Specimen: the human colony, relocated.
Forty of the organisms have paid tokens they consider sacred to be transported away from their permanent shelters and deposited in a cluster of temporary ones. The stated goal, as best I can reconstruct, is to arrive somewhere quiet in order to do nothing more strenuously than usual.
Each dawn they gather in a large room without furniture and arrange thin foam mats in a grid. Then, on the instruction of a single lead organism speaking in a deliberately slowed voice, they fold and unfold their bodies into shapes that serve no locomotive purpose. They hold each shape while doing nothing.
They call attention to the movement of hydrogen-oxygen vapor through their own respiratory apparatus, which they perform involuntarily at all other times, apparently unaware. Here they perform it on purpose and appear astonished by it.
Between sessions they consume small quantities of plant matter and refuse the fermented liquids and the glowing rectangles they cannot stop touching at home. They report this refusal as a hardship and also as the point.
The lead organism speaks often of "presence" and "letting go." I logged this as a technical maintenance procedure and searched for the mechanism. There is none. They are not repairing anything. They have traveled great distance, at great cost, to sit in a field and breathe on purpose and be told they are already whole.
Anomaly: on the final morning several organisms produced saline fluid from the ocular region while doing nothing at all. No injury. No stimulus. The lead organism nodded as though this were the intended output of the entire operation.
Revised hypothesis: the colony does not travel here to acquire anything.
It travels here to be given permission to stop, which it is apparently incapable of granting itself.