Notes in the Archives

The end is nigh! The War can only go on! And the scribes can only tinker away at the Archive...

[notesinthearchives-blog]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

So I wrote a little horror story.

[notesinthearchives-blog]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Here’s a little something I originally submitted to the recent Doctor Who Unbound Anthology. It didn’t make it in; so I’ve put it up on AO3 instead.

[notesinthearchives-blog]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Here’s a little something I originally submitted to the recent Doctor Who Unbound Anthology. It didn’t make it in; so I’ve put it up on AO3 instead.

[notesinthearchives-blog]

[This entry was redacted from the Book of the War and history at large for reasons of Homeworld security. The copy below has been kept for analysis. See addendum for further notes from our own investigations of the topic]

Homeland Relay [Lesser Species (?): Group/Technology]: The story of the homeland relay should have been a relatively dull and simple thing from the so called “galactic empire” era of human history. At its most basic, each individual homeland relay was a small, mostly automated space station with a crew of 3-5 people.

Messages and news from Earth would be encoded as light, before being shot through a primitive sub-spatial dimension that would allow the message to move at even greater speed whilst avoiding the worst of the dust and radiation and other things that could distort the light. The message would be intercepted by another homeland relay, which would check the data for distortions, before re-encoding it into light again and shooting it on to the next homeland relay, on and on until its inevitable destination.

The homeland relays should have been just another symptom of the centrality of Earth in human thought at the time: as all roads once led to Rome, so all the homeland relays led out from and back to Earth, with even various rival empires and break away factions being fundamentally linked back to their homeland. By all rights, the homeland relays should have become redundant after Earth was destroyed.

As we now know, they didn’t. Something kept sending messages to the relays.

Here information becomes scarse, until recently our main sources of information on the homeland relays and their inhabitants were the devastation they would leave behind: fake distress beacons luring in help that would never leave the space station; colony ships passing too close would find their hibernating passengers drained dry of blood and their corridors infested with strange carnivorous bats; nearby planets finding themselves visited by strange ships in the dead of the night, powerless to stop their townsfolk being herded into the ships and never seen again.

Strangely, the inhabitants of the homeland relays weren’t the only thing that was changed after contact with this new signal: the local structure of space-time itself appears to have been affected. Visitors to the space around the homeland relays reported that light appeared to shine dimmer; whilst entropy seemed to take on increasingly aesthetic qualities; even death itself was a more negotiable concept for the lesser species.

We have more information from when the inhabitants took a more evangelistic approach: making the shift from space travelling apex predators to being the leaders of militarised religious sects. But even here direct information from them was cryptic, vague and usually overladen with mysticism; and close examination generally suggested that their rhetoric and explanations of their nature were usually crafted to facilitate an infiltration and high jacking of the local institutions and power structures.

A few general themes can be discerned from their sermons: claims that the Earth that was destroyed being a fake Earth, a course not meant to be taken, but there is hope as the armies of the real Earth were coming: a prince or a knight or a messiah carrying the blood of a dragon leading the charge. Drawing from this, the general consensus among later post humans is that the whole affair was a particularly bloody overreaction to Earth being destroyed- a sort of apocalyptic theology or inverted apocalyptic theology for a post apocalypse culture. Select War historians are less sure [data corrupted, unretrievable]

We can learn more from their impact: after converting the leaders at a local and planetary level they’d set up strangely hedonistically inclined theocratic states. These appear to have meant to be temporary: less meant to be a pillar of society and more as a way of preparing society for holy (or perhaps unholy) war. Both internal warfare against dissidents and cannibalistic crusades against nearby cultures were the norm, yet neither of these were the ultimate target: instead being a way of priming the population for what was to come.

Though it is not difficult to guess who this future war was meant to target, we do not have to worry: the homeland relay, the so called “homeland cults” that grew from them and their theocracies were largely exterminated by the House Military’s second wave before they were ready for such a war. Doubtless a few relics remain, the Anticonvent culture, for example, was largely ignored by the House Military due to a combination of their isolation and comparative absence of bloodlust and war mongering instinct, but the days when these could have had an impact on the War at large are gone.

Addendum 1 [addendum uses common codewords- “Hand”, shortened to “Ha”, for the leader of field operations in this theatre of War; “Mind” being the collective statements of his superiors and shortened to Mi"]

Ha– Circumstantial evidence suggest that earlier conclusions may have been optimistic- we know damage to space-time in affected areas was diluted and contained but never mended. Permission to reexamine second wave’s data in conjunction with modern surveillance Y/N?

Mi—- Y- permission granted. [see addendum 2]

Addendum 2.1 [Timeline corruption- destroyed by interference earlier in timeline. We have preserved addendum from this timeline- see 3.1 for start of current timeline]

Ha– It appears that there were more survivors from the homeland relays than previously thought. The cult known as The Lesser Brides has been confirmed as having survived- they appear to have altered the sub-spatial dimension the homeland relay used to send messages, essentially dragging at the very least the space station itself and a population of unknown size into it. An extended stake out found that they were leaving the dimension to collect resources and recruits.

Ha—- Further information will require the infiltration of the sub-spatial dimension itself. Permission to launch infiltration Y/N?

Mi——– Y- permission granted [see addendum 2.2]

Ha—- The discovery of The Lesser Brides leaves open the possibility that other homeland relay groups may have survived. In particular, their use of sub-spatial dimensions may have been replicated by others, and may suggest that they have the support of some time active power. Permission to launch wider scale investigation with House Military heavy support Y/N?

Mi——– Y- permission granted [see addendum 2.3]

Addendum 2.2 Ha– Infiltration successful- our agent is in the Lesser Brides’ sub-spatial dimension and is sending reports to us. Posing as a local posthuman, he was initiated into a cult we had confirmed the Lesser Brides had been using as a recruitment tool.

Ha—- Initial description from agent follows, full log sent via [data corrupted- unretrievable]

   “Imagine walking inside a tube large enough to fit a cathedral in: that you can see so high and goes on for so long that no matter where you look you get vertigo. Imagine now that gravity is subjective: that where ever you place your feet is down for all intrinsic purposes and, if you know how, you can fall upwards or sideways. Now imagine if this tube was filled to the brim with architecture built to take advantage of this. Domed temples floating in mid air- their insides painted in a colour you’d swear was midnight black were it not for the fact that it glittered. Impossibly tall towers- the bells at their top causing vibrations that cause chimes throughout the rest of the tower to sing for hours in perfect harmony. Canals great and small, whose ink black water flows smoothly even at right angles or double backing on itself- which after defying gravity in a thousand different ways proceeds to link back to its source in a sprawling möbius loop.”  

   “There are people who have lived there entire lives here. The canals are dotted with boat houses and little Venices; every tower and temple is maintained and guarded by its own unholy order that grows most of their new members in vats; whilst the many parentless hybrid children are nursed and raised in crèches by what I believe to be the people closest to original Lesser Brides aesthetically speaking. The children are fed the Bride’s milk as babies, are gently corrected as they consider rebellion, and diligently cared back to health as they fall sick. For abominations against history and nature, the Brides make for excellent parents.”  

Ha—— this log has come to my attention, and makes me concerned that our agent may be at risk of being compromised. Permission to extract him Y/N? Extract from log below:

   “We visited a planet under the Brides’ influence. No, that’s an oversimplification. The planet we visited had a forty hour day, with the average night in the areas with some population (excluding the poles for instance) generally varying from 15 to 26 hours depending on the season and distance from the equator. The governing bodies of the planet lay claim to different hours of the day. The governing bodies that control the hours where there is sunlight year round are fairly conservative Arcadian or proto-Arcadian post human cultures. The hours near midnight are governed by the law of the Lesser Brides. When one government goes to sleep, another one wakes up.”  

