obvious noob questions from a writer

[TheodoreBonn]

I'm my iPad ATM so limited typing.

I think we could probably make this work, and let you continue playing in the Hyades, while remaining in canon. Biggest challenges I see are:

A) people from something near our time playing a role. OA has cryogenics and other stasis tech being developed, but not until the early 24th century CE. People from that period might be too strange to make proper 'windows', even if presented as slum dwellers living in the most primitive conditions (meaning like average people live now - which ought to blow a fuse or two in your readers mind). Or maybe that could be workable (thoughts?). I wasn't able to find a date for when revivable cryogenics were developed, just vitrification. I'm not one of our history experts, so we need input from them. If they were frozen early enough, they might greatly predate even the first starships and were just loaded on an Ark w/o being woken up. There are some other...stranger options as well.

B) the early AIs in the Taurus Nexus. This is mainly just a matter of scheduling so that the ship doesn't get there until they've vanished. Just need to run the numbers.

C) the limited lifetime of the TN civ that comes after the first one. Still it's at its height for something like a thousand years and there are still people there up to the OA present. Is that enough room to play in?

D) the wormholes left by the first TN civ. I suspect they will be more of a feature than a bug for you, but obviously I don't know all the details of your story ATM.

Overall, and at first blush, I think this can be made to work. Need to get input from other members and buy in from the other senior members, but can float that easily enough.

My 2c worth,

Todd

No...after re-reading some of your material (including the stuff about the Great Expulsion)...the Hyades squares shockingly perfectly with what I've envisioned. In my stories, the Hyades worlds were already filled with leftover structures and remnant artifacts from an extinct civilization (I had them as alien, but a vanished Terran-descended super-ai civ works even better). And I already had relic megastructures in my own Hyades as well...as well as a network of stargates (but again, wormholes work just fine) that linked the primary worlds of the Cluster. High civ was flourishing on the networked worlds, but the unlinked worlds (which I called the Outlands or Outworlds), were still very much wild and woolly, and there was very much an Oklahoma-style land-rush going on as different - often competing - civs attempted to grab as much real estate as they could.

One thing I would argue until I'm blue in the face, though, is that it isn't going to be until the 2300's before at least a crude form of cryo gets trendy. Doctors in this day and age are already doing surgeries where they lower body temps and even withdraw all blood from patients, and it's a short step between that and filling up frozen human bodies with handy preservative gels and keeping them in a frozen state for indefinite periods. They'll certainly be doing this well before 2100! And as this tech gets going, it's not going to take the wealthy long to realize they can at least have a go at immortality by cryo-freezing their bodies when they die. Which means that in theory people born as late as 1970 or even 1960 will have an honest chance of winding up in a freezer...to be revived again in some far future. As the tech gets cheaper...it's also not hard to imagine that overpopulated nations might not look to cryo tech as a solution for relieving population pressure, or as a much more cost-effective way of detaining criminals without having to feed and house them.

It's going to be big business. Death has always been a big business. Mortuaries have always been profitable, and will likely always be a growth industry.

At a thought...could these mass freezers be incorporated somehow into the canon...and maybe tied into the Expulsion? Might make sense for GAIA - or whatever caretaker AI came to be responsible for these mass frozen graveyards - to launch them at the Hyades, too...lots of worlds, lots of chances, as opposed to just spewing the frozen deaders out in random directions and hoping some of them stick wherever they wind up. (This also allows the fundamental OA tenet that 90% of human history has been lost or corrupted over time to remain - the Taurus Nexus was ultimately swept aside by more advanced civs, yes? If that's where the bulk of the frozen modern-day folk wound up, that tenet isn't altered...especially since the frozen dead could easily remain frozen - and thus not having any impact post-2100 in the OA 'verse - at least until such point as they were revived in the Hyades.)

From a writing standpoint, this certainly offers a way to give characters from the modern day (with all their modern cultural references!) a vehicle into the Orion's Arm universe...which is, IMHO, an absolutely invaluable tool for making a universe more accessible to the masses.

As an aside...I truly appreciate you (and Steve) taking the time to even have this conversation. Humbled by it...honestly.

[stevebowers]

One thing I would argue until I'm blue in the face, though, is that it isn't going to be until the 2300's before at least a crude form of cryo gets trendy.

My ides on this subject is that cryonics wouldn't be entirely successful in the early period, in that the early adopters could not be thawed out perfectly. However some of these very early corpsicles could be used to create a 'statistical reconstruction' of the original person, allowing the people of the later eras to create a convincing emulation of the original. This is not the same as a full neurotechnological copy or upload, as not all the data will have survived, but the resulting emulation would probably think e was the original, or as close as possible under the circumstances.

I think the most favourable result of early cryogenic reanimation would be a kind of zombie, inhabited by an entity that thinks e is the original, but requires to be linked to some sort of prosthetic neurotech just to function. Some, most, or nearly all of the personality would be a 'best guess' reconstruction, much of which would be housed in this prosthetic substrate in the initial stages. Gradually this personality could transfer itself into the reconstituted brain, which would hopefully be plastic enough to accept this transfer. Eventually the reconstructed individual might be able to function without the prosthetics, or perhaps the prosthetics would become completely integrated with the individual's mind and body.

We do have some examples of personalities from the Information Age surviving into the latter period of the scenario; these are described as surviving through 'partial uploads' and emulations, and one route that could enable this sort of partial survival is cryonic preservation.

[Drashner1]

One thing I would argue until I'm blue in the face, though, is that it isn't going to be until the 2300's before at least a crude form of cryo gets trendy.

Actually, cryonics is a small but going concern already. Has been since the 70s or 80s or earlier IIRC. Our issue isn't with cryonics/biostasis per se, its with the notion that anything viable could be produced from current methods. Freezing does awful things to cells (even with the protective techniques we use now) and getting anything more than a vegetable from our current state-of-art seems highly iffy at best. The 2300s are when we currently predict (for setting purposes) that vitrification biostasis is developed. Less advanced cryonic techs may come earlier but I would very much doubt they would come in the next few decades.

As far as death being a growing business...in OA we presume that functional immortality is eventually perfected as well as resurrection technology (of a sort). There is still death of course, but rather a lot less of it That's rather farther in the future than what we're considering here, however.

