Historically, the ascension rate in the
Red Star
'M'pire has been both higher
than the average to the transapient levels and lower than the average
to the archailect levels. Some details as to why are given below.
Recently this has begun to change/improve, and again some details as to
why are given below. Higher level ascension rates are still below
equivalence with the rest of the
Terragen Sphere
but, by the will of
Farview, the 'M'pire anticipates to be on par with the other empires in
another thousand years or so.
When Farview made per first
ascension
E was also set on the path to
slow-godhood. Knowing E would need quick minds to run the day to day
business of the 'M'pire Farview provided per zars with a godmod that
gave em the potential to become high transapients
(2<SI<3), had
ascension schools set up and encouraged all per citizens to ascend. The
biont lums did take an early lead in the race to ascend because to do
so also gave em new abilities in transforming into different forms,
however a lum wishing to ascend to still higher levels faced the limits
of eir biology and eir strong bioism culture prevented most from
leaving eir flesh behind. On the other hand the
vecs didn't
have this
problem and ey would be the first to reach the third singularity,
however the vecs did face the same bugaboo that Farview did in per
ascension goals; a limited resource base. Heavy elements were always
going to be rare in the Far View region and it became more reliable to
simply fuse hydrogen into what was needed. Energy balances made carbon
the material of choice and Farview, Starry Eyes and the bionts had the
priority for its use, so to gain the resources ey would need the vecs
readily became the miners of the 'M'pire. Traveling far and wide on the
beamrider network (and even farther) ey would strip whatever planetary
systems ey could find. The vecs were obligated to send any
'life-supporting elements' back to Farview and per lums but anything
else ey found ey were free to use as ey saw fit. For most vecs the
priority was to increase eir numbers but for a few the goal was
ascension.
Fashioning small amounts of eir stockpiles into synthetic gemstones, ey
traded with the lums for high grade photonanotech computronium and
evolution software. Now able to run sims in fasttime these vecs could
explore as many mindstates as ey needed to find the best route to the
higher toposophics. After becoming moon brains some of these vecs
became Godlings even while Farview perself was still
3<SI<4.
However there were no serious challenges to Farview's rule, the moon
brains may have had extremely fast chronometrics on eir side but
Farview had resilience and consensus on pers. And those post-vecs that
gave eir full support to Farview found emselves the beneficiaries of a
substrate upgrade once Farview became a fourth toposophic archailect,
allowing some of em to become smaller ISOs and regain eir mobility. The
progeny of one of these would fill the skies of
Maximum Air as
the
Starpuller clade.
The 'brain' of a Starpuller is a
picotech
substrate, with a core of
magmatter. Although relatively small in dimensions it is large in mass
and heavy even in the weak stellar gravity field of Maximum Air. As
such, Starpullers use a combination of aerodynamic and lighter-than-air
lift to stay airborne. Two kilometres wide and three long (if you
include the tail) ey have a lifting-body shape with triangular wings
and from a distance ey look like an ancient form of Earth marine life,
a manta ray, with a tail that ends in a bright globe (its fusion
reactor). Internally ey have two large
vacuum
dirigible cylinders
running lengthwise and placed side by side while the wings are filled
with hot hydrogen. For propulsion the wings have been divided into
chambers which cycle gas pressure changes between them, causing the
wings to beat the air. Eir brain fills the prism shaped space between
and below the cylinders while a second prism shaped space mirrored
above is used for support/auxiliary equipment, sensors, comm systems, a
hanger for eir remotes, etc. The dome/hump of eir backs protects a
large vivarium.
The 'M'pire is strongly biocentric and thanks to centuries of memetic
pressure all vecs/post-vecs under the third toposophic level have taken
to this meme set. Most turing level vecs are avid hobbyist gardeners,
some even breeding or geneering new plants and animals for eir gardens.
