The Secrets' Crusade
- Thread starter Snowfire
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Have to say, I love this Quest. This is everything science fiction should be: strange new worlds, bold, mind-bending concepts, depths both subtle and profound, and then all of it falling away at the perfect time to highlight a transcendent moment like this one. Bravo @Snowfire; I just wish I hadn't been out of town all last week so I could congratulate you earlier.
As to the choice, I have to say, I'm not particularly enamored with any of the choices presented. I guess I'm the least dissatisfied with Doubt and Hope, but both of them go in directions that I don't think are particularly productive.
Hope in particular seems to be particularly naive, even passive, because in this case the Hope being articulated is a Hope that denies action, a Hope that the Authority will somehow decide to shed millions of years of inertia based on the impassioned words of a self-described exile from Shiplord society, and that nothing further needs to be done. I give that pretty much a zero percent chance of actually happening, and so in that case Hope is just a waste of effort and energy. There's a reason Pandora found Hope in a box containing all the world's ills, and it wasn't a compliment.
At the same time, Doubt seems to do the same but in the opposite direction. What good does Doubt do, in this case? Do we want a pat on the back when the Authority does what it's done for as long as humanity has been an actual distinct species, and ignore Kicha in favor of starting up yet another mass xenocide? Would it even matter that we're right?
No, if I were putting together a set of emotions for Amanda in this case, it'd be along the lines of:
[O] Resignation - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. While that's probably the best that Humanity could have hoped for strategically, it's going to be a difficult road ahead. About the only way that violence on a galactic scale will be avoidable now is if the Consulat Origin has a miracle (possibly a Miracle) hidden away. The die is cast, now.
[O] Acceptance - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. This was probably inevitable, given the events at the Third Sorrow, and almost certainly needed to happen as part of the process to convince the Shiplords as a whole to change.
[O] Satygraha - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. That must have been a terrible choice for her; she's going to need all the help she can get, and that we can provide for her.
[O] Determination - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. This is a beautiful and terrible outcome, one that we will absolutely have to lean in to in order to survive and thrive in the bloody days, weeks, and possibly centuries to come.
As to the choice, I have to say, I'm not particularly enamored with any of the choices presented. I guess I'm the least dissatisfied with Doubt and Hope, but both of them go in directions that I don't think are particularly productive.
Hope in particular seems to be particularly naive, even passive, because in this case the Hope being articulated is a Hope that denies action, a Hope that the Authority will somehow decide to shed millions of years of inertia based on the impassioned words of a self-described exile from Shiplord society, and that nothing further needs to be done. I give that pretty much a zero percent chance of actually happening, and so in that case Hope is just a waste of effort and energy. There's a reason Pandora found Hope in a box containing all the world's ills, and it wasn't a compliment.
At the same time, Doubt seems to do the same but in the opposite direction. What good does Doubt do, in this case? Do we want a pat on the back when the Authority does what it's done for as long as humanity has been an actual distinct species, and ignore Kicha in favor of starting up yet another mass xenocide? Would it even matter that we're right?
No, if I were putting together a set of emotions for Amanda in this case, it'd be along the lines of:
[O] Resignation - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. While that's probably the best that Humanity could have hoped for strategically, it's going to be a difficult road ahead. About the only way that violence on a galactic scale will be avoidable now is if the Consulat Origin has a miracle (possibly a Miracle) hidden away. The die is cast, now.
[O] Acceptance - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. This was probably inevitable, given the events at the Third Sorrow, and almost certainly needed to happen as part of the process to convince the Shiplords as a whole to change.
[O] Satygraha - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. That must have been a terrible choice for her; she's going to need all the help she can get, and that we can provide for her.
[O] Determination - Kicha's statement of intent is sure to start a civil war among the Shiplords. This is a beautiful and terrible outcome, one that we will absolutely have to lean in to in order to survive and thrive in the bloody days, weeks, and possibly centuries to come.
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I disagree with a fair amount of your post, especially the idea that Amanda can be sure Kicha's statement will start a civil war. But also, making a vote title which requires searching to find its meaning tends to be... far from optimal.
To address your other statements, I don't see the context you give for either Hope or Doubt as accurate - they are the primary emotions/frames for the coming interaction with the Shipkids, as I see it. It's not "how will we proceed from here", but rather "what flavor will go forward, and how will it color the coming conversation?"
