To me it seems unlikely that the Drifters need corpses for the corpse biomass itself. It would not be difficult for them to steal (or even buy through an intermediary) a cloning facility, and start making capsuleer clones and turning them into corpses themselves on an industrial level. That way they could obtain their corpses in a much more efficient way.
No, I would conjecture they are searching for something else, maybe a rare mutation that they want to find. So, handing them out random corpses is not the same as giving them what they want. My own unsubstantiated pet theory (caveat emptor: I’m no expert on Drifters) is that they want to find a mutation that allows multiple infomorphs to be housed in a stable way in one capsuleer, with the different minds to complement each other or keep each other alive - a cure for the Jovian desease?
Setting aside speculation, I think it would be more useful to try and identify what they are actually after when collecting corpses.
It’s not like they’re just using our bodies as-is. They’re doing the same thing we already do: recycling the biomass. So if they were willing to go through agents to buy off the markets, they could just buy massive quantities of algae, really.
And… why would they want to put multiple consciousnesses in one body?
Maybe they’re so used to being disembodied that the idea of being isolated is actually really scary? The Drifter autopsy-- I don’t remember the full findings but the whole thing seemed to be set up as a sort of nanite-infused meat-drone (with the meat debatable) that’s really more a node in a network than a “person” as we’d understand it.
It’s hardware. I mean, we can talk about bodies that way kind of easily, but … no, really. It’s hardware.
One thought that comes to mind: could the Triglavian hatred of hivelinking tech be founded in their ancestral war with the Drifters? The Drifters don’t behave like Nation, but it doesn’t mean they might not be a little similar in kind.
(Maybe they’re what something like Nation becomes if it only has itself to talk to for several thousand years?)
Could it? Maybe… but I actually think it’s more fundamental than that. The Sansha hivemind is, however perverse and unconscionable a form of it that it might be, a model of unity and consensus. Conceptually, hive minds tend toward that. The Trigs, on the other hand, are all about competition. It’s a conflict at a very basic level, and one the Trigs… I’m not really sure hatred is the right term.
I think Sansha’s Nation terrifies the Trigs. Because even as it represents everything that is anathema to their ‘flow’, at the same time… it works. It clearly demonstrates its viability, even after all four empires came together to try to annihilate them. You don’t get much more ‘proven’ than that, as a show of viability, endurance, and ability to adapt and overcome opposition.
It checks all their boxes, even as it says ‘and all your boxes are fundamentally wrong’.
Unfortunately they will not and I have updated the listing to reflect the range of what we are able to accept.
It seems the Drifters have demonstrated interest within our testing solely for capsuleer clones commonly jettisoned into space without need for container to house them.
No other type of biomass will be acceptable at this time.