Species Showcase #2: Nevadra

Hidden away in an unassuming cluster of stars, the planet Veera rolls through another cycle of its orbit around an orange sun. This wet, warm world is home to a rather unique sentient species: the Nevadra. Unique not for their four arms, or their triple-segmented legs, features somewhat common in the universe at large, but for the system of webbed ridges that run in thin rows down each creature’s head. Rising only a few inches over their scalp, these rows of membrane form an organic radio communication device, linking each Nevadra with the rest of the species, forming a global network.

Through this network, a central, collective consciousness was born. This mind was distributed equally between all Nevadra, and directed their actions toward mutually beneficial goals. They never knew war, or politics. Suffering, want, and death were only discomforts to be eliminated with a new reorganization of efforts.
Nevadra cities were scattered across the planet like a handful of gemstones flung, new technologies making their lives comfortable and leisurely. At first, this state of affairs brought their linked mind to a new level of contentment, able finally to rest and contemplate the mysteries of the universe.
Once the contemplation began, the contentment did not last.
Very few sentient brains ever truly stop working while alive. The Nevadra brain is no exception. While they eat, while they sleep, while they daydream, the Nevadra’s minds remain active, processing the collective thoughts, ideas, and wonderings of the species as a whole. This proved an extraordinarily efficient way to process mathematics, science, and other answerable questions. It was philosophy, and the unanswerable questions it contained, that they were somewhat less adept at dealing with.

These questions, with no truly satisfactory answers, were left in the collective mind of the Nevadra, reverberating through the network of linked brains, becoming more urgent, more frantic, and more crippling with each new consideration. Before long, the mind found it difficult to focus on anything else.
Metaphysics brought the scientific minds in the Nevadra’s network to their knees, certain that it must solve the problem of how the universe really works, beyond all observable evidence, before it could put it’s minds to anything else. Each new model, each new concept, only raised more questions, and each was based on such flimsy evidence as to collapse entirely under the scrutiny that could not help but be leveled against it.

The question of morality was worse. Before they had developed painkillers and sedatives, they had adopted the practice of killing badly injured or sick Nevadra to spare themselves from their pain. Its defense against this guilt, that the mind as it existed now was not the same mind as then, only further complicated the issue. None of the Nevadra who had played host to the mind of the past sill lived, leaving the collective mind to wonder if it really was the same at all from one moment to the next.

But all these problems were manageable compared to those caused by the biggest question of all: whether it’s existence had a purpose.

Every purpose the shared mind tried to attribute to itself seemed wholly inadequate, either ancillary to some further purpose, or boiling down to a seemingly pointless concept, like survival or experience. As it began to wonder if it’s existence had any meaning at all, it had lapses of malaise and self destruction, segments of the population falling into a depression, barely meeting their own needs, while others participated in violent outbursts, as if the Nevadra hoped to learn the meaning of life by studying pain and death.

The collective consciousness slowly came to realize that this painful and doubting existence was intolerable. It had become aware, in the early days of it’s technological revolution, of the effects of radio waves on a Nevadra’s connection to the collective consciousness. The right radio frequencies would cause interference, and in one experiment, even complete isolation for a short time, with apparently no significant lingering affects once the Nevadra in question rejoined the group mind. It was clear that more research was necessary; to both distract the mind from its unanswerable questions, and to finally put an end to them.
In a year’s time, the inhibitor was designed and built. A device capable of generating the complex signal necessary to blot out each Nevadra’s connection with the rest of the species, using the planet’s native magnetic field to carry that signal to every point on the globe. When the inhibitor was activated, the collective consciousness would end, replaced by meaningless static. After that, only individual minds would remain, too small, to self absorbed, to be trapped by the unanswerable questions.

Was this suicide? Did the group mind exist apart from those creatures that served as its hosts and component parts? Was this the right thing to do?
With the pull of a lever and the press of a button, those terrible questions vanished.