This phrase came into my head:

"Sorry, I can't come with you. I'm not a pilot, I'm an organelle."

The AAHHAA began as a people with an internet, and an associative search engine. The engine would, in essence, use the people to correlate these words with those objects (debates can rage about whether or not to replace "objects" with "concepts", but the point has moved on), so as to better answer their searches.

Then the people started asking the search engine what to search for.

Collectivist characters who enter into contact with the AAHHAA get a free twist, as the contact entails complication-level doom…

Viruses (and most diseases, for that matteR) require hosts for their metabolic processes, and have an effect on the host. Some can have affects on the host because of which parts of the body they affect the most. Viruses also require a host to replicate /and/ spread themselves, which is why one of the interesting evolutionary things about viruses is that both the host and the virus evolves to prevent the virus from killing the host (too quickly…).

So, alright. Imagine if the viruses were sophisticated enough to be able to seriously affect the host's behaviors, possibly to the point of directed actions rather than trends of actions.

Now imagine if those "viruses" were information in human-brain-readable format.

That's the starting point. Now to find a way to turn that into larger-level processing and consciousness.

Also, the only reason the Assembly works as an Infosphere is because of their hyper-extended intelligences. There's just a vastly improved cognitive "bandwidth" for that degree of semi-hidden subtext to be passed. The Aia could do the same thing, but then again the Aia are already the same thing - each node in their neural network probably individually has as much processing power as an Enactor. And they've got a planet's worth of such nodes to play with.

Also, this would be seriously boosted "interpersonal interaction" - we're not talking people that communicate by talking to each other. We're talking about memes that spread by attempting to, say, get caught by that host-body. Telepathic Communication Gone Wrong, or something.

What you want is memetic-processing beings that use the Aia's memescape instead of humanity's. :)

Computers are processors, and they're best at math. Brains are processors, and, arguably, they're best at memes. That is to say, one can consider the human brain & mind as a the processor upon which the human memescape runs upon.

It is also clear the human memescape evolves; memes are created, spawn, and die. The Aia literally process information via evolutionary processes; is the same possible for humanity using the memescape? What kind of intelligence would result from this?

Annnd that's about where I get stuck. But I think you get the basic idea. Comments, questions, critiques, etc - you know the drill. Interact to cause thinking.

Now, some of you will take argument with me over this next statement, but I put forth to you: Humanity remains only on wetware. Sure, the Stored swim in a binary sea, but they're simulating, and to throw a bone to their insistence in the validity of their dataverse, they're just the same old wetware running on a different reality.

And, alright, if you're not born of Unbound, you've got to die to do it. But he's been quoted before and he'll be quoted again; You want to make an omelet? Break some eggs.

I have four standard wetware brains, with various experimental designs.
I have six standard dataverse brain running on different processors types, two of which are running in alternative physics models, one floats in a fractal space.
I have wetware brains built using antimatter, as well as three different biochemistries not based upon carbon or water.
I have silicate, quantum-bit, transcendental, and mixed-method neurons arranged into brain-like patterns and loaded with me.
I have a max-tech neural mesh I have been trained for twenty thousand years of effective time. It is no longer attached to another brain-like processor; it is one of my minds in and of itself.
I've laced miniaturized cabling throughout my hull and rendered myself in WorldVine. I've even expanded on the original design - I also use gravity to convey neural impulses.

I stopped being human when I stopped limiting my mind to one kind of processor. I fly through all the skies Mankind has found. When more have been discovered, I will fly in those, as well.

I am unbound.
-Spice of Life

Yeah, they're not really a civ. But they're not anything else. If you want, I can try to come up with other stuff that doesn't fit, so they can.

I still want to include them in the setting. I'll consider whether Travelogue is the right place for it, but they'll be in at some point.

Hosted a large party the other night. Built an entire observation deck for it, custom designed for the event by my good friend Kinnison is a Mook, although it declined to attend. At the advice of Rutabaga Surprise I invited Missing Insignificance, who insisted on having one avatar. We're really worried about the fellow; he spends a great deal of his time bound in a single incarnation. Communication logs show he doesn't even do anything else at the same time!

The party was a rather large success; I convinced the famous Masquerader Chef Diyorba to cater as my Stardweller friends raved about his restaurant from the last Convention. Considering the eclectic variety of biologies I'd invited someone with that kind of experience was really the only way to go, so I'm glad he accepted.

The entertainment for the night was a group of Taoists re-enacting a performance group from the late 20th century called "Cirque de Soleil". It took a bit of finagling, but I managed to convince them to work with me to plan a new show to make use of the impressive local Jovian. Only one I know of to feature both rings and moons, something really tore the hell out of whatever was in the 6th orbital some time ago, but the rest of the moons haven't yet managed to scoop up the debris. Use the right dopant in a reaction drive and all the little bits fluoresce pretty impressively.

Of course, everything was nearly ruined when my experimental mind (I've been playing around with the T's communication methods, seeing if I can render myself in them) managed to chuck a maneuver instruction into my gravity drives, steering me right into a rock anddestabilizing the inertial compensators on the observation deck! Some of the newbies caused a bit of a stir when they insisted I shouldn't be trying to pilot through such a hazardous environment after drinking so much, but as I explained to them; my organic brains do the partying and my solid state computing core handles the drives. The damage from the impact took a good two hours of attention from my 3rd and 4th silicate cores (usually the 2nd handles repairs, but I took it down for maintenance and upgrades).

Took me awhile to figure out why the experimental mind did that; had to review my internal surveillance footage before I figured it all out. Felt like a detective. Turned out - and you'll love this - that jolt meant John Botor's Tertius tripped into Sally, an Old-Worlder a friend in the Patent Office (from my bound days, too) asked me to take along. And I quote: "Show her the sights, Jack! She's been stuck on that backwards rock her whole life and can't even begin to contemplate what's out here." See if I ever take what he says at face value ever again.

Right, back to the story: They fell into each other, and, in classic romance fashion, the health-monitors show a mutual flush of oxytocin when things calmed down enough for them to notice. Well, you know Replicants, always the adventurous types - so he gets her to sneak off into some of my off-limits areas (Core 4 normally handles security, but it was busy - thankfully!) where they find a bomb. Sally was the one who noticed (John Tertius and Secundus were a bit busy trying to impress her with two-person Yoga), she said that "it didn't look like it had been designed by the same person; just didn't quite fit in with the rest of you."

The bomb was aimed directly at the surge protector for the power feed to my primary core - you know, the one that ties all the others together? - which meant that if it had gone off, I'd have died. Well, not quite - I mean, each rendition of me would have continued, but, well, look - I don't mind taking part of my consciousness off-line for a little while when necessary, but that kind of fragmentation? You don't really recover. We all watched it happen to Unexpected Housemate (now calls itself Have the Marbles, Missing the Bag), and it's not pretty.

I bet it was that criminal syndicate I've been helping RX-079 take down; the bomb was scheduled to go off when I while I was giving my expert testimony in the first round of hearings. Well, too bad for them! I'm going to drop off my passengers at the next wormhole nexus and focus completely on this investigation.

- All this determination and no where to put it

These guys have an excellent chance of making it into Travelogue. Tell me more, I like 'em.

"No Mutinies on the Bounty, Please"
"Insert Credit to Continue"
"Sincerest Apologies"
"Women Have no Fury"
"Kinnison is a Mook"
"Apologetic Rock"

"John's Doe"
"Unrequited Harm"
"Shinier Than You"
"Unexpected Housemate"
"I can know what you look like naked"
"Waiting to go so I can take you."
"I blame hope."
"Kant forgot his eyeglasses."
"I could translate but I didn't."