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The Secrets' Crusade

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Snowfire said:
On the matter of the Fourth and Eighth Secrets, the Last Memory can tell you this:

The Fourth provides the means to manipulate the bonds between hadrons, allowing manipulation of matter at a level not even the Sixth can match. It appears to deal with the gamma ray bursts that would result from this sort of manipulation, and is probably part of how the Shiplords terraformed the entire galactic core. It's an incredibly useful construction and economic tool, but has limited offensive capacity. No stable strange matter, for one.

The Eighth is hinted at for how the Lament made this interface, though their use of it was deliberately incomplete to create something short of a full AI. It's the non-Second mechanism for creating artificial intelligences, that Iris has been slowly unravelling, and seems to also deal quite heavily with aspects of the soul.
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...Thank you.

[exhales, a tiny fleck of annoying incompleteness relieved after years]

So, then, the Secrets:

The First is space-folding, primarily FTL communication and travel, possibly also teleportation.

The Second is bioscience, Evangelion-level bullshit bioscience. Lets you create beings with souls, it seems.

The Third is electromagnetism, energy manipulation, and provides functionally perfect heat dissipation.

The Fourth, we now learn, is, loosely speaking, easy transmutation of the elements. I had thought the Sixth might somehow grant this, but always doubted it. Learning that it's a separate Secret explains a lot. It also suggests that really dangerous planetary nanoforges combine the Fourth and Sixth Secrets, because otherwise they are bottlenecked by the available chemical elements. Hm. We may find clues to the Fourth if we go poking around inside the terraforming structures created by the Practiced Miracle that gave us that Mars settlement back. Because that stuff explicitly isn't using the Second Secret, and yet is capable of functional terraforming. Then again, could be the Sixth, or could just be pure Practice which is its own kind of esoteric sparkly bullshit.

The Fifth is gravitic manipulation- space-twisting rather than space-folding. Lends itself to high-performance STL drives and the kind of weaponry you build when you know all eight Secrets and have all the time you need to think through every plausible variation on how to weaponize them.

The Sixth is bullshit-tier nanotechnology, but presumably not involving transmutation of the elements. Presumably lets you build stuff like Matryoshka brains and whatnot, though you get a lot more leverage out of that if you combine it with other Secrets.

The Seventh enables implausibly good simulations, and may involve postcognitive intelligence-gathering capabilities or ability to gather information about the past (or even the present) that isn't normally accessible. It seems fairly clear that the Seventh does not let people foretell the future.

The Eighth, we now learn, is creation of true artificial intelligence. Like the Second (and this may be the closest we see to any two Secrets that can truly duplicate each other's effects), it can apparently create beings with souls. However, there's apparently some distinction between "life" (a la Second Secret) and "AI" (a la Eighth Secret). The Eighth, it is implied, dives into soul science more fully than the Second, which actually doesn't surprise me because it involves entities that are more purely information-theoretic.
 
TheEyes said:
I don't know if it's outright stated, but it's implied that the Shiplords use possibly still-living souls to make these weapons, and it's the ultimate fate of the "tribute" that the Tribute Fleets collect from other species.
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If this is the case, then some proof should be gathered, sometime during our trip. Heck, we should have asked the shiplord hearthgaurd if it was true.
 
Let me clarify. The only ships that Amanda felt this wrongness from were the Medicament-class seconded to the Tribute Fleet that was destroyed in the Second Battle of Sol and - to a lesser degree - the Tribute Fleet ships themselves. She never felt it from the Regular Fleet craft - though her senses should be considered to have been less than capable after she took a full battery of anti-Uninvolved weapons straight to the soul.

Remember, Amanda deliberately acted to shield the rest of the 223 from those weapons during the Third. That she survived intact is a testament to the strength of her own soul and a few other things.
 
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TheEyes said:
Note: this implies that at least the First Secret isn't going to travel outside of the galaxy very well, since distant galaxies are going to be traveling at relativistic speeds relative to one another, and so picking the privileged inertial frame of reference to be in the Milky Way would imply some very odd things happening outside the galaxy, where the same privileged inertial frame of reference would lead to some very weird seeming-paradoxes.
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I think I can address this one, since you're right, that would be a simple experiment to run.

The apparent frame of simultaneity referenced by the First is anchored to the nearest star, and lerps smoothly between stars for interstellar travel. It hasn't been tested, but presumably the same would hold for intergalactic.

The maximum speed you can achieve with the First is limited such that there's no non-relativistic (relative to a local star) frame of reference in which you appear to move backwards in time, and no combination of movement can result in causal loops. Knowing what you do now, Mary would likely assume this is deliberate.

Incidentally, since War Fleet drives push hard at these boundaries, this could make them slightly predictable…
 
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Snowfire said:
The only ships that Amanda felt this wrongness from were the Medicament-class seconded to the Tribute Fleet that was destroyed in the Second Battle of Sol and - to a lesser degree - the Tribute Fleet ships themselves
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I'm more interested in this. If we can broadcast to the whole galaxy that whatever the shiplord's are doing to cause this effect is similar to what the hjiven were then we can cause that shiplord civil war we need.
 
