The Cygnus Pentad

[Xhin]

This is some lore for a spacefaring civilization that will probably make its way into a game in a few years (its predecessor game is taking a long long time to develop).

Conworld Basics

The conworld takes place in a region of space in the Cygnus constellation -- five star systems known as the "Cygnus Pentad" which are rich in terrestrial planets and planetoids. There's a huge amount of alien infrastructure in the region, including a large invisible barrier surrounding the five systems known as the Shufflecross. The aliens that built the monolithic structures here (as well as probably terraformed the planets) have vanished, but there are two alien races in the region that are descended from their legacy in two very different ways.

Alien technology is a way of life in the Cygnus Pentad -- there are gigantic deposits of alien materials that are mined and shaped into various useful technology, and alien structures and craft are occupied by Sents (basically the general term for sentient beings, nonsentient beings with special consideration and rogue nonsentient beings). I'm going to focus on both of those things a lot in this post.

The total Sent population of the Cygnus Pentad is pretty monstrous, however it's very loose-knit and isn't organized in any meaningful way. Regions tend to keep to their own local interests and don't try to extend beyond that due to logistical issues. There are definitely conflicts over "land" or resources but they don't typically escalate into largescale wars due to how spread out everyone is and how difficult it is to actually capture territory. There are also kind of a lot of different "races" which complicates things a lot because there are completely different values systems.

Cygnus Pentad "races"

There are five broad races in the Cygnus Pentad, however this classification system really doesn't work at all, it just gives you a general idea:

1. *-flesh -- Basically humans, or what humans have evolved into. Flesh, muscle and bone. They require food and oxygen. That sort of thing. These have some word appended to the "flesh" suffix, such as Oneflesh.

2. Isomorphs -- Self-replicating beings. These can be either mechanical or biological (or other weird forms) depending on their environment, however wherever they're present they're 100% identical to one another 99.9999% of the time. There's a lot of interesting background behind them, so I'll get into more depth with them later. Unless they're under Special Consideration or they're Rogue, they're not considered Sentient so by the USL they can be freely destroyed, enslaved or modified. Not that anyone follows the USL. There are more Isomorphs than anything else, but they also don't exist in planets or other widely inhabited areas (unless they're rogue of course).

3. Cybcygs -- Also known as "*-mech" or if you're a racist, "robots". These are fully mechanical constructs with their own kind of mind and sentience that aren't under human control. There are two main groups of these which I'll cover in the Cybcyg section since it ties into their history. Like humans they have a very distinct set of physical requirements -- metal alloys, hydrogen, carbon, some fairly random chemical blends and in the case of the second group, Anachronium.

4. Kingslaves -- Also known as "Pentadians" or "Xenos" or if you're a racist, "aliens". These occupy the long cylindrical passages of Earthnails, planetary cores and a lot of alien craft as well. These beings have various forms that all have helix-shaped tendrils. Ones near humans or humanoid Cybcygs will take on a more humanoid appearance. They don't seem to require food or light or anything, but they do have to be around both Anachronium and Chimera in order to not slowly dissipate into a gaseous form. Kingslaves will thus usually incorporate those elements into their own bodily structures, ideally in trace amounts so they're not mined for them (that breaks the hell out of the USL, but as pointed out, it isn't necessarily followed). Kingslaves have a weird reproductive and societal structure which I'll cover when I get to them -- they don't really "reproduce" in the traditional sense.

5. Speccons -- Also known as "Ghosts" or "Liquid Lightfish". Speccon itself is kind of an epithet, since at one time they were given "special consideration" and weren't believed to be fully sentient. There are lots of other mean nicknames along those lines, but they don't seem to care. Ironically though, Speccons possess both sentience and Supersentience -- much like the occasional Tangle that appears in Isomorphs they're capable of being aware of both themselves as individuals and as a unified group organism. Speccons are composed of a substance known as "Liquid Light" -- basically photons that have collapsed into a solid form by being wrapped around Quantum Baubles. I won't go into all of the physics here, but essentially they don't interact with anything unless they want to. If they're not interacting with anything, they're visible as a faint shimmer in whatever matter they're occupying. In Hyperspace they take on brilliant Chimeric colors.

I'll cover each of these races separately in future posts.

One thing I do want to point out before I move on though is that these are really just broad generalizations. There's a considerable amount of mixing between the five forms -- Cybcygs and *flesh had Transhuman and Transmech blends even before entering the Cygnus Pentad, but thanks to alien elements and technologies it's gotten significantly more confusing. There are also blends between these two races and Kingslaves or Speccons, then you have Kinglslaves that have taken up the reproductive habits of Isomorphs and it just gets more complex from there.

Anyway, onto some of the technology in use in the conworld:

Technology

Technology in the Cygnus Pentad tends to be a blend between ancient *flesh/*mech technology and Kingslave/Speccon technology, with some fixtures from the original race of aliens in use as well. A lot of the really advanced stuff comes from the use of exotic materials like Anachronium, Chimera or Xorite, however certain things (like the Atomizer or Microring) are older human technology.

* Lightwrapping -- Probably the most important technology, Lightwrapping is a set of techniques for bending energy vectors into solid matter, or conversely, unraveling solid matter back into energy vectors. It's similar in concept to Atomization, but much much much more advanced -- with the use of Chimera, matter can be unfolded into strings many orders of magnitude longer than normal and then folded back up at the other end, allowing for near-instantaneous jumps through large regions of space. The weird in-between area (where everything is Unfolded) is known as Hyperspace and it has some weird unintuitive properties like metals spontaneously melting or time not working correctly. the material Chimera itself takes on slowly shifting hues that run from one random color to another -- this color effect is known as something that's "Chimeric", and it also happens to Speccons while they're in hyperspace.

Lightwrapping requires bombarding Chimera with energy, though not nearly as much as is required to compres/contract spacetime via nanosingularities, harmonize quantum fluctuations or other primitive means of jumping through space.

* Mawed-Helix -- These are leftover alien technology -- absolutely monstrous rings of Chimera/Anachronium/God-knows-what-ium lattices with a permanent connection to some other one some far distance away. Basically moonlet-sized portals. Entering one will Unfold you and then Refold you further away, somehow without requiring the use of any energy whatsoever. The Hyperspace in one of these seems to be more stable as well -- time doesn't randomly become nonlinear and everything has a faint Chimeric sheen. They're highly useful means of transport between systems in the Pentad, as well as some remote in-system areas, however they're under the jurisdiction of the USLP which means you can't have committed crimes against sentient life (or be planning to) without repaying your debts. This is obviously a problem for the vast majority of the Sents in the Cygnus Pentad. You also can't just lie your way through it because of the large amounts of Anachronium present in the structures. So generally, jumping around manually makes more sense.

* Atomization -- A primitive human technique for converting matter into a nonunique substance known as Aether and then reforming it into solid objects with somewhat poor structural integrity. Obviously Lightwrapping makes more sense (especially for large scales) but Atomization doesn't require exotic materials so seems to be best-suited for emergency situations where Chimera has died or is unavailable.

* Handski/Spaceplane/Windwright/Salamant/SSVEM -- Different vehicles for different environments, earth/air/gas/molten rock/water respectively. These are the general names as defined by the USL, actual vehicle appearances and functionality vary dramatically. These are sometimes under Special Consideration, especially Salamants since they're derivatives of Speccon Autotech which is most definitely sentient.

* Spaceship -- Exactly what it sounds like. No one likes this name, and so no one outside of the USLP and anyone that has to deal with those idiots really uses it. Spaceships have a variety of forms but at a minimum they need metal and carbon for structure, some kind of high-conductance material (silver is usually used, though copper works. Kingslaves tend to prefer Autotech Matrices), some kind of hot-temp superconductor (there's a million of these and carbon/silver will work if absolutely necessary), something to cover the frame and provide general structure (Aether is the cheap option here due to its low structural integrity), hydrogen for base fuel purposes, and Chimera. Spaceships will also sometimes have containers of trace elements so they don't have to get created from The Foam when required for miscellaneous tasks. As usual, the functionality and compositions vary. A lot. Cheap spaceships can legitimately be made by hand (well, hand tools like Atomizers, Fractalizers, etc) so long as the base materials and Chimera is available. Probably not a great idea for any practical purpose though.

* Shufflers -- These alien-inspired devices will create "shuffling fields" around an object that alter any causality entering them in unpredictable ways. They are thus useful shields, though they're not 100%, so usually some kind of primitive shield (like a Quantum Bubble) is activated occasionally for edge cases. Shufflers work by Half-Unfolding via Chimera, seeding with Xorium and then expanding the bubble through basic Field Remapping techniques. Since they work by Half-Unfolding, they don't work while you're fully solid, nor do they work in Hyperspace. So using them as shields in combat is somewhat of a tactical game. Shufflers are the same basic technology as the monstrous field surrounding the entirety of the Cygnus Pentad, although that one seems to be 100% effective and also no one knows where it actually originates from.

