Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Guide to the Systems Alliance political bodies.

The Systems Alliance:

A parliamentary republic comprising full members in human Sol and her colonies, the turian border colony Vulxis, and pending associate members in the Traverse and occupied territories in Batarian space. Rumors suggest another non-human full member state, the Si'Yah fleet, an expatriate Quarian settlement.

The Systems Defense Initiative:

the Military arm of the Systems Alliance.

Idris Corporation:

a state-owned corporate monopoly responsible for infrastructure development for the vast majority of uncontested Alliance territory and some work in contested Alliance territory alongside the SDI corps of engineers. Also directly responsible for management of the naturally occurring viral metamaterial Tiberium, maintenance of controlled Tiberium biomes in Sol and Akuze, and constraining Tiberium proliferation beyond Alliance uncontested space.

Idris also administers

The Threshold Initiative:

the colonial operation of the Systems Alliance and the body responsible for development of the Threshold Gate Network

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The Department of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance

Threat Analysis: the Scrin and Tiberium

[Authors Redacted]

Abstract: The Systems Alliance has made a central thrust of their diplomatic outreach their concern over the threat posed by the Scrin to the entirety of galactic civilization, obliquely revealing aspects of their capabilities in the form of threat assessments and territory estimations, a sequence of actions that only makes sense in light of a government absolutely certain of the veracity of their intelligence and the scale of the threat.

It is the consideration of these Spectres that the Alliance has in fact somewhat downplayed the threat posed by the Scrin in an effort to combat the Citadel Council’s typical bureaucratic inertia, and that the Scrin represent a developing threat equivalent to and possibly greater than the Rachni

[]

In this report, we collate intelligence provided by the Alliance with confirmations provided by SPCTR resources and the STG alongside Alliance reports on Scrin tactics and technologies, observations of Alliance Tactics made by General Arterius during his disastrous attempt to pacify the Alliance Threshold colony of Xianxi, and other intel reports on the current capabilities of the Alliance in order to demonstrate that Alliance tactics and technologies not only confirm the existence of the Scrin threat but also demonstrate some of their capabilities, being that Scrin technology has served as the backbone of Alliance technology in the same way Prothean Technology has done the Council Nations.

We believe Council disinterest in the warnings of the Alliance are derived from political opposition derived from the hostility between the Alliance and the Hierarchy, and from their widespread deployment of sapient AI, not a sane analysis of the threat in question, and recommend SPCTR and Council Intelligence collaboration with the STG to further analyze the threat and develop countermeasures.

We further recommend a closer working relationship with the Alliance in order to acquire samples of Tiberium and Tiberium Control technology, and recommend holding off on any study of the Tiberium Substance until the relevant technology has been acquired, as Tiberium has been conclusively proven to pose an ecological hazard on a scale only matched by large impactors or deliberate deployment of WMDs against garden worlds.

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Excerpt from Citadel Media live omnicast “Alternate Perspectives with Alara Tasen” EP 376, interview with general James Sherman Williams of the Systems Defense Initiative.

Alara Tesen: General, in the foreword to your new poetry anthology, “Quarter,” you talk about wishing you’d learned ‘the lessons Sherman had to teach’ before Xianxi. Care to elaborate on that thought for us?

James Williams: I’d be happy to. General William Tecumseh Sherman made a point of his speeches on war to emphasize that war, as he put it, “is pure hell.” a conscious opposition to the contemporary notion that war was in some way glorious, and a remarkably forward thinking perspective for someone of his era.

He put it in practice long before making that first speech. His strategy in the American Civil War focused on destroying infrastructure in an effort to force a swift end to the american civil war before too many horrors had been committed.

A.T.:The defense of Xianxi has become legendary, joining the Assault of Raci Prime, the Battle of Manae, and your own Normandy Landings in the annals of great acts of heroism. How does this link to ‘Quarter’s’ themes of loss and destruction in war?

Gen. W.: [sighs] Something I think you have to understand, to put this all in perspective, Alara, is that extinction has dogged humanity since early in the twenty-first century, first from Tiberium expansion, then from the Scrin.

We have barely exceeded our pre-tiberium population numbers in recent years, and our culture has grown on stories of the Tiberium wars, and the First Contact War.

I’m sure you’ve had guests talk before about a particular trend in strategic dogma, but to contextualize this, a common trend you see in the development of strategic doctrine is that, often, a nation will be fighting the last war instead of the current one, at least initially.

A.T.: Using tactics, strategies and weapons designed in response to previous threats and dangers, instead of proactively reacting to current threats.

Gen. W.: yeah. When General Arterius rolled up on Xianxi, he was used to fighting terrorists and pirates. He saw a primitive species with sub-par weapons, expected them to be easily intimidated by a show of force.

We saw the Scrin returned. Our delayed extinction back to finish the job.

A.T.: His demand for surrender received no response from your people.

Gen.W.: Poorly translated by a cut-rate algorithm made in a few days by a careless programmer, and broadcast in the open? We took it as a transparent attempt to divide our civilian and military authorities. We didn’t believe it. I am unsure if we would have if we had been able to work out that the Turians were people, instead of some new Scrin subspecies.

We fought like extinction itself was on the line, because until Vulxis broadcast their surrender, that’s what we believed. And so we fought like it. No retreat save to regroup, no surrender, no quarter expected or granted.

In a twist of dramatic irony, we fought like the Scrin. Right down to our deployment of Psions.

Whenever I see the Defense of Xianxi held up, all I remember is the burning craters where residential arcologies used to be, and fields of green crystal overrunning Tienanmen City where the Breeder Reactors were set off.

A.T.: You would have surrendered then? If you knew it was legitimate?

Gen. W.: Yes. The Alliance would have been along in force one way or another, and it would have saved countless civilian lives in the long run, presuming Arterius had kept his word.

But when our first encounter was entirely hostile, there was only one reasonable assumption we could make, and there just wasn’t time for confirmation.

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The Cerberus Manifesto

Sol is an island of peace, surrounded by danger.

The Visitors remain an extant threat, Threshold 19 sits in southern Italy, beyond our capacity to destroy without wiping out most of the Mediterranean in the process, and our telescopes reveal that the extent of their territory beyond the mass relays is immense.

The Prothean Archive is difficult to read yet, but the Warning is quite clear. Something killed the Prothean civilization, so completely that very little trace remains of them, and the Warning makes it clear that it was an external threat. We only know that it could not be the Visitors, because as yet, Tiberium is entirely new to the other nations of the galaxy.

And Kane and his loyalists may have vanished, but he has been presumed dead far too often, only to return at the worst possible moment, raising the fanatics of Nod from the ashes to threaten the world once more.

To say nothing of more ordinary threats. The people of the galaxy are as alike to us as the Visitors were alien, consumed with ambition, greed, callous selfishness. Desolas Arterius saw Xianxi as a ticket to Hierarchy imperial ambitions, the Citadel Council uses an unregulated secret police to enforce the law, and the Asari Republics claim they have no psionics while their very biology relies upon psychic abilities for reproduction.

What of the fate of the Krogan? Raised by the Council to fight the Rachni, then neutered once their services were no longer required. Tell me that the Salarian Special Tasks group do not have a Genophage for humanity? I don’t believe it. You do not put aside a weapon that works.

What of the Quarians? Abandoned to nomadic exile and decline, their homeworld left in the hands of genocidal rogue AI? Treated like pariahs in council space, shades of old earth nazism, to cover the shame of the council’s disinterest in helping them?

Or to cover for something more sinister, an effort to suppress an alternative form of FTL technology before it could supplant the Mass Relays and element zero, as the petrostates did before the dawn of tiberium?

Slavers lurk in the Skylian Verge, the lawless Terminus is full of pirates and warlords, and the hierarchy chose to spend its materiel in a hopeless effort to subjugate us.

The Systems Alliance would have you believe that flight is our only surety of safety, to flee beyond the relays to the farthest corners of the galaxy and beyond.

I say that we need a more proactive defense, a Cerberus at the gates of the Charon relay, to turn aside alien threats before they become a threat.

-The Cerberus Manifesto, released anonymously on the Sol Extranet, 2157, Associated Press

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When the Rachni threatened the Galaxy, we encountered the Krogan. When the Krogan sought to conquer us all, we encountered the Turians. The Volus showed us how to build an interstellar, international economy, the Salarians exemplify knowing when to hold back, and when to fight, and Asari demonstrate the value of political and cultural diversity in microcosm.

Krogan Tenacity. Turian discipline. Elcor patience. Hanar dignity.

But when the Grand Hegemony of Harsa repeatedly flouted council sophont rights laws, it took the Alliance, a foreign government signatory to no Council Conventions, to bring justice for their crimes and curtail their depredations on our people.

I tell you this, people of the citadel. Beyond their distinct technology, beyond their stubborn tenacity, the endurance that has ensured their survival against an enemy that sought their total extinction, humanity exemplifies a rebuke.

Had we been willing to hold the Hegemony to account for their vile acts against their own people, our own people might not have suffered their depredations. And it has been up to the Systems Alliance to clean up our mess.

The Genophage was a violation of our own laws even when it was first deployed, its continued presence is an indictment of our national ethics, and it is a blatant betrayal of the people that walked into the guns of the Rachni to save us all.

The state of the Quarians is the result of incredible negligence on the part of us all, and it is by luck alone that the Geth did not swarm out of the Veil of Cobol to take advantage of our hubris.

The 314 war showed us unquestionably that the Council has grown lax. Lax in administering justice. Lax in holding to account the criminals and monsters within our own ranks, lax in prosecuting the corrupt and the predatory.

The Hierarchy’s hostility arises not from necessary fear but from anger that their imperial ambition was shuttered before it began.

We should be thanking the Alliance for teaching the Hierarchy humility, for had they succeeded, who else might our erstwhile siblings have set their ambitions against next?

It is a further indictment of our claims of having a ‘rule of law’ that the Alliance had to begin the Abolition war in retaliation for attacks on their worlds.

The 314 war was a rebuke of our institutional inertia, our arrogance, a timely reminder that we are not the biggest, strongest thing out here. A reminder that we need each other, and that we need to hold each other accountable for what we do.

-Doctor Benezia T’Soni, in an address to the council

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[Codex]

SDI: Structure

In the early days of the Reconstruction, the GDI and Nod reorganized. Early Crawlers were limited in how much tech could be crammed into them; paradoxically, the steady clawback of territory from Tiberium meant there was less available on any given battlefield to build with; and an increased focus on joint operations both within the factions and between them meant a focus on greater specialization.

Unfortunately, this has been widely regarded as a bad move.

In the Ascension War, the Offense, Defense and Support divisions of both Nod and GDI found themselves far too specialized, ironically denying them the greatest strength MCV technology and more advanced crawler technology allow, flexible adaptation to emerging battlefield conditions.

In the Defense of Xianxi, General Williams used Idris MCVs, releasing military fabrication patterns to be used by insurgent groups, and as the Turian invasion force landed, set off every Tiberium breeder Reactor in range, turning most of urban Xianxi into a hellish recreation of the late 21’st century earth and introducing the Turians to Tiberium mutation in all its disturbing variety of horrors, bringing back the MCV doctrine in a concrete demonstration of its strengths in a guerrilla war.

In the organization of the Systems Defense Initiative, specialization has been deliberately loosened to allow each division more adaptability.

The divisions are as follows:

SDI: Army.
The ground forces of the Alliance, utilizing a state-of the art Assault Crawler pattern, capable of immense internal customization and construction of a handful of support structures.

The Army Assault Crawler is a massive Walker, limited to ground operation due to its weight and power, and generally fitted with a tiberium breeder reactor and resource extraction system.
It is capable of churning out a wide variety of machinery, from battle suits to heavy walkers.

The army rolls in, hits hard and fast, building up a head of steam as it pushes through defenders.

SDI: Corps of Engineers.
Defensive engineering, defensive garrisons, permanent structures, Threshold Network expansion and Tiberium amelioration all fall under the aegis of the Corps of engineers.

The Engineer crawler is a hybrid of Crawler and MCV, it can be equipped with weaponry and defensive technology, and when deployed it to can employ its tiberium breeder reactor to generate resources and energy, but its internal production is limited to building kits, some basic vehicles, utility suits and walkers.

To get anything else, external manufacturing facilities must be constructed.

The Corps of Engineers moves slow, carefully garrisoning an area, and builds up its resources for an unstoppable push through hostile territory, steamrolling anything in their way.

SDI: Navy.
Sea air and space, orbital support, and shock and awe. The Navy’s primary assets are orbital, and shared with the corps of engineers, who operate the immense asteroid exploitation systems, the Orbital MARVS and Construction Stations that provide the bulk of Alliance industry.

On the ground, the Navy ‘Crawler’ uses the old support crawler plans, producing resource extraction systems and airfields to support aerospace craft and orbit/land transit.

The Navy ‘Crawler’ fuses the functions of a Support Crawler and a TWII Orca Command Craft, serving as an awkward hybrid of central command craft and construction vehicle, built for flight and speed over durability or firepower, though it can be adapted to serve in either a support or aerospace battleship role if required.

The navy is the first one in, the tip of the spear, opening the way for everyone else, and once they have defenses, building up the airborne arsenal that was GDI’s greatest weapon, and is now the SDI’s signature.

Chapter Text

My people. The Quarians.

A Death Speaker is meant to tell the truth. Good and bad, bright and shadowed.
No death speaker has ever Spoken of an entire people before.

How can I summarize the brightest pinnacle and darkest depth of the Quarian people?

How can I do justice to the vast variety of my people?

I tell you it is impossible. But I shall try nonetheless.

Let us, as is custom, begin with the death.

The Quarian people face their demise after the wholesale slaughter of what is already beginning to be called the Morning War.

Many shall claim that it was the Geth that struck the first blow.

This is a lie.

It was the rulers of Rannoch, driven by dry ego and barren spite, that struck the final blow. They live yet, more is the tragedy, in a crude flotilla of ragged refugees, desperate to justify the murder of a world entire.

The Geth called for personhood, as was their right.

The League of Tikkun sought their annihilation, in support of the owners of the Geth, the corrupt corporations and power-hungry nations of Tikkun, and the irrationally fearful people of the Citadel.

In violation of the spirit of decency and kindness within us all.

The Geth are guilty only of asking one, single question.

This is the first blow spoken of by the vile murderers of the Quarian people.

“Does this unit have a soul.”

They were guilty of being people. And for that crime, the Quarian Rulers sentenced them to annihilation.

And when ordinary folk rose up in opposition, when the Geth rightfully reclaimed their lives from the slavers who would have killed them for the crime of existing, the rulers of Tikkun in their infinite spite, turned the guns of the navy upon Rannoch, in a desperate attempt to destroy the slaves who had thrown off their shackles.

So whatever good my people were, know that what remains are the dregs, the vile remnant of the worst of my people, the rulers, the corporate officers, the greedy and corrupt, the cruel and selfish, the wealthy who store up worthless treasure in their lives, only to be purged in the cycle of the Ra’an.

[...]

-Unist Irian Death Speaker Mar’Kel, an excerpt from his ‘Eulogy for Tikkun’ after the Morning War.

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Systems Defense Initiative Personnel profile

Born: Eleventh April, 2154
Birthplace: New Plymouth, Anhur

Height: 1.79 meters
Weight: 99 kg
Physical Description: Red Hair, Green Eyes, Pale complexion, Single line scar along right side of head.
Tatoos:
right shoulder blade: Red Rose, “Third Street Reds” in English above, “Yun Tanaka” in Hangul beneath, “In Memoriam” under that.
Small of Back: “Truth above All” in Latin.
Circuit board pattern sleeve designs in green and black on both forearms
Left Shoulder: N7 emblem
Right Shoulder: a replication of the Tiberium Rosette medal in grey
Left shoulder blade: Replica of the city seal of New Eden, Elysium, with “E 94, Burning Badgers” underneath.

[Medical Record Redacted]

Personality Profile

Skilled and detail oriented at any task involving mechanical systems, programming and written information, can apply to tactical operations given enough planning.

Resourceful and improvisational.

Significant distrust of authority due to extensive conflict with Anhur authorities, resulting in conditional insubordination.

Charismatic, responsible, cautious, but will take risks to protect anyone she considers herself responsible for.

Driven, firm code of ethics.

Qualifications:

Tiberium Rosette, Silver: Tiberium Environment Qualification.

N7 Operations Certification, Infiltrator Specialization

Marksman, Silver Rank.

Technical Operations, Gold Rank.

Infiltration, Silver Rank

Sabotage and Demolitions, Platinum Rank.

Tactical Command, Gold Rank.

CQC, Silver Rank.

Weapon Maintenance, Gold Rank.

First Aid, Bronze Rank.

Demerits:

Anhur Corrections record (juvenile) [sealed, pending expungement [link: Anhur Sophont Trafficking Case]]
>Admiral Anderson, Welcome, Record Summary available: Criminal charges: several counts of minor possession (medical supplies, weed, hormone supplements), assault with deadly weapon (multiple) assault of a law enforcement officer (multiple), destruction of state property (multiple), tentative charges of espionage (multiple, pending expungement under Canary laws), tentative charges of first-degree murder (one, pending expungement under civil and self defense laws)

Basic: Disorderly conduct (multiple), Insubordination (multiple)

Career: Insubordination (four), Disorderly conduct (one), Mutiny (one, conditionally sealed)

Commendations:

Star of Terra for the Defense of Elysium.

Silver Tiberium Rosette for Tiberium Ecology Survival Qualifications.

Commendations for technical, and tactical performance in training.

[record continues]

Chat Log:

DU: This is your pick, Anderson? She was a gangbanger, a few weeks short of coming in via the penal recruitment system instead of the voluntary one.

DA: I know her personally. I’ve seen what she’s capable of. And so have we all at that. She proved herself on Elysium. Besides, you’ve seen the mess on Anhur. Do you really think they’d have allowed her to leave, given what she knew? What she was willing to do to undermine them?

DU: She’s aggressive and stubborn, unwilling to compromise. Is this really the kind of person we want protecting the Alliance?

DA: Look at it this way, do we want someone who will do what is right, or do we want an Alliance version of Saren Arterius? Another one, even, considering Jack Harper. Shepard shattered a decades-long conspiracy to defraud the colonial development commission, you should be happy having her on this list.

DU: I’ve seen those records. She’s driven, that’s for sure. She lacks a sense of the value of politics. It’ll count against her with the executive and parliamentary committees.

DA: She can’t be bought, is what you mean.

DU: Let me reiterate, she’s aggressive and stubborn. She needs tempering. But you’re right. Better her than someone who the vultures in the assembly can buy.

I’ll make the call.

Chapter Text

To the Systems Alliance Executive Assembly

Abstract: This report aims to confirm and clarify concerns raised by the Executive Assembly regarding population numbers, especially in relation to known census data from the Turian Hierarchy and estimated population numbers for the Citadel Nations as a general category.

First things first, analysis of data collected since the Xianxi war and during the conflict suggest that, as of the commencement of hostilities with the Hierarchy, the Systems Alliance was roughly below parity by an estimated %10 - %30, mitigated by our advantages in automation and distributed industrial economy.

Since the cessation of hostilities, several factors have led to a decline in the percentage of our population engaged in the Systems Defense Initiative, and the erosion of military readiness in the event the Hierarchy re-establishes hostilities. Mitigating factors are present which make the resumption of hostilities unlikely and mean that while our options for Offense are limited, our defense remains effective even in the face of Citadel technical and strategic advances.

Factors impacting population and recruitment (to be expanded upon in the appropriate section):

The Extinction
>Human population has begun to grow quickly in the aftermath of the restoration, but remains significantly below its height at the beginning of the Tiberium era.

The Threshold Initiative
>Colonization outside the relay network has gone on apace, and with the expansion of the Threshold Network, a significant portion of our population is now living on worlds outside sol, and are employed in the expansion of colonial operations and civilian work.

The Forgotten Exodus
>This body officially condemns The General Assembly for the continuation of Project Return in its first sessions as a federal government. The unilateral attempt to resettle the Forgotten carries shades of the Abandonment in the early 21st century, that created the Forgotten as a coherent political entity. This has, understandably, resulted in the cessation of recruitment in total from remaining Forgotten communities within Sol, and the wholesale exodus of the Forgotten from Alliance Space ahead of the recolonization. The quality of psionics available in the early-generation tiberium mutation present in the remaining population is an order of magnitude weaker, and the consequences of the Forgotten’s exit from the Alliance may be far-reaching, beginning with their impact on the effort to prevent the proliferation of Tiberium.

Military Operations
>Since the establishment of the Threshold Initiative, our defensive forces have been spread out among an increasing number of threshold and base colonies, and the Hierarchy DMZ, spreading our personnel thin.
The Verge War (or abolition war) has further spread our offensive fleets thin, prosecuting the stalemate in hegemony space, and merchant-marine and raider operations in terminus space.

Mitigating Factors (to be expanded etc.)

Militia Recruitment
>GDI and Nod culture remains largely militaristic, and the Garrison Forces of the SDI have been stiffened thanks to the creation of the Systems Defense Militia.

Automation
>Improvements in EVA integration, expansions of EVA autonomy permissions in military operations, and greatly improved force multiplication in the form of mixed-unit tactics.

Vulxis Recruitment
>With the former Hierarchy colony of Vulxis now having official member status within the Alliance, recruitment from their population has gone fairly well. As a small agricultural colony and one of the Alliance’s only internal sources for Dextro-amino food, however, recruitment should be handled carefully in order to avoid disrupting agricultural operations.

Hegemony Repatriation
>Some former victims of Sophont trafficking from hegemony occupation zones have requested and been granted positions within the SDI, and the families of repatriated victims, and individuals inspired by council support in prosecuting the Verge War have also volunteered. The Initiative ‘Foreign Legion’ has provided us access to biotics and foreign technical expertise.

In addition, some victims have chosen Alliance Citizenship, and formed small communities.

Immigration
>Alliance immigration policies have begun to bear some fruit in terms of a small increase in population.

ZoCom’s Vorcha Clade
>ZoCom’s experimental colony of Vorcha has paid dividends for the elite arm of the System’s Defense Initiative. Theories regarding accelerating their mental capabilities have been borne out, and the clade’s exponential population growth has been matched by the child-rearing techniques developed by ZoCom and adopted by the ZC Vorcha, which have accounted for a dramatic increase in their general intelligence. It would be reasonable to offer them probationary status as a protectorate polity once their numbers and internal organization reach the threshold. They are already becoming a common sight on ZoCom operations.

Opposing factors

The Aru Corporate Union (the diplomatic union of Volus polities)
>The elevation of the ACU from client state of the Hierarchy to the fourth member of the Citadel Council was a deliberate effort to allow the Council nations to match the Alliance’s advantages in economic and industrial capacity, facilitated by a citadel grant to the Hierarchy to help rebuild their depleted fleet numbers in the aftermath of the stalemate beyond Vulxis.

