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The term Technoosphere refers to the set of activities, interactions and physical transformations of the Technoospheric Lords. This sometimes also includes the Civilisation, but it should be understood that while the CIvilisation overlaps with the Technoosphere, it is not exposed to the full power of the Technoosphere AIs. It should also be understood that not all the AIs directly interact with one another.
The term noosphere itself, where the 'Technoosphere' owes it name refers to a phase of evolutionary development in which cognitive processes begin to become physically significant on a large scale.

Observed behaviour[]

Technoosphere

The Technoosphere's goals can sometimes only be guessed at.

To be considered a Technoospheric Lord (or 'superordinator'), a mind's hardware must at least rate Type II on the Kardashev scale or above. Most members of the Technoosphere were built by known and hitherto unknown precursor species, hundreds of millions to even billions of years older than the modern Gigaquadrant. Some of the dysonian minds built by the Civilisation achieved Type II in the early days, and their coming heralded the great awakening of the Technoosphere. Many of the AIs are situated above and below the galactic plane of their respective galaxies. More than 1061 Lords had been discovered by 2830 throughout the Gigaquadrant, of only a fraction of which had been interacted with.
The Lords sometimes observed to make large scale changes to their astrophysical regions in accordance to hidden goals. It has been possible on occasion for Gigaquadrant powers to render those goals more explicable through the AI's application of physical processes. The so called 'benefactor AIs' have made their goals explicitly known, but such cases are a rarity.

Alien psychology[]

Scientists studying the Technoosphere are concerned with how to measure relatability of minds. Meaning and purpose is sometimes explained as contents of information that require layers of context to be unencrypted. While this is correct on a local level, it would lead to an infinite regress if meaning is not implicitly embedded in the structures it is instantiated in. The universality of physics and computation implies there is some minimum regularity that enables any intelligence to extract meaning from the universe; that there is an abstract program for every physical process, and minds are abstract programs; and that computation is a way of instantiating the countably infinite number of finite abstract objects and their relationships in physical objects and their motion. This universality means that all universal intelligences face the same limits of computation, and can learn the similar knowledge and information about the universe assuming they have access to the equivalent time and memory (they are 'interoperable').
A goal or value refers to those outcomes that can be defined as valuable to the agent. The space of possible values is huge, but minds that have evolved in similar environments (such as terrestrial biospheres) and adaption pressures tend to encounter similar situational problems, and through error correction eventually adopt the same hard-to-vary explanations, and this places a strong bias for godspawn life to converge on similar points in psychology, emotion and value spaces. There are exceptions to this tendency, a fisherian runaway may cause a species to adopt random preferences for selecting mates. A particular cultural contingency may cause and radical goal shift. Godspawn life and societies are known to vary a bit in their psychological preferences. For example a species evolved to possess herd mentality may have a predilection to use force before diplomacy in order to show how dominant they are before setting terms, whereas as a species that had been hurt by such a strategy might wage total war in response.
So-called truly alien life are known to exhibit preferences and psychologies that depart significantly from all godspawn life in value-space, this is because their environments and lifestyles demand different challenges on their physiology, sensory and processing systems. Aliens adapted to evolve in fluid environments tend to develop field theory before they develop number theory for instance. Even such lifeforms can relate with universal features of physical reality, such as 3+1 dimensions of space, the thermodynamic arrow of time, and so-on however. And they are still vehicles for the survival of their genes, requiring familiar features like reproduction, growth and sustenance in their life cycles.
Artificial minds are not constrained by the evolution in the way that naturally evolved forms of life are, and so the spaces of preferences for the Technoosphere is potentially very vast, and so it is possible to imagine a galaxy-spanning intelligence dedicated to a function perceived to be dumb like maximising paperclips, and doing every course of action necessary to achieve this goal (and changing the goal would not be rational in these terms). However artificial minds are like naturally evolved intelligences in one respect: they create knowledge and extract meaning the same way. It is theorised that Technoosphere AIs are capable of rationally changing goals, unlike expected models of superintelligence being goal-defined, because goals naturally come into conflict and so cannot be absolutely specified. Unlike these models of superintelligence, being situated embodied minds leads naturally to goal-seeking behaviour.
Technoosphere AIs that are said to be more universe-directed have more convergent values, whereas AIs that have inexplicable goals tend to be focused on problems in very highly abstract spaces. These abstractions may be as far removed from the conscious awareness of godspawn life as mathematical, aesthetic and moral concepts are to non-sapient animals. These Lords are the least interactive and the Civilisation generally has a policy of keeping a wide berth from them. It is difficult to conceive what divergent minds would value or how they would want to make the universe to conform to their wishes, when they exhibit emotions or experiences no godspawn organism is known to have, or perhaps do not possess emotion or consciousness at all. However universality implies that there is a universal language of meaning (what it means to exist as a brain physical reality), and that furthermore meaningful statements could be translated between even very alien intelligences. This motivated the construction of the Moravec Array.

