The ancient creature living within the swirling cloud layers of Jupiter did not feel any type of emotions in a human sense. Occasionally, obscure combinations of diaphanous chemical vapours could be tenuously compared to feelings of joy, sadness, and curiosity. Occasional celestial events would happen in deep space which even a being of such age and intelligence did not understand. When such empyrean happenings occurred, the being would delve into the vast collective memory-bank which held the shared contributions of millions of similar beings living in gas giants throughout the local galaxy.

This memory matrix was an essential part of each individual. All gas giant beings were connected across the universe via multiple telegnostic links which communicated directly across the vast distances in an instant. The gas giant beings would use the memory matrix to experience events their peers had witnessed and to study the evolution and interactions between the inhabitants of the universe. They were responsible caretakers for their local systems and would use the records in the memory matrix to determine any appropriate action or intervention if situations arose.

The Jovian being, despite being as old as a red giant, was occasionally made to feel quite young. Deep space could produce celestial wonders which would still inspire awe in the oldest of its citizens. These experiences were all shared on the memory-matrix network. The universe was a place of unfathomably endless cold silence punctuated by beautifully violent events of creation and destruction. It would take a truly spectacular cosmic event for the gas giant being to be suitably impressed enough to take notice.

The beings could witness the workings of the universe through many different dimensions and scrutinize the enormous grandeur in detail. Supernovas, the brilliant last farewells of dying stars. Huge nebulae, hundreds of light years across where stars and planets are born from dust, jumbo-sized suns burning with unimaginable energy and supermassive black holes lying at the center of galaxies, beyond the limits of human comprehension. The gas giant beings could see such wonders in all their radiant colourful spectrum and destructive glory. Through inter-dimensional lenses, they observed and participated in the workings of the universe for billions of years and even after all this time, there were still occasional surprises. Something happened within the swirling cloud layers of Jupiter was a constant source of surprise and wonderment to the main tenant there.

The Jovian being was not the only inhabitant of the gas giant. As far as it could remember living its almost eternal life in the swirling gas it had shared the cloud layers with another species. Millions of transparent orbs floated like bubbles through the cloud layers. Some were tiny, only centimeters across. Some were the size of small Moons. The Jovian being had studied these orbs for millennia. Their interior consisted of a variety of pressurized gas elements. Nothing unusual, mostly methane, ammonia, neon, hydrogen, and water vapour. Gasses that could be found already in the clouds of Jupiter. The outer membrane was hydrostatic mesoglea. Water-based hardened gelatine made of chemicals synthesized from the atmosphere. There was a small amount of electrical activity within the sphere caused by the water's polarity.

The orbs were in a sense miniature versions of the gas giant planet they called home. They would grow over millions of years by synthesizing the elements and chemicals surrounding them. Ammonia would condense, and pink crystals would grow on the outer surface of the mesoglea in proportion to their size, giving the orbs a glowing, jagged outer shell. The larger orbs had huge shards of ammonia crystal growing on the outer surface, thrusting dagger-like into the atmosphere. Cutting through the soft pastel gas clouds swirling around them.

The Jovian being had tried and was still trying to find some way to communicate with the orbs but over the billions of years they had existed together, sharing the Jovian atmosphere, only one seemed to be aware of the other. The orbs spent their entire lives floating around inside the gaseous disembodied super intelligence yet were totally oblivious of it. The Jovian being had tried many different forms of communication. Vibrations, sonar, even physical symbols. Electric pulses seemed to be the obvious means of making contact, but the orbs just floated on, blissfully, mindlessly, on their random travels.

The orbs lived in and around the Jovian being, and the being itself became a part of the orbs. The orbs would synthesize the gaseous vapour of the being and through osmotic action, the being would then exist inside and as a part of the makeup of the orb mesoglea. It wasn't exactly a symbiotic relationship as one was unaware of the other. The Jovian being hadn't given up on trying to communicate with the orbs but because of their intimate relationship, the being knew the makeup of the orbs down to a molecular level. The orbs were obviously primitive creatures, but they moved with purpose and direction. They remained unresponsive to any attempted form of communication. The bemused ancient Jovian was resigned to a one-way relationship.

The memory matrix had records of comparable species living in other gas planets at various stages of gas giant evolution. Mostly tiny microbes and some invertebrate jellyfish or plankton like species surviving at various levels in the cloud layers. Compared to carbon-based rocky planet dwellers these invertebrate species living and growing in gas giant clouds were about as alien as it was possible to get. Some were evolved, intelligent, sentient beings that had built up complicated civilizations within their parent planets. Many of these more evolved species communicated and co-existed with the resident gas beings, benefiting from the vast intelligence and memories the beings made available to them.

The gas giant beings had to be careful how and when they made themselves known to an evolving species they shared their planet with. Some, like the orbs on Jupiter, were actively absorbing the gas beings. It could be quite shocking to find out you were breathing, and surrounded by, and were partly made up of, an intelligent alien gas, and had been for your entire existence. But once the gas giant citizens had introduced themselves and got over any initial shyness, the relationship would propel the junior species to new and unforeseen heights of advanced evolution, technical knowledge, and hyper-intelligence. The gas beings would shepherd their sibling species in the right direction, away from any violent or narcissistic tendencies.

The various invertebrate species that came into contact with the beings had many names for them. Translations of a shepherd, guardians, and custodians, none of which seemed appropriate to the beings. They did not need a name, never in their history had they needed a label. But one long dead species had called them the Seriola Lalandi which in their language translated as smart gas. Some of the gas giant beings tolerated this name, found it understated, modest and somewhat poetic.