As the tech gets cheaper...it's also not hard to imagine that overpopulated nations might not look to cryo tech as a solution for relieving population pressure, or as a much more cost-effective way of detaining criminals without having to feed and house them.

Earth's population was at 22 billion just before the Nanodisaster. Although the tech of the time made that no big deal to maintain (there were other issues going on, but it's...complicated).

As far as earlier eras having population issues and turning to cryonics to alleviate them...I've seen the notion before but I'm not sure that I find it a likely solution. If for no other reason than that a society so on the edge that it would freeze people, might then go on to deciding that it would be even cheaper to just let them thaw in an uncontrolled manner (oops) to avoid having to continue to maintain them.

At a thought...could these mass freezers be incorporated somehow into the canon...and maybe tied into the Expulsion? Might make sense for GAIA - or whatever caretaker AI came to be responsible for these mass frozen graveyards - to launch them at the Hyades, too...lots of worlds, lots of chances, as opposed to just spewing the frozen deaders out in random directions and hoping some of them stick wherever they wind up.

GAIA doesn't seem to have cared much about what happened to the people she kicked off the planet, although she did create the ark ships to help get them out of the solar system...although She might have arranged to remove any cryonic sleepers since they couldn't remove themselves (whether any would be around in the past might be problematical, but possible I suppose). Or maybe the people running whatever future version of the cyronics facilities was in existence at the time did it. Hmm.

Thinking about this, I would agree with Steven's suggestion that any revived sleepers from this period might be more the product of someone's imagination than the original people themselves. Which doesn't mean that couldn't be the case - Maybe some sort of rush revival and reconstruction job was done on them during the Expulsion years and then they were put back in stasis (using the better tech of the day) and sent off into space.

Although there is perhaps another possibility...you may remember I mentioned some 'stranger' options being possible in this scenario.

Obviously I don't know how your story is structured right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was mainly told from the pov of the newly revived sleepers. Which makes things interesting, since presumably all of their memories and cultural references and such come from them and are based on their memories. It's possible to play with that.

Imagine that the sleepers (or a subset of them I assume), wake as they are approaching the Hyades or a system in it. Their memories are from some point early in the timeline (probably more than a few decades from now, but not 500yrs in the future either), but they don't know how they got on this ship nor is there any record of their ship ever leaving Sol system (although records from this period are spotty). Did we mention that higher level transapients can think new beings into existence, complete with memories and culture and everything else with trivial effort?

Basically, the Hyades civ might be very worried that this ship of lost strangers is some sort of transapient trick or trap or covert attack. So they are likely to be very suspicious. At the same time, their culture shies away from just blowing the ship out of the sky, especially if it is actually refugees from Sol. Different factions might have different views on this and much debate and merriment could then ensue...Ultimately, the backstory of how the sleepers got there could be a mystery for them and everyone else for most (maybe even all) of the story. Even if revealed to be transapient constructs or reconstructions, by the end, will that really change how they act during most of the story?

Or something like that. Do any of these options lend themselves to the story? Obviously I haven't read it so I'm sort of just brainstorming here at the moment. As we have more info, other options might suggest themselves. To go back to your original question, we may be able to incorporate the idea of frozen people, but it may require some tweaking of the idea itself as well. When do you imagine these people get frozen exactly?

Thoughts?

Todd

P.S.: Thanks for the compliment but we actually really enjoy these sorts of discussions. This kind of thing can result in making the setting richer and more fun all around. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us.

[TheodoreBonn]

One thing I would argue until I'm blue in the face, though, is that it isn't going to be until the 2300's before at least a crude form of cryo gets trendy.

Actually, cryonics is a small but going concern already. Has been since the 70s or 80s or earlier IIRC. Our issue isn't with cryonics/biostasis per se, its with the notion that anything viable could be produced from current methods. Freezing does awful things to cells (even with the protective techniques we use now) and getting anything more than a vegetable from our current state-of-art seems highly iffy at best. The 2300s are when we currently predict (for setting purposes) that vitrification biostasis is developed. Less advanced cryonic techs may come earlier but I would very much doubt they would come in the next few decades.

As far as death being a growing business...in OA we presume that functional immortality is eventually perfected as well as resurrection technology (of a sort). There is still death of course, but rather a lot less of it That's rather farther in the future than what we're considering here, however.

As the tech gets cheaper...it's also not hard to imagine that overpopulated nations might not look to cryo tech as a solution for relieving population pressure, or as a much more cost-effective way of detaining criminals without having to feed and house them.

Earth's population was at 22 billion just before the Nanodisaster. Although the tech of the time made that no big deal to maintain (there were other issues going on, but it's...complicated).

As far as earlier eras having population issues and turning to cryonics to alleviate them...I've seen the notion before but I'm not sure that I find it a likely solution. If for no other reason than that a society so on the edge that it would freeze people, might then go on to deciding that it would be even cheaper to just let them thaw in an uncontrolled manner (oops) to avoid having to continue to maintain them.

At a thought...could these mass freezers be incorporated somehow into the canon...and maybe tied into the Expulsion? Might make sense for GAIA - or whatever caretaker AI came to be responsible for these mass frozen graveyards - to launch them at the Hyades, too...lots of worlds, lots of chances, as opposed to just spewing the frozen deaders out in random directions and hoping some of them stick wherever they wind up.

GAIA doesn't seem to have cared much about what happened to the people she kicked off the planet, although she did create the ark ships to help get them out of the solar system...although She might have arranged to remove any cryonic sleepers since they couldn't remove themselves (whether any would be around in the past might be problematical, but possible I suppose). Or maybe the people running whatever future version of the cyronics facilities was in existence at the time did it. Hmm.

Thinking about this, I would agree with Steven's suggestion that any revived sleepers from this period might be more the product of someone's imagination than the original people themselves. Which doesn't mean that couldn't be the case - Maybe some sort of rush revival and reconstruction job was done on them during the Expulsion years and then they were put back in stasis (using the better tech of the day) and sent off into space.

Although there is perhaps another possibility...you may remember I mentioned some 'stranger' options being possible in this scenario.

Obviously I don't know how your story is structured right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was mainly told from the pov of the newly revived sleepers. Which makes things interesting, since presumably all of their memories and cultural references and such come from them and are based on their memories. It's possible to play with that.

