The Secrets' Crusade

[TheEyes]

I wasn't referring to this specific information. I was more talking about plot arc of this entire book, wherein we set out in the middle of a war for survival to ... basically tour a bunch of alien museums. Very big, very historically significant museums built on memorials, but nonetheless ultimately just museums. Whose tourguides refuse to talk about the other museums.

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It's looking like a big, if not the biggest, portion of what we get from this journey is going to be "the friend we made along the way". In particular, it's going to be Kicha, the Hearthguard we met who was also a celebrated, transcendent war hero, whom we proved, using her own Seventh Secret super-simulation, no less, that at least the Third Sorrow could have been averted if the Shiplords had only married sufficient empathy with their aggressive diplomacy. That's going to be the spark that leads to a civil war among the Shiplords, and alone would be a very good result of this trip. Billions of human and allied lives will likely be saved because of that action.

Incidentally, once we get back to Earth we need to immediately start working on unlocking the Seventh Secret. That's going to massively increase the Orrery's predictive capabilities and lower casualties from future War Fleets, which is sure to be useful even if future events obviate the Shiplord's current threat.

In comparison, the Second and Fifth Sorrows were, I don't want to say entirely wastes of time, but they're useful pretty much only as background info. The Second shows the power that the Hearthguard still has, since I rather doubt that the currently ascendant Shiplord faction would be keeping the Gysians alive if not for both cultural inertia and the lingering influence of the Hearthguard faction, but I'm not sure how much we needed to know that. And I'm afraid the Fifth Sorrow, other than providing some very interesting inspiration for how far we can take our Beltway installations, is basically redundant, unless the Fourth provides some additional context that reshapes what we learned at the Fifth.

The wildcard here is going to the the First, and whether we can find a location for the Consolat archive, or, even better, the Consolat Origin. That's going to be the endgame here, as I'm suspecting that is going to be the Practice equivalent of a leyline, something our group of Argonauts could use to reshape the war (and potentially wreck the galaxy, but that probably goes without saying. Heck, at this point I'm convinced the only thing preventing Mary from doing that herself is that Mandy has stabilized her and prevented her from either killing herself or going Red Queen on the universe. )

I mean, if we know the Teel were good at biology editing, and we know that the Shiplords still can't help but think of the Teel with respect and thus might not have been motivated to look so hard for any survivors with a hostile eye... Well, it's not inconceivable that some might have survived, perhaps, though it's a bit unclear to me whether any members of a species can survive Instrumentality becoming an Uninvolved.

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Actually we know the latter can and does happen; it's apparently one of the ways that knowledge of the process of Instrumentality becoming an Uninvolved proliferates. I think it was the Sarthee who told us about that way back during Second Contact, that their people learned how to Ascend become an Uninvolved from a living remnant of a previous race that underwent the process themselves.

 

[mastigos]

since I rather doubt that the currently ascendant Shiplord faction would be keeping the Gysians alive if not for both cultural inertia and the lingering influence of the Hearthguard faction

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The Gysians ARE Shiplords now.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Actually we know the latter can and does happen; it's apparently one of the ways that knowledge of the process of Instrumentality becoming an Uninvolved proliferates. I think it was the Sarthee who told us about that way back during Second Contact, that their people learned how to Ascend become an Uninvolved from a living remnant of a previous race that underwent the process themselves.

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Okay. In that case, "some of the Teel are still around" seems borderline probable to my gut instincts, though I won't be surprised or disappointed if that hypothesis turns out to be wrong.

 

[TheEyes]

The Gysians ARE Shiplords now.

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They are a racial / ethnic minority, living under a violent, militaristic regime that is actively engaged in an ongoing series of xenocidal progroms that span the galaxy. The fact that they haven't been gathered into extermination camps at any point in the last several million years is no doubt the ongoing mission, and continued triumph, of the Shiplord Holocaust Museum Second Sorrow, and proof that the Hearthguard still have some non-negligable presence in Shiplord culture, and therefore Shiplord politics.