* Guns -- as called by the overly traiditional USLP, this is the name given to a broad spectrum of weapons meant to destroy Sents, their Spaceships, or their Civilizations. Doing any of that without special exemptions (like consent) violates the USL. These are vaguely categorized into material and energy weapons, though physical beings (basically anyone who isn't a Speccon) can also be atomized or have other nasty things happen to their physical structure. Use of these so-called Polymorph Weapons on Sents have the harshest penalties given by the USLP. Genomorph (Bascially genocide but with polymorphing rather than death) is one of the few crimes that results in Nondeath if caught.

I think this post is probably long enough. In my next post I'll talk a bit about the USL and USLP and then I'll probably be done for now. Feel free to ask questions if you want.

[bradrn]

This isn’t the sort of thing that I usually like, but based on how good your previous Ik'Thulu thread was, I’m really interested in seeing more of this! (By the way, whatever happened to that thread?)

A question: how did humans get to Cygnus from Earth in the first place? Or is that part of the same mysterious background as the vanished aliens who built the Shufflecross?

[Xhin]

USL & USLP

The USL is a set of guidelines for the treatment of sentient life by other sentient life. According to the USL, it stands for "USL Standards & Law" which was chosen to resolve a dispute between the Sents who believed it should be either the "United Sentient's Laws" or the "Universal Sent Law". No one's sure what the exact etymology is, but it's most likely neither of those.

In addition to containing Law, the USL contains a number of other things, including definitions for various pieces of technology or the overall goals that they believe sentient life should strive for. The USL also outlines penalties for breaking it as well as various administrative things that help keep it able to be enforced.

The USL is maintained by the USLP (USL Standards & Law Pact), an organization who holds very little land and power in the Cygnus Pentad generally, but controls every single Mawed-Helix and also has a fleet of Anachron Enforcers who really only punish the most heinous crimes. The USLP itself is a mixed crowd of *flesh (Oneflesh actually hold the most power, which pretty much doesn't happen anywhere else), Cybcygs (mostly the second type), Kingslaves, Speccons, some Special Consideration automatons (like the Crown Gunner, a sentient self-flying spaceship) and a surprising amount of Rogue Isomorphs. The USLP is one of the few places where pure races (like humans that aren't even slightly mechanical) are common, and it tends to attract those kinds of people due to its black-and-white perspective.

The USLP maintains its power through its edge in Anachronium technology, its vigilant punishing of the overly power-hungry, and probably also fear (some of the penalties are horrifying). Attempts to overthrow it tend to turn into the victors and losers merging into a new unified USLP which is somehow just as idiotic and traditional as the first.

A primer on the USL

The USL asserts several rights:

* The right to live
* The right to die, by choice or circumstance
* The right to reproduce asexually if resources and space are available
* The right to reproduce in other ways if there's consent
* The right to take on whichever form you want, and keep that form by choice or circumstance
* The right of not being enslaved physically, mentally, emotionally, astrally, spiritually, entropically... (the list goes on for some time here)
* The right to "kill", "reproduce" or "enslave" nonsentient objects in your environment, unless it conflicts with other rights.
* The right to travel freely, provided it doesn't conflict with other rights.
* The right to privacy in one's own sentience and internal world, unless it conflicts with other rights (Speccons can enslave sentient entities through their internal world so this exception is needed).

Violating any of those rights in another sentient being is a USL crime, unless one of a few conditions apply:

* There's consent from the Sent
* It prevents the Sent from committing worse USL crimes
* The Sent is under Special Consideration and the USLP agrees with you in that context
* The Sent is wanted by the USLP -- you can do anything here but kill them and also can't do it indefinitely -- it has to be towards the goal of bringing them before the USLP.
* The USLP can also do all kinds of stuff to Sents themselves.

Having a USL crime doesn't mean you're wanted by the USLP. There's way way too much USL crimes and too little enforcement for that to happen. It's really only heinous crimes where the USLP will want them, and the worst of the worst the USLP will dispatch their Anachron Enforcers.

Sent Classification

There's a bunch of weird arbitrary definitions for what it means to be Sentient that I won't get into (half of them are wrong), so instead I'll just talk a bit about the weird outliers:

* Isomorphs -- Isomorphs aren't considered to be Sentient. While they can replicate, communicate, and possess independent will, by the USL they are automatons that follow whatever their mechanistic programming tells them to do.

* Atypical Isomorphs -- Atypical Isomorphs are Isomorphs that don't match the other Isomorphs in their group -- either their appearance or behavior is different. These aren't necessarily classed as Sents, but they're always classed under Special Consideration.

* Rogue Isomorphs -- Rogue Isomorphs are Atypical Isomorphs that are doing very very atypical things (like trying to join type I Cybcyg society). Isomorph Queens are also considered to be Rogue Isomorphs since they are in line to populate another inorganic space, although this is controversial among Sents that aren't Rogue Isomorphs since the Queens seem to also be following programming.

* Apathetic Type I Cybcygs -- These are considered to not be sentient because they violate the virtue system of Type I Cybcygs. And also probably because they just sit there.

* Newflesh Nodes -- These aren't considered to be Sentient on their own, despite their potential. Newflesh Nodes turn into new Dreamflesh host bodies when their old body dies.

* Oneflesh -- These are sentient but there's been a lot of controversy around classifying them as such since it's very easy to kill them even accidentally. Most Sents also have an irrational hatred of them since they refuse to blend with the other races in any capacity, can't interface directly with anything, and tend to be zealously religious. They're also what you and me are -- humans with one body and no mechanical, polymorphic or energetic upgrades.

* Autotech -- These are biological constructs created by Kingslaves out of their own bodies and minds for specialized tasks. Since they're essentially Kingslaves, they're considered sentient, however their rights are whatever the creator Kingslave determines them to be, who can kill, re-absorb or modify them as needed.

* Self-maneuvering vehicles -- These are sometimes sentient, though due to utility this is rarely proven or disproven. Given their nature they're capable of independent movement and react somewhat like an animal would to different environmental conditions (especially those that maneuver through molten rock which do so very very quickly and also learn). They're thus given Special Consideration, though these crimes are rarely followed up on, again due to utility.

* Sentient Spaceships -- Unless explicitly proven, these are considered to be nonsentient, regardless of how they act. This decision is quite controversial since it's the only one that classes an actual provable sentient entity as nonsentient, however this again goes back to utility. The Crown Gunner is actually in favor of this rule, mostly because it likes killing other spaceships.

* Gas Automatons -- Gas Automatons are patterns of gas in gas giants that seem to self-replicate over time. It's assumed that these are sentient, but no one can figure out what the distinct entities are or how to communicate with them, so they're fair game for exploitation and destruction.

* Flora, Fauna, etc -- These have been proven to have only occasional bouts of sentience, most of the time being quasi-sentient or nonsentient. Given their utility, they're classed as nonsentient, but some of them are under Special Consideration such as the mold colonies in *flesh habitats.

* Type I Cybcygs -- These are provably quasi-sentient with full-sentient bursts (like plants or animals), however they maintain that they possess full sentience mostly out of spite towards *flesh entities. The *flesh entities don't question it because they reallllllly don't want another one of those wars.

* Full Merges -- This is the name given to entities that are roughly equal parts *flesh, Cybcyg, Kingslave/Isomorph, and Speccon. They tend to have very atypical motivations and actions and don't really fit in well to any community (including blended communities). They tend to also commit a lot of USL crime, including a lot of heinous crime. They've been proven multiple times to have full sentience, though never Tangle or Speccon supersentience but they're consistently pushed back under the magnifying lens because of the issues they cause other societies. The USL even has a rule against them being able to join the USLP except through an attempt to overthrow it, which they have yet to do since they don't really organize.

* Anachronium, Chimera, Xorium, etc -- Exotic materials have been proven to have at least quasi-sentience, however there are still too many unknowns about what they actually do and also their utility is very high. God-knows-what-ium is given a reverent Special Consideration that's never enforced.

Anachronium

Discussing the USL without discussing Anachronium is difficult since so much of their power and knowledge is reliant on it.

Anachronium is an exotic material found mostly in the core of gas giants and the sun. There are also big pockets scattered throughout the rest of the Cygnus Pentad, but because of how it works, the USLP will usually send out its Anachron Enforcers to collect it before it's mined by some other group. It's thus somewhat rare outside of USLP territory -- Kingslaves probably have the biggest supply of it, but they also need it to live.

Anachronium answers the age-old questions of "what is sentience" and "can it be proven". The answer to the second question is yes, while the answer to the first question is a lot trickier and involves energy vectors Folded around time rather than space. Anachronium also answers some other metaphysical questions like "what happens after death", which has led to some pretty fucked up punishments for breakers of the USL. It also seems to mostly just replace age-old questions with even more questions.

When bombarded with energy, Anachronium will loosen the bonds between Sents and their causal selves within its sphere of influence. They're able to observe other subjective sentient experiences remotely across both space and time, and since their bonds are loosened rather than broken, they can return some of that information back to their causal selves (though not all). This also plays out in real time (unless you're in Hyperspace and Time becomes Nonlinear of course. More on that in a bit.)

This technology allows the user of it to find out the truth of any USL crime committed by viewing it remotely (though several USL members do this during an investigation to eliminate potential inaccuracies). It can also be used to see the harvesting of large Anachronium pockets (since Anachronium is itself quasi-sentient). And many other things.

As powerful as it is, Anachronium does have a few weaknesses.

* You can't see through Shufflers 99% of the time (since they're blocking causality).

