[procdrone]

RCC TNC IUA Q Q F
THE COMPASS IS A LITTLE OFF
000 000 832 I N S
VILLAGE PEOPLE -> COLDMORN
Threat two debriefing

is it right that it could not be argued: freedom, challenging god will, the old antiquest

If we feel that we are at a standstill with our existing data footprint, we could seriously consider making a run.

We have the codes from the Duke. We have the location of the portal and ships in position for SMOKEJUMP. We have fledgling MORPHEUS countermeasures. We could insert a team. No more SADABA YEAR bull****: a realspace run. Good old-fashioned recon.

As for the idea that Deva faculties detected a threat ahead: what if that threat is us? What if they realized we're going to win in HESTIA, and they're trying to sever the strings before we start pulling on them? I bet SECCON would like that.

Maybe we already know Shambhala will fail. Maybe t2 told us.

the presto, the usual, the heavy-lidden sink of the way of the will. to will on earth the salvation of their own instruments and they play you well. to will is to dissent

[niffiwan]

Sammy's older than he looks! Or younger. Or something.

Sammy's body died when the Keeper went down, was his mind was uploaded into a new body that was made for him out of old stock?  (I'm sure there's some problems with this idea, but it could be an interesting thought trail) So, could there be some sort of agent in the new body? Has his consciousness been altered along the way?

[Phantom Hoover]

I think Sam got uploaded into the Vishnan consciousness, and they built him a new body when the Keeper was going down. That accounts for the basic questions, though not the potential causality weirdness.

[perihelion]

Someone also sent me a thing:

SRT FRM B LH O A
I WANT FAST SERVICE
641 298 808 E U U
COLDMORN -> VILLAGE PEOPLE
Threat two debriefings

no curious study passes the fire forest beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. only by taking such charge of each last entity routed out by the inquisitor may the purpose of the specimens be known. this is my dispensation

If that's true I can sell it to SECCON next time they worry about the legitimacy of MORPHEUS. It's scary but it's useful news. Body snatching is intuitive and sexy. Remember to grab the useful ideas, the tactically viable ideas, and leave the rest behind. You can't afford to get snared in the existential trap. We're all components now and we ahve to perform.

Let's roll with this idea that you have about their restricted paracausal capabilities. I feel clever so let's call it Deva.

Assume they can't use that Deva capability aggressively because if they could we wouldn't be here questioning them (or at least it's not useful to think we would be) and they'd be entirely omnipotent. Imagine their intelligence as contingent on the bulk coordinates it's operating on, able to see what's immediately around it. Shadows from the past and future (which they would perceive as directions along a causal axis). So they —

ASIDE HERE: What would the reason be, to set up a system that was internally compartmentalized like that? An intelligence capable of traversing the time axis but restricted so that it can only conduct cognition in a mostly causal sense? 'I am here, so I can only know and think about information ~here?' Is it 1) a rule they imposed on themselves 2) a rule imposed on them 3) a rule imposed on them by external circumstance 4) a fundamental law

— Are you aware of the recent phenomenon we are calling the hush? Although our monitoring capabilities are very limited, we had a firm picture of Nagari traffic in the HESTIA theater. A lot happening, a lot of internal teleonomy. Abruptly it all dropped off. Fell off a cliff. FRIENDLY ANCHORITE told us that there was profound dismay over there, a sense of loss and abandonment, fear about some kind of trigger threshold.

So we began working on a model. Trying to figure out what had happened to cause this. But we couldn't pin down an exact inflection point. Something felt off.

What if we have it all backwards? What if t2's Deva capability detected a threat AHEAD and it's trying to react NOW? What if the hush is an effect and we haven't yet seen the cause?

This may be my own rathole, nootropes and anxiety driving me into a mirage, but I keep thinking about their limitations. I see them trying to WORK AROUND A PROBLEM. Like they're trying to exploit a loophole. Or influence events with just one tiny scalpel or set of forceps. Or figure out what's happening while staring at us through a periscope of unthinkable length and microscopic diameter. Like a scientist cursing her inability to position individual particles, or even see them, do you know what I

Look:

They start small. They crush the entire human species down to a few thousand people. They minimize the variables. Those people are asleep. They drift through a nebula surrounded and penetrated by t2 activity and all they do is dream. Limited scope. Small phase space. Malleable.

