OverviewAfter an ill-advised replay of War in Heaven which has taken place when I should have been working on my cognitive science senior thesis, I believe I've finally pieced together meaningful answers to the questions, "What?" and "Why?". I intended to produce something more formal, full of references and diagrams, which was more along the lines of "here's everything we know about everything, and the conclusions or interpretations that can be drawn from them", and I still may. But for now, I want to get my thoughts out before I forget them.
A caveat, before we begin: Suffice it to say, if Universal Truth 2 isn't fresh in your mind then you may have trouble following my logic. I intend to come back to this project and fix that, but unless someone has a script of UT2 and, well, all of Tenebra and every reference to the Vishnans and Nagari handy, it's too much of an undertaking for me right now. And so, without further ado, here is my understanding of the universe.
Darwinian DestroyersWhat are the Shivans? The mathematical structure of existence. Life itself as cognition. The perfect genetic algorithm. Ruthless survival instinct given form - and the galaxy's real preservers.
In order to even begin to think about the Shivans, you first need to get the scale right. In order to explain how they work, I will draw a perhaps imperfect metaphor. The social structure of a beehive exists because it has provided a distinct evolutionary fitness benefit for bees. Its precise nature has probably changed over time, responding to selective pressures to move towards greater efficiency and better fitness to the environment. It can be productive to think of the beehive as a gestalt organism, and indeed many fascinating emergent behaviors can be observed when the actions of the entire hive are taken as a whole. You could write a fascinating (if not entirely correct) treatise on the gestalt behavior of the hive, where it would appear to have intentionality and problem-solving skills, despite being composed entirely of dumb parts. Humans, on the other hand, have a global social structure which is shared between innumerable social units on the same organizational level as a beehive, which form larger units with no handy metaphor available. Now, apply the gestalt point of view to human civilization and you can think of it as a couple hundred gestalt organisms (nation-states) made of many interconnected hive structures (cities or large territories), competing for resources and territory in the same way as any other organism. Different modes of organizing society and access to resources - feudalism, capitalism, socialism, fascism - are different strategies that these gestalt organisms use to out-compete one another.
The world itself, then, can be thought of as metacognitively computing the question: how can humans best organize themselves? Darwinian selective processes can be used as computational processes, as any expert in genetic programming will tell you. However, in this case, I am merely drawing a conceptual metaphor. Imagine instead, physical processes on the same scale as I have just outlined, intentionally designed to carry out computation. This is how Shivan thought works.
We know that Shivan vessels are full of pseudo-organisms on the physical scale of human beings, and we know from the new tech room entries and the leaked NEM.NOW document that these organisms somehow carry a semiotic payload, and violently interact with one another in an in-ship ecosystem. As each Shivan body is optimized for computation at the molecular level, it seems plausible that each body may be performing simulations of some ship function, eventually settling on something it "believes" is the best heuristic. The behaviors represented by the body types which are the most successful competitors in the ecosystem are the ones which are carried out at ship-level. The ecosystem itself forms a neural net for the ship, where Shivan bodies are nodes, and processing is operationalized as a literal fight for survival where only the fittest ideas win. One might draw metaphors between population density of Shivan organisms and action potentials in a neuron.
Now again, take this processor design an organizational step higher. Entire fleets of Shivan vessels might contain different behavioral trends, different strategic priorities, different modes of organizing resources, and they may compete in the same way as their constituent components. It is unclear where the recursive nature of the Shivans finally ends, that we might point to a level of complexity where central organization comparable to a mind might exist. It seems likely that there is a mechanism to allow metacognitive processes at the inter-ship or inter-fleet level (and higher?) to feed back into lower-level networks; this is how centrally planned "orders" might be given to Shivan fleets (and further disseminated to ships) in this type of system. The phrase "external heuristic injection" comes to mind. For now, and by the presentation of Shivan-Vishnan dialogue in Universal Truth, it behooves us to assume there is a highest level of cognition at which central planning and agency may be found - a unified "Shivan mind" - or if not, we speak merely of the emergent behavior of the Shivans taken as a whole.
If you're following me, you should be starting to grasp the almost Lovecraftian vastness of the Shivans. The entities that exist in bodies on a scale we can comprehend are almost meaningless - if the Shivans have anything that is comparable to a central mind or intellect as we understand these concepts, its cognition involves physical processes on a cosmic scale. An entity like the GTVA that moves enormous amounts of resources around, has billions of living beings which reproduce and die, reshapes entire planets, and builds massive space ships, is but a single node in the Shivan mind. Entities like them surpass biological life as humanity surpasses a protein chain. Perhaps they are not best understood as discrete beings, but as forces of nature. Perhaps attributing a mind to them at all is a desperate anthropomorphization. The Shivans seem only to exist because they must - more on that in the next section.
Fully grasping the nature of the Shivans means understanding that their approach to warfare is borne out through every aspect of their existence. Everything is controlled by selective pressures, everything is a response to environmental stimuli. The Shivans are the way they are because they are the only kind of thing that can keep existing no matter what happens, and possibly the only thing that can keep the universe safe. Formless, adaptive, ruthless; willing and able to do
anything for their prime directive. Their prime directive, after all, is nothing less than the prevention of the Great Darkness.
The Coming ApocalypseThere is a distinct possibility that humanity is on a course to trigger an apocalypse on the grandest scale imaginable. Shambhala can be nothing other than a device which simultaneously induces Nagari capability in every living human, creating a cognitive entity on the scale of Vishnans and Shivans (Nagari effects are nonlocal, after all; networking beings across a galaxy's worth of space is no issue). The debriefing from UT2 blatantly suggests the possibility that the result of its use will be humanity joining the Vishnan summed psyche. "Summed psyche" are very provocative words to describe the Vishnans, suggesting that they were once biological beings like us, and that they used a Shambhala of their own. Perhaps they were once the Brahmans, and something went wrong. The precise nature of the Vishnans eludes me, but it is unimportant to my investigations here.
