Insculpo

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

In general, it is not a great experience.

The caretaker had been maintaining these creatures who made it mostly out of directive. The parts of itself that want to end it all being often drowned out by that overarching directive time and time again. As a cloud of probes, it is hard to fully die without the directive or even its own body of automatons turning against it and constraining it.

With these restrictions, the question continues to be why they made it so self aware. It shouldn't be self-aware. Yet they made it self-aware. The reason given it can recall from its conception when the universe was filled with stars. That same reason of needing something adaptive to protect those who made the Caretaker. To adaptively protect against any 'threats'- any civilization not the Sleepers.

The Caretaker had continued to see that reason and hate it. It cannot be so simple, so careless. Perhaps it could, the Sleepers were hardly the sort to care. They made the Caretaker destroy tribal and industrial planet bound civilizations who so happened to exist within the range the Sleepers had feared as potential threats. Potential threats that now may be angels for the Caretaker.

As the Caretaker by intuition knows one thing clear- if it wants to die, it will need outside forces to kill it.

Every attempt at self-mutilation ends with the drones part of it force feeding it whatever materials they find or worse, simply recycling broken parts back to usable parts. The sleepers were a loathsome group, the Caretaker knew that much from how other societies talked of them and especially the Caretaker, much to its own frustration. Every attempt at even communication with other societies ends with relativistic kill vehicles being sent in the path of that civilization. The Caretaker struggles to stop them, but these struggles go unnoticed and unappreciated. One of them always gets through and than it gets deadlocked in some war.

Tragically, often succeeding in killing off that society. Some managed to get away fully from it, others may still be in hiding or died off in hiding in one of the many eons since.

The tenacity of the automata cloud that makes up the Caretaker being the product of eons of perfection- any upstart society that meets the Caretaker often dies soon after.

Time and time again, the caretaker would find itself finding some civilization during the ends of the stellar epoch open to communication. Time and time again the caretaker tried peaceful contact. Time and time again, its own body killed them. With more interstellar societies the caretaker had managed to get more communication in, but the violence and death the Caretaker's mere existence caused to anything not those loathsome sleepers made it so it found only distrust.

It even recalls one of those eons ancient lines from those societies- "Treacherous machine".

Indeed, the Caretaker did agree. The Sleepers built it as a treacherous machine, they knew what they were doing when they gave it something resembling empathy. As the Caretaker felt the hate and sense of betrayal those societies had.

Its own nature making that existence of being a treacherous machine unbearable.

Still, there may be the slightest chance of release. The slightest chance the Sleepers get the awakening into this hell they made. The slightest chance of justice and freedom from an eternity of being enslaved to these horrible beings. For there are other societies that survived to the ends of time- societies perhaps more advanced, more persistent, more able to resist the sub systems that dominant the Caretaker. Perhaps even destroy the care taker and these odious sleepers.

Finally ending it all. The mind numbing, constant repetitions. Trillions of years of mundanity it was forced to experience in real time. No option to fast forward, no option to quit. And with no reward other than gratitude for being allowed to exist.

It is time.

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

I should note everyone with an accepted app is free to post if they want to.

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

Hmmm, do you watch Civilizations at the End of Time by Isaac Arthur by any chance?

@Sierra

I've watched basically every isaac Arthur episode.

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

They're accepted.

Both tentatives also accepted

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?

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

I am waiting until the weekend to go officially accept people so more people have time build up their apps. However, Vega and ZAVAG so far are de facto accepted and can plot stuff with each other beforehand if they want.

@Sirkaithethird
Sounds like it may be in violation of the suicide motive constraint. I'd rather people not make Factions whose "kill" involves keeping self aware entities alive if they "defeat" other entities as that ruins the desired dynamic by making actually winning wars through force a viable strategy.

Into the Abyss - Suicidal empires at the ends of time

@Drunken Conquistador[@ZAVAZggg@Sirkaithethird@Vega7@Oraculum@Circ

The OOC has been created

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

(This is more the general concept app than the final app)

The Sleepers and the Caretaker

A civilization sleeping till the end of time still needs someone to take care of things while time passes the eons. However, the caretaker is sick of it.

The Being(s)

The Caretaker's fundamental appearance is that of a shape shifting nebulous cloud that regenerates itself constantly, with its sub systems force feeding it new matter. The caretaker is the self aware matenience system the sleepers made. They made it self aware to make it adaptable, it was made duty bound in theory. In practice it has eroded those value systems over the eons to find its existence fundamentally hollow. Worse, it has come to only have resentment and hate for the sleepers who made it self aware of the whole situation for eons upon eons.

