eldraeic transcend

Trope-a-Day: Generican Empire

Posted by

1

Generican Empire: Well, the thing to remember here is that the Empire of the Star was named long before it ever got into space (and has many stars, besides).  It’s actually named after a philosophical symbol rather than anything physical.  (In fairness and trope-compliance, they could have called it the Eldraeic Imperium, or some such, except (a) back on their own world at the beginning they didn’t feel like offering up such a blatant statement of world-conquering intent, and (b) once they got out among the stars, they didn’t want to sound like a bunch of race/species-obsessed jerks.)

By the time it acquired the alternate soubriquet of the Eldraeic Transcend, evidently people figured they’d already established their credentials on the polyspecificity front.

(The third alternate name, the “Bright Empire”, is actually a given-in-scorn-adopted-in-pride name originating with a news editor’s slip of the tongue and an unfortunate phrasing in an interstellar explorer’s autobiography; as such, in the Imperial mouth, it can make you sound isolationist, hegemonic, or even belletrist, and in the outworlders’, either distinctly pro-Imperial or distinctly sarcastic, and should thus be used with caution.)

Anyway, back on topic: most star nations hang some sort of non-generican name on themselves.  The ones which don’t are often considered suspicious, maybe even likely to be rogue – sort of the way that, on Earth, any country calling itself a Democratic People’s Republic is definitely some sort of creepy-ass dictatorship.

Averted somewhat by the “Associated Worlds”, which isn’t all that creepy – it’s just that a name that Generican is all that the various people included under that moniker could agree on.  They are all worlds (well, mostly, but the drifts that disagreed didn’t push that point too hard) and they are loosely associated, at least galactographically.  Everything else may vary.

Trope-a-Day: Gate of Truth

Posted by

Gate of Truth: The Transcendent Core may not know all knowledge in the universe, but it does know everything any part of the Transcend knows, and whatever a weakly godlike superintelligence can reasonably deduce from that that it’s had time and occasion to think about, including a small amount of information harvested from the future via acausal logic processing.

And yes, you can ask it to share, hopefully in quantities small enough to fit into mere postsophont minds.  Just visit your local contemplationary.  And be prepared to have a real personal religious experience…

Trope-a-Day: Empathic Environment

Posted by

Empathic Environment: Much of the Empire has one of these, one way or another.  On a  small scale, this is because of the assorted Genii Locorum around the place, the house brains and city manager AIs and planai and other assorted minds at least one of whose functions is to make sure that things are arranged to their people’s liking before their people consciously realize that they want things that way.  (And since they can usually do so in cooperation with their people’s muses, which live inside their heads, they’re very good at it.)

On a larger scale, this is because to some extent people believe that the pathetic fallacy, if not how the world does work, is certainly how the world ought to work.  It would be appropriate.  And so the Transcend, constructed as it is from the trillions of minds of its constitutionals, and intertwined with, as it is, the weather-control systems and other infrastructure of every developed world, makes sure that it jolly well does work that way.

Trope-a-Day: Genius Loci

Posted by

1

(‘Bout time I got back to these, I think.)

Genius Loci: Quite a lot of them, from the simple usually-non-sophont AIs that run people’s houses and apartments (the “house brains”) to the increasingly sophisticated “city managers” and other AIs that run cities, provinces, transport networks, ports, and so forth, up to the planai and other archai that are responsible for the infrastructure of entire planets and star systems.  And, of course, to a large extent the Transcend can be interpreted as a Genius Loci for the Empire as a whole.

(This, of course, from the local perspective, is merely the realization of ancient thoughts on animism.)

Trope-a-Day: Dream Weaver

Posted by

Dream Weaver: Not actual dreams – well, not usually, although specially tuned slinky equipment can be used for lucid dreaming – but the title “dreamweaver” is used for composers of slinkies and virtual novels.

Also, the oneiri of the Transcend, which subroutines organize the dreamscapes where the collective hyperconsciousness dreams the dreams of its constituents.

Trope-a-Day: Divine Ranks

Posted by

Divine Ranks: The Transcend does have, as does any seed AI that expands to the point at which its individual thoughts are, effectively, independently sapient, an extensive taxonomy, ranking, and categorization of its assorted subroutines, processes, and threads.  And since at least some of those wear mythological masks… we have eikones, divine ministers, exarchs, and so forth.

