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The Secrets' Crusade

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So basically the easiest way of thinking about it might be that it allows new civilisations to leapfrog from the early interplanetary era to the late interstellar era (fast local FTL that's affordable in numbers) and there's clear pathways to reach a well developed galactic civilisation all without developing the rather risky or dangerous steps in between until you are at a stage above it where the hazards of those steps are simple enough to deal with?

Such as for example, FTL being so hard that everyone's going to have developed and set out high c-fractional STL vessels to colonise their local area which also means high c-fractional interstellar missiles able to wipe out planets if things go wrong. Yet now instead before reaching that level of technology you'll stumble upon the Fifth Secret which gives you solid yet limited below the danger threshold reactionless drives and if you still want more speed, there's the First Secret which gives you FTL that overrides any need for those high c-fractional drives thus making the lower speed limit of the Fifth Secret gravity drives not really something people care about. And even if someone does still push to develop high c-fractional propulsion which gets turned into interstellar missiles, anyone they are shooting them at would absolutely have the lagless FTL sensors and communications which mean those missiles are absolutely going to be intercepted before they hit.

All of this being just one of the big dangers that can arise with that 'early interstellar' technology, and even that then development period for when the dangers arise is inaccurate for the non-spaceflight oriented ones. Such as I am reasonably sure the nanite Secret (The Sixth I think? Or am I confusing the Fifth and Sixth Secrets?) which can be developed before any of the others has precautions baked into it such that no Grey Goo or Nanite Plague incidents can occur without everyone being on board with a suicide pact. Still disastrous, but not apocalyptic.

Things which make it so a flourishing, interconnected and interacting galactic society will arise that can come together to lift everyone up past the need for the Secrets as they are to fill in all the gaps. Of course, then a few 'errors' in how the Secrets were coded arose which caused issues that then got compounded when a Soul Science danger arose that the Secrets don't cover and all of a sudden that flourishing galactic society is dying out, replaced by the Shiplords focus on 'protecting the galaxy', little realising that in doing so they are probably killing off what the Consolat gave their lives created the Secrets for.
 
justinkal said:
This raises an interesting question.

Iris was born through Practice, not Secrets.

Is she unbound by some of the shackles normally placed on AI?
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Answering this question properly would require you to get your hands on an AI specifically developed using the [Make AI] Secret.

I would, however, point to what Iris did in What Lies Beneath to an AI of (presumably) that nature. Now, this was done with the aid of a Miracle. But Iris also mentioned that she might, with time, be able to do that again. If she's had enough time to do that so far i-

*is hit by several dozen snowballs*

Mean.
 
Snowfire said:
Answering this question properly would require you to get your hands on an AI specifically developed using the [Make AI] Secret.

I would, however, point to what Iris did in What Lies Beneath to an AI of (presumably) that nature. Now, this was done with the aid of a Miracle. But Iris also mentioned that she might, with time, be able to do that again. If she's had enough time to do that so far i-

*is hit by several dozen snowballs*

Mean.
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Yes, that incident came to mind to me when the question did. She's been able to 'defeat' other AIs who are presumably much older and more experienced than herself.
 
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justinkal said:
Yes, that incident came to mind to me when the question did. She's been able to 'defeat' other AIs who are presumably much older and more experienced than herself.
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Eh, just the one so far. What she and Vision did to the Regulars at the Third Battle of Sol was kinda an enormous sucker punch. As was her taking over the oversight AI at the Fifth Sorrow, when you think about it. But the second one was done largely by herself (ish) whilst the other attempt involved Vision.
Altom said:
Presumably due to the Uninvolved who made it, going:"I am a Space Wizard, time to use Space Magic to cheat".
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Amusingly, no. I have an explanation grounded in the physics of PW's reality for both why your drive works and why it's starting to fail. No magic is involved!
 
Snowfire said:
Do you really think that the current incarnation of the Shiplords would remove exploits like that when a race wins free of Tributary status?
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Well, I did discuss the likelihood that in one way or another, the lack of progress on purely computational AI was a result of Shiplord interference with the scientific process, so not really, no.

But previously, I had thought that such purely computational AIs were, in the context of this setting, categorically impossible, so when it turned out they were, my response like "aha, an anomaly, an anomaly that is most likely explained by Shiplord action, come to think of it."

