3.1
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There was an air of excitement in Sanctuary. Lucy, true to her words, had given an explanation of what happened this night.
The implications that came with it weren't lost. People knew, now, that there were other survivors.
I mentioned it before, but the people of Sanctuary had a strong communal sentiment. The information given only inflamed the desire to reach out and get to them.
And then Lucy had topped that off with a short speech.
"No more is our Voice the only one that survived in the galaxy. Somewhere out there, other remnants of Humanity still survive. We might be locked in here right now, but our light once shone brightly across the galaxy, and it can do so again. I call to all willing to listen; we can unite Humanity again, restore goodness to its rightful place, and if the hell that invades our galaxy seeks to stop us from blazing a trail of cooperation and reason, then it is our duty to cast it back from whence it came. That Others May Live."
It was a nice speech, I suppose. Short, to-the-point, yet accurately cutting. Lucy's style. Yet, stronger than the words had been the sheer passion behind them. The passion of a woman who knew what was right, was willing to lay down her life for it... She wasn't some grand orator, with a thousand words to rile an entire population. She didn't need it. She had sheer force of personality and the will to save the galaxy.
Knowing that even if everybody else said no, she would fling herself into it regardless? That was a powerful thing.
It was infectious.
Thus, the air of excitement. People knew, people wanted to help.
People also knew it wouldn't happen quickly. Two hundred and fifty years had been the realistic estimate. It could be shorter, or longer, depending on how high the population growth rate could be boosted, and how long that boost could be maintained.
That could go quite high, honestly. Sanctuary's medical technology allowed for effectively limitless lifespans, no troubles in birthing, and the amount of children being up the parents. With a population that would never grow old, maintained considerable neuroplasticity even in adulthood, as well as support from Stone AIs, growing large wasn't difficult.
The trick was growing stably. Producing a population that was stable, productive, and not going to descend into utter hedonism. That was another part of the reason that this hadn't been attempted earlier; everybody involved had felt that a more 'natural' growth rate would be more conducive to maintaining stable growth.
Not anymore.
See, it loops around. A bigger population was a necessity in order for me to increase my energy income.
Why did I need more energy income to eat a Warp Storm? One would think that eating the Warp Storm would get me energy income, and that was absolutely true.
The problem with Warp Storms is that they have a lot of energy. I mentioned before that one of the reasons I hadn't eaten it already had been the consequences for the planet.
The other reason was the consequences for myself. Or, rather, the consequences for acquiring what I'd need in order to consume it.
Warp Storms were big. So much Warp Energy just leaking into realspace. Devouring it would have required far, far, far more bodies far, far, far larger than what I had. It wasn't acquiring them that was the problem, especially since the Warp Storm solved that neatly.
No, the problem was sustaining them, after all was said and done. Bodies like that needed a lot of power, and a Warp Storm would need a lot of bodies. So, imagine: I go up and start chomping, where does that leave me afterwards?
Hungry. The kind of hunger that would require me to drain entire stars to satiate. Sanctuary's population of Symbionts would be nothing to that kind of drain.
That was why the plan wasn't 'eat the Warp Storm', by the way. The time it would take for the Symbiont population to reach the point where the energy drawn could sustain what would be required to eat it in a reasonable amount of time was, itself, too ridiculously large to be viable. It would require populations measured in tens of quadrillions.
A number that a single planet can't actually sustain, by the way. The waste heat generated by that many Human biological processes alone would cook the planet. Yes, they had the technology to deal with that, but that was just one of the many problems that would all have to be solved. Worth it? Definitely not.
That was why the plan was 'punch a hole through it'. It was much more feasible. Billions was a lot, but it wasn't unsustainable or impossible.
The other option was to starve, collapse those bodies back into energy and let myself deplete with time into something more manageable.
I didn't experience sensations in the same way that Humans did, but starvation was still unpleasant for me. I had no desire to experience it again.
So I kept myself fairly small, stayed under that line of sustainability, and satiated my desire to eat Warp Energies on the murder of Daemons that crept in every month.
I had been content to wait, really. The population would grow in time. Gratification could come after I had the means to sustain the method.
In the end, it would have worked out better, anyway. Children inherited a part of the strength of their parent's soul, and a significant portion of Sanctuary's population were Psykers. Coupled with my Symbionts artificially strengthening the Warp connection in their Souls, the abundant supply of Psykers, and the fact that children's souls were a bit more adaptable than adults, and the population would have mostly ended up as what would have been significantly powerful Psykers.
I, uh, hadn't realized that when I first started the Symbiosis effort. Probably should have seen it coming, but...
Well, I knew it now. It's already happening, the children of Sanctuary being born with, on average, stronger souls. There had only been two generations since Symbiosis had started, but it was a noticeable, if still currently small increase.
Although, that was before the genetic engineering attempts of Sanctuary's inhabitants to produce more powerful Psykers. On any other world, it would have been a very dumb idea, but here, it was a good thing for them since it meant more powerful and capable Symbionts, something that the people of Sanctuary found desirable.
I mean, so did I, but for a different reason. On my part, it hadn't been intentional. On theirs, they were working very hard to make it happen.
Where was I going with this?
Right, waiting. I could have waited. It would have ended up like that. It wouldn't be bad at all.
Thing was; Quantity could make up for quality. This trade was simply a pretty good population of awesome in a few millennia to an awesome population of pretty good in two and a half centuries.
And, really, quality was linear. Quantity was exponential.
And when you just needed more?
The latter worked just fine.