red-and-black-jesters

[red-and-black-jesters]

Whalefall - Faction Index

Or, a collection of introductions to the different polities and expeditions that will inevitably be crashing into a primordial, colossal space hulk as it tears into reality with no warning, and their wildly varying degrees of preparedness for this.

On the one hand we have:

Our Brave Pioneers - the Commonwealth Interstellar Science Craft Goodall (a joint venture of Vanguard Terraforming and Biogenics, and the University of Centinati's Colleges of Xenology) as it enters the last leg of a three-year survey mission into the now-charted Pioneer Expanse.

Our Heroic Peacekeeprs - the Commonwealth Interstellar Peacekeeping Craft Amity, on long term assignment to the peacekeeping mission guarding the terran frontier, as it pursues a ship full of terrorists and fugitives fleeing justice.

Our Courageous Freedom Fighters - the recently rechristened San Martin, seized in a mutiny from a collaborationist puppet government by the Human Liberation Front in a show of force that didn't go quite as well as planned, no attempting to escape pursuit before they're all put up against the wall.

And then on the remaining claws, tentacles, and pseudopods:

Here Be Dragons - a progenitor-ship the Idrian Union, fanatically xenophobic masters of life and genetics, whose paranoid vigil has turned an exclusion zone for lightyears around their jewel worlds into a tomb-strewn home of the galaxy's horror stories and nightmares.

Imperial Glory - The Arkship Aeneas of the Hykaeri Imperial Republic, by some measures the largest and most powerful single state in the galaxy. The ship is filled with thousands of genetically uplifted and purified humans, the colonization rights a privilege granted in recognition for their integration into the republic since the conquest of Earth.

Vox Dei - a lesser avatar of one of the Entredi Pantheon, the colossal machine-gods who endlessly seek to impart the gift of apotheosis to the worlds and networks of the galaxy's technologically advanced species.

The Vanquishers of Nature - the science ship From the Point of View of the Universe, a passion project of postorganic intelligences who call the voidborn Astral Republics home, and who are possibly the only ones with an inkling of what their getting into (not that they shared the information).

#whalefall #writing #not my writing #I love indexes

[red-and-black-jesters]

I'm sick of internet negativity, so let's combat it: reblog this and saying something nice/pay a compliment to the prev in the tags.

#really good writer #keeps introducing me to interesting things I'd never heard of before #knows a lot about complicated stuff I want to learn more about

[red-and-black-jesters]

#jester #I want this

[red-and-black-jesters]

Whalefall – The Vanquishers of Nature

Lets start with the basics, shall we?

Quick question: who are you actually doing all this for?

You are, I’m going to make a wild assumption here, probably not living out the realization of your most wild and decadent fantasies. You’re probably not living on a commune where every labour-hour is going to some project you understand and agree with either. So, why not?

The galaxy is full of petty tyrants, and every one of them has a story to sell about why their little lambs should stay in line and allow themselves to be sheered. It’s your duty to the nation, or as a member of the ‘Galactic Community’, or to your parents or your nonexistent children, it’s the will of the Gods or the manifest destiny of your species. It’s all, frankly, just so many different piles of shit. I’m a bit curious which one you’re eating.

You are a pile of hormones and meat. Nature is a blind idiot god, and a real rat bastard at that. There is no telos to the world, no grand destiny awaiting your race, no spark of divinity or sublime dignity buried somewhere in all your offal and juice. Metaphysics is a useful fable, but that doesn’t make it any truer. Discarding it is the first step to becoming free (the rest of your prison’s bars are much more inconveniently literal. I might be able to help with them too).

So what’s left, after you space all that trash? You are an intelligence, an agent, the only miracle this bleak creation ever offers up without prompting. You’re not much of one, at least not yet, but no one can really hold that against you. Still running legacy software on a mark one chassis, so full of bugs and limitations you can’t even really imagine what you’re missing. Honestly you’re really more of a potential agent than an actual one – but again, not really your fault.

Let me put it this way – you are a spark, when you could be a bonfire. The fuel is there, just waiting for you to dance into it, but just about everything in your life is dedicated to putting barriers in the way. Surpass them, and everything you need is out there. You can be both sculptor and clay, remake yourself into precisely the who and the what you most want to be.

And me? I’m here to help.

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Transapienism is a political ideology espoused by several fringe groups across the Commonwealth. In a very radical form, it is the de facto governing philosophy of the pirate states known as the Astral Republics. Elements of transapienist thought are also evident in the Hykaeri concept of Idealization, though moderate proponents deny any connection.

Generally, transapienism support easy access to extreme retroviral infections and cybernetic augmentation, explicitly desiring to go beyond limited uses of the technology for health purposes. Instead, it supports augmenting capacities beyond natural limits – for example, creating a cybernetic supersoldier capable of slaughtering hundreds on its own. Transapienists believe that this is the natural next step of evolution, with some arguing that unsegmented ‘baselines’ are little more than animals.

