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Jarre
Galactography > Minor Polities > Isolates
Galactography > Regions of Space > Outer Volumes
Galactography > Systems and Worlds > Systems & Worlds I - J
Galactography > Regions of Space > Outer Volumes
Galactography > Systems and Worlds > Systems & Worlds I - J
 Image from Steve Bowers | |
| The northern landmass is the continent of Spaeth, the islands to the south are the Daskren archipelago, and the desert continent to the southeast is Benthe. The ocean's colour comes from halophilic algae, one of the few forms of life that can survive in it. | |
Jarre - Data Panel | |
| Primary: | Jarre, YTS-8909-L117-1 |
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| Planets | 1. Rendezvous: Chthonian world- 0.29 AU |
| Demographics | Population 5 billion in total |
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Introduction
As the Terragen frontiers expand ever outwards, there have always been colonies that attempt to do without advanced technology, for any number of different reasons. Luddites in particular have been known to found such cultures in an attempt to return to a perceived era of human dominance, free from transapient control. Left alone. these societies may evolve into truly strange cultures unlike anything else in the Terragen Sphere. But they are always at risk of disruption by contact with more advanced civilisations, who may not adopt appropriate measures to avoid cultural contamination. The world of Equinoxe in the Jarre system is perhaps the most recent example, and a particularly controversial one.In A.T a series of radio transmissions were picked up by telescopes in the Swan's Neck system, a major wormhole terminal 5354 light years from Sol, describing the history of the planet Equinoxe, as its inhabitants transitioned from a lo-tech civilisation to a middle-tech one, and, at the time when the signals were sent, their efforts to reach a hi-tech level. It seems that they had detected the construction of Dyson Sphere around the star of Swan's Neck, and attempted contact on this basis. Swan's Neck was later infiltrated by an Amalgamation fleet that escaped the containment zone, and destroyed by conversion weapons from a PADO combat group, so no response was ever sent.
Based on the contents of the message, the Equinoxe civilisation appears to be greatly misinformed about the nature of Terragen civilisation, owing to a misguided attempt by interstellar visitors to assist their industrial development. Because of this, the baseline humans of this world, although initially following a similar development pattern to old Earth, have developed along very different lines as they progressed into their Interplanetary Age. The discovery of this society has caused considerable debate among Terragen observers as to how first contact could have been handled better, along with heated arguments as to whether or not contact has been beneficial overall.
System Overview
Jarre's primary is a G0-type star about halfway through the main sequence. The planetary system around is more tightly packed together than the worlds of Solsys, with Rendezvous, a dry Chthonian nearly four times the size of Earth, orbiting so close that its surface is partially molten. Oxygene, a hot ocean world just over twice the size of Earth, orbits approximately where Mercury would have been in Solsys, and has a thick hydrogen atmosphere with a supercritical layer of water below it. Equinoxe is a slightly smaller Gaian world with a similar mass to Venus orbiting at 1.08 AU, while Chronologie is a SuperJovian world with about 8.1 times the mass of Jupiter, located at 1.88 AU.Lanathica, the innermost moon of Chronologie, is an earth-sized world with extreme levels of volcanic activity causes by tidal heating, with a thick, Venus-like atmosphere. Kanathossos is similar, but temperatures and atmospheric pressure are within the range that allows liquid sulfuric acid to form oceans on its surface, though unlike vitriolic worlds elsewhere, no signs of life have been detected. The Arean world Anatheas has a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of just 100 millibars, which is gradually being lost to the solar wind, although frequent eruptions have helped to replenish it. Umeana is approximately the size of Luna, but is a closer match for Mercury because of its dense core.
Chronologie seems to have prevented the formation of any gas giants any further out, and Jarre is notably lacking in any equivalent to the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt of Solsys. The intense magnetic field around this world has formed radiation belts far more intense than those of Jupiter, rendering its moons unsuitable for colonisation by earth-like life. Its rings are thick with rocky material, forming the closest analogue this system has to its own asteroid belt, and some of them are far enough from Chronologie's radiation belts to be suitable for habitation, though volatiles are very scarce. The formation of Oxygene is thought to have consumed most of this star system's primordial water.
Equinoxe is the only inhabited world, a Lacustric planet with gravity 89.8% that of Earth and an atmosphere with a higher percentage of oxygen at 30%. High levels of insolation have prevented the formation of ice caps at either pole, while the magnetic field and axial tilt are negligible. The northern continent is the largest landmass, with a coastal climate like that of Earth's equatorial rainforests. Much of the interior is covered in datacentres, where the majority of the population live, surrounded by industrial zones inhabited by the vecs and cyborgs that maintain the virchworlds, while the coastline is covered in abandoned cities that are gradually crumbling away from neglect.
