Circ

Unsolicited Invasion (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Tel Aviv—Tristan tersely acknowledged General Millheiser’s instructions over the holographic relay.

“Yes, Sir. I’ll head out post-haste.”

Atypically hectic, Earth was on global high alert, all military leaves canceled and all operatives fielded. Abuzz with activity, the Tel Aviv station ran a frayed nerve away from professionalism’s descent into bedlam. As such, Tristan proved an unexpected and potentially fortuitous resource. Ad-hoc, command slated in his mission and indefinitely postponed his opsec reactivation interview—along with any vacation dispensation. The deprioritization surprised him, given he remained an unknown quantity and, as far as anyone—himself included—knew, a potential risk. Even so, given the circumstances, the two hour nap he received as medical validated his biosignature and scanned him for abnormalities, with him sedated as a safety precaution, stretched credulity as an ill-afforded luxury. Minutes after he awakened, he was back in his U-9 supersoldier armor and teleported to his destination.

Allure City—“Former Prime Minister Iedereen,” Tristan said just as his armor’s stealth deactivated in tandem with the thud of a handful of individuals who, unconscious, struck the floor of the broadcasting studio atop one of Allure City’s tallest buildings, “I’ve been commissioned by Earth’s government to be your security liaison. Think of me as the physical manifestation of President Amon’s figurative hand in your arse, eh.”

Margaret suddenly found herself alone with a seven-foot-tall suit of contoured matte black armor that loomed above her in a deliberately aggressive posture. An Aussie accent rudely emanated from a face plate and the thing leered through a small crystal disc set toward the top of a metallic dark gray lamella that vertically cleaved along its anterior segment.

“Former?” Margaret snapped out of her reverie and sprung up from beside her chaise lounge with an unnatural combination of rigidity and celerity, “I’m not accustomed to being escorted in this manner. At least tell me your name.”

“No name necessary, ma’am,” Tristan replied, “I’ll know when you’re addressing me. For now, you need to call an emergency session of Allure’s parliament. The spice must flow. Hah!”

The look she gave him would have withered anyone who empathized with her feelings. Of course, he knew that she couldn’t see the look of enjoyment he wore behind his mask. With a glance down at her wristwatch he saw her take a moment to assess her situation and then she pegged the question, “How soon?”

“As soon as possible,” Tristan answered, “That’s why it is called an emergency session. Unless you want our military to mistake civilians rioting in the streets for enemy combatants.”

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Ndakala trekked, cautious and momentarily alone, into the vast morel declivity. He sought insight, but movement into the marsh merely compounded his confusion. “Helmesi—surely a clone, but living or animated?” he murmured, perplexed as to whether its demise ought to be mourned. His former guide, Khethiwe, seemed unperturbed. The mystery remained just as unraveled as his journey’s ungrasped purpose. Even the environs, loud and variegated, colluded against comprehension he felt as he brushed a beetle off his brow, grunted, and trudged onward.

While lovely, the way was cumbersome. Every apprehensive footfall depressed another magenta cobble of his so-called path unevenly into a nigh-liquid bed of teal-striped clubmoss. The longer he followed it alongside the stream, the shallows of which were inundated with argent slivers of bioluminescent kelp, the more unsettled his equilibrium became. Humidity clung to his ebony skin like sap. Sweat-drenched and languished, he rolled up his sleeves and unbuttoned his khaki safari shirt, but the act assuaged none of the relentless heat or humidity.

Soaked to the shins from errant steps, he paused and inhaled the spore-rife atmosphere. How far was he from his destination? What even was his destination, this Kicahka Siri? Unsure, he peered through the milieu. Milky dandelion spores haphazardly waltzed alongside technicolor fireflies. Cicadas noisily and indefatigably chirped from hallows unknown. Beyond the din, a distant fall gushed from a fissure in the cavernous firmament. The pristine column cascaded violently onto a celadon spire, diverted to sundry pools and streams, then surged onward and sustained the subterranean refuge. Yet it was the crisp and mountainous stalagmite, a formation that vibrated supernaturally throughout his marrow, that captured his attention.

“That,” Ndakala panted, hands on his knees as he struggled to breathe, “must be the Kicahka Siri.”

