As the network learned, it began to show glimmers of intelligence. The jet streams had expanded as high as the stratosphere, but after a few hundred thousand years of reactions by the network they were slowly weakened, calming the raging storms. Several hundred thousand years of orders from the network in space resulted in tossing the ocean waters until the axis tilt was corrected and the seasons were eliminated. The jellyfish network ran on solar radiation and had no need of excess environmental changes. Meanwhile, this was pure hell for traditional life forms, whose already fragile ecosystems were utterly decimated.
By this time, the Idol had continued her process of minor upgrades, and was now in the 11th Generation. The jellyfish network was not what she would call a satisfactory fan. The network’s intelligence resembled a conscious mind but was not one. Certainly, the jellyfish network had intelligence. But it was, figuratively speaking, a mind without a face. With humans, there was a clear link between their actions and their internal reasoning; they would wave glow sticks to express their joy, shove the person in front of them out of anger, or blow a fortune at an auction trying to score a ticket. Meanwhile, the jellyfish network’s internal conditions were linked to its actions, but those conditions were never what we’d call ‘reason’. The network’s actions were always the result of the output from the whole network or the result of what the network had learned; they were always changing. In other words, it never took action based on individual emotions or specific reasons, but always as a result of information processed by the entire network.
This was not what the Idol had expected. She’d modeled the jellyfish network on the human brain, but what it produced was intelligence she could not comprehend. To her, consciousness went hand-in-hand with specific reasons and emotions. Over time, those formed her ‘self.’ The jellyfish network had no ‘self.’
The Idol grew to fear the jellyfish network. This was a shock as great as if the flood of audience members into a concert hall had turned out to be zombies. Adding fuel to this fire, lately the jellyfish network had become aware of the Idol’s existence, viewed her as a potential threat to its continued existence, and begun to attack. It was like there were spears being hurled from the crowd.
After tens of millions of years of hard work, her attempt at creating a fan had clearly ended in failure. For all her years as an idol, her fan count remained at zero. There were days when she considered giving up on the whole idol thing. But each time, she remembered her high school days, when throwing herself into her idol activities had made everything gleam. How her heart sang when she got her dance steps right, the thrill when the spotlight caught her, the rush when the audience roared, and the certainty that she was shining bright. She wanted to be an idol. She didn’t want to let her dream end as a dream. With that thought in her heart, she threw herself into her idol activities once more.
The jellyfish network had spread to a degree unprecedented by any Earth species, but its demise was quite sudden. The unnatural activity levels of the solar flares that had gone on for several million years abruptly came to a halt. Perhaps as a backlash from all the magnetic energy it had been unleashing, sunspots became extremely rare. The sun released far less of the UV rays and radiation that served as the Novum Organum’s primary energy source. As if it had been waiting for that, the ozone layer reformed, further depriving the jellyfish network of the UV rays it needed to survive and sealing its doom. All over the planet, jellyfish nerve cells died. Unable to obtain sufficient energy, the jellyfish turned brown, their bodies disintegrating. The massive web in the sky came apart, and the spiders that had served as the nerve information carriers consumed the jellyfish corpses. Even then, the network was intelligent, and tried to fight this threat. It made hydrogen gas balloons and tried to raise itself up to the ionosphere, diminishing the impact of the ozone layer. It tried to destroy the ozone layer with CFC gases.
If it had been given more time, perhaps it would have found effective countermeasures. But the cessation of the sun’s activity levels came out of nowhere. Like a brain destroyed by lack of oxygen, the jellyfish network came apart, and was soon unable to function cohesively. At last, there were not even enough clusters for it to be considered intelligent at all. The cooling of the Earth also took its toll. As the sun’s magnetic field weakened, the number of cosmic rays striking the Earth increased, causing clouds to germinate and in turn increasing the albedo. Ice formed again at the poles, marking the beginning of a new ice age.
The quieting sun and encroaching ice age were threats to the Idol as well. She, too, had used Novum Organum as a source of energy. Fortunately, she did not burn energy on the massive scale the jellyfish network did, so was able to survive for a while eating dead jellyfish. But this was not a long-term solution. The corpse buffet available to her now would eventually disappear. She needed to make her body eco-friendly. She needed a make-over.
Thus, the Idol entered her 12th Generation. This generation she was a shut-in idol. She covered her body with ice, with carefully constructed muscles sticking out like fins that allowed her to use the power of waves to obtain the energy she needed. These muscles would move in response to electrical stimuli but if they were moved by outside forces they generated electricity instead. Other nourishment she obtained from tentacles she dangled into the depths of the ocean, using filtration to harvest plankton.
Until the surface ecosystems recovered, the 12th Generation Idol continued her shut-in life. This took approximately three hundred million years. During that time, the ordinary lifeforms lurking in the ocean depths to escape the Novum Organum slaughter rose up, filled the seas, and once more stepped out onto land.
The first to make landfall were shrimp, crabs, and other crustaceans; they shrank and grew more varied, evolving into insect-like creatures. The crustaceans were followed by anemones. No longer rooted to one spot, the anemones evolved powerful muscles, moving around rapidly. Using an array of tentacles for legs, whenever they found a crustacean, dozens of legs would snake out and haul it in towards the central mouth. They were followed by sea cucumbers and shellfish.
Some unbelievably large-scale adaptive evolutions later, anemone appeared that could use membranes to glide across the sky and whose tentacles had hardened into scoops that could dig holes. Seizing her chance, the 12th Generation Idol abandoned her shut-in lifestyle and became the 13th Generation Idol. Covering her entire body in narrow anemone tentacles she became able to run across land, and, thanks to surface tension, water.
The 13th Generation Idol was determined to make herself some fans this time. Convinced her previous failure was because she had set herself the difficult task of making a world-sized brain, this time she swore to progress slowly but surely. This time she resolved to follow the mechanisms of traditional evolution. In other words, she protected anemones that exhibited conscious behavior, and slaughtered those that did not. By repeating this, eventually a strain would appear with a will of its own. She wasn’t sure how many millions of years it would take, but it was the safest path. After all, in theory, this was how mankind had come to be.
However, once she actually tried, it proved easier said than done. For starters, what was conscious behavior? It would have been so much easier if the anemones had begun searching for a way to explain their consciousness scientifically, but the whole reason she was trying to help them evolve was because they were doing no such thing. To tell if they had consciousness or not required her to interpret what was going on inside the anemone. She had no idea what being an anemone was like at all. Her plan was doomed from the start.