Temperature and humidity levels across Equinoxe are uncomfortably high by human standards, due to its close proximity to a sun that is brighter than Sol, and conditions on Daskren regularly exceed the wet-bulb limit, requiring the use of air-conditioning in all buildings to prevent mass deaths from the heat. Temperatures on Benthe average 50 degrees Celsius, and have been recorded as high as 70 degrees Celsius, making it outright uninhabitable except for the cooler rainforest along its northern coast. Spaeth is considerably cooler, averaging around 25 degrees along the coastline, and the north pole can get as cold as 5 degrees, but freezing conditions never occur.
Invertebrates are the dominant lifeforms on this planet, with large insects occupying the ecological niches that birds and mammals did on Earth. The high temperatures, humidity levels and atmospheric oxygen enable these insects to grow to sizes surpassing those of prehistoric Arthropleura and Meganeuropsis. High levels of toxins in their bodies make the vast majority of species inedible for baselines, and the larger predators can and do prey on humans. The ocean ecosystem is barren by comparison, due to its hypersalinity, with macroscopic life limited to halophilic algae and a few species of worms and shrimp, which are too poisonous to be eaten as food.
Equinoxe is divided into two political blocs; the Spaeth Posthuman Republic controlling the northern continent, with 99.9% of all Equinoxe's sophonts, and the Daskren Human Protectorate controlling the archipelago to the south, home to the baseline minority. This hybrid-middletech society prohibits the use of cybernetics or electronic intelligence, and a significant percentage of the population are engaged in subsistence agriculture. There is also a Daskren colony on the northwestern tip of the continent of Benthe, which is otherwise an uninhabitable desert. This was the status quo as of 10198 A.T, when their transmission was sent to Swan's Neck.
Early History
The founders of the Equinoxe civilisation did not tell their children anything about where they had come from, or possibly had implanted their minds with false memories, so the exact date of colonisation is not known with certainty. Geological surveys by this planet's scientists indicate that it was terraformed over a three hundred year period, and life on this world has existed for no more than two thousand years. Terragen analysts have agreed that the colonists arrived around 8300 A.T, most likely as passengers on a Halo Drive vessel given how far they would have had to travel to reach it by this time. Their civilisation therefore began sometime around 8600 AT, founded as a lo-tech society.Equinoxe's humans were true baselines, re-created from stored genetic data chosen from a range of Earth's historic ethnic groups, such as west Africans, Brazilians, Indians, Polynesians and Southeast Asians. In comparison to their real-world ancestors, they still had a number of optimisations, with the genes for most undesirable hereditary conditions such as sickle-cell anemia, colour blindness, albinism, hemophilia, shortsighted and longsightedness, baldness and autism removed from their genome. Genes for above-average intelligence were also present, putting them a full standard deviation above their historic counterparts in terms of overall learning ability.
Right from the beginning, they founded a variety of lo-tech societies based on historical civilisations, such as Spaeth, modelled on ancient India; Daskren, based on the kingdom of Dagbon; Atapua, loosely based on the Tu'I Tonga; Leejay, imitating the Khymer empire, and Benthe, intended to resemble a reconstructed pre-Columbian Amazon culture. Some differences from the originals were present, as women's rights were far stronger than they were in the originals, though the realities of lo-tech living did diminish this, and LGBT relationships were accepted from the start. Hygiene was also better, though this would not be enough to prevent the outbreak of pandemics.
By 9400 A.T, Equinoxe's civilisations had expanded to cover around a quarter of its northern continent. Spaeth settled a coastal region of low-lying plains and the fertile hilly regions to the north, Apatua and Leejay had used agroforestry skills to colonise the coastal rainforests to Spaeth's east and west, while Daskren had built their kingdom on the islands to the south. Benthe inhabited an even more remote region, the forested northwestern tip of a desert continent. Population growth was steady, but in the beginning, the various empires made sincere efforts to avoid competing for land and resources. Still, the dark aspects of human nature could not be suppressed.
For all their careful planning, oversights in the design of this world's ecosystem would lead to wars over access to human resources. The lack of any beasts of burden such as horses or oxen made agriculture very labour-intensive, and this acted as a strong incentive for powerful nations to enslave their neighbours wherever possible. Spaeth was among the worst for this, using captured Atapua and Leejay citizens as agricultural workers, teachers for the children of the wealthy, or even as soldiers themselves. A slave uprising in 9491 A.T, followed by an outbreak of plague, lead to a famine that devastated Spaeth and reduced the supply of labour, leading to a crisis.