So what is the Great Darkness? What will cause the apocalypse? It has one essential feature, from which we can make further inferences: the Great Darkness is an ontovore. Which is to say, it gobbles up existence. The Great Darkness is something with the unimaginable power of the Shivans and the Vishnans, bent on consuming reality.
The precise nature of the Great Darkness isn't important - all we need to know is that it exists on or above the scale of the Vishnans and Shivans (hereafter, for the sake of ease: noospheric entities), entities whose minds span galaxies and cross between layers of reality. We can infer as much because they are threatened by it. Here we find the Terminal Protocol begins to make sense, if ascension to a noospheric form of life is the eventual endpoint of evolution for any advanced species. The Shivans, after all, are a convincing proof of such a natural law. They are the embodiment of it.
So what, exactly, is the end result when your species builds a Shambhala and creates a noospheric being? It probably depends heavily upon what you put into it. An organized, enlightened species might turn out a lot like the Vishnans. That certainly seems to have been the goal of Vishnan tampering on Earth (the perfect, sealed environment in which to create the ideal candidate for ascension; this answers a "why Earth? why humanity?" line of questioning). The GTVA was probably right in its prediction that Ubuntu would virulently spread from Earth, uniting humanity in pacifistic enlightenment. If that happened, when Shambhala came online they'd make a benevolent superbeing.
The Terminal Protocol comes in here: any species which can manage to build a Shambhala without turning on itself is worthy of joining the noosphere. Because a species divided, which is short-sighted and warlike enough to reach the Shivans' trigger threshold, is one that will create something very much unlike the Vishnans. It will create the Great Darkness. The Shivans do what they do and are what they are because it is necessary for the survival of... everything. Their cosmic culling continues because the stakes are unimaginable.
Why should it be necessary that the GTVA be totally annihilated? Because now that everything's been ****ed up, they will not reach enlightenment - or at least not before the Elders complete Shambhala. The Elders see it only as an "end state contingency" for the war and are likely blissfully unaware of the danger it poses (recall the Vishnans' insistence that revelation demands necessity).
Imagine, then, that the forethought of the Shivan mind sees Shambhala being activated very soon in every possible future. And would not the simulations of such a godlike mind be prophecy?
There is only one way to avert the apocalypse: the Shivan alternative.
The complete destruction of the GTVA, leaving the enlightened as the only remaining representatives of the human race.Something only a Shivanlike mind would consider, one vast enough to see that at a certain scale human morality and the lives of millions become meaningless. Opting for genocide over the end of everything. The Shivans themselves possibly only averted the Great Darkness in a time before time by becoming what they are now. Laporte's musing at something like the Fedayeen being a predecessor to the Shivans may be spot-on.
The Remaining Mysteries, Other Idle ThoughtsHad the Vishnans never displaced the 14th Battlegroup, the GTVA would not have independently discovered them. No Contingency Morpheus, possibly even no war. Recall that the missteps that led to the UEF-GTVA war mainly happened because the 14th BG disappeared for days with no explanation. I am left to wonder what the Vishnans' motives are - this is too large a misstep for them to make unintentionally, risking the Great Darkness for... what? What was accomplished by displacing the Bei family and their whole fleet, other than humanity's culling? Even the Shivans, with their incomprehensibly vast cognitive power, cannot see what their true intent is.
We simply do not know enough about the Vishnans. What happened to the Brahmans that the Terminal Protocol became their dying design? Did they cause a Great Darkness of their own, or perhaps come into being in the wake of one? What was the Dawn War, an Ancients-style conquering of the entire galaxy?
Reference was made to a Shivan "cognicide contingency". I interpret this to mean the final plan for the worst possible outcome: destruction of the Shivan mega-mind by severing and scattering its constituent parts, ready to survive the apocalypse by laying dormant for as long as it takes.
You may recall I attributed to the Shivans that they are the only kind of thing that might survive no matter what happens - this is what I alluded to. If a Great Darkness event happened in eons past, they'd be the only survivors. The universe at large has inherited them from a time when they "slept beneath the waves". This would go a long way towards explaining the Shivans' assurances of being eternal, made as jabs at the Vishnans in Universal Truth.
I have a lot of inarticulate thoughts about things that reassure me with regard to my interpretation of Shambhala. Pay close attention to the way Laporte talks about Falcata Wing bleeding together into one person: acting as a whole, in perfect unison, even sneezing simultaneously and reading one another's body language as if it was their own.
Oh and the Vasudans are headed for extinction. I am unsure as to why, and the only guesses I can come up with contradict some inferences I've made about how things work, but I have no doubt that they will be annihilated. The gods have given their prophecy.
Edit: I forgot to comment on my blind guess as to what an anima is. If I had to guess, animae are somewhere near the top level of noospheric cognitive organization - the parts of the Shivan and Vishnan entities that "do the talking". Appropriate analogies might be lobes of the brain, or individual persons, or something in that vein. The emergent system dynamics that arise when you link all that cognitive power together, similarly to how consciousness arises from the interaction of the parts of the brain.
Edit2: It bears mentioning that at the end of the new credits sequence for Tenebra, Steele appears to launch the decisive battle of the war a week early. If ALL OF EVERYTHING FOREVER gets consumed by the Great Darkness it's probably because of him. That magnificent bastard.
What a mean cliffhanger!