Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

[Invictus]

I imagine it is a radical approach advocated only by a few Sajit clerics who will probably get their shit ruined by the orthodoxist Sajit and even the Wrannath (after all, if enough non-Wrannath become Wrannatheic then their Great Dreaming will be coopted by the wrong dreams... the advantages the Wrannath enjoy is that they can monitor psi-karma without being affected by the "lower lifeforms," they are separate "impartial" arbitrators that maintain their autonomy and agency, without being reduced to inanimate apparatuses, they can have their cake and eat it too).

Well yes, even under my schema transmigrating into a Wrannath "body" can be a bit unworkable, verging on a nonsense concept. In my mind individual Wrannatheic thornbush bodies aren't even individually sapient or capable of sustaining an average sapient mind - the collective psychic interactions between groups of them is where Wrannath consciousness comes from, and even these gestalts think very differently from your average animals with meat-based brains. In the particular context of the collective Wrannath species as a caste of the Sajit'satyk, groomed and cultivated into their role as psi-assessor/enforcers, I've always thought of them as this vast hyper-adapted questionably self-aware sociopath on a tight leash, like the Vampires in Blindsight, and the Satykarma is programming. The closest thing to becoming one of them would be to have some kind of thought-construct of yourself transplanted into their Dream Gardens, which is of questionable utility and agency.

If the Sajit'satyk functioned like I described in my last post, the Wrannath may indeed be declared immune to transmigration, their karma directly overseen by the Sajit. This would be another way they are "janissaries": enjoying unique privileges as a group that render them unduly influential.

This could indeed be the basis of a possible Wranna'satyk: everyone uploaded into a Matrix made of psychic flowers. Now we're really being high concept, folks.

Maybe in ancient times the plan was to turn the Satyk into this when all the parts were in place and functional... but it's too much trouble for its worth, implementing a system that can trans-upload and cross-load and down-load trillions of consciousnesses and manage this effectively and fairly? Hah, good luck with that. Most Sajit clerics think this is too much.

And really, what's the point of transferring minds and bodies? It makes no sense from a non-ideological standpoint. It only makes sense in the context of the stratified Bounty - where the Sajit radicals will enthrall disenfranchised masses with the prospects of ascending the hierarchy in body and spirit... and dilute the Wrannatheic Dreaming, potentially turning the species into... the ganglia and dendrites of an existential interspecies nervous system.

Well *now* you think the idea is technically unfeasible

The point is it is ideological - riffing off Hinduism, the reason why all the species of the Bounty deserve to exist and get along is because every species has a place in the Bounty. Every species is the way it is, doing the way it does things, because it deserves to. So there must be an overarching hierarchy of moral worth that explains why a given species is on top and another is slumming at the bottom, and it is because they either earned it or deserved it. And since a species is the way it is because it deserves to be the way it is, it would be virtuous for them to continue acting the way it is. And for social mobility's sake, if an individual has done well enough, why shouldn't it deserve to be something better?

Of course, there can be nuances in the system. Many gradations of merit and privilege even within a species. Stuff like seniority and patronage being taken into account, lots of rules about how people from different clade-castes should (not) interact with each other, to avoid unintended karmic consequence. Different clade-castes that are acknowledged not to be directly superior or inferior to each other because of contexts so vastly different, so maybe seniority or something counts instead. Most members of a clade-caste inhabits their clade-caste niches well, and get to stay in that clade-caste. Those who get to transmigrate upwards are an exceptional few and only at the end of their natural lifespans (which gets me to think that transhuman technologies would be strictly controlled within the 'satyk - all the ways it could mess up the natural order of things!), creating a scarcity of privilege that's both due to deliberate policy and technological limitations.

I mean ultimately that's what the Satykarma is. A way to socially and technologically reinforce the "natural order of things", because the natural order of a Bounty where innumerable species rub shoulders without being at each other's throats is better than many alternatives.

So the transference of souls is what is needed to maintain the dynamism of this "Final Stage of Sajit'satyk 'Perfection'" which is inherently rigid, with species being turned into castes, only the paradoxical transcarnations can temper this?

It's inherently rigid in the way that all political systems (excepting certain ludicrous transhuman cyberdemocracies) are inherently rigid, and need to have their laws and policies tweaked now and then. This and not the transmigration of souls is the dynamism I was talking about; a new member of a clade-caste would still be forced into its strictures.

Hmm, let's try an example. Okay, space giraffes. With prehensile tongues or something.

They're huge, fast but not very dexterous. They were mentored all the way into civilization by another space serengeti species, whole mentored them all the way to civilization but also strapped lasers to their heads to use as retro living siege platforms. (It made sense at the time.) Even by the time they can sustain a modern interstellar civilization on their own, they're still kind of tall and awkward and don't enjoy space travel.

They're now a member of the Sajit'satyk, and the Sajit survey them and decide that they're doing well in their current niche, inhabiting level terrain and taking advantage of their superior height and reach, so clearly their caste role should be such! As a consequence, the space giraffes get first dibs to settling any plains, and preferred employment to being park rangers, construction workers and living siege platforms. Trying to crew cramped spaceships or building big cities is discouraged, with collective species demerits enforced via loss of resources and rights, and ringleaders being taken away for punitive transmigration. Young giraffes are educated of their species' place in the Sajit'satyk, that they should take pride in what their ancestors do and do it diligently themselves. They must show appropriate grateful deference to their former mentor species on all social occasions, but are also allowed at certain times to totally ignore other species that are too short and inconvenient for them to notice, as long as no injury is caused.

And since to the Satykarma ecological niches are also moral niches, Sajit priest-scholars start debating what being a space giraffe means. Do they exemplify the qualities of a watchful guardian, or do they excel in their manifestation of grounded humility despite towering over everyone? Once codified, watchful guardianness and grounded humility also become part of what it means to be a good space giraffe. It makes sense to extend new avenues of profession attainment in this direction, and also to add new taboos.

External conditions mean that there are no longer as many new suitable planets to settle, and space giraffe territories grow crowded even though they're not allow to be crowded. Insulated by technology from actually needing to fit into their niche, they still fit diligently into their niches because their niches have been made law. Their virtues as a species are interpreted as generations pass, developing technicalities and workarounds. "Living siege platform" gets rather ceremonial in practice, but the Sajit'satyk still pays for a battalion of them every season. Their powers of watchful guardianship eventually argues them into the job of media censor, which is really inconvenient for their blue collar society but what can you do. Another loophole is successfully argued that they can in fact do whatever job they want, as long as nothing in the job environment is taller than them and the job technically involves making observations, which makes a lot of their previous education moot and probably draws complaints from other castes who are having their jobs threatened, so maybe the Sajit smack that one down.

Space giraffes who see opportunities denied are barred from pointing out ethical contradictions, as it is not their place. Karmic immigrants and higher caste administrators treat them by their derived virtues as taught by pan-'satyk culture. Social and economic immobility become the foundation of further issues, and stereotypes perpetuate without reflection. It's the roles themselves which trap everyone involved into stasis.

