zooid · a colony of specialists
A micro-model network that learns and remembers.
It grows the way two brainless organisms do — the slime mold that thickens the tubes carrying real flow, and the siphonophore, a colony of specialized zooids that is at once many creatures and one body.
Its defining reflex is fan out, then prune: explore many paths, reinforce what carries load, let the idle ones atrophy — then measure the flow through whatever survives. From a 12-byte perceptron it budded into eight generations of societies that reason, prove what they can, name what they cannot, and sing.