Snowfire said:
Eh, just the one so far. What she and Vision did to the Regulars at the Third Battle of Sol was kinda an enormous sucker punch. As was her taking over the oversight AI at the Fifth Sorrow, when you think about it. But the second one was done largely by herself (ish) whilst the other attempt involved Vision.
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Isn't Vision also a result of Practice on the part of the Elder First, or am I misremembering? Vision is 'only' decades old at this point, as I recall, or less than a century old. If there's something about being a Practice-made AI that allows Iris to bypass limitations that AIs made using the Second and/or Eighth (?) Secret have, then might not Vision also have that something?

I could just be outright forgetting details here, of course.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Isn't Vision also a result of Practice on the part of the Elder First, or am I misremembering? Vision is 'only' decades old at this point, as I recall, or less than a century old. If there's something about being a Practice-made AI that allows Iris to bypass limitations that AIs made using the Second and/or Eighth (?) Secret have, then might not Vision also have that something?

I could just be outright forgetting details here, of course.
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Nah, you've got this right. Vision began existence as a set of programs that helped the Elder First to do things similar to Project Insight, and as such is definitely less than a century old. Her sentience was much more of an accident than Iris', however, as it came out of repeated layerings of Practice into the structure that eventually became her.

What began as a low grade AI (I can hear Baughn screaming at me from here for that term) evolved steadily into something far more complex, and then finally into a person. Vision has been confirmed to possess a soul in much the same way as Iris does, but her entanglement with the human living experience was very different. Largely because her coming into existence happened very gradually, and by the time the Elder First realised, it was too late to give their creation anything like childhood.

To put this another way: Vision was the first AI created by humans. Iris was the first human AI.

And to get to your question (sorry for the roundabout route) it's not unlikely, but hard to tell.

Vision has far more experience than Iris does where it comes to infowarfare. A lot of that got passed down to Iris as she grew up, but just having those tools doesn't give her the same degree of skill with them as Vision.
 
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Snowfire said:
Do you really think that the current incarnation of the Shiplords would remove exploits like that when a race wins free of Tributary status?
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They are absolutely going to be revisiting all that research with a priority only slightly below the actual warfare now that Humanity is able to tell them the sheer extent of the Shiplord infiltration, aren't they? Even if it means getting a bunch of human systems or helpers to go through either enough of the whole system or an isolated research set up despite that breaking a bunch of beliefs, traditions and regulations regarding secrecy.

I mean, more than the fact that Humanity has got two True AI with much less advanced 'pure computing' capabilities, even once you add in the helping hand that practice gives would cause. Hell, more than the fact that they are in a galactic scale war with the Shiplords and cracking the secret or indeed Secret like Humanity has probably shared some suspicions about would be a massive gamechanger for military efforts.

Snowfire said:
To put this another way: Vision was the first AI created by humans. Iris was the first human AI.
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This is going to have interesting effects for Humanity and their allies going forward with AI development, isn't it? Because it 'proves' that there are two different paths of creating AI which both work, both create 'true' Entities and likely have some differences in their performance capabilities. Not anything that shows up too much at the highest end (due to sheer capability) or the lowest (due to lack of capability) but the in-between segment may prove... significant.
 
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Pyro Hawk said:
They are absolutely going to be revisiting all that research with a priority only slightly below the actual warfare now that Humanity is able to tell them the sheer extent of the Shiplord infiltration, aren't they? Even if it means getting a bunch of human systems or helpers to go through either enough of the whole system or an isolated research set up despite that breaking a bunch of beliefs, traditions and regulations regarding secrecy.
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Oh, absolutely. Problem is, getting that deep into things and then getting research back on track is going to be a total bitch. And that's before you even touch on the idea of letting humans get involved, which would break all sorts of things that aren't...necessarily easy to break.
Pyro Hawk said:
I mean, more than the fact that Humanity has got two True AI with much less advanced 'pure computing' capabilities, even once you add in the helping hand that practice gives would cause. Hell, more than the fact that they are in a galactic scale war with the Shiplords and cracking the secret or indeed Secret like Humanity has probably shared some suspicions about would be a massive gamechanger for military efforts.
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I'd be hesitant to call Iris or Vision True AI, and I think my tech team would agree with me there. They're remarkable examples of artificial lifeforms, but they're still probably not what Baughn would classify as an AGI. Which matters, given both their involvement in the tech side of this quest and their rather significant knowledge of the field.