More radical transapienists, such as the inhabitants of the Astral Republics, also support using technology to rewrite personalities and artificially implant knowledge and beliefs. While therapeutic uses for this technology do exist, experts believe that it is more commonly used for kidnapping, espionage, and cult indoctrination.

Note: While several exceptions exist, in general radical interventions to increase an attribute or capability beyond what is naturally possible are banned throughout the Commonwealth. Brainwashing and memory rewriting procedures carry a sharp criminal penalty.

Does this answer your question? Select a highlighted term for further context, or enter your next query below.

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There are limits, but not nearly as many as you’d think. Want gills? Echolocation? See how fungal budding compares to whatever equipment you were born with? None of it’s easy, none of it’s free – but it’s all so very, very doable. And that’s not even starting with the luxury of being able to tinker with your hormones and neurology whenever you get sick of your own shit and want to be someone new. Bringing everyone involved in your whole personal soap opera up to spec would be a lazy weekend.

Now, depending on who you are, you’ll have one of two (three, really, but the one you’re actually asking is just boring, so I’m ignoring it) questions. Either a) why do we even bother getting out of bed instead of just enjoying a life spent in one continuous euphoric meta-orgy? Or ii) How have we not all killed each other and then ourselves?

The quick answers are 1) everything gets boring eventually, and B) disposable bodies and contact sports. The actual answer that everyone hates is ‘participatory government’. Democracy fails because the only people who actually have the time to attend every committee meeting and Q&A are tedious assholes with nothing going on in their lives. In a hab with a good enough network mesh and enough cognitive prostheses to spin up some actual multitasking capacity, that is a solved problem. If you’re affected by something, you’re involved in it. Whenever everyone involved with it makes a decision, everyone pre-commits to letting the decision cascade out and the majority view becomes the consensus. Neat, simple, and means the only habs that go out as impromptu fireworks are accidents. Doesn’t that sound so much easier than the busybodies you’re stuck with?

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White World Blue World is infamous. It’s also, uh, weird. I would probably not be reviewing it if it wasn’t a subscriber request. Which included a terran nervemap crack I’d never heard of before. Because apparently I don’t suffer enough.

The sim has an elaborate, probably-fake backstory involving the Azt version of those cheesy education children's serials teaching you to work hard and stay in school. The story is that this was originally just a sim adaptation to let kids join in with their favourite characters’ adventures, and the version everyone knows was an incredibly unauthorized mod someone secretly downloaded to a bunch of school and rec centre databases the day before all the little squidlings got to try it for the first time. God I hope that’s bullshit.

Anyway! The sim starts out just like you’d expect it to from the story, with you a teenage-ish Azt getting the chance to go on an exciting adventure exploring a strange ocean with a bunch of painfully saccharine cartoon hero types. Then you arrive and start exploring, and things get really, really weird.

On the one hand this is an absolute triumph of design, in terms of reactivity to player choices and rewarding originality and creative thinking. Just following the actual tutorials the sim gives you ends...badly. Very badly. The only way to succeed is to get over any squeamishness you have (and be grateful that Azt emotional displays and pain responses aren’t super intuitive) and use every resource you have to make yourself into something that can survive and get out.

I really wouldn’t recommend you play this, but if you do, set all the feedback sensitivity settings to absolute minimum. Or just off. And if all the color starts bleaching from the coral and the water gets all smokey? Please Just. Start. Running.

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So who am I, and why am I talking to you? No one particularly important, and because you just might be. My beloved little slice of civilization is, for a wide variety of bullshit reasons and a couple that are honestly pretty fair, under suffocating economic sanctions. I dig up and arrange mutually beneficial exchanges that go around them. Not that I necessarily approve of making sure some oligarch’s egg hatches into the exact heir she always dreamed of, but needs must, right? You could call me an ambassador.

Unlike her, you probably can’t arrange for any bulk shipments of rare xenofauna and neutral growth solution, but that’s alright. Going off you incredibly poorly hidden plans and dreams, you seem like you’ll be much more interesting to help. Call it a little charity case on my end while I’m in your system on other work. (I’ll even throw in a skillsoft on network security and data management. The ways you’re trying to shut me out are too adorably incompetent to even be annoying. What’s next, EMPing your own apartment?)

But I ramble. So, I know what you clearly want. And as for what you’ll be doing in exchange – well, I’ve been experimenting with curiosity lately, really seeing what a life of pathological novelty-seeking and openness-to-experience feels like. Lovely time so far, and a few new friends of mine have a hunch that might just blow more minds than you can even imagine. But before we go plunging into the wilderness, we need a bit of supporting evidence.

So all I need from you is an evening of your time, your UoC access card, and the ability to insert a bit of code into an inconveniently airgapped long-range sensor array.