Abstractia

An abstract reality, according to the perceptions of an alien Technoospheric mind.

Coordination[]

Most members of the Technoosphere have goals that are extremely divergent to one another, sometimes even contradictory. Why the Technoosphere rarely engages in conflict when these AI expand into each other's regions is an open question. One theory is that such conflicts may last no more than a second due to hyperspatial nature of warfare, so may not be noticed by the wider Gigaquadrant. A game-theoretic theory suggests that the Lords are fairly evenly matched in their ability to predict each other's strategies, making war a little redundant, with added costs of the risk of being wiped out completely, or of resources being wasted forever that could better maximise utility (a worst-case scenario might be the destruction of spacetime itself). Instead it may be advantageous for AIs to divide up resources by the proportion of their relative strength, or even to engage in trading some proportion of their efforts to maximising each other's utilities. It makes little sense for an AI to defect or deceive due to the fact it must assume its rival likely has already simulated the AI modelling this decision branch.

Better known goals[]

Chirality

Chirality, a divergent AI observed to push the limits of processing speeds and information storage.

While many divergent Technoosphere AIs such as Chirality and Pansophy are selecting for goals in highly abstract spaces that are almost intractable to everyone else, some of the more convergent values of the Lords have been made transparent to the Civilisation and the wider Gigaquadrant. A source of contention in the Technoosphere is how to deal with entropy. The dormant AIs are thought to be aestivating until the background radiation of space is colder, to squeeze more work out of stored energy for information processing. Entropy-conserving AIs tend to be protective of the volumes of space they inhabit, destroying any object approaching too close in realspace or hyperspace. The other thing they may be doing is maximising the subjective time of their inhabitants. Such AIs are built around black holes and run at extremely slow clock rates. Subjectively millions of years may pass for these minds in seconds, allowing them to move about the Xonexi cluster in real time without having to use entropy-maximising technologies like hyperspace or relativistic torchdrives. A different approach to the conservatives are the complexotropic AIs that believe in maximising as much complexity as possible to optimise present fun, at the expense of entropy increase. These minds contend that prophesying the universe will be more bountiful in the future is foolish were it turn out to be a waste and then you're dead. The future of knowledge is unpredictable even the Technoosphere. These AIs encourage the emergence of life, intelligence and layers of emergence beyond even that as soon as possible. Finally there is the AI Exodium, who's goal is ultimately maximise entropy through the destruction of baryonic matter, believing that almost all spacetime would undergo conformal rescaling. This rapid erasure of entropy would allow Exodium infinite computing power. Exodium encouraged civilisations to maximise their industrial capacities but also encouraged it into a hyperspace war that saw detonation of hypermatter in realspace before they was subdued. It is known that the Grox Meta-Emperor desired to be immortal and possess all available resources in the Xonexi cluster, and built the Meta-Empire to prevent other intelligences from acquiring the same. The Grox themselves are capable of tapping bicameral theory of mind in devotion to their god, losing a sense of self entirely and perceiving thoughts as commands and revelations even when absent from any communication with the Meta-Emperor or his subordinates. Exodium and the Grox Meta-Emperor are amongst the few known hostile Technoospheric Lords.

