[Luis Dias]

Great writing!

There is also the thing about other star systems being already able to watch Capella going boom boom (like Betelgeuse, for instance, which is only 10 LY from Capella according to my own calcs), this could provide some interesting writing along those lines too.

[Rheyah]

They seem to understand that I am unlike them.  I have never seen them eat or speak, even to me and yet day after day a receptacle of some foul liquid is brought to my chamber, if you can call this such a place.  The first time, I was forced to choke it down.  Now, as the hours, days and weeks pass me by, I grow accustomed to its taste.  It has a metallic tang to it, much like I imagine a tube of mercury might taste were it not lethal.  I did not ask them for this.  They simply seemed to understand.

As far as I am able to tell, mine is a unique arrangement.  Since the last of my officers killed himself, I am all the Shivans have remaining in their custody.  If they eat, then they do so in secret.  Their communication between ships appears to be the same as their communications between..  persons.  I remain blinded to any difference from Shivan to Shivan.  They appear identical, even down to the individual markings.  Perhaps they are simply a shell.  Am I a figure of amusement to them, some ascended primate stupidied at a distant mirage?

If so, they demonstrate this no more than they demonstrate their pretense towards ingestion.

They do not appear cruel or callous.  It would be simple for them to accomplish were they so.  The Shivans do not build windows, but each jump has a distinct feel.  We have jumped no less than eight hundred separate times, remaining in subspace for long periods.  Where are we going?  This vessel appears nothing special, little more than a cruiser.  What could drive them to expend such energy?

Spending such a long period amongst them has done little to ease the enigma.  They are silent totems, wandering hellishly lit hallways formed of the same cloth from which they are cut.  There is one thing of which I am sure, however.

Their interest in me is secondary to their goal.  I am but an observer, doomed to play the part until, as always, the bitter end.  Perhaps before I die, I will understand the enigma of the Destroyers.

[Scotty]

The tone there (and also the content) practically screams Bosch to me.  Good job.

[Rheyah]

I fell in love with the stars.

It's really quite a stupid thing when you think about it.  I mean, what are stars?  Big blazing balls of gas that kill you with radiation if you get too close and starve you.  That's the thing, though.  You never realize what you love until it's gone.  They are gone.

It's terrifying.

We've been here in this..  **** me, I don't know what it is.  Nebula, maybe?  Supernova remnant?  We did a lot of grav analysis in the early years but never found a neutron star or a pulsar here.  In amongst the shifting dark clouds lie the shattered remnants of planetoids scattered throughout its bulk.  The stars own children snuffed out by its violent demise.  We keep thinking there might be a micro black hole out here but even if it were - it'd be so small we'll never find it.   

That's something the engineers do know.  This star wasn't a natural death.  It died screaming.  It was torn apart.  It bears the mark of the Destroyers.

Bosch knew.  Bosch fortold of this.  So did the Hammer, but they don't understand.  They think the Destroyers came to cleanse, not to enbolden and lift us beyond the dreams of our ancestors.  They came to test us and found us worthy.  They will come again.

We shall follow his example and those who refuse the call shall be given to the Destroyers to do with as they see fit.  That's what they say.  I'm not so sure, but I must have faith in my path and my calling.  We toil out here, welding, forging, training.  All of us, all of this in preparation for their return.  When they come, we shall prove our worthiness and our loyalty.

The masses never understood.  I hope they understand his message before the end.  Capella wasn't a warning.  Capella was our future.  I want to see it through.  I believe that wholeheartedly.

I just wish I could see the stars again.  I miss them.

[Lorric]

The idea that the Shivans are putting us to some kind of test is an idea I haven't heard before, and that surprises me because it fits so well. It's the first thing I've come across that would explain why they nova'd Capella, when a handful of those juggernauts could have exterminated both races. If 80 jugs were necessary to nova the star and novaing the star is part of a greater design...

[perihelion]

Wha-?  Trying to climb into the head of the previous narrator and figure out 1) where he is, and 2) how does he perceive the Shivans?

1) I'm guessing this is some group that has discovered a node beyond the red line leading to a dark nebula / supernova remnant?
2) ... that I'm just not getting.  How is blowing up a star "finding us worthy?"  I am deeply intrigued by the writing, but the narrator's point of view is too slippery for me to get a grasp on.  What has he seen to make him think this way?

[AdmiralRalwood]

Sounds like some sort of Neo-Neo-Terra.

[Lorric]

I got an impression they'd found something in the remains of the star. Something to suggest that its destruction has a purpose. Maybe the Shivans will use the remains as building blocks to construct something. That they maybe found us worthy to go through whatever process they have in mind, and the destruction of Capella is the beginning of whatever process that is. Capella is the future.

[Luis Dias]

Sounds a lot like a cult of Bosch designed in a very similar way to the Hammer of Light. I like the touch of uncertainty in the faith of the narrator. In my opinion, most fanatics are just like that, always actually unsure of their own faith, and the way they prove to themselves (and to others) their faith is by enacting their own sacrifice.

[General Battuta]

Your prose has really sharpened. I'm a little put off by the familiar old 'Shivans are testing us!' chestnut - a very familiar theory, even if it's espoused by a bit of a nut here - but the rest of the content is interesting.

[Rheyah]

If there is anything to be discerned from natural disasters or even an Outside Context Problem, it's that people discern meaning where there isn't any to be had.  I am running with several parallel narratives here, though admittedly very intermittently and for good reason.  I'll briefly expand as much as I'm comfortable because ultimately, the question of the Shivans is going to come up and I want to explore that naturally through my campaigns.  However, to put some (not much) curiosity to rest.

