The Helianx Proposition/page 3
Due to the lack of predation on Womb Planet, together with their ability to manipulate
their own biology, and the extreme security of their underwater world, individual Helianx lifespan had steadily increased over the generations, in some cases to as much as two million years.
This massively extended lifetime allowed them the luxury of learning. Over time they discovered that as they lay on the surface of the ocean they were able to receive the wisdom gained from the hard experience of millions of races living on as many worlds. Their great crystalline bodies resonated with the insights of other intelligent species. Projected images danced on wavelengths just within their field of perception, acting out the dreams and nightmares of a myriad of species on planets at a thousand different degrees of development.
Information pouring down to the Helianx was absorbed, pondered, picked over endlessly, compared with all that was previously known and originally stored in the virtually limitless memory banks of the combined neural network of the Helianx.
Since the Helianx soaked up their life energy, their food, from the twin suns around which their home planet orbited, they cannot be regarded as true aquatic creatures. This factor served them well when they finally realized their ocean was diminishing in size and depth; their world was literally drying up.
The Helianx had become the masters of survival on their utopian planet. The only extension to the richness of their inner lives that they permitted themselves were large organic computers that they modeled on their brains and cultivated from their own DNA and life plasm. Their ability to manipulate their internal biology combined with their musical sensitivities, had allowed them after thousands of years of experimentation, to use sound as a tool. In the denser medium of water, sound waves become very real and tangible. Just as another species might use frequency modulated radio waves to convey information, so the Helianx used focussed sound waves to form and shape biological matter into the complex mechanism of their immense computers.
One of the great challenges to extremely long lifespans is memory. There is simply too much to remember. It was this that had first impelled the Helianx to create their computers. Thus, these elaborate biological mechanisms stored all that the many generations of Helianx had learned about themselves, as well as the information they had accumulated over the millions of years of eavesdropping on the Universe Broadcast Circuits.
Tragically, it was these computers that were among the first artifacts to fail while the temperature of the water gradually heated up and the seas started to evaporate.
