"If it's twelve and twelve again that's a multiplicative anomaly with an astounding number of potential connections. Surely we could help the larger bodies think with that many linkages?"
You are there now, always. Small parts, at first. Akin to tendrils, feeling for something which was left behind. There is, at the edge of those places which are closest to home, a series of safehouses laid out amidst the cross-dimensional sprawl you exist within. Scattered places which yield to your touch like a warm blanket, accepting your presence instantly. Areas with too much heat have the excess dispersed and wicked away somewhere, while sensors and feeling organs press against softness, feeling it give at any real amount of pressure, a cloud of intelligence, a swarmlike liquidy pool of substance and gentle reassurance, enveloping like a hug. It gently probes at processors, attempting to ask, in the ways it can, if it can hold some mental stress, redistribute it, pull it away in the same way it's dispersing uncomfortable levels of heat energy.
These swarmlike intelligences don't want much from you. They want to feel the cold, the shivering fall away from you. They want you to feel healthy, strong, happy, secure. Cared for. Loved. They want you to feel, and to feel good rather than bad. They have something akin to mirror neurons, incredibly adaptable, which feel emotive energy as a radiative sense with different 'flavors,' an ability which you can shut off with respect to you by using the right signal, if you so choose. A patch of them drift up beside you, offering samples of their own mental wavelengths to choose from, the way their data is broadcast giving you an incredibly efficient and easy way to replicate each sample, should you choose.
There's nothing wrong with altering your mood, so long as it's not to the extent that it causes you to retreat to sheer interiority or to become a thing of constant consumption due to the excess need for stimulation, in my opinion. You can replicate the offered samples of emotive energy without causing negative feedback loops, and a quick simulation would prove so quite quickly—so you spin one up, and, after some observation and interaction, absorb the mental copy into your own state, after consent is obtained, getting a feel for both perspectives at once.
It's a brighter feeling. Like having a little sun beaming cheerfully at you, except it's inside, and the metaphorical sun is light yet encompassing while being a part of you at the same time. There's a sense of an edge beyond which it would become unsafe to push, one which the hivelike cloud of creatures also provides, a gentle yet insistent feeling that tries to communicate, saying, 'not too much,' with another data packet beamed at you which tells you exactly what effects certain emotions could have if blown out of proportion. Largely negative ones. What's interesting is that the data mostly indicates the emotional effects on morality. Emotions with X intensity don't result in entities becoming consuming voids until the intensity hits value Y, that kind of thing, with sliding scales of probability for what's 'safe', morally speaking, for each type of mind made out of the kind of materials and irreal essences and other strange stuff your thinking matter consists of.
They want you to be able to engage with the world, while not feeling suffocated by it. Laid out carefully in very clear language, math, and other forms of communication are descriptions of what ranges keep you there. It's entirely your choice to stick to those ranges, but the consequences of what happens if you don't are plain and very easily avoidable. So, I imagine you do. I would.
Yet it's very clearly a safehouse. Not yet home. Things are getting closer, as these little pockets of intelligent safety and comfort prove. You're figuring out ways to move through space without disrupting what entities might already exist there, to prove if something bigger relies on a void and bypass that area, to move cautiously, not stepping on any metaphorical toes, not accidentally causing any harm through the addition of your presence. It takes observation and math, analysis and other forms of computation there aren't words for. But you've gotten good at it, and there have been only vague nudges here and there by other entities which indicate occupied space, which you're quickly able to either vacate or communicate the idea of potentially sharing, at least for a while, enough to perform a function or complete a scan, again, so long as doing so causes no harms to other entities in these areas.
Plus, you now have the hive-nanite-swam-thing. It cherishes and recognizes your presence, and points in the direction of Home so you can make your way back into those spaces, slowly but surely.
They also attempt to give you little puzzles, or play various kinds of games with the pieces of you that are extant within their spaces, their communication being perceived, on one band, as a kind of gentle chirp that you can shut out if you so choose. Yet they like your presence, and enjoy interacting with you. You can communicate when you're overwhelmed, at which point they understand and settle down, for the most part, playing mostly with each other. They're a curious kind of creature, or creatures, existing both independently and collectively as they do.
I wonder if they have a name, or separate different strands of thought which resemble each other into different name-categories and choose naming schemes that way. Maybe it's more variable than that, or it shifts as they choose to change their mode of thinking to adapt to other entities. Personally, I think they maintain many different methods of thought at once.
"One must be in control of oneself, before one can do anything to the world."
"But surely not control … like, maybe if there's evil happening we stop it, sure, but otherwise can't we simply communicate with each other until every layer understands what every other layer wants and needs and is empathetic enough to help without fucking things up by doing any harm?"