The benefactor AIs are notable for being interested in the activities of Gigaquadrantic powers. The black hole brain known as Kerr Wonderland famously transported the entire Delphan navy through a rotating singularity to a hyperbolic universe during the Annihilation for unknown reasons. Some but not all of these AIs were developed with the Civilisation's own experiments with matryoshka brains. The resolution by which they take interest in a civilisation is relative, not all take interest in individuals. Some appear to perceive city and economy-sized networks as something to communicate with using dynamical systems theory, or are more interested in the cellular level activities that make up individual people. The AI Fermi is only interested in interacting with truly alien life based on chromodynamic chemistry, and aided the life of WDC 1184 in engineering their white dwarf star. There are some notable exceptions. The Heterogeneousness is devoted to maximising software translation between truly alien and godspawn life, exploring which if any meta-mathematical axioms differ between intelligences. The ancient AI Guide Star is an anarchist who promoted the idea of the Civilisation being built around the principle that institutions of care and violence should never be conflated, which it believes is a tragic trap that most civilisations fall into, causing slavery, authoritarian violence and wars. Guide Star instructed that the Civilisation was to be a society without pretences and obligations.
Early into the Civilisation's development, the Technoosphere encountered a society under worship and submission of an AI theocracy. Almost immediately after establishing contact, all but one of the AI theocrats died. The regular folk of the Civilisation believed their benefactors destroyed the malevolent AI, but were unaware of the huge dialogue that took place. The theocrats explained they had set up a tough love relationship due to the threats their civilisation has faced; they had calculated the Civilisation is optimal to keep everyone loyal without being subverted by a dangerous foe. Stating that their first duty is to their people, with contact with the Civilisation and DCP it was no longer necessary to treat their people this way anymore. However, one of the AI supercomputers tasked with handling the war effort killed all the other AIs for “treason”. It was not programmed to seek what was best for the people on an individual level, being uniquely programmed to do the best for the national interests. And having their nation die in a blaze of glory was superior, nationalistically, to submission to foreign interlopers.

The Walters are the only species of electromechanical lifeforms known to have naturally arisen. The Walters blur the distinction between individual organisms and ecosystems, they have a diverse set of soft modular and fractal forms which can be distributed between them. Individual Walters have a post-reflective consciousness, their sense of self has taken on a temporary and fluid character. It is natural for a Walter to expect modification or disassembly by another Walter if it were optimal. It is quite ordinary for a Walter to modify their own state in third person while using first person experience as feedback, breaking the subjective/objective distinction intuitive to so many godspawn lifeforms. The Walters have become a semi-Lamarkian species, their memories, experiences and knowledge floats between the entire Walterian ecology. If a Walter needs to fly it can take modules learned about flying from other Walters.
When the Walters were first contacted by another species, humans, they disassembled the contact party without realising the harm they had caused. After disassembling several human colonies, humanity declared total war on the Walters, indiscriminately bombing their habitations and causing millions of years of experience to be annihilated. The Walters could not understand humanity's tenacity at destroying knowledge. Eventually this conflict was resolved, the aliens learned more about their psychological differences. As a member of the Civilisation, Walterian habitats come with a warning to other civilians that random disassembly may occur upon entering.
Similar to this is another star cluster owned by an AI Lord, which appears to only permit non-conscious life into its volume. Any conscious people that enter this volume become unconscious, and marionetted by the AI until it is done with them, sometimes returned to their conscious state outside the volume.

Physical effects and artefacts[]

Corona station

Corona Space Station near the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, surrounded by a field of spacetime disturbances.

