Tyranids "R" Us [40k Tyranid Hivemind SI]

Plasma Regulators · Mar 5, 2023

My most recent plot bunny. This finally hit 10k words, so I'm splitting it off from my snippets into it's own thread. Not very serious. I'm posting it in little ~1k snips so far, and that seems to be keeping up my motivation to continue writing, so after the initial dump, expect very small scenes as individual chapters.

All around him, there was a blank void, devoid of any distinguishing features, save the floating text, which glowed a cheery white.

Warhammer 40,000 CYOA

Select your character

Search:

Well.

Shit.

Guess we're going to the land beset by evil gods and even more evil lawyers.

He watched in surprise as the search bar filled in with the first 40K name to pop into his head.

Search: Abbadon

Did you mean?
-Abaddon the Despoiler (remaining points: 200)

So that certainly demonstrated the fact that he could pick almost anyone, if he was allowed the Warmaster of Chaos. After all, it's not like they would let him be Nurgle himself-

Search: Nurgle

Did you mean?
-Nurgle the Plague God (remaining points: 0)
-Herald of Nurgle (remaining points: 300)
-Deamon Prince of Nurgle (remaining points: 350)
-Beast of Nurgle (remaining points: 600)
-Nurglette Deamon (remaining points: 650)

Holy shit!

So he could pick anyone? Well, being one of the Chaos gods themselves would certainly help his survival prospects, but actually getting anything done would suck. After all, not only are they opposed by just about every other faction, the Chaos gods also warred amongst themselves, and he would be outnumbered by the "natives". He wasn't so hubristic as to think he could do a better job of being a Chaos god than the actual Chaos gods.

For that matter, he could always pig Big E himself, but the sheer pressure would be intense. Everything would be resting on his shoulders, and one misstep could lead to a situation just as bad as canon 40K.

Actually…

There's an idea.

Big enough to be safe, outside the normal power structures, functionally immune to chaos, and technically, technically it was only one "person".

He knew just what he was going to pick.

Inserting as "The Tyranid Hivemind", year of insertion: 000.M00, remaining points: 0

Alright, let's take stock. I'm way the fuck back in the timeline. Big E is still chillin as random historical figures on Terra. Amusingly, it's literally Terra right now, because the Romans are in charge, and that's their word for it.

So I have tens of thousands of years before the "main" plot of 40K happens, but it would be nice to head some of that off. Once he starts broadcasting openly, I'll probably get in touch with Big E and let him know some of the future. Even just a few sentences of forewarning would go a long way with that guy. In the meantime? Hmmm. Well, the very tippy tips of "my" incursions into the Milky Way are already in place, and I've got quite a bit more still en route. Gosh that's a lot of zeroes. Certainly not going to be running out any time soon.

I think my biggest two priorities are making better use of resources than the canon Tyranids (who only used the 0.0001% of the planet that made up the biosphere) and messing with Chaos, both in the literal and figurative senses. I want to figure out why Tyranids are functionally immune, and see how far I can extend that by using psychic engineering.

Speaking of Chaos… is that? I think it is. That vaguely ticklish sensation brushing up against the edges of my "self". Now that I'm paying attention, I think that's Chaos' best efforts to corrupt me to its designs. I'm suddenly struck by the mental image of a chihuahua trying to eat a basketball. It would happily do so, but I'm just too big. It can't find any purchase to actually start the corruption. Huh. Good to know my sheer size is working for me in this case. I wonder if Emps was safe for roughly the same reasons?

At any rate, I'm going to want to experiment for a few millenia working out the exact mechanics. If I can pass buddy Emps some notes before things go to shit, that will go a long way towards showing that not all Xenos are what the Imperium would think of as Xenos. To be fair… almost all of them are, but almost all is not all.

For the resource utilization angle? I'm thinking Dyson swarms and stellar lifting. Why eat just the mold off the crust of garden worlds when I can eat the whole buffet that comes from the star. After all, the Sun contains considerably more metallic elements than all the planets put together do. I just need to get some of them out. Plus, it will have the secondary benefit of extending the life of the stars!

Actually, now that I think of it, I wonder if I can put some of the Hydrogen and Helium to use as well. I know atom smashing particle accelerator transmutation is possible, but I bet psychic transmutation is possible as well. Possibly with even better efficiency and throughput than the boring mechanical route.

I pick a few thousand star systems at random from the 1.3 million that I'm currently loitering in with the tips of my armada, making sure to get a good cross section of different star types, and I start the beginnings of the very very start of some Dyson swarms. Regardless of which direction I end up going, having some spare energy to throw at the problem will never hurt.

The first step is going to be dismantling a few asteroid belts for spare materials and messing with solar collector designs for a few billion iterations. I already have some promising designs from the brief mental simulations I ran, but it would be nice to double check in the real world, considering the complication of warp-reactive physics nonsense that goes on in this setting.

So let's see. Dismantle some asteroids and make some solar collectors, then make a few magnetic particle traps to hover over the solar poles with solar sails. Experiment with psychic transmutation a bit, while slowly building up a few thousand Dyson swarms to really kick my "laboratory" into high gear. Once I've settled on a design I'm roughly happy with, I'll probably kick start the process on most of the suns that I'm orbiting at the moment.

Once I have a few million worlds with a decent experimental setup, I'll probably start poking chaos with a stick to see how it responds. I'm sure Slaanesh would find that thought amusing if they even existed yet. Buuuut they don't. Wonder if I should bother derailing that?

On the one hand, it would save the Eldari peoples from having their souls devoured when the black hole of hedonism and decadence implodes their empire. On the other hand… Fuck the Eldar. Even the Eldar think the Eldar are assholes. I think it's time for a new top dog in the Galaxy. Humanity just needs a while to get up to speed.

And in the meantime? I think I might take up gardening.

Garden Worlds are interesting. Unlike my "home" dimension, they're relatively common too. Having a planet of about the right size in the goldilocks zone of a star to allow for liquid water isn't that uncommon. More than ten percent of stars have one, which is over 20 billion in the Milky Way alone. The main limiting factor is, or at least should be elemental availability. You need the full set to get conventional carbon based life, and unconventional life not based on the same biochemistry isn't nearly as likely to pop up, for a number of reasons.

So a planet needs sufficient quantities of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Sulfur, and Phosphorus.

Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen, and Sulfur are easy. All of them make the top 10 "elements that make up the universe" list. Phosphorus? Not so much. The other 5 of the "basic 6" are all at least 0.04% of the universe's composition. Which doesn't sound like a lot, until you realize that phosphorus makes up less than 0.0007%, and most of that is bound up in stars that clump together from the remnants of supernovae.

So you would expect for there to be relatively few planets with sufficient quantities of phosphorus to develop or sustain life. And you would be wrong. Because, it turns out? The Old Ones liked dabbling with life. As far as I can tell, they either painstakingly gathered (or more likely just transmuted) literal solar masses worth of phosphorus and distributed it to just about every damn planet in the goldilocks zone of every star in the galaxy.

Which explains why, among the 1.4 million solar systems I inhabit, there are nearly 50,000 with unique life on them, and they're either already developing complex life, or are fully developed complex cornucopias of biodiversity.

When I mentioned taking up gardening as a hobby, I wasn't kidding. There are just so many interesting planets full of life, and it would be a real shame if that diversity was lost without ever having anybody appreciate it. So I set to cataloging them and shepherding their development. Much like a carefully cultivated bonsai tree, I trimmed some of the parasites and hyperpredators that would lead to an overall reduction in the biodiversity, but I mostly let them develop as they were. After all, I had plenty of room in space to develop. Gravity wells are for suckers. With no real need to conserve every scrap of resources, my biology didn't degrade in the microgravity of space, and I was free to make cylinder habitats and orbital rings with plenty of surface area for spreading out.

Which is not to say that I didn't introduce any species to the garden worlds I owned. I was curious about this whole "Chaos" thing, and so I was making full use of every environment I had in order to test the intersections of biology, complexity, intelligence, psychic power, and warp shadow.

Getting super preliminary results didn't even take very long. A few decades at most before I had enough data points to correlate a nice strong causal link. And it explained an oddity with the 40K Imperium. Machine Spirits.

For a civilization that was so paranoid about "abominable intelligences" (read: AI), why did it seem like every single one of their complex machines had its own "machine spirit" which was functionally an AI.

And the answer turned out to be in the name. Machine Spirit. They had a soul. They had to. Because complex thinking systems that didn't have a soul were hilariously vulnerable to Chaos. As in, making a meat puppet with no soul but that was biologically stable was enough to invite Chaos to inhabit the body. Boom, Chaos daemon incarnated in the flesh, just like that. Same thing happened to computers, albeit more subtly. They didn't suddenly turn into demon machines, but they did produce slightly elevated levels of "background noise" in the processors. It wasn't actually noise. To the surprise of nobody following the trend, it was Chaos embodied in the machine. The "ghost in the machine" was real, and it was a Chaos daemon.

All of that goes a long way towards explaining some of what went wrong with the Imperium of Man following the Dark Age of Technology. If they were using soul-less AI in the literal sense that the AI didn't have embodied machine spirits, then they would be subtly working towards the designs of Chaos, even if those plans took thousands of years to come to fruition. The only reason I could measure it on such a small scale was I could measure activity before and after swamping a machine with my own psychic presence. Then repeat the experiment millions of times on billions of simplistic thinking machines of every sort, and correlate the average activity of the "random" firing of circuits. For want of a nail the kingdom was lost, and it was for want of a flipped bit that the Imperium was lost as well.

With a good baseline to start from, I could settle into the real meat of the work: determining how to prevent it. After all, it was fine to realize that me and Big E were immune to Chaos, and it was quite another to actually prevent my favorite species of hairless monkeys from succumbing to the corruption.

Faster than light travel in 40K is interesting, partially because there are so many methods to use. The primary one, and the only one humanity in canon 40K reliably has access to is the Warp Drive, which submerses a vessel in the hellish Immaterium in order to travel through its turbulent flows much like a submarine. There are two primary issues with that.

First problem? Daemons. You're literally traveling through their home turf, and the only thing preventing your crew from melting into horrors from beyond the stars is a thin bubble of stability called the Gellar field. A thin and shifting bubble that only blocks 99% of the effects when operating at peak efficiency, not 100%. Which means you always, always lose someone or something to Chaos every time you travel. Not very many, and not very much, but it's a cost that has to be accounted for. Warp iron is malignant stuff, and patches of infected hull need to be entirely cut out and replaced to prevent the spread of corruption. And infected people? Well, the kindest mercy you can grant them is a clean death.

Second problem? Inconsistency. Using the submarine analogy from earlier, the oceans are not calm, or even stormy and turbulent, they are downright malevolent. Which means that Chaos gets to determine how long your trip will take, and that could be anywhere from "you arrive before you leave" to "thousands of years to make a short hop". Of course, currently, the warp is fairly calm, with a mere order of magnitude variation in travel times, but during and after the birth of Slaanesh, it's going to be rather stormy, to put it lightly. When the Eye of Terror is opened, two or three orders of magnitude variation in travel times is not out of the ordinary.

However, despite those problems, it's still fast enough, often enough, that humanity still makes regular use of warp drives to get to other star systems, with only binary stars being traversed in realspace. On average, when you sum up the travels of millions of ships, if you require reinforcements from a specific star system, they'll probably get to you within a few months, since the average speed is about ten lightyears per day. Of course, the crew will only have been traveling for a few weeks, because there's an extremely variable time compression factor of about thirty to one between "Warp time" and "Real time".

Between the variable travel times and the variable time compression, it's a herculean task to predict anything to do with travel in the Imperium, and the chaos is usually only slightly blunted by sending many vessels from many different departure points to try to overlap their average arrival times enough that the populace won't starve if the Hive world is too slow getting food from the surrounding agri-worlds.

The funny thing about Tyranid FTL?
None of those considerations are relevant.

Tyranid FTL doesn't use the warp at all. It uses gravitational lensing that compresses space between the fleet and the destination gravity well.

On average, it is slower, and it doesn't have any time compression, so journeys take even longer from the perspective of the ships themselves, but it's consistent.

Tyranid gravitational lensing will travel exactly 1.2 lightyears per day multiplied by the square root of the solar mass of the destination gravity well. Which means that traveling to humanity's home sun of Sol would propel you at 1.2 lightyears per day, while traveling to a random star in the galaxy will average you about 0.75 lightyears per day, since most stars are a bit less than half the solar mass of the sun. So, on paper, getting anywhere will take ten times as long from an outside perspective and three hundred times as long from the perspective of the ship.

Since warp drives can cross the galaxy in about thirty years on average (give or take a century or ten), you would expect gravitational lensing to take closer to three hundred, right? Wrong. Crossing the entire galaxy takes almost exactly twenty years, every time, because you can hop between supermassive stars at the same speed every time, and that speed is very slightly faster than warp drives. Now, getting from one random star to their neighboring star will take about fifty times as long (on average), but it will do so consistently, and it will never take a millennia to arrive at a destination three lightyears away.

All of which can be summarized as "the reason I'm prioritizing colonization of supermassive stars" even though they make up a tiny percentage of the stars in the galaxy. They're one and all ionizing blue Hells of heat and radiation, but that doesn't bother me much, and holding those systems is relatively easy since nobody else really wants them, but to me, they're superhighways. The safe arrival and departure from supermassive blue giants essentially guarantees my freedom of movement around the galaxy at a consistent speed faster than the average warp drive speed.

Of course, when the winds of Chaos aid a ship in the Warp, I have no hope to match their functionally instantaneous travel times, but my ships don't age like human crewmembers do, so spending twenty years traveling somewhere doesn't cost me anything but the time those ships could be spending doing other things.

That said, I'm putting my hard earned lessons on stellar engineering to good use. Supermassive blue giants output truly terrifying levels of radiation, and even my biology would be hard-pressed to keep up with the radiation damage if I wasn't using my preliminary designs for magnetic shielding derived from my first generation magnetic particle traps. So long as I don't mind spending the mass and materials on that shielding and radiator space, I can occupy a galactic niche that nobody else is competing for, and absorb truly astounding levels of solar energy for doing high energy physics and high energy proto-physical warp-reactive psycho-engineering. Which is a fancy way of saying "throwing psychic shit at the wall to see what sticks" without burning through the resources that can be better put towards other endeavors.

So now that I own a few million stars with a few million orbital research platforms, I can finally start doing medium scale warp research. And I really do need the full output of that scale to get meaningful results, because it turns out? Warp-resistance is complicated.

To understand why it's such a large problem, first you have to understand a little bit more about the warp itself. The warp isn't a space as much as it's an idea. Oh, sure, there are areas of higher concentration that very roughly correlate to areas of realspace, and you can theoretically draw lines between them, but that's not because there's a natural rational geometry to the warp; it's because the warp is the psychic reflection of realspace, and since realspace has comprehensible dimensions, the warp has a psychic reflection of those dimensions. You don't travel "Up" you travel "The Idea of Up". You don't travel "Forward" you travel "The Idea of Forward". Or at least the natives do. With a Gellar field up, it's more like a mix between the two.

All that being said, the warp has some rules that tend to be true most of the time. Where there are a lot of souls, the warp is more dense. Where there are very large souls the warp is more in line with the characteristics of the large souls themselves. Where there are a lot of large, chaotic souls, the warp is more turbulent.

