fandomhigh | Getting Out of Tight Situations- Period 5- Class #5

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Getting Out of Tight Situations- Period 5- Class #5

When the students got to class today, they'd find themselves in the middle of a hilly forest area. At least it wasn't too humid or too cold this week?

"Hey, guys," Jaina greeted them. "Today you're going hiking. You can pick up a few essentials to take with you, the trail is marked, and you even get a companion on your hike." As she spoke, a nondescript teenage boy appeared next to her, waving at the students. "This is Bob. Something's going to happen on your hike, and I'm not going to tell you what. But once it happens, you're going to have to figure out what tools you have available to you and what you're going to do about it. Good luck, and I hope you all wore study shoes."

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She raised her eyebrows, definitely interested to hear about what he had like the Killiks back home. Even months later she missed the Colony juuust a little. "Of course. I'm pretty much able to talk whenever. I'm free now, or I hold office hours on Friday, whatever works for you."

"Then I think now is fine," Ender said, easily. "The reason I'm bringing it up is because we've recently started colonising the worlds the Formics left behind, and we're only barely starting to make sense of all the data that's coming in."

Well. One of many reasons, and probably the one least important to Ender, but also the least problematic.

"Hopefully I can help somehow," Jaina said. "Is there anything specific you wanted to know?"

"A lot of things," Ender admitted. "Of course, I have no idea how comparable the species really are, but they were both bugs and hive minds. Communication, I guess, is a big one."

"Insectoid race," Jaina corrected. Normally she let the bug thing slide now, but given this discussion, she figured being technical would be better. "Bugs don't tend toward the sentient. Killiks do."

She took a breath, beginning, "Communication's a little hard to describe. Insectoid minds are very simple, very literal, but the hive mind is something that's easier to experience than to tell. Have you ever experienced a telepathic link? Maybe one of the Jedi or psychics here sending you a message even without words, just feeling?"

"Insectoid," Ender repeated, sounding unoffended and unsurprised by the correction. It was a little bit of a paradigm shift - back home most people insisted on calling them 'buggers', and never even used the name of their race at all - but he hadn't known how Jaina thought about them until now.

That little correction told him a lot.

"I know they have trouble communicating in words," he said, after a moment. "I think human minds are usually too analytical for that kind of connection."

And here was to hoping she wouldn't mention the details of that to Ben, or it might ring a few warning bells.

"You're right," Jaina confirmed, "which is I think why most people can't understand it. The Killiks communicate a lot through their antennae, and when humans or other species are involved, forearms are used instead. It's a friendly gesture, but there are a ton of meanings involved in it. There are also sounds that are used, things like humming from the thorax or mandibles clicking or things like that."

"Ben mentioned rubbing forearms," and had been disturbed by it, "so it was a combination of telepathic conversation and physical cues?"

Which might be a difference from the Formics, and insinuate some kind of individual awareness.

"Pheromones have a lot to do with it, too. And I don't want to just say it's telepathic conversation, in part because there was a Jedi leading the Colony for the whole time I was involved and I don't know now how much that had to do with that," she said truthfully. "But also because the hive mind is much more than that."

"What makes you say that?" he asked, leaning forward in interest. "From what we managed to gather from the Formics, their communication was mostly instantaneous, across telepathic lines." Philotic, technically, but he didn't want to get caught up in explaining terminology to someone who got the general symbolic gist.

"Did Ben explain that I was actually absorbed by the Nest?" she wondered, aware she might sound like a crazy person if she went into further detail without that out there.

"He didn't really go into a lot of detail," Ender said, with a slight smile. "Like I said - it weirds him out."

"Right. My Ben's still pretty okay with it. Maybe it's because he's nine." Or because he wasn't that far removed from being sort of a Joiner himself. "I say that because while there definitely is some telepathic link, I know a lot of what happened with me had to do with the Force, so my information may be a little skewed." She was maybe a little used to having to give intelligence reports with that sort of disclaimer.

"And the thing is, your intel's right. And that's exactly how I would have described it in the months I was there before I became a Joiner," she went on. "After that, though... There's a big difference between what you see from the outside, and experiencing the hive mind as part of it."

"What was it like?" Ender prompted. He still had bad dreams from the days when the Formics had been trying to get into his head, and that was only a shadow of something that Jaina actually described as 'being absorbed'.