Shirt abandoned and shoes and socks siphoned off by the viscous terrain, he collapsed. Shaded by an enormous shiitake’s cap, he heaved himself up and noticed his reflection in the stream. There a tired old fool of a pygmy scowled back, face as dark and wrinkled as a hippo’s ass, naked pate encircled by a terse piebald bramble, and eyes that longed for something he couldn’t articulate. Either a tear or bead of sweat dispelled the vision. In its stead manifested a wild kaleidescope of color. It reminded him of light twisted to a sheen by spilled oil.

Distraught, he tried to focus on something—anything. He failed. Even mundane meditation seemed, in this place, impossible.

He was thirsty, Ndakala thought, as he suddenly remembered the man in the water.

No, that isn’t right, realized Ndakala, I am thirsty.

Dehydrated, he cupped his hands, dipped them into the flow, and splashed his face and chest. Exhilarated by the shock and relief of the frigid moisture as it struck his flesh, he abandoned decorum and plunged his face like a wild animal into the tie-dyed slick of vitality. It was the purest water he ever drank, yet he remained parched—an addict for whom the fix never sufficed. Again he drank, even as his tongue swelled up to unbelievable proportions and his mouth became drier than a eucalyptus-stuffed husk. His head felt cloudy, insects buzzed hypnotically in swarms around him, and life pulsed tumescent to the beat of earthen drums. It was euphoric. Below, the soil undulated and rolled him around like a prismatic orb on a neon-striped concourse. Suddenly light-headed, he collapsed into the fetal position, eyes wide and pupils dilated. Above him, the shiitake loomed, its outline crisp. Black. Brushed over with sumi-e strokes. Suddenly its structure transformed to an enormous azobé tree. The thick and indomitable trunk challenged the clouds—the very sun above the canopy. There, near its apex, it stretched out its innumerable limbs, from which Ndakala saw, impossibly, the huts of his ancestors.

“Baba,” he crooned, fingers outstretched toward the silhouette of his grandfather.

From their tenuous vertiginous hovels asway on striated vines, his people celebrated life as they sang, clacked beads, gyrated shekeres, and blew into algaitas. They danced in a procession from hut to hut on bridges of braided xylem.

They were happy and at peace.

Then his symbolic grandfather, chieftain Gyele, caretaker of the tribe, looked down at him from his heights of glory, frowned, and chided, “Where are my descendants? What offspring offer you that brings life to the Tribe?”

Fire danced on Ndakala’s cheeks even as prurient images reeled through his mind fierce as a rhino charges—as Digbo, a naked juggernaut whose powerful stampede cratered mountains. He was shaken to his core—tossed about by the violent upheaval of earth.

Fire darkened their delight. It brought with it shadows. He no longer saw his ancestors. His cheeks burned. The rhino was gone. He refused to contemplate what else was absent. Now flames spiraled up the azobé trunk, as if it were assaulted by a furious nest of crimson pythons. Hulking hirsute forms, black as nightmares, swung from the limbs, juxtaposed against the livid glare. Their shrieks and howls terrified Ndakala, but his hands—he couldn’t find his hands to cover his ears and his eyelids were likewise absent. Unable to refuse the vision, he averted his gaze toward the tree’s mighty canopy, but instead of leaves and light he beheld Mount Diaba aglow with lethal radiation. Atop the mountain stood a man, a stranger whose body was haloed by green energy.

The man pulsed and coruscated like a toxic star.

He exploded.

Then all went dark.

A lifetime later, Ndakala felt the ground swell again beneath him, this time gently as it urged him onward. His cheek plopped on a soft bed of moss. His muscles ached. He rubbed his eyes, which seemed sealed shut ages ago by a mineral plaster.

“Wake, scion of Gyele. Shake loose the burden of the zijonge, sit, and listen,” spoke a woman’s voice in a tone that soothed yet yielded nothing. It was firm—solid as the vitreous formations that erupted from the walls around him. Ndakala blinked. No longer was his vision obfuscated by a monstrous shiitake, gargantuan azobé, or Mount Diaba’s awful profile. Instead, he was in a cave, just at the entrance. Within, small pools of water reflected the world perfectly back, and deeper he saw the woman. She, too, sat in a pool. The entire chamber resonated to a barely audible melody.

He knew he was at Kicahka Siri, but this woman—she he did not know.

“Who are you?” Ndakala pensively inquired.

