Consider this: Even in Inheritance, the Talocan are always spoken of in the past tense. Even if they were incredibly active as late as the Jove (First) Empire’s time, nothing but their work remained by the time of the Second (“The Tyranny”), or the Third (The Directorate). We know, after all, that when the Jove went to Anoikis they were studying Talocan technology/ruins, much like we study Sleeper technology/ruins, with Talocan bits mixed in, in the Anoikis of today. If we presume that the Enheduanni are Talocan, we have to presume that not only were there still Talocan around long after we have reason to believe their “great disappearance” occurred, but that they cared enough about Jove, let alone the Sleepers, to be their secret shepherds.
We know that there was a group of stellar engineers, probably with the capacity for creating their own wormholes to facilitate FTL travel. They had massive construction ships and they built the star gates for the original settlers and presumably were part of the same group that were trying to stabilise the Eve Gate. It makes a lot of sense for these to be the precursors of the Talocan. In some ways it would have been a good move to blow the gate and disrupt gates in New Eden to prevent the warring faction from the Earth side coming in to exploit resources, although it could have been some kind of accident.
These guys had the capacity to live on their ships and harvest resources, and were used to living in space. They didn’t need to settle anywhere, maybe build a few facilities in space and experiment, but not a planetary colony. There are many parallels that can be drawn between the way they operated and what we know of the Triglavians. Especially the way Anoikis functions and the Triglavian network of Abyssal pockets.
Triglavian technology is more primitive, and smaller-scale, by stages on the Kardashev scale compared to what the Talocan were up to. I see some similarities, but the chain of events doesn’t make sense to me. A civilization as advanced as the Talocan… I can’t imagine how they could fall so far.
The thing is, the Enheduanni - regardless of what they became - are Jove in origin Annisir. Inheritance shows Veniel describing the presence of cultural material entirely distinct from anything to do with Jove civilization aboard the swarm. The only era contemporary with the time of the its construction was the First Empire, a time long before the Enheduanni became the shadowy guides described in Theodicy and in Templar One (that happening after the fall of the Second Empire).
Flying on Anoikis, I found a very interesting description of Talokan. It says that they have a nomadic lifestyle.
EVE Source book : Factions and Enclaves (p139)
The Jove of the Third Empire may be a pale shadow of their glorious forebears from the First and Second Empires, but they do not fall short when it comes to factionalism and the tendency to splinter into isolated enclaves. If the Jovian disease is a real menace that has only relatively recentlye doom of the race, then their almost pathological need to form factions is perhaps the original curse of the Jovian people. The two main philosophical groupings that have been in tension throughout the history of the Jove are the Modifiers and the Statics. These are very broad categories containing numerous factions and splinters, many of which are often found working against one another, as well as members of the opposing tendency. For most of Jovian history, these groups were organized into enclaves made up only of a particular faction or subfaction. The Third Empire and the Jovian Directorate changed that somewhat, making possible unusual groups such as the Society of Conscious Thought, but Jovian enclaves usually lean at least a little more in one direction than another.[…]
A few good points there. No they aren’t necessarily Jove in origin, Grious claims it, which is a big difference. There is no in game evidence to back up that claim. What Grious claims is that they were the original custodians of the Jove on their migration to the Heaven system and continued in that role through the initial settlement period and throughout the First Empire. That is where that particular argument falls apart. The Dyson Swarm is completely different, but still human and that would fit with a Talocan/Triglavian hypothesis. I think they were contemporary at some points in their history, as evidenced by structures in Anoikis, although we could really do with more exact evidence. As dfase points out they do appear to be nomadic, which again fits. I am not too sure about the tech requirement. Much of New Eden is post-apocalyptic in many ways. Their original tech was isogen-5 based, in that it seems to be their primary source of power, losing that would be a massive deal. I doubt we have seen the full extent of their current tech and building a ship like the World Ark is a huge step up on what we have seen so far. The Singularity technology is not small potatoes either.
I can see a viable path for the mythical Enheduanni to become the Triglavians we have come to love, but by the same token I see a more viable path with the Talocan and there is always a third, perhaps less likely option that they cam from some unknown third party.
I go for the third party group, another splinter enclave from Jove 1st/2nd Empire, I like the idea more than Enhuedanni descent even if many things point to them eventualy.
As someone thinking they’re either a 2nd-empire splinter or another culture who developed in that time span, let me ask you this: If the Pre-Triglavians were either Enheduanni or, somehow, regressed Talocan, who are “Ancient Enemy Azdaja”, the Drifters, and what was the nature of that relationship and conflict? To me, that’s where our understanding of the dynamics of that time period would get the messiest.
The Datastreams definitely point at the Tyrants as the Ancient Enemy. Miko Bour set up the Ruling Chambers so that they could effectively vote for the Tyrant. So it isn’t really clear whether it refers to early Second Empire or later. There is stuff about Miko forcing the enclaves that didn’t want to join to do so. Whether that involved a ‘forbidden dominance arrangement’ is questionable but it may be where that taboo came from. The Triglavians also speak about ‘Jovian Expansionist polity’ which sounds like they were spreading out, maybe infringing on Triglav domains and that prompted them to move to the Abyss.
There is a piece where it talks about the Second Empire and the outlying enclaves being attacked first and suffering greater damage than those of the First Empire. Since the First Empire break up seems to be some kind of civil war, it hints that more damaging weaponry was used, and we know how effective Triglavian weapons are at damaging structures. It could also be linked to Quarantine Areas in Anoikis and the migration of the Sleepers. So the Triglavians could have helped the Sleepers migrate and even instigated the Jovian Disease before moving on.
