(from “The Archives of the United Nations Quantum Corps”)

 “The Coethi”

Throughout the series Tales of the Quantum Corps, the main adversary has been referred to as The Old Ones.  The real name of this extraterrestrial race is the Coethi.  From the files of Quantum Corps Intelligence (Q2), we can now reveal the following:

The basic element of the Coethi is a nanobot.  An autonomous, nanoscale assembler/disassembler of incredible sophistication and complexity. 

Nobody knows how the Coethi came to be, even the Coethi themselves.  As an organized superorganism of bots several light-years in extent, the Coethi have existed for a substantial fraction of the age of the Universe.  Best guess by Earth scientists is 4-5 billion years old. 

It is known or strongly suspected that the Coethi were instrumental in seeding Earth with self-replicating molecules that eventually evolved into living organisms, although the evolutionary track went awry.

The Coethi are a true superswarm of vast proportions.  In size and extent and connection density, it exceeds the complexity of all the human minds that have ever lived on Earth combined.  It is a thinking sentience, whose true environment is now interstellar space. 

There is an archive of knowledge (humans have called it The Archive) within the Coethi, a sort of computational cloud or main memory, which retains all information ever created or experienced by the swarm.  Red Hammer was able to access this Archive through understanding how to operate the Keeper system at Paryang monastery in Tibet. 

Within this Archive is information indicating that the Coethi originated on an actual home world, somewhere in the M75 cluster in Sagittarius.  The data show that the home world was destroyed by a nearby supernova and the surviving elements dispersed into space in a sort of interstellar diaspora.  As humans reckon universe time, this happened at least 4-6 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was approximately 7 billion years after the Big Bang.

There is no known head or leadership group or body.  However, the term Central Entity has been used by Config Zero to refer to the Coethi.  Also, the term Mother Swarm has been used. 

Nanobotic elements of the Coethi engage in some specialization to ensure that the swarm survives and the Central Entity is maintained.  Bots can specialize in such tasks as logical processing, communication, maintenance, archiving and memory, internal transport, navigation, world-seeding, orientation, etc. 

Part of the Coethi swarm is organized as a vast logic array or processor, capable of quantum computation on a stupendous scale.  Effectively, this could be considered the Central Entity.  IT people would call it a galactic scale CPU.   But the truth is that the Coethi are a true collective entity whose behavior evolves from relatively simple rules applied to a vast congregation.  Most sentience and observable behavior emanating from the Coethi is emergent from the complexity and scale of the nanobotic connections. 

It’s not too farfetched to consider the Coethi as a sort of galactic brain, although it certainly doesn’t encompass the entire Milky Way galaxy. 

But the Coethi have an Imperative of Life which compels them to grow and expand the swarm.  Ultimately, they want to unite all world-based instances of swarm life which they have seeded into a giant, galaxy-spanning swarm or hive mind (like a neural network or computational cloud).  To the Coethi, this is the Imperative of Life itself.  The Imperative of Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or builds structure or order.  Life is anti-entropic. 

In order to get their heads around the idea of the Coethi, some descriptors used have been: galactic brain, interstellar neural network, computational cloud, galactic internet, and universal web.  The basic organizing principle or topology of the Coethi is unknown and can only be speculated about. 

The general physical dimensions of the Coethi swarm have been estimated to vary anywhere from a few billion kilometers in breadth to several light years.  Cosmologists say that very few organized structures in the Universe are that big.  Astronomers point to some nebula, gas and dust clouds, even black holes as objects of that dimension or larger.  There are some cosmologists who question whether the Coethi swarm is truly alive in a traditional sense.  Even biologists say the proven existence of the Coethi stretches the definition of life and sentience nearly to the breaking point. 

The Coethi can manipulate quantum states of the subscale fine structure of space itself to communicate and affect matter at great distances. As one scientist says, “If the Universe were a great quilt, the Coethi can yank on a fiber at one end and untie a knot at the other.”  Their ability to use quantum entanglement as a means of manipulation is eons ahead of Humans’ ability to understand, let alone emulate. 

Throughout the Tales of the Quantum Corps, we’ve always considered the Coethi as an adversary, heading toward our solar system to absorb all matter into its vast swarm.  But perhaps that’s not totally accurate.  Could the Coethi be or become an ally rather than an enemy?

We’ll explore this possibility as we continue to plumb the intel files of Quantum Corps, for research has begun to reveal that the Coethi also possess the rather startling capability of manipulating time and space…traveling across time.  In fact, there are indications showing that the Coethi’s real adversary is not Humanity as we know it, but rather far-future descendants of Humanity—we can call them Umans—who have begun to occupy regions of the galaxy that the Coethi consider their own territory.

Look for more details and revelations from Quantum Corps Intelligence in the next post, due in August 2017.

See you then.

Phil B.