Acatalepsy
Firewall Proxy
- Location
- The Diamond Age
[X] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
Deterministic Chaos: An Unraveled Tapestry Quest
- Thread starter MJ12 Commando
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi Fantasy
- Location
- [REDACTED]
[X] Divine Knight Lumen (Commando Ops)
IamtooSleepy
I came here to be an ant
[X] Axiom/Astarte.Simacrula.4.0.t (Weapons)
prometheus110
Join Cayman-Global & be part of the 1E-9 percent!
- Location
- La Ballena City Raft
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Divine Knight Lumen (Commando Ops)
Now that is a wacky bunch of misfits to gracefully dance screw up our way through the stars!
You mentally prepare a calming subroutine as you agree with the Mourning's analysis. Dangerous as they might be, the hostile AVs are a secondary concern to the payload which nearly wiped out the ship. Unfortunately, studying a Dragon-killer means spinning up your own Dracotech specialist, which calls for...
"An 'intelligence failure,' you say? Rather curious."
"Dr. Tesk-"
"Just 'Jenril,' please. You're the captain, sir, not some grad student trying to glad-hand me for a recommendation." The Dracotechnician's tiny virtual avatar shuffles some papers around on its desk, an obvious mental exercise to clear one's mind. Your own avatar shows no similar emotional tics, but you suppress a minor glimmer of frustration at the diminutive academic and his flamboyant gestures. At least you'd gotten 'Jenril' to ditch the spectacles.
The only difference between total war and university politics is that soldiers on battlefronts tend to die quickly. Given a choice between mandatory ego-pruning and mindstate reversion, versus a quick conversion into gamma radiation, and you'd probably take the antimatter route. Jenril Tesk, Dragon-tech academic extraordinaire, is a hardened veteran from a dangerous school of combat that cloaks its weapons with shrouds like "peer review" and "budget oversight." A warrior yourself, you know a trained survivor when you link minds with one.
You nod in response to his social cue, passing along a summary of the current threat profile. "The Mourning suggests that the enemy-"
"Pirates? Mercenaries?"
"Potato, potahto." You suppress another twinge of annoyance at Jenril's tendency to interrupt a prepared statement, and spin off another copymind to recompile the threat profile on your head of Engineering. The 'befuddled academic' mirage is just annoying enough to keep you distracted, which is likely why he maintains it. "Regardless, the Mourning suggests that the enemy was unsure of the tool's effectiveness, and used it with an overabundance of caution."
Jenril clacks his simulated mandibles in thought for a moment, lost in virtual thought. You use the opportunity to link with the Mourning's central oversight, which helpfully updates you with a summary of the queries submitted by Jenril's various subminds. Although he's been carrying on his expected work in Engineering after such an attack, your mind notes several anomalous queries which you flag for follow-up. You rely on your subordinates, but their capabilities make them potential threats, and your primary mind is built as an archaeologist rather than a manager. Especially with everything still operating far below spec after the attack, you and your officers are left verbally jousting in the dark. Jenril politely ignores your momentary conversational lapse as your primary focus returns, and you return the favour in turn.
With your queries complete and mindstates back in synch, you both return to the verbal fray. Jenril raises one mandible in a gesture of thought: "Hmmm. The payload displays a remarkable effectiveness against Dragon-tech, doubly so given the local Architecture. It's quite impressive that such an executable survived the transition to our AV's architecture intact."
You idly consider adding an 'eyeroll' emote to your current avatar; you don't need a specialist to tell you the obvious stuff. "Tailored for us, you think?"
"That would be the obvious conclusion," Jenril continues gracefully, "but the payload was quite ineffective against the mundane components of the Mourning. It was made to kill a Dragon, but we're currently only half-lizard-wizard." At least his avatar doesn't laugh along, you think sourly to yourself.
You digest the information for a moment, different subroutines coming to the same inescapable conclusion. "So either they mistakenly assumed the Mourning was fully intact-"
"-or we were never the primary target in the first place." Jenril flicks his avatar's upper appendages around in a sign of distress. "Not a comforting prospect, no?"
[X] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
You mentally prepare a calming subroutine as you agree with the Mourning's analysis. Dangerous as they might be, the hostile AVs are a secondary concern to the payload which nearly wiped out the ship. Unfortunately, studying a Dragon-killer means spinning up your own Dracotech specialist, which calls for...
