Scrapyard Station: Becoming a Scholar
Nov. 17th, 2023 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariIt’s not as hard as you’d think, adapting to being a hive mind of tiny carrion worms. You are the hive, but you’re not really the individual worms, at least not consciously. You can choose to pick up a small object, for instance, and your subconscious will move over as many worms as necessary to lift the thing up. Your instincts tell you how to burrow, whether in earth or in meat. When a body is about to die of old age or injuries, its memories back up to a new body without your conscious intervention. The part of you that can read and understand itself is still you, just running on different hardware.
The change in senses is a bit more concerning, but most people weather it pretty well. Scholar bodies can see and hear a surprisingly long distance, and the hive mind easily pieces it together into a unified portrayal of what’s going on nearby. Touch is practically the same as before, and taste only changes in terms of input, not general usage. If meat now tastes like fruit used to, and fruit now has more of a dairy-like taste, then that’s something you can gradually adjust to.
The biggest loss is for Nomads, who find chunks of their memories scrambled. Whatever Nomads have that allows them to process sensory input from hyperspace, Scholars lack it, so all the time you spent in hyperspace is now a blur of colors and sounds. You can try and search for meaning in the noise, but you’ll never truly get those memories back.
So why don’t dying Tinkers and Builders and such all become Scholars? Sometimes it’s religion, or a feeling that you’ve accomplished enough already. Mostly, it boils down to “ew, worms.”
The change in senses is a bit more concerning, but most people weather it pretty well. Scholar bodies can see and hear a surprisingly long distance, and the hive mind easily pieces it together into a unified portrayal of what’s going on nearby. Touch is practically the same as before, and taste only changes in terms of input, not general usage. If meat now tastes like fruit used to, and fruit now has more of a dairy-like taste, then that’s something you can gradually adjust to.
The biggest loss is for Nomads, who find chunks of their memories scrambled. Whatever Nomads have that allows them to process sensory input from hyperspace, Scholars lack it, so all the time you spent in hyperspace is now a blur of colors and sounds. You can try and search for meaning in the noise, but you’ll never truly get those memories back.
So why don’t dying Tinkers and Builders and such all become Scholars? Sometimes it’s religion, or a feeling that you’ve accomplished enough already. Mostly, it boils down to “ew, worms.”
