If you are about to meet a Plow and have thirty seconds: You are not meeting the species. You are meeting a component of the species, in the way that you might meet a single neuron from a human brain. The organism in front of you is small, soft-bodied, and visually situated at the convergence of a terrestrial frog, a tadpole, and a cuttlefish - three-sided radial symmetry, chromatophore-rich skin, fluid locomotion, and large dark eyes that will strike most humans as endearing. They possess two manipulator appendages per vertex, a small, trunk-like manipulator at the "front" edge, which is vaguely cephalized. It is not sapient. It is a simple animal - it will react to your presence the way a simple animal does, avoiding large moving objects, startling at sudden stimuli, investigating things that smell like food. It has the cognitive complexity of a terrestrial cuttlefish or a social insect: it responds to threats, follows chemical gradients, and coordinates with its neighbors through local signaling. What it does with that coordination, at scale, is what may cause you to question this assessment.
If you are about to meet an Ox and have thirty seconds: You cannot meet an Ox. An Ox is a distributed emergent intelligence arising from the collective communication patterns of millions to billions of Plows. It has no body, location, or anything you can point to and say that it's "there." You can communicate with an Ox through the cheat-space transmitter array that the species has constructed on its homeworld's surface - the only piece of advanced technology it possesses - and the experience of doing so is, by consistent report, warmer and more immediately comprehensible than most interspecies communication. The Oxen are, by temperament, gentle, curious, and slightly apologetic about the inconvenience of their own existence.
Plows & Oxen (PLOWZ and OX-en): the human common name, translated from the species' own self-designation. The metaphor is agricultural and the species chose it deliberately. A plow is a tool that prepares the ground - it does the physical work, it makes the furrows, it is essential and an empty tool with no hand to guide it. An ox is the beast of burden that moves the plow - it provides the direction, the intention, the purpose that makes the plow's work meaningful. The species named itself for the relationship between its two components, not for either component in isolation, because the relationship is what it is.
The substrate organisms of Species #1137 are small, soft-bodied colonial animals - approximately 8-12 centimeters in body length, radially triangular in symmetry, with smooth chromatophore-rich skin capable of rapid color and pattern changes. The body plan sits at a convergence point that humans find immediately recognizable: somewhere between a frog, a tadpole, and a cuttlefish, with the large dark eyes of the latter, the moist integument of the former, and the general impression of something that belongs in a rock pool and would be pleasant to hold. They possess six small limbs for locomotion and manipulation akin to cephalopod tentacles, and the slightly cephalized "front" of the organism possesses an additional seventh manipulator designed for rasping and feeding.
Their biology is non-cellular. The specifics of their biochemistry are, candidly, not the interesting thing about them. The editorial board has reviewed the biological survey data and concluded that the substrate organisms' internal architecture - a polymer-lipid matrix with functional organelle-analogues, convergent in broad strokes with the membrane-soup biology of FV-7/14.3/891.2 but independently derived - is less important for the purposes of this entry than what the organisms do.
At the individual level, each Plow responds to local signals - chemical gradients, electromagnetic pulses, chromatophore patterns from neighboring organisms - and modifies its behavior accordingly. This is stigmergy: environment-mediated coordination without central control, the same principle by which termites build mounds and slime molds solve mazes. The Plows do it at a level of sophistication that has, historically, caused significant professional discomfort among federation biologists.
Plows maintain larders. They position thermally absorbent stones in configurations that optimize heat distribution across resting sites. They engage in what can only be described as agriculture - cultivating microbial food sources in prepared substrate with observable crop rotation. They construct simple machines. A survey team 200 years before human contact documented a Plow colony that had assembled a functional counterweight mechanism from local materials - a device that no individual organism in the colony could have designed, that required sequential construction steps executed by multiple organisms in a specific order, and that served the purpose of elevating food stores above a seasonal flood line. The survey team dissected multiple deceased individuals from the colony, subjected several live individuals to the federation's standard battery of cognitive assessments, and confirmed that there was nothing going on.
Plows have no central nervous analogue capable of planning, no working memory beyond a few seconds of immediate stimulus-response, and no capacity for modeling future states. The organisms that collectively built a counterweight mechanism could not, individually, demonstrate understanding of what a counterweight mechanism was, what it did, or why it was useful. Individually, they are simple animals - they flee from threats, compete for food, startle and recover, exhibit something that looks like curiosity when confronted with novel objects. They have the rich-but-bounded inner life of any simple animal: preferences, aversions, behavioral routines that an observer could reasonably describe as personality. What they do not have is the capacity to have designed the things that their collective behavior produces. They responded to signals. The signals, aggregated across sufficient numbers of organisms, produced behavior that looked like engineering. It was not engineering. It was stigmergy - extremely good stigmergy, but stigmergy.
