Civilization: Subject; Why Prospect Space? [12622 HE, 522 Post Warp 07.09] When the Golden Swarm carried out its assault on our kind we had gained knowledge of them. Prospect Space. We loosely refer to it as such, as the world "prospect" appeared so often in what data was recovered from the golden swarm's members. The golden swarm brought with them multiple species from prospect space, of which included the Heavy Symbionts, Lung Walkers and the Acidic Minds themselves. Initial assumptions were these were thrall species the swarm had conquered. That assumption was dead wrong. The golden swarm was but the offshoot of a much larger civilization out there. And it managed to still decimate the human population. Those "heavy symbionts" and "lung walkers" have been found to be massive players of that civilization. We just saw a miniscule grouping from the golden swarm that had indoctrinated themselves into the swarm pathology, one they had embedded mentally into their distinctive manifestations of conscious thought in their own ways. For they were escaping a cataclysm. You know the Ramos Massacre? The mass panic for decades that erupted from it due to the belief they were about to wipe us all out? One so great it was able to shake enough warring factions into consolidating? Those USOs revealed a network of entities that silently judges us. Turns out they are the same entities mentioned and depicted in golden swarm's red records. The red records gave the sense of mass death, the name of the perpetrators translated to Custodian. They describe similar actions- emerging from some higher dimension to strike from. Interestingly we know that hyperspace does exist from these red records, but no one is clear on the mechanisms to build it and the kind of engineering needed is just not known. Warp industries have advanced much faster and so it's not clear we ever will bother with hyperspace, not in this millennia anyways. But the strategic edges it gave these custodians is daunting all the same, even to the hyperspace builders Prospect Space has. The custodian technology remains as terrifying as ever. For all our advancement over the past thousand years from peasants to what those peasants would regard as demigods we remain primitive compared to what is in this very galaxy. We can't even begin to process how [[Custodians]] distort and manipulate gravity the way they do, let alone the hyperspatial coordination they engage in. Or their defense systems. Or how a group of them is able to destabilize the gravity of entire worlds, cause stars to erupt with directed super flares and so forth. And these most certainly are just their drones- I don't want to worry you with what their civilization may be capable of as we dread they may have capabilities that rival [[the sprawl]] itself. These are the beings that appear to have exterminated [[Prospect Space]]. We can't even be sure what for. They never tell us what we must do, the hegemony that silently judges us has no interest in explaining anything. Why we aren't even sure of. I suspect they just see it as meaningful as explaining to a rat why it can't eat grain. What we can say is there has been more knowledge uncovered. The Red Archives revealed a deep tragedy. One where an ancient dominion spread [[[[void ecologies|Void Ecologies]]]] across countless worlds, uplifted countless species and augmented them to fulfill ideals that obsessively center around "symbiotic enlightenment". The Heavy Symbionts and their beliefs dominated the ancient dominion indeed. The dominion's fall is unclear, but it is known after it fell competing pack masters would find the Custodians have gone in their path of destruction. Again, we can't say why. Only that it was during the custodian invasion that the golden swarm left, presumably others did but the golden swarm survived for centuries while others may have been destroyed by custodians or simply not in our part of the galaxy. When reading these archives I find myself lost in the kind of ideals which formed their society. How beautiful it must have been to be part of it, in the embrace of the all-god they called [[Dozin]]... our civilization failed to even come close to that kind of elated state of existence. Just a farce of an ideology, imposed for centuries until one day it just vanished with the empire that perpetuated it. [[Dozinism]] was not like that. It survived to the end. They would have sought to make our society part of their cosmic ecology, in a higher state of existence and harmony with reality than our loathsome kind could muster. There is no tragedy with us. The shift to a cyborgized humanity is but a logical evolution from a species that had become ever more interested in the supremacy of the self. Few weep for [[The Vanguard]], at most cursing its name for how it had squandered the one chance humans had of being a unified species. But even the golden swarm, in all its bile toxicity and pathological hatred had tons of archives lamenting and mourning the end of the dominion and the chaos which followed. A eulogy for the dominion was played in the archives, the tonality alien yet recognizable enough to even human ears as sounds of despair and loss. Why than did the golden swarm attack us? That was the initial question that led to access of the red archives. The answer only got more distressing. Multiple members of our team just quit, overwhelmed by the realizations and by the anxieties that come with first knowing what would become