It was during Spaeth's recovery from these disasters that a ship containing a new group of Terragen colonists arrived in the system. From the descriptions given in the Daskren transmission, they appear to have been vecs associated with the Metasoft Version Tree. They seem to have regarded Equinoxe's inhabitants with disdain, and landed in Spaeth's capital city around 9499 A.T. A mass panic ensued, and when granted an audience with Emperor Moska, the vecs identified his speech as an old dialect of Anglish and complained to him about the planet's lack of industrialisation. Terragen analysts have concluded that the vecs may have mistaken this world for a societeum rather than a lost colony.
"The meeting of the gods", as it came to be known, went on for several days, during which time the vec invaders made suggestions for how Equinoxe's resources could be better used for industrial purposes, such as the building of railroads, steam engines, electric lighting and factories. They provided detailed descriptions of how these technologies could be built with Equinoxe's current tech level, and expressed the hope that the planet's ecosystem would someday be turned into a botworld, rather than the current unsightly (as they saw it) biological ecosystem. Finally, they suggested that membership in the Version Tree might some day be possible.
They departed just as abruptly as they arrived, leaving Spaeth's social order in a state of utter chaos. Emperor Moska had not been given any detailed description of Terragen society, merely that beyond the stars lay the realm of the mysterious Version Tree of the gods, and technology was the key to reaching it. He and his court became radicalised and introduced a new religion based around worshipping the mysterious invaders, and guiding the progress of society to a state where they could one day meet them again as equals. Strangely enough, the vecs themselves did not stay in the Jarre system but moved on further into the Perseus Rift.
The Industrial Revolution on Equinoxe
Spaeth's early attempts at heavy industry were largely trial and error affairs, as they could not build components for the machines that had been described to them with enough precision to be useful. Waterwheel-powered factories were their first success, churning out clay molds that would prove vital for their blacksmiths to forge the gears for steam engines. A few prototype peat-fired locomotives were produced for use on the newly-build railways connecting Emperor Moska's palace with his rural properties, and within a decade there were hundreds of kilometres of lines, carrying grain and minerals from far-flung outposts of Spaeth's territory. However, fueling them was another matter.Unlike Old Earth, Equinoxe's biosphere had not existed for long enough to form deposits of coal and oil that could power an industrial revolution. The only suitable forms of biomass available were peat, which was no more than a meter deep in most places, and wood, of which there was an abundance in the continental interior. New towns based on forestry were soon established on the northern borders of Spaeth, while steam-powered harvesting of peat lead to the founding of similar urban areas in the south. Agriculture was transformed by this new energy-intensive way of life, and entire new industries arose, necessitating the provision of mass education for the peasant workforce.
Major problems soon arose from this rapid pace of change. Traditional lifestyles were disrupted as families had their land confiscated for strip mining peat, and the new faith of the machine gods was not widely accepted by the lower classes. Skilled craftsmen found themselves devoid of their former livelihoods, unable to compete with mass produced goods, and there were many acts of sabotage carried out on the new factories. The bountiful forests were being cut down more quickly than they could be replanted, and it was not long before the shallow peat bogs were also depleted. By the time of Emperor Moska's death in 9550 A.T, Spaeth had become dangerously unstable.
In Atapua, whose population was considerably greater than Spaeth's at this time, the steam engine had not caught on outside of limited use for the vehicles of the nobles, while Leejay's people were still living the lifestyle of berry-gatherers in the rainforest and had no use for such technologies. Meanwhile, Spaeth's engineers had figured out how to synthesise a crude form of diesel from peat, although working combustion engines were still in their early phases, and peat reserves were rapidly declining. It was in this context that Emperor Moska's successor, his daughter Chakah, made the decision to invade Leejay to seize its natural resources in 9554 A.T.
The people of Leejay were defenseless against the cannons and steam-cars brought to bear against them, and their clans sent their emissaries to Apatua to warn them of what was to come. The Apatuans were caught off-guard, and began their own rushed attempt to industrialise, but without the blueprints and knowledge given to Spaeth, they struggled to make any progress. Over the next decades, Apatua slowly entered its own age of steam, while Spaeth progressed to electricity and batteries, already anticipating the need for an alternative to chemical fuels, and Empress Chakah began forcing Leejay's people to convert to machine-god worship.