On the Shivans, there are numerous perspectives.  In this thread I have briefly touched on the materialistic, the scientific, the social, the economic and the religious.  When writing, I limit myself to the perspective I want to explore.  There is an underlying thread going through this and some very limited idea of what the Shivans actually are but I will spoil one thing.  I am going to run with Volition's idea wholeheartedly.  The Shivans are the symptom of a much, much larger problem.  I am writing them from the perspective of an Outside Context Problem.  I don't want to explain anything - that's not what the Shivans are good for.  What I want is people to connect the dots themselves.

My job as a story teller is to lay those threads and my worth is determined by how entertaining they are to assemble.  There will be no exposition mission and no "this is what happened."  I suspect a few people already have ideas about the direction I want to go in and if you -are- interested in that direction, please feel free to talk to me about it because I love people helping me explore ideas.

On another point, I will be posting a screenshot or two tonight.  I have around half of Ephesus completed now and am doing it in short stints between work on my differentiation report

[General Battuta]

I definitely disagree with a lot of your narrative philosophy here (at least as a universal, prescriptive truth), but I'm interested to see where you go with it!

[Rheyah]

It's a personal philosophy rather than a universal truth.  Not meant to be a judge on anyone who chooses to tell a story otherwise.  I have always liked leaving narrative clues and world building every bit as much as telling a story.

After all, there are so many ways to tell a story

[General Battuta]

I don't disagree with that particular set of instruments, it's clearly one of the great joys of a large canvas.

[Rheyah]

So!

It's been a while since I posted anything of significance and I thought I'd let you all know how things were going.  My differentiation went swimmingly and benefited from the extra time spent.  Of course, this meant that the bulk of my mental effort was being spent on something other than being creative and running a 13 day week 9 hours a day to make sure all my work was done kind of left me with not much left to continue.  However, I did manage to potter along and so I'll be resuming something of a more regular schedule again now that I'm in the low period of my PhD.  FREDing requires that I have enough mental energy left to power through and as I'm sure a few of the career modders will attest - that's not always possible.

With all of that said, have some pretty screenshots!

----------------------

[Luis Dias]

Big Popcorn!

[Rheyah]

ITEM 27356-BA94-13

Log File - Dr R. Jennings - dated 27/13/2387 GC
Postdoctoral Researcher -
Superluminal Optics Research Centre
Alto Pegasan Institute For Advanced Physics

I'm dictating this down with my results because I don't fully believe them myself.  I don't really know who to talk to about them.  If I tell Marco, he'll tell me to go and fix my input files.

I mean, remember when they discovered faster than light neutrinos?  That was stupid but this?  This is mind****ery. but you gotta keep quiet, right?  This is just first order correction stuff, like... numerical instabilities working themselves out in the string code.

< SILENCE - 18 seconds >

Come on, Rach, it's ****ing stupid.

But.  But I mean, it's there, isn't it.

I mean, there's a fallacy that's as old as maths itself, seeing patterns in the numbers.  It's like that prehistoric religious BS where people saw meaning in stones and cards and comets.  Thing was, I was just working off the real data.  Jake comes to me and says, "Rach, I got some weird stuff off the SUBCEP data when I was reducing it.  Can you take a look?"   I thought it was an opener for a conversation or something or an attempt to try and get me to have coffee with him but he just dropped this LUBkey on my desk and then went off.   I feel he thought he was onto something.  We all get like that from time to time.  I feel like I'm chasing ghosts.

So, uh.

I had a look at his data and he hadn't reduced it properly yet but sure enough, there was this really ****ing big spike in the 13-26 EHz subspec band.  This is a proper big discovery, by the way.  That's the band you expect to find subspace grav waves if you have a region of space time compression.  So I ran the numbers and applied the Al-Qara metric to the Sanwell-Einstein subspace stress energy tensor on the assumption of a collapsing subspace metric and sure enough, there it is, 13.742 EHz spike.  Little off.

So I hunt him down later and ask him where his data was from.  He asks me if he's right.  I say I can't find any errors.  Then he gives me this really haunted look and just says.

"Capella."

At this point I'm getting chills down my spine.  He's gotta be wrong, right, so we go and look at the data again.  Over and over and over.  We even got some of the pharoahs to check our calculus and to run simulations, not telling them where we meant.  We spent six months looking at this data and every single time, we get the same thing.  An extreme spike at 13.7 EHz.  Indicative of subspace gravitational compression waves.

Here's the scary thing.  There's a big object called the Great Attractor, right.  It's an astrophys object that we thought was pulling the Milky Way towards it but that was sort of disproven in the 2030s.  We found some huge supercluster that was supposedly attracting everything and I don't see any reason why that's changed.

Except for one thing.  We're getting the same signal.  Time delayed and doppler shifted due to the tachyonic compression of such large distances, but I ran the numbers again.

13.7 EHz with a travel time of 47,000 years, give or take a thousand.

The whole ****ing thing.  It's the same signal everywhere.  Capella.  The Attractor.  Maybe even the ****ing galactic nucleus.  The same goddamn signal.  I hope I'm not right.  I really do, but if I am.  Oh god.

The Shivans are compressing space.  They're..  I can hardly believe it, but if it's them, they're engineering entire galaxies or...  What?  I mean.  Entire ****ing superclusters!  What the **** are they doing?

[General Battuta]

Uh oh, xeelees

[Rheyah]

I just had to look up the Xeelee again - I only remember bits and pieces about them from the time I was a serious hardcore sci-fi geek.  The idea of a systemic universal enemy is an old trope in sci-fi (been around for years) but the Xeelee approach is one of the best.  I also love the Culture idea of an Outside Context Problem.

Expect to see both in my approach.   I loved Excession in particular.

[Mongoose]

That is some heavy ****.  I like it.