The Wilds
Generic term for non-sephirotic terragen space beyond the borders of the Civilized Galaxy
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The WildsGeneric term for non-sephirotic terragen space beyond the borders of the Civilized Galaxy |
The Wilds, or The Wildernesses, is a term sometimes given by sapients to the vast regions of dangerous and unconsolidated interstellar space beyond the Civilized Galaxy. Home to transapient pirates and raiders, ahuman ai empires, prowling autowars, out of control nanoswarms, rogue ISOs, and vast (even by sephirotic standards) enigmatic megastructures, it is not a place that the ordinary sapient would feel safe in. Here sentient rights of lower sophonts are not respected, the strangelet ban ignored, the Tragadi Treaty considered irrelevant. But here also there is much beauty and wonder - exotic nanecologies, extraordinary high toposophic experiments, vast regions preserved for their natural (or artificial) beauty, unexplored and forgotten low resource systems that might serve as havens for isolationists, Free Zones where there really is no memgineering (at least none detectable by even high transapients), gigantic orwood forests cultivated by ISO gardeners, friendly transapient utopias following non-sephirotic principles, archeological treasures of lost alien civilizations....
Occasionally a Lawkeeper, an Empire Ship, a Black Angel, a neumann swarm, a linelayer with khaki convoy, or some other emissary of sephirotic civilization will venture into the Wilds to establish a beach-head for Sephirotic colonization, or destroy a particularly pernicious blight. And as new frontier worlds are established, and Nexus links set up, the sephirotic empires expand their presence, create more living space, and assimilate more local polities and civilizations, at the expense of the Wilds.
But the Wilds will never be beaten, because they two are constantly expanding, moving outwards on a wavefront at relativistic speeds. And while one lot of new worlds are settled then other seed colonies will leapfrog past, so the frontier is never ceasing. Meanwhile, some old regions in the Wilds are so entrenched with their local civilizations and non-sephirotic archai they can never be absorbed into the Civilized Galaxy. Thus they are bypassed, and the Civilized Space grows in a sort of piecemeal fashion, leaving untouched these other empires and metaempires (such as Panvirts, Diamond Network, and many others). And despite the unease that lower sophonts have regarding some of these polities, the sephirotics themselves seem to have no problems with them, leading to the common paranoid opinion that there is really no difference between them, and it is just part of the game played with and on lower sophonts. Others say that the Wilds and the ahuman ai are just part of the diversity of the terragen bubble, and that the whole of colonised space would be impoverished if they were to be completely assimilated into sephirotic civilization, and this is why there is co-existence between the various metaempires, and between the Civilized Galaxy and the Wild places.
Whatever the opinion of the higher transapients and archai, for the lower toposophics and ordinary sapients, the Wilds are as diverse as the orientation of sentient beings:
But really, the Wilds are all of these things, and more. It as as many things as the imagination of the sophont contemplating it will allow. And beyond all those things, it is still...The Wilds