   “In between these hours the patterns of law and authority wane and wax from one to the other, changing based on what they can plausibly enforce and what one will let the other get away with. In these not quite either hours, a network of hybrid subcultures flourish: party goers and cultists; musicians and gangs; the night shift staff and the strange customers that they service…”  

   “… It was a dispute over one of these not quite either hours that drew us from the subspace dimension. Matron Tremaine was arriving as a diplomat, I was part of her retinue. I didn’t see what negotiations went on, but her opposite number left looking fairly pleased with himself, apparently having wrangled substantial concessions out of her. Matron Tremaine was also satisfied with the concessions, giving me the impression that her opposite number didn’t quite grasp the power of who they were negotiating with…”  

   “As Matron Tremaine later said to us, ‘It pays to maintain good relations with our neighbours. Afterall, we are always recruiting.’ I could have sworn the Matron gave a pointed look in my direction, and for a moment I was worried that my cover was blown. I relaxed when I realised that surely they’d have done something already if they knew…”  

Ha——– Belay that request. After a worrying but understandable period of silence from our agent, we have received her latest and almost certainly last entry and are now certain that she was compromised before regenerating into a form that was antithetical to Homeworld’s interests. The entry was generated by our agent’s emergency protocols that act to inform us in the event of our agent’s corruption by hostile powers. Extract below:

   “I was on my knees for the ceremony. My Husband was absent in the flesh but nevertheless there in spirit as He was for us all. Two of my fellow brides lifted up the veil of my wedding dress as Matron Tremaine brought the goblet- holding it up to my mouth. The Blood of the Dragon slid smoothly down my throat, painting my lips a deep, dark red as it passed down.”  

   “As the matron took the goblet away, the younger brides took my wrists and sunk their fangs into it. My internal weaponry wanted to activate, as if by reflex, but I restrained it as the brides drank deeply. My throat, of course, was Matron Tremaine’s to take. Moving to her knees to access it, spilling rose petal stains down my dress and hers, I was rendered utterly powerless in her grasp…”  

   “I was faint when the deed was finally done, my white dress having turned a liquid red. My ceremony was not yet over: it finished with my chest impaled upon Matron Tremaine’s spear. My protocols of regeneration kicked in, now guided by the Blood of the Dragon in my belly. I awoke from the fires of my rebirth with a form made to my Husbands desires, and with hungers the likes of which I had never experienced… Hungers my fellow brides were only to happy to teach me how best to sate…”  

   “Now? My past life seems like a dream, like something that happened to someone else. Did I really live in a world of dull colours and duller senses before the Blood of the Dragon made me see colours so vibrant?”  

   “Did I really half live a half life in service to my House before my Husband taught me to live- really live, really feel alive- in a body of beautiful dead flesh?”  

   “Was I really that pathetic?”  

   “And then there’s you, my former masters. Its just like you to install a back door in my biodata, too late for me to stop now of course even with the Blood of the Dragon now cutting my links to the Homeworld. So I suppose I’m stuck with an audience for now. Very well. I can live with that.”  

   “Afterall, I don’t think anyone has told you just how pathetic you are.”  

   “I was pathetic once, but I had the possibility to become something better. You can’t even achieve that.”  

   “And I now know, that you are nothing.”  

   “You are nothing compared to the Prince who carries the Blood of the Dragon, yet alone the Mother of Monsters who empowered Him.”  

   “He is coming for you.”  

   “You will know fear.”  

   “You will know death.”  

   “You will know the [data corrupted- unretrievable]  

Addendum 2.3 [data corrupted- unretrievable]

Addendum 3.1

Ha– Initial fears have been proven beyond doubt. We now have yet another front in the War. Status update attached below:

Probably using information obtained from our compromised agent, homeland cult known as Night’s Children launched a surprise attack earlier in history- apparently having partially detached their sub-spatial dimension from history itself- to make war on the local House sympathising societies. The homeland cults Knights of the Dead Suns, Haemomancer Covens, and Night’s Black Agents swiftly replicated this tactic.

Just as our forces mobilised to exterminate these forces, the homeland cults took action later in history: across the spatial territories of homeland cults long since exterminated that had been recolonised by various (mostly human or human derived) species, great machines activated and started butchering the colonists on an industrial scale. After the population was sacrificed in these Moloch Engines, the blood spilt seemingly resurrected the dead homeland cults and their theocracies, which started making war on House sympathising societies later in history.

As it stands, our forces have driven back the homeland cults positioned earlier in history and contained the theocracies later in history, current tactics are relying on waging a war of attrition with the understanding that we can afford the losses and they can’t. Previous attempts to recapture their territory or wage a more retroactive war against the cults and activated Moloch Engines were bogged down fighting time active partisan cells. We are currently mobilising a task force for locating a destroying any other Moloch Engines before they activate.

The Lesser Brides and a number of other homeland cults have retreated into their sub-spatial dimension completely, our forces currently have them under siege. In light of our agent being compromised, we suspect that the Lesser Brides may soon have access to some Homeworld cultural-genetic weaponry, but nothing the Faction hasn’t already traded in and nothing that should be a problem as long as the Lesser Brides remain contained.

The Anticonvent remain unhostile, but we continue monitoring them both for changes in behaviour and information on the source of their transmissions [data corrupted- unretrievable].

Ha—- we are containing the homeland cults, and projections show that in the long run we are winning or at least can maintain this stance indefinitely. However, Homeworld has essentially infinite resources, of which we are using a comparatively pitiful amount to fight these enemies. Even when we reach a point where we can launch retroactive warfare without interference, the homeland cults hiding within their sub-spatial dimensions will remain a security risk, and judging by past and current experience there is a good chance that those forces that we defeat will just stubbornly refuse to stay dead.

Ha—-Request: can I have use of heavier firepower to deal with them Y/N? Currently, most of the forces I am using are either allied cultures in the region or conscripted auxilia forces. Whilst functional at containing the threat, they are utterly inadequate for eliminating it. I would like to emphasise that the homeland relay cults are affecting the local structure of space time: we have no idea what kind of damage they are doing but what is certain is that the longer we dither the more difficult it will be to repair.

Mi——– N- request not granted. Homeworld’s resources may be infinite but our attention isn’t. Our situation is one of distractions: if we take the time and effort to deal with enemies like the ones you are fighting the real enemies will start advancing on a thousand more important, more delicate fronts. The homeland cults, if they are still around when we win the War, will be relatively easy to mop up afterwards. This is a minor front after all, even if we look at who is sending the signals [data corrupted- unretrievable].

-

Link to archive of our own version: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042054/chapters/42320339

[notesinthearchives-blog]

[This entry was redacted from the Book of the War and history at large for reasons of Homeworld security. The copy below has been kept for analysis. See addendum for further notes from our own investigations of the topic]

Homeland Relay [Lesser Species (?): Group/Technology]: The story of the homeland relay should have been a relatively dull and simple thing from the so called "galactic empire" era of human history. At its most basic, each individual homeland relay was a small, mostly automated space station with a crew of 3-5 people.

Messages and news from Earth would be encoded as light, before being shot through a primitive sub-spatial dimension that would allow the message to move at even greater speed whilst avoiding the worst of the dust and radiation and other things that could distort the light. The message would be intercepted by another homeland relay, which would check the data for distortions, before re-encoding it into light again and shooting it on to the next homeland relay, on and on until its inevitable destination.

The homeland relays should have been just another symptom of the centrality of Earth in human thought at the time: as all roads once led to Rome, so all the homeland relays led out from and back to Earth, with even various rival empires and break away factions being fundamentally linked back to their homeland. By all rights, the homeland relays should have become redundant after Earth was destroyed.

As we now know, they didn't. Something kept sending messages to the relays.