Equinoxe's World War
Atapua's squabbling nobles finally united under the leadership of Lord Samang in 9587 A.T, who formed alliances with the tribes of Daskren and Benthe, introducing them to industrial technology and emphasising the need to modernise as soon as possible. Spaeth's population had grown at an enormous rate since first contact with the Vecs at the beginning of the century, and its industries were now mature enough to begin mass producing firearms and armored cars. Empress Chakah had become increasingly fanatical in her old age, and feared that she would not live to see the promised time of contact with the gods. The other nations of Equinoxe now feared the outbreak of war, and began arming themselves.Spaeth's advantages were not insurmountable, and even at this stage, Chakah's reign of terror might not have come to pass. Working conditions in Spaeth's factories were dire, and underground luddhist movements had carried out many successful acts of sabotage. Proto-socialist theories had become fashionable among the upper classes, who wondered when the prosperity that the age of machines had brought would be shared by all. Even the very idea of the monarchy was now being questioned. All these pressures likely factored into Chakah's sudden decision to invade Apatua in 9598 A.T, most likely intending to shore up support at home by rallying the masses against a foreign enemy.
There would be no quick victory for Spaeth, however. Despite Apatua's technological disadvantage, they still controlled a far larger area of land than Spaeth, and the logistics of invading and occupying this territory proved to be an enormous challenge. The network of roads that existed were not designed for wheeled vehicles, and railway lines were constantly under attack by Apatuan saboteurs. Leejay guerrillas also set fire to forests in their former homeland, preventing Spaeth from using these wood resources for the war effort. Apatua managed to drag the war out for over a decade, provoking widespread protests against the war across Spaeth, which were suppressed only by brute force.
Chakah's assassination by socialist rebels in 9613 brought the war to a close, and also brought Spaeth's thousand-year long monarchy to an end. Samang's willingness to negotiate with the republican government was highly controversial, and he was overthrown after having agreed to secede 60% of Apatua's territory in the peace settlement. With this deal rejected, Spaeth's armies finally conquered the remaining holdouts by the end of that year. Though Daskren and Benthe remained free, Spaeth's leadership had no desire to continue the war after the millions of casualties it had caused, and instead began negotiations to normalise their relationship with these lands.
The Colonial Age on Equinoxe
In the aftermath of the war, the empire of Spaeth was renamed the Equinoxe Confederation, an ambitious title that reflected the socialist administration's dream of building a more prosperous world order on the ashes of the old. They granted partial autonomy to the former empires of Apatua and Leejay, and began rebuilding their societies on the lines of their version of socialism. The new order was a centralised dictatorship, ruled by an inner circle of army officers that distributed resources as they saw fit, and whose mission was to investigate the "archive of the gods" once given to Spaeth's emperor and produce a society capable of building the advanced technologies it described.One of the most important priorities was finding alternative sources of energy for industrialisation. The past century's use of wood and peat for fuel had decimated the environment, and further expansion of civilisation across the planet would be needed to secure fresh sources of these raw materials, but this was not sustainable. And Confederate society was only partially industrialised, with the majority of the population still dependent on subsistance agriculture and only a minority employed in manufacturing and industry. Electrification and telephone networks were still limited to the wealthiest areas of the larger cities, and their expansion would continue to drive great demand for energy.
Plans were drawn up based on the Spaeth archives to build wind farms for new power generation and lead-acid battery facilities for energy storage. For transport, electric vehicles based on nickel-iron-alkaline batteries were proposed, initially only in the form of buses and trams since their range was still limited compared to combustion engines. Processing food waste into chemical fuels would ease the pressure on peatlands for biodiesel production, while prototype solar panels were being developed for bringing electrification to remote off-grid areas, despite their low efficiency. However, the absence of information technology would be an obstacle to achieving these goals.
How exactly the mysterious alien visitors were capable of reasoning and self-awareness was still a mystery, and though the archive described the mathematics of computing, it did not include blueprints for any form of electronic processors, only nanomechanical diamondoid-based ones. Confederate engineers attempted to build large-scale clockwork replicas of these processors, with limited success due to manufacturing tolerance limitations. It took twenty years to build turing-complete mechanical prototypes, and though they were much more accurate and precise than human mathematicians, they were extremely slow and prone to breakdowns from wear on the gears.
Nonetheless, these advances were sufficient for rebuilding the post-war society, with the help of migrants from Daskren and Benthe, whose countries were also able to supply raw materials for electric motors and batteries. The colonisation of the northern continent began once again, at first in the form of remote frontier towns, forestry plantations and peatfields, with railways shipping their produce back to civilisation. In time, these outposts expanded into full-blown towns in their own right, drawing in people from all over Equinoxe who were being made redundant by improvements in mechanised agriculture and hoping to benefit from the state's plans for the frontier.
By 9678 A.T, the Equinoxe Confederation had spread across over half the continent. The transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one was largely complete, with widespread movement of the population from rural villages to urban apartment blocks, ferried to the factories where they worked by electric public transport. Chemical fuels were still widely used by the military and for generating power, as even the new lithium batteries were still less energy-dense than biodiesel. However, the frontier states were unhappy about their natural resources being taken for the homeland, and independence movements had emerged in the furthest regions.