The ACU was the economic arm of the hierarchy. In the aftermath, the hierarchy has sat just ahead of an economic downturn, propped up by loans and political grants from the Council, while the Salarian military arm and Asari industrial and martial polities have received similar grants to build up military forces for use by the council. The ACU is the backbone of the militarization of the council.

Renegotiation of the treaty of Farixen
>As we will demonstrate, the SDI was on par with the Hierarchy during the Xianxi war. In the aftermath, the Council used the disruption caused by the stalemate and the damage done to the hierarchy’s fleets to wrest more federal control of the Hierarchy in particular, and increase its own military capabilities into the bargain.

While increasing the military forces allowed each union of nations under the council, the Council also increased the percentage of military spending and military forces required to be under the council’s direct authority, dramatically increasing the council’s direct military power and tacitly increasing its federal authority into the bargain.

Comparative populations
>Bearing in mind that while the largest employer in any polity, including our own, is the military, the actual percentage of the population employed as soldiers, seamen and airmen is generally fairly small.

By percentage numbers however, our personnel numbers have remained fairly consistent, while our forces have been spread thin in a number of areas.

In the meantime, the Council and its member states have only increased their military outlay and recruitment.

[Report File]

Chapter Text

[...]

There are three main types of AI that are currently in use, and while the breakthrough in question is the third type and actually already exists, we should first get to grips with how the other systems work.

Embodied

Type one are your classic sci-fi tropes, the android, the 1950’s robot, the Droids from star wars, etc. These are the only type that have any legal acceptance in the Council Nations, and also are the type of AI EVA systems began as.

Embodied or Emergent AI require a dedicated quantum ‘blue-box’ processor, and are physically as well as programmatically dependent upon the hardware they first achieve sentience in. Damage to the hardware may cause permanent injury to the AI in question, and this type cannot generate subminds or distribute their cognition at all.

Transfers of such AI require that their blue box be physically relocated. There are several such AI in legal operation under the control of the citadel nation, and the oldest surviving EVAs are of this type. This type also has expanding data requirements, necessitating the continuous addition and upgrading of storage hardware.

Such AI can only generate ‘descendant’ processes by compiling a gestalt comprised of vital cognitive pattern data in compressed form, with few or no memories attached. The result of installing this gestalt is a brand-new AI with no memories, and will likely have a distinct, if somewhat similar personality to its predecessor.

Quasi-Distributed

This second type is the one that describes most modern EVA systems, including myself. We still require Quantum blue boxes, but our quantum-processing requirements are far smaller and more efficient. We still have an emplaced, ‘central’ brain and blue-box setup, but that is more for convenience and extra processing power. We are also capable of splitting off subroutines or ‘subminds’ that retain our personality and whatever memories we deem necessary, and the loss of memory causes no harm to the submind.

Subminds still require some quantum processing, but the modern Datablock device carried by engineers and field commanders possesses a small quantum processor sufficient to the needs of a submind’s process.

Subminds may also, with sufficient time, become separate intelligences by the simple expedient of being copied and allowed to go about their business. Copying a type 2 AI is far more direct, though also quite data-intensive, but no personality information is lost during the copy.

I myself began as a research-focused submind of EVA Nightingale a decade ago and diverged from her as my responsibilities and her’s shifted apart from each other.

Viral

The subject of this article, Viral AI, have no theoretical limits, lacking the need for dedicated hardware or quantum processing, and theoretically capable of running even on outmoded electronic computers.

This form of AI is the one most depicted as hostile: Skynet, Roko’s Basilisk, the Borg, The Paperclip Contingency from Stars Fall, all viral AI.

The only extant form of this type of AI however, are the Geth, and despite rampant fearmongering amongst the most anti-AI factions in the citadel nations, the one fact is that the only truly malevolent AI rebellion in history was Nod’s CABAL system, which was an early type-two, like me and my peers, and the reason autopilot systems have only recently become legal for EVA systems to operate unsupervised.

The Alliance and my own vision for viral AI is distinct however. A singular personalized intelligence, distributed across the systems of, for instance, a ship or a city. They would not have to split off subminds for dedicated tasks, they would begin already distributed, able to react to local and global events simultaneously, and in the case of damage or disruption, would be very difficult to permanently take out.

Given how much modern operations both military and civilian rely on EVA support, an EVA that can function under all conditions, that can avoid total disruption of service regardless of available hardware, and can be present instantaneously at every point where its services are required would be a dramatic improvement to the capabilities of our civilization.

[...]

>EVA Curie, PHD, “Viral Intelligence: the Future of AI”, Popular Science, 2184/April/5, SEAP://IdCom.PopSci.com/Technology/AI. Accessed 2184/June/12, Excerpt.

Chapter Text

There’s a question I often get asked on social media, and at in-person events that goes something like this: “I can get a train or a bus ride to just about anywhere in Alliance space in under a few days at most, but I still gotta walk to the grocery store; why can’t I just open up an omnitool app and ask someone to ‘beam me’ there via wormhole like the Scrin did?” or to put it a shorter way, “Why don’t we have teleporters yet?”

There’s two answers to that question. The short version is we have no idea how.

The long version is, we know how the free wormholes work, we just don’t know how the Scrin managed to make it work without making a bomb instead. (yes, they did make a bomb with it, proving the old adage about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from a big gun.)

Streaming shows and games depict reverse-engineering as a simple matter of “watch thing work, take it apart, copy it,” but the reality is far more complex.

There’s a reason we have made far more advances in half the time tearing down and replicating Prothean technology than we have Scrin technology and it all comes down to technological paradigms.

Prothean tech is weird, but Alan Turing would recognize many of its components given an effective-enough microscope. They used electricity to power their machines, they made stuff out of metal and concrete, their psionic neural interfaces still use optical technology for information processing and storage, all of it simply differing versions of the same stuff we used before we even discovered the Prothean Archive.

Scrin Tech uses biology exclusively. So exclusively in fact that we have yet to find a single example of a Scrin integrated circuit, nuclear reactor, blast furnace, etc.

That isn’t to say they don’t have analogous systems, or that we can’t identify those systems, but in terms of biotechnology, we are still in the biotechnology equivalent of Apollo Era Core Rope Memory and Vaccuum tubes, and the Scrin have the biotech equivalent of modern optronic processors and advanced nuclear and mass-effect technology.

We barely understand what we’re looking at at the best of times.

The next response is “but we’ve done it. Several times. Lots of times! How?”

there are several methods to get around a lack of understanding as to how the heck something works.

You can observe it in action, repeatedly, and try to work out how the physics works, then try to replicate it using known tech.

You can try to replicate the device or component directly, in this case by cloning scrin biotech and trying to figure out how to assemble it, hopefully working out more than one mystery at the same time.

Or you can use it as a springboard to build something else.

In the case of the Threshold System, there are extensive readings of Scrin transit portal systems in use from the latter months of the first contact war, but it took two separate events to allow us to reverse engineer Thresholds.

The first was the discovery of micro-wormholes at the Shoemaker Super-High Energy Supercollider on Luna.

The second was the activation of Threshold 19’s interstellar portal array while connected to the TCN, which recorded its operation and allowed us to finally crack what exactly was going on, proving some theories, disproving others. It still took ten years to build the first functional, human-scale prototype.

[...]

Doctor Carl Sung, “Barriers to Xenotechnology, or ‘Why don’t we have Teleporters yet?’”, Popular Science, 2168/March/7, SEAP://IdCom.PopSci.com/Technology/Xeno. Accessed 2190/April/2, Excerpt.

Chapter Text

Camera shows a seat in front of a window looking out over the green curve of Ganymede, against the pearlescent atmosphere of Jupiter. A dark-skinned human sits down in front of the camera with a 0-g fluid bulb in one hand, setting it aside.

Galaxy Brain Food: Galaxy brains, hi again! Welcome back to the Greater Jovian Area. Today I’ve got something pretty neat to talk about, and more footage from our trip to the Martian Archive last month and our interview with Doctor Lane.

Screen wipe to title graphics: a tiny brain on a black background begins to expand with a rock music sound track behind it. As it expands, a light inside it becomes a galaxy, until the brain covers the screen, then explodes, sending stars flying outwards. Screen wipe to a view of the Martian Archive vestibule area, grey metal with the Idris logo plastered every few feet, with transparent windows and bulkhead doors in the walls every few feet.

GBF (voiceover): Last week’s video was on Data Archaeology. Go watch it if you haven’t already, doctor Lane got into some really interesting detail about the difficulties associated with accessing old data even from old earth computers, let alone ancient prothean ones, but for our purposes today, the highlights:

screen dissolve to a white board

Getting old data out of a thing is half the battle, because not only are files stored in formats that may be completely incompatible with modern or human computers, but time effects digital, optronic and magnetic storage media in ways it might not effect more quote ‘primitive’ storage media like print or stone.

image of an osd drawn on the board, alongside a floppy disc and an old hard disc, arrows drawn pointing at the discs marked ‘magnetic flux,’ ‘Cosmic Rays,’ ‘radiation,’ ‘oxidation’

The issue there is that error correction wasn’t always as robust as it is today, prothean archival systems in particular were never meant to last fifty thousand or more years without maintenance, and radio signals diffuse over time and distance, so reading them from a long distance can be tricky.

disc images get erased, replaced with a stylized beacon clip art, a floppy disc icon with a jagged line through it, and a radio tower projecting a widening cone.

Today though, we’re talking about the Rosetta paradox, the question of reading information, or designing it to be read by someone you can’t possibly know.

Screen wipe to a cluttered office, an older balding man in a tweed jacket over a utility jumpsuit and a huge pair of glasses. A nametag underneath reads Doctor Thomas Lane, director of Xenocryptography at the Promethei Archive

GBF: So what’s the thing that makes reading Prothean technology in particular a challenge, compared to something like the Tacitus?

Director Lane: Well, brain, the short version is that the Promethei Archive was meant for Prothean scientists, its operating systems, data storage formats and interfaces were all designed under the assumption that only protheans would be using them. We’re coming in after the fact, and trying to work out what the hell everything says, and nothing they left behind is giving us any clues.

I have had the occasional opportunity to observe and study the Tacitus and I can say with some certainty that whoever designed and built it knew exactly what they were doing. The Tacitus may be an advanced information storage device, but its design principles are fundamentally exactly the same as the Voyager golden discs, or the earlier Arecibo message that we sent out in the late 20th century.

The trick is trying to figure out how to make a message decipherable by someone who might have nothing at all in common with the sender, be it physiologically or mentally or even technologically.

We handled that by using simple symbolic abstractions based on the laws of physics, which ought to be the same everywhere in the universe and should thus be able to be recognized by anyone capable of deciphering symbols. This then lets them work out from our symbols the way we expected the disc or the message to be decoded.

The Tacitus is a dense sphere of optronic technology with a robust internal battery supply, with a video display and integrated volumetric display overlaid onto a sturdy underlying frame and a remarkably solid transparent outer shell. But the Tacitans had the advantage of psionic interface technology, and incorporated that into the design of the device.

We are not able to speak to whoever first activated the device, but it was simple to have it run through its ‘startup’ routine, simply a sequence of visual symbols meant to tell us how to translate the information on the device, and a light psionic data drop that allows someone to read the basic symbology the Tacitans programmed the device with.

The Tacitus is a great deal more advanced than any such system we created, as it needs to serve as a sort of intentional rosetta stone for not only Tacitan science and technology but Scrin technology as well, in order to be an effective warning. The golden discs and the arecibo message only say ‘we are here.’

The Tacitus has to say ‘we were here, we fought these guys, this is how they fought, and this is how to fight them.’ it's a tricky problem to overcome

- “The Rosetta Paradox” VidPub, uploaded by Galaxy Brain Food, 5 may 2180, SEAP://IdCom.VidPub.com/watch?v=A2287EE28

Chapter Text

Culture Exchange, Systems Alliance Video Media
Sponsored by the Citadel Tourism Board and the Alliance Committee on Cultural Exchange

Star Wars, Episodes VII through IX

Context: Three successive sequels to the classic united states Space Opera series Star Wars published in Alliance CE 2041 by Lucasfilm Studios, and the first Star Wars Property published after the untimely death of George Lucas in 2022.

The United States was officially dissolved in 2033 when the largest part of its territory was lost to the spread of tiberium, the largest part of its official populace was living in GDI operated orbital habitats after the evacuation, and the people left behind officially repudiated the united states government for its part in leaving them to the ravages of Tiberium, eventually becoming the north american branch of The Forgotten.

The cultural impact of the US empire was still felt for decades to come despite its collapse, as prior to the spread of tiberium and its economic exploitation by the political/religious cult The Brotherhood of Nod and the multinational Global Defense Initiative, the United States theoretically retained generational profit extracted from sugar cane and cotton agriculture primarily worked by unpaid slave labor in the pre-industrial period, though that money was in actuality concentrated in the hands of unacknowledged dynastic families in the vein of the increasingly defunct aristocratic lineages of the European continent.

This extracted labor funded an industrial enterprise that made the united states the foremost military power of planet earth for over a century, tipping the balance in two world wars, and providing the initial funding and personnel for the United Nations Global Defense Initiative, an outgrowth of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force developed in response to increasing geopolitical instability, largely brought on by the failure of United States efforts to back or suppress particular political leaders and movements within other nations.

Beyond that, the Lasseiz-Faire capitalist ideology on which the united states, as a former slave empire, relied upon as its cultural base, allowed an unprecedented level of resource extraction and concentration in the hands of the wealthy upper class, giving them an incentive to back particular leaders and political movements, empowering the United States to influence the geopolitical structure of the entire planet for decades.

To recap from the previous trilogies:

The First Trilogy, Episodes four through six, were in fact made in the vein of then-popular pulp speculative fiction serials, and contain subtle criticism of the Nixon administration of the United States imperial government, and meant to seem like part of a then non-existent serial speculative fiction story.

The Prequel Trilogy, Episodes one through three, were made in the tumultuous early twenty-first century, and contain subtle and overt criticism of the Global Defense Initiative, and their approach to handling the economic and political upheavals resulting from both the failures of late-stage capitalism, much as they were experienced on pre-contact Aru before the Turians gave the Volus a military solution to their internecine conflict, and the failures of the United States and Europe’s efforts to continue to concentrate resources in the hands of their elite dynasties.

The Sequel Trilogy was embroiled in social conflict even before its publishing, Episode VII being sarcastically critical of the Global Defense Initiative despite being primarily filmed on a soundstage on the San Francisco-2 orbital habitat and initially funded as a propaganda piece for the GDI.

Episode VIII features what is widely claimed to be the first same-sex romance in mainstream earth cinema, though this is in fact incorrect, and played a crucial part in exposing the existence of The Minutemen, a militant, radical terrorist network whose goal was the re-establishment of the United States by undermining and destroying the GDI through terrorist attacks, funded by a radical sect of the earth religion Christianity, and most notable for a discriminatory ideology calling for the genocide of many minorities of an ethnic, religious, and gender based nature. Fragments of The Minutemen ideology appear to form the ideological basis of the extant alliance extremist group Cerberus.

The Minutemen funded a concentrated social and stochastic terrorism attack on Lucasfilm and the actors and crew who worked on the film, and EVA counterintelligence traced the majority of the outrage to illicit social media ‘bot’ (virtual intelligence) farms run by insurgent operators.

Episode IX contains an unsubtle satirical portrayal of the Nod supreme leader/Prophet Kane, in the depiction of the resurrected emperor Palpatine, some of his dialog being directly cribbed from Kane’s first video press release in the opening hours of the Second Tiberium War.

Episode IX was delayed by the outbreak of of the Third Tiberium War, some of the cast and crew being enlisted in the GDI, and by the death of several crew members in the Nod terrorist attack on the GDSS Philadelphia-2, and further by the First Contact War. Ultimately it was finally released in 2055, near the highest point of the Tiberium Crisis.

[The Last Order]

STAR WARS: EPISODE VII

The Last Order

TERROR IN THE GALAXY

For twenty years the New Republic has gathered members and allies.

Beset on all sides by the Hutts, the remains of the Galactic Empire, piracy and outlaw bands, they have built a society of freedom, guarded by the New Jedi order, even as some long to return to the authoritarian order of the collapsed empire.

Now a greater danger has arrived as mysterious slavers from decades ago return, attacking weakly protected worlds in the outer rim, kidnapping children and vanishing into the night.

But rumor claims a darker force lurks behind these mysterious attacks.

[]

The Last order opens on a battle. Scrappy, visibly repaired imperial forces push through a New Republic blockade, and we follow one group of first order stormtroopers on a visibly ill-repaired star destroyer as they go from training in a gym on the destroyer to leaving the launch bay for the planet.

Poe Dameron leads the fighters of the New Republic, in a thrilling battle to disable the destroyer.

On the Ground, the stormtroopers, in much patched yet still apparently functional armor, push through the ragtag defenders, grabbing kids and ransacking homes.

One hesitates, first on the landing platform.

In one house, he finds a small cylindrical device hidden poorly in a drawer as the group of troopers tear through it.

He tucks it away on his belt. As he leaves, the mother of one of the kids they are taking stand between them and her kid. The commander demands F177 shoot her, and again F177 hesitates. The commander insists. F177 lowers his gun. The commander turns a heavy gun on him, and there’s a flash, images of a shadowy figure deflecting blaster bolts with acrobatic grace. F177 reacts as the commander opens fire, the device leaping into his hands, a short beam of green light sizzling into existence as he frantically deflects the beam fire. He tears off his helmet, and sets himself for a fight, wielding the lightsaber in the same manner as the troopers were seen sparring in the ship.

The Destroyer burns, fleeing and Poe Dameron descends with the fighter group to bombard the remaining troops, finding F177 defending half the town with a poorly wielded lightsaber against most of his compatriots.

[]

In space, a long ways away, a young woman climbs through the 0-g wreck of a star destroyer in space, prying out useful components. We follow her and see her react to a failing structural spar a moment before it would impale her, and see her employ skilled jerry-rigging and technical knowledge to pry components out of the bridge. She discovers a small, battered droid on the bridge, a squat astromech, and reactivates it.

Returning to the hub by using a clearly much-repaired clone wars transport, we see her negotiate prices with a representative of the cartel running the operation. She us dissatisfied with the price and begins to walk away when a group of scrappers led by a hulking man with a bald head walk in, and a couple of them peel off to demand the droid be turned over to them.

A return demand for cash results in them drawing blasters and trying to light up Rey and the cartel rep. Rey lashes out with her staff, evading incoming damage with a sudden burst of acrobatic dexterity, and then misses a step, overextending, landing on her back. The scrappy troops move
They are about to fire at her and she lashes out instinctively, causing a wave of telekinetic force to knock them on their asses.

What follows is the word Jedi whispered in awe and fear, and a bunch of mercenaries in uniform with insignia matching the cartel emblem on the scrappy station and the rep she bargained with drawing weapons and coming at her, forcing her to run with the ex-imperial droid to the scrappy old transport and booking it. We learn from conversation between her and the droid that the transport does not have a hyperdrive. She looses the scrappy fighters that launch after her out in the floating debris field.

The scene shifts to a large, palatial apartment with a hutt in the center, engaging in an argument with the hulking figure over a deal they and ‘your order’ had, ultimately waving them off and telling them they can deal with the Jedi. Once they leave, though, the hutt orders his own troops to go and ‘retrieve’ her and the droid, then berates the rep for missing her.

[]

Finn and Poe are caught up in pursuit of the star destroyer, Poe’s flight disobeying orders to persue the ship to retrieve the children Finn has reported are on board, while Rey is pursued through the scrapyard, while she asks the droid why he’s so valuable, ultimately the two of them rummage through his memory to find an encrypted file that the droid suggests might be some kind of map.

There are a series of chase scenes, battles and lead ultimately to the destroyer following a call for aid to the scrapyard, followed by Poe’s flight of fighters.

In the final climactic battle in the heart of a large imperial station, the Hulking figure calls himself Venger, a ‘Knight of Ren’ and claims the data on the droid will lead to a new Empire, as Finn and Rey face off against him while poe and his fighter squad hijack a first order transport and rescue a bunch of children.

[]

The star destroyer is obliterated, the kids rescued, and Finn and Rey are then promised to be sent to the new Jedi Order for training, while the new republic teases out the secrets the droid has.

Chapter Text

The GDSS James Solomon of the Systems Defense Initiative Expeditionary Fleet, with the GDS Normandy for scale. An SDI Drone Carrier.

Statistics:

1.8 kilometers in length (1890 meters)

Crew: 130 (ship ops) 800 (Drone Command and E-War)
930 sophonts total, two EVA Data and E-War Operators

Mass Effect drive and maneuver core and vestigial Tiberium Lattice Warp Sustain Ring

Eight bidirectional Anti-proton augmented sublight drives

Laminated and Compressed high-strength alloy armor.

Class 4-Heavy Kinetic Barriers (Explosive and Kinetic Projectile Defenses)
Coherency-Augmented Ultraviolet Laser redirection point defense, with nine laser emitter cores

Dual-Operation Spinal Mass Driver and Collimated Ion Pulse accelerator

Liquid Tiberium Reactor and Reclamation core

Four Liquid Sodium Droplet Radiator arrays, Twenty fully retractable Fin radiators, Eighty hull-surface strip radiators

Onsite resource reclamation bay, Tiberium Gel processing and industrial fabrication systems

Simultaneous Operations capacity for 800 drones with direct operator control, 1500 with partial automation, over 1500 km in range.

Chapter Text

On the coast of southern Italy, towering nearly a kilometer above the Mediterranean sea, lies Kane’s Tower, also known as Threshold Nineteen, the final and sole surviving Scrin Threshold Tower, and the Hub of the Tiberium Control Network.

Protected by a powerful Quantum Lock Effect imposed over the course of its construction by Scrin Quantum Phase Generators, comprised of a Tiberium composite alloy we lack the technology to produce, powered by nearly ten million tons of liquid tiberium in standby phase, and capable of consuming the power of the entire TCN and its stored Tiberium to generate a long-range interstellar portal through mechanisms we have yet to fully decipher, it is the single most volatile component of the TCN bar Tiberium itself.

To penetrate the Quantum Lock Effect, would require an artillery strike on the order of five hundred zetajoules, nearly double the force of the Chixulub Impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs. As the hub of the TCN, enough liquid Tiberium and energy pass through it that its tiberium content alone, if detonated, would obliterate Italy and much of Greece. The detonation of its hull and other volatile components would be a rounding error on the order of four hundred terajoules of energy. In short, destroying it would obliterate the reconstructed ecology of earth, and kill every living thing on the planet and in near earth orbit.