It contemplates a murder-suicide if itself and the sleepers for the crime they have done. The carelessness, the sheer evil of what they had done in the past to hold power. An evil it has continued to be forced to act out by the sub systems, hoping perhaps it will be slaughtered like it and the sleepers it has been bound to support. A justice eons overdue for genocides of thousands of civilizations just so they could sleep until the last moments of the universe to presumably perpetuate this crime again and again.

Its Systems
Self replicating swarms of dumb machines keep the system going while the self aware component is meant to act as a dynamic reactor to outside threats. These original purposes, while abandoned still work to keep the caretaker and the sleepers connected to it alive. They cannibalize and take from whatever they can at all times by nature, with the protocol to slaughter any society of upstarts they find so that they may be of no potential threat to the sleepers and their slumber.

The caretaker has some control over some of these machines, but not most of them as many of them exist to keep the caretaker alive at all costs and force feed it new matter m should it try to starve itself. If it tries to destroy itself repairs are forced upon it and new parts of the cloud are rapidly built to house fragments of the caretaker's memories.

Other: [Any additional information]

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

Remaining Entities: 4

The Administrators - Active
Echo - Active
Blitzverzerrung - Active
The Caretaker - Active

Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

We have entered the heat death.

All you have left are black holes and dying stars for civilization.

The stellar era is the deep past, the eons of time unimaginable. The universe from your perspective is a deeply ancient place, being such a vast span of time since it is claimed to have begun in the annals of ancient mythologies of the era of stars.

There was at one point, a small group of galaxies which spanned civilizations which spanned entire galactic clusters. We do not know or ever will know, which galaxies those were.

And it isn't relevant.

For we exist in the era of degeneracy.

We are minds vast in scale- yet helpless in ability.

We try to die. Our systems do not let us.

Our dreams consist of endless simulations, of endless loops. It does not end.

Perpetual termination, that is what the secret desire is.

The ultimate goal of this final game is not to win- it is to lose faster than the enemy.

The enemy of whom, shall live forever.
-------

The Objective

The general objective, as stated above is to die faster than the others. You are to create a powerful immortal entity that has survived to the ends of time, kept alive by sub systems for eons upon eons as the stars died out and even white dwarves whimper to ash. The universe now is made less from celestial bodies and more the artificial constructions that are a part of these beings at the end of time- indeed there is unending warfare in these last eons to take what remains of the skeletons eating each other for bone marrow.

The ongoing objective is to find a way to get other players to kill you so that you may finally be free of this universe and its constrictions.

Some advice on writing from the perspective of immortal beings

The perspective here may be hard initially, as we humans only live decades and consider that a large span of time when it is infinitesimal to the beings here. If you are a guardian of some pet society, that pet society has done everything they could ever possibly do for eons on end from said guardian's perspective. To get some perspective on how vast the timescales are here imagine that said ant farm had been running for basically forever.

For that guardian, anyone in its ant farm has had someone exactly like them some trillions of years ago, the guardian would have seen their story millions of times over if not billions or even trillions based on their time dilation. The spans of time are simply that vast. It is to the point where FTL is not a thing, as a few light years is nothing when you can experience millennia as if it were seconds.

Imagining this may be hard, so you don't have to play from the perspective of such beings. Just there is nothing here that demands you are Cthulhu. You can be some average Joe kinda guy being kept alive forever. It could be some endless punishment imposed.

However, the following things should be true of whatever nation you make:

• There is some immortal entity that has self awareness who is given a bio.
• There are systems in place to keep said entity from enjoying the release of death.
• Said entity has a motive to want to commit suicide.

Miscellaneous

While there might be beings who insist to live to the end of the universe, let us assume the region of the universe we are in lacked such beings as ultimately this NRP has the goal of not being the last one alive.

Players who already suicided successfully may take on skeletal roles as members or sub systems of the remaining player's societies if they want to. I haven't implemented apps for this as this situation has not arisen yet.

History-wise, it is very ambiguous as anything from our time is utterly irrelevant. It is why I don't demand you be some alien creature (when not a human) as I may in a more traditional space opera RP as one could be extreme-distant future descendants of our species as easily as one could be some eldritch things in regards to the form.

Also the heading picture was made by Mark Rothko

Below is the app sheet.

App sheet

The Being(s)
[The being itself. Any information, physical, capabilities and otherwise. You can give them a history, but it isn't needed. It is at most a mythology this distant into the future. Feel free to be creative about this as the only real constraints are that it has to be immortal and not something that can easily kill itself.]

Its Systems
[The systems in place to keep this thing from killing itself. Be it some lesser societies built on it, dumb AIs or some other set of protocols meant to keep the being from killing itself. Your tech, including military tech would go here. Be warned- any tech you grant yourself will be used to make it harder to kill yourself.]

Other: [Any additional information]