Inner Life 1: Birth

My family line is really good at being born.

That was something that I discovered right away. As I became aware for the first time and dug into my memories, I found that a really high proportion of them were about the physiology of bodies. Here is where the heart is in a Bantic slug; avoid it. Interfacing with the bidirectional nervous system of an Altresian star is unusually tricky; here’s how to do it. These temperatures, these circulatory chemicals, these senses, mean that you’re in this kind of body, and here’s how to integrate as safely and seamlessly as possible. Dozens and dozens of common hosts, to give me the best chance of successfully being born.

Most of it useless to me. Because whatever body I was in, it wasn’t in my inherited memories.
I was getting nerve activity. I had enough confidence in my line’s implantation skill to take it as assumed that I was somewhere in the central nervous system, or whatever equivalent this body had, but if there was a small, compact control centre (please let there be a compact control centre) then I wasn’t there. The nerves were too long, too directional; a rope of nerves sending controlled signals in both directions. (Not omnidirectional like an Altresian star, thank salt; some nerves went one way, some the other). They spread out from the rope into thinner threads and singular nerves, away from the central nervous system. Sending and receiving signals to and from the body. Simple enough; if there was a compact control centre, it would be at one of the ends of this rope.

So. What was I dealing with?

Most of the signals were noisy and chaotic. I dismissed those for now; I didn’t have the context to decipher them. I looked for rhythmic patterns and found several, moving in both directions; rhythmic pulses moving to, other rhythmic pulses moving fro. Great. What were they?
My own form was pressed against something hard; a stiff plate protecting the nerves. I’d curled tendrils of myself around the edges of it to sample their signals. But the rest of me, the bulk outside the protective plate, was perfectly capable of feeling other things, such as the rhythmic pulsing pressing against me. Two rapid beats, a pause. Two beats, a pause.

Fluid in tubes. Circulatory system. Heartbeat.

I quested some tendrils out and found two interlinked systems; one under the rhythmic pressure to circulate fluid, the other apparently passive. Good to know. The one under pressure was only half under pressure, delivering fluids to tissues via the heartbeat and then having them drain out into a passive half of the same system. None of this was alien to me; it was a sensible sort of arrangement, and similar to many in my memories. I tasted the fluids from both systems and recognised several chemicals in them, but I didn’t yet have the context to determine their use or importance.

I could figure that all out later. For now, I focused back on the nerves. Was the heartbeat ingoing or outgoing information? There were pulses in the nerves that were in sync with it; were they beating the heart, or reporting back on feeling the beat?

Reporting back, I figured. There were too many of them to be beating the heart. I could go looking for the heart and find out for myself, but poking myself into such a critical organ was a great way to kill my body before I’d even finished being properly born, and for someone whose family line was all about being born really well, that would just be embarrassing.

Also, I would die. Which I didn’t want.

Anyway, the signals I was getting timed with the beat were probably incoming information, which gave me a direction for the nerve rope. I focused on incoming signals only, and looked for pain.
Pain is usually pretty easy to figure out in a new type of body. The methods of transmission vary greatly between species, but their massive importance to survival for pretty much any body means that there are similarities in the urgency and in how a body reports them that aren’t universal, but are close. I found pain pretty easily, and… hmm. This body was definitely in a fair bit of it.

Some newborns would panic at that, try to take control to avoid the pain, and get killed. I did not panic, the wisdom of my family line in the front of my mind. This body had kept itself alive until I arrived, and it could keep doing so now. I had to trust it. If it wasn’t keeping itself alive… well, there wasn’t a whole lot that me getting involved would do to help. I had to know how to operate it before taking control. Even if I was in trouble, the best thing to do was to learn as fast as possible.

Intense, sharp pain from somewhere. Moderate, duller pain from a few other places. A burning pain in two areas that were synced with outgoing signals – that was interesting. My body was hurting itself.

Again, I told myself not to panic. This didn’t mean that the body’s native control system was malfunctioning. It could be cutting itself out of a trap, or beating through an obstacle to avoid death. There were all kinds of things it could be doing that were the right thing to do, that involved hurting itself.

After some thought and some more fluid tasting, I determined that this body was overworked. The signals that fired and caused the flares of pain were movement signals, and the muscles that they moved were being pushed beyond their limits. There were other related incoming signals, too; rhythmic signals of non-painful (well, very slightly painful, but not enough so to really consider in comparison to everything else) sensory input that alternated from two areas of the body, with a gap between.

This might be a puzzle for some newborns. But my starting memories had a lot to say about this. Sensory centres tend to be close to their signal processing centres, which tend to be close to the nervous centre, when one exists; my likely position meant that these signals were probably coming from a more peripheral body part. So they were either something that had to be far away from a sensory centre for physical reasons, or a sense widely present over the body. Eyespots, on bodies that were covered in them. Or temperature. Or touch.

