Sojourn: The Abyss

[Aria_Jenneth]

“They’re Coming”

This series of journals began as sort of cultural investigations into a variety of settings, thoughts and observations from a series of stays among different peoples. This one’s fallen a little short of that for a while, now: beyond a few kind of repetitive musings, I ultimately kind of ran out of stuff to say about the Triglavians and their culture-- there just wasn’t much of it I could see-- so the whole thing kind of became more a bunch of notes and record of doings and maybe a little inspiration/advice for fellow divers.

It seems that might be about to change. Because, it looks like they’re coming here, in force.

It was always pretty clear the Triglavians were a martial people, and even more since we learned an Abyssal filament dive is basically a trial by combat. It wasn’t quite clear what they wanted from us, though, aside from a read on our abilities. Now we have some answers, and hey, good news, they seem to like us! … but, not everything about us.

They’ve noticed, particularly, that there are some Nation agents or sympathizers in the capsuleer class. This isn’t acceptable to them, and likely neither are other “perverse ideologies” expressed here and maybe other places of, ah, memetic exchange. So it looks like they’re coming to conduct an ideological purge.

I’m not sure how they’d be planning to do that. It’s not like killing us does a lot. Either way, it’s a worrying development: they’re willing to move aggressively to suppress ideas they find “perverse.”

What’s “preverse,” though? I think Nation and Sabik ideas fill the bill pretty well, along with maybe anarchism. Only, also, there are a lot of ideas I think are pretty wrongheaded. If I were conducting an ideological purge, I might be tempted to label those as perverse and add them to the list for elimination.

How much variation are the Triglavians willing to accept? Do we have to conform fully to their “flow,” which I’m guessing is their own ideology and political/martial direction, their list of blues and reds, so to speak, before we’ll be acceptable neighbors? A lot of it’s not all that controversial: the oddest thing on their list of likes and dislikes is that they’re tolerant of at least some rogue drones, which is kind of an interesting idea actually.

Only, does it really stop there? It’s not like the Triglavian Collective’s really had to deal with having neighbors, really, unless we count the various clades (which seem to have been existing in a sort of weird simultaneous war and peace all this time?).

One way or another, we’re probably about to learn a lot about the Triglavians. I wish it could have happened a little differently, but maybe this was inevitable from the start. Capsuleers are freakishly diverse in our beliefs and loyalties, even more than our origins would suggest. We’re given so much freedom, and not all of our ideas were ever going to be good ones. The Triglavians seem to set pretty tight limits on what constitutes acceptable diversity in thought, and … I don’t expect we need to think too hard to guess what happens to Triglavian dissidents.

At least they seem willing to accept successful self-defense as validation of a kind. “If you’re strong enough to survive, maybe there’s something to your ideas” seems to maybe be a familiar or even accepted notion, though they also seem to consider some ideas (“hivelinking,” hence Nation) just totally outside any acceptable bound.

Maybe if we defend ourselves successfully, tolerating diversity of thought will seem more valid to them. Either way, we’d better get ready: looks like it’s the Triglavians’ turn to show us their strength.

Time to put the Collective itself to proving.

[Mahazkei_Vas_Hiigara]

This all sounds familiar to me somehow, something about “combat being the purging flame by which impurities are burned away,” or something to that effect. An enlightening pain, by which knowledge and wisdom is accrued through trial, stress, and struggle, though I can’t remember why, I believe it also translates to literal painful education…

I suppose by turning on the most basic instinct to survive, all other senses go on high alert and our memory kicks on, to provide us any tactical advantage should we survive, or remember something on how we survived before to ensure survival now. There is some merit to the thought; you are never more alive then when you are about to die.

It’s interesting as a thought experiment among capsuleer bodies, as death holds no permanent penalty for us, but for baseliners and non-clones, the concept is intolerable.

So what does that mean for the Triglavians? Do they use capsule technology, or some equivalent, making this line of thought for behavior acceptable? Or are the callous in their care?

I hope for our sakes that survival is validation, Aria. I don’t know what I would do, what any of us would do, if survival wasn’t enough.

