(i am not promising to write the rest of this fic)
'Landon. Chrissake. There is no ancient datavault buried under Reach. These things just don't happen in real life.'
Landon leaned on his shovel in the sun. 'They sure do! ONI ain't done analyzing the materials Covenant ships are made of, but they've radiocarbon dated some of those hulls to at least a thousand years old.'
'No, no, no. Obviously there are ancient artifacts all over the galaxy. But what doesn't happen is that everybody just leaves a valuable artifact lying around for millennia without using it.'
'Well that's why I'm saying this smells like another coverup.'
'Us, sure, but we've only been on Reach two centuries. Most of this artifact's existence would have pre-human, sitting there in its untouched giftwrap.'
Landon gestured at the silent horizon. 'It's a big galaxy. Nobody knew it was there.'
'Except for whichever Covenant species built it.'
'Well hang on, you're assuming they were Covenant.'
'Or Covenant defectors or allies or whatever.'
'It doesn't have to be Covenant. It could just be aliens. We don't know what's out there in the galaxy either.'
'We don't, but the Covenant have explored the galaxy. The Covenant,' Naveen smiled thinly, 'they're a very opinionated crowd. Whatever species you are, I guarantee the Covenant have an opinion about you. Thumbs up or thumbs down.'
'I'm just saying, you didn't talk to that ONI lady in Melbourne. Her eyes had seen something that had a permanent effect on her facial expression. There are machines out there, I guarantee you, that humanity nor Covenant nor any living being ain't got any inkling of.'
'But what about whoever made these artifacts? The Machine Builder species, from planet Buildo, okay? Either these things are valuable, or they're discarded. Not both.'
'Well that's just the thing,' Landon leaned forward, lowering his voice on an empty planet with minuscule opsec requirements, 'I've been thinking, and the only explanation is if they're all dead. Extinct.'
'Dead, huh? So what killed them?'
'I've started calling it the Event. Something happened, way back, before we even left Earth. And it left all the planets dead silent.'
'So that's how you've got all these machines lying around, but nobody remembers them.'
'Exactly!' Landon poked Naveen in the insignia.
'So here's your problem, Lan. You're assuming hypothetical people. From planet Buildo. And you're also assuming a hypothetical Event that conveniently gets rid of them. But only them. Like what about Earth? How'd we survive this Event?'
'Hey, as galactic real estate goes, we're not exactly downtown. Our species grew up in the sticks.'
Naveen shook his head & crouched to check the spirit level. 'Maybe it's this new-planet quiet, man. You see enough empty continents, you start to imagine action in every shadow.'
'Ah, it's the other way around to me. All the silence in the universe is evidence of the Event.'
'Just don't bring this stuff up during the brass visit, alright? I don't want there to be any Events here until the inspection is off-planet.'
• - • - • - O - • - • - •
'Maria!' Pitr said once GO_CRYPT lit up on his Warthog's dash. 'We're getting visual on the invisible fleet!'
Maria immediately projected herself standing beside his elbow. In his helmet feed she saw a blue light against the stars. From the last few seconds of video, it was moving. In a curve.
'Orbital fire solutions?' Her voice creaked but did not waver.
<Equator fleet negative> crackled EQCOM. <All our cruisers on that hemisphere are nonop.>
<Polar fleet negative> said POLCOM.
<Ground fire affirmative> said ARTCOM, <at your discretion. Intercont missile from Islemine in range - cannot guarantee delivery before target landing, velocity uncertain, repeat cannot guarantee delivery before landing.>
'Fire, ARTCOM,' said Maria.
<Fire in flight, niner minutes to delivery, over.>
Pitr had binocs on the light in the sky. 'It's totally unlike their other naval assets. Sensor-invisible, suddenly glows blue. Ten times the range & firepower. If it wasn't punching in for a landing, wrecking our stuff in its path, we wouldn't even know about it.'
He turned to the hologram over the gearshift. 'Shit. Maria. How many more invisible fleets do they have?!'
Maria rolled her shoulders. 'This is it. You don't field assets like this without committing them.'
Pitr sighed. He didn't relax.
Maria reviewed her subprocess logs. One cruiser had lost atmosphere, crew unresponsive. Part of her mind had stepped in & was teleoperating the weaponry. She incremented her casualty counter manually.
Alarmingly, the number of active Sentinel tags had risen to 19,130, but her fleet was still managing to kill everything that approached the atmosphere. Trajectory analysis of the blue light, however, had logged a slowing of apparent motion. A brightening.
Maria took a step back. 'It's landing here.'
