Lyro
Errant Chronicler
Silent Stars
INCOMING TRANSMISSION
If anyone can hear me... please... please respond.
It has been... 17 days since I last received any communication.
I see the ships. I see the space stations. They're all still there, all intact. But they're all silent. Nobody answers my challenges.
Same with the planetary settlements. This ship is not equipped for planet-fall, but whatever happened to the space structures, I have to assume the same fate befell the planet-bound ones.
Only short-range communications are working. I have been blinking around the galaxy non-stop for the past two weeks, trying to find people.
Supplies are dwindling. Fuel is burning up.
I don't know how long I can keep going.
Help me.
This message will repeat nine more times.
END OF TRANSMISSION
---------------------
INCOMING TRANSMISSION
If anyone can hear me... please...
If anyone can hear me... please... please respond.
It has been... 17 days since I last received any communication.
I see the ships. I see the space stations. They're all still there, all intact. But they're all silent. Nobody answers my challenges.
Same with the planetary settlements. This ship is not equipped for planet-fall, but whatever happened to the space structures, I have to assume the same fate befell the planet-bound ones.
Only short-range communications are working. I have been blinking around the galaxy non-stop for the past two weeks, trying to find people.
Supplies are dwindling. Fuel is burning up.
I don't know how long I can keep going.
Help me.
This message will repeat nine more times.
END OF TRANSMISSION
---------------------
INCOMING TRANSMISSION
If anyone can hear me... please...
.
Far into the future of humanity, the stars have gone silent overnight. There was no warning, no panic, no sign of any kind that something was amiss before all communications winked out almost simultaneously. The galaxy is quiet now - ships drift through space aimlessly, space stations in automatic lockdown refuse all entry, and planetary energy grids progressively fail. If there are any humans left in the affected areas, they are not to be found.
But some pockets of humanity at least have survived. How is still unclear, and scattered as they are throughout the galaxy their chances of long-term survival are slim. From needleships to freighters to orbital docks, they cling to what resources they have stockpiled and try to remain hopeful in the face of the unknown.
You play as one such survivor.
The Plot
There will be at least two distinct phases to the roleplay:
- Three weeks after the fall: Your character, having survived the first few weeks, is running out of time. For some, especially those stuck on the smaller ships, it will be a question of days. For others, it could be months, maybe even years before supplies run out, or before something breaks. But sooner or later, something will have to change. The first phase of the roleplay will chronicle our characters meeting up (not necessarily all at once or in the same locations), attempting to demystify recent events and survive. This phase doesn't have to last very long, and will serve more as a prequel of sorts to introduce everyone to each other.
- About ten years later, maybe more: Your character, having survived the initial weeks (or not, in which case you are free to start a new character) is now a member of the only known human settlement still in activity, of which they might even have been one of its founding members. While it will be decades, perhaps centuries before a full industrial revival is possible, the presence of salvaged orbital factories and still-functioning, mostly automated systems is enough to sustain the colony. Above them, however, the galaxy stirs for the first time since the fall. And whatever is now moving these ships isn't human.
I have not ruled out the possibility of additional phases set even farther into the future, using cryosleep, prolonged lifespans or even just new characters to maintain continuity. Whether or not there are additional jumps in time will depend on the players' wishes.
The overall plot's main focus will be on dealing with the unknown threat out in space, but, should the roleplay take on a slower pace and span a much greater length of time, the focus may occasionally shift towards rebuilding civilization and everything it entails.
The Characters
Your character (or characters, should one of them die at some point) is either a human or a robot originally hailing from a part of the galaxy of your choosing, within the constraints outlined in the next section. There are only a few requirements they must respect:
- In order to survive the fall, your character must have been aboard either a small ship, a derelict space station, an out-of-the-way planet, or any sort of small location that is somehow isolated from the rest of the universe.
- Wherever your character started out, they cannot have had access to a hyperwave receiver - the only source of FTL communication known to man. Their device could have been broken shortly before the fall happened, for example, or maybe they simply never had one. They can (and probably should, if they are on a ship) have access to a hyperdrive, however.