Now it's ready. You used up one universe to prep your payload for another.

Now they prepare a theater for delivery. One star system. Bound together by clear causal models. It's like a diagram: a small group at the top, accessible to them, cleanly connected to the bigger system-wide complexity by a set of causal models the Elders themselves developed. Hooks and levers. Steering mechanisms. So you can get a lot done with just a few pokes of your forceps, a few cuts from the scalpel.

Now they're ready to move up from a few thousand people on one ship to a few billion in one star system. They fire their bullet into the operating theater. (Why do they need a bullet? They're being sneaky? Something went wrong? They need to sharply change course? A seed? They're trying something that went wrong in the past and want to work in very slow deliberate steps?)

Start small. Grow a seed. Get it right. Take the seed. Move it to the next pot. Grow the plant. Get it right. Take the plant. Move it to the forest.

Start small. Make a gene. Get it right. Insert the gene into an organism. Grow the organism. Get it right. Take the organism. Move it to the...

What's the next layer of this? How far up does it go?

I don't know. Am I on to anything interesting? Redteam me on this.

the terms of our own fate must be permitted to stand absent before we are properly suzerain of the world. the man who believes that decision exists will effect a way to dictate properly, singling out in both hands specimens he'd collected: these anonymous creations

[redsniper]

These are some juicy scary documents, but what really gets me are the stream-of-consciousness headers and footers. They seem too deliberate to be just random words... but maybe the point is to give the illusion of deliberate sentences... but maybe there's deep cryptic **** hidden in them arrrgh.

I mean, "to will on earth the salvation of their own instruments and they play you well. to will is to dissent???" "the man who believes that decision exists will effect a way to dictate properly"!!

[redsniper]

transcendent madness

!!!!!

art-historical kernels of terror

Bosch

a reappropriation of elementally traumatizing borders far beyond zoophrenia

"zoophrenia" is a made up word. -phrenia apparently meaning dysfunction of the mind. Like schozophrenia. Elementally traumatizing the minds of all animals? The Great Darkness?

[Leeko]

I found this somewhere. Thought you guys would want to read it.

MDC JXM V PN N NX X
SHALL WE TAKE A SHORT STROLL
097 541 800 D F G
COLDMORN -> VILLAGE PEOPLE
Threat two debriefings

the universe is not constrained by anything that exists within it, it is a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulated and destined to repeat what exists in one part in its entirety

Sorry dashing this one off real fast I have a flight

Ok let's start again from the basics. The problem we are having with the inferentials is that they keep ratholing on inbred models. You know this is a problem when they work from small footprints. So let's see if we can leverage what we have and get a bigger foot.

I am micromanaging this a little so feel free to push back. I promsie youll be ok.

What happened to the Temeraire's scout wings? Do we have any datalink telemetry? Did the pilots get Athanased or was the encounter purely coincidental? WHAT WAS DIFFERENT ABOUT BEI?

I am looking at SNRI data here which is honestly scaring the **** out of me. Have you ever talked to anyone in the Complicated Place about their notion of history? Well someone in SNRI is tearing up and down screaming that the recursive parabolic transits they observed on battery 11 are actually all fragments of a single trajectory that would be — and i borrow their phrase here because of course we all ****ing love a good euphemism — 'not conventionally causal'. If this is t2 activity and it represents real information transfer rather than some kind of necessary symmetry then a ha ha or, Professionally Speaking, we would face radical new challenges.

even in this world, he said, no man's mind be it strained by any pitch or latitude in a maze, that exists in one part in any other part in any a pitch in many a pitch in many other part. even in one part. even it all from birth. calamitous beyond reckoning.

Since I don't recall seeing it explicitly stated anywhere, I think I've worked out a few codenames? Blackbird village (as well as "the village people") sounds like SOC to me. Balcony View reads like Adm. Bei, and Friendly Anchorite sounds like possibly the traitor elder? Just idle musings I guess. This is heady stuff, though.