[Shroom Man 777]

If the Sajit'satyk functioned like I described in my last post, the Wrannath may indeed be declared immune to transmigration, their karma directly overseen by the Sajit. This would be another way they are "janissaries": enjoying unique privileges as a group that render them unduly influential.

This could indeed be the basis of a possible Wranna'satyk: everyone uploaded into a Matrix made of psychic flowers. Now we're really being high concept, folks.

Either everyone is in a Wrannatheic form or the mass karma-ethical transmigration, transcarnation logistics across species-castes is facilitated by really steroidified Wrannatheic apparatuses. Perhaps one stage is a precursor to the other stage of final Wranna'satyk. Perhaps the Sajit have groomed the Garden for the assumption of that ultimate - karmically perfect - state.

Of course, shitloads of other Sajit clerics and constituent satyk-species think this is a horrific concept or at least ridiculously unfeasible, taking resources needed to beat back the MYRRANNI HORROR.

Well *now* you think the idea is technically unfeasible

If not me then the in-universe conservatives and orthodoxists who'll shit their pants at the high concept of this.

I guess it depends on what the interpretation of Satykarma is.

"We are tired of the Sajit techno-monk hegemony."

"Okay, let's transubstantiate all society into a state of transmigrancy and transcarnation into either all-Wrannath or, for the meanwhile, into other species-castes through massive Wrannatheic conduits."

"NOOO! WRANNATHEID! WRANNAT'SATYK! ARGH!" or "Inconceivable! What about the MYRRANI THREAT!"

[Invictus]

New Idea: The League of Exilates

The Hyperpacifican nation isn't actually the most representative bunch of humans living in the Samtic Nexus. Those would be the diverse populations that fled into the Nexus during the early formation of the Fracture, when xenophobia against any clade too far outside the arbitrary baseline solidified, and many Samtic-backed post-Reign polities were being toppled and sidelined by rising nativist great powers like the House of Auriga. The Fracture's broken psychosocial consensus no longer had a place for them, and so they left in vast multitudes. Some were able to overcome their ingrained animus against the meddling molluscs and took shelter within the Nexus cosmopoles, while others passed into the Tide Reach and other, more distant regions.

Formally, the Exilates classify themselves still as the legitimate governments of a host of early-Fracture states in exile, and still lay claim to significant volumes of human space that hasn't been theirs for...well, as long as the Fracture has existed, in some cases. The individual Exilates don't necessarily share an ideology or even a common cause, but among the Nexus they represent themselves as a League of human polities for the political leverage, setting the rather human-standards-picturesque planet of Alterre as their Council-world.

Despite a given diversity of transhuman physiologies, the Exilates have by their common existences forged a kind of third common alignment of humanity: the Exile. They consider themselves citizens of the infinitely splendifiously diverse galaxy (or of slightly less infinitely splendifiously diverse Nexus, but close enough), able to come to grips with any kind of alien or environment and never minding having a symbiote or two, but also defining themselves in relation to a cosmic home they can never go back to, holding the Nexus itself at a certain guest-like distance despite mostly being found rambling its cosmic waterways. They also have a Hippie-Traveler-Browncoat thing going on, tracing some of their legacy from the idealistic veterans of a thousand mind wars who fought a corrupt Earthreign, and bitterly consider the current bunch of humans who live in the Fracture as no better than scavengers and usurpers who squander humanity's future.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe in the earlier days of the Grandeur of Auriga, the Sidereals got a lot of shit when the Aurigan and Avancorean houses suspected them of plotting coups to reinstate some Exilates who are, after all, "Desecrated" like the these peripheral weirdo clans. Ala Dorne wanting to reinstate the Targaryans.

I wonder if these Alterrans just include posthumans and Desecrated who were once Earthreign-oppressed before being nativist racist-oppressed after Reignfall... or if the Nexus... granted... Earthreign loyalists asylum. OPERATION MOLLUSK-CLIP!

[Invictus]

I wonder if these Alterrans just include posthumans and Desecrated who were once Earthreign-oppressed before being nativist racist-oppressed after Reignfall... or if the Nexus... granted... Earthreign loyalists asylum. OPERATION MOLLUSK-CLIP!

No actual attempt to institute large-scale psiocracies will be much encouraged in the Nexus, of course. but I do see some Earthreign reconstructionists in the mix too. Maybe they descended from some psychic managerial clade of the fallen regime who found themselves vilified and worthless, or maybe they were subaltern enough in the Fracture to vaguely miss what life was like under the Reign. But it's not like any of them really remembered what the Earthreign was like, since the ancestors of the Exiles also went through the Cataclysm. You'd have nostalgia and imagination filling in for reconstructed cultural mores, either casting this as a golden past to be hearkened back to, or in the case of the countercultural rebels, as a deliberate bogeyman to reject.

They'll all on average romanticize the Earthreign more than the average Fracture denizen, though. And maybe inherit a higher incidence of psionic talent.

[Invictus]

I had an idea a while ago about Nova Meropia.

Whether sapient androids/robots exist in the Fracture is, surprisingly, an utter grey zone despite how common a space opera trope they are. Technology levels notwithstanding, I have no idea how they would interact with the psychic nature of sapience in general or the psycho-traumatic conservatism of the Fracture in particular. Shroom and I tossed around some ideas that freemind rebels at the very end of the Earthreign could have tried to upload their minds to resist psychic influence, whether or not that would work, and how such uploaded human minds in mechanical bodies could be distinguished from robot-robots.

I want to lay some groundwork by making Nova Meropia robots. A polity of robots or at least of the descendants of uploaded human minds, the existence of which is definitely unusual by Fracture standards and is also why they're not particularly aligned to anyone despite being a technological and industrial powerhouse. They've been described as a working Calibrationist state, which might well be true by the definition of Calibrationism that lots of people in the Fracture use, but it would be less the case that they deliberately and successfully implemented Calibrationism (not a single coherent philosophy in the first place), but more because they are robots and high-tech so everyone just pegs them as Calibrationists.

In addition, the Meropians maintain their...eccentricities, but mostly because they're too used to being robots. Their exported technology has a reputation for quirkiness because they often fail to take account of the comforts or basic needs of their intended human users. I'm not sure if I want to go as far as to have the Fracture influencing them to act like stereotypical sci-fi robots - over-reliance on logic, irrational hydrophobia and so on - but I think having them be actual robots actually doesn't do much violence to their current themes as presented.

[Shroom Man 777]

Would being robbits have insulated them from the cataclysm, or would it have really screwed up with some of their programming, data corruption and the like?

[Invictus]

Would being robbits have insulated them from the cataclysm, or would it have really screwed up with some of their programming, data corruption and the like?

