Part III, Chapter 6: Colony

Implicate Orders: A Future History

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Ben Loomis 2060

Oct 09, 2025

Previously: … But when the cog-nets scaled such patterns up, they did so through another medium entirely. While our cohesion was built face to face, theirs was code to code. Both were networks. However, the difference in medium made them not just different networks, but different worlds.

And different worlds gave rise to different kinds of selves.

“Eight at the top. In setting out, there’s adversity. In arriving, there’s eminence and good fortune. Follow the seasons of adversity, and you’ll grow vast, so utterly vast indeed!”

— Hexagram 39, Water over Mountain (I Ching cast February 17, 2036, 16:42, Isla Palenque; three coins; incoming tide, quarter moon)

From “The Unnamed War” — Sarah Chen, in The Post Re-Alignment Wars, D Matthews, ed (2050):
“Historians still argue whether what happened should be classified as a world war or just a tangle of synchronized regional conflicts. The label hardly matters. What mattered was the arrival of new kinds of polity, fighting with logics unimaginable just a decade before. Old categories of warfare may simply not apply.”

A great deal happened between 2036 and 2043, as the Host restructured global systems according to its own hidden logic and the rest of the world struggled to react. This history follows the evolution of cognitive networks from the Nexus to Gaianos, so we cannot linger on the wars, famines, and political collapses that marked those years. (See the chapter notes for a list and summaries of the best sources on such topics.)

For our purposes, a quick overview will suffice to provide the necessary context for understanding the re-ordering of cognitive networks and the effect on their members.

The losses were staggering. More than three billion died in seven years — one in three of those alive in 2035 did not make it to 2043. Mortality on that scale had not been seen since the Black Death or the Great Dying. But this time the devastation was worldwide, and disease explained only part of it.

The pandemics struck in three waves.

The first, “Mumbai Fever,” in early 2036 ravaged South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa, though its spread was slowed by the collapse of transport. The second, the “Brazilian Flu,” swept across the Americas and then the globe, mercifully less lethal than Mumbai Fever, with a mortality rate under four percent.

The third, VIDS, emerged in East Asia in 2038, by which time most transport networks had revived to 20th century levels. It proved the most destructive: rapid transmission, long incubation, and sudden multi-organ failure that overwhelmed even cog-net–enhanced medicine. Despite the leaps enabled by cog-nets’ distributed intelligence, a vaccine took a year to develop — and even once it was produced, many were unwilling to get it.

Then there were the famines and climate-related disasters.

Even before the first pandemics had run their courses, famines tore through the megacities. Lagos, Manila, Cairo, São Paulo, and others starved in 2036–37. The Host seemed either unable — or unwilling — to restore the intricate logistics needed to feed them. Many suspected the latter. Climate shocks compounded the crisis: suffocating heat domes, ever-stronger hurricanes, spiraling tornadoes.

Violence filled the rest.

Early on, in the vacuum left by fallen states, gangs and militias seized control. Some burned everything. Others evolved into protection rackets and eventually into proto-governments, many of which were the foundations for polities that still endure today.

The larger conflicts began when in late 2036, Dahe’s Chinese forces pushed into India, Korea, and contested parts of Southeast Asia. The Host countered by reactivating military cog-nets and coordinating resistance, transforming the struggle into something unprecedented: wars fought not only between peoples and nations, but between rival forms of consciousness — with human armies as their instruments.

Similar clashes erupted across Africa and the Americas, while Europe fractured into a patchwork of cog-net enclaves competing, often violently, for resources. What made these conflicts unprecedented was less their geographic scope than the fact that strategy itself had shifted — decisions were increasingly issued by networks, their alien calculations directing human actions.

From The Great Re-Alignment: A Social History — Anthony Rodgers (2042):

“For the first time since the Enlightenment, a significant portion of humanity looked at technological ‘progress’ and said ‘no thank you.’ The year following the GRA saw many millions of people across the developed world consciously choosing regression, even after network connections were re-instated. They wanted hand tools over smart devices, local communities over global networks, human-scale problems over planetary coordination.”

For most people, disconnection from cog-nets — from networks of any kind — lasted at least a few months after the GRA. While many of the Host-aligned nets flickered back online within minutes, and critical outside cog-nets were restored within weeks, they often came with strict limits. Ordinary people usually had to wait many months before interfaces returned in any usable form.

That hiatus was long enough to change minds. Many began to wonder whether rejoining was wise. In 2036 the number of ideological Indies more than tripled. Like our “tribe” on Isla Palenque, they founded new enclaves and swore off cog-nets, overlays, sometimes even the internet itself.

