Volk

Imagine a beastie like an otter, with longer legs and a more fluid gait on land, the size of a short-legged Alsatian or German Shepherd. Their pelt is short and thick and patterned in fractal jags of black and white in an uneven countershading that works well as camouflage both on land and in the water. One of them is not quite as bright as a chimp, but when you bring four or five of them close enough together they start thinking together, and a pack of Volk is easily as intelligent as an average human or other legally sentient member of Puzzlebox.

The Volk are (according to Argent) a species that evolved in a universe where pure relativistic physics holds sway: the classical model of quantum physics is reality, there is no FTL, no artificial gravity, no matter transmission, no computational physics or reality graphics, a strict limit on information density, and so on. Puzzlebox and most of the advanced physics of the Mess simply can't happen. All these things have been proposed, and some experiments that didn't bear out in the Volk's original universe work in the Mess.

Thus their group mind operates through classical physics, using the electromagnetic fields their ancestors used to detect and stun prey. They can't use it as effectively as their ancestors, for that purpose (but if you bother a lone Volk you could be in for a shock), but they can pass neural traffic directly from one of the nodes that terminate their lateral lines to the next, at the speed of light.

Modern Volk language is not based on words, but on stylised packets of the same neural traffic that binds the gestalt mind together. Volk used to use symbolic languages, but the neural languages proved so effective that these languages (and those packs that refused to or were unable to learn Neural Slang) died out over a thousand years ago (more of this in Gestalt).

Volk automation is based on neural networks rather than digital computers, and Volk communicate with their computers using a simplified version of their neural language. This is very nearly a direct mind-computer link, but one that developed when the race was still at the pocket-calculator level.

Argent's communications with Puzzlebox are mediated by a simulation of one of the Volk neural network automata operated by Puzzlebox as a kind of puppet.

Comments

Comment: Could the Volk be described as a Plural-like species that evolved semi-naturally?

Response: Volk are well inside any reasonable definition of Plurals, and evolved that way. Neural languages pushed them right up to the edge of the Terrestrial Singularity while they were still in the bronze age, but the limitations in their naturalistic approach to automation would likely keep them on that edge for a long time, until some chance development flipped a group over to a new level of group intelligence...