That's what I want us to work out. While different species have different psi-potential levels and presumably different susceptibility levels to psionic effects, the Fracture is a thing mainly because it's filled with humans who are definitely vulnerable to psionics. It's probably worth it in general to work out how AIs and "artificial" minds (as much as that means anything in science fiction) interact with psionics in SOTS*, but my specific issue is if they really are insulated, and there are a bunch of AIs/robots out there who have no idea why all the humans are acting like weirdly conservative spacemericas and in fact perfectly recall what happened during and before the Cataclysm, how much does this undermine the whole idea of the Fracture?

On the other hand, the Fracture is a thing also because it used to be a ruthless regime of psi-tyrants who oppressed their subjects too far. If psionics was the Earthreign's principal method of control, I'm not sure if they would have tolerated a bunch of psi-resistant AIs/robots living in their empire. As prominent robbits are to the genre and as much as I want to include them in SOTS for this reason, they might really have relatively shallow roots in the Fracture because the time before Reignfall was a Butlerian Jihad no-AI zone. (Except for like, vat-grown giant brain-computers, but those are more likely vulnerable to the Cataclysm) The issue of robots and Cataclysms never comes up because there weren't any back then.

In any case, my personal idea is that the Meropians were uploaded humans rather than "true" robbits, and that their dysfunctions would be due to either imperfections in the original upload process, or the simple side effects of human minds living in inhuman bodies.

*But if Aguero-space theory is right, *any* sapient mind should have the potential to interact with psionics. And if possible Aguero singularities like the Cataclysm work by erasing information on a platonic level, I don't see why thinking AIs would be spared.

[Shroom Man 777]

If the original Meropian engineers pursued this course *after* the Fracture then that might make the results of their efforts even more problematic than if they were already robbits when the cataclysm happened?

[Siege]

Perhaps uploads and smart robits are just as vulnerable to psionic meddling as squishy humans.

CompInts could be immune because most of their brain cores are submerged in hyperspace and other dimensions that are difficult / impossible to reach psionically.

Likewise certain more 'regular' AI could be insured against such meddling by having multiple thought-centers constantly check each others data-integrity against each other. When anomalous neural patterns are detected they are automatically overwritten with the 'proper' data. This could make such AI a bit stiff and conservative in terms of accepting new ideas compared to the more 'out there' CompInts too.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Maybe there are different wavelengths of information, so it's easier for a human psychic to mess with another human brain than with a computer, but a giant neuromancer slug might be able to do both with no problem.

I have an idea on a completely different tack if anyone wants to do anything with it:

Treewalkers is a term that refers to people who live among the Karlacks. Since the definitions of 'people' and 'Karlack' are pretty vague, whether a civilisation is a Treewalker tribe or a Karlack brood is often based on political or academic expediency. They can vary from people who are almost trying to be Karlacks, or parasitising Karlack terrafauna in some way, living inside their organs or on barnacles or in body cavities or something, to societies that are technically in 'the Karlack jungle' because there are Karlacks on every side of them at a distance of X lightyears, but have no idea that this is the case.

[Shroom Man 777]

I like this. I do imagine and maybe mentioned beforehand that there might be civilizations, societies and just plain organisms that live in sorta-harmony with the Karlack ecosystem. There could have even been human "tribals" that did so, prior to being displaced by Fracture-human industrial ichor harvesting/space whaling that disrupted relatively benign Karlack and non-Karlack organisms, causing some kind of evolutionary arms race and the arrival of more combative Karlack bioforms.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Looking at that I wonder about the mechanism for Karlack evolution, which is obviously a lot faster than normal evolution; In SDNW4 I know the Karlack were like the Zerg, and they had an overmind and avatars ('aspects'), now since they are now more of an ecosystem, maybe the overmind is more of an oversense, and it just transfers impressions and information through the Karlacks, with each organism responding differently. Thus, when space whalers come and start killing Karlack organisms en masse, this generates a lot of negativity and aggression in the oversense, triggering Karlacks to become more agressive in the face of the outside threat, making epigenetic changes that have them growing biocannons and so forth, and killing human ships more often, whilst smaller Karlacks would just learn to fear human ships.

It's not a mind because every organism that can tune into the oversense uses it in a different way, but it has measurable effects across the ecosystem, also, whether or not a being can make use of it is one metric as to whether that being is or isn't a Karlack.

I don't know.

[Shroom Man 777]

I like that, the ruling "principle" of the Karlacks is far more abstract than just an over*mind* as it is the interconnected feedback loops of factors beyond just intelligences.

There will be some, even many, intelligent and hyper-intelligent Karlack organisms, including group intelligences, but on such a large scale the interconnections of sentient, sub-sentient and meta-sentient things might cause some kind of "emergence" that, when required, compels say the more organized-seeming Karlack movements, actions against hostile forces and so on.

That's not to say entire Karlack planets or solar systems don't have actual cerebrates and overminds, maybe there are highly successful hivemind-components there, perhaps led by hyper-intelligent individual "nodes" (be it some enormous brain-slug-structure thing or some infesticated former Magi lady with wing-claws ), that consciously orchestrate the evolution of the beings under their sway and even try to spread, control or indirectly guide surrounding "feral" Karlacks. There could be other super-smart Karlacks that act like lone-wolves, not commanding or under the command of any other thing aside from the abstract forces compelling the swarm. And all around these are the more indirectly-linked, uncontrolled feral Karlacks just living in all their endless sectors-spanning numbers.

The idea of fractal chaosy factors, the sheer complexity of these contradictory components, exponentially... coalescing and causing an "emergence" of something greater is nice and allows us convenient refuge in obscurity.

[speaker-to-trolls]

That's not to say entire Karlack planets or solar systems don't have actual cerebrates and overminds, maybe there are highly successful hivemind-components there, perhaps led by hyper-intelligent individual "nodes" (be it some enormous brain-slug-structure thing or some infesticated former Magi lady with wing-claws ), that consciously orchestrate the evolution of the beings under their sway and even try to spread, control or indirectly guide surrounding "feral" Karlacks. There could be other super-smart Karlacks that act like lone-wolves, not commanding or under the command of any other thing aside from the abstract forces compelling the swarm. And all around these are the more indirectly-linked, uncontrolled feral Karlacks just living in all their endless sectors-spanning numbers.

What's more, those same feedback mechanisms which cause them to zergrush humans who go over their fishing quotas could prevent hiveminds or empires within the jungle from spreading too far, once a hive got too big it might instigate the creation of smaller hives that would challenge its power, or nudge them into putting lots of power into synapse creatures which eventually break off from the main hive so the whole thing fractures once it gets past a certain point.

Oh, I like the idea of lone-wolf super Karlacks guided by these vague forces, even if for nothing else than one of them menacing the western Fracture as the Super Moby Dick of Space, emerging out of the dark to obliterate whaling ships and punish mankind for his hubris.

The idea of fractal chaosy factors, the sheer complexity of these contradictory components, exponentially... coalescing and causing an "emergence" of something greater is nice and allows us convenient refuge in obscurity.

A very good refuge, and one I think we will use many times in future

[Invictus]

I assume "living in harmony with the Karlacks" means accepting you'll be eaten every now and then.

