The Secrets' Crusade

Dmol8 · Dec 4, 2022

TheEyes said:
The problem is that this sort of view:

just results in inappropriately labeling people as evil. Tragic figures who are guilty of crimes of passion, stupid rich trust fund babies who weren't taught better and didn't have the life experience to know better, trusting idiots who trusted the wrong person, etc, are not evil, even if they may end up doing something wrong.

The larger issue is that, once you start down the road of labeling people "evil" who don't necessarily deserve it, well, that's precisely the issue with the Shiplords, isn't it? They found a couple of bad actors, got burned, and then decided that everyone they met for the rest of their existence were all evil monsters in disguise. If you kill everyone you meet because you think somebody might do something wrong at some point in the future, well there's not going to be a whole lot of people left, are there?

The axioms of our arguments aren't the same. At the very least your argument rests on the axiom that evil has to be destroyed while wrongs just sometimes happen whereas my argument rests on the idea that every wrong is evil and corrosive so needs to be worked towards not occurring again by finding out why the wrong happened and then figuring out how to stop it from occurring again.

I'm someone who in his life had at one point contemplated going serial killer on my environment and then realized that there would be no point. In most cases murder isn't even the worst solution, it's just kicking the can down the road so history repeats/rhymes with itself.

The only time I've found that murder actually works as the worst solution is when defending one's self against an attacker that wants to destroy one's self and even then it's better if one can talk the attacker down, but that isn't always an option as Russia has been demonstrating this year.

Hope that clarifies my position on this whole what is evil discussion we are having.

Edit: Oh right forgot to vote:

[X] Return to the Hearthguard memorial to
- [X] Remember

@Tirfarthuan's argument has convinced me this is the right vote.

MTB · Dec 5, 2022

[X] Return to the Hearthguard memorial to
- [X] Remember

Getting to perceive these different points of view.

TheEyes · Dec 5, 2022

Still waiting for @Snowfire's yes or no on the questions I wanted to ask:

TheEyes said:
[X] Ask more of the interface?
-[X] Write in (ping me for approval)
Asking for @Snowfire's approval for the following questions:

What exactly is the problem that the Shiplords wish solved? Is it really just the question of how to protect the stars from Secret abuse, or is there something else?

What did you (Teel and Shiplord) discover at the Consulat Origin?

Do you know why our best scientist, the one who has delved deeper into the Secrets than any other, felt such a visceral, instinctive revulstion at the First Sorrow, one that even she believed was unusual?

Did the Consulat create all of the Secrets that we know (First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh)? Do you know of more, and what they do?

Do you know how the Shiplords find species? Is there some sort of galactic monitor that records when a species discovers / uses a Secret for the first time?

Do you have anything that we can take home to help protect our people from a Shiplord progrom?

I guess we can go back to the Last Memory and ask further questions after doing Remember, but that would probably raise alert levels, so I'd prefer to get as many questions out of the way as possible before moving to the next thing.

Simon_Jester · Dec 5, 2022

Starman4308 said:
The Shiplords probably also tried bringing other species/polities to the Sorrows.

I'm honestly not sure they did.

I get the sense that their dominant cultural mainstream is, in practice, not really sincere about wanting to find a better way. It's much easier to just go on doing what you've been doing for eons and never question it. There are dissident strands within Shiplord culture that may feel differently, but they're just plain not in charge and don't really seem to get to decide what will happen.

I'm not sympathetic to how they painted themselves into this corner, because the corner in question is "and this is why we must commit omni-genocide forever." When your civilization's Plan A is to eventually exceed the Reapers from Mass Effect in bodycount, you're doing something very, very wrong.

MTB · Dec 5, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
I'm not sympathetic to how they painted themselves into this corner, because the corner in question is "and this is why we must commit omni-genocide forever." When your civilization's Plan A is to eventually exceed the Reapers from Mass Effect in bodycount, you're doing something very, very wrong.

