Scientia Weaponizes The Future

[TaliesinSkye]

Thank you for the complements and feedback, as always.

Though was Sophia the one to try the air bubble trick?

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Yes. Although she was dancing to the Simurgh's tune. The Endbringer tweaked events just a bit as one of her assassination attempts. The chapter that was mostly from Contessa's POV has details.

 

[Raiseth]

Ah, "the mourning". I see.

 

[Dur'id the Druid]

Snip.

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Everything has limits. It's perfectly believable that with her higher function neurons cooked, and so changing that much at the atomic level, and no backups preserved, that bringing her back is just a fantasy without resorting to outright time travel.

Anyone read the Bobiverse books? A sci-fi series that has full transfer of physical to digital intelligence, and outright copying of the digital personalities. Though the copies tend to have different personality traits. In the last book, the author added a twist where they started noticing that if one digital persona is deleted, then another one activated shortly after there was a continuation of the same personality traits. They don't know why and can't detect it directly, but it's believed as proof of some sort soul does exsist, and the cause of different personalities between digital clones is because each clone is getting different souls.

 

[Emagstar]

These last two chapters were epic. I'm excited to watch a Culture level civ pull itself out of non-existance using it's own bootstraps, then proceed to repeatedly suplex Scion into the dirt.

Though, this just occured; why is Taylor the most important person? Surely that should be Fortuna?

After all, Taylor killed one of the Entities - but she'd never have had that chance if Fortuna hadn't killed the first one. Without the Thinker dead, it would have been completely impossible to win, what with active management by the only half of the Entity pair able to plan and think (seemingly). With active management and heavy use of precognition, the Thinker would have kept everything completely on track until the cycle was complete and every Earth exploded.

So the most important instant in Worm was surely finding the right place and time to stab the Thinker, no?

 

[TaliesinSkye]

These last two chapters were epic. I'm excited to watch a Culture level civ pull itself out of non-existance using it's own bootstraps, then proceed to repeatedly suplex Scion into the dirt.

Though, this just occured; why is Taylor the most important person? Surely that should be Fortuna?

After all, Taylor killed one of the Entities - but she'd never have had that chance if Fortuna hadn't killed the first one. Without the Thinker dead, it would have been completely impossible to win, what with active management by the only half of the Entity pair able to plan and think (seemingly). With active management and heavy use of precognition, the Thinker would have kept everything completely on track until the cycle was complete and every Earth exploded.

So the most important instant in Worm was surely finding the right place and time to stab the Thinker, no?

Click to shrink...

Thank you so much for the high praise!

'Importance' is not a perfect word, I think. 'Variability' might get the concept across better, although it needs to be substantial and not trivial variability, so importance matters too.

The energy minima is the point of maximum potential change. See the timeline in your head as a branching tree. The nodes are places where significant changes can occur. Those changes are branches that come out of the nodes.

The more branches that emerge out of a node, the more potential paths history could diverge into at that moment. The energy minima is the node with the most branches, augmented by the 'weight' of the sub-branches above it.

The implication there is that Taylor's trigger event could have gone a great many ways, and a great many of them would have powerful echoes that reverberate down the resulting timelines. Stopping Scion, one way or another, and also doing other things of significance besides.

It's a tip of the hat to the sheer number of alt-power stories, in other words. But also a comment on the character of Taylor Hebert, who would have not stopped trying to find a way to defeat Scion no matter what power she wound up with, and may have had the same idea of psychological warfare in a great many possible timelines.

Fortuna's moment was significant for all the worlds like Taylor's was, but it boiled down to only a few immediate branches. Kill the Thinker or not, with some variability depending on how fast she did it because the Thinker was trying to lock down Path to Victory while Fortuna hesitated. That's why Taylor's trigger event was the greater key. It could have gone so very many ways, and a great many of them had enormous, multiverse altering effects.

 

[DoubleThought]

Revelations just keep coming, huh?

There's no better time to start a reread than when big, context-shifting information has just been released. I'm sure I'll start to see loads of earlier hints in a different light, now. Time to jump to it!

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Revelations just keep coming, huh?

There's no better time to start a reread than when big, context-shifting information has just been released. I'm sure I'll start to see loads of earlier hints in a different light, now. Time to jump to it!

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That's been one of the really rewarding things about knowing where I've been going the whole story, I get to insert clues in gradually. I hope you enjoy the reread, and I'd love to hear any thoughts that stick with you.

 

[Xon]

It was honestly a disappointing and pointless 2/3s of the chapter. One of the things which retroactively make a fic worthless after it being added.

Magic handwave for no emotional reaction, "it was a dream" backstory with the stupidly large plot hole of none of the information that has been driving the main character's actions having any logical source.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

It was honestly a disappointing and pointless 2/3s of the chapter. One of the things which retroactively make a fic worthless after it being added.

