Companion
The manual said that Companion was intelligent. It was wrong.
The Companion was made up of billions and billions of thinking cells, which acted as one. It was more than intelligent; if a descriptive name had to be given, then the word super- extelligence would have been a better fit.
So the Companion did not think or act as an individual, and the idea, for example, of it sitting quietly in the corner reading a book would be quite alien to it. Nonetheless, it ticked all the boxes to qualify as a living creature, plus the human box of Thinking . At the present moment, however, the animal (including human) instinct of Survive was so high on its list that all the other boxes may as well have been on a different planet.
Another difference between this species and the human one was
