11-18-2013, 10:21 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-18-2013, 11:42 AM by 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.
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.