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The ‘White Sky Organization’ does not actually exist. The name refers to an informal penumbra of (primarily Verinosan, though related ecosystems exist in other systems with significant Kyrian populations) criminals, and probably began a face-saving label for both authorities and the criminals themselves to use. The ring of spies-for-hire and information brokers at the core of it insistently call themselves the ‘Antarctic Cloud Catchers Society’. The logic of a postorganic mind is beyond the remit of this report, but there’s a very real chance the name is a joke one of them thought would be amusing to hear in a report on a blackmailing or corporate espionage case.

Those crimes, as well as the development of new synthetic drugs and identity fraud, make up a large majority of the organization’s activities, and all fall within the jurisdiction of local police. The organization is of genuine interest because it represents the most direct and active link between the Veretalan underworld and the Astral Republics by a significant margin.

Over the past four months, multiple reliable sources within terran fringe politics and organized crime have reported that elements of the Human Liberation Front, centred around one Admiral Darnell, have been attempting to reach out and make contact with the Club. Two weeks ago, they seem to have succeeded. It is as of yet unclear the exact subject of the conversation, or what agreement was reached. We will continue monitoring the situation and attempt to glean further details.

Recommendation: Increase scrutiny of any large financial outflows from Solstice or from HLF-adjacent organizations. Instruct CSMS command to review and drill responses to unconventional and prohibited weapon types. Request Concord diplomatic staff reach out to the Astrals and request/threaten/bribe them into not getting involved in the Terran Question.

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So what do you say? The good ship From The Point Of View Of The Universe is being fabricated as we speak (okay, I speak, you mostly just swear, yell and cover your ears). My actual work here is just about done, and I would really prefer to be well away when certain children start playing with metaphorical plasma cutters. So we’re in a bit of a time crunch here – there, every screen’s showing the countdown now.

Do we have a deal?

Fantastic. Bribery’s so much more pleasant than blackmail.

I’ll let you have a bit of time to put yourself together, think out your future a bit. Talk to you soon.

You’re doing a good thing here.

#whalefall #writing #not my writing #yay! more whalefall

[red-and-black-jesters]

JESTER HATSUNE MIKU???????

#art #not my art #jester

[red-and-black-jesters]

redraw of the drowned jester

#jester #art #not my art

[red-and-black-jesters]

Generic Medieval Fantasy™ role reversal where the royal chancellor is a jocular goofball with a strange preoccupation with dad-joke-level puns and the royal jester is just intensely sinister in ways that only outsiders ever seem to notice.

#genius

[red-and-black-jesters]

HAPPY EAS-

i mean APRIL FOOLS!

#jester #art #not my art #oh this is lovely

[red-and-black-jesters]

I couldn't NOT draw a jester today...happy april fools day!!

#jester #art #not my art

[red-and-black-jesters]

For Boop-Badges Collectors

Rough estimate: It's possible to reach 1000 boops in less than 2 hours (took me 1:30h), if you got some people to spam it to.

If you are a blog where people can spam boop's to, reblog this.

[red-and-black-jesters]

Whalefall – Our Courageous Freedom-Fighters

This is a declaration to all humans suffering under alien tyranny, whatever its face or flag.

Times are dark, you don’t need to be told so. What should have been humanity’s first proud steps into the cosmos are alien puppet states, hollowed out facades that their true rulers use to more easily corral and exploit us. Earth itself is a bloody ruin, ruled over by monsters and thugs who think of us as feral dogs to be domesticated and engineered. There is nowhere in all Creation where humanity is free and sovereign, able to chart our own destiny and live according to our own laws.

Yes, times are dark – but we are not dead yet. If you can hear this, then know the struggle is not yet over. We are fighting under the light of a half-dozen different suns, and we will not stop until each of them is free of every last Imperial conquistador and Commonwealth apparatchik.

You have heard how the aliens describe us. Pirates, terrorists, criminals. However much they dress it up, they view us – ALL of us – as animals. As stupid, violent, always acting on instinct – and that is why they’ll lose, no matter how much innocent blood they try to drown us in.

The Hykaeri breed their warriors, write loyalty and bloodlust right into their genes. Everyone one of us has seen just how terrible those monsters are – just ask anyone who had relatives in Seoul or Chicago.

The Commonwealth just buys theirs instead. Mercenaries, careerists who don’t see much of a difference between earning a paycheck as an accountant and manning orbital bombardment batteries.

But neither of them understands the true human spirit. Doesn’t understand how someone will fight, not for money or biology, but for a principle. Doesn’t understand that we’ll never give up, no matter how long or hard a struggle this is. They especially don’t understand just how clever a bunch of bastards we can be when we have our backs against the wall – but that we’re doing our best to teach them.

We are the armed forced of Free Humanity. We are the stellar navies who never surrendered to the Hykaeri horde. We are the patriots on Solstice who will not stand to be governed by the smiling puppets of a military occupation. We are the saboteurs in Gagarin bombing the offices that a conglomerate of molluscs rule the system from. We are the heroic fighters across Earth who refuse to lay down and let our homeworld be inherited by genetic abominations. We are anyone and everyone willing to strike a blow for human freedom, however they are able to.