The hyperturing vecs go into full biospheric design and gengineering,
even going so far as to make softbots and keep them as pets or
servants. Some of the post-vec clades retained these hobbies, with many
moon brains clothing emselves in planetary scale eco-systems. A few of
the mobile ISOs, having adopted
Caretaker
metapsychology, left the
'M'pire to search for Garden Worlds to protect. The Starpullers on the
other hand have internalized eir bioism, carrying eir garden wherever
ey
go. While a Starpuller's vivarium is only 400m wide, 900m long and 100m
high they are still fully self-sustaining worlds in miniature, each
containing a interdependent mix of biomes completely sealed off from
the world around them. When the Metasoft Empire sought to subvert the
'M'pire vecs back to the Version Tree with exposure to the
Kja
Observance it was the Starpullers who counter the memetic assault
and
caused the 'M'pire vecs to integrate the Kja Observance (specifically
the Quantitative school) into eir bioism memeplex while still rejecting
Version Tree protocols.
For the vecs/post-vecs the next wave of ascensions did not happen until
after 9,900 a.t. when Farview ascended to the fifth toposophic level.
In 7765 a.t. a window of opportunity had opened; Maximum Air was
largely completed, a new wormhole to the Terragen Sphere had been
inflated, Farview was focusing per efforts on building Jnodes in the
Orion's Arm and trade was beginning to flow. For the first time the
Godling post-vecs had a surplus of high grade computronium available to
em. Some post-vecs, like the Starpullers before em, simply procreated
to become clades in eir own right. Some of these also tried to ascend
by forming collective minds. While a few of the older moon brains
explored a mind structure of multiple moon nodes distributed across
interplanetary space others concentrated eir growth into Jupiter
brains. However none of these Godlings had ascended to middle level
archailecthood before the window closed in 9900 a.t. (when Farview
refocused per efforts into expanding the local beamrider network into
wormhole connected cells for a future attempt at ascending to the
SI>6 level) It took Farview perself to change this situation.
With per ascension to the 5<SI<6 level Farview needed to
maintain, improve and expand the contacts E developed among the fourth
singularity beings of the Terragen Sphere and the post-vecs were per
means of doing so. With Farview's guidance, coaxing and suggestions
four Jupiter brains, so far, have become fourth toposophic archailects
and were each sent one of the first wormholes ever produced by the
'M'pire. (these have not been inflated pass comm gauge) [Note: a fifth
comm gauge wormhole was gently forced upon the
Silk God, a
biobrain.
This strict biotech sub-polity didn't want eir project contaminated by
the non-biotech wormhole so it was placed high outside eir system's
Oort cloud with a relay station for a biolaser transmitter/receiver for
the final connection.]
Even in the development of these Jupiter brains the 'M'pire shows how
novel it can be. Each of the four has been flattened out in order to
provide a larger surface area for the collection of solar energy from
its sun. Ey are disk worlds.
**********
Disk worlds are very rare, prior to the 'M'pire there were only three
ever built in the whole of the Terragen Sphere, and its not hard to
understand why. A disk world is an oddity, an absurdity, a freak of
engineering and a waste of resources! For the amount of effort and
materials that go into a disk world/brain one could build a
conventional (spherical) Jupiter brain that is faster or a swarm of
habitats that provide thousands of times more living space. (having
said that, it has been pointed out that some also consider bionts to be
a waste of resources) However the "flat Earth" meme set is an ancient
idea, one that pre-dates written history, and it is embedded deep in
the folklore of Hu descendant life so perhaps it was only a matter of
time until somebody built one.
Two of these disk worlds still exist and are of the classical type;
with a wide heavy metal plate, honeycombed with DCMs, for a base and
with high 'rimwall mountains' of synthetic rock on each side which
slope in towards the centre giving such a megastructure two concaved
sides. This distribution of mass not only keeps air from spilling over
the edge it reorients gravity effects across the disk. To have night
and day each spins in its orbit like a coin spins on its edge after
falling to the floor. The first was built in the NoCoZo as a
fantasy/adventure playground complete with flying dragons,
witches/wizards, sea serpents and other creatures of myth. Its
popularity has gone up and down in cycles as the fads for such things
went in and out of favor. It went into receivership many times and
changed ownership often. The neogen "staff" has been replaced/updated
more times than anyone wishes to remember and there is always been talk
of scrapping/recycling the whole thing or selling it for salvage. The
second of these classical disks is in the
Utopia
Sphere and is serving
as a shelter for many of the 'fantasy' lifeforms that for one reason or
another can't live elsewhere.