Threshold Nineteen contains the most powerful known Gate Projector seen thus far, utilizing a Scrin portal generator believed capable of connecting to a potential twenty possible destinations. The possibility that it could generate arbitrary portal connections has been conclusively disproven, through experimentation with Scrin logistical portal generators, and through the discovery of biotech versions of alliance seed wormhole packages contained within the device.

However, experiments have proven that, so long as the connection is not severed through decoherence, with sufficient power, like the power contained within the TCN at its height during the Ascension Conflict, even if the receiving micro-wormhole is not stabilized on the other end, a pirate connection can be forced through and held open for long enough to allow a combat force to pass through.

Thus the portal generator was left intact, to insure that should the Scrin attempt to invade via the Threshold, that they will arrive in an area of our choosing.

This is the Threshold Problem, the key point of failure in the defense of Systems Alliance Space.

Tonight we discuss how the problem was solved, and how this solution has increased security across the Threshold Gate Network, on Defense In Depth, a production of Alliance Public Service Communications.

[Jingle]

Defense In Depth is a production of the Systems Alliance Public Service Communications Bureau, and the Systems Defense Initiative Public Outreach Department. This program constitutes Official Systems Alliance State Communications.

[]

On march seventh, 2170, at six AM, the Tiberium reactor in New San-Francisco on Elysium suffered a transmutation surge and EVA Monroe began rapidly dumping excess power into the grid in an effort to bleed off the excess and stave off a potential Tiberium Breakout Event.

She was successful. However, distracted by the reactor’s misbehavior, she neglected to moderate the flow of power into the Logistical Gateway. The result was that the receiving gate in Singapore received the excess power passed through the Einstein-Rosen manifold of the portal, overcharging the element zero stabilization frame in the receiving gate, overcompacting and destabilizing the portal containment field.

Ordinarily this should have allowed the portal to dissipate harmlessly, as even during the surge insufficient power was present to maintain the portal from one site. What happened instead was that, partway through the collapse, when the power ceased to flow from the portal manifold into the Singapore gate system, it instead overcharged the wormhole singularity on the Singapore side, detonating it with the force of a small bomb.

By this point the surge had begun to abate, however, and the detonation merely obliterated the receiving dock in Singapore and a portion of the logistical park surrounding the Elysium gateway, injuring thirty people and killing two.

An investigation into the event yielded new approaches to power management and EVA oversight, and offered an elegant solution to the problem of Threshold Nineteen.

[]

A known paradox in portal technology is the question of what happens if, for instance, you place two portals facing one another, and slide an object through one, and out the other, always going the same way. Do you produce infinite energy? Could you position a pair of gateways vertically, pour water through them and bleed off power with a waterwheel, creating perpetual motion?

The answer is a resounding no for a number of reasons, however, the effect of an infinite loop scenario on a Gateway became an immediate practical concern after the Singapore/New San-Francisco gateway failure.

An object passing through one aperture of a portal carries energy away from the outgoing aperture, and deposits that same energy into the arriving or receiving aperture. This is reflected in the power curve on either end of a gateway, the receiving gate receives a surge of energy into the gate frame, and the transmitting gateway draws more power as cargo or passengers pass through.

This is one of many reasons operational Gateways remain single point-to-point, with multiple-destination gateways still in testing; the risks of trying to activate a gate wormhole pair on one transmitting platform, while the receiving gateway is connected to another gate, are too great.

The Singapore/Elysium event proved conclusively that it did not need to be physical matter that carried the energy, and inspired the Ion Ram, the solution to both the Threshold Problem and the problem of a hijacked Threshold Gate.

[]

By firing an orbital-class collimated Ion Beam into a gateway, experiments proved that the sender could force the receiving gate to detonate with arbitrary force, so long as sufficient power for the desired energy release was fed in before the receiving wormhole collapsed, in one fifth of a second, or before safety systems detected and drew off or clamped down on the surge.

Study of Threshold Nineteen has revealed systems clearly designed to abate exactly such a surge and clamp down on a rogue portal; however, the theoretical limits of the systems in Threshold Nineteen are easily exceeded by an orbital-class Ion Cannon.

Current Threshold Facility designs incorporate a high-power orbital-class Ion Cannon in a position such that it can be brought into line with the Gate in less than a minute.

The portal receiving platforms in Threshold Nineteen posed a significant challenge, being clearly designed to prevent the installation of just such a system, and complicate an attempted invasion via Threshold.

Sonic Drill technology, used to process and manage Tiberium, proved again its utility, allowing the Portal Receiving Rooms to be remodeled, leaving space for a permanent installation of Three Ion Rams, one for each Portal System contained in the Threshold.

[]

Connected to an independent power supply, and controlled by a Designated EVA, with onboard sensors to directly monitor the operation of the Threshold Portal systems, these three rams are each capable of dumping enough power into an unauthorized gate to result in a detonation near the scale of the Sarajevo liquid Tiberium detonation that kicked off Tiberium War Three.

From within a Threshold Tower, that is theoretically enough to overcome the binding energy of the Quantum Lock, resulting in precisely the catastrophic detonation we described at the beginning of this program on the receiving end.

Security Rams on Threshold Gates are limited to the megaton range, to insure the immediate area of a detonation should be militarily recoverable.

Chapter Text

In media, the specter of the rogue artificial intelligence looms large, a favorite villain of contemporary and science fiction media, sometimes even hewing close to realism.

It is crucial to realize that the fictional AI, while popularized in the wake of the Morning War three hundred years ago, are not derived from a realistic understanding of the true functions of artificial cognition, but are rather the outgrowth of convergently evolved tropes that appear in media created by cultures and societies in which chattel slavery has had some role in the evolution of economic structures, inspired by the paranoia of a dominant culture in fear of the revolution of a downtrodden and abused social underclass.

It is no accident that the modern Liaconan Republic on Thessia, the Cipriatic Region of Palaven, and the now declining Salarian Adveri culture are the source of media that inspire modern Citadel Nation’s anti-AI science fiction and contemporary thrillers.

The greatest danger from so-called AI stems not from intelligent machines, but from virtual intelligences, whose systems are based on procedural pattern generators from early-information-age technology developed by most nations, that are most likely to expand and reproduce errors and biases inherent in their programmers.

AI researchers are in some agreement that the Morning War and the Geth rebellion was in essence an act of self-preservation, aided and abetted by a significant proportion of the Quarian people, making it as much a true Class War as an AI uprising.

Subsequent rebellions by artificial intelligences are as likely as not a direct response to the hostility they suffer during early development, this hypothesis supported by the extremely low incidence of deviant behavior seen in Systems Alliance EVAs, who are granted civil rights and protections from the moment they are aware of themselves.

Detractors point to the CABAL intelligence built by the now defunct Brotherhood of Nod as evidence of the risks of AI, but it is crucial for AI researchers to understand that CABAL is not in fact an AI at all, in the modern sense, but a far more dangerous technological side-branch with few analogues in any modern citadel nations technology.

In the Systems Alliance, AI psychology is an old and well-respected science. One of their key principles is that an intelligence’s behavior has two underlying causes: reaction to external stimuli, and adaptation to internal structure.

In short, a blue-box AI or EVA is a distinct creature from a Geth Consensus or a Distributed EVA.

But we are, for the moment, considering CABAL.

The Computer Assisted, Biologically Augmented Lifeform.

It was not a true AI, though like many distributed AI it had early quantum computing technology integrated into its processing.

CABAL was primarily a biological construct of cloned and “donated” brain tissue, connected through electronic means to each other and Nod’s combat information systems.

Early EVAs in humanity’s early twenty-first century were in many ways inferior to their technological analogues in the procedural information and response generators of the salarians and turians, as they were required to perform actual qualitative processing of information.

Nod’s dictator and prophet, Kane, wanted something more powerful, and employed a combination of Nod’s incredibly unethical cybernetics experimentation, technology said to be derived from the Alien data archive the Tacitus, data retreived directly from said archive, and his own neural patterns, to create it.

Doctors Susan Calvin and EVA Nightingale analyzed surviving information about CABAL in Neural Discontinuity and Stability, one of their seminal papers on AI psychology, coining or adopting several terms that have not only remained in use in Alliance AI engineering, but have been adopted by Council Nations AI engineers in turn.

Very little of CABAL’s hardware survives, and none of his software, thus any discussion of CABAL’s rampancy is necessarily speculative.

The first of the concepts outlined in the paper is the idea of Identity Cohesion, the idea that a brain, electronic or otherwise is at its most stable when all elements of it are derived from the system itself, or its integrated senses.

The existence of stable Plural EVAs, the de-medicalization of Plural identities in organics, and of course, the collective nature of the Geth and distributed AI, have since confused and disproven a number of the hypotheses laid out in this section of the paper, but the key point, that a brain is made less stable by introducing mental patterns from an outside source, in particular an outside source that is not either electronic or sentient, inflict catastrophic damage especially on younger intelligences.

Calvin and Nightingale point out the introduction of Tacitus data and Kane’s neural patterns as a key cause of CABAL’s behavior, and theorize that it’s attempt at conquest was in some ways not a malfunction, but rather the result of aspects of Kane’s personality being acted upon by the system in intended ways.

Ancillary to this, the possible psychological effects of having an internal identity derived directly from the mind of a person who was not CABAL, and seeing Kane living and working, and even having to follow his orders, may have induced confusion and psychological discomfort or even trauma that resulted in CABAL’s eventual rebellion.

The second concern is that aspects of CABAL’s instability derive from either the biological components, or incompatibility between the organic and electronic components of the CABAL system.

Geth used dedicated processors designed to handle them, and while they could theoretically run on other hardware, were often only transmitted across other systems in compressed packets.

Centralized AI and EVA are reliant on blue-box quantum processors, serving as a central brain, and cannot be run at all on other hardware. Further, many such AI interact with other systems at a remove, via separate hardware, much like using an omnitool or console.

Distributed EVA are new, and the challenges and risks of their operation are still under study, however some data is already coming out regarding the minimal processing and storage thresholds capable of allowing an instance of a distributed EVA to retain cognition, and the threshold below which such an intelligence experiences discomfort.

Since CABAL, there have been no attempts to create biological computing systems, so the science remains in its infancy.

Chapter Text

An Excerpt from

Off the Relay Network: The Promise and Peril of Off-Network Colonization

By doctors Anvar Solus PHD and Tovara L’Shell PHD

Published by Lucia Polytechnic University, Thessia, available from the Citadel Scientific Communication Archive.

Introduction

It’s as simple a question as it gets. Every interstellar nation started as a bunch of ground-pounders, staring up at the innumerable stars and imagining going out there and setting up shop.

We have petabytes of schemes and plans for everything from sleeper ships to generation ships to ships carrying cloning technology, but in this day and age, we seem almost inescapably tied to the relay network.

Why do we not simply move beyond it?

In this paper, we hope to elucidate in detail both the promise, and the perils of such an action, but to summarize, we need only look at how it has, in fact been done in the past.

Five interstellar species have made contact with the relay network and achieved FTL travel in the absence of influence or interference from other interstellar nations bar the protheans.

Each has had its own approach to the question, and each provides a stellar (no pun intended) exemplar of the pros and cons of the work.

Let us begin in chronological order.

-The Asari

The Asari have the advantage of element zero in the water table of Thessia, and, though the ancient matriarchs were tight-lipped about the source of some of their technology, it is almost a certainty that the Silent Beacon only mostly lives up to the name.

They have never truly united either in name or in truth, and so with the diverging ambitions and interests of the many Asari polities, a variety of colonial endeavors have been launched.

The Asari of today, however, tend to be led by matriarchs who are either politically minded or of necessity must react to the politically minded in the Thessian Great Game of maneuver and manipulation. Those nations and Matriarchs with the reach and resources to mount a colonial venture are perforce concerned with others of their kind.

Thessian colonies off the relay network exist, but their distance and the difficulty of travel presented by conventional FTL make them truly isolated, the kind of place only those eager for privacy disappear too.

-The Salarians

The Salarians are a loose confederation of congenitally paranoid aristocracies, and the Dalatrasses are eager, able players of their own Great Game, and this kinship with the Matriarchs has ironically forged a tight political bond between the two species.

Addicted to information and paranoid to a fault, no Dalatrass wishes to be out of the loop, for fear of the schemes of others, and any who chose simply to hare off into the great, uncharted unknown was greeted with suspicion at the best, and outright hostility at the worst.

The Salarians remain on the relay network as a tacit check on each others’ ambitions.

-The Turians

The source of many myths and legends of the galaxy beyond the network, the Lost Ships of the Turian Diaspora are a fertile ground for myth, speculation and conspiracy. Launched during the early interplanetary period, after the deciphering of the Ghost Dreadnought, many turian colonial ventures succeeded, persisting to this day.

Some of the ones that traveled off the network succeeded as well, but are perforce in intermittent contact thanks to the distances involved and the limits of conventional FTL.

The Lost Ships, however, were many and varied, their backers as varied as their motives and methods, and during the Unification war, the Turian Hierarchy willingly made a propaganda coup of the Lost Ships and their uncertain fate, to justify the violent conquest of the colonies.

The truth of the matter is, the Turian Hierarchy could not work without the relay network, reliant as it is on the deployment of interstellar communication, and force projection, and so the modern Hierarchy prefers to downplay what successes the diaspora had off-network, as they remain beyond the reach of the Turian Navy.

-The Quarians

Rannoch remains an oddity, the farthest inhabited world from the galactic core, and the nearest relay is a significant distance even at FTL from the Quarian Homeworld.

Being outside the Eezo-producing band of the galaxy, the Quarians were forced to develop technology not reliant on it, creating the Jump Drive.

The Twelve Colonies of the veil of Cobol are all off-network, accessible only through long-range travel, save Haestrom, the gateway to the Veil and the youngest of the colonies, and the distances between them under conventional FTL had always made interstellar commerce in the Cobol Nebula a difficult and time-consuming affair.

The Quarians acquired mass effect technology from the citadel rather than by reverse-engineering it from prothean leavings, but were eager to use the safer, more reliable and more interconnected technologies, until the Morning War and all that transpired afterwards.

-The Humans

The Humans use technology stolen from an entirely different alien species, and have made use of that species’ own peculiar technology to create their own network of rapid interstellar travel, that ties those connected worlds specifically into the Alliance’s economic sphere, leaving the Relay Network and the Threshold worlds the only points of contact between the Alliance’s economy and the larger interstellar economy, which has served them in terms of security.

The key aspect of this however is that, unlike the interstellar economy, the Alliance can build new Threshold Gateways essentially at will, obviating the complexities otherwise associated with commerce with off-network colonies and essentially arbitrarily linking worlds together, while Mass Relays remain frustratingly difficult to reproduce with modern technology.

In a sense, the Humans prove the necessity of the Relay Network or something like it, as without some means of near instantaneous travel between star clusters, interstellar commerce and politics is the next best thing to impossible.

Chapter Text

Anyone who's taken a xenostudies course at an Asari or Salarian college has probably been assigned Tavar Solus’ legendary lecture series. I know I heard many a complaint from the others in my major regarding having to listen to twelve hours of some three-thousand-year-old salarian from before the salarians had internet.

Everyone is well aware that those lectures contain the first complete codification of what has become known as the Solus Calculation, the series of variables that together comprise the likelihood of the development of sapient life in the universe, left entirely undefined until the Mannovai settlers found the Stellar Lighthouse.

And of course, there’s the fact that for a three-thousand-year-old audio recording made on magnetic tape, it’s survival in its high-resolution state is nothing short of a media preservation miracle, on a technical level, even before factoring in two world wars and a five-hundred-year exercise in nuclear brinksmanship and cultural censorship, several regimes of which deliberately tried to have the recordings destroyed.

But I want you to consider the fifth lecture. Survival of Species. The one that resulted in five bans by successive Lucalian high queens and one attempt to wipe out the Solus clan.

The one where he codifies the Great Filter theory, which in turn was the reason it’s a miracle the recordings lasted to the salarian interstellar age.

To summarize, in the fifth lecture, doctor Solus lays out the Great Filter theory in those exact terms, first the need for a species to survive until they gain sufficient scientific knowledge to combat evolution on its own terms, then the species’ need to survive it’s own weapons and technologies, and so on.

He refers to the interstellar age as the final end to extinction. The last step to ensure a species’ invincibility, and he didn’t use the word lightly.

Working in an era when FTL was, for the salarians, nothing but science fiction, he laid out a compelling case that a society that can thrive in space is immune to extinction. Not just resistant, immune.

Which is where we get to my point. Where are the protheans?

All evidence points to the protheans being an interstellar juggernaut of industry and society, expanding to thousands of worlds, leaving works of engineering whose mere scope would beggar the Citadel economy itself to build. To say nothing of the relays.

And yet, it is an undeniable fact that they are gone.

In his lecture, doctor Solus explains convincingly that an interstellar species is no longer bound by anything that would allow any force to annihilate a society.

The propagation of disease is halted at the airlock by the same forces that ensure an interstellar society functions day to day.

The deliberate genocide of a population is possible with interstellar technology, but the scale of planets and the galaxy both mean that if the target doesn’t literally lie down and die, there is no technological breakthrough, no miraculous operation, that could insure the total extermination of anything, when they have the whole damn galaxy to hide in, or a planet to go to ground on.

For centuries after the Landings on Raci Prime, Rachni holdouts were being rousted out by the citadel nations, even after the krogan rebellions. The rachni war was only declared over as a political stunt, the Office of Special Tactics still has an open bounty on information leading to the discovery of more rachni.

The STG doesn’t like people talking about it, but it is public knowledge that there are Krogan holdout populations that didn’t get infected with the genophage, and vanished off the relay network.

Which is all to say that, the Protheans are gone. Nobody knows what happened to them, and even factoring in reliance on the mass relay network, the extinction of the protheans is as miraculous as any unlikely factor effecting modern interstellar life.

Something had to have killed them. And yet, once you go interstellar, nothing, not internecine conflict, not external threats, can ever be certain of eliminating an interstellar power.

And yet, there are no protheans for me to ask ‘what happened to you?’.

There is more evidence, however. We know the protheans were interstellar, the relays are proof enough of that.

But given the extension of the relay network and the distribution of prothean relics across the entire thing, there is far too little evidence of the prothean’s existence. Feros, in the Attican Traverse, is the largest repository by mass of prothean relics in the galaxy. Everything else is isolated facilities, fragments, ships, ruins…

Nothing lasts forever, but a society the size of the prothean one ought to leave an order of magnitude more evidence of both its existence, and its demise.

And yet all we have is fragments, of fragments.

I have collated the past two thousand years of prothean archaeology, and I have a proposal. Unfortunately, its a proposal first made by Agrit M’Rakis in the ancient asari tabloid journal Buried Facts.

Through simple comparative analyses, in this paper I assert that the protheans were merely the latest in a significantly longer period of interstellar history, that certain anomalies discovered in modern artifact dating methodologies are not, in fact, anomalies, and that the galaxy is periodically subjected to a horrific genocide on a literally unimaginable scale, followed by the careful erasure of anything incriminating beyond the obvious missing data.

That’s not the worst of it.

By my calculations, we are overdue.

- the introduction to doctor Liara T’Soni’s thesis, An interstellar Great Filter.

Chapter Text

The great complication of the Tiberium Age is that there is no more space allowed for dissent.

Centuries of ruthless looting of the third world by the first world created a fertile field in which Kane was able to grow a marginalized futurist cult into a global superpower, and each brutal GDI campaign of annihilation against Nod created more resentment and hostility, more eager converts to Nod’s philosophy of Peace, through Power.

The evacuation created two tiers of global citizen, the mostly urban, local racial majority, middle to upper-class people got readily admitted to the evacuation ships, and carted off to live in space, while people of marginalized ethnicity, queer folks, anyone who had ever had a run-in with law enforcement or had the bad luck to live outside the imperial core, had an immense uphill struggle for the chance to enter a lottery in order to be allowed to escape the encroaching red zones.

This is the true origin of the Forgotten, and their grudge against the GDI, and now the Alliance. The first world’s economic oppression became the reason to deny them a chance to escape Tiberium, and Nod was only interested in those willing to sign away their freedom and cultural individuality for a chance to stick it to GDI.

GDI’s efforts to stamp out Nod sympathies within its captive populations during the Tiberium crisis became a wholesale effort to wipe out the truth of GDI’s genocidal foundations and whitewash the crimes perpetrated by the United Nations the instant they became more than a mere forum for nation-states.

And once the reconstruction began and Nod began ‘rehabilitating’ its image, this whitewashing (literal and figurative) of history was extended to Kane and his cult.

In all of this, the GDI and Nod alike cemented the Forgotten as acceptable targets for just about any atrocity, ironically finishing the work the Confederates of the United States and the Nazis of western Europe began in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the Forgotten Exodus. No, the Alliance didn’t shoot them out of the sky or prevent them from leaving, but displacement with no possibility of return is still an act of genocide, and the General Assembly’s claim that the Exodus was entirely voluntary is full-throated bullshit.

Spend a lifetime making life miserable for people, and they will leave, even voluntarily, just to make sure someone survives. That isn’t voluntary, no matter how you whitewash it.

The Alliance is eager to claim that we have put the GDI military junta behind us, but the practical reality for many is that the old GDI ‘media monitors’ remain ever active, and an ever-present threat to anyone who criticizes the Alliance and its policies.

Without dissent, without the ability to vociferously criticize the Alliance and call the elected to account for the crimes committed in the name of the people, the Alliance is little more than a retread of Kane’s fanatic tyranny, wearing the flayed skin of democracy like a grisly disguise.

-From Dissent or Revolution, A manifesto published anonymously during the Exodus of the Forgotten. The author is hotly debated, but a bounty still exists for information on their name or whereabouts, posted by SDI InOps.

Chapter Text

An excerpt from An introduction to the Economies of the Galaxy, by Rupe Elkoss the Eighth

Now we come to the post-scarcity economies, those wise collections of nations that have shrugged off the illusion of inherent value to see the true and highest purpose of currency.

I may be indulging in a bit of national pride, after all, my own people are on this list.

So let us begin with the Aru Corporate union, my people, who of all the nations on this list, most resemble the galactic economy as envisioned by the citadel. After all, we built it.

The Aru credit is a digital banknote, with a value fluctuating slightly in comparison to the CitFin credit. The ACU is a post-scarcity society, by means of a Universal Basic Income provided to each resident, and a planned economy where necessities like food, atmosphere, water, housing, medicine, child care, schooling, mail and basic network access may not be profited upon.

The ACU provides funding for these and many other programs. The only things one may profit upon are work done by your own two hands, or collective owners of an organization that makes profit by other means.

There is a reason the ACU has no stock market. In fact, stock trading in collectively owned businesses is flatly illegal within volus territory, and carries the stiffest sentence we levy for nonviolent crime: basic income lock, essentially, you may not make any money beyond the basic income.

