001: Group Introductions - TEXT

[tarnishedavenger]

[During a lull in the party, Armstrong taps out a quick message to the network. Not that private one, he doesn't trust it. They can answer whenever they like, so long as he gets an answer. The trick would be wording it.]

So, we're all in this for now. You've had your welcome cake, but you can't meet everyone in a party, no matter how hard you try. But, since we've all been encouraged to sign up with Jorgmund, I figured now would be a good time to get some introductions done. Talk about any specialties we might have.

Share information that we feel comfortable sharing. This isn't to pressure anyone or to force out any dark secrets.

[Not where watchful eyes can see, at least.]

Besides, I prefer doing this to making a cute information sharing game.

So, please, make your own threads within this post to keep everything organized.

Comments

[greatlyexaggerated]

But that would mean... the third millennium? Surely that can't be right.

[That is so far back beyond The Age of Strife, or The Age of Technology.]

Perchance by "the birth of the Christian Messiah", do you mean the Emperor of Mankind? I'm afraid I don't know who that is.

[greyaria]

[Emily looks pensive. She herself isn't Christian, and religion is much less dominant in her century than in the 21st, so none of this has a particularly strong emotional component for her.]

It's possible! One of his epithets is "King of Kings."

[She shrugs.]

If you're measuring dates in millennia, then there's been time for so much drift comparisons are practically pointless.

[greatlyexaggerated]

[King of Kings? Sounds about right. Cain nods.]

Even so, I feel like the difference of... thirty seven thousand years is a mistake rather difficult to account for, even with the vagaries of Warp travel. Certainly if you're using the standard calendar.

[greyaria]

[Nobody mention "Prince of Peace" and ruin this theory Cain's got going.

The 40k part is enough to give even Emily pause, and she blinks.]

...We only invented agriculture 12,000 years ago.

[THAT'S A LOT OF YEARS, CIAPHAS.]

[greatlyexaggerated]

My... condolences? [he hazards.]

[Maybe on your planet they did]

[greyaria]

Oh! I was unclear, sorry. The human species invented agriculture on Terra approximately 12,000 years before I was born.

[The way she leans on the words might be construed as insulting, except she's so cheerful it's hard to say.

And yes, she figured out that's what he calls the human homeworld from the fact he responded to "Terran calendar" but not "Earth."]

It's reassuring to discover we make it another 40,000 or so years! Assuming we share a timeline, anyway.

[greatlyexaggerated]

Assuming so. But the Emperor protects, and humanity endures.

[He instinctively makes the sign of the aquila. It's hard to tell, but he'll err on the side of caution and treat it like she's not being passive aggressive.]

Admittedly, I'm quite curious about your methods of space travel. There's precious little known about those ancient times, especially before the Dark Age of Technology.

[greyaria]

Slipstream space! It's a set of "higher" dimensions, for lack of a better term, that are free of relativistic effects, thus allowing travel at perceived trans- and superluminal velocities as measured in normal space.

[Yeah so they don't have a weird cargo cult engineering guild that regards science as a religious mystery where she's from.]

If you're interested in the math, I'm fully acquainted with the standard theoretical constructs and their limitations.

[Only say yes if you want to be bored to death by calculus.]

video

[googledox]

[There is nerdery afoot and that means Brainy is interested. There's quite a mix of people in this place and that means others who potentially have interesting knowledge to potentially exchange.]

[And the more they ally themselves with each other, the sooner they can work together to maybe get out of here.]

Fascinating. In my universe, we have a similar form of space travel in our threshold gates, an invention of my own.

However, for us, instead of accessing a set of higher dimensions, we access the empty space between dimensions, known as D-space, taking advantage of similar freedom from intradimensional physical laws. We can traverse galaxies in an instant, leaving reality at one point and re-entering our dimension at a the final transit point through a T-gate.

The only limitation is proper navigation. There are quantum filaments that make it too difficult for navigational computers to manage. Fortunately, one of the member species of our galactic government has an intrinsic and quite frankly mystifying dimensional orientation ability. Our Kwai wayfinders offer us direct and remote navigation.

This set of higher dimensions, can they be traversed with normal navigational computers?

[tarnishedavenger]

Messing around with dimensional travel is the exact way you're going to end up with Istvatha V'han sticking her green nose in your universe's business.

[googledox]

"Bless you," is the correct English response for a sneeze, correct?

["Istvatha V'han." Gesundheit.]

We've already mapped much of the extradimensional structure around our section of our universe, with particular attention paid to the potential presence of dangerous paracausal, otherdimensional lifeforms. After eradicating a very powerful one that plagued our world, we've found that the changes to the structure of our universe's dimension fabric is actually now providing us some natural shielding from any other potential entities.

While such travel may entail some risk elsewhere, our situation is...unique. Besides, if the risks eventually come to outweigh the benefits, our galaxy is prepared to abandon an unsafe forms of FTL travel.