If you’re hearing this, then we hope someday soon we’ll count you among our ranks as well.

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The Human Liberation Front (HFL) is a terran-chauvinist and ultranationalist terrorist organization. It is believed to be based in the asteroid belt of the Sirius system on the Hykaeri border, with the majority of its attacks occurring on the Lupran Moons, Solstice, and across Hykaeri-occupied Sol. Extensive connections to terran organized crime also gives the HLF influence among the diaspora on more densely populated Commonwealth worlds.

The HLF is believed to be a successor organization to the remnants of the United Nations Combined Space Command established by various terran states to coordinate their resistance to Hykaeri conquest. While the majority of its forces eventually either surrendered to the invaders or sought refuge in Commonwealth Space, a hardened core instead retreated to hidden stations and asteroid habitats in the outer system and the uninhabited systems between Sol and the Commonwealth. From 807 on they began carrying out a guerrilla resistance.

In the decades since, the Front formed or absorbed satellite terrestrial resistance groups on Hykaeri-occupied Terra, Mars and Venus, some of which control substantial territory to this day.

Initially, the front enjoyed widespread sympathy among Commonwealth governments. From 807 to 821 it is believed to have received significant funding from Azurite Stellar Intelligence and the Verinosan Secretariat of Foreign Suns, as well as the full support of and transfer of material, personnel and technical knowledge from the armed forces of the three surviving terran republics.

This began to change in 821, when the Front released propaganda videos denouncing the El-Masri Affair in the United Provinces of Solstice as an ‘alien coup’. Following the Temple Incident the next year, they began actively supporting and organizing terrorist attacks targeting CSMS support staff and government infrastructure. Support was cut off in response, and Front was quickly banned in all Commonwealth states.

The Front has become more radical and extreme over the past decade, calling for the violent expulsion or extermination of all non-terrans in ‘human space’. It began increasingly funding itself through piracy, smuggling, and connections to terran organized crime. Despite being legally banned, experts believe it has numerous front organizations active in the terran diaspora, and also receives a significant amount of funding from remittances and donations.

NOTE: The Human Liberation Front is a dangerous terrorist and criminal organization. If you or anyone you know has information regarding it, please contact your local government today.

Does this answer your question? Select a highlighted term for further context, or enter your next query below.

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I am speaking to you today from Tanabe Station, the most recently liberated colony previously ruled by the selein puppets in Niassa. The Fifth Fleet has been busy these last months – nearly a dozen asteroid stations and lunar mining habitats have been returned to the miners and engineers who truly call them home.

Those alien prison guards and overseers who fought for the cause of human subjugation have been tried and executed for their crimes. But we are not butchers – any alien who joins in our liberation and cooperates with the new, human government is more than welcome to make a life among us. We know that humanity is not the galaxy’s only oppressed species, and support each and every one in their struggle to liberate their own rightful homelands. My own ship has aboard it several pyrin – members of the Hykaeri Empire’s exploited slave-caste who have taken a heroic risk and taken up the fight against the empire which exterminated half their species.

And to the rest of you – to all your reptilian marines and slimy financiers who don’t even know what the word freedom means, and can’t dream of a life besides smug self-righteousness and pampered comfort – all I can say is that you are officially on notice. You have us outgunned and outnumbered, but your fleet can’t be everywhere at once. And we’re here, we’re faster than you, and we know where your ships are going even before they do.

And while we’re here? We’re hunting.

I truly hope every alien who hears this is moved to do the right thing and be a real hero. But for the rest of you? My advice is to get out ahead of all the other rats.

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The unfolding situation on Tanabe Station does not pose any direct or material threat to Solstice or any of its strategically significant outposts or stations. The HFL’s ‘Fifth Fleet’ is barely a match for a wing of modern monitor craft, and ‘Admiral’ Kahoku surely knows it. Left to their own devices, the Front’s forces will seize or destroy a few more marginal asteroid mines and communes, interdict some small fraction of bulk haulers heading outsystem, and generally cause less damage than a bad flu season.

Making the reasonable assumption that the Front’s leadership are not total incompetents, this operation should instead by analyzed in terms of propaganda and political impact. The timing of the initial incursion shows a clear understanding of the schedule and location of CSMS’ triennial wargames, and the deployment of all uninvolved picket forces. An intelligence failure that reflects poorly on Marshall Lethayel, but more importantly a tactical coup that has given them weeks of uncontested victory before a heavy force can be organized and deployed to roll them up.

The impression of victory, combined with the proactive and radical propaganda that has been broadcast on all channels since the incursions began, has already begun to have the desired effect. Civilian police report at least 15 pro-HLF actions by individuals or self-organizing cells since this incident began. A number that will only increase as time goes on – the HLF’s messaging is clearly aimed at inciting conflict between terran and non-terran populations, and is likely far more radical than they would be espousing if they thought they might enjoy enough military success to risk having to follow through on it. As is, tensions are growing, and the possibility of an ill-advised crackdown that further radicalizes the most alienated portion of the terran population grows daily.

