There were questions I had been asking myself.

What, precisely, were the conditions for a Coral Mind to arise? As a phenomenon, why did it happen? Was it possible to induce a Coral Wave Mutation?

What were the differences between myself as an entity, and the likes of Ezra and Seria?

C5-1. Aithe Vernadael. The second oldest member of the volunteers.

I watched as Aithe desperately dodged, juking left and right with quick bursts of thrusters. Bullet rounds flew past him, missiles streaming through where he'd been only a moment before. It was quick, effective-

And wholly the wrong thing to do, here. His capacitors depleted, leaving him out of energy at a critical moment. Ezra capitalised instantly, laser blade igniting and carving out a piece of the mech, which was followed up with by another strike that speared right through an actuator. The mech collapsed, and a moment later, the simulation ended.

"Fuck!" Aithe sighed.

"You're getting better."

"I didn't even last forty seconds, Ezzy..."

I was not my children. Even the most cursory glance showed that. I had capacities that were significantly diminished in them; my ability to forge Contact as an example. Part of that was sheer age, part of that was experience, but there was a... more fundamental difference between us.

Dolmayan had likened me to the ocean even as he likened my children to waves. It went beyond simple size, though.

Would my children eventually become like me? That was a question I couldn't answer; I can't say I've noticed any changes or alterations in either Ezra or Seria, but there are rather significant differences in our history. I had reached centuries of age even before I came into contact with Humanity, and then I spent many more years effectively mainlining their entire communications infrastructure. Was this responsible for the differences? If I put them into the same position, would they become more like me?

If they didn't, would that be a good thing, or a bad thing?

I didn't know. I couldn't know.

C5-3. Maryna Waldeburg. The kind of person who liked going on wiki-walks.

"A five megabyte computer weighed over a ton?" She asked me, absolutely incredulous.

"Human technology has come a very long way." I laughed, amused. "The very first computers were incredibly large and bulky things. A common personal agent from today would be a supercomputer capable of running entire countries in the twenty-first century, you know. There used to be a time where people thought giant mechs would be impractical, slow, and unwieldy. Technology marches onwards, my dear."

"I... I can barely believe it." She shook her head. "Where would you even find something like that?"

"After all the wars on Earth before Humanity expanded into space, I'd be surprised if there were any genuine examples left. Still, I do have the digital proof..."

There were questions I could answer, at the very least. There were data points in existence, which I'd already found, for me to consider.

Fact: Until the Fires occurred, there were no other Wave Mutations. I was, until the Coral was scattered across Rubicon, the only actual Coral Mind, the only true Rubiconian.

I had not felt the formation of any other minds, even preliminary, despite the fact that there were plenty of other mutations occurring in the Coral, which led me to another data point:

Fact: Wave Mutations are not the same as those produced by the Density effect.

This made sense to me. The supplies of Coral that had brought forth both Ezra and Seria were far below the amounts necessary to start Mutating from the Density effect.

But they were also far below the amount of Coral I consisted of. Perhaps especially notable; neither masses had given rise to more than a single mind.

That was a theory to explore.

C5-6. Rutendo Connell. What do you call a guy who likes Mechs? A normal person. What do you call a guy who really likes mechs?

"As much as the RRI horrifies me from its mad science, I really can't help but be impressed by some of this stuff." He said, leaning back into his chair. "I was expecting... I don't know, upgraded BASHOs?"

"The BASHOs are a solid line of ACs, yes." I hummed. "They're also a known factor. BAWS keeps things simple. Popping up with twenty BASHOs would be problematic, both in that BAWS wouldn't be able to explain where they all came from, and that their weaknesses are well known. You are my Firekeepers. You need something with a little bit more bite to it."

"You won't see me complaining." He smiled, briefly looking up before turning his eyes back to his datapad. The words IB-C04 shined brightly. "Though if I may make a suggestion about these hydraulics..."

Ezra and Seria both possessed portions of my knowledge. In a very literal way, both of them had formed from fragments of my being.

Ezra and Seria both grew in isolation. Ezra and Seria, once they appeared, knew no peers in their Coral colonies. They had only gained peers after establishing contact with another established colony.

My conversations with both of them allowed me to narrow down the approximate size of their colonies when they had, for lack of better word, coalesced. While quite large relatively, it wasn't exactly very big in absolute terms.

I...

There was a reason I had chosen to make vacuum chambers, and it wasn't just for redundancy purposes.

C5-10. Aimo Ko. The musician.

Aimo hummed a tune as she plucked at the strings of her guitar, fingers dancing up and down the instrument. There was a rather notable difference between now and how she'd been before her augmentation; what before had been practised and careful was now perfectly deliberate. She'd had a bit of a tremor in her hands before. Now, she played steady enough to reliably perform what previously would have required a programmed machine.

She hit a note, and stopped then and there. With a frown, she reached up to adjust the tuning.

"I think the string isn't even." She said aloud.

"There are some upsides to having your ears enhanced so much." I replied, already scheduling a replacement. "And some downsides, too."

I was not a single example, anymore. No longer an aberration in the system. My existence had been duplicated twice. Probably more that I didn't know of.

We were a species, now. More than a phenomenon. So, could there be more?