common knowledge. For you see, they saw us as custodian-like in trajectory. The custodians, the things that wiped out the Ramos foundation and tried to wipe prospect space out. We structurally reminded them of the custodians. In shape, form and development. That is what unnerved them so much. One day humanity... becoming something just like the civ so murderous and psychotic it traversed this entire galaxy just to destroy prospect space. This was not the only reason, but it is evident it to them was a retributive assault by a swarm lost in its own pathos. One that saw us as a primitive form of the custodians to mutilate and torment, as if this ever would have led to any superior outcome. Whatever the case, prospect space is believed extinct. Minimal data has been found after the custodian invasion, much of which just suggesting a resistance to the bitter end. If the custodians attack is next, our kind will be truly and surely reduced to scattered ash across thousands of worlds. We may only find remains leftover from the custodian genocide of prospect space. ----- Update; The Disaporas [12640 HE, 540 Post Warp 05.07] When the golden swarm had invaded, we had diaspora groups who sought to find their home cluster. They were under the belief they somehow could negotiate a peace, or at least thrall status instead of extinction. These people were gone for over a century and now return. They have made extreme claims about what they saw, so extreme that the lack of anything to show for it makes what these former diaspora humans claim suspect. But what they describe has a disturbing amount of consistency with what we wrote about the red archives, with information beyond that. But this can be dismissed as people using and having an AI generate extrapolated information based on our information. Our own AI extrapolation passes didn't replicate what their information gave but this can be attributed to them using different inputs and novel data from other accounts. Still, the lack of hard data in the form of artifacts or items from what they kept calling "prospect space" makes them of little credibility. However we now entertain what their accounts state. According to the diaspora, they encountered a vast civilization where the interpolated vopson swarm data traced back to. It took them decades to reach the place even with their exploitation of sprawl access status. As the local [[Gilizet]] sprawl automata have proven all too permissive with those seeking to escape destruction we have to also than ask if they ripped information from sprawl archives. No one knows for sure at this point. Only that what they had to say and explain, if it is true, horrifies me. I would hope the diaspora was conjuring this information as a sick parody of our work with how horrendous everything about "prospect space" is. If we are to believe them, they encountered a civilization where extremely advanced AI beings took over after the [[Vusidian Dominion]] and created a civilization of psychotic entropy worshippers who in aggregate outnumber us hundreds to one. That they are extremely factionalized, have sectarian wars over Dozin and empires of intelligent bioships that compete against the AI entities has us in disbelief- it is nothing like the Vusidian dominion. How much can a civilization change in mere centuries? The Vanguard's fall didn't uproot the beliefs, only liberalized the virtualization that always was going on. The custodians just retreating was even stranger. They were assumed machines, why would they retreat? None of the account made sense. It was a chaotic mess, so unlike anything Dozinism stood for that this civilization being the same as the Vusidians is sickening me just validating the non sense these diasporas claim by giving it my thought. The diaspora was ridiculed for good reason. They didn't seem all that bothered by the ridicule, despite being the descendents of deserters. But if we go through what they have said, we find the following statistics: Human Space - 108380 systems occupied. Population in the tens of trillions. Prospect Space- 21082010 systems occupied. Population in the quadrillions (despite custodian extermination efforts). That is where things stand in the present. If we accept this, than our species nears a point of no return. They will arrive here. But I wouldn't fret it. It is the diaspora claiming non sense at the end of the day to give legitimacy to their desertion. It is too ancient to care about, but it is pathetic all the same. ----- Update; The visitor [12645 HE, 545 Post Warp 03.01] Two decades of work in vain. A strange visitor arrived to our system. Not a custodian, not anything of the sprawl or such. Or more distant civilizations still. It was a vessel that radiated a mysterious energy to it. With its complex, colorful patterns it rapidly maneuvered its way to our space station. It knew us somehow. It knew to approach us. We had published our knowledge stream, "Lost Leviathan: The death of the Vusidians" back in 12645 HE. It was our most detailed account based on the Red Archives and accounts from isolated [[vopson|Vopson]] on the downfall of the civilization we had come to know as "Vusidians". It was generally accepted that their civilization was extinct, purged by the custodians and with what stragglers left running into the void just as the golden swarm did. But this stranger and the USO (unidentified space object) it piloted we could tell had the marking of something that ... could