"An 'intelligence failure,' you say? Rather curious."
"Dr. Tesk-"
"Just 'Jenril,' please. You're the captain, sir, not some grad student trying to glad-hand me for a recommendation." The Dracotechnician's tiny virtual avatar shuffles some papers around on its desk, an obvious mental exercise to clear one's mind. Your own avatar shows no similar emotional tics, but you suppress a minor glimmer of frustration at the diminutive academic and his flamboyant gestures. At least you'd gotten 'Jenril' to ditch the spectacles.
The only difference between total war and university politics is that soldiers on battlefronts tend to die quickly. Given a choice between mandatory ego-pruning and mindstate reversion, versus a quick conversion into gamma radiation, and you'd probably take the antimatter route. Jenril Tesk, Dragon-tech academic extraordinaire, is a hardened veteran from a dangerous school of combat that cloaks its weapons with shrouds like "peer review" and "budget oversight." A warrior yourself, you know a trained survivor when you link minds with one.
You nod in response to his social cue, passing along a summary of the current threat profile. "The Mourning suggests that the enemy-"
"Pirates? Mercenaries?"
"Potato, potahto." You suppress another twinge of annoyance at Jenril's tendency to interrupt a prepared statement, and spin off another copymind to recompile the threat profile on your head of Engineering. The 'befuddled academic' mirage is just annoying enough to keep you distracted, which is likely why he maintains it. "Regardless, the Mourning suggests that the enemy was unsure of the tool's effectiveness, and used it with an overabundance of caution."
Jenril clacks his simulated mandibles in thought for a moment, lost in virtual thought. You use the opportunity to link with the Mourning's central oversight, which helpfully updates you with a summary of the queries submitted by Jenril's various subminds. Although he's been carrying on his expected work in Engineering after such an attack, your mind notes several anomalous queries which you flag for follow-up. You rely on your subordinates, but their capabilities make them potential threats, and your primary mind is built as an archaeologist rather than a manager. Especially with everything still operating far below spec after the attack, you and your officers are left verbally jousting in the dark. Jenril politely ignores your momentary conversational lapse as your primary focus returns, and you return the favour in turn.
With your queries complete and mindstates back in synch, you both return to the verbal fray. Jenril raises one mandible in a gesture of thought: "Hmmm. The payload displays a remarkable effectiveness against Dragon-tech, doubly so given the local Architecture. It's quite impressive that such an executable survived the transition to our AV's architecture intact."
You idly consider adding an 'eyeroll' emote to your current avatar; you don't need a specialist to tell you the obvious stuff. "Tailored for us, you think?"
"That would be the obvious conclusion," Jenril continues gracefully, "but the payload was quite ineffective against the mundane components of the Mourning. It was made to kill a Dragon, but we're currently only half-lizard-wizard." At least his avatar doesn't laugh along, you think sourly to yourself.
You digest the information for a moment, different subroutines coming to the same inescapable conclusion. "So either they mistakenly assumed the Mourning was fully intact-"
"-or we were never the primary target in the first place." Jenril flicks his avatar's upper appendages around in a sign of distress. "Not a comforting prospect, no?"
[X] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
- Location
- in the trash
1.4 NETWORKED
1.4 NETWORKED
Strictly speaking, crews have never been necessary for entire epochs of war machine development, thanks to the advancements in cognitive science and processing technology which Architecture requires and fuels in a virtuous cycle. An AV can be fully integrated with a single warmind, with no subminds or sometimes even personalities to get in the way. But the flipside is also true - the necessity for a modern war machine to comprehend a myriad of sensor feeds, separate truth from plausible lies, and make decisions based on assumptions and faulty data makes achieving sapience trivial for a militarized intelligence. After those requirements are met, it requires minimal mental overhead to possess the ability to express complex emotion, hold an internal narrative, and comprehend day to day life, and the opportunity cost there is so low many warrior-cultures keep it on even in the midst of battle.
