[Nova Wars] Chapter 181

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“I can explain it to you but I can’t understand it for you.” – Warlord Natshun Carvu’ur, Age of Bronzed Muscles, TerraSol

The Noocracy was old. Older than most galactic civilizations out there. It had possessed space flight and conquered almost a hundred civilizations by the time the Terrans had achieved space flight. While they weren’t as old as the Treana’ad or the Lanaktallan or the Mantid, the Ornislarp Noocracy was almost two hundred thousand years old. Entire species had reached the stars, founded their own stellar nation, then fallen back into barbarism and then vanished during that time.

They spread, and spread rapidly, along the rim of the Cygnus-Orion Galactic Arm Spur. Their flashgates and jumpspace combinations making excellent work of scouting and then moving vast fleets.

But they still had problems.

They did not possess the Mantid and Lanaktallan skill for automation and record keeping. Even with media storage with that had stable at room temperature zero-molecular movement, even with the ability to encode it on a vast array of substances, their record keeping was no better than any other post-Information Age society.

They did not possess the Traena’ad ability to hand down information in non-written formats. Or the Leebaw method of encoding it in the DNA.

The fact that they virtually lost the data, historical, cultural, scientific, at various cycles was lost on them.

How do you know you have lost something that you did not know you had because the fact you had it was lost.

It wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t malevolent.

Their own culture did it to them.

Historical data went from:

• On this data the following military forces (link) attacked the following worlds (link).
• Then links of battles and after action reports
• On this date, the war was lost

And over time it was compressed to:

• Attacked TCAS
• Lost

which had no real value as far as historical data went.

It compressed fifty years of screaming, millions of dead, nova-sparked systems, uncounted wealth expended, into three runes.

With little actual meaning attached.

Then there was the simple fact that the Noocracy was over two hundred thousand years old. A space faring civilization in that time generates records to the extant that they require new sciences and new techniques just to categorize much less archive and store.

For example, the Original Treana’ad work “Two Moomoos for Sister Sara’ah” would be simplified down to a single glyph that reads “FICTION LITERATURE/CONFLICT/PERIOD” and pictures would be shrunk to a single pixel that was the average color of the entire image. Compression Paradox was the fancy word for it. The entire moving picture media would be compressed into a single pixel that was the average color of the sum of all the images.

A six hour movie compressed down to a single glyph and a single pixel.

Then they suffered from the Self-Devouring Singularity where the index of the index of the index uses more resources than the original data due to indexing and reindexeing. The indexes all point at each other and the data the indexes were indexing is gone.

There is an index that points at “TREANA’AD: FILM DRAMA” and then points at “CONFLICT” then “FICTION” and then “PERIOD” and then “TREANA’AD: FILM DRAMA” again. The whole thing begins to index the index of the indexed indexed.

We still don’t know if Sister Sara’ah got her two moomoos.

Then the Interpretive Paradox, where the data is found again, in perfect condition. But the codecs are lost, how to read it is lost. The data is right there. Sometimes they can even read it. But nobody knows what it means.

There the movie is. Perfect condition. We even have the codecs to watch it.

Except nobody speaks Treana’ad in the Noocracy. Nobody understands why she needs two moomoos or why the moomoos are important.

Meanwhile a new index has been formed that indexes the researcher’s discoveries on the Compression Paradox. Now things are worse and…

Heuristic Haunting. It’s dangerous to societies because it looks like function. The system purges relevant data on schedule. The system preserves on schedule. The system files and catalogs and maintains on schedule. The data that is purged is carefully pruned and indexed by the index built by the system. But the values encoded centuries or even eons ago in the heuristic are no longer examined because just the Compression Paradox sigil of the index recursion and they can’t be interpreted anyway. Now the system is just a very organized way of perpetuating the assumptions of people who are so gone that they’re not even a bullet point anymore. Nobody questions the heuristic because the heuristic is invisible.

So, because nobody understands it and it hasn’t been watched or had any research or annotations done to it in a few centuries, “Two Moomoos for Sister Sara’ah” is deleted. Even the rune and pixel version.

Most of the data on the Treana’ad went with her.

The same thing happened with the Terrans.

Which is why the Noocracy made the Prime Miscalculation.

