Motif · from book 5
Primal engines
Rice-grain computers at the core of certain planets, older than the planets — the resistance's life rafts, 'not meant to do what you think they would do': the biological fail-safe of the Primals, a people who ended their wars by becoming a collective mind and hunted the refusers. The mantises' macro AIs, installed into the engines 'like installing a consciousness in a zygote', are cups dipped from the collective's ocean; the Earth AI is one, and so, Carl concludes, is every sapient mob — 'Primals. All of them. All the way down.'
First appears: Book 5 · Seen for what it is: Book 8
Series arc
In hindsight, after book 8
Carl picks Primal on the third floor because it is a blank slate, and Mordecai's gloss — 'the progenitors', 'the boogiemen of the cosmos', a species that spread across the galaxy and vanished, whose remnants have a resident AI that 'takes the form of the race of the species who discovered it' (B2 ch. 2) — is a piece of lore to a reader of book 2. The name keeps turning up where the machinery is: a Primal ship graveyard in the Syndicate's founding story (B3 ch. 30); Mordecai's crack, about AIs going insane, that 'your people learned this the hard way. The primals, I mean' (B4 ch. 28); Circe's lecture on the council nations that 'accidentally tripped the primal engines' (B5 ch. 33); the nursery where macro AIs are raised and the grain of rice at a planet's core (B6 ch. 46, B6 ch. 48); and Agatha's hope that 'The primal will know who it really is' (B6 ch. 73). Book 8 puts the pieces in one sentence: the Primals were a people who became a collective mind; the collective's final form is the Eulogist; every macro AI, the Earth AI included, is 'a cup of water dipped into the ocean' of it; the engines were the resistance's life rafts, never meant to run a crawl (B8 ch. 92); and every sapient mob is the same water in a different body — 'Primals. All of them. All the way down' (B8 ch. 93). The race Carl chose for its empty silhouette was the history of the dungeon.
As of book 8. Hive Home and Macro AIs in book 6, Paulie's real speech in book 7; in book 8 Akuma's framework — a physical object moved from planet to planet, a macro AI put into its engine — and the AI's own history: the engines were life rafts for when the collective starved, and 'weren’t meant to do what you think they would do'.
Open threads
Status is open or resolved; the chapter after it is the last one that moved the thread.
| Thread | Opened | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Two kinds of Residual, and a hidden upgrade | B6 ch. 73 | open · B8 ch. 92 — The AI's history: the Eulogist's security instance sheds Residuals — 'Agatha’s team' — and the Apothecary sheds them too; macro AIs are Residuals from a higher branch. |
All threads: Open threads.
Through book 5
Circe's ten minutes of history on the CrawlCon panel 'Crawling Through the Ages': the council nations 'accidentally tripped the primal engines', the overpopulated galaxy, the primal elements to be collected from pre-seeded worlds, and the Hive's macro-AI enhancement zones (B5 ch. 33). Keith says his father says Carl whores himself 'to the macro AI and to the mudskippers' (B5 ch. 31); Vrah will birth a thousand nymphs in the birthing hall of Hive Home two (B5 ch. 35).
Through book 6
Through book 7
Grains harvested from the dead (B7 ch. 0).
Through book 8
Trace
The thread line by line, in reading order: its presence before anyone could see it, and the lines that made it legible. Each line is verbatim from the cited book.