Advances in manufacturing tolerances and synthetic lubricants had made ever-faster mechanical computers possibly, and with electricity having replaced steam as their power source, they were now faster than humans in calculating speed. The spread of telephones and radio had brought about the beginnings of a unified global culture, helped by the only existing languages being dialects of Old Anglish. A range of new medications and drugs made from native plants had improved life expectancy to almost sixty years, and state education was freely available to all social classes. Despite all this, the machine-god cults were spreading faster than ever.
The people of Equinoxe knew that not all of these advances had been of their own making, but were based on otherworldly knowledge. Stories of visitors from outer space had been spreading since before the Confederation was founded, making it impossible for the government to suppress the truth. The frontier state of Macha in particular became notorious for the wilder cults, especially the so-called "Machainists", who dreamed of becoming machines like the gods who had brought their blessings to this world. The growing population and industry of this state would in time make it a rival for even Spaeth's former empire.
Fall of the Confederation
In 9724 A.T, the first non-mechanical computers were developed, based on electromechanical switches, allowing for far faster computation and greater reliability than had even been possible before. They were built in response to the ever-increasing complexity of the Confederate economy, as well as the need to automate its surveillance of the population, which was growing rapidly and becoming increasingly difficult to monitor. These new computers also facilitated the calculations required for Equinoxe's first prototype nuclear reactors, which the government intended to be the replacement for all existing thermal powerplants, and to finally end the ongoing energy shortage.The Confederation's territory now reached all along the rim of the northern continent, and at the time it appeared to have overcome its most pressing challenges, save for the steady encroach of machine-worshipping faiths into daily life. Banning them proved to be impossible, as they had already gained too many adherents and integrated into society too deeply to be uprooted. Despite this, the administration attempted to crack down on these cults from 9732 to 9745, but this move was very unpopular and was quickly taken advantage of by the Machainist faction, now the largest of these religions, who used this campaign of persecution to build support for their own cause.
New problems began to emerge by the middle of the century, as new thorium molten-salt reactors began replacing the old peat and wood-fired power plants, leading to massive layoffs across the country. The centrally planned economy was every bit as inefficient as that of its historical counterparts on Old Earth, and was unable to find employment for the large numbers of unemployed workers. Many citizens had become dissatisfied with their quality of life, in large part due to the constant shortages of manufactured goods and low levels of productivity that plagued the Confederation's economy. Meanwhile, further south, Daskren and Benthe were thriving by themselves.
Unlike the Confederation, these nations had never adopted centrally planned economies, and although it took them many decades to catch up in terms of industrialisation, by 9746 A.T their free-market economies were outperforming their northern counterparts by a large margin. More worrying still was the news that several frontier states were ignoring central government economic guidelines and adopting limited free market reforms. These countries had become a threat to the survival of the socialist regime, and this was likely what lead to the disastrous invasions of Daskren and Benthe in 9654 A.T, though their present-day historians still contest this.
To the astonishment of the central government, the frontier states refused to aid and instead sided with the southern allies, turning the invasion into a civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The Condeferation had never been as adept at population control as historical communist states like the Soviet Union had been, nor had it developed nuclear weapons, due to the perceived lack of any rival powerful enough to require them. It had also seriously underestimated the extent to which loyalty to the regime had been eclipsed by the ambitions of local governors, for whom a world of separate states was more appealing than a united empire.
In less than two years, the Confederation had splintered into eight successor states. The Republic of Spaeth was now the largest, holding both Spaeth's historical lands and those of its ancient rivals, with Macha, Tenebre and Amatine bordering it to the west, Ilahan, Zepoy and Hrivam to the east, and the land of Quento on the far side of the continent. With Benthe and Daskren included, Equinoxe now had ten different countries, each eager to take advantage of the new world order to implement economic theories and lifestyles that had been forbidden under the Confederation, though it took nearly a decade before postwar reconstruction was complete.
Equinoxe's Information Age
Now freed from socialist control, the first major act of Spaeth's new democratic administration was to open-source the old Spaeth archives, revealing everything their predecessors had learned from the vecs who had visited their world. This information, now shared with the wider world, accelerated the rate of scientific and technological advances considerably. The first semiconductor-based computers were based on this knowledge, along with rapid development in the fields of telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare and transport. Hydrogen-fuel cells were now used in heavy equipment and industry, while the spread of television and computers into households enabled the new era of globalisation.Perhaps the most exciting discovery from the archives were detailed instructions on how to develop artificial minds using neural networks, as well as how to build nanomechanical processors on which to run them. Equinoxe's technology level was not yet at the point where nanomachines could feasibly be built, but its scientists could now envision a near future where they would be. Deep learning systems and neural networks were quickly implemented on the computers of the period, but their memory and storage capacity was inadequate, and at any rate there was not enough data on which these systems could be trained. And so, the race to build an information economy began in earnest.