The warchives of the Mourning suggest that this was not always the case - before the Empire, there was a time where unconscious combat savantism ruled the battlefields, etched in metal and meat and meshed fiberoptics. Back then, warriors were computation-poor, and every iota of substrate counted. Nowadays, there are still those who seek this zen state, but they do so out of ideology or preference, rather than necessity. The question of how much individuality is ideal is one which has been debated by conflict philosophers since before the Collapse. And, in your opinion, it will probably be debated when the Collapse itself is itself distant history.
But you have your own opinions on the appropriate amount of individualized cognition on an AV, and so you have a large crew. The Harbinger of Mourning appreciates, or at least has no objection to this arrangement, and network components which would have once connected the CLAVIHARP to other Dragon-scales and now sit idle have mutated and grown to enmesh sparks of sapient thought into each other.
So when Jenril Tesk is reembodied, you feel what he feels. He is back and his mind is his again. The portion of the engagement on limited sapience is a vivid dream for him - perhaps a nightmare to others, but he's a veteran of combat archaeology, a field where squeamishness towards death means that you are either absurdly unsuited for the task, absurdly new to the career, or absurdly skilled. Jenril Tesk is none of these. He is hardly unsuited for his claim to fame. He might think he is extremely lucky, but his luck has come from being bonded to a hundred million tons, nominal rest mass, of Dragon-designed, Dragon-evolved war machine. It's not the kind of luck which leads to avoiding death. And he has done this for years and years. So his feelings towards death are simply professional resignation.
Your engineer's eyes reboot, immediately drawing images of his world in spectra from ultraviolet to infrared even through closed eyelids. He opens them anyways - his body is a facsimile of a biological kabilae (or at least their own baseline-equivalent, with the same level of extensive bioengineering), and he hasn't consciously deactivated emulation yet. You see what he sees - the gel-sac of his cocoon. Such shock cocoons are ancient, a common sight in gameworlds and h-dramas based on the pre-Empire era, or what people separated by eons saw in the pre-Empire era. Back when a starfarer's body was often not even equivalent to a baseline, more akin to the Frails used by the ultra-wealthy as status symbols, back when people needed to be shielded against tens of meters per second squared of acceleration, back when machine and man were meaningfully different and the latter was clearly the inferior of the two in the science of war. In the modern era, such a system is a statement, not a necessity. A tiny cyst of invariant material leeching an infinitesimally small trickle of matter and energy off of the time-crystal bones and foamed-quanta hull of the Mourning, a reminder of a history eons old.
"Pontifex." He calls you that because to him, you are a bridge-builder between the divinity of the Dragon and the action that its fragments now take. Just one of many titles you've adopted across your life.
"Tesk, what's our systems status? Have they left any Trojans in our system from the spike?" Your voice is undergirded by cool concern. On a social level, the question is simply a sentence in a common language. But the tactical network expands on these statements, taking the detail-less sketch that terse language could provide and filling it in with every necessary detail.
"I'm already doing a full neural audit. There's some encysted malware and a few false-image impressions - concentrated on defensive sensors, as you'd expect - but my initial impression is that they wanted to try for a kill from surprise so they were focusing on a hard-kill rather than sabotage." Any well-designed breach will open an exploit for long enough to beam a scattershot of viral munitions in with it before anti-intrusion systems can compensate and shift firewalls and antibodies to close the wound. But you've gotten lucky this time - a hard-kill is an immensely difficult task, and their focus on attempting one has left your AV with minimal damage. Tesk is confirming what you've already suspected.
"Was it tailored? Or did they just fire off a really high-end spike?" you ask. Neither of the possible answers are desirable, but in very different ways.
"No. Just a well-designed one-shot. The oracles think a double-tap is low-probability. Too much materiel usage, even if they've got an irrational attachment to this specific gameworld," he says, with the chiding tone of the professor he was. "Unprofessional. Conflict isn't about causing harm to the enemy - that's incidental to accomplishing the objective." It might not logically conflict with the Dragon's actions during the Collapse - and if Tesk's belief in the Firewall Postulate was true it might even be true - but intuitively the statement feels wrong coming from him, especially when paired with the Mourning's own approval of the thinking. The Dragon-spawned AV notices your train of thought - cannot help but notice, given all the real-time fault monitoring necessary to avoid subversion - but diplomatically chooses to not respond with either statements or mental impressions.
"Maybe the spike's target was us, after all. Either that or it was a fit of pique or desperation." You know you can't plan for irrationality, just around it.