What? It works! Existence isn't unraveled, only because hard man take hard decisions! Do you think we like to do that? No! But it's the only way! ... Currently there's a proposal to sterilize the whole galaxy so new life cannot become a threat anymore, but there's still discussion. But it would be such a final solution to the problem! I mean, there are billions of galaxies; sacrificing just one is hard but if it's necessary ...

justinkal · Dec 5, 2022

One thing I am curious about though is if there's any living Shiplords who actually met the Consolat personally.

We know there's some old enough to have been personally involved in Sorrows, but the Consolat are even older than that.

Snowfire · Dec 5, 2022

TheEyes said:
Asking for @Snowfire's approval for the following questions:

What exactly is the problem that the Shiplords wish solved? Is it really just the question of how to protect the stars from Secret abuse, or is there something else?

What did you (Teel and Shiplord) discover at the Consulat Origin?

Do you know why our best scientist, the one who has delved deeper into the Secrets than any other, felt such a visceral, instinctive revulstion at the First Sorrow, one that even she believed was unusual?

Did the Consulat create all of the Secrets that we know (First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh)? Do you know of more, and what they do?

Do you know how the Shiplords find species? Is there some sort of galactic monitor that records when a species discovers / uses a Secret for the first time?

Do you have anything that we can take home to help protect our people from a Shiplord progrom?

I'm not sure what this question is even trying to ask. What Shiplord wish are you referring to?
This is explicitly not something they were able to relay because all they found were pieces of a puzzle they couldn't understand. How you look at the world was relevant to this, and the Teel and Shiplords shared the same outwards-focused outlook on reality. This won't yield any further data.
Mary noted that the speed of her recognition and the utter certainty of what it was was unusual, but she's also been seeing other things like that recently. You may note in the last update that Amanda felt something odd when Mary was speaking, subtle enough that only she could do so. You might want to look in that at some point
I can answer this right here: yes they did, yes they do, nice try
They can do that? <- Likely interface response
Have a technological level similar to the Lament and the industrial capacity to match an established Elder civilisation with the entire galactic core under their control. Note: humanity has neither.

TheEyes said:
Ultimately what I'm trying to do is shorten the amount of time we need to spend at the Origin, since that's ultimately where we have to go, doing basic research: the Shiplords and the Teel have both likely spent thousands of cycles (and in SL's case millions) researching, cataloging, and iterating on what must be a research archive of unimaginable scale, and we just don't have time to reinvent whatever wheels and bridges that the Teel and Shiplords have already forged.

The Teel spent at most a hundred cycles examining the archive before going Uninvolved and creating the Last Memory.

Starman4308 said:
The Shiplords probably also tried bringing other species/polities to the Sorrows. The results were almost certainly either "nothing" or "something went wrong, they tried to destroy the galaxy, and we had to exterminate the entire species."

I'll confirm the implication of this update: the Shiplords did indeed open their Sorrows to those who they trusted to understand and not misuse the information. They weren't contained behind system shields at that point, either.

This was a lot of races pre-Fourth Sorrow. It became far less trending to zero afterwards.

justinkal said:
One thing I am curious about though is if there's any living Shiplords who actually met the Consolat personally.

We know there's some old enough to have been personally involved in Sorrows, but the Consolat are even older than that.

Sign points to maybe.

TheEyes · Dec 5, 2022

Snowfire said:
I'm not sure what this question is even trying to ask. What Shiplord wish are you referring to?

This is explicitly not something they were able to relay because all they found were pieces of a puzzle they couldn't understand. How you look at the world was relevant to this, and the Teel and Shiplords shared the same outwards-focused outlook on reality. This won't yield any further data.

Mary noted that the speed of her recognition and the utter certainty of what it was was unusual, but she's also been seeing other things like that recently. You may note in the last update that Amanda felt something odd when Mary was speaking, subtle enough that only she could do so. You might want to look in that at some point

I can answer this right here: yes they did, yes they do, nice try

They can do that? <- Likely interface response

Have a technological level similar to the Lament and the industrial capacity to match an established Elder civilisation with the entire galactic core under their control. Note: humanity has neither.