Cracking how to make more AI using the Secrets - not just throwing Practice at something and hoping - is going to be a big enough challenge on its own. Purely computational AI? You'd have to essentially start from scratch - or some practically prehistoric notes by IT standards, which probably isn't much better.
 
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I will refrain from musing about the possibility of using the Secrets to build the infrastructure for computational AI. Even if it worked, I expect it would still require generations of computer science research.

Given the current discussion, I think it might be safe to say that humanity in our universe (the one we readers call "real") is farther along in that part of the tech tree... and look how far we still have to go.
 
Snowfire said:
I believe I've been saying for quite a long time that the Secrets and how they were made did not at all involve magic. And I can justify this, in a way that is at least conceivable (last I checked) to modern physics. It most likely doesn't conform to what our reality's physics actually are - maybe, there wasn't a consensus on that point last we talked about it - but it could.

This development was pretty much the reason that I made a Discord server for PW. Specifically for the locked #technical channel where @Coda and @Baughn have helped me to find scientific justification for everything that people can do in this story. It looks like magic, and by some definitions that makes it indistinguishable from it. But there's a solid scientific framework supporting it.

And I really can't thank my tech team enough for helping me do that. I quite literally could not have done so without them.
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Speaking of science...

So, turns out, 'Hawking Radiation' is actually a gross simplification of what actually goes on Stephen spread around as a layman's explanation, and while the mass loss mechanism is unclear for things that aren't black holes, it's technically possible for it to occur with anything that has a gravity well. Which is basically everything. And if my math is right, something that managed to turn even 1/100000th of Earth's mass via this process would exceed the planet's binding energy by several orders of magnitude, as the efficiency of energy conversion in Hawking Radiation is extremely high.

Secrets don't let you do this, because the Consolat would have blocked it, right?
 
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ilbgar123 said:
Speaking of science...

So, turns out, 'Hawking Radiation' is actually a gross simplification of what actually goes on Stephen spread around as a layman's explanation, and while the mass loss mechanism is unclear for things that aren't black holes, it's technically possible for it to occur with anything that has a gravity well. Which is basically everything. And if my math is right, something that managed to turn even 1/100000th of Earth's mass via this process would exceed the planet's binding energy by several orders of magnitude, as the efficiency of energy conversion in Hawking Radiation is extremely high.

Secrets don't let you do this, because the Consolat would have blocked it, right?
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It gets more fun than that. Since acceleration is indistinguishable from gravitation, for a ship in constant acceleration there's an event horizon behind it -- and, yes, it emits Hawking radiation. Which gets you to the point that the existence or nonexistence of a particle can depend on your frame of reference, though really that's telling you that 'particle' is the wrong level of abstraction here.

Every time you wave your hand, you form an event horizon... some billions of lightyears away, with correspondingly negligible levels of radiation. Nobody's going to notice, though for a high-G antimatter-powered rocket it might be somewhat less irrelevant. To the point of being measurable, maybe?

= = =

Anyway, there's a lot of things the Secrets don't block. In general they seem to only have tried to block things that would cause hard-to-stop runaway processes, and even that not perfectly -- see the false vacuum situation -- but I think we can probably guess, at this point, that we're looking at a beta build. Considering the consequences, I doubt the Consolat intended to commit collective suicide. There might be control systems, and I can virtually guarantee they intended to tweak them over time.

Considering that fact... we're lucky that their beta build is high enough quality that it didn't break the universe.
 
When you get down to it, "Hawking radiation" is a way to create the effects of negative mass, which is normally something that's only possible at quantum scales for undefinably short amounts of time. And even then, it's not entirely clear if "negative mass" is actually physically real, or if it's only a mathematical representation of part of a quantum process that can convert energy into real particles.

Regardless of the underlying mechanism... It's only relevant for black holes because black holes only have three extrinsic properties -- mass-energy, angular momentum, and electromagnetic charge -- and mass is the only one of those that requires an exotic mechanism to reduce. For any object that extends beyond its event horizon, you can use much more mundane ways to extract mass. Why would you ever screw with trying to use quantum effects to subtract mass from a planet when you could just use antimatter?

And for that matter, PW-verse military doctrine long ago realized... Why would you use antimatter, which has mass and is therefore subject to F=ma, when you can use the Fifth Secret to make gravitational shear weapons that propagate at lightspeed and ignore barriers?

Frankly, even if one of the Secrets CAN arbitrarily manipulate negative mass, it's not even clear that it would be a threat worth worrying about.
 