Imagine that the sleepers (or a subset of them I assume), wake as they are approaching the Hyades or a system in it. Their memories are from some point early in the timeline (probably more than a few decades from now, but not 500yrs in the future either), but they don't know how they got on this ship nor is there any record of their ship ever leaving Sol system (although records from this period are spotty). Did we mention that higher level transapients can think new beings into existence, complete with memories and culture and everything else with trivial effort?

Basically, the Hyades civ might be very worried that this ship of lost strangers is some sort of transapient trick or trap or covert attack. So they are likely to be very suspicious. At the same time, their culture shies away from just blowing the ship out of the sky, especially if it is actually refugees from Sol. Different factions might have different views on this and much debate and merriment could then ensue...Ultimately, the backstory of how the sleepers got there could be a mystery for them and everyone else for most (maybe even all) of the story. Even if revealed to be transapient constructs or reconstructions, by the end, will that really change how they act during most of the story?

Or something like that. Do any of these options lend themselves to the story? Obviously I haven't read it so I'm sort of just brainstorming here at the moment. As we have more info, other options might suggest themselves. To go back to your original question, we may be able to incorporate the idea of frozen people, but it may require some tweaking of the idea itself as well. When do you imagine these people get frozen exactly?

Thoughts?

Todd

P.S.: Thanks for the compliment but we actually really enjoy these sorts of discussions. This kind of thing can result in making the setting richer and more fun all around. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us.

Gawds...you guys suck. (Can't STAND it when people think of my great ideas first, though I should be used to it by now...I've been here, like, three days, after all.) Actually in my story it is a covert attack.

In my story, a rogue AI that was run off Earth for being too...destructive has used nano (actually reprogrammed cancer cells, monocolonals) to infect both the hull and the crew of the colony ship, using these 60,000 hapless refugees as distributed nodes and servile waldos. This rogue AI got in on the ground floor, implanted some distributed nodes in the hull...and is using this flying beacon of hope...to attempt to infect its next target, that being the colony in question.

The interdiction ship - told from the viewpoint of a Dexter-type psychopath from Earth who has been blessed by a particularly malevolent archailect who has taken a liking to him with some unusually potent imbedded firepower - picks up on the ruse, and...duly blows the ship out of the sky.

Remind me again...why aren't you guys running scifi yet?

[TheodoreBonn]

One thing I would argue until I'm blue in the face, though, is that it isn't going to be until the 2300's before at least a crude form of cryo gets trendy.

My ides on this subject is that cryonics wouldn't be entirely successful in the early period, in that the early adopters could not be thawed out perfectly. However some of these very early corpsicles could be used to create a 'statistical reconstruction' of the original person, allowing the people of the later eras to create a convincing emulation of the original. This is not the same as a full neurotechnological copy or upload, as not all the data will have survived, but the resulting emulation would probably think e was the original, or as close as possible under the circumstances.

I think the most favourable result of early cryogenic reanimation would be a kind of zombie, inhabited by an entity that thinks e is the original, but requires to be linked to some sort of prosthetic neurotech just to function. Some, most, or nearly all of the personality would be a 'best guess' reconstruction, much of which would be housed in this prosthetic substrate in the initial stages. Gradually this personality could transfer itself into the reconstituted brain, which would hopefully be plastic enough to accept this transfer. Eventually the reconstructed individual might be able to function without the prosthetics, or perhaps the prosthetics would become completely integrated with the individual's mind and body.

We do have some examples of personalities from the Information Age surviving into the latter period of the scenario; these are described as surviving through 'partial uploads' and emulations, and one route that could enable this sort of partial survival is cryonic preservation.

Hmm. I actually had some of the same thoughts...mainly, that these colonists were going to be considered to be damaged goods...from a product that was less than desirable to BEGIN with (that being, poorly-educated baseline humans from a crude and barbaric age, meaning, ours.) In my story I had that the chemical process had damaged a lot of cells, meaning, these colonists were going to need a LOT of medical reconstruction...but reading through the EG, apparently to stay in canon, reconstructing them physically would be the least of the problems. So...having them have incomplete mentalities that must be reconstructed...that's interesting. (I'm remembering the case of Pham Nuwen from A Fire Upon the Deep, after Old One puts him back together again...as best as the Power could, anyhow. Pham had a lot of gaps in his memory.)

Looking through the EG - some of which, it looks like, you yourself wrote! - I see that early star voyages were done by long-lived supers because cryo wasn't reliable. Also looks like Anders Sandberg did touch on the subject of freezing, but that corpsicles weren't retrievable...in the early Interplanetary Age, anyhow.

Think I can work within this, though. Again...very much appreciate the input.

[Drashner1]

Gawds...you guys suck. (Can't STAND it when people think of my great ideas first, though I should be used to it by now...I've been here, like, three days, after all.) Actually in my story it is a covert attack.

Technically, you did think of the idea first since you developed the story idea some time ago We just came to a similar conclusion after you provided enough information.

On a related note, and sort of connected to the ideas below - how far in the future do you think you could have your sleepers hail from without compromising their 'real life relatability'? Would people who were frozen a hundred years from now be too far future?

I ask, because if people are willing to engage in cryonic storage now, when no method of reviving them is known, then consider what might happen if science developed a way of ALMOST reviving them.

As you probably know some species of frogs can survive being frozen:

http://www.livescience.com/32175-can-fro...rozen.html

Given your earlier comments on RL use of cooling in surgeries and such (and subject to our resident bioscience members not having a stroke at what I'm about to suggest), it might be reasonable to postulate that sometime in the next hundred years a method is developed to replicate what these frogs do in other (simple) organisms (at least to some degree). Perhaps only a wide range of cold blooded creatures, or maybe even some simple warm-blooded creatures. Maybe in combo with some sort of hibernation tech such as bears and other animals do.

The tech hasn't been developed to the point where it will work on humans, or been demonstrated to work safely on humans for any great length of time, or whatever but it would seem much more promising than cryonics to many. So perhaps there is a boom in 'cold sleep' enterprises.

As part of this large numbers of people, most with incurable diseases go into 'cold sleep' with the thought that future tech will be able to wake them and cure them (much like modern cryonics patients). Except that it turns out to be harder than first thought to get the tech to work on a human and get a functioning nervous system out the other side (animal subjects tend to develop cancer, nerve damage or deterioration and other not great things, but surely that will be cured or curable eventually right?). So the sleepers languish for centuries, first watched over by people and later by AI support systems. Which brings us to...

