Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:
In terms of names for the whole system... Well 'the Sajit Ranges' has been thrown out there, but maybe that's insufficient and doesn't quite do the whole interspecies agglomeration justice. At the moment all I can think is, I think 'Satya' is a sanskrit word meaning 'truth' or something, so maybe if we twist that a bit, like Saya or Sayat (and retcon in that 'Sajit' is actually derived from this or vice versa, either the idea is named after tjrm or they have made themselves as indistinguishable from the idea as possible), Satyk, something like that. Satykarma? The Satykarmic peoples or something?

Stop me if I am going too far with misappropriating Hinduism, btw
Satykarma sounds good. Satykarmic?

How about Sajitsatyk? Sajit Satyk? Translated as the Sajit Way or the Sajit Truth, the suffix -satyk (meaning truth/way) could be an alienoid form of -cracy or -archy suffix denoting the unique metakarmic/satykarmic form of governance. So emulating states in the K-Zone or elsewhere could call themselves the Qylasatyk or Urrasatyk or something?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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New idea, a more horrific twist on the Omega Point and Hallowlights phenomena?

The Hyperspace Nightmare - A vortex of fractal chaos bleeding through the boundaries between reality and hyperspace, its recurrent hell-patterns simultaneously breakdown and rearrange that which it comes into contact with, a catalysis proportional to the complexity of its victims. It is most severe on living, thinking beings regardless of organic or inorganic composition. Biological creatures, unnatural machinery, even ethereal thoughtforms are warped and twisted into agonized echoes resonating across the Nightmare's expanse, while their torments seep into the dreams of sentients lightyears away. In the K-Zone, its origin traces to the destruction of ancient Apexaia, when the Bragulans shattered the forbidden vaults of Selindil Iirthu and released its horrors. On the other hand, Bragulan propaganda proclaims that it is an Apexai revengeance weapon unleashed after Byzon's victory became evident. Similar calamities have been detected in areas of extreme cosmo-psionic and hyperdimensional duress, in the "haunted" regions of the Fracture and the Cthonic parts of Myrran space. Theoreticians link the Nightmare's enigmatic nature to the more benign Hallowlights, thought to follow similarly obscure Omega Point principles. When it manifests, the Nightmare advances nigh-inexorably like a typhoon, sometimes moving in seemingly premeditated paths, and even massive military mobilizations summoning fleets of hyper-barrier arrays can barely stem its destructive tide...
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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PREVIOUSLY ON SOTS SUPREMER
Siege wrote:Incidentally this could be how the Apexai learned to travel through space: they never bothered to leave their homeworld until they could drive their space cadillacs right up to the gates of hyperspace using nothing but their minds (maybe they used some form of astral projection before they learned to do that). Initially I recall I had some ideas how Apexai ships were fueled by destroying memories and this is how Byzon nailed them with a moon (the Apexai thought the Bragulans were so disgusting they used their memories of them as hi-octane fuel... Thus creating a giant blind spot in their collective memory by willfully forgetting about his giant warfleets and planet-smashing capabilities until a big rock landed on their oversized heads.) That doesn't fully jive with the concept of Aguero spaces but maybe it's like a nitro boost for Wardiscs or something.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I don't necessarily agree that the Apexai would be ridiculous enough as to forget crucial galactic cosmopolitical realities just to put another log into the fireplace... I'm not sold on the whole memory-for-power thing.
I sort of reverse my stance! Thinking about the Hyperspace Nightmare and how it relates to the Psychic Cataclysm and the Fracture... made me realize something!

Whatever its causes, a disturbance in Aguero space or Omega Point... the Nightmare arises like an evil... destructive version of the Hallowlights... if the Hallows are aurora, then the Nightmare is a world-roasting solar flare. If the Hallow is like a small dustdevil kicking up some dust and some leaves all nicely, then the Nightmare is an F5 tornado - all conjured by oscillations in the cosmopsionic-hyperspatial dimensions, of differing degrees/severity.

And I think that the Hyperspace Nightmare can erase information. Like, not just bio-psionic memory... but also in terms of pure... chronology. Those things never happened! Causality is raped. And this led me to Siege's idea of the Apexai-amnesia. Amnexia. Apexamnesia. Except while I'm not so sure that the Apexai would be silly enough to cause an amnesia crisis by using their memories for fuel, leaving themselves open to a good old Byzonic asskicking (they'd never live it down, the elder races would never stop giving them shit about that!).

But I know who could have made such a colossal fuckup, in regards to destroying memories and pasts! The Earthreign!

Maybe the Earthreign, in desperation as the enemy warfleets crept up on the homeworld and all that, as their outlying colonies' neuromancer controls were overridden (by Samtic contrapsych? who knows!), they created a massive weapon of revengeance by interlinking their remaining neuromancers and their remaining worlds and populations. To channel all the psionic energy, burning all those memories and identities and pasts and information, to cosmo-nuke all their opponents in one go! A wave of destructive, but intelligent and intelligently-guiding thought-energy melting anyone in their Bad Book! Maybe this was the ultimate end game of their neuromancer network, a strategic psionic WMD network!

But well, it was rushed and the neuromancers overloaded and exploded like Federation bridge consoles and so the unchannelled raw psionic-memory-information-pasts just... fucked everyone up. Not just on a contemporary level, but maybe space-time blurred, their near-pasts and their near-futures melted, explaining entire lost centuries. A horrific resonance cascade at the heart of human civilization, causing a fracture, cracks spreading outwards and undermining proximal populations, human or otherwise, everything within blast radius getting space-time-mind-raped.

Heck, the K-Zone Hyperspace Nightmare could be born from this, which the Apexai bottled up for science(!) when they saw humanity fuck up.