More seriously, the existence of Treewalkers does help demonstrate that the Karlacks aren't all Turbo-Zerg all the time, that lots of the cosmic organisms that make up the "Karlack" ecosystem fulfill roles that make them quite placid by human standards, or at least are dangerous in ways that are avoidable by human standards. Space whale grazer cosmozoans, harvestable space kudzu that's just hideously toxic instead of actively trying to bite your heads off back, and so on.

Related to the Treewalker concept and the thin line between people and particularly clever zerg, I had the sudden question about what happens if a particular Karlack brood evolves sapience, decided that they didn't want to go on being just hyper-evolved space ticks or something, and tries to join this civilization thing? There's nothing intrinsic about Karlack organisms that prevent them from developing self-awareness, so how often would it happen? Are periodic barbarian migrations' worth of these primitive entrants sweeping into civilized space a thing?

[speaker-to-trolls]

I assume "living in harmony with the Karlacks" means accepting you'll be eaten every now and then.

Basically yes

And 'you' sometimes encompasses your entire family, tribe, planet or indeed species.

That's the circle of life

More seriously, the existence of Treewalkers does help demonstrate that the Karlacks aren't all Turbo-Zerg all the time, that lots of the cosmic organisms that make up the "Karlack" ecosystem fulfill roles that make them quite placid by human standards, or at least are dangerous in ways that are avoidable by human standards. Space whale grazer cosmozoans, harvestable space kudzu that's just hideously toxic instead of actively trying to bite your heads off back, and so on.

Exactly, and the number of ways that people could adapt to fill these niches and find ways to coexist with the zerganid monsters all around them is potentially limitless. A lot of these tribes will have some degree of cooperation with Karlack organisms, or at the least will fight them in predictable, sustainable ways that don't wipe out huge amounts of Karlacks and don't trigger an 'immune response' that wipes out their tribe.

Or at least, hasn't wiped them out yet, see above.

Related to the Treewalker concept and the thin line between people and particularly clever zerg, I had the sudden question about what happens if a particular Karlack brood evolves sapience, decided that they didn't want to go on being just hyper-evolved space ticks or something, and tries to join this civilization thing? There's nothing intrinsic about Karlack organisms that prevent them from developing self-awareness, so how often would it happen? Are periodic barbarian migrations' worth of these primitive entrants sweeping into civilized space a thing?

I would imagine that happens every so often, I think that when we were brainstorming the Padryceps/Oolycysts I suggested that the Padryceps could have originally been Karlack organisms of some kind or another. Again this is where the line between Karlacks and Treewalkers becomes political; a peaceful convoy of refugees or merchants bringing exotic new technologies and trinkets=Treewalkers (even if they evolved from Karlacks). An invading horde subjugating planets and fighting the locals for dominance=Karlacks (even if they were originally Treewalkers, and even if it emerges they are just oppressing (or even liberating) rather than eating the locals).

It all depends on who is defining the categories and what they want out of the situation.

[Shroom Man 777]

Aside from the teeming numbers of miscellaneous cosmozoans drawn to that ecosystem and finding all sorts of niches there, would there still be traditionally, universally recognizable Karlacks though (Vanilla Karlack? Karlackassic?)? With even common genetic markers that might suggest a common point of origin? Since there would be cosmozoans that originated from, say, the other side of Myrr space that would totally be not-Karlacks by anyone's reckoning. There should still be some identifying traits so the "Karlack" description, or at least the educated specific one, won't just refer to just any organism that evolved out of any rock in the galaxy... since if we stretch the definition too loosely, humans, Zigonians, Brags, Samtics, etc. would just be Karlacks too...

This would mean discerning folks would know that there are lots of space whales that, somehow, someway aren't "Karlack."

Would this mean that while, yes, the concept of the Karlacks is "brute nature... but in space... and with sometimes-subtle sometimes-not-so-subtle Gaian hypothesis Na'vi Pandora emergence oversense" things... on the other hand there might also be *other* space ecosystems out there full of bioforms but are recognizably not-Karlack?

More seriously, the existence of Treewalkers does help demonstrate that the Karlacks aren't all Turbo-Zerg all the time, that lots of the cosmic organisms that make up the "Karlack" ecosystem fulfill roles that make them quite placid by human standards, or at least are dangerous in ways that are avoidable by human standards. Space whale grazer cosmozoans, harvestable space kudzu that's just hideously toxic instead of actively trying to bite your heads off back, and so on.

Exactly, and the number of ways that people could adapt to fill these niches and find ways to coexist with the zerganid monsters all around them is potentially limitless. A lot of these tribes will have some degree of cooperation with Karlack organisms, or at the least will fight them in predictable, sustainable ways that don't wipe out huge amounts of Karlacks and don't trigger an 'immune response' that wipes out their tribe.

Or at least, hasn't wiped them out yet, see above.

I bet that immune response would be Karlack hunter-scavengers just attracted to the scent of the dead Karlacks, that while people think the hunter-scavengers are there to exact vengeance on the attacking outsiders and "recycling" their brethren-Karlacks... in actuality the hunter-scavengers are there to feed on the dead and just happened to notice the other tasty treats in the area.

Related to the Treewalker concept and the thin line between people and particularly clever zerg, I had the sudden question about what happens if a particular Karlack brood evolves sapience, decided that they didn't want to go on being just hyper-evolved space ticks or something, and tries to join this civilization thing? There's nothing intrinsic about Karlack organisms that prevent them from developing self-awareness, so how often would it happen? Are periodic barbarian migrations' worth of these primitive entrants sweeping into civilized space a thing?

I would imagine that happens every so often, I think that when we were brainstorming the Padryceps/Oolycysts I suggested that the Padryceps could have originally been Karlack organisms of some kind or another. Again this is where the line between Karlacks and Treewalkers becomes political; a peaceful convoy of refugees or merchants bringing exotic new technologies and trinkets=Treewalkers (even if they evolved from Karlacks). An invading horde subjugating planets and fighting the locals for dominance=Karlacks (even if they were originally Treewalkers, and even if it emerges they are just oppressing (or even liberating) rather than eating the locals).

It all depends on who is defining the categories and what they want out of the situation.

The evolved individually sentient sapient "civilized" Karlacks might still be utterly alien from the way all sorts of other "conventional" creatures approach the universe, maybe weirder than even Samtic aggregate-existences... so even then joining normal civilization might not be that easy as they themselves are far from normal? But that depends on the particular Karlack... a specialized node-mind that can feel the ebb and flow of a solar system-sized ecosystem would probably have a harder time than some of those Treewalkers variations if, say, they got left behind by the greater Karlack migration they followed and ended up colonizing some garden moon (intelligently terraforming it by cultivating Karlack-derived flora and fauna...) and evolving to look like tall lanky blue space cats

(On the other hand, the former node-mind would not have such a hard time integrating if he was introduced to Olympic and all his other CIs... maybe some Karlack swarms that approach USS space can be placated that way... they eat a few populations here and there but are fended off when a SUPERDREADSTAR comes in, shows its guns... and opens a channel and Olympic and the node-mind Ravenous Aspect have a TEST OF WILLS and an EXCHANGE OF RIDDLES before the intruders mysteriously withdraw, with the survivors and meatbag witnesses none the wiser and the USSF and USMC crews thinking that it was the use of some PSI DISRUPTOR that shooed the zerg off...)