In my story, a rogue AI that was run off Earth for being too...destructive has used nano (actually reprogrammed cancer cells, monocolonals) to infect both the hull and the crew of the colony ship, using these 60,000 hapless refugees as distributed nodes and servile waldos. This rogue AI got in on the ground floor, implanted some distributed nodes in the hull...and is using this flying beacon of hope...to attempt to infect its next target, that being the colony in question.

Been doing some thinking about this. Not sure if the following will still be relevant to your story depending on how it's developing, but will throw it out and see if it helps.

As part of the OA timeline we have mention of a conflict between different camps of transapient AIs:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49a7d33abf557

The losers (many of them anyway) ended being driven from the solar system, using shanghaied starprobes to leave. I'm honestly not entirely sure about the starprobes bit (we don't talk a lot about this phase of early interstellar exploration and should probably expand on it), but it does lend itself to a couple of possible plots, one of which might fit into your story as so far described. To wit:

Option A) The conflict takes place much as already described. One of the losers, an ahuman AI, oversees one or more cryonics facilities. In secret it has been developing the sort of waldo tech you describe. Or maybe it just has some attachment to the sleepers as pets or a remnant of its programming. Or maybe it wants to torture them for some reason or do experiments or whatever. Regardless, it decides to leave Sol and take them with it. Via various tricky methods, it manipulates events so that the sleepers are loaded aboard a star probe aimed in the direction of the Hyades and uploads itself aboard. And then...

Relating to this, do you actually need 60,000 sleepers (which mass rather a lot), or would 6000 work?

Option B) The conflict between the AI factions takes place much closer to the nanodisaster (or maybe it's a WWI and WWII type of thing - more than one AI conflict). The conflict in question takes place near or in the ND (maybe the ND is a side-effect of the battle - a theory that some might hold in later centuries, along with the notion that GAIA was created to be a weapon that ended up getting out of control and turning on Her transapient creators - forcing them to flee Earth and causing some to flee Sol entirely). One of these is an ahuman AI that oversees a cold sleep facility as mentioned above. It first gets off Earth and then decides to leave out of fear of GAIA or the Dark Age or something. To get out of town, it manipulates events to get its sleepers and itself loaded aboard one of GAIA's arks and then takes off with it, heading for the Hyades. It might either leave before more people can be loaded aboard (I don't think we indicate how many a given ark could carry), only bring enough sleepers to fully fill the ship, or kill off the rest of the passengers en route. And then...

With this options, 60,000 sleepers is quite doable. It's an ark ship after all

Regardless of the option picked, while in flight the AI detects the passage of faster ships and the colonization of the Hyades. First by ahuman AIs (which it likes), creating the Taurus Nexus and later by biologicals (which makes it very unhappy). Knowing that it is stuck heading to the Hyades, wanting to be there, and resenting the idea of dirty bios taking its chosen plot of space, it begins re-engineering the sleepers into bioweapons of some kind such as you describe or something more OA-esque. Eventually it arrives at a system in the Hyades and the story begins...

Or something like that - just some stuff that occurred in the shower this AM. YMMV. And some of this would need approval by the larger group since we might need to add or tweak some things to the setting.

The interdiction ship - told from the viewpoint of a Dexter-type psychopath from Earth who has been blessed by a particularly malevolent archailect who has taken a liking to him with some unusually potent imbedded firepower - picks up on the ruse, and...duly blows the ship out of the sky.

Remind me again...why aren't you guys running scifi yet?

Are you thinking that all the colonists die? Many or most? I'm not overly wedded to happy endings, but something where some of the characters survive would be nice Note that at the time the Taurus Nexus was a major modosophont civ, there wouldn't have been anything higher than the Third Singularity around AFAIK. Of course their brains are the size of Earth's moon, and they can make (crude and inefficient) wormholes, convert matter completely to energy, and create magmatter, among other things. So some quite potent firepower can be had if you want it.

Btw what sort of tech and wonders were you thinking of populating the Hyades/Taurus Nexus with? Some things appear later in the timeline and wouldn't be available. Others would very much be. We might also want to discuss wormholes. OA wormholes have various interesting features and limits and can take a bit of getting used to. Have you read the Layman's Guide by chance?

As to why we aren't running scifi yet...we talked about it but it seemed like it would be too much work

Anyway, hope all of the above helps. A lot depends on when you see your characters hailing from and some other factors, but hopefully this gives a starting point for discussion.

Hope this helps,

Todd

[TheodoreBonn]

Gawds...you guys suck. (Can't STAND it when people think of my great ideas first, though I should be used to it by now...I've been here, like, three days, after all.) Actually in my story it is a covert attack.

Technically, you did think of the idea first since you developed the story idea some time ago We just came to a similar conclusion after you provided enough information.

On a related note, and sort of connected to the ideas below - how far in the future do you think you could have your sleepers hail from without compromising their 'real life relatability'? Would people who were frozen a hundred years from now be too far future?

I ask, because if people are willing to engage in cryonic storage now, when no method of reviving them is known, then consider what might happen if science developed a way of ALMOST reviving them.

As you probably know some species of frogs can survive being frozen:

http://www.livescience.com/32175-can-fro...rozen.html

Given your earlier comments on RL use of cooling in surgeries and such (and subject to our resident bioscience members not having a stroke at what I'm about to suggest), it might be reasonable to postulate that sometime in the next hundred years a method is developed to replicate what these frogs do in other (simple) organisms (at least to some degree). Perhaps only a wide range of cold blooded creatures, or maybe even some simple warm-blooded creatures. Maybe in combo with some sort of hibernation tech such as bears and other animals do.

The tech hasn't been developed to the point where it will work on humans, or been demonstrated to work safely on humans for any great length of time, or whatever but it would seem much more promising than cryonics to many. So perhaps there is a boom in 'cold sleep' enterprises.

As part of this large numbers of people, most with incurable diseases go into 'cold sleep' with the thought that future tech will be able to wake them and cure them (much like modern cryonics patients). Except that it turns out to be harder than first thought to get the tech to work on a human and get a functioning nervous system out the other side (animal subjects tend to develop cancer, nerve damage or deterioration and other not great things, but surely that will be cured or curable eventually right?). So the sleepers languish for centuries, first watched over by people and later by AI support systems. Which brings us to...

