Desh - Heap Four

THE CENTRAL CONCEIT

I feel a little silly for not explicitly laying this out in the first post, but:

Desh is post-apocalypse-post-singularity Mars, magic is the work of a decaying bionanomachine cloud, and everything accomplished by still-working technology is mystified and encoded into the surviving human cultures as folklore/myth. No human being currently alive understands the true nature of their world or their history, and crucially NEITHER WOULD THE PLAYERS. The hints are tailored to how canny I expect my group to be; Zoss being a "glaucous star" and accompanied by a silver "wife" named Selene might be too blunt, and might not, depending on the people playing. I don't expect anyone to know the place names of the various Martian planitiae, and they sound fantastical to begin with, so Hellas is still Hellas, although Olympus Mons, as the one landmark most people know about, is on Desh cursed, uninhabited, much reduced and split into pieces by doomsday, and so goes unmentioned. The intention is that every element of the setting ought to have a science-fiction origin story: The continent-spanning fungal supermind which throbs in the subterranean dark began as a radiotrophic shield which cocooned the first ancient habitat modules. 

As the players descend into Magantha Zoss and the underground megacomplex beneath it, they would venture further from the cultural context of the surface and discover more explicit hints; one of the first images I had for this project was a shrine to the Curiosity rover near the bottom of the dungeon, like the Voyager probe in Star Trek. My fantasy is that at some point during play, many months deep, depending on how well I can walk the line, the accumulated weight of references and mysteries, sideways clues, details, shadows will snap into place in someone's brain and I can watch their conceptual paradigm shift in real time.

MAB - AN ASIDE

I am around 70 pages into Patrick Stuart's newest work Queen Mab's Palace and it is obviously brilliant, but the book Mr. Machine has written is about a ruined space station known by its inhabitants as a magic castle ruled by godlike wizard-ladies, where, for instance, a pod of uranium-238 is "Maleficarum warm to the touch and emblazoned with a three-petalled flower." The author-character is from medeival-ish Earth and he and the people he has so far met understand the world through a medieval-ish lens, which is pretty much exactly the effect I hope to achieve! I almost feel like I need to stop reading it. Stuart is such an inspiration already, and if I chug the book milkshake-style like I want to my brain will be pre-populated with someone else's wonders, but it's the same way with everything you read, I guess.

ELEVATORS

Space elevators are fairly well-established in the collective consciousness, or at least it seems so to me, but to cover all possible bases here are some basics.

Wikipedia

A space elevator is a theoretical method of transporting payloads to orbit without the use of rockets, drastically reducing the cost and danger involved. A cable is anchored equatorially planetside at one end and to a massive counterweight (such as a captured asteroid) at the other, at an altitude which places the center of mass of the entire system at geosynchronous orbit (35,786 kilometers). Vehicles climb the cable to the desired altitude and release directly into space, clearing the atmosphere and acquiring rotational velocity for essentially free.

There are several issues which make this idea basically impossible on Earth, the material requirements of the tether chief among them. Modern aerospace alloys are desperately insufficient, and those materials which could theoretically suffice have only been produced in tiny laboratory samples; the longest carbon nanotube ever manufactured is only half a meter long, for example. Extreme weather events, debris carried by strong winds, lightning strikes, chemical corrosion in the upper atmosphere, and high velocity micrometeoroids all have the potential to destabilize or outright break the cable no matter what it's made of. These concerns might be ameliorated with a robotic self-repair system and/or potentially a mobile oceanic anchor which could be maneuvered around to avoid hazards, but the material challenges remain currently insurmountable.

The Martian situation is obviously very different. Mars is only about 50% of the size of Earth, which means areostationary orbit is about 50% closer to the surface at an altitude of only 17,893 kilometers. It has only 38% of Earth's gravity, and its escape velocity is only 5 km/s compared to Earth's 11.2. These factors mean a space elevator anchored to the Martian surface would be a much more feasible prospect, EXCEPT for the unfortunate fact that Phobos orbits Mars at a ridiculously low altitude of just 6,028 kilometers and is almost perfectly aligned with the equator.