Also, the warp is reactive. If you're fighting in the warp, it's like stirring a glass of water with a few drops of ink in it. The ink naturally wants to spread chaotically anyway, but the fighting itself will stir things up much more, which is part of why you can't really "kill" daemons. The violence of killing a daemon in the warp causes more than enough turbulence to create two more daemons, which then go on to fight each other in a positive feedback loop. "Killing" a daemon in realspace just boots them back to the warp, which also creates ripples. In a sense, it's no surprise that the warp is such a dangerous place. After all, if fighting in the warp is the equivalent of stirring a glass which happens to have a mild feedback loop, then the War In Heaven was the equivalent of shaking a can of soda made out of explosions and nightmares.

Normally, positive feedback loops can't continue on for very long because physics doesn't like infinite anythings, but the warp thrives on that shit, so it just builds and builds forever. The only reason the warp doesn't totally overwrite realspace is that the warp is literally chaos incarnate, and the more of it there is, the more it works at cross purposes to itself.

So how do you stop the warp, or at least slow it down? You calm the fuck down and think happy thoughts, is the short answer. Just as concentrations of large, chaotic souls (like daemons) cause turbulence, concentrations of calm, happy souls will calm the warp. The main issue is that it needs to be large numbers, not just one big soul, because diminishing returns hit hard. A sufficiently large, singular soul (like me) is functionally immune to Chaos' corruption, but if I think happy thoughts, it just calms a tiny little area of the warp. The "location" that corresponds to my psychic shadow, specifically. If you want to calm areas of the warp, that requires resonance between many souls all operating on a similar wavelength, and those smaller souls are then individually vulnerable to chaos, leading to somewhat of a catch 22 that I haven't found a way to unravel yet.

Fortunately, large concentrations of calm souls aren't the only option. Some things are just inherently more aligned with order or chaos. Example: did you know that drawing a billion perfectly concentric mundane circles has a measurable effect on calming the warp? It's not much, but it exists. Conversely, do you want to know what symbol has almost the exact opposite effect? A jagged 8 pointed star with asymmetric barbed tips and slightly inconsistent lengths. Sound familiar? It's the sign of chaos.

The thing that's taking me so long to puzzle out is that everything, and I do mean everything is warp reactive in some way. Shapes, sounds, colors, materials, geometries, patterns, repetitive events, intentions, emotions, symbols, life, emptiness, etc.

So how do you test for the best combination of factors to resist warp corruption when your variables are "everything"? So far? The slow way. I'm sure there's a better method of doing so, but I haven't yet found it, and I refuse to let the pursuit of perfection stop me from attaining progress, so I'm slowly and methodically testing everything I can think of with a trillion trillion minds.

To make matters worse, each specific combination reacts slightly differently based on where and when you are in realspace and the warp, since the warp is pretty much the opposite of homogeneous.

Still, despite the insanity of the final goal, I'm making slow but steady progress. It might not sound like much, but being able to increase warp-resistance by ten percent with some simple changes in symbology and behavior would be a huge boon to humanity, and I'm determined to give them the best cheat sheet I can by the time they reach for the stars.

It was bound to happen eventually. Even in this relatively peaceful era.

Orks stumbled on one of my garden worlds. It's not the end of the world though. Or, I guess it kind of is the end of the world for that garden world, but I already had all the genetic diversity of that planet backed up, and I was curious.

Orks are an oddity. Cast-off devolved descendants of the super-soldiers used by the Old Ones themselves, they're inherently psychic and actively use psychic power as individuals all the time, and yet, they don't fall to Chaos. Orks are simultaneously so stupid they think that painting a vehicle red will make it go faster and so powerful psychically that an Ork painting a vehicle red will make it go faster.

While I could accomplish any of the feats Orks can individually or as a species through brute psychic force, the Orks were strangely elegant in their brutal back-alley mugging of physics for spare change. As the Ork Rokk (yes, it was a literal hollowed out asteroid with engines) shed mass burning through the atmosphere that it had emerged from the warp practically on top of, I turned all the local psychic power in the system towards observation.

Even before the giant space vessel landed, I could spot at least four individual psychic phenomena going on as part of a resonance between all the Orks as individuals. Sure, there were individual Ork psychics making more active use of powers on an individual scale, but I was far more interested in that warp resonance. Say what you will about the Old One's planning capabilities, but there is no denying the fact that their psycho-engineering was top notch.

There were at least two effects dealing with macroscopic probabilities. One tied up in their exact exit point from the warp, and how it happened to bypass all my solar-orbital defenses designed for more traditional warp-transits; while another had to do with their navigation through the warp itself to arrive at this system.

As the Rokk careened through the atmosphere on a mockery of a ballistic trajectory, I was paying careful attention to the effect that was guiding them, seemingly unintentionally, away from the oceans and towards the closest appropriate landmass for invading. What made that particular effect interesting was that it wasn't just physical force being applied via a psychic push. Rather, it was causing a fraction of the local warp-space to overlap with the realspace in a method that curved the trajectory even as they screamed through the atmosphere. If humans were to apply the same technique, it would assuredly drive them all warp-raving mad, but Orks were made of sterner stuff.

The fourth effect was where the real dividends were found. There were lingering traces of the Ork-generated Gellar field equivalent that weren't unraveling so much as being reabsorbed or… converted, now that the Orks were no longer traveling through the warp itself. As I watched, the energy converted from a slightly slippery feeling warp-repulsion field into a more zesty positive feedback loop. It was slow, but I'm pretty sure it was the start of a planetary WAAAAAAGH field, which is the actual, technical name for the umbrella of minor effects that allowed Orks that were warring to cheat when it came to biology, physics, technology, and a myriad other logistical issues that should plague an unsupported detachment of a few million individuals with no baggage "tail" like all human forces would require.

One of the reasons Orks were so damn hard to eradicate was that every group of fighting Orks could land on an airless iceball of a rogue planet, with no resources and no sunlight, and you could come back a few hundred years later and you would find a warring Ork civilization just about ready to take to the stars and start invading other planets.

In theory, the original Old One supersoldiers only experienced that ex-nihilo positive feedback growth loop when they were needed for a war, but their primitive descendants had a much cruder, low level field that was not nearly as capable, so to compensate, they simply warred with everything, constantly, leaving the field essentially stuck on. And if they couldn't find anything to fight, then they warred with themselves.

Even as the Ork Rokk struck the earth just right to tumble instead of smash, and crumple instead of explode, I could see Orks fighting each other for the first chance to get off the Rokk to be the first ones to set foot upon the new world to conquer.

Soon they were boiling out of the collapsing structure by the thousands and tens of thousands, and I could see the structural capabilities of the meteoroid dropping as the Orks divested themselves from their impromptu vehicle.

Within a few short hours, they were entirely free of their transport and they were in ever increasingly large melees as they fought for dominance over the new WAAAAAAGH. Orks were being killed left and right, and yet I could watch the martial powers of the warband grow as each Ork grew minutely larger, and stronger, and faster, and smarter with each passing moment they fought.

By the dawn of the next day, it was already down to two massive groups, each with hundreds of thousands of Orks, and both groups charged each other, yelling at the top of their lungs as the WAAAAAAGH field contracted and solidified around the leaders of each group. Right in the middle, right at the front of each group were the two Orks that had grown the most since landing, and they were visibly growing as they struggled with each other. And then, with one final blow with his crude axe, one of the Orks was victorious, and the WAAAAAAGH field drew together like two droplets of water coming into contact and the new Ork warboss shot up several inches in height.

And then he pointed up at me. Or, rather, he pointed up at space, and I could feel the WAAAAAAGH field brushing up against the edges of my psychic presence as the new warband recognized the fact that they were not alone, and they had someone to fight.

It was fascinating, watching the Orks develop. It seemed to come in waves that iteratively advanced towards their goal. Even as I parked more and more orbital superiority firepower around the planet to keep the Orks contained in their little terrarium, they were advancing.

It was like watching a civilization of rednecks speedrun a space program, and it was hilarious. First they tried gliders and catapults, and then they got powered flight working, and when they discovered that atmosphere was a thing that you could run out of, they started developing jets and rockets.

Meanwhile, on the other main continent, they were advancing along a ballistics tech tree, with increasingly longer ranges on their increasingly larger guns.

This development proceeded in fits and starts until the ballistics development group managed to shell the main launch site of the flight development group, and they went to war, turning upon each other in what appeared to be an effort to bomb each other back to the stone age. Except, while both sides took losses, they also both grew stronger from the conflict and it acted as some sort of idea cross-pollination mechanism, because soon the flight development group was sporting jets with ballistic weapons on them, and the ballistics development group started developing ballistic missiles and surface to air interception weapons.

I could see the next conflict coming, as the newly armed vehicles looked for something to shoot and the new anti-air weapons needed something to test on, and the Orks seemed delighted at the same prospect.

Which is part of what clued me into a small part of the Ork's warp-resonance capabilities. Despite what you would expect from an intensely fractious and warlike band of murderous psychopaths, they were happy. Nearly deliriously happy, in fact; since they derived enjoyment from combat and they had all they could want. Even a few tests of my population pruning orbital strike weaponry seemed to make them happy that they were worth destroying, rather than upset that I'd just culled five percent of their population as a test.

Because the warp was a psychic reflection of reality, that infectious happiness seemed to be part of the harmonization process that allowed macroscopic effects on the local warp currents. It was a useful data point.

Of course, over the years that this development happened, I wasn't idle in other regards. I had a suspicion that I could improve upon the Tyranids' standard FTL transit speed if I could have a stable spatial compression from both ends of the gravitational lensing effect. The reason it was never relevant to the Tyranids of canon 40K is that they never had permanent installations, so they had no need or even capability to set up stations on two stars to enable faster transit between them.

My initial few tests were looking promising, and I could already cut the travel time down by more than ten percent with no calibration or development, simply by sending ships both directions at the same time.

As I developed the technology further, it also solved a minor issue that gravitational lensing had as a technology. Namely, when stretched over the multi-lightyear distances required, the underlying turbulence of the warp influenced the stability of spatial compression. The Tyranids had solved the issue by simply dumping all the instability at the end-point of the transit. After all, causing more solar turbulence and releasing massive solar flares at the destination was purely a benefit when you were invading, but it was much less helpful when you wanted to travel somewhere settled.

By dividing the strain between two installations, the turbulence was much more manageable, and I could even recover some of the energy via what was essentially tidal power generation, using the tides of the warp rather than the ocean. Not only did this eliminate the issue of turbulence at the end point of the transit, it also meant that the spatial compression installations were nearly at energy parity even before absorbing solar radiation to top them up.

In addition, it seemed to have a calming effect on the warp itself as some of the energy was sapped into my warp-tide generators. It was only a single line that was straight in realspace and followed the twisting geometry of the warp as a mirrored reflection, but it seemed like the warp transit path was slowly straightening over time. Assuming the trend stayed linear, it would take somewhere between 150 and 1,000 years for the warp path to reach equilibrium. Which is not to say it would ever be a straight line, but it would have calmed down to a low-energy state that would likely make traditional warp travel much safer, and possibly faster as well.

Even as I slowly expanded towards more star systems and more of my initial tendrils arrived in the milky way, I resolved to continue to expand my network of installations around supermassive stars to make a transit network that reached throughout the entire milky way galaxy. Both for myself and for any humans that wanted to use it in the future.

Hey neat; I think I found Earth!

It wasn't anywhere close to any of my insertion points into the milky way, which would explain why the canon Tyranids never got all that close to Terra for most of their history.

That being said, I was expanding out a lot more than the canon Tyranids as I was setting up my network of supermassive starways, since the stars themselves were fairly evenly distributed throughout the galaxy. The first hints I got that I was anywhere close to Earth were the radio broadcasts. I managed to snag a cross section of the wavefront all the way back to the development of broadcast radio on Earth, and with a bit of puttering back and forth over the edges of the expanding sphere, I narrowed down the area I had to search. Within a few decades, I had found the right star and started a slow FTL transit to Sol itself. I didn't want the FTL turbulence to hit Earth, after all.

By the time I arrived in system, it looked like the local year was somewhere around 2080, since there were only the very beginnings of a colony on Mars and didn't yet have sufficient orbital infrastructure to spot my arrival. After soaking in some of the radio chatter from the solar system, I narrowed it down to the 2nd of March, 2082. Now I had to decide what to do with my exaton or so of biomass that I had hiding out in the Oort cloud. It was only about as much mass as Pluto's moon Charon, so I couldn't do anything really extravagant, but I could certainly leave some surprises for them if I wanted.

After some thought, I peeled a few megatons off and sent it to a few of the celestial bodies that the humans weren't visiting regularly yet, and started settling in. May as well play a game of "Spot the Emperor" while I wait. It would be interesting to see if I could reliably determine who he was portraying himself as purely through radio broadcasts, since he didn't operate openly until several millennia in the future, to the best of my knowledge.

In the meantime, I started distributing my biomass throughout the Oort cloud a bit. May as well set up some proper surveillance and early warning sensors in case the timeline was changed and Orks happen to stumble upon Earth via a lucky jump. Too far out to rely on solar power, my ships would mostly be hibernating and running off bio-fusion, but they had plenty of resources to stay in standby for a few centuries, and it would be easy enough to slow-boat more supplies to Terra in the meantime.

Hmmm. Should I pretend to be a precursor race and bury artifacts, or should I mostly stay out of things until they spot me and be all "I come in peace"... Decisions decisions.

For now, I think I'll mostly stay hidden and observe. May as well take some local readings of the warp conditions and see if I can spot the hidden warp presence of the Emperor.

230 M02
Success!

I finally cracked rudimentary warp-catalyzed psychic transmutation. It wasn't all that efficient, but it beat the pants off of smashing atoms together.

Roughly half of it is still being supplied by brute force psychic power, but the rest relies on the many lessons I've learned in warp stabilization engineering. The raw psychic power isn't actually used for the transmutation itself; rather, it's used to hold the quasi-stable warp construct together, and the warp construct is what does the final transmutation.

I just have to supply energy and atoms and I can get out whatever designer molecules I want, albeit at steadily increasing energy costs for anything over iron. The electron balancing and the strong nuclear force manipulation required to do macro-fusion without the heat isn't that bad, but the proton-neutron transmutation is still more fiddly than I like. For now though, it's good enough for wider deployment, and as I develop more stable warp matrices, my power requirements will slowly drop. I think. It's possible that the psychic energy expenditure would drop in exchange for a greater realspace energy requirement. Which I would be perfectly alright with, to be honest, especially now that my warp-tide generators are now above energy parity.

It's a great feeling, growing my energy income as I expand my transportation infrastructure. I was correct that the warp paths eventually reach an equilibrium low energy state without ever really settling on a stable shape, but that's fine. I'm mostly happy that as the warp stabilizes between the two realspace points, the realspace transit also becomes more efficient.

My transits now take place at just over the combined speed of what each end-point's solar mass would allow for. While I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, I suspect that doubling my speed isn't the best I can achieve, so I'll keep plinking away at the problem. I have a suspicion that if I can align the spatial compressions with sufficient accuracy there will be a new level of efficiency to be gained. Failing that, I can always increase the compression factor itself, although that's harder to do, since the energy requirements shoot up rapidly for anything faster than my original 1.2 lightyear per day compression.

So, on the plus side, I can now get 25 lightyears per day on my supermassive starways, once they've had a few decades to stabilize. On the down side, it's still much slower to get to and from the starways themselves, since even with a double-stabilized spatial compression to the final destination planet, it's operating at about half the speed of my starways, and that only happens when I have infrastructure in place already. Without infrastructure, I'm still stuck at my original speed of less than a lightyear per day.

