Field note. The dwelling has reached a state I can only describe as thermal and acoustic overload, yet the specimens will not leave.
Population density peaked hours ago and has since begun to decay, but decay is not evacuation. The survivors have not gone home. They have distributed themselves into the least logical corners of the structure: two in the fluid-preparation room, seated on the cold floor beside the humming cold-box, speaking in low tones with terrible urgency.
One alone on a stair, staring into its glowing rectangle. A cluster of six around a flat surface littered with translucent vessels, all emptied of the mild neurotoxin they had been sipping for social lubrication.
The airborne pressure waves have changed character. Earlier the sound was rhythmic and coordinated, and the organisms moved their limbs in synchrony, a behavior I logged as a mating display or possibly a threat. Now the sound is sparse. A single specimen keeps restarting one particular audio sequence, and each time, the others emit a collective vocalization of recognition, then attempt to sing along, then fail, then continue anyway. Efficiency is not the objective here. It never was.
Two specimens by the entryway have been saying a farewell ritual for forty-one minutes. They announce departure. They embrace. They release. They resume speaking. They have not moved toward the door. I have adjusted my earlier hypothesis: the door is not an exit. It is a location where the most reluctant of them go to prolong the not-leaving.
At this hour the specimens appear less guarded than at any prior point in the cycle. The performance has exhausted itself. What remains is unclear, warm, and inefficient.
I do not have a classification for it. I have flagged it for further study.
I find I do not want the study to end.