Field note. The colony maintains illuminated boxes that hoard sustenance and refuse to surrender it without ritual.
The box stands upright, taller than the organism, humming with a low mechanical respiration. Behind a transparent barrier it displays its provisions in rigid grids: pressurized cylinders of sweetened liquid, rectangles of compressed carbohydrate, packets that crackle. The provisions are fully visible. The provisions are fully unreachable. This appears to be the point.
To extract sustenance the human must first feed the box. It offers the machine flat tokens, or increasingly a smaller glowing rectangle it presses against the box's flank, transferring nothing I can measure. The box accepts this and only then permits a single item to fall.
I observed a specimen at the terminal stage of the transaction. It had entered a numeric command. A helical coil rotated. The desired packet advanced to the edge of its shelf, tilted, and stopped, suspended, having failed to fall. The human stood motionless. Then it struck the barrier with an open appendage.
Struck it again. Placed both appendages on the box and applied its full mass, rocking the structure while glancing sideways at other members of the colony, evidently checking whether the ritual was being witnessed.
Correction to earlier hypothesis. I had recorded the box as a storage unit. It is a dominance apparatus. The colony has constructed a device whose function is to accept tribute, withhold reward, and require the tributary to beg with its entire body in public. The human retrieved its packet only after a second organism struck the box on its behalf.
They call no priest to this shrine. They need none.
Every member of the species already knows how to plead with a machine that has already been paid.