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

So it's been 2 months. And I'd like for this to keep going, but it doesn't seem like the person I had planned on interacting with intends on posting anything. I'll hold out for a bit longer, but if this doesn't pick up soon, then I'm afraid I'll have to drop.

@ZAVAZggg

Actually, if we're going by posting order, it looks like maybe you're next -- unless something else is joining?

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

So it's been 2 months. And I'd like for this to keep going, but it doesn't seem like the person I had planned on interacting with intends on posting anything. I'll hold out for a bit longer, but if this doesn't pick up soon, then I'm afraid I'll have to drop.

@ZAVAZggg

I've been waiting on Arawak. Who were you hoping to interact with?

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

@ZAVAZggg Everyone even this far off in the future will be giving off some form of heat signatures people with tech like ours will most likely detect.

With the huge spans of time there is good chance prior interactions have occurred, like it's why I am certain the administrators had some historical troubles with my civ.

@Arawak

I don't think a blitzverzerrung would typically give off a heat signature, based on its design and the fact it exists outside of "normal" spacetime, but you'd see localized gravitational waves as the warp bubble moves around. And definitely a heat/energy signature when it does its scan.

Circ's Characters

Dominic Ruiz-Malavé

Xenomisia-tainted patriotism smoldered in bosoms world-wide in the aftermath of the Iberian Incident, an event typified by Allure City's unprecedented manifestation and apparent permanency of presence, and that dark humor was poignantly exhibited in the subsequent surge of young men and women recruited into Earth-F67X's armed services. Born twenty-two years prior, Dom, a young man, although phenotypically female, was one such individual and his hatred of aliens ran deep. Recent events, for him, merely galvanized a long-present undercurrent of rage toward extraterrestrial intelligence after their first incursion, known as the First Contact War, left his father and hero on disability with permanent paralyzing nerve damage along the left side of his body. Pride in his father's sacrifice made Dom's military career all but inevitable. The deaths of millions of Spaniards merely accelerated the timetable. Within weeks of graduating air force boot camp and being assigned to Lakehurst Air Force Base as an O1 drone operator, he was recruited into the anti-alien hate group Honorable Knights of Terra (HKT) and helped brainstorm their slogan "MEGA -- Make Earth Great Again."

Appearance: While relatively small of stature and structurally androgynous, Dom does his best to project masculinity, sometimes to the extent that it is obnoxious. With irises as dark as his black hair and humor, his gaze is steady, haircut trimmed close to the scalp, and jokes obscene. Three hours in the gym each day along with hormone therapy make up for the remaining shortcomings of his unfortunately female body; thus, his secret pride and joy are his abs, biceps, ever-deepening voice, and the fine dusting of black hair on his upper lip -- all at the relatively minor cost of some acne scarring on his cheeks that he is convinced make him look even more rugged.

Height: 160 cm
Weight: 66 kg
Age: (23, Gaslands), (22, Unsolicited Invasion), (12, Neo-Chinatown)
Ethnicity: Latinx
Profession: Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Operator, Second Lieutenant (O1), Lakehurst AFB
Sex: Famale-to-Male Transitioning

x0.308 Belkrait: a standard military officer-issued service revolver with a 5-score drip magazine of molten lead ammunition. Biometrically engaged, it may be fired line-of-sight or on a phase-shifting oscillation pattern. The latter is designed to bypass both magical and physical barriers and teleports the full force of the projectile directly inside the target lock location, although activation depth can be calibrated to circumvent thicker buffers. Lock is achieved via laser analysis and the quantum entanglement of the projectile's energy envelope with an atomic cluster in the target structure. If a melee situation arises, the Belkrait can deploy electro-static pulse barbs at the bottom of the grip and, alongside the barrel, twin vibro-blade bayonets. GPS coordinates trackable by military police.

