There seems to be no evidence of such a thing - the gleanings of the structures are all observations made of subjects in known space. Additionally, the Drifters are making no effort to control them - they’re disassembling them for parts.
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Yeah, exactly - the Triglavians know who the Drifters are, and they want them gone with no question.
The question is “why” though - the mention of “??? unshackled in forbidden dominance arrangement” is the most tantalizing part of that stream, sounding like the Triglavians know the Drifters to be some form of life or process that they unilaterally reject/“forbid”, and that the Drifters exhibit different ideological patterns from the Tyrants they take their name from.
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We inherited a motto One body, One mind from whoever gave us Capsule tech.
Drifters seem to all be the same Artemis or Apollo, or maybe they are all the same Vigilant Tyrannos, hundreds of them, at the same time, at the same place, as we’ve seen when we lost our Empress. A mind loaded in hundreds of bodies. Which is unshackled and forbidden.
Triglavians on the other hand seem to be about Troikas. I even think Navka, Koschoi and Narodnya are 3 minds loaded in the same body. 3-9-81-243-729 ….
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While the Drifters all are identical across each sex, the same also goes for the Sleepers in general - every sample of their bodies we’ve seen come from the same genetic base.
We’ve seen many types of Drifters, and I’d wager their names are more of a rank or title than an actual personal name - Apollo and Artemis are the controllers of the primary fleet battleships, Orion and Cassandra control the cruisers that respond to aggression against Lancers, Hikanta guard the Vaults in the Drifter Hives, Strategos is the seeming General position, and we’ve seen many others as well - Karybdis and Scylla as the battleship and cruiser pilots operating in the Abyss, Apate, Arithmos, and many others. I’d definitely say it’s a rank/position sort of thing.
Troika on the other hand, I’m interested in - Zorya is obviously something more than simply three people talking, and calling them “Detached Executive Troika” matches their form to the myriad other Troika mentioned in the datastreams.
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do we now infer that the drifters are the other/others, or is that still conjecture?
((That’s all out of character knowledge, no one in-character knows anything about the Others, we don’t even know they exist - you can read this post for all the info on the Drifters’ story from what we’ve been able to see, and the speculation section mentions this OOC info in theories. This subforum is for in-character discussion 
))
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I’m still very much of a mind that we have seen the only Drifters in existence. Each name seems to operate in a unique manner. From the way they behave in fleets it seems like one is the command node and the others slaved off it. When you kill the command node it breaks their activity until a command node is re-established. The autopsy on the corpses showed they were just shells, not an actual person as we understand the term.
Admittedly you could say the same about Goons.
The Triglavian Collective definitely has archived info of contact with the Second Jove Empire, but based on the most recent messages I think we have to eliminate the possibility that they may have left during the Second Empire. The message about the “stability of local spatio-temporal environment” comes after a message about failing to find the locus signature for the Drifters, so it must be a direct reference to the stability of the wormhole network.
They say the stability doesn’t correspond to archive data from “Jovian expansionist polity iter.4” which means the Triglavians must have gone into Abyssal Deadspace after the settlement of Anoikis and establishment of a stable wormhole network. I’m increasingly coming around to the viewpoint that the Jove were studying the remains of the Talocan empire there, and the Triglavian split must have occurred after this.
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Careful now. If you start deciding that generic meat-shells built from homogenized and non-specific repurposed biomass specifically for the purpose of housing a ship-controlling infomorph aren’t people…
… that’s us, too.
The Jove didn’t establish that network, though. The Talocan did.
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We are more than that. The Drifters are not repurposed biomass, but rewired corpses. More like the age old fantasy stories about zombies.
I’d definitely say the “stability of local spatio-temporal environment” comment refers to the now-strangeness of spacetime following Seyllin and Caroline’s Star, where it would have been far more stable when they left New Eden - and yep, I’d also wager that time would have been during or towards the end of the Second Empire.
And as Arrendis said, the wormhole network has overwhelming evidence of having been created by the Talocan civilization, though it was doubtlessly used by the Sleepers to access Anoikis.
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To be honest, I can’t say I feel there’s a huge difference when you get down to base of it - neither of us are living in the bodies we were born with (if there was ever one), we’ve simply created a new vessel for an infomoph.
