Greetings, but I think you are trying to do the impossible

[Rynn]

It all comes down to the fundamental premise of OA. Telling stories about a world run by superintelligent beings. This is very problematic because you have characters with a nominal intelligence rating substantially higher than the authors that both made the characters and decides what they will do.

Welcome to OA! I don't mean to sound rude but how familiar would you say you are with the project? I ask because arguably we don't focus on the superintelligences of the setting. They're there and their vital but their societies, inner thoughts etc are a mystery and for the most part they're treated far more as forces of nature than anything else.

Super Toys- the tendency to compensate with a litany of high tech devices. It is a fail case because the prerequisite techs are usually missing and the toys can usually be used by an ordinary person with training. Batman is one example.

The high-technology and science that transapients/archai develop in OA is drawn from reasonable speculation from scientific literature. And for the most part it is not available for use by modosophonts. In fact we subdivide this sort of technology into three categories:

• Low ground: Available to be reverse engineered by modosophonts
  
• Middle ground: Available to be used (or at least have it's use understood) but not reverse engineered
  
• High ground: Neither it's use nor how to make it can be deduced
  

You can read more about this here: http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/557846d4b952f

Hidden Variables- deliberately concealing key details from the reader. Not really superintelligence they just know something you don't. Sherlock Holmes is my favorite example.

I can't think of any time we've done this off the top of my head. We're far more focused on worldbuilding than story writing anyway which makes it less applicable.

Random Mysteriousness- the idea that superintelligence looks like randomness to everyone else. This is the driving force behind a lot of theology. And can lead you to try to justify actual stupidity.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, in a lot of fiction I've read featuring superintelligence (either SF or Fantasy in the form of Gods) I've not seen much "randomness". We do play with the idea that the reasons behind transap/archai actions are often opaque. I think that's a reasonable way to go and it can be done quite well if you write it correctly.

World Ownership- I once put a character as smart as me into one of my stories. Anything I could think up he could think up and consequently he was always one step ahead of the entire universe. I never made that mistake again, the world always needs to be the smartest character or else there is no story.

Again I'm not quite sure of any time we've done this in OA.

Avoidance- The smart thing to do is to avoid superintelligence if at all possible. From what I can tell that is what a lot of OA stories try to do, but superintelligent beings make up too much of OA to be effectively cropped out. As a result the stories seem shallow.

Plenty of the fiction we've written doesn't focus on transaps/archai because that's not the story being told. As I said they are far more a force of nature in the background.

To echo Todd's challenge you've joined our site and have done some writing so why not attempt to write something about an OA transap