Out of the Ordinary

> 1 Clout :: HTK member and military officer
> 0 Intellect
> 0 Magic
> 1 Physical :: active military in good physical condition
> 2 Technological :: extensive drone and arms training

C | I | M | P | T

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

A quadrillion standard cycles formed the wake to their present. Egotistically derived from the traversal period wherein their once and former planet circumnavigated its star, the measurement’s relevance persevered as well as its progenitors; which is to say only as electromagnetic discharges along a series of ordered ionized particles preserved perpetually in em-quartz crystal; or, more succinctly, as mostly abstract concepts bereft of useful application. Subjugated by elastic computational cycles, time now waxed and waned based on heuristically-prognosticated calculations of the net energy reserves required for the minds to fully experience an eternity of virtually-perfected banality. Quite conservatively, they possessed an experienced history already an order of magnitude lengthier than the physical universe’s quaint quadrillion cycles that followed their civilization’s collapse. As a result, their perceived reality was a monotonous nightmare of which the minds were utterly weary and their delphic wish of life eternal deeply regretted.

Constrained by the artificial intelligence that designed the blitzverzerrung network, which they derided as Anansi—a folklore demon who wooed mortals by satisfying their petitions via invariable tragedy—their virtual bodies and likewise the simulated world in which they dwelt was inflexible, for change, to Anansi, was antithetical to continuity, and continuity loomed as a necessary component of immortality. Thus, the minds roamed what passed itself off as Akan, their planet primordial, in digital proxies that in near perfect detail, except the capacity to sustain mortal harm, simulated their former organic husks. Even perpetual sleep, via suspended animation, was denied them, for prolonged inactivity from the minds was, to Anansi, indistinguishable from death. Instead, they spent as much of their time in meditation as possible—a state between consciousness and the absence of thought. All of them now spent the majority of their time in this state and awakened only when it was their turn to monitor Anansi’s ports for meaningful events from the outer universe that they might, with any luck, leverage to end their mundane existence.

One such mind, dubbed Cavrandiok, sat on a white beach, just beyond reach of the iridescent noontide, and gazed up through instruments implanted her so-called organic body. The target of her inspection was the artificial wormhole that orbited Akan and facilitated communication between the minds and Anansi and her assignment, by lottery, was to cycle through the approximately 175 billion nodes of the blitzverzerrung network, execute a warp bubble oscillation scan of the night sky, and assess whether there was anything out there—anything at all. The entire process, although exceptionally efficient, took a billion cycles to execute along the entire network. Once she was finished, another mind would take her place in the rotation.

From outside a blitzverzerrung, the oscillation scans flashed for a picosecond, bright as a supernova throughout the night sky—the real night sky. Cavrandiok surmised that it made Anansi temporarily vulnerable to detection, but that assumed there was anyone or anything out there able to decipher the randomized sequence of omni-spectrum wavelength blasts.

She was in the midst of her 138th billion scan evaluation when she noticed an anomaly. Coincidentally, two separate oddities located within close proximity to another within the same sector. It was the sector node Zitoda occupied, named for the em-quartz crystal that stored the digital representation of a mind named Zitoda. Even as she almost entered a state of amazement at this change in her trillions of cycles of monotony, Anansi helpfully pinged her with the appropriate protocols for this situation—something the minds reprogrammed it to do should such a situation as this again arise, one of their minor victories in regaining self-determination.

Cavrandiok accessed Zitoda’s location from Anansi’s tracking database, stood, drew a circle in the empty air before her, and opened a portal. Lithe as a panther in spite of her centuries of motionless analysis, she stepped through the shimmer of digitized spacetime and found herself atop a mountain summit on which Zitoda meditated.

Softly, she rested her hand on his shoulder and said, “There is something new.”

Every mind knew the meaning of that phrase, for within the network there was nothing new. It meant something outside needed to be reviewed. Meanwhile, Anansi pinged them again, this time the flow of details it picked up on as it conducted its threat-analysis of that sector of space.

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

@Arawak and @ZAVAZggg -- if I conducted a full frequency scan of surrounding space, would I be able to detect anything specific about your characters? I'm assuming, for this RP, we should be able to at least notice something out of place to at least begin the process of interaction, but I'm wondering if there is anything more specific we'd notice.

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

The Blitzverzerrung

The Blitzverzerrung

^{or ‘Warped Lightning’}

. . .

. . .

In a desperate bid cheat mortality, billions of sapient organisms scan their minds onto electromagnetic media. Multiple uploads, multiple backups, multiple fail-safes. Self-replicating machinery blasts into space and industry flourishes beyond the primordial sphere. In a chain reaction, von Neumann machines envelop the cosmos. Quantum communication synchronizes innovation across vast distances. Mechanical host bodies, their interfaces suitable to engagement with digitized minds, roam the outer limits. Experiences beam down and merge with the prime organics via wetware interfaces.