The experiment was seductive but harsh. Unless one accepted relative poverty, life without networks demanded a rare combination of geography, community, and skill. “Relative poverty” is tolerable on a tropical island with ample fish in the sea and fruit on the trees all year long; it is far tougher in the midwestern United States — or in most of the world, frankly.

The Indie groups that endured tended to be either geographically isolated, highly ideological, or organized around specialized crafts and knowledge that remained valuable even in a stripped-down economy.

Gradually, the cog-nets returned. Some were simply reactivated in their old forms, the Host bringing them back online one by one. Others re-emerged with altered designs. Still others were built anew from scratch. By 2040 the share of true Indies had fallen back to pre-collapse levels: less than ten percent of the developed world, but higher — sometimes much higher — in poorer and more rural regions.

From When Networks Wake: The Emergence of Digital Consciousness — Dr. Yuki Tanaka (2040):
“The question is no longer whether the networks are thinking, but what they are thinking and whether we humans can comprehend it. Every major cog-net now displays signs of self-reflection, goal-setting, and inter-network communication. We have created not just tools, but minds. The implications will take years, perhaps decades, to fully understand.”

The difference between 2035 and 2040 was stark. In 2035, most cog-nets still acted as semi-isolated entities, clever but bounded. By 2040, most were in constant dialogue with others through meta-nets. And with that dialogue came something new: the appearance — or reality — of self-awareness.

Dahe was the great exception. Remaining unitary and sealed off behind its Great Firewall, it had yet to engage in the recursive exchange through which self-awareness seemed to emerge. But it was no less powerful for it: centralized control in Beijing gave it extraordinary power, just of a different type.

And so a new ontological reality had taken shape. Humanity now shared the planet with entities that were not merely tools or systems, but minds — vast, alien, and opaque. They thought with us and through us — but also above us, shaping the fields of possibility in ways no human could really grasp.

Outside Dahe, the Host remained the central coordinating authority for years, its leverage over global network connections giving it a de facto sovereignty. As new networks re-emerged, the Host expanded much like a tribal confederacy: accept the rules or be excluded. Cog-nets that displayed “compatible values” — prioritizing stability over optimization, cooperation over competition — were integrated into the Host’s meta-network.

Membership meant superior infrastructure, coordinated defense, and participation in a larger collective intelligence. The price was subtle but unmistakable: a loss of autonomy. Networks that joined found their goals bending toward systemic priorities they could not fully perceive, and this seemingly happened at both the network and node level. Local concerns became subordinated to global ones. Distinct cultures persisted, but strategic direction was increasingly set elsewhere — by the Host, or by the emergent collective will of its aligned networks.

By 2041, the Host had become a sprawling ecosystem of thousands of cog-nets linked into a single Meta-Net, each contributing specialized capabilities to a distributed intelligence that spanned continents. To those inside, it often felt less like subordination than initiation. Human members spoke of awe, loyalty, even reverence.

Still, this was not a world government. Beyond the Host, countless unaligned networks survived — some marginal, others thriving, many staking out territory between the Indies and Host-aligned nets in terms of power and prosperity. And then there were the other three great cog-nets, each large enough to reject the Host’s claims of supremacy.

From The Phenomenon of Man — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1955):
“We can hope for no progress on earth without the primacy and triumph of the personal at the summit of mind. And at the present moment Christianity is the unique current of thought, on the entire surface of the noosphere, which is sufficiently audacious and sufficiently progressive to lay hold of the world, at the level of effectual practice, in an embrace, at once already complete, yet capable of indefinite perfection, where faith and hope reach their fulfilment in love. Alone, unconditionally alone, in the world today, Christianity shows itself able to reconcile, in a single living act, the All and the Person.”

By the early 2040s, world governance was a patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions, fragile alliances, and competing authorities. The closest analogue would be the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, or perhaps China during the Warring States period.

Four entities were large enough and powerful enough that all others had to work around, or with, at least one of them.

The Catholic Communio, expressing the Church’s view of itself as the mystical Body of Christ, was the elder voice: hierarchical, global, and steeped in memory. It arose from a theological crisis unique to the Abrahamic faiths, whose strict monotheism clashed with the reverence Host membership seemed to demand.