Yes, but the wormhole network is in Anoikis. The fact that the Triglavians have data about the network means they must have obtained it while in Anoikis, which limits the potential timelines for their divergence from the Jove. They had to have left after the settlement of Anoikis and during the Sleeper empire rather than during the Second Jove Empire.
As a side-note, the phrase “unshackled in forbidden dominance arrangement” referring to the Drifters really seems to back up my hypothesis that the Triglavians were part of a power-sharing arrangement of the waking members of the Sleeper civilisation. It hints that the Tyrants of the Second Empire were forbidden to rule in Anoikis themselves, and that may have been the ultimate spark for the conflict we know they had with the Triglavian Collective.
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No, only after the discovery of Anoikis during the 2E. That doesn’t mean your conclusions are necessarily wrong, but don’t go assuming more surety than we actually have.
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Yes, some of the sleeper structures are very old.
What Arrendis said re:the timeline, and I also share this idea - perhaps they left from Anoikis to the Abyss, somehow? We’ve still never learned the original purpose of the Nexus anomalies & the structures within, something I mentioned earlier here - and the Triglavians have to have entered their now-home somehow.
When we have first seen Drifters, their corpses, my thought was could they be Sleepers/Jove awakened and controlled by Rogue Drones. It was a wild guess as we couldn’t analyze their actions and infer their motivations and goals at that time.
But so many years observing their behavior what can we really make of it? They dont communicate. They murdered Empress Jamyl. They scan or possibly salvage Jove Observatories. They guard their Wormholes. Now they wage war on Triglavians. Doesn’t make much sense to me.
May look like a wild guess again but can they be used as a weapon by say Sansha Kuvakei? What if he managed to gain control or enslave a whole Sleeper Anclave or something? Why would he fight Triglavians though, how would he find out they existed even.
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It’s possible that they are referring more generally to the disruption of spacetime following those incidents, but I’d bet that they’re talking specifically about the stability of the wormhole network. The reason is that this message follows directly from one about exploration operations failing to establish the “active locus” for the Drifters. That could just mean current location, but we do refer to the wormhole system coordinates as a locus signature. They may be saying that they haven’t the wormhole into the Drifter system, not just that they can’t find it. This is just speculation though.
That’s a granted assumption, I think at this point we can all accept the wormhole network as Talocan tech and the Seylinn disaster as having screwed something up. As I mentioned above though, if they ARE referring to wormholes and not just the general disruption of spacetime following those incidents, that pins the Triglavian departure to during the Sleeper colonisation of Anoikis rather than the Second Empire. That also fits with the numerous mentions of the Jovian expansionist polity.
The question then becomes: What actual disruption of spacetime has there been that they could be referring to? The only ongoing disruption I know of has been to the wormhole network and the superluminal nature of the Caroline’s Star event, everything else seems fine. I will admit that there could be disruptions that I haven’t kept up to date on, I have been out of Galnet for a while. Nevertheless, I still believe they are referring to the wormhole network specifically.
“Ancient Enemy” designation is the basis of today’s conflict. The point is what started the “War In Heaven” in the first place.
- “The” Precursor Civilization
- time
- Talocan, Jung, First Jovians, etc.
- more time
- Second Jovian Empire
- Factions emerge, including Sleeper/Tyrant and Triglavian
- “War In Heaven” begins between Sleeper/Tyrant and Triglavians
At this point, they are not yet “ancient enemies.” Something started the war, and resources are a common source of conflict.
Talocan ruins would be valuable resources. The factions may/likely also strongly disagreed about how to approach nascent civilizations emerging around the cluster.
The Sansha definitely aren’t in control of the Drifters - in the days before Caroline’s Star, the Sansha retreated from an incursion without using their wormholes - and when we chanced upon a Sansha-controlled wormhole system, used as staging for some incursions, we also found the Shattered Battleground.
The site contains the wreckage of a conflict between Sansha and Sleepers, with what were (at the time) a number of unknown wrecks dotted throughout the field. Lining this up with the plundering of the Sleeper Caches and changes to Sleeper behavior, this was almost 100% certainly a conflict between the Drifters and Sansha.
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