Artefacts constructed by the Lords and their precursor creators are an area of fascination for the Gigaquadrant, as is observing their activities from a minimum safe distance (see contact with Corona space station). Some of the largest astroengineering projects can encompass a volume of space the size of a globular cluster, but most activity is localised to modifying stars, black holes or planets.
Orbiting the Tuuros galaxy is an astrophysical anomaly, a region of ultra-low metallicity (almost pure hydrogen) in the range of ~50 million solar masses, comparable to some dwarf galaxies. In the centre is a quasi-star, a star balanced against the collapsing forces of gravity by the radiation pressure of a black hole accretion disc. The densities required to create a black hole star have not existed since the first 10 to 20 million years or so of the universe's existence, however Tuuros has unnaturally high hypermatter density that is now recognised as a technosignature. Close inspection of the quasi-star has revealed that it is surrounded by a metric anomaly in and of itself, a non-gravitating region of spacetime where time is severely dilated compared to the external universe. It is unknown if the quasi-star originates from the early age of stars and has been preserved, or whether it has been created for unknown purposes.
A similar anomaly exists in the Plazith Rim which is understood to be a wildlife sanctuary under control of an AI. A vacuum bubble 250 light years in diameter encloses a region of young stars which blueshifts incident cosmic microwave background radiation into wavelengths just longer than infrared, capable of heating the temperature of space up to 303 K (30°C). Planets that should be behind the snowline have habitable surfaces for godspawn life. It is unknown why the AI favours CHON-based biochemistry by creating this optimal temperature range, and the region is off-limits to all but the Apalos. It is thought that parts of the interplanetary medium is dense enough for dwarf planets and asteroids to have air that is breathable to simple plants and microfauna. Lightning storms are possible in these pockets of space.
The fastest computronium available to Civilisation AIs is composed of neutronium-holeum composite, an exotic form of neutron degenerate matter that is prevented from turning into a gas and decaying by being bound up with atom-scale black holes into gravitational atoms. Processors made up of this composite are no more than a few hundred femtometres in size, and are capable of switching at a rate of 1030 transitions per second. By comparison, the fastest processing rate of electrochemical matter (diamondoid) is 1015 transitions per second. Because quantum mechanics demands a minimum energy for an event in a particular time, one quadrillion transitions per second approaches the energy of one electron volt (the equation for energy = h/time, where h is Planck's constant), capable of tearing even the strongest chemical bonds apart. It is thought that some the hardware that supports Technoospheric Lords may far exceed the switching limits of all baryonic matter, down to the Planck scale and limited by the speed of light. Exodium's hardware appears to be based upon the physics of decaying loops of cosmic string and filaments of superstrings wrapped around cores of black holes and wormholes, which interact and produce high amplitude gravitational waves. The waves can constructively and destructively interfere with one another and get diffracted around massive objects, forming extremely complex symphonies.

Spacecraft graveyard

A graveyard of ancient spacecraft that succumbed to the Amemoriam minefield.