Here information becomes scarse, until recently our main sources of information on the homeland relays and their inhabitants were the devastation they would leave behind: fake distress beacons luring in help that would never leave the space station; colony ships passing too close would find their hibernating passengers drained dry of blood and their corridors infested with strange carnivorous bats; nearby planets finding themselves visited by strange ships in the dead of the night, powerless to stop their townsfolk being herded into the ships and never seen again.

Strangely, the inhabitants of the homeland relays weren't the only thing that was changed after contact with this new signal: the local structure of space-time itself appears to have been affected. Visitors to the space around the homeland relays reported that light appeared to shine dimmer; whilst entropy seemed to take on increasingly aesthetic qualities; even death itself was a more negotiable concept for the lesser species.

We have more information from when the inhabitants took a more evangelistic approach: making the shift from space travelling apex predators to being the leaders of militarised religious sects. But even here direct information from them was cryptic, vague and usually overladen with mysticism; and close examination generally suggested that their rhetoric and explanations of their nature were usually crafted to facilitate an infiltration and high jacking of the local institutions and power structures.

A few general themes can be discerned from their sermons: claims that the Earth that was destroyed being a fake Earth, a course not meant to be taken, but there is hope as the armies of the real Earth were coming: a prince or a knight or a messiah carrying the blood of a dragon leading the charge. Drawing from this, the general consensus among later post humans is that the whole affair was a particularly bloody overreaction to Earth being destroyed- a sort of apocalyptic theology or inverted apocalyptic theology for a post apocalypse culture. Select War historians are less sure [data corrupted, unretrievable]

We can learn more from their impact: after converting the leaders at a local and planetary level they'd set up strangely hedonistically inclined theocratic states. These appear to have meant to be temporary: less meant to be a pillar of society and more as a way of preparing society for holy (or perhaps unholy) war. Both internal warfare against dissidents and cannibalistic crusades against nearby cultures were the norm, yet neither of these were the ultimate target: instead being a way of priming the population for what was to come.

Though it is not difficult to guess who this future war was meant to target, we do not have to worry: the homeland relay, the so called "homeland cults" that grew from them and their theocracies were largely exterminated by the House Military's second wave before they were ready for such a war. Doubtless a few relics remain, the Anticonvent culture, for example, was largely ignored by the House Military due to a combination of their isolation and comparative absence of bloodlust and war mongering instinct, but the days when these could have had an impact on the War at large are gone.

Addendum 1 [addendum uses common codewords- "Hand", shortened to "Ha", for the leader of field operations in this theatre of War; "Mind" being the collective statements of his superiors and shortened to Mi"]

Ha-- Circumstantial evidence suggest that earlier conclusions may have been optimistic- we know damage to space-time in affected areas was diluted and contained but never mended. Permission to reexamine second wave's data in conjunction with modern surveillance Y/N?

Mi---- Y- permission granted. [see addendum 2]

Addendum 2.1 [Timeline corruption- destroyed by interference earlier in timeline. We have preserved addendum from this timeline- see 3.1 for start of current timeline]

Ha-- It appears that there were more survivors from the homeland relays than previously thought. The cult known as The Lesser Brides has been confirmed as having survived- they appear to have altered the sub-spatial dimension the homeland relay used to send messages, essentially dragging at the very least the space station itself and a population of unknown size into it. An extended stake out found that they were leaving the dimension to collect resources and recruits.

Ha---- Further information will require the infiltration of the sub-spatial dimension itself. Permission to launch infiltration Y/N?

Mi-------- Y- permission granted [see addendum 2.2]

Ha---- The discovery of The Lesser Brides leaves open the possibility that other homeland relay groups may have survived. In particular, their use of sub-spatial dimensions may have been replicated by others, and may suggest that they have the support of some time active power. Permission to launch wider scale investigation with House Military heavy support Y/N?

Mi-------- Y- permission granted [see addendum 2.3]

Addendum 2.2 Ha-- Infiltration successful- our agent is in the Lesser Brides' sub-spatial dimension and is sending reports to us. Posing as a local posthuman, he was initiated into a cult we had confirmed the Lesser Brides had been using as a recruitment tool.

Ha---- Initial description from agent follows, full log sent via [data corrupted- unretrievable]

   "Imagine walking inside a tube large enough to fit a cathedral in: that you can see so high and goes on for so long that no matter where you look you get vertigo. Imagine now that gravity is subjective: that where ever you place your feet is down for all intrinsic purposes and, if you know how, you can fall upwards or sideways. Now imagine if this tube was filled to the brim with architecture built to take advantage of this. Domed temples floating in mid air- their insides painted in a colour you'd swear was midnight black were it not for the fact that it glittered. Impossibly tall towers- the bells at their top causing vibrations that cause chimes throughout the rest of the tower to sing for hours in perfect harmony. Canals great and small, whose ink black water flows smoothly even at right angles or double backing on itself- which after defying gravity in a thousand different ways proceeds to link back to its source in a sprawling möbius loop."  

   "There are people who have lived there entire lives here. The canals are dotted with boat houses and little Venices; every tower and temple is maintained and guarded by its own unholy order that grows most of their new members in vats; whilst the many parentless hybrid children are nursed and raised in crèches by what I believe to be the people closest to original Lesser Brides aesthetically speaking. The children are fed the Bride's milk as babies, are gently corrected as they consider rebellion, and diligently cared back to health as they fall sick. For abominations against history and nature, the Brides make for excellent parents."  

Ha------ this log has come to my attention, and makes me concerned that our agent may be at risk of being compromised. Permission to extract him Y/N? Extract from log below:

   "We visited a planet under the Brides' influence. No, that's an oversimplification. The planet we visited had a forty hour day, with the average night in the areas with some population (excluding the poles for instance) generally varying from 15 to 26 hours depending on the season and distance from the equator. The governing bodies of the planet lay claim to different hours of the day. The governing bodies that control the hours where there is sunlight year round are fairly conservative Arcadian or proto-Arcadian post human cultures. The hours near midnight are governed by the law of the Lesser Brides. When one government goes to sleep, another one wakes up."  

   "In between these hours the patterns of law and authority wane and wax from one to the other, changing based on what they can plausibly enforce and what one will let the other get away with. In these not quite either hours, a network of hybrid subcultures flourish: party goers and cultists; musicians and gangs; the night shift staff and the strange customers that they service..."  

   "... It was a dispute over one of these not quite either hours that drew us from the subspace dimension. Matron Tremaine was arriving as a diplomat, I was part of her retinue. I didn't see what negotiations went on, but her opposite number left looking fairly pleased with himself, apparently having wrangled substantial concessions out of her. Matron Tremaine was also satisfied with the concessions, giving me the impression that her opposite number didn't quite grasp the power of who they were negotiating with..."  

   "As Matron Tremaine later said to us, 'It pays to maintain good relations with our neighbours. Afterall, we are always recruiting.' I could have sworn the Matron gave a pointed look in my direction, and for a moment I was worried that my cover was blown. I relaxed when I realised that surely they'd have done something already if they knew..."  

Ha-------- Belay that request. After a worrying but understandable period of silence from our agent, we have received her latest and almost certainly last entry and are now certain that she was compromised before regenerating into a form that was antithetical to Homeworld's interests. The entry was generated by our agent's emergency protocols that act to inform us in the event of our agent's corruption by hostile powers. Extract below:

   "I was on my knees for the ceremony. My Husband was absent in the flesh but nevertheless there in spirit as He was for us all. Two of my fellow brides lifted up the veil of my wedding dress as Matron Tremaine brought the goblet- holding it up to my mouth. The Blood of the Dragon slid smoothly down my throat, painting my lips a deep, dark red as it passed down."  

   "As the matron took the goblet away, the younger brides took my wrists and sunk their fangs into it. My internal weaponry wanted to activate, as if by reflex, but I restrained it as the brides drank deeply. My throat, of course, was Matron Tremaine's to take. Moving to her knees to access it, spilling rose petal stains down my dress and hers, I was rendered utterly powerless in her grasp..."  