In my story, a rogue AI that was run off Earth for being too...destructive has used nano (actually reprogrammed cancer cells, monocolonals) to infect both the hull and the crew of the colony ship, using these 60,000 hapless refugees as distributed nodes and servile waldos. This rogue AI got in on the ground floor, implanted some distributed nodes in the hull...and is using this flying beacon of hope...to attempt to infect its next target, that being the colony in question.

Been doing some thinking about this. Not sure if the following will still be relevant to your story depending on how it's developing, but will throw it out and see if it helps.

As part of the OA timeline we have mention of a conflict between different camps of transapient AIs:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49a7d33abf557

The losers (many of them anyway) ended being driven from the solar system, using shanghaied starprobes to leave. I'm honestly not entirely sure about the starprobes bit (we don't talk a lot about this phase of early interstellar exploration and should probably expand on it), but it does lend itself to a couple of possible plots, one of which might fit into your story as so far described. To wit:

Option A) The conflict takes place much as already described. One of the losers, an ahuman AI, oversees one or more cryonics facilities. In secret it has been developing the sort of waldo tech you describe. Or maybe it just has some attachment to the sleepers as pets or a remnant of its programming. Or maybe it wants to torture them for some reason or do experiments or whatever. Regardless, it decides to leave Sol and take them with it. Via various tricky methods, it manipulates events so that the sleepers are loaded aboard a star probe aimed in the direction of the Hyades and uploads itself aboard. And then...

Relating to this, do you actually need 60,000 sleepers (which mass rather a lot), or would 6000 work?

Option B) The conflict between the AI factions takes place much closer to the nanodisaster (or maybe it's a WWI and WWII type of thing - more than one AI conflict). The conflict in question takes place near or in the ND (maybe the ND is a side-effect of the battle - a theory that some might hold in later centuries, along with the notion that GAIA was created to be a weapon that ended up getting out of control and turning on Her transapient creators - forcing them to flee Earth and causing some to flee Sol entirely). One of these is an ahuman AI that oversees a cold sleep facility as mentioned above. It first gets off Earth and then decides to leave out of fear of GAIA or the Dark Age or something. To get out of town, it manipulates events to get its sleepers and itself loaded aboard one of GAIA's arks and then takes off with it, heading for the Hyades. It might either leave before more people can be loaded aboard (I don't think we indicate how many a given ark could carry), only bring enough sleepers to fully fill the ship, or kill off the rest of the passengers en route. And then...

With this options, 60,000 sleepers is quite doable. It's an ark ship after all

Regardless of the option picked, while in flight the AI detects the passage of faster ships and the colonization of the Hyades. First by ahuman AIs (which it likes), creating the Taurus Nexus and later by biologicals (which makes it very unhappy). Knowing that it is stuck heading to the Hyades, wanting to be there, and resenting the idea of dirty bios taking its chosen plot of space, it begins re-engineering the sleepers into bioweapons of some kind such as you describe or something more OA-esque. Eventually it arrives at a system in the Hyades and the story begins...

Or something like that - just some stuff that occurred in the shower this AM. YMMV. And some of this would need approval by the larger group since we might need to add or tweak some things to the setting.

The interdiction ship - told from the viewpoint of a Dexter-type psychopath from Earth who has been blessed by a particularly malevolent archailect who has taken a liking to him with some unusually potent imbedded firepower - picks up on the ruse, and...duly blows the ship out of the sky.

Remind me again...why aren't you guys running scifi yet?

Are you thinking that all the colonists die? Many or most? I'm not overly wedded to happy endings, but something where some of the characters survive would be nice Note that at the time the Taurus Nexus was a major modosophont civ, there wouldn't have been anything higher than the Third Singularity around AFAIK. Of course their brains are the size of Earth's moon, and they can make (crude and inefficient) wormholes, convert matter completely to energy, and create magmatter, among other things. So some quite potent firepower can be had if you want it.

Btw what sort of tech and wonders were you thinking of populating the Hyades/Taurus Nexus with? Some things appear later in the timeline and wouldn't be available. Others would very much be. We might also want to discuss wormholes. OA wormholes have various interesting features and limits and can take a bit of getting used to. Have you read the Layman's Guide by chance?

As to why we aren't running scifi yet...we talked about it but it seemed like it would be too much work

Anyway, hope all of the above helps. A lot depends on when you see your characters hailing from and some other factors, but hopefully this gives a starting point for discussion.

Hope this helps,

Todd

Pretty much we've been thinking along a lot of the same lines...and I think it definitely can be made to square up with the OA canon with minimal disruption. Keep in mind this story I wrote was just the first of a series of partly-completed (and in some cases, outdated) stories that I wrote, but the more I read the history and culture of the Hyades and the Taurus Nexus the more I think that our world-universes square up...honestly, we seem to have been working off a lot of the same postulates.

As for sleepers, pretty much the way I had it is, people who died, and had money, started commonly freezing themselves. Others wound up shanghied into freezers by a variety of methods (especially criminals, which provides a huge number of potential future villains for my stories.) The concept of "perpetual care" ensured that legally, even those the freezing operations could be bought and sold, the "perpetual care" aspect could not be set aside. In the early days the freezers would have been especially crude, but like every other big industry there would have been a lot of consolidation over time (keep in mind, these freezer outfits would have had huge financial resources, due to the trust funds associated with those who had died), so buying and selling these earlier, more dispersed freezer cemeteries would get to be HUGE business. Probably, over time, these consolidated mass freezers would have gotten moved up into orbital stations for more convenient storage. But especially due to the fact that earlier cryo was so disruptive to cells - especially brain cells - the tech to revive these earlier sleepers wouldn't have existed until much later per the OA canon. By the time this point arrives we're into the nano wars, the rise of GAIA, the dark ages. And maintaining these freezers would have gotten to be the purview of an AI quite early. (I'll call this AI "Charon", the ferryman of the underworld, for the sake of simplicity.)

When all the unpleasantness happens on Earth - the nano wars and subsequent Expulsion and dark ages - Charon's got a problem: he's got a duty to fulfill (perpetual care, and eventually resurrection) and needs to do something with these deaders. Which means that even though Charon now has the tech to resurrect the dead, Sol is a mess, and obviously the sleepers have got to go elsewhere. The abandoned relic megastructures (left when the Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ that had populated the Hyades transcended), are his solution. My thinking is that the Xi Geminorum themselves, before they transcended, built a megastructure called "Purgatory" as a new home for these revived deaders as fulfillment of some sort of trust. (The Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ might even be descended from Charon in some fashion.)