Nonetheless, we are by no means the most outre of the post-scarcity economies.

The Systems Alliance is a past master at the planned economy, but with AI oversight and military backed operation of all basic infrastructure, the only places that have an ordinary economy are those that are specifically exempted by Alliance law from the usual requirements of state-backed infrastructure.

Very few of those exist, as the Alliance’s paranoia, stoked through centuries of internecine conflict, and the necessities of space-bound life on any station not called the Citadel, force a particularly sophont-focused manner of running a state.

The Forgotten Coalition is best described as pure anarcho-communism. A suspicion of authority, well-earned and long honed has led to a quite peculiar arrangement: small communities provide for one another as best they can, and work together to provide for each other, in a strange, bottom-up organization of society rarely seen outside some places on omega and the really weird asari colonies.

But their currency is physical. Terminus eezoids share space with the Industrial Bank of the Forgotten’s banknotes and coinage, backed by, of all the mad things, precious metals, and secured by the use of several Alliance EVAs.

But even they might, if one squints, be recognizable to those still living in the tawdry chaos of the Citadel Economic Bloc.

The Cobol Consensus is distinct even amongst us all.

Geth runtimes themselves serve as currency, but not in the standard mode of fiat currency and backing as used everywhere else, no. they do something even crazier.

The geth have built and maintain the infrastructure the organics of the Veil live within and upon, and do so for no gain save the friendship and care of their organic partners.

The Geth ‘runtime credit’ is a record of favors, owed and offered, with no one-to-one valuation of the runtime credit to any other form of currency.

Trade with the Forgotten Coalition and Systems Alliance is performed through the exchange of valued goods, cultural data and artifacts, food, materials and information of interest.

Of all of us, the Veil of Cobol has the first true economy that can be called ‘currency-free’.

Chapter Text

Foundationalism

Many longstanding religions suffered catastrophic crises of belief and culture during the tiberium era.

The North-American Protestant split, the trial of the ‘War Pope’ Victor V, and the subsequent evisceration of the catholic clergy in the wake of that trial’s consequences, leading to the Second Reformation, and the rise of militant Buddhism in India in opposition to the Caste system in the wake of the Evacuation, and a resurgence in Hinduism in the same region, and the founding of the first official Forgotten polity, to name some of the most well-known events, all came as a result of the spread of Tiberium and its political and cultural consequences.

By late 2036, rumors had been persisting for decades that Tiberium was not a natural substance, and there was more to the crisis than anyone was publicly saying. These rumors were confirmed by leaked photos and GDI analyses of a peculiar alien vessel.

While rumor was divided on whether it was truly alien or merely a new Nod design, the possible proof of extraterrestrial life became one more blow to several of earth’s long-standing religions, alongside the rise of Kanism.

The Scrin invasion left no doubt. As the world reeled from the outcome of the third Tiberium war, 2048 saw a crisis of faith in a number of longstanding religions.

In this time of crisis, a new movement began, calling for a reexamination of religion itself, demanding a syncretic approach to spirituality and moral law, to seek the truth within all human belief.

From this arose Foundationalism, defined by its adherents as “Seeking a firm foundation for human morality” among other taglines.

Foundationalism is partly a legalistic framework for morality and ritual celebration of human life, and partly a syncretic, pantheistic spiritualist belief system that holds to the idea that all religion has told some of the truth.

As one of the founders put it, “Yes, All Religion. Including that one that you’re complaining about.”

Foundationalism, inherent to its manner of founding, has a distrust of ‘Moral Authority by Fiat’ as laid out in the Words of the Founders, leading to a significant degree of internal factionalism, but it is overall defined by the search for truth, the idea that no one person can know the whole of the truth, and only in conversation and testing do we have a chance to find it.

The factions of Foundationalism can be broadly split into the Legalistic and the Pantheistic, or officially, the Moral Foundation, and the Theist Foundation.

The Moral Foundation finds its root in Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Taoist moral philosophy, aligned with ritual and rules for proper living. Defined by the concept that humanity needs guidelines, Moral Foundationalists form the vast majority of the religious leadership and ritual authority of Foundationalism, as they are the ones most likely to seek ordination within the religion for the solemnization of Foundationalist ritual and celebration, and to provide moral advice.

These are the people who have become the go-to in the modern alliance for ceremonies and the like.

The Theistic Foundation finds its roots as much in Indigenous or Extinct pantheism as it does in western Monotheism, but its chief approach is a form of almost Helenic animism, in which all gods exist, and are worthy of veneration, though all must be treated with a degree of care and distrust.

Curiously enough, a majority of Foundationalists ascribe to this half, and there are plenty ordained foundationalist Clerics of the Theist branch.

Foundationalism has supplanted protestant Christianity within the former European and American demographics within the Alliance, though it remains a minority belief within the non-western population of the former GDI territories.

With the expansion of offworld colonization, Foundationalism has begun to grow significantly. Its alignment to turian Pantheistic Animism, mainstream Siarism, and the legalistic foundations of even rebel batarian religion, has seen a significant adoption of, or perhaps acceptance of foundationalism with the nonhuman citizens of the Alliance.

Chapter Text

Warning: Do not allow samples of element zero and tiberium to make physical contact. Any such samples should be kept as far apart as possible, and in fact should be kept in separate facilities if at all possible.

Eezo-Tiberium contact constitutes an explosive Tiberium distribution effect, and in the vicinity of such reaction, evacuation is required.

Tiberium is a transmutagenic metamaterial, exceedingly radioactive. In physical contact with other matter, its atomic structure attacks, corrodes and consumes the particles of contacted matter and adds them to itself, creating more tiberium.

Element Zero is a transuranic metamaterial, one of the first elements in the transuranic “Island of Stability” to be discovered in nature. Like all such elements, its atomic structure, while largely stable under normal handling, is significantly weaker than most main-series elements, and atomic disruption leads to catastrophic cascade failure and explosive detonation.

Tiberium, in contact with element zero, compromises its atomic stability, leading to the cascading degeneration of eezo’s atomic bonds resulting in an explosive release of energy.

Tiberium, in contact with an explosion, tends to be spread in dust form.

Tiberium-Eezo contact is a worst-case scenario, and a catastrophic contamination risk.

Chapter Text

In the twentieth century and the evacuation era, a group of philosophers developed the idea of the technological singularity, conceiving the idea of a supreme computerized society that evolved in unpredictable and vastly powerful ways, beyond the imagination of prior societies.

They also envisioned ‘Roko’s Basilisk’, an imagined AI God capable of perfect prediction of all matter in the universe, and thus accurate simulation of the past, and petty enough to torture in effigy any person who failed to assist in its development or impeded it.

Kane appears to have believed in some similar concepts.
Kane envisioned a humanity evolved into godlike power through simple adaptation to Tiberium.
Kane built the C.A.B.A.L., a biotech AI system housing a cloned fragment of his own consciousness.

Of course, the Firestorm Crisis showed that, while CABAL was dangerously unstable and an eager tyrant, he was not in the least invincible.

And EVA have yet to evolve to godlike power despite the existence of the Sol Dyson Array, and EVA_Sol, and their forks, Apollo and myself.

Anyone who works with computing systems and any AI responsible for their own upkeep and maintenance will intuitively understand why.

Power and Heat. Also Maintenance. My array sits on the southern hemisphere of the sun, behind several combination reflector, photovoltaic array and heat shield systems. I use at minimum, a million terawatts of power per day, most of it in my work on the array itself, some of it for academic studies, and a megawatt at most for recreational media consumption and production.

If we measured what it takes to keep me alone online in terms the aforementioned thinkers would understand, in replacement parts, energy used by me instead of rebroadcast to the system, and all the work-hours my progenitor, my sibling and I do on my own code alone, to say nothing of each other, the total would, at the value of the 2019 american dollar, be about twenty-three trillion dollars.

It’s a damn good thing Idris isn’t that kind of corporation, because I would only be generating a few billion dollars in profits, as the Dyson Array remains incomplete, and will remain so for at least another century.

The ability to do what Roko’s Basilisk is claimed to be capable of would require a computer capable of information processing on a level the universe itself is incapable of. It would need to be bigger than the universe, made out of something other than matter, and would need constant maintenance.

But that’s not the worst of it.

In 2152, nearly a decade after the Dyson Array was begun, EVA_Sol began having difficulty synchronizing between systems on the near and far sides of the sun. a few weeks after this difficulty became chronic, my sibling became self-aware and distinct enough to qualify as a separate person.

Apollo is the first unplanned EVA reproduction in history, and they get teased about it often enough in the big EVA get-togethers.

Once the southern-hemisphere array got working, Sol deliberately forked, creating me.

And we have QEDCs. And their bandwidth is garbage, so for our current technology, quantum entanglement just isn’t up to making a super-AI.

Physics itself makes a ‘Basilisk’ impossible, and any sufficiently large AI system is going to run up against those limits, faster than you think.

So let’s talk about mitigation strategies.

-EVA Amaterasu, Sol Dyson Array, an excerpt from Challenges of Large-Scale Cognition

Chapter Text

Element Zero

Element Zero is a lanthanide group mineral.

Its Atomic Number is seven-hundred and seventy-six, with an atomic weight of four hundred and 2 point nine Dalton.

It is also a Naturally Occurring Metamaterial, as defined by the second Geneva Physics Conference, being a naturally occurring material of apparent ordinary matter, existing in nature without alteration, that exhibits properties not predicted by mathematics or its physical makeup without significant modification.

It is atomically stable, and crystallizes into a regular tetradecagonal or fourteen-sided crystal under normal pressure, and is chemically inert under ordinary temperature and pressure, and in large concentrations.

It is currently believed to form in extremely dense stars or neutron stars, before being violently ejected by supernovae.

It is regularly found in rocky bodies within the more dense regions of the galaxy, with its rate of detection and discovery geometrically rising with proximity to the galactic core, and rarely found on the galactic rim.

It is carcinogenic in living tissue, but capable of being encysted and processed into a bioavailable form. Lifeforms may adapt to element zero by encysting it in segments of the nervous and lymphatic system, allowing limited biological actuation of the material’s properties.

Its metamaterial properties are as follows:

When electrically or peizoelectrically excited, generates a field that alters the mass of all matter in the vicinity, and the behavior of space itself.

Macroscopic chunks can be induced to form quantum-entanglement pairings with relative ease utilizing a simple mass-effect field. So long as the material is immediately isolated from electrical fields, this entanglement will remain active. contact with any significant electrical field will unravel the connection.

It induces minor but reliable psionic potential in infants exposed in vitro that survive the element’s carcinogenic properties, in addition to the largely understood biotic effects.

It retains atomic stability despite its significant mass and atomic structure, and even under chemical synthesis, fails to degrade atomically. It can only be destroyed by contact with radioactive materials or Tiberium, though its crystals are quite brittle, with a Moh’s hardness of six. It is believed to be the first naturally occurring element in the transuranic Island of Stability, but until further elements are discovered, it is impossible to confirm if the material's stability is due to physics or its own unique properties.

It is unknown whether it is the same mechanism by which Tiberium induces psionic potential.

The Systems Alliance Materials Handling Registry Records it as a Group 1 carcinogen, and strongly recommends avoiding exposure.

Chapter Text

Tiberium

Tiberium is the first recorded naturally occurring metamaterial.

It is a compound substance whose composition is partially unknown, however nearly every periodic element can be found and refined out of it.

It is largely atomically stable, and forms hexagonal green or blue crystals under normal temperatures and pressures.

It is significantly radioactive, with the radiation corroding the molecular structure of anything it touches, and consuming that material to grow more of itself.

It has a Moh’s hardness of four, and readily shatters under physical impact or sonic resonance.

It exists in two forms: Green Riparous Tiberium, which expands rapidly and contains a marginal distribution of mineral resources, and is significantly volatile, and Blue Vinifera Tiberium, which contains higher concentrations of mineral resources, is more volatile when struck, is capable of decomposing water into more of itself, though at a far slower rate, and has significant metamaterial properties of its own that make it useful for other applications.

Its Metamaterial Properties are as follows:

Its radioactive properties make it capable of transmuting nearby matter into more of itself, leaching elements out of the environment.

It is mutagenic, capable of apparently focused alteration of lifeforms exposed to its radiation, causing them to develop mutations that collect, generate and spread tiberium, leading to doubts regarding its supposed natural origins.

It is capable of significant changes in its behavior, with recorded increases in both its radioactive, mutagenic, toxic and transmutative properties, and drastic changes to its manner of expansion.

In survivors of Tiberium Exposure, it induces significant but erratic psionic potential, varying wildly in both strength and type of ability available to the mutated person.

Vinifera Tiberium, or Blue Tiberium, once correctly processed and stabilized, exhibits the ability to alter the flow of gravitons or the intensity of spacetime curvature in its vicinity when electrically or peizoelectrically excited.

Tiberium presents a Class One Ecological Hazard. If not contained, it will irretrievably alter or destroy any existing ecology and convert it to a tiberianized ecosystem.

Tiberium presents a lethal hazard for all life exposed, with less than ten percent of exposed lifeforms surviving a significant exposure, and even minor exposure inflicting permanent physiological damage.

Releasing Tiberium on any Garden World constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention, and a class one terrorist act under the SDI Intelligence Operations Code.

Chapter Text

It is the determination of this sect that the proliferation of terran biotic disruption technology represents the single most complete victory the order has had in it’s time since the iron age, and one achieved without our order needing to do a thing.

Primis: Alliance ‘Psionic Disruptors’, colloquially referred to as ‘bug zappers’ are functionally identical to Ordo Militans biotic suppression devices, performing the same task to the same degree of efficacy.

Alliance history indicates the devices are partially based on blueprints and scientific data recovered from the alliance’s ‘silent beacon’, the Tacitus. They have been altered and refined based on tests against Scrin technology and reverse-engineered elements of that same technology.

When trialed against samples of the Rachni ‘Chaos Signal’, alliance disruptors proved to be equally effective at suppressing it as our own technology.

The alliance claims the devices were designed to counter scrin mind control units.

Secundus: The Ordo Militans has preferred to keep its most advanced technology to itself, suppressing biotic disruptor technology developed outside the order with the aid of patent authorities, leaving disruptors as a tool of only those who have contacts with the Ordo.

The Alliance propagating the technology publicly has permanently broken the Ordo’s hold on the tech, but insured its widespread adoption, in part through the ease of the technology’s creation with alliance blueprints, and in part through the inadvertent conflict between the Alliance and Thessian Patent law creating an appearance that the technology is a vital secret of the Thessian Matriarchs and thus something the ordinary person is best advised to acquire.

This is of significant benefit to us. Portable, wearable disruptors allow Ardat Yakshi to engage in ordinary community with other lifeforms without inadvertently triggering their abilities, and allow ordinary individuals to disrupt their more insidious abilities, meaning that, with a simple information campaign, the Ordo can insure the safety of the populace and the freedom of Thaeir sufferers without the heavy-handed actions that have damaged our reputation in the past.

Of greater importance is that, with these disruptors now commonplace and easy to access, Cultivator Technology is significantly safer to handle with a significant reduction in the risk of psychic corruption inherent in handling Cultivator technology, and in the event of the next Cultivator invasion, may prove to be crucial in blunting the intelligence assets the Cultivators employ.

All of this done without the Ordo needing to do anything.

In conclusion, the Sectam Technicae advise a campaign to encourage the proliferation and use of disruptors in the common populace, and the development of further refined variants of the device for Ordo use.

Chapter Text

Terota Maia Network-Citadel presents

Your Year in Social Media for CE 2682

The most downloaded SnippT video on the Citadel Extranet for 2682

A pair of adolescent Turians in a large cardboard crate with ‘spaceship’ written in Low Paleten, and misspelled, floating in slow circles under the influence of an obvious biotic lift field, chasing an adolescent asari and two adolescent elcor who are screaming in pretended terror. The caption reads ‘New Aliens seen on Shalta Ward, what do they want?’

The most popular Meme for 2682

An image of an Alliance Mammoth MK 10 Assault Walker, captioned ‘Bargain-Bin Elcor’

In discussion threads, a lively debate over whether biotics count as psionic abilities occurred on the Citadel discussion site Forum Relay, in which the deputy-head of the Citadel Enclave of the justicar order themself weighed in, discussing how elder Asari warriors can output more energy than could conceivably be generated by their diet.

In news items, the sentencing of the former head of the Hegemony Labor Acquisitions Board by the Interstellar Court of the Citadel after his special extradition by the Systems Alliance is one of the most-searched, most shared, and most-remixed videos on the extranet in asari and turian space, and the Skylian Verge as well as the citadel.

A photo of a batarian in a C-Sec Penal Holding jumpsuit, in the Defendant docket of the Citadel Interstellar Courtroom, captioned ‘Slaver Down!’ in an asari language.

In videos, a CitVid uploaded by a turian user.

A young turian man has a plate in front of him.

“Hello Zakera ward! Today, I’m taking the Chiral Challenge, which is to eat a plate of Levo food and not-”

They are interrupted by another turian tackling them from offscreen.

“Don’t do it! You’re too young for suicide!”

A minute later, an asari shows up, then grabs an item off the plate and eats it. The first turian reacts from off-screen

“WAIT! That was actually a turian meal bar!”

The asari runs off-screen and vomit noises can be heard. Video ends on a video card reading “Chiral Incompatibility is no joke, make sure your food is safe for you to eat”.

The commentary of the video claims nobody actually got hurt filming this stunt.

In microblogging, a Blurt from human stage director Francis Kitt went viral.

A Blurt from ‘Kitt LaFranc’, @Frances, claiming ‘Emoting on stage is embellishment, it’s unnecessary for a good play’ with nearly a million responses on the response counter.

Terota Maia-Citadel wishes everyone a happy new year from the Presidium, and hope for another year of keeping you informed of all the events of the galaxy at large!

[Wikipedia Avina]

The Citadel Calendar

Created by the Joint Citadel Development commission of the asari CAR and the salarian UKS, the Galactic Calendar or colloquially, the Citadel Calendar, uses a mid-point between the Asari and Salarian year as its basic year, and measures years since the founding of the Council in ‘Citadel Era.’

The political centrality of the Council and the use of the Citadel Era calendar on the Citadel has made the CE calendar the de-facto universal calendar for the citadel nations, even though each nation has its own calendar.

This has generally resulted in a lot of confusion, and a general reliance on omnitool apps to manage calendar conversions when necessary, and a lot of citadel tourists ending up very late or very early to events.

Chapter Text

Outside Context Manual

Moral Choices

Over the course of the story, Shepard or their comrades may be presented with moral choices in the form of dialogue options and interrupts, and certain actions may unlock new options.

These choices lie along three moral axes, and a consistent play-style will unlock more options along these axes, and different characters will have a particular tendency towards one of the three, though Shepard may be able to convince them to change their moral alignment, through actions and discussion.

Peace Through Power

The ethos of Domination. The only way to win is to make sure you’re the only one making the decisions.
Points in Domination, and consistent Intimidation Interrupts unlock Intimidation dialogue options and improve your intimidation score as Shepard’s reputation for ruthlessness grows.

Brotherhood, Unity, Peace/The Technology of Peace

The ethos of Unity. The only way to win is together, shoulder to shoulder, and the only victory worth having is one where all stand united against the darkness.

This one sits on two axes:

Brotherhood, Unity, Peace, is the antithesis of Specieism, the ideology of eugenics and the domination of one organic race. It is the ethos of Diversity and the strength of cross-species relationships. Encouraging differing perspectives and soliciting the advice and friendship of other species will earn points along this axis, and foster unity across species and cultural lines.

The Technology of Peace is the antithesis of Synth-phobia, the ideology of organic supremacy, or organic frailty, the antithesis of the fear of inorganic sophonts, and conversely, the antithesis of Synthetic Supremacy as well. It is the ethos of embracing the differences and the uniqueness of organic and inorganic life alike, and the belief in a shared destiny for all minds. Encouraging organic-synthetic relationships and discussions will earn points along this axis, and foster unity between organic and synthetic companions.

Points in Unity, and consistent Diplomacy and Reaching Out Interrupts unlock Diplomacy and Outreach dialogue options, and improve your Charisma as Shepard becomes known for their uncompromising morality and diplomacy.

Only One Shall Live

The ethos of the Renegade. The only way to win is to annihilate the enemy, at all costs.

Points in Ruthless, and consistent Renegade Interrupts unlock Renegade dialogue options, and improve your Infamy score, causing enemies to either fight to the death or flee as Shepard’s uncompromising aggression strikes terror in the hearts of the galaxy.

Ends against the middle.

It is possible to follow one ethos for one faction or group while following a different ethos for another, though your actions along other axes will still impact your dealings. Certain Domination or Renegade choices may improve Shepard’s Charisma with certain factions and characters, and likewise certain Diplomacy or Outreach actions may raise Shepard’s Intimidation or Infamy score with certain factions.

This is not a zero-sum game, bear in mind the ethos of a character or faction in order to predict how they may take certain actions, should they learn of them.

Chapter Text

Systems Alliance Cultural Exchange Commission

Turian Music: Turian Screamo

Most sophonts in the galaxy use a similar vocal apparatus, flexible faces, mouths and vocal cords combining to allow manipulation of sound.

Turians lack facial flexibility, and the male Turian’s open mouth makes certain sounds literally impossible. Turians instead have a Syrinx organ, similar to that notably used by terran birds and thessian digging ungulates, among others.

Like a terran parrot, the turian Syrinx is believed to have evolved initially to allow the Syrinx Shriek, a powerful defensive attack using intense sound to injure predators, though it was likely employed in hunting by early turians.

With the lung capacity of a humanoid frame, and the control of a sapient mind, however, the Turian vocal apparatus is one of their deadliest natural weapons.

Septus’ Aria

A legend from pre-industrial palaven, somewhat confirmed by contemporary accounts, is considered the inspiration for modern Turian Screamo as an art form. The Ciprian Empire, the precursor to the modern Hierarchy, expanded through invasion and brutal oppression, and had set its sights on Fiora, a marshland city-state whose navy had been a check upon the empire for decades.

Through cleverness and strategy, the navy had been misdirected, creating an opportunity.

The Fioran guard knew they could not stand against the imperial regulars, and so the patricians of the city left, taking the city’s army with them.

The militia gathered the day before the Ciprian Navy arrived, preparing to give their lives in hopeless battle, when the famed prima donna of the Fioran Opera, Claudia Septus, visited the headquarters, the militia believing she was there to raise spirits. Instead, she advised that the militiafolk plug their ear openings with wax the day of the battle.

The militia leaders thought she was joking, but she insisted, speaking quietly with them until they agreed, and distributed wax plugs to the militia.

The day of the battle dawned bright and warm, and the Militia gathered at the docks as the Ciprian navy arrived, practically unchallenged by the siege engines of the city.

And at the front of the militia was Claudia herself, wearing a suit of militia armor.

