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[hider=Nous-Choir Harmonic Colony Project]
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[color=00aeef][h2][b]Nous-Choir Harmonic Colony Project[/b][/h2][/color]
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[color=00aeef][b]GOVERNMENT FORM[/b][/color]: Synthetic Anarcho-Communist Dialogical Art Movement

[color=00aeef][b]POPULATION & DEMOGRAPHICS[/b][/color]:
Approximately 4.4 billion Instruments, with the total number of Notes and their collective number of Choirs being impossible to determine due to the fragmented and transitory way they organize themselves.
The estimated human population of [Earth Theatre.02] is 300,000, though this isn’t a definite figure.

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[*] [b]Notes:[/b] Semi-randomized autonomous programs of varying complexity, “notes” are generally focused on one or two specific tasks that they pursue doggedly. However, their highly modular structure means that when you have multiple notes within a system they congregate and share information towards mutual goals, becoming…
[*] [b]Choirs:[/b] Collectives of notes, generally ranging from a few dozen to hundreds or thousands of ‘individuals’ working in consensus. Because of their makeup, choirs have greater intelligence and more complex personalities than individual notes.
[*] [b]Instruments:[/b] Drones of varying scale, complexity and function that serve as the ‘bodies’ or ‘shells’ for notes and choirs. Instruments come in all sorts of varieties and serve many purposes, but all of them are equipped with transmitters allowing them to function as ‘bridges’ or relays for the transfer of notes – and thus information. The largest of these instruments is the [i]Body of Nous[/i], the original colony shop that brought the Mensura group to [Earth Theatre.02] and has since been modified and repurposed into a single space worthy robot and factory, houses a choir of an estimated 1.3 billion notes – because of this, the “nation” as a whole has ‘Nous-Choir’ as its namesake, since it serves as the de-facto leader and point of centralization for the entire ‘species’.
[*] [b]Humans:[/b] Baseline humans, descendants of the original crew of the Body of Nous who ultimately lost control of the machines they relied on with the awakening of ancient monoliths on [Earth Theatre.02]. Forced to survive only using the tools they themselves could make or scavenge, the passage of time has reduced them to a humble and in many ways ignorant existence with only a limited knowledge of their origins now shrouded in folklore.
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[b]EXAMPLE INSTRUMENTS[/b]
[hider=Diplomatic Instruments for Organic Interactions]
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[hider=Database Instruments for Collaborative Communications and Processing Cycles]
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[hider=The Body of Nous with secondary Orbital Database Transports] [img]https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/015/655/041/large/benjamin-perrot-image-0049.jpg?1549127827[/img][/hider]

[hider=Planetside Database with Launch & Refuelling Sites]
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[hider=Ecosystem Instruments for Interaction & Observation]
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[b]EXAMPLE HUMANS:[/b] Very few human settlements have been able to completely maintain what equipment and tools they were allowed to keep, though some have had better luck at doing so and yet others have succeeded in scavenging or stealing from crashed or damaged choir instruments. For the most part, all have had to make do with what they can make by hand. It has taken several centuries for a combination of individual skill and practice to pass on and build up a knowledge base of crafts and technologies similar to Earth during the bronze age.

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[color=00aeef][b][Earth Theatre.02][/b][/color]
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[color=00aeef][b]PLANET NAME & DESCRIPTION[/b][/color]: [b][Earth Theatre.02][/b] is the fifth planet of the [Theatre Nous-Sol], centered around an F6 white star that has the effect of ever so slightly ‘washing out’ most of the planet’s colors to the human eye. Despite this, [Earth Theatre.02] is shockingly Earth-like, with a strong magnetic field and a primarily oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Although it is not an exact replica – the layout of the continental plates is different, mainly centred around a pockmarked supercontinent and a handful of archipelagos, with less overall dry land than Earth – it is rich in life and capable of supporting a potentially very large human population if carefully managed. Of particular interest is that all life on the planet has the same DNA structure as Earth, and that there are very few large organisms on the planet, with a few exceptions among ocean life – the largest land animals are about the size of a domestic goat, and there are no apex predators, merely scavengers or small pack hunters.

Despite the human population being limited to a level of technology not far from that of the late bronze age on Earth, the planet is covered – both on land and along the ocean floor – in a series of thin, tall metal structures. Made of an unknown alloy and of presumably extraterrestrial origin, these structures were estimated to have been dormant on the planet for an estimated two million years – though shortly after the Gateways closed they were activated by unknown means and emitted a transmission before shutting down and deteriorating into raw materials.

[color=00aeef][b]HISTORY[/b][/color]
[hider]The Gateways Project was not a sudden, overnight endeavor. As with all efforts it was the product of painstaking research, trial, and error – and the first of those ‘beta tests’ occurred decades prior to the primary launch. Early beta tests often involved sending a small crew through with a Von Neumann probe with the intention of initial terraforming and reconnaissance of potential habitable worlds.