To make things more confusing, sure maybe the Oolycysts and Padrycepts were spawned from Karlack splinter strains or their ecosystems were turbo-charged by some milder form of infestation or gene-transfer... but what if the Karlacks aren't the only roving space-ecosystem to do this? It wouldn't even have to be just a space-beast horde through space. Even rogue "normal" civilizations could do this - SinTek experimentation-vessels gone rogue atrocity-splicing their way through clusters of viable worlds... The Earthreign might have done so with a few proto-Sidereals and pre-Sidereals... same with the Grand Aurigans... whole swaths of space full of forehead-ridged biped "humanoids." The Samtics and the Overlords that came before them... heck, the Nexus' uplifts might have been messier before and might have incorporated SUPERIOR DOMINANT GENE TRANSFERS aside from just intelligence-boosting. There could have actually been Apexai Hybridization attempts in ancient times, before the Doom of Apexaia and totally more hybridy than what the CEID did to produce psions (perhaps based on some table napkin scrawlings some refugee Zedath Kaleshi scientists made while trying to vaguely recollect ancient alchemical attempts...).

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe the first inkling people get of this messed up intermingling of supposedly separate cosmically-separated trees of evolution would be when some Orthii and Myrran travelers meet up, feel some gnarly subconscious urges, shack up and end up producing - gasp - viable offspring!

Like, the biggest thing I can take from the semantics of what is a Karlack and such is that... again, taking refuge in obscurity, we have the option of saying fuck it and make things even worse by kicking it up a notch and making it not only the Karlacks but just filling the entire galaxy with whacky PROGENITOR RACE THEORY hijinks.

We need bluerpleiolet vaguely-humanoids that somehow can shack up with humans. Populations must be present in Cevauk since I am sure if we're to have Twi'leks, they'd be there in the K-Zone too and they'd be there in Mobius land.

All this also has the makings of a bad anime.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Aside from the teeming numbers of miscellaneous cosmozoans drawn to that ecosystem and finding all sorts of niches there, would there still be traditionally, universally recognizable Karlacks though (Vanilla Karlack? Karlackassic?)? With even common genetic markers that might suggest a common point of origin? Since there would be cosmozoans that originated from, say, the other side of Myrr space that would totally be not-Karlacks by anyone's reckoning. There should still be some identifying traits so the "Karlack" description, or at least the educated specific one, won't just refer to just any organism that evolved out of any rock in the galaxy... since if we stretch the definition too loosely, humans, Zigonians, Brags, Samtics, etc. would just be Karlacks too...

I have actually wondered about the poss both that the Karlacks are the ancestors of all biological life in the universe, and that there is no true Karlack biology. That the Jungle is some kind of emergent Aguero Space network thingy and the Karlacks are actually all descended from immigrant strains that have patched into the network and end up synching their minds to some level and developing similar mutations through psychic horizontal gene transfer or something...

But, even if either of those were the case (and I am going to go out on a limb and say they're not) then, yes, you would still be right and there would be a recognisable set of Karlack traits. What there might also be, though, is a distinction between the Karlack Classic things and the mutating immigrant species, Karlack Import or Karlack Blend. Treewalkers could get mixed up with those.

This would mean discerning folks would know that there are lots of space whales that, somehow, someway aren't "Karlack."

Would this mean that while, yes, the concept of the Karlacks is "brute nature... but in space... and with sometimes-subtle sometimes-not-so-subtle Gaian hypothesis Na'vi Pandora emergence oversense" things... on the other hand there might also be *other* space ecosystems out there full of bioforms but are recognizably not-Karlack?

Maybe, some might be just as dangerous too, my thoughts about species joining the Jungle were actually informed by Vic mentioning that the ancient Cryst nightmare weapons still breed among the Karlacks

I bet that immune response would be Karlack hunter-scavengers just attracted to the scent of the dead Karlacks, that while people think the hunter-scavengers are there to exact vengeance on the attacking outsiders and "recycling" their brethren-Karlacks... in actuality the hunter-scavengers are there to feed on the dead and just happened to notice the other tasty treats in the area.

Could be both.

The evolved individually sentient sapient "civilized" Karlacks might still be utterly alien from the way all sorts of other "conventional" creatures approach the universe, maybe weirder than even Samtic aggregate-existences... so even then joining normal civilization might not be that easy as they themselves are far from normal? But that depends on the particular Karlack... a specialized node-mind that can feel the ebb and flow of a solar system-sized ecosystem would probably have a harder time than some of those Treewalkers variations if, say, they got left behind by the greater Karlack migration they followed and ended up colonizing some garden moon (intelligently terraforming it by cultivating Karlack-derived flora and fauna...) and evolving to look like tall lanky blue space cats :p

I guess it depends on where they end up, as you say, USS CIs could probably work with them to establish a workable coexistence, whereas if they end up in the Fracture then they'd probably be hastily exterminated.

Of course they could try hiding in plain sight and evolving into bodysnatchers or just creatures that look human enough to pass in the Fracture, fanning the area's xenophobia to even higher rates and getting lots of innocent green Desecratinos pogromed off their home planets.

To make things more confusing, sure maybe the Oolycysts and Padrycepts were spawned from Karlack splinter strains or their ecosystems were turbo-charged by some milder form of infestation or gene-transfer... but what if the Karlacks aren't the only roving space-ecosystem to do this? It wouldn't even have to be just a space-beast horde through space. Even rogue "normal" civilizations could do this - SinTek experimentation-vessels gone rogue atrocity-splicing their way through clusters of viable worlds... The Earthreign might have done so with a few proto-Sidereals and pre-Sidereals... same with the Grand Aurigans... whole swaths of space full of forehead-ridged biped "humanoids." The Samtics and the Overlords that came before them... heck, the Nexus' uplifts might have been messier before and might have incorporated SUPERIOR DOMINANT GENE TRANSFERS aside from just intelligence-boosting. There could have actually been Apexai Hybridization attempts in ancient times, before the Doom of Apexaia and totally more hybridy than what the CEID did to produce psions (perhaps based on some table napkin scrawlings some refugee Zedath Kaleshi scientists made while trying to vaguely recollect ancient alchemical attempts...).

To this and your next post where you posit this project turning into a bad anime:

YES

[Shroom Man 777]

Vic and I discussed that the various origins and classifications and definitions of "Karlackness" would, in-universe, be a matter of heated contention between actual scholars of the galaxy's various Institutes of Cosmozoan and Karlack Studies (ICKS).