* Similarly, you can't see anything outside of the Cygnus Pentad (because of the huge 100% efficiency Shuffler surrounding it).

* You can't observe any other sentience under the influence of Anachronium. I don't know why you'd want to.

* When viewing the future, you're viewing split-second potential futures. They tend to jump around fairly randomly because of this, or mostly just be highly inaccurate on details (or even major events).

* You can observe a decent amount into someone's death (and what's after it), but can't view anything past the point where the sentience enters nonlinear time. Future deaths have this problem, plus the above problem.

* If you observe nonsentience, you just move forward in time until you quit observing it. So it's somewhat hard to quantify when you come back because you don't remember anything -- you need multiple observers to not remember anything essentially to confirm it.

* Quasisentience is a horrible experience for sentient creatures to experience, somewhat like a combination of being stuck in a loop and fainting from lack of oxygen. And no it's not one of the USL penalties, those are far worse.

USL Crime Penalties

If you want to pass through a Mawed-Helix, you have to have not committed any USL crimes without paying the appropriate penalties. You're also not able to pass through if you'll potentially commit a USL crime (by choice) until after that moment has passed. For minor crimes you get minor penalties, but more severe crimes will get other Sents to potentially bring you in for justice or the absolute worst will bring the Anachron Enforcers on you -- you can't escape them because they're aware of your sentience and so know exactly where you are at all times, and they also have millions of Sents working at a time so Shufflers won't protect you. You also can't outrun them because you'll just bounce off the Shufflecross. Your best option is probably death.

Minor crimes have very simple penalties -- the subjective experience of what you did to the other sentient entity. This penalty is performed by loosening the sentience via Anachronium and then sentient enslavement through Speccons, which force the convicted sentience towards the moment they committed the crime (but from the other perspective). The convicted will experience the whole thing up to the moment of death, but the Anachronium bombardment will stop at that point. It's definitely an unpleasant thing to go through, but is only for small infractions (like murder or multiple murders).

More serious crimes have more creative punishments (technologically speaking), up to the worst of the worst which is Nondeath. There's a movement against such brutal punishments in the USLP, but at the moment they're believed to be doing more good than harm by deterring mass genocide and enslavement. Like everything else in the Cygnus Pentad, it's a mixed bag.

[Xhin]

This isn’t the sort of thing that I usually like, but based on how good your previous Ik'Thulu thread was, I’m really interested in seeing more of this! (By the way, whatever happened to that thread?)

Thanks! I'll get back around to the Ik'Thulu thread eventually, especially since there are apparently still fans of it. Feel free to ask questions there -- they help. I also have a technology post that's been half-written since March.

A question: how did humans get to Cygnus from Earth in the first place? Or is that part of the same mysterious background as the vanished aliens who built the Shufflecross?

Here's a brief history of that. I'm not underlining any of the words since the history isn't hugely relevant to the Cygnus Pentad.

They were part of a much much larger spacefaring group that spread out from Earth and into almost three galaxies. Quite technologically advanced (see: the Atomizer or Newflesh Node), but not as much as the vanished aliens were. The movement was spearheaded by a collection of self-replicating automatons all somewhat entangled with each other for better communication/distribution, some of which have survived here as Isomorphs (though they lack that supersentience they once had). Probably humanity's biggest achievement of the time though was the exploration of a place known as the Dodecaverse -- a 12-dimensional region of closed spaces and pocket universes. Of particular interest were spaces that had both parabolic/flat geometry and self-illumination since they'd be able to support life pretty much indefinitely.

Around this time, (and it's probably related to the exploration of the Dodecaverse, though Cygnus Pentad, Ik'Thulu/Drake and Shatterloop records are all unclear on that point) the main universe (the one earth is in) started to become temporally hyperbolic rather than just spatially hyperbolic. Entire lines of causality were just snapped off, erasing entire worlds and civilizations in the blink of an eye (because in the universe's mind they never existed in the first place). It didn't erase memory, however, so people were able to find ways to avoid it -- either by fleeing into pocket universes or into spaces shielded from the original universe's causality (such as the shade of the Sra tree in a conworld from 11 years ago that I'll come back around to eventually).

In the case of the Cygnus Pentad, the Shufflecross was switched on during this event and the five systems were shielded and remain shielded to this day. The Shufflecross has some connection to the aliens that were here originally but it's unknown whether some form of them switched it on, or it switched on automatically when it detected the universe shifting, or what. No one even knows what's powering the Shufflecross, though it's probably a physical object somewhere in the Cygnus Pentad. That period of time is also difficult to explore with Anachronium due to issues with causality itself.

[Ares Land]

Hey, that's really nice. I liked the casual transhumanism, and the way they experimentally test sentience. The playing around with space-time is really great. It's got something of an Orion's Arm feel.

I get a little confused with the sentients. I'm kind of lost with the Newflesh/Oneflesh/etc. (I believe those are regular humans, some kind of Cronenbergian augmented humans that uploads after death?) but I like the thoroughly alien feel.

A few questions / suggestions:

- I suppose by 'in the Cygnus constellation' you mean that the systems, as seen from Earth, lie in the general direction of Cygnus?
- There are a lot of conworld-specific terms to remember, which I think can be a little overwhelming. I'd suggest trying to minimize these -- though of course, I don't know how that translates in terms of gameplay.
- I'm kind of bothered with the 'exotic materials' trope. The way you describe them, it seems that they're exotic lifeforms, rather...
- Who are the USL leaders, how are they chosen, and are they accountable to anyone?
- You're far from alone in doing this, but I'm bothered by the idea that SF worlds must have cruel and unusual punishments. Those sentients are incredibly advanced, technologically: it seems odd that they're resorting to an 'eye for an eye' and torture.

[bradrn]

Probably humanity's biggest achievement of the time though was the exploration of a place known as the Dodecaverse -- a 12-dimensional region of closed spaces and pocket universes. Of particular interest were spaces that had both parabolic/flat geometry and self-illumination since they'd be able to support life pretty much indefinitely.

I’m hardly an expert on this, but how can a universe have parabolic geometry? I thought that a space could have spherical (positive curvature), flat (zero curvature) or hyperbolic (negative curvature) geometry, but I haven’t heard of a universe having parabolic geometry.

(and it's probably related to the exploration of the Dodecaverse, though Cygnus Pentad, Ik'Thulu/Drake and Shatterloop records are all unclear on that point)

So Ik'Thulu and the Cygnus Pentad are both part of the same universe? I definitely wasn’t expecting that — those two conworlds seemed too different to be at all related. (To me, Ik'Thulu felt more fantasy-inspired, whereas the Cygnus Pentad seems quite firmly science-fictional.)

… the main universe (the one earth is in) started to become temporally hyperbolic rather than just spatially hyperbolic.

Could you explain what that means? As I said above, I’m not at all an expert on such things.

It's got something of an Orion's Arm feel.

That’s what I immediately thought of as well! (Link for the curious: https://www.orionsarm.com/)

I get a little confused with the sentients. I'm kind of lost with the Newflesh/Oneflesh/etc. (I believe those are regular humans, some kind of Cronenbergian augmented humans that uploads after death?) but I like the thoroughly alien feel. … There are a lot of conworld-specific terms to remember, which I think can be a little overwhelming. I'd suggest trying to minimize these -- though of course, I don't know how that translates in terms of gameplay.

If this thread is anything like Xhin’s last thread — and, based on the presentation style so far, I see no reason why it wouldn’t be — then all of these terms will be explained in great detail sooner or later.

[alynnidalar]

(and it's probably related to the exploration of the Dodecaverse, though Cygnus Pentad, Ik'Thulu/Drake and Shatterloop records are all unclear on that point)

So Ik'Thulu and the Cygnus Pentad are both part of the same universe? I definitely wasn’t expecting that — those two conworlds seemed too different to be at all related. (To me, Ik'Thulu felt more fantasy-inspired, whereas the Cygnus Pentad seems quite firmly science-fictional.)

I had the same reaction! That being said, I do recall indicators in the Ik'Thulu thread that the inhabitants weren't original to that "world" (not sure "world" really applies in that case, haha), but they weren't quite expanded on.

I deeply enjoyed the Ik'Thulu thread (and the slow unfolding of how things work; I love a good mystery) so I'm excited about this one as well! The sentience distinctions are particularly interesting to me.

[Xhin]

I get a little confused with the sentients. I'm kind of lost with the Newflesh/Oneflesh/etc. (I believe those are regular humans, some kind of Cronenbergian augmented humans that uploads after death?) but I like the thoroughly alien feel.

I'll explain those a bit in my next post, but essentially:

* Oneflesh are humans that have exactly one body and die for real when it dies. They're what you and me are.

* Dreamflesh are humans that sort of "float" when their current body dies and they then go into a new body which is created at a Newflesh Node.

* Newflesh Nodes are biological constructs that create new human bodies very quickly and then push Dreamflesh consciousneses into them.

Newflesh/Dreamflesh technology was pretty ubiquitous in the galaxies and even made its way into several universes in the dodecaverse as well -- however it doesn't work in all of them for some reasons that are entirely too technical to discuss here.

- I suppose by 'in the Cygnus constellation' you mean that the systems, as seen from Earth, lie in the general direction of Cygnus?

The archaic definition there is that they're physically close to stars visible to the naked eye in that region of the sky from earth. In this case,
Deneb. It makes sense to use those definitions here since we're not spacefaring, though at the time they use more of a polar coordinate system from several points (such as the galactic center).

- There are a lot of conworld-specific terms to remember, which I think can be a little overwhelming. I'd suggest trying to minimize these -- though of course, I don't know how that translates in terms of gameplay.

Like my other game, the gameplay comes first with the lore built around it. I'm trying to keep this post as general as possible so I can use more of it later, but I'll probably end up rewriting some things eventually.

- Who are the USL leaders, how are they chosen, and are they accountable to anyone?

The USLP is a non-hierarchial co-op. They're accountable to each other and also to the fact that they're outnumbered by other Sents in the Cygnus Pentad by some ridiculously large order of magnitude. There's this delicate balance with their operations where they have a technological near-monopoly capable of absolutely dominating the Cygnus Pentad but also lack the manpower to physically carry that out. Meanwhile large groups of other societies can't replace the USLP due to the USLP's technological edge -- absolute worst-case they explore the attacking Sents' lives in depth and find routes to peacefully convert them.

- You're far from alone in doing this, but I'm bothered by the idea that SF worlds must have cruel and unusual punishments. Those sentients are incredibly advanced, technologically: it seems odd that they're resorting to an 'eye for an eye' and torture.

While I'm not trying to justify it (I agree with you more generally), there are a couple societal problems with the Cygnus Pentad that seem to result in nonstop wars/enslavement/genocide without some kind of deterrent.

The first is that the Cygnus Pentad has a fixed number of resources due to the Shufflecross -- the boundaries of the region are well-known and the best areas and resources are already occupied. This is a problem particularly for human-descended races who are used to thousands of years of free exploration and settlement. It's stifling and brings up old competitive instincts.

The second problem is the large amount of species blending. Form and function are key parts of one's identity, and there's a kind of overbearing zealousness that comes with particular well-suited forms. Taken over hundreds of years and you have a multitude of forms that all believe themselves to be superior to one another in one way or another, and since there's this seamless meshing of instinctual drive and physical ability, it's impossible to convince them otherwise.

Probably the worst problem though is that each race has its own very different virtue systems. Not everyone believes the same thing of course, but for each race there are at least underlying themes that coalesce into moralities or ideological systems. There's an absolutely enormous amount of conflict between races that have different moral underpinnings, for example the Rogue Isomorphs whose underlying goals are geared towards making everyone (and everything) else resemble them.

I'll cover some of these differences in my next post. I'm not saying it's a valid justification for it, I'm just saying that it seems to be the most practical solution at the moment for preventing far far worse atrocities.

[Xhin]

I’m hardly an expert on this, but how can a universe have parabolic geometry? I thought that a space could have spherical (positive curvature), flat (zero curvature) or hyperbolic (negative curvature) geometry, but I haven’t heard of a universe having parabolic geometry.

Could you explain what that means? As I said above, I’m not at all an expert on such things.

These both tie into a set of more advanced physics in use at the time. What you're talking about (spatial curvature) describes the overall structure of spacetime and its various means of connectedness (3-torus universes as opposed to Poincaré dodecahedral space for example). What I'm talking about is a fundamental property that determines how those structures arise, the way energy vectors self-organize into physical phenomena, the scale of the cosmological "End of Greatness", and so on. The definitions get really technical really quickly, but essentially the value of this property results in three different kinds of universe:

* Flat -- These are infinite in two directions and "bounded" on the other axis (they collapse into a singularity at some distance). Causality is stable but largely uncertain which leads to things like parallel timelines being accessible or even a part of the causality of the main timeline. If the geometry is stable enough, flat universes can have a band of "self-illumination" -- a persistent sky glow caused by an infinite space collapsing to a single point, energy radiating back out at the scale where matter can't reasonably squeeze further. If it isn't, they can appear to loop back onto themselves on that axis at different points or even curve around into other universes.

* Hyperbolic -- This type of universe is finite in size but has a non-fixed amount of space -- as the universe ages, the amount of spacetime increases (pushing matter apart) and the physical laws also change subtly. The rate of this is ultimately what determines whether causality is stable or not -- if too much time gets inserted between two connected events, they'll cease to be causally related and the newest one will regain its Uncertainty.

* Parabolic -- This type of universe is finite and curves back into itself on every axis (including time). These universes thus have stable and cyclical causalities, highly stable (and Certain) quantum events, and so on. These are pretty boring but can support human civilization pretty much indefinitely, provided you get around the issue of the distant future and distant past being the same thing.

Oceano de la Vida is Parabolic, Shatterloop is Flat, the parent universe (the one we're in) is Hyperbolic, and it's an open question whether the Ik'thulu universe is flat or parabolic. It being flat with the Edge and Sea containing singularities makes a certain amount of sense, but that has its own set of problems.

Long story short though, what happened in the parent universe is that time started expanding and many causality chains started to get ripped apart. It's unclear why this started happening after billions of years of only spatial expansion, but accessing the dodecaverse may have had something to do with it.

So Ik'Thulu and the Cygnus Pentad are both part of the same universe? I definitely wasn’t expecting that — those two conworlds seemed too different to be at all related. (To me, Ik'Thulu felt more fantasy-inspired, whereas the Cygnus Pentad seems quite firmly science-fictional.)

Different physical rules can definitely do that. I do think the Ik'Thulu world has more science in it than other fantasy worlds do, as well as a higher level of technology and development.

If this thread is anything like Xhin’s last thread — and, based on the presentation style so far, I see no reason why it wouldn’t be — then all of these terms will be explained in great detail sooner or later.

That's the plan! Hopefully in a way that adds more terms as it goes like the other one.

[bradrn]

I’m hardly an expert on this, but how can a universe have parabolic geometry? I thought that a space could have spherical (positive curvature), flat (zero curvature) or hyperbolic (negative curvature) geometry, but I haven’t heard of a universe having parabolic geometry.

Could you explain what that means? As I said above, I’m not at all an expert on such things.

These both tie into a set of more advanced physics in use at the time. What you're talking about (spatial curvature) describes the overall structure of spacetime and its various means of connectedness (3-torus universes as opposed to Poincaré dodecahedral space for example). What I'm talking about is a fundamental property that determines how those structures arise, the way energy vectors self-organize into physical phenomena, the scale of the cosmological "End of Greatness", and so on. The definitions get really technical really quickly, but essentially the value of this property results in three different kinds of universe:

* Flat -- These are infinite in two directions and "bounded" on the other axis (they collapse into a singularity at some distance). Causality is stable but largely uncertain which leads to things like parallel timelines being accessible or even a part of the causality of the main timeline. If the geometry is stable enough, flat universes can have a band of "self-illumination" -- a persistent sky glow caused by an infinite space collapsing to a single point, energy radiating back out at the scale where matter can't reasonably squeeze further. If it isn't, they can appear to loop back onto themselves on that axis at different points or even curve around into other universes.

* Hyperbolic -- This type of universe is finite in size but has a non-fixed amount of space -- as the universe ages, the amount of spacetime increases (pushing matter apart) and the physical laws also change subtly. The rate of this is ultimately what determines whether causality is stable or not -- if too much time gets inserted between two connected events, they'll cease to be causally related and the newest one will regain its Uncertainty.

* Parabolic -- This type of universe is finite and curves back into itself on every axis (including time). These universes thus have stable and cyclical causalities, highly stable (and Certain) quantum events, and so on. These are pretty boring but can support human civilization pretty much indefinitely, provided you get around the issue of the distant future and distant past being the same thing.

Oceano de la Vida is Parabolic, Shatterloop is Flat, the parent universe (the one we're in) is Hyperbolic, and it's an open question whether the Ik'thulu universe is flat or parabolic. It being flat with the Edge and Sea containing singularities makes a certain amount of sense, but that has its own set of problems.

Long story short though, what happened in the parent universe is that time started expanding and many causality chains started to get ripped apart. It's unclear why this started happening after billions of years of only spatial expansion, but accessing the dodecaverse may have had something to do with it.

Honestly, I don’t really have anything I can say to this, except that I am continually amazed by how extraordinarily well-developed your con-universe is. But I’d also be really interested to see whether you’ve worked out the con-physics here — does it have proper mathematical underpinnings yet, or did you just take a couple of keywords from it without worrying about the details?

[Xhin]

That being said, I do recall indicators in the Ik'Thulu thread that the inhabitants weren't original to that "world" (not sure "world" really applies in that case, haha), but they weren't quite expanded on.

It isn't really relevant in that setting except in very specific circumstances like the origins of Drakes and some of the Ik'Thulu mythology and written records. Here it's a lot more important to cover because a lot of those technologies and groups still exist in some capacity.

I deeply enjoyed the Ik'Thulu thread (and the slow unfolding of how things work; I love a good mystery) so I'm excited about this one as well! The sentience distinctions are particularly interesting to me.

Thanks! I'll try to update this one over time (and also the Ik'thulu one, now that I'm actively conworlding again).

[Xhin]

So, onto a more in-depth look at the different "races". I'll cover the main racial groupings first and then get into the various types of hybrids (which is what most of the population is.

This will probably be a multi-post post -- it's fairly late tonight already and it'll probably also take a few days to go into full depth here.

*Flesh

This group is humans, or what humans have evolved into. Flesh and blood, fixed lifespans in one way or another, a need for food/water/etc and sexual reproduction. *Flesh are also notable for being really weak in their base form, though also extremely adaptable and very easy to modify constructively. All of that said, there are a number of advantages of being *flesh or some *flesh hybrid, provided you make a lot of modifications of course. Below, I'll list the major groups of *flesh:

* Dreamflesh -- The most common kind of *flesh, these have been given basic modifications (like life extension or increased lung capacity) and fitted with what's known as an Astral Loop, which lets their consciousness float after death until they can gain a new body in a Newflesh Node. Newflesh Nodes are special devices that create a new Dreamflesh body very quickly and transfer the consciousness over. Dreamflesh are paired with newflesh nodes, which are also paired with each other to prevent attempted Duplication which can do various bad things ranging from locking up the machine to degrading the astral loop. It can't literally duplicate people fortunately. In this dimension anyway.

Despite the life extension and the newflesh node systems, Dreamflesh are still not immortal. The reason for this isn't fully understood, but essentially fully sentient consciousnesses will Unravel at some point and trigger death, regardless of what their physical body is doing. Only speccon and speccon hybrids seem to be immune to this since their physical structure is constantly manipulating vectors and space/time nodes anyway. Quasisentient life and nonsentient life also seems to be immune, and so there's been a lot of work exploring whether targeted quasisentience/nonsentience can extend life.

Dreamflesh are fairly conservative when it comes to biological modifications, preferring to instead optimize their own specific newflesh node system and base modifications but otherwise maintaining their human appearance and behavior. They are however fairly liberal when it comes to mechanical or alien extensions and so over the years have become the largest source of *flesh hybrids.

* Myrflesh / Myriad -- "Myriad" is what they call themselves, but that's used in a bunch of other contexts, so Myriadflesh or its shortened form Myrflesh makes more sense to prevent confusion.

Myrflesh are still technically human, but that's about all you can say about them. They've been modified extensively for specific purposes or to be more modifiable in general. Myrflesh have also generally been modified neurologically, emotionally or astrally, which breaks all kinds of Dreamflesh taboos and has led to a lot of conflict and even genocide/genomorph when extreme enough. Despite their biological liberty, there's an odd movement within their race of avoiding mechanical or alien upgrades. This isn't universal by any means, but is common enough to be notable. There's a kind of inherent pride in coming up with similar solutions through biological means, and they've probably bought in somewhat to the biological superiority argument given by Oneflesh religions if their membership numbers are any indication.

Myrflesh also use Newflesh Nodes, but their versions of them are a lot more advanced since they support multiple forms and formats. Myrflesh newflesh nodes are notable for transferring fine details like scars or hair color, which is due mainly to biological constructs known as Micronads whose purpose is tracking form and function at a deep level. It's worth pointing out that despite their more advanced biotechnology, the Kingslaves were particularly impressed at Micronads and spent several generations trying to replicate them.

* Lux Ursum / Bearflesh -- A weird group that's somehow almost as numerous as Myrflesh. Their history goes way way back, and without getting into all the details the bear ended up becoming a kind of mascot for spacefaring in general. Over many generations outside the Cygnus Pentad this group modified themselves to look and act more and more like them, while still retaining human characteristics (like full sentience and opposable thumbs). Within the Cygnus Pentad, their opinions on biological/mechanical/alien modifications vary more than any other group as they variously believe in physical, mental, or spiritual bear-ness. Their "racial religion" has also influenced rogue isomorphs to a greater degree than anyone could have predicted, with many rogues therein taking on bear-like forms and behaviors.

Lux Ursum don't typically have racial conflicts with other races -- they will definitely have individual or regional conflicts, but what they are and strive for doesn't inherently clash with other groups, outside of rogue isomorphs of course (though they've somehow managed to convert isomorphs to a religion despite their lack of sentience or motivation). Oneflesh do sort of inherently hate them, but Lux Ursum are too embedded into Oneflesh society for them to do anything about it, outside of the occasional localized genocide.

While not common to the three galaxies / dodecaverse in general, Lux Ursum were fairly concentrated in the systems surrounding the Cygnus Pentad due to that being the birthplace of one of their Fang Queens (Basically a great leader, though they were post-hierarchial during that time period so that's not really a great definition). When the Cygnus Pentad closed off they were thus able to grow their numbers to something far larger than in most societies. And with their liberal outlook and aversion to conflict they're widely represented in Cygnus Pentad societies, even those that don't generally welcome outsiders.

Up next: Oneflesh and their dogmatic belief system.

[Vardelm]

I'm not a huge sci-fi guy, but this is really cool stuff and a fascinating read. I really appreciate the amount of thought that has gone into this so far.

[Xhin]

I'm not a huge sci-fi guy, but this is really cool stuff and a fascinating read. I really appreciate the amount of thought that has gone into this so far.

Thanks!

Oneflesh

These are a bit different. Oneflesh are humans that don't use Newflesh nodes, effectively trapping them in whichever body they started out with. Additionally, while it's not universal, they're well-known for rejecting biological upgrades as well as mechanical or alien extensions. Indeed, this provokes such ire from the other races that the more-liberal Singulus movement within them has tried to distance themselves from other Oneflesh traditions.

Oneflesh are somewhat inseparable from a zealous set of beliefs that are basically a religion despite the lack of concrete theology (theology itself is somewhat weird and I'll cover it in a future update). This set of beliefs drives their rejection of Newflesh nodes but also their tendency towards rejecting other types of extensions. Before I cover those beliefs, it's important to look at their long history.

Oneflesh history

Oneflesh history can be traced all the way back to The Great Leap, the moment where a primitive spacefaring humanity essentially locked to one system (though not entirely) found a way to move faster through a technology known as Nanosingularities (won't mention this here because it's irrelevant, but essentially these distort spacetime selectively through the creation and manipulation of naked singularities. This is harder to pull off than it looks.). This was a long project that pulled in scientists from diverse fields, including the proto-oneflesh movement who at the time were a group of Recursivists.

Recursivists were a very specialized field that studied recursive structures and the formation of intelligence and (or so they thought) consciousness. Their theories became obsolete once the "wrapped energy vectors" idea was well-understood (don't worry, I'll get to that eventually) but they were quite essential at the time. Recursivists had a large detachment out of the Sol system as they were studying the Tangle phenomenon seen in Spore Automatons (the progenitors of isomorphs). Before the Great Leap, interstellar groups were completely isolated and weren't even able to communicate effectively with Sol due to the light barrier. They more than anyone had the motivation to study Pairing (which today would be known as quantum entanglement) which the Spore Automatons seemed to be doing naturally.

When they unlocked that secret, they shared it with Sol over the horrible years-long communication system and it led to this absolute explosion of technology, including Nanosingularities. That in turn led to this huge spreading-out into the parent galaxy little by little (and a much greater spreading by the Spore Automatons). However, that's not really relevant here.

Pairing was the holy grail for the Newflesh system, which at the time transferred your mind to a generalized body type that didn't have your DNA and had a lot of mechanistic extensions, granting a kind of quasi-immortality though it failed completely ~10% of the time. While obviously extremely useful, the early version of this technology had a lot of problems so there weren't as many early adopters as you'd think. Additionally though the Recursivists who discovered Pairing in the first place had some enormous theoretical concerns with it but were unable to convince other members of the scientific community. So instead, they did their usual interstellar thing and became stricter and more dogmatic, forbidding their societies from interacting with the technology under penalty of death.

Why they'd go to such extremes is a good question and ties in somewhat to the dynamics of interstellar society.

Pre-great leap interstellar society

Before the Great Leap, leaving Sol was costly, could take several generations (improvements in sublight speed like Microrings helped a lot here), and completely isolated you from the bulk of human society (and their help). This set of conditions fundamentally altered the brave humans who undertook the challenge and scratched out a living in some largely unknown system with no outside help or communication and no ability to ever return.

Early interstellar humans were thus rigid isolationists, had extreme hierarchial structures and conservative attitudes, and prized meritocracy and technocracy above all else. Strife was unfortunately common but also heavily suppressed, and interstellar humans would go to ridiculous lengths to keep their society intact.

These kinds of attitudes would change as humans spread out more into the system, and they were definitely improved after the Great Leap for that society at large, but for the most ideologically dogmatic, they became increasingly isolationist and hid themselves away from larger society.

The spread of Recursivists, and the One Flesh

A lot of times, these groups would simply die out, but in the case of the Recursivists, their numbers only grew higher and higher as their very set of beliefs promoted progeny and defiant seeding of the system despite the presence and pressures of a larger society. Over time, that entire system and most of its trade routes were under their control, and their quasi-religion had inspired countless rejectors of newflesh technology to take up the "One Flesh. One Life. One Soul." banner themselves. They were at least somewhat liberal at the time, with some of them even using Newflesh Nodes provided certain conditions were met (accidental deaths only for example).