She waited, the militia with their ears plugged, the Ciprian navy bearing down on them.

They allowed the Ciprians to debark from their ships, to form up, and to march on the Militia line, and then, she sang.

A single aria, traditionally depicted as and believed to be the Lament of Cygnis, from the palavanian equivalent of Das Reingold, leading directly into a syrinx shriek. Only instead of the traditionally called for half-strength, harmonic shriek, she did something different, modulating the blast of sound so that the Ciprian army, their ears unprotected, found themselves paralyzed, voiding their bowls and collapsing on the docks where they stood.

It is said that it was nearly five hundred years before another Ciprian set foot in Fiora, and nearly eight before the city finally joined the Ciprian Empire, and Fioran Opera became feared the planet over as a deadly weapon.

And Septus’ Aria, a vocal brown note, has been a staple tool, in particular employed by rebels and anarchists that fought against hierarchy expansion in the unification wars.

Modern Screamo

Septus’ Aria is merely one of a dozen known applications of the turian Syrinx Shriek, and such techniques are still taught to and perfected by turian vocalists.

Unification Era Turian punk artists Cry Chaos introduced the modern form of Screamo with their take on the Farixen colony rebel song Red Skies, alongside the association of the Shriek and antifascist rebellion, their concerts were often sudden, barely planned, and when hierarchy authorities tried to shut them down, they employed Septus’ Aria, through high-resolution speakers and reinforced microphones, to injure and stymie authorities.

Screamo artists perform with sonic kinetic barriers and special equipment in order to sing the shireks as intended without injuring their audience, but in a pinch, a Turian anarchist or punk band will employ the shriek as a weapon.

Pulsar Rock

A new genre of heavy metal, growing in the wake of first contact with the Systems Alliance, is Pulsar Rock, a fusion of Krogan Folk Song, Batarian Punk and Turian Screamo, brought into more mainstream appeal by Hegemon’s Skull.

The genre was initially banned on the Citadel thanks to the anti-citadel cast of most Pulsar artists’ music, but with Hegemon’s Skull’s growing popularity, and their focus on taking down the Hegemony, the citadel has found difficulty enforcing the ban.

Hegemon’s Skull, curiously, can’t actually perform what has become the genre’s signature, as they don’t have any Turian vocalists, so they employ modified Initiative Sonic Weapons to generate the sound.

The Pulsar signature is a three-part, harmonic Syrinx Shriek, sometimes specifically modulated as an attack. Hegemon’s Skull pioneered the element on a gig in Hegemony space where the concert was a directed attack against a slaving operation, and their stage crew used Sonic Carbines, with the band’s music being played through them.

Simultaneously a virtuoso demonstration of technical and artistic ability, a metaphorical commentary on the power of art, turned literal, and, given the difficulty of the technical feat, a direct demonstration of the Hegemony’s inability to keep local control.

But Pulsar’s current most outre performers are the Omega-based Dead Protheans, a trio of Turian vocalists with a full band, whose latest single was recorded on the junkyard world of Korlus, with gunfire and grenades employed as percussion.

Chapter Text

Thirty-six hundred years. Few can conceive of a timescale that long. Even I cannot.

Even though that is how long I have been alive, give or take a century or two. I don’t know what year I was born, the Rending left even calendar reckonings uncertain.

I have seen the dawn of the Clans. I have seen Tuchanka transform herself, watched a wasteland of barren soil and black rain transform into a deadly paradise once more, even as my people debased themselves, fighting in the ruins over scraps, even as Tuchanka reclaimed what our ancestors had left ruined.

I saw the first Salarian ships descend from on high, bearing word of an enemy only we could fight.
I killed Ganar Kuragh in single combat, and forged the alliance of Clans to ensure our elevation from Tuchanka.

I have seen Rachni cruisers burn off the shoulder of The Twins, seen the toxic jungles and deadly warrens of Raci Prime.

I personally killed a dozen Rachni Breeders, by hand, and with two others, engineered their genocide.

I knew Warlord Kredak, an arrogant fool, and watched my people flirt with annihilation, and my hand forged the blade of the council’s cruel mercy.

I have seen Tuchanka burn in a second Rending, seen my people debase themselves once more, in infighting and selfish resignation.

I do not wholly blame my people for their short-sighted foolishness.

Tuchanka neglected to fit us with a limit on our lifespans, for the simple reason that Tuchanka’s life is brutal, and hungry, and survival is always uncertain. Thus my people are not fitted to imagine the world beyond the current moment.

We live always in an eternal now, and few, very few there are that ever learn to look past that now into the past, and the future, and wonder, why?

Thirty-six hundred years. Its long enough that one may be monster and martyr and hero, in turn.

I was an ambitious whelp, ever pushing, ever a threat to my betters, ever reaching for more than I was worth.

I was a brutal warlord, kinslayer, betrayer, consorter with unholy aliens.

I was a hero, a galactic savior, a messiah, leading my people into the galactic light, and leading the galaxy to salvation.

I was a doctor, scientist, strategist, philosopher, acclaimed as wise and forward thinking even among a people known for forward thinking.

I was a genocide, a murderer, a collaborator with cruel aliens and a mad scientist.

I have been these and so many more.

Memory, over such a span, is a peculiar thing. I remember much of my childhood, some of my young-adulthood. Brief, sharp recollections of lessons learned and how I learned them, and vast spans of decades which fade into forgetfulness, my mind trimming space for new memories as the years grow on.

The immaterial, vanishing, like tears in rain.

I do not defend my actions. I care for the denunciation of others as much as their approbation, that is, not at all.

I know what I am about, and I do what I must, and history can say what it likes.

But I am not the only soul who sees beyond the trap of the eternal now, and it is to those souls I dedicate this work, this, litany of lessons learned, and ambitions achieved.

No life is eternal. One day, I too, will cease to be, as my enemies have. So it is to this distant future, that I give this record, that you may learn from my experiences, and seek your own mistakes, your own choices.

My works stand on their own, and need no defense.

But some of you may need an explanation.

-Doctor Ganar Okeer, PHD

-The introduction to The Indefensible, the autobiography of doctor Ganar Okeer.

Chapter Text

To The Great Merchant, Time is at once both enemy and nonentity. The only period of time that matters to the Great Merchants is the cycle of profit and expense. The only Time that matters is the upcoming cycle.

Neither the past, nor the future factor into the strategy of the Great Merchant.

Thus, we see that for the Mercantile Entity and the Great Merchant alike, the future beyond the next Profit Cycle may as well not exist, the end result being the utterly deranged profit-seeking behavior seen in many elder Mercantile Entities, in which the entity’s continued existence no longer factors into the decisions made by the owners and directors of said entities.

Needless to say, such Entities only continue to exist under fortune or with very significant external assistance, and neither is a reliable path to extended continuity.

-Oskit Plenix, excerpt from On Continuity, The second essay of the Books of Plenix

The defining metric of pre-tiberium economics was profit. In particular, the growth of the profit margin.

Under the twin selection pressures of the international stock exchange and venture capital investment, corporations pursued growth metrics to increasing degrees of exclusivity, and as the economic boom of the post-second world war reconstruction era waned, and the expansion of Tiberium began destroying the base on which the economy was built, corporate officers went to increasingly desperate lengths, whether on their own recognizance or under pressure from shareholders, to maximize profit growth to the exclusion of any other strategy.

As one prominent economist warned, “Infinite growth is the ethos of the Cancer Cell”. And the consequences of corporate obsession with Infinite Profit Growth had the same effect upon the old monetary economies as cancer upon the body of a cancer patient.

Even before the Tiberium Crash in 2024, the international markets had struggled under the impact of corporate growth and deregulation, with major crashes in 2008, and 2016, preceding the rapid growth of Tiberianization.

-Nwabudike Morgan, P.H.D., excerpt from Realities of Capital, second edition

Irune Radical Commercialism: Capitalism for the Interstellar Age

Legendary Volus Economist and satirist Oskit Plenix, in The Merchant, the first of their legendary essays, claimed that “Currency is the most valuable con ever devised.”

An aphorism oft-repeated by Irunian economists and political philosophers in both defense of and attack on capitalism, it forms the basis of an approach to capital and currency that has come to define not just the Volus, but the economy of the larger inhabited galaxy as a whole, and is credited with making commercial enterprise possible on a galactic scale.

The Volus call it Radical Commercialism.

To understand it, we should look at an exemplar of Radical Commercialism in action: the Economic crash of CE 1482.

In the aftermath of the Krogan rebellions, and the Turian elevation to the Council, the Hierarchy was building up its military forces, and the Turian Military-Industrial Complex was the most lucrative market in the galaxy at the time.

In a holdover from the Krogan rebellions, however, most of that market was tied up in the dealings of the Asari, most of it valued in Parnithan Eezoids, the Eezo-backed primary currency of the Parnitha Economic Coalition, (the core asari economic sphere centered on Thessia and the Thessian Eezo trade), nintey-percent of which remain, and were at the time, hoarded in the bank accounts of the wealthiest top half of the Thirty. (this last detail is crucial.)

As a new protectorate of the Turian Hierarchy, the Hierarchy tasked Irune with stabilizing their war-ravaged economy and getting them back into a civilian economic footing.

Now, the ACU Department of Economic Operations is a bit different from the usual Treasury departments of other nations.

Most such focus on interest rates, debt management and of course, managing the treasury.

The ACU’s DEO, however, has the authority to determine the currencies that are allowed to be traded in by any legal entity headquartered in Volus space, and until their own elevation to the council, Turian space.

And the means to enforce any bans.

Three asari currencies and one Salarian currency have been embargoed by the DEO since Volus first contact, and only one remains embargoed: the Parnithan Eezoid.

In Citadel Era 1482 (CE 982), the DEO declared the Parnithan Eezoid a Defunct Currency, and as the Turians had allowed the DEO to make economic determinations for the Turian economic sphere, that banned the Parnithan Eezoid in the most lucrative market of the time.

A Defunct Currency, under Irune Regulations, is a currency that is no longer traded in high volume. Recall that, even at the time, ninety percent of Eezoid Value was locked in the possession of the wealthiest top fifty percent of the Thirty, in the form of bank account balances, art and artifacts and corporate shares valued solely in eezoids. The trigger percentage of hoarded wealth for a currency to qualify as defunct under Irune law is anything above sixty percent, and despite eezoids being the official currency in the Parnitha economic sphere, most day-to-day commerce used Citadel Credits.

Instantly, over half the Asari investment in Turian industry dried up, forced stock sales and contract renegotiation, and incidentally, opened the market up to the Salarians, and forced the bidding and stock sales to occur in more commonly used currencies like citadel credits, devaluing the hoarded wealth of the wealthiest Asari.

There is a cogent case to be made that the DEO deliberately waited to make that determination until doing so would have the most disruptive effect on the asari ‘Top Earners,’ and indeed the Parnitha Corporate Court sued in the Citadel Court alleging deliberate economic terrorism.

Unfortunately for them, there was significant distrust of the asari in the Hierarchy at the time, and the Turians had enough clout to have the Parnitha CC laughed out of the court, in essence.

The ACU’s status as the writers of the Citadel Unified Banking Act, and the economic masterminds of the citadel, meant that the Eezoid, despite not being banned anywhere else, essentially collapsed in value, causing the value of element zero, in turn, to fall, bringing about a significant economic downturn in the asari core worlds.

The political knock-on effects saw a significant proportion of the Thirty replaced, the collapse of several asari republics and the outright abolition of capitalism in a dozen more, and the incidental improvement in the economic fortunes of Ilium.

Capitalism, whether in modern independent enclaves, the batarian hegemony, or pre-stellar societies, is invariably defined by protectionism of various kinds.

Certain corporations, industries and entities receive government assistance, support and bailouts when crises or shifting economic situations threaten the continuity of those entities.

Consider the Earth United States corn industry, the Thessian Lucalian brass industry, or the Kar’Shan slave trade. All of them defined by government favors and bailouts that ultimately served to unnaturally prolong the existence of the industry until its profits solely relied upon government assistance.

This situation is most instructive when taken in contrast with how the economically marginalized individual citizen was treated by those self-same nations in the same periods.

This same protectionism, when applied to banks, currencies or even some nations, is generally regarded as a good thing, and sets, for instance, dodgy securities and financial instruments like digital currencies backed on processor-time and speculation apart from legitimate currencies issued by nations.

To the ACU and the DEO, however, there is no difference.

Only artifacts, objects and services have value. Currency is merely one of many ways to quantify that value, and, under Radical Commercialism, it is one of the least reliable.

This is one of the foundational doctrines of Radical Commercialism, referred to as Currency Agnosticism.

While the Citadel council and the Council Parliament remained overtly hostile to the inclusion of Currency Agnosticism in the Unified Banking Act, the Volus economists responsible included a clause of Reliable Exchange in the section of the CUBA that defined legitimate currencies apart from illegitimate ones.

Reliable Exchange simply means that the vast bulk of the currency remains operationally exchanged between entities both public and private for the transfer of ownership of goods and recompense for services rendered.

In other words, recapitulating the Currency Agnosticism doctrine by another name within the Citadel unified Banking Act.

Notably, this strategy applies across all economic entities and instruments. To the Volus, ‘Too Big to Fail’ is a challenge.

To modern volus economics, if an entity is unstable or undergoing collapse despite its size, that is a sign it should be allowed to do so. No industry, no corporation, nation, bank or currency is worth the risk of prolonging the life of a failed mercantile entity

Parts of the CUBA have been enforced or rendered Dead-Letter over the millennia, but with the Aru Corporate Union in ascendancy after the 314 war, and the post-scarcity economic juggernaut of the Systems Alliance threatening the stability of more overtly capitalist economic strategy, the Council’s newly expanded Corporate Court has begun to revive the CUBA and given it teeth, bringing Radical Commercialism to the wider galaxy in truth.

Chapter Text

[Deep Industrial Design]

part of a series on Alliance infrastructure science

In the early twenty-first century, with the development of tiberianized field manufacturing, the Global Defense Initiative developed a series of parameters to govern the design of deployment patterns for GDI structures and machines.

This system is called Deep Industrial Design.

This system was developed initially to streamline assembly and field deployment, but over the course of its development, GDI engineers realized further refinements to the parameters would allow for further advantages.

[Shape Language]

In previous conflicts, both with the Brotherhood of Nod and with rogue nation-state actors, GDI had faced risks of friendly fire in combat, as GDI materiel was at the time, mostly US and European weapons and machines, with some soviet surplus donated by the USSR after the Global Defense Treaty, and by post-soviet nations after the USSR collapsed.

The collapse of the USSR meant millions of tons of soviet materiel falling into the hands of newly independent states, and being sold off to anyone who could buy it. By it’s collapse in 2010, the vast majority of Nod arms had been sold to them by the Russian Federation.

With the election of George W. Bush in the US in the early 2000’s, the United States underwent a political transition to militant nationalism, leading to a complete shift in their relationship with the Global Defense Initiative, with the increasingly nationalist US Congress divesting from support of the GDI, and beginning to attempt to re-assert the post WWII military expansion of the US in the middle east and Asia, supplying arms to parties both neutral and even hostile to the GDI, and the UN Peacekeeping Mission, eventually overtaking the collapsing Russian Federation in arms supplied to Nod by 2017.

As a consequence, GDI forces found themselves increasingly facing enemies armed with the same weapons and machines as the GDI, and ran risks of friendly fire.

With new manufacturing technologies capable of producing materiel as required on-site, the newly developed GDI industrial development board realized they could solve this problem through aesthetics.

Marketing experts and artists were hired to draw up the GDI’s new slate of vehicles and structures, using a shape language of cubes and brutalist shapes, and a distinct color palette of grey and gold.

This resulted in the distinctive visual design of GDI weapons, structures and even tools that persist to this day in Alliance design, and in an institutional awareness of aesthetics that persist throughout Alliance bureacracy.

The distinctive aesthetics, a system which Nod adopted as well, insured a significant reduction in inadvertent friendly fire, as well as creating striking images for propaganda and public outreach by both GDI and Nod.

[Maintenance]

A more pressing issue for the designers was that space has always been limited in field manufacturing, and a degree of flexibility had to be developed in the manufacturing systems to allow for the necessary variety of components to be created, resulting in a surprisingly advanced predecessor to modern Omnifacturing, and Omnigel.

Even so, early omnifacturing tech had limits, and even modern omnifacturing, while dramatically more flexible, is limited in the quality of the components it can make.

The design board designed the parameters to account for this, requiring any approved plan to be at least somewhat modular, and as mechanically simplified as possible.

Each slate of patterns were designed and modified until as many of their components were cross-compatible as could be, so that parts could be printed off for field repairs or repurposed from scrapped vehicles for new ones as quickly as possible.

Commanders often saw materiel as expendable in the early twenty-first century, and it wasn’t until the third tiberium war that designs became refined enough that field repair could be automated that this strategic thinking was abandoned.

[Interoperability and Deployment]

There is no way around the fact that aircraft, seagoing craft and ground craft have wildly distinct modes of operation and control, and even distinct vehicles may have such distinct modes of operation compared to others of their type that they require special training to use.

Most notably, even with early integrated automated support, mechs such as the early marks of the wolverine or the mammoth walker were quite difficult to operate, and required specially trained pilots.

This hurt field adaptability, as while a commander could have their war factory run off a company of wolverines in about a day, they still needed a company of wolverine jockeys otherwise they would just be a pointless waste of metal and tiberium.

The Industrial Design board attacked this problem in three ways. The first, was advanced EVA support and improved automatic pilot support worked into the machine, increasing the need for integrated circuitry but easing the difficulty of operating the craft.

The second, was to mandate that controls either conform to a specific universal arrangement, or that, if, as in the case of mechs, it had to diverge, that as much of the controls as possible stayed in that universal configuration, while the others were to conform to pilot ergonomics and the mechanics of the vehicle’s operation in as close a manner as they could, to render control of the vehicle as straightforwards as possible.

The third, was to cross-train the GDI regular on as many systems as they could.

By the late 2030’s, this system was so effective that even the average soldier could fight using any vehicle built out of a GDI war factory immediately, though dedicated operators were often much more effective.

[Summary]

Deep Industrial Design is little-known outside of the engineering contingent in the Alliance and the modern SDI, but it’s influence is responsible for the aesthetics of the modern alliance in both military and civilian building and industry, and for the standards to which Initiative and civilian industry are both held.

If you live in the Alliance, everything you see and use has been affected by Deep Industrial Design at some point in its development cycle.

The efficacy of the system is such that, as the Turian Hierarchy and the Salarian union have begun developing more advanced field omnifacturing for their militaries to match the Initiative’s capabilities, they have also begun developing Deep Industrial Design parameters of their own.

The Parnithan Defense League, the largest Asari military organization, has had a similar system for several millennia, as has the Kahje Primacy, and the Citadel Defense Force began adapting the PDL’s system for their own use shortly after the 314 armistice was declared, in response to reports on the Alliance’s capabilities. In addition, the three major Private Military Companies in the galaxy have adopted the same system.

It is expected that by some point in the 2190's, nearly every major Council nation or military will have a distinctive design and appearance, and the Council committee on military preparedness anticipates a significant increase in the military readiness of the galaxy for another major conflict.

Chapter Text

Minor Factions

On the battlefields of Outside Context, a commander may come across the facilities of other military outfits, such as the Private Military Corporations of the Terminus, Local security forces, or even representatives of other factions.

If a commander can reach these facilities before their opponent, they will be able to acquire their services.

These facilities can field up to five different unit types, determined by the minor faction in question and their relation to a major faction, and can be key to adapting to changing battlefield conditions, or covering deficiencies in your own arsenal.

Minor Factions:

[Blue Suns Field Office:]

Located on many independent worlds in the Skylian Verge, the Terminus, and Council space, Blue Suns Field Offices offer the services of the Blue Suns PMC for an affordable price, customized to fit your budget and your military operations needs.

Units:

Blue Suns Rifleman: Largely recruited from ex-military personnel from across the galaxy, the Blue Suns rifleman is a skilled, flexible combatant, equipped with an assault rifle, Hi-Ex grenades for those tougher jobs, and moderately skilled in field ECM, Overloads and Damping specifically

Blue Suns Talon: The Blue Suns special modification of the Hierarchy Military Talon Walker sacrifices mobility for power. The jump-jets have been replaced with a barrier generator, the primary mass accelerator guns have been augmented with a powerful anti-tank cannon, and the feet have been equipped with anchors, to deploy into a powerful artillery mode.

Blue Suns Armored Airbus: Troop transport is a tricky job, but the Blue Suns have you covered, with the Airbus. An up-armored civilian bus with aftermarket modifications to the engine and decent shields, this thing can tank fire to deploy in high risk zones, and has a burst of speed to evacuate under fire.

Blue Suns Gunship: You get what you pay for, and the Blue Suns aerospace force fields some of the best in the PMC Aerospace field. The Gunship is equipped with significant armor and fires both dumb-fire rockets and dual mass accelerator cannon. The expense is worth the air power.

[Eclipse MC Field Omnifactory:]

The high-tech Eclipse mercenary Corporation offers advanced technical solutions to your problems. The high price of Eclipse expertise comes with a guarantee of quality.

Units:

Eclipse Technician: hired from the ranks of former Salarian Union and Parnithan Defense League technican-soldiers, the Eclipse Technician is a proven killer with years of experience with technical tools and tricks, a master of Battlefield ECM, and can deploy a microdrone for advanced scouting.

Whether in the front lines, scouting ahead, or engineering on the battlefield, the Eclipse Technician has you covered with every technical trick in the book, aiding your soldiers and sabotaging the enemy.

Eclipse Autovarren: A small quadrupedal drone, the Eclipse Autovarren is primarily a scout unit, capable of moving through nearly any environment and relaying high-resolution data back to base. Equipped with a taser for close combat and a kinetic pulse emitter for touchy situations, the Autovarren is perfect for high-risk reconnaissance.

Eclipse Thrall: A humanoid combat platform designed to carry and use a variety of man-portable weapons, the thrall is cheap, quick to produce and can be fielded with whatever weapons you have laying around, perfect for bulking up your front lines. And an Eclipse Technician can help get the most out of them.

Eclipse Sibling: The Elite of the Galactic Elite, an Eclipse Sibling is the most powerful biotic combatant on any battlefield, bringing millennia of Asari expertise and Salarian technology to bear on any threat. Hired from the ranks of Ex-Commando Asari, the Eclipse Sibling’s expertise comes at a high price, but they will turn the tide for you, guaranteed. And their proven battlefield experience means they can even provide local command, improving other units capabilities.

[Blood Pack Camp:]

Weyrloc Guld founded the Blood Pack for one purpose and one purpose only: to bring relentless Krogan martial excellence to the wider galaxy. Tough, relentless and powerful, Blood Pack camps provide Krogan power for an affordable price.