So yeah, if there was a crossover and the Doctor went into SOTS-past, he'd detect a horrible Time Scar. Something as bad as Gallifrey (before Moffat undid it and made it all fuzzy wuzzy).
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Isn't that a little too Eye of Terror-y though? Evil hole in reality caused by downfall of elder race that warps everything into bannerspikeskulls?

Why is this thing evil anyway? If it's a more or less naturally sustained phenomenon shouldn't it be described in more neutral terms -- dangerous, but more akin to a Bermuda Triangle trap door into the Dreamlands than a twisty-chaos-y soulsucking nightmare thing?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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True, Vic raised very similar concerns and maybe I got over-excited in describing its grimdark-darkgrim-grakdrim-drimgrakiness.

But I'm thinking that this thing is caused by the rapid breakdown of organized, complex... reservoirs of Omega Point/Aguero-"essence" (people!) and it perpetuates and gains further... "entropic momentum" by coming into contact with and breaking down other complex/organized things. Its born from calamity and it echo-ripples the pattern. Like a hurricane gaining mass and power as it crosses oceans. Which is pretty horrible, but since it is a non-moral calamity it shouldn't be described with subjective words.

But-but-but those that come into contact with it do die pretty horribly, painfully, since they don't wink out of existence quickly but it happens agonizingly and takes some time. It kind of does twists them up and what it does to their essence is kind of like soul-sucking. So it becomes some kind of really pants-shitting outside context problem for everyone.

(It's like that red vortex of killy lightning that appears when you use the chronosphere in Red Alert!)

Hmm... I dunno. On one hand, I don't want an Eye of Terror/warpstorms knockoff since 40k does it really cheaply. But on the other hand... its a big honking space disaster, and seems like an understandable "environmental" result/fallout of all the horrible things people have done and if we portray it as such, it wouldn't be so lame.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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See I'm not convinced it should necessarily be painfully killing or deconstructing anyone. Most importantly because the principle posited is that sentient mass bends the Aguero thought-space; the ultimate outcome of this is the Omega Point - the sentience singularity - that exists (will exist, has always existed) somewhere in the future.

(Mind that this last part was originally intended as a semi-religious belief held by the Foundation for Omega Point Experimentation, not necessarily wholly correct.)

Presuming that this nexus of bad juju is some sort of regional nonlinear 'oil spill' related to the Omega Point it can't very well go about erasing sentient thought, because that's what it's made of. Permanently destroying the stuff that makes it a thing in the first place runs contrary to its own principles.

It'd be like throwing stuff on a huge pile, growing and growing the mass of stuff until the pile is about to collapse in on itself... At which point bits and bobs of stuff just start vanishing from the pile. Not bending behind an event horizon, but straight up vanishing. That doesn't make intuitive mechanical sense to me.

In my opinion this regional time-space error would work better as either

A) a region that has formed around a collapsed 'neutron star of thought' that has regionally deformed Aguero Space to a highly unusual degree. This causes ordinary beings entering the region to experience 'noospheric slide', a rapid acceleration of thought-complexity proportional to their position within the Nightmare. This is not something the brains (or for that matter bodies) of baseline creatures are in any way equipped to deal with, and consequently typically has highly unfortunate results. On the bottom of this well of thought there may furthermore be something living and waiting that has frighteningly alien wants and designs but lacks the 'escape velocity' to break out into the galaxy. (Perhaps the Traumfanger are the dreams of this god-thing, indicating somewhat how pleasant it is.) Incidentally I quite like 'the Well of Thought' as a name for a point inside the Nightmare.*

Or

B) a 'white hole of thought' where utterly alien thoughts and dreams spill into the galaxy, possibly from a parallel reality or many such realities. Or possibly it is an intrusion from a place where Omega Point Collapse has already happened, that is attempting to force its way into this galaxy. On occasion things might spill out that don't belong in this galaxy and shouldn't exist in this composition of dimensions.


* Spacefarers traversing the expanse of the Nightmare might carry clever pets with them, like cats or crows. These creatures function as a 'canary in the coalmine' that indicates their proximity to the Well of Thought (since you might not actually be able to see it): as soon as the pet starts to exhibit signs of sentience the spacefarer will know they are experiencing significant noospheric slide and it's high time to vamoose it the hell out of dodge.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Yeah in retrospect/upon further reflection, a "wooo big scary hyperpaaace eeeevvviiillllssss!" is kind of too cheesy and campy, I was really trying too hard to make it seem like some kind of big bad. It can still be a frightening calamity without the tone of "boo! evils!"

(I am not sure if Hyperspace *Nightmare* is an appropriate name now, since its really... something... too easy, too comic booky)

And yeah, disappearing information is fallacious reasoning on my part. Its supposed to rearrange it, perhaps to unrecognizable and insane and terrifying degrees, but it can't vanish altogether. Even in the Cataclysm phenomenon, the noosphere messups were the result of extreme distortion to incomprehensibility and thus confusion, not utter disappearance.
Siege wrote:In my opinion this regional time-space error would work better as either

A) a region that has formed around a collapsed 'neutron star of thought' that has regionally deformed Aguero Space to a highly unusual degree. This causes sentient beings entering the region to experience 'noospheric slide', a rapid acceleration of thought-complexity proportional to their position within the Nightmare. This is not something the brains (or for that matter bodies) of baseline creatures are in any way equipped to deal with, and consequently typically has highly unfortunate results. On the bottom of this well of thought there may furthermore be something living and waiting that has frighteningly alien wants and designs but lacks the 'escape velocity' to break out into the galaxy. (Perhaps the Traumfanger are the dreams of this god-thing, indicating somewhat how pleasant it is.) Incidentally I quite like 'the Well of Thought' as a name for a point inside the Nightmare.
Hmmm... the acceleration (and painful rearrangement) of information complexity could create the god-thing you mentioned, but it might not be alien per se, as in from somewhere else, it could just be the reasembled, re-organized sum of the parts that the phenomenon absorbed. That may explain why it behaves "predator"-like in seeking out prey, the more it consumes, the more components it has for whatever is hiding inside the Well of Thought, maybe after it reaches an information/complexity critical mass, the phenomenon stabilizes and whatever was created inside can finally... get out! This would work if the phenomenon is the result of stuff like the Cataclysm or the destruction of ancient Apexaia.
Or