Okay. In that case, "some of the Teel are still around" seems borderline probable to my gut instincts, though I won't be surprised or disappointed if that hypothesis turns out to be wrong.

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The alternative is that the Teel might have come upon humanity, and for that matter other developing species, in the distant past, and used the process of Ascension becoming Uninvolved to ensure that some future like the one we're seeing, where species actually can survive their first Tribute, can actually exist.

It's always bothered me that the sort of out-sized, even cartoonishly, dark and violent event that was the Week of Sorrows could have happened to the human race and somehow not resulted in humanity going extinct in the first year. That was placed at the feet of the Elder First and their fashioning of "Humanity 2.0", but to me that always rang a little hollow. After all, the sort of wide-ranging Practice change to all of humanity that resulted in Humanity 2.0 was implied to be something that all of Humanity 1.0's adults agreed to in some sort of mass plebiscite, similar to the process of becoming Uninvolved in that nearly everyone needs to agree, and something like that would take time, if it could ever happen at all given how Humanity 1.0 can barely agree on basic facts, let alone how to solve a big problem.

It makes sense to me that something may have happened before that change, something that set the stage for and gave enough room to species like humanity such that they even could come together in the face of Shiplord hyper-aggression. That could be what we're seeing here with the Teel; I suppose we'll find out soon.

 

[Snowfire]

In comparison, the Second and Fifth Sorrows were, I don't want to say entirely wastes of time, but they're useful pretty much only as background info. The Second shows the power that the Hearthguard still has, since I rather doubt that the currently ascendant Shiplord faction would be keeping the Gysians alive if not for both cultural inertia and the lingering influence of the Hearthguard faction, but I'm not sure how much we needed to know that.

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The Second Sorrow also told you what to ask at the Fourth to get to where you are now.

I wouldn't exactly call that...small.

 

[Baughn]

It's always bothered me that the sort of out-sized, even cartoonishly, dark and violent event that was the Week of Sorrows could have happened to the human race and somehow not resulted in humanity going extinct in the first year. That was placed at the feet of the Elder First and their fashioning of "Humanity 2.0", but to me that always rang a little hollow. After all, the sort of wide-ranging Practice change to all of humanity that resulted in Humanity 2.0 was implied to be something that all of Humanity 1.0's adults agreed to in some sort of mass plebiscite, similar to the process of becoming Uninvolved in that nearly everyone needs to agree, and something like that would take time, if it could ever happen at all given how Humanity 1.0 can barely agree on basic facts, let alone how to solve a big problem.

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Humanity pre-2.0 still wasn't like us.

They were still the product of another series of conflicts (wars?), in which the Second was almost used the Hijivn way, and where humanity collectively recoiled from that possibility before taking up the goal of creating utopia. They were a society in which biological immortality was, if not universal, at least common. They were capable of creating the Dragons, and calling them 'friends' instead of 'tools'.

The jump from here to 2.0 is immense, but it would have been significantly less so from that perspective.

 

[Snowfire]

The end of the Lamentable War was a terribly quiet thing.

Faced with the awful reality that they could not find victory, the Teel'sanha had tried to convince their once-mentors that there was another way to seek peace amongst the stars. They'd done it through a war, but it had been a war where they'd stood against the tempest instead of trying to become one. They'd never threatened the Shiplords, simply refused to comply.

When it became clear that the Peoples could never succeed in this way, it was almost enough to break them. Bonds that the Teel had cultivated for a thousand centuries were tested, and for some it was simply too much. They broke from the Peoples, unable to accept what they'd all been told. Those race's history fell into a pattern that would be entirely familiar to any who've seen the passage of a species into becoming Uninvolved in current times.

But that was only some, neither majority nor plurality within the Peoples as they stood in the ashes of the Lamentable War's end. They knew what was required to fix their old friends, and for half a century they fought the laws of reality with every piece of understanding a truly mature culture born of the Secrets can. But as birth rates dropped and the Peoples retreated from the galaxy in sorrow, it became clear that nothing they found would be enough. They couldn't give the Shiplords their oldest friends back. They couldn't even give them an answer to it.