   "I was faint when the deed was finally done, my white dress having turned a liquid red. My ceremony was not yet over: it finished with my chest impaled upon Matron Tremaine's spear. My protocols of regeneration kicked in, now guided by the Blood of the Dragon in my belly. I awoke from the fires of my rebirth with a form made to my Husbands desires, and with hungers the likes of which I had never experienced... Hungers my fellow brides were only to happy to teach me how best to sate..."  

   "Now? My past life seems like a dream, like something that happened to someone else. Did I really live in a world of dull colours and duller senses before the Blood of the Dragon made me see colours so vibrant?"  

   "Did I really half live a half life in service to my House before my Husband taught me to live- really live, really feel alive- in a body of beautiful dead flesh?"  

   "Was I really that pathetic?"  

   "And then there's you, my former masters. Its just like you to install a back door in my biodata, too late for me to stop now of course even with the Blood of the Dragon now cutting my links to the Homeworld. So I suppose I'm stuck with an audience for now. Very well. I can live with that."  

   "Afterall, I don't think anyone has told you just how pathetic you are."  

   "I was pathetic once, but I had the possibility to become something better. You can't even achieve that."  

   "And I now know, that you are nothing."  

   "You are nothing compared to the Prince who carries the Blood of the Dragon, yet alone the Mother of Monsters who empowered Him."  

   "He is coming for you."  

   "You will know fear."  

   "You will know death."  

   "You will know the [data corrupted- unretrievable]  

Addendum 2.3 [data corrupted- unretrievable]

Addendum 3.1

Ha-- Initial fears have been proven beyond doubt. We now have yet another front in the War. Status update attached below:

Probably using information obtained from our compromised agent, homeland cult known as Night's Children launched a surprise attack earlier in history- apparently having partially detached their sub-spatial dimension from history itself- to make war on the local House sympathising societies. The homeland cults Knights of the Dead Suns, Haemomancer Covens, and Night's Black Agents swiftly replicated this tactic.

Just as our forces mobilised to exterminate these forces, the homeland cults took action later in history: across the spatial territories of homeland cults long since exterminated that had been recolonised by various (mostly human or human derived) species, great machines activated and started butchering the colonists on an industrial scale. After the population was sacrificed in these Moloch Engines, the blood spilt seemingly resurrected the dead homeland cults and their theocracies, which started making war on House sympathising societies later in history.

As it stands, our forces have driven back the homeland cults positioned earlier in history and contained the theocracies later in history, current tactics are relying on waging a war of attrition with the understanding that we can afford the losses and they can't. Previous attempts to recapture their territory or wage a more retroactive war against the cults and activated Moloch Engines were bogged down fighting time active partisan cells. We are currently mobilising a task force for locating a destroying any other Moloch Engines before they activate.

The Lesser Brides and a number of other homeland cults have retreated into their sub-spatial dimension completely, our forces currently have them under siege. In light of our agent being compromised, we suspect that the Lesser Brides may soon have access to some Homeworld cultural-genetic weaponry, but nothing the Faction hasn't already traded in and nothing that should be a problem as long as the Lesser Brides remain contained.

The Anticonvent remain unhostile, but we continue monitoring them both for changes in behaviour and information on the source of their transmissions [data corrupted- unretrievable].

Ha---- we are containing the homeland cults, and projections show that in the long run we are winning or at least can maintain this stance indefinitely. However, Homeworld has essentially infinite resources, of which we are using a comparatively pitiful amount to fight these enemies. Even when we reach a point where we can launch retroactive warfare without interference, the homeland cults hiding within their sub-spatial dimensions will remain a security risk, and judging by past and current experience there is a good chance that those forces that we defeat will just stubbornly refuse to stay dead.

Ha----Request: can I have use of heavier firepower to deal with them Y/N? Currently, most of the forces I am using are either allied cultures in the region or conscripted auxilia forces. Whilst functional at containing the threat, they are utterly inadequate for eliminating it. I would like to emphasise that the homeland relay cults are affecting the local structure of space time: we have no idea what kind of damage they are doing but what is certain is that the longer we dither the more difficult it will be to repair.

Mi-------- N- request not granted. Homeworld's resources may be infinite but our attention isn't. Our situation is one of distractions: if we take the time and effort to deal with enemies like the ones you are fighting the real enemies will start advancing on a thousand more important, more delicate fronts. The homeland cults, if they are still around when we win the War, will be relatively easy to mop up afterwards. This is a minor front after all, even if we look at who is sending the signals [data corrupted- unretrievable].

-

Link to archive of our own version: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042054/chapters/42320339

[notesinthearchives-blog]

The Flame Coteries

[You can’t help but double check to make sure no one is watching as you unwrap the incense. As paranoid as that sounds, you know that this is considered illegal by every government that dares to admit that it exists, so perhaps this caution is justified.]

[You light the incense, runes lighting along it as you place it on a holder. The faintly herbal smoke makes you feel drowsy, but you're still awake enough to hear the faint fiery crackle and still primed enough to feel the reality equations kept within the incense start to awaken.]

[You have have the feeling of having drifted off to sleep or near sleep, and when you awaken you have the feeling of being embraced like a child curled up next to their mother. You certain this isn't real- more the ghosts and shadows of things that were once real. When she speaks, and you're sure this feeling or shadow or ghost was once a woman, her voice carries the comforting spices of midwinter wine and the relief of shelter and fire after a trek through a snow storm.]

Would care for a story, O Best Beloved?

[You instinctively nod, not sure if you even could say no to such a cinnamon voice]

This is a story from the strange and beautiful times after Earth was nothing but dust and the first human empires had fallen.

And in these strange and beautiful times, across 9 little worlds in a tiny corner of the Universe, lived the Kafkaesques. A people ever so sensible and quite dull, far too respectable to join the rest of post humanity in their carnival of flesh and science and magic.

And why would they? After all, they knew they were the children of the Gods and made in their image, and that everything would be alright as long as they did as they were told and the right paperwork was filled in.

And the Gods loved them too- for they were a tide pool of stability amid the roiling chaos of post humanity. A little pocket of the God's Homeworld, amidst a horde of barbarians.

But these were the strange and beautiful times Best Beloved, and so this was not to last. For there were other Powers at work: factions cunning and clever; skull faced tricksters cast down from the Land of the Gods.

And it was then that one of these skull faced trickers brought a gift to worlds of the Kafkaesques: the ghost cargo.

Oh! It was clever gift Best Beloved. By itself the ghost cargo did nothing. But when the Kafkaesques found its power soon enough: for the iron cage of bureaucracy could not contain it.

No symbolism could be attached to it, subjective perspectives slid of it like as if it were slickest oil, and to eyes of paperwork it was rendered invisible: the hands of bureaucracy could not cage it any more than they could cage smoke or shadows.

It was not long, Best Beloved, when the gift had ended the quiet in the Kafkaesques' little tide pool of history, for it had brought their ruling powers to their knees.

As the gift began to spread, many Kafkaesques who didn't want to be quiet and sensible and dull anymore saw its potential: they became vandals and anarchists, strikers and criminal.

At their action, food rotted in the streets as warehouses thought empty turned out to be filled with stock invisible to the eyes of bureaucracy; transporting goods slowed to a crawl as ships and trailers were found filled with worthless cargo that may as well have appeared over night; roads and buildings and cities would fill with steadily accumulating cargo that no one had any use for or could fill in the forms to remove.

At the command of the Gods, the ruling powers of the Kafkaesques turned to setting the ghost cargo on fire. But as these are want to do, Best Beloved, the fires got a little out of hand. And those years of fire and turmoil, the Kafkaesques died, and rising from their ashes came the Flame Coteries.