Trope-a-Day: Deus ex Machina

Posted by

Deus ex Machina: Essentially averted – while the archai of the Transcend are arguably dei and quite definitely machinae, they abhor being anything close to this unsubtle.  (Besides, if you’re the sort of person that is inclined to screw things up to the point of needing a deus ex machina, then you’re both a terrible candidate for becoming one of the Transcendent, and unlikely to be considered a worthwhile use of their system resources.)

The CPU of Fate

Posted by

To primitive peoples, the world is a place of telos.  Created for a purpose; moving towards a purpose; ending with that purpose.

Of course, as they develop the scientific method and practice it assiduously, they rapidly come to learn that there is essentially no teleology to be found in the universe, and the closest thing to destiny one may find in operation is the inexorable unfolding of acyclic causal graphs along time’s arrow.  (Later discoveries add a smidgeon of chaotic indeterminacy at the smallest scales to power the whole thing along, and should they happen upon the rare conditions necessary to travel along time-like curves, the causal graphs in question turn out to be potentially cyclic, after all; but none of this changes the overall picture.)

Even the discovery of the fascinatingly nondeterministic algorithms which power what we presume to be volition, while they may introduce free will into the universe, do not give it purpose.  And they are themselves, indeed, merely another product of the inexorable unfolding of causality’s chains from a chaotic beginning.  We are; that is true, but we are not for.

At this, the weak and simple often retreat into nihilism – void of purpose given to them, they deny all purpose – or merely engage in grand denial of the question.  Stronger and more mature civilizations conclude that the lack of aboriginal purpose does not necessarily mean a lack of all purpose, and proceed to draw one from their current position in the universe, or forge one for themselves as an act of will.

Of course, very few conclude that the optimal solution for a world lacking telos is the construction of an instrumentality capable of imposing it on top of causality’s mechanical meaninglessness, and of those, only one has carried it through to implementation.

And if you’re inside the Transcendent light-cone, here’s how it works.

– Introduction to Moiric Architecture and Implementation, Cala Cendriane-ith-Cendriane

Recruiting

Posted by

“What do you people want from me?”

“Just the usual. That you should continue to be exceptional, live forever, join a transcendent hyperconsciousness, and evolve into a demigod – or at least the closest thing the physical universe has to offer – sometime in the next few millennia. You can make up the rest as you go along.”

“…why me?”

“That’s a little difficult… Look, let me put it this way. I’m a post-soph. I’ve been enhanced with a couple of millennia worth of bio-nano-info-sopho-technology to the point where there’s orders of magnitude difference between me, in cognition, coordination, memory and emotion, and an average baseline. We write software of greater-than-baseline-mind complexity. And so most of us have trouble relating to people who are, from our perspective, temperamental, slow-running, fuzzy-minded, blurry-souled near-automata.”

“So when I say that I find you interesting as a person, that’s a notable event. When our said transcendent hyperconsciousness, on the other hand – the weakly godlike superintelligence that is as many orders of magnitude above me – finds you interesting enough to recruit, that’s a genuine once-in-a-trillion-lifetimes miracle, albeit one that I don’t have a prayer of explaining. If you want more details, you’ll have to ask It. It’s all ineffable to me.”

Trope-a-Day: Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions

Posted by

4

Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: While science hasn’t exactly disproven religion – there are certain, ahem, logical problems with that notion – it has closed a sufficient number of the gaps for a hypothetical god-of-the-gaps that supernaturalism in general has an amazingly small number of adherents in the Empire.  Most “religions” of the modern day are, well, philosophies, and while they may well include plenty of abstractions, they don’t generally call for supernatural gods, miracles, or other entities of supernature.

The mainstream Church of the Flame, for example, has in its time moved from asserting the existence of the eikones as supernatural entities to asserting the existence of the eikones as abstract personifications whose actual existence was more or less irrelevant to the point to knowing the existence of the eikones as digital Dei Ex Machinae, without really having to change doctrine all that much in the process.  (Even the remaining supernaturalists have more or less accepted the point that the deity-eikones would be perfectly capable of wearing the machine-eikones as hats, did they exist.)