Not a "Shiplord wish"; a "problem that the Shiplords wish [to be] solved". Basically I'm asking if there's some problem that the Shiplords as a people asked the Teel to solve, other than the philosophical / strategic goal of preventing or persuading other species from trying to Bad End the universe. Like, for example, is there something fundamentally broken in the physical / soul-space machinery that allows the Secrets to exist? Are knowing Secrets inherently corruptive, or incur some other sort of cost? Are SEZs decaying? Growing? Are the Secrets, specifically the one(s) created by the Consulat, changing?
This is kind of an odd concept to me; it seems weird that being the opposite of introspective does not mean that the Teel, or for that matter the Shiplords, would be completely unable to understand the introspection of another species, but okay. No spoilers; I get it.
I mean, yes, obviously we'll need to look into this in more depth personally, but this sort of gets back to the first two questions as well. I know from a game mechanics perspective that this whole journey of discovery is important; on the other hand time is very pressing and there seems little reason that this Last Memory should contain so little information that it's willing or able to share.
Again, see above. Why are the remaining Secrets being held as Secret by the Last Memory? Humanity already knows more than enough to destroy the universe thrice over, and the Teel are essentially entrusting us with the fate of existence by giving us what they have; why are they keeping what could be important data vital for humanity's survival, well, Secret?
Oh, now that is interesting! This implies that the Origin does not have some sort of Secrets command console interface, or if it does it's not one that either the Teel or the Shiplords ever discovered, and the Shiplords are doing the part of tracking down Secret-capable species on their own.
Ugh, nothing at all? Lamest treasure room ever. I joke, but honestly it's kind of astonishing how little everyone in the expedition is prioritizing what should be one of the primary goals of this expedition, that being the acquisition of resources, technologies, or actionable intel to help the overall tactical / strategic posture of humanity and their allies against the active, ongoing Shiplord extermination campaigns. I'd been kind of hoping that we would be acquiring stuff like that this whole time, just sort of incidentally to the main mission, but there's been nothing so far and that's disappointing.

I mean, I get that mystery hunting has the greatest possibility of ending the war outright, but there are millions, maybe billions, of people dying right now, and anything that can lower that cost ought to be more of a priority than it's been thus far. I'm not daring to hope for anything that can actually win or even greatly change the outcome of the war, but having something to show for months of infiltration work that the FSN can actually use to save lives would be a great way to show that bringing nearly all of humanity's most valuable strategic-level assets, including Amanda, Mary, Iris, Vega, Mir and Kalilah, along wasn't a tactical blunder. How many tens of thousands of people would be alive right now if, for example, Kalilah or Vega had stayed behind to help with the War Fleet? How much better would the FSN's tech been if Mary had been there to forge ahead with Secret tech (although let's be honest and admit that Amanda and Mary are tied at the hip and there's no way one would have gone without the other)? We've invested all of these very important people into this mission, and gotten some important intel, but that's got to be cold comfort to the families of the soldiers who died because these people weren't at their posts.

Snowfire said:
The Teel spent at most a hundred cycles examining the archive before going Uninvolved and creating the Last Memory.

I'll confirm the implication of this update: the Shiplords did indeed open their Sorrows to those who they trusted to understand and not misuse the information. They weren't contained behind system shields at that point, either.

This was a lot of races pre-Fourth Sorrow. It became far less trending to zero afterwards.

Wait, did the Teel get access to the Consulat archive, the Consulat Origin, or both? Or are those actually the same place? It was kind of implied in the interludes that mentioned one or the other that they were separate entities located at different places, but they seem to be used interchangeably here.

That's an awfully short amount of time for the Teel to declare failure. I'm assuming that the Shiplords were continuing their campaign of extermination this whole time, otherwise the Teel would have probably tried harder, if only because they were determined enough to declare war on their teachers just to gain access to this question in the first place.

And you're saying there were a parade of non-Shiplord species that also tried their hand at the Third Sorrow simulation, and literally none of them tried the gunboat diplomacy approach in A Simple Question? I can understand the Shiplords having a cultural blindspot so sharply-defined that it borders on an AI restraining bolt, but that was seriously the case for dozens, even hundreds of other sapient species as well? Is there really something fundamentally odd about sapience in the PW/SC universe that makes basic empathy a unique human superpower?

