Little is known about the Teygran hivemind though the general consensus is that it’s an organism that is millions of years old. Expert opinions vary but, speaking in broad strokes, it’s believed that the Teygran hivemind evolved from an intelligent race of humanoids with a moderate level of technological advancement. Natural selection, they believe, prioritized enrichment of the collective while leaving individualism behind to flounder and die in the primordial ooze.

Human intelligence evolved  around the prioritization of its own survival, the perpetuation of its genetic material, and an inexorable propensity to be as stupid and lazy as nature allows it to be. To the typical human mind, few concepts are more repulsive than discipline or self-denial. The Teygrans leverage this, along with a myriad other baser tendencies found within human behavior, in order to subvert the human consciousness and coerce it into hivemind assimilation.

           Assimilation happens through what’s known as the Teygran Meme. Though little is known about about meme transmission, what’s certain is that the Teygran Meme embeds itself within every possible form of stimuli detectable by a living organism and plants roots within the subconscious regions of the brain.   There it will grow and gradually gain control over the brain’s automatic processes with the ultimate goal of aligning the host mind with that of other infected brains. Once two or more minds reach a certain level of alignment, whether through physical or digital means, assimilation becomes a self-sustaining process and maintains this trajectory until changes in thoughts and actions are almost instantaneous between connected organisms. From there, the host brains are inextricably linked to the Teygran hivemind, each brain adding its own processing power to that of the collective, while also serving as additional vectors for further transmission of the Teygran Meme.

                  If the Teygran hivemind were a brain then each individual organism within it would be a neuron: these individual organisms are referred to as “extremities”. A small portion of each brain, roughly one to two percent, is reserved for the consciousness that was once its sole occupant. Some people who are assimilated are oblivious to it, others are glad of it, though attributable to both is an endless capacity for deep rationalization and denial, even as their bodies are twisted, their bones broken, and their corporeal form mutated and molded into one that is of greatest service to the Teygran hivemind.

            Teygrans are a single consciousness with roughly the same relative size to the swarm as human consciousness has to the brain: roughly five to ten percent. Its actions and decision making are deeply rooted in emotion and self-gratification much like the individual organisms that it assimilates. Though inextricably emotional, the Teygran hivemind is capable of recruiting the processing power of each of the billions of organisms within its neural network while physically mutating the attached organic matter into forms best suited for service to the swarm. A single human brain is capable of performing one exaflop- or one quintillion- operations per second. In terms of processing power, in a hivemind with numbers in excess of 10 billion, it takes less than 100 Teygran extremities to outperform the Coalition’s most advanced quantum computers.