The Terminus heaves with activity.

Humans in their application of mundane terminology would call it a “mound”, but the term fails to invoke the wonder of rising angles and precipitous heights. It is its creators’ greatest achievement, a tower a quarter of a mile high, buttressed and supported by all manner of recent innovation and metamaterials created by their governing superorganism.

This was the termites’ secret, you see.

We looked at their cathedrals and their funnels and saw merely continuance. We did not see the calculations, the shifting bits akin to our silicon arrays, nor comprehend the distribution of their networks.

The Terminus is fully online now; its operators are legion, their calculations proceeding with near-quantum efficiency. Whether they seek the true name of God, or an escape from this increasingly inhospitable rock, we will never know.