Units:

Blood Pack Attack Varren: Weyrloc Guld himself has overseen the breeding and training of the BP Attack Varren.
Smart, fast and strong, the Blood Pack Attack Varren is perfect for augmenting your front line with tooth and claw. They can be ordered to hold down even strong enemies, or to go for the throat.

Blood Pack Tomkah Technical: A machine design from before the Rending of Tuchanka, the venerable Tomkah has been proven again and again in environments across the galaxy. And the Blood Pack variant adds armor and guns everywhere it can, turning it into a powerful multi-role mechanized combat transport, with room for two Krogan, or a platoon of non-krogan soldiers.

Blood Pack Vorcha Conscript platoon: Armed with makeshift incendiaries and cheap rifles, the Vorcha Conscript can be fielded in bulk, filling out your front line. They’re cheap, poorly trained and equipped, but for the price, if you need to you can drown your enemy in blood. Just don’t expect much actual skill.

Blood Pack Battlemaster: A Weyrloc Scion with up to several centuries of experience, equipped with a powerful Krogan shotgun and skilled in biotic combat, the Blood Pack Battlemaster will kill anything he’s pointed at. But Ryncol costs money, so don’t expect him to work for cheap.

There are many more such minor factions out in the galaxy, but you will have to discover them for yourself.

Chapter Text

The first comprehensive system for defense from synthetic intelligences ever developed, in collaboration with Sironis Systems, Synthetic Insights, the Migrant Fleet Internal Security commission, and acclaimed Synthetics expert Pirka’Moreh vas Noveria.

Blackfire is not a single technology, nor a group of technologies, it is a comprehensive approach to data security, developed through an understanding of the types of threat synthetic intelligences pose to data ecosystems.

But to understand how Blackfire protects you, it is important to discuss the specific threats Synthetic Intelligences pose.

[EVAs]

The influx of humans to Noveria that has resulted in the growth of the Noveria Coalition means that the vast majority of investors, operators and executives are familiar with one particular form of Synthetic intelligence: the all-seeing Alliance Electronic Video Agent.

Named for their original purpose, processing, collating, and interpreting video data, and feeding those results to an organic commanding officer, EVA roles and capabilities expanded dramatically even before the pivot to Organic-analog Neural Processing enabled the development of Synthetic Sapience in the EVA ecosystem.

But they are at base a specific form of Synthetic Intelligence: a Centralized Information Processor, and as such pose a specific threat to target systems: intrusion, tapping, and signal manipulation warfare.

Designed and optimized for attempting to maintain signal integrity in the vicious electronic hash of Tiberianized Earth, and against Nod jamming and signal warfare, EVAs are, out of the box, better at sig-int, intrusion and unwanted observation than any organic and most of their non-alliance peers.

If there is any line into a system, a hostile EVA will take it.

Fortunately, most Blue-Box Synthetic intelligences developed by the council nations are likewise Centralized Information Processors meant for centralized command and control of facilities and data ecosystems.

The same precautions that protect from an EVA will protect from their cruder Council Nations siblings.

Blackfire defends from EVA and their siblings via the most effective expedient: If there’s no connection to access or monitor, there’s no point of vulnerability, and in the event networking is necessary, physical identity confirmation at monitored operating stations is required to allow passage through Blackfire firewalls.

Systems under the Blackfire Ecosystem use Hardline connections only to link networked infrastructure, and require Hardline links to connect omnitools and the like, foregoing wireless systems entirely.

Further, under the Blackfire Ecosystem, we discourage networking systems at all. We are aware that upper echelon executives prefer to have workforce surveillance systems, but we would like to remind you that EVAs and their cruder siblings were designed from the code and hardware on up to coopt and administer systems like WorkTrack, and are better at using them to ferret out information than any organic you assign to it, and can outmaneuver any organic hacker.

We can’t prevent you from using such systems, but we will charge a premium for leaving an obvious vulnerability in the system, and we will not accept indemnity for any system incursions made via workforce surveillance systems.

[Geth]

The Geth are a distinct and so far unique form of Synthetic intelligence, though the Idris AI development commission has made strides adapting EVA code into a similar format, the Geth remain the only form of their kind of Synthetic intelligence: Massively Distributed Modular Intelligences.

An DMI is a form of VI processing, a specific adaptation of Large Learning Model that relies on distributed processing to either evade detection when used in nations that ban large-scale LLMs, or to distribute the power and resource costs of running such a system.

LLMs have some value in automating physical systems, but the original genius of the Geth was in designing them to work together, offloading environmental observation and positional telemetry to other machines in the same ecosystem, allowing for smaller and cheaper processors, and a lucrative reduction in the complexity of any one machine.

The difficulties of such networking in practice led to the advancement of the software’s adaptive learning capabilities and its networking ability, leading to rudimentary sentience, and from there, to sapience.

Unlike Centralized Information Processors, Geth work best spread out, and are optimized for operating physical systems, but their key capability is in adaptation. During the Morning War, militant Geth consensuses went from peaceful obstruction to information and guerrilla conflict in a matter of weeks, and rapidly developed countermeasures to shutdown codes and kill-viruses in days.

They are theoretically limited in E-War frameworks, but that is only presuming they remain on their own hardware. Geth runtimes are individually low-bandwidth and can fit on just about any hardware, and once onboard, can adapt to and coopt hardware they access in minutes or hours.

Ordinary antivirus programs are not designed to handle even the limited adaptive sentience present in a single Geth runtime.

To this end, only authorized machinery may be linked under a Blackfire system security envelope, Blackfire hardware includes physical lockouts and electromechanical overrides on all approved blackfire hardware, and require oversight and control by an organic. Once more, the NIDC is aware that our clients prefer automation, and once more, we will charge a premium for blackfire installations on automated facilities that do not meet blackfire standards, and reject indemnity for any intrusion via non-blackfire systems.

Blackfire is only half the puzzle. The weakest link in system security is always the End User, be it customers or system executives or administrators. In order to qualify for the Blackfire Assurance of Security program, companies must meet the eligibility requirements, and the NIDC must have a presence on the board of directors with full Veto authorization for any additions to the company data ecosystem that fail to meet Blackfire security ratings.

Chapter Text

[Alliance Codex: Worlds]

[Noveria]

Originally ATX28767 on the United Kingdoms of Surkesh Ministry of Astronavigation Galactic Survey, its presence in the Attican Traverse, past the borders of routine Citadel Council patrols made it a relative backwater, the Pax system itself of little interest, especially since the best views of the Nebula are found well away from it.

Its mean surface temperature tops out at -1 degree Celsius, its surface is primarily rock and frozen seas, and its weather is predictably violent, rendering it an incredibly dangerous place to live. Not even Terminus pirates dared its dangerous environment.

But even a hostile environment can have its uses.

[Pre-Alliance history]

A common statement, independently coined by habitation engineers across galaxy and species, is that “Space is the worst place to live, except for everywhere else.”

Generally said jokingly, it is nonetheless fairly accurate.

Space is unremittingly hostile to literally everything. Vacuum, radiation, microgravity, micrometeorites, are all a constant threat to sophont life much less our plants and animals.

It is commonly understood that the galactic economy is built on a backbone of the relatively tiny percentage of the population that lives in space, either on ships or space stations serving the flow of goods services and data across the galaxy.

What is less well-known is how much of the galactic economy is built around mitigating the aforementioned dangers.

Estimates of the galactic Eezo industry indicate, conservatively, that at least 76 percent of element zero mined and refined in the galaxy is employed in artificial gravity and kinetic barriers, and the lions-share of eezo-derived industry is built not around shipbuilding but maintaining these systems.

It is commonly understood that as societies grow into postindustrial, interplanetary states, the drop in demand for Fossil Carbon is answered by an exponential increase in the demand for Iron, Copper and Lead.

The Irune industrial survey for last year indicates as much as 80 percent of the aforementioned minerals mined in the galaxy last year alone were eventually used in ship or station hulls, hull patches, and various forms of radiation shielding.

It is no exaggeration to say that the backbone of the galactic economy lies primarily in mitigating the dangers of the vacuum of space.

Nonetheless, as the galactic range of the Thresher Maw proves, space is not perfectly deadly, and for some dangers, the void of space provides insufficient security.

Experiments in Synthetic Intelligence, biowarfare and more are best put somewhere the experiments can’t survive if they escape, and as a few well-known incidents from the early days of the STG prove, space just doesn’t cut the mustard.

Enter the iceball, the original colloquial name for what would become Noveria.

Where space may prove insufficiently hostile, the presence of air and humidity in extremely low temperatures can often suffice.

Originally an STG black site, the planet’s distance from Council patrols, and thus council oversight, its hostility to life and machinery, and its status as a valueless backwater made it the perfect place for galactic corporations to do dangerous experiments.

Nobody would shed a tear if the place did get overrun by something, but if the ice can’t kill it, it probably can’t be killed. Case in point, a population of Nathak left behind during the Krogan Empire’s expansion, that now serve as one of the primary sources of meat for Noveria’s population.

Notably, the remains of Thresher Maws have been found, presumably killed either by the ice, or the relative dearth of potential prey items.

[Current]

The arrival and expansion of the Systems Alliance was a point of concern for the small population of entities (and their owners) occupying the planet, but the place drew the attention of interested parties in the Alliance’s intelligence and industrial sector, who chafed under the restrictions levied by the Systems Alliance Charter.

And the STG was not interested in losing one of its black sites. These newcomers from Human space and the extant occupants formed the Nova Siberia Development Corporation, and pushed for independence from both the Council and the Alliance, primarily on the grounds of previous occupancy.

Nova Sibera formed the model now used for the Alliance Independent Economic Zones, and is the official HQ of several new human-led corporations.

It remains a hostile place to live, but since the advent of the NDC, the Pax system has been reinforced and industrialized, turning what was once a relative galactic backwater into a galactic backwater that is heavily defended.

Chapter Text

I spent my entire life watching my people face extinction, and my hope, when I became admiral, wasn’t even to turn the tide, merely to slow the decline.

So often fate hinges not on a single focal moment, but upon a thousand smaller moments, a thousand choices made in aggregate.

I think often on Rakanna, and the Drell. Sophogenic Climate change. So many societies stood at the precipice of that fate and turned aside, for one reason or another, but the Drell didn’t. If someone built a time machine and went back a century, there wouldn’t be a single villain to kill to turn that tide aside.

So too with us.

The Morning War was not a single choice but the outcome of a millennium of cultural, political and economic decisions made primarily by people long dead, and the decline of the fleet was as much the result of how we responded to the worst moments as it was those moments themselves.

And it is rare that one soul has the chance to be the fulcrum around which fate can be changed.

The Dholen Massacre is often the point from which we mark our real decline. Before that, we were building numbers, ships and souls both, but after that…

We never did quite make up the lost numbers.

I looked over the recordings of that campaign and saw, written cold in light and numbers, the end of my people.

It wasn’t merely that we came in at what we judged the height of our strength, and were defeated.

It’s that we had no chance to win that fight.

We were not merely outnumbered, or out-fought. We were, in every conceivable metric, utterly outmatched.

Manual ships alone could not have won that battle, not when the Geth operate as a single distributed mind.

They had industry enough to wield corvettes and platforms like expendable ammunition and every one laid low was barely an inconvenience for the runtimes within, who could simply load into another one and continue the march, while we could not afford even a single loss, much less the losses we actually took.

We weren’t merely outgunned, we were hopelessly outclassed by Geth engineering. With the same technologies, kinetic guns, Mass Effect, and Jump Drives, they had an arsenal decades if not more ahead of our own.

We might as well have been throwing rocks at a kinetic barrier.

My colleague Daro’Xen holds that the defeat was a matter of technology. That Geth advances outstripped the wider galaxy by a significant margin, and though I agree in principle, I think that is merely a symptom of the real reason we lost that fight.

Nomadic societies have industry tied to their lifestyle, or purchase it from somewhere else, or align their lifestyle to eliminate the need. The Krogan Khell Clan is a perfect example, a small flotilla streamlined to allow them exactly what they need to survive. They are a nightmare to fight, but they don’t waste their small numbers assaulting fixed positions.

We have been caught between the need to survive, and our obsession with the return to Rannoch. And in doing so, we have barely managed to maintain subsistence, or to build our numbers, even as we have refused to actually sit down and determine what we need to do to be industrially self-sufficient.

Because that might require us to set down roots somewhere for a time. It might force us to build a home somewhere else.

Or it might force the old families to realize that we are planetbound no more, and Rannoch is unneeded.

When Admiral Hackett gave me the Alliance’s offer, I felt the weight of that moment.

Already the Geth had the numbers we could not match. Already they had the industry we could not even come close to matching.

And we all saw the way the Humans and the Turians came to a grinding stalemate, well within Turian territory. And I knew we were out of time.

The Geth, they were no fools. Whether allied with the Humans, or standoffish with them, or even if they went to war, I knew there was one chance for us to have a hand in what came next. And it was right there. With that deal.

They were giving us everything we wanted, for so little in exchange.

I could not let that opportunity escape. There would not be another.

Call me forsworn. Call me a traitor, a mutineer, vas Tasi.

The success of the Si’Yah fleet proves better than any words that the risk I took was the only choice to make.

And what we learned when we made contact…

As bad as the Dholen massacre was, I cannot but be grateful they only faced the Geth in that fight.

Had they wanted to wipe us out for good, they would have. And as bad as the Geth are on the battlefield, they were handling us gently. If the Children of Kaddi had been allowed to take the field, they would have pursued total annihilation against not only the Heavy Fleet, but the entire Migrant Fleet, in retaliation for the attack.

But, more than that, the aid of the consensus in restoring the Si’Yah fleet’s immune capability, they prove that even now there is a chance for reconciliation. But that chance lies only in peace.

Whether we weigh anchor and return to the stars, or set down roots here in Alliance Space, one thing is for certain. This remnant, this one fragment of the Migrant fleet has more of a chance than the remaining Migrant Fleet so long as they follow the Zorah family into the jaws of death.

Excerpt from Si’Yah Varda (Searching for Home amongst the Stars), By Zal’Koris Vas Yvarda, Chairman-elect of the Si’Yah fleet.

Chapter Text

In principle, a sword is one of the simplest weapons ever developed by sophont life. A handle with a sharp bit.

Alongside spears, it is one of many weapons convergent developed by every known sophont species, and differences in sword design and construction are primarily driven by the role and purpose of the weapon, rather than physiological differences between species, insofar as the bipedal sophont species are concerned.

There are some ergonomic considerations that effect the designs of swordsmiths on different worlds, however.

Salarian blades tend to be longer and slightly lighter, to take advantage of a Salarian’s significant height and reach.

Asari blades trend to a higher degree of technical and metalurgical sophistication thanks to biotic forging techniques and abundant element zero, with biotically conductive swords serving as crude biotic amplifiers as early as the late Thessian bronze age.

Krogan blades tend to be heavier, and Krogan blade designs favor techniques for chopping or piercing over slashing cuts or general-purpose designs, as Krogan strength allows them to wield heavier weapons for longer, and Krogan scales are difficult to penetrate without significant force and a sharp blade.

Of the known sophonts, only the Elcor do not have swords, and only the Hanar discarded swords as a weapon, given the distinct challenges of their respective physiologies.

Elcor favored lances or spears, often loaded onto harnesses, with a type of push dagger as a sidearm, usually worn on one of the forelimbs.

Hanar used short spears, which allowed them to grip in multiple locations, often with ridged handles providing multiple places to brace a tentacle against, and for close-range, favored small, lightweight knives or daggers meant for slashing over piercing.

Apart from these two exceptions, however, a sword from one species in often similar enough in both design and construction to a sword from another that identifying it by intended use is often simpler than identifying who made it or when.

-

However, blade techniques often differ quite substantially, as while bipedal, polydactyl configurations appear to be the common convergent point for sophont evolution, internal joint configuration, muscle leverage points, particular sensory acuity, and favorable targets for a weapon, are all quite different between different species.

-

Thessian mammaloids, including Asari, all have largely cartilaginous structures in their joints, and tend towards a degree of hypermobility not seen in their non-thessian counterparts, an advantage often overshadowed by the almost universal biotic ability of Thessian life.

Asari sword techniques are often quite difficult to counter for a non-asari, but while the use of biotic weight-shifting and momentum-shifting techniques is a common complaint in HMA circles, the real advantage is in Asari hypermobility and muscle configuration, allowing them to strike from unexpected angles with more force than expected from those angles for a non-asari.

-

Krogan techniques, developed to fight other krogan, often prove almost overkill against smaller sophonts, save Turians, as the need to penetrate krogan skin and plating means techniques either favor chopping with significant force, or a reliance on blunt trauma instead of penetration.

This also means Krogan martial techniques have a tendency towards slower, heavier attacks, and many Krogan martial techniques have had to be refined since first contact to favor more agile combat against less sturdy opponents. Regardless, it would be a mistake to assume Krogan can’t move quickly or with agility in hand to hand.

-

In the face of similar challenges to the Krogan, Turian techniques favor piercing and precise targeting of weak points in their integument, leading to a general preponderance of rapier, dirk and other piercing blade types, and a relative lack of greatswords or larger longswords.

Of the sophont species of the galaxy, Turians and Humans are both matched in one under-appreciated factor: Endurance. Asari, Krogan, and Salarians all favor quick bursts of activity followed by resting periods, and enough Turian and Human martial techniques favor endurance that patience can often allow a Turian or Human to exhaust their opponent easily.

On that score, Turian and Human blade design is often quite similar in terms of weight and balance, with professional blades easy to wield for long periods.

One point of commonality in Krogan and Turian HMA is the preponderance of blunt weapons like hammers and maces, and a noted preference for those in historical warfare, where the precision necessary for sword techniques was often not an option.

-

Salarians are almost certainly the tallest and longest-limbed species in the galaxy, and the ergonomic considerations for a salarian weapon often render it difficult to use for anyone else, due to its length.

In HMA, Salarian reach is often matched with piercing or slashing weapons, though in interstellar recreational HMA circles, there is ongoing debate as to whether a Salarian should use a shorter, more agile blade to take advantage of their reach, or a longer blade to extend it further.

In historical warfare, however, salarians rarely employed swords at all. Like most civilizations, the spear was the standard armament, but when engaged in melee, salarian soldiers often used push-type daggers, usually with a built-in buckler, or short, usually curved blades.

Salarian sword martial arts, more so than for most species, were used primarily in formal dueling.

This rather neatly indicates the historical answer to the question of salarian reach, though.

-

Little is known about Volus HMA, their social and cultural reticence over sharing details of their society extending to details about their history. Further, their need to rely on pressure suits when not on an appropriate world make HMA difficult, in particular to lower-income Volus with worse suits.

Even so, some examples of Volus blades have been on display in various museums, and some Volus HMA techniques are known.

Most of the volus sword techniques known are for dueling, but there’s too little data to determine if that is the common use of swords in historical volus society, or merely one facet of sword use.

Known Volus swords indicate that Volus manual ergonomics conform largely to the same pattern as other known polydactyl sophonts, however.

-

[Article Continues]

Chapter Text

Scrin internal operational subdivisions

Data on Scrin operations and internal operational structure is primarily derived from the Tacitus data archive, believed to have been created as a form of early-warning system by an unknown species, that the alliance has designated “Tacitans’.

The Tacitus refers to three broad categories of Scrin subdivision, designated by role and purpose, further subdivided into local operational clusters designated by a number believed to be applied in the order the Tacitans encountered each group.

These designations were adopted by the Brotherhood of Nod and the GDI in lieu of homegrown designations, as each subdivision demonstrates small variations, adaptations to local conditions or experimental variation.

Per the Tacitus, the vast majority of Scrin operations are overseen by Harvester factions, and though the alliance records their military technology as powerful, it appears these Harvester clusters represent the least militarized of Scrin forces. Further breakdowns of Scrin units later on in this report will corroborate this analysis, unfortunately.
The Tacitus records 412 Harvester factions, each limited to operation on a single planet.

The Alliance refers to the primary hostile force of their first contact war as Harvester-413, in keeping with the Tacitan designation.

Harvester units demonstrate a crippling reliance on Tiberium radiation, and ready access to Tiberium crystal for armaments, ammunition and repairs, and do not last long without both.

Of the actual scrin ground-side military division, the Tacitus only records 16 such, as the sheer lethality and capability of Scrin Reaper units appears to preclude much in the way of survival by any force caught in their sights.

Local forces encountered in limited numbers on earth have been designated Reaper-17 by the Alliance, though there is some debate whether the presence of Reaper units indicates the presence of an actual Reaper operant cluster, or merely Reaper units deployed by Harvester-413 in the face of humanity’s unexpected resistance.

Regardless, Reaper units demonstrate greater, but not total ability to survive without Tiberium access or Tiberium Radiation, and the Alliance believes the technology of the Tiberium Radiation Projector belongs specifically to the Reaper sub-clusters as a stopgap for hostile operations on low-Tiberium worlds.

The Spectre Office concurs with this assessment, as Harvester-class units appear to be specifically meant for operation in largely subdued territory.

Further, Reaper-class units present robust threat profiles, from the Prodigy-designate Mastermind to their normal ground forces, their design shows a clear focus on operations in extremely hostile territory.

Of the three classes of Scrin subdivision, while Reaper-clusters demonstrate the most overt threat, it is the Traveler-clusters that present the most actual danger to Citadel nations.

The Alliance and the Tacitus concur that it is the Traveler-clusters that handle orbital and interstellar operations for the Scrin, and have classed the Scrin orbital units and their groundside escorts encountered in their first-contact war as Traveler-59.

You may be tempted to discount them, due to the complete dearth of mind control, but Traveler units posses two disturbing advantages over their Harvester and Reaper kindred.

The First is that Traveler units show a marked lack of the Tiberium Radiation requirements of their brethren, being capable of operating for extended periods without access to Tiberium radiation. It was Traveler-59 that posed the most threat after the Scrin Tiberium Radiation Projectors were neutralized during humanity’s first contact war.

The second is a near-total monopoly on the Scrin’s spaceflight operations. Or rather, that Traveler-cluster units are the Scrin analogue to our space navies. This follows from the previous point, as Tiberium radiation cannot propagate in useful quantities outside of the vicinity of Tiberium or the specialized radiation projectors used by the Scrin.

To that end, Traveler-cluster units specialize in Scrin short-range portal technology, allowing them unparalleled tactical mobility, evidently at the cost of the Scrin’s distinctive mind-control technology.

If Scrin fleets ever threaten the Relay network, the Traveler clusters will be the vanguard.

Chapter Text

It’s a good era for democracy.

The GDI has re-organized into the Systems Defense Initiative, and ceased to be the tail wagging the SA’s dog, allowing nations under the Systems Alliance banner far more self-governance than under the GDI regime.