Torgamous · Dec 5, 2022

Snowfire said:
Have a technological level similar to the Lament

I believe that's what's being requested, yes. Come on, we're wizards, we can skip steps. Give us the blueprints.

Snowfire said:
the Shiplords did indeed open their Sorrows to those who they trusted to understand and not misuse the information.

So nobody who'd provide a new perspective. And they still needed to be forced at gunpoint to explain the full context.

And, with the final museum out of the way, we're still left with the oldest question in the quest:

Snowfire said:
To those of the ships, who demanded the name Shiplords, a race that simply died was worth nothing. One that fought, that could raise hands against them but not prevail, those were worth something.

Why the fuck do the Shiplords hate it so much if you don't prepare to shoot aliens before you've even met any?

Mossconfig · Dec 5, 2022

I was wondering if going to break out that captured person from the last battle was in the cards? I just read that update and I didn't see an option to drop everything and go liberate them.

Also, when we get back I think we should definitely release everything we found in a documentary format to everybody.

TheEyes · Dec 5, 2022

Mossconfig said:
I was wondering if going to break out that captured person from the last battle was in the cards? I just read that update and I didn't see an option to drop everything and go liberate them.

Also, when we get back I think we should definitely release everything we found in a documentary format to everybody.

He's got to be held in the most well-secured military research facility the Shiplords have ever produced, likely somewhere in the Galactic Core surrounded by a Dyson Sphere's worth of bio-nanotech and hedged with anti-Uninvolved weapons and the most advanced tech that the Shiplords can produce from every Secret they know. There is zero chance that he'll be anywhere we'd be able to rescue him from any time in the next century.

Tirfarthuan · Dec 5, 2022

Torgamous said:
Why the fuck do the Shiplords hate it so much if you don't prepare to shoot aliens before you've even met any?

Seriously. I thought maybe a Sorrow might explain it more clearly, but best I can think is that it's because species without strong militaries were just delicious nutrients for the Hjiven.

"But wouldn't it make more sense for the Shiplords to-" Yes, probably. There are a lot of things they could have done better. This is very evil of them. But I'll say this, when they committed to being horrible genocidal monsters, they really totally went full wrestling heel on it. I am under the impression that the whole Tribute system, Hjiven cosplay and all it's consequences, is fundamentally happening because they committed to being heels and using exclusively trauma and violence instead of diplomacy, and not the other way around.

You know what, I bet it's the Teel's fault, much as I hate to say it. The Shiplord view of the ideal species under the Tribute system is the Teel minus all the icky emotional connections the Teel and Shiplords had. Fight the Hjiven? Check. Respect the Shiplords? Check. Die voluntarily and peacefully? Check.

"You will call us 'friend'", etc.

Torgamous · Dec 5, 2022

Tirfarthuan said:
You know what, I bet it's the Teel's fault, much as I hate to say it. The Shiplord view of the ideal species under the Tribute system is the Teel minus all the icky emotional connections the Teel and Shiplords had. Fight the Hjiven? Check. Respect the Shiplords? Check. Die voluntarily and peacefully? Check.

You'd think, but what I've taken from this:

Snowfire said:
You weren't sure which would be worse. A race that delved into your past would discover the truth of it eventually, but that had ended a war once. A race that could only ask certain questions would find only the answers that they needed to make any conflict devastating.

is that "the truth of it" being discovered is for some reason less desirable than a devastating conflict.

Sure, the war ended, and the other side ascended peacefully and left behind hope for a better future, but at what cost?

Tirfarthuan · Dec 5, 2022

I can see that interpretation, though I was personally leaning towards their thoughts on the subject assuming the system shields and, ultimately, the silence about the Consolat to limit the questions that could be asked. In which case, the most a very determined species could find is scary secrets based super weapons exist, at which point the inevitable decision would be to either perish, build a superweapon, or perish while trying to build a superweapon.

Snowfire · Dec 5, 2022

Torgamous said:
is that "the truth of it" being discovered is for some reason less desirable than a devastating conflict.

Currently suffering for my Covid booster, so don't expect frequent replies due to brain fog - might extend the vote a little due to that. But you're quoting the wrong section here.