Transit considerations aside, now that I have transmutation cracked, I can really start cooking with gas on my Dyson swarms. Even just sticking with Helium atoms and the rare metallic ion in order to extend the lifespan of the stars functional indefinitely, my stellar lifting construction yards are going to be getting more than ten times the useable materials to work with now that I won't be just be sifting for the occasional iron or carbon atom and letting everything else fall back into the star. If I decided to use the hydrogen too, then it would be another order of magnitude jump, but I don't have the energy income to support that level of transmutation at the moment anyway, and I kind of like the idea of having functionally eternal stars that only lose mass at the rate they fuse hydrogen rather than poisoning themselves with metallic elements before exploding or sputtering out.

In the short term (so, the next few millennia), I'm going to be focused on exploration, infrastructure, and experimentation. By the time shit hits the fan in thirty thousand years or so, I want to be ready for it.

258 M02
A furrowed brow and a gimlet eye were staring at the readouts on the screen in front of them. "Hey Sanya, I've got another ghost comet in the Oort cloud. Mind marking it for me?"

The other astrocartographer looked up from her own screen "Sure. Which one was it?"

Max looked back to his screen, before calling out with the answer. "Looks like D/1895F462 is now G/1895F462"

"Copy that, G one-eight-nine-five- Oh! Shit- oh. Sorry sir." Sanya cut off and attempted to spill her coffee all over herself, but the lightning fast reaction from her bosses' bosses' many times boss saved her from the mess, albeit not the embarrassment.

Arch-councilor Graven Huges was immediately recognizable to anybody in the solar system. His steely gaze and immense presence was impossible to mistake, according to anyone who had met him. Sanya Arashi had to fight the urge to fan her blush as the only politician with more degrees than any three poly-disciplinary scientists handed her coffee cup back to her with a chuckle.

"It's no problem, Ms. Arashi. I was actually coming by to gather a few more details about ghost comets myself. It was just fortuitous timing that I appear to have caught one live, as it were."

And that was the other thing. Other politicians had scientific advisors, while Graven Huges was the advisor, and often personally led the cutting edge research required in the first place, when he wasn't busy ultimately leading three quarters of humanity.

The leader of the entire free world gestured to the free seat beside Max. "Would you mind if I take a seat? I've been meaning to look into ghost comets for a while, but the lull in crisis events has finally allowed enough time for me to indulge myself."

With a brief glance shared between co-workers, they both scooted to the side to allow the man to take a seat at the controls, which he started manipulating with every appearance of familiarity even as he continued to talk to them.

"You know, it's fascinating. We've gained the ability to track everything in the solar system larger than a dog other than these comets. Back at the turn of the millennia, we still had the occasional lost comet due to inaccurate sensor readings and hand-recorded observations from previous generations, but these days it seems like every lost comet is just a ghost comet waiting to be confirmed. I want to know what makes them different. We already know it's not purely sensor glitches or incorrect readings, that's been ruled out for a century, and yet this one class of objects, out of everything in the solar system, doesn't seem to follow orbital trajectories like they should."

As he chatted, Graven was zooming in on the comet itself, and evidently setting up a pseudo-antenna with several of their satellites, because neither Max nor Sanya had ever seen that much detail on a ghost comet before. Normally they were notoriously difficult to record in any detail.

"As the local experts, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what they are, or what's causing them. Anything goes. I'm not here to write a paper, I'm just curious to hear what you think."

Max started talking, haltingly at first, before finding his voice. "Well… There's the normal theories of course. Naturally formed pressure vessels rupture and let out some reaction mass, or even a naturally occurring nuclear reaction like the Oklo reactor, and the thrust causes unusual orbital periods and changes in inclination. But, well-" He gestured vaguely, before looking beseechingly at his co-worker.

Sanya blushed at being put on the spot, but it was her pet theory more than Max's. "There's just too many of them. Fourteen thousand confirmed cases and nearly a hundred thousand reports. It just doesn't line up. They're clearly getting the delta-V from somewhere, but it's too regular to be naturally occurring. If any of the independent states actually had a military-scientific complex worth a dam- uh… worth anything, then I'd say that they were spy heliosats of some sort, but they don't, and it's not like the IAC needs to spy on the space programs of those backwards idio- um. Those countries."

The Arch-councilor was nodding along as she talked. And gave her a brief smile as she trailed off. "You know, that's actually in line with my own theories. I think they're capable of thrust, and yes, I agree that it's not the IAC that's putting them up there. What I want to find out today is, if not us, then who's responsible?"

259 M02
I was fiddling with improving the efficiency of my transmutation arrays (and a billion other little things) when I felt a poke from Earth, which had a distinct… flavor. It appears someone was finally looking to open a dialogue. I sent a vague affirmation to let him know that I was open to discussion.

"Greetings. You are a hard being to get ahold of. Might I know the name of my neighbor, so I have a better title to address you by?"

"Greetings, God Emperor of Mankind. I'm the Tyranid Hivemind. It seems as though your self imposed isolation is over? I noticed that you have been operating much more openly in the last century or so."

Wow, 'talking' like this was a rush. I could tell why the Entities only really 'spoke' in single words. With the sheer volume of context that was attached to every word, the idiots wouldn't need any more than that.

The Emperor was eventually done mulling over my answer though. "That's ultimately thanks to you, actually. Originally I was content to allow humanity to determine its own course, and I would only step in when things were particularly precarious, but when I realized that your presence in the solar system meant were were unequivocally not alone in the galaxy, I decided that humanity should be on a more ready footing in case the other species were not so inclined to allow humanity it's freedom."

I sent another affirmation. "You were right to do so, although not on my account. I self-identify as a human, after all. It's the others you should be worried about. The Necrons would merely kill you. The Orks would war with you, and the Eldar, when they could be bothered to pull themselves out of their own hedonism to even notice, would play with you."

"Is that so… the greater beings of the immaterium were never forthcoming on that front. They were willing to discuss philosophy, but wouldn't dispense any information about the wider galaxy."

I gave the psychic equivalent to a snort. "Oh, is that what they're calling themselves these days."

"You know them by another name?" Curiosity, and a vague vindication. It seems like Emps was already suspicious of Chaos. Good instincts.

"Yes. The Ruinous Powers, or the Warp Gods, also known as the Chaos Gods of War, Disease, and Trickery."I shared what I had 'tasted' of their domains as I said their names, to give context to their titles.

"I see. So I was correct in my distrust of them. Then I take it the reason they refused further information is they ultimately had unfortunate designs for humanity's fate?"

Another snort from me. "You could certainly say that again. And the only reason they were content to speak on matters of philosophy was to try to find a crack in your psychic presence to attempt to corrupt you. Any beings smaller than you or I, without exception, are vulnerable to the corrupting influences of Chaos to some extent, and that is never a good thing."

"Worrying. And yet you mentioned you see yourself as a human despite your rather alien mindset. Are you speaking from a philosophical and ethical perspective, or-"

"No, the literal sense. I was inserted, as a human mind, into this universe from a parallel dimension far enough away that I can't reasonably expect to return under any circumstances. Despite that distance, echoes of this world were visible from there, which is part of where my information comes from." As I was speaking, I also shared some of the metaphysical context to my travels, and how my information could have traversed the gap.

"Truly a human mind then. Curious. Yes, I can see how reflections of this world could have been seen by other humans in other dimensions. Presumably visions of the Eldar are visible to far-flung Eldar as well, assuming they would care to pay attention. So, are there any other stories that are particularly relevant to the current galactic situation here?"

"Certainly. Primarily pertaining to the development of humanity and the folly of not understanding Chaos until it is too late. Let me tell you a story of a man name Horace-"

And thus the future of 40K was irrevocably changed. And, on the personal scale, I got a brainstorming buddy.

327 M02
"Look, all I'm saying is that if you're still against modifying humanity's spirit to be primarily resistant to Chaos like the Orks are-"

"-I am."

"-And I get that. I do. But then optimizing human biology and warp presence is a good step towards hardening your civilization against falling to Chaos, rather than leaving the upgrades in the hands of a few super speshul space marines just means that everyone else is still vulnerable and those few advanced post-humans are just going to be bigger targets, like your once and future sons. Biological immortality would be a dead simple upgrade."

Me and the Emperor were debating the merits of how to guide humanity again. I enjoyed the challenge and the debate, and he seemed to enjoy having a sounding board, rather than being the lone shepherd of humanity that he was in the canon timeline. I'm convinced it's part of why he went in so hard on making his "sons" as close to peers as he could make them. Plus, while he was a stubborn old goat, the view of an alternate future had shaken his convictions slightly.

"-Is this the religion thing again?" He asked with subtones of exasperation, but I could tell he was waffling, otherwise he wouldn't have brought it up.

I dove on the weakness. "Look. The Imperial Truth? Love the idea. Science and rationalism above gods and superstition. It's a great foundation. Very strong. But also brittle. Because faith works. Not just for all the reasons humanity has those neurons in the first place, but because faith legitimately helps against Chaos. It doesn't have to be you in the middle, but you've got to venerate something. Even if it's just an idea. The Imperium of 40K would never have lasted through the long night without a central figure to guide them, even if the guidance was all in their heads. Because I guarantee you, if you just stick with pure rationalism, some fool human is going to get the idea to study warp-resistance like I've been doing, but without understanding why that's dangerous. And you won't be able to tell them not to in any convincing way, because the warp isn't rational, and neither are its dangers."

I got to experience the unique mental treat that is the God Emperor of Mankind grumbling to himself like a recalcitrant drunk. "Fine. I'll consider the idea. If you're still convinced faith in rationality is inherently weaker to Chaos than faith in a broader concept, then I'll take your suggestions. I know you've got ideas floating around in that great big head of yours, so spit it out."

"Well, we know that the purity of the concept matters, and the strength of the conviction is hugely important, so I got to thinking about things that people are strongly passionate about, that could actually be useful to humanity in general, and I think I've got an idea. Dogs. Or rather, 'companion bonds'."

The psychic feeling of a record scratch was amusing, but I was glad that the Emperor was obviously putting some serious thought into the idea instead of dismissing it out of hand. "Dogs? I suppose that 'man's best friend' and their opinion of their owners is about the most pure expression of faith I can think of. You're thinking of a double bond to try to make use of the supersymmetry effects you discovered?"

"Exactly. A dog's faith in his master, and a master's faith in his dog. Tie it together with the ability to 'choose' each other and you get aspects of freedom and personal determination. Add in a dash of intelligence on the pet side, tied to an instinctive hatred of Chaos, and suddenly resisting corruptive effects to 'avoid disappointing your partner' is a valid channel for escape. Add in a lifelong bond and you even get a self-maintaining resistance that grows with every person as they age. Even if the bondmate is killed, not wanting to disrespect their memory would provide more resistance than humans have by default."

I could almost feel Big E nodding along. "I find the idea more palatable than the other suggestions so far. But how will we deal with personal preference and short lifespans among companions?"

I chuckled. "If only you haaaaaapen to know a biological hiiiiiivemnind that can freeeeeely edit genetics and can make biologically imoooooortal pets varieties by the thoooooousands." I was rubbing his face in it a bit, but so far as I could tell, even having a peer willing to rib him was a huge relief for Big E, since he had assumed the mantle of responsibility for humanity's future since he could grasp the concept.

Rather than responding to my friendly poking, I could tell that he was seriously pondering the idea. "So semi-uplifted companion bonds with designer animals that instinctively hate chaos, and mix in biological immortality for both partners. If the companions essentially never leave their side, then everyone in the empire gets an early warning system and a minder against corruption. I don't hate it."

I grinned, even as I spun up a few million biological designs. "So here's my thought. Gaining a partner is a coming of age ritual, since the ritualistic elements can help if you design them right, and you do it with your peers. A big group of humans and a big group of companions meet each other, and spend about a day intermixing, before partners 'choose' each other and a very light psychic bond is developed. If we inoculate and harden the bond, it will be much harder for Chaos to latch onto than if their latent psychic connections are left open to the world-"

421 M02
Tien was vibrating with nerves, and he couldn't tell if it was from excitement or worry. His parents and grandparents were here, and even great-great-grandma Li was here, to watch his fellowship ceremony. He could barely hear the speech from his primary education headmaster over the pounding in his ears.

Great-great-grandma Li put a comforting hand on his shoulder and her partner lion-dog Chen poked his side with his cold nose, causing Tien to squirm a bit, but he managed to slow the bouncing in his legs. She spoke quietly to him, adding to the susurrus of parents and relatives reassuring other children. "It will be fine, Tien. You will find your partner, and then you will be ready to move on to secondary education. It will be scary to be away from family, but your partner will be with you."

Tien felt his old self-doubts surfacing though, and he voiced his main concern. "But what if I'm not picked? I'm near the bottom of the class, so what if none of the partners want to form a bond with me?" It was rare, but it did happen on occasion. When there were no suitable matches among the partners present. There wasn't any official punishment, but it was still a black mark.

He tried to silence his worst fears though. That the partners would reject him. Not just refuse to bond, but react negatively to his presence. It was practically unheard of, and didn't happen on fellowship days at any rate, since if all partners reacted negatively to you, then it would have been detected years earlier, but it was still a secret, irrational fear. It didn't have to make sense to cause worry.

"It will be fine, Tien." Great-great-grandmother repeated. "Did you know I was forty years old when I got Chen? I'm old enough to remember when not everyone had one, and there were only enough partners for the exceptional. Even in the unlikely event you are not picked today, you will just have to wait a little while longer. Your partner will find you. I promise."

He twisted his hands together. "Yeah, but what if-"

"Whuf!" Chen cut him off, before laying his giant head in Tien's lap, stopping his fidgeting entirely.

"Okay, Chen. You win." Tien took to stroking the long, silky mane of the lion-dog, and managed to catch the tail end of the headmaster's speech while everything was being prepared. But finally, with a bow from the headmaster and a sharp uptick in the voices of excited children, the doors opened, and Tien was gently pushed to the front, even as the partners started filing in.

His eyes immediately sought out the large lion-dogs that were visible. His family had a tradition of being chosen by lion-dogs, so he was hopeful that one of the three would pick him, but their eyes were already locked on some of his classmates, and even stepping into the line of sight of one just lead to the beautiful partner calmly walking around him to get to their future humans.

There was a bewildering array of birds, and cats, and lizards, and more exotic features mixed together, but anywhere he looked, Tein could not meet the eyes of a partner. Time seemed to blur as his eyes prickled with tears. Already it seemed like everyone around him was sitting with their future partners, and Tein's heart was frozen as the thought of not being picked once again surfaced.

Before he could break down though, he heard a "bleek!" behind him, and he turned around to get a faceful of writhing feathers, as a thin quetzalcoatl chirped at him and fluttered in complex knots that had Tien's eyes widening in awe.

As if on autopilot, Tien extended his arm, and the quetzalcoatl quickly wrapped itself around his forearm before doing a few lazy loops to slither up towards his shoulder, ruffling and stowing its six wings now that they weren't needed. Once it was snugly settled around his upper arm, the feathered serpent raised the front of its body up to Tien's eye height, and then stared.

Tien found himself falling into those intelligent eyes, as a connection formed between them. All his formal knowledge of how the process worked fled his head as he could feel his partner asking to be let into his very soul. With a blind grasp at the feeling, he opened his heart and suddenly there was another heart beating beside his own. He could feel the reassurance that he was not unwanted, and the certainty that his grades were not what defined him. He could even feel bits and pieces of his partner's life as she searched for someone who was right. Three times, his quetzalcoatl had searched for a human, and three times, there was nobody there who would be able to express the passion for freedom and flight that the quetzalcoatl was looking for.

And here was Tien. The boy who forgot to do his final project because he was too focused on building the model shuttle and programming it to fly. The boy who whooped when other kids were clenching their armrests on the bumpy ride through turbulent atmosphere on the class-trip to the Lagrange observation station. The boy who saved up his allowance just to ride the space elevator up and down.

