- [X] Why does shiplord technology feel wrong to the soul?
Pretty sure we know this part: it's because the Shiplords build it into their Second Secret technology as an anti-Uninvolved measure. It just so happens to also work against Practice and the Unisonbound; it's the source of the "Essence Disruption" maluses that we saw in the previous Quest. I don't know if it's outright stated, but it's implied that the Shiplords use possibly still-living souls to make these weapons, and it's the ultimate fate of the "tribute" that the Tribute Fleets collect from other species.
And yes, the comparisons with the exact sort of crimes the Hijivians were committing are both obvious and apparently accepted by the Shiplord Authority.
That was never the goal of this expedition. The point was to find an answer to the Shiplords that wouldn't require a third of the galaxy burnt to ashes - at minimum. Remember that Project Insight said you could win, but it also told you the cost of victory.
Yes; at the same time, saving a few million lives here and there by stealing fire from the gods is not a worthless endeavor, in particular since our experience discovering the Fifth as opposed to the Third implies that acquiring a Secret or Secret tech from an enemy can massively reduce the time and dedication required to unlock it, compared to doing it entirely on our own.
On the matter of the Fourth and Eighth Secrets, the Last Memory can tell you this:
The Fourth provides the means to manipulate the bonds between hadrons, allowing manipulation of matter at a level not even the Sixth can match. It appears to deal with the gamma ray bursts that would result from this sort of manipulation, and is probably part of how the Shiplords terraformed the entire galactic core. It's an incredibly useful construction and economic tool, but has limited offensive capacity. No stable strange matter, for one.
The Eighth is hinted at for how the Lament made this interface, though their use of it was deliberately incomplete to create something short of a full AI. It's the non-Second mechanism for creating artificial intelligences, that Iris has been slowly unravelling, and seems to also deal quite heavily with aspects of the soul.
Hah, I was right, and there is a Strong Force manipulation Secret, and it leads to transmutation! I just got confused because I figured that the three Force-related Secrets would go in either increasing or decreasing order of strength and / or distance decay, with it either going Strong Force -> ElectroWeak Force -> Gravity, or Gravity -> Electroweak Force -> Strong Force. And then the AI Secret rounds them out; there's only eight?
This, plus the fact that we now can be pretty sure that the Secrets were built using Soul Science, means we can make some pretty interesting speculations about the true nature of the Secrets. For example, the First Secret:
1. The First Secret picks a privileged inertial frame of reference, almost certainly tied to a rotational frame centered on the Milky Way's galactic core so as to minimize the number of causality violations* that the average person in the galaxy would experience**, and allows direct positional manipulation of mass-energy. No energy cost needs to be paid, or at least very little if you're far away from large sources of gravity (therefore an SEZ), but there's a processing hurdle to be overcome, which was always weird because it kind of made little sense for said processing to be done using conventional mass and energy. But, now that we can be pretty sure that the Secrets are built on soul machinery, the Secret probably involves the exporting of positional data from real space to soul space, the manipulation of said data in soul space, and then the uploading of the altered positional data back to real space.
And so and so forth up the list, with the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of information still reigning supreme in real space, but with information (position, momentum, energy levels, etc) being "fudged" by the Secret soul machinery exporting data into soul space, processing it there outside of conventional time with UNDEFINED levels of processing capabilities, and then re-uploading it to real space, all the numbers adding up from moment to quantized moment so the invisible accountants behind conventional universe is happy, but crazy space magic being possible in between those moments because soul nonsense.
*-Heck, I bet we could actually determine what the privileged inertial frame of reference is with a reasonable degree of accuracy by taking a bunch of probes going at different velocities and using them to observe which First Secret events seem, from their perspective, to be paradoxes. Wouldn't
that be a crazy title for a physics paper "Measuring the Absolute Velocity of the First Secret Aether By Quantifying Apparent Causality Violations in Relativistic Space"
**-Note: this implies that at least the First Secret isn't going to travel outside of the galaxy very well, since distant galaxies are going to be traveling at relativistic speeds relative to one another, and so picking the privileged inertial frame of reference to be in the Milky Way would imply some very odd things happening outside the galaxy, where the same privileged inertial frame of reference would lead to some very weird seeming-paradoxes.
