Sa'arm Gestalt Identity
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 20:15, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
Gestalt Identity - The Sa'arm Point of View
(This is taken from an email conversation between TH, ZM, MO, and several others, with the intent of pinning TH down on how the Sa'arm Gestalts look at each other.)
ZM 7/28/21: ...the "Moraes Conjecture" has nothing to do with the gestalt or hive mind's intelligence being related to the number of units available. The MC is all about how THIS planet full of 4 billion Sa'arm co-operates with THAT planet full of 7 billion Sa'arm over there, 12 lightyears away. It says that they are completely separate entities and will not go out of their way to cause trouble for each other, but they won't co-operate, either.
The point of MC was that our worst fear, that of the "Emperor of all the Sa'arm" ordering all his planets to mass into one huge fleet to overwhelm us, can't happen. Each Sa'arm system is independent and will try to built a large enough fleet on its own. If two different Sa'arm fleets come to the same system at once, they will either stay far enough apart to avoid fighting (2nd Battle of Beerat) or they will come together and have their own contest for control of the combined gestalt (3rd Battle of Earthat) before getting back to us.
On the author level, we know this. On the character level, our characters don't know this. They can surmise it and look for data to confirm or destroy the theory, but they don't KNOW it. It's just a theory. They have to treat the possibility of a "Sa'arm Grand Fleet" as a real threat.
TH 7/28/21: I’ve been meaning to write a tale from the viewpoint of the Earthat gestalt for some time – but am concerned that it won’t fit into the structure we’ve created, as I want to include a global attack on it – nothing immediately successful, but bad enough to make it feel embattled and confused. But every gestalt thinks that it is the ONLY TRUE descendant from the original gestalt. As such, other gestalts are ‘pretenders,’ and are to be absorbed in order to purify the race. This limits cooperation quite a bit.
Communication between gestalts, over long distances, as we’ve seen with units dispatched to deliver messages, is between ‘parent’ and ‘child’ – and less so between ‘siblings.’ I had planned for the gestalt to be named something like ‘Second migration of the sixth extension of the third migration of the second extension of the Original.’
Migrations would be for a whole gestalt (or what it can shrink into a colony ship) to move itself after depleting a system, while extensions would be colonization efforts from a currently successful gestalt with serious resources.
The short name for this individual gestalt would be 2M6E3M2E or, more likely, 2E3M6E2M. Actually, this is an example, as I had figured on probably 3 more levels. In any case, individual gestalts are solitary items, and as a result are EXTREMELY self-centered. Very likely, they only communicate with their parents. This will tend to limit the attacks on any one planet – including Earth. We got unlucky, somehow, during 3rd Earthat.
ZM 7/28/21: Are you willing to give us guidance on how large the war is? If they are just getting started, then "2E3M6E2M" makes sense, and there probably aren't more than a couple hundred Sa'arm systems yet.
If they've been at it for a while though, given that it's been written that it only takes 5 years for a new colony to start sending out its own scout ships, then it's probably more like "26E342M64E218M" or the 218th migration of the 64th extension of the 342nd migration of the 26th extension of the Original, and there are tens of thousands of Sa'arm systems.
That's my main character in IC and ETM's worry, that there are several thousand Sa'arm systems within invasion range of his home, and they can't help but accidentally send 43 separate fleets at once to Beerat.
TH 7/29/21: We’re somewhere in the middle. I’d be looking at double digits in some areas, not triples. I would also expect extensions to occur less often than migrations. Something like 4E26M3E21M2E11M1E12M.
(A silly digression into Sa'arm mating habits can be found here: http://swarm.freewiki.in/index.php/Unwritten_Stories)
TH 7/31/21: ... There is no mating. It is not the nature of the organism. It is not binary. It does not seek company.
An individual gestalt is almost an exercise in solipsism. ‘I exist. My inferiors MAY exist. If one of them shows up to take what is mine, we will do battle, and I will win, because I am superior. I am the One True Descendant of the Original. All others are pretenders. I extend my resources over a planet. If it is rich, perhaps I will extend my hegemony elsewhere. If not, I will use its resources in the manner I deem most efficient, and when it is depleted, I will move on.’
ZM 7/31/21: How does it regard its descendants, those others created when it sends out a colony fleet?
TH 7/31/21: As itself, extended, more or less. But while there is a certain parent-child loyalty, the extension is ultimately not the original, and through experience becomes a different gestalt -- and they WILL come into conflict if they approach one another. The offspring will become threatened by the parent and conflict and assimilation will result. They are likely to conduct distance communication, however, and will tend to instinctively avoid a direct contact situation. There will NEVER be a cooperative fleet action against a single planet between two or more gestalts. They just can’t tolerate each other.
ZM 7/31/21: Right. You know that. I know that. All the other writers know that. It's Swarm Cycle canon. However, none of our characters know that, none of them CAN know that, because they don't understand the Sa'arm.
DL 7/31/21: I've found this to be a very interesting discussion and thank you to both TH and ZM for guiding the exposition. I'm trying to extrapolate various implications of the understanding that is evolving. First, it seems Earth was a unique situation. In the first battle, a ship escaped to return to the home world and bring back a larger fleet to colonize it. This resulted in the second invasion and the landing in Africa. No other incursions from this planet would be expected.
If another invasion occurs (third battle) it would be arriving from a different parent world (mentioned in one of the stories showing the conflict between the colony already in Africa and the invading fleet. Since no Sa'arm from this second world escaped, we would assume the Fourth battle was with a colonization fleet from a third parent world. Each time no one escaped to return to the parent world, that world would assume the colony was successful and never send another node to it. Subsequent invasions would all be from different worlds, arriving at Earthat with no previous contact.
It also seems that the ships that landed in the fourth fleet would be in competition with the Africa group and would not reach a point of cooperation. This means that when the forces meet in the Middle East, there would be a standoff between the invaders from the second fleet and the invaders from the fourth fleet. Only one could proceed into Europe. There might even be a battle front between the two factions. It would be assumed that the Russion invasion and the Indian invasion are from the same migration. (ZM: Yes, both were from the same fleet, which was all one gestalt or mind.)
In ZM's terms, I would guess that the first two invasions were Expansions. The third might have been an expansion, but based on the size of the fleet I would guess the third and fourth were both migrations of the entire colony from a burned out world.
MO 7/31/21: Fifty years seems somewhat too fast. It smacks of so many SF stories: It was a desert planet, it was a jungle planet, and the like - as if from pole to pole climate and geology and geography were identical.... A planet is huge. How fast would Sa'arm units need to multiply and mature to consume the Earth? I always felt our stories had them spreading too fast if they were consuming every resource in their advance...
TH 7/31/21: I was attempting to throw out an average. I was also looking at the fine job we’ve been doing polluting our world in the past century or so. We could certainly double it, as necessary.
DCM 8/10/21: I would think that after 14 years of encountering humans, assuming one fleet had come from a battlefront world, the swarm would assimilate any bio-matter resources to maximize their numbers against the dangerous enemy but would only harvest mineral resources as needed until the threat is neutralized.
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