(And I especially disagree with the strawman of "Hope implies the belief that the Authority will completely change course" - it is the willingness to see as possible the idea that enough of the Shiplords will want something different, that it will have an effect on the Authority's policies.)
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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While I agree that I don't particularly like the options of the actual post, I also don't like the assumption that Kicha's statement will cause a civil war. Hell, we should be so lucky that it actually does--I highly doubt that it will, especially not any time soon. Kicha outright condemning the Authority for betraying the spirit of the Consulat's sacrifice and desecrating their sense of responsibility towards the universe in favor of securing Shiplord safety/dominance/convenience at the direct expense of all other peoples would have made a far greater impact.
The kind of statement that such a living legend making would have been a lightning bolt to the sense of apathy and uncertainty that Shiplord society seems intent on sticking to. A line drawn in the sand; an accusation that the Authority has become the real threat to the stated goals of the Shiplords, and by the Authority's own standards and arguments, the Authority must stand down utterly or be destroyed with extreme prejudice (or just be destroyed with extreme prejudice regardless, just for cruelty's sake).
The kind of statement that such a living legend making would have been a lightning bolt to the sense of apathy and uncertainty that Shiplord society seems intent on sticking to. A line drawn in the sand; an accusation that the Authority has become the real threat to the stated goals of the Shiplords, and by the Authority's own standards and arguments, the Authority must stand down utterly or be destroyed with extreme prejudice (or just be destroyed with extreme prejudice regardless, just for cruelty's sake).
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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- Wordcats
I...confess to be a little confused by what else you think "We will not abide another" means.
I'm not going to in-depth on this, I've learned my lesson, but Kicha delivered an ultimatum here. It might not be the ultimatum you'd have wanted her to deliver, but it's no less one for that.
I'm not going to in-depth on this, I've learned my lesson, but Kicha delivered an ultimatum here. It might not be the ultimatum you'd have wanted her to deliver, but it's no less one for that.
- Location
- LEO
Let's just wait an see how the kids react to it. The problem isn't a lack of rhetoric, clearly the shiplords have some tradition of public discussion. The problem is that the shiplords view roman style actual decimation as a good first contact protocol. What's so fucked up about their society that a video game can shatter one's world view to want to change that?
- Location
- Germany
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- He/Him
Kind of a variant of the Peter Principle: They assigned themselves the job of 'Guardian of Reality' but are unfortunately not suitable for it.
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- San Ramon, CA
The reason the Shiplords utilize the "first contact decimation" is because they wholeheartedly believe that it's the ONLY way to prevent a species from reaching a state where "blowing up the whole universe" is something that they are willing and able to do. The "video game" was meant to be presented as a Kobayashi Maru: an unwinnable scenario based on real events that showed that there was no "good" way to stop one of the Sorrows.
Of course, now that Amanda and crew "beat" the video game on their first try, they are now in a position to make the claim that "maybe you Shiplords just aren't very good at this."
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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- Wordcats
To be fair, you beat that simulation (calling it a video game is enormously reductionist given the amount of work and Secret use put into making it function) via liberal application of totally-not-magic.
But apart from that, pretty much, yes.
At the level she's working on, if you're not using liberal amounts of "totally-not-magic", are you even trying?
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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- Wordcats
- Location
- LEO
As I understand it the important thing we did, that no other shiplord thought to do, was to straight up ask "what's your problem?"
That doesn't require magic. The magic we used was against the final desperation attack, which I don't really think is critical? Does it matter if the fleet leadership died and the rest of the fleet escape? Have I misunderstood something and a complete victory by force of arms is required?
Also, I do think treating it as a video game is the correct framing. It might run on magic hardware, and depict an incredibly sore point in their history but it's still not real, a simulacrum of reality which was enough to dislodge eons of habit is something I just have no frame of reference for.
The reality of uncountable dead isn't enough to shake these people, but some stranger coming in and beating their high score is enough to shake the foundations of their world? I struggle to describe that in terms outside of egotism.
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Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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- Wordcats
It's...not as simple as that. A major issue was finding a middle ground between escalating straight to an all-out war that the Shiplords very well could have lost if they did so without proper preparation but also making it clear that the Shiplords truly were what they claimed - that being a species as ancient and powerful as they'd claimed.