Magic handwave for no emotional reaction, "it was a dream" backstory with the stupidly large plot hole of none of the information that has been driving the main character's actions having any logical source.

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More 'tomato in the mirror' than 'it was all a dream', I think. It's a bit like a Twilight Zone twist, with the extential questions it raises.

I wonder if maybe you missed something important on your read, the information source was explained. In any case, it's okay that you didn't enjoy it. I found it profoundly emotionally affecting - I cried when she did - but my tastes don't have to be your tastes.

 

[Colshan]

Someone explain to me how you keep something that was never real in the 1st place alive in your heart.

 

[BurnBright]

What is real? If two people meet on Zoom, for example, does that mean they never met at all?

 

[AtomicStryker]

Amazing chapter, i guess the story is nearing its endgame.

No way to defend brains from being read? I'm no physicist, but im sure there could be a technological solution, using quantum uncertainty something - reading a neuron twice does not yield the same result...

Plus, all the consensus knowledge is technological in nature. I had the feeling entities do not understand technology in any fashion. Tinker powers "work" by hooking up simulated brains of extinct races to hosts, which then use their existing technology as "ideas" to solve new problems. Entities never invent anything, because they cannot. Hmm i guess they could hook up Tinker hosts (or the Simurgh) with consensus brains, so all the technology would become usable by these users ... nevermind me

 

[Aeselon]

The only remotely similar mechanic for an SI that I've seen (granted, I don't read SIs generally) was a Mass Effect fic by Shujin (Catalyst.exe).

Really well done, and no less powerful for it having been foreshadowed. In fact I'd argue that the clues followed by the full reveal added to the impact. Sort of creeping "oh god no".

I guess I'm just curious why there was no anger given the sheer existential horror involved, even if she can one hundred percent agree with the decisions taken to preserve the origin civ.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Someone explain to me how you keep something that was never real in the 1st place alive in your heart.

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I think love is often not rational. Love and other emotions are older than reason, from when our pre-human ancestors survived by instincts.

A person might tell themselves that their loved ones were never real, but I don't think the heart would be quickly swayed from a lifetime of feeling deeply for someone who was a very convincing imitation of real.

Haven't you ever still loved someone a bit even after you left them, or fallen just a bit in love with a fictional character? Those are common experiences, and good examples of love diverging from what makes rational sense. It follows its own logic. It's a wonderful thing, but it doesn't necessarily make sense all the time.

The only remotely similar mechanic for an SI that I've seen (granted, I don't read SIs generally) was a Mass Effect fic by Shujin (Catalyst.exe).

Really well done, and no less powerful for it having been foreshadowed. In fact I'd argue that the clues followed by the full reveal added to the impact. Sort of creeping "oh god no".

I guess I'm just curious why there was no anger given the sheer existential horror involved, even if she can one hundred percent agree with the decisions taken to preserve the origin civ.

Click to shrink...

Thank you. It being a fairly original concept (that also plays with and subverts the expectations of the insert genre) is one of the reasons I settled on it, way back when I started writing Scientia a year and a half ago. Original ideas are rare, and it seemed too interesting not to write.

I'm glad treating it as a mystery plot, with gradual reveals throughout the narrative like in a classic whodunnit, seems to have worked so well.

As for why she's not angry, well...the VI acted in a way that the people who created it never anticipated. It's not around anymore to get angry at, and it wasn't even sapient in the first place. With what happened to her being an accident, and the people being genuinely apologetic and trying to help, in addition to in desperate need, it's hard to stay angry at them. I think she's mostly just feeling a profound sense of loss that overwhelms anything else.

 

[Aineko]

Is it weird that I barely consider the revelations to qualify as plot developments, and certainly not twists? Simulation backstory and consequential distress are part of my basic trope library I guess...

I mean, the chapter is fine, but it isn't one I'd see as a turning point or anything. It kind of makes the 'no name' thing feel over-hyped too, since it wasn't actually leading to anything deeper.

Obviously I'm askew from some of the audience on this though. EDIT: I mean, it does play with the SI concept except (despite many readers not listening) we've been told all along that Scientia is not an SI.

Someone explain to me how you keep something that was never real in the 1st place alive in your heart.

Click to shrink...

Exactly the same way you keeps something that was real. You can't keep external entities alive in your heart (1) (2) at all. You keep your memories of and experiences with them alive. And simulation creates memories and experiences no different from reality. Which is what the chapter said!

Spoiler: Endnotes

(1) Scientia might be able to and the Exodus Fleet certainly could, but it'd be pretty weird to specifically place somebody's mindframe there.
(2) Yes, it's possible in squidgily biological senses as well but we're not talking about parasites and microbes here.

