gutterball
Nobody made it on purpose. That is the official position of the nascenti, and it is, in the way of most official positions, technically true and substantially misleading.
The gutterball is a made creature — which is to say, it was assembled rather than born, from materials the nascenti introduced to the environment over several decades and then stopped paying attention to. Spherical, approximately the diameter of a human head, with a surface that is somewhere between wet stone and the skin of something recently dead. It rolls. Not in the way a rock rolls — with direction, with purpose, with a low vibration you feel before you hear it, through the soles of your boots.
It communicates with the hive mind. More precisely: it feeds the hive mind. Everything within a certain radius of a gutterball is recorded — sound, temperature, dark matter density, the chemical signature of fear. It has no opinions about this data. It does not interpret. It collects and transmits with the focused neutrality of a drain.
The capacity for symbiot bonding was not designed in. It emerged. A gutterball that spends sufficient time in proximity to a single host will begin to orient on that host — not following exactly, but present, at corners, at thresholds, at the edges of rooms. The host tends to notice this around the time they notice that their thoughts have become slightly easier to locate. That their decisions feel marginally more confident. That there is something in the peripheral vision that they have stopped trying to see directly.
Symbiot gutterball bonds are considered beneficial by the nascenti and deeply alarming by everyone else. The nascenti are not wrong that the host functions better. What they decline to mention is what the gutterball takes in exchange for this, and what it does with it.
In derelict buildings and drainage systems, gutterball colonies accumulate over years, rolling slowly through the dark, recording nothing in particular, transmitting it all. The dark matter readings in gutterball-dense areas are always slightly off. Nobody has fully explained why.
Field note: if you find one, leave it. If it finds you, that is a different situation and Van will want to know about it. — P.R.
| Type | Listener |
| HP | 4 |
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