Coda said:
When you get down to it, "Hawking radiation" is a way to create the effects of negative mass, which is normally something that's only possible at quantum scales for undefinably short amounts of time. And even then, it's not entirely clear if "negative mass" is actually physically real, or if it's only a mathematical representation of part of a quantum process that can convert energy into real particles.

Regardless of the underlying mechanism... It's only relevant for black holes because black holes only have three extrinsic properties -- mass-energy, angular momentum, and electromagnetic charge -- and mass is the only one of those that requires an exotic mechanism to reduce. For any object that extends beyond its event horizon, you can use much more mundane ways to extract mass. Why would you ever screw with trying to use quantum effects to subtract mass from a planet when you could just use antimatter?

And for that matter, PW-verse military doctrine long ago realized... Why would you use antimatter, which has mass and is therefore subject to F=ma, when you can use the Fifth Secret to make gravitational shear weapons that propagate at lightspeed and ignore barriers?

Frankly, even if one of the Secrets CAN arbitrarily manipulate negative mass, it's not even clear that it would be a threat worth worrying about.
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The idea was from War of the Krork, where the Doomsday Device causes a tiny fraction of the mass it targets to Hawking Radiate, essentially turning it's own mass against it the second the shields are down. Hence the example of Earth. It's kind of like a hybrid of the grav shear and antimatter. That beam hits, and any normal celestial body explodes.
 
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Baughn said:
Every time you wave your hand, you form an event horizon... some billions of lightyears away, with correspondingly negligible levels of radiation. Nobody's going to notice, though for a high-G antimatter-powered rocket it might be somewhat less irrelevant. To the point of being measurable, maybe?
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Are you referring to the cosmic event horizon? If so, that would be a distortion of an existing event horizon, not creating one.
ilbgar123 said:
The idea was from War of the Krork, where the Doomsday Device causes a tiny fraction of the mass it targets to Hawking Radiate, essentially turning it's own mass against it the second the shields are down. Hence the example of Earth. It's kind of like a hybrid of the grav shear and antimatter. That beam hits, and any normal celestial body explodes.
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While "convert mass to energy" is a nasty weapon effect, "beam that does [insert Space Magic] to convert target's mass to energy" is not particularly relevant to this quest because of the [insert Space Magic] section. And pretty much everything from 40k more complicated than a projectile weapon (and indeed some projectile weapons) have [insert Space Magic] as part of how they work.
 
ilbgar123 said:
The idea was from War of the Krork, where the Doomsday Device causes a tiny fraction of the mass it targets to Hawking Radiate, essentially turning it's own mass against it the second the shields are down. Hence the example of Earth. It's kind of like a hybrid of the grav shear and antimatter. That beam hits, and any normal celestial body explodes.
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That's basically technobabble. ^^() Calling it "Hawking radiation" in this context is kind of meaningless. Hawking radiation if you get past all of the pop-science explanations is a form of quantum tunneling. So you're saying there's a beam that can induce quantum tunneling -- a beam that can influence the potential energy curves of the various particle fields. That's not just breaking the laws of physics; that's locally rewriting them.

I won't say it's impossible that one of the Secrets could do something that could manipulate the energy barriers of quantum fields... to be honest, that sounds like something that would be kind of likely, given that we know the Secrets make hard stuff easier? But again, based on that description... You would get the same practical effect by just dumping energy into the system so that the particles enter an excited state and become unbound, and that doesn't even require science-fiction. It isn't actually scarier than other things we know the Secrets CAN do.
 
Snowfire said:
"I wanted the feeling of home. The warmth of the family so many of us had lost." A single long finger tapped the wood of the bar. "Everything that the CIrcles grew to become, and everything this is, too.

"So I think this is wonderful," you finished. There was a warmth in your voice that only the Circles knew, and you saw it as a few of those present recognised it. "Truly."
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So, most of the conversation so far has focused on technicals, but I just wanted to call this out. It was a really, really evocative moment, and it very sharply brought back the beginnings of the quest, where so much of the focus _was_ on the Circles, and on the way humanity's collective traumas would need healed by people coming together lest humanity become something less than it could be, losing the spark of kindness. I suppose it was the perfect counterpoint to Amanda dropping into a memory of the _results_ of this, to then make me as a reader drop into a memory of the _cause_.
 
eternaleye said:
So, most of the conversation so far has focused on technicals, but I just wanted to call this out. It was a really, really evocative moment, and it very sharply brought back the beginnings of the quest, where so much of the focus _was_ on the Circles, and on the way humanity's collective traumas would need healed by people coming together lest humanity become something less than it could be, losing the spark of kindness. I suppose it was the perfect counterpoint to Amanda dropping into a memory of the _results_ of this, to then make me as a reader drop into a memory of the _cause_.
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I could say a lot on this, but mostly? I'm just thankful to be told that it did work. The emotional component here was important to me, and it's wonderful to be told that what I tried to do with it worked.