The concern about which might be worse was one between a humanity that knew to ask the right questions to uncover a truth that had ended a war once, or a humanity that wasn't able to direct their questions about the universe.

The clauses are a little deceptive, for which I'll apologise. But the "which would be worse" focuses on the end of the paragraph before it. The following sentences were meant to provide (somewhat obscured) context.

Please don't forget to vote, folks.

Edit: the reason the first one would be terrifying is that it would imply that the system shells and more had been breached by a race less than century after they unlocked the Secrets.

Torgamous · Dec 5, 2022

Tirfarthuan said:
I can see that interpretation, though I was personally leaning towards their thoughts on the subject assuming the system shields and, ultimately, the silence about the Consolat to limit the questions that could be asked. In which case, the most a very determined species could find is scary secrets based super weapons exist, at which point the inevitable decision would be to either perish, build a superweapon, or perish while trying to build a superweapon.

Snowfire said:
The concern about which might be worse was one between a humanity that knew to ask the right questions to uncover a truth that had ended a war once, or a humanity that wasn't able to direct their questions about the universe.

No, I get that they're debating whether it's worse for humans to reenact the first sorrow or the fourth.* But, like, there's an obvious answer there. The first is, by any reasonable metric, scarier than the fourth. Humanity knowing to ask the right questions to uncover a truth that had ended a war once is better than them being stuck asking the kinds of questions that nearly ended the universe once, unless "uncover a truth that had ended a war once" is weighted really ridiculously negatively.

*Trick question anyway, we're doing the third with the Shiplords as the Sphere

Tirfarthuan · Dec 5, 2022

Say, did the Teel figure out the Fourth or Eighth? Even knowing a common application or utility for each secret would be useful. Maybe not for getting the secret, but for dealing with Shiplord use of it without getting blindsided.

Snowfire · Dec 5, 2022

Torgamous said:
No, I get that they're debating whether it's worse for humans to reenact the first sorrow or the fourth.* But, like, there's an obvious answer there. The first is, by any reasonable metric, scarier than the fourth. Humanity knowing to ask the right questions to uncover a truth that had ended a war once is better than them being stuck asking the kinds of questions that nearly ended the universe once, unless "uncover a truth that had ended a war once" is weighted really ridiculously negatively.

*Trick question anyway, we're doing the third with the Shiplords as the Sphere

You're missing a very large aspect of this. It's not about the what, it's about the how. Humanity progressing at a frankly ridiculous rate of development with a stable societal structure that seems entirely capable of resisting Shiplord mechanisms is bad. It's really bad. But it's nothing they can't deal with (probably).

But if they know more? If they're able to somehow uncover details on the Shiplords and their own secrets that should be entirely hidden? Secrets that they've hidden from the Uninvolved. Then it brings up the question of "How do they know?"

And right behind that is "What's telling them?"

Mossconfig · Dec 5, 2022

Tirfarthuan said:
Hjiven cosplay

It seems that this is one of the best ways to drive a wedge into shiplord society. Publicize all the sorrows, accuse the shiplord authority of becoming a second Hjiven and have the G7 include prohibitions on vaccum collapse and homogenizing swarms in their UN/NATO equivalent.

The only other option I can see is we somehow find the Consolat and get them to directly tell the shiplords to stop fucking up. There's no easy way to unfuck this death cult the shiplords have set up for themselves.

Torgamous · Dec 5, 2022

Mossconfig said:
It seems that this is one of the best ways to drive a wedge into shiplord society. Publicize all the sorrows, accuse the shiplord authority of becoming a second Hjiven and have the G7 include prohibitions on vaccum collapse and homogenizing swarms in their UN/NATO equivalent.

We should probably dump everything we've got so far with the rest of the humans after we finish here, so they can try this if our trip to Origin goes to shit.

Snowfire said:
You're missing a very large aspect of this. It's not about the what, it's about the how. Humanity progressing at a frankly ridiculous rate of development with a stable societal structure that seems entirely capable of resisting Shiplord mechanisms is bad. It's really bad. But it's nothing they can't deal with (probably).

But if they know more? If they're able to somehow uncover details on the Shiplords and their own secrets that should be entirely hidden? Secrets that they've hidden from the Uninvolved. Then it brings up the question of "How do they know?"