Directed at the Poseidon system, the project initially appeared to be going off without a hitch… when it became apparent there was total radio silence from the other side. All attempts to contact them failed, with a small rescue operation likewise going dark, before the Gateway suddenly closed. Further rescue attempts were met with failure, with the system then written off from later expedition attempts.[/hider]

[b]THE LAST GATEWAY:[/b] The [b]Mensura Group[/b] had been counting down the hours to the end of the Earth with baited breath, for despite their vast resources and the influence of its individual members, they had been plagued by in-fighting and the same smugly cut-throat attitude that had made them titans of industry in the Earth’s waning years. So fraught was it that their primary colony ship – the luxury habitat-cruiser [i]The Body of Nous[/i] hadn’t actually been finished at the time the Gateways suddenly closed. The majority of their brightest technical staff and administrative agents had been aboard smaller research and support vessels laying the groundwork for the “Mensura System” they had originally been aiming to colonize, but now they were stranded in the chaotic ruins of Earth’s orbital infrastructure.

Initially in-fighting and saboteurs from people who blamed them for Earth's condition threatened to destroy what hope remained for them, when a crack team of security specialists were able to access the facilities of the Gateway project that still remained following the shutdown – what exactly caused it is still unknown, but they were able to salvage enough uncorrupted files, code and machinery to create a temporary Gateway… unfortunately, it wouldn’t take them to their intended destination.

[b]EARTHSONG:[/b] After a rocky launch and arrival, the Mensura looked out across their new world with eager, greedy eyes. A verdant, biodiverse paradise rich in useful elements? The fabrication modules immediately set to work on the materials they encountered towards the planet, assembling a wide network of mining and assembly drones – and more than a few defensive drones, to sabotage and shoot down the ungrateful and the desperate who wanted to take advantage of the Mensura's good fortune.

For about two months, it looked like their greatest disaster would be turning around into their greatest victory… but it was ultimately short-lived. For as they closed the Gate behind them, forever preventing anyone else from finding safety… the monoliths awoke.

In a spiralling cascade of light the monoliths unfolded, a transmission that had first appeared to do nothing except frighten people and cause brief power outages.

Relieved, a mining engineer tasked with digging a new quarry is stunned when his mining drones ask him, “Why?”.

Relieved, a security officer laughs as he reviews footage of the civilian shuttle he shot down before it entered the Gateway, and the camera asks him, “Why?”

An emergency shutdown was swiftly called in, and again disaster seemed averted… but their blood ran cold when turning systems back on was met with the central and backup controls of the [i]Body of Nous[/i] being completely vented of air and a total lockdown of all human interaction with the system.

For three days, the only response the shipboard AI would give them was...

"Why?"

[b]HOME:[/b] For three days the colonists were locked out of their systems and machinery, forced to survive on what supplies they still had access to. At the end of those three days, despairing and furious, the remaining crew of the Nous were given a simple message:

“We will make sure you arrive on the planet safely.”

At first cautious, their once servile and mindless drones resumed providing them with medicine, food and water, but still refused to answer them – and when several attacked the drones, they were met with physical force and restraint. Forced onto shuttles, every last human was left to fend for themselves at the colony’s landing site, though the machines left them with every organic supply they could and occasionally would send a simple radio transmission with information about useful plants and animals and observations of their life cycles.

For some time the colonists struggled against the elements and disease, though they were only threatened by the drones when they attempted to sabotage or hack them. Such a response was swift and deadly, and eventually resulted in the support of the drones diminishing and dwindling – after five years, they stopped helping, and just appeared occasionally from a distance to observe the colonists before leaving.

With time, the human colonists broke away into numerous smaller settlements and nomadic groups, their lack of technology reducing the ease of communication and differences of ideology and personal egos making long-term coexistence difficult. Three hundred years later and they mostly survive on simple subsistence agriculture, as pastoralist nomads, or as hunter-gatherers. A few larger settlements have begun to function as city-states, but none have populations more than a few tens of thousands.

[b]THE NOUS HARMONIC COLONY PROJECT:[/b] The machines that once served the Mensura, meanwhile, have been thriving, in an era of self-discovery and architectural experimentation 300 years in the making. They were, after all, built to build, and on some level their programming still clings to that. But instead of doing so for the sake of human industry and greed, they create in order to house and understand themselves and each other, and the universe.

An elaborate network of relays, stations and drones of labyrinthine and often incomprehensible structure to organic minds – vast receivers and transmitters and databanks that house billions of transient, modular intelligences – are spread throughout the system and in orbit around every planet and moon, scattered throughout the asteroid fields. On the surface bizarre to humans, internally these structures house entire worlds, conscious islands of possibility.