B) a 'white hole of thought' where utterly alien thoughts and dreams spill into the galaxy, possibly from a parallel reality or many such realities. Or possibly it is an intrusion from a place where Omega Point Collapse has already happened, that is attempting to force its way into this galaxy. On occasion things might spill out that don't belong in this galaxy and shouldn't exist in this composition of dimensions.
This could also be the result of something that weakens the universe's fabric to allow... permeation from somewhere else? But this depends on something occurring on the other side.


In light of this... maybe the Telestron meditations, instead of making new universes, could be creating some Pillar of Reality to stabilize existence from these things? Or maybe the exact opposite? Telestron disagreement! There could be two, polar opposite Telestron hyperstructures that, due to their opposition, ironically cancel each other out and stabilize things!
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:Hmmm... the acceleration (and painful rearrangement) of information complexity could create the god-thing you mentioned, but it might not be alien per se, as in from somewhere else, it could just be the reasembled, re-organized sum of the parts that the phenomenon absorbed.
Perhaps once upon a time, before the whole region collapsed in on itself, it was something vaguely recognizable (like an Earthreign psyker slugman slaved to a thought-weapon of some description)... But that was a long time ago, and since then it's been down there in unknowable circumstances feeding on whatever falls down the Well like a creepy psychic ant-lion in its sand pit trap, so who knows what it is now. All the galaxy knows is that it's definitely trying to get out.

(Perhaps amongst some groups or peoples a punishment for gruesome misdeeds is to be thrown into the Well.)

In light of this... maybe the Telestron meditations, instead of making new universes, could be creating some Pillar of Reality to stabilize existence from these things? Or maybe the exact opposite? Telestron disagreement! There could be two, polar opposite Telestron hyperstructures that, due to their opposition, ironically cancel each other out and stabilize things!
I forgot the specifics of the Telestrong Signal, but perhaps these phenomena could have some relation to it.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Whatever's in the Well would not have only been reorganized and accelerated in incomprehensible ways, it would also be fused with all the other things that got absorbed and catalyzed. The whole greater than the sum.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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RE: Can we revisit the Raptured Lords?

I confess that I didn't really see their appeal until I started looking at them like the eponymous faction in the game Echo Bazaar/Fallen London, who share similarities in their incomprehensible, city-stealing, story-eating ways. The Raptured Lords are divided into 12 distinct flavors of novelty-seeking entity, who plot and jockey with each other for influence but who nevertheless relate with each other more than anything else in the universe. None of them are really driven to acquire profit and gain, even if they prefer to interact with the wider galaxy (and their own minions) in the form of trade. What they really seek is to witness performance and story, but how they do so and what kind they prefer varies from Lord to Lord. Some just like to watch things happen. Some like the stories they buy to become secrets denied to the rest of the galaxy. Some merely leverage their resources to engineer circumstances where their preferred stories occur; other approach holders of unique and direct things directly and offer straight-up deals for them. Some let their Hirados do what they will and let their Massjammers drift across the stars; others take a more personal hand in cultivating networks of trade and influence. The works of some inevitably carry some mark or taint as a personal signature; others can be the faceless masters behind a thousand perfectly harmless commercial concerns.

But all have their peerless mastery of hyperspatial technologies that maintain the fabric of their incomprehensibly huge Massjammers, whose spatial dimensions can be more suggestion than reality. And all have correpsondingly advanced sciences - and twisted conceptions of value - to make all their bargains land somewhere between Faerie and Faustian. If they're sold some species-wide characteristic, they will find a way to strip it from each and every member of that species. They seem to have no qualms about accepting abstract and symbolic qualities as payment, either (though their more mortal factors may have objections) and at least some of them appreciate a particularly good cheat. However, just because profit is not their motive doesn't mean that they don't understand the value of punishment and retribution.

I recap my understanding on all this because I have an idea: the Opichunids (working name). Resembling segmented worm-dragons, this species is associated with, and is generally thought to be servitors of the Raptured Lord known as the Wept, whose preferences are in tales of spite and dissolution. Legend says the Opichunids as a species bargained away to the Lords all their qualities that distracted from their macabre genius in weaponcrafting and liminal biology, such that to their dismay they barely retained enough driving volition to entertain their now-sole love. In the end they had to rent their species-wide motivation back from the Wept, the price being eternal servitude to the Lord they now serve.