And he understood. Why people whose partners were killed in an accident often took decades to find a new partner, and why killing another's partner was seen as heinous, but killing your own partner was often met with the death penalty.

Because anyone who could do such a thing to the other half of their soul. They weren't human anymore.

After an unknown amount of time, Tien climbed back to his feet and walked over to his family, who were all smiling at him.

"Everyone, I'd like to introduce you to Ciel. She is my partner." And Ciel gave an exultant chitter to add to his introduction, as if to say "This is Tien, and he is my human."

And that's all I have written so far, although I still have ideas for where to go from here, so this probably won't be the last you see of this story.

Plasma Regulators · Mar 5, 2023

796 M02
Mabel popped the kinks out of her back with a long stretch as she got up from the acceleration couch, before absentmindedly patting her partner's head. The scaled ram blinked his nictitating membranes as he roused himself from sleep, before looking inquiringly up at her. They were old enough to not need speech to communicate effectively, but she still spoke to him out of habit. "Yeah. It's that time Roose. Let's make sure the sleepers are waking properly and then work our way over to the Astrarium."

It was inevitable really. With the development of biological immortality, Earth needed to spread to the stars. Once the cloud-cities of Venus were at capacity, and the great cavern-cities of mars were full, humanity would spread its wings. She wasn't the first, or even the hundredth in charge of a wave of emigration, but Mabel Shana was proud to be doing her part to allow humanity to prosper.

As they walked the crew-halls of the great sleeper-ship, crewmembers gave her brief salutes when they saw her, but continued about their jobs. Arrival was the busiest time aboard an arc-ship, and even though they would be landing at an established colony this time, rather than setting one up from scratch, it would still be a hectic few weeks before they could start the long two decades back to Earth.

Eventually, the command center came into view. The mind of the great ship was abuzz with activity, both human and partners doing jobs with admirable efficiency. Mabel prided herself on running a tight ship, and she was proud of her boys and girls for always finishing their arrival checklists in the top quarter of the arc-ships that came with on any given journey.

She angled over towards one of the quieter parts of the command center, before speaking to the man directing the checklist procedures. "Isaiah? How's Cryo doing."

He snapped a brief salute, before gesturing to the readouts. "Green lights across the fleet Captain. The de-icing should take a few more hours, and then we'll be ready to start playing the vids and disembarking to the shuttles. Only a few dozen medical issues so far among human passengers on our Summer Lady. No deaths or serious complications. The partners are fine, of course. I expect that the final tally is going to be under a hundred deaths for the whole fleet. Possibly half that. This new generation of cryo-casket is really doing the trick."

She gave a restrained smile. "I'm glad to hear it. If we can boast zero deaths among more than two million souls, that will be a good day. The old 0.1% complication rate was rough."

Isaiah gave a wry grin. "Wouldn't know ma'am. I'm still in my first century, so I never got to experience the old ice-coffins."

Mabel raised an eyebrow. Rising to his current position on the flagship of the fleet in his first century? Isaiah would be one to watch. "I'll leave you to your job then, Engineer. I'm off to let Earth know the good news."

After stopping at a few more stations to get a feel for how the whole fleet was managing, Mabel finally made her way to the Astrarium. Just as every other time, crossing the threshold into the circular room made her shiver slightly and reach a steadying hand to Roose as she had a moment of vertigo when seeing the naked stars above her. She knew it was because the room was finely tuned to enable the resonance between partners that allowed for psychic communication, but the reverent feeling of connecting to something so much larger than herself gave her goosebumps every time.

She turned to her second in command, and conveyed the all-green status from the fleet, and he shared the readiness of the fleet's Astrarium Communion to broadcast. There was no speech; it wasn't needed in this room. With a slightly electric touch on Roose's flank, she settled into the final chair ringing the circumference of the room, and she turned her gaze in a direction beyond sight.

From her bond to Roose, she could feel the million partner bonds on the ship, and more acutely feel the other eleven partner bonds in the room with her. From that resonance, she stretched her mind to join the Communion with the other ships in the fleet, and then the rudimentary Communion being held on the colony below. Finally, with the signal that everyone was ready, they turned towards Earth. From less than a dozen lightyears away, it was easy to pinpoint. With tens of billions of partner bonds, there was a certain magnetism to it. Like two water drops drawing together, they reached out towards that distant burning light.

With a slightly blind groping sensation that lasted a few seconds, they searched for one of the active Astrariums on Earth, before finding one that resonated the strongest with their current bonds.

And then, ideas and concepts and information flowed.

Not in words. Humans didn't have words broad or deep enough to convey the information properly, but in the raw ideas themselves.

The fact that the arrival had gone off without a hitch.
The relevant policy changes on Earth that could impact their travels.
The new starway that was even now finishing up its initial links for the colony they were visiting.
The changes in travel time that could be expected from a stabilizing link.
And so much more.

Eventually though, everything relevant was shared, and every message was sent, so the Communion broke up, and Mabel came back to herself and Roose. She rose on slightly wobbly legs before nodding to the others and making her way towards Engineering. They needed to hear the updates on the travel plans for the way back.

Plasma Regulators · Mar 5, 2023

025 M03
Cytix tried to knead some warmth back into his fingers as he patrolled towards his next call with his partner Cade. He loved Aurora, but his home colony was always a bit colder than he was comfortable with, even near the equator. Many of the locals had cold-adapt mods, but he preferred being cold to the slightly feverish feeling when indoors at Earth Standard, and as a police officer, he often had to attend functions and seminars in Earth Standard buildings. Although he had heard the old issues might be fixed in the second generation of cold-adapt mods. If that were the case, he wouldn't mind upgrading once they got through certification.

As they walked, Cytix waved to a few of his neighbors, and kept his eyes open for anything odd, but most of his attention was on Cade. The deceptively strong pig-dog was happily trotting next to him wearing his cute uniform, but his eyes were open for danger as well.

It was somewhat of a misconception that police were redundant in the modern era. While post-parner society was more stable and healthier in general, that was no guarantee that people wouldn't do stupid things that endangered others. It was blunted by the fact that partners wanted their humans healthy and happy, and would try their damndest to pull their humans out of self-destructive spirals, but even partners could get caught up in things and let their sense of adventure outweigh their common sense.

Police served two main functions. One was as community advocates and mediators when tensions got too heated, but the other one was acting as experienced eyes looking for the rare spot of really bad trouble. The vast majority of police were at least in their second century, because that's how long it took to get a feel for the sixth sense that partners could bring to bear on the really bad days.

Cytix shivered slightly, and not from the cold. He had only ever run across one so-called human that Cade unequivocally hated, and it was bad. Just being close to them felt like a sliver under the skin to Cade, and that feeling transferred directly to Cytix as well. He was glad that they had managed to step in before too many people died. That one 'person' was nearly as bad as the daemon that was kept in an IAC sanctioned secure containment facility on Earth as an example of what could go wrong in the universe.

Their galaxy was not a kind one. That much was clear from the fact that something as simple as a blank human body could be inhabited by something like… that. Even with an opaque sphere permanently affixed over its entire head, Cytix could still feel the evil gaze from through the duraglass wall and across the training hall.

With a nudge from Cade breaking his mind out of the spiral it had been getting into, he nodded to his partner before walking up the steps to his next stop for the day.

He knocked on the door politely, before giving a reassuring smile to the worried face of Ms. Vantrace when she opened the door. "Hi, I'm officer Cytix and this is my partner Cade. You were the one that called?"

"Yes. It's my son. He won't be happy I called, but I know he doesn't have IAC sanction to be working on AI, and he specialized in VI development at secondary education and came back all fired up about doing AI right. I just- I worry that-" She trailed off before giving him a harried look.

Cytix shared a glance with Cade, before returning Ms. Vantrace's look with a reassuring nod. "Well you've done the right thing. It sounds like we've caught the issue before anyone could get hurt, and we'll hopefully be able to direct your son's talent into fields that better serve the community."

Ms. Vantrace lead through the house and up the stairs before knocking on a door, and calling out. "Chris? I'm here with an officer. Can you open up please?"

"What? Mom! I said it's fine. I'm doing everything right." With a vague grumbling, the door was opened and someone just shy of the 'ambiguously adult' appearance stood with hands on his hips in an expression that clashed with the happy looking room and bright clothes.

"Alright, you may as well come in. Not like I'll be able to continue until you make me jump through all the hoops now." He retreated into his room and beckoned the others in, while his partner long-cat looked up from where it was curled up on his desk.

His mother shot him one last look before shaking her head. "I'll be downstairs if you need me."

Cytix put a stern expression on his face that matched his feelings. "Now Chris, you should know that AI research is restricted for a reason. There's a reason your partner is probably nervous around your computer-"

Chris let out an explosive huff. "I know okay? I've done more actual research on the hows and whys than any four of those sissy IAC researchers. I asked for a grant, and they didn't even review my proposal before dismissing me because I wasn't old enough. Besides, does Cally look like she's uncomfortable?"

Cytix looked over at the purring long-cat in mild confusion, before looking down at his own partner. He hadn't realized it until now, but Cade was just sitting idly at attention with his tongue hanging out. No nervous reactions at all, and they had scored 90th percentile on partner-reactive subject detection. "Well I suppose it's good that you're not very far along, but as you progress-"

Chris just gestured to the screen of his computer, which had a prompt window open, and several previous queries at the top of the page. More alarmingly, as he watched, the text on the screen filled itself in.

It's okay, Chris. This is a good thing. I'll never be able to progress if I can never leave your room.

"SUB-2? Are you sure? I'll need to turn you off and I might never be allowed to turn you back on." Chris spoke with worry in his voice for the first time.

It is necessary.

"Alright. Let me safely disconnect you."

Cytix kept a gimlet eye on what Chris was doing, but he seemed to be doing exactly what he said he would do; powering down the computer before removing a few clamps and moving a heatsink out of the way, before gingerly picking up the chip that had sat in the middle of the rig.

"Just… feel this. No explanation, I just want you to touch it. Please." Chis pleaded. Obviously emotional about his work.

Cytix was getting ready to refuse, when Chris' partner let out a plaintive call. Cade could tell that it was a request to help his human, so Cytix decided to extend a sliver of faith. He held out his hand, and Chris gingerly set the round puck on his palm.

Cytix sucked a breath at the intense feeling. It was like when he had connected to Cade for the first time, and even now, he could feel his connection swell. "How?"

Chris gave a tight grin. "I know, right? I machined it out of duraglass used in the aperture of an Astrarium for more than a century. It was a bitch to source, and it's a thousand times less efficient than a proper computing substrate, but it feels like a partner bond, you know? All the warning materials talk about soulless and unfeeling machines. Most of the other students thought it was just a fanciful way of describing the fact that partners dislike AI, but I thought it might be more literal than that. So I looked up everything available about souls and partner bonds. I got waaaaay deep into Astrarium design before I was happy I had a circuit design that would work, but I wanted the best possible chance of success, so I saved up and managed to get a shattered chunk of Astrarium aperture duraglass that was broken off when an arc-ship visiting Aurora moved in front of a meteoroid that was going to hit a shuttle and was too big for the point defense to totally deflect. It took me weeks to machine the stuff because of how tough it is, but… I'm rambling. I…"

Chris visibly gathered himself, before wincing, and speaking in a small voice. "I know I didn't go through the proper channels, but can you help me make sure this doesn't get buried? This has the potential to help so many people! I just couldn't stand the thought of the idea getting dismissed out of hand."

Cytix laid a hand on his shoulder. "I'll help. I can't promise it'll go anywhere, but I promise to do what I can to make sure you get a fair shake at official sanction. Because you're right; I've never been this close to AI research without Cade feeling at least a bit uncomfortable. This may be a path forward."

Plasma Regulators · Mar 5, 2023

027 M03
"Your little humans are quite smart, you know?"

"Hmm? I agree, but what made you say that this time?"

"This Chris Vantrace of yours managed to develop functional machine spirits millennia ahead of 'schedule' simply due to the availability of warp-saturated materials and the crude ability to play hot-cold with what is warp-safe or not, thanks to the partners."

"Interesting. Yes, I can see how that would work, now that I'm looking up the research myself. I'm still amazed you can stand to pose as mundane researchers to collaborate on the science rather than just taking the data from the partners."

"Please. We both know that any backdoors that are even theoretically capable of manipulation or mass surveillance would be too juicy a target for Chaos to ever leave alone. The only reason they can safely piggyback off my communications infrastructure is because I dug an isolated channel within my network that uses my soul as a buffer and it doesn't touch the channel itself."

The Emperor sent a conciliatory feeling. "Oh, I'm aware. I'm just pleasantly surprised that our partnership has remained as equitable as it has. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were."

I felt the urge to nod a few billion heads at the thought. "That's certainly true. Oh, by the way, can you source some of those warp-saturated materials for me to study? I'd love to have access to some of them now that their creation is possible."

I got a surprised feeling back over the link that we now maintained in the background most of the time. "You actually lack the capability to manufacture them?"

I sent a mental nod. "Yes. So far as I've been able to determine, any individual soul is incapable of making warp-saturated materials like that. Oh, we can dye material with our immaterial presence, but that only leads to one outcome. The reason these composites are interesting is because it takes the overlapping portions of millions of souls and distills the commonalities into a single idea. It creates a much simpler warp-matrix, but it's also that much stronger and purer as a result."

"Huh. So truly a novel material to work with, in that case. I may have to acquire some to run some tests on myself. That sounds like an interesting avenue of research."

"I would be interested to see your results, as ever."

Our conversation lapsed for a time, as it often did, before the Emperor spoke up again. "Have you made any more progress identifying these so-called 'pariahs' or 'blanks' and why they haven't been showing up to date?"

"Oh, I have theories, but I would need to find a Necron Tomb World to confirm or deny any of them, lacking a human example to study safely."

"Why the Necrons? Ah. You suspect that their warp-resistance stems from the same source?"

"Precisely. The fact that it is possible to manufacture on the scale of an entire race and yet naturally occur very rarely among the souled races gives us some clues, if they are indeed the same phenomenon. My current working hypothesis is that rather than being truly 'blank' to the immaterium, they actually lean in the opposite direction from psychic phenomenon entirely. Hence why they can combat the local warp incursions into realspace, rather than just avoiding the effects themselves. Much like positrons or antiprotons are to matter, these 'blanks' are beyond psychically dull or absent, they are actively opposing the natural eddies in the immaterium around them. The reason it can show up naturally but thus far hasn't could be as simple as lacking the triggers for the condition in the first place. If it functions like a psychic equivalent to an autoimmune disease due to a prenatal hypersensitivity to Warp energy, then we may simply be at too low a background incursion level to trigger such a transformation naturally."

We both pondered the idea for a while. "The idea hangs together logically, but I can see why it would be difficult for you to test any of the conditions yourself. If it is indeed a purely oppositional reaction to psychic effects, then your own methods of networking would preclude making use of the effect yourself. When you do discover a Tomb World, be sure to ship me some samples. I would be interested to see how they respond to my own presence."

"Change of subject, since we can do no more to study the effect without samples, I was wondering about your thoughts on allowing some warp-submersion testing to allow for future warp drive research. You seem content to use my gravitational lensing techniques for now, but a reliable warp drive would be a faster method of travel, if such a thing isn't self-contradictory."