More common are the pseudo-disk worlds. These are tabletop biospheres,
circular platforms held above a much larger megastructure by some form
of pedestal. Such pedestals are often sculptured and for some reason
turtles and elephants are a popular design choice. When built upon
an
ISO
these platforms serve a useful function; the circulation of water
and gas up through the pedestals and over the disks helps in cooling.
Three notable pseudo-disk worlds are the Dancing Turtle moon brain in
the Terran Federation, a Jupiter brain in the Sophic League that has
been nicknamed "Turtle Soup" and a mobile ISO which calls jerself
"Terri."
**********
And then there are the disk worlds of the Red Star 'M'pire. As stated
above; a disk world in the 'M'pire is really a
Jupiter brain
that's
been flattened out in order to provide a larger surface area for the
collection of solar energy from its sun. Built in orbit around very
small K type and large red dwarf stars, ey are a result of 'M'pire
ethics against star lifting main sequence stars. As the star systems
had already been mined of all other material there was no fuel left for
any internal fusion reactors to run on. The only way to power the
Jupiter brains was by solar power, the one resource left in these
systems. To maximize solar gain these Jupiter brains orbit eir stars
with one pole (on the flat side) always facing eir sun. (to keep eir
shape each Jupiter brain has a series of concentric dynamic compression
rings centred on the axis and the gyroscopic force from the spin of the
disks is countered by the circulation of mass in the dynamic
compression rings) The disks spin like a record on a turntable but this
is just to help with the deployment of beanstalks around the rims.
These beanstalks support large ring structures of solar collecting
panels to increase the collection area.
The goal of building these Jupiter brains into disk worlds was to
maximize solar gain not to provide an abode for life. However, although
these Jupiter brains weren't designed for habitation as eir first goal
ey are still a part of a biocentric culture and so on each there is a
bubble of life. To further maximize solar gain these Jupiter brains
orbit eir stars as close as ey can and the heat makes the sunward side
un-inhabitable by biont life. The backside on the other hand is only
heated by the waste heat of eir computronium and temperatures here are
'tropical' but bearable. The sunward side of these disks are flat but
eir backsides are convex, making em thicker at eir centres. On a disk
world like this the centre of gravity is the axis and any fluids, like
air and water, would flow towards it. Moving away from the axis is like
moving up a mountain so to make the backside inhabitable the land in
these areas is terraced. Depending on the angle it is viewed from one
of these disks looks like its backside is either a saw-toothed dome or
a 'wedding cake' of truncated cones with the angle of each truncated
cone chosen so its side is horizontal to the disk's centre of gravity.
The truncated cones are separated from each other by high vertical
cliffs so the biospheres on each disk are divided into concentric rings
and each ring can have its own biome or system of biomes. A disk's mean
thickness is some 10,000km, providing an average terragen standard
gravity, but this is only an average. In fact, each truncated cone has
its own local gravity.
Once again - "On a disk world like this the centre of gravity is the
axis and any fluids, like air and water, would flow towards it"
however, each of these disks has a large volcano-like feature at its
centre which increase the thickness there so as to form an island at
its pole. These islands are surrounded by rings of ocean biomes and the
'volcanoes' are actually the base of the disks' cooling fountains
wherein hot air and water vapour are jetted up to the high altitudes
where they cool, becoming clouds. Because a disk spins these clouds
spread outwards to the rim where the water falls out as rain. As the
water flows back to the centre it passes through each of the different
biome rings, forming rivers and lakes and great waterfalls as it
plunges over the cliffs from one level to the next. There are airwalls
around the rims which direct any air that might spill over the rims
back through cooling channels to the volcanoes and mounted on the
airwalls are mirrors which reflect light from the sun below up and
across the disk into the cloud layer above, the white clouds then light
the disk below them.