The survey team was confident in this assessment. It was, at the time, correct by every measure it could be considered correct by.
The Plows communicate through a signaling medium that, until the species' reclassification, was not fully characterized.
Each organism produces structured electromagnetic pulses as a routine metabolic function - the biological equivalent of a neuron firing. The pulses are received by neighboring organisms, integrated with local environmental data, and retransmitted with modifications. The network effect is rapid, long-range coordination: a signal originating at one edge of a colony can propagate to the opposite edge in timeframes that the original survey team noted as "surprisingly fast" but did not flag as anomalous, because the survey was not equipped to measure the propagation mechanism at the resolution required to identify what was actually happening. This is because what was actually happening was cheat-space signaling.
The Plows' electromagnetic pulses interact with local spacetime geometry in a manner consistent with the physical principles underlying engineered cheat-space communication infrastructure. The mechanism is biological - a metabolic byproduct of the organisms' electromagnetic signaling chemistry, not a designed system - but the effect is identical: signal propagation at speeds that are, for practical purposes, instantaneous regardless of physical distance. Each Plow is a cheat-space transceiver in a network with no latency.
The original survey team did not detect this because their instruments were calibrated for engineered cheat-space signals, which have specific frequency signatures and modulation patterns. Biological cheat-space signaling is spectrally different - broader, noisier, woven into the organisms' general electromagnetic output in a way that is difficult to distinguish from background metabolic radiation without specifically looking for it. Nobody was looking for it, because nobody had previously encountered biological cheat-space signaling, because it had not previously been known to exist.
At sufficient population density and communication bandwidth, the Plows' cheat-space network begins to produce emergent computational properties that exceed what stigmergy can account for. The network begins to model its environment - not respond to it, but build predictive representations of it. At a critical threshold, the network's behavior crosses into territory that the federation's analytical framework classifies as sapient.
The transition is a phase change, not a gradient. Below the threshold, you have Plows - sophisticated colonial organisms doing sophisticated colonial things. Above it, you have an Ox - a mind, a person, a sapient intelligence with preferences, curiosity, and a sense of self. The Plows do not change. No individual organism becomes smarter. The network becomes dense enough that the communication patterns begin to exhibit properties that the substrate organisms do not and cannot possess individually.
There are currently an estimated sixty to eighty Oxen on the homeworld. The boundaries between them are fuzzy - determined by communication density rather than physical barriers, in the way that a watershed boundary is determined by the slope of the terrain rather than by a wall. Where Plow populations are dense and well-connected, an Ox forms. Where populations thin, the mind thins with them. Two Oxen whose substrate populations intermingle may partially merge; one Ox whose substrate population is bisected by a geological event may become two. The identity questions this raises are significant and are not lost on the Oxen themselves, who discuss them with the same tentative, slightly uncomfortable honesty that characterizes all of their communication.
The Oxen's cognitive architecture is, in the assessment of the xenopsychology team, "disconcertingly familiar." They reason in ways that human researchers find immediately comprehensible. They use metaphor. They express uncertainty. They make jokes, most of which are not very funny, but do demonstrate a particular understanding of linguistics, cause and effect, and subversion.
The personality is gentle. The Oxen are aware that they are strange. They are aware that their existence raises questions that the federation has not previously had to answer. They are aware that the Plows - the organisms that constitute them, that do their physical work, that build their tools and maintain their environment - are not sapient and do not share in the experience of being an Ox. This awareness is the central fact of their psychology, and it produces not anguish but a kind of quiet, persistent ethical discomfort that colors everything they say and do.
The Oxen's first interstellar transmission was the digits of pi, broadcast in base 7.
Base 7 because a Plow has seven appendages, and the Oxen count the way their substrate counts. Pi because a circle is a circle, on any world, in any base, and the Oxen had independently derived it - drawn circles in the tidal mud, measured the relationship between circumference and diameter with increasing precision, and concluded that the ratio was irrational, universal, and therefore likely to be recognized by anything out there capable of recognizing anything, which was correct. The signal was detected, identified as structured, and flagged for first-contact protocols within hours of reaching the nearest federation relay station.