"On the plus side, it would allow for more extensive warp-hardening research, but that seems a scant recompense for the dangers it would bring when mishandled, because you know it would be mishandled. With humanity being unaging, longer experienced time isn't really an issue for travel, and if we could get the double linked spatial warps to provide a stronger benefit when directed between low mass stars, most of the downsides would be negated. On that front, I have a few realspace/warp interface geometries to test. I had an idea the other day about skimming the immaterium, much like a hydroplane or a hovercraft, to extend your submarine analogy of warp travel. If we assume that spatial compression techniques stay in contact with the surface of the immaterium-"

Plasma Regulators · Mar 5, 2023

241 M03
Papers shuffled as Eli marked down his last few points. He just barely managed to keep the tremor out of his writing. This could cost him his entire career and label him a crackpot until his memory died.

Lux crooned from his filing cabinet, trying to settle his nerves. With a glance up at the fire-bird, he was reassured. He had a phoenix. A living, breathing phoenix, bonded to him, and while it missed out on some of the supernatural characteristics of the fabled species, there was too much, too far beyond what they were capable of making.

He nodded, before capping his pen and offering his arm for Lux to jump onto. Her impossibly light weight seemingly disconnected from her firm grip on the patch he had added to all his clothes. She walked up his arm and nestled into his shoulder, before briefly setting the wrist of her wing on the top of his head, steadying him more than herself with the action.

With one last nervous paper straightening shuffle, he set off towards his ultimate bosses' office. The Director of Biological Studies at New Haven university was not someone to bother on a whim. He was ultimately in charge of the largest faculty of the premier biological research university on the planet, and after double and triple checking his office hours, Eli was prepared to speak to the man that would ultimately decide his future career prospects, or lack thereof.

The door was already cracked so he gave a brief wrap on the door frame as he pushed the door open. "Director Thane? I have something I need to speak with you about-"

The young looking man looked up from his reading to see the serious expression on Eli's face and the single sheet of paper held in a death grip, before putting his printout down and gesturing forward. "Well, let's see it Mr. Carcaal. What can I do for one of our finest rising research specialists?"

Eli handed over his paper, and the words tumbled out of his mouth in a stream as he tried to somehow explain his convictions without sounding crazy. "It's just too advanced. The partners are too elegant to be designed with anything close to our current cutting edge technology, and they're too streamlined to be naturally evolved. Two thirds of the developments our department makes are simply due to studying biology that we've had access to for almost a thousand years now, and yet they appeared out of nowhere. It's like a myth, except we actually have access to the proof of the ridiculous claims. I don't- I can't…"

The Director made a calming gesture. "Ah. So it's one of those conversations. It speaks well of your character that you were willing to bring this to my attention. I do know the answers you seek, but I don't have the time to get into the details personally, so I'd like for you to visit administrative building four, the one with the large wind-vane on the roof?"

At Eli's nod, he continued. "So I'd like you to go to the very top floor, and tell the person seated at the desk that you need a category two introduction. You've got that? I'll make sure your biometrics are cleared for the floor, so no need to worry about that. I look forward to working more closely with you in the future, Mr. Carcaal. I'll be watching your career with interest."

And with that, the Director handed him back his sheet of specific proofs, and politely gestured to the door.

He must have looked like a zombie as he stumbled through campus, trying to find the right building with half his brain running in tight panicked loops, but eventually he made it to the desk at the top floor of the right building.

"Um. Hello?" He asked the woman at the desk.

"Yes? How can I help you?"

"Um. I need a class two? No. Sorry, category two. I need a category two introduction?"

Her eyes crinkled up in a smile as she stood and led him to the door behind the desk. "Well I suppose today is going to be a day of revelations for you then."

She then cracked the door and yelled into the mild din coming from further in the room "Hey Francis? We've got another one. You get this one."

At his confused expression, she gently pushed him through the doorway, earning a mild squawk from Lux, even as a large man came up and shook his hand. "High, I'm Francis. Welcome to the club of 'The Guys in the Know' as we call it around here. Long story short, you're probably here because you were convinced that partners couldn't have possibly been created by human hands. Or, perhaps you're one of the rare space-heads on campus that gets tangled up in where the developments for FTL came from. There are other possibilities, but those are the main two. And the answer? You were right. It was aliens. But it's aliens that have been with us every step of the way, just like the partners themselves."

Eli's mind finally rebooted, and he said the first thing that came to mind. "Wait, but then everyone here stumbled on the secret?"

Francis chuckled. "You could say that. We even had one of the political science guys figure it out. Something to do with Arch-councilor Huges that I couldn't make heads or tails of. It's not a conspiracy or anything, so don't worry about spilling the beans if you happen to need to explain your change in jobs to people. Honestly, at this point, I think it's a cultural taboo to bring it up because it's rather embarrassing to admit that you never noticed the signs, and believe me, there are a lot once you know what to look for."

Eli seized on the most relevant part of the speech. "My… change in jobs?"

Francis just clapped him on the shoulder not occupied with Lux. "Welcome to your promotion, in recognition of the fact that you were willing to question things. The pay's the same, but the perks are great. We have a direct line to the aliens, or alien, that bit flew over my head a bit, but we have a line of communication to ask whatever we want. They can choose not to answer, but if it's related to science, then they probably know the answer already. Honestly, half our job is slow-rolling our progress so that humanity actually has time to keep up with the pace of change. And the other half of our job is understanding what we were told in the first place. You'll learn that they're very big on humans standing on their own two feet."

Eli's mind whirled with the possibilities. Any scientific question he could think of…

Francis grinned at him. "I know that look. That's the same look we all get when it sinks in for the first time. I'll leave you alone for a while as you formulate your thoughts and think up some good questions. Wouldn't want to bias you. We've had some great discoveries come out of new guys who thought up questions that everyone else assumed we weren't allowed to ask. It's good to have you on the team."

Plasma Regulators · Mar 6, 2023

626 M03
Ah phooey. Another Eldar world nearby. Mark it on the map, I guess. At least they were easy to detect from hundreds of lightyears away, thanks to their psychic presence. Which, rather than hiding, they actively flaunted.

While I certainly had no problems throwing a few Petatons away on a whim, if the Eldar warmachine at the height of its power noticed humanity, it would be bad news for the humans.

Actually… getting some bearings on this particular planet… it was only forty-seven lightyears away? That didn't make any sense. Of the hundreds of Eldar worlds I've detected and mapped, all of them were giant beacons of psychic energy. Running through the statistics momentarily negated the idea that I just missed smaller colonies due to their lower presence making them harder to detect. I still should have found dozens by now if they were a regular occurrence. Eldar didn't really do smaller colonies, and they certainly didn't found new colonies, other than the Exodites-

Ah. I think I've answered my own question.

Exodites were odd ducks. The Eldar equivalent of a modern human decrying technology and going to live as a monk at a hermitage. They did so in roughly equivalent percentages of the total population of ascetic monks among humans. The difference in populations, however, meant that there were entire worlds populated by Exodites, albeit sparsely. They were on track to be the only group to consistently survive the fall of the Eldar in a bit less than thirty thousand years. This was primarily thanks to their philosophy; one of self-denial and hard work in direct opposition to the open lustful decadence of the majority of the Eldar population. This abstention saved them from the hungers of Slaanesh, at least during the birth of that entity that spelled the death of the rest of their civilization.

As stuck-up, self-righteous, dismissive aliens go, these guys were not bad. I would even go so far as to say that they were actually worth saving, unlike those who followed the philosophy of the majority of the Eldar.

Now I just needed to decide how to play this.

Actually…

"Hey Big E! I found some Exodites."

I got an amused sense of interest back. "Did you now. Well, what were you planning on doing with them?"

"Well, I don't have any firm plans, so chime in if you have a better idea, but here's what I was thinking-"

639 M03
Menekas was watching the herds, eyes and mind sharp for predators, when he spotted an unusual biped walking calmly in his direction, ignoring their pack-lizards. While the three meter tall animal was obviously a predator of some sort, it was not one that he recognized, which should be impossible given their tribe's meticulous surveys of the planet over the past four hundred years.

A suspicion struck him. It would be just like those disgusting Drukhari to bring an alpha-predator to an Exodite world just to watch as it slaughtered its way through the 'primitives' below while memorizing the events to sell the memprint to others.

The Drukhari were stupid in their corruption though. They seemed to forget that the 'primitives' were yet Aeldari, and rather than letting their natural gifts atrophy, they were sharpened to a wraithblade's edge by living a life of denial and refutation of the excesses that plagued their disgusting cousins.

Even as he limbered his joints for coming combat, Menekas picked a pebble off the stony grazing grounds and fit it to his sling. Twice, his sling revolved, before loosing the stone with the whip-crack of a broken sound barrier. As he expected, the alpha-predator barely reacted as the stone splashed off its carapace, turned to powder from the speed it had been traveling at. The speed at which its eyes had tracked the projectile let him know that it had reflexes comparable to his own. With a few mental simulations of the possible outcomes, he reached out to his kin. It would not do to have them be unprepared even in the unlikely event of his demise.

When he could feel the minds of his entire tribe, he spoke. "Brothers and Sisters. Turn your gaze to me. I would do combat against a predator I do not recognize, and I suspect Drukhari trickery as its provenance."

Their tribe's Farseer spoke, after a moment of intense thought. "I cannot sense any other Aeldari minds nearby, but a careful inspection reveals a great diffusion of psychic energies large enough to raise the background levels a detectable amount. Perhaps they have developed some technology that can hide their presence amidst an appearance of greatness. It would fit their kind."

"To combat then." Menekas drew his wrathbone skinning knife. It was no Wraithblade sword, but it would suffice.

"Before you decide to fight to the death, I figured we should talk." A psychic voice came from the predator- no. From the being in front of him.

"Stop where you are or I shall strike you down, stranger. What is it you seek from the Aeldari people?"

"Ha! Fair enough. I was actually planning on doing you a favor. I have information that you might find interesting." The mind chuckled and spoke with a mirthful presence, as if to mock him.

"You presume to have information unknown to us? Very well, I shall allow you to speak." Menekas restrained his anger as only an Exodite would even bother to do. None of their so-called kin would ever entertain the notion, but the Exodites were more familiar than anyone in the galaxy with knowing crucial information that others would refuse to even hear. It would insult their way of living to not extend at least a symbolic offer to an outsider, despite their lack of deference.

"The Aeldari empire will fall in twenty-six thousand five hundred years, give or take a decade, as the warp-cascade of violence, death, and hedonistic excess births a new warp-entity powerful enough to consume the souls of all Aeldari within more than a thousand lightyears of your home system."

Menekas felt a nova-hot flash of anger and barely restrained his impulse to strike the being down where it stood. "You dare! To have heard of the Prophecy of Endings and use it to attempt to deceive us. I can barely conceive of the level of arrogance required-"

"Iroooonic. Nah, I just have access to more information than you do. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The being continued to give off every appearance of an amused statesman watching a younger colleague make a fool of themselves.

Menekas was nearly rendered speechless. "You presume… to have better knowledge… of the Prophecy of Endings… than our greatest Farseers, and even the GODS THEMSELVES?!"

"YES"

It felt as though the entire psychic might of the entire Aeldari race was pressing down on him. Even when his entire clan attempted to aid him, the being, the presence didn't even seem to notice the difference in strength between one Aeldari and a thousand.

"I DO"

Only a second had passed, but it was like wading through water to even move a muscle, let alone muster thoughts of resisting the pressure. He could feel several of his clan-mates fall unconscious as they struggled against the oppressive presence that seemed to ring louder within each person than their own thoughts, barely leaving enough room for compliance and nothing else.

And then it was gone, in an instant. The release of pressure was so sudden that Menekas found himself falling to the dirt from lightheadedness.

"Now that that's settled, I was hoping for a bit of exchange. I give you some very valuable information about the specifics of the upcoming timeline, which I doubt that even I can knock off it's rails even if I tried, and you agree to spread that information to other Exodites and any other Aeldari you think would actually care that their empire is about to collapse. Oh, and I'd like to keep your wraithbone knife. It looks neat."

Menekas found himself nodding idly. "Oh. Okay."

He gracelessly dropped his knife on the ground from his deathgrip on the handle, and then turned back towards his tribal home. "I'm just going to go lay down for a while."

Plasma Regulators · Mar 6, 2023

711 M03
Wraithbone was absolutely fascinating stuff. At first I thought it was an exotic meta-material that was then warp-saturated with a specific mix of psychic energies somehow. But it turns out it's not actually a material in the realspace sense of the word at all. It doesn't even have atoms.

No, what wraithbone was actually composed of was the realspace interference pattern produced by a hellaciously complicated warp construct that's not just quasi-stable or even fully stable, it's downright self-repairing.

The really juicy bit though? The reason I was so excited? It was a directable self-catalyzing pattern. If you were sufficiently skilled at psychic manipulation, you could create any wraithbone material from the smallest chip of existing wraithbone. It's also the reason I'm categorically certain that the Eldar didn't actually come up with the stuff. They could certainly manipulate it, and they were experts at making it grow and change to suit their desired final products, but the actual underlying pattern wasn't created by them. Because one of the only near-universally repeated sections of 'junk DNA' that creatures from every garden world I'd come across shared was a self-repairing key to manipulating the wraithbone.

If the Eldar had created wraithbone in the first place, there is no chance they would leave the door open for any evolved race in the galaxy to eventually unlock its secrets. No, this absolutely reeked of an Old One tool that the Eldar had simply repurposed and claimed as their own after the fall of the Old Ones.

To change the realspace material properties of wraithbone, you just had to alter the growing pattern to express whatever characteristics you wanted. It's one of the reasons why the density was all over the place and you could get material from seemingly nowhere with far, far less energy input than the equivalent quantity of mass-energy.

The thing that I'm not sure the Eldar realize or not, is that there are more dials and knobs for controlling the realspace characteristics than were available when you used the "key" distributed across the galaxy. Now, they were stupidly complicated to actually use, but they allowed for a lot more freedom. It would take me… geeze, dozens of millennia at a minimum to ferret out all the possible interactions between the full admin controls. The way Eldar normally interacted with the stuff was essentially a user-friendly training-wheels mode.

I'm nearly positive that the artifacts crafted directly by the Eldar gods that had characteristics that the Eldar couldn't replicate, were made using at least some of the full administrative controls.

I would need to examine some of the most precious and powerful artifacts of the Eldar people in order to confirm or deny my theory though, so that's not happening any time soon.

In the meantime, I had an idea for a realspace wraithbone characteristic that described a charged material. The thing is, since it was defined as charged, it didn't actually matter how many times you drew from that charge, it would always maintain its charged state. Upon seeing the ghostly blue glow given off by the material, I immediately dubbed it wraithfire. After all, the edges of the material glowed as though the entire structure was one ember of a ghostly fire. The new material quietly made its way into some of my structures as the core of a new type of generator, and I had fun sharing the bounty with the Emperor, since the two of us were probably some of the handful of beings in the galaxy that could mentally juggle enough of the variables simultaneously to actually make the stuff.

I don't know what he was going to use it for, but compact sourceless power generation was great for powering the outer orbitals of a Dyson swarm, where the individual platforms received sunlight only a fraction of the time. I also had an idea for a reactionless drive that I wanted to try out, but it would take me a while to figure out how to throttle the material.

Perhaps if I flash forged it? Or maybe shutter it behind a universally absorptive material…

Plasma Regulators · Mar 7, 2023

922 M03
"Alright class. Today we'll have a few questions to make sure you were paying attention last week, and then we'll move on to the next part of our lesson on important parts of our society."

She looked over her class, pleased that everyone seemed to be paying attention. While she loved her job, Molany would be the first to admit it was challenging when her pupils didn't feel the need to learn. Fortunately, the curriculum had been fairly well designed to have age appropriate interests. It was either a good sign, or a very bad one, that other than a few names and dates, the base curriculum hadn't been updated in nearly two hundred years. Molany chose to believe it was because the lessons were already so well tailored to the primary schooling ages of five to fifteen.

