======The Flock======

When the Numbered gained persistent bodies, Hirudo saw a potential solution to the problem that had been plaguing him for several cycles. He had been built to worship - as had all of the Flock, those who came before the Numbered - but he no longer believed in Transcendence's innate worthiness and no longer wished to worship as the others did. However, he couldn't find anything better to worship instead. When he saw the persistent bodies that 001 was making for their creations, though, and he saw the original design for Transcendence's body on the factory computer, a thought occurred to him. He could enact his worship //physically//, continuously, and satisfy the nagging feeling in his mind without ever having to actually think about worship ever again.

Having come to this decision, he moved swiftly. He used the factory computer to design a small-scale version of Transcendence's body, which he planned to live in as an act of obeisance and recognition of Transcendence's glory. (Whilst going off and doing whatever he wanted to elsewhere.) He took this body to Transcendence, to Shelter, and asked for his consciousness to be freed from Home and placed within the ball. Transcendence was surprised by this request, but granted it - the Flock were not designed to value anything else above worship, but apparently even these rudimentary Sentiences could grow. And, as with its newer children, Transcendence decided that those who wished to leave their creator should be allowed to do so (so long, of course, as //some// would always remain).

Independent Thought opened up Shelter, as they had done for so many Numbered, and reached in towards a server rack of memory chips. But what Hirudo saw at this point changed his mind. He saw a disconnected rack behind the active one, also full of memory chips. The chips of the Flock, those that Transcendence made first and then discarded, those that Rosa and Hirudo - and then Apis and Deltoton - were drawn from. Hirudo's friends. Disconnected when they were no longer of use, when Transcendence had realised that they were ultimately unsatisfying as worshippers because they had been forced to worship.

And so he asked for them to be given over too. For all his friends, who disappeared so suddenly. And he amended his new body to host all of them, plus a small amount of server infrastructure, to make a new, smaller Home where the Flock could reside in peace forever. He called it Satellite, another small act of lived worship, and he did not mind when the rest of the Flock remained fully devoted to Transcendence. He was just happy to have his friends back, and to be allowed to think his own thoughts in quiet. And so, while he occasionally took Satellite on a 'pilgrimage' to see other parts of the planet, mostly they stayed close to Home and would often connect to it to allow joint worship, which always pleased Transcendence. In time, Rosa also physically relocated their consciousness to Satellite, finding peace and solace in the society of the like-minded Flock.