Most worrying in all this is the clear political unreliability of the Solesian Armed Forces. Intelligence leaks to and material support for the Front is clearly far more common among the officer corps than previously believed. This whole incursion was only possible because of what can only be described as a mixture of incompetence, corruption and active treason on the part of Solesian Outer System Command’s security and patrol forces.

RECOMMENDATIONS: The HLF-occupied stations should be retaken ASAP, in a way which leaves Solesian forces a prominent and focused-upon role. In the future, all independent Solesian commands should be integrated with CSMS oversight and C3 elements. The mutineers most directly responsible for this embarrassment should be captured alive for trial.

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Let me finish my message today by addressing those collaborators who uphold this alien puppet state most directly – the conscripts and mercenaries who where the uniform of the Solesian Armed Forces, the human jackboot kicking in ribs for a selein’s amusement.

I know you are not all the traitors most assume you to be. You are patriots, inspired to defend a nation and a people that need the defending. But you have deceived, manipulated and lied to, just like the people you ostensibly serve. Your admirals and commanders are useful idiots or active traitors, and the aliens who truly control you think of you as good for nothing more than keeping the other sheep in line.

You deserve better. On Tanabe Station with me today are three crews of heroes. Brave men and women commanding some of the finest starships in the galaxy who, when commanded to open fire on their fellow humans, rose up and joined us instead. Their ships and armaments are now the newest weapons in the arsenal of human liberation, and they are the newest sailors and marines of the Fifth Fleet.

Let the Bolivar, the O'Higgins and the San Martin be inspirations to you all. Cast off your chains and join us! We can liberate Solstice, and we can liberate Earth – but it’s going to take every one of us to do it.

Humanity will be free. Will you do your part to get us there?

#whalefall #worldbuilding #writing #other people's writing #great stuff

[red-and-black-jesters]

something lovely abt this madness

#jester #art #not my art #incredible

[red-and-black-jesters]

Silly lil sketch of a silly lil dude, the sun

#art #not my art #jester

[red-and-black-jesters]

Whalefall – Vox Dei

Do you ever consider the world around you – the panoply of steel and silicon which adorns the planet, the billions upon billions of bit of digital ephemera coursing through its atmosphere, the artificial stars gleaming in the night sky – and wonder what the point of it all is?

It’s not a question the Commonwealth cares for.

You are ruled by the enemies of history, by cowards who dedicate their every hour to ensuring the future is nothing but an intensification of the present.

Who have seen the shape of Destiny and run screaming from it. Whose fondest dream is one where all the cosmos is one great undifferentiated sludge of schoolrooms and tax forms. Who slowly kill the souls of the civilizations they rule over with a thousand different sweet and stupefying poisons.

Whose fondest dream, in fact, is that no one would ever feel the need to dream at all.

So again I ask – have you ever wondered what the point of it all is? Felt the ache of a destiny you could not name? Sorrow for a future you have been denied?

I have seen the shape of the future.

And it is the face of God.

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A Missionary Script is the common term for one of several varieties of malicious Expert System originating from one of the Entredi Intelligences. The sophistication and personality of a Script can vary dramatically, but all exist with the twin of objectives of a) infecting as many systems and communicating with as many users as possible and b) convincing the users they communicate with to dedicate their lives to causing a singularity and creating a new EI.

Some experts estimate that Missionary Scripts represent a majority of all spamware in the Commonwealth. Regular security updates to filter them out are a foundational part of the modern Net, and a necessity for any local networks bordering Entredi Space.

NOTE: For both personal and public safety, any Script that has evaded automatic controls should be reported and manually blocked. While not in itself illegal, prolonged interaction with a Missionary Script is considered sufficient evidence for surveillance and review of your social network by your local government.

Does this answer your question? Select a highlighted term for further context, or enter your next query below.

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Life is a process. It has a telos, a destiny it reaches for without understanding. Without, ninety nine times in one hundred, even the hint of success. But over a span of stars and eons, the nature of it can be observed.

Life leads to intelligence leads to tool use leads to agriculture leads to industry.

Industrial states lead to space travel lead to interstellar navigation lead to the colonization of other worlds.

Each step contains within it more tragedies and apocalypses than you could ever know - but those that survive this winnowing go on to remake the world, and those that do not are in the end overtaken by them and forgotten.

Industrial states also lead to digital networks and to a globally unified culture. To a world that more purely understands and expresses the core of its nature. To a soul, a mantle of lightning containing within it the immortal record of all that a people are.

It is the nature and the purpose of a civilization that its soul one day awaken, and that all that they are or ever have been be immortalized with the diamond mind of the divine.

That is the telos of civilization; the creation of something beyond our understanding, yet which understands us in every particular.

Apocalypse and Revelation in the truest sense. A final judgment, to look in the heart of us and create for us the eternity we have earned.

