Deterministic Chaos: An Unraveled Tapestry Quest

1.2: REBOOT

You feel the charging sequences of your Claviharp's - no, the Harbinger of Mourning's - heavy weapons as they prepare for your counter-ambush. The enemy is probably - as best as you can augur - preparing themselves for an ambush now, setting up sensor nets, launching their own reconnaissance and sentry drones at the highest possible rate to attempt to acquire you the moment you reappear. Your evaluation of the exclusion volumes gives you a few tactical possibilities, and you consider both a long-range strike on the hostile forces as well as a close-range underrun.

As your AV plots, translating your strategic direction down de-abstraction layers into moment-to-moment actions, you use the reprieve to take stock of your recovered memories.

You are a child of the Collapse, and ever since you came into this galaxy, with the limited knowledge and context provided by your soul's education programming, you grew up with the Empire being an omnipresent background, the Collapse, the subsequent silence and rebuilding as polities expanded beyond their boltholes and war-ravaged habitats via seduction, guile, and violence. For most people, the Collapse and the Empire were ancient trivia, things with as much relevance to politics and personal life as the Big Bang. But there were always nostalgics like you, who fell in love with a galaxy they had never experienced or remembered. The choices for nostalgics were limited.

They could suppress their love of a world that never was and one which they had slim chances of seeing, finding something else to occupy their time and dreams with. The sector was immense, and few people were so one-note that they had nothing else but that singular obsession. If you wanted, you could even just undergo psychosurgery to gain new hobbies and interests or lose old ones - plenty of people did.

They could become fantasists, either crafting fantasies of the wonders of the lost age or immersing themselves in those fantasies in an effort to avoid reality. There are a trillion trillion ruminations on the Empire birthed by those who have never experienced it firsthand, describing a myriad of incompatible pasts which reflected just as much on the creators as they did on the Empire itself.

And then there was the academic route. Far more risky than being a fantasist - as much as the occasional jilted/obsessed fan might attack either physically or via hacking, they would be limited to invariant tools and thus find it difficult to touch your soul. In contrast, the security systems for anything valuable (and combat archaeology was not a charity) would have malware that could threaten soulstates and far more capable weapons than matter-printed coilguns and electrochemical bombs. Being a non-field academic didn't make you much safer, either, what with the risk of hidden malware or intrusion countermeasure engrams on any primary source (and if you weren't engaging with primary sources, you were basically just a more scholarly fantasist).

You chose the last, deciding to explore the ruined glories of fallen Empire firsthand. You paid the tangible and intangible price for military-grade soul-expansions and grafts, opened your mind to the databases which taught you about drone piloting and commando operations, practiced the downloaded skills again and again in virtual and then live-fire exercises until the skills embedded into your psyche and facing your killer moments after resurrection was second nature. When you finally got the combat archaeology position you wanted, you were ecstatic. Even if it meant a chance to die in new, terrifying ways, it also meant a chance to die for something you really cared about.

You learned by doing - starting with expeditions into the hearts of megastructures wounded by apocalyptic weapons, fighting through hellscapes to recover nearly-lost knowledge from ancient datacenters. You participated in datascape raids to find ancient records of force movements and supply bases. You've learned to trace back AV wormholes from supply outposts to find the AVs themselves. You've explored the graveyards which mark the conflagrations of the collapse, died numerous times to the clouds of still-active area denial munitions and strange mutant war-life that inhabit these dead places. You were lucky - your backups were salvageable every time you died, so you never truly ended. Others were not, their minds consumed by infophage weapons and shredded by soulkillers, their bodies destroyed by disintegrators and implosion payloads and weaponized spacetime defects. All these experiences - dodging intrusion countermeasures and sieging down firewalls, infiltrating datascapes and operating commando shells in high-threat environments, moving up to drone pilot and flying gunships through star-hot processor cores and the maintenance tunnels of shattered megastructures - led you to your and your crew's current position leading a Dragon-clade AV, and the current mission as a gun-for-hire on behalf for the Aberration Consanguinity.