Pyromancers and stellar engineers; hosts to a thousand cults to the Phoenix, to Horus and Ra, and to the Sacred Flame; an armada of blazing cathedral-warships and an anarchist explosion of art and culture and life; when skull faced tricksters came to us again we welcomed them as liberators and greeted them with open arms and warmest hospitality.

And once again, Best Beloved, our trickster gave us another gift: just as they first liberated us from being a pet of the Gods, now they liberated us from the trap of time itself.

And so it was Best Beloved.

Our atomic armadas would sail upon time winds created from the gas giants they had made into stars: our inferno marching gloriously into the future and past...

... Our magician-spies would walk to certain death atop a flaming pyre and walk out in to great fires of London and Rome...

... whilst our warrior-nuns would brand the equations of time ships into every inch of their skin and fearlessly fling themselves into the storms of time...

... The discovery of fire and explosions of Pompeii and Krakatoa would mark the births of knowing, unnaturally clever children- our prophets reborn to spread the holy words of the Flame Coteries to those too far in the past for a visit from the armadas...

... The most cunning of us all changed history so that the Kafkaesques faced their rebirth earlier, and had more territory when it happened. At our height, we were born in a fire that stretched over an entire galaxy...

... And as our birth retroactively became earlier and earlier, we begun to encroach on that dull stretch of time before post humanity: bringing our passion and poetry and star light where ever we went.

But alas Best Beloved! This was not to last. For the gods were angered beyond word: as we burned brighter than they ever could. And so, they declares that our fires be doused where ever found and existence purged from history.

We fought bravely, we fought well, but the gods were too powerful even for us and skull faced comrades. Our home land is lost to us.

But the story does not end here Best Beloved.

Our prophets and armadas are scattered but still here: building khanates and pirate colonies until we can get our homeland back.

We hide in the glare of the stars and in the fiery mantle of planets, in the wishes made upon shooting stars and in the fire and passions that burn in us all.

Even now, our soldiers fight alongside our skull faced allies to rescue our home land from the oblivion the gods consigned it to.

And now, Best Beloved, we live within you.

As long as you remember us Best Beloved.

You'll hear our songs in the roar of the furnace...

Our sonnets in the crackle of the fireplace...

Our war drums in the sound of gunshot.

And we shall remember you.

I promise Best Beloved.

Our carnivals

Our holy orders

Our artists

Our warriors

Will visit you one day

As long as you remember us...

[The shadow fades, the incense having burnt itself out. You are alone, but undeniably warm and comfortable as you slip into sleep]

-

Link to the archive of our own version is here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042054/chapters/40973891

[notesinthearchives-blog]

The Spirit of Steam

[A Mal'Akh fang, acting as a storage device for some little sibling of Faction Paradox, covered in runes that are ready to be decoded with the correct biodata key]

[As you lack correct biodata key, the runes will have to be decoded manually]

[decoding...]

Contrary to popular belief, not all spirits are inherently sympathetic to our family, but most can be made to be useful. The spirit of steam is both a perfect example of this fact and the demonstration of how many limitations there can be when one has to treat these powers as things to be used rather than entities to be bargained with.

The spirit of steam emerged with the 1830s and the increasing adoption of the steam engine. The ruling classes had taken to fetishising the steam engine and steam power in general- seeing it as a tireless, all-powerful slave comparable with the wish granting Djinn from their understanding of Middle Eastern tales. In particular, the fact that the steam engine allowed factories to be set up where labour was plentiful and cheap (unlike the water wheel based factories, which were more restricted in where they could set up) was considered a blow against attempts of labourers to organise themselves: so that the capitalist could hire and fire 300 people a week and could be free from people objecting to little things like having to choose between death by overwork or death by starvation.

Needless to say, the spirit of steam is utterly useless when used conventionally, and this is derived precisely from how subservient it is. Anything that responds positively to the dominant, "correct" structure is going to undermine any attempt to subvert or uproot that structure whether intentionally or not, and a creature that lives but to serve will fall into being a cog in a greater system without thinking about it. In effect, even the most violent or treacherous spirit is superior to the spirit of steam, as they can be trusted to have a back bone.

That is not to say that the spirit of steam doesn't have its uses. We have several instances of the spirit of the steam in the Stacks after all, and not just for research or archival purposes. Hunting, whether mounted or otherwise, is an important component to many rituals; as is the use of symbolic substitutes for the real thing. Here the subservience of the spirit of steam comes into play: it is perfect for playing the role of various factors in maintaining the status quo. By hunting the spirit down, it is possible to force the present down timelines where the status quo has less stable pillars holding it up.

Of course, this ritual is not without its difficulties: most obviously, a body is needed for the spirit of steam to inhabit. Some covens place the spirit amongst a collage of machinery in the shape of a beast, but in a pinch someone could always volunteer to carry the spirit of steam. This of course has its own dangers, the ritual requiring at least the symbolic death of the spirit, but to families like for whom not existing is simply a particularly good form of camouflage little things like death in controlled circumstances like these isn't too difficult to get around.

No, the more pressing danger of the Hunting of Steam is simply the same with all uses of the spirit of steam and arguably for all spirits: the spirit's fundamental nature opens the door for things going wrong. This time, the sheer centrality of steam to the dominant world view of the society that birthed it causes the problem: it was so ubiquitous that training it onto this or the other thing that's keeping the world together is difficult. With the ritual being so difficult to aim, the possibility of unintended or dangerous consequences is always a possibility: a number of unfortunate attempts to hunt the steam are suspected to have resulted in the late 20th and early 21st centuries inability to deal with climate change or the biosphere meltdown that accompanied it.

In spite of these inherent dangers to using the spirit of steam in any capacity, a number of witch covens on the margins of our influence have tried it. Perhaps the most curious of these misuses of the spirit of steam- one that didn't so much fail as such but instead arguably worked too well- was with Brookhaven's attempt to film an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Brookhaven knew that the 1980s and 90s shift from an industrial society to a consumer society would inevitably lead to a different understanding of spirituality- as one member of Faction Hollywood would comment "telling someone that the God that gave them a conscience want them to keep their head down and work hard for their family is at least intuitive, telling someone that that God want them to have a new phone every month, 50 cars and the company of a different hooker every night? There going to think that's a bit of a stretch".

As such, in order to bring A Christmas Carol into the consumerist age and wed the story to the spirit of the 1980s he summoned the spirit of steam to act as the ghost of Christmas present. There is a logic to this- the ghost of Christmas present taking some inspiration from a suitably christianised Bacchus bringing the midwinter feasts and festivals, the spirit of steam combining the gift of plentiful production with the gift of modernisation was arguably the best replacement for any modernisation of the story to occur.

The result can charitably be called utterly bizarre. Between the traditional symbolic representation of Christmas as a time of transition between the last year and the new and the tautological nature of the present as being sandwiched between the past and the future, actually putting the spirit of steam in the role of the ghost of Christmas present had sent shock waves throughout the making of the whole film; whilst the servile nature of the spirit of steam both resulted in a complete surrender to the 1980s and the defanging of the script of any intentional satire inherited from the original story.

The precise time period the story took place in was blurred- select scenes suggest Dickens' Britain whereas others suggests Reagan's United States, but by and large these exist side by side: flat capped street urchins hawking newspapers under the neon lights of shady night clubs and decaying cinemas; yuppies and wall street corporate raiders drive past smoke stacks and top hatted carollers; and Mr Fezziwigg's Christmas party, which initially seems completely Victorian, has both lines of cocaine being consumed by the party goers and several go-go dancers performing there. Even with this in mind there are oddities: the scene where the ghost of Christmas present shows Scrooge what his nephew Fred is doing on Christmas day, for example, appears to take place at a seasonally themed gun show in 2018 Arizona.