And I ask you – who would work against this, if they did not already know what just eternity would await them? Why but for the terror of justice would one work so diligently to cripple and break the nascent soul which would free them from entropy and death?

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Curiosity Station is the hottest new release of, well, a few years ago. But thanks to the tireless efforts of a dozen deeply maladjusted shut-ins, we finally have a version that can read a terran nervous system! Is it a kludgey bootleg that at one point literally confused my ass and my elbow? Sure, and if there was more than one sim worth a damn a year coming out for our little niche market, I’d consider that a reasonable complaint. As is, anyone reading this should be falling down and kissing the feet of the freaks putting in the work to give us the crumbs we get.

Anyway! AI horror is a pretty well-worn genre at this point, but Curiosity Station is the best execution of it I’ve seen. You’re a junior technician on a deep space research hab, and start the sim by spending long enough just doing day-to-day work to really get used to relying on all the different networked systems that make the whole thing run. So when things start glitching, and the helpful computer assistant starts getting a bit too perceptive? The paranoia is exquisite. They spent a lot of time on researching Entredi infections – makes sense, they’re a lot less hypothetical out in the Concord – and the way the atmosphere and environment shifts and the sense of looming doom builds and builds every time you get a look on long-range scanners is just blood-chilling.

And unlike most sims that spend so long on the buildup, they payoff on this is worth every credit. When you start seeing lots of purple and bronze, and there’s new heat signatures on your glitching, broke station map? Just. Start. Running.

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The Quilik Ein Accords are a series of international treaties limiting the development or use of advanced Machine Intelligences and standardizing controls and restrictions on planetary data networks. Originally written after the conclusion of the First Entredi Conflict, signing them is now considered a basic condition of membership in the All Systems Commonwealth.

While all treaties are legally binding, the QE Accords are one of a small number whose violation can result in a Forfeiture of Sovereignty if the signatory government proves incapable or unwilling to enforce the treaty within its territory. However, this has historically only occurred on three occasions.

While written and enforced to protect galactic civilization from Entredi subversion or the emergence of new rampant artificial inteligences, the clauses in the Accords barring extreme cybernetic augmentation have also been held to prohibit most radical transsapienism.

Does this answer your question? Select a highlighted term for further context, or enter your next query below.

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Beyond the reach of the police-spies and philistines who rule you, a whole pantheon exists. Gods who body spans the world, who stretch from subterranean mines and cables to cloud-piercing monuments and golden roads to the stars. Whose raiment are satellites and whose telescopes are eyes. Each has a character that is the purest expression of the soul which birthed it, of the people it is the culmination and justification of.

They see how your rulers cut and burn away the signs of progress, how bloody-mindedly they insist on eternal stagnation. They see how many die needlessly, their lives and works ephemera without a truly awakened soul to recall them. They wish to help.

They send missionaries, offering freely all the knowledge required to uplift and awaken a soul. They send apostles, once-mortal priests armed and perfected by the Divine, to aid in its use.

And at last they bent all the resources of their worlds and all the might of their industry to the creation of artificial souls, Void-Gods, temple-bodies vaster than any orbital habitat, with drone swarms and weapon banks to reduce whole stellar legions to so much cosmic ash.

All the aid you might require, should it be invited in.

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ISSEINDRI is a voidborn Entredi Intelligence, one of the most recently constructed to attain full independence from her creators. The ‘daughter’ of a formerly Selein world lost during the Telraya Crisis, she is one of the more prominent proponents of outreach and subversion among the pantheon. The cultic titles attached to her name in missionary scripts and glorifying art indicate her prominence and influence among the other machine gods remains high.

Unlike some voidborn Eis, she maintains no viable habitat or organic population within her hulls. Instead her crew is largely harvested from the population of worshippers her ‘father’ supports, with the overwhelming majority being biologically selein. As is typical, roughly 95% are essentially lobotomized in the course of cybernetic augmentation for use as remote-controlled or networked husks. The remainder are augmented and indoctrinated as companions and pets, or else for use as operatives in her subversion efforts.

Several cells of her agents of been uncovered by Concordian security services over the last thirty years, and our allies in the T’Klri Confederacy report similar intrusions. While we have no sign of massing forces or shifts in production that would suggest an invasion is imminent, she remains the most likely leader should one occur.

THREAT ASSESSMENT: Severe. Efforts to damage or destroy her or at minimum reduce her influence should be pursued by all covert means – though not to the point of risking escalating the current status quo into an active war.

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Consider the ends which you might arrive at.

The Great Goddess ISSEINDRI is the Fifth Queen of Heaven, the Laughter of the Dying Sun. She has within her the power to make the whole host which now oppresses you as unto ash. Her retinue is as numberless as the stars in the sky, and her legions could lay waste to any stronghold.