I was thinking that whether A.) there was an original Karlack strain that interbred with various cosmozoans as various lifeforms congealed around Karlack territories to form one huge ecology... or, if, B.) for millions and maybe billions of years the various ecologies of the galaxy just developed and interbred and when exposed to various extreme stressors (such as Rhapsodites, godkillings, Bragulan Wars, Earthreigns, etc.) naturally developed the obvious Karlack attributes (gauntlinglisks, gigajoule-weathering carapaces, military-confounding behaviors...) that might go away during peace time when no longer needed... either possibility might not be... easy to distinguish for specialists in ICKS.

[Invictus]

SOTS is pretty anime already

Like Shroom said, for the particular topic of the origin of the Karlacks I would definitely appreciate being able accommodate everyone's cool ideas. And of course, the in-universe probably falls somewhere between all the theories, and the sheer complexity of the Karlack ecosystem certainly allows for a lot of divergent causes!

So "Karlacks", which is to say the gribbliest, most dangerous-to-civilization of the cosmic wildlife, spur mutual evolution through "normal" ecological interactions of natural selection and external stressors. And as Speaker proposed, there can also be AGUERO HYPER-EVOLUTION, where the noospheric/hyperspatial resonances of particularly hyper-complex clusters of Karlack life spread to other clusters a-causally and a-physically, creating a certain commonality in Karlacks everywhere. One wonders what this noospheric emanation of common Karlackdom, this PLATONIC JUNGLE, looks like.

And then we have the fall of the Rhapsodites. If one intact tomb-world is enough to create an energy revolution across the Fracture, what about all the rest of them (that the Telestrons weren't able to secure or seal away)? It makes a kind of sense that the Karlacks were able to evolve forms that can tank gigatons and bite neutronium-plated warships in half because of the sheer amount of orgonic energy all those dead Rhapsodites injected into their ecosystem. Energy that might take a few thousand more years to be evenly distributed through the cosmos and make the Karlacks chill out a bit, but right now they're still on a feeding high. Still being driven out of equilibrium, even. Once again, it's all the Rhapsodites' fault.

Last but not least, I'll owe up to the Cryst superweapons run rampant thing and posit the third general source of Karlack new blood as "civilization and its literal malcontents." That's your Treewalker tribes who adapt and adapt until they fit in perfectly well. That's your nastiest punk offshoots of various polities who decide that going Full Senator Armstrong is the choice for them, and actually manage to survive doing so. That's your deliberately engineered terror weapons. Like cetaceans returning to the deep, technological civilization and its shortcuts may actually turn out successful Karlacks relatively often. That raises the further, disturbing question of which of the turbo-zerg we see today were actually put there?

[Siege]

The Brags are psychic blanks and so cannot very easily deal with primarily psionic beings or interface with Apexai tech, which is wholly mentally controlled which obviously Brags cannot do. So I wondered if the Brags don't keep one or two (weakly) psionic alien races around that have been bound to the will of the Imperator. All but exterminated, caged and battered by continuous heavy anti-psi fields, they get carried out like some sort of funny tool every time the Brags have need of someone to do some psionic stuff for them. Possibly these are the remnants of a once-great species that once thought to invade Bragspace and found out, to its dismay, that it's quite significantly bigger and well-armed than they thought. Like Amplitur. Maybe they serve a dual purpose: first a psionic tool, second emergency rations in case a supply drop doesn't come in time .

Alternatively, I was wondering if Brag null-status isn't a natural thing; perhaps it's the result of the relentless indoctrination and will-subsuming way of their species. So Brags aren't technically blanks, it's just that they become such due to the way Brag society works. But maybe there's a handful of deviants that Byzon keeps around that aren't like this. These individuals are treated kind of like antisocials in Brave New World, they're exiled and reviled by mainstream Bragsociety, but they perform a vital role nonetheless. They are painters and philosophers and indeed psychic in some distinctly bearlike way. I recall Shroom writing about Brag Samurai in the past, these guys might be like ronin poets, kept locked away in castles full of paintings and scrolls of balladry (which to a Bragulan is like way worse than a concrete jail cell). Occasionally when a sector commander really needs advise on matters of psychal unBrag activity they'd solicit their advise, but their sheer existence gives normal Brags the heebie jeebies because they're just wrong. So they live reclusive lives of solitude and concealment, wandering around beating on Myrrans, getting into haiku battles with Zygonian dilettantes and philosophizing with Telestrons.

Maybe Byzon does both; Bragspace is vast, it contains multitudes.

[Shroom Man 777]

What broken brilliance!



These are marvellous ideas!

@Siege

My initial idea for the Brag Samurai back in SDNW4 was just that they had nucleonic-power swords and maybe gifted Brags did some non-psychic force-of-will atomic manipulation so the Brags could have Green Lantern knockoffs to face off OP-as-fuck USS and Imperium psykers.

I did propose recently to Vic an idea for a subjugated interstellar species whose homeworld and past-territories have longsince been gobbled up by Bragspace - Pale Sliders, wormy dish-faced, wiry-tentacle-limbed, lamprey-annelids whose Bragulanized populations are now miserable maintenance-mules and other such cogs in the Byzonic machinery, relegated in some kind of hyper-redundant logistical system that makes even organized sabotage and resistance utterly futile. The escaped populations form some kind of interstellar raider-smuggler insurgency near-suicidally reaving accessible areas in Bragspace, perhaps with USS material support.

I guess to prevent a scandal where the Brags discover that the USS is sheltering refugees who are technically Byzonic citizens, the insurgents probably send their liberated kin to the Hirados of the Raptured Lords because perhaps a "secret sanctuary for the refugees of a species that barely exists anymore" is something that is like worth INFINITY QUATLOO DINEROS to the Lords. Yet it's such a Faustan deal since you'd expect the Hirados and the Lords to pay the insurgents with something incredible like a Byzon-Killer Superweapon but instead their payment is... the right to visit their freed kin. Of course, they have 100% assurances that their kin will never ever be molested or threatened as they can now call home the Neptune-sized art gallery/terrarium of a friggin Mass Jammer... but who else can host, secretly or with impunity or without fear of reprisal, countless refugees and escapees whose defiance would enrage the Bragulan Star Empire and lead to reprisals and escalations? Aside from the Raptured Lords, you'd either have to somehow stick them into the heart of Karlack space or somehow agree with some Kerberos killswarm or a Telestron dimensional-monastery or an actual Rhapsodite God, and those are impossible options.

So maybe some of these oppressed Pale Sliders could be used as psion-mules. Maybe aside from them, there are other "once great psionic species" that the Brags ruined too. Less insufferable as Apexai and thus allowed the honor and reward of being Bragulanized/Byzonized into service!

As for the Psi-Brags (as opposed to Cy-Brags )... there could be actual naturally psychic Brags, very rare ones, while the majority Byzonic Brags are so Orwellianized that they are "nurtured" into being nulls. It might be a point that this nulling is done through ideological means rather than genetic methods like those mythically used on the Myrran. The idea that psi-Brags unnerve the "normal" majority null Byzonic Brags, as the reverse of how (in 40k and elsewhere) nulls and pariahs disgust normal humans with innate psi/warp/Fade-connections, is a great one too.