Mossconfig said:
I'm more interested in this. If we can broadcast to the whole galaxy that whatever the shiplord's are doing to cause this effect is similar to what the hjiven were then we can cause that shiplord civil war we need.
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I doubt it, because there's nothing to suggest that any of this is a secret instead of a Sad Truth that the Shiplords just Have To Accept Sadly. It's the Shiplord's Burden to have to do all this horrible stuff to everyone else for the good of all, and all that junk.

I'm sure everyone working together could figure out a solid attack at the heart of Shiplord apologia, but it's not going to be that simple and will depend on knowing as much as possible about how the Shiplords see things, which is why we need to
[X] Return to the Hearthguard memorial to
- [X] Remember
 
Baughn said:
Just to be clear on this one, thermodynamics fully applies to the entire universe. This includes "soul-space".

Ditto basically every other law of physics.
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Well that's incredibly concerning. The Wellspring of Practice has been noted to be getting more powerful over the years, where is that energy being taken from? Are we draining the universe's soul material and energy supplies? Will we eventually make it such that no new souls can be formed?
 
Ompa60 said:
Well that's incredibly concerning. The Wellspring of Practice has been noted to be getting more powerful over the years, where is that energy being taken from? Are we draining the universe's soul material and energy supplies? Will we eventually make it such that no new souls can be formed?
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Technically it's possible, inasmuch as the universe is finite, but I wouldn't worry. We're many, many orders of magnitude away from exhausting the well that all souls draw from.

= = =

While I remember...

[X] Return to the Adamant to assess and plan your next move.
- [X] Compose a poem about the health benefits of nuclear pasta.

Don't take this as a recommendation, folks. It's just that I already know everything we might learn here.
 
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[X] Return to the Hearthguard memorial to
- [X] Remember

Have been trying to think of anything useful to ask, but nothing came.

Baughn said:
[X] Return to the Adamant to assess and plan your next move.
- [X] Compose a poem about the health benefits of nuclear pasta.
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*bonks Baughn with a neutronium meatball*
Also, [jk] Fabricate plushies for all the Hearthguard

Better than the very dubious poetry.
 
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Torgamous said:
secret instead of a Sad Truth that the Shiplords just Have To Accept Sadly. It's the Shiplord's Burden to have to do all this horrible stuff to everyone else for the good of all, and all that junk.
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We don't know that. Which brings up the question, why didn't we ask Kicha when we had the chance about the what happens to tribute and what is the average shiplord's feelings on it. Are the regulars a different section of society who wants nothing to do with what the tribute taking ships do with their captives?

That seems like a big oversight in questions we could have asked.
 
Mossconfig said:
We don't know that. Which brings up the question, why didn't we ask Kicha when we had the chance about the what happens to tribute and what is the average shiplord's feelings on it. Are the regulars a different section of society who wants nothing to do with what the tribute taking ships do with their captives?

That seems like a big oversight in questions we could have asked.
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We knew the average Shiplord's feelings on it before we met her. They're deeply respected.

You're looking for an easy fracture point that isn't there. If a Shiplord civil war was as easy as telling people how the tribute fleets operate, a whistleblower would've started that war without our help at some point in the last million years.
 
Torgamous said:
We knew the average Shiplord's feelings on it before we met her. They're deeply respected.
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"Yes," she nodded. "And of the three we talked to, all expressed a wish for a system that didn't kill so indiscriminately. [...] But their civilian population, what we've seen of it, appears to only go along for so long as it appears to be the only game in town. Why they believe that's so, I don't know. We couldn't ask. But one of them," she paused, then gestured to Mir. "You talked with them."
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So, the sorrows we have seen have show clearly that the shiplords suck at doing "empire". The Zlathbu, the shiplords weren't capable of examining the obvious outcomes of inflicting sorrows. They were blindsided by the Gysians, and once they identified a threat they struggled to set up a system that killed less indiscriminately from the very jump. The Hjiven showed that they still sucked at identifying a threat and the simple act of open confrontation was something they haven't tried. These are explainable in the context of alien mindset suffering from trauma.

The tribute fleet and sorrows aren't. Those are the problem. If the shiplord's were just crappy galactic overlords prone to heavy handed responses that would be bad, but understandable. What they're doing isn't.
 
Mossconfig said:
The tribute fleet and sorrows aren't. Those are the problem. If the shiplord's were just crappy galactic overlords prone to heavy handed responses that would be bad, but understandable. What they're doing isn't.
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Why? The current tribute system inflicts trauma on the species it's inflicted on, then these species are tightly controlled in their further development, then they are allowed to become Uninvolved. What's crappy? It works, no reality-ending escalating problems for millenia.
Edit: And once Uninvolved and staying uninvolved, the SL don't bother them anymore, so they were just shepharded through their races' infancy where the tendency to commit universecid was trained out of them. Truly, the SL are friends to all, you must see this?
 