"Well... The way it worked was that we belonged to certain Nests, the ones that welcomed us in," she explained, carefully watching her pronounces to make sure no 'we's slipped out when they shouldn't. The Killiks themselves didn't have individual names, and would be addressed by the name of their Nest, Taat or Wuluw or wherever they belonged, because speaking to one was like speaking to all of them, in a way. For those of us who became Joiners, it was different. We stayed ourselves, with our own wants and needs, but in addition to being an individual, we were part of the collective. You belong to the Nest and the Nest belongs to the Colony, and it's like being a very small part of a large group of a trillion beings.

"When I first realized I was a Joiner, it was because I wanted to go against the will of the Colony, to do the right thing outside of just their needs. And they wouldn't let me. I'd go to stand up, and I'd have the will of the rest of the Nest, thousands of other consciousnesses telling me that I'd want to sit down, and so I'd sit down. It wasn't like I was being forced, but it was really like peer pressure to an extreme degree; after a while I'd want to do what Taat wanted me to. I couldn't really read their thoughts, but I instinctively knew what they wanted and the reasoning behind it, and I didn't even have to speak to communicate if I didn't want to, because the rest of the Nest knew my intentions. It was completely invasive and welcome at the same time."

And yet she still didn't entirely think it was weird. It'd take a while for that.

The fact that she didn't think it was weird, yet, made this all the more valuable. It meant Ender was still getting a little glimpse of the Killik mind, instead of the Jedi interpretation of it, judgements and all.

He was thankful for it.

"Was it a true hive mind?" he asked, "Or were their queens, or leaders? Who did you look to for purpose while you were a Joiner?"

"That's where it gets a little tricky," Jaina admitted, making a face. "The Unu nest had found a Jedi friend of ours. He became a Joiner, and then eventually he became king, UnuThul, though we're back to calling him Raynar these days. He led the Colony, and when we went to war, he was the one giving us orders." Though he was definitely not a military commander and therefore his orders were often bad and that still bothered her. "At least, that was what we thought. In truth, there was a Dark Jedi who'd secreted away her presence and was actually leading things, but Raynar was unaware of it, and therefore the rest of the Colony was, too."

"So they were highly susceptible to stronger... what, will? Force presence?" he guessed.

"I don't think it was that easy. Everyone thought Lomi was dead to begin with, and she had the ability to make you forget you'd ever seen her, which was something we'd never seen before. She was able to use that to hide the presence of the entire Gorog nest. Remember what I said about how big a nest could be, and how strong the influence was when they wanted you to do or believe something," she said. "If they could control Raynar that way, especially when he'd suffered a lot of physical and emotional trauma and wasn't exactly all there, they controlled the Colony the whole way down."

She'd still willingly go a little dark side for a chance at five minutes in a room alone with Lomi Plo, just for the opportunity to Force slam her into walls until she stopped moving. But Jaina was often told she had anger issues.

Ender had whatever the opposite of anger issues were, and he had a kill count to his name that vastly dwarfed Jaina's; it was likely he'd have more nuanced opinions on the matter, if it ever came up.

Regardless of the way his narrative liked to pick at his psyche, Ender nodded thoughtfully. "But would you say it was instinctive for the Killiks to make themselves subservient to one sentient in that way?" he asked. "They must have had leadership before the Jedi came along."

"That's one of those things where my knowledge is iffy," she said apologetically. "The entire time I was a Joiner, Raynar was in charge, and Killiks don't have thoughts like 'The guy before him was so much better,' or anything, so I'm not sure on how things normally worked. I know most insect colonies have the same sort of caste system, usually with a queen at the head of everything, so I assume it still worked that way with the Killiks, but that's about all I have on that."

He nodded. A little disappointed, but not entirely surprised. "Thanks anyway," Ender said. "What did you guys eat while you were in the nest, anyway?"

He was thinking about the Formic orchards they'd found recently.

Jaina smiled a little. "Somehow I didn't expect that question. By the time I was there, there were quite a few Joiners, so normal food was fairly common. It was kind of weird at first, actually; you'd get a craving for something and the Killiks would just know what you wanted and have the food brought in from offplanet, even."

"So they were pretty well connected," Ender said; it was half-serious and half-joke. "I'm asking because the whole reason the subject of Killiks came up is when I got news that some of our xenobiologists had found a Formic orchard. We... didn't really see that one coming."

"An orchard?" she repeated, raising her eyebrows. "That's... new. I'm guessing you haven't found out why it's there yet."

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