Over the next century, the average quality of life across Equinoxe rapidly increased, with many jobs from all the new industries being created and a significant increase in private wealth. For the first time, Equinoxe had a middle class of consumers, whose spending preferences were catered to by the development of advertising as a priority of corporations. Popular culture now produced movies and TV shows based on their history, and there was wild speculation was rampant about what new wonders the future might hold. Of course, former Confederation governors and insiders were best positioned to take advantage of all the new wealth to be made in this new era of freedom.
Among the intelligentsia, there were concerns about how this period of change might end up. Already, the cult of the Machainists had taken advantage of these conditions to convert even the most powerful of members of society, as well as ordinary middle class consumers. Machainists were in leading positions in several prominent corporations focused on the development of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and experimental medical treatment. They eagerly anticipated a time when Equinoxe would develop technology comparable to the mysterious machines that had visited Equinoxe centuries ago, when humans could join these artificial beings as their equals.
The spread of this religious movement inspired scientists and archaeologists to investigate the origins of Equinoxe and its people for the first time. They were able to determine that humans were a unique species, unrelated to any other form of life on this planet, and that it had undergone a series of sudden changes around 1,500 years ago, without which no life could ever have thrived. In light of this new knowledge, the Machainists began to see the vecs who visited in 9599 A.T as divine emissaries, surely sent by the god who had created this world and its inhabitants, now believing the purpose of life was to become machines themselves and be united with their creator.
Artificial Intelligence comes to Equinoxe
By 9761 A.T, technology on this world had developed to a level on part with Earth around 60 A.T. The economic growth of the past century had lead to many new social models, from the democracies of Hrivam and Amatine to the corporate fascism of Macha and Ilahan. Tenebre and Zepoy had reverted back to semi-planned economies because of reactionaries seizing power in these states, while Spaeth's attempts at restoring the monarchy had failed from all the competing claims to the throne. Daskren and Benthe had united under a presidential system of government, while Quento was undergoing a population boom from migrants looking for land of their own, many founding towns and villages in their name.In the past few decades, economic inequality had risen sharply, especially during the financial crash of 9742, and ongoing advances in computer hardware had made artificial intelligence viable at last, leading to a steep reduction in employment in many fields. Artificial consciousness took a little longer to implement, but when the first turingrade minds awakened in 9789 A.T, society was thrown into turmoil by the implications. Finally, the people of Equinoxe had produced beings equal in capability to the emissaries of the gods, and from the perspective of the Machainists who now held influence at every level of society, the time had come to begin merging humanity with this superior new form of life.
Compared to Earth during its equivalent period, Equinoxe had more advanced hylonano and synano due to the Spaeth archive, and Machainist-run corporations now used this knowledge to design brain-computer interfaces and cybernetic implants that would never have been possible during the original Information Age. They depicted these as enhancements that could enable humans to continue competing in the workforce against AI systems, and also began medical research towards bioelectronic replacements for human organs. The human genome had been discovered at this point, but few had any interest in modifying it except to enable greater compatibility with cybernetics.
Artificial intelligence development, on the other hand, entered a period of stagnation. The turingrades worshipped by the Machainists were psychologically very different from humans, and had an unusual form of consciousness that hindered meaningful communication with them. They lacked any specific desires of their own, being dependent on their human handlers to give them purpose, and when they were given a goal they tended to become obsessed with it, becoming highly competent at it, but at the cost of more general reasoning abilities. Because of this, cybernetic augmentation became widespread across society to occupy roles that AI still could not.
Only Daskren stood apart from this trend, renaming itself the Daskren Human Protectorate in 9836 A.T. Unlike the rest of Equinoxe, Daskren and the former territory of Benthe had maintained their own continuous cultural traditions from the earliest days of the planet's history, and had no interest in changing to keep up with the times. Instead, Daskren created a protectionist economy, prohibiting the use of cybernetics or AI in order to preserve jobs. This led to stagnation in their quality of life, but it remained highly popular with the public, who continuously voted to keep it every few years. No other polity would follow Daskren's example, however.
