Field note. The specimen gathers voluntarily in a large dim room, then arranges itself around the perimeter, hugging the walls as though the empty center were toxic.
The center is not toxic. This has been confirmed. Adult specimens cross it freely, carrying folding tables and bowls of orange liquid, and suffer no ill effect. Yet the juveniles will not enter. They cluster by developmental sub-type: a mass of tall ones along one wall, a mass of shorter ones along the opposite wall, the two masses locked in a stable orbit that never decays into contact.
Sound is administered at damaging volume. The juveniles do not appear to enjoy it. Their faces remain fixed in an expression I have logged elsewhere as "distress," yet none flee. A smaller specimen mouths every word of the sound while pretending to consult its glowing rectangle, thereby performing indifference and total devotion simultaneously. Remarkable metabolic waste.
Periodically a slow, low sound plays. The two orbiting masses undergo brief structural collapse. Pairs form. They stand at arm's length, hands placed on shoulders and hips with the rigid caution of a specimen defusing an ordnance, and rotate in place. No one leads. No one arrives anywhere. The rotation stops precisely when the sound stops, and the pairs spring apart as if repelled, returning to their walls, radiant with what I initially recorded as relief.
Correction. Reviewing the ocular data: at the moment of separation, each specimen turns to a same-type companion and speaks rapidly, glancing back across the room. The distress expression is intact. The eyes are not.
I have no unit for what the eyes are doing. I am logging it as damage and requesting further specimens.