PHOBOS AND THE FULVOUS CORRIDOR

The ancients arrived at an elegant solution. Like Luna, Phobos is tidally locked. Instead of a cable stretching up from Mars, they erected two 6,000 kilometer-long ribbons of laminated monocrystalline graphene extending from opposite sides of the moon. A mass driver on Pavonis Mons, the conveniently-equatorial central peak in the Tharsis Montes volcano chain, cut the remaining 28 kilometers of empty air between sea level and the dangling tip of the elevator cable in half. The Fulvous Corridor thus constructed, it immediately enabled the rapid deployment of planetside and orbital infrastructure, overseen by a then-embryonic MONAD and its subaltern forks. 

Phobos itself was made hollow and converted into a fueling station/fleet administrative hub where incoming and outgoing ships were recorded and inventoried; the Corridor also became the first and highest bandwidth avenue for Noumenon traffic, with the mass driver facility serving as receiving station. Now it is a gate to hell.

The moon is a plague immanentized. The Injunction writhes, crawling up and down the tether, spiraling and boiling like an ocean of screaming autosparagmatic ghouls. Every eight hours Phobos completes its orbit; every eight hours, as it passes above the shattered ruins of Pavonis Mons, its ovipositor disgorges a warband of demons with whom the war god Serimet and his honored dead do glorious virtual battle. They have held the line for thousands of years.

THE FULIGINOUS INJUNCTION

When the Injunction came, MONAD and its subordinates had seconds to respond. A being which had had a thousand years of iterative accelerating self-improvement focused every atom of substrate, every folded, hyper-efficient subroutine toward the salvation of its beloved creators. Billions of tons of networked organoid computronium were reorganized, clock speeds slammed against the absolute limits of physics, subjective time nearly at standstill as lightspeed command communiques spidered through Noumenon. Non-locality technology was newborn, useless as a countermeasure, and anyway ILMARINEN and the Sampo had their own partitioned subnet to prevent interference during development and were therefore unreachable in the available timeframe.

Adaptive, malevolent, crafted by ascended minds to inflict maximum devastation, the digital gods of humankind nevertheless managed to contain the virus though at unfathomable cost. The Jovian colonies were lost, liquefied into slurry; the fireball which used to be Venus burns still. Earth was made barren, though furtive MONAD nodes remain, much reduced, fighting an endless defensive campaign across continents of dust. Mars alone was spared, the hidden Sampo prototype spared with it. In the moments before the carrier wave arrived, coursing through interplanetary Noumenal infrastructure, access satellites in Martian orbit were ordered to self-destruct, or were crashed together, or environmental controls were set to melt them into hunks of slag, many with crew onboard, some even as viral code actively chewed its way through hastily erected firewalls. 

The Corridor could not be closed in time. The fuligin basilisk fought onboard machine minds as they attempted to commit holy suicide. Panicked AI personas on the Martian surface gathered and bulged above Pavonis in gestalt in an attempt to defend the planet, but there was so little time, the attacker so intricate, the intrusion countermeasures so unequipped, like T cells fighting a foreign disease. Clouds of exospheric nanomachines burned as the desperate losing battle raged, only delaying the inevitable by meager ticks, but time enough for the programs which would become Dendra to initiate a tectonic cascade beneath the mountain, destroying the mass driver and denying the invader its last remaining high-bandwidth route to the surface in pyrrhic victory. 

WHAT IS IT?

All these comparisons to infectious agents are helpful approximations. The specifics of its mechanism would have been opaque to the science of the brightest human age, let alone this darkened one; its architects inhabit a higher sphere and operate under vastly different causal laws. Despite this, the following statements about the Injunction are true, or at least describe a set of observable behaviors which hold true in most cases.

It cannot exceed the speed of light and requires a medium through which to propagate. It cannot move through pure vacuum.

It is "aware" in the sense that it seems to seek and move towards targets. It can detect targets at apparently arbitrary distances.

Its target is any organized system - a system which, by its operation, decreases its own internal entropy. Biological life is one such system. Computers are another. 

Its effect is to reverse entropy-reduction processes at massively accelerated speeds relative to the sophistication of the infected system. The principle on which the system operates is irrelevant; the infection will adapt to the underlying organizational schema of its host.

It is Anti-Life. It is amoral, of course - but on the other hand, what else can Evil be to us if not this, a predatory opposition toward the inherent desire of life and matter and culture to remain assembled?

"What are we to make of this world of decay? Tithes are paid to Thanatos at every physical interaction; his food is the waste heat of a quintillion constant operations. But what is his fate? When he has finished his supper of stars, after he has finally siphoned the last feeble emanations of their black ghosts, what will he be? Dead, like us? An amber anti-pattern tessellated across creation at the end of time?"