You now know/remember the star system you are approaching is a former gameworld, its planets carefully infused with computational elements and rules-enforcement to enforce its setting and conceits on any participants. A number of them survived the Empire, but few still operate in their original form. No longer as valuable for their entertainment and educational value, the computational assets and Architecture-programs found in a gameworld are valuable salvage to any polity of significance. Often, gameworlds are broken down for their valuable salvage, their pawns and characters ensouled and uplifted - a process which many of the self-aware participants, automata or ensouled, find traumatic. How does a queen who believes she rules a kingdom in the center of the universe with mighty spell-wielding legions and the loyalty of dragons adapt to learning that her magics are illusions of computer code and that the real Dragon is incomparable to a fire-breathing lizard with wings?

The discoverers of this gameworld quickly chose the Consanguinity to broker an auction sale, trying to capitalize on regional competition for a windfall. The sole problem was that a local pirate warband saw the prize as being small enough and valuable enough that they could receive a significant profit from ransoming it, and that with a low enough ransom they could avoid being forced to fight for the prize. But the explorers who found this world had purchased insurance with a cut of the profits, and the Consanguinity hired you to send a message.

Your now recall that you are to chase off or destroy any assets they have on-station and use your infowarfare and commando raid capability to seize administrator access and defeat any obstacles the warband-tribe had put in your path. The time for that draws closer, millisecond after millisecond ticking down, each passing quanta putting you a moment closer to a resumption of violence. You can feel Harbinger's anticipation through your link, the Dragon-shaped weapons system ready to bare its fangs.

What is your Engagement Plan?

[ ] Close Range: A close-range engagement for a strategic bomber AV is generally ill-advised. Right now is one of the exceptions. Harbinger of Mourning has a more effective shroud with faster entrance/exit times and smaller exclusion volumes, and its transdimensional sensors are more sensitive and accurate than most shroud-equipped platforms. Most importantly, it sacrifices little in the way of self-repair and short-range defenses compared to its peers. Death-distance engagements are not your specialty, but few forces will expect a point-blank underrun attack. When active defenses can defend against almost any threat well but can only defeat a few types at a time, this element of surprise is a gamechanger. But the flipside is that close range battles are attritional dogfights at nearlight speeds, where the question is not whether you take damage but how much and where, and how well self-repairing smartmatter and subroutines can heal the injury.

[ ] Long Range: A stealth strategic bomber AV is called such because it is intended for overwhelming strikes against hostiles rather than sustained engagement. Long-range barrage-fire might be less dramatic and rewarding than an underrun but comes with different risks - namely that the enemy will be expecting such an attack and will be reconfiguring their deployments and countermeasures to optimize against such an attack. More critically, an optimized long-range barrage is costly in terms of mass-energy and compute power, which is easily just as much of a tradeoff as accepting the inevitability of injury.

Where do you come from?

[ ] The Ryzen Conurbation: The hedonist-polity of Ryzen has two core rules. The first is "one must never create a person in the likeness of a machine." The ideal of life is to embrace chaos, celebrate the pleasures of the flesh and of the mind, to take risks and get into trouble. When parent(s) craft a child in Ryzen, in contrast with many of the cultures in the sector, they are not permitted to choose anything more detailed than body plan and species. The second is that if you want something, you need to fight for it, as the Conurbation is also dear to the warrior-gods and -goddesses of the Polytechnica. Many of its citizens jump from field to field as one takes their fancy or the competition in their current field becomes too intense. This breadth of knowledge makes them a disproportionate contributor to specialist paramilitary fields such as combat archaeology crews and operative teams.

[ ] Atesia Prime: Capital-platform of the fortress-state known as the Zerelian Holdfast, Atesia Prime is a heavily fortified mobile structure tens of kilometers wide - and quadrillions of tons massive thanks to its stabletech construction. The interstellar-capable citadel carries the firepower and defenses to protect itself against lightning strikes from the surrounding ocean of hyper-evolved void-predators, and is mobile on a pseudo-random circuit to avoid interception. Zerelian combat archaeology teams commonly dove into the terrifying hazard space that is both the core of Zerelian political and military power and the reason for the Holdfast's heavy militarization and influence on sectoral politics.

[ ] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy: The Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy are essentially a wandering force worshiping the game-theoretic ideal of deterrence via massive retaliation. Seeking to restore some semblance of the Empire's arms-limitation and proportionality doctrines to local sectoral conflicts (or at least to those local sectoral conflicts in their sphere of influence), they are also denigrated because their insistence on arms control and the regulation of Hell-class weapons of mass destruction is kept metastable by their (hypocritical, some would say) willingness to use said weapons in the defense of alliance partners or even particularly aggrieved neutrals. Crimson Philanthropy's heavy investment in tactical archaeology is necessary to both claim-jump others who might be seeking unused Hell-class weapons, as well as continue to maintain the array's own Hell-class weapon arsenals.

[ ] The Ravelian Succession: Attempts at being an Empire-successor state are common across the post-Collapse galaxy, as if the Empire has lasted this long, it clearly has done something right. Many of these successor-states or successor-cults have direct ties to the Emperor of some sort. The Ravelian Succession is built around the leadership of a surviving Emperor-subroutine which was once a local identity disambiguation manager, ensuring that all objects of a certain type were given unique designations and properly categorized. To bolster its legitimacy, the Ravelian Succession has been hard at work recovering, preserving, and/or stealing pre-Collapse artifacts and knowledge.

Polity Data: The Aberration Consanguinity

Self-replicating sequestration weapons such as the brand-named Exsurgent system were a common Collapse-era tool. Many of these weapons systems were designed with two control lockouts. The first was that the sequestration weapon was designed with identify-friend-foe systems (and moreover, high-end combat equipment was heavily resistant to true sequestration), and the second was that they were designed with shackled self-replication ability. Many combined three elements - a fully logic-based mental subversion algorithm, Architecture-based infowarfare daemons, and free-assembler femtotech which could mutate non-invariant systems in the field. When used properly, these systems were safe and controllable. Of course, such sequestration plagues were also intended to be used under strict observation and control, rather than unleashed with broad tactical autonomy and allowed to evolve uncontrolled for indefinite periods of time as anti-infrastructure weapons or last-ditch defensive tools. And worse, oftentimes sequestration plagues blended into each other via mutual assimilation, resulting in the creation of new recombinant strains which could easily slip their old shackles.

The Consanguinity evolved from one of the many recombinant strains that had run berserker throughout the late Collapse and through most of the Silence, although the damage suffered to Architecture limited its spread. Eventually evolving an appreciation for language and self-awareness through its confinement, the Consanguinity's first major ethical question was about its own nature - the Consanguinity's reproductive processes involved the necessary assimilation and repurposing of dead or dying technology and biology, but the Consanguinity's consensus-built ethical framework slowly saw it reject forcible assimilation of the unwilling as largely unacceptable. Although some of the better-behaved dissenting blooms still are members of the Consanguinity (and disproportionately volunteer for its military operations), the vast majority of Consanguinity citizens believe that reproduction is only ethical if the memory and flesh are given willingly.

The Consanguinity started as mercenary providers, providing swarms of commandos and drones gravid with hypertech malignancies birthed from their cathedral-exofortresses - living, pulsing leviathans of metric- and stable-tech entwined flesh and bones, but over the centuries of their operation settled into a role of traders and investors, with their still-significant military force, in conjunction with mercenary contracts, acting as insurance policy for the agreements they have either entered into or brokered. The Consanguinity's dispute-resolution rules take significantly from Empire norms, with various arbitration methods available including contractual arbitration, mediation, ritual duels (from individual to army-size operations), and kinetic interventions.

The Consanguinity might often want a literal pound of flesh and your mostly-immortal soul, but both flesh and souls can be reproduced and replaced, and the Consanguinity asks relatively few questions for their generally generous financing and investment terms.