-
The next beings to ascend to archailecthood were the ai. Each cycler
ISO/habitat in the beamrider network has its own Hab Mind. Because the
computronium onboard a cycler is actually processing Farview's
mindstate these hab minds are only turing level aioids, meant only to
run the cyclers' systems and keep them on course. However as a
beamrider circuit may easily loop outside Farview's 50ly horizon some
of these hab minds have found ey can expand into Farview's computronium
when E is not using it. Many have ascended when on an outward bound leg
of a cycler route and survived in eir new toposophic level by spawning
a replacement hab mind to run the cycler on the inward leg while ey
sleep in a compressed file. Other ascended AIs on an inward leg have
simply traded places with a turing level ai on an outward bound leg and
repeat the trade each time ey find emselves approaching Farview's
vastening horizon. Some cycler routes are very well traveled and many
of these hyperturing AIs have found emselves in an outer 'arc'
together. These arc AIs have sometimes linked through eir laser comm
systems to merged into a greater intellect. Even today these 'Arc
Godlings' rule the interstellar spaceways in the zones between
Farview's beamrider cells while the post-vec godlings hold court around
the small stars found in these inter-cell zones.
As the beamrider network has expanded into wormhole connected cells one
cell has found itself with a neutron star for a neighbour. This was
just too good of an opportunity for the arc godlings to pass up and ey
traded with the Terragen Sphere for the magmatter picites ey needed to
turn this neutron star into a neuron star. After importing a huge
number a files and templates from the
Cyberian Network
there now
appears to be at least one 4<SI<5 AI in this vast
cybercosm as
the neighbouring beamrider cell was directed to produce an additional
wormhole for it in 10,378 a.t. and data traffic through this comm
wormhole is so intense it had to be inflated to multi-centimetre gauge.
Tracking the data flow shows the 'M'pire has been involved in
info-trade with most of the Terragen Sphere with a current focus on the
Cyberian Network, the FAS, the NoCoZo, the TRHN and even the friendlier
parts of the Diamond Network.
-
The 'M'pire's bionts have been the last to ascend into godhood. From
the earliest days of the 'M'pire the lums could reach
2<SI<3 but
had a long standing problem in ascending to 3<SI<4. Eir
godmod
was designed by Farview while E was only a third toposophic godling
perself and it had its limitations. To ascend still higher ey need to
try something new but eir bioism memeplex and duty to be a part of
Farview's blue mind made the lums resistant to "leaving eir flesh
behind." Augmentation was still a possibility but ey would require
picotech or femtotech to make any noticeable gains and Farview had the
priority on these. It was the opening of the new wormhole to the rest
of the Terragen Sphere that broke the stalemate. With access to new
ideas and technologies the lums experienced a burst of creative
activity and eir ascension goals benefited. One line of biont godlings
came from Titan stock. The Titans had been on the path to 'organic
bloatware' and in all this time it hadn't gained em godhood, not one of
em. So some, having reached the limit of SI:2.99, traded for magmatter
pico-processors and became the largest aquatics in Maximum Air.
Why adopt an aquatic form? Well, the problem with augmenting a
biological lifeform with magmatter picotech is twofold; mass and waste
heat. To counter this the Titans took to the water and used eir
metamorphic talents to grow buoyancy and heat exchanger organs.
Describing these third toposophic 'godbrights' in detail is impossible,
as ey have greater metamorphic capabilities than any other lums before
em; Eir skin changes texture, colour and bioluminescent effects as fast
as a cuttlefish, squid or octopus. Ey can design/grow new organs within
days and eir bones flow like quicksand.
