The Hidden Dossier: Difference between revisions

ACCESS: RESTRICTED

DECRYPTION KEY: 2CA9SXUO2C$IKO-006

REP#: 091-STASIS-TEST

AGENT(S): TRU-135

::1. Now I know you think I'm a steady old hand so you give me the weird jobs on the theory that if I spook then it's worth getting spooked. But this one has me worried. Does no one any good to play with fire. Or cold as the case may be. Either way you get burnt.

::2. All right here are my observations on the use of Stasis.

::The virulence of Stasis against other Guardians has generally decreased. Withering Blade doesn't bite so deep or freeze so solid. Glacial Quake won't catch so many cold footed. Now why is this?

::Partly I reckon that Guardians have learned to counteract the effects of Stasis with their own Light. Heat what's cold and whatnot. But the experimentalists out here mutter that Stasis has a mind of its own: which is strange right because they all insist that "the Darkness comes from within us," that it's a part of them, some residue of the Cambrian explosion or whatever. The real Darkness was inside us all along. Which is it? Is Darkness in all of us or has it got a mind of its own? We need to answer that question.

::Let's say they're right and Stasis has in some way changed itself. Why would Stasis weaken its effect against other Guardians? I'll tell you exactly why. Same reason a virus evolves a strain that won't kill its host. People were turning against Stasis, didn't like what it was doing to their Crucible. So Stasis made itself nicer. So we'd keep on using it. If Stasis was better than what the Traveler gave us we wouldn't be able to accept it as just another colorful species of whoopass. We might get scared of it.

::But this way it's nice and balanced. Everything kept in proper balance. And doesn't "balance" sound like a goal worth striving for?

::3. Now you asked me to keep an eye out for signs of cruelty among the Stasis users. But it strikes me there's a problem here. In the old days we would call it "statistical comorbidity" but maybe you fancy Warlocks have some deeper understanding of synchronicity or hidden concordance or whatnot. What I mean is can we tell if Stasis makes people cruel or reckless or in the best cases very bold? I see Stasis users who shouldn't have any kind of power, never mind Stasis. And I see decent Guardians who took to Stasis as an urgent necessity. It's the old question about Thorn. Was Dredgen Yor corrupted by his weapon? Or did he just need an excuse?

::Maybe Stasis really is just a tool. Maybe the only moral valence it has is what we bring to it.

::4. Cowlick still refuses to examine the Stasis crystals with her own unique senses and I'm not gonna make her. Poor Ghost shouldn't have to stare into what hurts her. Best details she could get with secular instruments attached. However Cowlick is pleased as pinch to go over the results and come up with theories. I'll leave the "Flack parametric analysis" and all the other numbers to her…

::5. Now I do know something about viruses from my frontier medicine days. I know that gentler strains of a virus have a competitive advantage if they keep their host alive long enough to jump to a new one. So we can imagine Stasis as a virus, maybe even a virus with purpose—limiting its virulence so as to get at the rest of us.

::But we've got to remember that a virus only evolves to go easy on its host when that makes it more successful. It's a myth that all diseases evolve to coexist peacefully with us. A virus will crank up its lethality to 99% so long as that viciousness also lets it reach a new host. If a virus could make people explode like rotten balloons and infect everyone nearby, a virus would do it. Viruses don't give a damn for anything except making more of themselves.

::They certainly don't give a damn for their own long-term viability—they're too stupid to think that far in advance.

::So keep that in mind when it comes to assessing the safety of Stasis. After all it is a power we use to explode each other like rotten balloons.

::And keep in mind also that a virus isn't evil. It just wants to exist. If there really is a distinction between Stasis-as-a-power and the voice in those ships, if one can be separated from the other, then maybe Stasis isn't intrinsically corrupting. Or maybe it is corrupting but only when it's tied to the voice behind it. Maybe we can wrest it free. Who knows? Not me.

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<small><span style="color:#735c99;">Mara said there was a difference between Darkness as a force and the will that guided it. But there is no question that the interlopers led us to stasis.</span></small><br>

The enemy has given us a tool. Does that make the tool the enemy?</span></small><br>

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:The Stasis crystals aren't water ice. Obvious enough, but I thought I'd get it out of the way. The extraordinary property of Stasis is its ability to create ordered structures from chaos—it doesn't care what kind of matter is available; it just sucks entropy out of the system until it's got a crystal. The crystal's not exactly chemical. The normal electromagnetic interactions between atoms are suppressed in favor of something weirder. A bit like spinmetal.

:Examination by scanning and tunneling electron microscope (plus X-ray crystallography and neutron diffraction, if we want to be exhaustive) revealed a highly ordered crystalline structure at the nanometer scale. Results included a lot of lens artifacts, so I had to resort to makeshift ptychography. But I've attached what I could see. As far as I can tell, we're looking at conventional baryonic matter—not reifled virtual matter, space time at a true-zero energy state, an excitation of some novel field, or (Traveler save us from VanNet theories) super-extremal naked black holes masquerading as particles.