- Broadly? The Shiplords know at some level that they're broken. They know that what they're doing is wrong, but they also can't see any way out of the spiral they've become part of that would actually work. The statement of "all we had to do was trust them" is relevant to this. They knew how to fix the problem, but they didn't know how to do it. And this goes back to the very core of how the Secrets were made. The way that the Consolat appeared to die to give them the universe, and how deeply that damaged them. And they don't know how to make that better. There is no human comparison, and it could be that the Sorrows are a horribly twisted attempt by the Shiplords to make others understand them. If it is, it doesn't excuse them, but knowing what they know now it's hard to avoid the possibility of that being the case.
- It's not really spoilers. I've said for most of this quest series that the way that humanity sees the world was more important than almost anything else. This is not something that's new, but it's still important. Much more on this would be spoilers, but I'd like to draw your attention to one thing in particular. The Lament referred to the Consolat's science as a deeply philosophical one, and this wasn't just limited to science. Consider how the Secrets work, how they become accessible to a species. You can do the science, but you have to believe that there's an answer, too.
- In all seriousness, this isn't a question it would be able to answer. Most races don't delve into soul science to nearly the same degree that humanity has - in truth, humanity is arguably the most advanced species in the galaxy where that's concerned. Practice gave you both the means and need to explore that field in a way that no one has since quite possibly the Consolat themselves.
Hm, now this draws some even more interesting speculation. I'm beginning to see, or think I see, what's fundamentally "wrong" with the Shiplords. When Silverking suggested that the Shiplords lacked:
a certain emotional intelligence
he might actually be correct. In particular, I'm suggesting that
Shiplords, and most, maybe not all but certainly all of the species that the Shiplords ever brought to the Third Sorrow, lack something very important. They lack empathy, easy instincts that tend towards moral and ethical decision-making, emotional self-awareness.
They lack, in other words,
souls. Well, sort of.
Remember the one time when Iris started forking herself? Despite each fork having its own
exact copy of Iris's operating code, somehow the aggregate because less moral and ethical, more prone to discarding empathy judgments, more willing to impose her will on those she saw, at that moment, as "lesser". The implication is that all of those functions in Iris's personality were not forked, that they were located somewhere other than in her infomorph body / mind. In other words, her soul.
This is making me think that this is common for all sapient life in the PW universe, that empathy and general emotional processing is solely, or at least mainly, occurring in the soul, across species, and Shiplords just have less of this soul processing than, say, humans. Now, it seems to me that this is a double-edged sword. On one hand, having less soul/empathy means you are less affected by an equal amount of grief; this would mean, for instance, being a bit less immediately impacted by, say, a Week of Sorrows, and thus more likely to survive one. On the other hand, also having less ability to emotionally process would mean that it's more difficult to recover from grief, and being emotionally compromised, especially when it's a situation where the stress is ever-present, is something that a Shiplord just may never recover from, even with a million years to process.
TLDR:
Shiplords have gingervitis. 
Except when they do a genocide because the species hasn't proven itself worthy of the Secrets by putting up a fight.
If that was the name of the game then they'd be ecstatic whenever they found pacifists running a system. Instead we get this:
And this is what happens. You have Shiplords, all running around with essentially eternal PTSD, that they simply don't have the emotional processing capacity to ever recover from because of their weak souls, lashing out because they emotionally
need other species to feel their pain, and justify it afterward by calling it an important lesson. And, bitterest of ironies, the ones that fall to their grief from the crimes that the Shiplords pour out on them, those were the very species with the deeper sorts of souls that could have understood the Consulat, could have solved the Third Sorrow, except they're not around anymore because the Shiplords inflicted so much acute trauma on them that they died of grief.
Okay, that actually does answer all the questions I had for the Last Memory. Before we leave though I think we need the Shiplord perspective on what happened here, and why it's a Sorrow:
[X] Return to the Hearthguard memorial to
- [X] Remember