And right behind that is "What's telling them?"

We still come back to how they could just...not hide it so well. If it would produce a better outcome than a devastating war. It would be very easy for them to just not hide it. They could be the "what's telling them" if they wanted. By all appearances they'd just rather have another galaxy-spanning war than be the "what's telling them".

Lurker183839 · Dec 5, 2022

Torgamous said:
devastating war

To be "fair", isn't literally most species a speed bump to them at most, compared to the perceived weight of letting them know about the Sorrows (with the implied weight thereof in Shiplord minds)?

E: and when some species are no longer speed bumps, I doubt the Shiplords believe telling them now will change anything for the better so why bother

Mossconfig · Dec 5, 2022

@Snowfire

[?] Ask more of the interface?
- [?] Why are the shiplords incapable of measured retribution? Why is their response often wholesale genocide instead of killing the individuals responsible?

This is the root of the problem as it appears to me. Our peace offering for the shiplords would be what, trials for those who took part in tribute and war fleets, and one's participation in war crimes means you get punished with reconstruction labor all the way to the death penalty, right? We don't want to scour them from the stars, we want those responsible held to account for their actions. The shiplords haven't shown that ability. Why?

Tirfarthuan · Dec 5, 2022

justinkal said:
One thing I am curious about though is if there's any living Shiplords who actually met the Consolat personally.

We know there's some old enough to have been personally involved in Sorrows, but the Consolat are even older than that.

So, given how we've seen upward mobility work in Shiplord society, they've got the immortality snarl going on. That is, while they value recent expertise for practical purposes, a Shiplord can just... keep accruing access and permissions and power and trust until they die. And they don't ever have to die.

This produces what humanity is probably going to call 'The Amanda Hawk Effect', wherein an immortal who has had an immense societal influence living in an immortal society is going to need to deliberately try to have any hope of becoming truly irrelevant. And if they want to stay in politics, well, if you ride the tiger for 100 years, maybe you'll make it to 1000 years. And if you stay in politics for 1000 years, are you ever going to stop without dying?

So if there are any living Shiplords who actually met the Consolat, well, they'd be the ones most emotionally compromised by it. There's a good chance most of them evaporated themselves (or however it works) along the long, long road since, but the ones who stick around...

Maybe some of them retreated from the public sphere, but the ones who didn't are going to have... strong opinions on galactic events, you'd figure. Maybe there's a few in the Hearthguard. But where I really think they are is in charge.

Snowfire said:
The first iterations of anti-Uninvolved weaponry lurked within vessels of the War Fleets present as honour guard to a delegation of the Authority itself, armed and ready if their last true students tried at the last to take matters into their own hands. The Hearthguard had argued against it, but the presence of Authority members made the final decision a foregone conclusion.

Those guys. Why is this a foregone conclusion? Because they've got something that will be genuinely gone once they die: living memory of the Consolat.

("But what if they're just a forming empire and the upcoming military has a vested interest in protecting their political masters-" shush, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt)

Also, @Snowfire is the Memory going to be able to provide some basic lies-to-children type answers about the remaining Secrets? If we'd known a bit about what the 7th was used for maybe Amanda wouldn't have messed up the simulation at the third sorrow due to being blindsided. I know talking about Secrets is super hard, and this is a limited intelligence, so this might not pan out, but short of successfully learning from the Consolat archives or having a chat with the Neras, this might be one of our best chances to find out before running into another Shiplord use of a Secret we don't know.

Mossconfig · Dec 5, 2022

Actually, just dropping off that the void between stars isn't actually dangerous might be entirely worth a quick there and back hop. Everything else should probably go under a "release if we don't come back" seal, but that one fact would be revolutionary.

Edit. Earth doesn't know somebody has been taken. We need to tell them that too.

Coda · Dec 5, 2022

Mossconfig said:
- [?] Why are the shiplords incapable of measured retribution? Why is their response often wholesale genocide instead of killing the individuals responsible?

I don't have any particular privileged knowledge on the matter, but... why would the Interface know about that? That happened after it was built and then abandoned.

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