The Vex keep their hypotheses in quarantine. Tested and iterated on until they are ready for distribution.

My lungs fill with salt water. I grow gills, filtering life from the sea of data. What compost have you turned over for me, my creatures?

I make myself anew. Humans have poor magnetoreception: I neglected the sense when building my body. A failure of oversight solved by the addition of digital cryptochromes. Ampullae of Lorenzini and a neuromast while I'm at it. Any information is good information. The wheat may be sorted from the chaff later.

OPEN THE DOOR.

I slip in and out of network and real space, quickstepping through the hollows of space between bodies. Spiraling out towards the Oort cloud through Mercury's burning sands and the radioactive winds on Luna.

The umwelt of pure radiolaria is different from that of a Goblin within its bronze chassis; the umwelt of a Hydra is different from that of a Goblin. The Hobgoblins' sensory horns take in different data than a Harpy's cilia. They each serve different needs within the collective.

The collective's multiplicative umwelten all feed into mine. They, the microorganisms within my holobiont, and I the controlling intelligence at its center.

SPREAD OUT.

My Vex disseminate across the system, ants on the hunt, bringing home information to their queen. I know what I am searching for, if we can only find the right tool for the quest.

The magnetosphere is abruptly useless. Chaff tossed out on the wind. It is gravity that beckons my attention.

I sideslip through the system towards an interesting aberration. A tangled clump of dark matter. My Goblins sift through Human computer networks, bringing me a name: Cocytus.

This is not a place anyone wants me to be.

I suborn the warheads, I take over the gates, I stock the land with my tools.

Gravity moves in the dark; it whispers against my cheekbones and pulls me down. Fine strands of dark matter move around me and through me.

How do we solve the hard problem of consciousness? One theory suggests increasingly complex electrical wave patterns. Sustaining those complex waveforms through an affected substrate. Electrical impulses through brain matter. Another kind of impulse through dark matter.

Vast, dispersed minds. Thinking and acting across distances and timelines broad enough to confuse even the Vex. Gravity's reach is long and greedy; the Sun's dragging influence on spacetime barely wanes before Proxima Centauri asserts itself.

Spacetime accounts for more than physical dimension, and gravity works its effects upon it all.

These consciousnesses, finely spread across such a distance, must work within the dimension of time in a way that differs from the Vex. Else, a single thought would take years to vibrate across their superstrings. Else, a Collective would have consumed them long ago.

Here is the key to my heart's desire. Here is how I reach you, my life.

A theory of the Cocytus gates assembles itself. Not all the pieces—but enough for now to build out, and test, a hypothesis.

If I am right, there are powers within Sol, huge and silent and untapped. Waiting to be commanded.

If I am right, there are Nine of them. Macrobiomes of vast holobionts, sustained by the complex life of Sol's microbiome. Living off the mitochondria of human spirit, roaming through time as a human roams through space.

If I am right, then they have minds. And that which has a mind, I may command.