As eir forms are so fluid the only things that can be used to identify
em as belonging to one clade is the type of ascension augment ey use
(the magmatter pico-processors) and eir size. These godbrights are as
massive as the largest lifeform ever to swim in Gaia's seas, the Blue
whale, but eir forms change to match eir 'job of the day.' (contrast
this with the hyperbrights and metabrights abilities to match eir forms
to eir lifestyle) From one day to the next a godbright aquatic may
float at the surface of an ocean like an island, tap changes in
buoyancy to glide to a new location in a streamlined winged form,
actively swim with a set of powerful flippers and/or a tail or crawl
along the sea bottom.
Supplying eir magmatter pico-processors with energy was another
problem to be solved. Feeding eir biological forms is one thing, ey are
still apart of Farview's ecological node and there is ample food supply
in eir environment, but eir magmatter pico-processors needed a
gamma-ray laser generator. Fortunately the oceans ey live in are on
Maximum Air's band which is made of computronium and therefore has its
own energy grid, all one of these godbrights needs to do is tap into
it. Some aquatics grow long muscular tentacles that have power cables
at their cores which can be plugged into outlets on the band's energy
grid, others use eir remotes.
All 'M'pire godbrights control an army of remotes and the aquatics may
use these to ferry in energy stores from long distances. These remotes
cover a range of types and may be hard or soft, large or small. They
are bots, biobots, biomachines, bushbots, muschines, softbots,
synsects, utility liquid, utility fogs and nanite swarms, to name just
a few. Under 'M'pire ethics all remotes are subsapient but sapients and
transapients may also choose to serve a godbright either directly or
through eir own remotes. Godbrights can also exert control over the
local angelnet when needed.
Another group of lums, the Pearlhairs, have used femtotech to become
godbrights and so have kept eir smaller forms. (if you can call a
metabright giant small) The Pearlhairs have commissioned the TRHN for a
steady supply of Siris Pearl Module 'beads' which ey make under a
licence from the Siris habitat. These SPMs are no larger than 1cm
across but are used in quantity and it is how they are used that is
interesting. The Pearlhairs grow eir hair over three metres long and
have given it the properties of optical fibre. The SPM beads are
actually woven into the Pearlhairs' hair and not simply strung on. They
are woven in a complex pattern with many hairs fed through the holes in
each bead after being crossed over and looped around creating a network
of thousands of beads for each lum. These bead networks tap into the
lums' own bioluminescent neural net. Each bead network takes a team of
hyperbrights hours to put together and ey must be supervised by a
metabright who works from a detailed template that's been supplied by a
fourth toposophic archailect. And for all this effort Pearlhairs are
very fragile godlings. The bead network needs constant maintenance; the
hairs often break under the load they carry and it must be washed
daily. For these reasons a Pearlhair godbright must record per
mindstate within an external network each night, shut down per higher
functions to go to sleep as a metabright, have per hair cared for each
morning after the bead network has been removed and finally have it
re-installed later in the morning to reboot back into a godbright.
However, with eir smaller size the Pearlhairs are more mobile, ey can
go anywhere eir metabright cousins can go and can still quickly adapt
to the local environment when ey get there. A Pearlhair can easily pass
through a 10m gauge wormhole (with eir support crew and any remotes
following) and carry out much of Farview's business in remote parts of
the Terragen Sphere, one might even say the Pearlhairs are the seraiph
of the 'M'pire. Still, there was seen to be a need for a more robust
3<SI<4 mind that was also mobile enough to pass through
smaller
gauge wormholes. Enter the Volvox.
When Farview created the templates for the ecology and social nodes E
knew they would have to be universally applied to be effective but this
meant there was a risk of the lums falling into the trap of a
collective mind society so safeguards were put into place. These did
not preclude the formation of smaller group minds by other means, in
fact the early colonists had used unityware to great effect in
surviving the first 200+ years. However the formation of gestalt
entities to gain higher toposophic levels was delayed due to the lums'
favoring of face to face encounters over virch or DNI use. The solution
to this impasse was the Volvox because the Volvox are as much habitat
as ey are group minds. The actual format of the group mind varies from
Volvox to Volvox; it might be a tribemind, hive mind, collective
intelligence, unity or something else but the habitats are easily
recognizable whenever they are seen as is the source of the name for
these third toposophic minds. A Volvox habitat is a form of freesphere
but looks, quite clearly, like the microscopic colony lifeform of green
alga known as a volvox.