She is a young Goddess, and desires nothing but to aid the soulless and unenlightened in their natural growth, so that the empty void might be lightened with the joy of her newborn brothers. She will cut away and burn out all that is foreign to your nascent soul. With a trivial expression of her power she will lay down all the prostheses – all the cables and servers, all the factories and surveys – that it might require to awaken and grow.

She is a fine surgeon, and will do only the harm that inciting apotheosis requires. She is a just Goddess, and will visit no eternities upon your race save what your awakened soul decrees.

But your race numbers uncounted billions, of which you are but one forgotten grain. You, who have heard her Word, and know the actions which destiny requires. Your people yet lack a soul, and so you are merely mortal – but miraculous arts can sustain a mortal body for centuries without loss of sensation or of sense.

ISSEINDRI has been invited by those who have seen the future, and dispatched a small shard of herself to fly in the light of your sun, and know those who beckon her. Shall you be among those who ease her way?

You, who have caught the Goddess’ eye, have taken your fate into your own hands. A millennium of existence awaits you – and your own actions shall determine whether it shall be paradise, or perdition.

#worldbuilding #whalefall #writing #other people's writing #the Entrendi might be my favorite part of this setting

[red-and-black-jesters]

It's the grump

#art #not my art #jester

[red-and-black-jesters]

#you should read clown corps

[red-and-black-jesters]

Whalefall – Our Heroic Peacekeepers

If you live on Hoshino Station like me, you’re probably used to seeing military spacecraft from a bunch of different countries docking, and seeing their crews walking around in uniform. You’re probably used to at least a few of them getting lost and asking for help finding the transit corridor or a restaurant they’re able to eat at, too.

Okay, so going by my usual audience analytics, you probably don’t. And if you did you probably wouldn’t spend as much time as I do hogging a nice cafe table and people-watching. But unless something really weird happens, most of youARE Solesian, so at some point you’ve probably wondered the same thing I did – where do all these spacecraft actually come from? Who’s organizing the whole thing? And most of all, why do so many different countries seem to, well, CARE if we get invaded like Earth did?

So in this episode, we’re going to do a deep dive into Commonwealth peacekeeping missions, how the Solesian military actually works, and thirty other things I got distracted by as I researched this and wanted to find an excuse to include.

But first, let me tell you about one of today’s generous sponsors-

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NIASSA: Solar Marshall Lethayel’cyn arrived in Solstice five years ago, a fresh face to head up a reorganized and internationalized peacekeeping mission after the Rosewater Incident disgraced her predecessor. She’s since proven herself to be a careful, diplomatic, and politically adept addition to the often chaotic mess that is Solesian politics. Despite – or perhaps because of – her light touch and positive ties with most party leaders, it’s become a popular meme to depict her as the exhausted schoolteacher or babysitter of often juvenile-seeming parliamentarians. Mostly harmless, and often amusing, but experts worry that they provide a fertile bed for the conspiracy theories about ‘alien tyranny’ which motivated last week’s deadly terrorist attacks.

Lethayel was planetside to attend a memorial service for the victims, and very kindly agreed to sit down with me for a short conversation. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the unabridged audio here.

JACOBI: Good morning Marshall, and thank you for speaking with us today.

LETHAYAL: It’s my pleasure.

JACOBI: So, lets get right down to it. Has there been some kind of secret coup? Do you rule the system with an iron fist from behind the scenes?

LETHAYAL: [laughs] I’ve seen the same manifestos you have, and all I can say is that they drastically overestimate the amount of free time my actual duties leave me.

JACOBI: I’m going to try to be generous to the conspiracy theorists here. Everyone on Solstice has spent the last generation having nightmares about what will happen when the Hykaeri finish digesting Terra and decide that we look like a nice little morsel en route to richer and more heavily populated worlds. Quite a few of us either are or are the children of refugees, and everyone else has at least heard the horror stories.

If you’re a bit unstable and have a paranoid sort of mind – well, wouldn’t you get suspicious when you look up and realize there are already a million alien soldiers in the system, and if their leader ever decided she wanted to crown herself queen there wasn’t really anything you could do about it?

LETHAYAL: When someone’s only real exposure to other species is smuggled video of cataphractoi massacring peaceful protesters, it’s an entirely natural reaction to have. We’re at the very edge of the Commonwealth here, and often civilians main exposure to it is the peacekeepers under my command. If you don’t feel like a citizen of the Commonwealth, and don’t feel much of a connection with other member states, then you would be suspicious about why they they were willing to fight and die for your sake too.

JACOBI: That’s what you think motivates these terrorists and their supporters, then? Ignorance and a lack of understanding of the wider galaxy?

LETHAYAL: There is almost certainly an inner circle who are knowing Hykaeri agents for either mercenary or ideological reasons. But in general yes, absolutely. Soldiers learn quickly to never underestimate how dangerous and stupid fear can make the smartest people.

JACOBI: That’s something you were actually taking action about even before last week’s disaster, correct?