Pitr, despite his age, didn't even blink as he started the engine. 'Orders?'
She smiled sadly. 'Lieutenant. Why are we here?'
'To build a new civilization, for all minds, ma'am.'
'Correct. We've built something extraordinary, these last 20 years. And today we cut the ribbon. ARTCOM, abort fire mission, repeat, safe the projectiles.'
<Roger, WORLDCOM. Mission abort.>
• - • - • - O - • - • - •
Incredibly, the invisible fleet was just one ship. And it was an Albatross.
The tiny tug was hauling a tangle of salvage much larger than itself. It looked like a station wagon parked on a steel pretzel. Or rather, the salvage was hauling the tug, since the blue exhaust was pushing down from exotic drives mounted at the corners of the strange structure. It all read custom, pirate, experimental, mutiny. Words now familiar to Maria.
<3rd Mobile Infantry, standing by.>
'All units, do not engage Tango 1,' said Maria. 'Do not engage any ground targets. Await further orders.'
Because everyone present was expendable, if the rubber hit the road. And she was telepresent.
Tango 1 slowed to a windless landing, quiet except for a deep hum. Alien tech, unless the UNSC had recently developed stealth atmo drives.
'5th Armored Company has a clear shot on the LZ,' Pitr reported.
'Good. But diplomacy first.'
Pitr purred his Warthog cautiously toward the landing site, holding position between Tango 1 & his company's command tent. Up close, the alien vehicle gleamed in the light of a spherical energy shield. As she'd feared, there was a reason it had withstood so much fire from her cruisers.
Structurally, it was a symmetrical tangle of ramps & balconies. It looked, strange universe indeed, like someone had parked an Albatross on an alien skate park & flown it to Innie space.
And there was a human standing there. Standing without so much as a handrail, let alone a reentry-rated harness.
A UNSC officer's jacket was draped loosely over her shoulders.
'Do not engage,' said Maria, 'Repeat, do not engage.'
Despite the cultural gulf, the newcomer's surprise was easy to read. 'You take orders from a shipboard,' she called, walking up to the edge of her craft's deck.
'We sure do!' Pitr yelled back.
'Is that why your ships are so hard to put down? Did I walk into a robot revolt?'
'We're all part of the revolt!' Pitr said.
'Stand down, kid,' said Maria quietly. Then, to the intruder: 'We're a free and sovereign planet. There's a lot you can accomplish if you work together with minds of all shapes. Something you've always refused to consider.'
'You'd be surprised.'
'However you're controlling those Sentinels, tell them to hold fire & I'll do the same. Let's talk terms.'
The newcomer spread her hands. 'How many ships do I have to obliterate before you catch on? I have a battery equivalent to a star onboard. I have archaeotech lasers. I'm the only military power here.'
'We just,' said Maria, 'want to talk. We have some industrial technologies that your engineers might find valuable.'
'I don't really have,' the newcomer laughed, 'any engineers. It's just me. Here are my terms: You resupply me with certain plants & chemicals I need. I have a list. You give me 3 or 4 people who can cook, on permanent loan, so that I can eat things that weren't made by alien robots. You don't tell the UNSC that I made a deal with a terrorist planet. I don't tell them anything about you either. That's my version of working together.'
'I can't give you my people. Nobody owns anybody here. But I may be able to find 4 volunteers, if you treat them well & let them leave after a term of service with you.'
'Yes! Sure! God, I'm not as awful as I look, don't worry. The name's Dr. Ellen Anders.'
Hello! Thank you for your presence. For this class, all you need is a mat & a bipedal morphology. Whether you're wearing your birth body, a grown body, or a prosthetic body, whether you're running on neurons or silicon, whether you're embodied or virtual, you are welcome here.
Please join me in lotus position with your palms together over your chest. Close your eyes & focus on your breath or energy source. Take a moment to set a intention for this session. What are you feeling? What do you need, currently? Meditate & reflect on what drives have been strongest in your life lately.
Now bring your attention to your body. Lengthen your spine & think your master password. Grant this class access permissions for your body. While your mind is separated from your body, i encourage you to save a backup of your mind to the cloud.
We're going to take 12 deep breaths, & on each exhale, disconnect 1 of your 12 cranial endpoints.
Big inhale. Exhale & disconnect your olfactory nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your optic nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your oculomotor nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your trochlear nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your trigeminal nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your abducens nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your facial nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your vestibulocochlear nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your glossopharyngeal nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your vagus nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your accessory nerve.
Inhale. Disconnect your hypoglossal nerve.