only be consistent with them. The tech was ahead of our own, but not much more so than the golden swarm. It was a more advanced form, the basis had similar markings- an emphasis of regenerative scaffolding, something like that bony meta material but much more refined. It had clearly been of construction of a similar society, the blue coloration and membrane like textures didn't fully break us. But the fluidic lights, the signals that we picked up emanating from the spaceship. Knowing this, we tried to use what was known of the golden swarm language to open comms with it on a vopson wavelength. We had no idea what their goal was here. But it turned out, we didn't need to do anything. It opened comms with us and revealed an [[Utanguis|Utanguis]]. One that looked nothing at all like the sulfuric colorations and intonations of a Golden Swarm [[Utanguis|Utanguis]]. "The extinction of Vusidians led to the extinction of their whole kind. No more, the fosskemians or Utanguis, all reduced to ash by the custodians." The Utanguis read out to us in a synthetic translation tonality that read to our sensibilities as mockery. It was from our data stream, the last chapter and conclusion we had stated. "I want you to write the sequel" the Utanguis than directly stated. We were in just plain and numb shock. In utter disbelief, the communicator we had asked the Utanguis "And you are?" "Iputurvier Risuf Turmus. Your kind refer to me as Risuf for convince. Your records are false. I have arrived across thousands of photonic orbits (light years) only to find your account declare us extinct. But little did you know, the Custodians failed." What did this all mean, was what we had wondered. How much did they study us to speak so clearly to us? How much of their civilization had survived? The implications just left many in shock. That civilization is still out there. And we had no idea what the fuck it is now. The accounts of the golden swarm went back to 12220 HE. Centuries ago. It is 12645 HE. Over 425 years. We didn't know how much alien societies mutate or change, but we do know that 4 centuries was enough time to go from farming monarchies to interstellar space travel. To go from fuedalism to postcapitalist existence. To go from a society of racial mindedness to one of posthumanism. Four centuries. This is a whole new civilization being dealt with at this point. So the communicator had to ask, "What is Dozinism anyways?" The Utanguis was seemingly startled by the question, they hadn't been here to evangelize at all. This Utanguis was secular. Dozinism mattered little to it and they hadn't done much ritual for it. But still, Dozinism was something it was all too aware of and so replied, "Dozinism Universal symbiosis, your species is of no exception. I fail to the details. My leviathan, The [[3_Civilizations_ex/[[Mediators|Mediators]]]], hold to their ideals of merit. Will it or not, Dozinism exists. It is not faith, it is description. You ask this, out of deep ignorance. I did not traverse these stars to spread Dozinism." This Utanguis is far more secular than what the red archives implied. The archives made it seem like Dozinism was a deep part of Utanguis identity. One fundamental to their existence. But at the same time why is this a shock? Did humans not vary in their own zealotry? This... Utanguis just happened to be one lacking it. The way it spoke of "mediators" was similarly baffling. Was this a new society or some organization within a reformed dominion? What was meant by leviathan? "Than what was the cause? Just to correct our accounts made using what data we had at the time?" We asked "I aspire to far more, mere correction it is not. You must know we never were going extinct. We made the Custodians flee centuries ago. If your kind had hoped us extinct, you will find only dread." What was clear in that moment, is that what their civilization now is not only isn't extinct, but more advanced than it was. And likely more expansive as well. This was no dead or dying civilization. It is a very vital, healthy one that is not too far from us. And we have no idea what to make of it. Inevitably we would collide. And a civilization able to handle custodians is a civilization more advanced, and much more numerous than our own. "... our records only dated to 12220 [[1_Worlds/02_Plexus Volume/Human]] Era. We have no idea what your civilization even looks like. Are you a survivor?" the Utanguis seemingly scoffed at that question, replying only "We have thrived ever since. We are on another expansionistic wave, our leviathans fighting in a perfection of cosmic harmony across hundreds of millions of star systems. We had for a time, retracted. But now we turn outwards once more. Your civilization, on our periphery. You made the error of thinking our kind weakened or even destroyed. In truth we were strengthened. The custodians reduced to mere attempts to quarantine us. They tried to stop what we were about to be, tried to stop the emergence of higher order harmony. The golden swarm was to you but a pestilence. The custodians were to us exterminators. And we showed them brittle in resolve. For all their advancements over is, they could not destroy everyone. All the death they dealt, we have not only reserved but grew tenfold since. And now that we expand our horizons- your civilization too, will have to reckon with such reality. Your move is next. #story #narrative #Galactic-Region/ProspectSpace #Utanguis #Galactic-Region/plexus