When things fall apart, they often do so very quickly, and so it proved for the Teel and those many races who remained part of their once grand dream. A hundred thousand years of growth, and all of it undone in a hundred and fifty cycles. They'd picked the bones of the galaxy for answers, and all of it wasn't enough. Yet even then, somehow, they didn't lose hope.

For in the depths of the archives of Origin they'd glimpsed something; secrets beyond the Secrets and utterly outside their ability to understand. Buried deep in the philosophical science left behind by the Consolat, beyond theory and in the realms of faith, were sparks of hope. At a cruel remove from their desperate hands, but hope nonetheless.

They were, after all, a nation born of those who looked ever outwards. What they'd spied required a different way of seeing the world, and that placed this flickering chance forever out of reach. They couldn't even explain why they felt this way, and that more than anything convinced them of the futility of offering what a handful of their researchers swore they'd seen to the Shiplords. They were too similar, and if the Shiplords hadn't found it after millions of cycles, they wouldn't now.

This would have to fall to someone else. And for that, there would need to be a guide.

The remains of the Teel'sanha at this point were fragments of what they'd been before, but more than enough to begin the process of becoming an Uninvolved. And when they did, they told the Shiplords two things. That they would, just once, act to create their own memorial for their lament in the process of their ascension. And that their homeworld afterwards should be granted to the Hearthguard, the one group among the Shiplords who they believed might one day be capable of understanding what they'd chosen to leave behind.

The act of becoming Uninvolved is not a particularly complex one, but it is a terrifyingly powerful and sublime transformation. At its core it's quite simple: a people come together and decide as one to leave the world behind. The Teel'sanha were many species even now, but when they chose to go, they went together. Billions of beings streamed into the Teel's home system, and as they did they saw the ending of a shared dream of paradise.

Ancient shipyards stood down from millennia of labour, the beating heart that had taken the Teel to stars and laid the foundations of their unity falling silent. Stations and orbitals were decommissioned across the star system, and the fleets that had stood so proudly in the Lamentable War were laid to rest in orbits that would eventually wear them away to dust. It would take millions of cycles, but that was alright. There would be time.

When the Teel'sanha turned off the lights of their past they left only a few things behind. In order of least to most importance these would be their history, their culture, and the vast complex that would become known as the Last Memory. A place that any Shiplord pilgrim could ask to enter, but that would reject trillions of across the millions of cycles that were to follow.

History and culture were retained within vast museums that would in time form the heart of the Hearthguard's memorials to the Fourth Sorrow. But the Last Memory was something much more. The creation of the place was the death of more than a hundred races, and a vibrant people made one in truth.

The Shiplords gathered in number to watch them go, though not all of those numbers were peaceful. The first iterations of anti-Uninvolved weaponry lurked within vessels of the War Fleets present as honour guard to a delegation of the Authority itself, armed and ready if their last true students tried at the last to take matters into their own hands. The Hearthguard had argued against it, but the presence of Authority members made the final decision a foregone conclusion.

They proved unnecessary.

When the last of the Teel'sanha stepped out of reality, the Lament was born. An Uninvolved of singular power, it reached out from the spaces beyond and wove matter and energy together upon the land swept clean in preparation for this day. It spoke to the Shiplords in those moments, expressing the depth of their sorrows and the purpose of the last memory they would leave behind in corporeal reality.

No Shiplord was ever able to decipher what exactly the Lament did in their creation of the Last Memory complex, but it proved capable of resisting any and all sensor technology directed against its walls. The place was an enigma, and one that countless scientists and philosophers would try to unravel, all to no avail.

If the Shiplords had wished to, they could have destroyed the place. Anti-Uninvolved weapons could have disrupted the twinned nature of the place, and allowed it to be analysed or destroyed. But in an example of trust far deeper than any who followed the Teel's departure ever would have believed, the Shiplords didn't use them. They let the Hearthguard take custody of the system, and entrusted the Last Memory to their stewardship.