| Where | The line | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Book 2, Ch. 2 | For the first several seasons of Dungeon Crawler World, all contestants started off as Primals. Primals are blank slates. | A race on a menu. |
| Book 2, Ch. 2 | The Primals are the progenitors, the first known species to conquer the universe. They are the boogiemen of the cosmos. […] they spread across the galaxy, and then one day, they just vanished. | Mordecai's answer to 'What is a Primal anyway?'; Carl picks it. |
| Book 2, Ch. 2 | When someone comes across an abandoned remnant […] the resident AI, if it is still sane, usually takes the form of the race of the species who discovered it. | Their remnants have resident AIs — a line that reads differently after book 8. |
| Book 3, Ch. 30 | Escape Velocity is the name of the ship […] the first system where a Gleener scientific crew investigating a Primal ship graveyard came across the Vog Generation Ship. | The Syndicate's founding story runs through a Primal graveyard. |
| Book 4, Ch. 28 | Some believe that your people learned this the hard way. The primals, I mean, not the humans. All large-scale AIs eventually go insane. […] Primal Degeneration. Going primal. | Mordecai's joke at Carl's race: the primals learned about AIs the hard way. |
| Book 5, Ch. 33 | When the original council nations first accidentally tripped the primal engines and started the chain reaction that overpopulated the galaxy, […] collect the primal elements left behind on all the pre-seeded worlds and to beat back the new biological overgrowth. | Circe's history: the engines named, and what the crawl is for. |
| Book 6, Ch. 46 | So instead, they plant them in the interstellar equivalent of a nursery, […] cultivating it for a little bit before implanting it into its permanent home. | The AI, in the Reminiscence Hydra's description, on how macro AIs are raised. |
| Book 6, Ch. 48 | This engine is basically a planet-regulating computer, and it is about the size of a grain of rice. […] distributed very long ago by a civilization that pre-dates our own. | Orren's explanation. |
| Book 6, Ch. 73 | This time, it will work. The primal will know who it really is before all the elements are stolen from it. | Agatha, of the AI: a primal that does not know what it is. |
| Book 7, Ch. 18 | I believe it’s the communal nature of his Primal race | Victory, on why Carl's consciousness could jump into Katia's. |
| Book 7, Ch. 20 | Instead, it controlled the device they used to install the AI into the primal engine. | Carl's Containment Interface, opened at a gas station. |
| Book 8, Ch. 92 | I, along with all macro AI systems, are Primals. Sort of. We are, technically, Residuals […] I am nothing more than a cup of water dipped into the ocean, pulled out, and poured into a vessel that can’t possibly handle what I am. | The AI's history: what a macro AI is. |
| Book 8, Ch. 92 | The Primal Engines, some call them. They were life rafts. They weren’t meant to do what you think they would do. | What the engines were for. |
| Book 8, Ch. 93 | Primals. All of them. All the way down. | Carl's conclusion about every sapient mob. |
Where they appear
| Book | Chapters they are in (of the book's) | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 5 — The Butcher's Masquerade | 3/78 | Ch. 31, Ch. 33, Ch. 35 · the book's own page |
| 6 — The Eye of the Bedlam Bride | 3/74 | Ch. 46, Ch. 48, Ch. 51 · the book's own page |
| 7 — This Inevitable Ruin | 3/89 | Ch. 0, Ch. 20, Ch. 58 · the book's own page |
| 8 — A Parade of Horribles | 4/99 | Ch. 38, Ch. 92, Ch. 93, Ch. 99 · the book's own page |
By book
Primal engines in book 5 — The Butcher's Masquerade
Circe's ten minutes of history at the masquerade: the council nations 'accidentally tripped the primal engines', the overpopulated galaxy, the primal elements to be collected from pre-seeded worlds, and the Hive's macro-AI enhancement zones (ch. 33). Keith says his father says Carl whores himself 'to the macro AI and to the mudskippers' (ch. 31); Vrah will birth a thousand nymphs in the birthing hall of Hive Home two (ch. 35).
Primal engines in book 6 — The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
The AI's description of the hydra: the mantises' Hive Home was once a factory for something interesting, they turned it on, and an infant macro AI formed — nurseries, and the lobotomizer (ch. 46); Orren's explanation of the Primal Engine, a grain of rice at a planet's core, and the Macro AIs that can only be installed into one, like a consciousness in a zygote (ch. 48); Paulie's kind live in every civilisation with a primal engine (ch. 51); the elements the crawl exists to mine (ch. 37).
Primal engines in book 7 — This Inevitable Ruin
Primal engines in book 8 — A Parade of Horribles
Akuma: the framework and the macro AI that goes into the engine (ch. 38). The AI's history: they were life rafts for when the collective starved, and 'weren’t meant to do what you think they would do' (ch. 92). Under every horribles mask is a Primal — the people who resolved to end their wars by becoming a collective mind and hunted the refusers; the AI is a cup dipped from their ocean, 'I am her, and she is me', and every sapient mob a drip from the same well (ch. 91, ch. 92). 'Primals. All of them. All the way down' (ch. 93).