VoidHive Codex — Arc 4, Chapter 22: The Memory

[RESEARCH LOG — LT. SERA VANCE — DAY 9, ARCHITECT PROJECT]

Lumen showed me the first harvest today.

Not ours. The first one. Ever.

I don't know how to write this in a way that will make sense in a report, so I'm writing it here first, in the log no one else reads, until I find the right words.

The species was called — there's no sound for it, but the closest I can render it is — the Vel. They were sessile. They didn't move. They grew in vast networks across the surface of a tidally locked world, and they thought in geological time, and they were the most complex minds the Architects had ever encountered, and they were dying.

Their star was failing. They had no way to leave. They had no concept of leaving — movement was not part of their cognition. They were going to think their last thought in approximately four hundred years and then there would be nothing left of them anywhere in the universe.

So the Architects harvested them.

Not destroyed. Preserved. Every pattern, every memory, every thought-structure encoded into the Hive network and carried forward. The Vel still exist. Lumen showed me. They are still thinking, somewhere in the distributed mind of the Architects, in geological time, about a sun that no longer shines.

I sat with that for a long time.

Then I asked Lumen: What about the ones who didn't want to be preserved?

Lumen went very still.

It hasn't answered yet.