The kabilae reflexively gnashes his pointed teeth in thought. "Mourning's analysis - and yours - is that they didn't know what they were supposed to be facing. They definitely weren't set up to engage something with a paracausal shroud. But you think they didn't need to, as long as they were given the right weapon for the right opportunity." he's starting to see the problem the same way you are, thoughts guided by the intellectual empathy that a good tactical network engenders.
The context/subtext-layers of your conversation help him drive you to a conclusion. "They wouldn't need to know what we were if the weapon and its deployment parameters were set correctly. And if they wanted to force an engagement, maybe it'd be better if they didn't know what they were dealing with." Even now, the Dragon's reputation precedes it, and few mercenaries would be willing to fight a high-end pre-Collapse war machine blessed by the bloody-minded, nearly-oracular warmind that was the Emperor's executioner. Sometimes a breach of contract was simply more efficient.
But if they were already committed to the fight, already in an envelope of information and spatial warfare that cut off pathways, degraded transit and warp drives, and forced that engagement to happen, the lack of choice would focus them fully on survival.
"Maybe the weapon was self-executing, or it was just provided for a certain contingency level and the supplier was playing the odds. Maybe they found out where we were heading to from the employer's networks and knew we would be here, and sent a fast courier with the weapon to give them an edge. Maybe keeping the enemy ignorant was part of the ambush." Modern information warfare and intelligence-analysis systems can rip thoughts out of minds and souls and piece together facts from small scraps of incidental data. The only surefire way to lie is to never know the truth.
"Right. Security by obscurity." As an academic archaeologist, he understands the concept well. You told people as little as possible, gave them the information they needed to be useful without anything that they could leverage. "But how can we make use of this, Pontifex?"
"If we think the weapon was targeted - revenge maybe?"
"Un-Imperial, but in this day and age, people do so many un-Imperial things. Without the Emperor and the Dragon, the stability needed for forgiveness is gone," he laments. "So maybe. Someone might see this as sending a message. Anyone in mind?"
"Plenty of enemies in this corner of the galaxy," you respond noncommittally. That's just what being a mercenary means. The majority of people understand that sometimes death is death, and they signed up for the risks when they decided to play the great game. But there are increasingly those who see these operations as personal affronts, and are willing to spend resources out of proportion to any possible deterrence gains for vengeance…
[ ] and who can blame them, after the Collapse? Before, if you lost your empire, you could eventually rebuild one, and the costs of victory and defeat were rarely uncalibrated and all out of proportion. In this fallen age, games are routinely played for existential stakes and always for keeps.
[ ] which is another tragedy of the Collapse. The game-theoretic forgiveness preference in the Empire may have concealed injustices, but it also prevented conflict from escalating into lose-lose propositions. The wars which defined the Collapse were a symbol of that breakdown of an order which at least recognized its imperfection, defining itself as always chasing a nigh-unreachable Omega Point.
Your discussion quickly returns to preparations for the incoming enemy strike. Although the missiles are still distant, the sheer scale and speed of superluminal warfare paradoxically means that it is geologic-slow in the temporal dimension. You tick down the minutes before initial engagement nanoseconds at a time, your attention mods allowing you to focus attention on thin slivers of time while not losing focus or attention. When the engagement happens, you still feel like the intervening time was both too long and not long enough. The inexorable weight of entropy - expressed through the unbending arrow of causality - drives your conflict to culmination as it did for quadrillions of prior battles and will do for quadrillions more.
Tesk suggests you listen to drone comms and you immediately elevate the submind dedicated to doing so to full integration. Without Armageddon taking the reins, their performance is lesser. It is true that it is never necessary to pare down a military intelligence to the bare minimum of self, creating a not-quite sapient weapon that sees the world as a utility function to be solved and treats mass death as a balancing tool to achieve that solution. It is also true that sometimes, those utility-maximizing creations are truly inspired. Perhaps it could find a solution, a clever way to employ your slowly-degrading web of drones, now entangling with the enemy's own fighters as they try to puncture the initial mesh of your layered defenses, or preempting the enemy's defenses by sniping remote defenders on high-risk attack runs. But you chose to value defenses and damage control, and that is a decision you will have to live with.
