When the first documented worldminds began to emerge, the immediate response was panic: developing hyperintellects were mistaken for widespread mental disorder, for telepathic disease, for arcane alien sabotage. Hysterical Viridians launched futile attacks against the awakening Segundan world-forest and strangled sleepwalking children in a desperate attempt to curtail the spread of higher awareness.

Today transcorporeal intelligence is recognized as not only a natural phenomenon but a fairly common one, with over a dozen recognized worldminds in Parliamentary Space alone. In scope such entities may range from the single species of Homo terminus occupied by the Nova Entity to the planetary sentience of the White Flower Dreaming to the ever-expanding dreamfield of the Zone of Many Thousands; in aggressiveness, they may vary from the subtle whispers of the Quiet Emperor to the tidal rage of Oloria Prime’s Ocean Man to the all-consuming ego-horizon of Planet Allthing.

The emergence of so many collective intelligences in so short a time has frequently baffled researchers, but the most likely explanation is also the simplest: the worldmind is an incredibly useful adaptation, one that neutralizes the worst traits of intelligent life while retaining its more beneficial aspects. Civilizations of intelligent individuals typically fall prey to all manner of self-destructive behavior, from resource depletion to civil war to genocide; collective consciousness can regulate population and resource consumption while eliminating those divisions which give rise to conflict, from class, ethnic and species boundaries to the individual itself.

Collective consciousness has rarely emerged without resistance: both the Egg of T’ltssk and Halo 14 were destroyed in their nascent stages, and even the Nova Entity’s growth was stunted by violence in its youth before flourishing to outlive its parent species. Despite such setbacks, the worldmind appears to be with us for good. What this means for the future is uncertain: Essen-Hrane predicts a time when nearly all extant species will be incorporated into worldminds; Lotar Lotarios, however, believes worldminds will hold their own growth in check, encountering and warring with each other over territory and resources just as individuals once did. Finder 2112, on the other hand, projects that worldminds in competition will merely merge with one another, inevitably discovering co-assimilation to be a simpler route than physical conflict; such a process of merger and re-merger could theoretically be repeated until every lifeform in the universe is joined in a single cosmic consciousness. Ajari M’tesh maintains this has already occurred, and that all of us, past, present and future, are the dimly-remembered dreams of a vast and slumbering cosmos.

—Recorder 3000-21