[Colonol Dekker]

So how do I help?

[Phantom Hoover]

Blackbird village is the GTVI black ops site, yeah.

[Phantom Hoover]

a reappropriation of elementally traumatizing borders far beyond zoophrenia

"zoophrenia" is a made up word. -phrenia apparently meaning dysfunction of the mind. Like schozophrenia. Elementally traumatizing the minds of all animals? The Great Darkness?

Sounds like a pretty apt way of describing the Lacanian real. Very battuta.

[Damage]

Village People really wants to send a recon mission through the Knossos at system N362 and find out whats on the other side.

Blackbird Village is probably the GTVI's deep-research/operations division (think HYDRA but without the Nazis).  Village People is probably high-up in their structure, as he communicates with Coldmorn.  Balcony View retired (forced or otherwise) apparently after Capella.  Coldmorn took over his operations, and was still running things when Admiral Bei's 14BG up and disappeared to the surprise of everybody.  Granite Mountain was an SOC group, Black Dove was Snipes.  I'll gladly post more tomorrow, if someone else doesn't get it done first.

[Mars]

I think that Blackbird Village is a discreet facility rather than a division, most likely a place where the most secretive operations are carried out. We know from previous fiction that it is where interrogations tend to take place. The Village People are the SOC operatives working from this facility.
EDIT
To put it another way; Blackbird Village is very likely the place where the crew of the 14th BG was debriefed and interrogated, and where the vessels of the BG were examined. The Village People were very likely the people who had direct contact with the personnel and equipment of the 14 BG.

[Phantom Hoover]

Blackbird Village is a discrete facility somewhere in Beta Aquilae, analogous to the Federation's Solis Lacus on Mars. (Chat with the devs on IRC is that it's probably an island somewhere on the planet.)

[SmashMonkey]

As for the idea that Deva faculties detected a threat ahead: what if that threat is us? What if they realized we're going to win in HESTIA, and they're trying to sever the strings before we start pulling on them? I bet SECCON would like that.

The sheer arrogant stupidity of the GTVI is overwhelming...

[Scotty]

I don't think it qualifies as "arrogant stupidity" for the GTVA to think they're winning in Sol.

Because they pretty much are.

[Lepanto]

The document on Deva explains a key point that's been bugging me about BP's storyline. Previously, the GTVA looked incredibly stupid in trying to disrupt the quantum space-time super-aliens' little sandbox in Sol. It seems utterly impossible to inflict any real defeat on beings that have planned for everything your entire species could possibly do far 'before' your entire species ever exists.

But if the Vishnans' vision and powers have limits that can be exploited, then humanity might stand a chance at carving out its own destiny. Of course, our friend COLDMORN could be mistaken, and the Vishnans aren't (at least quite) as limited as he'd hoped. And that's not even factoring in what the Shivans or GD might do. But if true, this whole Deva thing certainly makes BP's convoluted cosmic plot make a good deal more sense, and allows for a more epic conclusion than "super-aliens impose their will on lesser races, end of story."

[Scotty]

FreeSpace in all its iterations has always held true to the same general theme.

"You are a cog in the machine"

FreeSpace in all its iterations has also always held true to another general theme.

"You will change the face of the universe"

BP has not changed these themes.

[perihelion]

Ok, in the interest of prodding our brains into action, I'm going to post a disclosed piece of communication from the earlier thread:

OCAC Expedient
TIA Rapid Exemption
Candidate 616A9707YBPTR
Subspace Systems Command, Strategic Navigation Research Initiative

SADABA YEAR went into early stand-down after an internal event and the loss of some assets and personnel. However, unexpected post-mission applications across the last six months have driven an explosive knowledge footprint. Although primarily of intellectual interest, this new footprint could be mined for strategic intelligence.

At the requests of SSC thought leaders we have prepared an extremely brief precis.

