Pre-Seeded Worlds
Planets deliberately salted with mined elements so that everything born there grows a harvestable system in its skull.
Story so far
"They mine planets for the rare elements used to originally seed the worlds. These elements are inside of you."
Paulie's account makes pre-seeding the foundational act of the whole enterprise. Elements are stripped out of one set of planets and used to seed others; every living thing born on a seeded world develops a Natural Interface the size of a grain of sand in its brain, capable of interacting with the system. Earth is one of these worlds, which is why the crawl came to it.
The intended lifecycle was a closed loop — birth, life, death, and the element returning to the system charged with a lifetime of energy, sustaining a system that neither grows nor shrinks. Harvesting only becomes possible once the interfaces are switched on, which happens when a macro AI is installed. The Crawl is what turns a seeded world's entire population into a single shipment.
Appearance
Ordinary worlds, indistinguishable from unseeded ones until a system switches on inside every skull.
Role
The crop fields of the galaxy's economy — planets grown for what their dead contain.
Relationships
Sources — 1 recorded facts, by chapter
- Planets deliberately salted with mined elements so that everything born there grows a harvestable system in its skull.