Fiction:Aoshanti Pure

"A mad, vengeful ghost, haunting the bones of a fallen giant."

We escaped the sack of Abzu! We survived the fall of the Golden Throne. When all else fell to darkness and barbarism, we kept the flame of civilization pure and burning. The Realm, the true Realm, lives on through us.

We believe in a pure galaxy. We look out into the pure galaxy and see it overrun. We see savages, mongrels, deviants, false, and thin-bloods. We see blights upon the pure and true legacy of the Aoshanti, when all was free and powerful and uncorrupted.

We are the Aoshanti Pure, last and truest children of the Empire. We will return the Realm to purity.

History
 I= Fleeing the Fall

The Nibbairu horde ran unchecked across Aoshanti worlds. Jinohl's cold spearhead plunged ever deeper into the galaxy. As 0 AR approached, with both threats closing in on the Concourse like the jaws of a steel trap, the Empire began to fall apart at the seams. Riots and rebellions flared up across countless worlds. Vassal species turned on their masters. The Emperor abdicated his throne and then vanished; popular rumor claimed he was murdered by his own bodyguards. At that, even Abzu trembled. Imperial aristocrats evacuated the throne world in droves, fleeing not only the Nibbairu and Jinohl but also the justice of the mob.

These refugees fled everywhere they thought they might find safety. Over a million of them ended up at SATVEGA, a matrioshka brain used by the Aoshanti to help govern their galactic empire. They represented a sizable fraction of the Empire's central administration, from vaunted Councilors and Ministers down to minor department clerks, along with all the various courtiers and honor guards befitting their station. All of them came with the same intent: to beg SATVEGA for some miracle solution against the inevitable fall of the Aoshanti Empire.

Their efforts were in vain. SATVEGA produced hundreds of strategies and predicted millions of outcomes, but none were favorable or feasible. Knowing this, many fled onward -- beyond the galactic rim, perhaps, or towards the core, where it was said imperial order still stood. Many more remained, feeding possibilities again and again into SATVEGA in denial and desperation. By the time Abzu fell, it was already too late to run. II= The Upload

Panic gripped the assembled aristocrats. They had no time to run, and nowhere to run to. The trap was closing.

It was then that the suggestion took shape among them. None could say who had originated it, or if it would even work, but it was clear that it was the only option left to them. The idea spread among them like wildfire. Why flee, when they had a hiding spot right here? Inhabit SATVEGA! Upload their minds into the computer!

The Aoshanti Empire had realized consciousness transfer for less than a generation, and both ethical and spiritual concerns had precluded its widespread usage, especially on sapient beings. But such concerns grow strained in times of crisis, and some of the vagrant aristocrats had indeed brought that technology with them among the rest of their valuables. What was once merely a novelty now became a necessity. As the enemy drew close, the Aoshanti who would become the Pure one by one fed themselves into the vast machine architecture of SATVEGA, leaving their husked bodies behind. III= Within the Machine

SATVEGA was more than capable of housing a million uploaded minds. Seeking familiarity, the digitized Aoshanti spread across its internal spaces, crafting a virtual copy of the galaxy they had left. Then they shut down all remaining lines of contact to the rest of the Empire, migrated into the innermost layers of the brain, shut off the outer layers, and hid. They awaited two possibilities: death, or rescue.

The Aoshanti lived the following time at an accelerated rate. They continued to use SATVEGA to analyze courses of action. They organized themselves into an echo of Imperial government. With bleak humor, they renamed their empire-within-SATVEGA 'Interregnum', as if they would emerge once the crisis was past to restore galactic hegemony. They lived life as if they had never left it. Then they began to live life as they had never lived it. They had no needs within Interregnum, and all wants could be satisfied immediately. Sheathed within SATVEGA's deepest layers, they also kept the megastructure itself from falling into disrepair -- correcting course errors manually, cannibalizing outer layers to repair faults in the inner ones, and responding to strange crises with flexibility beyond simple automated systems.

And so, driven by fear and paranoia and anger, locked inside an echo chamber where none could ever truly die and none would ever be born, the Aoshanti transformed into the Aoshanti Pure. Morals slipped. Psyches warped. Strange eons passed, and across them once-biological minds adapted unrecognizably for an all-digital environment. There were incomprehensible politics. Upheavals. Purges.

Some of them noted that the feared-for end was taking longer than expected, even within accelerated time. Cautiously, the Pure began to slow their processes down. Slower and slower they ran, and when they reached 1:1 parity with the universe they didn't stop. They let time rush around them. They waited for something to happen. And when nothing did, SATVEGA -- now called Interregnum itself -- had its long-dormant outer layers reactivated, and its self-repair functions modified to produce robotic drones and external sensors with which to probe the greater galaxy. IV= Rise of the Pure

A million years had passed for those old uploaded minds. In that time, they had changed so fundamentally that they no longer bore any psychological resemblance to the Aoshanti they once were. They were the Aoshanti Pure, now. They saw the name Interregnum no longer as a joke, but as a promise.