Your drone pilots are out there, the Mourning's remote eyes and fingers, doing what they can with ad-hoc leadership. Instead of idle banter, you hear the clipped pulses of military callouts.
"Nemo sees thirty-eight vampire signatures, Mourning estimates five probables. Going bright." One of your major advantages - a small handful of Dracotech Finals, superfighter drones designed to live up to their name. Far too valuable to lose, but nimble, stealthy, and exceedingly dangerous in any environment - a force multiplier spearhead. The two on-station right now, burning valuable compute and mass-energy, are acting as sensors platforms right now, observing without engaging - perhaps a waste of their abilities, but defaulting to force preservation in the face of danger is often the safest decision. A standard sensors platform would be quickly eliminated once it burns nova-bright, richocheting superluminal, negative-mass particles to illuminate the void. The Final is capable of scrubbing its own signature from the cosmos, and fast enough that by the time they react, there will be nothing there but the ghost-images of old light.
These sensor pulses give you an imperfect understanding of the tactical situation.
"Confirm formation of sixteen drones incoming, distance two-five gigameters, identified as six Manticore saturation drones and ten Roc heavy fighters, tacnet concludes likely suppression mission."
"New threat vector, five incoming bombers, mix of Orcas and White Sharks, penetration mission, intercept course with Mourning-"
"Kairo." The other Final deployed. "I have a ping from a sensors ghost - likely enemy SWACs. Request assassination permission."
"Unknowns visible on a third vector, distance is too great for clear imaging - might be drones, might be decoys, might be vampires."
Operational Prioritization:
War is a game of resources. One of the greatest advantages of M-tech weapons systems is that they can dynamically reallocate resources, prioritizing different tasks almost as if the hardware of a war machine was invariant software. The flipside is that a combatant will always have to consider how to prioritize their resources, focusing them on a single issue. Your drones will focus on:
[ ] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
[ ] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.
[ ] Defeating enemy bomber strikes.
[ ] Engaging enemy missiles, and their fighter escorts.
Strictly speaking, crews have never been necessary for entire epochs of war machine development, thanks to the advancements in cognitive science and processing technology which Architecture requires and fuels in a virtuous cycle. An AV can be fully integrated with a single warmind, with no subminds or sometimes even personalities to get in the way. But the flipside is also true - the necessity for a modern war machine to comprehend a myriad of sensor feeds, separate truth from plausible lies, and make decisions based on assumptions and faulty data makes achieving sapience trivial for a militarized intelligence. After those requirements are met, it requires minimal mental overhead to possess the ability to express complex emotion, hold an internal narrative, and comprehend day to day life, and the opportunity cost there is so low many warrior-cultures keep it on even in the midst of battle.
The warchives of the Mourning suggest that this was not always the case - before the Empire, there was a time where unconscious combat savantism ruled the battlefields, etched in metal and meat and meshed fiberoptics. Back then, warriors were computation-poor, and every iota of substrate counted. Nowadays, there are still those who seek this zen state, but they do so out of ideology or preference, rather than necessity. The question of how much individuality is ideal is one which has been debated by conflict philosophers since before the Collapse. And, in your opinion, it will probably be debated when the Collapse itself is itself distant history.
But you have your own opinions on the appropriate amount of individualized cognition on an AV, and so you have a large crew. The Harbinger of Mourning appreciates, or at least has no objection to this arrangement, and network components which would have once connected the CLAVIHARP to other Dragon-scales and now sit idle have mutated and grown to enmesh sparks of sapient thought into each other.
So when Jenril Tesk is reembodied, you feel what he feels. He is back and his mind is his again. The portion of the engagement on limited sapience is a vivid dream for him - perhaps a nightmare to others, but he's a veteran of combat archaeology, a field where squeamishness towards death means that you are either absurdly unsuited for the task, absurdly new to the career, or absurdly skilled. Jenril Tesk is none of these. He is hardly unsuited for his claim to fame. He might think he is extremely lucky, but his luck has come from being bonded to a hundred million tons, nominal rest mass, of Dragon-designed, Dragon-evolved war machine. It's not the kind of luck which leads to avoiding death. And he has done this for years and years. So his feelings towards death are simply professional resignation.
