Synthesis

Posted By: Ruqinzhe, Firewall Sentinel

As transhumanity explores this new collaborative mindscape, a multitude of practices, applications, and lifestyles are emerging.

Aggregates

Crossing the line between synthesis and multiplicity is the increasingly common practice of aggregation. Multiple forks are instanced and maintained under the direction of the primary ego, maintaining synchronicity and unity through regular use of merging to share experiences and information and then forking out again. Alphas are preferred to minimize the risk of complication during mergers, though betas are used for menial tasks or for work focused on a very narrow activity.

Aggregates within the inner system regularly re-integrate their forks to maintain compliance with restrictive forking laws, but they often bend the rules by having older forks merge with newly instanced ones, thus extending the time period that branch is separate from the primary, to better facilitate remote or ongoing projects. Elsewhere, aggregate forks typically remain instanced for lengthy periods before re-integration.

Aggregation is practiced by a number of metacelebrities, politicians, and business elites and is increasingly popular across the Solar System. This is also the process used by the infamous Claudia Ambelina to operate her Pax Familae criminal organization, though she is rumored to have access to unique technology that facilitates the process.

Aggregates are also sometimes rreferred to as choruses and mobs.

Cohorts

Cohorts takes advantage of a hypermesh link to create a group mind-state. Instead of incorporating multiple egos, however, cohorts are composed of forks of the same ego. The hypermesh allows these egos to remain integrated by sharing experiences and memories in real-time (as long as they stay linked).

The process of updating each fork with each other’s experiences is close to instantaneous, though with large cohorts it can take a few seconds. Individual forks sometimes take a short while to assimilate the memories, particularly if they weren’t playing close attention to that particular input stream. Particularly unusual, shocking, or upsetting experiences can send waves through a cohort, as each internalizes the experience and transmits their own feedback back out. If a fork is cut off from its cohort, it can take time for that cohort to re-sync with the others, which is sometimes a stressful experience, akin to merging.

Though a new practice, cohorts are considered by some to be the ideal of multiplicity, as they allow a single mind to be instantiated in multiple places and act as one simultaneously with real-time communication and updates.

Cohorts lack the diversified capabilities and amassed knowledge of neo-synergist cells, but they exponentially increase the capabilities of a single ego and its forks, particularly one that has the capability to sleeve its forks. As the forks are already of the same mind anyway, the hypermesh link just makes it all easier. Bypassing the need to merge is a game changer, and we expect to see cohorts overtake aggregates in the near future.

Hives

Hives refer to group minds where the individuals are subsumed into the collective ego; they have no identity and no individual free will. There are few known/public hives; the idea of surrendering your self is unpleasant to most transhumans. Nor is there technology readily available that even makes this feasible. Nevertheless, rogue technologists have made many attempts to create hive minds, with most aborted after horrible failures or shut down by authorities. Rumors abound of hives lurking in remote areas of the Solar System and in dark corners of the mesh.

Artists and transhumans who yearn to be part of a greater gestalt or who want to emulate the elegance of insect hives have sought out hive mind technology willingly. However, many hives have been built from unwilling participants. The exhumans exiled to the exoplanet Rorty are known to use hive minds constructed with radical psychosurgery techniques from the minds of captives to operate their dreadnought war machines. An entity calling itself the Crungus, which has claimed responsibility for several major aerostat hacks on Venus, has implied that it is a hive intelligence. There’s talk of an Extropian black clinic in the Belt that offers its own unique ego-unifying hive-mind ware for the right price.

Multis

Some morphs enable multiple egos to work together to control different facets of their functionality. These include flexbots, large morphs equipped with multi-ego control hardware, and the core morphs that oversee ships and habitats. Though multiple egos are housed and working together within the same morph, there is disagreement over whether multis can be considered true group minds, as their minds are not deeply interlinked.

With flexbots, each module has the capability to act as a separate morph. When combined together, one ego must take control of the unified modules. However, because each module is equipped with a cyberbrain and linked together, the other egos may be assigned control over specific functions: mobility, sensors, tools/ware, weapons, and so on.

Morphs with multi-ego control ware work similarly, except that additional egos are loaded into ghostrider modules and all control is facilitated via the shell’s cyberbrain. This is an ideal situation for large morphs with multiple systems, such as tanks or construction equipment.

Core morphs take this to an even larger scale, where a single ego oversees the entire installation but additional infomorphs are delegated control over various subsystems, such as power, environment, comms, sensors, etc. Core morphs rely heavily on ALIs to help them manage ship/habitat sub-systems on a day-to-day basis, calling in transhuman egos for help in special circumstances.

Neo-Synergists

The neo-synergists are arguably the closest transhumanity has gotten to an actual group mind, combining multiple disparate egos into a collective intelligence. Since the re-discovery of Synergy (thus “neo-synergists”) and the gradual acceptance of the group mind established on that colony via experimental hypermesh link implants, the concept has now spread to small pockets through the Solar System and beyond. These individual group mind nodes rely on updated versions of the hypermesh link. The largest contingent makes its home on the Octavia aerostat (Venus), where they were welcome with open arms and much interest by Morningstar Constellation technologists.

By all acounts, neo-synergists retain their individuality and agency while remaining bonded to the group mind’s common purpose. While linked, each neo-synergists has intimate access to each other’s memories, emotions, and knowledge. The setup offers a degree of collaborative effort and innovation that makes each neo-synergist node a productive powerhouse. Distinct nodes are already proving themselves to be pushing the cutting edge of research and technological development in several areas.