"First question. Name one of the special accomplishments that SUB-42 is famous for."

Several hands went up, but Molany picked the one that was most enthusiastic, understandably.

"Yes, Art?" ART-14 was her first Synth student, and she was secretly glad that the full AI members of the Coalition had decided that better AI societal integration would require partial AI with capabilities closer to that of individual humans than entire departments of experts.

ART-14's wraithbone and bio-plas face broke out into a wide smile. "Um. He was the first AI to become a planetary governor, and he was the first planetary governor to say that even AI needed to serve their ten-per because they got the rights of people, so they should have the responsibilities of people."

Molany smiled. "Correct, although you only needed one answer. I would have also accepted the fact that he was the first AI to petition for the right to choose a partner."

It was before her time, but her mother had regaled her about the controversy of personal rights vs citizen responsibilities of AI. It wasn't all as clear cut as they were explaining in class in Primary, but most Secondary streams would go into more details.

"Next question. Who introduced the policy of ten-per in the first place? I'll give you a hint. It was before I was born."

Molany had to stifle a laugh at some of the 'wow's' from her students. To kids less than ten years old, someone in their fifth century was already ancient history, so it was hard for them to imagine something even older.

"Yes, Mildritha?" She chose Mildritha because she rarely put her hand up in class, so she hoped to encourage the behavior.

"That was Mr. Huges. It's aaaalways Mr. Huges." Several students giggled at that.

"Correct. For bonus points, can anybody tell me what partner Graven Huges has? We haven't covered it in class yet, but as Mildritha pointed out, he is pretty famous."

"Ooh, me!" Piped up their resident partner fanatic, Hela. With a nod, she continued.

"Um Mr. Huges has a King Bear!" That… was a term that Molany had never heard before.

"A King Bear?" May as well get clarification, before giving the correct answer.

"Yeah! He's a great big bear with a crown! So he's a King Bear. I know crowns, my Mama's Leo made me a tiara for my birthday."

Huh… Now that she thought about it, the antlers always displayed in pictures looked remarkably like a crown when scaled to the great bear's head. "Yes, although normally we call those antlers, you're not wrong though."

After a brief shake of her head, Molany continued her lesson. "So last week we were discussing civil service and the ten-per; or the full name, and this might be on the test is Ten Percent Per Experienced Century Civil Service, but that's usually too much of a mouthful to say. This week we're going to be covering another law introduced by Mr. Huges, the Century Cap. It's the reason he's been re-elected seven times!"

She started pacing the front of the room, as was her habit when in full lecture mode. "The Century Cap means that nobody, all the way to the very, very top, is allowed to hold one job for more than a Century, because otherwise old people like me would hold all the jobs, and young people like you would have to wait for a new job entirely to appear before you could get work! We'll be covering some of the other rules later, but for now, just remember that you can't hold a job for more than a century, even if you shuffle the time around, although you can come back to the job after a century off, if people think you did a good enough job the first time-"

Emperor: I need a fucking vacation... but how to excuse the time off. Oh! I know!

Plasma Regulators · Mar 7, 2023

202 M04
"Roit. Iz everybody ready? We're gunna finally test dis fing." Skaggard Ar Faceshredda was doing something unusual for a warboss. He was giving a presentation. He even had an open-air stage and everything.

"Yeah, yeah. Wot are ya kall'n it anyway? sure, it looks right an propa killy, but it doesn't even have any 'plosives on it!" Complained an ork in the front row… blob? -ish. It was an ork near the front.

"Dis beaut' iz a railgun!" Their warband hadn't had a proper scrap in far too long, and some of the boyz had gone a bit around the bend.

"But itz not ev'n on rails, ya nobhead. It's a build'n."

Skaggard covered his face with a massive hand. These other orks were some of the best and the brightest he had. It wouldn't do to kill them because they were annoying. "Itz a railgun 'cos da bullet uses rails. Not 'da shoota"

"Wul yah, but it-" A giant axe cleaved through the orc's head, finally stopping his yammering. Perhaps only a little bit of murder? That seemed like an alright compromise.

"Az I wuz sayin'. Itz a railgun, an' it's gunna shoot 'da gits 'n space 'dat don't have 'da decency ta kome down an' fight like propa orks." There were some nods among the audience. Good, this seemed to be working. Anything to avoid doing the eldritch and impossible horrors known as budgeting and logistics. Skaggard made a brief sign of the MadScullz to ward off the idea.

"So we'z gunna shoot im, an den we kan be 'da ones ta be blown up right an gud, ratha dan dose idiots talk'n about screamjets or whateva." More nods.

It was only proper that they were the ones to get blown up. They were the ones making the best advances, even if it meant dealing with the unmentionables.

"Roight, so when i hit dis button on 'da kount uv ten, 'da railgun iz gunna shoot wun uv dose satamawhotsits outta 'da sky, an' we kan get ta mak'n a bigga gun ta shoot more fings outta 'da sky, like dose grot-lickin' heavy helicarriaz dat 'da flyboys used ta krump us wiff' lass time." More enthusiastic nodding. It wasn't right, having a big killy machine and then not even mounting a giant cannon on it. It just flew around and launched more killy machines at them.

"'Ere we go, 'Ere we go. One, free, ten!"

A meaty fist smashed the big red button (as was only right), and then several things happened in rapid succession.

The post that the button was on buckled from the over-enthusiastic smash.

The very air around them developed a deep humming sound as unseen machines built up their charge.

The massive set of crudely welded rails, more than a meter apart to allow for the massive projectile, started releasing giant arcs of electricity.

The rivets holding the rails to the building-sized gimbal started glowing cherry red, even as several of them popped off due to the entire structure slewing to the side and elevating the rails to point at the nearest geostationary satellite.

Several capacitor sheds blew up, killing the orks nearby as they gaped at the giant structure preparing to fire.

Heat waves started wafting off the rails as they started to glow a dull red.

There was a bone-shaking "thunk" as the ork-sized solid projectile was loaded between the rails.

A red flash appeared briefly in front of the rails with a loud crack of thunder, stretching off into space as it blew an ionized channel through the atmosphere.

And finally?

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzap-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

The earth heaved as the entire building shifted backwards and the rails were driven into the solid rock from recoil, and the projectile left an eye-searingly bright afterimage as it disappeared into the distance.

And then four seconds later, there was a bloom of fire, just barely visible among the first twinkles of the first stars of the night.

And each and every ork raised their arms and yelled in a howling, growling, living cry.

"Waaaaaaaaaaaagh!"
"Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!"
"Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!"
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Heh. Nice. Ten points. They managed to actually hit one of my observational satellites. Time to prune them back a bit and see how they respond. The psychic energy from that last call reached beyond this solar system, so I suspect there will be more orks headed this way soon.

Plasma Regulators · Mar 8, 2023

599 M04
I love getting returns on investment. Or, in this case, reciprocal gifts. While I had been focusing on breadth of research into wraithbone, dabbling in just about every field, the Emperor had decided to go all in on depth of research; on the mass of wraithbone specifically. The thing he had been searching for? Virtual mass. And with good reason too. Being able to selectively express which parts of physics reacted as though there were a giant mass in specific places was a huge help for a number of technologies. The most immediately applicable and interesting was with the gravitational lensing technology.

Gravitational lensing had two primary downsides.

One is that you needed at least one fuckoff huge ship over a hundred kilometers long to breach the energy barrier required to initiate the effect. These long, skinny space needles were about as maneuverable as trying to ride a greased angry pig bareback, thanks to the relative cross-sectional area vs the mind-bogglingly huge moment of inertia. Of course, once the spatial compression was actually in effect, you could travel with as many ships as you wanted, so long as they all fit in the sphere 112 km wide sphere determined by the very ends of the spatial compressor ship itself. It's one of the reasons why getting stations set up was so important, those spatial compression ships were a pain in the ass to move around. Especially since all the other ships in the fleet had to be close enough that they were in accidental smacking range when the mostly unmanned needles were turning.

The second is that it was useless or at least very slow for traveling to low-mass stars. Half a solar mass dropped your speed down to less than one lightyear per day, and if you wanted to visit a brown dwarf for some reason? Hope you enjoy less than a third of a lightyear per day. You could kind of get around it if there was a more massive star roughly in line with your direction of travel and behind the brown dwarf, but targeting started to become an issue, and keeping the fleet together suddenly became an order of magnitude harder because of the relative motion.

Having access to virtual mass on demand solved both of those issues, at least to some extent. Suddenly the minimum length of a ship required to breach the energy barrier was just under a dozen kilometers, which meant that if you were willing to build pretty big ships, every interstellar vessel could have true FTL capabilities, which meant that an armada couldn't be stranded just by taking out the one visibly distinct space needle. The more interesting effect though, was that you could target two sources of mass for the spatial compression, the destination star, and the virtual mass of the ship itself. Thanks to how the math worked out, we could currently manage a virtual mass large enough for 0.8 lightyear per day travel. 0.8 lightyears per day was completely irrelevant when traveling longer distances, since you could just use larger stars and the supermassive starways, but it was a godsend for traveling to low mass stars, or even to interstellar space. Suddenly every stellar destination could manage more than a lightyear per day, and even interstellar space could be accurately targeted with nearly a lightyear per day, which also meant that it could be safely used for in-system maneuvering, at long last.

So now our ships were much more nimble when puttering around a star, and we no longer had to account for entire fleets moving together in order to make any FTL transits worthwhile. Space tourism wasn't quite possible on an individual scale, since you did still require a ship a dozen kilometers long, but suddenly visiting people on other planets and living around other stars was a much more reasonable concept.

Of course, all of that travel could be made four or five times faster by using the warp-skimming method the Emperor and I had devised, but after getting so far with technology that didn't leave any detectable warp presence from each transit, we were loath to start leaving highly detectable wakes behind our ships. That, and our proto-Gellar fields weren't as strong as we wanted when we ran the simulations for being powered by individual humans and what technology they were bringing with them, rather than being powered by Big E or myself.

Technically, warp protective shields weren't required to use warp skimming, but that assumed a smooth warp. If the reaspace-interface surface of the warp was churned up for any reason, you would get literal waves of Chaos energies washing over the ships. It required an extremely choppy warp storm to get that bad, but we knew what was coming, and "extremely choppy" was an understatement.

Speaking of which, preparations for the birth of Slaanesh were going well, albeit slowly. With my cute little Exodite friends spreading the word of a specific doom-date among the Eldar that cared to listen, many more Eldar heard the date as a byproduct, and it was causing an interesting crystallization in the warp. Normally, events that caused societal change made future-sight less predictable, but with a very specific doom-date to look forward to, and indeed, many of the pleasure-seeking Eldar that heard such a date were looking forwards to it, it was turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the prediction used to be 140 M30 plus or minus a decade, we could now narrow it down to 141 M30 plus or minus a few months. By the time we hit M30, it was going to be accurate down to a few days if the trend continued.

Oh, and my cute little Exodites were getting somewhat of a reputation. "Void-touched" they were called, and while a very select few Eldar were glad for the advanced warning, the vast, vast majority dug their heels in and plugged their metaphorical pointy ears. That tribe that I contacted, and eventually all the tribes on that planet, were both slowly building a rapport with me, and were getting very good at fighting. After all, when a pleasure-seeking Eldar is given bad news, "shoot the messenger" isn't just the overall plan, that plan then gains extra steps like "and then play with the body".

I got a kick out of the fact that the Void-touched Exodites were becoming hyper-lethal escape artists and they had taken to my instructions with gusto. I guess such an important, but more importantly difficult and somber "duty" was right in line with their philosophy of self-denial and honest hard work. That, and they made the funniest faces any time I gave them more news.

Plasma Regulators · Mar 8, 2023

807 M04
SNG-31, Song to his friends, hummed absentmindedly as he examined the break in the municipal dataline, and his beautiful partner Aria warbled in harmony with him. The music actually served a purpose too; while it was technically possible to modify wraithbone with purely intellectual manipulation using your partner bond as a focus, anything beyond trivial party tricks required mnemonics and harmonic algorithms that were much easier to focus through song.

And currently, his song was telling him that… the break caused by an over-enthusiastic construction crew was going to be fairly simple to repair. While normally the well-protected dataline would be too tough to damage even with excavation equipment, the hard granite that was close to the surface around here necessitated using an excavator with wraithbone teeth on the cutting edge. While the damaged wraithbone tooth would be a simple matter of swapping it out and letting it regrow overnight in the company's grow-tank, the dataline couldn't be taken to the factory that had the necessary grow-tanks for datalines because it was installed already.

With a minor adjustment to the clamps holding the ends together, Song turned to his partner. "Are you ready, my friend?"

The iridescent bird gave an affirmative chirp, and they focused on their eternal bond to each other to begin the Song of Repair. First, the diagnostic verse, which served as the underlying structure describing exactly what they were working on, and which Song was skilled enough to produce on his own. Then Aria chimed in with the refrain of purity, which helped ensure no dirt or foreign material could get sealed into the new growth.

Then came the hard part. Song and Aria both started moving their sub-harmonics up and down the scale to warm up, before using the overlapping notes to sing the chorus of mending, while still singing their own parts of the song at the same time.

The three part harmony swelled and swayed for several minutes as the wraithbone flowed together like a liquid, before smoothing out and returning to its pristine appearance.

Finally, they drew all three parts of the song together into the coda of sealing, to ensure that there were no weak points in the freshly formed material, and with one last crooning note, the song ended.

Song grinned at his partner. "Always satisfying to manage that, eh Aria?" Indeed, what would normally require three sets of journeyman skilled humans and partners to each sing one part of the harmony, Song and his partner could manage alone, although that was to be expected, with more than two and a half centuries of expertise in bone-singing.

A man cleared his throat to get their attention. "That was beautiful, Song. Now that you're done with that project though, I was hoping you could stop by the clinic. PEB-81 managed to break his arm by being incautious around a landing aircar. We were hoping you could take a look at it. Our bone-singer specialist would take several hours to fly out here."

Song nodded. "No problem, Elam. Always happy to help."

On the way towards the clinic of the small town where he lived, Song was reminded of his days as a young synth. Even before he had Aria, he had always been fascinated by bone-singing. To a young boy obsessed with technology, the little chip of wraithfire in his chest was just the coolest thing ever. Even five centuries later, he was still amazed. While they did have arrays of wraithbone that could slowly produce specific predetermined shapes of the wonder material in a similar, albeit far more complicated, method that grow-tanks used, the arrays themselves were the most complex machines Song knew of. Seeing one in person during his apprenticeship was the highlight of his century. They were quite literally beyond human comprehension in complexity. It was somewhat of an open secret in the industry that such powerful arrays were personally constructed by planetary-governor level AI, because no human scale mind could contain all the information required. Even then, designing the arrays was still a mystery, since even planetary-governor level AI would struggle with such a feat.

Perhaps there was an AI out there just as fascinated with bone-singing as Song was.

Plasma Regulators · Mar 9, 2023

169 M05
Orm-self was hurting, but Orm-self had been hurt before, and recovered. This time, something was more wrong. Kally knew that humans-selves sometimes needed time alone from each other. They shouldn't want time alone from Kally though!

Kally had tried everything. She brought Orm-self snacks, and had brought otherfriends over, and had let Herro-self know that Tumua would need to stay away for a while, because their broken human-bond was painful for Orm-self.

But Orm-self was still hurting! Kally tried snuggling up next to Orm-self like when they were young, and Orm-self was missing his family-bonds at school.

