The Star-Dwellers

I see you without beginning, middle or end; of infinite energy, with unlimited arms, with eyes like the sun and the moon with blazing fire in your mouths, heating this universe by your glorious radiance.
-- The Bhagavad-Gita

Entity symbionts are not the only kind of bulk space beings that interact with the brane. The Dwellers are a kind of beings relatively similar to the symbionts but living along the brane. They use stars as their habitat: within the plasma cores they form complex societies, building elaborate infrastructures and sending messages using neutrinos and gravity waves. They not only live in stars but help shape them during formation; without Dweller interference young stars would often detonate or become unstable.

Dwellers look like complex bundles of plasma and electromagnetism that does not dissipate; they are held together by their bulk space structure. Their society is a “functional soup” of goals and wills merging and splitting in an infrastructure where technology, intelligence, memory, bodies and other functions are picked up and used and then discarded. They are not individuals, but when working outside the main society just a few threads coexist and they appear like groups of splitting and merging individuals. Needless to say they are nearly totally incomprehensible to humans, and conversely humans are hard to understand even with their extensive intellects.

The Dwellers prefer the universe as it is and do not want the Entities to destroy the stars in their quest for mass. If they detect an intrusion they are compelled to act to wipe it out. They are far less powerful and smart than the Entities, but against the symbionts they are quite a match. Usually Dwellers simply keep their surroundings free from low-energy life that could be used by the Entities, or encourage it to develop through a technological singularity so that it ends up as a civilization like them living around the brane and less vulnerable to the Entities.

In the solar system the local Dwellers have not cared much about the third planet, and now suddenly find themselves with a possible Entity incursion. Being somewhat cautious they have decided to send a few investigators to examine how serious the problem is and how to best deal with it. The investigators arrive in style as a coronal mass ejection and set out to check the power of the novas and their integrity. If the threat is too large the Dwellers have to immediately wipe out the planet by a few directed solar super-flares. But some Dwellers threads hope that the tools of the Entities can be turned against them – either their networks can be infiltrated through the novas, or the novas could break free of their control and start aiding the brane instead. They do not care much about the humans: organic life is rather trivial by their standards, and occurs in a lot of other places. Besides, individual intelligences are so hard to relate to. But if novas can be used, that might be a way of slowing or complicating the Entity harvesting program.

The Stellar Structure Enigma

Let him greet the Sun at dawn, facing East, giving the sign of his grade. And let him say in a loud voice: Hail unto Thee who art Ra in Thy rising, even unto Thee who art Ra in Thy strength, who travellest over the Heavens in Thy bark at the Uprising of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Night!
- Liber resh vel Helios, Aleister Crowley

Neutrino scans reveal that stellar cores have a very complex and asymmetric structure. There seems to exist patterns that can only be explained as the result of stable dissipative systems.

Simulations have also run into problems explaining how stars could form stably; there ought to be far more violent eruptions and “baby novas” than is observed. Some theorists are already considering the possibility of “starlife”, some kind of fractal dissipative plasma structures that develop within stars. But none believe it is intelligent or spreads to new stars (except in the stories of a few hard sf authors).