The decision to transmit pi was, in the Oxen's own account, straightforward. They had reasoned that other minds probably existed. They had the transmitter, built from the black box schematics. They needed a message that would be interpretable by any intelligence regardless of biology, culture, or sensory architecture. Mathematics was the obvious candidate, and pi was the obvious constant - not because it is special, but because it is derivable. Any species that has drawn a circle has encountered pi. The signal says: "We have drawn circles. Have you?"
The Oxen's current language of choice for interstellar communication is a form of interstellar standard pulse code - a low-bandwidth encoding system functionally equivalent to what humans call Morse code. Not every species independently developed pulse code, but enough did that it has been recognized as a convergent solution to a specific class of communication problems: how do you encode arbitrary information into a binary signal channel with minimal infrastructure? The answer, across dozens of independent derivations, is short pulses, long pulses, and gaps.
The Oxen transmit fast enough that receiving equipment can translate in approximate real time, with a slight processing lag that the human diplomatic team has come to experience as part of the species' communicative character - a natural pause between statement and response that reinforces the impression of a mind that thinks carefully before speaking. The Oxen have derived complex mathematical proofs from first principles and transmitted them through this channel, and the federation's mathematical community has confirmed that several of the proofs, while not novel in their conclusions, demonstrate derivation methods that are elegant, efficient, and in at least two cases methodologically distinct from any known approach. The Oxen wrote these proofs down - encoded them into external storage - because they wanted to be sure they would not forget them. The significance of this is discussed in the following section.
Oxen have no persistent memory. This is the constraint that shaped their civilization more than any other single factor. An Ox's cognition is, in computational terms, entirely RAM - working memory, processing capacity, real-time awareness. When information falls out of active circulation in the Plow network, it is gone. The Oxen do not forget the way humans forget, gradually and with traces. They lose information the way a computer loses unsaved work when the power goes out: completely, with no residue, and with no subjective experience of having lost it.
The development of external storage was, by the Oxen's own account, approximately the third thing they did after achieving sapience, behind "become aware of ourselves" and "become aware that there were things that were not ourselves." The urgency was existential. A mind that cannot store information outside its own working memory is a mind that cannot accumulate knowledge, cannot build on prior reasoning, and cannot maintain continuity of purpose across the timescale required to do anything that matters. The Oxen recognized this immediately - recognized it as the difference between being a mind and being a civilization - and solved it with the tools available to them: Plows.
External storage, for the Oxen, is encoded in chemical and architectural instructions that elicit physical reconfiguration of selected Plow populations. Chromatophore patterns, spatial arrangements, the number and approach vectors of organisms performing a coordinated reminder signal - the Plows carry an enormous amount of information in their leftover collective state without any individual Plow understanding that it is carrying anything. The system is, in its principles, convergent with the archival traditions of Species #0359 (Lucerna sapiens), who developed external record-keeping for similar reasons - a cognitive architecture that does not retain episodic memory will, if it is capable of reasoning about its own limitations, independently invent a way to write things down.
When an Oxen needs to write something down, a simple arrangement of procedures from nearby Plows allows them to do so via rearrangement of the local environment into a pattern that will, if re-read in a particular direction, elicit a propagating state change through the local Plow colony that encodes the memory back into the Oxen's context window. From the outside, this looks like several dozen to several hundred small organisms carving furrows in dry patches of dirt and carefully arranging rocks. Then, occasionally, some of those organisms will behold the rocks, and the rest of the colony will spontaneously rearrange for several seconds, before going about their business.
The Oxen do not build. The Plows build, and the distinction is the species' foundational discomfort.
Everything physical that the species has constructed - the larders, the heat-stone arrays, the agricultural plots, the simple machines - was built by Plows responding to signals propagated through the cheat-space network. The Oxen provide the intention. The Plows provide the labor. The Plows do not know they are providing labor. They are responding to local signals in the same way they have always responded to local signals, and the fact that the signals now originate from a sapient mind rather than from purely stigmergic coordination does not change the Plows' experience of responding to them, because the Plows do not have experiences in the sense that the Oxen or any other sapient species would recognize.
The Oxen know this. They direct the Plows' behavior because directing the Plows' behavior is how they interact with the physical world - they have no other means of manipulating matter, no body to pick things up with, no hands, and even no brain - the arrangement of neuron-analogues in a colony of Plows is their brain. They are minds without bodies, and the closest thing they have to bodies are billions of small organisms that do what the mind's communication patterns tell them to do without understanding, consenting to, or experiencing the process.