Introduction

Cosmological study with conventional instruments has determined that the universe is spatially infinite, flat, and unbounded. Most importantly, the universe appears isotropic in all directions: the same laws, dynamics, and high-level structures prevail. However, the historically recent discovery of subspace opens new cosmological questions. Due to the importance of subspace navigation technology, applied subspace mathematics and computational subspace dynamics are now well understood. But due to the expense and limited utility of non-navigational subspace instruments (NNSI), broader questions have been neglected.

Summary Findings

The stand-down of SADABA YEAR left SNRI with a number of sophisticated sensor assets that were applied to scientific questions with assumption of retroactive authorization. Investigation has produced preliminary evidence for major breaches of isotropy in the subspace domain. Puzzlingly, follow-up investigation of cosmological data detects signs of teleonomy in some traits of the space/subspace interface. SNRI requests additional funding and access to strategic computational assets to determine whether these findings may be of military interest.

Specific Findings

The physical universe can be described as a subset manifold of subspace — traditionally, a bubble or sheet adrift in a larger space. Active battery transits conducted with SADABA YEAR surplus NNSI detected adjacent manifolds, supporting Bardakci et al. and numerous others.

Teleonomic inference detects tantalizing similarities in the organization of these manifolds, from high-level symmetry breaks down to astronomical structure. The similarity may continue to smaller scales. Inference suggests shared causal history until a time, tau-break, within the past several billion years (present inclusive). These nearby manifolds may be identical to or only minimally divergent from our own.

NNSI wake sensors detect subspace transit activity between these manifolds. This opens the possibility of causal action between manifolds. The origin and provenance of these transits are unknown but see Centaur/transit 21. Depending on the degree of causal drift since tau-break, observation of nearby manifolds may provide previously unavailable data on historical counterfactuals.

Initial active battery transits detected a local comoving constellation and echos of other structures at the same scale beyond the horizon of instrument resolution.

Repeated active battery transits detected a massive isotropy break within the local subspace volume. Team members nicknamed the direction of this break the 'wow vector' due to the unexpected magnitude and statistical significance of the signal. Local manifolds appear to be moving away from this vector in a loose dispersal constellation. The wow vector may represent a historical origin point and a possible reason for shared causal history.

Some team members suggest that refraction patterns and probability slopes along the wow vector are evidence of manifold necrosis.

After mathematical work outside the scope of this precis, data from NNSI investigation of the wow vector was applied to teleonomic analysis of the space/subspace interface. Results suggest traumatic isolation of our manifold from a larger structure within the cosmological timeline. However, REDTEAM counteranalysis argues that this is in fact a reverse-read of an earlier event in which multiple manifolds joined.

Teleonomic analysis of the joining and isolation events may suggest an engineered event (but see REDTEAM 8.8b).

Peripherally, SNRI teleonomic analysis of structures in the Lanieakea supercluster suggest the presence of an engineered object of unprecedented magnitude. Unfortunately, neither the funding nor manpower for further analysis of this signal has yet determined itself necessary.

Strategic Impact

Further investigation of the local structure of subspace may provide insight into the role of intelligent life in the development of the universe and the challenges it may have encountered. We hope the strategic ramifications require no further emphasis.

Special Thanks
The team would like to thank Li Weng for her extraordinarily diligent support, Djau for exemplary organization and context services, and the casualties of SADABA YEAR for their faithful service in the face of unimaginable challenges.

Now, we've had at least two if not more references to SADABA YEAR?  This is sounding like some sort of ship or installation that met an unfortunate end whilst conducting subspace research.  The postmortem appears to have revealed some fundamental properties of the universe that may shed some light on the behavior and motives of threats 1 and 2.  Does anyone have any idea what the SADABA YEAR was?  Is this a code name for a ship or installation we are already aware of?

[Colonol Dekker]

It could be,  the stand down leaving assets available could refer to a scientific venture? It could be a period or movement. I may just be focused on the YEAR part too much. But the blocks must hold significance. REDTEAM must be referred somewhere else and I'm hoping the more of these we crack the easier the cross references get.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Pretty sure SADABA YEAR is the 14th Battlegroup.

REDTEAM isn't a BP-specific term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_team