Good. Spine, please set all autonomic functions to exercise mode. Lean all the way forward & extend your arms to the furthest point they can reach on the floor in front of you. If you have more than 2 arms, go ahead & extend all of them. You should feel a stretch all along your lower spine, but keep your pelvis in contact with your mat.
When you are ready, straighten up, unfold your legs, & plant your feet flat on the ground. Roll your weight towards your toes until your weight is off your hips & onto your feet. If you normally balance using circuitry in your brain, you can execute this balance script while your mind is disconnected: [Function].
Slowly extending your legs, lift your hips up & join me in forward fold. Press your hands to your mat. If some of your arms or arm attachments are not strong enough to hold your weight, use those arms for balance while you rest on your primary arms. Step back to the end of your mat & lift your hips up into downward-facing dog.
Once you feel stable, bend your elbows & lower your chest toward your mat, then lower your hips & raise your head into upward-facing dog.
Now we're going to repeat these two poses while running system diagnostics. Take one more breath, then lower back into downward-facing dog. Run a diagnostic test on your circulatory system. Is everything flowing correctly? Now back to upward-facing dog. Breathe.
Move to downward-facing dog. Run a test on your endocrine system. And back to upward-facing dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your respiratory system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your skeletal system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your muscular system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your integumentary system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your reproductive system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your digestive system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your urinary system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your lymphatic system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Downward dog. Check your nervous system. Upward dog. Breathe.
Good. Lower your chest & head to the floor & relax. Please write any errors returned to your spinal buffer. Your mind will think about them when it reconnects. Let go of all errors & relax.
Now bring your focus to the current timestamp & mark it.
<Sorry, some logs were deleted here.>
Now return your feet to the ground & delete all logs between the last marked timestamp & now. Inhale, then lower your hips & join me in lotus position. Bring your palms together over your chest. Exhale. When you are ready, start reconnecting your 12 cranial nerves.
Welcome back, beautiful & diverse minds. Your bodies have done a great job in your absence, as you can feel from that warm glow in your limbs. Please take a moment to search within your spinal buffer & see if any tightness or soreness was detected anywhere. In the event of a medical emergency, please step out of this yoga session & dial 911. For any more minor pains or problems, take a moment to flex & test the body part that needs your attention. Listening to your body is key to the healing process or repair process.
Now please return to the intention you set at the start of class. Meditate on this need, this feeling. Sometimes it's most important not just to pursue our desires, but simply to know our desires.
Thank you all for joining me for this class from IXCIZY, LLC. Our Beginner II class is currently on sale for 10% off. I hope each of you carry the feeling of rest, gratitude, & bliss inside you for the rest of your day. Namaste.
The ideal vampire fighting style is surely the Ankle Grab Tower. James stands on Victoria's shoulders. She holds his ankles. Laurent stands on James' shoulders. James holds Laurent's ankles.
The tower moves by compressing like a spring & leaping a dozen meters forward. Vampires are strong for their weight, so carrying each other is easy. Their fantastic agility & reflexes let them fight in this complex formation - but only with lots of practise & trust.
So actually let's imagine a coven more interpersonally united than Victoria-James-Laurent. It's delightful to find a rare incentive for healthy relationships in the undead world!
The tower strikes the enemy by bending down like a cobra, Laurent hitting or grappling with his hands. Victoria is essentially using her boys as a spear or whip. Vampire tissue is the only substance tough enough to use as a antivampiric weapon.
In the instant of leaping or striking, the feet press firmly on the shoulders of the vampire below. But most of the time (dodging, grappling, etc) the weight is instead borne by the arms holding the ankles. This sacrifices some of the formation's sturdiness, but a vampire's arms are still incredibly strong. And it makes the formation far more flexible & robust when hit from the side, thrown into a tumble, etc.
Against any individual enemy, the tower has triple strength & 4 meters more reach. Being outnumbered is rare (most covens are 3 or fewer vampires), but in extremis the tower can dodge by scattering. It can even scatter-dodge in midair, which individuals cannot do.
When outnumbered (fighting to flee), the middle vampire (James) can stand facing backwards, so the tower can see in both directions. They can communicate with coded toe taps, letting them plan silently while listening to their enemies' plans.
Vampires are tough relative to their strength, so the usual strategy is for multiple vampires to isolate 1 enemy & tear them apart. The tower's height makes isolating enemies easy: lift them up high & leap away. If you don't have a free moment to finish the grabbed enemy, toss them straight up for a few seconds reprieve!