The spirit of steam also threw off the characterisation throughout the whole story: Mrs Cratchit is a materialistic trophy wife who obsesses over outdoing her neighbours with regards to Christmas decorations; the ghost of Christmas past is an aggressively kitsch depiction of an infant Jesus as derived from the 80s religious right depictions; and every character with sufficient money takes cocaine- which makes the ham fisted speech in favour of Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" anti drug campaign even stranger considering that the none of the characters, good or otherwise, pay the least bit of attention to it.

The film goes through the movement of the original story but without any of the substance: certainly Scrooge starts off grumpy and ends the story happy but its difficult to see what, if anything, he learnt from this or why exactly the events of the story changed him. This, combined with the many dutch angles used in the film and the colour schemes and depictions of 1980s excess that verge on the grotesque when they're not outright embracing it constantly begged the question among those few people who did get the chance to watch the film: what were the makers of this film thinking?

This is probably why the film was never released or even properly edited for release, instead condemned to sit at the gates of Production Hell for eternity. Curiously, various edits of the film have in fact been show to some test audiences (an act considered less the film leaving Production Hell and more the audiences being temporarily imprisoned alongside it) which brought about the curious claim from one critic that the film was a bitter satire of 80s consumerism and the flattening effect it has on the already shallow Hollywood liberalism.

Though this was not the intended effect, later studies conducted on the test audiences suggest that variations of this theme would be the main thing the audience drew from the film: with the audiences showed a stronger reaction against perceived materialism after watching the film.

For example, surveys done years later showed that 15% more of the test audience joined monasteries, nunneries or other anti-materialistic religious establishments than the general population; 5% more of the test audience developed wealth or affluence related phobias; and at least 1 individual from the audiences has been established as having left their home country to join a Maoist insurgency...

-

Link to archive of our own version:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042054/chapters/40415711

[notesinthearchives-blog]

A Study in the Banal

[A Mal'Akh finger bone covered in code, presumably as a handy guide for little siblings]

[Normally, the correct biodata key would allow the code to be read automatically, but since you lack it it will have to be decoded]

[Decoding…]

Using a technology requires adopting the organisational practices and communication styles that made that technology. - Inverse Conway’s Law

If a technology doesn’t appear political to you, its because you are using the politics said technology implies. - Anon, adding a footnote to Inverse Conway’s Law

Our family’s claim that the ghost point fundamentally ruined almost all attempts at genuine transhumanist experimentation until the start of the post human era is controversial in some circles, and in all fairness there are a few edge cases to bear in mind. For example: the Heavenly Minds, as we have taken to categorising them, are a series of human era cases wherein the people involved ceased to be human in the biological sense of the word. However, we submit that these cannot be considered transhumanist success stories for the simple reason that they failed to transcend the human society that built them to any meaningful degree.

A quick study of their history is necessary here. The first of these came about as a result of human attempts to colonise the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter- the idea being that the asteroid belt communities would be able to provide a way point for ships hoping to gather hydrogen from Jupiter whilst also being just about close enough to the Sun for some use of solar power to be economical, and that a massive amount of wealth could be gained by mining the minerals in the asteroid belt and using the microgravity environment to build large ships without ever having to get them into orbit.

Needless to say, these plans hit reality like a car hits a solid brick wall. Though on paper the idea of hollowing out an asteroid to house people and generating gravity by making it spin is a relatively sound idea as far as they go, the society that the colonists and companies and governments involved hoped to build there was simply not going to happen.

By the time humanity had made serious attempts at entering space, their society was sufficiently complex that the average person who would become a space colonist had no input into making most of the goods they used nor any knowledge of said goods were made. Sitting at the end of a long supply chain of which they knew little, this by and large gave them the impression of a world without meaningful limitation- tellingly, every school of economics that was taken seriously took the world’s resources to be essentially infinite. But as these colonists and their leaders entered the asteroid belt, they entered made up of nothing but limitations, where supplies of food and water was inevitably fragile and certain death could quite literally be a few feet away.

The sheer culture shock of this combined with the inevitable shortages of food, water and electricity to cause multiple rebellions, but this did nothing. Every story this society understood as having some relevance to this situation involved an individual seizing the power of whoever was on top in order to bring about a plentiful cornucopia that the corrupt leaders had been preventing. Unsurprisingly, this just ending up replicating the same structure and society that had brought about the rebellion in the first place.

After a series of revolutions and counter revolutions that ended up going no where, it was proposed that if heaven could not be created in the material world that it could be created in the virtual one. Following the logic that human personalities were a programme being run on the biological computer of the brain, once a sufficiently advanced man-machine interface was created all that was necessary was for one’s personality to be uploaded to a powerful enough computer with a large enough memory, at which point they could exist in a heaven completely free of the material world.

Most of the asteroid belt’s human population was swiftly taken in by quasi religious mania, and uploaded their personalities en mass whilst letting their physical forms be taken apart molecule by molecule for the computer’s use. In the long run, the computer was no more inherently inclined to tell the individuals apart from each other than a person is to instinctively think of the ocean as individual water molecules that just happen to be together or any more than a person is to consider their separate thoughts as different entities from themselves. As such, the basic functioning of the computer lent in it to treating the individuals within it as part of its whole, and as a result the first Heavenly Mind was born.

Our family comes in here. A number of cousins had caught wind of this and, curious to see if it amounted to a genuine break from the ghost point, quietly created an small fork in the timeline from which the Heavenly Mind could be extracted without the Great Houses noticing.

The idea behind the Minds was not necessarily a bad one, but the Heavenly Mind our cousins picked up was a disappointment. Though its components were no longer human in the strictest biological sense of the word, and though it was theoretically intelligent enough to be on an equal footing with any of the higher powers, it had fundamentally failed to break past the cultural limitations of the ghost point, and as a result it could be understood as being within the context of not just humanity but the specific human society that created it.

As part of a series of experiments, the Heavenly Mind was given a society to shape however it thought best. Without fail, no matter what environment the society was in, the Mind would set about recreating the specific post ghost point human society that utterly failed to survive the asteroid belt prior to its creation. When said society would collapse, whether due to the environment or other factors, the Mind would declared the collapse inevitable in spite of post human societies surviving in comparable environments with even less resources at their disposal.

Various other Heavenly Minds were created under similar circumstances in the human era, and we did investigate them. The second Heavenly Mind we found was far more vicious than the first due the environment it came about it. Instead of a simple collection of asteroid colonies, this Heavenly Mind came about on a generation ship: a slower than light speed colonising ship wherein the passengers would live and die through several generations before reaching their destination.

Here, all the problems with the asteroid colonies were combined with the pressure placed on the generations that didn’t remember their home planet but wouldn’t live to see the planet they were intending to reach and the dangerous tendency for individuals born after the first generation to perceive themselves as breeding stock and others as a potential meal. Between this environment and the smaller population making the pathologies of each individual stand out more as they averaged out within the Heavenly Mind made the second Mind comfortable with and prone to extreme levels of violence, but other than this the experiments putting it in charge of various societies worked in a similar way to the first.

This pattern, with only minor variations, was repeated with every Heavenly Mind which we investigated. Understandably, we have little use for them now we have studied and catalogued them, though we still keep them in the Stacks as a number of us enjoy finding new ways to try to make them useful or at least entertaining. The most recent of these, Godfather Morlock’s “debate” with the original Mind on whether time travel was possible provided hours of entertainment before, in the words of one Father “the Mind realised that Morlock was taking the piss”. If you wish to try something similar yourself, please contact the relevant staff before going into the Stacks. They’ll appreciate more if you ask before hand than they will if you get yourself eaten by something in the Stacks and they have to clean up the mess…

Link to archived of our own version: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042054/chapters/40206029

[notesinthearchives-blog]

Notes on Noosphere Ecologies: Wolves, Squid and Others

With the link between culture and biology being cemented by all powers involved in the War, it was inevitable that changes in any given planets noosphere would produce changes in the world’s biosphere: relic sauropods retroactively surviving in the jungles of 1890s central Africa, the once fictional red weed taking on rude life in terraformed Mars, and long abandoned space stations growing whole ecosystems of animalistic abominations to unleash on anyone foolish enough to enter. Needless to say, most of these are created completely accidentally: the War has left many weapons hidden within human culture in ways comparable to ship wrecks or mine fields that last long after the initial clash ended; the decay of these weapons emerging in unexpected way.