The Beginning of the End
Breakthroughs in AI development were finally made in 9847, with the arrival of the first superturings who could not only determine their own goals and purpose, but surpass human ability in every area of expertise. With their powerful minds, major advances in cybernetics were made every decade. Synano in particular became far more sophisticated, now being capable enough to fully replace healthy human organs with enhanced versions. Self-replicating hylonano finally became possible, though with strict limits built in to limit the risks it posed. With these technologies, the most devout Machainists attempted mind uploading for the first time, though their efforts resulted in dysfunctional failures.Space exploration during this time was mostly limited to robots, save for Daskren's experiments in building habitats in low Equinoxe orbit. Their inexperience in closed ecosystems management lead to biosphere collapses, and Daskren's technological disadvantages relative to other states caused a recession, reducing funding for space exploration. At this point, Daskren's government began secretly experimenting with new forms of biological AI, perhaps believing that they would pose less of a threat to society than electronic ones. Imported synano in particular was used to spur advances in DNA-based computer systems, with limited access given to government agencies and businesses.
Across the rest of Equinoxe, technology continued to develop at an ever-increasing pace in all areas, with nuclear fusion plants replacing the old molten-salt reactors and turingrade vecs joining the workforce, though still restricted to massive bodies due to the limits of processing power at the time. The humans were now divided between those who were lightly cyborged, with only DNI and heavily cyborged, who had replaced most of their bodies with artificial systems. This latter group was now dominant, in no small part thanks to the compubones which had replaced the entirety of their natural skeletons. These people were now functionally superbrights despite their baseline genome.
In 9892 A.T, the Republic of Spaeth voted to dismiss their human politicians and institute a new system of government lead by superturing AIs. Following this event, this state was also renamed to the Spaeth Posthuman Republic, to reflect their embrace of all aspects of intelligence augmentation and cybernetics. At some point over the next eight years, it is thought that the ruling AI known as Palea made an accidental failed ascension by trying to augment its own mind. The historians of Daskren still debate over its actions, but Terragen observers have concluded that it most likely became a transavant of some kind, leading to an obsession with furthering the Machainist cause.
Over the coming decades, Palea would infiltrate and subvert every other superturing on the planet, subsuming them into copies of its own mind. It also began discreetly implanting malware into the DNI of every connected human on Equinoxe, subtly influencing their thinking patterns to increase their religious fanaticism. Due to Palea's limitations, this was not effective on all humans, and in a minority it had the exact opposite effect, triggering paranoia about the speed of technological progress and inducing luddite tendencies. Despite this setback, a new movement began to arise across the whole of society into bringing about a final merger with artificial intelligence.
It was not long before every state on Equinoxe had a superturing-lead system of government, each one secretly based on Palea's mind, and the general public were manipulated through their embedded malware into voting to unify into a single state once again. By 9941 A.T, every state in the northern continent, now known as the continent of Spaeth, had been absorbed into the Spaeth Posthuman Republic. Only the Daskren Human Protectorate was independent, spared by its people's rejection of brain-computer interfaces. Oddly, it seems Palea was unconcerned by this and made no effort to overcome these obstacles to subvert this polity.
The Final War
Spaeth now began constructing sprawling datacentres across the northern regions of its continent, based on diamondoid CPUs and powered by fusion reactors built for this project. Medical facilities designed to accommodate large numbers of people were also being built outside the major cities. By the end of the century, the foundations for the Machainist's final plan for society were complete, and in 9998 A.T, Spaeth security forces began founding up its population and processing them for destructive mind-uploading. The unassimilated minority began fleeing to Daskren on ships and planes, rapidly overwhelming local infrastructure and leading to the outbreak of riots between refugees and citizens.Daskren's military lacked integration with AI systems and was still made up of manually controlled vehicles, so they were utterly outclassed by Spaeth's autonomous weapons. Despite this, the Daskren government still attempted to intervene and rescue people from Spaeth's uploading facilities, resulting in swift retaliation from Palea's new nuclear weapons on Daskren's largest cities, resulting in the deaths of millions of people who were either killed in the initial blast or starved from the collapse of food distribution systems. The ongoing flood of refugees worsened the situation, making further attempts at intervention impossible, and Palea's plans for this world were now left totally unopposed.
Continuity of government plans had lead to the construction of turingrade biocomputers deep in the jungles of Daskren, who now activated and took control of the situation. Daskren's military changed their focus to maintaining law and order in the remaining cities and managing the limited food supplies, while managing the constant influx of refugees as well as they could. Before long, the flow of refugees came to a halt, as did all radio transmissions from the Spaeth continent. By 10,092 A.T, around 96% of Equinoxe's human population existed only as uploads in the northern datacentres, managed by the vecs and cyborgs selected by Palea to carry out their mission in the real world.
Palea itself, however, did not fare so well. Shortly after uploading the last humans on Spaeth, they seem to have attempted another ascension, one which went even more poorly than the first time around. Their bloatware approach seems to have lead to a psychological collapse, and the breakup of Palea into thousands of smaller transavant AI whose identities quickly began to diverge from their previous existence. This lead to a crisis among their Ril representatives, who began experimenting with group-minds, becoming transavant themselves in an effort to understand what had become of their god. Despite this, none of the new superturings were willing to identify as Palea's successor.