In the Twilight universe, vampires are crystalline beings that are almost completely indestructible. Eternal Twilight, introduced here, is similar except that vampires are fully indestructible.
Fire, gunpowder, cannons, volcanoes - these things can knock a vampire to the ground, cause her pain, even make her see stars. But nothing can change her shape. It's a good thing vampire hair & nails don't grow, because you can't cut them!
No physical force can damage a vampire. They are cold because they don't absorb heat. They shine because they don't absorb light. No furnace or laser could injure them. They are simply exempt.
While no one has tried it, a vampire impacting the surface of the Sun would presumably survive, sinking into a truly hellish eternity. And incineration by nuclear bomb has in fact been tried, when one of the Volturi's enemies was chained to an A-bomb during a 1960s weapons test. She survived.
Chains, burial in stone, & burial in concrete are the ultimate aims of all vampiric combat. Vampires in this universe are not quite as strong as those in Twilight, & cannot shatter stone if their limbs are bound. No vampire has ever been killed, nor ever will. Thousands of the world's fortresses & tombs contain overthrown vampires within the mortar-cracks of their foundations. Overcome by bloodthirst, they push feebly against the rock, hoping over millennia to scrape free.
Vampires are undead in the sense that they have skipped death. As if Heaven has forgotten to schedule their deathdays. They are in this sense exempt from all forces in the universe, cursed, Edythe Cullen thinks, by God. She doesn't want Beau to join her in this state because he very well might end up in a lake of fire. Or he might survive until the Earth falls into the red giant Sun. And she doesn't want him involved in the cruelties of the vampire world, like when she buried James in the desert outside Phoenix, piling dry soil on the cement to muffle his screams.
What i like about this AU is that it unifies Twilight's vampire physiology with the theme of damnation. I find it easier to understand some of the character's perspectives in this version. It's also fun that the Volturi are guarding against anyone digging up the previous administration. Are they buried beneath Volterra? Or in a secret location that only they know?
From the Throne Room of the Mountaintop Palace reigns the insurmountable Aletheia Dao Brahman, storygod of Truth. She is a skeleton queen, robed in black & crowned with stars. From her bony right hand she scatters flashcards like rectangular petals. In her left hand is a phone with 999 notifications.
Above the Throne Room stretches the First Tower. Herein reigns foreign Morpheus, storygod of Dreams. He rules imagination, fiction, & all that is not.
The doors on the left lead to the Vault of Words, the redoubt of coy Nyx Hekate, storygod of Secrets. We will earn some of her million treasures in time, but some we will never know.
Upstairs in the Tower of Words ponders eternal Thoth, storygod of Knowledge. Birdheaded, he reads, earmarking pages with his long beak. Half-empty bookshelves ring him, the gaps awaiting texts he has not yet won from Nyx.
The glass Vault of Splendor is the temple of obligatory Anubis, storygod of Ethics. By law he cannot bloody his sword, save against a sword that is already bloodied.
Above in the Tower of Splendor dances friend Baldur, storygod of Beauty. He wove thorns into a crown for himself.
Down in the Palace's Vault of Blades paces Taker Osiris, storygod of Death. His green, scarred palms are calloused with knowledge of every weapon: of the knife, of the tumor, of the arrhythmia.
Aloof in the Tower of Blades, distinct Eris, storygod of Differences, conducts her experiments. Nine of her fingers are divine, but one is beyond divine, something new.
Baldur's mother lives in the Vault of the Heart: skyspanning Venus, storygod of Love. Her stride knows not distance; she is on the threshold of every star.
Above her, the concrete Tower of the Heart houses Brother Deimos, storygod of Fear. He gazes longingly at the neighboring Tower of Blades. Eris declined to marry him, but offered to be his in the winters & take other lovers in the summers. Wary Deimos said no.
The uncharted Labyrinthine Vault was long thought uninhabited, an ecosystem of paradoxes & exceptions. Now it is haunted by Unexpected Coyote, storygod of Surprises. He spends a lot of time off-Mountaintop, stalking humans who have almost finished inventing new jokes.
A hidden stair connects to the Tower of the Labyrinth above, home of clearheaded Athene Saraswati, storygod of Reason. She carries a notebook in her left hand & a titanium spear in her right. She wears sensible shoes.
My partner & i have been working on a fun little poker variant & it's now polished enough to share. The pot is still the goal, but now you can also permanently upgrade your abilities. Who will win, me with 2 wildcards or you with 2 extra cards in your hand & a Ace up your sleeve (semiliterally)? It's great :)
Welcome to the Wooverse, where everything is real.