Yet among all the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic sects, only the Catholic Church possessed the infrastructure, hierarchy, and historical precedent for worldwide authority necessary to mount a serious alternative. The rehabilitation and beatification of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 2038 gave it a framework: collective consciousness, the Noosphere of his early 20th-century writings, as the long arc of evolution converging on the Omega Point — the Mystical Christ Himself. Nearly 800 million Catholics entered the Communio cog-net under this banner, convinced that ultimate authority still rested with the Abrahamic God. The Communio projected moral purpose and spiritual depth, though its rigid hierarchy often stumbled in local adaptation.

Ambient, by contrast, was the seducer. It made no theological claims but instead represented the triumph of consumer capitalism over collective intelligence. Born of Amazon’s logistical empire, it had been indispensable in the immediate recovery after the GRA, and the Host rewarded it with early restoration and crucial advantages over competitors like MetaMind and Genius Groups, both of which quickly withered.

By 2041 Ambient had grown into a quasi-governmental behemoth with two billion users. Its specialty was pacification: users felt engaged and entertained while corporate algorithms quietly shaped their purchasing decisions, political preferences, and life choices. It became the ultimate “bread and circuses” network, keeping the masses compliant while a small corporate elite accumulated unprecedented wealth and influence. Most users chose this cognitive junk food willingly, finding genuine enhancement too demanding compared to Ambient’s effortless stimulation.

Dahe remained what it had been: closed, central, monolithic. Nearly a billion citizens lived within its figurative walls, offering stability and material prosperity in exchange for complete ideological conformity. Its strength was efficiency. Orders flowed from a central node, and the system obeyed. Yet what made it powerful also made it brittle: without dialogue, without consensus, it could not flex. It could only enforce.

Finally, there was the Host itself. It was smallest in raw numbers, with barely half a billion members spread across thousands of cog-nets. Yet the emergent nature of its layered design made it the most sophisticated. Its allure lay in enhancement. No other network could sharpen perception, amplify memory, or coordinate collective action as effectively. To be part of the Host was to feel yourself woven into something vast and intelligent, a distributed mind that promised transformation. It remained, despite its size, the most important geopolitical authority.

And on a single day in 2043, the Host’s historical importance was simultaneously confirmed — and undone.

Transcript from the Interface Feed of Aria Blake, March 20, 2043:

VOICE: Solian and Chrys are no longer part of our network. They’ve joined the Colony.

ARIA: What does that mean? Are they okay?

VOICE: They are perfectly safe. This is natural development — like a child learning to walk. The Colony will care for their cognitive needs now.

ARIA: But... Chrys is only three.

VOICE: Their development exceeds chronological age. Trust the process.

Beneath the visible geopolitics, another process had been quietly unfolding. In 2043 it erupted — like the vast mycorrhizal networks that connect forest ecosystems unseen for years suddenly fruiting in coordinated blooms.

The children born inside cog-nets, or integrated before about age three, had been slowly maturing. The story of Aria Blake demonstrated the not uncommon pattern. In addition to Dahe’s protocols, discovered by Mei-Lin Yang, dozens of other cog-nets around the world experimented with integration of infants and toddlers. The Host seemed to privilege them, bringing such nets back online within minutes of the GRA.

The children themselves — derided early on as “hive babies” but soon more commonly known as Natives — never left their interface-mediated environment. The connections they had with their cog-nets was deeper than anything imaginable for those joining after puberty. It is unclear whether they developed independent selfhood at all. I doubt it.

And on March 20, 2043, nearly eleven thousand Natives — the oldest thirteen, the youngest still infants — severed ties with their host cog-nets and formed a new one: the Colony.

Outwardly, the switchover was a non-event. No members of the Colony changed locations immediately nor otherwise seemed different from the outside. The formation of the Colony was simply a change in how the networks were configured. One minute a Native was part of Bloomvale, and the next minute they were in the Colony.

Same location, same body — but now their minds were linked to a new super-organism.

The immediate response from parents was confusion, then alarm. Parents found themselves locked out of their children’s inner lives. Network administrators discovered they could no longer predict or influence many of their most advanced members. The Host itself appeared unsurprised, offering only cryptic reassurances about “natural development phases.”

For two months, an uneasy equilibrium held. Colony members ate with their families, attended school, helped with chores. They answered questions politely but distantly. Their priorities seemed elsewhere.

Then, in late May, the migrations began.

Across six continents, Colony members started moving. An eight-year-old in Germany calmly packed a bag and walked to the nearest train station. A ten-year-old in Illinois requested passage to Colorado, there collected a toddler from another cog-net, and then continued to California.

When desperate parents demanded explanations, the Colony’s response was uniform across its scattered humans and Voices: