The Council of Alephs

[Xhin]

Across the Dodecaverse there are beings of unfathomable power known as Alephs. They didn't create nor maintain the Dodecaverse (that honor presumably belongs to the Naked Singularities) but they wield similar power and responsibility. In this post I'm going to go into what they are in great detail.

A recap on the Dodecaverse

All of my conworlds, books, games, etc take place within the Dodecaverse -- a twelve-dimensional collection of universes with their own unique physical properties. Around three thousand years ago by their time (far in our future), a civilization of immortal humans and Automatons that spanned almost three galaxies from our universe (designated [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0] in the coordinate scheme) began exploring it. Within a couple hundred years, their original universe went temporally hyperbolic, randomly causing entire lines of causality to be permanently erased. This accelerated exploration of the Dodecaverse -- planets were blasted apart into Conical Arks that transported billions of people at a time to different universes. The Council of Alephs played a role in the collapse of the parent universe -- they didn't cause it, but they were aware of what caused it and took actions to prevent it from happening again. I'll cover some of that somewhere in this post. In any case, humans spread out very far into the Dodecaverse and as the millenia passed, those groups that were able to retain their old technology spread out even farther, limited somewhat by the Labyr of course.

The different universes largely lost connection with one another -- unlike the Council of Alephs, the surviving civilizations can't easily communicate with other universes, and that's even assuming they retain the technological ability to travel the Dodecaverse -- different physical laws cause original technology to not work right for all kinds of reasons.

In any case, this is just a brief recap of what the Dodecaverse is and who's occupying it.

Infinite power and Aleph Power

None of the universes in the dodecaverse (including our own) is known to use mathematical infinity, with the exception of the size of the universe (some are spatially infinite in one or more of the axises, some are actually hyperbolic and split off infinitely in an infinite number of directions). This would cause issues like Zeno's paradox where nothing can ever change or happen because there would be a mathematically infinite amount of steps involved. Instead, energy and things like it that reach a certain density will become "infinite", acting like they're infinite despite being some fixed value.

Something "infinite" like this, assuming it's under the control of a conscious entity, can transfer as much finite energy as wants as many times as it wants. So in a universe that uses magic, a spellcaster that has infinite mana can cast spells that cost finite mana as many times as they want. They're not weak by any means -- they can absolutely destroy the entire finite human civilization there if they want to. However, they're not Aleph.

Infinities can be transferred. If there's a spell that costs infinite mana because something in its effect is infinite, then with infinite mana it can be done exactly once. However, the concept of Aleph gets around this -- Aleph is immutable no matter how many infinite spells or infinite energy to get matter up to light speed or whatever is done. If you have Aleph mana then you will always have aleph mana, and nothing (including the interaction of other beings with aleph mana) can get around this.

Becoming an Aleph (by Council standards)

Merely gaining aleph power doesn't make you an Aleph. It definitely makes you a being of unfathomable power in your universe. In universes without a magic mechanism, you can gain similar power by creating an object that contains aleph energy that you can control in some way -- these are obviously more complicated to create because of how difficult it is to contain even infinite energy, but it is possible since, as mentioned, you have infinite energy to work with,

In any case, gaining Aleph power in some form may make members of the Council aware of you, but there are some other conditions you have to fulfill before they'll actually contact you.

1. Just because you have Aleph power doesn't mean that you're invulnerable. You can still totally die, and if immortality tech didn't make it to your universe then you can even die of old age. A being with aleph mana that dies will effectively erase the aleph mana from existence (it'll still exist because it's immutable but it's attached to something that is no longer connected to the dodecaverse). If your aleph power is contained within a controllable object, then when you die others could conceivably use it. To become an Alepn you have to become completely invulnerable to death by any means.

There are various ways of achieving this, and a lot depends on the rules of your universe, but generally it involves separating your conscious existence from your corporeal existence in some way. Aleph power works because there's a temporally parabolic subuniverse that contains infinite power -- if infinite power gets transferred out, the timeline resets and it contains infinite power again. So all you'd really need to do is transfer your conscious existence there. It's conjectured by the Council of Alephs that the actual powers in the Dodecaverse help beings achieve this because conscious experience is still poorly understood and there are many many ways this could go horribly wrong. Many of the beings on the council have stories of Ascending in this way where they got trapped in infinite loops of singular experience only to be rescued eventually by something not under their own control.

In any case, once separated you're no longer tied to your corporeal form. If it dies or the entire subuniverse it's in is erased or something you can use your aleph power to create a new corporeal form.

2. The Council of Alephs only invite a being with aleph power if they have supremacy in their universe. Conditions that cause one being to achieve aleph power can cause other beings to also achieve aleph power, and this will typically lead to power struggles because beings that achieve aleph are typically very power hungry. Since the effects of aleph power can spill over to nearby universes, if this is bad enough it may cause the Council to deem that universe some kind of threat and if their interventions don't work, they'll put it under a Seal.

In order to be contacted by the Council of Alephs, you have to undeniably either be the strongest in your universe or have the other alephs under your control in some way, or have them sustainably sealed away or something. Some of the Alephs in the Council have the ability of Selective Omniscience that allows them to determine the state of your entire universe and whether you have supremacy or not.

Note that you don't have to actually rule over your own entire universe -- you just have to have enough power to do so and the abilities to counteract any other alephs that may exist. Once you've been contacted, the Council will intervene and prevent future Alephs from forming without your express consent. They're quite good at doing this -- they've pooled together the abilities and knowledge of alephs across incalculable universes and refined their techniques over thousands of years -- and that's not even including the non-human dodecaverse natives who were doing it back when humans were beating each other up with sticks.

3. If you're too power-hungry or too genocidal you won't be contacted and will instead likely be Sealed or otherwise contained. The standards here are really really low -- most of the beings on the Council of Alephs are antiheroes at absolute best and supervillains at worst, and they would definitely subjugate or destroy one another if they could. However, they're willing to cooperate with each other over common interests, like making sure the Dodecaverse itself isn't damaged or their local supremacy isn't threatened. There are however beings that achieve Aleph that literally want to end all of existence, or are unwilling to cooperate (or even pretend to) under any circumstances whatsoever. If you're one of those, you're not getting invited to the Council and your universe will probably be detached from the Dodecaverse soon enough.

In the next post, I'll cover how Alephs interact with one another and other universes.

[bradrn]

Hooray! A new Xhin thread! And one which looks like it gives more juicy detail on the Dodecaverse, too.

(No, I haven’t read it yet. I look forward to doing so right now.)

EDIT: Just finished reading. To make a more substantive comment:

This would cause issues like Zeno's paradox where nothing can ever change or happen because there would be a mathematically infinite amount of steps involved.

This feels like almost exactly the opposite of the usual understanding of Zeno’s paradox (as I understand it). The resolution is to observe that an infinite sequence of numbers can be summed to yield a finite number, as long as the numbers in the sequence shrink quickly enough. And this should be true independent of which universe you do the proof in. So the infinities don’t actually matter in this sense.

[Xhin]

Interactions between Alephs and their Universes

Alephs all turn out a bit differently from one another -- the rules of their universe and who they were as people (or other beings) makes them each have different techniques from one another. Some new ones are quite weak and don't even know how to do simple things like create new subuniverses or Uplift other objects or beings to Aleph status. At bare minimum, they do need a way of interacting with other Alephs, so once invited to the Council they'll be taught the heavily refined technique of Dodecaversal Telepathy, which allows them to communicate with any other Aleph or group instantly.

Alephs are permanently tied to their universe. While they can project their corporeal form, consciousness or abilities to other universes instantaneously (assuming they know a technique for it), they can't move to another universe permanently. If their universe is Sealed for any reason, they leave with it.

As mentioned, Aleph power itself is strong enough to ripple outwards into other universes instantaneously. The range over the Dodecaverse is limited, so long ago, the Council built nonsentient alephs in intermediate universes to keep their network intact. Humans being humans, one of the human alephs decided to take this a step farther and created automaton alephs whose role was to populate as much of the dodecaverse as possible with these -- this went horribly wrong and led to the emergence of the Labyr who would've otherwise just slumbered peacefully until the heat death of their respective universes. On the plus side, the wave of Parabolic universe destruction that this act had caused stopped. Thankfully the Labyr aren't an existential threat to the Alephs (since their power is immutable), they're just a big problem to the non-aleph humans.

In any case, this network (with nonsentient alephs now placed manually and very carefully) enables Dodecaversal Telepathy, as well as the ability of Alephs to interact with or observe other universes easily (provided they know techniques for it of course). Since alephs of any form are immutable, the nodes in this network are also immutable -- regardless of what happens to that universe that node will always carry these signals. Unless it's Sealed of course.

Interactions between Alephs

Alephs occasionally hate one another and wish each other's destruction. This is kind of a general rule because of the personalities of beings that become Alephs, but occasionally it's actually heated as well -- usually due to an Aleph interfering in another Aleph's universe in some way.

Unfortunately, Alephs are immutable. An Aleph cannot kill another Aleph, or remove their source of power, or disconnect them from their universe or anything whatsoever. They can conceivably destroy the other Aleph's universe with simple Aleph destructive techniques, but other Alephs with the technique of Planar Archetyping can restore it, as well as protect it from further damage of that type. They also can't Seal the other universe by themselves -- Sealing requires a majority of the Council of Alephs to agree in a literal physical sense because the dissenters will pour their power into stopping it. Contested universes between Alephs that have a dispute will have anti-sealing protections in place.

They can definitely subject the other Aleph's corporeal form to repeated death and/or torture -- these kinds of techniques are very common and protecting against them is much more advanced, so a lot of the time new Alephs that have some kind of dispute will go incorporeal altogether until it resolves -- that's as simple as atomizing your corporeal form and not restoring it.

There aren't really any rules on conduct with the Council of Alephs -- the whole thing is managed on a Might makes Right basis. Those with more of a pure heart might step in if something isn't right, but they might be opposed by someone who's interested in seeing the dispute play out. Typically, those in the Council with the most power (represented by the amount of techniques they know) are neutral so long as the dispute doesn't threaten the dodecaverse as a whole.

Larger threats and Sealing

The reason there's even a Council of Alephs in the first place is to counter dodecaverse-wide threats. As mentioned, some beings that gain aleph power seek to end the entirety of existence. There are also other issues like Automaton Alephs that go astray as mentioned, or universes spontaneously collapsing that ripple out into adjacent ones. Some of these threats have been quite terrifying -- one that comes to mind is the Wall of Void -- a collection of universes seemingly infinite in four dimensional axises that caused the collapse of universes in its path at a rate of about one per day. This was at least very very far out, somewhere on the order of [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,10^6,0] from origin but it would've eaten most of the civilized dodecaverse in another few thousand years if it hadn't been stopped. Deviant Labyr Alephs actually did most of the work here since it was their universes that were threatened first.

As mentioned, Universes that are a threat to the Dodecaverse as a whole will be Sealed. This requires either a majority of all Alephs in the Council or at least more Alephs willing to Seal than opponents. The actual technique of Sealing is creating a barrier between the problematic universe and the Dodecaverse as a whole that has Aleph strength. Since Aleph is immutable, this means that nothing can get in or out ever again. At least not into the Dodecaverse -- some Alephs believe that the universe will drop into a different dodecaverse or something else entirely, but there's no evidence either way because no Sealed universe has ever been interacted with ever again.

Because of the way the Dodecaverse works, there can't be nothing there that occupies the space where that universe used to be or the Chimera that flows between universes will start a feedback loop that starts to damage adjacent universes. So a few minutes after a universe is Sealed, a Parabolic Universe will inevitably form in the space left behind. The Council of Alephs tend to believe that the maintainers of the Dodecaverse are doing this because the oldest non-human Alephs say that is is the case, but it tends to hold up under empirical testing as well -- the more secretive a project to Seal a universe repeatedly is, the more time it takes to be fixed and it also isn't instant so it likely isn't a natural mechanism. Additionally, there are no techniques for creating new Universes from scratch (and this even seems to be physically impossible) so it can't be the action of another Aleph.

In the next post, I'll detail the different races (if that word even makes sense) present within the Council.

[Xhin]

This would cause issues like Zeno's paradox where nothing can ever change or happen because there would be a mathematically infinite amount of steps involved.

This feels like almost exactly the opposite of the usual understanding of Zeno’s paradox (as I understand it). The resolution is to observe that an infinite sequence of numbers can be summed to yield a finite number, as long as the numbers in the sequence shrink quickly enough. And this should be true independent of which universe you do the proof in. So the infinities don’t actually matter in this sense.

That's fair if time also has infinite subdivisions, but time seems to be universally quantized in the Dodecaverse, with the understanding being that if time were infinitely subdivisible conscious experience would be impossible.

In any case, thanks for the support! Feel free to ask more questions -- they do help a lot.

[Xhin]

The Races of the Council of Alephs

Note that the race or species or whatever of a particular Aleph is largely irrelevant -- having immutably infinite power elevates you way above your species. It might affect your corporeal form for a while, but Alephs tend to take on flashier hybrid forms over time to better suit their (very justified!) megalomania. It will definitely affect your personality, motivations and the ways you interact with other Alephs, however, so it's worth bearing in mind. Human Alephs tend to care in some way about humanity as a whole, for example.

* Humans -- as mentioned, there are a lot of human Alephs. They form the vast majority of the council, but their motivations and alliances are all over the place so this isn't really helpful for humanity as a whole. Humans are a very new species in the grand scheme of things -- only a few tens of thousands of years away from being primitives on some random dustball world. Other races are far far older. Another distinction is that humans have spread all over the Dodecaverse at breathtaking pace like a virus. Other races tend to stick to their main universe or if they do spread, they're very selective and they move very slowly. A lot of this has to do with the destruction of their home universe and their civilization's gigantic population / unity / technological level at the time.

* Deviant Labyr -- the Labyr are an existential threat to human civilization as a whole. These are beings that play with infinities naturally like they're toys -- Labyr ships for example have infinite strength because of the scale-infinite (yeah there is a way around spatial quantization) beings known as Quettans that they treat like harvestable plants. And these happen in universes without magic -- hyperbolic ones very similar to our own with stars and galaxies and so forth. I go into a lot more Labyr lore in a couple upcoming games I've worked on, but the main takeaway here is that they're not explicitly evil, they're just doing what the humans are doing with proliferation, except they see other entities as exploitable resources.

In any case, Labyr as a whole don't become Aleph -- they're already immeasurably powerful because of the powerful entities they've domesticated, and they're also entirely united in purpose. Labyr do occasionally deviate from the norm though -- this is a part of the way their "species" (they're incorporeal so this word doesn't really work) works, so they're more adaptable. They tend to avoid universes where Aleph is achievable because those are also universes where their technology doesn't work, but deviants will occasionally find their way into them and achieve Aleph.

Since they ultimately see all other sentient beings as exploitable resources, they're always willing to cooperate with the Council of Alephs, including on very friendly terms. The power equalization between Alephs helps a lot -- they know they can't explicitly exploit beings of immeasurable power, but they can definitely exchange favors and cultivate mutual respect. Humans that come from Labyr-infested universes are wary of this, but the rest are pretty easily manipulated into serving Labyr interests (like preventing anti-labyr human alephs from helping parts of humanity under siege by the Labyr). It's a real problem.

It's worth pointing out that until that one errant human aleph released their aleph-creating automaton, the Labyr were peaceful and in a kind of stasis. They had spread to a bunch of universes over millions of years, using parabolic ones that they'd completely taken over as giant computational machines to try to find their next steps -- the automaton however destroyed parabolic universes and erased a lot of progress so that's when they began a new expansion phase to find a way to create computational machines without parabolic universes.

* Non-Primitives -- like the Labyr, these are names the humans have assigned, not what the actual races call themsleves. In any case, this race is also native to the Dodecaverse, and corporeally manifests as platonic solids which are as smooth and unbreakable as possible given the universe that they're in. They're also way older than any other race -- they existed before the humans' parent universe was created for example. Or so they say. They are also the original Alephs and originally had contact with the actual powers in the dodecaverse. Or so they say. Really, it's hard to tell what they actually are -- they say all kinds of conflicting things that make their other claims very probable lies. Whenever there's some hint of a Naked Singularity being found, they'll claim that they have no knowledge of them beyond what the Council has gleaned, despite this being contradictory to their claimed origin.

The epithet "Non-primitives" was coined because of their tendency to call human alephs "primitives". Which yeah, that's fair -- regardless of their actual age, they're definitely older than human civilization. Not a whole lot is actually known about the Non-Primitives -- they do tend to have the most knowledge as far as aleph techniques go and are also very definitely neutral in inter-aleph disputes. They are however very passionate about dodecaverse-wide threats and tend towards inspiring or coercing other Alephs in the council to work together on those problems.

* The Interveners -- This race is a small group (well, small by Council standards anyway -- only a few thousand) of powerful immortal beings that interact with beings in universes to serve whatever their goals are. They've also all become Alephs -- the timeline on that is after humans started becoming Alephs, but the race as a whole is much older and has interacted with humanity on many occasions in human or human-like corporeal forms. It's hard to tell what their goals actually are, but gaining Aleph power only emboldened them. This tends to be the race that causes disputes with other Alephs incidentally -- they'll do whatever they like in a universe they've targeted, regardless of what the local Aleph has to say or do about it. Some particularly targeted universes have caused their Aleph to Seal themselves out of frustration. Thankfully there aren't very many of them and the other Alephs have largely banded together to prevent interactions or actions by them that would cause too much destruction. Annoyingly though, some non-Intervener alephs have allied with them -- generally it's those that have Glimpsed. Those that have Seen are presumably allied with them as well, but they're permanently damaged and can no longer take meaningful actions.

Because it's starting to come up anyway, in the next post I'll detail both of those and how being an Aleph can sometimes go catastrophically wrong.

[Xhin]

Omniscience Techniques

When the Interveners became Alephs and joined the Council, they brought with them powerful Omniscience techniques, many of which they dispersed freely. Some limited forms of this already existed, but it was more a means of locating something specific or becoming aware of something specific happening in a different universe, definitely not a means of becoming aware of an entire universe at once. Or beyond it.

Omniscience techniques allow its user to become aware of an entire universe at once, in its entire potentially infinite expanse, down to the smallest detail. This kind of of experience doesn't play well with the focused and subjective experience of conscious entities, so further techniques have been refined to allow selective filtering (known as Filtered Omniscience) or to create bubbles of subjective experience that can move instantly anywhere within the universe (known as Bordered Omniscience). The Interveners consider these techniques to be abominations, but there's nothing they can actually do about it.

The techniques that the Interveners share freely are universe-specific Omniscience. However, there's a second type that allows the Aleph to be aware of the Dodecaverse as a whole, including the motivations and internal worlds of every single sentient being (and this includes other Alephs as well). However, this kind of experience is even more traumatic for conscious entities so it has to be carefully worked towards and sustained only briefly for the tiniest fraction of a second. The Interveners won't teach these techniques to just anyone -- they're very selective and choose based on their own mysterious motivations.

Those that have had this second kind of experience are known as those who have Glimpsed. Something about the experience fundamentally changes the motivations of the aleph performing it, and they tend to then ally with the Interveners and outside of Dodecaverse-wide threats seem very detached. There are however exceptions -- a Deviant Labyr that had the experience not only didn't ally with the Interveners, but created a bastardized version of the technique known as Selective Omniscience that they then taught to a select group. This particular technique is like a more powerful form of Filtered Omniscience, as it can only target a single universe, but allows its user to see the motivations and internal worlds of any being inside (including Alephs). It can also be filtered to something very very specific so the experience isn't as traumatic as Omniscience techniques normally are. There are also several cases of humans that have Gimpsed, only to go on chaotic tangents (I'll cover those incidents in a bit).

Incidentally, Selective Omniscience doesn't help when trying to understand the truths and lies of the Non-Primitives -- their internal worlds seem to be as equally contradictory or non-consistent as what they say.

Some alephs have had the experience, didn't go crazy afterwards, and also didn't ally with the Interveners -- generally this happens with non-humans but there are a couple human alephs that got out of it as well -- known as the Resistant Few, all beings that have remained themselves and not allied with the Interveners will instead have universes that are pretty much constantly interfered with by them and their supporters, but their advanced Omniscience abilities and the techniques of Autonomic Omnipotence that they've learned from this kind of conflict (and shared eventually with other Resistant Few of course) will eventually make the Interveners stop.

Those that have Seen

Occasionally, Glimpsing in one of its many forms goes wrong. If sustained for too long or without adequate preparation the effect will become permanent, and the Aleph will become one of those that have Seen -- permanently Omniscient of the entire dodecaverse. This isn't as great as it sounds. While they're still able to move around in their corporeal form or use their aleph power however they want, they seem to lack the motivation to do so. If they act at all, their actions are extremely strange, and they don't communicate. Occasionally their universes will be Sealed without the intervention of other Alephs , even if anti-sealing protections are in place. They do however occasionally help with dodecaverse-wide threats and never cause them, so they're allowed to stay on the Council despite not really contributing to it a normal way.

The Interveners claim that they are perpetually in full Omniscience, and those that have Seen have just become like them. Observations with Selective Omniscience of Intervener/Seen internal worlds seems to support this, but further mysteries can't be deciphered because focusing on a full omniscient state while in a full omniscient state yourself is an infinite feedback loop that's tantamount to becoming one who has Seen yourself.

For whatever reason, Omniscience techniques of any kind can't find Naked Singularities or even any mention of them -- there's some kind of censorship inherent in Omniscience techniques that prevents this. Regular Singularities of any kind are also blocked. And the energy that makes up infinite or aleph power is seen as a single unit, not as individual units of energy. A consequence of this is that even the Interveners are just as in the dark about the true powers of the Dodecaverse as everyone else is.

[Xhin]

The Mystery of the Singularities

It's thought that the true powers in the dodecaverse are singularities, specifically naked interactable versions of them. There are a few pieces of evidence that support this:

* The non-primitives say that this is the case and that they had contact with them when they first became alephs. Granted, they also claim to have no knowledge of them beyond what the Council of Alephs has discovered.

* There's some kind of censorship mechanic inherent in Omniscience techniques. They can't perceive aleph or infinite energy, they can't peer into singularities of any kind, but most damning is that all mention of naked singularities are also somehow removed from the omniscience experience -- that's a level of active censorship that doesn't make a whole lot of sense as some kind of natural law to omniscience.

* There have been actual leads. The biggest one of these is connected to the universe that caused the humans' original universe's destruction, which I'll cover next.

* It isn't necessarily a piece of evidence, but Flat universes in the dodecaverse are bounded by a singularity on one of the three spatial axises. Technically, it's one Singularity on either end, but Omniscience surveys show them as the same (heavily censored) object. Additionally, hyperbolic universes form singularities with some regularity. These objects are all censored from Omniscient gaze in the same way that naked singularities are.

* Infinite power itself is a form of singularity -- the creation of an infinite state (that's also censored). Aleph power is just an extension of this, and considering the ways beings experimenting with Aleph will get deus ex machinae from unknown sources, it's likely that aleph power and the true powers in the dodecaverse are intimately connected.

* The universe that caused the destruction of the main one and contained the best evidence of the existence of sentient singularities also has some really peculiar properties attached to it, despite it having been Sealed. I'll get to that when I make the next post. In any case, because of those effects it's conjectured that the true power there must have supra-aleph abilities.