That points to the Disease appearing after the Shrouded Days, so the Disease didn’t contribute to the fall of the Second Empire. Given the Triglavian’s activities then I wouldn’t be surprised if they hacked the genome database to mess them up. The interesting thing is that the Triglavians recognise the Drifters as Ancient Enemy Azdaja but say they are different.
Okay, if we’ve established that the Azdaja as the Tyrants (or the Second Empire as a whole) and not the Others in specific, let’s come back to the Triglavians and ask the next key question: why would the Pre-Triglavians have been in conflict with the Tyrants if they were:
-A splinter culture of the Second Empire?
-An outside culture that rose in that time period?
-Talocan who had regressed to a smaller-scale society?
-The remnants of the Enheduanni, incredibly important figures in Jove history, who themselves were probably either Jove or Talocan?
If we assume the Jove were trying to expand, and that makes a lot of sense; cover more territory and therefore gather more resources. Then I can see them trying to annex any other high tech groups around. The Triglavian precursor group must have been sophisticated to a great extent, much more than the precursors to the current Empires would have been. Jovian civilisation was then centered on the Heaven constellation which is widely separated from where those groups lived anyway. So the Talocan could have bumped into them by nomadic roaming. As that seems to be a Triglavian thing as well, any external group that was of that mindset could have done the same thing.
The other option is that the Stasis People had developed such a high level of technology that the Tyrants wanted control over it. That is covered in Templar one, using a time dilated Construct which enables research to take place overnight instead of over centuries.
It is also one of the areas where Templar One goes off the rails, the Jove didn’t want them to supply a cure for the Disease at that point, because it didn’t actually exist according to Eve Source.
Which leads into another possibility in that if the Tyrants were putting pressure on the Stasis people then a group of them left the Construct to deal with that threat, possibly using Drifter ships, which are very different to standard Jove ships.
It still leaves us with the mystery of what happened to the Talocan. If they built the Nexus gates and went through, and those presumably lead to the Abyss, then that puts the Talocan in the Abyss as well.
In regards to the Talocan, consider Wormholes in New Eden. The network in Anoikis is partially unstable, but New Eden is completely unstable, and can’t even form any static connections. Connections mainly have to form on the Anoikis end, and couldn’t form at all until the event that destabilized the network in Anoikis.
This implies that whatever spatial engineering the Talocan did to make Wormholes possible, they finished in Anoikis, but didn’t finish in New Eden, which raises the question of why, exactly, did they not finish? If you’re in a position to enact projects on that scale, you don’t just stop. Something stops you.
The Dyson Swarm at Caroline’s star stabilised it. When they blew up it allowed wormholes to form spontaneously.
Thank you for clarifying the background to my question, but that’s an aside to it, at best.
They did complete it, and in a really clever way. Class 1-3 wormholes all have statics to K-space, and wandering connections from Class 5 and 6 connect to K-space as well. Class 4 are the odd ones, and only connect to W-space; when I was working with Signal Cartel pilots stuck in Class 4 holes were the worst to find because they tend to form closed chains. So they could live in W-space and pop out into K-space as they needed to, without the K-space inhabitants knowing, and use the Class 4 holes to move through W-space to their desired destination.
It’s not too difficult to see it being a perfectly controllable network. Caroline’s Star connected to Thera, then using the 25 small ship shattered and the 75 other shattered, which all contain Epicenters, to manage connections. The 5 Drifter wormholes are a special case but we have already seen that the Drifters appear to be able to assert some level of control over them. There are 1,000 Jovian Observatory systems and The Drifter wormholes go through phases where they drop to maybe half a dozen connections each, up to between 30 and 50. Generally according to Drifter activity.
I think it is clear they were living in W-space and only using K-space when they needed to, without being seen by anyone in K-space. If we are right, and this is the group responsible for building the original star gate network then they already had the ability to form wormholes in K-space at will. Both the Jove and the Drifters have used this kind of technology, as well as Sansha. The Drifters could have got it through research in the Construct, the Jove by studying Caroline’s Star, and the inference is that Kuvakei stole it, probably from the Jove. From that I would say they had no reason to construct a wormhole network through K-space.
Wormholes do form patterns in their connections. The mathematics of those patterns is really complex, Alan Turing wrote a paper on it. It’s the same maths that governs the formation of patterns on a Giraffe, or on variegated leaves. The patterns that form are not really predictable but are expected from the underlying rules.
And you know that in the data WH the sun is of the same class as Caroline? And surprisingly, the entrances there appear in those systems where there are Jove Observatories. That is, they know how to control the entrance.
Now, about Talokan. In addition to their nomadic lifestyle, there is evidence that their structures cause an unusual and unpleasant feeling.
I’m wondering if that is how they were set up originally. So the Jove used the Drifter holes to position the Observatories.
What do we know about them? That they were left to listen and observe. Therefore, they had to transfer data somewhere. There is a lot of data. It takes a lot of energy for data processing complexes.
But the Sleepers are not exactly Jove. This is directly stated in the trinar stream: exploratory operations have failed to establish active locus for presence of Jove Empire of the Chamber of Tyrant. Jovian expansionist polity iters.[2.0.0, 2.7.20]
And about the Triglavian time, there is another trinar stream: Jovian-Triglavian satellite polity ident:JTNBZx12t7 cat:hybrid subcat:hivemind iter.1.2
I have too many questions and too few answers. Unfortunately, the structures of the Talokan and Drifter are not amenable to Entosys …
It is strange that the Drifters did not attack Arc Triglav. Sworn enemies, and no action whatsoever. 