In really old vanilla SOTS when we threw around "omg Apexai Hybrids!" a lot, one of the cassus belli we had for the Running of the Apexai was the idea that the Apexai were interfering with Bragulan affairs. Either causing the pre-Byzonic civil war, or undermining the nascent Byzonic regime, the idea that the Apexai were making grotesque Apexai-Bragulan Hybrids and other experiments also featured in this - whether this was really the case, or just Byzonic propaganda BS entirely fabricated to scapegoat the Apexai and justify the war, who knows?

An alternative approach, if Brags *are* naturally nulls, is that maybe the ancient Apexai foresaw great trouble with these teeming hordes of tyranny-prone psionically-null barbaric bears and sought to "fix" and metaphysically uplift their societies by seeding them with psi-potential. Ironically this might've been used by the Byzonist as a scapegoat cassus belli for the Apexai decimation. Whoops.

Either way, the pained, tortured poet psi-Brags with their solitary existence - either in their sanctioned pagodas within the BSE under strict commissariat oversight, or outside as wanderers - is great.

And as Speaker proposed, there can also be AGUERO HYPER-EVOLUTION, where the noospheric/hyperspatial resonances of particularly hyper-complex clusters of Karlack life spread to other clusters a-causally and a-physically, creating a certain commonality in Karlacks everywhere. One wonders what this noospheric emanation of common Karlackdom, this PLATONIC JUNGLE, looks like.

That the Jungle is some kind of emergent Aguero Space network thingy and the Karlacks are actually all descended from immigrant strains that have patched into the network and end up synching their minds to some level and developing similar mutations through psychic horizontal gene transfer or something...

These are lovely ideas! Whatever the origins of the Karlack, when all the potentially-psychically-sensitive bioforms and the psychically-advanced creatures making up the Karlack ecosystem accumulate in sufficient numbers, an emergence will inevitably occur, this AGUERO HYPER-EVOLUTION that is the bio-psychic "oversense" equivalent of the crazy confluence of the Solarian Singularity (the biosingularity, as Vic put it in our chat).

I am thinking that in the deepest epicenters of these Karlack emergences, in places that one might think the Karlacks originally evolved from, such is the level of psi-biosingularity that space, time, thought, life and even tissue and flesh might become indistinguishable. Like the Red Pain from the PROPHET comics of Image, the most incredible manifestations of the Karlack life-will might be something like if the Zerg Overmind or the Pandora-worldmind from Avatar went... star-child ala 2001 Space Odyssey. A life-nebula or something. (Don't ask me how many AUs or even light-seconds such a thing might encompass maaaannnn, I'm having a hard time grasping the idea itself....)




Also, before I wrote a response to your recentest posts, I was actually typing an entirely new post... (I was contemplating just emailing it to Vic since... where I am now, I shouldn't be logging in and posting... ) But I've got nothing else to do.

So instead of double-posting manically, I shall include it in this post:

Can't communicate normally (i.e. facebook ). Idling and slowly going nuts in my 930pm-630am night shift. Just making additions and revisions to Master's List google doc (not yet posting them in the Master List thread tho) and contemplating misc. ideas

Did some grammar revisions for other articles (mostly mine, which have redundancy issues...)

Adding entry for ORGONE:

Orgone - An extremely potent fuel derived from the necro-metabolic processes of the Rhapsodites. The carcasses found in the worlds of Shen had their digestive systems reactivated and repurposed into industrialized fuel rigs, providing power to a large percentage of the Fracture’s interstellar vessels and other hypertechnologies. This has resulted in immense prosperity to the Shen Rhapsody, even as rival states and factions fervently seek alternatives to end Shen’s dominant position. While the search for other cosmic crypts has yet to produce results (as other suspected sites are heavily guarded by the likes of the Kereberos), the Shepherds and NEUROM states have found and proliferated a viable substitute: ichor harvested from Karlack bioforms and other cosmozoans - but the logistics of harpooning uncooperative space-leviathans compared to industrializing god-cadavers and the sheer potency of Rhapsodite secretions has kept orgone numero uno in the Fracture.


Modified VERDIGRITE: "Most expertly cultivated and utilized by Bragulans to enhance nucleonic power sources and weaponry, its lethal effects extend hyperspatially and reactor meltdowns have been known to irradiate entire solar systems and even larger areas. These disasters have resulted in military applications inconceivable to other civilizations - like the lightyears-spanning Peripherary Zones of Alienation, deliberate contaminations intended to secure sections of the Bragulan Star Empire’s borders from the Karlacks. Quantities of verdigrite are harnessed outside Bragspace (NEUROM and the Shepherds are the second largest producers, primarily for military munitions), but its toxic nature has led most sane civilizations in the galaxy to opt for safer energy sources - such as the brute-force generation of anti-matter and black holes, ichor harvested from the Karlack Swarm’s ravenous bioforms, orgone produced by rare Rhapsodite god-carcasses and the borderline incomprehensible arcane processes the Apexai have bequeathed their allies."

Modified Meridian Institute, added: "At the same time, historic missteps, such as unethical experimentation-happy Calibrationist offshoots, psionic test subjects gone rogue, archeologists-turned-orgone robber barons and the more, have led the modern Meridian Institute to maintain a measured approach to its activities, dissuading it from becoming too assertive or exploitative of its advantages lest it jeopardize its standing amongst fickle Fracture neighbors."


For Myrrans, added: "According to legend this engineered temperament was a gift bestowed by the Queen With No Soul to protect the Myrranni from mentallic subjugation, which myths say their ancestors were once victims of - a tale substantiated by the modern species’ complete and utter lack of psionic receptivity."


NEUROM ideas

REPLACE: Sternreich with Sternheim? Heim = home. Less Nazi associations, more... sympathetic origins as the Sternheim might have been a post-cataclysm, post-reignfall refuge/haven that was then eventually beset by all manner of foes - Karlacks, Phyrron, Aurigans, etc. Rhineworlds. White Children-derived ideologies have them shun genetic engineering and psionics, sure they might have had a racist/genocidal phase where they called themselves Sternreich... but anyway, while their societies still gradually became militarized with scheming and plotting and backstabbing leaders and secret Ministry of Fate conspirators... I am thinking that the society itself, the common folk, might be as nostalgia-prone as any in Auriga or the Freeworlds or the Shepherds, etc. Possibly even moreso, with rustic trappings and whatnot, rife with deliberate anachronisms and romantic touches and whimsy to mask how imperialistic their state apparatuses actually are (like how the Victorian Era did have lots of whimsy despite being, y'know). Sternvolk might be *this* close to be as kitschy as those guys flying space-galleons and acting like space-spaniards.