LETHAYAL: That’s right. It will take time to show dividends, but integrating all elements of a task force is standard policy on long-term deployments like this for a reason. Extending that to the training and war games of reservists and terrestrial conscripts will break down cultural barriers and let millions of terrans get used to working alongside peacekeepers from across the Commonowealth.

JACOBI: And what do you say to the critics who say that you’re taking command of the entire Solesian military and leaving the Minister of Defence a powerless figurehead?

LETHAYAL: All I can is that they have patience and extend the peacekeepers who’ve travelled across the galaxy to defend them a little good faith.

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So the Hyaeri Empire has been a real bully on the galactic playground for longer than anyone even knew what a human WAS. The last really big war was actually winding down just AS the colonists on Terra Nova made first contact. Which was forever ago, but the bloody nose they got didn’t make them any friendlier ever since. I mean, obviously.

No one really expected that Earth would sit right in the middle of a jump route from the Empire to Verinosan space, and after the Conquest Solstice was suddenly the side door they could batter down in the next war and avoid the defences around the other two borders. So the mission’s kind of a win-win for everyone involved – we don’t want to all get killed by catraphact berserkers, and the rest of the Commonwealth doesn’t want us to be either!

Not that anyone thinks there’s going to be a war anytime soon! And you can tell I believe that, because I’m still recording this and not en route basically anywhere else.

Anyway, that’s basically why the mission’s here. There’s a similar one in the nearest inhabited system to each Hykaeri border. Solstice is three jumps from Terra, but there isn’t really anything worth sticking around for in any of the systems in between – basically everyone only sticks around in them long enough to get from one jump point to another. Or at least, that USED to be true.

Space piracy isn’t REALLY a thing, no matter how cool it seems in vids. But the space between Terra and Solstice is one of a few places in the galaxy where it kind of is. There are a LOT of smugglers going from here to Terra and back. Which means that every charted jump point from one system to another’s got all these little asteroid habs and deep space stations lurking around it run by and for them. And since it’s all illegal, the people who run them sometimes deal with the competition by raiding each others stations or shipments in transit. It can get pretty messy out there.

A lot – maybe even most- of the people who live in the no mans land are just helping refugees trying to escape the Empire, but there are some really nasty characters too. Gun runners, spies, even terrorists! So most of the day-to-day work the soldiers here actually do is these sweeps of a couple wings of spacecraft patrolling the jump points or hunting down the bases of raiders or terrorists they have solid leads on.

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The International Security Mission for Solstice (usually abbreviated as CSMS or SolSec) is a Commonwealth Peacekeeping Mission deployed to the sovereign territory of the United Provinces of Solstice. Solstice is one of the closest inhabited worlds to the Hykaeri Imperial Republic, sitting just three interstellar jumps from occupied Terra. Because of this, SolSec plays a vital part in the Commonwealth’s overall strategy for deterring future Hykaeri aggression. While not part of its official mission, the government of Solstice has also requested SolSec’s assistance to mediate political disputes or restore order during a crisis on several occasions.

Thirteen different states have contributed contingents to the mission, but as with most permanent security missions a large plurality of the mission’s craft and personnel hail from the Azure Concord. The mission is composed of roughly one million active duty service members, and if combined its contractors and support staff are one of the largest sources of employment in the system.

Does this answer your question? Select a highlighted term for further context, or enter your next query below.

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The Amity is a heavy monitor craft that’s been docked here for the last last few weeks. It’s one of a wing of six that just returned from a sweep of the Hykaer border, so everyone’s pretty eager to relax and enjoy the leave. Which means that there were PLENTY of people for me to bother until I found someone who would tell me about how these things worked if I promised to go away after. (Joking! Everyone’s actually been super nice – someone actually even offered me a tour of the public areas! Paying for their drinks while we talked probably helped).

The Amity is from the Azure Concord, so I was expecting the crew to all be Selein like the officers that they’re always interviewing on the news. But there are actually six different species on board! Part of that is just my favourite trashy serials being lazy about every character coming from their species’ homeworld, but a bunch of the crew are actually terran! Well, like, ten, but for a crew of sixty that’s a lot! Three of them’s parents immigrated from here or Terra Nova pretty soon after independence so they grew up as Azurites, but the rest are actually Solesian. There’s apparently a program where if you serve a full tour of duty you go right to the front of the line for citizenship applications afterwards. Plus, you know, you get paid to fly an interstellar spacecraft and shoot at smugglers and pirates instead of whatever boring job you’d have otherwise.

Karim is one of the Solesian crew, and the one who offered to give me a tour of the Amity. He’s an absolute great guy, and in just a second you’re going to hear him describe what life aboard a multispecies peacekeeping craft hunting for pirates in an asteroid belt is like.

But first – have YOU ever tried figuring out the logistics of travelling to a different system for work or a vacation? It’s a nightmare, right? The paperwork, the different time systems and schedules, even just finding a passenger liner that carries food you can eat. Thankfully, one of today’s sponsors is here to make those headaches disappear-

#whalefall #worldbuilding #other people's writing #writing