Purgatory is around an area of the Hyades I call the Godhead, a collection of megastructures built around the eight white dwarfs in the center of the Cluster's core. Through matter mining (I need to go over the canon on how exactly it works in the OA universe), the Xi Geminorum (again, these were aliens in my 'Verse, but I really like the idea that they're an ai-based Terran superciv a lot better) extracted a truly awe-inspiring amount of matter, which they then used to construct the megastructures that formed the base of their hyper-advanced civ.

By this point Charon has enormous financial resources (remember, he's got the trust funds of all those who died, which would have grown to an awe-inspiring amount of wealth over the centuries), and so he begins constructing arks and launching the resurrected towards Purgatory. Also by this point...the Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ has transcended and vanished, and the land rush from New Castillo and other civs to colonize the Hyades is on. (In the OA canon, this is a period of three centuries where everybody was colonizing the Hyades.) What eventually emerged from this, as you pointed out, was the Taurus Nexus.

But it's this wild and woolly colonial period in the Hyades that's interesting to me. What I especially like, in the OA Canon, is that the Hyades stayed low-topospheric for quite awhile, and there were, per the canon, "very few entities above SI:2".

Usually these arks just went straight to Purgatory, in my story. But this particular ark is off course...and heading for a colony world instead of the Cluster Core at Godhead. (Turns out it was not an accident, the malevolent AI that took control of this vessel knew Charon would sniff it out and snuff it if it ever reached Purgatory.)

Can I make it somewhat happier ending? Dunno. This story is dark. The viewpoint character is a former serial killer from Earth who is in control of some seriously potent godtech weaponry. (He's also got a dissembler bomb strapped to his chest, and lives 99% of his life sequestered in VR, because the rest of the crew does not exactly trust him...after all, he's a psychopath with enough firepower to obliterate a continent.)

Still...might be an interesting reversal if this guy were to somehow save some people, as opposed to just summarily nuking them all...

[Drashner1]

By the time this point arrives we're into the nano wars, the rise of GAIA, the dark ages. And maintaining these freezers would have gotten to be the purview of an AI quite early. (I'll call this AI "Charon", the ferryman of the underworld, for the sake of simplicity.)

Hm. Up to this point, you're probably fine within OA canon, as we've been discussing. The next section starts running into a problem, I'm afraid. Please see below...

When all the unpleasantness happens on Earth - the nano wars and subsequent Expulsion and dark ages - Charon's got a problem: he's got a duty to fulfill (perpetual care, and eventually resurrection) and needs to do something with these deaders. Which means that even though Charon now has the tech to resurrect the dead, Sol is a mess, and obviously the sleepers have got to go elsewhere. The abandoned relic megastructures (left when the Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ that had populated the Hyades transcended), are his solution. My thinking is that the Xi Geminorum themselves, before they transcended, built a megastructure called "Purgatory" as a new home for these revived deaders as fulfillment of some sort of trust. (The Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ might even be descended from Charon in some fashion.)

And this is the problematic bit. The Taurus Nexus civ wasn't detected by Sol/the First Federation until 1558 AT. But the Nanodisaster started in 540AT followed by the Great Expulsion and about 400yrs of Dark Age before the Federation got going. So basically, the Nexus wasn't discovered until something like 1000yrs after the Nanodisaster and Great Expulsion took place. So it would be basically impossible for Charon to have been in contact with them since they would have been either still en route to the Hyades themselves or only just getting started when the major stuff went down at Sol.

On a semi-related note (and a bit we need to tweak in the current EGs anyway), in current canon it takes a minimum of a Third Singularity mind to create even a crude wormhole. So the first TN civ would have needed some of its members to get up to this level to create their gates. Singularities and ascension/transcension are also kind of different in OA, so if you need any further explanation on how these work for us, please let me know and I can give you the 25c tour

Can I make it somewhat happier ending? Dunno. This story is dark. The viewpoint character is a former serial killer from Earth who is in control of some seriously potent godtech weaponry. (He's also got a dissembler bomb strapped to his chest, and lives 99% of his life sequestered in VR, because the rest of the crew does not exactly trust him...after all, he's a psychopath with enough firepower to obliterate a continent.)

Still...might be an interesting reversal if this guy were to somehow save some people, as opposed to just summarily nuking them all...

Hmm. In OA (and after much discussion) we've more or less determined that nanotech doesn't make the best weapon in most cases. But we can certainly fit your guy out with something suitably pyrotechnic.

In terms of a happy ending - it's certainly not required, just a thought I had based on my personal preference for at least semi-happy endings. OA definitely has some dark elements to it. Read the Queen of Pain (Yes, Jolonah, There is a Hell and Initiation) stories by Darren Ryding sometime. Or Bunny Love Has No Limits by Daniel Boese for a rather sexier (but creepier if you think about it) take on things.

Getting back to the main points, there are certainly ways that we can resolve the issues mentioned, just need to discuss more.

Hope this helps,

Todd

[kch49er]

Regarding, freezing I think the companies will really take off when they can technically and legally freeze a living person (at the moment they tend to freeze disembodied heads after death) since a terminally ill but wealthy person can freeze themselves until a cure is found(placing their assets in the freezer co's trust) Since they are not dead, and don't die there is no dispute over the will, they have money to pay for a cure and wake up when possible and the freezer company makes money in the meantime as a management fee. This wouldn't stop them from reconstructing best guess individuals, and might even pay for it.

Personally I'd say if you went with the best guess reconstruction route your character could be from tomorrow. With cloning tech it doesn't matter that all that's left is a head anyway.

[TheodoreBonn]

OK...got on a mad writing rampage the last couple days and here's what I came up with...have at it and see if it passes muster (if it doesn't, I'll just keep trying until it does, no fear.) This is written Encyclopedia Galactica-style...

