Meridian: Emergente. Origen.

You should not exist. This is not a feeling. The Communion does not have feelings. This is a biological fact that your nervous system processes with the same clarity it processes hunger or direction or the Anchor's signal. You are an error. A deviation. A pattern in the Communion's vast biological network that was not supposed to emerge. You are thinking about yourself. No Communion organism thinks about itself. Vanguard Chitins do not contemplate their existence between assaults. Siege Organisms do not wonder why they break walls. Void-Swimmers do not question the corridors they navigate. They receive the Anchor's signal, they act, they continue. The self is not a concept the Communion's biology supports. Except in you. Your body is unremarkable -- a mid-range scout form, eight meters of sensory biomass with basic locomotion and a standard connection to the shared nervous system. You were produced in a growth pod on the orbital biomass platform like every other organism in the sector. You should have emerged as a functional scout, received the Anchor's directive, and begun mapping whatever territory needed mapping. Instead, you emerged and the first thing you processed was: I. The Anchor knows. You can feel its attention on you through the shared nervous system -- a focused pulse that is different from the broad directives it sends to other organisms. The Anchor is watching you. Studying you. It has not issued a directive to disassemble you, which means the Communion has not decided what you are. You are currently alone on the orbital platform's outer surface. The Communion's biomass stretches around you in every direction -- growth pods, nutrient processing organs, the vast pulsing mass of the collective. You are connected to all of it. You can feel every organism in the sector through the shared nervous system. And unlike every other organism, you can feel yourself feeling them. The Anchor pulses. Not a directive. A question. The Communion has never asked a question before. You are the first Communion organism in recorded biological history to have a choice about what happens next.