She scanned the surface, but it seemed the destruction of the Vigilantes had been a huge setback to the human’s territory. There was nowhere left for humans to live in Tokyo. No matter where she went, it was spiders, spiders, spiders, jellyfish, spiders, and jellyfish. When she was lucky enough to find a human they already had spiders inside them and were being eaten alive. The existing ecology was collapsing. Even the cockroaches were declining in the face of these spiders.
She had to find some fans. First she made herself available, then she chased her public down, and now she’d grown into an idol that searched for fans. In these times, it was not simply enough to go where the fans were; a good idol had to actively search. The 4th Generation Idol was ill-suited for long distance travel. The Idol adapted herself to the times. Thus, the 5th Generation Idol was born.
The 5th Generation Idol used the airborne giant jellyfish as the base for her body. She altered the 700 meter jellyfish so it would be part of her. She placed her brain in the stomach membrane at the center of the jellyfish, sending her nerves out through all parts of its body. All it could do was float on the wind pressure, lacking any real maneuverability, so she made an air bladder, a sphere that could supply putrid gas. The jellyfish could no more swim against the wind current than plankton can, but by using her brain’s control to turn it, ejecting putrid gas, and taking sea water on as ballast, she managed to free it from the winds, elevating it to the level of nekton. She added eyeballs to the tips of the tentacles, allowing her to carefully observe the surface from the sky above.
At last, the 5th Generation Idol launched her first world tour. No planes, trains, or automobiles, just a slow journey alone by jellyfish. Her goal: to discover anything that might become a fan. The solar winds grew more frequent, auroras glittered in the night sky, the sea was covered in a red tide caused by all the creatures that had died to ultraviolet waves, and in an age where Novum Organum replaced both plants and animals she was the lone idol on Earth.
Starting with a tour across Japan, she set out to see the world. She followed the Ryukyu Island chains, entered the Eurasian continent, and headed south towards Oceania. On Sri Lanka, she found spider threads descending from the asteroids in orbit around the Earth, surrounded by a swarm of hardened jellyfish that filled the stratosphere. Looking up, the jellyfish dispersed the sunlight, glowing like thin clouds, and when she looked closer she could see their digestive systems moving. The hardened jellyfish were not dead, but still alive, gathering moisture through the incredibly long tentacles that stretched all the way to the surface. The wind currents tore pieces off the hardened equatorial jellyfish, and these formed new jellyfish, embarked on a journey to the south.
Since the hardened jellyfish were blocking the ultraviolet light at the equator, perhaps the old ecology was making a comeback, the 5th Generation Idol hoped. This hope proved foolhardy. As she neared the equator, she saw that the tentacles dangling from the stratosphere had consumed all living things, leaving a massive sea of death behind. Since all higher forms of life had been wiped out, plankton had proliferated, and with nothing to eat their dead, they had rotted. The blue sea was gone, leaving a vast wake of chemical sludge as far as the eye could see.
When the 5th Generation Idol saw the tentacles from heaven moving to consume her, she hastily left Oceania. After that, she spent a few hundred years searching through Europe, Africa, and the Americas, but she found not a single fan. It took a lot out of her to perform concerts in venues devoid of fans.
The 5th Generation Idol couldn’t bear the sadness. She needed a strategy, something that would provide her mental support. She would have to create fans. In the next age, it would be standard for idols to create their own fans.
But when it came to making fans, in this age, there was nothing to make them out of. All vertebrates, down to the smallest fish, had been hunted by the jellyfish and were all endangered species. There were plenty of spiders and jellyfish, but she was extremely unsure about turning them into fans. Of the two, the spiders seemed slightly more feasible. In fact, with their complex webs, spiders had much more complex nervous systems than other arthropods, though hardly ideal. Your average mind might consider elevating the spiders into intelligent life. But the ultra mega cute genius Idol thought otherwise. She decided to construct something out of both spiders and jellyfish.
How could she create intelligence? All that required was a neural network. A neural network was modeled after the operations of nerves in the brain. Nerve cells could be either neurons, which functioned like electric lines, or synapses, which functioned like antenna; electrical signals from one neuron would cross the spaces called synaptic clefts as neurotransmissions, arriving at other neurons. The transmission rate in this process is affected by the input signal in the synapse. Learning is based on these changes to transmission effectiveness. Changes to transmission effectiveness can not only improve the frequency of transmission — they can also lower it. Additionally, the flow of information is not one-sided — it is also possible for feedback to return received information to the input layer. The human brain contains approximately 100 trillion nerve cells arranged like this, resulting in an incredibly complex information network.
Unfortunately, jellyfish lacked a central nervous system. To replace this, the Idol planned to make the jellyfish themselves into nerve cells. The cells in human brains used ion gradients to transmit information via changes in the electric potential, but the jellyfish nerve cells transmitted information via the movements of the spiders within them. She made a jellyfish network by connecting tentacles to bell shapes, filling the tentacles with spiders. When a stimulus was received from a different jellyfish, the spiders were excited, and they passed that baton down the lines of spiders, communicating the information. So how did she establish the weighting required for learning? In biological brains, information transmission speeds are increased by wrapping nerve cells in a type of cell known as oligodendroglia. The insulation provided by oligodendroglia, like the coating used on electric wires, makes it possible to transfer information effectively. Within the jellyfish network, the oligodendroglia functionality was provided by spider thread. She placed spider threads in frequently used jellyfish interiors so that when spiders touched the threads the vibrations instantly ran down them, swiftly transmitting the information. Her plan was to make hundreds of trillions of jellyfish like this, placing them all over the Earth’s sky and oceans, making a massive neural network on a planet-sized scale. We could call it the Earth Fan Conversion Plan.
She did not have time to hand-make hundreds of trillions of jellyfish nerve cells one by one. Even if she could make one a day, it would take three hundred million years to achieve her minimum goal. Just thinking about working for that long made her want to throw up. So she decided to leave the reproduction to the jellyfish themselves. She established a life cycle in which they would focus on reproduction when young, and as they matured, connect to each other as nerve cells. When first born they were only a few centimeters in size, but as they grew, their bodies would become hundreds of meters long and connect to nearby jellyfish nerve cells. Repeating this, the network would propagate itself, gradually achieving intelligence by adapting to environmental data.
After three million years, the Earth was completely covered in jellyfish. The sea and sky were filled with floating bells and tangled tentacles. If you looked very carefully, you could see the translucent tentacles pulsing, and black things scuttling through them. Those were the spiders. Spiders that were carrying information. Spiders provided the jellyfish with nourishment and consumed the jellyfish when they died. With plenty of energy provided by the sun’s radiation, the network was operating at full power.