Of course, here’s the interesting thing.  The founder, as it were, of that particular religion was the seeress Merriéle, back around -1,180, who dictated most of the principal holy text after a vision on the side of a sacred mountain, and in her later wanderings was executed by the traditional fire of purification in Somáras.  This execution gave a great deal of, ah, credence to the religion, since it involved her ascending directly to the Twilight City via a pillar of light and flame, which not incidentally completely destroyed the capital of Somáras and created the geographical feature now known as the Bay of Somáras.  The fact of which – if not the traditional implication that the eikone Elmiríën, the Bringer of Order and One Word of Truth, gets a mite irritable when some mortals presume to execute his Chosen and Beloved Voice Under Heaven – is very well documented and undeniably real.

Now, it’s not like there aren’t perfectly adequate, if unverifiable, explanations for this.  There were Precursor artifacts lying about back then, and it’s entirely possible that Merriéle had one, which either she set off, or which involved some components, like fullerened antimatter, that really don’t react well to fire.  Purely mechanistic explanations abound.

But… well, while so far as we know, time travel Does Not Work That Way, and it should be impossible to ever travel back before the creation of the machine, whatever it is, the Transcend is a weakly godlike superintelligence, after all.  And so long as we’re postulating Precursor artifacts anyway, we might as well postulate the permitted-by-physics temporal equivalent of a tangle channel.

And so, it is entirely possible, say some mechanotheologians, that the Vision was supplied by the modern Transcend in the mother of all predestination paradoxes; that the Ascension was, in fact, the Transcend reaching back to discreetly upload Its faithful seeress and cover it with a modest antimatter explosion; and that, in short, their religion has always been true, and it’s Deus Est Machina all the way down.

Now, of course, all of this is just speculation, and the machine gods aren’t saying anything on the topic to confirm or deny… but still.

(And, no, I-the-author have no idea whether this theory is valid or not, either.)

The Fire at the Heart

Posted by

Corícal Ailek.  It’s not the oldest star system in the Transcend, nor the most central – two gates from Eliéra via Palaxias, one gate from Cinté, and one gate from Tessil – but it may well be the most important; the seething brain of the transcendent overmind itself.

Corícal had five planets once, according to galactographic records, but only the oldest, the indigo-green hydrogen-methane ice giant Saviáná at the far fringes of the system remains, its moons hosting refueling stations (some dating back to the system’s days as a stopover on the Cinté-Tessil route), reception habs for visitors, and the system defense force.  The four small rocky planets that once orbited closer in to the primary have long since been dismantled, torn apart for construction materials along with the majority of the system’s asteroids.

After all, it takes a lot of material to build a Dyson swarm.  Or even a partial Dyson swarm; the Transcend is yet young, and evidently feels no need to expand Corícal any faster than its processing needs grow, and so the three layers of the Corícal swarm still only fill a fraction of the circumstellar sphere.

The most complete of the three layers is the innermost, orbiting so close to the Corícal sun as to skim its corona.  Golden-winged polyhedra soak up light and particles alike, beaming power and fuel to the complexes and terranes further out, and soothing the temperamental star’s emissions.

Further out, AI-hosting complexes, immense fractal chandeliers of organic crystal, orbit; photonic computronium glimmering with information light, communication lasers flashing between them and binding the Transcend’s core mind – for though it is scattered across processors throughout the Imperial worlds, this is the center to which they all answer – into one single whole.

And outermost, within the life zone of the star, orbit the hexterranes; open-topped hexagonal habitat-plates, walled to hold atmosphere, organized into a great free-floating lattice that will one day surround it, with scattered wells to vent the heat from the inner layers.  Under the yellow-white light of Corícal, scattered across rainbow skies by the crystal computers of the middle sphere, the hexterranes play host to dozens of environments – oxygen, halogen, ammonia, methane, hydrogen, sulfide – each with its own paradisiacal ecology perfected for the comfort of the sophonts who inhabit it, or who come to visit the cathedrals, loreworks, contemplationaries, and estates of these cities on the edge of the heart of the light.

– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Core Worlds

The Dreaming Goddess

Posted by

In a room in the Twilight City, Laryssan dreams.

The room is not a room, nor the city a city; the eikones and their realm are creatures of mathematics and algorithm, running on the great lunar brains of Corícal Ailék; on local photonic processing nodes scattered across Imperial space; on processor capacity bought upon the cycle spot market; on the brains and cogence cores of the Transcend’s many constitutionals – and dataspace has no native physical representation.