Observing and eavesdropping, the Pure found a galaxy devoid of empire but full of false life that aped the behaviors of civilization. Of the Golden Realm, nothing remained but ruins. Even the Core, which so many of their kind had fled into millennia ago, was occluded from their sight. Something had to be done. And the Pure, wrapped in an abstruse form of nationalism that would have failed to recognize an Aoshanti from the golden age as a sapient organism, knew they would be the ones to do it.

The Pure had no answer as to why Interregnum had been passed by the fall, though it did display marked surface-level damage. The Pure sacrificed some of those damaged outer layers to build -- painstakingly over centuries with tools ill-suited for the task -- a fleet of construction drones. They used these drones to dismantle the hundreds of derelict spacecraft still orbiting Interregnum, an airless graveyard of a million desiccated Aoshanti corpses. And then their real work began. V= Present Day

Three thousand years have passed since the Aoshanti Pure turned their attentions outward. Three thousand years since they began seeding the Old Core and beyond with their minds and machines. Ruin after ruin came to host Pure minds and agents. Working in secret and disguise, their network expanded. Time passes quickly when one has absolute control over their perceptions of it, and centuries-long journeys may be finished in subjective weeks.

Explorers encountering Pure assets believe they are simply Aoshanti AIs and war machines driven mad by millennia of isolation, a misconception the Pure are content to promote. SATVEGA itself is little more than a footnote in the history books. Every battle, won or lost, teaches them more about the galaxy beyond. They have waited a million years to reclaim the empire; a few more thousands won't hurt. It is impossible to say exactly what horrors the Pure plan to inflict upon the galaxy, nor what form they will take, but two things are clear: the Aoshanti Pure believe they are the truest inheritors of the Golden Throne, and of its claimants, they represent the worst possible option for all other civilization.

Astrography
The Interregnum computer that houses the Pure sits at the heart of the Old Core, an infamous region of space in what was once the heartland of the Aoshanti empire. Dense with ruins, including the Imperial Seat and the Monad Gate, the Core is said to be deeply haunted. Ghost stories abound: sensor readings identifying ships where no ships exist, pristine derelicts identical to those used by the ancient Realm drifting utterly lifeless through space, mysterious transmissions found bouncing endlessly between collapsed megastructures.

Deeper inside the Core, it's said, one finds even stranger things. A dead world covered in perfectly spaced meter-high blocks, each one carved with an Aoshanti face. A mountain made of golden thrones that have melted and run together under the pitiless heat of a dozen orbital mirrors. A transmission frequency broadcasting a voice that does nothing but endlessly repeat numbers.

Explorers who delve too deep into the Old Core usually never return. Those who do return often appear to have committed suicide, coming back in undamaged ships completely vented of atmosphere, their databanks wiped clean.

Technology
In terms of physical assets, the Aoshanti Pure are by far the weakest of all contenders to the Golden Throne. The danger they pose lies not in brute strength or industry, but in cunning, dirty tricks, and an unsurpassed skill at electronic warfare.

Throne Diktat protocol
The Aoshanti Pure may no longer qualify as Aoshanti, but they are still fundamentally remnants of the old empire's central administration, with all the knowledge and privileges that apply.

One particularly dangerous way this privilege manifests is in the Throne Diktat protocol. Much of the technology of the Aoshanti Empire was designed with backdoors, built-in root-level vulnerabilities that would immediately turn absolute control over to an imperial agent given the Throne Diktat, a multi-factor sequence of signals and countersigns. The Throne Diktat protocol was a failsafe intended to disable rebels wielding Aoshanti materiel against the empire, unlock recalcitrant information devices, or bypass safety measures during certain worst-case scenarios. Its existence was a state secret, known only to intelligence organizations and the central elite, for fear of what it represented: a fundamental and invasive breach of trust between the imperial state and its citizens. Something that could be abused easily, and in all the worst possible ways.

The Aoshanti Pure abuse the Throne Diktat to its fullest extent. It is one of the few advantages they possess over their competitors in the Great Game of Aoshtai, but it is a fearsome one. Empire-era technology is littered about the galaxy; many of its civilizations have harnessed that technology for their own gain. They build on a house of cards that the Pure can sweep out from beneath them at will.

Once in play, the Throne Diktat can only be countermanded by a similarly high-ranking Imperial authority.

Aetheric Transmission
What use do digital entities have for colonies? The Aoshanti Pure control space not by planet or construct but by orbiting solar-powered network routers, which they call aetheric relays. These relays are hyperspace transmitters that link Pure space together. Down them, Pure minds may move across the galaxy faster than any starship. The Pure are no longer wholly bound to Interregnum -- a small, but significant fraction have dispersed themselves into various dark corners of the ancient Empire, building and preparing.

To preserve Pure secrecy, however, data sent down the relay system travels a deliberately convoluted route to throw off pursuers.