And so they never once discovered the truth of the repository the Lament had created. A place born of intense harmony and a desire for peace. That would grant insight to a galaxy's slow destruction. And that, if those who were finally admitted could see deeply enough, could lead to a great mending.

It is impossible to be sure if the Lament knew what they were doing. If they could somehow peer across the veil of time, and find the future that would one day come to pass. But here you stand now, and what comes next? Will be yours to decide.

 

[Snowfire]

Yeah I didn't expect this either. Thanks to betas, they helped quite a bit with some of the writing here.

Narrative update hopefully soon.

 

[Tirfarthuan]

The deeper I see the hole they've been digging the more I wonder if anything will actually suffice to make the Shiplords stop, short of force. Even if their military remains subservient to their civilian government at this time, they've thrown so much else away in fear and anger. It's just one more small step on a road they've been walking for a long, long time.

Humans have yet to convince anyone who doesn't already want an alternative to listen. There's an overwhelming certainty that the Shiplords will respond to overtures with nothing but violence, born out by overwhelming evidence. Humanity will not have the diplomatic leverage of the Peoples for a long, long time in Shiplord eyes. The current plan is essentially to break Shiplord society over the weight of their own sins, from the Third Sorrow onward. For the Hearthguard to launch one final desperate plea with the social weapon they've been searching for since the Hjiven, and hope they don't fall short in yet another doomed moral crusade.

And I wonder if, at this point, the Shiplord military is capable of the shift. To put diplomacy back in their arsenal. To put down a system which, from their horrifying perspective, still works if they can just murder the latest troublemakers.

I wonder if any of the Shiplord Relay Station personnel surrendered. If so, then maybe there's a chance. If not… then a Shiplord political schism to continue their war of oppression feels inevitable. Hegemony claims it is it's own justification.

I can only hope the Lament left a way forward. Because the Shiplords have cut everything along the road to peace into as many tiny shreds as possible, no matter how much they claim to yearn for it without any action to follow the desire. By all accounts, for all their efforts, the Shiplords have only gotten worse, millennia by millennia.

 

[edofthesquid]

That would grant insight to a galaxy's slow destruction. And that, if those who were finally admitted could see deeply enough, could lead to a great mending.

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Mending eh?

Definitely wondering if mending could help with the psychological or philosophical scars causing the Shiplords so much problems.



Almost feels like we're two simulated realities deep with the bit about things beyond the secrets.

 

[ilbgar123]

So the Secrets have secrets you say?

 

[Snowfire]

Mending eh?

Definitely wondering if mending could help with the psychological or philosophical scars causing the Shiplords so much problems.



Almost feels like we're two simulated realities deep with the bit about things beyond the secrets.

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There were no simulated realities harmed in the creation of this update.

So the Secrets have secrets you say?

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You might even need to mount a crusade to find them!
#TitleDrop

 

[justinkal]

The idea of secrets beyond the Secrets screams "Practice".

 

[Simon_Jester]

Given that Practice appears to confer the ability to replicate feats normally gated behind Secrets that as I recall (possibly wrong)... I think humanity did not possess at the time (e.g. gravitic weapons on the first generation of ships that engaged the second Tribute Fleet)... Yeah, it kind of does.

 

[Snowfire]

Given that Practice appears to confer the ability to replicate feats normally gated behind Secrets that as I recall (possibly wrong)... I think humanity did not possess at the time (e.g. gravitic weapons on the first generation of ships that engaged the second Tribute Fleet)... Yeah, it kind of does.

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The Potential-enhanced Dauntless and Ulfberht classes of the FSN had gravitic disruptors as of Second Sol, though the former only with a Potential group aboard. Nothing else did.

 

[Simon_Jester]

The Potential-enhanced Dauntless and Ulfberht classes of the FSN had gravitic disruptors as of Second Sol, though the former only with a Potential group aboard. Nothing else did.