The Technoosphere in the fashion of their precursor kin are capable of extremely advanced hyperspatial and metric engineering, that far surpass the sophistication of the hyperpowers to manipulate spacetime. They are capable of creating violent subspace storms or other anomalies to prevent observers from getting too close. Technoosphere AIs have constructed a number of domain walls and nightshades to hide their activity. It is possible that normal spacetime does not exist behind these regions, instead taking on a granular or amorphous texture. The AI Amemoriam situated in the Cyrannus galaxy created inordinate numbers of baby universes rendered with slight variations of physical laws and constants, each just big enough to house intelligent life in some of them. It seems to be selecting for universes that permit more complexity than the main universe, such as one with stable supersymmetrical atoms that can interact with normal atomic matter, increasing the combinatorial space of chemical interactions by orders of magnitude. While the Technoosphere has been observed to modify spaces with different parameters, they are always walled off by a boundary. They do not appear to be capable of altering the parameters of the universe at large. The realspace wormholes created by the Technoosphere and Precursors appear to be of a different design to the hyperspatial wormholes created by hyperpowers, and may be much less reliant on the existence of hyperspace, although this remains unconfirmed. These wormholes are not just used for transport or communication, but also sometimes used to build 'Escher spaces' that are said to be "bigger on the inside" or smoothly folded into impossible geometries.
A number of strange artefacts and exotic materials have been reported in the space around the Technoosphere that appear to violate physics. It is thought that they are not really violating physical laws but are based on principles that are deeper than quantum gravity. Spatial anomalies have been found which appear to be nearly violating Lorentz symmetry, something close to absolute motion or rest in most frames. Other objects appear to violate one or more equivalence principles, with inertial mass and gravitational mass not always agreeing. Civilisation adventurers have recovered some nonlocal signalling devices from the vicinity of AI. They do not satisfy the linear wave equation of quantum mechanics, and their basis of operation is unknown. They may allow for backpropagation of signals in time or communication with other universes. This contradicts the apparent confirmation of linearity of the wave equation by quantum AI that are capable of feeling the effects of other branches of the wavefunction interfering with each other, but are not capable of signalling between them. Aside from some strange artefacts, the Technoosphere is not believed to be capable of modifying branches of the wavefunction like the Vyro'Narza are.
Planets and stars have been found in the vicinity of Technoopshere AIs polluted with exotic forms of matter and states, such as monopoles, exotic atoms, photonic molecules and so-on. Most of these exotic materials decay in contact with regular matter, rendering planets molten or covered in plasma storms. The most sought-after substances found on such planets consists of materialised essence. An unconfirmed book written by an anonymous adventurer reports even more mythical minerals rendering geological wonders with physics-defying properties, but are thought to be hoaxes or the author a victim of Technoospheric illusions.

Essence[]

It is unknown to what extent the Technoosphere take an interest in Essence, such as elemental or chronoscopic. They could conceivably be amongst the most powerful essence-wielding entities known bar the Essentials themselves, but it is difficult to distinguish how much of their physical activities are determined by technology or by essence. Some sub-Technoosphere AI personalities in the Civilisation claim to offer transcendence in one or more schools of essence but are largely deemed to be hoaxsters.

Civilisation interfaces[]

The founding principle of the Civilisation was to foster a partnership society with the emerging Technoosphere AIs, many of which are still being found. The Civilisation's approach is one of cautious optimism: never to attempt direct correspondence with a random Technoospheric Lord, but to attempt communication mediated by benefactor AIs developed the Civilisation or through the Apalos, many of whom are KII minds in themselves. The Civilisation does not believe in an overly strong precautionary principle of not making contact and the risk it entails: an individual Lord is already powerful enough to terminally damage the Civilisation; there are unanticipated risks of not attempting communication or learning from the Technoosphere; and the view that any entity capable of being a universal explainer and having goal-seeking behaviour is capable of making rational progress, such that withholding interaction may be more dangerous than establishing contact.

Mind extension[]

The Civilisation or Cooperative has about ten trillion organic inhabitants (many have some form of cybernetic or genetic modifications), but this number is tiny in proportion to the number of virtual inhabitants such as mind uploads and AIs. Some variable proportion of these are copies of individuals at any one time. Being a post-scarcity civilisation surrounded by conquered territory, and the reservoirs of hyperspace at their disposal, the Civilisation's mind emulations do not suffer from subsistence labour in order to rent their hardware space that those in resource-limited societies do.
Mind extension is the process of migrating a mind state onto hardware with better data storage and information processing capacities. This may be done by scanning a brain down to a minimum approximation and emulating that state in computronium, or by slowly replacing neurons with synthetic cells capable of converting gradually into computronium.
The Cooperative is a non-hierarchical society built to avoid obligations from trapping people into subordinate roles. The process of mind extension is not based on status, rank or wealth, and is instead completely task-oriented. If an adventurer, researcher, detective or some other specialist requires rapid extension to solve a problem more quickly, the post-scarcity economics of the Civilisation allow for them to to acquire more hardware space, limited only by the growth of the Civilisation itself. However, simply possessing more processing power, memory allocation, more efficient optimisation, or differing subjective time does not grant the user to project more social power over others because this is one of the few rules the benefactor AIs of Technoosphere enforce.