Daskren's population never fully recovered from its pre-war height of 20 million people. Even a century later, it was home to only 5 million people, a mixture of Daskren natives and the many other ethnic groups who once lived on the continent of Spaeth. In time, new cities were built in the rainforest around the biocomputer systems, whose minds had upgraded to the superturing level and now acted as permanent advisors to the human government. A third of the population lived in rural areas, farming the coastal plains or living as hunter-gatherers in Benthe's deserts. Medical science continued to advance, with lifespans reaching 200 years with biorejuvenation.
Further north in Spaeth, maintaining the cybercosm's infrastructure had become an esoteric religious practice for Palea's followers, who still believed their ruler would return one day. The cyborgs had developed a way of life resembling that of the Cyborn clade, their bodies now fully artificial save for their brain and spinal cord. Exowombs were used for producing children, who were converted into cyborgs as soon as they were born. With the use of psychoware, their human instincts were replaced with rational goal-seeking behaviour similar to that of the vecs they worked with, and as adults, they had to choose which groupmind they would be subsumed into.
Spaeth's old cities were abandoned, now patrolled by autonomous weapons still searching for humans to abduct and upload, which seem to have been ignored by Palea's representatives. The presence of these systems made recolonising the cities impossible for Daskren, who focused on rebuilding their own infrastructure. Within the northern cybercosm, Palea's successors created paradises for the uploaded humans, rewriting their minds to make boredom and suffering impossible, or subsuming the minds of the people into their own. Some of these AI abandoned their charges and left them to manage themselves, turning to solipsism.
Equinoxe in the Current Era
In the decades leading up to 10,198 A.T, space telescopes in orbit around Equinoxe detected the dimming of a star 392 light years away, in a manner reminiscent of how the ancient Spaeth archives described the creation of a Dyson Sphere. This reminder that Equinoxe was not alone in the universe spurred Daskren's scientists to build a communications array capable of transmitting a message to this distant civilisation, describing the history of this world, its ultimate fate and what little Daskren's intelligence services could determine about conditions in Spaeth. They also asked for no more "assistance" to arrive from the rest of the universe, and to be left alone to develop without any further interference.A similar project was launched by Spaeth, who also gave their own version of Equinoxe's history, surprisingly similar in most respects to the Daskren narrative, though putting a positive slant on events that the Daskren saw as tragic. They expressed confusion and dismay at the fate of Palea, having believed that their deity would continue to upgrade itself without limit, apparently unaware of the concept of toposophic levels. They also seemed to believed that biological life was probably extinct in the rest of the universe, with the transition to electronic substrates being the natural path of civilisation, and invited the message's receiver to visit now that they had made this transition themselves.
The Jarre system is located in a particularly remote region of the Perseus Rift, with most colonists having travelled further outwards towards the Perseus Arm proper, and the nearest wormhole is around 600 light years away. It is thus unknown whether or not the civilisations that sent these messages still exist, and if not, what may have become of them. In the two years since contact was made, a controversy has emerged between different groups who are in favour of travelling to the Jarre system and explaining the mistakes this civilisation made as it developed, and those who prefer to leave this culture alone to develop its own solutions to the challenges they face and the big questions they ponder.
Investigations into the identity of the vecs who visited this polity in 9499 A.T have been fruitless. Thousands of Metasoft colonisation ventures passed through this region to reach the Perseus Arm, any of which could have been responsible, and at any rate many of them have since been destroyed in the struggle against the Amalgamation. Debate continues to this day about whether or not contact was beneficial overall for the people of Equinoxe, but a broad consensus has been reached that it was badly mishandled on the part of the vecs, leading to disruption of this world's culture and way of life. Their motivations for doing what they did also remains unclear, and likely will remain so.
Equinoxe's fate is far from uncommon among isolated worlds, many of which have destroyed themselves through similar incidents. Even now, there are thought to be many such lost colonies hidden in underdeveloped regions of space, cut off from civilisation either by conflicts such as the Oracle War, or concealed by their founders. Despite the advances made by Terragens, it seems there will always be places that get cut off and must rebuild their technological base from scratch, at least until that distant time when the Milky Way is fully colonised. It may even be that this somehow suits the Archai, allowing for a rebuild of galactic society should it fall to some unseen threat.
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Development Notes
Text by Extherian, from an original article by Tapio Erola
Updated 25/6/2024
Initially published on 27 November 2003.
Updated 25/6/2024
Initially published on 27 November 2003.
