yeah, group minds -- everybody's tra la la until criticality

(and then it's tra la la for ever)

Red warning lights blinked on across the length of the transit ring. As one, the Comprise kicked free of the machinery, leaping inward in acrobatic unison, like a swirl of orange flower blossoms seen through a kaleidoscope. By tens and scores they linked hands and were snagged by swooping jitneys. Wandering up out of nowhere, hands deep in pockets, Constance said, "That's really quite lovely. It's like a dance."

Wyeth didn't look up. "Not quite so lovely when you consider why they're so perfectly coordinated."

She blinked. "Oh, quite the contrary. When you think of the complex shapes their thoughts take, the mental structures too wide and large to be held by any one mind . . . Well, that's cause for humility, isn't it?" Then, when Wyeth said nothing, "The Comprise is a full evolutionary step up on us, biologically speaking. It's like . a hive organism, you see? Like the Portuguese man-of-war, where hundreds of minute organisms go into making up one large creature several orders of magnitude more highly structured than any of its components."

"I'd say they were an evolutionary step down. Where human thought creates at least one personality per body, the Comprise has subsumed all its personalities into one self. On Earth, some four billion individuals have been sacrificed to make way for one large, nebulous mind. That's not enrichment, it's impoverishment. It's the single greatest act of destruction in human history."

"But can't you see the beauty of that mind? Gigantic, immensely complex, almost godlike?"

"I see the entire population of mankind's home planet reduced to the status of a swarm of bees. A very large swarm of bees, I'll grant you, but insects nevertheless.

Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers is like Bruce Sterling's Schimatrix's younger sister, more playful, possibly smarter.

(always a challenge to gauge the relative intelligence of people who are smarter than me)

The protagonist of Vacuum Flowers is a young woman working in a dead-end job as a QA tester for the current mass entertainment medium, recorded personalities.

She's testing a new AAA title, a dashing (deceased) asteroid miner from the Oort Cloud. She loads her up and decides she likes being this new her better than herself. So she deletes the master and bails, becoming the MacGuffin fugitive.

The thing I love most though is Swanwick's answer to "Why can't the space people go down to Earth" anymore which is so much more interesting than Sterling's "Uhh... things just got controlled and stale and super boring?"

Instead, Swanwick's Earth is a single superorganism that emerged from a runaway self-catalyzing group mind forced upload cataclysm. It's a superintelligence running on wireless neurolinked human substrate.

It can't spread into the solar system because the comms lag from anywhere higher than Earth orbit causes the colony to eventually schism into a distinct mind, which Earth apparently finds existentially unacceptable.

The clipped passage is the first real explanation of what is going on (apologies for the mild spoiler). There is a shaky alliance who, stuck on The Problem, negotiate a rare collaboration with Earth and they are Super Fucking Paranoid about containing the Earthlings.

The terrifying thing about them is they are a random assortment of people, age, sex, ethnicity rendered meaningless. Just nodes, substrate. One of them is a child. It doesn't matter.

Hey, I'm looking forward to the art that will come out of this too, but brush up on your cogsec and practice your LBRPs, friends, because you gotta get lucky every time.

The Comprise only has to get lucky once.