The outer envelope of a Volvox is a spherical shell of utility water
2,000km in diameter and 10m thick, the utility water is saturated with
blue green algae which serves as a nutrient source for those who live
within and gives the Volvox a greenish colouration. Embedded in the
utility water are thousands of 10m diameter spheres, each connected to
its neighbours by webs of both cable and optical fibre. Both webs serve
to re-enforce the structure of the shell with the cable web doubling as
an energy and material supply network and the fibre web acting as a
communications bus for the spheres and the mesobots in the utility
water. The re-enforcement is necessary because the inside of the shell
is a pressurized atmosphere needed by the large number of lums who live
within its freefall environment. The embedded spheres look identical
but in fact there are different spheres for different functions, more
than half are computronium nodes while most of the remaining are 'storm
cellars' for the lums. The rest hold the supporting infrastructure
needed by an ultratech 'worksite' colony; nanofabs, picofabs and the
like. If the Pearlhairs are the seraiph of the 'M'pire then the Volvox
are the journeymen and eir lum membership is chosen for eir expertise
in whatever field will be needed to complete the task ey are assigned.
Ey can travel from site to site through any wormhole larger than 10m to
oversee the assembly of the 'M'pire's megastructures. Often several
Volvox will be on a given site, each specializing on a different aspect
of the project, forming a small 'tribemind of collective minds.'
Each Volvox houses thousands of hyperbright lums which network with a
few metabright lums to form the brain of the habitat. It is the lums'
natural metamorphic skills and the open architecture of the habitat
that allows the lums to communicate with the bandwidth needed to become
an effective gestalt without the DNI or cyberspace hardware other group
minds have needed. Each lum in a Volvox has grown new organs to
transmit and receive coded pulses of biolaser light. The living
quarters inside a Volvox are simple inflated structures and when it is
time for the lums to get to work these are deflated and packed away
leaving the entire inside of the habitat free and clear obstructions.
The hyperbright lums then take up positions against the shell with eir
backs to the utility water while the metabrights move to the habitat's
centre. In this way each lum has a direct 'line of sight' connection
with almost all of per fellows. If this arrangement were analog to a hu
brain then the hyperbrights would be the cerebral cortex and the
metabrights would be the cerebellum but in truth this statement is a
gross oversimplification of the situation.
The Volvox are mobile habitat/minds. Ey have drive units for legs and
remotes for arms and with eir main structure being one of utility water
ey can be disassembled to pass through a wormhole and reassembled
quickly on the other side. And as no unit of a Volvox is larger than
10m in diameter the wormhole can be quite small. Volvox have gained
some small degree of fame for eir ability to enter new star systems
through under-inflated wormholes and begin 'site improvements' early.
This design feature has proven to be very useful in the Far View region
as the few wormholes there are smaller than standard.
The latest godbright clade in the 'M'pire is actually a cooperative and
is a result of the
Nearbaseline
Archailect Femtosecond Emulation
Project. While the 'M'pire took no interest in the primary project
the
offshoots of the project showed much more promise, one was even able to
hold a realtime conversation with a hyperturing. The lums reasoned that
if this group of subsingularity AIs were able to cooperate to emulate a
transapient mind then the population of a Jnode, being a mix of
super/hyper/metabrights, should be able to form a working simulation of
a 3<SI<4 mind. This Co-op mind would have to be designed
by a
higher toposophic god but the lums had a strong memetic for teamwork
and were ready, willing and able to give it a try. It was Farview
perself who provided the needed program. The lums were already a part
of per ecology and social minds and this was a way for per to possibly
offload some of per administrative duties as well.