The majority of the Opichunids slumber away in their master's Massjammer, a planet-dwarfing necropolis that sometimes have its outermost reaches intersect through hyperspace onto random locations, forming the semblance of lost tombs from which they emerge to deal and grant boons. Their cadaverous bodies seem too frail to support their power, and indeed their vital innards are hidden away in canopic dimensions to grant them a more limited form of their master's immortality. They pride themselves in performing the more macabre aspects of applied biology for their clients, such as the resurrection of lost species. They also auction off singularly powerful weapon-artifacts to interesting bidders, and accept commissions for such for outrageous prices. But their sensibilities override their acumen: they may be commissioned by a furious client who just lost their homeworld to Bragulan bombardment to construct a powerful warfleet for revenge - but if they're allowed to craft the warships out of the shattered shards of said homeworld, they might just do it for free. Want your whole civilization retooled into a single-minded war machine of biomechanical gruesome monstrosities? Sure, they'll do that too - just to provide their master the satisfaction of watching how it all crashes and burns.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Hmmm... it would be cool if the Raptured Lords and their solar system-sized ships had partially transcended actual physicality to become strange ass abstracts, non-psionic reality-warpers, since they are physically... reality-warped to be indestructible. I think Siege pretty much said this outright, but yeah, it could be re-said that it would be more messed up if their actual dealings were primarily in abstractions instead of just physical stuff like planets of gold. Unless... aha, maybe that's their magic. Whatever physical things they give or take have to be warped in such a way - either physically warped or ideologically warped - to become... preposterous metaphor symbols. If its absurd enough, like a planet of gold, or a bronze bull that planetary executives worship and fetishize in their super-capitalism, heck even simple wooden religious symbols that pilgrims stampede themselves in, or... a collection of movie paraphernalia that's become the memetic craze of an entire solar system's datasphere network... copies of CJ MOTONOW'S STAR WARS, or moon-statues of Byzon, that kind of stuff. The worst absurdities would be like Comix' SPACE SAUCEROR where entire planetary species are distilled into sauces or soups for gourmet dining of space warlords - something that horrible yet ridiculous... absoludicrous... would entice the immortal Raptured Lords and their jaded Hirados? JADED HIRADOS.

You can also offer the absurdification of a planet. Say someone offers to bury Rhapsodite orgone on some under-developed world and offers the Raptured Lord of the Hirado a front row seat to watch the populace war with each other for the orgone reserves for centuries and pollute their environment and mutate into absurdities due to the THEOSTIGMA, some parable of environmentalism that will freak out the rest of the system... or will lead to an exterminatus, or a Calibrationist takeover where the mutant albinos are enslaved into weapons and test subjects... a worthy sacrificial fracas to amuse the lunatic gods.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Ideas discussed with Vic:

Sidereals - A fringe house of the Aurigan aristocracy, composed of desecrated lines - the post-humans and aliens who had the "honor" of being properly humanized during the Earthreign and even during the early years/centuries of Auriga. While with the nature of the gene-engineered noble elite of the core Aurigans makes the whole "true humanity" thing hard to tell nowadays, the fact that the Sidereals are the nobles in charge of distant worlds which have tensions with the core authorities means that they are the pseudo-estranged other in Aurigan affairs. Xenophiles (orientalism of the future!) adore them, may even comprise some of their membership. Core conservatives dislike them and believe they're untrustworthy treasonous bastards. Avancore merchants have a love-hate relationship, the trade-fleets need the warp gates possessed by the Sidereals, but that allows the Sidereals' own spacers to compete with the Aurigans' Trading Company. The Sidereals dislike the Aurigans' leash, but the protection from the Phyrron is invaluable, and being the designated nobles to deal with aliens and occupied territories gives them a prestige and rank that's pretty cool.

Fighter jockeys of the United Solarian Star Force and Marine Corps - The pilots operating the White Sharks and Peregrines aren't actually necessary! The CI minds in these crafts - either independent non-sapient minor brains or interconnected with the greater shipminds of their mothercraft - can operate perfectly well without post/trans-human pilots! But its a combination of memetics in the Datasphere - all the action movies, the TOP ACES and such - have instilled in people such a mythology that people actually volunteer to be pilots, to be augmented and serve and have reckless violent adventures! And somehow this phenomenon is good for PR, for building Solarian military ethos, and is the closest thing the naval branches can have to matching the USMC's war mech superhero Para-Marine and FORCE operators' reputation in the media. So these pilots aren't there because they're needed, its completely frivolous, its thrillseekers who are there because they *want* to! :D

Ehl-Shir - Microscopic organisms that inhabit silica shells and communicate with each other via extremely sophisticated static electric networks, forming distributed intelligences that in sufficient masses can become sapient, primarily inhabiting sand worlds that dot the fringes of the Fracture, run through the Cascade and into parts of the K-Zone. These are like... "Gaia" or "Solaris" type creatures that when concentrated appear as whirling sandstorms and dust devils! They attain religious significance to the wandering Sardicans, for these creatures aided them in their travels and exist in their sacred shrine worlds, which pilgrims pay homage to! Initially the Shir create macro-technologies and macro-engineering by gathering in such numbers and using such energy and resources - sufficient populations to manipulate the climates and thermals of entire desert-regions - to painstakingly create glass superstructures with which to ascend to the heavens. Think of Dr. Manhattan's Mars Clock. But this is such a slow and arduous process, so making contact with Sardicans - utter giants by the standard of a standard "mass" of Shir - and the ensuing cooperation was celebrated in both cultures. The Shir's nature as communicating via the EM spectrum also means they are susceptible to the influence of wisps/data-djinn and perhaps the Shir were the ones who conveyed djinn-worship to the Sardics.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Perhaps though even if all fighter jockeys are crazy thrill seekers their presence is not completely pointless. Because even the simplest of these guys is still a 16th generation Solarian gengineered homo supermax ubersapien who may look like Tom Cruise but is actually by modern standards a crazy biomechanical killfucker with fiber optic nerves and a mind supercharged for spatial awareness.