- Your character need not have been alone. In fact, they could even start off paired with one or more other player characters (provided their roleplayers consent to it). But they can't have been part of a large group (defined here as a dozen people or more).
- Your character may be either a human, a robot, or anything in between. Artificial intelligence exists and robots with human or human+ intelligence can be found in most parts of the galaxy, though humans still make up the vast majority of sentient life.
- Average lifespans in the well-off areas of the galaxy (which make up about 95% of known space) are around 400 years, and can be much longer with cybernetic augmentation. The effects of age are hardly felt until the treatments are stopped, after which the body begins to rapidly deteriorate (at a rate proportional to the amount of time spent under treatment - a 200 year old person can expect around thirty years of life, while a 500 year-old person is likely to die within the year).
In addition, while there will be combat in this roleplay, it is not required of your character to have any particular skills in this area. Should they desire, they can stay back at base and provide help in other ways; not all characters have to stick together at all times.
With regards to individual character abilities and strengths, the rules of this world allow for individuals to be quite powerful, thanks to cybernetic enhancements, gene therapies, AI assistants and more. As such you are free to make a strong character, provided you come up with ways to balance out their strengths.
As the game master, I will be playing the role of several non-player characters. Should you wish to do so, you can also roleplay some semi-permanent non-player characters (just run them by me beforehand), so long as they don't become some kind of substitute for your own PC.
Character Sheet: Fill out the following form and send it to me by PM to submit your application. I will work with you if any adjustments need to be made. I will upload my own character sheet soon, which should give you an example of what it should be like.
BBCode Version: Character Sheet Template (BBCode)
BBXML: Character Sheet Template (BBXML)
Search for the following keywords and replace them with the relevant text/BBCode/BBXML:
BBCode Version: Character Sheet Template (BBCode)
BBXML: Character Sheet Template (BBXML)
Search for the following keywords and replace them with the relevant text/BBCode/BBXML:
- CHARACTER_NAME
- CHARACTER_IMAGE
- CHARACTER_QUOTE
- CHARACTER_SPECIES
- CHARACTER_GENDER
- CHARACTER_SEXUALITY
- CHARACTER_AGE
- CHARACTER_RELIGION
- CHARACTER_FACTION
- CHARACTER_PROFESSION
- CHARACTER_EQUIPMENT
- CHARACTER_SKILLS
- CHARACTER_FLAWS
- CHARACTER_APPEARANCE
- CHARACTER_PERSONALITY
- CHARACTER_HISTORY
- CHARACTER_ADDITIONAL_NOTES
Professions
As indicated in the character sheet, your character can have one (or more) professions. You are free to come up with your own professions, so long as they fit into the lore of the world, but here are a few suggestions for your consideration:
- Archaeologist: A go-nowhere profession according to most people. Archaeologists spend their time scouring the ruins of ancient alien civilizations (or, occasionally, ancient human civilizations), looking for clues to what the galaxy might have been like in ages long past. They are usually learned people, but some are just down-on-their-luck grave robbers looking for easy ways to make a quick buck.
- Filter/Sifter/Reporter/Enricher: The name varies according to the culture, but the function remains the same: picking out the most interesting pieces of information that transit through hyperspace and broadcasting them. In ages past, this person might have been considered a combination of a reporter and an investigative journalist.
- Entrepreneur: A rich kid who just flies around the galaxy for fun. The name has been stripped of its original meaning in a universe where free enterprise is mostly irrelevant, thanks to hegemonic super-corporations dominating all aspects of private trade and all-pervasive governments taking care of the rest. Only a few minuscule nations seek out alternative economic models.
- Insurer: A registered, armed bodyguard. In some nations where entire armies have been privatized, the word has also become synonym with "soldier".