While their home system was erased when that line of causality had snapped off, there was already a huge diaspora of Oneflesh and descendents of their supporters, including within the Cygnus Pentad. When the Shufflecross was switched on, they became increasingly dogmatic over the years as their influence waned in their main system and resources and locations were increasingly claimed. At the time of this writing they're basically an interstellar society again with one of the few remaining hierarchial societies.

Up next (still today though), a look at actual Oneflesh beliefs.

[Xhin]

Oneflesh Beliefs

I've talked a bit about Oneflesh history and their rigid biological conservatism, which has bled over into other form/function conservatism as well. It's worth making a note about how unusual this is in the Cygnus Pentad -- the free mixing of biological humans, mechanical beings, and two very different alien species has led to a complex decentralized society with a very stratified technological system. Having a means of manipulating tech that isn't suited to your physical body is absolutely essential, and opposable thumbs (or hooks, or claws) really doesn't cut it when you're dealing with Autotech (kingslave tech) or Nanons (isomorph tech) or Splends (speccon tech) which are hopelessly embedded within different layers of the machines essential to daily life. Being unable to manipulate it effectively is a genuine disability, and so Oneflesh reluctance to modification and extension makes them fairly useless to larger societies. They do seem to be particularly well-suited to enforcing the USL, however.

In any case, this post is meant to chronicle what exactly the Oneflesh believe, rather than the intense dislike they provoke, which I've probably already discussed ad nauseum. Though like the Ik'thulu and their lack of wings I'll probably come back to it a lot.

The core of the Oneflesh belief system is the idea of "evolutionary supremacy" -- they believe that biological constructs that have evolved over billions of years have far more potential and purpose than anything that those biological beings could design. They see themselves as the last bastion of a race that spread out and conquered not just one but three galaxies as well as entirely new dimensions. They did this by being biological beings that fulfilled a complex but focused design to spread life and thought into the darkest corners of reality. The two pillars of this were their eons-old battle-hardened biological programming and their mortality. The latter drove them while the former gave them the tools they needed to accomplish their purpose. To them then, making shortsighted modifications to an otherwise perfectly executed design makes them weaker and less capable. Given enough time they would kill one another off, diminish in technological capacity or simply find some way to disappear like the original aliens in the Cygnus Pentad. They see the great disunity in the Cygnus Pentad as proof of that, as well as the inability for humanity to move beyond their weird bastardizations of alien technology. To them, humanity in the Cygnus Pentad has fallen and lost its way, the mechanical beings that were meant to serve them have gone astray, and the alien races are learning entirely the wrong lessons from this broken society.

Oneflesh are one of the few groups in the Cygnus Pentad that are hierarchial. This is probably a carryover from their interstellar roots, as human society had already become fairly post-hierarchial by the time they had spread out into most of Sol. Some of the factors driving this post-hierarchial push were the lack of resource scarcity and the flexibility of human settlement locations. Petty wars were definitely possible but largescale empires definitely weren't, and there also wasn't any motivation or even really any gain in them. In the Cygnus Pentad, resource access issues are definitely issues again, but the non-hierarchial nature of the galactic society has continued to influence current societies. Words such as "King" and "Queen" appear a lot in the language in very different contexts.

Oneflesh are a definite exception however. Their social structures are not only hierarchial but also heavily regimented and controlled. Being Oneflesh is a bit like belonging to a cult except as you rise through the ranks through merit or loyalty you only find more layers of cult. It's definitely stifling if you don't fully buy in to whatever version of the core beliefs they're using at the time, but if you're okay with being permanently socially ostracized from your birth people, becoming Dreamflesh, Myrflesh or some kind of hybrid is quite easy.

The Great Games

You can't really talk about Oneflesh society without talking about the yearly (by old-earth reckoning) event known as the Great Games. This event is a way to change your social class favorably or to gain or lose leadership. Despite the strict hierarchy elsewhere in the society, the actual Games played here (and their rules) are decided democratically, with some meta-rules (which are also changed democratically) like "A game must have 0.1% or more support in order to be played". Games are competitions between individual players or groups that run physical or mental challenges, usually with some risk of death. As of this writing, Games that require opponents to compete to the death have been outlawed, though that wasn't always the case. In that particular case, the stakes were too high so players tended to use undetectable modifications or even outright dreamflesh technology to get an advantage -- one too many discoveries of that led to the practice being banned outright. Risk of death is still a part of the Games though -- Oneflesh die every single year in large quantities, though only like 1% of all participants proportionally.

The Great Games use old-earth time systems (OET), such as their "yearly" timing or base-60 systems for measuring seconds, minutes, and hours for each Game. Individual Games also can't last longer than an old-earth day (86,400 old-earth seconds is more commonly used here). Some Games are timed in local time systems and then converted to OET later, such as the Sun-chasing event (measured by one full rotation of that celestial body).

The majority of the Great Games will take place in exactly one location -- some territory or habitat controlled by Oneflesh. However certain challenges are space-based or require specific types of celestial bodies (see: Sun-chasing). Those challenges tend to take place after the main event. Events happen somewhat simultaneously, though similar types of games will happen together and larger/more interesting events (especially those that challenge leadership) will happen later with fewer simultaneous events.

The events, scheduling and meta-rules are all decided democratically, through the Thought Nodes Aggregator -- a strange piece of technology that resembles Neural Nanons used elsewhere in the Cygnus Pentad in function but has very different input methods and has layers upon layers of superfluous hardware designed to promote accuracy. I'll get into specifics later, but what this thing does basically is asks questions to your subconscious and measures answers at a very fast rate -- these answers can then be reviewed and altered consciously at a rate that's still fast (direct brain interface and all that) but not as fast. The whole thing is sent out to other nodes in the network which average it with other inputs they've received, around and around until all nodes reach the same set of answers. This system (as well as Neural Nanons) is quite useful for cases where direct democracy is necessary, which is a lot rarer than you'd think from my descriptions so far.

Great Games Rules / Consequences

The point of the Great Games is to change or maintain social standing. As I pointed out before, Oneflesh society is rigidly hierarchial as well as extremely regimented. I'll get to that in my next post, but "multi-level cult" is a pretty good description. Given its interstellar roots, the regimentation is based on meritocracy and technological expertise -- the better you are, the higher your ranking (provided the criteria is fair and no one's suiciding (cheating) of course). To change social ranks, you can normally just prove to leadership that you're better at some specialized task than the person who's already doing it. Or leadership can find you and do something to that extent. If that doesn't work though, then it makes sense to challenge a person who occupies that social niche in a Game that that social niche can compete in.

That person can either accept or reject your challenge:

* If they accept your challenge and lose, you get promoted to that social niche. They get some mark against them (which carries penalties but isn't a big deal).

* If they accept your challenge and win, nothing happens. Sometimes leaders will remove marks against them or add marks to you, but that's really only if something unusual happens in the game.

* If they reject your challenge, they go under review for demotion. This review is done by leadership. They don't necessarily get demoted, but it's basically the same as having a lot of bad marks on your record.

The rules are a bit different if you're challenging someone in a leadership position:

* If they accept your challenge and lose, you become a leader yourself and they lose their leadership position. They still maintain their social niche (and their head).

* If they accept your challenge and win, you're executed.

* If they reject your challenge, they're executed.

Like other systems in the Cygnus Pentad that carry stiff penalties, the purpose of these rules is to prevent violent change of power. Despite their lack of quasi-immortality, Oneflesh have a very different concept of death than you'd think -- sometimes picking the third option above legitimately makes the most sense, especially since you'd automatically get a leader's funeral and your family would get leader post-death benefits.

Next post (should be today, though the other time I said that it wasn't true) will explore Oneflesh social hierarchies.

[Xhin]

Oneflesh Social Niches

Despite the sound of things, Oneflesh don't actually have a caste system. What they have instead is a system based around the concept of a "social niche" -- a collection of traits and actions associated with some set of field proficiencies and some ranking among people with similar skills/interests. Changing your field of study or work doesn't require anything special, you just change your field of study or work. You could be a chlorotech farmer one day and a dualistic pastor the next, provided the economy supports that decision.

However, the privileges/benefits you receive are entirely based on your social niche. If you have land holdings in Oneflesh territory, or access to common-use machines, or some set of Oneflesh having to pay some kind of tribute of goods or services to you are all dependent on your social niche. Additionally, ranking heavily dictates control and legal matters -- people of a higher rank are allowed to use more force to bend you to their will, unless your rank is also high. Depending on what your leadership looks like, you can live under either laissez-faire or brutally authoritarian societies (Oneflesh society tends towards the latter). This fragile balance is maintained through the democratic Great Games system and its inherent death and risk of death. Though it probably does also help that leaving Oneflesh society is easy and heavily encouraged by other races of the Cygnus Pentad.

Social niches are inherently tied to certain fields of study/work. For example, the Husbandry social niche encompasses fields that involve the exploitation of quasi-sentient lifeforms such as Isomorphs, Chlorotech or Fauna. Changing over from the Tangle Mapping industry to the Chlorotech Breeding industry is a hell of a jump but would help round out a Husbandry social niche and those different modes of thinking might make it more likely for you to be chosen for a leadership position through meritocratic promotion or a great game later.