[Arrendis]

@Mahazkei_Vas_Hiigara

It’s interesting as a thought experiment among capsuleer bodies, as death holds no permanent penalty for us, but for baseliners and non-clones, the concept is intolerable.

Why? The concept of trial-by-combat’s pretty universal, even if most baseliner societies no longer practice it. Heck, the Amarr more or less based their entire interstellar expansion on the idea that the more worthy would always win—until they lost.

So why assume, as you wear your Triglavian attire, that a group espousing a belief literally every facet of humanity has embraced at one point or another, is ‘intolerable’? Objectionable, sure, but plenty of people tolerate it, even now.

Like the Blooders. And the Khanid. And, doctrinally, the Amarr, who still base their claims of superiority (for all the veil them in scripture) on the foundation of ‘we may have had our aggression checked, but you haven’t actually proven us wrong until you destroy the Empire’.

[Aiden_Vayle]

Our observations of the Collective, especially the indication that their minds are linked in a pseudo-gestalt (part of a collective while retaining individuality), and the evolution of their language to have exchanged many verbs and nouns for equivalents related, or specific, to computational terminology, lead me to believe that they are generally… semi-infomorphic to fully infomorphic?

[Aria_Jenneth]

“Balle”

Well … here I am, far from my other duties, on the edge of something awful happening in somebody else’s territory.

It’s been a while since I spent any meaningful amount of time in the Federation. That’s for various reasons, but, really … the Directrix doesn’t dislike visiting, but, to me, this place is least disturbing viewed from a distance. Maybe that’s mostly because I just don’t trust what it stands for very far.

Not that I have a good answer to the question it asks in turn.

We’re here for two key reasons. First, the Triglavian invasion at Haatomo was so swarmed with capsuleers we were having trouble getting much study or salvaging done. Second, there’s an observatory at Colelie, so this is a place where the Drifters and the Triglavians should meet. That’s a thing that would be important to see.

Not that we’ve seen such a thing yet. Maybe the Drifters are lying low; after all, the Triglavians are here in force and even with their firepower it seems like the Drifters would just get swarmed.

Anyway, we’re on down time right now. ARC’s tinkering with fits and concepts, trying to prepare for what’s ahead even if what we have is based mostly on speculation. I’m afraid I’m not much help. That’s to be expected; in the end, I’m just another gun.

The Triglavian menace … it sounds like a phrase from a bit of State propaganda, alongside “the Federal menace” I expect some people will insist should still take priority. And definitely, they’re the older threat. There’s history there, lots of it.

But the Federation never stole the stars.

What have they done? The systems the Triglavians have invested: conditions are strange. System data transmits in Triglavian letters, and the light is muted, veiled in black and red except for a strange golden line, like a dawn that can’t help but be false because there’s no planetary landscape for the local sun to rise over. It feels ominous, like a seam in the world that might crack open at any moment into some horrible new reality.

Maybe it will.

For now, all I can do is try to be ready when the time comes to be useful, to be positioned, be equipped, be ready to move. Hopefully I’ll be able to do that.

The Triglavians don’t feel like an ordinary enemy. They’re not incomprehensible in the same way as the Drifters, but it feels like however different the experiences of humanity’s various tribes and nations might have been, whatever our histories and our grudges, all the gaps between us fade into insignificance next to whatever lessons the Triglavians have learned from the Abyss, and the distance between us and them those lessons have built.

I don’t hate them at all. Whatever they do to us, I’m not sure “hate” is going to be an applicable emotion, if only because it’s going to be so absolutely useless. It won’t motivate me, it won’t teach them; they are who and what they are, and no pressure we can apply is likely to equal what they’ve already been through.

If that makes sense.

I think … it’s just as useless as fear. Even if what we’ve seen is kind of alarming, there’s no point in being afraid. Right now, for all our politics and quibbling to even matter, it feels like we need to observe and think clearly. We need to understand, so that we can react correctly.

Even if all I can do, right now, is wait.