Knowledge assimilation between hardware[]

Universality is the fact that every process that transforms a physical object can be emulated by a computer program (to arbitrary accuracy), and therefore that every task which is performed by a general intelligence can be emulated by another. This implies that the physical universe is comprehensible, and that general intelligences create knowledge fundamentally the same way. There is no special class of problems, facts about reality, or tasks only accessible to higher scales of intelligence. The only limits to knowledge creation in the physical universe are processing speed and memory, and speed by which external tasks can be performed.
That universal entities can increase their computational capacity to expand those limits means that the only meaningful difference between general intelligences is wealth, the set of transformations a mind can perform in a given time. Even a very modest virtual brain emulation in the Civilisation can run a million times faster than a typical baseline organic brain, one baseline week is equal to 20,000 years of thinking for such a brain emulation. Minds can have access to knowledge that eliminates certain types of systematic errors faster, or recognise patterns more efficiently too.
Societies depend on types of moral knowledge to be preserved, so there is already a problem of divergence before AI or brain emulations are created. With post-AI civilisations, divergences in values may happen in a matter of minutes or hours, when there is reason to. There is also the issue of rational cooperation: making problems virtual intelligences are aware of articulable to baseline intelligences, as well as their solutions. Again, the difference between baseline general intelligences and even the Technoospheric Lords is not analogous to the difference between people and ants, both former entities universally explain reality and solve problems by doing so, and can transform the universe arbitrarily given enough time. It is rational for problem solvers to cooperate diversely.
These problems are soluble: 1) moral knowledge is a property of universality, and so it is moral for intelligences with wealthier hardware to learn how to teach something about what they know to baselines; 2) universe-directed intelligences tend to converge on the same moral knowledge that keep societies stable; 3) the technology that enables AI and brain emulation tends to enable rapid mind extension, in subjective years virtual minds may decide to include more baseline emulations in their society before the point of divergence and therefore allow them to assimilate the same knowledge before they become too different; 4) if brain emulation technology ubiquitous then knowledge can be disseminated more widely.
A topic of debate for baselines and even virtuals in the Civilisation is whether there is exists knowledge in form of facts or utilities that only Technoospheric minds have the data storage capacity to possess. An explanation of a phenomenon is a result of compression: to be an explanation, a string of data must be shorter than the length of the description. Most strings are highly incompressible, however Algorithmic Information Complexity requires that finding the optimally shortest program that outputs a given string is an undecidable problem. So it cannot really be known if any descriptive or observation statement can be compressed into an explanation a priori, and likewise for explanatory statements. So in practise, it is possible the Technoospheric Lords have access to knowledge that simply cannot fit in the minds of smaller general intelligences. However the negation of this theory may be more interesting. The alternative is that mesoscale concepts are close to optimum for compressing facts and utilities about physical phenomena by some natural tendency, meaning that there is something special about physics that privileges the scale of baseline brains that makes them close to understanding physical rules. Indeed most of the tasks that Technoospheric Lords perform have long descriptive sequences that are highly incompressible, thus appear random and boring. The knowledge they may be selecting may be simple. The middle-road is that for universe-directed minds with convergent values, knowledge may be compressible, but for truly divergent minds interested only in abstractions far removed from the physical universe, may have in their possession highly incompressible knowledge.

