>>42042732Maybe they work like Tines packs from Vernon Vinge’s Fire upon the deep.
Those are hive minded dog creatures, where each individual is a pack of 4-8 members mentally connected to each other through short range ultra-sonic waves.
Their mind is distributed over the entire pack, with each member contributing to their personality and memories being shared between.
Because of this they can occasionally add additional members to their pack or donate a member to join another’s pack or form a new one, still maintaining their original memories and their general personality, while also gaining a small bit from any donors they receive a member from. The actual offspring of individual members can similarly be either incorporated into their parents pack, added to another’s pack or grouped together to form a new pack. It’s even possible for an one of their ‘minds’ to outlive the lifespan of any of its individual members by gradually replacing aging members with younger additions, Ship of Theseus style.
In the novel it’s shown that they can’t really last/live long as a singleton. If they are reduced to only 3-4 members they are usually stable but essentially mentally impaired due to not having enough members to think at normal capacity. Conversely if they are forced together as a pack of 9-12 individual they become cognitively impaired due to the inter-member communication becoming too muddled and tangled. Forcibly forming these is sometimes used as an ethically dubious method of making work crews for certain tasks of coordinated physical labor.