Moreover, their minds work in tandem with battle coordinating CompInts, adding sublayers of self preservation instincts and opportunistic individualism to the battlespace. This may seem like a pointless flaw and overcomplexity at first, but it is the millions of tiny mutations caused by the presence of chaotic and imperfect humanity that make it impossible for even the greatest Myrranni cognosticators and Bragulan thermionic nomographers to fully predict USSF manoeuvers. Without the uncertainty vortex caused by a human presence the actions of super rational CIs would be much easier to anticipate!
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

RE: Sidereals

My idea was that in the current confusion of the Fracture, it's not at all obvious at a glance whether a given clade of blue-skinned humanoids were originally alienoids who underwent extensive genetic reconstruction until they resembled blue-skinned humans with only modest head-tentacles, or humans who were genetically modified to have blue skin and head-tentacles. And even if further biological study will uncover said origins readily, my idea is whether the post-Earthreign humanity, being all post-historical and collectively traumatized and having long been reshaped by the mad whims of the late-stage Earthreign, really care. Not to take away from the general thesis of the Fracture being inculcated with a general conservatism and xenophobia, but I like the idea that their baseline for "humanity" is a bit different from what we would think, and accordingly prejudge and conservatify in unexpected ways.

Which is to say that I'm wary about "Sidereals" being a particular definable group of transhuman lineages. I mean sure, terms like these always make for politically convenient labels for those with influence to slap on people they wish ill (see Calibrationism, etc.), but I prefer nobles houses slipping in and out the status over the generations as standards shift and political fortunes turn. I envision the reigning lineages of Auriga and Avancore as a fairly diverse lot in the first place (physiologically, if not culturally), so whether any lineage's characteristics are too *exotic* to fall out of line ought to be a negotiable thing. Being treated by Grand Auriga (and to a lesser extent, the tilted psychosocial fabric of the Fracture) as a designated "Other" has its disadvantages, but also its privileges, as Shroom mentioned. Grand Auriga would rather give the Sidereals room to exist rather than turn up the oppression, which would drive the Sidereals into pursuing Calibrationism or worse. And of course, Auriga's Magi matrons have a vested interest in maintaining humanity's diversity this way.

RE: USS fighter jockeys

Yeah, I can see the average Sovereignty-issue panhuman with the sensory acuity and mental data processing capacity to consume USS hypermedia doing pretty well when wired into modern warmachines, especially compared to more baseline humans.

Extending the topic, I can also see plenty of situations where Solarians who aren't Marine replicant killborgs being called to fight. At the limits of the Sovereignty's influence, in Wildspace systems that they only exert nominal authority over (such as in Siege's Coronet Expanse), at the fringe sectors where for whatever reason the bow wave of Solarian infrastructure has quite reached far enough, and at all the places where the the Sovereignty's elite but tiny military doesn't happen to be nearby so when some novel foe has a go at USS territory, the first to meet them has to be a scratch militia of fringe world yokels.*

*Which realistically doesn't happen that much since the CompInts are probably good enough at strategic intelligence/prognostication to reposition a few brigades and fleets to where they will be needed pretty soon.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

I personally prefer the idea of Maverick Fighter Cocks and Spacebilly Militias being kind of impractical but existing because Solarians are just that neophiliac. Imagine a reverse-mercenary company where rich Solarian kids pay for the privilege of getting re-sleeved into a killfucking transterminator robot body and given hardcore marine training, then flown into Wildspace or the Bounty for package military adventurism :)
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Even then though you'd (presumably, in my mind) end up with a bunch of people who are just demonstrably better at killfucking dozens of Bragulan interceptors with a half billion mini smart missiles, either because they're crazy enough or lucky enough or because they add that certain undefinable x-factor to the proceedings.

I quite like the idea that people are thrown into White Sharks killbot megafighters just 'cause they paid for it and they have mind-backups ready to go anyway. A White Shark will just roll its eyes and ignore its pilot, who only gets to feel awesome for surviving his or her ride after all is said and done. However to my mind there has to be a stage after that, where the totally useless nobs are weeded out, given a medal and sent back home to mommy's estate on Solaris (like a photo at the end of a particularly good Disney World ride; ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: FREEDOM EAGLE BADGE ACHIEVED)... But a handful of people are kept on because they genuinely add value to even a postsingularity hyperhuman battlespace.

They might first still be assholes unfamiliar with the realities of warfare, totally unused to the fact that for some people when they die, they actually die... But now they're called upon to be more than that, to go beyond their comfortable zero-risk posthuman upbringing, to genuinely expose themselves to risk, and be that thin chrome line that's protecting what might be a completely out-of-control insane hypertech utopia but that's still the very best chance that humanity has for a better universe.

And then they come back from having fought on that final frontier, from having been Roy Batty, from having fought on the ragged edge where the Sovereignty's insane technological edge only serves to narrowly compensate its utter numerical inferiorty... And then they suffer culture shock and their eyes are opened to the utter vapidity of the Sovereignty's hyperconsumerist shortcomings, and they get pursued by nameless assassins and have to hire John Baylor to fend them off.

Anyway...
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Speaker's right about the kind of weekend warrior that's more likely to fill in the gaps in the USS's conventional military presence, and Siege's explanation makes sense as to human value-add in hyperturing warmachines (do similar jockeys get to ride gunships, hovertanks and other small vehicles? What about the crew of larger warships?), though I also question what "rich kid" means in the context of the USS's hyperpostconsumerist post-scarcity utopia.

And there are also all those Solarian PMCs for giving adventurous civilians jobs, too.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Siege: and once they've gotten away from those assassins they are the ones who end up founding militias and colonies of rugged individuals out in Wildspace.

Invictus: I was mainly thinking of PMCs when I was writing it, but then I'm not entirely sure where and how the line between PMCs and official military gets drawn in the Sovereignty.

I'm going off Errance for the idea that the Rich Kids of Solaris exist, but I know that's one story with one very specific set of characters on one specific planet. So basically I don't know who they would be as a whole.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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So it's like The Last Star Fighter, but instead of arcade games, its real fighter dogfights? And non-rich kids can be selected if they actually also do awesome in actual arcade games and Datasphere MMO Ace Combat games and attract the attention of talent scouts in the military or the PMCs?