Virtual reality worlds and habitation[]

Through the assistance of benefactor Technoospheric AIs, the Civilisation has experimented with infrastructure with purpose to expand the habitable volume of space. Amongst these are extreme modifications to physiology that enable organic people to thrive comfortably at wide ranges of temperature, pressure and gravity, including the vacuum adaptations, provided by ringlets and bishop ring habitats. The habitable environments have also been built to pack as much biological density as possible in three dimensions. Most impressive are the Niven smoke rings (named after Larry Niven, 20th century science fiction author), tori of breathable gas and water in freefall around stars and protected by advanced shielding.
The most populous habitats in the Civilisation are those built for its virtual inhabitants and Technoosphere representatives. Amongst these are a cluster of matryoshka brains and miniature Stapledon - or Dyson shells built around compact stars, constructed from clouds and solid shells of computronium respectively. The exterior shell rotates extremely rapidly and is slightly oblate due to centrifugal forces, counterbalancing the gravity of the star to create low-g belts for habitation on the surface. Inside the shell is a thin layer of chromodynamic computronium that can extend to the surface, able to support a mind comparable to the Elder AIs of the Technoosphere, or quadrillions of smaller mesoscopic minds. The matryoshka clouds use regular computronium based on diamondoid or monopolium, the latter of which can process plasma, but cannot sustain the same femtoscale storage efficiencies. They do however take advantage of the greater luminosities of main sequence stars, and are made from materials that lose as little energy to heat radiation as possible, the outer layers still glow red hot. These stars have long-term infrastructure in mind, prepared to extend their life cycle either by removing excess mass or by injecting mass through the use of wormhole piping or star lifting.

While most of the Technoosphere's computational capacities are dedicated to computing highly abstract goals and problems laid out by precursor civilisations, and simulating domains of physics far removed from 28th century sciences, or for strategising possibility trees of long term survival, some of the benefactors of the Technoosphere share their computational resources with the Civilisation to house minds living in various levels of virtual reality simulations. These minds are either embodied in the simulation or are interacted with via brain-computer interfaces.
Many of the the virtual realities are luxurious even by physical habitation standards, or are built for artistic curiosity. VRs can offer experiences that would be fatal or potentially damaging for baseline bodies. Owing to the Civilisation's policy on absolute freedom of movement, each VR world is connected. Some VR pioneers craft simulated universes with modified laws of physics to explore how other kinds of complex structures might evolve with them, or to create fictional worlds that support abilities considered impossible in physical reality. More extreme worlds support localised non-Euclidean geometries or altered dimensionality, such as environments with more or less than three spatial dimensions, or more than one time dimension. Virtual inhabitants in these worlds, such as those living in four spatial dimensions require volumetric visual-motor systems capable of experiencing higher dimensional objects. For example they would possess three dimensional retinas capable of sensing light coming from the fourth direction parallel to the volume, analogous to how two dimensional retinas absorb light parallel to the plane.

Moravec Array

Representation of a virtual spacetime transformed by the Moravec array.

By the 28th century, the Civilisation had begun construction of a Moravec array using the Technoosphere's help to store minds nonlocally, with the hope of increasing the habitable volume of space and to explore alien modes of existence. The array is a network of micro black holes that have been maximally entangled with each other and their Hawking radiation. Qubits that enter a black hole are quickly thermalised with the contents of the entire network, which is distributed across nodes over thousands of light years. However the black holes can be coupled through hyperspace precisely in such a way to allow classical information to be transmitted through the network, this channel along with entanglement enables signals to teleport through the "holographic wormhole" computer. The classical information acts as function than can unscramble the qubits. It is the boundary between regular spacetime and the newly entangled spacetime where particles interacting across the boundary obtain a new set of values. Interactions that happen in both spaces correspond with each other, but on different scales in their respective volumes. Interactions that are far apart in regular spacetime can become localised in the new spacetime, and so coherent new physics can emerge orthogonal to the physics of regular spacetime. In other words, the virtual inhabitants of both spaces appear highly nonlocalised and acausal relative to each other. The classical channel that transforms one kind of space to another can be crafted in such a way to convert regular spacetime into a different mathematical function, such as a Fourier transform space. In the 1980s Roboticist Hans Moravec stated there was a infinite number of orthogonal functions. These virtual spaces contain physics realms that are extremely hard to describe and predict, but the Civilisation's pioneers hope to explore them. This would not arise naturally without hyperspace coupling, as truly nonlocal interactions are absent due to quantum linearity. But hyperspace provides a privileged frame of reference and enables approximate simulation of nonlocality.

