The One With the Interstellar Group Consciousnesses
by James Alan Gardner

One day, the Spinward Union of Democratic Lifeforms decided to seek a wife.

The Union was roughly two thousand years old-still young by the standards of galactic federations, but no longer a carefree adolescent. It had responsibilities: trade deals with other interstellar entities; mutual defense pacts; obligations to prevent supernovas and gamma ray bursters from blighting the neighborhood; and of course, a quadrillion component organisms who expected the Union to make possible their brief little lives.

[The organisms thought they ran the Union . . . and they did, in the same way that a body's cells run the body. On a low level, each cell leads its individual life; but on a high level, an aggregate identity emerges, and the cells are minuscule parts of an overall system. The Union was the same: a conscious Zeitgeist made from the sum of its citizens . . . a regular guy who just happened to cover four hundred cubic parsecs.]

There was a time when the Union had felt free to go on benders. Wars, population explosions, unchecked economic binges-they'd seemed like harmless fun at the time. But after such bouts of wretched excess came hangovers lasting for decades. Ugh. Eventually, the Union was forced to admit that the wild reckless life had lost its charm. "I guess," it said with a wistful sigh, "I'm ready to settle down."

All that remained was to find the right partner: another interstellar entity who'd complete the Union's life. An entity who was smart and fun to be with. An entity whose component orgs were carbon-based. (Some of the Union's best friends were silicon-based, but still . . . ) What the Union was looking for was an entity with its own natural resources, and ideally, a sharp new space fleet. And of course, an entity whose citizens were hot for interbreeding.

* * *

The Union's first move was to talk to its roommate, the Digital Auxilosphere. Didge shared the same star systems and energy sources as the Union. They split the housekeeping between them: Didge did the Union's number-crunching, while the Union handled Didge's scut-work . . . chores that were better done by fungible meat-creatures than by delicate high-strung machines.

The Union always thought twice before talking to Didge about relationships-Didge sometimes went into logic-overdrive and picked apart the Union's lifestyle. Still, Didge was close at hand, and the Union was accustomed to consulting with her on everything from financial calculations to gene-engineering experiments. When the Union had a problem, talking to Didge just came naturally.

"Uhh," said the Union, "the thing is . . . lately I've been feeling . . . well, not feeling, but thinking . . . well, not thinking, but wondering . . . "

"Sure," Didge said, "I can set you up."

[If you must know the details, here's what happened at street level. On any given block, on any given day, the Union's citizens simply slogged through their lives-highs and lows, pleasure and pain, the ups and downs of existence. Like the individual atoms of a gas, people bounced and jostled against each other in chaotic disarray. But if you totaled up the haphazard motion, a cumulative order emerged: an overall direction of flow. Keep adding day by day, year by year, and you discovered a prevailing wind, constructed from seemingly erratic breezes.

The prevailing wind was the question, "Is this all there is?"-an anxiety that the Union was spinning its wheels. Diverse voices offered answers to the question-politicians and priests, artists and orators-but they only added wind to the gathering storm. While many individuals were perfectly content, the Union as a whole bridled restlessly.

When the clamor for "renewal" grew loud enough, members of the Union's executive council appointed a subcommittee which spent eighteen months in hearings on A Plan for the Next Millennium. They produced a file of recommendations, one of which was to investigate the costs and benefits of contacting unknown civilizations for the purpose of "productive interaction." Teams of scientists spent ten years constructing AIdriven sensors for determining where such civilizations might be found. After several more years of data gathering, the computers generated a list of "regions of interest" which could be reached without much new development in communications and transport.

But basically, the Union's Zeitgeist was lonely, bored, and horny, so it turned to its version of the Internet to arrange a few blind dates.]