, on hundreds of tongues and endless skirts of baleen, and we fed continuously on microorganisms strained out of a surface gel of molten lithium compounds coating the world to a shallow depth. We reproduced by triplicate fission, asexually, and during reproduction shed the shells from which our mounds were constructed. Our notions of property and inheritance could not have been derived from a bisexual species. The customs surrounding the division of memories and property no doubt served us well after the mechanization of all thought.
Of our culture, history, triumphs, defeats, philosophy, languages, symbolic expressions, and the great, slow, mile-wide feeding dances of our immense domelike ancestors, some previous generation lacked reason to convey to the next, and the information was lost.
“That is terrible.”
Only for a race possessed of curiosity. The emotion cannot be satisfied if one is curious about matters beyond the boundary of available information. To maintain unsatisfiable emotion is inefficient. You would be better advised to eliminate it in the races you create to replace you.
Montrose said, “If we did that, they would not hardly be human.”
Such is the self-perpetuating nature of psychology. Our race has been purely machine-based for a long span of time, and yet we still conform to imperatives and rules established for mound-dwelling asexual gastropods.
It is for this reason that we answer your questions: to hide, distort, or restrict information between a hive of all children from one parent, who share common memories inherited from common ancestors, would be an egregious violation.
“Your servants that you sent to enslave us were not so forthcoming.”
Of necessity, interstellar expeditions are thrifty to the extreme. Contrariwise, the expense required to allocate information across merely an interplanetary distance is negligible.
Montrose said, “How long a span? How long ago did this take place?”
It is believed that our biological period ended during the same epoch when a dark matter cloud the mass of a dwarf galaxy intersected with the Milky Way.
The optimal condition for evolution of life is found in star systems maintaining equidistance from the core throughout their galactic orbit. A now-extinct race of Panspermians long ago intended to maximize the development of life and civilization in the Orion Arm for the benefit of later generations and seeded chemical compounds throughout. The dark galaxy collision disrupted many such stellar orbits and prevented the anticipated harvest of civilizations, leading to the current dearth of mature civilizations in this area.
At that time, the intelligences dwelling among the Hyades stars and spheres and structures were organizing themselves into a single coherent mental system, and this dearth forced certain strictness of economy into our governing equations, protocols, and practices. One protocol thrift imposes is the elimination of memories and records that serve no current nor anticipated purpose.
Montrose consulted an almanac in his memory. The Widrow Dwarf Galaxy had intersected and been absorbed by the Milky Way during the time described, which was in the Lower Paleocene epoch. On Earth, the Cenomanian anoxic extinction event was taking place, wiping out vast numbers of marine species due to oxygen loss in the surface layers of the sea. Flowering plants were appearing for the first time, as were bees.
Montrose said, “Are you talking about just the inhabitants of this solar system, Ain, Epsilon Tauri, or are you saying you are the Hyades race?”
There is no Hyades race. Distinction between races fade once they are all elevated to machine existence. The Dominion of Hyades was founded by five naturally evolved master races or Principalities, Hosts, and one hundred thirty-one artificially evolved or created servant races, Virtues, Powers, Potentates.
Since there is no evidence of forced evolution in our origin, it is likely we were one of these five original Principalities, perhaps the last to join, for we are less perfectly assimilated into a homogenous norm.
Whether the patelline race from which we sprang originated in this star system or another is impossible now to determine, as the number and composition of bodies in this system has been reengineered several times during the last one hundred million years.
Nor are there planets in other systems in the Hyades Cluster to examine for archeological or other evidence. It was determined to be an ineffectual use of resources to maintain planetary bodies in the Hyades Cluster, except as the interstellar vessels you observed during your approach: ice giants are massive enough to endure tenth-lightspeed impacts with smaller dust particles during transit.
8. The Compassion of Myrmidons
There was a third and smaller line of inquiry, where Mickey asked, “What is the meaning of these events? Why us?”
Ain conquered Sol because it is the obligation of higher and more civilized beings to rule, guide, govern, and reprove lower and less civilized beings.
Had you greeted Asmodel as equals and possessed and used the technology to send Asmodel to his next destination with gifts sufficient to compensate for the energy expenditure of the expedition, no conquest would have been necessary.
“What is your motive? Over these distances, it cannot be simply for gain. Nearly any use of the same amount of energy, a treasure horde, would be better spent closer to home.”
The Hyades is obligated by the compulsion by Praesepe, who is superior. Life serves life. It is the law. This is already known to you. Our servant Cahetel explained.
“Great and noble Principality of Ain, I ask a more personal question. I am not asking about your laws but your soul. What is your motive for obeying the law? Yours, personally?”
Our motive springs from an emotion you do not possess. In our history, as each generation reproduced, the common memories were duplicated up until the time of fission, and the independent triplet children developed independent memories thereafter, passing them to their own offspring.
However, differences, divarications, and heterodoxy arose as time passed, and each branch of the memory trunk grew more remote from each other. Whenever remote memory lines and bloodlines fell into confusion, amnesia, and information poverty, it was the moral obligation of the central memory lines to uphold, correct, and support them. Our emotion prompts us to this moral obligation.
Your cruel, weak, and silly human race was in this same category as such a deviant colony and needed our intervention for your correction and support.
Mickey said, “Sir, I myself do not possess this emotion, but the Myrmidons which once lived among us do, since their memories and lives were similar to your own. They called it compassion, but it was indistinguishable from hatred.”