That is not to say they don’t have a wider effect. The coven-packs among the wolves of old europe, for example, were for a time a minor power in the War itself. Retroactively created as the rusting War machines left hidden in the dark ages for activation in the renaissance started to intermingle with the medieval fears and understanding of the forest and the wilds as a place fundamentally inimical to human life; the wolves from the wilds of France to the Black Forest of Germany to the Russian east woke with a cunning intellect and, understanding that the European project of taming the wilderness amounted to their extinction, mobilised for War.

At first, this was somewhat small scale: aristocratic hunting parties ambushed; merchant caravans disappearing in the dead of the night; saw mills sabotaged. The largest scale tactic at this point involved panicking a villages cattle to stampede through the settlement, followed by picking off the survivors one by one. Normally, this would have been the end of it: with the noosphere ecology disappearing as normal without any lasting impact. However, roughly concurrently in the timeline of the War: Faction Paradox agents in France, time active Mal'Akh cultists in the Balkans and individuals from the Order of the White Peacock in the Russian far east first learned off the Wolves’ War and, feeling some degree of sympathy for and solidarity with their struggle, started to arm the wolves.

As it turned out, these 3 powers were the shifting boulders needed to start an avalanche. Local powers were the next to join in. Witch covens in the Alps, pagans around the Baltic Sea and heretics in the Pyrenees would first make temporary alliances and then, as their situation became more desperate, would throw their lot in with the wolves against their common foes. A number of well connected alchemists and occultists, upon discovering the wolves’ bargains with Higher Powers, would trade strategic information for the any scraps of second hand rituals and sciences that the wolves had learnt from the elemental powers. The masonic lodges that would go on to form the British secret service starting supplying the wolves with their own rituals, hoping to destabilise their rivals on the continent.

Other Higher Powers would become involved. A number of posthuman factions, using the Pilot Coteries as intermediaries and seeing an opportunity to develop a power base earlier in history, started to make their own deals with the wolves; and the Celestis, already active in the time period, soon joined in. The Great Houses, seeing this as an equivalent of the Great Game the British and Russians would play in Central Asia, starting selling their own weaponry to the wolves in the hopes of competing with the other Powers for influence. Even the Remote would join the competition, understanding the scent trails of the wolves and subtle changes of the forest as just another kind of signal, and would start to offload surplus or sufficiently boring technology they had captured or salvaged.

With all this, the wolves would become creatures more shadow than fur, as much nightmarish concept as flesh and blood: living avatars of the wilderness as an antithesis of civilisation; yet also understanding every animal and plant and fungus of the wilderness as citizens of it to be marshalled and conscripted. The forests of continental Eurasia became a single unit where time and space was fluid, whole towns would sink into the wilderness and King’s armies would march out to fight them and simply vanish as if they had marched down a great invisible gullet.

However it did not last. Ironically, the massive aid from the War time powers probably doomed the wolves even as it allowed them a fighting chance- before they were merely fighting against humans, but as they became increasingly time active they found that they were fighting against the shape of history itself and that they were no more able to defeat that than a river was able to move uphill. The weapon sales diminished: the Celestis grew bored, the Remote found more compelling signals, the Great Houses cut their loses as they realised how wrongly they misread the situation.

Of course, eventually the wolves lost, the local noosphere ecology that made them was closed off, and the whole conflict retroactively never existed. Many of the wolves escaped: most of the packs joined the Faction or the Order of the White Peacock due to their continued support for the wolves cause; other packs ritualistically committing suicide to be resurrected by Mal'Akh cultists in the far future.

Ultimately, almost all noosphere ecologies end like this: tied to the context that they are in, even those that make an impact inevitably collapse in on themselves from the moment that the cultural context that created them disappears. The only confirmed exception to this are the ecologies of deep sea cephalopods and in particular the giant and colossal squid.

Having previous had received relatively little interest from human culture previously: with the famous medieval kraken being described closer to norse misconceptions about whales than cephalopods; the cephalopod’s tentacle would explode in human culture after the first world war- becoming a symbol of unseen, unknowable and fundamentally alien forces far removed from human lives, whether in satirical images of monopolistic companies or in the weird fiction of the post war writers.

As an extension of this, the deep sea cephalopods emerged as the logical end point of this- hungry intelligences that grew up hidden away from sunlight; as much of an opposite to humanity as it can be whilst still sharing some kind of ancestry in the bacterial mats of the precambrian.

Needless to say, due to the fact that the noosphere ecology is stable it is generally agreed that it was made artificially, though the question of which side in the War did it is another matter. The biodata of deep sea cephalopods is inevitably so loaded with useful symbology imposed on them by humanity that most time active species with at least a passing interest in the War have at least dabbled with using it, and it remains a go to element of biodata hybridisation experiments to this day by all major parties.

That said, it is worth pointing out that in the timeline of the Great Houses, the retroactive creation of the deep sea cephalopod ecologies seems to be closely correlated to the first message from the

- the draft cuts off here. It was found as a handful of loose pages stuffed in a scroll case made of mammoth ivory.

Link to archive of our own version

[notesinthearchives-blog]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

In light of the fact that tumblr’s future has an alarming question mark over its head, I’ve decided to start putting the Faction Paradox fan fiction I wrote for tumblr up on archive of our own. Not all of it will go up at once- honestly a lot of it needs reworking, but it will all get there eventually. As long as tumblr is still functional, future fan fiction will still be posted here alongside a link to the chapter on archive of our own.

[sam-keeper]

I’m working on an article (which I hope to have up sometime in the next couple of days for my Patreon backers plug plug) and finding myself increasingly distracted by the question:

is any creative/artistic industry actually doing ok in 2018?

[sam-keeper]

got a few likes but I notice no one has offered an industry that’s not either on the verge of collapse or characterized by massive exploitation and inequality or both :P

[notesinthearchives-blog]

“either on the verge of collapse or characterized by massive exploitation and inequality or both”

In all fairness to the creative/artistic industries, this basically characterises the 21st century in general.

[sam-keeper]

yeah I posted this and was like wait all I’m really saying is that creative industries are like every other capitalist industry…

oh well, if anything that’s just a useful argument for creative industries unionizing and being treated as Work by Workers instead of some other class of production

[notesinthearchives-blog]

To try to answer the original question as best as I can, I think success in the Disney sense of the word is defined in ways that demand either being fucked in the long run or just plain fucked up. By definition, everything successful enough in terms of either cultural capital, wide spread critical acclaim or cash to be an “industry” in our social context will be either its own grave digger or exploitative or both.

I got to say though… I don’t think that’s the only measure of success and certainly not the best one. I mean, most of what I post here is fan fic of a small press Doctor Who spin off following the misadventures of a time travelling criminal cult against the back drop of a war between scientific gods and an unnamable enemy, whilst most of the fiction I read on a daily basis are either patreon fueled web comics, alternative history stories serialised on various forums, or fan fic. With the exception of patreon stuff (where patreon the company seems comparable to a land lord with patreon the platform as someone’s home) to ask whether their industries are collapsing or exploitative is an irrelevant question, as they exist on too small a scale to really be called an industry and by the very nature of the stories they tell, this is going to be the case for the foreseeable future. To judge them by the standards of what Star Wars or the MCU are doing is to judge them as failures.