(I think at some point the lines of the USS' official military, CEID-sponsored PMCs and genuinely uncontrolled PMCs are so blurry, perhaps it depends on how their actions are interpreted? If a USMC White Shark accidentally blows up a refugee ship full of Padryceps or Qylathi, mistaking it to be full of Bragtag invaders, then data/"reality" can be retrospectively rewritten to say those were mercs! It's some weird ass Russia-Crimea-Ukraine shit!

And there could be "goals" that the USS' official hierarchy wouldn't go for, like the wants of wealthy fringe world oppressors. This necessitatates PMCs or CEID spooks who, ironically, could still openly or not so openly advertise in the Datasphere due to free speech laws?)

I think the "rich" would either be the advantageous privileged descendants of those who own the superpost-singularity means of production, as opposed joe schmoes who're enjoying the bog standard but still prosperous awesome defaults of a singularity society (or its consequences... like mind-worm-meme-ridden wanderers in the streets), or those who are just friggin talented so that the pursuits they've chosen are in demand and are thus rewarded more - even assuming egalitarian basic incomes and such, there would still be exceptional folks (or parasites) whose non-conventional approaches (or exploitative approaches) net them better lots than the average folks.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

It's always a timely reminder that the Solarian state, the power of which is manifest in its military forces taking political objectives from its civilian leadership, and CEID with its deniable catspaws do not necessarily work towards the same purposes. And there's also the third spoiler force in the form of the Solarian megacorps, who themselves form the industrial backbone of the Sovereignty and have commercial interests that stretch well beyond the territory of the Sovereignty itself. Isn't the megacorp that rules the planet in Errance basically some distant tendril of Solarian corporate culture? And *their* enforcer goons are basically the furthest thing from any Solarian state action. (Though I suppose that's another type of soldier added to the list: fringeworld nabobs arming less developed locals.)
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I think the "rich" would either be the advantageous privileged descendants of those who own the superpost-singularity means of production, as opposed joe schmoes who're enjoying the bog standard but still prosperous awesome defaults of a singularity society (or its consequences... like mind-worm-meme-ridden wanderers in the streets), or those who are just friggin talented so that the pursuits they've chosen are in demand and are thus rewarded more - even assuming egalitarian basic incomes and such, there would still be exceptional folks (or parasites) whose non-conventional approaches (or exploitative approaches) net them better lots than the average folks.
This makes sense.

If the USS can memetically ensure that military service is a cool thing to brag about in society, and also that military service is necessarily selective because there only so many White Sharks to joyride and most candidates wash out, then it would be richest kids who get to join the military because well, that's what privilege gets you. And where you can have Datasphere wargames which can simulate the real thing with perfect fidelity, then actually joining the real thing with its immaterial aura of authenticity is the only mark of status over that.

(At this point though, it's probably useful to remind that military service would be far from the USS's only mark of status. You probably do get more than a few lineages of citizens who ruthlessly optimize their transhuman upgrades and ace their Datasphere manshooters/family-run raid guilds as to maximize their chances of getting accepted into the Navy or whatever, but they're probably a vanishingly tiny percentage among the people who obsess over other less comprehensible hobbies, or go into politics.)

And I actually had a funny idea re: The Last Starfighter and so on, where virtuality and reality blurs. Those ultra-realistic Datasphere wargames are probably played by billions upon billions of very enthusiastic people, but they know they're playing a game. What if there are people who don't? Children raised in the endless hyper-hives of Solaris, their minds plugged from birth into some pastoral virtual reality with the hope of instilling them with values 'cleaner' and 'better' than the vapid hyperconsumerism of Solaris proper, but upon maturity gradually reintroduced back into meatspace through the medium of a succession of intermediary virtual mediums - namely, games. From the children's perspective, they'd grow up in some nice single-world spacemerica and be encouraged to delve into these hyper-realistic and cool space shooters until they discover holy shit, all the space opera and the aliens and stuff is the real universe. And this method of raising children would be seen as eccentric but acceptable, like homeschooling.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Vic wrote:Isn't the megacorp that rules the planet in Errance basically some distant tendril of Solarian corporate culture? And *their* enforcer goons are basically the furthest thing from any Solarian state action. (Though I suppose that's another type of soldier added to the list: fringeworld nabobs arming less developed locals.)
I'd imagine it to be a mid-world in a pretty chill region of space, so the CEID and USS military controls are pretty lax. Its just another average world. The fact that the megacorporate culture has shaped society to be a bizarre biopunk nightmare means its more well-off than some fringe world! Hmph! :D
What if there are people who don't? Children raised in the endless hyper-hives of Solaris, their minds plugged from birth into some pastoral virtual reality with the hope of instilling them with values 'cleaner' and 'better' than the vapid hyperconsumerism of Solaris proper, but upon maturity gradually reintroduced back into meatspace through the medium of a succession of intermediary virtual mediums - namely, games. From the children's perspective, they'd grow up in some nice single-world spacemerica and be encouraged to delve into these hyper-realistic and cool space shooters until they discover holy shit, all the space opera and the aliens and stuff is the real universe. And this method of raising children would be seen as eccentric but acceptable, like homeschooling.
That is quite fucked up. I think there'd be a Child Services or Memetic Services or Ideology and Memes Administration (IMA) or something that tries at least to regulate and ensure these memes and virtualities people indulge themselves in are within some healthy barometric - particularly when raising non-consensual kids in pocket realities without their say in it. Imagine cults and all that! Fuck, entire generations raised in realities - not just totally submerged in Dataspheres, but in realities totally separated from the actual objective meatspace (which itself is pretty variable already!). Cults of people believing CEID genocided the Gamma-Sigma colony, convinced that they have to take up arms to right these wrongs! Nerve-gassing subways and shit! Ack.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

I think that a hallmark of the Sovereignty is that its institutions - from the government to CEID and its megacorps - are hugely vast in terms of holdings, impact and influence, but simultaneously extremely hierarchically flat and run by tiny cadres of ultra-elites.