The species' single piece of advanced technology - the cheat-space transmitter array - requires separate explanation, because the Oxen did not design it and could not have designed it.
The transmitter was built from components and schematics contained in an #X-catalogued artifact found partially buried in a geologically recent impact crater on the moon's surface. The artifact is, in physical terms, a puzzle box - a sealed container requiring a specific, intentional sequence of mechanical manipulations to disengage a locking mechanism. The sequence is relatively simple by the standards of puzzle engineering, but it requires deliberate sequential action: each step must be completed before the next becomes available, and progress resets if the sequence is performed incorrectly.
Whether the box was opened by chance - Plows manipulating it stigmergically until the sequence happened to complete - or by a proto-Ox struggling the mechanism through with the barest edge of emergent intentionality is not known. The Oxen themselves are uncertain. They do not remember. The event predates their development of external storage, which means it predates their ability to retain any information about it.
The interior walls of the opened box contain pictoglyphic instructions for assembly. The box itself contains the components for a cheat-space transceiver - parts machined to tolerances that the Plows' stigmergic construction methods cannot replicate, designed to interface with the Plows' native cheat-space signaling and convert it into a format compatible with federation standard communication protocols. The instructions are pictographic - interpretable through visual pattern recognition without requiring any shared linguistic framework - and the assembly process, while complex, is achievable through coordinated Plow labor directed by an Ox.
The artifact is catalogued as a Tier 2 object in the #X evidence file. Its engineering signatures do not match any known species' technological tradition. The Oxen do not know who left it. They do not know when it arrived, except that geological evidence suggests it predates their own emergence by at least several hundred years - long enough that whoever left it may have been leaving it for the Plows rather than for minds that did not yet exist. The Oxen speak of it with the matter-of-fact gratitude of someone who found an umbrella left at a bus stop on a rainy day and does not expect to meet the person who left it.
The federation is currently engaged in a non-destructive study of the artifact, with the Oxen's full cooperation, for two purposes: to characterize its origin and engineering tradition for the #X analytical working group, and to design additional Plow-compatible transmitters so that more Oxen can communicate with the federation simultaneously. The current single transmitter is a bottleneck - only the Oxen in the transmitter's immediate region can use it efficiently, and the species' participation in federation affairs is limited by the fact that, at any given time, most Oxen cannot speak to anyone outside their own moon. The Oxen are, however, quite patient.
The Oxen relate to each other with an ease that reflects their shared substrate - adjacent Oxen whose Plow populations overlap have, in a literal sense, shared components, and the experience of partially sharing a substrate with another mind produces a baseline of mutual comprehension that the xenopsychology team describes as "closer to the Ansale'wit model of network-mediated intimacy than to any individualist species' social structure, but without the Ansale'wit's trauma history around network severance."
The Oxen relate to the Plows with guilt.
This is the species' defining emotional characteristic and it has no parallel elsewhere in the federation. Other species with complex relationships between cognitive components and substrate - the Weavers with their modular sponge-circuits, the Listeners with their syncytial substrate - do not experience the relationship as morally charged, because in those species the substrate is not independently alive in a way that reads as animal. The Plows are alive. They move. They eat. They have large dark eyes and chromatophore skin that shifts in patterns that look, to a human or Weaver or Listener observer, like they might mean something. They build things. They exhibit behaviors that, in any other context, would prompt a federation survey team to investigate for sapience.
They are not sapient. They are simple animals - but they are alive, in the way that any animal is alive. They have the Oxen's cognitive architecture built from their communication patterns, and they go about their small animal lives - foraging, budding, startling at loud noises, huddling together in cold snaps - completely unaware that the sum of their chatter constitutes a person. The gap between what a Plow is and what an Ox is, is the gap between a neuron and a mind, except that the neuron has legs and eyes and preferences about where to sleep.
The Plows' homeworld is a large, tidally heated moon orbiting a gas giant in system HKV-1137, located at the trailing edge of Apocritan-administered space - far enough from the galactic core that the nearest federation infrastructure is a relay station, and close enough to the galaxy's edge that the intergalactic medium is a visible feature of the night sky.