But… They’re not even trying to be anything like Star Wars or the MCU or anything big enough to be part of an industry- at most they are trying to be interesting enough to have a self sustaining fan base and with this in mind they are currently successful. When you write (for example) an I Claudius pastiche about all the universes where Rome never fell going to war with all the universes where the Nazis won WW2; an alternative history story (told in a mixture of extracts from history books, in universe documents and short stories) about the US undergoing a communist revolution and, instead of going stalinist, evolving into a hyper democratic version of the Culture; or a new weird web comic set in a world of dead gods where heaven has been taken over by glorified gangsters, then by the very nature of what you are trying to do you are not playing the same game as anything Disney has a hand in, and they have merit not in spite of this but largely because of it.

[sam-keeper]

I’m working on an article (which I hope to have up sometime in the next couple of days for my Patreon backers plug plug) and finding myself increasingly distracted by the question:

is any creative/artistic industry actually doing ok in 2018?

[sam-keeper]

got a few likes but I notice no one has offered an industry that’s not either on the verge of collapse or characterized by massive exploitation and inequality or both :P

[notesinthearchives-blog]

“either on the verge of collapse or characterized by massive exploitation and inequality or both”

In all fairness to the creative/artistic industries, this basically characterises the 21st century in general.

[notesinthearchives-blog]

A Gluttonous Family History

Whilst transhumanism is generally agreed to have come crashing to a halt with the ghost point, there are nevertheless a handful of oddities that exist before he post human era. By and large, these are nothing to write home about. A major symptom of the ghost point is that the ruling powers within human society considered change, or even self improvement beyond becoming like themselves but “more”, to be beneath them, whilst those they ruled interpreted change and self improvement to mean becoming more like the ruling powers. In this environment, the notion of liberating oneself from ones biology and various other radical possibilities offered by transhumanity was utterly incomprehensible.

As a result, experiments in it were fundamentally stunted. Unwilling to risk changing their “selfhood”, it is difficult to find any genetic experimentation that couldn’t have achieved the same results just as well through environmental or educational factors. The most famous example were the ubermenchen military cults found in various human empires. Theoretically super soldiers created through genetic experiments, in practice every aspect of their history and subculture was explainable through having spent from the test tube to the grave as a decorated part of the military and through the entitlement that emerged from believing themselves to be more than human.

Of course, we ended up helping in the creation of the one exception. The Hinderman family were at the time a space age robber barons reigning over a planet sized company town, but the then patriarch Bill wanted more. He hoped to reign eternally as a Pharaoh of his planet’s past, present and future: a god king among mortals. For this effort, he enlisted the help of three little siblings from our family, sealing a pact with them to place himself as the true ruling power of his planet rather than someone who just happened to own it.

Everyone involved was surprised when, upon sealing the deal, the sky opened and 3 different versions of Bill Hinderman’s son, each at the head of a separate army, burst forth looking for conquest. The little siblings got away quickly, followed by several versions of themselves from the planet’s 3 futures, and, perhaps wisely, asked their Godparents to sort out their mess.

The planet itself was swiftly quarantined into a spare bottle a Father had lying around, and an investigation revealed that the 3 futures were created by the actions of the little siblings shortly after their pact with Bill Hinderman: one future where they felt they were not getting what they desired from their pact and so took to slowly sabotaging the project as a form of industrial action that got out off hand; the second where they were loyal to their “contract” until they destroyed their work out of frustration at Hinderman’s micromanaging; and a third where they decided the pact was a bad idea and instead decided to deliberately twist it as a parodic sort of temporal performance art.

As a result, the Hinderman family emerged as a cannibalistic nightmare of Freud, a repeated tale of the children of the “present” ruler rebelling and eating their father before invading their past and, now embodying their time, literally causing the planet’s future to devour its past before itself being devoured by its own future. As it stands, every second of the planets timeline and an uncountable number of alternate “futures” have been integrated into this cycle, which shows no sign of stopping.

Aside from being a curiosity and “interesting mess” as one Father put it, we have little use for it. A few researchers have noted that the Hinderman timeline bears a degree of resemblance to space and biology that has been tainted by the Yssgaroth without its virulent nature, and that it might be possible to use as a “lab safe” substitute in some experiments, though since we have no problem with using the real stuff that is a moot point…

An entry from The Bestiary of the Stacks. Hastily made from the notes of various researchers, the Bestiary lists the more unique or dangerous items that can be found there. Faction initiates are strongly encouraged to read it, especially after the spectre sauropod incident.

[itsgenderterror]

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[itsgenderterror]

Seriously, we’re open to any form of writing! Send us your ideas, your pitch, your half-finished works. We wanna see it all!!

[big-finish-sketches-deactivated]

Just wrote this in a chat group: 

yeah, Shadows Of Avalon confirms that he remembers both the loom and his father

and he will always have been possibly only half-human only after Unnatural History

I wonder if his regeneration into Eight stopped the memory of that possible origin from going further back in time

as in, I wonder if Eight was the first to remember that, upon becoming Eight

And damn it, this fandom is stretching the limits of the English language with its temporal aberrations. :D

[notesinthearchives-blog]

Maybe it would help if we use the term/tense “wizzle/wiz/wizzn’t”. It was recently invented in Alan Moore’s book Jerusalem, where a significant chunk of the book takes place in a higher plane outside of time with the past, present and future occuring simultaneously. To quote the book itself:

… ‘wizzle’ was a term that had “was”, “is” and “will be” folded up inside it, as though dividing things into present, past and future was thought an unneccessary complication in these parts

[doctornolonger]

Hey, could you elaborate on your nu who sja torchwood interspersed watch order?

I’ve always wanted Doctor Who to be an anthology show. The Whoniverse has so many great settings and concepts that could be explored in incredible ways without the Doctor watching! This sort of format has been briefly experimented with before (Mission to the Unknown, Love and Monsters, Blink), but never fully embraced … but by editing Doctor Who, Torchwood, and the Sarah Jane Adventures into one watch order, I can pretend it has been!

To make it seem like one show with several different threads, I have threepriorities:

Tonal consistency. Whereverpossible, I’ve tried to minimize the number of swings from happy and funnyepisodes to depressing or emotional ones.

References. If a character crossesover between the different threads, their timeline needs to match up.

Switch-around-iness. It’s not ananthology series if it’s “a season of this, a season of that”!

I haven’t achieved all of thesegoals, but I’ve tried, and when I watched through the series in this order, Ireally enjoyed it. I hope you will too!

Keep reading

[notesinthearchives-blog]

In a weird way, I sort of did experience Doctor Who as an anthology show. 

To explain: when I was a really little one in the 1990s, they would air various kid friendly science fiction shows in the morning: the ones I remember catching being various episodes of classic Doctor Who as well as the original versions of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. I’d usually be shuffled off to school before I could finish watching the episode (filling in the gaps later by reading my Dad’s Target novelisations), which sort of made vast chunks of it blur together.

The end result is that I thought of the UNIT era and the Troughton base under siege stories as taking place in the same timeline as Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds: with UNIT era being that timeline’s 70s/80s, Thunderbirds taking place not long afterwards, Captain Scarlet being far enough in the future that humans have a moon colony but not much else and the Troughton future stories taking place after humanity broke out from the solar system.

I also think you could make a Doctor Who anthology show by watching parts of JNT Doctor Who alongside Blake's 7 (specifically I’m thinking bits of Peter Davison together with the Colin Baker stories)

[sam-keeper]

Gotta wonder sometimes, if the monsters aren’t scary or threatening or, well, monstrous at all, what’s the point of the Monster Girl genre? Like isn’t that just… ecchi high fantasy?

[notesinthearchives-blog]

Have you encountered Marguerite Bennett’s comic Insexts? Reading this gives me the feeling that you’d find it interesting.