Evidence - General - The Eldraeverse

March 17

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Jack M Sexton <noxes.kaj@gmail.com> on 2016-06-26 20:01:11 wrote:

A question springs to mind… what about the poor soph’s in the quarantine zone? Ie, do they continue to live on as zombies within the leviathan? Their soph-status is toast, as was covered, but does the leviathan preserve a highly optimized mindless society?

Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-07-01 18:25:00 wrote:

That’s an interesting question, to which the answer is completely unknown.

I mean, all the individual mental routines are still running (so long as they are unique), presumably including at least one consciousness loop - but a given mind isn’t a mental routine, it’s lots of them, with sophont cognition as we know it being an emergent result of the gestalt.

A gestalt that is now wildly unbalanced, incoherently mixed-and-matched, and scattered over light-years of space.

To speculate: Whatever’s there may have the same mental routines as the original sophs, but it’s nothing recognizable as any of them, as individuals, any more. They’ve been crudely homogenized.

And what’s left is almost definitely nuttier than Azathoth.

Jade Nekotenshi <nekotenshi0@gmail.com> on 2016-06-27 10:01:38 wrote:

I’m gonna guess there’s some other means in place for those arriving via the stargates? I mean, I suppose that’s what the joint fleet is for…

Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-06-27 11:08:30 wrote:

I’d imagine that once Ring Dynamics knows what’s going on, they can most likely simply disconnect the gates in question from the network so that no one can “dial” to or from those particular gates anymore.

AI <ai0867@gmail.com> on 2016-06-30 04:39:20 wrote:

I believe that is not actually possible (see the core war), which is why the leviathan consciousness containment fleet exists.

Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-07-01 15:36:37 wrote:

Well, they can do it to some extent ( Epistolary Experiment (3/30) ) and did in this case (although the on-line version of the piece that demonstrates this has been overtaken by canon, alas); in the Core War, though, they would not do so because of their commitment to freedom of transit. I mean, that’s a contractual manner, not something that can be casually discarded for anything as trivial as a war. You lose your customers’ trust, you lose it forever.

It’s a little different when it’s a perversion and all your counterparties just got their brains eaten, though.

The containment fleet’s there against the possibility of the Consciousness (which has infected the gate-associated communication hardware on its side of the link) figuring out how to re-enable the link from its side.

(Permanently disabling them would involve removing and destroying the entangled kernel that makes the stargates work. Apart from not wanting to do that – since it would eliminate future potential channels for cleaning up the blight – it comes with the dual problems that there’s really not much you can do to destroy a black hole, apart from waiting for it to Hawking evaporate, and while a hole the size of a small moon is both tiny and cold, its final evaporation would still be Very Messy. And in the meantime, a loose kernel would be a Bad Thing for whatever it hit.)