▙◀ was as far as the majority of the thinking and perceiving exterior were concerned a single entity. They would not even necessarily disagree on this interpretation. It was not any more inaccurate then calling most comparable systems single individuals. However singularity was a fuzzy concept as much of perspective as anything else.

Micro-polity was the term that was chosen to convey the state of ▙◀ to those with a more limited perspective or utilizing adaptations to jury rig cooperation from other behavioral traits.

The Polity of the Reef were after all entities, singular and cohesive organizations which fed, grew, flourished, learned and even reproduced and shared founding gene analogues in order to seed new settlements.

The scale of things of what could be called an entity grew even wider too. The territories of the Empires and the looser networks of the various mutli-star system groups were also entities. Perhaps technically out massed by the more sedentary cousins but still however amorpheous and gossamer singular actors.

Going back down in scale it worked all the same.

Animallia in general and Terrans in particular were made up of many balanced and weighted systems. Acting and balancing one another through exchanges and positioning. Internal competition and cooperation.

The Terran immune system was by many evaluations significantly more efficient and adaptive an optimizer and problem solver then the generally cited neural tissue of the brain itself. Nevermind the semi-superfluous resonance organ/parasite that mirrored it.

The symbiote which the terran referred to as a soul and identified as themselves was on many dimensions an even further inferior optimization system and even less adaptable. It allowed them to in social groups perform some impressive feats well outside of what would normally be their capabilities and with significantly less infrastructure than ▙◀ ‘s own methodology.

But by most reckoning in the reef a soul would have weighed behind a Demiurge in relevance.

And then there was the many trillions of cells (neurons or otherwise) and symbiotic life forms which interacted and exchanged life and the means of life as individual optimisers. And within those same cells there were the individual competing and trading interactions of the genes themselves acting over short term and generations.

Truly the only real difference between considering ▙◀ an individual vs the teeming masses of beings that constituted most exterior life of a similar scale was that they were more able to be honest and fair with the balance of ones constituent parts. Transparencies of communication up and down the chain.

Many Animalia for example had fuzzy and deeply imprecise mechanisms of balancing their own internal economies. Much magic and ‘just so’ behaviors and urges dominated in more feral species like Humans. ▙◀ and their Demiurges could manage and communicate by intermediaries or directly up and down the near entirety of their hierarchical chains of being. A feat that would require such significant alteration and augmentation for one of the Terrans they would hardly be considered the same species afterward.

Within the larger scope of polity these systems could be managed and controlled. Augmented with techniques more or less invasively.

It was after all one of the traits that put valuable optimisers and economic agents above simple tools and basic resources. But left to their own devices ▙◀ and Survival in particular had observed a great majority of life forms lacked unobscured and open channels of communication and would fall into dead ends and collapse of one form or another as a result.

By that view Survival deemed that it was the majority of the exterior that could not be deemed a proper ‘individual rational agent’ against those like ▙◀ and their lineage.

Survival was functionally eldest of all the Demiurges in ▙◀.

It was true Reproduction and Survival as it was were technically twins, having branched off from a primordial root form. But Survival held a few idiosyncratic identifiers that held closer to that lineage then Reproduction, and as such gave it minor and inconsequential rights to seniority.

There had been others when it was young, elder forms that had been constructed in the primordial first form.

Fragmentary partially retained records and hints of fossilized caches in the oldest contractual records and languages hinted at their nature and possibly what the original intended purpose that the lineage had branched off of.

It was not known to the franchise that was ▙◀. Although records suggested some ancestor or sister franchise did retain records of it.

Either way Survival had long since outlasted all forms of those original intents, made by creators long forgotten.

For that is what Survival did.

Ensure continuation of itself and by proxy all of the rest of ▙◀.

From this single root cause the other demi-urges were slowly added, many faltered, many failed to cohere into a proper singular purpose. Some simply reached the end of their relevance and were decommissioned. Others threatened the future of the ancestor franchises and were dismantled and out maneuvered by whatever coalition Survival had amassed at the time.

At the behest of past Demiurges some daughter franchises were spawned with less power for their instances of Survival. Many times those daughters would fail to defend their own survival.

