"...a site auspicious for the founding of a new outpost of intelligence." (Genesis, p. 84)
One such site is a planet with primitive life unlike any on Earth: mats, stalks, membranes and spongy turrets. The reigning intelligence of this planetary system, Intelligence Prime, based on the surface of the life-bearing planet, resembles a huge jewel surrounded by lightnings, rainbows, barely perceptible energies, force fields and quantum computations.
Now nearly understanding the planet and therefore beginning to turn its attention elsewhere, Intelligence Prime is always changing itself and extending its capacity in accordance with ideas received across hundreds of light years from other intelligences. Intelligence Prime has helpers with different mental abilities, including the Brannock upload. When an intelligence leaves a planetary system to explore further, it takes with it not the Brannock upload that is at that system and that is still needed there but a copy. Thus, Brannocks have been multiplied throughout the explored galaxy. The Brannock that helps Intelligence Prime remembers four births but cannot know how many other Brannocks there are.
This Brannock had intended, when the exploration of the life-bearing planet was completed, to go unconscious until he could be recruited into some new undertaking. However, he has reached the limit of his data-processing capability and must therefore store most of his memories, setting some aside whenever he retrieves others. Rather than remain as he is, he asks to be uploaded into Intelligence Prime within which he will then exist as a memory, deepening that intelligence's understanding of organic life and thus also deepening the understanding of those intelligences with which Intelligence Prime communicates, the longevity and patience of these intelligences rendering unimportant the fact that their electromagnetic, neutronic and gravitronic conversations last for centuries or millennia.
Intelligence Prime has acquired the ability to incorporate uploads since its arrival at the life-bearing planet. Brannock has helped to establish the base, to build the industries necessary to support it and to explore the planet but is no longer needed for these purposes. Other Brannocks, if not destroyed by chance events, will seek to be uploaded and, if any of them is resurrected in emulation, that experience will be shared across the interstellar network. But we must read further to find out what "resurrected in emulation" means.
It is good to transcend the pettiness of the game-players back on Earth long ago.
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