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Muuh Taboo

A catalogue of subjects that the Muuh are reluctant to discuss

Muuh Sleeping Popsicle Ship
Image from Steve Bowers
The Sleeping Popsicle, a Muuh ice-ship

One of most curious attributes of the Muuh xenosophonts and their meta-culture is tendency to avoid, misinform or even deny existence of certain objects and concepts. This tendency has been dubbed the Muuh Taboo by researchers mainly for lack of a better term.

Despite numerous attempts by empais, transsapient diplomats and uncountable modosophonts, there are only a handful of recorded instances of the Muuh breaking this Taboo, all of them with disastrous results for the parties involved.

Topics

Researchers have so far identified over one thousand topics fitting the definition of taboo. Most of these have hundreds or more virches, monographs and papers devoted to them and entire teams of transapient researchers working on them.

Among the most notable topics are:

Nature of the Taboo Phenomenon

Current research has led to the conclusion that the Taboo goes beyond mere memetics and is in fact physiological in nature. why such a radical limitation exits and what party is responsible for it remain unknown. It is believed that this limitation was implemented by an entity of at least the 4th toposophic level, since no Terragen entity below this level has been able to safely break through this barrier. However direct comparisons between Terragen archailects and xenosophont entities are highly problematic.



Incidents

The Taboo was broken on only handful of unusual occasions, each time with catastrophic results. These incidents have led to several treaties now respected in most Sephiriotic polities. In most of these instances the Muuh defence AI, the System of Response, was capable of limiting the impact of these events. Listed here are several of the least fortunate incidents.

The Ergopolian Incident

In 9781 AT a semi-hider habitat the Ergopolis discovered a long-dormant Muuh ice-ship that was dubbed the Sleeping Popsicle for its shape (resembling an ancient terran candy). Initial inspection by local transapient PrinceLector revealed that several inhabitants of the vessel sustained only minor injuries and could be revived.

The government of Ergopolis saw this as way to change course of the entire society, if the revived Muuh revealed some of their secrets or possibly granted access to their archives out of gratitude, the Ergopolis could stop its hider tendencies and return into Sephiriotic periphery as formidable polity.

Records of later events are contradictory and often corrupted. Nevertheless some basic facts can be considered granted.

  • The dormant Muuh were successfully revived
  • Their mental state was out of their species norm
  • The Ergopolis government attempted extract information from Muuh
  • New technologies and memesets were introduced into Ergopolis society
  • Several ascensions occurred
  • Soon afterwards the local society collapsed, leaving only a few survivors behind
Vessels from neighboring polities responded to calls for help coming from Ergopolis only to find on their arrival that all the habitats were empty and bore marks of considerable armed conflict. A few survivors were recovered, all of them equipped with undocumented genemods and with considerable nano augmentations.

The phenotype of the survivors was not similar to any of the clades inhabiting Ergopolis, or even more disturbingly, any other known clade in the Terragen Sphere. The System of Response requested immediate transfer of all surviving individuals, isolation of area, memetic and psychological evaluation of any modosophonts and transapients who came in contact with Ergopolis and return of any Muuh technology still present. These requests were complied with except for return of survivors, these later appeared in Transform:Eternal polity where they were given an O'Neill cylinder to inhabit.

Today they still live under supervision and care of the local transapient Foo();.

The Sponges of Nunshi

In 10205 AT Nunshi, a system in Perseus, was settled by a group of isolationist cryo-adapted neogens of the same name. Unknown to them, the system was also the destination of the Muuh vessel Look-Oh-There[1]; at this time the Nunshi had not received any prior information about the Muuh, and were unaware of their existence.

When Muuh arrived they were initially welcomed by the Nunshi heirarchy as a fellow Terragen cryo-clade. Unfortunately for the Muuh the settlers belonged to the NeoUrak/Eternity sect of Terragen supremacists. When the true nature of Muuh became apparent the Nunshi imprisoned the Muuh and later subjected them to interrogation, experimentation and torture.

Thanks to detailed recordings made by the Nunshi it is possible to reconstruct the following events with great accuracy, at least up to the point at which the taboo was breached. The Muuh resisted all attempts of their interrogators to break their taboo, so the Nunshi utilized a rare form of mindgoo, possibly a gift-tech of Panvirtuality origin.

What exactly occurred after that is uncertain. The records are thought by many to be either corrupted or falsified given the unlikelihood of the events they describe. The only certain thing is that 37 standard years after this meeting the Nunshi sent a call for help in direction of the nearest settled system.

When a combined force of System of Response craft and the local transapient Alfonso of Eridani arrived, they found the Nunshi habitat devastated and no survivors. In fact the entire habitat was empty except for thousands of sponge-like organisms forming a continuous mat over the colony's floors. The System of Response quarantined the entire system for a century and destroyed the Nunshi habitat along with all records and organisms on board. However Alfonso created a copy of these records before the purge and later distributed them to the Sephirotic Empires.

Rumors that Alfonso or a possible third party took samples of sponges or copied their genome appear unfounded. Nevertheless several megacorps and at least one Genen family have claimed that they received a copy of the genome of a similar organism.

[1] Part of a longer name in the Muuh language, detailing the journey of ship and its origins.

 
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Appears in Topics
MuuhXenopsychology
 
Development Notes
Text by Dalex
Initially published on 18 December 2014.

 
 
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