:(Now, I am a little disappointed to discover that the super vacuum hypothesis is out. Quantum physics says it's impossible to know the exact energy state of a volume of space, and "zero" is an exact energy state—so it's physically illegal for a volume of space to have zero energy when observed. That's why we get random virtual particles popping in out of the void; they're created and destroyed by the energy of emptiness. Some Warlocks thought that if you carried out the impossible task of sucking ALL the energy out of a volume of space-time, nulling out even the zero-point fluctuations and achieving a True Void, then you could achieve a physical regime where space and time themselves ceased to exist. Instead, you'd get a "space-time condensate," a superfluid vacuum capable of interacting with itself to generate structure. In this theory, the Stasis crystals were a cold so deep that they froze space-time itself! It had a certain elegance, but either the True Void does not exist, or it is not here attained, or I am just misinterpreting this data.)

:The crystalline structure of the Stasis material is both spatial and temporal: it forms ordered patterns in three dimensions, and those patterns evolve over time without outside energy input. I've tried bootstrapping several models, but when I compare the predictions to the actual behavior of the crystal, the R-factor is always garbage. (I don't have the equipment to open up the Calabi-Yau manifold and peek at extra dimensions here, sorry. Maybe I'd glimpse the paracausal truth of the Darkness and start dividing in half until you had a planet full of Cowlicks and Truces all complaining.)

:There's some funny stuff going on within the crystal structure: long-range multiparticle interactions that might require paracausal intervention to sustain. The crystal also soaks up incident motion and energy, which it converts into mechanical work: this is how these crystals form so rapidly, and why they're surrounded by such intense cold. (Think of it like a nucleation event in a false vacuum; the crystal keeps expanding because it's energetically favorable for it to do so, as long as its surface area-to-volume ratio is sufficiently high.) It's also why they retain significant structural-impact volatility (they shatter really well). When you've stored so much energy in a dense lattice, you're already most of the way to a bomb. All high-energy chemical explosives are crystalline.

:The actual structure of the crystal is... hard to characterize. The mass has some spooky quantum characteristics, behaving like a superfluid condensate complete with vortices, so it's hard to get information on specific areas—you get domains of the crystals behaving as single particles.

:By poking random spots, I've got the idea that the crystal is composed of different isomer territories which compete along their boundaries to recruit each other. The isomer domains also generate mutants ''within'' themselves, which spread and take over if they have superior recruiting properties; I've even seen encysted "laboratories" where mutants compete before the winners breach the barrier and spill into the surrounding lattice. Our three queens in action again? I promise not to dive into Bieberbach's theorem and abelian subgroups, but there's some fascinating math going on here.

:Now if you're up on your theory (which I am), you know that crystal structures are closely tied to symmetry groups, which by Noether's theorem, are mathematically equivalent to conservation laws: they're descriptions of the ways you can transform a physical system without breaking the rules of that system. All those old kooks were right: crystals are the basis of reality! Sort of. It was spontaneous (read: quantum) breaking of symmetries that created our universe—random perturbations that caused uniform fields to depart their symmetrical but unstable initial state and settle into one of many possible configurations permitted by the laws of physics. Like a ball rolling down the symmetrical peak of a fashionable sombrero and settling somewhere on the brim.

:So that's high-level cosmology. But at the lowest levels of condensed matter physics, the crystals we're looking at here are a product of the same spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism. Matter cooling down abruptly, generating structure.

:What I'm getting at is that the "Stasis ice" is produced by the same mechanisms that created the entire universe from nothing. Cold order from hot chaos. Wild, huh? Makes you wonder if we could use the Light to heat everything back up to the primordial fire. Let it all cool down into a different shape. Maybe even a better one.

:P.S. Something unnerving just occurred to me. The Stasis crystals probably contain domains of superconductive electron flow. And space-time crystals are one way to implement a quantum computer. Those are both very rich media for computation. If there's evolution occurring within the crystals, as domains compete for advantage... that might favor domains with useful internal simulation of the world around them. Almost Vexy.

:There might be cognition and computation happening in the Stasis crystals: thoughts in the crystals themselves, in that short span between their creation and destruction. Tiny swarming minds created and annihilated in the detonation of a grenade. Maybe something to put Shimizu on…

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:Thank you for writing back.Determination is a good word for it.

:You once told me that you consider VIP #2014 to be a real friend. Someone you trust implicitly. But #2014 was forced to use Stasis during the events on Europa. I know #2014 is just one of a number of powerful Guardians from the Cosmodrome cohort, but there’s no question they’re an influence on their peers. I hear gossip that #2014’s Ghost is overwhelmed sometimes by the need to support a Guardian who’s taken such huge risks. He tends to minimize his own needs, rather than push back. He’s barely even confided in other Ghosts about his own repeated possession by the intruders. Silence about such an invasive trauma? While he’s working with a Guardian who is constantly forced into close contact with the traumatizer? That worries me.

:All right, I give up. We may have quit the Tower, but I still need your help.