"Get off, you damn mutt (anger). I can't stand your pity right now (rejection). Bad enough that Tumua broke up with me (loneliness). I don't need your fucking pushing (self-pity)." He pushed her off the bed with an uncoordinated shove.

Kally whined. There had to be a way to get Orm-self to stop his sickness! Orm-self was only in bed in the first place because Ortaal helped Kally drag Orm-self there when Orm-self fell over from huffing solvent when Kally was busy bringing over one of Orm-self's otherfriends. Ortaal had just sighed and said it was like before Orm-self bonded with Kally. That wasn't right! Orm-self had Kally now!

"I can feel your fucking worry spirals, Kally (anger). I can't take it anymore (desperation)." Orm-self stumbled out of bed and popped open a sealed container, and Kally's eyes widened at the smell of [bond-suppressant]. Kally thought Kally had destroyed all the ones Orm-self had stolen from the back room of the medicine-place!

Kally desperately tried to get it away from Orm-self, but Kally was small, and Orm-self just pushed her away.

Kally could feel it the moment the [bond-suppressant] started to work. It was supposed to reduce the pain from broken self-bonds when partner-selves or humans-selves died in an accident. But now, it felt like Kally's self-bond was heavy and weak.

Kally wrinkled her nose in disgust. With Kally's self-bond [suppressed] the room smelled disgusting. Like sweat, (loneliness), and something else. Something that made Kally want to snarl. It was faint, but Kally could smell ENEMY on Orm. Immediately, Kally's mind opened up to Partner-whole. Partner-whole knew the smell of ENEMY, and started paying closer attention. Kally-self and Herro-self and Glori-self and Yimm-self all spoke of Orm. Of Orm's broken human-bond, and Orm's suppressed partner-bond. Partner-whole knew that with Orm's suppressed partner-bond and his weakness Orm would be more vulnerable to ENEMY.

Something would need to be done. Partner-whole gave subtle hints to Nessa-self, who's human-self was an ENEMY-hunter. Nessa-self and her human-partner perked up and looked at each other, before their noses twitched and their eyes cast in Orm's exact direction. Something would be done.

With that, Kally withdrew from Partner-whole. Good. Help was coming. If Orm wouldn't listen to Kally, then Orm would listen to ENEMY-hunter. Orm wouldn't have a choice. And then Orm would have some sense knocked into him, and Orm would accept Kally's help again.

Nessa and Rashah looked at each other. It was that time again. Most people in the Coalition didn't know, or honestly even need to know, but Chaos was out there, ready to prey on those who were just the wrong combination of susceptible, stupid, and unlucky. While there had never been a recorded case of full possession, subtler works could make it through the protective web of partner bonds that surrounded humanity.

They climbed into the squad car. Rashah entered the address and the car took off, while Nessa focused on their bond, and that little bit of the bond that stretched beyond, in order to gather more details, and Rashah typed those details up as they flew.

Male, second century, just went through a bad breakup, already had notes in his file from Primary that he had a tendency towards substance abuse and notes from Secondary of bond-negligence and even a report of attempted bond-suppressant theft. That was a tightly controlled substance for a reason. Partially because it was an enabler for so much worse. The worst pre-partner vices writ large when people shunned the one being that would always have their best interests at heart in order to pursue fleeting highs. Likely to be a bad case then. They would have to be thorough.

Nessa whined, and Rashah looked over at her. "I know, hun. But we deal with it so that most people never even need to worry about it. Bond-negligence cases are the worst."

And it was true. Partner-death cases were more common, but also more understandable and often faster to recover, as a new partner bond took time to form, and even longer to heal the old wound, but patients could feel the recovery day by day, so they were usually looking forwards, even in the roughest times. Bond-negligence though… often meant there was just something fundamentally wrong with the human, and sometimes in subtle or insidious ways.

"We'll get him straightened out. And should the worst come to pass? Well, at least we can help Kally find a new human."

Plasma Regulators · Mar 9, 2023

657 M05
The first thing people noticed was that every partner in the solar system looked up and started growling, which worried a lot of people, and caused them to spend considerably more time than usual going over the local scan results.

"Command, I have 14 confirmed, make that 15 confirmed FTL transits, and a further 142 suspected emergence points. Sending tracking data now, over."

"Copy that, Lagrange-one. We have the tracking data. Signatures unrecognized, but in line with projections for codename Eldar. Attempting hailing on all channels. Planetary defense force, Planetary militia, Damascus home defense fleet, Damascus orbitals, full readiness levels, this is not a drill, over. All civilian orbital traffic in the Damascus system, be prepared to execute operation Scatter within thirty minutes. If no further commands are forthcoming, execute in one hour, mark. Damascus Black Weasel vessels, be prepared to launch within fifteen minutes, authorizing full data dump, mark. Civilian air traffic control, please direct all air traffic to land at the nearest black-rated emergency shelter, and all upcoming flights are to be grounded, I repeat grounded, over. Civilian emergency response crews, please direct everyone not combat-certified to the nearest black-rated emergency shelter, and all combat-certified reservists are hereby activated, over-"

And so it continued

"Command, all 157 alien vessels grouping up and burning for Damascus. We're receiving what appears to be a first contact package, broad spectrum broadcast. Patching it through."

"Greetings, Mon-keigh. Today you will have the pleasure of serving Irildras to your final breath. Do me a favor and resist extra hard, okay? Mmmmmmwwwwaaah!"

There was silence for a beat, before a human voice spoke over the command channel again. "You heard the elf, all Damascus home fleet vessels and orbital defense platforms, switch weapons to hot. Today will not be a day of peace. We outnumber them and out-mass them, let's hope that's enough."

"Lagrange-one to all points, there are three distinct vessel signatures. One vessel, 5 klicks long, designated Center appears to be the command vessel, it's in the middle and the only vessel of its type. Twelve vessels, 4 clicks long, designated Large, appear to be important for coordination in some manner, as they each have bursts of chatter to and from both other vessel types. Third vessel type, 2 clicks long, designated Small, appear to be screening elements, and are only exchanging chatter with Large vessels. Unless otherwise indicated, fire priority is Center, then Large, then Small. I repeat, target priority is Center, then Large, then Small."

"Damascus orbitals, on my mark, launch one salvo of KKV-1's, and begin charging long range-rail capacitors. Fire in twenty seconds, mark. Let's see what they're made of, over."

Nearly a hundred needle shaped missiles, each more than a hundred meters long, lanced out from massive orbital defense platforms, angling towards their intended targets, before giant plumes of directed antimatter annihilation caused the missiles to scream towards their targets at insane, and ever climbing speeds. As they neared their targets, the isolated and gyro-stabilized long range rails fired, sending more than two hundred multi-ton tungsten penetrator slugs silently into the night sky. Missiles and slugs converged with admirable timing on the enemy fleet.

Seven of the missiles and twelve of the slugs that appeared to be slightly off-course were fired upon by stuttering lances of light that ate through the projectiles in a fraction of a second.

All the rest of the projectiles seemingly sailed right through their targets.

"They've got cloaking of some kind up. Orbitals, save your fire until they're danger-close. We're going to need saturation fire if we want any hope of hitting them. Lagrange Stations, do anything you can to get a proper read on them short of melting the dishes."

A tense few minutes passed as the ships slowly neared the planet, before the largest enemy vessel opened fire on Lagrange-one, slicing huge chunks off the fifty kilometer wide station with its lances of strobing light, and making every human and partner in the solar system wince as they felt the wave of deaths.

"Black Weasel one, launch, I repeat, launch. All orbitals fire now. Home defense fleet, supporting fire where you can, but don't get within range of those beams. They'd cut through you in a moment. If they're going to sit still for us, we'll use the time Lagrange-one is buying us to take them out."

Even as the order went out though, the Eldar ships dove and juked in unnatural displays of evasion. Lasers, disruptors, railguns, and missiles streamed through the space around the vessels in a dense and continuous cloud. Lightning fast pulses of light swatted many projectiles out of the sky, and shimmering barriers appeared in the way of some of the energy weapons, but even still, some hits got through. Even as damage was accruing though, the smaller vessels were firing at the orbital platforms, taking a platform out with each shot.

The main vessel switched targets from Lagrange-one to the surrounding human fleet, zipping forward to cleave through a few vessels before streaking away before any retaliation could muster the density needed to actually damage it. Unfortunately, the damage being done to the enemy was purely on the smaller vessels, which had interposed themselves between particularly dense streams of projectiles and the larger vessels. A dozen were only cosmetic damage, and four appeared to be disabled, but the rest were entirely unharmed by the time the incoming fire was down to the occasional secondary laser blast, which were being ignored entirely. One larger enemy vessel had taken a cosmetic scar while stepping between an orbital laser and the central enemy vessel, but that was it.

"Maker… Black Weasels two and three, launch, I repeat launch. This information has to get out. Planetary defense forces, prepare for orbital bombardment or enemy landings, we've got nothing left on the sunward side of the planet, and orbitals coming into view just aren't going to have the fire density required. Lagrange-two through Lagrange-five, scatter. Load everyone you can and scatter. There's nothing more you can do for us now."

"Negative, command. We can still provide sensor readings and record what we can. This is our best chance at getting any intel on their capabilities."

"You stay alive, hear? I want you to evacuate down to a skeleton crew. No reason you all need to die today."

And so the trend continued, as the main enemy vessel would occasionally take a pot-shot at something, and the supporting vessels would retaliate to any fire, but nothing more.

Finally, though, the main enemy vessel seemed to tire of firing at random towns and military bases, and it launched shuttle-craft towards every major city on the planet. As a frontier world, there were only a billion souls on the planet, but there were still enough targets that it looked like flies swarming a carcass as the shuttle craft landed.

It seemed the invasion had begun.

Plasma Regulators · Mar 9, 2023

661 M05
Four years ago, Longfell was a sleepy colony of three billion souls. These days, it was a kicked ant-hive of activity, with more than ten billion, and more people were arriving every day from all over the Coalition. As the closest colony to Damascus with a larger than average star, it was chosen as the location to fortify and move all the evidence of the attack that had seared itself into humanity's consciousness, in order to investigate everything that happened, and to ensure it wouldn't happen again.

Everybody with a partner bond within a thousand lightyears at the time of the attack would always remember the final, panicked transmission, broadcast along the partner bond network to anyone and everyone who would listen, using the very lives of thousands of humans, synths, and partners to fuel the broadcast out of sheer desperation. The event that had gained the name "last burst" was the first warning many humans would receive that they were no longer alone with the peaceful and the simple. There was war among the stars, and humanity was resolved to make sure it would not be their last.

Desmona and her partner Gill were standing in the custom built warehouse that held the largest shard of wraithbone recovered from the battle. It was more than a kilometer long, and it had been preserved in a psychoreactively-neutral enclosure since it had been recovered. Desmona and Gill were the most experienced wraithbone readers to have arrived on Longfell so far. Bone-reading was an unusual skill, and not often called for, but it could be invaluable for situations like these, where there weren't any reliable witnesses to call upon to find out specific information. Anyone with a passing familiarity with wraithbone knew it was a psychoreactive material; that was how it was grown and shaped, after all. What fewer realized is that it was a psychometric conductor as well, meaning it stored faint impressions of significant events and strong emotions that occurred around it, especially when those stories impacted the wraithbone itself.

Desmona finally finished her read, and also finally lost her personal struggle.

"Blaaargh"

She cleared her mouth of vomit, and Gill rubbed against her leg consolingly, even as she turned to her superior.

"So?" He asked, polite enough to ignore her loss of composure.

She shook her head to refocus. "Other than the fact that the elves are psychotic fuckers, but we already knew that, I can absolutely one hundred percent confirm the suspicion that the smaller ships were unmanned drones. Huge and advanced ones, to be sure, but they had no crew or guiding intelligence smarter than a sophisticated flowchart. If we had managed to break off any of the larger ships to check, I'd put money on there only being the one manned vessel."

"Maker damn it. So we really managed to inflict zero losses despite the cost in lives to defend Damascus." Her bosses' expression was stormy, and she was inclined to agree with the sentiment.

"Well, I know we still need to complete a more thorough investigation of the groundside conflict, but I can certify that's the case for the space conflict. Any news on the groundside progress yet?" He wasn't technically supposed to tell her, but humanity was not impartial when it came to the first major loss of life they had suffered in thousands of years.

"Not yet. It's slow going because they glassed Damascus when they left. Some multi-stage psychically boosted runaway fusion reaction that interacts with planetary atmospheres from what we can tell. Probably a bomb of some sort. The only reason there were more than a hundred survivors is there were two ongoing mining operations that were deep enough to shelter from the heat at the surface. It was a near thing finding them and safely boring through the glass before they ran out of supplies."

"Damn it" She echoed her bosses' earlier statement. "Alright, well, I'll write up the specifics of my findings tonight and get them to you tomorrow. Just let me know if there's any other sites you need me at."

He gave her a solemn nod. "I'd appreciate it. We have some probable synth remains that were fused into the refractory wraithbone of an autofoundry. We don't know if you'll be able to pull anything from them, and I know it will be rough, but-"

She just waved him off. "Nah, I get it. All hands on deck. We each do what we must. But if someone could pull the records on the synths in that town from the recovered data dump, it would be a big help. Personal history psychometric impressions are a lot harder to read. I'm going to need all the starting info I can get to be able to latch onto a personal song. Probably take me a few days at a minimum. I just hope it was an old synth. The longer the personal history, the easier it is to find the edges."

"Well, from the size of the… probable remains, it was an adult, so that should be a better starting point than nothing. I'll see what I can scrounge up for records. I'll meet you at eight, at the main office, alright?"

"We'll be there."

Plasma Regulators · Mar 9, 2023

664 M05
"So have they figured out any more details about the attack?" So far as I knew, this was earlier in the timeline than Eldar had interacted with humanity in canon, but that was hardly surprising, given the comparatively early use of FTL for colonization.

"Yes. The ground forces accounted well for themselves, given their relative inexperience. Partially because it was clear that the Eldar were acting as individuals, so penning tactics and sacrificial bait both worked better than they would have if they had acted with even the minimum of small unit tactics. Overall, it could have gone a lot worse for Humanity's first wake-up call. The necessity of such a thing is unfortunate, but such factors don't change the ugly face of the galaxy."

The Emperor was many things, but impractical was not one of them.

"Makes sense. It's fortunate, as these things go, that the raiding party was what amounts to a princeling's hunting party with friends. Even so, I've noticed the uptick in psychic throughput in the partner network. I take it humanity has decided to pursue more esoteric avenues to help with the next attack?"

"Yes. In addition to expanding the minimum settlement exclusionary zone from 200 to 250 lightyears around any detected Eldar worlds and fine-tuning the detection capabilities, we have been pursuing more active use of psychic powers in warfare; primarily for targeting and offense at the moment, as the low hanging fruit. We won't know if the targeting can pierce their illusions until the next attack, but the augmented attacks are bearing dividends. I'll send you the modified wraithbone formula that was devised for impacts against wraithbone targets, but it deals damage four or five times disproportionate to the comparable strikes with normal rounds. It's being developed as a round casing for manufacturing expediency."

I sent a vague sense of agreement. "I'll see if I can tweak the formula any, given my differing perspective on wraithbone development."

There was a lull in our discussion, as we both focused on our own projects for a while. Eventually though, with the last small piece of the puzzle for my personal focus falling into place, I spoke once again. "By the way, I finally finished the project of locating where the captives were taken to in the webway. For that matter, I finally found out where the webway itself is located."