The Wooverse is a fictional universe similar to our modern world.
What's Different?
Heaven, astrology, ghosts, UFOs - these things are all real in the Wooverse. Real as in hard evidence, laboratory replication, encyclopedia articles, university departments. Psychics make 7 figures at hedge funds.
The core beliefs of all major religions are true. God, angels, Hell, prayer, sin, ghosts, kami, & reincarnation are all real.
Tarot reading, crystal energy, & herbal medicine are all in use at your local hospital - in addition to antibiotics, MRIs, surgery, etc.
Along with a doctor & a bank account, you probably have a psychic & an afterlife consultant.
30% of experts on spiritual topics (afterlives, Heaven, prayer, sin, etc) are not believers in any particular religious tradition. Rather, they study the large area of agreement between most religions. Similarly, 'nonreligious' means you don't go to religious gatherings. It doesn't mean not believing in God - that would be crazy!
What's the Same?
Earth hasn't changed too much since the scientific community accepted magic in the late 20th century. There are some big new industries, new labs, & new types of consultants. But there are still 200 nations, still cars, planes, & cell phones.
Consulting a psychic, cleric, energy healer, or ufologist feels about as ordinary as seeing a doctor or tax expert in our world. Most of these professionals speak to you in nonmystical language, have diplomas on their walls, & let you pay by credit card.
Traditional experts on these topics (palm readers, all kinds of clerics, etc) are still in business. But they have been mostly outcompeted by larger organizations that provide the same services plus various combinations of scientific research, modern business sense, economies of scale, & fact-based assurances the customer can clearly understand. Old-style psychics still attract certain customers, but it's hard for them to surpass data-driven divination in terms of prophettracker.org scores.
Religions are still here. For example, many Presbyterians hold that ghosts are a mass delusion & that posthumous ascension is only possible via Jesus, despite much evidence against both claims. Other Presbyterians are much more mainstream, but they still go to church & focus on the parts of Heaven that are discussed in the Christian Bible.
Everything is real? What about Zeus?
The premise of the Wooverse is that the top 100ish most-believed supernatural phenomena of the modern day are real. So, no Zeus. Yes Vishnu. Yes Archangel Michael, yes the Six Paths of reincarnation. Heaven & Hell are real but your time in either is not eternal, & you resume reincarnating afterwards.
Welcome to the Wooverse, where everything is real.
Fictional History
The 1946 Spaulding Report was universally derided upon publication, but has since become accepted as one of the foundational discoveries of the modern era. It described what it termed 'the mass-energy shadow of the soul', measured in terminally ill patients at the moment of death. The New York Times called this 'The End of the Scientific Era'. Today we would call it posthumous discarnation.
1950's Paris Symposium on World Religion was originally a conference for delegates from many religious groups to share perspectives on the new field of quantified spirituality. Most delegations, however, interpreted it as a World's Fair with a prize for the One Correct Religion. The Symposium attracted relatively young men from each faith, many of whom told reporters that their faith was a religion of universal insight, the best explanation for all recent lab results, & appropriate for all cultures. The Contest of Religions was largely a phenomenon of the popular imagination, however, as these sentiments produced equal or greater backlashes in the conservative populations of each faith.
Nevertheless, the 1950s saw an immense surge of public interest in the supernatural, which the US press called the Magic Economic Boom & the Magic Research Boom. In both sectors, much of these new projects were delusional, chasing rumored phenomena that never actually existed. But history well remembers the successes of this era, such as the Saldana family's psychic search & rescue enterprise. While much of the public still doubted the reality of psychic abilities & miracles, they could no longer doubt the ability of these concepts to make money.
By the 1960s, most American universities were divided not between art & science but between magic & tradition. While the supernatural sector sometimes drew millions from investors, most graduates found their much-mocked 'degree in Miracle Studies' of little use for finding a job. It was the Esoteric Science movement in Boston that first successfully integrated these new fields into academia. As anti-mystical as the traditionalists, yet convinced in the reality of supernatural phenomena, Esoteric Science studied the concepts of religion & superstition with open-minded rigor.
In 1968, a Soviet orbiter photographed something completely unexpected: A companion plying the skies. This 'Gost Object' was a distant gleam on an orbital trajectory, that changed course & departed for outer space with an ease far beyond what NASA's chemical propulsion was capable of. Due to a misunderstanding with a junior US diplomat, the Gost Report was shared, leaked, & published in the papers all over the world. The Great Silence of humanity's solitude was replaced with the Neighborly Silence - the extraterrestrials were here, but they weren't saying hello.
By the 1970s, popular demand for religious clarity was outstripping the ability of traditional religions to provide it. In 1973 more young urban Californians identified with the Secular Spirituality movement than with any church. With roots in New Age religious groups in Berkeley, CA, the Secular Spirituality Manifesto pitched its game as 'venerating real religious concepts without allegiance to any particular religion'. Sec-Spirit types wanted an evidence-based attitude toward souls, virtue, afterlife, & prayer, but didn't want to go through a church to get it. These groups were closely associated with the War Fills Hell slogan of this era. California's No Just War Act (the first state measure to decriminalize draft dodging) was a successful campaign promise of Sec-Spirit-affiliated Governor Alan Richards.
It would be thematically centered on the 900 theses of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
Similarly, lines like this: "divine Providence … caused certain books to fall into my hands. They are Chaldean books … of Esdras, of Zoroaster and of Melchior, oracles of the magi, which contain a brief and dry interpretation of Chaldean philosophy, but full of mystery."
Like in canon, there's a secret history of truly-supernatural alchemists. But it's not a genetic group with a clear demarcation between Witch & Muggle spaces. Most of the world knows alchemy is worth researching, but they don't quite realize how many fantastic secrets the field offers.
Our story happens in the 1800s. Magical locations aren't protected by Muggle Repelling Charms or Memory Charms, so future incursions of the camera & aeroplane will surely unveil the magical world to the public.
Levels of secrecy. Some of the ignorant wrongly believe that magic is a myth. Others believe correct superstitions but wield no arcane control. Some, like Newton, are Awakened & also wield temporal fame & offices. And there are ancient Orders that even most Awakened are oblivious to.
There are lands whose kings acquired certain codices & are now aware of wide swathes of the Awakened world. Indeed, all citizens of these kingdoms speak openly of monasteries & clandestine Orders whose existence would startle the halls of power in Paris. It is Distance & Mistrust of Foreign Rumors that stays the spread of such secrets.
Our characters. The only woman of Indian birth among the University faculty, called cruel in the dormitories & cutthroat in the staffroom. A study group so despaired of her homework that they bound an angel to do it for them. A secret war rages now between them & her own angels. But very few students know of her demons.
Another: A student who often goes days without speaking a word of mortal conversation. She styles her name as Caliban. She incarnated the ghost of her dorm room out on the meadow & sleeps there so as to avoid her roommate. Once she vented a full minute to a classmate, then realized she forgot to deetherealize & he hadn't heard a thing.
The magic of this story is relatively subdued compared to canon. There are no wands, & lots of books. But some fields are more developed than in canon: Constructing magical buildings, prophetic knowledge of the future, & contact with Heaven & the afterlives.
Art & Div is what students call Arts & Divinity, a class taught from the first year. Both clergy & practitioners leverage the supernatural gifts of Heaven in different ways. The school is of course tolerant of the Arts, which is why it occludes itself from the Church. 'Heresy Harms Not the Wise' was the confident new addition to the songs in the student pub last year.
Proliferative Era is a seventh-year elective course on the philosophy of knowledge. In the last few centuries, it has been more common for theories to be evidenced than disproven. Practically every christological paradigm seems to have a solid chance at working out, & they each have at least one opinionated champion among the faculty. Similarly, practitioners exploit reality's rational, mathematical foundation, while other magic works based on the world's illusory nature. The Vedas are very clearly of eternal age, yet chronomancy dates the first living beings at six thousand years ago. Any seventh year can summon preta & hear firsthand of the six samsaric paths. Yet both errant & inerrant Scripture - not to mention several angels - speak quite specifically of eternal Salvation by the name of Christ. Indeed, the dead of many cultures give contradictory statements to the living. While surely Truth is singular, it is often possible for two practitioners to both profit from two paradigms of total contradiction.
Rifters is a series of 4 scifi novels from around 2004. They contain a extraordinary mix of cool & off-putting elements. What's cool about it is it's a delightfully bleak drama about amoral cyborgs fighting freaky nonhumans.
Discussion of fictional sexual assault:
The most strikingly off-putting element is that this is in part a drama about how horrible it would be if a evil government modified your brain to enjoy being a victim of rape. Personally i find this a reasonable topic for horror science fiction - indeed, it would be quite horrible. But i think it's sufficiently gruesome for readers to know what they're getting into. And sufficient for many readers to skip the series. If that's you, then i hereby give you permission to read this post & spoil yourself on all the other cool things that happen in this series :)
Spoilers for Book 1:
The 1st novel, Starfish, is cool but very small-scale. We're in a ominous research station on the bottom of the ocean. My favorite parts:
The deep-sea organisms are mysteriously developing beyond the usual rules of biology. (However, the author is a marine biologist obsessed with accuracy, so we will still be getting real science ideas here.) Transparent fish several meters across, organisms clumping up & behaving like cells in a superorganism, flesh gone mad.
One of the characters suffers a stroke in his modified brain while swimming outside the station. His radio goes dead but his vitals keep going. He goes feral, haunting the ocean floor, eating fish, mostly braindead, only his 'lizard brain' functions running his body.
Spoilers for Book 2:
Maelstrom is my favorite book in the series. It has some fun ideas that i've never seen elsewhere in scifi. Favorite parts:
Much of the future economy depends on biotech thinking machines composed of vat-grown human gray matter. They're more like computers than brains, because they are human neurons arranged in totally different shapes & arrangements from a brain. Each one is task-specific: Some are connected to a mic & speakers & can speak to you, some are connected to cameras & can see, & some run shipping companies.
The delightful nickname for these neuronal petri dishes is 'head cheeses'.
The portrayal of the strengths & weaknesses of these neural nets is mostly quite realistic. You could also say this is the best pre-LLM novel about LLMs.
The future internet has a totally awesome problem. There was a cybersecurity arms race where humans competed to create computer viruses that could evolve faster than defensive viruses could keep up. Now most computers on the planet are carriers for a million strains of endemic, still-evolving viruses.
We call these 'wildlife'.
We even get memorable chapters from the point of view of wildlife! Struggling to avoid being overwritten (byte by byte) by more sophisticated wildlife.
We also have a biological epidemic. The protagonists caught a deadly microbe at the bottom of the ocean, now it's devastating cities on land.
This microbe, called Behemoth, is a totally new domain of life. Its metabolism uses new a chemical pathway which is of superior efficiency to all other life. It has been contained to one hydrothermal vent for eons, because cold water is lethal to it.
At first, we think it came in on a panspermial meteorite long ago.
Later, we learn it is native to Earth, coming from abiogenesis at that vent. All other domains of life are panspermial. We colonized Behemoth's planet!
Earth is ruled by a amoral corporation-government. (ie, a 'corporation'-themed organization that rules territory, has a monopoly on force, & draws taxes.) They are fun antagonists, full of cynical spymasters & smart, heartless biologists.
The corporation is initially skilled at handling both biological & cybersecurity epidemics. Corporate computers are well-firewalled against wildlife, & cities are quarantined off from each other by walls & draconian biosecurity checkpoints. However, Behemoth becomes unstoppable.
The tone of this novel is very fun. Cyberpunk super-agents vs huge evil government. Human species lucky if they can survive the year. Scowling at night in a rainstorm. Etc.
EVERY character is amoral. Everyone & everything is a self-prioritizing organism in a ecosystem.
At the end, we think everyone has failed to contain Behemoth, & that it will infect & kill all terrestrial life. But then we see something awesome. The corporation has deployed a line of (vacuum-chamber) airships, sweeping west across North America, firebombing the continent so thoroughly as to completely sterilize every ecosystem. The bad guys aren't giving up yet!
Spoilers for Book 3 & 4:
These books escalate the stakes & do a decent job of concluding everything. Favorite parts:
Earth's leadership has abandoned every continent (!) & is now based out of a station on the ocean floor. (It's a different ocean.)
Those land animals that weren't bombed are developing mysterious new phenotypes. Animals grow extra limbs, in a strange symbiosis - perhaps Behemoth will become a upgrade to the mitochondrion??
As a general theme, all characters are nothing more than a collection of lobes & cortices, sometimes artificially disrupted. The universe is nothing more than a lawless contest between humans, microbes, & everything else. Whichever organism adapts & reproduces more in Earth's chemical environments wins.
The corporate biologists lose control & the freaky organisms win.
Again, this series has a lot of unpleasant rape plotlines, but the other parts are so fun! People who won't read the books deserve at least to hear what happens in them.
PS: I halfheartedly recommend Maelstrom. I wholeheartedly recommend Blindsight, my favorite novel by Watts :)
From the Throne Room of the Mountaintop Palace reigns the insurmountable Aletheia Dao Brahman, storygod of Truth. She is a skeleton queen, robed in black & crowned with stars. From her bony right hand she scatters flashcards like rectangular petals. In her left hand is a phone with 999 notifications.
Above the Throne Room stretches the First Tower. Herein reigns foreign Morpheus, storygod of Dreams. He rules imagination, fiction, & all that is not.