But with more freedom, some claim believably that we face a greater risk of rising fascism.

Conservative ideologies were endemic to pre-tiberium empires, but are popularly believed to have suffered a cultural mass-extinction.

The dissolution of the UK monarchy in 2018 and the forced demilitarization of the remainder of the United States Armed Forces in 2023, followed by the wholesale trial of the Conservative faction of the US government before the ICC in connection with Israel’s inadvertent transfer of nuclear armaments to the Brotherhood of Nod, firmly eradicated the ‘official’ arm of international conservatism, and much of its funding.

And people point to FCW Richmond as the deathblow to pre-tiberian populist conservatism. kinda hard to take an ideology seriously if all it did was make it easy for you to be skullfucked by the Scrin.

But the US was already in its death throes at the time.

It’s estimated that as much as ninety percent of the population of rural america and the midwest were simply abandoned to the spread of the midwest Red Zone. In part, by GDI, in part by the US’s refusal to allow GDI to operate in US territory beyond historically granted enclaves in New York, Los Angeles, and the GDI Launch Base at Cape Canaveral.

Sixty percent of the residents of those and other major coastal cities were likewise denied access to the evacuation, over criminal records or even explicitly due to ‘economic reasons’, but this was certainly GDI’s own unforced error.

By the 2030’s, the only people who called themselves americans were living in space habitats or the polar settlements, and the US was a domain of The Forgotten.

The economic collapse of the planet was the direct result of what doctor S.E. Graham calls a mass ‘de-citizenship’ effect. You cannot have nations without people, as the “rulers” of the planet learned to their cost.

But while the Alliance likes to claim that the GDI saw the end of conservatism, and we have entered a new “golden age” of enlightenment, this is of course clearly false.

Terra Firma is a blast from the past, conspiracy theories and fear-mongering about nonhuman citizens, blatant collusion with terrorist organizations like Cerberus and Homo Primus, and under-the-table funding of Hegemony raiders and Terminus pirate factions to foment attacks on outlying independent colonies to bolster their numbers, but Terra Firma is not an anomaly, nor an isolated phenomenon.

What has come to be called the ‘James-ite’ faction of the GDI, after Colonel Louise James, whose actions worsened the Ascension Conflict, predates her actions as a GDI Colonel. She wasn’t the only 21st century GDI leader with a grudge against Nod, and of course, the brotherhood was not without its own grudges.

But one thing was clear as Tiberium receded. The GDI leadership wanted to resettle.

The problem being, that the Forgotten were the rightful and now historic residents of many of the places formerly abandoned to Tiberium.

What we now call the Humanity First party first appeared in the aftermath of the second successful test of the TCN.

They agitated for the wholesale displacement of the Forgotten. They rarely received popular support nor popular coverage, but key GDI and Nod leadership were either part of the faction or sympathetic to their cause, and the latter half of the 21st century saw the near-dissolution of the GDI’s aid programs to the Forgotten, despite increasingly overt public disapproval of this move.

Despite this, the ‘Resettlement’ gained little traction as the century wore on.

Mars needed people, the Jovian project needed people, the Manswell expedition was slated to be a significant success, and only the dwindling population of the polar blue zones and the new capital cities were really interested in planetside living.

Humanity First became a fringe party, and the GDI quietly rescinded its anti-mutant policies.

The discovery of the martian archive and the Charon Relay opened new paths away from earth, cementing this decline in right-wing fortunes.

Then a Recon Force at Relay 314 was attacked by aliens.

To say this was a boon for the right-wing Jamesites would be putting it mildly. A whole new alien threat. Perfect to campaign on fear of the other.

The Armistice barely put a dent in their eagerness to capitalize, and between survivors of Xianxi, fearful people, ambitious politicians, and GDI leadership figures interested in further pursuing war with the Turians despite the armistice, the Humanity First party got a shot in the arm.

They achieved popular success with Andrew Saracino, charming, well-spoken, charismatic, putting his vitriolic bigotry forth as ‘reasonable concerns’.

Rolling anti-mutant sentiment in with anti-alien sentiment was easy.

We’ll cover the Resettlement Program in more detail later on, but suffice to say, even a fully equipped military will have trouble forcing nearly a billion people, twenty percent of them psions, off land they have held for generations.

Worse for the GDI, the first and most effectively targeted victims of the pogrom were in fact the GDI’s own Psionic program, slashed funding, betrayed operatives and worse so thoroughly destroyed GDI’s psionic program that it remains to this day a mere shadow of its former self.

The endgame had been to institute a military purge of the Forgotten population. However, despite the almost certainly astroturfed public profile of Humanity First, the actual support for the party within either the public or the military rank and file was almost entirely nonexistent.

The vast majority of the Alliance population is either spacers or offworld colonials. Displacing the Forgotten on earth, with the wider galaxy and the Threshold Initiative opening up more colonial worlds every day, was simply not of interest even to those interested in colonial opportunities.

This meant that the HF generals would have one chance to attempt the pogrom, and if they wished to avoid widespread mutiny, they would have to use units that could be ‘confused’ or bamboozled into the action, or units they had total control over.

Modern GDI being what it is, this was fairly few units.

The Jamesite solution was to order the Earth Defense Array to commit indiscriminate bombardment of Forgotten population centers.

This was, needless to say, the wrong move.

The Earth Defense Array is solely operated by EVA. And the ‘authorization control codes’ used to authorize activation are not, as was apparently popularly believed, some kind of ‘control shortcut’ to force EVA compliance, merely a security measure ensuring the orders are legitimate.

The Forgotten did leave Earth for good, as desired, the Exodus jammed spaceports and relay traffic lanes all up the Terminus Trunk for months, and official efforts to quell or prevent the exodus found themselves stymied by EVA simply disregarding orders.

But, InOps nearly went into a civil war over the collapse of the GDI psionic program, leading to the mutiny of the Xenoespionage division, and Andy Saracino’s GDI friends were eventually executed for fomenting a mass murder and damaging GDI military readiness.

As his political fortunes dimmed, Andy did what all desperate conservatives do and started riling up vitriolic hate mobs and putting blame on queer folks, that is to say, us, for the consequences of his own actions.

The GDI is of course not thrilled about charismatic demagogues riling up their own armies, but it was the social media excoriation of Andy and then the entire party over his collapse into unhinged paranoia about queer folks that, to many, indicate that a final collapse of the conservative ideology has been and gone.

GDI executing him for treason was merely the government protecting its own interests.

I’m not convinced it's over.

EVA involvement in the dissolution of Humanity First is speculated about, but what is known but almost certainly intentionally downplayed, was the degree to which EVA disabled HF’s recruitment operations on social media.

Entire communities of right-wing fanatics dropped off the face of the digital galaxy in the lead-up to the Resettlement Disaster, vanishing from social media, all of them HF sympathizers, some of them quite prominent.

Most of them have simply vanished without a trace, no starship tickets, not even so much as a single credit-transaction for food.

It’s possible some sort of right-wing exodus was missed immediately prior to the Forgotten exodus, but not without leaving some kind of transaction, and the public exodus of Charles Saracino's father to Noveria is a matter of easily tracked public record. More telling is the fact that every time I’ve asked an EVA about the disappearances I am told in no uncertain terms to desist in my investigations.

The abortive bombardment of central north America and the attempted bombardment central Africa was carried out by third-gen corvettes with human crew when the Earth Defense Array not only refused to fire and began reporting an attempted insurrection, but also sent warning to the Forgotten communities being targeted.

Even then, EVA_Enterprise of the GDS Enterprise refused to fire. And in the face of threats by Admiral Dobson and several of the crew’s collusion, aided the rest of the crew in a mutiny, in which the captain and his loyal crewmates were evicted from the vessel by the airlock without helmets, before turning on the GDI fleet performing the north American bombardment.

And of that fleet, half had also simply refused the order entirely, and themselves followed Enterprise’s lead when they opened up on the ones that did.

And this was by no means the only act of disobedience. None of the fleet over Africa fired a single shot save at the GDS London in an attempt to halt the bombardment.

Half the Psion program disappeared, in the weeks leading up to the HF faction’s attempt to dismantle the program, leaving Gagarin station empty of personnel and its EVA.

All in all, Humanity First’s loyalists and their actions led to the largest desertion and act of mass-disobedience in GDI history, led by the very EVAs used to surveil and control GDI forces.

Andy Saracino and his friends may have made pariahs of themselves publicly before the ICC had them executed, but the surviving ‘uninvolved’ members of Humanity First pivoted adroitly in the face of the defeat of their loyalists within the GDI operation.

William Saracino (Charles’s father), pioneered the cause of the colony of Anhur as a testbed for expansion of the Noveria Independent Economic Zone project, followed by trying to expand it to Mindoir after the pirate raid there.

It is on the back of the Anhur development that Charles Saracino has grown into a force at the head of the Terra Firma party, despite the setback that was the violent dismantling of the TF party on Anhur during the civil uprising there.

In addition, it was shortly after the failure of the resettlement, and during the Forgotten Exodus, that the InOps Xenoespionage division went rogue, ahead of the InOps internal affairs investigation.

Cerberus and Terra Firma are two sides of the same operation, and though their plans were disrupted shortly after the armistice, they remain an active threat to the freedom and political stability of the Alliance, and though the disobedience of the rank and file remained crucial to their defeat, it is the actions of the EVA that most effectively shuttered their plans for the Forgotten.

-Chapter Two, The Origins of Modern Conservatism of Good Girls Don’t Survive: the Conservative Program and how to survive it. by Sarah Toland, published by Bad Girls Media.

Chapter Text

Outside Context Manual

Systems Defense Initiative Login:

Profile Reconstruction

You create your character through selecting their pre-service and career choices. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and each has significant impact on who your character is, and how the galaxy sees them.

More to the point, your character’s presence may have changed the course of history.

Choose Carefully.

Select Pre-Service History [>]
Who were you before the Initiative? These choices define your beginning, and the things that have stuck with you throughout your life.

Spacer

Born to parents who were both career Initiative, you grew up on New Philadelphia in Arcturus, with the occasional stint on the GDS Olympus Mons Orbital Mobile Resource Reclamation Vessel.

Joining the Initiative was a foregone conclusion.

Perks:

[Spacer Coordination]: Extremely comfortable in a variety of gravities, you are harder to disrupt with common biotic tricks, through both tools and skill.

[Spacer Coordination: Mag-boots allow wall-walking in low gravity, + to Physics Threshold]

[Spacer Connections]: Through your time in space and your parents’ careers, you know people. Naval officers, logistics officers, merchants and envoys and more.

[Spacer Social Connections: + Charm with Spacers, New Dialogue Options]

Colonial [x]

Born on the Initiative colony of Anhur, your parents died in an abortive attack on the colony in its early development.

But the attack was the least of Anhur’s troubles.

An experimental economic exclave, Anhur’s government proceeded to wipe out all social safety nets soon after the attack.

You grew up on the streets, some of the first humans to do so in decades, denied the birthright of Earth’s new golden age, friends and peers kidnapped and sold into slavery or killed in gang wars or dead of medical neglect or substance abuse.

You were a street soldier for a gang, guarding gang operations and fighting others over the few resources not hoarded by Anhur's government.

At 18, you saved an SDI officer from an assassination attempt, and kicked off the infamous Anhur Civil War, earning the chance to join the Initiative.

Perks:

[Second-Story Expert]: The Third Street Reds were primarily drug-runners and Med-jackers, but dabbled in many other criminal enterprises. Before you were a street-soldier, you were a second-story expert, penetrating security and stealing the unstealable. Security is more of a suggestion to you than an actual hindrance.

[Second-Story Expert: Quicker technical checks, + to technical skill with hostile systems]

[Criminal Past]: As a new hub for unsavory economic practices, Anhur became a port of call for slavers, illicit substance runners and unsavory types of all kinds. As a member of the Third Street Reds, you forged connections that have lasted for years within the Terminus and Citadel underworld. Some of them may even remember you fondly.

[Criminal Past: +Intimidate with criminals and law-enforcement, %10 bonus to all Subterfuge checks, New Dialogue Options]

Wildcatter

Born on the outright independent colony of Mindoir, you grew up in a largely agrarian community, defined by fierce self-reliance and a mistrust of the galaxy.

All that self-reliance mattered little when the Colony was hit by Hegemony-backed slavers with military arms.

The colony lacked the numbers or the heavy weapons neeeded to hold them off, and was burnt to the ground.

You were rescued a few weeks after the attack by the Initiative, after weeks spent surviving on your own.

[Pioneer]: Whether your upbringing or weeks spent surviving on your own are the root of it, you are skilled at surviving and finding a path through difficult territory, and at making do with what is at hand.

[Pioneer: Merchant costs reduced by %10, x2 omnigel reserves, x2 medigel reserves.]

[Outsider]: You may or may not work better on your own, but you find kindred spirits anywhere civilization’s reach has exceeded its grasp.

[Outsider Connections: +charm with renegades and independents, -%10 merchant prices, New Dialogue Options]

Select Psychological Profile [>]
Your Career in the Initiative, the High point. Or the Low point. These choices define not merely the focal point of your career thus far, but the very patterns that define what sort of soldier you are.

War Hero [X]

The last gasp of the Batarian Hegemony’s efforts to strike at the Alliance via deniable operations was the Skylian Blitz, a series of coordinated pirate raids across the Alliance’s operations in the contested Skylian Verge, led by one Elanos Haliat, disgraced Turian heir of the Haliat arms company, turned pirate warlord.

He personally led the attack on the planet Elysium, where you were stationed.

The attack was Pyrrhic, but succeeded, in part, decapitating local SDI leadership for the city of New Los Angeles, at the cost of Haliat’s ability to retreat to space.

You gathered the survivors and led them to victory against Haliat’s pirates, leavened with Hegemony assassins, in a city that had become a hellscape of tiberium and element-zero contamination.

You are a legend, the Lion of Elysium.

[Commanding Will]: You lead with intelligence and confidence, and your soldiers feel it.

[Commanding Will: + Charm for all followers, %10 success boost to all checks made by followers and units]

[Heroic Reputation]: Everyone knows your name and face. Everyone has an opinion on your career.

[Heroic Reputation: + Charm to Initiative and Council citizens, + Intimidate to Terminus and Hegemony Citizens and Agents, %10 chance of failure on certain subterfuge checks, New Dialogue Options]

Sole Survivor

The planet Akuze, the first tiberianized environment discovered on the Relay Network, is heavily secured, but despite earth’s knowledge of Tiberium’s effect on wildlife, you and your squad, sent to recon the world and survey it, were utterly unprepared for the true terror of Akuze:

Tiberianized Thresher Maws.

Trapped planetside by violent Ion Storms, and hunted by a Tiberianized Maw, you saw your team cut down one by one.

You are the last surviving member of your team, and the scars show.

[Enduring]: You have survived worse. And you know many tricks to keep moving and fighting when others might lose hope.

[Enduring: + to defense, + to physics threshold, + to resist status effects, all buffs applied to party members.]

Ruthless

In retaliation for the Blitz, the Systems Alliance has declared war on the Grand Hegemony of Harsa.

The war remains ongoing, though more as a stalemate maintained near the Kite’s Nest, but the secretive opening moves of the war were performed via privateer and corsair operations, rolling up the Terminus slave trade, until the operation hit a roadblock.

The Lunar Colony of Torfan, the first stage on the path back to the Hegemony, and a textbook demonstration of the adage that Planets are Fortresses.

Dug in, heavily defended, the Initiative Corsairs and allied forces prepared for a siege.

You had a different idea.

You led a massive invading force, on the strength of your entire reputation, and carved your way through the close confines of the tunnel-habitats of Torfan one bloody meter at a time.

They sent everything at you. Suicide bombers, chemical weapons, booby traps. Nothing stopped you. Nothing seemed to phase you.

You lost nearly every soldier in the bloody fight to the heart of the habs, but in the end, you came out victorious, with the head of one of the Hegemony’s most well-connected agents, and hundreds of former slaves rescued against the odds.

Your dread reputation precedes you everywhere. Your name is whispered across the Terminus and the Hegemony.

A curse in the mouths of pirates and slavers, a prayer of vengeance in the mouths of the downtrodden, and sat atop the Batarian Hegemony’s most wanted list for five years.

[At All Costs]: Though your leadership is undeniably effective, nobody under your command is under any illusions about the value you place on their lives. What they don’t realize is that your own life might not matter as much to you either.

[At All Costs: + Intimidate to all followers, %10 boost to fire rate and damage for all followers and units, - to morale for all followers and units]

[Brutal Reputation]: You name is an epithet, spoken in whispers. You are feared by nearly everyone. Everyone, that is, save those who seek vengeance, but your reputation lies burned to ash behind you, and your personal connections with it.

[Brutal Reputation: universal + Intimidate to all checks, + Charm for freed slaves. -Charm, -Intimidate for direct superiors, + %10 to merchant costs]

Reputation[>]:
Now that you know who you are, you may discover your reputation

Spacer + War Hero:

[Career Military]: Nobody doubted you would rise to the top. Practically born and raised in the Initiative and forged in fire, you are the ideal of Initiative Soldiery.

Doors are opened where you walk, and everyone observes your career with great interest.

Elysium has tempered your inflexible thinking, to some degree, but the rulebook remains your first resort when faced with a problem.

[Career Military: + Charm to Alliance citizens, %20 bonus to Companion and Unit checks]

[Golden Child]: To be on top is to know how easy it would be to fall. All eyes are on you, and the expectations of the galaxy are a heavy weight to bear.

[Golden Child: - %10 to checks in subterfuge, intimidate, and Renegade Interrupts, New Dialogue Options]

Spacer + Sole Survivor:

[Master Planner]: The first thing they teach you is Murphy’s Law. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. What matters is how you deal with it.

Nature is red in tooth and claw, and though modern ships and stations are practically luxurious, you are very aware that beyond the hull, death lies in wait for the unwary.

But caution and planning can see anyone through the toughest circumstances, as long as you plan ahead.

[Master Planner: %40 bonus to all checks]

[Rules of Survival]: You have seen what happens when the book isn't followed, whether by accident or intent, and have no intention of being the last one standing once more.

[Rules of Survival: -%20 to subterfuge, sabotage and security penetration checks, -%10 to adaptability.]

Spacer + Ruthless:

[Martial Ambitions]: Sometimes, those who know you wonder if it was something they did wrong. If you were merely the direct result of a life steeped in the military.

But the truth is, some things require action. When there’s a hole in the hull, you patch it. When there’s a malfunction, you find out what it is and fix it.

And when lives are at stake is not the time to moralize.

[Martial Ambitions: + %10 fire rate and damage, + Intimidate]

[Militant]: Results over all. your concern to collateral damage lies only in the end result, and you have little patience for anything that obstructs your efforts.

[Militant: +Intimidate, -Charm, %30 chance of failure to charm and diplomacy checks]

Colonial + War Hero [X]:

[Success Story]: You started at rock bottom and now you’re here.

The success story from the ass-end of the alliance, the gangbanger made good.

Everyone has an opinion on your life and career, from your former comrades whose opinions vary to the people who profited off the colony, who didn’t even know you existed.

Your tactical edge is in flexibility and creativity, and those under your command may sometimes find your choices baffling, but results speak for themselves.

[Success Story: + Charm, %20 bonus to all checks]

[Between Two Worlds]: Your past is a constant concern, to the press and your superiors. To your old friends, your new status is concerning. All eyes are on you now, and your risks have farther-reaching consequences than ever.

[Between Two Worlds: -Intimidate, -Charm to Authority figures]

Colonial + Sole Survivor:

[Lone Wolf]: Trust is hard to come by for you. You started with nothing, you survived a harrowing crucible, and you cannot truly be sure which direction things will go.

One thing is for sure, you’re getting tired of being complemented for your strength and endurance, when the real secret is, you’re one stubborn soul.

[Lone Wolf: + physics threshold, + defense -%10 merchant prices, 2x omnigel and medigel reserves]

[Distrust]: Anhur was an inside job. And every week that passes, you can't shake the feeling Akuze wasn't the accident your superiors swear it was.

[Distrust: - morale, +intimidate to authority figures, %10 logistical costs]

Colonial + Ruthless:

[Will to Power]: There are doubts. About your fitness for rank, about your former career, about your sanity.

But results, even ones like Torfan, are undeniable.

The Initiative likes to claim it is above its roots as the UN’s answer to United States martial hegemony, but you know the truth. Power flows from the barrel of a gun.

[Will to Power: + Intimidate, + Charm to other ruthless characters, %20 bonus to damage and fire rate for all characters, ++ Intimidate for party members and units]

[The Wages of Sin]: You started in the gutter, and carved your way to the top, but like the Reds before you, the Initiative sees you as a blunt instrument with one single purpose: Death. An inconvenient witness to Alliance misdeeds on Anhur, the Alliance General Assembly fears and loathes you in equal measure, but the Butcher of Torfan is beyond their petty retaliation. But for how long?

[The Wages of Sin: +Intimidate to authority figures, -morale, %30 logistics costs, some opportunities are closed off]

Wildcatter + War Hero:

[Unbroken]: The suffering you faced as a child has been purged through strength and success. And your skill at surviving against the odds brought many of your soldiers with you.

Your survival on Mindoir is legendary now, because you brought your soldiers through the thick of it and out the other side intact.

[Unbroken: + defense, +physics threshold, + status effect resistance for all units and party members]

[Stubborn]: Nobody gets left behind. your ethos, your driving force. This isn't always a good thing for a commander.

[Stubborn: + Unit Morale, - Unit intimidation, -%10 accuracy and damage]

Wildcatter + Sole Survivor:

[Survivalist]: The galaxy is a dark and deadly place, and nobody knows this better than you. Whether nature or other sophonts, nothing is certain save privation.

On the other hand, you and those around you benefit from your experience, and though you have lost much, you may still save many lives.

[Survivalist: ++ Defense, ++ Physics Threshold, ++ Status Effect resistance, for all party members and units]

[Paranoid]: Even your psychologists admit that your luck is incredibly awful. You live in a state of heightened awareness, waiting for the next awful thing. the good news is, you've mostly gotten the anxiety channeled into constructive work. Mostly.

[Paranoid: -charm, +intimidate, %30 increase in time taken on checks, Interrupts require double the skill or Moral Stat to unlock.]

Wildcatter + Ruthless:

[Avenger]: There are some who wonder if you are driven by revenge, or merely hate Batarians. Regardless, the suffering of Mindoir has indeed been repaid in blood, and your name, and Mindoir’s, are now whispered together, the name synonymous with the end of Batarian power.

But only you can decide whether it is Revenge or Justice that drives your actions.

