Field note. The colony has convened to celebrate an organism that has not yet arrived.
The subject of the gathering is a single female of the species, visibly swollen at the midsection, where a second, incomplete human is being manufactured internally over a period of roughly three hundred rotations. The colony does not seem alarmed by this. They touch the swelling without permission. They speak to it. The occupant does not respond, being, by my measure, functionally inert.
Tokens the colony treats as sacred have been converted into objects and stacked around the female. I catalogued: miniature textile envelopes for limbs not yet formed; a padded holding-vessel that rocks but goes nowhere; a device that emits recorded sounds of the interior of a body, apparently to convince the new unit it has not yet left. They are preparing an entire habitat for an organism whose principal activities will be leaking and screaming.
The females perform a ritual of prediction. They estimate the mass of the unformed unit and its arrival date, and they measure the swollen female's circumference with a length of string. The one whose guess proves accurate is rewarded. This is the first instance I have logged of the colony gambling on the dimensions of a colony member.
A structure of layered baked starch has been erected. It is not consumed for some time. It is photographed more than it is eaten.
Correction to earlier hypothesis: I assumed the gathering honored the swollen female. It does not. Every object, every prediction, every touch is directed at a being that cannot yet perceive them. The colony has assembled to lavish attention on a stranger who does not exist.
My instruments register a persistent warmth in the room that I cannot attribute to any heat source, and I have flagged it for further study.