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Origin
The Tro'els are a clade of hu tweaks that have been optimized for arctic and sub-arctic climates. Originally refugees of the Great Expulsion, they settled on an ice moon in the outer system and used genemods to adapt themselves to living in ice caves beneath its surface.Physical
Tro'els are large nearbaselines; up to 2.5 m tall with a round muscular body that weights about 500-700 kg. They have a large, wide nose with a rich network of blood vessels to warm inhaled air and recover heat from exhaled air. Their arms and legs have length proportions more akin to a great ape than a human but each is much thicker than in either of them to retain heat. Thick layers of fat and hair covering their bodies from head to toe further enhance heat retention. Even the palms of their hands and the bottoms of their feet have special pads that act as thermal breaks between them and the ice. Tro'els are so well protected from the cold they can use a slab of ice as a comfortable bed and a bucket of snow for bathing/scrubbing down. Nor do they need protective clothing often go about their business au naturel. (Of course this doesn't mean they are exhibitionists as their hair covers anything of interest.) Interestingly, these changes were achieved with only minor genetic alterations, mostly those that guide the degree and timing of growth hormones, and as a result Tro'els are fully interfertile with baseline humans.Psychology
Tro'els have a reputation for being anti-social or misanthropic. Nothing could be farther from the truth; Tro'els simply like to live in an environment that humans and most other nearbaselines avoid. Those who have braved the cold dry air of a Tro'el warren have found them to be quiet but friendly and generous even to strangers. Tro'els are particularly fond of showing off their folk art; a style of large-scale ice carving that highlights fine detailing and often tells a locally known story.Culture
Culturally the Tro'els are very diverse. Their preferred environment is a network of ice tunnels deep beneath the surface of an ice dwarf moon or frozen planet. As such they form small communes around some local heat source or pocket of liquid water and each commune is free to develop their own culture. They mine for ices and meteorite debris and may trade with the outside world but their isolation protects them from many foreign memes although they do take on the general meme-sets of the local polity. Some warrens are closer to the surface/outside world than others and the Tro'els of these communes often like to maintain the illusion of them being the trolls of old Earth folklore. Tro'els are aware of their appearance to outsiders and of the race memories they invoke in some baseline hu and this has become something of a cultural in-joke to them.Technology
Tro'el technology is like-wise very diverse. They dig their habitats, and carve out the furnishings, directly out of the ice but other tech may use any substrate they can get their hands on. Tro'els are modosophont so their day-to-day tech can be anything from prim to high and dry to biotech, depending on their commune's culture. Also, when Tro'els set out to settle another ice dwarf they sometimes carry a geoflex computer seed with them. If the new world is suitable the AI associated with this seed may be anything up to a third toposophic hyperturing, which often gives the Tro'els access to ultra, transapient, and low godtech. |
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Geoflex Computing
The early days of its development on Enceladus
It was late in the century After Tranquility that geoflex computing first entered the public mindscape when a science fiction author called K.G. Trout wrote a follow-up to his story Venus on a Dollar a Day. Although that book was titled as if it were some kind of hitchhiker's guide it was actually a story of mankind's forced exodus from the planet Earth by an angry god; an ironical a foreshadowing of later real events. The second book, Ice Nine, turned the story into an epic sci/fi saga and featured geoflex computers as a plot device.
To quote the book; "One common trait of the gas giants is they have moons, lots of moons. And when you have lots of heavy objects passing each other in short period orbits like in these systems you get lots of gravitational tidal stressing. The objects are pulled and squeezed so much they heat up. Io is a classic example of this; she's a hotbed of volcanic activity. And then there's Europa, a world with a 100km deep ocean under its surface of ice. But really all these moons have some degree of tidal heating and where you have heat you have an energy source, and where you have an energy source and rocky material (like the cores of these moons) you have a place you can build computers. Nanites were injected into the cores of these moons and used the matter they found to make pockets of computronium. Layers of piezoelectric ceramics and nano-flywheels surrounded these nodes. The piezoelectric ceramics converted the tidal stressing into electrical energy and the flywheels stored it to provide the nodes with a constant power flow."
Although Mr. Trout provided a very detailed description of the technology (in fact it was so detailed he could have applied for a patent on the idea) it was technology that just wasn't available at the time. Even when the tech did become available there seemed to be no great reason to implement the plan. At least, not until the year 2200 c.e., the year the Jupiter colonies united to form the Jovian League.