Your engineer's eyes reboot, immediately drawing images of his world in spectra from ultraviolet to infrared even through closed eyelids. He opens them anyways - his body is a facsimile of a biological kabilae (or at least their own baseline-equivalent, with the same level of extensive bioengineering), and he hasn't consciously deactivated emulation yet. You see what he sees - the gel-sac of his cocoon. Such shock cocoons are ancient, a common sight in gameworlds and h-dramas based on the pre-Empire era, or what people separated by eons saw in the pre-Empire era. Back when a starfarer's body was often not even equivalent to a baseline, more akin to the Frails used by the ultra-wealthy as status symbols, back when people needed to be shielded against tens of meters per second squared of acceleration, back when machine and man were meaningfully different and the latter was clearly the inferior of the two in the science of war. In the modern era, such a system is a statement, not a necessity. A tiny cyst of invariant material leeching an infinitesimally small trickle of matter and energy off of the time-crystal bones and foamed-quanta hull of the Mourning, a reminder of a history eons old.
"Pontifex." He calls you that because to him, you are a bridge-builder between the divinity of the Dragon and the action that its fragments now take. Just one of many titles you've adopted across your life.
"Tesk, what's our systems status? Have they left any Trojans in our system from the spike?" Your voice is undergirded by cool concern. On a social level, the question is simply a sentence in a common language. But the tactical network expands on these statements, taking the detail-less sketch that terse language could provide and filling it in with every necessary detail.
"I'm already doing a full neural audit. There's some encysted malware and a few false-image impressions - concentrated on defensive sensors, as you'd expect - but my initial impression is that they wanted to try for a kill from surprise so they were focusing on a hard-kill rather than sabotage." Any well-designed breach will open an exploit for long enough to beam a scattershot of viral munitions in with it before anti-intrusion systems can compensate and shift firewalls and antibodies to close the wound. But you've gotten lucky this time - a hard-kill is an immensely difficult task, and their focus on attempting one has left your AV with minimal damage. Tesk is confirming what you've already suspected.
"Was it tailored? Or did they just fire off a really high-end spike?" you ask. Neither of the possible answers are desirable, but in very different ways.
"No. Just a well-designed one-shot. The oracles think a double-tap is low-probability. Too much materiel usage, even if they've got an irrational attachment to this specific gameworld," he says, with the chiding tone of the professor he was. "Unprofessional. Conflict isn't about causing harm to the enemy - that's incidental to accomplishing the objective." It might not logically conflict with the Dragon's actions during the Collapse - and if Tesk's belief in the Firewall Postulate was true it might even be true - but intuitively the statement feels wrong coming from him, especially when paired with the Mourning's own approval of the thinking. The Dragon-spawned AV notices your train of thought - cannot help but notice, given all the real-time fault monitoring necessary to avoid subversion - but diplomatically chooses to not respond with either statements or mental impressions.
"Maybe the spike's target was us, after all. Either that or it was a fit of pique or desperation." You know you can't plan for irrationality, just around it.
The kabilae reflexively gnashes his pointed teeth in thought. "Mourning's analysis - and yours - is that they didn't know what they were supposed to be facing. They definitely weren't set up to engage something with a paracausal shroud. But you think they didn't need to, as long as they were given the right weapon for the right opportunity." he's starting to see the problem the same way you are, thoughts guided by the intellectual empathy that a good tactical network engenders.
The context/subtext-layers of your conversation help him drive you to a conclusion. "They wouldn't need to know what we were if the weapon and its deployment parameters were set correctly. And if they wanted to force an engagement, maybe it'd be better if they didn't know what they were dealing with." Even now, the Dragon's reputation precedes it, and few mercenaries would be willing to fight a high-end pre-Collapse war machine blessed by the bloody-minded, nearly-oracular warmind that was the Emperor's executioner. Sometimes a breach of contract was simply more efficient.
But if they were already committed to the fight, already in an envelope of information and spatial warfare that cut off pathways, degraded transit and warp drives, and forced that engagement to happen, the lack of choice would focus them fully on survival.
"Maybe the weapon was self-executing, or it was just provided for a certain contingency level and the supplier was playing the odds. Maybe they found out where we were heading to from the employer's networks and knew we would be here, and sent a fast courier with the weapon to give them an edge. Maybe keeping the enemy ignorant was part of the ambush." Modern information warfare and intelligence-analysis systems can rip thoughts out of minds and souls and piece together facts from small scraps of incidental data. The only surefire way to lie is to never know the truth.
