1.07-Grids of Plaxis

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]I’ve been alive long enough to remember when Corvisites were a galactic panic. Hurus and politicians, Priests and Wrots said they would be the end of the Continuum. That in a thousand years we’d all be drowning in nano-particles.I was on the other side of the Drelneigh Quadrant when the first ones appeared on Plaxis. Of course there was a huge push to try to use them for something. Industrial decomposition, synaptic repair, hell, even entertainment. Had a Nelgani technopath try to explain them to me once but I never had much head for that stuff. Bottom line is, no one could figure out how to replicate the base crystal Corvisites use. Of course, by that time, they were in everything on the planet save outgoing ships. In the span of a few months they had integrated into the Plaxis ecosystems. A few years after that they started reshaping them.Whole planet is dusted yellow now with striations in the atmosphere. Later I learned those were jetstreams. The Corvisites had weather engineered the seasons out of the meteorology. The little machines had fine tuned their own production.Ambassadors tried making contact but the little things seemed to prefer their own company. A couple strands broke off, making their own way in the Continuum. A mico-colony short the typical full sixty billion complement, lives with me on the ship. I call ‘em Hamark.All the worry about them spreading never amounted much. Seems culturally taboo amongst them to replicate unscrupulously off world. They’ll find a nice nook somewhere and hold up. Ghost ships, a couple natural satellites, some in symbiosis. Human and Orware physiology seems to work well. Corvitals we call ‘em. Make these golden exoskeleton for themselves. And their eyes disappear, vestigial sensory organs I’d guess.I drop by Plaxis every decade or so. Hamark likes to keep tabs on their kin. They used to go down to the surface but you can’t do that no more. Atmosphere holds suspended, ambient aluminum particles at 137 parts per million. No wires, just raw power surging through the air. A mess of storms following latitude lines. Makes it hard to go on or off world. The grid is ubiquitous, omnipresent, but as Hamark pointed out, a grid can also be a cage.