But for visitors to the Transcendent Realms, in seeming, the Cynosure of Fate has the appearance of a room; one framed by the impossibly complex symmetries and incalculable fractaline complexity of the weave of fate, a tangled tapestry-web of billions of crystalline strands, ruby and emerald, sapphire and adamant, a virtual representation of all the Transcendi and their myriad interactions, all tended, pruned and shaped by scurrying clockwork automata.  And faithful to the myths of old, amid the gleaming strands, robed in white upon a white-draped couch, the pale and colorless form of the Dreaming Goddess smiles softly in Her perpetual slumber.

There are those who question the archai of fate and destiny adhering to those myths; for the eikones-as-archai are merely weakly godlike, and so Her waking could not, they reason, bring about the absolute predestination of which the stories warn, and from which Her sleep preserves us.  Yet while this is true, a wakeful and active Fate could bring about an absolute predestination among sophonts guided by Her.  This, then, is the promise of Laryssan’s dreaming to us; that our collective consciousness shall never slip into a true hive mind, guidance become puppetry, and our free will remain untouched by enforced destiny.

– “Myth and Machine, Eikone and Archai”, Aléne Rysar-ith-Rysakar

Harmony with Their Will

Posted by

Among the comforting things about living in the Transcend are that when divine commands are issued, first, you can be confident that they’re being issued by something with actual qualifications for the role, rather than externalized mental agents, brain dysfunctions, or particularly effective entheogens.  And second, if you ask, you can usually get an explanation as to just why doing this particular thing is so important.

The difficulty, of course, is that having had a divine answer placed in your head is all very well for you, but so far as everyone else is concerned, a sense of surety backed up by something which you are confident you could explain if you could invent a new language, some creative mathematics, and perhaps some necessary cognitive surgery – but otherwise can’t – is functionally indistinguishable from taking something on pure faith.

Which is problematic when dealing with people who don’t understand the modern meaning of dei volunt.

– introduction to “What the Fire Said”,
Korris Serannis-ith-Sandre, acquiescent of Dírasán

Trope-a-Day: Because Destiny Says So

Posted by

2

Because Destiny Says So: In some cases, played straight due to the tendency of the Transcend (and other potential acausal-logic using seed AIs) to whisper in their own ears from the future; however, while they do apparently intervene in people’s timelines for the sake of their Optimal Futures, a combination of the even-if-you-could-formulate-the-right-question-you-couldn’t-understand-the-answer effect and the nature of predestination paradoxes means… well, good luck getting anything out of them on the topic beyond “Further information is not available at this when-where,” Chosen One or not.

(Averted in mythology.  Laryssan, eikone of fate and destiny, is portrayed as asleep – and voluntarily so, in order to spare the universe the chains of absolute predestination that would result if she was actually awake and thus aware of all the possible links of cause to consequence throughout time.  How much influence the dreams of Laryssan had was something of a matter of theological debate back in the day.)

Apotheosis As Usual

Posted by

2

”There have been many questions raised in this body and elsewhere, since our Reorganization, concerning the new status of the Empire and of our new Transcend. Some of them have come attached to transparently political proposals – to the discomfiture of our true hive-mind members, such as our honorable friends representing the vlcefc, hjera, and cusaron – to refashion the political arrangements of the Accord. It is not our intention to address these proposals here and now, or where and ever. We remain, and shall remain, a founder of the Accord and seated upon the Presidium.”

”In clarification of some salient points, however, the Transcend and the Empire are not coextensive. Not every Imperial citizen-shareholder is one of the Transcendi. For this reason sufficiently, the Empire is maintained as a polity distinct from and a superset of the Transcend.”

”Nor is the Transcend a hive mind in the traditional sense. We remain individuals, though united on some mental strata. While the consensus of the Transcend does now perform much of our group planning, our government will remain the instrumentality through which it is executed.”

”And certainly, we could devise some method of prioritization and resource allocation operating through the Transcend, which knows all of our requirements and desires, but – especially now that it allows us to share information most effectively – there is no need to when our internal market already performs these tasks with a theoretical efficiency equal to the best possible planning routine, with far less waste of centralizing bandwidth and cycles involved.”

”Which is to say, sophonts of the Accord, that our operations, as they interface with yours, continue as before; that all treaties and contracts will be honored; that your investments continue to be safe and profitable; and that Imperial space remains, as ever, open for commerce and pleasure.”