"Right. Security by obscurity." As an academic archaeologist, he understands the concept well. You told people as little as possible, gave them the information they needed to be useful without anything that they could leverage. "But how can we make use of this, Pontifex?"
"If we think the weapon was targeted - revenge maybe?"
"Un-Imperial, but in this day and age, people do so many un-Imperial things. Without the Emperor and the Dragon, the stability needed for forgiveness is gone," he laments. "So maybe. Someone might see this as sending a message. Anyone in mind?"
"Plenty of enemies in this corner of the galaxy," you respond noncommittally. That's just what being a mercenary means. The majority of people understand that sometimes death is death, and they signed up for the risks when they decided to play the great game. But there are increasingly those who see these operations as personal affronts, and are willing to spend resources out of proportion to any possible deterrence gains for vengeance…
[ ] and who can blame them, after the Collapse? Before, if you lost your empire, you could eventually rebuild one, and the costs of victory and defeat were rarely uncalibrated and all out of proportion. In this fallen age, games are routinely played for existential stakes and always for keeps.
[ ] which is another tragedy of the Collapse. The game-theoretic forgiveness preference in the Empire may have concealed injustices, but it also prevented conflict from escalating into lose-lose propositions. The wars which defined the Collapse were a symbol of that breakdown of an order which at least recognized its imperfection, defining itself as always chasing a nigh-unreachable Omega Point.
Your discussion quickly returns to preparations for the incoming enemy strike. Although the missiles are still distant, the sheer scale and speed of superluminal warfare paradoxically means that it is geologic-slow in the temporal dimension. You tick down the minutes before initial engagement nanoseconds at a time, your attention mods allowing you to focus attention on thin slivers of time while not losing focus or attention. When the engagement happens, you still feel like the intervening time was both too long and not long enough. The inexorable weight of entropy - expressed through the unbending arrow of causality - drives your conflict to culmination as it did for quadrillions of prior battles and will do for quadrillions more.
Tesk suggests you listen to drone comms and you immediately elevate the submind dedicated to doing so to full integration. Without Armageddon taking the reins, their performance is lesser. It is true that it is never necessary to pare down a military intelligence to the bare minimum of self, creating a not-quite sapient weapon that sees the world as a utility function to be solved and treats mass death as a balancing tool to achieve that solution. It is also true that sometimes, those utility-maximizing creations are truly inspired. Perhaps it could find a solution, a clever way to employ your slowly-degrading web of drones, now entangling with the enemy's own fighters as they try to puncture the initial mesh of your layered defenses, or preempting the enemy's defenses by sniping remote defenders on high-risk attack runs. But you chose to value defenses and damage control, and that is a decision you will have to live with.
Your drone pilots are out there, the Mourning's remote eyes and fingers, doing what they can with ad-hoc leadership. Instead of idle banter, you hear the clipped pulses of military callouts.
"Nemo sees thirty-eight vampire signatures, Mourning estimates five probables. Going bright." One of your major advantages - a small handful of Dracotech Finals, superfighter drones designed to live up to their name. Far too valuable to lose, but nimble, stealthy, and exceedingly dangerous in any environment - a force multiplier spearhead. The two on-station right now, burning valuable compute and mass-energy, are acting as sensors platforms right now, observing without engaging - perhaps a waste of their abilities, but defaulting to force preservation in the face of danger is often the safest decision. A standard sensors platform would be quickly eliminated once it burns nova-bright, richocheting superluminal, negative-mass particles to illuminate the void. The Final is capable of scrubbing its own signature from the cosmos, and fast enough that by the time they react, there will be nothing there but the ghost-images of old light.
These sensor pulses give you an imperfect understanding of the tactical situation.
"Confirm formation of sixteen drones incoming, distance two-five gigameters, identified as six Manticore saturation drones and ten Roc heavy fighters, tacnet concludes likely suppression mission."
"New threat vector, five incoming bombers, mix of Orcas and White Sharks, penetration mission, intercept course with Mourning-"
"Kairo." The other Final deployed. "I have a ping from a sensors ghost - likely enemy SWACs. Request assassination permission."