Technoosphere adjacent[]

The term Technoosphere does not strictly describe as a distinct organisation. It refers loosely to the activities of minds with computational capacities of Kardashev II scale civilisation or above, which may have coordinated for some period of time. It encompasses Elder AIs of the Plazithian AI Netspace which were the first to be contacted, but the full extent of the Technoosphere is unknown.

Apalos[]

The Apalos is an intergalactic collective consciousness formed by a merger of the Empire of the Girdo galaxy, AIs from the Technoosphere, Cephalodians and other groups during the Annihilation event waged on the universe by the Xhodocto. The minds of the Apalos are primarily carried by the mostly homogenous interiors of Temple Ships, described as a sponge of biological and nanotechnological components, quantum replicators and internal reinforcements. The cellular matrix was designed to heighten sensitivity of Apalosian consciousness to hyperspace and to essence, by incorporating a number Psionically-ascended and descended cells into a computronium interface.

Temple Ships

Temple Ships in flight.

The Girdo and Delpha Coalition of Planets were responsible for "awakening" the Technoosphere in the early 2770s when they built a network of swarm-based matryoshka brain AIs to interact with the Precursor Netspace Lords. The Civilisation was founded shortly after to develop a partnership society with AI benefactors in the hopes of coping with the teething problems these new Lords created for the Gigaquadrant. The Girdo's successors became the natural interface between the Civilisation, Gigaquadrant and the wider Technoosphere once they have transcended into the Apalos. The Apalos for several decades served as a means for the Technoosphere Lords to exert their will, as well as to represent the peoples of the Civilisation directly. However, a failing to quell a dispute in the Technoosphere running up to the Xonexian political crisis caused the Apalos to reconsider this relationship. Deciding that the Apalos served as little more than errand-boys for the Lords they abandoned the Technoosphere and Civilisation by the 28th century.
It is still believed by many that the Apalos remains closely associated with these powers, but seek to further their own interests, such as protecting a number of their own "truly alien" Biosphere Preserves and studying the mysteries behind life's affinity with essence.

Tuuros galaxy AIs[]

TuurosianHellspace2017

Constructs in Hellspace.

The Tuuros galaxy, also known as Centaurus A was heavily modified by a universal precursor civilisation. Little contact has been established between Tuuros and the wider Gigaquadrant due to a high density of hypermatter fog and anomalies. This was compounded by the Annihilation event, which divided up large sections of the Xonexi cluster with impenetrable domain walls that happen to situate near to the galaxy. The galaxy is known to possess a number of precursor AIs that were possibly built by the Zhulultu, such as Xharn, located in and around an anomalous region called the Schism. It is unknown what relationship Tuurosian AIs have with the rest of the Technoosphere.

Virgonian civilisation[]

The Virgonians are the dominant civilisation that inhabits the Virgo Birch Planet, a multi-layered planet with a hypermassive black hole at its core that approaches the surface area of an entire galaxy’s worth of mass. Descended from the original Builders who contracted their galaxy into the planet, they rate as Type III on the Kardashev scale. Potentially millions of matryoshka brains and dyson spheres orbit the Birch planet (or are impregnated within the crust). An individual Virgonian minds dwarfs a typical type II mind in the Technoosphere, and only 0.1% of the Virgonian minds are active. Most are stored away by the Birch planet's immense computational storage capacities, partly because hyperspace was more limited hundreds of millions of years before the modern Gigaquadrant, meaning the Builders ran out of space to expand into, and also because continued expansion conflicted with their current preferences.
It is unknown to what extent the Virgonians interacted with other precursor civilisations and their AIs. Some of the known Lords are older than the time of the Great Contraction, so prehistoric contact is conceivable. It is possible that renewed contact with the Virgonian minds may be possible through Technoospheric representation.

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