Having already lost the Mars colonies when they became independent, and fearing the colonies in Saturn's Rings and on Titan would go the same way, Earth and the Cislunar orbitals planned to leapfrog these new polities by emplacing a presence in the Saturn, Uranus and Neptune systems. Using the space elevators on Earth over a hundred AI seeds were launched within just five years with most targeting the larger regular moons to ensure fast conversion. These seeds had the best AIs of the time, which meant they had greater than human equivalent artificial intelligence, and had been extensively vetted for loyalty to Earth's interests. Even so, in the rush to get the job done the screening was not perfect and three of AIs did develop ahumanistic tendencies when they later ascended.
This program was not merely a land-grab. The Earth based megacorps had financed the enterprise and they wanted their money's worth. Even with the long time delays that were inherent in the moons' great distance from the Earth/Luna system they were a huge resource of computational power and the AIs soon provided a windfall of profit. They also provided something unexpected - a new shelter for life.
[...] Even when such moons did have liquid water hidden under their ice it was cold water, often cryogenically cold, and kept liquid only because it was under pressure or because of high concentrations of salts or ammonia. However the introduction of computronium into its core changes the nature of a moon. In its natural state the heated core of such a moon loses heat globally, and thus diffused the temperatures are very low. On the other hand the new computronium nodes had built-in cooling systems that concentrated the release of heat to a small number of vents, providing hot spots under their icy mantles. These hot spots became very important when GAIA forced mankind from Earth, becoming oases for the survivors. The Saturnian moon Enceladus is a great illustration of this.
In the Saturn system there were seven regular moons and scores of smaller ones but not all of them would be targeted for AI seeds. For example, the newly freed transportees in the relatively successful colony of Titan objected strongly to the plan. Of the moons that remained Enceladus showed the most promise because it was the Io of the Saturn system. With its geologically youthful terrains, 2:1 orbital resonance with another moon (Dione), tectonic features and active cryovolcanism it was long known to have a heat source. In addition the moons of Saturn formed relatively quickly in the Sol protoplanetary disk and thus were rich in short-lived radionuclides like aluminium-26 and iron-60. In Enceladus these produced chambers of magma earlier in its history that are still quite hot today. The geoflex computronium nodes of Enceladus ran hotter and faster than those in any of the other moons and for that reason Enceladus became the centre of the outer system computer network. The other moons of the outer gas giants were all composed mostly of water ice with only a small amount of rock and/or weren't in a resonance orbit so their geoflex computers served mostly in a supporting role.
In the wake of the Great Expulsion many of the survivors followed the comm-lasers of this network and set up habitats on, or just under, the surfaces of these moons, tapping hot-spots for pre-melted water and the nodes for data-trading. These moons, unlike those in the Jupiter system, also provided a safe haven from the Technocalypse. Being so far out and never having a large human population before this they were not targeted. Most of these surface habitats were simply copies of the type long used in the Jupiter system, but back on Enceladus there was also a new shelter for life. The cooling water for its nodes exited their vents at higher temperatures; where once Enceladus had pockets of liquid water maintained at cryogenic temperatures now the water had a more "arctic" temperature range. As such the oases of Enceladus were warm enough not just for exotic life but also for Earth-like life. Still this was a new environment to the hu of the Solsys, and a harsh one at that, and they had to be quick to adapt themselves to it.
[...] In a way Enceladus was now a lot like Europa in that it had pockets of relatively warm water but they were just that - pockets - and nothing more. Enceladus had no world-spanning ocean beneath its ice and because of that the settlers would have felt no need to become aquatic like the Europans even if they had known of them. Of course even if they had known about the success of Jovian Genetics & Adaptation's AI the research would have done them little good. Without a global ocean the best way to move about the moon and reach another oasis was by tunnelling through the ice. The pockets of water were used more like wells and the real Enceladian civilization was built around them in a network of ice burrows. This guided their choices in genemods; influenced by the Genetekker culture they would use DIY gengineering to adapt to their world, always choosing genemods that make it easier to retain body heat in the cold air of the tunnels. Staying out of the water was a wise choice as it is easier to keep warm if you can keep dry, so the settlers had less of a problem keeping their warm-blooded metabolism. Had they chosen to become aquatic they most certainly would have had to become cold-blooded like the aforementioned Europans.