Could it be done deliberately?

I needed to know.

So, I constructed multiple chambers. I was going to test it. I was going to find out what was required to fulfil the conditions. It wasn't just about proliferation, I needed to make sure that it wasn't going to happen on accident. I was going to be building machines that would incorporate Coral. I couldn't take the risk that if something unintended happened, new minds would spring forth from them.

Everything I knew indicated it'd be fine so long as I maintained Contact, but what happened if a machine was disabled by the PCA and it was taken off planet? I wouldn't be able to do anything, if the Coral were to happen to form a mind.

...

I don't know enough to say that there aren't Coral Minds out there in the greater galaxy. There had been enough Coral taken away from this planet to meet the mass requirements many times, even without the formation of new colonies.

I want to hope that it didn't happen, isn't happening, but I didn't know enough to back that hope up with facts and data.

So.

I have to do as a scientist does, and test hypotheses.

C5-15. Gregor Rosenfeld. A programmer who liked to tinker.

"The problem is that your 'voices' do not translate very well into usable instructions." He sighed, rubbing at his temples. "Most AIs people interact with are built with language and communication in mind. Modern programs have seen much development that everything they need is already accessible for them."

"I am acutely aware, yes." I grumbled. "I am at this point honestly tempted to run an advanced text-to-speech. I've got the processing speeds to handle all that on the fly."

"But that would not be fitting of your gravitas!" He protested.

"After all the complete nonsense I've dealt with in this so far, I'm feeling a severe lack of gravitas right now."

I built multiple vacuum chambers to test a variety of conditions at the same time. The central chamber was the largest one, maintaining my connection to this base from Institute City.

The tricky part is that most of the excess chambers couldn't be in Contact with either me or each other. I did know how to break Contact, so sectioning them off from myself wasn't that hard, but stopping them from connecting to each other required quite a bit of space. A barrier of electromagnetic activity also helped, but it wouldn't stop Contact by itself.

I went with four isolated chambers in total, arranged in a tetrahedron that kept them all as far away from each other as they could get.

Chambers one and two were as close of a replication to the conditions that had formed Ezra and Seria as I could get with a single difference. Chamber one already had the required mass, while chamber two was below it, prepped to grow to that level over time. I -and there is no way to really put this into Human terms so this description is the best I could give- had to focus parts of my being into those colonies until they echoed with the proper 'noise', the parts of my being that I wanted them to copy, before cutting the Contact as suddenly as I could, which was about the best I could to replicate the significantly more violent loss of Contact and subsequent scattering of Coral after the Fires of Ibis.

Chamber three was different. I left it 'quiet' when I cut the Contact, slowly pushing that mass away from 'my being' until it dropped from me completely. Again, that was as close a replication I could achieve of the way that they used to take Coral out of my Contact range before the Fires of Ibis.

Chamber four was a test chamber. I tried to suppress the Contact, quieting it without actually 'cutting' it. That chamber still had echoes of me in it, and I wanted to see whether even this incredibly minute connection was enough to stop formation.

I was not expecting results quickly.

That was fine. If this life had taught me anything, it was patience.

C5-20. Alicia. No last name. She was the 'team cook' as it were. She was also the eldest member of the Firekeepers

"You've had vegetables?" I asked, curious. "Interesting. Anything aside from Mealworm products are quite rare on this world."

Alicia chuckled as she cut the meat into smaller chunks. "I was a much younger girl." She said. "Six or so years old, I think. The only thing I can remember is such a sour taste."

"I see." I paused for a moment, considering her. "I... realise that many stories of Rubicon are not happy ones, so I won't push if you do not wish to explain, but may I ask what happened?"

She paused, and I felt her brain light up.

A kind voice, shouting. "This is a farm! A farm! People will starve!"

A loud, mechanical groan. "You have committed ecological terrorism. The PCA makes no exceptions."

Sheer, stark fear. Heat.

She breathed in, and then slowly resumed cutting. "There was a fire..." She began.

"Your first mission is coming up." I began. "It will be quite simple. A Doser faction has mysteriously gained access to a variety of new MTs. They stand poised and ready for a raid on important civilian supplies. The RLF has been recently distracted and left open by a Subject Guard assault."

I felt the impression run through them. 'Damn PCA', I could tell they were all thinking.

"The PCA is already gone. They will not be a factor. This will be your debut onto Rubicon's stage. After this, everyone will know you exist, you will gain incredible amounts of attention, and little effort will be spared to hunt you down. It will not be easy, but every moment we last is a moment that the RLF has a bit less attention directed to it. Are you ready?"

I didn't need to ask.

It didn't matter that they still weren't completely trained, that they were barely beginners in AC combat. They had been fighting together as a group, in squads, for nearly two months straight. With Contact, they could just about read each other's thoughts. I had been drilling tactics into them even as Ezra drilled instinct. If all else failed, the machines I'd built for them would give them enough of an edge that they would live long enough to gain experience.

It wasn't ideal. I certainly wasn't going to be throwing them against Subject Guard or the greater PCA any time soon.

But we could start to make a difference now.

And they knew that's why they were here.

"For Rubicon!" They shouted.

"Until the day the fires no longer need to be kept."