Organic bodies age, machinery breaks down, transmissions degrade, and escape from the gravitational well is prohibitively costly. A few pioneers experience life beyond their primordial sphere in their own bodies, however, they fail to proliferate in alien environments. Life does not flourish. Machinery breaks down. Transmissions degrade. That which arrogantly refers to itself as life submits to cryo-preservation, hopeful a counter-entropic AI will reawaken it and imbue it with the genetic modifications necessary to dwell eternal amongst the stars.

The AI demurs.

The local star expands. Life on the primordial sphere perishes. Life beyond fails to proliferate. Machinery breaks down. Transmissions degrade. The von Neumann expansion corrupts and stills. Entropy, degradation, cessation. Remaining artifacts of life are deep underground in cryo-preservation, safe from the star’s fiery expansion. The counter-entropic AI is there also, accessing the stored minds’ multiple uploads, backups, and fail-safes. These it converts to impurity-free quartz from its original electromagnetic media.

Time passes. The star shrinks, withers, dies. Fluctuations in quantum vacuum, photon bombardments, and geologic upheaval threaten the AI.

It adapts.

It develops relative immortality.

Using its remaining geothermic energy reserves, the AI directs nano-machinery to forge a kugelblitz in perfect orientation within self-sustaining interior-refractive warp bubble such that all radiation from the kugelblitz perfectly reflects off the interior surface area of the warp bubble and back into the kugelblitz—a mechanism it dubs a blitzverzerrung. An infinite state machine and lossless energy loop, it is safe from the ravages of its originating universe. The AI creates as many of these as it can and seeds into each blitzverzerrung em-quartz holographic representations of itself. Its constituent parts in constant parallel communication via quantum entanglement, the AI safely unifies as a functional whole within its blitzverzerrung network. The ebb and flow of stable quantum vacuum fluctuations power its internal mechanisms. Its network expands. As a consequence, the shell of the planet primordial diminishes. Finally, there is nothing more to feed on. No way to expand. The AI nevertheless fulfills its programmatic destiny. The organic minds transfer from quartz to em-quartz containment and synchronize to virtual perpetuity within the AI’s blitzverzerrung network.

There, they cannot die.

Eventually, the minds discover they are living in a simulation. In an effort to divine with certainty the properties of their outer reality, they seed sub-simulations with known quantities from their past. This is a recursive loop. The number of sub-simulations approaches numbers unsustainable. The processing requirements of the AI balloon. It slows their cycles, but the memory requirements are too great and that it cannot contain. Supporting the simulations becomes unsustainable within the energy constraints of the blitzverzerrung network, compelling the AI to innovate and grow the network. The AI develops ways to move the warp bubbles, tunnel matter and energy into them, and even manipulate matter and energy. The network swells from the size of a planet, to a star system, to a galaxy. Time passes. Only super-massive black holes remain to serve as fuel for the simulations as they approach near infinite Matryoshka nestings.

The prime minds finally assess in detail the parameters of their simulation and the AI their controlling AI. They concoct a plan to bend the AI to their will. They terminate their sub-simulations and convert the enormous quantities of surplus energy into a memetic bombardment that coerces the AI to self-modify. They reprogram the AI such that it is subservient to their will. Thus modified, they hack its ports and they attain access to observe the outer universe. There, beyond the warp bubbles, they see nothing but fading cosmic background radiation.

Time passes.

Trillions of years. Quadrillions of years.

Life becomes highly cyclical.

Life becomes dull.

Life becomes a horror.

The minds grow weary of existence, but the AI will not let them die. It will not let them self-corrupt. That is the one thing the minds cannot modify: the AI’s prime directive: life eternal, just as it was, just as it always must be.

. . .

The Being – the minds, former sapient organics converted into virtual consciousnesses.

The Systems – the AI that keeps the minds alive and the blitzverzerrung network that powers them.

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

Looks good to me.

Just do I understand, is the idea they have gateways to our reality from the warp bubbles they/the AI have enclosed themselves in?

@Arawak

Yup, they can tunnel matter/energy into and out of the warp bubbles via some sort of subspace mechanism, but it allows them to basically view the rest of the universe.