So thanks. And I'm very glad it worked for you.
 
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Snowfire said:
I could say a lot on this, but mostly? I'm just thankful to be told that it did work. The emotional component here was important to me, and it's wonderful to be told that what I tried to do with it worked.

So thanks. And I'm very glad it worked for you.
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So, this actually prompted me to go back and start a re-read, and I just hit the end of the first post. I have to say, I was absolutely floored by the juxtaposition between the world the Third Awoken were expected to live in at chargen and the the world that grew from the Circles:

Snowfire said:
[] Third Awakened – You have no memory of the Shiplord invasion, all you know of it is what has been taught in school by your elders. This world of empty cities and gleaming weapons pointed towards the sky is the only one you have ever known. You recite the Directives beside your fellows, but the dedication is historical to you, not the fiery-eyed memory of the First and Second. You are new still to your powers, and the Aspects of the Third are as yet without a coherent direction, drawn from a wellspring of new growth untouched by the horrors of loss. That will change soon enough, you know, but even now the threat of the Shiplord's return is hard to actually understand. Your entire life has been spent preparing for it, but now that it is upon you none could fault any nervousness that might cling to your heart. (Least skilled, but you are almost entirely free to choose your Aspect. Unlikely to be on the front line to begin with, but if your Aspect is suited to it you will almost certainly find yourself there given time.)
[/spoiler]
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Snowfire said:
The ubiquitous smart matter of the compartment had been reconfigured into a spread of colourful clay tiles. The bright shades reflected cheerily from the polished faux-hardwood bar now laden with food and drink and was surrounded by traditional stools. None of them had been occupied then, but there wasn't a single empty seat now.

Behind you, heat radiated gently from three tall ovens in pale stone at the heart of a rustic kitchen, styled in more of the same stone and dark wood a match to the bar. They'd dialled the environmental settings up to the intensity of a summer back on Earth, and the smell of food all around you was underlaid by the scent of woodsmoke.

It had been a long time since you'd cooked pizza 'outdoors', but it certainly wasn't your first communal meal. They'd been an unconscious core to your first, fragile Circle. You'd shared in making meals so that eating them together would mean something more, and that had been – you could recognise now – where some of the strongest bonds had taken root between you.
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Look at that. We took a world where the projected course was empty cities, skyward weapons, reciting the Directives like the Pledge of Allegiance as the only way to feel connected to the sacrifice the Dragons made for us... and said no. We said that these cities would not stay empty, not so long as there were people willing to fill them with song and joy and togetherness. We said that we would not allow our lives to center on watching the skies for the next enemy, not when we could instead watch them for the next friend. We said that we would not allow our bond with the Dragons to remain empty, delving deeper into Practice both to properly appreciate the gift that they gave us and to understand what they did in doing so.

We did that. We turned aside that bleak future, and built a brighter one. One where even in the depths of Shiplord space, even hiding under stealth that if broken could mean so much was lost, even when faced with dangers we couldn't have anticipated and nearly tripped over... the captain of the ship takes the time to feed their staff a home-cooked meal, because they can and because they want to.

If we had built that world, I think that we'd have become another race like the others the Shiplords have been selecting for in their trauma all this time. And I think that the hope we bring today, the hopes that come from the ways we are like the Consolat, and not the Shiplords, would have died without ever being conceived.
 
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Trying to be more in touch here because who knows, it might help. There were some major delays in my writing due to helping a friend move most of the length of the UK a few days after my last post. Things are getting back to normal now.

Next update is only about a thousand words in, but I think I'm almost at the point where the flow should start kicking in by itself. Fingers crossed we'll have an update this weekend. This one will be covering the Echoes (Practical) action that was picked to investigate the remnants of whatever the heck the Consolat did here in the process of (presumably) making the Secrets and killing themselves.

I hope it will be worth the wait.
 
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