For the most part lums don't live on planets, ey live on megastructures
so it is easy enough for em to standardize eir timekeeping. The 'M'pire
day has 30 hours divided into a 12hr sleep period and a 10hr work
period (however one defines "work") with two 2.5hr personal time
periods on each end of the sleep period and with a 3hr lunch
sub-dividing the work period. It is this long lunch that was key to
making the Co-op minds workable. Lums shun the cybercosm, ey prefer
face to face encounters, therefore it was difficult to organize em as
was done in the Nearbaseline Archailect Femtosecond Emulation
Project. The answer to this problem was to resurrect an ancient form of
social contact - the cybercafe. The lums would go to a cybercafe on eir
long lunchs, sit at a table and socialize while eating. Thus fulfilling
eir part of both the social and ecology nodes. But as ey sit and eat a
terminal at the table would assign em jobs to do. Jobs that were in
fact parts of the Co-op mind's program. Hyperbrights and metabrights
might be asked to perform high order calculations, brights and
superbrights may be ask track down odd bits of information and all
would enter the answers back into the terminal. The supramundane
surface of a Jnode is sectioned off into 30 timezones and the lunch
period is 3 hours long so there is some overlap with the timezones on
either side. Thus the program can be run continuously and the terminals
give lums starting eir lunch in one timezone the results of the lums
finishing eir lunch in the preceding timezone. A Jnode's population may
be anything up to three trillion so it is possible that at any given
time a mix of 300 billion super/hyper/metabright lums may be running
the Co-op program but in actuality only a fraction of these are needed.
The first Co-op mind was set up to run on the Jnode Conor's Game and
other godbrights who have visited the megastructure have confirmed it
as a fully functional third toposophic archailect. It would appear that
the 'M'pire is satisfied with the results of this experiment for copies
of the program have been spreading quickly to the other Jnodes in
Farview's network and the lums on these Jnodes are setting up
cypercafes at great speed. The Co-op minds seem to be tasked with the
administrative duties of the Jnodes' local space so in effect the lums
are eir own god. (we-are-god-is-us)
The 'M'pire's bionts may have been the last to ascend to the third
toposophic level but ey gained a lot from the delay. By the time the
lums ascended to godhood eir path was well marked by all those who had
gone before em. In addition, the 'M'pire has a very strong meme complex
for teamwork and cooperation and its citizens support each other even
across the toposophic levels. Higher minds benefit from outsourcing
simpler tasks to the lower minds while the lower minds benefit from the
dissemination of higher level augmentation tech. As a result the
godbrights are generally less massive in form than the post-vecs and
AIs which had to bootstrap emselves up to godhood. Ey have eir limits,
of course, but these are not truly disadvantageous when the support of
others can be counted on.
To date there appears to be only one 4<SI<5 biobrain (or
an
archaibright as the lums might call it) in the 'M'pire - the Silk God.
However this may be about to change. The Silk God has colonized three
other star systems and recently eight fleets have been seen moving
outward beyond the horizon of some beamrider cells. These cells still
have their wormhole production facilities in place and all the fleets
seem to be heading for small main sequence stars. In fact one has
already reached its target star Bar's Gamble and has begun building a
dyson ring about 2 a.u. out and a dyson swarm of energy collectors much
closer in. What makes the godwatchers believe this may be an effort to
produce another bio-based fourth toposophic archailect is that no
effort has been made to place large amounts of computronium in the
Bar's Gamble system. The godwatchers are quick to point out how all of
Farview's own nodes are megastructures of terraformed computronium with
a large population of lums. In addition ey point out that on the one
hand the dyson ring is a collection of freespheres, Volvox and dyson
trees which is great enough to house the population needed for a
4<SI<5 Co-op mind and that there has been a migration of
hyper,
meta and godbrights towards Bar's Gamble. While on the second hand the
dyson trees are of the type found only in the Grove, the home of the
Silk God. On the third hand the ring itself is surrounded by multiple
layers of smoke ring type foglets and there is a developing atmosphere
of helium, nitrogen and oxygen intermixing with the freespheres, Volvox
and dyson trees. Just what the lums are planning for this system is
anybody's guess. And what about those other seven fleets? They are
still in transit but what will they build when they get to where
they're going?