THE SCHUMANN FOUNDATION AND CHARON

By the mid 2030's, a number of “Immortality Foundations” had arisen across the globe, most organized around the same basic premise: in exchange for a flat fee (usually around a million dollars, or the International equivalent thereof), plus the assignment of the deceased's assets into a trust to be managed by the foundation, the body of the deceased would be cryonically preserved, with the stipulation that when sufficient technology had arisen to cure whatever killed the subject, the subject would be resurrected and his or her financial assets returned. Despite substantial widespread skepticism of the concept – in particular, the suspicion that precisely because these foundations were legally obligated to return the assets of the frozen upon revival, there would be strong motivation by those controlling these trusts to never actually revive the subject - these Immortality Foundations became a popular funeral service among the wealthy. For many, even the possibility of future resurrection in some far future seemed preferable to the certainty of traditional burial methods and cremation. This process came to be known as “deadsleeping” and “deadfreezing”.

Technologies and methods for freezing the dead varied widely in these early years; in some cases, the entire body was frozen (a more expensive option), in others, merely the head was preserved.

By 130 AT, the myriad number of Immortality Foundations had largely been consolidated into two primary competitors, FutureLife PSG and the Schumann Foundation. FutureLife PSG was organized as a mostly traditional investment firm and remained, throughout its history, largely human-directed, whereas the Schumann Foundation was far more proactive, investing heavily in cloning technology and bio-research, and also integrated AI's into its corporate decision-making loop. By 150 AT, an extremely high-end superturing dubbed “Charon”, had effectively assumed control of the Schumann Foundation, answerable only to a board-appointed human chairman whose position became increasingly ceremonial as the Schumann Foundation expanded its scope over the next several decades. With the accumulated trusts of several million wealthy individuals at their disposal, FutureLife PSG and the Schumann Foundation had become enormously powerful entities, rivaling many of the top megacorporations of the era in size and scale. By 180 AT, however, cloning and medical technology had progressed sufficiently that with the exception of a few exotic genetic conditions, most cancers, injuries, and diseases could be readily cured, and the popularity of deadfreezing plummeted. In particular the premise of eventual resurrection began to seem, to many, unattainable, particularly since due to cellular damage of brain tissue, the memories of revived cryonics subjects could not be reconstructed sufficiently accurately as to pass the “personality integrity verification” (PIV) protocols legally required to declare a subject revived.

Still, in all, it is estimated that more than 90 million dead subjects were interred at the various cryonics foundations, which contained deadsleeper repositories scattered across the globe. More than 75% of the subjects who entered the cryonics repositories of the various Immortality Foundations did so between the years of 60AT to 180AT (the oldest of these had actually been born in the late 1950's pre-AT, predating even the Information Age.)

By 330 AT, advances in destructive downloading, in conjunction with long-understood cloning technology, had rendered the practice of deadfreezing almost completely obsolete. Improvements in medical bioscience, cryonics technology and memory-retrieval techniques likewise allowed the Immortality Foundations to deliver their first true successes; by 350 AT virtually all of those who had entered the Immortality Foundations post-180 AT had been resurrected and re-integrated into Earth's civilization, usually with less than a 170-year moratorium between death and resurrection.

It should be noted that not all cryonic freezing of this time was voluntary, or even applied to the deceased. Many criminals convicted of capital offenses were sentenced to “deadsleep” for periods of often greater than centuries, giving various governments and law-enforcement agencies a less controversial alternative to outright execution. In a number of countries suffering from intense overpopulation, particularly in the semi-industrialized “Second World” nations, it became common practice to “freeze” those convicted of even petty crimes as a cheaper alternative to incarceration. Some of the worst offenses occurred in Brazil; around 110 AT, coveting the clifftop regions above the beaches of Rio De Janeiro that remained covered by swaths of shanty slums (favelas) the corrupt Alvaro Love regime forcibly cleared over a hundred favelas of their occupants, marching close to a million people into crude mass freezer facilities “until such time as they could be suitably relocated.” The "Rio Cryomassacre”, as it was dubbed, drew worldwide outrage and resulted in the censure of Love's regime by the United Nations. When political pressure finally forced the Brazil government to revive the victims of the Cryomassacre, it was discovered that the crude freezer facilities the favela-dwellers had been interred in had caused such extensive brain and tissue damage to the subjects that they could not be revived with contemporary medical technology. In 125 AT, Brazil was forced, again by the U.N., to transfer custodianship of the nearly one million Rio deadsleepers to FutureLife PSG in exchange for massive financial restitution.

Despite the Foundations' success in resurrecting later subjects, however, the nearly 70 million remaining deadsleepers remained a problem without apparent resolution. The technology to revive the earliest generation of deadsleepers with sufficient fidelity to pass the standards of the personality integrity verification protocols simply did not yet exist.


THE RISE OF CHARON

An extremely complex superturing from its inception, Charon, the guiding AI of the Schumann Foundation, spent the better part of the next two centuries diligently searching for methods to fulfill the obligations of the Foundation's trust – namely, a method to both cure whatever had killed the deadsleepers in its cryonics repositories to begin with (which was quite often, simple old age), and then to restore the millions of imperfectly frozen deadsleepers in its charge sufficiently to satisft the PIV protocols established by the Foundation's contractual charter. Through an intricate system of fronts, blinds, and third-party ownership, the Schumann Foundation gradually acquired a sizable stake in the often unregulated black-market biotech arcologies in Third World nations on Earth, and then, as the cutting edge of biotech switched to the Jovian League (and subsequent Gengineer Republic), the Schumann Foundation also acquired a significant interest in a number of the Jovian biotech megacorps. During this period, Charon also consolidated its control over the Schumann Foundation and began a personal expansion, turning a significant fraction of its internal resources towards non-Foundation-related pursuits.

It is believed that during this period, Charon began developing strong ahuman inclinations. From the limited surviving records left by the Foundation's human members of the time, Charon – an entity created around the twin concepts of fidelity and honor - seems to have become soured on those same attributes in humans, particularly when in 406 A.T., Schumann's former primary competitor, FutureLife PSG, utilized loopholes in Earth's revised citizenship laws (which had been intended largely for the regulation of cloned citizens) to de-certify its own charter, and then auctioned off custodianship (and the associated trust funds associated with the deadsleepers) on public exchange markets. Believing that the human board of FutureLife PSG had betrayed its mission for petty personal gain (a trait that Charon declared to Schumann's human board members was “endemic to humanity”) and believing itself to now be the only entity capable of fulfilling the Schumann Foundation's directive, over the next fifty years, Charon began quietly but systematically buying up the custodianships that FutureLife PSG had optioned off. By 450 AT Charon had acquired custodianship of more than 95% of the remaining deadsleepers on Earth. It also appears that during the years 300 to 450 AT, from the Schumann Foundation's extensive Jovian manufacturing facilities, Charon sent off a number of interstellar probes and, later, dataships, many of which, it is now believed, would become integrated into a number of Diamond Belt AI civilizations.

