--Synergist–

  Its overall shape was that of a flat, round tuft of grass. The smooth, ecru, burlike structure with a fifty kilometer radius, had been drifting through the Current Nebula for tens of thousands of years. It would eventually become the Null Nebula, conceding identity to Next Nebula but for now it was Current. Once it was finished populating the viable planets and satellites of Current Nebula it would begin the prospecting campaign to find Next Nebula. Nebula was the most viable environment. Nebula harbored a higher survivability statistic than other cosmic habitats. Nebula was the ever constant motivation.

  Inside the bristly, barbed structure called The Spore were many giant, curved atriums filled with thousands of unconscious entities preserved in freezing chambers of glycerol. They were the colonists of a future world and society attempting to mimick the many similar crusades before them. None would ever know how different the earliest of those expeditions were by comparison. Most of these entities would know only a passive existence of superficial consciousness, pondering their own existence ineffectually while they involuntarily synthesized, propagated and carried out basic instructions, never knowing will, purpose or companionship unless a more advanced specimen took note of them and decided to cultivate the advance of such an object of their interest.

  One of the chambers, much larger than the others, changed from inactive to standby when a stellar proximity test returned positive.

  The entity inside whose name in ancient english meant something like Synergist-UVB (298 nm) 44,761 began the first stages of reanimation, converting its previous, pliant consistency to something denser as the oval shaped chamber drained of all moisture and heated to 0 degrees celsius. When the atmosphere began filling the chamber a panel housing a vast array of microscopic lenses glowed to life, shining on the lifeform which would not become fully conscious for another hour. As warmth and electromagnetic activity returned to its cortex for the first time in ten million years, the remaining suspension chambers maintained their current dormant settings.

  Covering The Synergist’s dark yet rootlike underside, its rough, serrated surface and edges of light, teal-grey surrounding it began to expand as the atmospheric mixture inside the translucent, ovular cabin became more viscous. Once the reanimation process was complete it would have thoughts, slow and vague at first and then more rapid as it’s body adjusted to an animate state. Then those thoughts would combine and begin to remember. Concepts like survival and expansion would emerge as the projection grid reeducated The Synergist. The thousands to follow would have their own training regimens, implemented by the spaser grids in their personal chambers but they remained lesser synergists all, prohibited from arrogate and identity. Sometime in the far future two or more of them might be given names and advance to greater synergists. For now they were lesser.

  When the first impulses of basic impressions like, cold, forget and food began to take hold in the rhizines beneath it, The Synergist’s education plan began self developing in the neural roots at the center of The Spore.

  --Wqwr--

  While he felt numbingly cold, he thought that the nausea might be the worst. As bile spilled from his throat on to the smooth ironcrete floor the first thing Wqwr took a moment to appreciate was that he had anything in his stomach at all. He didn't know why he thought this. Why wouldn't he have anything in his stomach? Why would he for that matter? The second thing he took a moment to appreciate was that he knew the cold, metallike material beneath his palms and knees was ironcrete, a durable, fast setting material that was virtually indistinguishable from steel plating. The third and most disturbing reflection he made in the few moments of conscious thought which seemed so new and yet so familiar simultaneously was that he somehow knew his name was Wqwr, despite having no other self knowledge other than the speculative contents of his stomach.

  He straightened his back upright, removing his hands from either side of the cold, titanium grating of the drain on the floor in front of him. Below, approximately twenty danits under the metal grid was the remaining bio-gel left over from his recent genesis, probably up to a ton or more. He had only moments ago been completely submerged by it despite having no understanding of how his mind retained this information of an event he was not conscious for. He watched the fluid level slowly decrease as it further drained from the section below.

  His stomach lurched again, this time only producing a pitiful few droplets and strands of bile and mucus as his hands returned to either side of the drain. Now, with the worst of the expulsion finished he realized that at least a half gallon of the ghastly mixture had been released from his stomach only a few moments before.

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  Why would that much mucus be in my gut? I only just woke u…

  Because the generation process requires a stomach content of approximately fifteen percent mucin, fifty-five percent bio-gel and a remainder of stomach bile, two thirds of which will be evacuated after specimen instantiation.