The Unyielding/Indomitable Principalities of the Mandragorae = badass name right? I think these guys, in the early years, probably loomed over the proto-Sternreich and the Anethgans before the sheer Spartan-like militarization of the Mandragorans bit them in the ass. Their lousy economies and rigid societies probably means that as the centuries went by, their NEUROM-neighbors overpassed them - the Sternreich in innovation and tech, the Anethgans in foods and being a viable nation and other things - and so through trade and other non-martial avenues, the Mandragorans eventually became... cooperative with their frenemies. That's not to say they aren't asskickers still... maybe on a genetic level, they are just easier to toy with psionically, so the Ministry of Fate have a field day toying with these guys. They are the most Space Somalia out of everyone.


Haven-Republic / Egalitarian / Egality / Serenity? of Anethgan = Anethgans could be the Earthreign's civilianized version of the Mandragorans, colonists instead of warriors, infrastructural-specialists, PRIZED BREEDERS universally capable of producing children, gynoid-hermaphrodites mass produced and meant to humanize planets either uninhabitable or chock full of xeno scum. The initial production-process for the Anethgans resulted in their having femme-features because embryos are by default female, right? (I hope not to be a sexist shithead in writing this but I'll probably trip up and do something stupid, oh well.)

Post-Reignfall they refused to bend the knee to Mandragorans and of course they refused to be pogrommed by the anti-Earthreign speciests and White Children-derivatives and other anti-posthumans. They are still capable colonists with terraformation tech and agri-tech and fabricators and such. To survive and prosper they carved out territories from uncooperative alien and human civilizations alike, Karlacks, whatever, going all LADY EBOSHI or Imperator Furiosa. More amendable to trade and co-existence with tolerable peoples (human or otherwise) and with more to give than the Mandragorans, the Anethgans would probably be not as dysfunctional as a lot of other folks. The fact that unlike other human populaces in the Fracture, these proto-replicant types started off with clean slates, it might mean they're less prone to weirdo posttraumatic meme-nostalgia-fixation... they'd still have Cataclysm-Fracture psychotraumas but they'd have to make their own identities, they can't bury themselves in the past... and they're unlike the Mandras who have roid-rage-risk AND the dangers of romanticizing their martial prowess and past conquests... the Anethgans have less risk of idealizing the past as their roles weren't as glorified in the Earthreign heirarchy. Sure, some of the post-Reignfall LADY EBOSHI and IMPERATOR FURIOSA types might skirt the line of militarism, xenophobia and supremacism... so their MATRON COUNCILS of ancient Vuvalini-types would have disputes on the course of their civilization.

I am thinking the founding of the Neurom Pact was due to the discovery of a NEUROMANTIC NODE in Anethgan territory. Some of the Anethgans, with their stashes of Earthreign infrastructure, might have kept some kind of... non-subjugative Neuromantic Node variant. While the other states, including the Mandragoran revolutionaries and the Sternheim purists, purged all traces of the oppressive and loathed neuromentallic control systems used on oppressed humans... the Anethga knew that *some* of the neuromantic nodes weren't designed for mind control but for, say, FTL-computation or non-human systems administration, even in Gaian terraforming and eco-maintenance mechanisms. They kept some of these, one such example was discovered by the other warring pre-Neurom states and that particular patch of Anethgan turf became a warzone as the McGuffin was either sought by parties willing to weaponize it (forgetting their ancient aversions to Earthreign tyrant-tech) or to destroy it (some still remembered). And of course the Ministry of Fate figures into thus.

I guess eventually accords were had between the rulers and the movers and shakers of the warring states. Probably brokered by one of the more pragmatic Bismark-ian, Clausewitz-ian realpolitiking Sternheimers (prior to the degeneration of the Sternheim elite ala post-Bismark, malarkey-prone Wilhelm 2 Germany...). A tech-sharing agreement behind closed doors? By some epic, cosmic Freudian slip due to this convergence of (psycho)history, (psycho)trauma and (psycho)cosmopolitics, the world the neuro-node was on was called New Remembrance and so it was shortened to the Neurem Accords but then subconsciously everyone ended up calling it NEUROM.

(I think Siege proposed this once, though the initial believed-name he proposed was New Rome.)

[Invictus]

Re: Byzonic espers

I like that the Pale Sliders have come together as an example of the kind of minor race that the K-Zone is supposed to be filled with, and as an example of the kind of the 'useful' subject species that makes the Byzonic sphere, in its own way, just as diverse as some of the other major cosmic blocs out there. It reminds me of the Dnyarri from Star Control 2, when it turned out these ugly psychic shoulder-frogs that everyone uses as universal translators used to be the sapient evil overlords of the galaxy (until the Ur-Quan overthrew them and devolved them into animal translator devices).

How good *is* Bragulan bioengineering, anyway? A few posts ago Shroom established that the baseline biotech level of SOTS is high enough that theoretically anyone can spawn exciting new species. The Apexai and the USS produce hybrids, the Earthreign performed Desecration to alter alien species beyond recognition, and the Samtics and the Satykarmics can always uplift suitable candidates. But in contrast the Bragulans always seemed...deficient in this area? Otherwise, they wouldn't need to resort to the indoctrination and the stickbeatings and the cy-brags and the imprinting soldiers onto giant rolls of magnetic tape with nuclear explosions.

On the other hand, I also really like the idea that the Bragulan ultra-statist maximum dystopia sets aside sub-regions (whole planets?) where they deliberately raise them wrong, just to see what happens. Not just for the cultivation of psychic potential (and here I favor the theory that the Bragulans do have natural psychic potential, but is just all but successfully suppressed by their sheer, hyper-advanced ideology, just like how the sheer advancement of their super-doublethink actually lets them make breakthroughs in hard sciences), but for a variety of other social engineering purposes. Live 'degenerate' exhibit societies that are arranged for right-thinking bear families to visit and boo and hiss at seems in character. There can also be Hitchhikeresque 'computer' planets, where old-school Byzonic institutes who still don't trust this newfangled quantum computer business prefer to do their psychohistorical modelling by having a whole society act things out. It is through these tightly controlled ways that the BSE explores alternate models of society - under safeguards that can instantly reduce these test planets to radioactive sludge, of course.

I imagine the art and cultural artifacts of these bohemian psi-brags, even if their strictly prescribed cultures are subject to periodic purges, would be one of the most difficult things to find outside Bragulan space.

Re: NEUROM begins

I think I proposed it, actually.

Shroom over chats proposed that the Ministry of Fate arose out of the inter-polity agency to regulate the use of the Neuromantic Nodes that the proto-NEUROM polities were fighting over, and also to regulate the use of psychic powers on humans. I think there was an idea much long ago that the Ministry grew out of the intelligence agency/government branch of one of the NEUROM polities, but it does make more sense if what would become the Ministry enforced the Neurom Pact and was the glue that held the alliance together to begin with. Of course, this doesn't preclude the Sternheim putting disproportionate investment into the Ministry to begin with, given their leadership role.

It's also interesting if two founders of NEUROM - the Mandragorans and the Anethgans - are also specialized Earthreign-engineered clades (though in the case of all humanity under the Earthreign, who wasn't?) like the noble founding houses of Auriga and Avancore, which makes NEUROM the blue-collar counterpart to the Grandeur!