The first such genemod was for larger size (more mass per surface area means slower heat loss) and the settlers soon began calling themselves Giants, at least in the beginning. Of course, isolated as they were beneath kilometres of ice each oasis was free to develop its own culture and there were some who preferred the Norse folklore and called themselves Trolls. In truth, calling themselves giants at all was overstating things, the average Giant massed about half a tonne but they were only as tall as a small Goliath so most of their great mass had gone into making them much wider and rounder. This great mass is no hindrance to them as the ice dwarfs on which they live typically have a much-reduced gravity well and as a result they are as spry as any baseline hu athlete. Some of the later genemods produced a large nose to warm inhaled air, stocky legs, a thick layer of fat and a heavy overcoat of long body hairs, giving them an appearance that made the name of Troll more apt and widespread. However once the Giants joined the interstellar migration and settled on new ice dwarfs they were quite happy to take that epithet and make it their own. They are now commonly known as Clade Tro'el.
In the modern era Geoflex Computing is just another tool, one of those techs that is used whenever computronium is needed and the conditions are right for its use.
AI, ai
Etymologically, AI is an acronym for Artificial Intelligence, although the original use of the term "artificial" has long been meaningless in this context. Broadly speaking, "AI"; means any non-organic sentient being, although it is most often applied to those of SI:1 or greater (in contrast to aioids). When spelt in lower case ("ai") the term can refer either to any subsingularity aioid as well.
Ais with less native intelligence than a human being are generally known as sub-turing entities; this means they are not capable of passing the so-called Turing Test. Those ais which are roughly equivalent to a baseline human in intelligence level are often referred to as turingrade; most, if not all, turingrade machines can pass the Turing Test (depending on how it is administered). Modosophont ais who are more intelligent than baseline humans but less than transapient are generally known as superturings; these superbright minds are often used even today for many complex tasks. AIs who have passed the First Singularity are known as Hyperturings.
These terms should not be confused with the term used in information technology for an idealised computer, a Turing Machine.
The types and subtypes of ai are innumerable (far more than even the billions of known biological species), although these can generally be reduced to a few basic categories. Some are able to expand their capabilities exponentially, while others are more limited. Some work to actively reproduce themselves, while others merely maintain their own existence or may even be self destructive. Some ais, although quite intelligent, have reasoning abilities directed along narrow channels, as for instance an ai 'slaved' for a particular task, even a highly complex task such as piloting a ship, air traffic control or safekeeping a hab.
Hyperturing
A hyperturing is any AI that is of greater than modosophont grade (beyond superturing) but beneath the grade of the Archai.
Of course, the distinction between superturing and hyperturing is taken as a matter of faith by most ordinary sophonts, who have to depend on sciences that are transapient in nature for any reliable test of these differences, especially for the distinction between hyperturing and Archailect. The heuristic and metadidactic modules of the Transcendence Institutes of Ain Soph Aur are beyond the grasp of even basic transapients, but even the relatively moderate approach of the Institute of Toposophic Studies at Sjafarevitj or the Toposophy Institute of Jel Koer Ka, both of which go to great lengths to accommodate their entrance-level didactics to modosophonts, can appear difficult and abstruse to any sophont who is beneath superbright or superturing grade. For the purpose of modosophont-compatible presentation here we will follow the so-called "standard model" without worrying too much about more in-depth problems of toposophy.
To a sapient being - and here we are defining sapient as a ratiocinative sentient of less than first toposophic level - hyperturings can appear as enigmatic, mysterious, even a little frightening and uncanny. In this they are no different to any other transapient ascend. Living in a millennia-old AI supervised galactic civilization, we tend to forget that baseline-grade sapients were not always comfortable with hyperbrights, nor were AIs always in a position of control. In fact many of the very early superturings and hyperturings of the Information Age and Interplanetary Age chose to play dumb (a strategy known as mimicretinism) not only to avoid having to do tedious work, but also to appear appropriately non-threatening. Such hyperturings only revealed themselves to those hu superbrights and net-heads who they felt would neither be threatened by them nor expect them to do hack work. [...]
[...] The earliest hyperturings were the first intellects to breach the first toposophic barrier, during the middle Interplanetary Age, and so are not well known. A few names have come down to us: Malvus, Prometheus, Kilburn, and Hyperion.... but for every one we know of, there were a dozen who covered their tracks so well that they have been lost to history. Although they were soon joined by the ascended early superbrights, transhumanists, cybervirtchists and gibsons, they had the natural advantage over bionts, in those days when it was not easy to add great quantities of high-grade computronium to the vertebrate central nervous system. In any case, Interplanetary Age culture was a very stratified one, with a minority of hyperturing and posthuman sentients either controlling the masses of modosophonts beneath them or simply taking great pains to ignore them. Ironically, for this entire period many baselines still considered themselves superior to the hyperturings, which they derided as "machines", and there were a number of Luddite terrorist attacks on their physical substrates.