  Wait, what...? he thought for a moment.

  A prompt was issued in the form of a query. A correlative output was generated in response.

  What query? I was only thinking.

  Precisely. You are experiencing generative thought. When a neural structure is trained and then later prompted…

  Neural structure? You mean my brain?

  Precisely.

  To Wqwr this sounded like programming. My mind is hardcoded with a set of conditionals and response statements?

  Absolutely not. The neurons of the human brain are very similar to the structure of nodes of a generative neural…

  Okay. Stop that.

  The independent, internal monologue abruptly ceased. He understood what it meant, being familiar with artificial intelligence despite not knowing how. The confusing tennis match of reactionary thought had hypnotized him despite the crippling disorientation and nausea in his entire body. How he knew what tennis was remained another mystery. The game was simple enough. Hitting a felt covered rubber ball back and forth over a net with rackets. How he knew any of that....

  My name is Wqwr and I have no idea what is going on, he thought.

  To his relief the part of his mind providing the silent answers did not respond.

  Because I told it not to.

  After the last of the current wave of retching passed, he stood. It was dark and his eyes were confined to tiny openings, fused by pseudo-rheum, a mild antiseptic adhesive. He didn't know why he knew that either but he did know that it was to keep bacteria from entering the eyes when…

  When what? When being born?

  The defeated gasp as he brought his head down, sure another wave of heaving was upon him, might have been comical if he didn't feel so deathly ill. This was the first time he consciously noticed the gray bodysuit with attached cowl he was wearing, leaving only his face, feet and hands exposed. It was made of hyper-propylene, a fast drying, synthetic fabric. At least I won’t be cold for much longer, he thought. He began to feel his first flashes of irritation with the unexplainable knowledge.

  He'd also just begun to appreciate the height of the ceiling in the enormous chamber when he heard a sliding pressure door open behind him. How he identified the noise....

  Wqwr stopped thinking. He turned and found the giant, titanium door exactly where he had heard it and had inherently known it would be. He stood up and walked towards the exit, carefully plodding towards the dim light in a blurry spire shape before him, his bare feet slightly sliding on the slick, polished floor beneath him (ironcrete contained trace amounts of ceria which rose to the surface after setting, creating the refined, finished look he saw beneath him.)

  He stopped before the open pressure door, at first becoming increasingly annoyed with the constant recognition of irrelevant details buzzing about his consciousness. After a moment he decided to experiment and see how much information about his environment his brain could produce without a visual confirmation and closed his eyes.

  Out there would be the first hall. He could visualize the layout despite having no clear memory of ever visiting it. At the end, two thousand danits ahead there would be a door, behind which would be an examination room of the same shape and composition as the one in which he currently resided. Inside there was a seat and simple interface for specimen examination.

  Wqwr opened his eyes, satisfied yet still frustrated that despite the so far, limitless trove of knowledge available to him, he still couldn’t answer the simplest question of all. Why am I here? As he finally passed through the doorway he realized he didn't have a previous memory of the chamber he had just occupied either but knew every detail of its structure like it had been his home his entire life, from the three heating units staggered along alternate walls of the hexagonal architecture to the imbedded wash station and grated floor drain in the center of the room he’d just thrown up into.

  Now that the light of the towering corridor gave a shape he already had envisioned to the existing impression, Wqwr took a deep breath and walked along the wide empty hall to the door he knew was precisely one hundred and fifty meters (he quickly made the conversion to earth metric, unsure why he so naturally defaulted to danits) from the center of the hall in front of the chamber entrance. His bare soles made a subtle pat, pat, pat noise as he approached. When the door opened he stopped, seeing another environmental attribute that didn’t surprise him.

  It was another hexagonal shaped room, nearly identical to the generation chamber, lacking only the metal grated drain in the center. In its place was a padded, curvaceous seat in front of a polished, smooth, five danit square, black panel. He stood for a moment, looking at it with a kind of apathetic abandon and began to feel the first subtle hints of existential unease he had a feeling would only get worse over time.

  Despite not having any information about what lay before him Wqwr did the most natural thing he could think of and sat down.