As utopian as this may sound, social niches also carry with them long lists of physical/mental/emotional responsibilities known as Reminders, which ex-Oneflesh like to refer to as "Robot Lists". Members of a social niche are expected to act a very specific way at all times, which includes modes of dress, hobbies and activities, sleep schedules, diet, number of sexual partners, etc. These lists are quite comprehensive and difficult to adhere to, particularly since people aren't usually allowed biological/mechanical modifications and their actual genes are all over the place. The cost of not following this strict regimentation is high (inability to advance without great games intervention coupled with a lack of opportunity due to a low social niche), though not as high as being Nicheless, so I guess it's a better alternative if you want to be a Oneflesh but don't want to conform.

Reminders and Social Niches have both evolved / been redesigned over time towards the common goal of making Oneflesh bodies more capable in the Cygnus Pentad's economy. Provided you follow them thoroughly of course -- if you don't, you end up being a stereotypical "Can't do anything right" Oneflesh to the other races. If you do, well *supposedly* those very strict modes of thinking and acting will eventually make you very optimized in your niche, and with physical workarounds to various interface tech you should be able to compete with other races. In reality, while this does definitely happen, it's quite rare. Humans do seem to be capable of beating transhumans, though only when perfectly optimized. This theory leads to more regimentation and more enforcement, so over time Oneflesh society has gotten increasingly authoritarian.

Voluntary Nicheless, Singulus, and other Post-Peacock movements (P-PM)

Rising authoritarianism tends to lead to rising opposition, and indeed there have been a lot of movements to separate from the collective body of Oneflesh thought. The collective movement here is known as the "Post-Peacock movement", since in their ideology trying to compete with other races in the Cygnus Pentad is a means of strutting around like a peacock, trying to say "look at me, look at me, I can do what you can do too without mods". In the mind of P-PM's, those Oneflesh have completely missed the point of being Oneflesh. They also have a derogatory term for those Oneflesh that are able to compete with other races -- "Honorary Cybcygs", or "Hons" for short. You'll kind of see why when I get into Type I Cybcyg culture.

P-PM's might have that in common, but they vary wildly on what they think Oneflesh should do instead. Singulus for example don't reject biological/mechanical/etc extensions -- so they can genuinely compete with other races. They're generally easier to get along with, except for the little problem of them only having one life to spend. Meanwhile, the Voluntary Nicheless think the entire social system is flawed and the purpose of Oneflesh should be spreading Life and Thought, not trying to compete with already-existing reservoirs of it. There are also the Revisionists, a loose collection of movements that believe in the "One flesh. One life. One soul." principle but reject a lot of the other beliefs associated with it. Ironically, it's the Revisionists that the other races have the hardest time with. That's probably where you'd want to be if you were Oneflesh though -- they're the freest of the lot.

Conclusion

I've probably spent enough time on the Oneflesh and humans in general. Next, I'm going to cover the Cybcygs in more depth.

[Xhin]

Cybcygs

If you haven't already guessed, "Cybcyg" is short for "Cybernetic Cygnoids" -- an old designation that contrasted them with "Isomorphic Cygnoids" or "Technological Cygnoids" (basically just newly designed machines) in the old outdated *mech classification scheme. Isomorphs have since been defined a separate race.

Cybcygs are mechanical entities that have minds, reproduce in some way and belong to themselves (aren't under human control in any way). They have a long and storied history, including the obligatory war with humans (it isn't what you'd think!). I probably won't get into that in this post since I'm still trying to define them a bit better.

Virtue System

I can't really cover more about Cybcygs without discussing their virtue system, as it's an intrinsic part of what they look like, what they do, and how they reproduce. Before I begin though, I should warn you that now that we're done with humans and their (roughly) human virtue systems, things are going to get progressively weirder as I go through the other races.

I guess the biggest part of being a Cybcyg is the concept of Function. Each Cybcyg is descended from some long line of cybcygs who was originally designed for some specific set of tasks. These tasks were once set up to aid or replace humans, but now free from that yoke, they've been able to heavily refine what that set of tasks means and how best to accomplish it, altering their form and methodology accordingly. Cybcygs don't require sleep, don't require rest, can fix or replace their own broken parts (ideally anyway, sometimes they need assistance from other cybcygs), and so can essentially work the same set of tasks over and over forever. They don't necessarily do this though, as they have a kind of general intelligence and a sense of self-preservation (which also isn't what you'd think).

One consequence of being free from human direction is needing some kind of Purpose to replace the original "serve humans" directive, since following their core Purpose is heavily encoded into their programming, and they haven't found useful workarounds to that yet. So, given that they were designed to be wickedly good at specific tasks, this has been rewritten as their new Purpose. They are thus "happiest" when doing the things they were designed to do, and "saddest" when unable to do those things, though neither of those are really good words since they don't subjectively experience anything resembling a human emotion.

This by itself would make their virtue system seem alien from an outside perspective -- for example a colony of culinary cybcygs might go to war with and enslave a nearby human population, only to then feed them gourmet meals repeatedly while leaving their society alone otherwise. Asking the humans for permission would never cross their minds, as subjugating the population is the most effective means of accomplishing their goal.

However, their virtue system gets more alien still when you consider the effect of general intelligence and their unique sense of self-preservation. I'll discuss the self-preservation first because it's pretty different:

Cybcyg Self-Preservation

Cybcyg self-preservation is ultimately based on something akin to "legacy" -- they want whatever their set of tasks is (and their specific methodologies) to be done forever. Unlike rogue isomorphs though they don't necessarily want to turn the entire universe towards their goal -- just having one of them is enough.

* Thus, a Cybcyg who is the only one of its kind in an area (as far as it can tell) will ruthlessly fight for its own survival.

* This same Cybcyg will use its general intelligence to determine that there's a chance that it will fail to survive, so it will also try to reproduce itself. There are several methods of self-replication that the overarching Cybcyg society carefully programmed into every single Cybcyg so that this was usually possible.

* This population increase won't be recursive -- as the number of cybcygs goes up, the chance of all of them dying goes down, and the way that their general intelligence works (getting to that in a minute) will interpret that to mean that they should reproduce slower and slower.

* Their productivity will increase a lot -- maybe a hundredfold or a millionfold depending on how likely the first one was to die, but this doesn't factor into their virtue system in any way -- one, a hundred or a million copies of the same set of tasks all count as one. And one is enough.

* For each individual in this proto-society, self-preservation still makes sense (as dying increases the chances that their function and methodology will be lost. However, if their death is 100% guaranteed to preserve their "legacy", they will willingly destroy themselves. Anytime where overpopulation becomes a legitimate threat and there aren't other options, their numbers will dwindle to something sustainable. Overpopulation isn't generally a problem due to their self-limiting reproduction, but it can become one if the environment drastically changes or something.

Their death is never 100% guaranteed to preserve their legacy however, so in practice this will lead to some weird results. To explain why, I'll have to talk about their general intelligence, which is the third piece of this puzzle.

Cybcyg General Intelligence

Cybcyg intelligence is statistical. At any particular choice crossroads, they evaluate all possibilities and determine the likelihood of each one fulfilling their goals. Let's go back to the culinary war example. They might determine that:

* Enslaving the humans has a 80% chance of them fulfilling their goals of serving gourmet meals forever.

* There is a 20% chance that attempting to enslave the humans will result in the humans fighting back and slaughtering them all or otherwise leading to some future state where they're all dead.

For a human, those seem like pretty good odds so if the prize is worth it (fulfillation of life goals) they'll probably convince themselves to take that risk. Cybcygs however will make both choices simultaneously in order to ensure that all possibilities are covered. So, a group of a million culinary cybcygs will procedurally split the decision among their population -- 800,000 will go to war and 200,000 will not go to war.

So that's great, they've explored both possibilities in proportion of their statistical certainty. They do this with everything. There's a big problem here that leads to their really alien behavior and it involves another facet of their general intelligence that should be kept in mind.

Cybcygs can't actually predict the future, and are aware of this. One consequence of this is a reckless push to increase their own intelligence towards the unobtainable goal of Perfect Prediction, however a more insidious consequence is the knowledge that they could be horribly wrong with the decisions they make. On the individual level this leads to making sure that they don't think too many moves ahead (as the possibility they got everything wrong gets worse and worse over time), but on the larger scale this means they're aware that other Cybcygs of their group are potentially fucking everything up.

Because they can't predict the future, they also don't put much stock in their past -- past decisions were made without information that they have now, after all. They are thus consistently in a state of reevaluating their current set of actions, trying to figure out if they're the best course forward, and if so, what new reasons to attach to them. Thus, even if they started some set of actions a year ago for clear reasons that they clearly remember, they might find themselves with entirely new reasons for doing that set of actions now which are retroactively fitted to why they made the decision in the first place. They remember why they originally made that decision, but that knowledge is irrelevant.

These two traits make them extremely adaptable (useful for short-to-medium-term survival!), but also leads to really chaotic behavior over time. With groups it can get extremely complex as well, which I'll explore next:

Self-Bounding Fractal Warfare

These two traits combine with their statistical/procedural minds and their unique sense of self-preservation and lead to some really weird results. Let's go back to the "War of the Chefbots" example again, but explore it in more depth:

* Enslaving a group of nearby humans in order to achieve life fulfillment seems like it has an 80% chance of working and a 20% chance of going horribly wrong.