A megacorp is its owner, a CI, and teeming swarms of 'dumb' machines. The government is the President, a handful of authoritative opinion-shapers, and one CI. CEID is its Director and who knows how many self-organizing sub-cells that report directly to her. FORCE is a loosely coördinated network of game-changer operators with no central authority at all.

To me, an essential part of the Sovereignty is how totally individualized it is. Where other polities need thousands or millions of individuals working in vast bureaucratic apparatuses the Sovereignty's ridiculous hypertechnology allows a single person to have the same level of impact. It is at its core a state of supermen: people who might look human, and occasionally act like it, but are actually so far beyond humanity that it renders the whole concept pretty meaningless.

The galaxy's main saving grace is that as it turns out, most supermen are in fact perfectly satisfied spending their days pursuing hedonistic outrage, smoking deathsticks, playing holosims, entering repulsorraces or skydiving into suns. On Solaris there is enough sensual stimulation to be found to last even a thousand immortal lifetimes and that's more than enough for the vast majority of people.

But there is a handful of people, people with very particular mind-patterns, who somehow can't be distracted by all the unlimited impulse-whimsy. These are the kinds of crazies who derive pleasure from building their own megacorp or becoming a master Datasphere orator or joining CEID.

The absurd impact that tiny handful of people has, shows the monumental level of stratification between have's on Solaris and have not's in Wild Space.

I could easily see the result of this being that one of these guys goes into Big Boss mode, recruits a bunch of fringe world yokels to his PMC, fits them with third-grade implants and lets them loose for the highest wild space bidder. Not because the government of the USS needs him to do so, but just because he's somehow got it into his head that's what he wants to do.

The atomized and fragmented nature of Solarian organizations (if you can even call them that anymore) means that a term like 'government sanction' is also mostly irrelevant. Because what does that even mean in a society that holds 'Do What Thou Wilt' as its central tenet?

Incidentally I imagine that in case of our hypothetical Big Boss, eventually a few CEID people in an autonomous cell might decide this has gone on for long enough, and put a stop to him. They might not even inform what passes for central authority, because it's just a regular mop-up job and not worth disturbing the Director's beauty sleep. It just... happens. People decide to do things because they can.

Maybe you could even argue that the idea of the 'Sovereignty' as a state in the traditional sense is a lie. It's just random groups of beings doing random things in a certain time-space, distinguished perhaps by a shared level of ludicrous technology but in terms of self-organizedness it might not actually peak above the background chaos.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I think there'd be a Child Services or Memetic Services or Ideology and Memes Administration (IMA) or something that tries at least to regulate and ensure these memes and virtualities people indulge themselves in are within some healthy barometric.
This could be one of Olympic's (or whatever the central government CI ends up being called, if we don't want to rip off ol' Ford too much) many functions. A CI would be ideally suited for keeping tabs on the multitude of crazy subrealities out there in the Datasphere.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

RE: The political model of the USS

Very illuminating, and once the individualistic and post-scarcity aspects are emphasized like that, makes the Sovereignty weirdly parallel that Prefecture place on the other side of known space. Though, if I look at it that way, I feel that it might be overstating things a bit. Surely, something came together among those disparate colony worlds against the Bragulan menace in the early days, and there's still some form of coherence to be had against all those non-trivial threats that the Sovereignty is still encountering, and I suppose at least those conventional USMC expeditionary brigades with their warships and hovertanks tend to be larger in scale than a few supersoldier commando badasses.

Of course, that might be the other point you're making. Just as the hyperprivileged of Solaris do not represent the Sovereignty's citizenry (see: yokels, fringe world) even if they are the most capable and most distinctive among the population, FORCE commandos and flashy Dreadstars are the nastiest and most distinctive end of the USS military machine, even if a lot of grunt Replicant marines also get work in the background (even though Replicant marines are definitely not grunts by the standards of the rest of the galaxy). No wonder vets like Baylor end up demobilizing to the fringe worlds.

Would it be fair to say that the ComInts are really the ones holding the Sovereignty together, since the humans clearly aren't the ones working on it? The CIs are the metaphorical and literal system. The genius loci. While we have to put together systems with people and rules and physical infrastructure as constituent parts to manage anything on a large scale, CIs just...embody all of that.
Siege wrote:This could be one of Olympic's (or whatever the central government CI ends up being called, if we don't want to rip off ol' Ford too much) many functions. A CI would be ideally suited for keeping tabs on the multitude of crazy subrealities out there in the Datasphere.
Behind my initial idea, I did envision that it went on with official CI endorsement and regulation (and vested interest in having these VR-homeschoolers do social experimentation for them). Raising your children in sub-realities is okay as long as the sub-realities aren't too out there, and that the children would eventually be re-integrated into reality (via videogames). And if you don't, Olympi with its control over the Datasphere would shut you down.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Yeah I suppose there would be a shared history-identity in the Sovereignty... Although it wouldn't surprise me if a few centuries of memetic drift and increasingly outrageous holovids have twisted history out of all proportion, to the point where even first generation posthumans who lived through it have difficulty remembering how the Sov-Brag War really went down.