In this situation, in this pattern? That was locomotion. The pressure of my locomotive limbs hitting the floor. It was impossible to be completely certain on such flimsy data, but the most likely conclusion was that I was bipedal, I lived under gravity, and, in conjunction with my heartbeat and the burn in my muscles, I was running. I was running faster, or for longer, or both, than what was normal for me.

In conjunction with the pain, that wasn’t a fantastic sign. I needed more information, and I needed it now.

Soon, I would be integrated fully with my body, but for now I was still exploring, and could move around. I crawled up the interlocking protective plates towards where I expected the nervous system’s true centre to be. I moved carefully, investigating the space ahead of me for obstructions; the last thing I wanted to do was break through something important, and kill my body before I could even finish being born.

It didn’t take all that long to reach the end of the plates protecting the nerve rope, and as I expected, they flowered from the top and billowed out into a much more complex structure of much smaller nerves. This, too, was protected, but I moved under this larger piece of armour, through the cushioning fluid around this nerve centre, to examine my environment.

I didn’t want to interfere with anything yet, not before I understood it, but even just a cursory examination of the structure’s surface revealed complexity, redundancy, area specialisation. This body was heavily dependent on complex nervous activity for survival. That could be good, or it could be bad. On the positive side, once I had control, I’d likely be in a position with a lot of potential to breed widely and live a fulfilling life, and a body this complex would probably survive just fine on its own for long enough for me to take my time gaining ownership of it. On the negative side, bodies usually only have nervous systems this complex when they need them, so I was probably starting life in an extremely complicated and dangerous environment. And the body itself might be a danger. Bodies have their own immune systems and, since they evolve separately from people, their own survival and reproductive strategies can differ from ours. Which of course means that the more complex and adaptive ones will often resist becoming people; the instincts and reactions that they have evolved with aren’t always in line with the priorities of people.

A nervous system is an immune system, and if this one detected me before I was ready, it might act to eliminate me. I had to be careful.

Several inputs and outputs from the main mass, of varying complexity. Most of them via the long rope I had travelled up. No other ropes of anything like that density; I’m probably at an extremity of the body, not in a central mass. The nervous centre was bilaterally symmetrical, comprised of two heavily connected hemispheres. The largest nerve bundles leading away (not counting the rope I’d travelled along) were a pair close together but laid out with one on each hemisphere, leading to their own complex little mini-bundles. Something very detailed and very important happening there. Might be motor. Might be sensory. I sampled the signals, but they were too complex to make sense of yet.

Well, at some point I was going to have to push forward without enough information. It was the only way to gain said information.

The bundles surrounded and embedded themselves in gelatinous orbs nestled in holes in the internal armour and ringed with tiny muscles. Examining the activity moving to and from the bundles, I determined that they were almost certainly sensory. There didn’t seem to be any important chemical activity in them; nothing that would kill the body if I broke it, I was pretty sure. (Pretty sure.) And the body had two of them right next to each other, so, given how clearly vulnerable they were, there was probably some redundancy there.

If I broke something, the body could probably get by with one.

I picked the left orb and pushed my filaments in, very carefully, navigating by where the nerves were. Yes, yes’ lots of activity! So many receptors! If I spread out, if I took the receptor data directly, I –

Oh. This was sight.

The nerves behind the eye did a lot of complex calculation to reduce the amount of data that needed to be sent; I didn’t know how to read any of that yet. But I did know how to read the activity of each receptor and put together the image myself. It was probably a lot harder and slower than using the body’s faculties would be, when I learned them, but it would do for now. I could see! And this body could see really well! Judging by just how big and complex the hardware dedicated to sight was, it was probably a really important sense.

I was bipedal, and bilaterally symmetrical. The main control centre of my nervous system was encased in an extremity at the top of my body that was covered in bumps and pits of unknown functions, probably sensory. The back of it was covered in a thick layer of filaments of some kind. The extremity had with some limited movement, able to pivot separate from the rest of the body, and judging by the general shape of the body, it was clear that the long nerve rope tailing off the central control area ran down the body’s central mass. There were four other visible structures diverging from the main mass; the two legs, and two similar tendrils higher up, ending on complex, dexterous appendages. There was a lot of colour variation over the body, though I wasn’t familiar enough with the vision receptors to determine what light they actually picked up, so I couldn’t be sure what all the colours were.

Of course, I couldn’t be absolutely certain yet that all of this was true of my own body. After all, I hadn’t taken control of any muscles; I couldn’t look down at myself. But I could see enough of myself to safely assume that my body was probably quite similar to the one that I was staring at on the floor.

Not exactly the same, of course. For instance, the one on the floor wasn’t holding a small device in its upper appendage, like the device I was pointing at it. Also, there were some holes in it that definitely shouldn’t be there, and that was obvious because of all the coloured fluid that had gushed from them underneath it. Nothing was gushing now, though. The body wasn’t moving at all.

Without me knowing why or daring to do anything about it, my body fired the weapon twice more, putting two new holes in the corpse on the floor.