Remember that the Sphere's disbelief was driven by the refusal of the Shiplords to truly demonstrate their mastery, something that the Contact Fleets were largely meant to not do except in particularly circumstances. And that the Shiplords didn't really get a proper picture of how horrific the Hjivin were until after the war kicked off. It's a cultural clash of truly epic proportions, and one that the Shiplords that came to the Third Sorrow after it was constructed found extremely difficult to get over given the trauma that the War of Sphere slammed into their racial psyche.
The way you reacted and particularly the way that you got out of the trap that the Sphere tried to use on you in the sim was one that showed what the Hjivin were in the simulation at that point in time, and also provided an example of Shiplord prowess in the field of the Second Secret. There's...a whole bunch more to it, as well, but stripping it away the combination of events were most likely to lead to a sudden and radical militarisation within Shiplord society in response to a clear existential threat.
But the most important point in this isn't how the Shiplords would react, but how the Sphere would. In your departure, the Contact Fleet would have shown clear mastery of the Second Secret, enough to make those terribly brilliant minds who led the Sphere to pause and consider the dangers of truly antagonising (in their opinion) what might actually be a peer power. War would still be inevitable, but the pause would almost certainly grant the Shiplords enough time to expand their navy to the point that when the tenuous cold war went hot they'd bury the Sphere.
What almost lost the Shiplords the war wasn't a lack of resources. It was their inability to immediately apply them. To put it another way, it's the difference between a max strength Stellaris crisis slamming into a sleeping Fallen Empire and it running into one that has fully reawakened and won the War in Heaven.
And it shouldn't be ignored how Amanda as well as those of her landing team - of specific import here is Mir, given his Focus of Peace - were falling back on Practice to guide their actions. The obvious not-magic was the defence that broke the simulation. It wasn't the only use of it.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, yes.
You seem to be saying that to obtain this "Golden Ending" (so to speak) to the Crisis of the Hijvin Sphere that ended in the war of the same name, there was some precise balance that needed to be struck against the Hijvin. The Shiplords would have had to balance on the razor's edge between two goals.
On the one hand, the Shiplord response would have needed to display a kind of strength that would inspire the Hijvin rulers with a lively sense of caution. Something to give them the awareness that a species with unknown potentialities just might be very dangerous even if they weren't recognizably similar to the Hijvin themselves.
On the other hand, the response had to avoid coming on so strongly that the Hijvin rulers suspect some kind of trick, and to avoid a situation where said rulers decide to resort to immediate war in "self-defense" against the presumed wrath and hatred of the Shiplords.
...
I gather the War of the Hijvin Sphere and the Third Sorrow happened, oh, something over a million years ago. We cannot know exactly how many individual Shiplords have tried their hand at the simulation, but the answer is conservatively in the millions and could easily be in the billions. Trillions might be pushing it but isn't out of the question if they're running the simulation in parallel on many machines.
The reasonable inference from this is that any strategy that is psychologically vaguely accessible to modern Shiplords has probably been tried at least tens if not hundreds of thousands of times, with many subtle variations on each theme. Even strategies that would require a highly deviant Shiplord (but not one-in-billions deviant) strategy have probably been tried at least a few times, maybe thousands of times.
For instance, I'm fairly sure people have tried "just attack" and "act like we know everything about the Hijvin at first encounter before they could possibly have told us." I suspect that both led to immediate war and mission failure.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
@Snowfire , I see that you "Insightful"-voted my previous post, which suggests to me that you meant to broadly confirm what I was saying.
There was a sort of corollary to that. Because there are two obvious ways to interpret the situation I outline in my previous post.
One possibility is that Practice enabled humans to take an approach that was psychologically accessible to many, many Shiplords and make it work by balancing on a razor's edge, so to speak, hitting just the right combination of notes to open the metaphorical combination lock.
The other possibility is that Practice and what it's done to-for humanity enabled us to try something psychologically not accessible to most Shiplords, something that some Shiplord would probably have succeeded at at some point in the past million years if it weren't freakishly unlikely or even impossible for a Shiplord to try.
The truth could be anywhere on the spectrum between those two points, I suppose; do you feel like commenting about where on the spectrum we are?
There was a sort of corollary to that. Because there are two obvious ways to interpret the situation I outline in my previous post.
One possibility is that Practice enabled humans to take an approach that was psychologically accessible to many, many Shiplords and make it work by balancing on a razor's edge, so to speak, hitting just the right combination of notes to open the metaphorical combination lock.