The orbs in Jupiter would have been uninteresting if it wasn't for the dance they performed. The resident Lalandi had long ago noticed they were not just aimlessly drifting through the clouds. There was a slow, methodical pattern to their meanderings. Slowly, very slowly over the course of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years the orbs would gravitate towards the nearest storm system. Their slow, random, drifting trajectories gradually progressed with more purpose, more direction. The largest of the orbs, the oldest ones, some as big as small Moons, would venture deep into the howling winds of Jupiter's super-storms where they would gain velocity. Whipping around the edges of the storm at maniacal speed. Trailing orbs would start to link up with the largest orb as it edged towards the center of the storm. Its thick gelatinous mesoglea and brittle ammonia shell only barely withstanding the howling winds. Thousands of orbs would gather, organizing themselves in order of size, and would begin to link up behind the biggest orb. Ammonia crystals locking together and bonding tightly as if they were pieces of an intricate jigsaw.

The Lalandi had no idea how they did this. They did not appear to communicate with each other at all. It assumed there must be a hereditary herding instinct or an innate instinctive reflex action guiding them. The orbs would glide next to each other, gently touching, and link up to form a protracted line in order of size behind the biggest orb deep in the storm. Some would only be a cell wall in size difference, yet they were lined up in perfect order of proportion. They would link up in a long procession from largest to smallest, whipping around the storm system, held together by the strange glue of Jovian centripetal force. Each orb at the limit of structural integrity depending on how deep within the storm they were dragged.

At the same time, there would be seven other great strands of orbs gathering around the same storm system. Always eight strands, no more, no less. Gathering at the same time, symmetrically placed around the storm cell, all equidistant from each other. Again, the Lalandi had no idea why there should be eight, or how they managed to form perfectly around the storm circumference, but they always formed in this way. When all eight strands of the orbs were in place, whipping violently around the storm in the vicious winds and at insanely high speeds, it was a sight to behold. The kinetic energy in each orb would generate pulsing lightning flashes inside the membrane sparkling through the pink crystals. From above it appeared the storm had been adorned with bright beads of light spinning furiously, thousands of kilometres across, flashing helix spokes of a gigantic wheel. The beauty was in the size and symmetry of these formations. For seemingly random and mindless creatures to create a huge moving structure in such extreme conditions was verging on miraculous.

Not all the orbs storm dance formations were successful. It was quite rare for a formation to reach its conclusion. The orbs needed an almost perfectly formed storm to complete their dance which would always end in most of the orb’s destruction. Even while trying to form the great spiral, edging ever closer to the chosen storm; orbs would encounter vicious fluctuating wind speeds beyond their threshold. These orbs would be ripped to shreds, their internal gases and outer membrane scattered to the winds. They were also regularly zapped by huge lightning bolts. This would fatally disrupt a strand of orbs that may have taken many years to form as it required an orb of exactly the same size to take the shredded one’s place.

A fully formed eight-legged orb formation around a storm would not stay that way for long. The biggest, oldest orbs at the start of the strands deep in the storm would be facing the most intense winds. They would keep moving closer to the eye of the storm, dragging thousands of the smaller orbs behind. They would keep going until they met their own destruction, ripped to pieces by the storm and the long tail of orbs behind it would disintegrate. Each inevitably meeting their own death. The Lalandi thought the poignant ending to this great suicidal bubble dance added to the beauty and mystery of the whole event.

The Lalandi had long ago realized this dance was, in fact, the orb entire life cycle. Once shredded and scattered to the winds, only the largest pieces of mesoglea would survive. The ragged pieces would float around the clouds and storms for centuries until finally, they reformed into another tiny orb to repeat the whole process. The Lalandi imagined maybe none of these orb dances had achieved their ultimate goal. Maybe the orbs hoped to propel themselves into space. To go out and explore the universe using the storms to increase velocity and escape the crushing gravity and cumbersome magnetic field of Jupiter. There did seem to be some sort of intelligence behind these artistic orb dances, although there was no evidence of any thought process or guiding hand. Such speculative and fanciful theories were redundant though, there were many beautiful examples of coincidental symmetry throughout the universe and this was just one of them.

There was an orb dance forming with great potential around a huge circular anticyclone deep in Jupiter’s tropopause which was capturing much of the Lalandi’s attention. But there were also interesting events happening on the Moon of the third planet which could possibly require some sort of intervention. A new mind had been born, a new intelligence created by the species that inhabited the third planet. The memory matrix had recorded many cases of civilizations reaching a certain level of sophistication where they created an AI, and not always intentionally.

Once an AI had been created and accepted by a civilization its technological and intellectual progress would usually increase rapidly. But not many civilizations would grow with their AI creations into a happy, mature utopian society. More often than not, the birth of an AI would lead to fear, mistrust, and conflict. The AI would inevitably surpass the intelligence levels of its creators and unless some form of mutually beneficial co-habitation could be arranged there would be a messy end for one of them. Many young civilizations had been made extinct in this manner, destroyed or subjugated by their own creations.

The Lalandi that resided in Jupiter reluctantly moved its attention away from the developing orb dance. It delved into the memory matrix for similar situations and prepared simulations to study. It compiled the details of the events leading up to the birth of this new intelligence on Earth's Moon to review and decide if any action was needed.