:For three years, we’ve had our best analysts working on the documents slipped to a Guardian via the queen’s court—the so-called “Truth to Power” manuscripts. All we’ve got to show for it are burnt fingers and bad arguments.

:I appeal to the Hidden for help.

::•The author of all these documents is Savathûn.

::•The documents are an extension of Savathûn’s strategy in the Dreaming City. They are cyclic, deceptive, and fond of the “you did exactly as I planned” mantra.

::•The true message concerns (a) the importance of singularities in Savathûn’s personal cosmology and/or (b) instructions on how to mantle Savathûn.

:We’ve had ships sweeping the edge of the system for orbiting singularities. But we don’t know the mass of the Distributary, or Exodus Green’s outward vector at the time the Distributary formed. We don’t even know if the Distributary singularity inherited the Exodus Green’s vector—leaving it on an escape trajectory into interstellar space—or if it emerged at rest with respect to the Sun—meaning, it would fall directly towards the Sun and pass through it, over and over. Add the gravitational influence of the planets, and it could be anywhere by now. We’re looking for a microscopic point in a volume larger than the solar system. We thought about using fleets of sensor mites to search for a gravitational influence— but then we realized the Nine are in competition with us to find the singularity, and they would certainly use their phantom mass to interfere.

 

:This isn’t a Basho haiku. Purposefully making a suboptimal move in order to make a game more “interesting” is a misunderstanding of the nature of a game. There is no reward for beautiful play in the rules of the game

:The Truth to Power documents are Dûl Incaru’s plea for her mother’s love. She wrote a biography of her mother, an attempt at understanding, in the hopes that Savathûn would also understand her. Imagine how lonely it would be to live in the High Coven, where everything, all communication, is deception. Imagine if your mother had never once told you the truth about anything.

:Think about logic. Here, we define logic as “the governing principle by which a power defines its own existence.” For example, the Hive practice sword logic.

:Your centuries of defeatism have left you with a bad case of learned helplessness. The documents are full of possible misunderstandings. One misunderstanding is that they are pointless, just complexity for the sake of confusion. The threads about imbaru and power-from-confusion point this way. This is the stance that most

:This is plainly foolish. The text is full of useful intelligence, including an excellent explanation of the Anthem Anatheme and an apparently accurate description of how Riven preyed on Guardians to create the curse.

:Think before you laugh! The letters carefully establish a sense of shared physicality. The Eris voice asks you to center yourself in your breath and your body; it asks you to imagine her as a judoka, a swimmer, a football player. This is subtle work, Arach! It is the work of an alien that has taken on many forms and learned how to win trust in all of them.

:The letters plead with us for compassion. Not-Eris describes herself as shy, pitiful, forlorn, afraid to share her true feelings for us. Not-Medusa pleads for help as she disintegrates. At the center, we find the clearest profession of love: “Thank you, sweet friend. You are a gift and a delight. You are more dear than my mother, for you have given birth to me a thousand times.”

:Are you implying that we created Savathûn by imagining her? That her presence in the Books of Sorrow, and all the things she’s done throughout more than a billion years of time, were caused by us reading the Truth to Power manuscript?

:If this is what the Light does to a mind, I’m glad I was never chosen.

:No, I don’t think that’s the right answer. Her spawning on Fundament was only one of her births. She says it herself. “You have given birth to me a thousand times.”

:Black holes. Vex simulations. Ahamkara. Manipulations of Hive tribute. So our answer must involve all four of those.

:The skulls of dire Ahamkara speak to me. They know I want to know the truth, and so they whisper to me of a path they climb. They call it the Anathematic Arc.

:Oh, don’t be so timid! An Arach of Dead Orbit driven to despair by the thought of other universes, when you should know the lore of Hubble volumes and Tegmark hierarchies by heart!

:The Pathria-Good black hole cosmogenesis principle of Golden Age physics confirms that the interior of a black hole is a new universe: all black holes produce their own interior cosmos. All cosmos, including our own, are probably the interior of a black hole in a parent universe.

:At first, Eris is real. Then we learn Eris’s voice is a deception by Medusa. Then we learn Medusa is nested inside Quria. Then

:Oh. I see. I see! A literary structure like that is called a chiasmus, and chiasmus means “crossing point”! Like a wormhole or a portal! It was hidden in plain sight.

:It’s all beside the point anyway. She may have already accomplished what she wanted. Some damn fool Guardian carried out her instructions on a dare. I don’t know why she wanted a powerful Guardian to destroy her daughter in the ruins of Mara’s throne. But she wanted it to happen. And I’m guessing the effects weren’t felt here.

:Of course, Savathûn is still with us. She walked among us as Osiris; she tricked us into removing her worm; she hasn’t vanished into some higher reality. I do not think she built a wormhole into another universe and walked through it—although her intrigues with the Nine have focused on creating singularities from dark matter.

:The Light is noncomputable. It can’t be simulated in conventional physics. That proves that any universe with the Light cannot be a simulation. Our universe can contain simulations, but it cannot be one.