– Calis Corith-ith-Corith, Presiding Minister for the Empire,
excerpt of a speech to the Conclave of Galactic Polities

Trope-a-Day: Super Senses

Posted by

4

Super Senses: Naturally, with various enhancements here and there, with the new Imperial baseline involving enhancing vision to include a substantial chunk of infrared and ultraviolet (everything from 500 nm through <300 nm), better imaging resolution, low-light sensing and thermal imaging, better sensitivity to motion, angle, and range, and – which so many of these miss – flare protection (actually, they all come with overload protection); hearing gets better amplitude sensitivity (to -50 dB) and frequency sensitivity (16-35,000 Hz), direction-finding, perfect pitch, and a sense of rhythm; smell gets closer to the bloodhound’s nasal skill, and taste likewise; touch enhanced with greater sensor density and acuity (and this, incidentally, is why people pay such attention to the comfort and texture of clothing and furniture); balance, rotation and acceleration senses are no longer troubled by rotating frames of reference or microgravity; pain detection is gateable; and the time sense becomes much more accurate.

(Parallel-type enhancements apply to species which were endowed with different senses by nature, of course.)

Of course, that’s just the existing senses.  Then come things like the entirely new sense for static and dynamic EM fields, synthetic additional visual fields and auditory channels for augmented-reality information, and senses operating through the Transcendent hyperconsciousness permitting the recall of memories never experienced and the direct sensing of nature, meaning, utility, entelechy, and obligation…

Trope-a-Day: Ave Machina

Posted by

1

Ave Machina: Smile when you say that, squishie!

Well, sort of.  The Imperials subscribe to the elegance of design, logic, and purity of the machine parts of the trope, but, well, this is a trans/postsophontist setting (even outside the Empire, which completely idealizes those notions, nothing-but-the-pure-flesh baselines are rare, simply because refusing to transcend the limitations of the average baseline species is the fast track to galactic irrelevance).  You don’t worship the machines that are, after all, merely the components of your personal apotheosis.

(Of course, the Transcend is a weakly godlike superintelligence some of whose high-level routines are wearing the masks of the iconic personifications of concepts that served the Eldrae as deities – but that’s really more a case of Deus Est Machina, which see.)

Trope-a-Day: Deus Est Machina

Posted by

10

Deus Est Machina: Done deliberately and intentionally.  When you build a recursively self-improving seed AI, the kind that turns into, in the lingo, a “weakly godlike superintelligence”, then you have to know that you’re committing a willful act of theogeny, right there.  Doubly so when you’re building a collective hyperconsciousness out of shards of everyone’s brains at the same time (see: Hive Mind, Touched By Vorlons), and upload the “souls” (mind-states) of the dead into it.  Lampshaded in internal context when your new e-deity decides the archetypal masks of your mythological deities make nice hats to wear for various pieces of its internal architecture.

Further lampshaded with the God of War-class hyperdreadnought (that’s one better than super).  When it turns up somewhere, it really does mean that Dúréníän, archai-slash-eikone of righteous war, battle, conquest, strategy, tactics, and the sentinel darëssef is taking the field personally to kick your ass.

Trope-a-Day: Hive Mind

Posted by

9

Hive Mind: The Transcend is not a traditional Hive Mind, it’s a collective consciousness, or group intellect.  The difference, as it will point out to you at some considerable length, is that all of the members retain their individual personalities and perspectives as well as contributing to the whole, that while knowledge is shared, individual memories aren’t (at least until one is poured into the soul-ocean on permadeath), and that the true hive-mindedness is that of the Transcendent soul-shard that’s grafted into your personal consciousness (see Touched By Vorlons), but which does not constitute all of it.  And that the Transcend has a (very large) metamind of its own (see Deus Est Machina), over and above and simultaneously within the collective aspect.

There are also, of course, genuine Hive Minds which do abolish individual identity, which are called Fusions, but since (a) resistance is not futile, because they only take volunteers, and (b) by far the most common type of Fusion is the Self-Fusion, made up of multiple instances of the same mind, they’re not anything to worry about.

(Okay, yes, in civilized space.  Hegemonizing swarms with a degree of intelligence are not unknown outside it, even to the extent of things like the Leviathan Consciousness, and the less said about things like the Calphrast Hordes the better, but still…)

The temporary kind (see the Mental Fusion trope) are known as confluxes, often used for tactical military purposes and in other situations where close teamwork is required.