Unexpectedly,
the Iodine Era was brought to an end not by a calamity but by the shock
of amazingly good news. The city of Ao suddenly achieved a
breakthrough in the creation of a "hive" - a group mind which harked
back to the old-fashioned, innocent and successful hives of the
Phosphorus Era. The new Aoan Hive consisted of a levy from all the
minds in the city, allowing each individual to retain his full
consciousness through the added advantage of the melding which
created value that was
somehow given back to the individual.... rather as though it were possible to get
something for nothing. In addition, as a kind of co-ordinating core to this
group consciousness, the Ghepion administrative computer contributed its own mind.
The combination worked.
If it can be done, this sort of thing is a good bargain
for both city and population. The city-mind is exalted by the
capabilities of the humans living in its territory, and vice
versa. Very occasionally, it is believed, the various
conscious minds of the people may have joined fully with the city's own
consciousness to form a brief super-mind, but mostly the effect was a
sharing, rather than an intensifying, of consciousness. And all
reports and diaries insist that it was gentle and considerate, and
you could drop out whenever you liked.
Other cities had tried the techniques which led to all
this, but only Ao ever succeeded. The success was bound to be
temporary, for too many destabilizing factors existed to allow it to
last. Remarkably, the Aoan Paramountcy (era 54, the
Xenon Era) lasted
1,735,700 Uranian days - 70.7 Uranian years - equivalent to 5,940 Earth
years; one of the shortest of the great eras, but an impressively long
time for a city hive-mind to have preserved this moral balance between
the collective and the individual.
The precise mode of consciousness of the Aoan Hive is beyond our
reach, yet we have reason to suspect that it knew roughly the extent to
which its days were numbered; also that it knew the chief purpose of its
existence, which was to stave off the hylozoic powers that had been
awakened like a cancer in the planetary subconscious, by the fight with
the Mad City. What the Aoan Hive actually did to shield Syoom
during its paramountcy, we do not know; the answer may lie in the spools
of the archives of Skyyon. What we do know is that the controlled
death-throes of the Hive lasted 13 minutes (the Caesium Era) during which it transmitted as much
as possible of its wisdom to the Sunnoad. These transmissions, known
as the Aonian Blasts, amounted to a kind of hand-over of
consciousness.
The
following Barium Era (54 days, 7 hours) was occupied with the action
taken by the Sunnoad, based on information received from the
Hive.
>> The Foam
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