Maybe the war at the time was covered in 'flat' 2D footage, and asking a modern Sov viewer to watch that is like asking a modern moviegoer to listen to a telegraph clattering in ancient Sumerian for two hours. Instead every battle has been reshot many times in fully-immersive VR, first as propaganda, then as entertainment, then as subversive art, then as entertainment again, and by the time people like C.J. Motonow are done with it it's like a Picasso version -- but one that appears actually more realistic to the viewing audience!

So at this point the war might be little more than a loose compendium of myths featuring legendary heroes improbably overcoming insurmountable odds. Some of those people are still around, but they have basically zero control over the way they are publically perceived and have given up the hopes of ever setting the record straight centuries ago.

Anyway, coming back to the average joe, there admittedly has to be a 'middle class' somewhere between the superhumans and the fringe world yokels. I wonder though if that group, composed of more recently assimilated worlds, wouldn't be better defined as a group of people who aren't fully mentally ready to commit to the postsingularity yet.

So there's a gradient that ramps up from mud hut settlements in Wild Space all the way to Solaris. And the Sovereignty's fringe worlds exist in various stages along that gradient, depending on how far the assimilation process they are. And that's where the 'middle class' is.

Even among demobilized Replicants you have people like Baylor who have some post-organs but are comparatively 'normal', but also people like Selphie who look normal but are actually FORCE-level enhanciles*.

Like Baylor the vast majority of Replicants are engineered to operate in relatively mundane environments. So after their service they're deactivated to worlds that suit their 'level' because if they were drummed out at Solaris they'd suffer acute memetic shock. The pure unrefined aggressive posthuman madness of the Sovereignty is something you have to acclimatize to. Or upgrade into. Either way it takes time to get used to it. And it's the same for entire planetary populations.

Ultimately building a few planetary megastructures or expanding Datasphere coverage isn't the problem, the real challenge is in upgrading the planetary population's mindset and doing it in a careful and controlled manner that doesn't totally disrupt and fuck up the minds and lives of a few billion people unready to accept the singularity. That can take weeks or years or decades, depending on local noospheric conditions.

So basically incorporating Wild Space planets into the Sovereignty is like uplifting a stone age cargo cult tribe to the point where they are comfortable in modern society, magnified by a couple factors of crazy.

Also yes I totally think CompInts are running the show in the Sovereignty. And they probably don't even need much of their processing power to do it, having plenty left to split off a bit of themselves to assist whatever crazy wants to set up a new megacorp or whatever.


* I wonder if FORCE isn't as much about mindset as it is about what they do. They're people who've gone a long way down very specific body optimization roads because... Well, because they wanted to. But really all that FORCE operators have in common is that they are known to exist at a certain level of crazy enhancement, beyond that they're pretty much freelancers who get called in to to specific jobs suitable to their specific mind-frames. Some are invisible quantum thieves, some turn into killfuck cyborg monsters, some are ultra-assassins, some have rules against killing non-backups, but they all have one or more talents that means they are registered as FORCE.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I like that, the refinement of your idea of the Solarian singularity as this expanding wave - you've finally figured out *why* there's some limitation of this supposedly edgelord rational redpill utopian hard sci-fi Orions Armsing, why it hasn't logically QED concession accepted the universe! It's because of soft sci-fi! (Hard sci-fi redpillers shriek in horror!) But it makes so much sense, aside from the deliberate delicateness on part of Olympic and on Strange McNamaras and other relatively sane people helping run the core, in terms of these demographic groups, the "osmosis" is just slow and I think its realistic. It mirrors how in modern times, the developing world is asymmetrically growing towards the first world's ways but its at a different pace and in a different manner and takes time. Usually this development is also violent - but I am sure the USS tries to stop rapine robber barons and TOM DANGERZONE PMCs from wreaking too much havoc and galvanizing resistant yokels who might suddenly end up with caches of K-bolters and Spuds.

Siege wrote:Also yes I totally think CompInts are running the show in the Sovereignty. And they probably don't even need much of their processing power to do it, having plenty left to split off a bit of themselves to assist whatever crazy wants to set up a new megacorp or whatever.
I was thinking that perhaps legislation, the constitution or whatever, says that while even though the CIs do all the hard work in organizing Solarian society and keeping it running, the old ancient laws still say that there has to be a human in the loop. So there could be billions of people employed to pretty much rubber stamp a lot of the measures the CIs are doing, at least measures that affect humans - just people redundantly clicking "yes, okay, approved" and going through make-work paperworks and documentations and perhaps occasionally going "WAIT WHAT IS THIS" when perhaps some CI's proposal is disagreeable to a bunch of humans (either because the CI is being too smart or the people are being too stupid, or someone made an oversight or didn't factor in something and so the humans have to have some inputs... or because the CI is being a dick and is doing something evil, from nanoswarms to evicting people to build a hyperspace bypass on some moon).

Technically, the USS' elected officials could do this, but I think the likes of Sinclair and McNamara are themselves already also so upgraded - with brains and off-site brain augmentator info-stream things - that their things also have to pass through the paperwork of these human approval lines.

It's like... while each post-person VIP leader and each CI is already so much more than a baseline human, they've become living individual institutions... maybe, counter-intuitively, even anachronistically and rustically, this somehow means that they've accumulated entire buildings full of necessary or redundant human bureaucracy because of their sheer importance.

This apparatus could be called The Referendum or something, and the people there are already also enhanced functionaries and bureaucrats and call-center clicker dudes. Like those folks in Ghost in the Shell with cybernetic clockwork fingers typing QWERTY keyboards. :D

(Of course its not gonna be as fucking redundant as the Bragulan bureaucracy, and in most likelihood the CI and the Sinclairs and McNamaras have already pretty much implemented their measures and these human approvals are just formalities...)
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