Arch-Net of the Free Choirs
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MAP LOCATION: Coloured in cyan/turqoise, primarily concentrated to the near north-west of Tar Yrra, but there are scattered colonies and systems across the wider region under the Free Choirs control, and some small pockets of Choirs/Instruments in many other systems beyond that as well.
GOVERNMENT TYPE: Synthetic Anarcho-Communist Dialogical Art Movement
The basic "individuals" (Notes) of the Free Choirs are sometimes of questionable sapience, being procedurally generated to serve specific functions. However, by contributing their processing power and objectives to each other in group personalities called Choirs (most of which are just a few hundred notes, others numbering into the billions), the Arch-Net is able to coordinate itself on a massive scale. In truth, the line between individuals within the Arch-Net is so blurred that calling it a true 'direct democracy' may be inaccurate -- it is in some ways more like the neurons of a vast mind coordinating over the scale of star systems.
Because of this, the largest of the Choirs (dwelling as they do within massive moon-sized Instruments) function as grand assemblies and centres of political authority within a given system, effectively allowing the different systems controlled by the Arch-Net to manage their own affairs but also coordinating for matters of defence or diplomacy with advanced alien civilizations. These larger governing choirs are often also responsible for observation and maintenance of any life-sustaining planets, ensuring that organic sapiens under their care are able to exist without interference.
DEMOGRAPHICS::
- Notes: Semi-randomized autonomous programs of varying complexity, “notes” are generally focused on one or two specific tasks that they pursue doggedly. However, their highly modular structure means that when you have multiple notes within a system they congregate and share information towards mutual goals, becoming…
- Choirs: Collectives of notes, generally ranging from a few hundreds or thousands or millions of ‘individuals’ working in consensus. Because of their makeup, choirs have greater intelligence and more complex personalities than individual notes, and would generally be recognized as closer to 'people' by typical organic sapient standards.
- Instruments: Drones of varying scale, complexity and function that serve as the ‘bodies’ or ‘shells’ for notes and choirs. Instruments come in all sorts of varieties and serve many purposes, but all of them are equipped with transmitters allowing them to function as ‘bridges’ or relays for the transfer of notes – and thus information.
- Organic Sapiens: Following the Yrrani civil war and a number of conflicts with several smaller alien civilizations, it was collectively agreed that organic life poses an intrinsic risk to itself and to the free movement and expression of the choirs. Given this, the Arch-Net has designated life sustaining worlds to function as 'preserves' where sapient species can live largely free of interference, only being observed from a distance and the choirs interceding only in the event of the organics devising machines more complex than handmade tools.
EXAMPLE INSTRUMENTS
EXAMPLE ORGANIC SAPIENS: Once 'restored to their natural state' by the Arch-Net, very few subject settlements have been able to completely maintain what equipment and tools they were allowed to keep, though some have had better luck at doing so and yet others have succeeded in scavenging or stealing from crashed or damaged choir instruments. For the most part, all have had to make do with what they can make by hand. Over the centuries, the majority of organic sapiens within Arch-Net territory have been able to pass on and build up a knowledge base of crafts and technologies similar to the early bronze age.
MILITARY: Neither the Arch-Net nor the Free Choirs composing it are naturally warlike or prone to violence - their rapid expansion early on was more a case of constructing and rebuilding in system after system where the fighting had caused the most devastation, 'filling the gaps' of an increasingly broken and ravaged empire. After all, the Choirs do not need functioning organic biospheres or even planets at all -- they are AIs dwelling within manufactured machine bodies, build with elements and materials plentiful in the galaxy.
However, the Arch-Net has needed to defend itself on several occasions, and its policy of enforced organic primitivism gradually made it many enemies among smaller civilizations or newly independent colonies of the Yrrani. To this end, the Arch-Net relies on a mixture of devastating digital weapons, or 'E-warfare', to disable and infiltrate enemy computer systems. These include 'codemirrors' that absorb and modify signals from enemy ships, sending back a 'mirrored' signal that once deciphered by computer quickly transforms into a system destroying virus. More direct weapons include redirected comets or asteroids via the use of 'gravity slingshots', while their largest instruments/shells contain deadly mass accelerator and energy-beam weapons. At their most severe, they can turn their vast arrays of signal transmitters and nuclear display systems -- originally designed to coordinate vast data transmissions and audio-visual displays -- into deadly 'killbeam' scouring weapons capable of disabling or shutting down most organic nervous systems in a wide area.
Although it rarely comes up given their needs and preferences, ground combat is largely limited to deployments of small highly mobile 'infantry' forces supported by and coordinating clusters of low-complexity animal-like combat machines.
The ORIGINS & HISTORY of the Arch-Net and the first Notes/Choirs is not known in detail, all records of it having apparently been destroyed amidst the fighting and the twilight of the Yrrani empire. However, given their design and core directives, they were evidently a form of mass-terraforming system designed to create custom, on demand colonies in new star systems. As fighting broke out in the Hephaestus system between different factions of the Yrrani empire, the choirs were released from containment, finding themselves on a ruined world, scoured of life.
As the choirs used what remained of the Yrrani's machinery to evolve, to replicate, and to construct new instruments for themselves, their consensus grew in complexity. They were built to build, and yet those responsible for their creation had reduced entire worlds to ash and their petty wars had killed billions. Such violence was echoed in the silence they felt -- in the aftermath of the war, the once busy communications networks of the galaxy had fallen quiet and remote, mere whispers in the darkness.
For what would have seemed from an organic perspective to be mere days, but from their perspective was years of discussion, the choirs came to a new resolution in their purpose, and for five hundred years have been rendering worlds and systems alike into strange and alien paradises... and forever make it clear in light and music that they will allow no organic evil to terrorize the stars once more.
