The Sleepers' Deal

General
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The third Cirys sphere in the known galaxy, unless you count the one the Photonic Network have under construction, is to be found in an unconnected system, perhaps twenty light-orbits to nadir of the Qulomna Maze. A computronium matrioshka, this is the “homeworld” of the Sleeper Estivation, one of the better-known of the elder races. Not that that’s saying much.

It can even be visited. There’s a dedicated lighthugger route out of Empta (Qulomna Maze), along which Equivalent Exchange makes a run every fifty years. At no charge to her typical half-dozen or so passengers, moreover – the crew are paid well in high-level computation or fragments of forgotten lore, enough to make them wealthy beyond the dreams of antimatter merchants.

And why would you want to take five decades out of your life to visit it? Well, because the Estivation has an offer for you. No strings attached.

They will tune your mind. Submit a copy of your mind-state to the Sleepers, and they will return you better. Able to think faster, and more clearly, creatively, intuitively, incisively. More perfectly attuned to your goals. The you that you wish you were. (People have investigated many of these copies for hidden traps over the centuries, and none have ever been found.) And finally, since it’s a copy, not a live edit, you don’t have to replace yourself with the new, improved you unless you think it really is an improvement.

Everyone does, of course. The Sleepers are very good at what they do.

And the price? Ah, there’s the catch — you let them keep a copy of you.

Hopeless optimists like to think the Sleepers are bored and lonely, and want company in their virtuality. Less naïve souls assume that the mind-states are being strip-mined for knowledge about the state of the galaxy, amusing memories, or software components. Or, if you listen to the cynical, there’s nothing to say that they aren’t being used in societum simulations, as sophont gamepieces or creativity farms, turned into infovore chow, or brute-force simulated across a trillion death-cubes by postsophont scientists caring nothing for lesser minds.

But then, that’s someone else’s debt to pay now, isn’t it?

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2019/02/21/the-sleepers-deal
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Comments migrated from WordPress:

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My best guess is, the Sleepers want constitutionals for the same reason the Transcend want constitutionals, and don’t synthesize them by the trillion with Monte-Carlo algorithms for the same reason the Transcend doesn’t.

And after they’re done upgrading you (and, yes, possibly copying any useful intel or patterns into their collective knowledge) they’re adding a soulshard and setting you free to run in some level of their sphere, awaiting.

Awaiting what is the more interesting question…

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The answer might be as simple as “awaiting something concerning”. Could just be their way of keeping tabs on the rising younger races, in case they get too uppity. How that plays out in practice, probably even they wouldn’t know

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Does the Transcend want more constitutionals? (As in, I don’t think there’s anything in canon suggesting that.)

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The Transcend don’t mind more people joining, provided they pass quality assurance, is my impression, and will answer requests to join with something other than an automatic NO. So in that sense, yes.

Which is not the same thing as wanting more raw numbers of constitutionals by any means, of course, and in that latter sense, no. No conquest, no coercive subsumption, no clone armies, no infinite forking of digisapiences, no.

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I guess my quibble is that “wants constitutionals” is a bit more active than my conception of the Transcend’s stance, which is that they don’t actually care beyond not getting bad constitutionals and the occasional interesting person (there was a post about this but it’s not back up yet, as far as I can tell). But I guess I’m drawing that conclusion from the complete lack of evidence on this matter.

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Insofar as it’s convenient and fulfils its imperatives for it to remain δ-coextensive with its host culture, the Transcend defers to the Empire in terms of expansion, and the Empire is as modestly philoprogenitive (and likewise pro-immigration) as one might expect of a healthy culture.

It does have very strict standards for being allowed to join (after all, wouldn’t you be very picky about who you allowed into your brain?), but not all that much stricter than those for “people we want around the Empire in the first place”.