working title: mother / amoeba

She drifted, and dreamed Cold Dreams, the vague, nebulous, random thoughts and reliving of memories of a mind a mere three degrees warmer than death.

Deep in her mind, the part of her that sensed sunlight on her skin sighed in pleasure, and the motion of the exhale set her spinning gently, exposing all of her skin, over time, to the warm light of the distant sun.

She spun, she drifted, she basked.

When the sun had warmed her sufficiently, she began slowly to wake, and the Cold Dreams gave way to Warm Dreams, a strange and sometimes disturbing commingling of Cold Dreams and real sensation from her surroundings. The solar wind played in waves against her skin, gradually increasing the sensations, slowly pushing on her to wake fully.

She warmed still further, and woke.

"Mother?" she inquired, and heard no reply.

This had never before happened to her. For a brief moment, she was afraid, and began to prepare to flee. She started to warm herself internally, and warmed first those organs she would need to leave this place. She opened her close-seeing eye, and looked around her. She saw nothing dangerous. Her far-seeing eye needed more warmth to function, and she was not yet fully awake, and she felt very sluggish. But she saw no immediate threat, and gave more of her energy to warming the organs she would need to explore, rather than marshalling the energy to run. She wondered what she should do.

She warmed enough to open her far-seeing eye, and she did so, looking first at the distant sun whose proximity had awoken her. She measured it, and, since she was in motion relative to it, in a very short time she had calculated it's distance. With it's distance and measurements of it's pull on her body, she knew it's mass.

Slowly she unfolded her second far-seeing eye and extended it’s polymer stalk until it was seventy of her lengths away from the first, and operated them both in tandem, effectively multiplying her eye’s reach. She began discovering her new home, seeking to map the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of heavy bodies. She looked for food. While she looked, she sought answers. Since she had none, she dreamed.

How had she come into existence? It seemed a good place to start. She relived her earliest memories, seeking in them new perspectives on her birth.

It was not a moment, but a series of events. There was no eureka point, where she thought to herself “I live!”.

She had started existence as one of Mother’s magnification eyes. The system in which she had begun life was a complex place of seven gas giant planets, and countless thousands of satellites, varying from so large as to be inescapably heavy, down to the size under which Mother considered everything to be dust. Mother sought to know everything, of course, and sent eyes to wherever she suspected there was anything new to be seen.

Mother was a dissociated entity, occupying no specific single location. Her many parts conversed and communicated with little fingers of coherent light. There were two phases to learning anything, mother had discovered. First, information must be gathered. And next, that information must be remembered and integrated, thought about, mingled with other data. The part of mother that did the thinking was very large, but the parts that did the seeing, hearing and tasting, as well as the parts that gathered and digested food, built new parts, were of whatever size they needed to be. She sent eyes and ears and sensory organs to see specific things, do specific things, while the bulk of her mind stayed in one place, protected and safe. It was tremendously efficient. It never occurred to her to simply move herself to where the new data was, it would have cost her terribly.

One some occasions, she had no choice but to dispatch a small piece of her mind to accompany a sensory organ, simply because it would be out of contact with her while having to make decisions. These occasions were rare, because there were very few places that the fingers of light could not reach her, or bounce off something or a large series of things, to get to her, but there were a few.

Sometimes, even more rarely still, the pieces of her mind that she dispatched into what she thought of as dark places, became large and complex in the course of seeing what mother sent it to see. On those occasions, she made a pragmatic choice. If that part of herself had changed significantly, and the change had brought benefits to mother, it was allowed to remain autonomous. Mother understood the value of a different perspective. But Mother would allow no competition for food, so those autonomous parts were sent to places that mother could not retrieve food from, if there was any. Mother looked at the stars.