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Yeah, that's what I thought.

Point being, we were duplicating the effects of gravitic weapons without having cracked the Fifth Secret first, as I recall, which strongly suggests that Practice operates and exists on a higher level that's capable of overriding or spoofing the restrictions on the Secrets.

 

[Zaealix]

So.
They fought.
They lost.
They went uninvolved.
And here, I think, was the pattern formed and forged.
But.
They would never be rivaled.
Or matched.
Because the Shiplords stopped teaching, stopped trying to be better.
Fear and Pain and Hatred… It got to them.
That, is the nature of the Lament.
The point where the Shiplords stopped allowing others to grow to the point where they could find something NEW, where they could in fact become something that could explain or heal the loss of the Consolat.
Where they became a head-honcho intent on their way or the uninvolved way.

 

[TheEyes]

The idea of secrets beyond the Secrets screams "Practice".

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Well yeah. We know of at least two, well I guess we ought to call them Deeper Secrets:

1. Practice, which as we now know is all about using Soul to create Artifacts which do Things.
2. Speaking, which is different enough from Practice that it deserves a new number, since it seems to use Soul to reshape reality more directly, immediately, and so far powerfully, than Practice, but with less nuance and versatility than a Practiced Artifact can.
3. The group Practice that I'm beginning to suspect that all races are capable of, that I'm suspecting the Shiplords of having done to themselves by visiting the First Sorrow over and over, etching xenophobia into the collective soul of their species.

 

[Simon_Jester]

The First Sorrow (or something) triggering racial self-rewriting to increase xenophobia would help to explain why the Shiplords were incapable of figuring out a solution to the problem presented by the Second Sorrow even at the time, when it was so obvious to Mandy and friends.

Otherwise, you'd expect somebody to have come up with the same trick, by sheer ridiculous Monte Carlo methodology, over the intervening thousands of millennia.

 

[Pyro Hawk]

And so they never once discovered the truth of the repository the Lament had created. A place born of intense harmony and a desire for peace. That would grant insight to a galaxy's slow destruction. And that, if those who were finally admitted could see deeply enough, could lead to a great mending.

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So uh... Snowfire, did you write this before or after my comment on the last Informational?

Because now I'm going to be very, very worried about what happens if Mandy touches anything in that room...

 

[Snowfire]

So uh... Snowfire, did you write this before or after my comment on the last Informational?

Because now I'm going to be very, very worried about what happens if Mandy touches anything in that room...

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Before~

 

[Pyro Hawk]

Before~

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So what you are saying is 'Countdown until the Shiplords start running around screaming for different reasons than they already were is at: Mandy "Oops!" due to current events'?

 

[Tirfarthuan]

"Can Mandy bring dead people back to life" probably not, she's not really delved into making souls yet.

But if she had data to start from, and Second Secret equipment that does do soul stuff, then it's somewhat worryingly plausible. That she could do something similar.

 

[justinkal]

"Can Mandy bring dead people back to life" probably not, she's not really delved into making souls yet.

But if she had data to start from, and Second Secret equipment that does do soul stuff, then it's somewhat worryingly plausible. That she could do something similar.

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You mean if she found a disembodied soul, she could mend it by creating a new body for the soul to inhabit?

 

[Tirfarthuan]

I'm saying that if she had enough of a soul-impression left by a person or people, that she could plausibly try to mend, and she had second secret equipment on hand to do the heavy lifting then whether or not she really, technically, brought someone back from the dead becomes. Well, a plausible question to ask.

but it's probably fine. Why would they have second secret equipment there anyway. And Amanda usually has very good control. She only loses it when under lots of stress, and she's surrounded by friends and having a pleasant talk with a friendly expert system. most definitely not on a hair trigger while attached to an ever-increasing pool of soul power. As long as there aren't hallways and hallways full of empty cloning pods filled with the memories of the grieving and hopeful itll probably definitely be fine.