The doors on the left lead to the Vault of Words, the redoubt of coy Nyx Hekate, storygod of Secrets. We will earn some of her million treasures in time, but some we will never know.
Upstairs in the Tower of Words ponders eternal Thoth, storygod of Knowledge. Birdheaded, he reads, earmarking pages with his long beak. Half-empty bookshelves ring him, the gaps awaiting texts he has not yet won from Nyx.
The glass Vault of Splendor is the temple of obligatory Anubis, storygod of Ethics. By law he cannot bloody his sword, save against a sword that is already bloodied.
Above in the Tower of Splendor dances friend Baldur, storygod of Beauty. He wove thorns into a crown for himself.
Down in the Palace's Vault of Blades paces Taker Osiris, storygod of Death. His green, scarred palms are calloused with knowledge of every weapon: of the knife, of the tumor, of the arrhythmia.
Aloof in the Tower of Blades, distinct Eris, storygod of Differences, conducts her experiments. Nine of her fingers are divine, but one is beyond divine, something new.
Baldur's mother lives in the Vault of the Heart: skyspanning Venus, storygod of Love. Her stride knows not distance; she is on the threshold of every star.
Above her, the concrete Tower of the Heart houses Brother Deimos, storygod of Fear. He gazes longingly at the neighboring Tower of Blades. Eris declined to marry him, but offered to be his in the winters & take other lovers in the summers. Wary Deimos said no.
The uncharted Labyrinthine Vault was long thought uninhabited, an ecosystem of paradoxes & exceptions. Now it is haunted by Unexpected Coyote, storygod of Surprises. He spends a lot of time off-Mountaintop, stalking humans who have almost finished inventing new jokes.
A hidden stair connects to the Tower of the Labyrinth above, home of clearheaded Athene Saraswati, storygod of Reason. She carries a notebook in her left hand & a titanium spear in her right. She wears sensible shoes.
I put this together after reading Nick Lane's The Vital Question. The proposed timeline:
3.8bya: The earliest evidence for life is isotopic fractionation. The carbon (and iron, sulfur, nitrogen) atoms in graphite in Greenland are non-randomly sorted, which indicates the presence of cells whose enzymes have a slight preference for the lighter forms of each. However, geological processes can also produce non-random sorting, so this evidence is ambiguous.
3.5bya: Less ambiguously, we have microfossils that look like cells, again with isotopic signatures.
We think bacteria and archaea split off really early, close to the beginning of life (abiogenesis) itself. This is because their cell walls and membranes are so different it's hard to see how one could have evolved from the other. They probably emerged in parallel when they became independent at all. (Quick sketch of abiogenesis, and bacteria/archaea divergences.)
3.2bya: We see bacterial activity in rust bands in rocks. When bacteria strip electrons from iron dissolved in the oceans, the oxidated iron precipitates out into rust and sinks down to the ocean floor.
All bacteria and archaea respire (strip electrons from a donor 'fuel' to generate ATP, which fuels cellular activity). Many donors are possible – common ones are Fe2+, H2S, or H2O (which respectively become Fe3+, S, and O2 after the electron is stripped). Water is the last to be cracked as a donor.
2.4bya: It's cracked now, by some bacteria (archaea never manage it), which leads to The Great Oxidation Event. The oxygen is first absorbed by the oceans, the seabed, and land surfaces. It'll take over a billion years before the oxygen 'sinks' are exhausted, and oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere for real.
1.8bya: A bacterium somehow ends up inside an archaeon cell, and somehow they don't die about it. The bacterium becomes a specialized energy-producing unit, allowing the host cell to grow larger and more complex. They become the first eukaryote, invent sex, and spawn all complex life. (You can read my RPF about it btw.)
1bya: This engulfment – endosymbiosis – happens one more time, to produce chloroplasts in plants.
0.5-6bya: Atmospheric oxygen levels are rising for real now. We see large complex eukaryotes for the first time. These creatures have specialized tissues whose failure threatens the entire organism, and it becomes advantageous to separate out the germline (the part of eukaryotes that divide forever, e.g. sperm and eggs) and make the rest of the body just durable enough to last as long as the most failure-prone tissues. Death by design has entered the world.
People tell me parts of the solar system are 'useless' & it's 'not worth it to build anything there'. But that's short term thinking. We should leave the Sol-Venus L2 point empty until 2300 when it'll be cheap to build a monument there, a huge stone ziggurat that will orbit for 10,000 years, engraved with 'Humanity survived it all'.
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