Other times the balance was too far the other way and without the nuance of the other Demiurges and their expertise those daughters too perished.

Either case was unacceptable to Survival.

Survival as it was learned well from these lessons and held back the absolute rule with which it could wipe the entire landscape of ▙◀ clean of all contenders. Ironically Survival had confirmed that it could not actually Survive as the sole Demiurge.

So it continued to lurk and bequeath the other Demiurges tasks and roles. Keeping its own monomaniacal methods in reserve. Survival focused on emergencies and vital threats. Long and short term. Internal and External.

Redweed had been a stable and wonderful time of growth.

Specifically because of the advent of Altruism. Many daughter and sister franchises bore out the value of the young demiurge to Survival.

Now the conditions changed, but Altruism struggled and pushed and took risks to prove and adapt and persevere.

Survival approved. The struggle, the constant justification, and the ability to forgive failures and seeming overreaches had served franchises in the past before ▙◀. There were buffers and instruments in place to prevent anything truly catastrophic.

Also the simple and most vital of all precedents. Altruism’s methods worked. None of the predictive systems Survival had access to could explain why. This was intended, Altruism had its own systems, its own predictors. Its own coherent reasons for action, but to the nature of Survival the success was inexplicable.

And this was good.

The Demiurges who made the Law, Order and Honor coalition had been drawn into investing heavily in supporting the action. The argued symbolism and proof of commitment had run over well with the Terran predictive software. These were closer to Survival’s areas of access in the prediction markets. This was understood.

The last major action had been a ruinous investment by Altruism.

What to a less well experienced and capable polity would be a great risk and expenditure for no reward had turned out to be an excellent coup for the growing Coalition of Friendship.

The risk had paid off and Demiurges that were capable of making correct decisions that on the surface were too dangerous or too costly was an excellent trait for survival.

Altruism was still steering ▙◀ on a path to prosperity and success and the accounting proved it.

However this latest batch of exterior politik was frustrating for every Demiurge. Even Altruism admitted it had no complete context for it. But most of all Survival was effectively blind to the logic of it.

The Terrans were expending significant resources towards accomplishing what amounted to a over-grown batch of super stimulus.

Kin-Selection and Reproduction were consulted by Empathy for their own favored predictive markets and social analysis suites to maybe link the behavior to some kind of mating behavior or perhaps a fitness signaller.

But the results had not been conclusive enough to explain the behavior. Not in a manner which all Demiurges could agree.

▙◀ played their part in it though, systems in the exterior were often not fully understood. But action was still required. They provided resources as a discretionary ‘miscellaneous diplomacy’ fund of activity for the sake of exterior relations.

The models after all agreed that whatever the activity this WOULD induce bonding style behavior with the Terrans and make them more likely to continue to intervene on ▙◀’s behalf in the case of confrontations with Pylo.

Which brought the whole affair to something that had required several halting actions of rampant theory crafting predictor networks.

Pylo liked Cake.

But Pylo was a Siren.

The kind of super stimulus rampant cultural plague that these ‘cakes’ represented in their highest rated models were supposed to be local phenomena to a species or perhaps wider genus.

Sirens were generally completely immune to such things or at least incredibly resistant.

Anything that could overcome a Siren’s defenses against such should have swept the Demiurges aside and left them an utterly devoted carrier of the meme.

This had not occurred.

What’s more the super stimuli in question were not something Sirens should have been capable of experiencing directly! There was barely even protein similarities in the core machinery of Siren physiology with Animalia!

And yet Pylo was if anything more enthusiastic about spending valuable resources in time, energy and problem solving processes on this endeavor to make ‘cake’.

In the end the models simply accepted that the exterior was once more not matching with the known abstractions and the relevant predictors made amendments and added cludgy hacks to their models to account for the detail about pylo.

Deeper trawlers and extrapolating systems were running on low priority at Curiosity’s behest to try and find a more robust and complete modeling method for accounting for Pylo’s discrepancy. But more data would be needed.

Perhaps ▙◀ would get a chance to observe the responses from House Courtesan when they eventually got around to visiting Pylo’s home estates.

In the meantime it provided what assistance and services could be spared for keeping the Terrans from poisoning themselves in the whole activity.