 

[Geas]

An artificial personality construct assembled within an effectively brain-dead Taylor Hebert, which believed that she was a body-jacking self-insert character due to how she was developed via simulation...

*steeples fingers, looks thoughtful*

... How elegant. It even very effectively and neatly explains why she has Taylor Hebert's memories and inherited some of her personality, given the unintentional brain damage she suffered from an infection run amok. I can't help but liken it to a damaged hard drive that one is forced to repair and reuse instead of discarding and replacing, in that the data which represented Taylor's memories were in (for the most part) undamaged portions of her brain. It wasn't 'erased' (poor word choice I know, 'overwritten' is probably the better word to use but we're talking wetware not hardware) so those lingering chunks of Taylor were instead integrated by the Scientia persona.

Or to put it another way, you move into a new apartment and find the previous now-deceased tenant's stuff that had been left behind, but it's really really nice stuff that you can definitely put to excellent use.

She's wrong though, about not having any real family. She might not be Taylor, but she has Taylor's memories, even though she's emotionally distant from them. That means that she has Danny.

... Hmm... In retrospect, her plan to ressurect Taylor might have some hiccups to it that I hadn't seen until now. If that VI that created her opted to create Scientia instead of trying to reconstruct Taylor Hebert from the data it had, that makes me think that there wasn't enough of 'Taylor' left within that damaged brain to attempt the process with any reasonable chances of success.

Now, that can be taken a couple different ways. Either the VI lacked the processing power to get it right, or even if it had been an outright AI instead, it still would have been impossible to reconstruct Taylor Hebert's persona due to how little was left. Ironically, the very nature of fanfiction tilts things considerably towards the latter possibility. The act of observing a thing irrevocably changes it, which is further complicated by the fact that no one views Taylor Hebert the same way, either in the story of Worm or the readers that have actually sat down and read it. I think it's been commented before, but that means there could have been a Taylor Hebert, but it wouldn't have been Taylor Hebert. Walks like a duck, looks like a duck, but sounds like a dolphin.

Another possibility is that it could not ethically or legally consider attempting such a process, even if it could have succeeded, because doing so would have gone well beyond simply resuscitating a dead girl. Mary Shelley was one of the very first to suggest that doing just that is an extraordinarily bad idea after all, and Stephen King once famously wrote that 'sometimes, dead is better.' For all we know, that advanced civilization could have had records of individuals who were brought back wrong, and outlawed such attempts in the future due to how those situations turned out.

 

[GeekGod_of_Speed]

Hmm for sec there I was expecting them to download their skills into Scientia's friends and allies instead of downloading those four into machine or biological bodies.
Huh its interesting though where did the VI pick Worm from.

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I'll assume you mean where she got the future knowledge from

I'm assuming that in a space between universes the VI could view time as a whole, if our dimension has 4 aspects (height, length, width and the fourth being time) than being outside of them would allow one to view it all at once (if you had the computational ability and didn't go mad), so it focused on the near future and past of where it was going (Taylor aka the most important person in history) before it arrived, it than has that data and feeds it to the new host personality

 

[TaliesinSkye]

I'll assume you mean where she got the future knowledge from

I'm assuming that in a space between universes the VI could view time as a whole, if our dimension has 4 aspects (height, length, width and the fourth being time) than being outside of them would allow one to view it all at once (if you had the computational ability and didn't go mad), so it focused on the near future and past of where it was going (Taylor aka the most important person in history) before it arrived, it than has that data and feeds it to the new host personality

Click to shrink...

Yup.

 

[Wolf on Air]

It's nearly midnight here in the cardiac monitoring ward - Spikevax is a bit of a bitch about that myocarditis issue, and it only just now as I write this occurs to me that my current circumstances are harboring a very slight reality rhyme with current story events, that's pretty amusing.

Anyway. Thank you @TaliesinSkye from the bottom of my slightly degraded heart for having been writing this wonderful never-the-genre-you-think-it-is story for this long, and I pray you keep going for as long as it asks of you.

As usual, when I read this, I smiled. I wept. I wanted to laugh, but older and frailer people are sleeping. At the end, I felt a profound satisfaction. The mystery has been a long time coming, and I haven't spent so much energy guessing it that I got more than half of it right, and the reveals felt consummate.

I enjoy Scientia for its character, ideology, its mystery and its genuine cleverness. The meta-jokes arrive exactly when they need to, and it's delightful where in lesser hands the fourth wall gets removed with the professionalism and proportionality of some guy with a YouTube account and access to far more dynamite than any five year old ought to.