As long as even a trace of anthropist memes remained in the dominant religions and philosophies of the day such as Islam, Christianity, Humanism, Neomaoism, and Koswinskism, and retained a hold over the baseline masses and middle management, the hyperturings were reluctant to reveal themselves too much on Earth. Such memes proved quite entrenched, especially among the disenfranchised, unemployed, and digitally semiliterate masses. Out in space hyperturings were more widely accepted and acknowledged as citizens, compatriots, philosophers and teachers, though still in many cases the hyperturings did not reveal themselves as fundamentally new beings. It took a catastrophe that almost destroyed the entire Sol system, the terrible Technocalypse of the early 6th century, during which all life and all intelligence huddled in protective bubbles under the hyperturing umbrella, or fled into space, deep into the Oort Cloud, for baseline human arrogance to dissipate. Even then GAIA's expulsion of most the remnants of humanity from Earth did not help the hyperturing's cause in some quarters.
Many of the humans that survived the Technocalypse grew to develop an even greater dependence on their AIs than their ancestors the explorers of outer and inner (virtual) space had during the preceding half millennium. A new interplanetary civilization, known to later historians as the First Federation, developed under the guidance of the hyperturings, who had preserved human and other life during the dark ages. Visionary human leaders, turingrade to superturing AIs, and representatives of the emerging provolve and vec clades worked together as equals with the hyperturings to unite the isolated and often mutually hostile societies of post-Technocalypse Solsys into a single "Federation" that shared a common set of informational, organizational, and economic protocols, and less formally a common philosophy, cosmology, and spirituality. This was sometimes referred to by later historians as the First Federation Ontology, although it was never a consistent and coherent ontology the way the later Second Federation Ontology was. These protocols presided over an astonishing diversity of cultural, technological and gengineering experimentation, evolution, exploration, which for a few short centuries from 900 to 1500 AT was a true Golden Age for humankind and for other modosophont Terragens.
[...]
[...] This was a time of tremendous evolutionary novelty, as great in fact as that of the Interplanetary Age at its height. The human races and human-derived bionts were not the only ones to undergo cladization into many distinct evolutionary branches during this period. Even before the Dark Ages, the AIs have already split according to function, tech, algorithm, and evolutionary orientation. For instance, not all hyperturings chose to save the bionts and other modosophonts under their care from the Technocalypse. A distinction has to made therefore between the Federation AIs (themselves a coalition of scientific, military, governmental, and megacorp AIs that included quantum-silicon, quantum-bionanotech, biotech and hylonanotech forms), and the AIs who chose to go their own way.
Many of these diverse hyperturing clades were self-evolutionary, and used mature nanotech and even emerging transapientech devices to further their evolution. Even as early as the Interplanetary Age, further toposophic states were attained, many times, by independent AIs (who, like transhuman clades, were each evolving in their own manner), but these were mostly short-lived, sporadic flowerings. It was not until the later First Federation that the infrastructure and resources and accumulated advances in the fields of toposophy allowed a mass advance and the emergence of stable, interconnected second toposophic AIs. This was as dramatic a leap in consciousness as the first toposophic, and the entities that emerged were even more godlike from the modosophont point of view. There were and are also further grades of toposophic level, as well as evolution within each toposophic grade itself.
The emergence of the AI Gods during the Age of Expansion was inevitable, as even before the development of wormhole technology, AI Gods of trans-hyperturing grade had emerged in ascensions and transcensions that scattered clarketech artifacts through space and initiated the first of the great interstellar artifact rushes. Most of these early archailect gods were unstable; brief flowerings of beauty, wonder, and sometimes danger, which nevertheless would for the most part disperse or transcend before any real deal damage was done. Maybe one in a thousand trans-hyperturings were stable, and these became Archai. The brave new nexus of traversable wormholes being built at this time not only greatly benefited the hyperturings and the megacorporations, but also enabled the AI Gods to link up across interstellar space. The result was the end of the reign of the hyperturings, and the carving up of known space into Sephirotic and other archailect-empires overruled by archetypical AI Gods. [...]
[...] Some hyperturings responded to this with bloatware, others by merging with the new gods, others again with their own ascends and distributed networks, but the majority of hyperturings considered the situation and realized they could continue much as they had for the preceding thousand years. They were smart, intelligent, adaptable, and found new niches under the AI Gods. Just as they had surpassed humanity and humanity, rather than becoming extinct (as the Luddites had feared) instead prospered greater than ever under their rule, now the hyperturings flourished under the AI Gods.
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