- Engineer: Modern engineering resembles philosophy in many ways, as the execution of most technical duties by machines means that engineers are more often tasked with the "how" than the "why". Despite this, engineers are required to remain very knowledgeable in their respective fields, as the machines are not infallible.
The World
Several millennia into our future, humanity was within reach of a post-scarcity economy made possible by practical faster-than-light travel and communication. The creation of hyperspace towards the end of the twenty-fourth century propelled humanity into the Entropic Age - an apt name, considering the disorganized conquest of the galaxy that ensued, but one which originally referred to the construct that had ushered in this new era. For hyperspace, despite a name derived from old twentieth century fiction, is less of a space and more of an extremely dense, networked stream of data. Thanks to its infinite potential for complexity, any arbitrary piece of information can be made to transit through it with the proper transceivers - text, music, even life.
This would have been revolutionary enough in and of itself, but hyperspace's true potential was unlocked half-a-century later when it was discovered hyperspace could be programmed using a Turing-complete model - in more practical terms, that it was possible to navigate and exit it from within. This led to the invention of the hopper drive (simultaneously an homage to an early computer scientist and an allusion to the way it works, by letting one "hop" around the galaxy), the earliest form of hypertransit (and still the most widespread, despite the popularity of blink drives among smaller craft).
Once the initially prohibitive production costs were trivialized by access to mineral-rich asteroids, all semblance of an ordered approach to space colonization was abandoned in a frenzy to claim as big a chunk of the galaxy as one could defend against would-be invaders. It took several decades for the first true fledgling interstellar nations to be formed, few of which remained independent for very long before Earth's governments asserted themselves. At the onset of this story, a great deal of the most powerful interstellar dominions could still trace their history back to the original spacefaring nations of humanity's cradle.
While war never fully went away in this new world order, the ruinous costs of interstellar warfare combined with its catastrophic human consequences meant that all but the most profound disagreements were resolved in alternative ways. In the year 18 317, the galaxy was at peace.
Hyperspace
Understanding the nature of hyperspace is difficult without highly-specialized cerebral implants, but it is easiest to think of it as an invisible, four-dimensional overlay over the entire universe. Unlike a physical overlay, however, it has a much greater information density, meaning that the entire width and breadth of the Milky Way galaxy is contained within an area no larger than a spinning top.
As such, the only effective limit to how fast one can travel through hyperspace is the amount of time it takes to enter and exit it. Compression and decompression of matter takes up the bulk of the travel time for large ships (time complexity:
, where
is the Kolmogorov complexity/algorithmic entropy of the object being transferred, when broken down to the sub-molecular level), and some of the largest can take up to an entire day to travel as a result. However, even small ships cannot travel instantaneously, as they also have to contend with the time required to plot their journey (time complexity:
where
is the distance to travel).
As a result of the latter property, is it usually considerably more efficient to perform a series of small hops when the mass of the ship is small, which leads to the following relationship in those situations:
This is why blink drives - which perform a long chain of tiny jumps - are so popular among smaller ships, whereas the traditional hopper drives are more common among the larger craft.
Hypospace
A counterpart to hyperspace exists, though its applications are not quite as broad. Where hyperspace is far more information-dense than physical reality (sometimes also called baseline), hypospace is the exact opposite, an extremely sparse and static, low-entropy realm. Unlike hyperspace, however, which must exist outside of physical reality, hypospace can be temporarily mixed with baseline. This has seen some use in non-lethal weaponry, most notably for crowd control, where its properties have been used to briefly blank out conscious thought and stifle movement. This application aside, it is mostly a scientific curiosity.
On the Subject of Alien Life
It had been clear for a long time that humanity was neither the first, nor even the second species to conquer the stars. Sprawling, ruined mega-structures testified to the might of the species which came before, though their exact number remained unclear. Judging from the wrecks of starships which litter some planets, it was inferred that most if not all of these civilizations mastered hyperspace travel before they disappeared. Some never travelled very far from their home system; others seemed to reach across the entire galaxy. A few left organic specimens behind, perfectly preserved in the natural stasis of space. But, with one exception (see below), no living alien or functional piece of alien machinery was ever encountered by humanity. While many stars remained unexplored, by the time of this story it seemed highly unlikely that any spacefaring species were still out there.