I've read a lot of the classics, both the foundational and the modern. Certainly no single trope, codified or not, is one I haven't at least seen the shadow of somewhere else, though the configurations are novel enough to entertain this 34-year-old with an excessive taste for questionable genre fiction. There's an analogy here to the speech Scientia-the-character receives about her own unique configuration of the skills explicitly donated from others, and the inherent value therein. If you neither intended nor recognized it, you're welcome, it's the truth.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

It's nearly midnight here in the cardiac monitoring ward - Spikevax is a bit of a bitch about that myocarditis issue, and it only just now as I write this occurs to me that my current circumstances are harboring a very slight reality rhyme with current story events, that's pretty amusing.

Anyway. Thank you @TaliesinSkye from the bottom of my slightly degraded heart for having been writing this wonderful never-the-genre-you-think-it-is story for this long, and I pray you keep going for as long as it asks of you.

As usual, when I read this, I smiled. I wept. I wanted to laugh, but older and frailer people are sleeping. At the end, I felt a profound satisfaction. The mystery has been a long time coming, and I haven't spent so much energy guessing it that I got more than half of it right, and the reveals felt consummate.

I enjoy Scientia for its character, ideology, its mystery and its genuine cleverness. The meta-jokes arrive exactly when they need to, and it's delightful where in lesser hands the fourth wall gets removed with the professionalism and proportionality of some guy with a YouTube account and access to far more dynamite than any five year old ought to.

I've read a lot of the classics, both the foundational and the modern. Certainly no single trope, codified or not, is one I haven't at least seen the shadow of somewhere else, though the configurations are novel enough to entertain this 34-year-old with an excessive taste for questionable genre fiction. There's an analogy here to the speech Scientia-the-character receives about her own unique configuration of the skills explicitly donated from others, and the inherent value therein. If you neither intended nor recognized it, you're welcome, it's the truth.

Click to shrink...

I am humbled and grateful for so eloquent and moving a series of complements. The last especially. Thank you. Clearly a great deal of heart went into this, which doesn't sound medically advisable for you at the moment, so it's doubly appreciated.

 

[Wolf on Air]

Just to reassure you, I'll very likely be discharged in the morning, and make a full recovery with time and rest. I've gone through this ridiculous sequence twice before, with no lasting harm beyond a profound feeling of having wasted my time. Nothing life threatening should be allowed to be this tedious.
At least I got to confound a doctor that one time about how a 30-year-old could have cause to have eight MRIs on record.

 

[quietobserver]

Sooo...are they still able to do the peek anywhere on the timeline thing? Or was that a one-shot?
If they still can then taking a snapshot of Taylor's brain/mind right before she "left the building" would be possible and they could build her a new body with an offer of either merging with the SI or a body swap back to her own after the job's done or pre-load the new body with a copied seed and associated hardware and swap back immediately with the original seed and hardware either going dormant or Taylor joining in on the shenanigans with her new sister.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Sooo...are they still able to do the peek anywhere on the timeline thing? Or was that a one-shot?
If they still can then taking a snapshot of Taylor's brain/mind right before she "left the building" would be possible and they could build her a new body with an offer of either merging with the SI or a body swap back to her own after the job's done or pre-load the new body with a copied seed and associated hardware and swap back immediately with the original seed and hardware either going dormant or Taylor joining in on the shenanigans with her new sister.

Click to shrink...

It was a one shot, I'm afraid; the enormous machine that ripped open the singularity and shoved the nanite and wormhole communications unit through to the Earth Bet universe was promptly destroyed by the vacuum collapse wavefront it used as a source of power. It got a picture of the timeline before any meddling only.

Some origin civilization theorists might wonder if that was necessary as part of forming a closed timelike curve to prevent causality issues local to their perspective. Otherwise they'd be able to see what they were going to do in the future in the other universe, and that just gets problematic if they decide to do something else in light of the new information.

Someone will probably try to argue that they should try the experiment if they ever get another chance, and most everyone else will likely be of the opinion that they don't want to risk it. They still don't know what triggered all those vacuum collapses in their home universe, after all. Alien civilizations getting clever with time travel is as good an explanation as any.

 

[Bearmauls]

I did not expect that reveal. Also don't think I've ever come across that concept in a story, so hats off for something that completely escaped my knowledge of writing tropes. So pumped to see where things go next!

 

[Ferrite]

Ok, to say that I have questions is an understatement. Actually, one question. If she is a simulation built after Taylor basically died of meningitis or some other infection, how did the VI have the knowledge that a reader of Worm would have had? If she started out with access to whatever memories Taylor had from before the locker, I could understand that because the simulation is running on Taylor's brain-meat so I could see having access to the past on Bet.

Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding this, the VI had an unrestricted read the future capability when it implanted itself.

Great. Make another one with the current timeline to see how things will turn out. If that simulation shows a fail state, move forward in a different direction. We have now effectively made a new version of Coil's power.