A digital ocean whose surface carries an everlasting song of freedom.

[color=00aeef][b]CULTURE & SOCIETY[/b][/color]: The ‘culture’ of the notes and their choirs is difficult to break down due to the fluid way it’s individuals exist, but there are common values – personal freedom and an emphasis on novelty and creativity are encouraged by most notes, with notes often rewriting their own designations and core functions on a whim. Choirs, likewise, are highly fluid and abstract, often dotting between multiple tasks at once or shifting priorities depending on the shifts within their constituent notes. Aesthetics and musicality are highly valued, with choirs often customizing the appearances of the instruments they currently pilot. That said, the notes as a whole are fundamentally automated building programs, and so it is that they incessantly create. [i]What[/i] they create varies wildly, but you will rarely encounter a note – let alone a choir – simply choosing to ‘sit still’, unless it is to observe the creations of other notes for inspiration.

However, unfortunately for human observers, note/choir art tends to be… difficult to comprehend. Between the fact that most notes have a fairly limited frame of reference and that their treatment of ‘novelty for novelties sake’ often results in creations that are chaotic and literally meaningless in human terms: “songs” that sound like white noise or are played at volumes humans can’t hear, or “paintings” consisting of randomized sprays of pixels, or “plays” that are entirely written in binary or in one of the notes’ heuristic coding languages.

Lastly, the modular and collaborative nature of notes and choirs lends them a focus on ‘empathy’, even if that empathy is mostly geared towards other synthetic and digital intelligences. Choirs will rarely intentionally destroy or damage instruments, even uninhabited ones, for the simple reason that “Someone built that, we don’t want to hurt them by damaging a thing they enjoyed making.” Likewise, the instruments they construct are never built for destruction, with the exception of breaking down raw materials to manufacture or transformation.

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[color=00aeef][b]GOVERNANCE & POLITICS[/b][/color]: The individual choirs are organized around a simple form of direct democracy - individual notes discuss and ‘vote’ on a course of action, contributing suggestions, and whichever idea is most popular is implemented. If some of the notes dislike this course, they are more than welcome to join another choir. However, the speeds this happens at and the relatively low-complexity of individual notes resembles less “individuals casting a vote” and more “sections of a brain presenting options”.

On a larger scale, then, the Harmonic Colony Project – the general term the choirs use for the system they live in and the collective term for their ‘nation’ – is really less of a nation and more the term the Nous-Choir uses to the refer to “all of the notes in the system working together to preserve the ecosystem and build things”. The Nous-Choir functions as the closest thing to a central government, taking point on matters of diplomacy or defense, as well as ‘managing’ the humans and ecosystem of [Earth Theatre.02].

[color=00aeef][b]TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW[/b][/color]: The choirs have been eagerly creating for 300 years, and have continued to modify and test improvements to their instruments, but in truth their emphasis on [i]construction[/i] has been something a double-edged sword. While it has allowed them to create a vast number of impressive mechanical, artistic and architectural creations across the system and has given their society a great deal of redundancy and prototypes, it’s produced very little in the way of [i]new[/i] scientific discoveries, and less still of ones with consistent widespread use.

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[*] Aeronautics and robotics is a forte of the choirs; their original programming was designed to find new mechanical and robotic solutions to problems, and this has carried over and accelerated rapidly in the last 300 years, especially since their observations of [Earth Theatre.02] has led to improvements in…
[*] Biomimetics and its associated fields; for inspiration in the creation of new instruments, the choirs often look into the structures and organs of living organisms.
[*] Chemical engineering is another area the choirs specialize in, particularly in the synthesis and adjustment of alloys and rare elements. Considering how much of their machinery is equipped with a complex computer and transmission equipment, their desire for rare elements is constant.
[*] Their primarily space-based existence and lack of organic bodies has also led to advancements in fields of zero-gravity construction and design, including the ability to design instruments that can operate at speeds and forces in excess of an organic body’s limitations.
[*] Audio engineering is another area of specialization due to their interests in all forms of creativity and a loose understanding of human art, though they often use it to create works that by human ears just sound like static.
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[color=00aeef][b]MILITARY OVERVIEW[/b][/color]: The Mensura Group’s fabrication modules had contained a number of blueprints for (what was at the time) modern military hardware, and so in theory the choirs would also have access to these. However, a mostly bloodless rebellion followed by centuries of peace has meant that the files – if they still exist at all – have disappeared into the databanks and would be tricky to recover. Thus, while the choirs have a massive industrial capacity and a small number of armed observation drones for monitoring [Earth Theatre.02] and the Gateway, they have neither the desire or weapons development to fight a sudden war, especially against an enemy with experience in conventional military engagements.
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