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I mean, even they think it's crappy for the most part from what I understand. They've not faced a genuine peer threat since the Hjiven, and yet they've been incrementalizing their way from being heavy-handed and restrictive to institutionalized genocide because their trauma is oiling up the slippery slope.

It's all well and good to say 'well it works' but that's not in and of itself justification. The world doesn't break down into a nice dichotomy where something that works is sufficient and good and something that doesn't is insufficient and evil.

That's why they've been running the simulation at the Third Sorrow for so long, because even the Shiplords acknowledge and, as an overall society, allegedly desire a better answer.
 
MTB said:
Why? The current tribute system inflicts trauma on the species it's inflicted on, then these species are tightly controlled in their further development, then they are allowed to become Uninvolved. What's crappy? It works, no reality-ending escalating problems for millenia.
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Killing everyone would also accomplish that.

You have to remember that the tribute system kills pacifists. Not for any reason based in the Sorrows, just because the Shiplords decided that you only deserve to exist if you blow up one of their ships.

If they just wanted to keep the Gysians from happening again, they'd do the opposite of that. They'd kill the ones who look at a sky with no known occupants and say "we've gotta be ready to kill that."

If they wanted to keep the Sphere from happening again, mission fucking accomplished. They're monitoring the whole galaxy, and a developed empire like the Sphere can't come out of nowhere and punch them in the dick anymore. If they wanted to be really sure, then they'd cooperate with the Uninvolved, as the Teel mentioned. It worked last time, after all. But that would mean trusting anyone and they're too busy writing poetry about how sad they are that they have to keep doing genocides. What if the Uninvolved saw their shitty poetry? It's just not a viable solution.

The massive, overwhelming majority of the Shiplords' atrocities haven't done shit to protect reality. It's Lisa's anti-tiger rock.
 
Torgamous said:
We knew the average Shiplord's feelings on it before we met her. They're deeply respected.

You're looking for an easy fracture point that isn't there. If a Shiplord civil war was as easy as telling people how the tribute fleets operate, a whistleblower would've started that war without our help at some point in the last million years.
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Well maybe. Given the Shiplords' general lack of knowledge of soul science, it's possible that the public is in the dark about the nature of Tribute Fleets. Heck, it's possible that the Shiplords as a whole have no idea that their anti-Uninvolved weapons have possibly still living, eternally suffering soulstuff in them. Revealing it could well be a Soylent Green moment for them.

Baughn said:
Technically it's possible, inasmuch as the universe is finite, but I wouldn't worry. We're many, many orders of magnitude away from exhausting the well that all souls draw from.
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We have little idea about the nature of soul space. For all we know there's a constant Big Bang situation in soul space, with a similar asymmetry between soulstuff and anti-soulstuff, so soul space is actually constantly generating new soulstuff.
 
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Tirfarthuan said:
That's why they've been running the simulation at the Third Sorrow for so long, because even the Shiplords acknowledge and, as an overall society, allegedly desire a better answer.
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Yes, but my answer is lot easier for a traumatized SL than 'btw. your genocides were totally unnecessary'. The real quest starts once we have all the answers, because then we have to find a method to cope with the SL without causing a total meltdown. You don't want a meltdown of the race that has the most ways to end the universe that's so cruel.
Torgamous said:
Killing everyone would also accomplish that.
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The SL's development is ongoing ...
 
MTB said:
Yes, but my answer is lot easier for a traumatized SL than 'btw. your genocides were totally unnecessary'. The real quest starts once we have all the answers, because then we have to find a method to cope with the SL without causing a total meltdown. You don't want a meltdown of the race that has the most ways to end the universe that's so cruel.
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They're not going to end the universe. For one thing, "knows" and "has" are two different things. They know how to end reality, but have not built the infrastructure to end reality. They have built the infrastructure to end themselves, even if it's historically been pointed outward.

For another thing, not ending the universe is the one thing they've convinced themselves they're good for. If a faction decided to try anyway they'd get their asses Lumen'd.

And softening our rhetoric so they don't feel bad about their genocides would work against the necessity of leading with "you need to stop doing your genocides right this fucking instant" when we confront them after Origin.
 
Another important piece of the "shatter the shiplord society" plan is that unlike real world genocidal fascists, the shiplords have never been forced to defend themselves. In the real world a Fuentes type can spring out a load of preformed arguments, as that is the primary method they have for convincing people. By the time you've debunked one conspiracy about immigrants they've moved over to fluoride or Hollywood.

They don't have a preformed arguments against "What you're doing is dangerously close to what the Hjiven did, hand over everybody who helped a tribute fleet and you can join us in preventing the end of the universe". They go from preventing these dangerous younger races from ending reality to fighting to prevent their boss from a firing squad.
 
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