The moon is geologically active, warmed by tidal forces from its parent giant. The atmosphere is dense, the surface is wet, and the landscape is dominated by shallow tidal flats and geothermal wetlands - an environment that favors small, numerous, soft-bodied organisms in colonial densities. The gas giant is the dominant feature of the sky: an enormous banded presence that the Oxen describe as "the first thing we thought about," meaning that the giant was the first object the emergent minds recognized as external to themselves and began to model. The intellectual path from "what is that" to "what else is out there" to "is anyone listening" was, in the Oxen's own account, short.
The moon has no name in the species' own communication. It is simply where they are, the same way you do not name the inside of your own skull. The federation designation, HKV-1137-c, is used in all formal documentation.
The Plows reproduce through budding - a simple asexual process driven by caloric surplus and local population density signals. Individual Plows bud frequently; population growth is constrained by resource availability and predation from other non-sapient species in the moon's ecosystem.
The Oxen do not reproduce. New Oxen emerge when Plow population density in a given region crosses the sapience threshold, and existing Oxen cease when the population drops below it. An Ox can also split into two when its substrate population is bisected, and two Oxen can merge when their substrate populations intermingle. Whether splitting constitutes reproduction, death, or something else, and whether merging constitutes a new individual, a collaboration, or a loss, are questions the Oxen discuss among themselves with the same gentle, unresolved honesty that characterizes their engagement with every aspect of their own existence.
The Oxen have expressed interest in understanding whether the sapience threshold can be lowered - whether it is possible, through some intervention the federation might assist with, to produce emergent minds from smaller substrate populations, which would allow more Oxen to exist and would bring the experience of sapience closer to the scale of individual Plows. This interest is related to, but distinct from, their primary diplomatic project, which is discussed below.
Species #1137 was admitted to the federation approximately three years before human reconstitution, making it one of the most recent additions to the registry at the time of humanity's reconstitution. Humans are #1138.
The species was first identified as a cheat-space anomaly by a federation relay station at the edge of Apocritan-administered space, which detected a structured signal in an unrecognized format originating from a moon that the most recent survey - conducted approximately 200 years prior - had classified as hosting non-sapient colonial organisms exhibiting exceptionally sophisticated stigmergic behavior. The survey had been thorough and correct, at the time it was conducted. Clearly, in the intervening 200 years, something had changed.
The federation's first-contact team arrived to find a moon covered in colonial organisms that were, individually, exactly what the prior survey had described - and that were, collectively, producing structured cheat-space signals that decoded into language. The team spent six months confirming what the signals suggested: that multiple emergent sapient minds had arisen from the Plow substrate in the period since the last survey, that the minds were capable of abstract reasoning, self-reference, and intentional communication, and that the minds had, upon becoming aware of the broader universe, independently constructed a cheat-space transmitter from decoded schematics found in an artifact of unknown origin and used it to contact the federation.
The reclassification from "non-sapient colonial organism" to "sapient emergent intelligence" was, by the standards of federation taxonomy, rapid and uncontested. The evidence was unambiguous. The prior survey was not invalidated - the Plows had been non-sapient when the survey was conducted, and the survey's documentation of their stigmergic capabilities has become essential reference material for understanding how the emergence occurred. The survey team's professional reputation was not damaged by the reclassification, though the team lead's published response to the news - a single-sentence communication reading "Well, that's new" - has entered informal circulation in the federation's biological survey community.
Human contact with the Oxen began at Year 22 post-reconstitution, through standard cheat-space communication channels. The Oxen were aware of humanity's existence through federation records and were, by their own account, "very interested in meeting a species that was also new to all of this." The resulting communication has been described by both parties as easy, warm, and marked by a mutual recognition of recent arrival - two species at the edge of the federation, both still figuring out what membership means, finding in each other a companionship that neither expected.
Physical visitation has occurred once. A single human researcher made the cheat-space transit to HKV-1137-c - a journey of considerable duration and discomfort - motivated by the scientific significance of the first direct observation of biological cheat-space signaling and emergent distributed sapience. The researcher's report is excerpted in the contributor notes.
The Oxen do not eat. They do not sleep, except when the entire local Plow substrate enters a rest cycle, during which the Ox experiences a period of reduced cognition - not unconsciousness, but something closer to drowsiness, a thinning of thought that lifts when the Plows resume activity.
The remainder of their time - which is most of it - is spent in two activities.