The other possibility is that Practice and what it's done to-for humanity enabled us to try something psychologically not accessible to most Shiplords, something that some Shiplord would probably have succeeded at at some point in the past million years if it weren't freakishly unlikely or even impossible for a Shiplord to try.
The truth could be anywhere on the spectrum between those two points, I suppose; do you feel like commenting about where on the spectrum we are?
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- San Ramon, CA
It does bring up the question of "could trained pre-Practice human diplomats have found the Golden Ending with enough tries, or would Practice be required for ANYONE to find the Golden Ending?". Up until now, I had been working under the assumption that it was the former; that the Shiplords are fundamentally lacking some degree of emotional intelligence required to properly conduct interspecies diplomacy, and a lot of this tragedy could have been avoided if they were willing to acknowledge this deficiency and ask some other species for help to do something that they couldn't. On the other hand, if it's the latter, then we may be in the position of having to mitigate our anger, since we would essentially be judging the Shiplords for not having our super-new magic.
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- LEO
I was assuming that the shiplord's psyche, epitomized by their obsession with personal privacy, would have prevented them directly asking a similar question to what we posed, and that psychological phenomenon got distorted to current practice of decimation. If shiplords are capable of directly stating their problems and giving the other side the opportunity to address them then every single "lesson of pain" is even more evil act.
If the Show of Force is just as important as the Clear Statement of Intent then I guess it could be that the shiplords have come down on the "Show of Force" side of things... It's just a scenario I have problems universalizing. Do shiplords clumsily use secrets?
You know what they say about assumptions. We need statistical data about the shiplords other attempts. We all assumed that it was obviously the conversation right beforehand, the flashy exit was just the obligatory fight scene we hadn't had for a while?
It might be an idea to distribute the shiplord video game to all the species of the galaxy and get comparisons.
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Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
More data required to give an answer you could feasibly have IC. Your viewpoints currently aren't sure which it is. Mandy's aware that Practice made enormously easier for them to hit on the solution set they did, especially so perfectly, but it's difficult to trace beyond that. Could a bunch of regular humans have done it? Maybe, given enough time.
But it would be really hard. And the timescale would be enormous.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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- Wordcats
The number of things that can't be done with Practice, given sufficient time and effort, are vanishingly small.
Okay, then perhaps a better question: could the Shiplords have solved the Hijivian Scenario, without Practice but having sufficient training / empathy, given the fundamental nature of their Souls as they exist today? Are they, currently, collectively, fundamentally unable to even see the solution that Amanda created, and now presented to them?
As a reminder to everyone, we may not have any idea precisely what Vega found in the storm of memory she found herself nearly washed away in at the First Sorrow, but the fact that there was Power there in the first place indicates that there is something being done at that Sorrow, something that the Shiplords, who have almost none of the tools of Soul Science, certainly nothing at the level of Vega's developed and experienced soul, are completely unaware of. We know that this sort of "collectivist Practice" can, in fact, alter reality on conceptual levels: Humanity 2.0 has apparently been using it for decades to reshape their cities into being Homes, and it was being used to empower Amanda during both the Second and Third Battle of Sol. Could it be a matter of the Shiplords' own Souls being sculpted away from being the type of people that could ever come up with the solution to the Hijivians?
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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- Wordcats
Kicha was able to understand and interpret the scenario you'd created, and the broader effects of it, within relative moments of her first viewing. She clearly possessed the ability to understand the solution. The question of why no one was able to find that balance point in all the time since the War of the Sphere, and how it might relate to Shiplord souls, isn't really one you can answer without an in-depth examination of a Shiplord soul.
And you haven't been able to do one of those.
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- LEO
Two important quotes from the scene itself.
A second intresting quote.
Shiplords are capable of utilizing enough force to give the hijven pause, but they are not able to make the sphere's mind listen. The important part is again the conversation beforehand. It didn't seem that Amanda was using practice till the end, right? A mundane statement of grievance and then laying out that war will be the result of attempting further unwilling expansion seems to be the default choice for humans, what's the average choice for shiplords?
A second intresting quote.
This is basically our situation right now, and if we have to dissect a shiplord's soul to find out, then so be it.
Amanda using Practice is rarely obvious. In some ways, she is always using Practice.
No.
You saying that shows you are fundamentally at odds with the theme of this quest.