"Unknowns visible on a third vector, distance is too great for clear imaging - might be drones, might be decoys, might be vampires."
Operational Prioritization:
War is a game of resources. One of the greatest advantages of M-tech weapons systems is that they can dynamically reallocate resources, prioritizing different tasks almost as if the hardware of a war machine was invariant software. The flipside is that a combatant will always have to consider how to prioritize their resources, focusing them on a single issue. Your drones will focus on:
[ ] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
[ ] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.
[ ] Defeating enemy bomber strikes.
[ ] Engaging enemy missiles, and their fighter escorts.
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- Location
- USA
[X] which is another tragedy of the Collapse. The game-theoretic forgiveness preference in the Empire may have concealed injustices, but it also prevented conflict from escalating into lose-lose propositions. The wars which defined the Collapse were a symbol of that breakdown of an order which at least recognized its imperfection, defining itself as always chasing a nigh-unreachable Omega Point.
[X] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
[X] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] which is another tragedy of the Collapse. The game-theoretic forgiveness preference in the Empire may have concealed injustices, but it also prevented conflict from escalating into lose-lose propositions. The wars which defined the Collapse were a symbol of that breakdown of an order which at least recognized its imperfection, defining itself as always chasing a nigh-unreachable Omega Point.
[X] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
[X] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
[X] and who can blame them, after the Collapse? Before, if you lost your empire, you could eventually rebuild one, and the costs of victory and defeat were rarely uncalibrated and all out of proportion. In this fallen age, games are routinely played for existential stakes and always for keeps.
[X] Engaging enemy missiles, and their fighter escorts.
Getting suppressed sounds like it would do bad things to our ability to handle the rest of the attacks, so I'd like to cut that off at the start.
[X] Engaging enemy missiles, and their fighter escorts.
Getting suppressed sounds like it would do bad things to our ability to handle the rest of the attacks, so I'd like to cut that off at the start.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] which is another tragedy of the Collapse. The game-theoretic forgiveness preference in the Empire may have concealed injustices, but it also prevented conflict from escalating into lose-lose propositions. The wars which defined the Collapse were a symbol of that breakdown of an order which at least recognized its imperfection, defining itself as always chasing a nigh-unreachable Omega Point.
[X] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.
[X] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.
[X] which is another tragedy of the Collapse. The game-theoretic forgiveness preference in the Empire may have concealed injustices, but it also prevented conflict from escalating into lose-lose propositions. The wars which defined the Collapse were a symbol of that breakdown of an order which at least recognized its imperfection, defining itself as always chasing a nigh-unreachable Omega Point.
[X] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.
[X] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.
[X] and who can blame them, after the Collapse? Before, if you lost your empire, you could eventually rebuild one, and the costs of victory and defeat were rarely uncalibrated and all out of proportion. In this fallen age, games are routinely played for existential stakes and always for keeps.
[X] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
[X] Assassinating enemy sensors and control drones.
Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, "Oh no, not again!" Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
Acatalepsy
Firewall Proxy
- Location
- The Diamond Age
[X] and who can blame them, after the Collapse? Before, if you lost your empire, you could eventually rebuild one, and the costs of victory and defeat were rarely uncalibrated and all out of proportion. In this fallen age, games are routinely played for existential stakes and always for keeps.
I don't understand the choice we're making as players here.
It doesn't say anything about our characters and capabilities, and it isn't strategic based on any information we really have available - any of these could be good options, based on information we don't have and calculations we can't do.
I don't understand the choice we're making as players here.
It doesn't say anything about our characters and capabilities, and it isn't strategic based on any information we really have available - any of these could be good options, based on information we don't have and calculations we can't do.
It's more of a ... Perspective vote, let's put it that way.
The main vote honestly is how you feel about the Collapse and Empire.
Which is kind of messy, unfortunately.
[X] which is another tragedy of the Collapse. The game-theoretic forgiveness preference in the Empire may have concealed injustices, but it also prevented conflict from escalating into lose-lose propositions. The wars which defined the Collapse were a symbol of that breakdown of an order which at least recognized its imperfection, defining itself as always chasing a nigh-unreachable Omega Point.
[X] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.
[X] Detecting incoming stealth weapons to allow for evasion.