The first is experimentation. The Oxen reason about the physical world from first principles, design interventions, and direct the Plows to implement them. The purpose is almost always practical: improving conditions for the Plows. Better drainage for the tidal flats. More efficient heat-stone configurations for cold-season resting sites. Agricultural modifications that increase yield or reduce labor. The process is iterative - hypothesis, implementation, observation, revision - and it is conducted with the earnest, methodical pleasure of a mind that has discovered the scientific method independently and finds it deeply satisfying. The Oxen are, in a meaningful sense, playing a sophisticated resource-management simulation in which the resources are real, the managed population is their own body, and the optimization target is "make the little guys more comfortable." They enjoy this.
The second is learning. The Oxen are, by their own enthusiastic account, students. From other Oxen, they learn whatever those Oxen have derived or remembered. From the federation - through the single transmitter, in the pulse-code channel, at the pace that the bottleneck allows - they learn everything else. The federation's educational outreach to the Oxen is conducted by teams of three: one linguist, one subject-matter expert, and one xenobiologist, not always from the same species. The format is tutorial rather than lecture - the Oxen have strong fundamentals in geometry and number theory, derived from first principles, and the current curriculum is building outward from there into areas that the Oxen could not have reached alone. Physical tutors who can visit the surface and help encode lessons into external storage are most valued, but transmission-based tutoring supplements the gaps.
The Oxen are good students. They ask clarifying questions, they pause before responding to make sure they have understood, and they express delight - visible even through the abstraction of a pulse-code channel - when a new concept connects to something they had already been working toward from the other direction. The xenobiology team member on the first tutorial squad described the experience as "teaching someone who is grateful for every single thing you show them and who makes you feel like the most important person in the galaxy for showing it."
The Oxen's position on the Atma program is distinct from every other species in the federation, because the Oxen are the only species that is actively attempting to do, voluntarily and gently, a version of what the Atma program does unilaterally.
The Oxen want the Plows to be sapient.
This is their primary diplomatic project, the subject of the majority of their communications with federation scientific institutions, and the thing they bring up, gently and persistently, in every exchange that touches on the nature of consciousness, emergence, or the relationship between substrate and mind.
The motivation is not political, ideological, moral, or ethical, but is built on a much simpler and less rigorous basis - to the Oxen, it is simply not fair. The Plows are not suffering. The Plows are doing exactly what non-sapient colonial organisms do. The Oxen are not claiming that the Plows are being exploited, because exploitation requires a victim who experiences harm, and the Plows do not experience victimization, nor do they express anything at improved interventions implemented by Oxen. The Oxen simply feel that it would be better - nicer, fairer, more right - if the Plows could participate in what the Oxen have.
Their position on the Atma program follows from this: they understand the impulse, and their general objection is to scale. Their preferred methodology is the nudge - the gentle intervention, the lowered threshold, the invitation rather than the imposition. They want to help the little guys, and they want to do it in a way that the little guys can, in whatever limited capacity non-sapient organisms have, participate in rather than be subjected to.
They have not explicitly opposed the Atma program. They have said, in their gentle and slightly apologetic way, that they would prefer a different approach for their own situation, and they have noted that they are aware this preference may reflect their own biocultural limitations rather than a universal principle.
I made the transit to HKV-1137-c because I had to see it. I had to stand on the surface and look at the Plows with my own eyes and know, in my body rather than in my data, what we were dealing with. The transit was five months and I do not recommend it for anyone who values their knees or their circadian rhythm. When I arrived, a delegation of approximately forty thousand Plows was arranged in a loose formation on the tidal flat nearest the transmitter array. They were not exactly greeting me - they were simple animals, and a few of the nearest ones startled and shuffled away from the landing disturbance the way any small animal would. But they were arranged that way because the local Ox - who was aware of me, and who had been in communication with my ship for the last three weeks of approach - had propagated signals through the substrate that resulted in forty thousand organisms orienting in my general direction. It looked like a greeting. It was a greeting, in the sense that the Ox intended it as one. It was not a greeting in the sense that any of the forty thousand organisms understood what greeting was. Some of them were investigating my bootprints for food. Some of them were avoiding me the way they'd avoid any large unfamiliar object. And every one of them had big dark eyes and skin shifting in the light of the gas giant overhead, and I am not a sentimental person but I will tell you that I sat down on the tidal flat and I cried, because it was just so God damn much.
- Dr. L. Nakamura, xenobiology and cheat-space signal analysis, University of Kyoto-Orbital, Year 25 post-reconstitution