The data said the Noocracy had fought the Confederacy to a standstill over and over. The data said that the Confederacy lost the Terrans who were xenocided. (At least, those who examined the historical data estimated the rune meant (ELIMINATED/DEFEATED/XENOCIDED/NO MORE) and not anything else.

Without the Terrans, the Confederacy lost quite a bit of the various wars according to the historical data. The Noocracy had been slowly absorbing the Confederacy for eons, the much could be tracked on the star charts.

So the Noocracy wasn’t worried about the fact that the Terrans were back.

The Bright Bite strategy of sparking the stellar mass should the Confederacy resist too strongly had led to quite a few surrenders. The Confederacy ships in Noocracy space were slowly down their attacks.

True, the war had kicked off before they had meant it to due to one of the food species getting into a fight with someone toward the gap between the Galactic Arm Spur and the next galactic arm, but it was nothing that the Noocracy couldn’t handle.

The Noocracy had built up vast fleets, massive armies, everything they needed in the areas they had seized over the eons that the Confederacy called “The Tomb Worlds”.

Estimations put it that the Noocracy had a hundred ships of each class for every single ship that the Confederacy had. The standing armies were even better.

The fact that the Confederacy was fighting the Mar-gite (who, it turned out, were delicious is properly prepared) split their forces.

Which meant the Noocracy had the chance to seize all of the Tomb Worlds, all of the species that had popped up since the Confederacy had started to fail.

And eat them.

Which led to military bases across thousands of planets all discovering the same thing.

They were no longer alone.

At first things were a bit garbled with Time on Target.

More than 2/3rd the bases were gone by the 1 minute mark. There had been no warning. No chance to get into bunkers or dive into blast ditches.

The weapons all fired staggered so the munitions would all arrive, including tank rounds and the strikers, within the same 10 second window.

Across planets.

Across stellar systems.

Across everywhere that the little tiny orbs had activated.

The Tomb Worlds were nearly 250,000 in the blobby wedge toward the Noocracy. Of which, fifty thousand of them, an almost unheard of number, had planets in the Ornislarp green zone. Many of them had life, or planets, where previous surveys had said, 100,000 years ago, there was only a single energetic star.

None of that mattered to the Ornislarp Noocracy, who had nibbled about around five stellar systems a year from the Confederacy. Often by just moving in settlers and when the Confederacy found out there was a sizable population of Ornislarp and their food species.

Of the 50,000 stellar systems inhabited by the Ornislarp, roughly 1/4 of them had a small orb or its equivalent down by the bedrock or somewhere else it could work.

Which meant, that across fifteen thousand systems, fifteen thousand worlds, the same thing played out.

Military bases took two minutes of Time on Target barrages before the tanks and striker-dropped infantry engaged the ruins and wreckage of the base.

Infantry in fast Infantry Fighting Vehicles backed by tanks and strikers and precision guidance munitions stormed cities, taking starports (and disabling or destroying space ships), taking possession of the ‘stockyards’, and taking the government buildings.

To the Noocracy, the attacking forces were horrors.

The UltraBlack coating on top of warsteel eliminated 99.999995% of light bounce, making the forces appear to just be 2D silhouettes. Living shadows that advanced rapidly.

Anything that stood in their way was eliminated almost instantly.

For the Noocracy, this wasn’t how things were done.

There was no gold mantid attempting to negotiate a cease fire.

There was no warnings for civilians and high level diplomats to take shelter.

Most of the high level politicians were eliminated in the first 2 minutes by kinetic strikes on their locations that hit with a kiloton or more of on-point force.

89% of the politicians targeted were bodily struck by the kinetic strike after them. Center mass.

The Noocracy staggered. Normally, this wasn’t how warfare was done! Who would do the cease fire where the Noocracy would get everything they wanted? Who would make the peace demands that gave the Noocracy everything they wanted?

The hermaphroditic Ornislarp were filled with fear as they realized that the black shadows weren’t interested in talking.

Military forces were wiped out within minutes. Those forces that did survive found themselves relentlessly pursued.

Corporate infrastructure and hierarchy found itself under the same assault. Armed sillouttes went through factories, shooting any Ornislarp they found.

It wasn’t the way the Confederacy made war!

Five systems managed to get flashgates open to ask for help.

CloneWarLyfe ships darted through the flashgates, hit a hyperspace beacon, dropped a half-dozen message torpedoes, and made death grip runs on the machinery surrounding them.