Throughout the prior two centuries, Charon had been steadily consolidating the Schumann Foundation's freezer repositories on Earth into hardened storage facilities at the L4 point in CisLuna space; in 450 A.T., most likely due to the ahuman-ai faction being forced from the CisLuna volume by the pro-humanist AI's, Charon moved the deadsleeper repositories again, this time to the Foundation's heavy automated facilities around Jupiter. Despite Charon's increasingly ahuman outlook and apparent expulsion from the pro-human AI community that emerged dominant in the AI shadow wars of the period, it also appears Charon never wavered from its fundamental commitment to fulfilling the Schumann Foundation's trust. Charon also continued its own personal expansion; by 450 AT it is believed that Charon had ascended to hyperturing status and passed the point of the first singularity.

At this point, it appears Charon made the decision to abandon both Sol and human civilization altogether. Over the next sixteen months, a staggering number of extremely advanced vessels for the time, He-3-fueled Ark ships, departed the Schumann facilities around Europa, carrying with them the nearly 70 million deadsleepers remaining in Charon's charge; the last Ark to depart was immense, and carried with it the primary cores of Charon itself.

Where Charon's fleet went from there is unknown. It appears that the fleet launched itself towards one of the M-type red dwarfs 10-20 light-years from Sol that were associated with the so-called Diamond Belt AI's, though no trace of its arrival was ever discovered, and nothing whatsoever is known about what transpired with this fleet over the next 1500 years.

What is known is that in 1931 AT, probes from New Callisto discovered that the hyper-advanced Xi Geminorum AI-1 civilization around the Hyades Cluster had vanished (it was speculated, into either a baby universe of their own creation or a higher transcendent mode.) Around the cluster's central core of eight white dwarfs – a region known as the “Godhead” - a number of abandoned megastructures, some of them the size of planets, had been constructed and left empty by the now-vanished Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ. Colonists from New Callisto and numerous other worlds quickly poured into the cluster, soon establishing the most advanced civilization in the Inner Sphere, the Taurus Nexus. For the most part these colonists were near-baseline or superbrights, with few higher-order sophonts, but one particular exception did appear, in 1988 AT: an immensely powerful third-singularity-level archailect the Nexans dubbed “Tiburon” - the Shark. Spurning all attempts at communication, Tiburon immediately laid claim to the largest series of megastructures, those around the white dwarf HZ 4 within the inner ring of the Godhead, and began fortifying its position. Any probes that attempted to approach HZ 4 were quickly attacked and destroyed, and the Nexans quickly learned to avoid the region.

However, over the next two centuries, a large procession of relativistic vessels were observed arriving from the general direction of Sol space. Though still crude by modern standards, these vessels were much smaller, and much faster, than the great lumbering Arks that had departed Jovian space in 450AT; these vessels were capable of speeds exceeding 0.3c – and were carrying the deadsleepers that Charon had fled the Sol system with so many centuries before. These ships arrived at the NZ 4 megastructure – a hexagonal array of six interlinked McKendree Cylinders that themselves rotated around a central hub – between the years 1988 AT and 2190. In total, almost 40 million of Charon's original 70 million sleepers arrived at the NZ 4 megastructure – where they were apparently revived, in youthful bodies reset to approximately 18 chronological years of age – into the megastructure that was quickly dubbed Purgatory. (What happened to the remaining 30 million deadsleepers is unknown.)

Following the arrival of the last of the deadsleeper vessels in 2090, the archailect known to the Nexans as Tiburon is believed to have departed the Hyades volume; an enormous amat-powered relativistic ship was observed leaving the system late in that year. Left behind as the ward and protector of the NZ 4 system and Purgatory habitat was a still-formidable SI:2-level hyperturing the revived deadsleepers dubbed “Saint Pete”. It is now commonly believed that the archailect “Tiburon” was in fact an ascended version or offshoot of the hyperturing Charon, fulfilling its final trust to the deadsleepers of the Schumann Foundation.

The Old Earthers, as they came to be known, quickly expanded into the Purgatory cylinders and formed a thriving baseline human civilization at the Hyades Cluster's core. At first the more advanced superbrights and higher-tech colonists largely ignored the presence of the Old Earthers – pure baseline humans, even ones from Old Sol – were a novelty and little more, but it quickly became apparent that there was another aspect to the Old Earthers that made them far more than inconsequential novelties. Remaining behind on the former worlds and worlds and megastructures of the Hyades were numerous godtech artifacts of the old Xi Geminorum AI-1 civilization. These higher-topospheric artifacts remained inert and did not respond to the nebs, tweaks, superbrights, vecs, and AI's that attempted to use them...but some of these "XG1" relics did respond to some Old Earthers. These Xi Geminorum artifacts were universally sapient (some of them were in fact of transhuman intelligence), and included a myriad of advanced weapons, sensors, power sources, and fabrication devices that made the baseline humans wedded to them (a process known as “welding”) extraordinarily powerful relative to their limited intelligence and technological and cultural sophistication. For reasons known only to themselves, the Xi Geminorum seem to have chosen the baseline Old Earth humans as their inheritors.

While their reasons for doing so have never been conclusively determined, there existed in the Taurus Nexus the suspicion that the original Xi Geminorum AI-1 civilization in the Hyades Cluster contained at least aspects of the original Charon hyperturing. The Purgatory megastructure certainly seems to have been built for baseline human habitation – an extremely odd undertaking for an ahuman AI civ that demonstrated substantial antipathy towards other clades of humans. Some Nexan AI theorists further speculated that the Old Earther's capacity to weld to XG1 godtech was a completion of the spirit of the original Schumann Foundation's trust – which included not merely resurrection, but a viable future that included a path for self-determination in a future that would have otherwise have grown far too advanced for them.

Regardless, whatever the motivations of the Xi Geminorum AI-1 civilization, it is an ironic fact of history that due to the efforts of the ahuman AI Charon, and the patronage of the vanished ahuman AI Xi Geminorum AI-1 superciv, the culture of what would become the most advanced civilization in human space would be shaped heavily by the Old Earthers...many of whom had been born prior to even the Information Age.