* The group of one million Chefmechs (Using the -bot suffix is racist, sorry about that) split this probability into 800,000 of them going to war and 200,000 of them not going to war.

* In the mind of the 200,000, they're fulfilling the statistical probability mesh, however they're each aware that the 800,000 could be wrong and could be dooming them all.

* Since they can't see the future and know they can't see the future, what they see is some of the 800,000 dying as the humans fight back, and since they chose not to fight, they grow stronger in their convictions that they stayed home not because of the statistical probability mesh but because they thought the 800,000 were dooming them all. Meanwhile, the 800,000 are probably seeing a slow victory unfold (despite some death here and there) so they reaffirm their beliefs in the cause.

* The belief of the 200,000 in impending doom grows and grows, until finally they decide to rebel and fight with the humans to prevent their version of the apocalypse. They can justify killing other Chefmechs because they're saving the race as a whole.

* The 800,000 chefmechs now have a problem. They don't care about self-preservation of themselves at the moment, so the fact that they're dying individually by the hands of the 200,000 is meaningless. However, the 200,000 are preventing their cause, so they should be killed. However, now they have a second problem -- killing the 200,000 would eliminate the safeguard against the 20% probability that they were all killed.

* Given this, they have a new choice to make. They weigh the possibilities and determine that there's a 80% chance that killing the rebels is a good idea and a 20% chance that they should avoid that. So 640,000 of them will kill the rebels that are standing in their way, and 160,000 of them will allow themselves to be killed if necessary.

* Over time, the rebels will have a new problem -- their action of fighting the warmongering chefmechs is leading to their numbers reducing. They can still justify killing the warmongering chefmechs because they're saving the race, but if they're losing members of their rebel cause, they might run out and doom their cause, which intrinsically dooms the race. The odds don't agree with them -- 640,000 vs 200,000 (roughly). They've been employing stealthier and stealthier tactics (and using human help wherever possible), but they've still determined that there's a 60% chance they'll fail and doom the race and a 40% chance they'll succeed.

* Cybcygs being cybcygs, this then means that 80,000 rebels will continue fighting and 120,000 rebels will fight the 80,000 remaining fighters.

* At this same time, the 640,000 will notice that they've been killing other cybcygs. Their previous reasons for this were very justified, but those reasons were based on their cause of enslaving humans, and they've mostly been killing other cybcygs instead. So they re-evaluate and 75% of them decide that the war isn't worth killing other cybcygs so they quit killing the remaining 80,000 fighters. The other 25% continue to do so.

* While all this is going on, the cybcygs who are no longer fighting other cybcygs or humans will see the slight victory they've achieved and will create a new 80%/20% push towards enslaving the humans. And the cycle will repeat.

All of this combined creates some really bizarre complex behavior. From an outside perspective you'd see an invading army raze your territory to the ground, fight itself internally in a fractal pattern and then push forward for another wave. These waves would have their own fractal civil wars but depending on how the overall war was going they would either get shorter or longer in duration, leading to either fullscale invasion or retreat. Watching individuals wouldn't give you any better idea of what was going on -- they could fight humans, fight other cybcygs tooth and nail, try to avoid fighting them, and allow themselves to be hurt by them in some incomprehensible pattern.

Just when you think all hope is lost, and this group of omnipotent (but really confused) beings enslaves your kind, all they want to do is serve you gourmet meals over and over. You try to leave and they don't stop you. You try to kill them, and they allow it and just make more. Society returns to normal, aside from gourmet meals made by the chefmechs. There's a chefmech in every business, a chefmech in every home, a chefmech on every street corner. They become a ubiquitous part of life.

Then one day, they start killing each other again. They kill humans that get in the way of this. Then start to make war on human society at large. Then join with humans against that, and then fight those rebels, and then all of a sudden all of them stop synchronously. Reevaluate things. Then leave the planet peacefully and en masse. No explanation ever given.

What the humans aren't seeing here is an insane self-fulfilling prophecy they cooked up -- everything was going well for them, too well in fact, and there was this slight lingering possibility that some rebels would appear and try to liberate the humans. Nevermind the fact that the humans were okay with their presence at this point -- that's irrelevant to their purposeful minds. They decided slowly that some of their number were corrupt and must be killed, for the sake of the race, they just had to find out which ones. Some of them disagreed with this procedurally, of course. Over time they think "Aha! The ones who disagreed must have been the ones that are going to rebel, let's kill them!" and so a civil war started over absolutely nothing. I'll let you figure out why they left the planet.

Conclusion

This post should demonstrate why dealing with cybcygs is absolutely ridiculous and why something like the USL is needed to preserve some kind of sanity. It should also give a bit of background into cybcygs that helps you understand their larger societies, reproductive modes and interaction with the other races, which I will cover next, though probably not tonight (It's pretty late already).

[Man in Space]

I don’t have anything of substance to add, but this is delicious and I hope to see more.

[Xhin]

I don’t have anything of substance to add, but this is delicious and I hope to see more.

Thanks!

Cybcyg Types

Before we get into the larger groupings of Cybcygs, I should first mention the different types, as they play a pretty big role:

* Type I -- These are essentially automatons. They do what their programming tells them to do -- they're driven towards fulfilling whatever their Function is, by way of their Form. And while they may logically decide to participate in larger Cybcyg society and its Art of Self-Alteration, this is an ancillary goal and done with the intent of maintaining their Function. Type I Cybcygs are also provably quasi-sentient with full-sentience bursts, as would be expected from entities incapable of modifying their own neural axioms.

* Type II -- These are a bit different. While their virtue systems are (roughly) the same, they're capable of thinking on a deeper, more recursive level about how best to fulfill their Function. They also have something interesting known as Aspect. They're also fully sentient. All of these changes are probably due to the Anachronium that's integrated with their bodies. I'll cover a lot about Type II Cybcygs and their history soon.

Extra-ordinary Types

These types are not recognized by other races, who will instead call them different names (which I'll mention), but in Cybcyg society the distinctions are important.

* Type III -- Within Cybcyg society, this is a general classification system for Cybcygs with the equivalent of mental disorders. Below are a couple of the more common types:

* Type III-a -- Other races call these "Apathetic Type I Cybcygs". These are Type I Cybcygs that lack Purpose, so while they have functioning minds they lack motivation to do anything, and due to their lack of recursion they're unable to change this. Type III-a Cybcygs occasionally appear from faulty reproduction -- the alterations to the Purpose hardware aren't yet perfectly redundant, so sometimes they're born with the "serve humans" circuit removed but the replacement not installed. I'll cover more about this in the Reproduction section.

Since Type III-a Cybcygs don't impede other Cybcygs, they're left alone. They also aren't helped because of a quirk in Cybcyg society where their Function is assumed to be nothing rather than whatever it actually is. Other races sometimes take them and attempt to tune them back towards servitude, but so far have been unable to get around the obtuse programming changes Cybcygs have made to themselves.

* Type III-b -- These are early Type II Cybcygs that lack Function -- They essentially altered themselves too much and so lost a coherent Function, while retaining Purpose. Other Type II Cybcygs like to enslave these, as they are able (and willing!) to perform Functions that they are not explicitly designed for.

* Type III-c -- Known elsewhere as "Cybcyg Hybrids", these are other races that have taken on Type II (or sometimes even Type I) structures in some significant amount. By Cybcyg reckoning, they're Cybcygs because they have the characteristic hardware and Form, however they also have the minds/virtue systems of whatever their main race is, so by Cybcyg logic they are Cybcygs that have faulty programming. Cybcygs would like to fix the Type III-c, but they are forbidden by the USL (as that counts as a form of Polymorphing)

* Type IV -- Also known as "Transmech II", or sometimes just "Transmech" (though that's ambiguous with previous transmech lines). Type IV are Type II that have taken on biological or alien forms either partially or fully. Type I Cybcygs don't recognize them at all (even if their Function matches), but Type II have integrated them into their larger society.

* Type V -- These are other races that are a part of Cybcyg society in some way. These were originally viewed as a Type III that had both faulty programming (though not as bad as the Type III-c) and faulty Form, but with the advent of Type IV Cybcygs, they're instead seen as a kind of hybrid of Type IV and Type III-c. Nevermind that they're completely different races with their own independent histories -- that information is irrelevant.

Because of the way the Cybcyg overarching society is set up, they don't really distinguish the different races the way we do -- both aliens and humans are seen as just having different Functions and so different accompanying Forms. They do however classify them as Type III-c or Type V if they join Cybcyg society, as the typing system is a vital part of their ruleset.

Up next, I'm going to start laying down the foundations for the overarching Cybcyg society. This will cover things like their history, the use of Aspect, the Art of Self-Alteration, and so on. I'll also be going into a lot of detail around Type II Cybcygs, as they're pretty pivotal.

[Ares Land]

Well, that's just great. I really like the idea of Purpose.

Two questions that came to mind:

- What are the options for Oneflesh who want to leave their wonderfully dystopian society, but are still weirded out by Dreamflesh, Newflesh and other transhuman antics?
- If I understand the Cybcyg correctly, shoudan't they take into account, too, the real possibility of a fractal civil war and the danger it poses to both purpose fulfillment and self-preservation? Wouldn't that create a third side everytime the population splits in two?