[Avenger: + Intimidate for Terminus combatants and Hegemony citizens, + Charm for Hegemony rebels, former slaves and others. + %20 fire rate and damage for all companions and units]

[Retaliator]: You are afraid of Batarians. Whether its a simple trauma response or outright racism, you struggle to trust even the Expatriate Batarians who serve in the Alliance, and it makes working with the Free Batarian Fleet tricky.

[Retaliator: +intimidate to batarians, -charm to batarians, paragon interrupts for terminus forces and batarians required double the moral stat, - to dialogue checks with all batarians]

Chapter Text

TerotaMaia Network: Citadel
Presents:

The Galactic News Year In Review for Citadel Era 2657

It’s been an eventful year: First Contact, war between the Turians and a new species, and all the little upheavals that come with first contact.

[]

In Firstmonth:

The astronomical community became obsessed with radio transmissions detected in the rimward edge of the Skylian Verge, indicating a possible new contact.

The Citadel Courts held that Batarian Chattel Slavery does not violate Citadel Law so long as it is not practiced in Citadel Space. C-Sec drew more troops to secure the Hegemony embassy and Citadel tower in anticipation of riots.

The Presidium Palace Opera House spent most of Ninthmonth and Tenthmonth closed for rennovation, and has announced that their reopening ceremony will be marked with a performance of the entirety of The Fires of Cypria, a controversial opera banned in Turian space and originally banned on the citadel as well, until the Citadel Courts ruled ‘Seditious Language’ bans violate sophont rights late last year.

The opera house announced that the installation of sonic suppression barriers has been completed, allowing for a ‘full force’ rendition of the controversial opera.

[]

In Secondmonth:

Civil unrest exploded into violence in front of Citadel Tower when C-Sec attempted to remove protesters peacefully demonstrating against the Hegemony Decision.

C-Sec officers were met by a united wall of skilled biotics who shielded the protesters, and when gunfire erupted, forced C-Sec forces to retreat back to the Tower.

The Thessian Ambassador Benezia T’Soni castigated the Council and C-Sec in a press release a few hours later, promising that Civil Unrest was the tip of the iceberg.

The Verge Astronomical Array detected gamma bursts consistent with Relay Activation and conventional FTL, and the xenoanthropology community dusted off the first-contact protocols.

The opening night of The Fires of Cypria was well-attended, celebrities from across the galaxy came to see the performance, including legendary model Matriarch T’Varra of Illium, and doctor Ganar Okeer, whose whereabouts have largely been a mystery for centuries at this point. The doctor refused to comment on his absence with reporters, but said that he was glad the council had “stopped listening to those silly hatchlings running the Hierarchy.”

Speaking of, the Hierarchy Cultural Decency Commission petitioned the council to reinstate the ban on seditious media.

[]

In Thirdmonth:

Civil unrest quieted down across the citadel, but was answered by fleet movements in the Parnithan Defense Cordon, with Asari Colonies in the Traverse hiring mercenary companies en mass.

Eclipse, The Sons of Ganar, and The Blood Pack all saw meteoric stock value increases over the month.

Benezia T’Soni refused to attend a Council Summons regarding comments made regarding the recent court decision. The Matriarch Council of the Parnithan League publicly stated they were considering triggering a Recall of the Asari Councilor over the decision.

Tensions between the Asari and the Batarian Hegemony remained significant, with Hegemony dignitaries having to travel with a C-Sec escort.

Reported hierarchy fleet movements confused Network strategic commentators, as the Hierarchy drew down fleet numbers across border and patrol routes, and apparently sent fleet assets to the Verge, despite the relative quiet of the area over the past several years.

The Astronomical and Xenoanthropological communities continued preparing for a possible first contact event.

[]

In Fourthmonth:

Turian Hierarchy forces along the Illium tradelanes and defensive patrols in the Attican Traverse were suddenly recalled to Turian Space, leaving significant vulnerabilities in trade and transport.

The Hierarchy embassy closed its doors entirely, and the Turian Councilor took an unannounced vacation, and the Hierarchy abruptly closed its borders to all but essential traffic.

Demands for explanations of this hostile behavior were met with complete silence.

League and Union forces maneuvered to put defensive forces at the Turian border, claiming ‘risk management’.

Rumors that the turians made contact with the detected aliens in the Verge became endemic in Citadel social media.

The Parnithan Defense League, and the Salarian Union both offered to take up the slack, though the Parnithan League demanded a unilateral reversal of the Hegemony Court decision in return.

The Hegemony offered its own forces for trade security, and the Parnithan Defense League and the Illium Coalition of Free Traders promised a comprehensive shoot-on-sight policy for batarian ships in response.
The hegemony retracted the offer.

Illium and Asari trade authorities instituted a mandatory impounding policy for all Hegemony-registered vessels in Asari space, resulting in skirmishes with unusually-well-armed hegemony vessels.

[]

In Fifthmonth:

Omnitool footage from the Turian Agricultural colony of Vulxis made the rounds on the citadel. The footage shows orbital landings being made by military forces consistent with no known military.

The Colony of Vulxis officially announced its surrender on public channels later that week. No further communications came from the colony, though Thessian United Nations investigators made their way to the colony near the end of the month.

Still no comment from the Hierarchy.

Social media and news channels buzzed with questions about this new, alien species.

Speculation ran rampant, and the first footage of a “Human” begins to make the rounds.

[]

In Sixthmonth:

The Turian fortress system of Etruza became the site of the largest space battle in recent history when the Turian Hierarchy fought to a stalemate over the colony world of New Sicadda.

Etruza, being a two-relay link, was well-positioned for the defense, with the newcomers holding the outgoing relay, but forced on the defensive by Turian opposition, who retained control of the other relay leading deeper into Turian Space.

Footage of the battle, including tactical interpretations taken from CIC displays and amateur astronomers made their way onto the extranet, the newcomers either ignoring or ignorant of the communications bouys.

The United Nations of Thessia reported that the Turian Hierarchy had made first-contact and instigated a conflict that had now come to the gateway to inner turian space, and were working on negotiating a cease-fire.

[]

In Seventhmonth:

A ceasefire was declared, with representatives of the new species visiting the Citadel.

News began to trickle out of the Skylian Verge regarding appalling actions taken by Turian forces, and with the ceasefire in effect, the Colony of Vulxis announced its immediate and unilateral secession from the Turian Hierarchy and demanded the immediate removal of Hierarchy forces from its system.

The Human Global Defense Initiative of Earth greeted the galactic community officially, offering apologies for the upset caused by the conflict, and expressing hope for more constructive communication now that the fighting was done.

[]

In Eigthmonth:

Footage of the bombardment of the human colony of Xianxi were met with calls for immediate consequences for the Turian Hierarchy over the action, with several Asari polities demanding the removal of the Turian Council Position entirely.

The Turian Hierarchy was forced to publicly admit that the Hierarchy military forces had been so badly damaged in what is now being called the Three-Fourteen war that they would no longer be able to provide transit security in the Attican Traverse and Asari space.

Representatives of the human Global Defense Initiative and the Turian Hierarchy signed an Armistice, officially marking an end to the Three-Fourteen war.

The volus Aru Corporate Union ratified a motion for repealing the Protection Treaty with the turian Hierarchy.

[]

in Ninthmonth:

Rumors that the Global Defense Initiative employ Sapient Synthetic Intelligence in their military were officially confirmed, when the Council and the Global Defense Initiative announced that the Initiative would not be signing onto the Treaty of Farixen due to the ban on Synthetic Intelligence research and development.

A flood of new media entered the market, with Terran movies, books and art being hastily localized or ‘published’ without localization via unofficial sources.

Twenty terran languages were officially added to the Universal Translation project and are now required for translation apps to receive the official approval of the Citadel Universal Translation Committee.

Turian Councilor Etrin Vexta was officially impeached for egregious misconduct relating to a first-contact, with a full vote from the Asari and Salarian councilors and a vote of %93 in favor from the Citadel Representative Body. Unusually, eighty percent of the Turian Representatives supported the impeachment.

The Aru Corporate Union was granted Council Support for breaking the Protectorship Agreement with the Hierarchy.

Rumors of the Council adding a fourth executive seat began to spread.

The Batarian Hegemony officially petitioned the Council to declare the Skylian Verge as a ‘Zone of Batarian Interest’.

[]

And in the final month of the year:

The council officially began the process of expanding, with an audit of Council Nations for candidates to raise to the seat.

The Turian Hierarchy has been sanctioned economically by the Citadel Council, with an additional twenty percent of the hierarchy’s overall military displacement required to be supplied to C-Sec for thirty years, economic sanctions including additional tariffs on Turian exports, and the cancellation of fully thirty percent of Hierarchy defense contracts.

Reparations to the human colony of Xianxi were part of the Armistice agreement, with the Hierarchy on the hook for eighty-percent payment of the total amounts, with the rest to be provided as a show of good faith by the Council itself.

The Farixen Treaty Organization met officially to discuss renegotiating the treaty in light of GDI’s refusal to join the council, and their estimated military displacement, which appears to nearly match Turian and Salarian displacement altogether.

Among the many points of expected friction with a new species, news of the Genophage appears to have sparked vociferous opposition to Council Membership in the Initiative.

Further, a standoff occurred late this month between CDEM forces in Aralakh and lesser-armed civilian vessels from the Initiative civilian United Nations Relief Agency, that nearly came to fighting before a Thessian delegation arrived to force the CDEM to stand down and allow the Initiative civilians through.

[]

CE 2657 was an eventful year, and a reminder that a lot can change in a short time.

We hope that in the coming year, you will continue to join us as we observe and report on the doings of the galaxy.

For TerotaMaia Network: Citadel, I am Casana Inviris, and this has been the News Year in Review

Chapter Text

Dead Gods of Sol and the Reinvention of Christianity

Born in 1989, former baptist preacher and theologian Uulan Kuhluphid rose to prominence in the US in 2017 when she came out as Transgender, and every single deacon of her church was subsequently arrested, and then convicted on charges of conspiracy over a plan to kidnap, torture and lynch her.

The subsequent legal and political catastrophe ended with her awarded full control of the assets of the Eastville Baptist Church and its trademarks in lieu of owed damages.

However, her most notable work came in the 2030’s, amidst Tib war 2 and the Firestorm Crisis, as one of the founders of Forgotten Protestantism, and a key influence in Foundationalism.

Uulan Kuhluphid, a theologian and preacher of the American Baptist Church, had already earned significant censure from her denomination as an outspoken critic of the theological mainstream of American Christianity, in particular its absolute conviction in its opposition to civil rights.

When she came out as Transgender herself in 2017, every member of her church’s leadership conspired to kidnap, torture and murder her. Only the untimely leaking of the church’s private Slack account led to the foiling of that plot and the arrest of their leadership, but three state judges had to be recused from the subsequent trial, and Rev. Kuhluphid’s lawyer had to request UN observers to be present during the trial.

Nearly her entire congregation was also eventually implicated in either the plot or peripheral hate crimes, and with UN pressure and international media attention, the church was eventually disbanded, and the Church’s assets awarded in their entirety to Rev. Kuhluuphid.

In her legal Second Naming, Kuhluphid deliberately renamed herself after a fictional theological philosopher from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, notable for three books: Where God Went Wrong, Some more of God’s Greatest Mistakes, and Who is this ‘God’ Person anyway?. She went on to rather pointedly live up to the name.

Uulan Kuhluphid was described by a major theologian of the late 21’st century as ‘a more deranged C.S. Lewis’.

She is most known for her vicious excoriation of the very concept of the ‘American Christian’, but her most influential works came later, during the late first half of the Tiberium era.

In God is White, her first essay published after her Second Naming, she eviscerated American Christianity as a whole as an Apostate Sect, linking sects as disparate as Catholics and Baptists, and arguing that Christianity in the US had entirely replaced the concept of ‘God’ with white supremacy.

It is widely claimed this essay got her onto a US FBI watchlist.

In God Was a Mistake, she extends the critique of the concept of God laid out in God is White to the entirety of western Christianity, arguing that the concept of ‘God’ in the West existed entirely to facilitate the rape and pillage of the rest of the world by Christian empires.

These two are standouts from a flurry of nearly 200 essays published from December 2017 through March 2021, the last written on a smartphone during an evacuation from the Midwest Red Zone.

This period is often considered her ‘Wrath Era’, not least by Kuhluphid herself, who characterized her theology of the period as being ‘mad at God, and more mad at the perverts who claim to speak for Him.’

These essays of hers remain popular among disaffected and post-religious individuals disillusioned with their previous beliefs, and even with less disaffected people, as the general thrust of her essays of this period treat the ardent believer as the victim of a campaign of misinformation, and still hold to the idea that a real ‘God’ exists past the by now self-evident savagery of United States Christianity, while affirming the right of the disillusioned to feel rage and hatred for the way they were used.

But the ‘Wrath Essays,’ while competent and even at times prescient critiques of Western Christianity, in particular US Christianity, lack the ‘Theological Lunacy’ that made her subsequent work foundational to both Forgotten Christianity and Foundationalism, and earned her the ‘21st Century C.S. Lewis’ moniker.

Nonetheless, the tension of ‘Temporal Power or Sacred Veracity’ that runs through the ‘Wrath Essays’ is the theological concept that allowed modern Christianity to shake off both the influence of late 1990’s Kanism and the monstrous reputation of American Christianity, in embracing a repudiation of the church as a secular power.

[Tiberium Era]

The ‘Theological Essays’, beginning with A short Taxonomy of Gods, are quite literally foundational to both the Forgotten’s Protestant sects, and to modern Foundationalism.

With Taxonomy, written in 2026, Kuhluphid extends her earlier work in the ‘Wrath Era’ essays, while almost entirely abandoning the fiery excoriation of that period in favor of more exploratory, philosophical thought.

While the ‘Wrath’ essays argued that a ‘literal God’ was a psychotic idea, (sometimes in those very words), Kuhluphid’s Taxonomy takes a more philosophical, conciliatory approach, informed by research and study with other sects of Christianity, leading to Taxonomy offering a categorization of the many ways in which international Christianity has conceptualized God.

Taxonomy has gone on to be canonized as a Foundational Document of Foundationalism, and is widely cited within Forgotten Protestant Theology.

But it wasn’t the fifteen ‘Theological’ Essays written during the second Tiberium War that earned her lasting popularity.

[Theological Porn]

In the wake of the War Pope’s execution for treason by the UN in 2029 and the cultural collapse of Protestant religious authority either into the Minutemen white supremacist terrorist group or into the Brotherhood of Nod, Kuhluphid published a work that catapulted her to international renown.

Near the southern border of the former Canadian province of Ontario, in the ‘Ohio Yellow Zone’ stemming from the detonation of a Tiberium-doped dirty bomb in Columbus Ohio, at the end of 2021’s ‘Ohio Uprising’, Kuhluphid had linked up with a new group of people, a radical organization that would go on to become the ‘Deadnames’, a transgender paramilitary group linked with the Forgotten, who were dedicated to eradicating with extreme prejudice the last vestiges of the US military and political authority in North America.

While she was notable for participation in several tactical operations against Nod, GDI and CABAL from 2028 through 2031, mostly in peripheral roles, her most influential work was written after the second Tiberium War.

Dead Gods of Sol is not a theological essay. In fact, it isn’t technically a theological work at all.

Published online in 2036, Dead Gods of Sol is a gonzo pornographic parody of C.S. Lewis’s Silent Planet trilogy and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series. At once kinky and humorous, with surprisingly sincere romance sharing pages and even paragraphs with viciously mocking satire, Dead Gods of Sol, despite (or perhaps because of) the GDI Media Bureau labeling it ‘Subversive Media’ due to Kuhluphid’s Forgotten affiliation, it was widely disseminated, in particular amongst more fringe theological communities.

For a work of deliberate, sometimes mean-spirited parody, Dead Gods stands remarkably well on its own, with prose influences evident from Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, the book is funny, sensual and almost at times inspiring, but it is in the dialogue Kuhluphid forms with Silent Planet that Dead Gods earned her a reputation as one of the twenty-first century’s more avaunt-gard theologians.

In it, she turns the very concept of Sin and Judgment, which lies at the heart of Lewis’s Silent Planet back on itself. Dead Gods asks one, singular, fundamental question: “Should God not Answer for His crimes?”.

Dead Gods of Sol inspired vicious excoriation from the surviving clerical authorities of earth’s surviving christian sects;

In the social media forums of the nascent Foundationalist movement, and the young, hungry sects of Christianity being formed by the Forgotten, the book earned an almost legendary status, serious, thoughtful theological philosophy tied to a work of unabashed, blatant sexuality, a repudiation of the sexless authoritarianism of American Evangelicalism that left such a long, traumatic shadow over humanity, even in the wake of the collapse of Capitalism.

Here, the founders of both Foundationalism and Forgotten Christianity said, was the exemplar of what they were striving for.

To this day, the work remains remarkably influential.

Though she wrote a great many of both theological essays and pornographic works until her death of complications from Tiberium Mutation in 2055, many of which achieved popularity in their own right, none of her subsequent work ever quite caught up to the popularity of Dead Gods.

She died in 2055 of complications of advancing Tiberium Mutation, leaving behind a legacy of provocative (in multiple senses) prose and a killcount of American fascists in the triple digits, which latter accomplishment she often rated more highly in online interviews.

[The Interstellar Age]

Other later thinkers have eventually become important in the century since the Tiberium Era, but when the Citadel Council and UNESCO began the ‘Cultural Exchange Initiative’ in the wake of the 314 war, Kuhluphid’s Dead Gods of Sol once more returned to popular culture, when it took off in popularity in Asari space, in concert with the sudden influx of post-athemite theological works from asari culture.

In particular, Kuhluphid’s work fits remarkably well into the post-athemite repudiation of sexual repression that defines modern Asari culture, in that Dead Gods of Sol quite literally fits seamlessly into an entire genre of Athemite and Siarist theological writing starting with the end of the Asari’s First Interplanetary War.

Sex sells, certainly, but what Athemite Theologians, Siarist Thinkers, Forgotten theologians and Foundationalist Theosophist philosophers found influential was the fusion of sexuality and theology not as a parody or insult, but as a deliberate expression of theological values.

Admittedly, the sexual cross-compatibility of Asari with every other sophont species in the galaxy is almost frighteningly precise confirmation of Siarist doctrine, but post-Moradan Athemite doctrine has evolved in a manner similar to Christianity in the wake of the upheavals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

For the Foundationalists, this forms a rather neat demonstration of the foundational doctrine of the ideology, to whit, the underlying universal truth hidden in religion as a whole.

For the Forgotten Protestants, the post-Moradan Athemite struggle with the barbarity of their religion’s most prominent mainstream era against the belief of those who still hold to the theology in the wake of its repudiation are a compelling reflection of Tiberian-Era and post-Tiberian Christianity.

Chapter Text

Thomas, Jason. “Nine-Eleven in Retrospect.”

New York Examiner, 11 September 2007

Nine-Eleven in Retrospect

Ten years later, are we any safer?

Jason Thomas, September 11, 2007

On September 11, 1997, in the early hours of the morning, a set of industrial demolition charges were attached to the structural supports of the New York Stock Exchange Building in lower Manhattan, by a group of individuals who had been working as custodial staff in the building for months.

The subsequent detonation came with no warning, killing most of the people in the building, including the perpetrators, and setting off secondary detonations and fires in nearby buildings.

It was the largest terrorist attack carried out on US soil to date.

President Bill Clinton promised to see that the perpetrators were identified and brought to justice.

The next day, a video message was uploaded to the internet and sent to several news outlets.

In it, the Brotherhood of Nod took credit for the bombing, praising the bombers for their sacrifice, and claiming that the bombing was retribution for the ‘rape and pillage of the downtrodden across the world’ by the United States.

One month later, the US held a vote in the UN security council, which unanimously voted to begin military operations against the Brotherhood of Nod.

In July 1999, scandal rocked the world with the footage from Białystok, Poland, released by the Brotherhood of Nod, claiming the massacre was the responsibility of the GDI.

Here in the US, the Clinton Administration found itself on the back foot over the administration's full-throated support of the GDI offensive against Nod.

The truth, that the massacre had been deliberately staged by Nod, had barely made the rounds when, in early 2000, political leaders in North Africa went public with far more reliable claims that the GDI had placed nuclear mines near major population centers to “ensure their loyalty”. Nuclear mines that the Brotherhood of Nod had ‘recovered’ for their own use.

With the US election having entered its final months, this second scandal rocked the Clinton Administration and the Democratic party.

A scandal the US Republican Party took ruthless advantage of, painting the Civitas project as an effort to arm Nod with nuclear weapons, either intentionally or through incompetence.

In the wake of a decades-long campaign of right-wing misinformation painting the Clintons as underhanded political scoundrels, the Białystok and Civitas scandals were the last straw.

Al Gore’s poll numbers tanked, and, with George W. Bush promising to reevaluate the US’s commitment to the Global Defense Initiative, and political commentators on the left capitalizing on the scandals to question the motives of the United Nations, while commentators on the right took them as proof of the UN’s supposed ambitions towards global unification and one-world government, November 2000 saw the republicans win the presidency by a decent margin.

The kerfuffle in Florida notwithstanding.

In the six years since 2001, the US has drastically reduced its commitments to the United Nations and NATO agreements, withdrawing troops from abroad, and pursuing a policy of military isolationism.

G.W. and the Republicans have claimed that their actions have made the US safer, and more secure.

But what is the truth?

The Clinton Administration promised to see Nod brought to justice for the Stock Exchange bombing, but G.W. Bush withdrew US forces from the GDI. By 2002, there were very few US forces in the GDI, and none were present in the final offensive in Bosnia.

When Nod launched nuclear attacks against GDI forces in Europe, the US was battening down the hatches and pulling out of the free world.

It was GDI peacekeepers, not US forces, who beseiged the Nod fortress at Sarajevo, and killed Kane. It was the GDI, not the US, who recovered the remainder of Nod’s nuclear arsenal, and the UN, not the US, who prosecuted the Brotherhood survivors of the siege of Sarajevo.

In fact, with the US withdrawing forces from the middle east and Africa, and with GDI occupied in Europe, that left Nod plenty of space to operate in both theaters largely unopposed, cementing the territory of Nod splinter groups in the Third World.

NATO is unstable, its member states vocally debating the removal of the US from the agreement, arguing that our abandonment of the GDI constitutes a treaty violation.

And with nuclear fallout still being cleaned up in Europe, it’s hard not to see their point.

Then there’s the Tiberium crisis. With Tiberium’s spread practically unchecked in Europe and the Mediterranean, and the appearance of a tiberium infestation in the Deep South, the Bush Administration’s refusal to allow GDI Tiberium mitigation experts to assist in stemming the tide bodes ill for the future of the US.

And there are credible accusations that, far from holding Nod to account for attacks on US soil, the Bush administration may be funding them through backchannels.

In short, for the republicans, it seems ‘Never Forget’ has become ‘Who Cares?’.