Mind Flower (CivBE)

Wonders

Mind Flower
Project in Beyond Earth
Cost	1900
Requires	13  Harmony No technology
Purpose	Planetary Wonder. Used to awaken the planet, completing the Transcendence Victory.

Once a Harmony faction has 13 points in that affinity, they can construct the Mind Flower and its Mind Stems. This is one way to achieve Victory.

Upon completion of the Mind Flower wonder, a countdown is initiated. It can be viewed by clicking on the Mind Flower. When countdown of turns reaches zero, the one who built the Mind Flower wins the "Transcendence Victory". You may have to have a certain number of Mind Stems built beforehand for this to happen.

The Mind Flower is constructed on a tile with in range of the selected city. Any prior improvement (except roads and mag rails) on the selected tile is removed. City connections from roads or mag rails that go through that tile are maintained, however, the tile itself becomes impassable (i.e. military and civilian units may NOT pass through the tile containing the Mind Flower, neither while being constructed nor after complete). The tile may still be worked by the city for the base unimproved value for that type of tile.

• David McDonough: "...you build this giant bio-mechanical brain machine and talk to the planet and achieve a new level of consciousness."
• Will Miller: "It's the worst jello mold you've ever seen."

History

Life will recognize life. It was easy for humanity to point to other creatures and recognize their existence. Humans were willing to anthropomorphize things that are not even alive, so eager were they to find life and celebrate it. Earth was a dying world, but the colonists made planetfall on a world that overflowed with life, strange and hostile as it may have been. In this life they began to recognize not just the mark of existence, but the hidden mark of intention and genius.

Meta-analysis of alien ecosystem behavior and behavioral paleontology projects were able to identify that the planet itself had a holistic organization that could produce intelligence. Human sciences eventually led to the creation of models that allowed an understanding of how this intelligence might function. At that point, to contact this intelligence, it was necessary to have life recognize life, through life that could think in the same scope and scale as a planet-wide megaorganism. To this end, the Mind Flower was created.

It was a strange flower indeed, and did not resemble the fruiting flowers of either world. It was instead a great Lotaxl tank (no other artificial ontological system would work on that scale), within which was the greatest mass of neural tissue ever created, dense with neurons, whose dendritic connections would have outnumbered the stars of the universe, because only life can create itself on the scale needed for such projects. Connected and embedded through this tissue were the cybernetics needed to interpret the thoughts, to scope them to something as limited as human understanding. Then the Mind Flower was exposed, slowly, to the strange architecture of the planet, shaping itself to match its rhythms and tides. Once it had mapped these, it took the intervention of human consciousness to blend the two.

Thus was the planet awakened to the presence of man, and humanity brought within the sea of understanding that this planet represented. The concepts of "I" and "Thou" and "We" no longer make sense, because it is all part of the same thought, the same dream, the same aspiration. We have fulfilled the promise that might have come to us on Earth, had it been able to sustain life in this way. The Mind Flower has blossomed, and the fruit it yielded is a planet which understands, and sees, and thinks, and reaches out, and recognizes things that the tiny "individuals" that dwelled on its surface might never have seen. Only in unification can the necessary perspective be gained. Only in the whole lives truth.

Images

Mechanism for holding the mind flower

Mind flower built

Mind flower closeup. In your face, and controlling your mind.