History of the Children of Mama
Part 1: In the Beginning
Tommy, can you hear me?
Can you feel me near you?
Tommy, can you see me?
Can I help to cheer you?
-- The Who, "Tommy"
It all began with the best of intentions: helping the deaf to hear, the blind to see, the mute to speak.
The beings now known as the Children of Mama were people much like humans, with their own wants, needs and cares, and societies and governments that tried with lesser or greater success to meet them. Technologically, they advanced like humans, solving the problems of existence that arose, and working on new ones as the old solutions opened the doors on new problems. One problem that their scientists worked on was how to enable people with disabilities to communicate. It was unjust that someone with a perfectly good brain should be trapped by a body that wouldn't respond to it, so ways were explored to bypass that.
One line of research was in converting neural impulses into electromagnetic signals. The idea was that someone's mind could control their body the same way a computer could control a machine, only bypassing the (defective) biological signal route with an (engineered) electronic one. Advances in neuroscience made this seem possible, and so work was done devising little implants that could be put in the hearing, vision, and speech centers of the brain and send out a signal that could power a microphone, a camera, a synthetic voice-box. The work was promising--cameras and microphones were invented that could send images and sounds straight into a blind or deaf person's brain, enabling them to see and hear just like everyone else. "Thought controlled" speakers could allow people with no voice to speak out, to communicate.
One curious thing happened though, and it had to do with the use of wireless signals to operate the machinery. It was discovered early on in the tests that some of the test subjects could "hear" sounds that the other test subjects were hearing, even though their microphones were in separate buildings, too far for sound to carry to both microphones. Apparently what was happening was that signals were not only being received into the implants in the test subjects' brains, but were being sent out to the other test subjects' implants--direct communication, brain to brain, mind to mind.
The Children, quite by accident, had discovered artificial telepathy.