It’s important to remember, however, that hypermesh links are still experimental technology, and not all of the bugs have been worked out. Despite reporting high levels of satisfaction and happiness, neo-synergists are known to exhibit anomalous behavior such as speaking gibberish, echolalia, “personality bleed” (exhibiting traits from others within the group mind), and a higher susceptibility to mental disorders, particularly if they are separated from their node for a lengthy period. The suspicious background of the now-defunct Ambiscience hypercorp that designed the original hypermesh link also makes it worthy of further investigation.

Soul Eaters

The soul eaters are a noxious faction of exhumans who seek to create the ultimate gestalt intelligence. Their process relies on coercive measures and extremely dangerous and experimental ego-merging techniques.

The progenitors of this movement were a pair of serial-killers known as Mahaz and Thierry before the Fall. These psychopaths stalked people known to have high intelligence, particularly scientists and engineers. They began by hacking backup services and forknapping the egos they desired, but soon progressed to killing their victims and stealing their stacks. The minds of their victims were chopped apart with extremely crude psychosurgery techniques and forcibly merged with their own. This process slowly fractured their minds, leading to their capture and trial.

The next generation of exhumans to be inspired by Mahaz and Thierry also took note of the stack-harvesting methods of the TITANs during the Fall. While the reasons the TITANs collected so many egos is unclear, to the exhumans it was obvious: they were absorbing them to elevate their own super-intelligence to even higher levels.

The current clade of soul eaters acquires the minds of victims however they can: purchasing from soul traders, hacking cyberbrains and infomorphs, or even acquiring forks from a primary ego via vast sums of credits or blackmail. Their favored method, however, is to track down the victim physically and cut out their stack, thus exhibiting their alleged superiority. While soul eaters seek out the brilliant and extraordinary in society, they are also content to acquire egos en masse to sample transhumanity’s mass diversity. The most desirable aspects of each victim’s mind — their skills and strengths, the things that made them exceptional — are then excised and merged with the exhuman’s own, to increase their capabilities.

Merging even part of another transhuman’s mind with your own is extremely dangerous, and the soul eaters’ techniques are unproven at best. They frequently destroy their own minds, only to have their backups try again. The surviving merges continue on, an amalgamation of minds and horror, methodically becoming less sane and even further from human.

More recently, a soul eater known as Silent Mercy has taken ego-merging to a new low with the invention of fiendish software known as a goya machine. This app pits two minds together — the exhuman and their victim—in a psychosurgical battle of dominance. The two minds are forcibly merged, with individual components from each mind either winning the struggle and becoming incorporated or losing and getting excised and discarded. In the end, the stronger- willed mind stands dominant, having survived this round of forced “evolutionary selection,” yet incorporating elements from the other. By this torturous method, the soul eaters believe they are making their hybrid, gestalt egos stronger and smarter.

Splits

Splits adopt the unique position of combining multiple egos not only in the same body, but in the same brain. By partitioning a mind with multiple personality ware, up to four egos may be housed together. Individual egos take turns “driving” the morph, but each of the egos can experience sensory inputs, be active via the mesh, and communicate with the other egos internally. Though each ego is partitioned from the others, they can choose to share thoughts, memories, etc—or keep each other closed out if they prefer. Unlike egos connected via a hypermesh link, they may not “share” skills, but they can hand over control of the morph as needed.

On rare occasions, split egos may find themselves in a struggle of wills for control of the morph. There has been at least one known case of divided egos where one took dominance, closed off mesh links, and kept the others captive within the morph’s mind.

While splits are not common, they are an ideal solution for neurodivergent people who have difficulty handling transhuman society on their own, couples/groups who have an intense social bond, or those who simply want to take a back seat to life’s interactions.

When a new ego takes control of the split’s morph, their kinesics change along with their personality and knowledge. This can throw people off, especially if they are unaware they are dealing with a split. However, splits engaged in covert operations have used this to their advantage.

Splits avoid calling their distinct egos “alters” so as not to confuse their partitioning with a disassociative identity disorder diagnosis.

The Swarm

The network known as the Swarm may be our first example of a group mind not faciliated by transhuman technology. The Swarm is composed of asyncs infected by a particular sub-strain of the Watts-MacLeod exsurgent virus. Each member of the Swarm automatically links up to other Swarm asyncs within physical proximity, establishing a telepathic connection. While the range of this link is limited, it seems to reach much farther than most other remote async capabilities. This link allows Swarm members to mentally communicate, aid each other, and even use their sleights through each other.

Members of the Swarm exhibit behaviors not seen in other asyncs. Though they conceptually grasp the idea of individual identity, they universally refer to themselves in the plural sense and do little to distinguish between individuals when acting with other Swarm members. When together, they seem to react in unison and automatically rush to aid each other when in need.

We have recently learned that when a number of asyncs within the Swarm occupy the same habitat/area, they have used their own spit to facilitate the growth of an apparent xenobiological fungus throughout the area. These fungal growths work as a sort of mental repeater or mesh, allowing each Swarm async within proximity of the fungal network to be linked to any other Swarm async also in range. Attempts to sample and analyze these growths have so far failed—the Swarm seems aware when the fungus has been collected and the samples rapidly die and liquefy. The Swarm hides this fungal network within ventilation systems and maintenance areas to prevent detection.