It was unclear how these species died out. Bio-engineered plagues could have ravaged an entire galaxy. War might have led to the destruction of entire solar systems. Or maybe, as some fringe groups proclaimed, the species had transcended as a whole and humanity's own ascension was fast approaching. It was a mystery, and it had been for millennia - for all the artifacts the aliens had left behind, no computer more sophisticated than an abacus was still functional after all this time.
Again, with one exception.
The Isolates
The technological singularity occurred some time around the thirty-second century, when the first hyperprocessors were developed. Unique devices capable of offloading all of their data processing into hyperspace, they made essentially infinite computational power available to a machine no bigger than a moon (not quite the size factor that had been hoped for, but nonetheless an affordable prospect for powerful nations). While artificial intelligence had become a reality several centuries prior, it had been fundamentally handicapped by the inability to make processors any more compact. The first hypercomputers were supposed to usher in the next age of artificial intelligence.
Eight such AIs were created, over the course of several centuries, each new attempt seeking to correct the mistakes of the previous attempt. Unfortunately for humanity, the results were consistently underwhelming. It seemed that beyond a certain critical intelligence threshold the artificial minds simply did not care enough about humanity to bring about the technological marvels that had been dreamed of. Certainly, they helped, and many governments turned to these seemingly omniscient beings for governance, with undeniably improved results. But on the whole, one could not help but feel humanity was being treated like a child, to be occasionally awarded treats if it begged long enough.
And so most of humanity turned away from these minds, as it was clear they had little to no interest in humanity. The enormous machines they were built on were fully given over to them, as no programs existed that couldn't be run on cheaper and more manageable conventional hardware. Left to their own devices, these AIs became known as the Isolates, having somehow managed to create their own separate versions of hyperspace which were inaccessible to any but them. Some called for their destruction, fearing their eventual uprising, but no such attempt was ever undertaken. What they busied themselves with when not lending the occasional hand to human supplicants was another mystery, and one which they seemed in no hurry to shed light on.
A Ninth Isolate exists, but it is not the product of human hands. As such, it is the most mysterious of all - the only still-working artifact of an ancient alien civilization, of which it never speaks. Like the other Isolates, it too houses its brain in its own localized hyperspace, making it as inscrutable as all the others, if not more. Unlike the others, it is more invested in human affairs, presumably if only because of the novelty factor, and throughout history it has dropped various cryptic hints when pressed for knowledge. Its extension into the physical world is the smallest of all the Isolates, having improved itself considerably over the eons, to the point where its technology is inscrutable to all (except, perhaps, its kin). All were free to visit it at any time, for any purpose, before it unexpectedly shut its doors one day, along with all the other Isolates.
The Roleplay
Silent Stars will chronicle the happenings of a small group of survivors following humanity's fall - perhaps the only surviving humans. I will control most (but not necessarily all) of non-player characters, at least towards the start, while also occasionally playing my own "player" character(s) (usually to help further the plot, but also because I just enjoy it). I tend to enjoy a fast pace among my roleplays, so I will not adhere to a strict post schedule - whenever I feel there are enough responses to reply to, I will write up an update post for those people.
This also means that you should be reasonably active (at least one post per week, even if it is short, though I will always prefer more substantial updates). The usual rules apply - don't attempt any god-modding, don't take control of other players' characters, etc. You are relatively free to make up some of the world's lore as it applies to your own character (countries of origin, technologies, etc.) - just run the more ambitious ideas by me before posting them.
If you are interested, even if you are not decided yet, you are invited to join the roleplay's Discord server (link to the side), which I hope will be the main source of OOC communication. Participation will not be mandatory, but it will be highly encouraged.
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I haven't played the game, though, so I only know the basic setup.