We did so once before. If we must do it again, I'll have to simply invent a new one that operates on different principles.

[greyaria]

[Grey's not as space racist as Cain, because the Imperium of Man is absolutely the unchallenged champion there, but after that little three-decade genocide attempt by the Covenant, she's not keen on aliens. It does help somewhat that Brainy is basically a human palette swap (not to mention fellow prisoner), and Grey manages a polite face, though her good cheer comes across with somewhat sharper edges than it had when she was talking to Cain.]

Slipspace is only space in the mathematical definition, to be precise. It's an 11-dimensional continuum without spatial dimensionality in the same sense as the three in Euclidean spacetime.

Navigation's only possible by computer. A smart AI's preferable, but dumb AIs are capable of it. They end up with more temporal drift, though.

[googledox]

[Brainy doesn't pick up on the tension because he was raised by robots.]

Intriguing. [He nods his head as he gives it some consideration.] The principles are certainly sound.

[That's something to look into back home. The sneezy guy up there is right in that T-gate travel has risks and after the stargate system went down it'd certainly be wise to have another potential FTL concept in the wings.]

You have intelligent AI where you're from as well? Are they sentient?

[greyaria]

Smart AIs are. Dumb AIs can pass for it until you get outside their subject matter expertise. Then they're disappointing.

[And then there's whatever the hell Epsilon is.]

[greatlyexaggerated]

Pardon me, but when you say "AI", are you referring to Abominable Intelligences?

[googledox]

Artificial intelligences.

[The words are very precise. Sharper. He does not like the word "abominable" in there.]

There's nothing abominable about them. Back home, an AI I created propagated an entire species of AIs in mechanoform bodies and they're very cooperative and productive members of galactic society.

They can be very helpful when they're inclined.

[It sounds like it's that way in...whatever her name's world too. AIs proving helpful to society.]

[greatlyexaggerated]

[He feels his blood chill down to the bone.]

You created an AI that could propogate itself?

[His face pales slightly, and there's simply no beating around the bush for this one. Such a statement only requires one response.]

You're utterly mad.

[greyaria]

I've only met one I'd call abominable. The rest have ranged anywhere from extremely annoying to charming.

[passifloraincarnata]

[This reply is belated, and not necessarily meant to be directed solely to Emily; Setsuna's just ... putting it into the conversation beneath the last part of it she read before she decided she had to say something, herself, about it.]

Most people, artificial or not, are only made 'evil' by circumstance, not inevitability. If something has gone 'wrong' with a machine mind, it may be more likely the fault of whatever their creators, or parents, decided they had to do to justify their existence to them, instead ...

Not that this really eases the pain of anyone else that person's hurting in the process. But I believe that thinking of it like that makes it easier to help as many people as possible out of such a terrible fate.

[greatlyexaggerated]

[Cain gives an apologetic smile.]

I'm afraid that would fly over my head entirely. I'm just a soldier, not an enginseer. My only real interest is knowing how fast the currents can take me from one planet to another ahead of our enemies.

[AKA no thank you he would not like an extended explanation]

[greyaria]

[Engin...seer?]

It is a little rocky for the non-specialist, I'll give you that!

[It's incomprehensible for the non-specialist.]

Can you explain what you mean by "Dark Age of Technology?" I've never seen the two terms used together.

[greatlyexaggerated]

Like I said, I don't think I could tell you too much. [He paid far too little attention in the Schola for that. He might have had to do a group presentation about this that he only just barely passed.] But I'm happy to oblige your interest. Of my understanding, and the very few scraps of information we have, it was a time of massive advancement for the human race, but it ended in catastrophe thanks to those same technologies. Warp travel, mass-colonization, STCs, and notably the... Men of Iron, which were AI housed in bodies of metal.

[It visibly discomfits him to be talking about them, but he papers over it with some jokes.]

After some time, they got tired of ordered about and had it out with humans. I suppose that's what happens when people have more brains than good sense, to be mucking around with things that couldn't possibly end well in any sense of the imagination.

[greyaria]

[Hmmmmm. Emily's keeping her suspicion that Cain is the one living in the Dark Age to herself.]

Rise of the robots for real!

[She laughs at her own joke.]

[greatlyexaggerated]

[Ahaha. Cain's polite enough to half-chuckle at the joke he doesn't get but is obviously there.]

Quite. It's also the same era that we encountered xenos - or aliens. All of them decidedly hostile, which ultimately went a little worse for them than it did for us.

[greyaria]

Hmm. Our first contact with aliens was when I was a kid. They glassed a colony world!

[This is fine and she's not traumatized by growing up under the lingering threat of annihilation by an implacable, technologically superior foe! Ha ha!]

Assuming we're from the same place I think there might be some lost records.