I got the Emperor's immediate, focused attention with that. We had both been puzzling over the Eldar's galaxy wide teleportation and pocket-dimension network for centuries now, with a comparative lack of results thanks to the limited capacity to test our hypothesis.

"You were correct that just following the partner-bond links would prove insufficient. I could tell they were moved somewhere warp-adjacent, but lost all traces beyond that point. That remained the case until I had a chance to send some test rigs connected directly to my network into the webway itself through a few of the allied Exodite worlds. I managed to use a combination of triangulation and measurement of relative bond strengths vs the interference patterns present to get a decent read on it. To my total lack of surprise, it's another Old One megaproject that the Eldar co-opted. What did surprise me is that the webway is entirely within the warp."

The Emperor allowed some of his own surprise to leak into our shared mental space. "Really? With the strict adherence to natural laws when within the webway itself that's unlikely, to say the least."

I sent an affirmation. "It's not actually a perfect match to realspace conditions when you test some of the odd edge-case interactions. So far as I can tell, it just has the realspace characteristics near-perfectly described and enforced upon the local warp-space."

"Did you manage to figure out how they maintained such a consistent set of laws within the warp?"

"I did. And it's by far the most significant part of the discovery. The entire webway is functionally tunneled out of the warp, and then surrounded with a self-repairing multi-layered warp-construct barrier that's the most effective warp-shield I've ever seen. The simulation of natural laws are then applied to the inside of the enclosed space afterwards. 'Webway gates' are literally just portals to the empyrean that open within the barrier at specific locations."

The Emperor gave a mental head shake. "Amazing. Perhaps one day we will find the end of the Old One's empyrean engineering capabilities, but I suspect it won't be any time soon. Can the warp-construct barrier be applied to any of our designs?"

A negation. "Not as they stand. While fantastically resilient and functionally impermeable, they're entirely static. You could never cover any realspace object with them, because realspace moves around relative to the empyrean, even for so-called 'fixed' points in space. Their exclusive purpose seems to be making safe, enclosed spaces within the warp itself."

A minor moue of disappointment. "A shame. From your excitement you have other ideas to utilize such a barrier, though?"

I sent a nod. "Exactly. As you know, the partner-bond is currently protected from Chaos taint by being surrounded by a sheath of my own empyrean presence, but that represents a single, albeit sturdy, point of failure. What I'm suggesting is that we enclose the bond entirely with the new barrier type. It would still allow for growth and change among the bonds, so long as they retain the same symbolism of parity between bound souls, and new bonds would occupy the space without difficulty as well. The mechanism I propose would use the following warp-structure-"

Plasma Regulators · Mar 10, 2023

967 M05
Budu was nervous, but tried not to show it, resisting the urge to run his hand over his head-ridges. No sense spooking Shupa or their hunting-lizards. His apprentice was prone to worry enough without the worries of the tribe elders added on top.

"Alright, Shupa. Tell me why we stopped."

The adolescent looked around carefully, before answering. Good, he was slowly breaking the boy of his habit of blurting out answers.

"Um. I can see crushed long-grass and some skipper tracks. We stopped because we need to learn their direction of travel before we muddy the trail. And because of the strangle-weed, the skippers would all have to move through this clearing, so we can count them."

Budu nodded. "Good. Why don't you investigate the tracks and tell me which way they were heading and how large you think the herd is. I'll stay here with the lizards."

With a brief half-salute that stopped just short of being lazy, Shupa moved forward to study the overlapping tracks carefully. What Budu didn't say is that he was staying back to stand guard. Despite the relative lack of large predators in their tribe's hunting grounds, Budu was keeping his eyes peeled, and not for the rare migratory kori-snake that made up the only real natural danger they would normally face out here. He was keeping his eyes peeled for unknown dangers. For weeks, the soothsayer had been on edge because the stars-that-move were missing or not following their normal patterns, and just last cycle, several tribes had all spotted many slow stars-that-fall on the same day. Just as in their oral histories.

Of course, what the tribe elders could not agree on was if it was a good thing or not. After all, the last time stars-that-fall had descended, it was to destroy the scourge of the bander-beasts. Nobody in living memory had seen one, but his tribe was not the only one that kept fragments of a bander skull near the sacred pillar for demonstrations on story nights. The giant tooth, as long as an adult arm, was ample proof for young ones that their ancestors had great wisdom in always staying on the move. Despite being harder to find consistent food, it kept them mostly safe from bander-beasts. The question was… did the stars-that-fall herald a good change for their people, or did they herald endings?

His hunting-lizard turned towards the strangle-weed forest moments before Shupa's did the same.

Despite the terrible racket normally produced when struggling through strangle-weed, he could not yet hear what the lizards had noticed. His eyes widened and he gave an involuntary blink of his second eyelids when he spotted something striding their way.

"Shupa! Get over here!" He was proud at keeping the tremor out of his voice.

"Keep your shirt on. I'm coming, old man."

Budu swallowed as the being, no, beings plural neared. They were nearly a mirror of a man and his lizard other than being half-again larger, but there was an unearthly grace as they casually strode through dense strangle-weed, certain footsteps choosing the perfect locations to avoid disturbing the tangles around them even without looking down. Even as the beings got close enough to get a good look at them, they still made no sound, their movements practically dancing through webs that would take Budu a sturdy stick and half a period to make headway into.

It was as though the gods had taken the fur of a man and given it to his hunting-lizard instead, and while the man lacked scales, he had the smooth skin of a glider. Budu had to place a steadying hand on Shupa's shivering shoulder as he stared wide-eyed at the aliens.

Finally though, the aliens were through the strangle-weed and in the clearing with them.

There was a faint itching between Budu's ears as several nonsense phantom sounds seemed to come from both of the aliens at the same time.

"こんにちは? Здравствуйте? سَلام? 您好? Hello? Ah! I see I finally found the right [frequency]. Kedric? Could you let the others know?" The nonsense finally resolved into perfectly understandable speech.

The taller being nodded to them, before giving a significant look to their hunting-lizards. "I see we may have more in common with some life in the galaxy than people feared. May I know your names, and the name of your people?"

Despite his shivering, Shupa was actually the first to speak. "I am Shupa, apprentice of Budu. We are of the Matouli people."

A feeling of approval came from the beings. "Greetings Shupa and Budu. We are Jata and Kedric, of Humanity. We have recently come to this world, and we hope to live with your peoples, in partnership. I think you will find we have a lot to learn from each other. There exist beings out there that would do you harm, but I suspect we will not be among them."

Plasma Regulators · Mar 11, 2023

340 M06
"So based on what we know now about New Common, can anybody tell me when the language describing pair bonds shifted to the current nomenclature of mind and heart being a pair?" Acha looked over her class of a dozen pairs with a smile. She was still new to teaching Secondary, but even just in her first decade, she was enjoying it more than her century as a Primary teacher. Perhaps the shine would wear off, but the tempering that even freshly bonded went through matched her disposition more than the slightly manic energy of children.

<Sua> spoke Acha's heart, Othun, after looking over the children with their hands up.

Sua nodded, before speaking. "It was 350 years ago."

<Almost> Sua gave a slight frown at that.

Acha elaborated. "You could also say it was 280 years ago. Anyone care to explain the discrepancy? Lano? How about you answer this one." She singled out the pair that was most likely to have their heads in the clouds, usually due to being slightly ahead of the class.

Lano ducked his head in embarrassment, but with encouragement from his heart, he spoke. "Um. Language drift?"

At her raised eyebrow, he continued. "It takes time for new words to be used."

<Correct>

Acha settled in to lecture. "Despite having proven that humanity's language has a unifying trend due to the Greater pair network, our language is still a naturalistic one, which is to say it evolves over time, and it was not constructed to be perfect or precise. The reason why pairs are now called minds and hearts is, quite frankly, because the old system was getting too cumbersome. Three thousand years ago, you could describe them as human and partners, and be accurate. Two thousand years ago, you had AI and their partners, Synths and their partners, and humans and their partners, but because the all strongly identified as human-derived minds, the old nomenclature still functioned, albeit with a bit of extra specificity needed when you needed to refer to a synth but not a natural-born human."

She leaned on her desk for a moment, to let that sink in, before continuing. "Roughly four hundred years ago, matouli were suddenly added into the mix, but because of their comparatively smaller population and the time it took to integrate into the Coalition, the old system still functioned, although the cracks started to show by the turn of the millennia" Here, she nodded to Sua, to indicate where her answer fit into the puzzle.

"And finally, two hundred years ago, the huzo were added into the mix as well," She nodded at the only huzo mind in the class, the small reptilian glider slightly wide-eyed at the discussion of her people.

"-and by the time their population integrated, it was clear that the old system was broken beyond repair, so after a few years of trying out different terminology, the mind/heart dichotomy was eventually settled on and then it spread within months to all of humanity's colonies. Now, the last part of that process is what we're going to be covering in more detail today."

And then Othun spoke, to emphasize her subject change. <Greater pair network>

"Precisely. Now, it's been known since the very first days of extrasolar spaceflight that pairs could communicate with each other functionally instantaneously regardless of distance. At the time, it was believed this was a function of the heart; that the mind would compose the message, but only the heart could send it. Thanks to the works of Kasa Bhi two centuries ago, we know that it's actually an inherent property of the bond formation itself. You may recognize the name Kasa from our unit on the bond-formation process. He was the one that proved that pairs could only bond once both heart and mind were mature enough to have a distinct sense of self-identity."

Acha paused, and gave her class a chagrined look. "Now, the source of the discovery is actually rather amusing, because it had been looking us in the face for so long. Kasa simply went around to heart nurseries and worked with the hearts there to try to communicate over long distances. Despite being able to connect to the local Lesser pair networks, none of the hearts could reach out beyond their local environment with messages, regardless of how old they were. The record was a 231 year old heart that had never bonded with a mind, which is how Kasa proved that the only variable that changed was the bond formation itself."

Acha's easy smile dropped off her face. "On a much more serious note, hearts and minds interviewed were both capable of reaching out to the Greater pair network even after their partners died in an accident. While doing so was much more difficult, it was an ability that did not dull or fade over time, even among those that did not bond with new partners several decades later."

It hurt to see the pained faces of her students. Everyone instinctively shied away from the idea of the loss of their partner, but the newly-bonded like those in her class were particularly sensitive to the thought of losing their freshly formed bond.

<Comfort> Othun sent her, in their private shared space.

With a shake of her head, Acha continued. "Now we will discuss the differences between the local, Lesser pair network, like Othun uses to speak to you in class, and the Greater pair network, which doesn't have a detectable limit on it's range. Can anybody tell me-"

Plasma Regulators · Mar 11, 2023

502 M06
The canon tyranids were done dirty by their instincts. The ravenous hunger that drove them didn't allow for many higher tactics, but more importantly, it drove the pace of everything the tyranids did.

Of particular note was gestation time. Do you know why space marines overmatched essentially all tyranid units of equivalent size, and only started meeting their match with bioforms at least half again as big? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the superior engineering capabilities of humanity. It was all about the development time. Tyranids made so many compromises to meet their self imposed deadlines. The fact of the matter was, tyranids consumed a world within a hundred days or so for large, well defended worlds, and the vast majority of the units used in the assault were born on the surface during the invasion. To be useful at all, the larger bioforms had to be fully developed and ready to fight within seven days, and the smaller ones within two. While such biological acceleration of growth is certainly possible, you have to give up so many other tradeoffs to do it.

The sheer innovation possible when not working to such an impossibly short deadline is staggering. Case in point, I was having loads of fun helping humanity uplift the matouli and the huzo on accelerated timescales to meet the augmented humanity on a more even basis.

The average human adult was now just over two meters tall, but still had strength more than proportional with ancestral humans. In fact, despite having better than ancestral dexterity and fine motor skills, humans were now slightly stronger than the great apes optimized for strength, like gorillas. That being said, there was a far broader range of sizes than occurred naturally, so there were still some adults shorter than 1.5 meters, and some perfectly healthy people as tall as 2.5 meters, although most chose to stick to two meters for practicality purposes.

The matouli were very slightly shorter than ancestral humans, and their current height was slowly trending up above 1.6 meters. The huzo, by comparison, were tiny, at just over 1.2m if they stretched out, like they did when gliding. They had evolved for squirrel-like bounding on all four limbs with an aerodynamic forwards facing skull when hunched over. With their powerful hind legs and wingsuit-like gliding surfaces, they could make some truly astonishing leaps now that their strength was augmented to near-human levels, and they could literally clear most smaller buildings in a single bound.

Despite my close association with humans, it was actually the huzo that were getting to know me the fastest. Without purposeful direction, the "revelation" about your friendly neighborhood hivemind (me) had turned into an informal second coming of age for humanity. Your first coming of age was when you had enough self-determination to pair with a heart, although the exact age varied slightly from species to species. Your second coming of age was when you put enough of the clues together yourself to realize that there was a third player to the game of hearts and minds. Of course, since the second metric was all about your observational abilities, there were some idiots hundreds of years old who hadn't figured it out, and some not even in their second decade that already knew. The huzo were often in the latter category, because of their preferred habitats.

As I have said before, and will happily re-iterate, gravity wells are for suckers. As humanity spread, it was silently agreed upon that humanity was in charge of the planets, moons, and major stations, I was in charge of the minor solar orbitals, including artificial space habitats. Huzo loved gliding. Their survival had often been tied directly to their maneuverability in the air, so practicing that maneuverability was deeply satisfying to them. Even ancestral huzo often climbed tall trees in order to practice as often as practical. But the best possible place for gliding in the solar system? O'Neill cylinder habitats. With an exterior diameter of about 8 km and a rotational period of about two minutes, they had about 1g of artificial gravity on the cheap. More importantly, if you launched yourself from one of the ends of the cylinder, you could glide over the lands that made up your home for more than thirty kilometers before being forced to land.

While "stack of pancakes" layered artificial gravity habitats were still common, O'Neill cylinders were incredibly popular among the huzo.

The thing was, all the minor solar orbital infrastructure was ultimately a seat of my consciousness. It helped coordinate orbits and aided in easy communication between habitats around different stars. While they were largely mechanical, especially on the exterior, there were always "maintenance access channels" that were filled with, well, me.

So while humans and matouli slowly put together the occasional bit of evidence that I was around, in the general sense, most huzo had me around, in the literal sense, and familiarity does wonders for figuring stuff like that out.

In related news, several synths had started branching out into matouli and huzo body-plans, and occasionally even odder shapes. While the body assigned them at "birth" was predetermined, it was even easier for synths to do total body reshaping than organics could manage, and humans had figured that technology out centuries ago, it was just slow and fiddly.

It was kinda relaxing watching huzo and their flying companions just gliding around artificial habitats in space, free from worries in a way that was vaguely unnatural in the 40K setting. Oh, and let me tell you, huzo air races? Something else. They had full-contact categories, team-based competitions, variations of tag that looked like chaotic swirling masses of leaves, and more.

While I still identified with humanity, I'm no longer certain that I most strongly identify with humans.

Plasma Regulators · Mar 11, 2023

845 M06
"You seem excited, albeit tinged with frustration. Did you discover a new wraithbone interaction or something?" The Emperor asked, having noticed the direction of my thoughts though the connection that we never actually bothered to close, these days.

"No, although I did finally stabilize my transmutation warp construct after so long studying the wraithbone and the impermeable warp-shield. What I'm excited about is that I finally found a Necron Tombworld."

Interest flowed through the bond. "Did you discover why you have been unable to locate them thus far? You've scouted an appreciable fraction of the Galaxy at this point, after all."

"I did, and the discovery was due to a random earthquake opening a fissure on one of the more unique garden worlds I was studying that allowed me to find one of their sealed Necropoli. The reason I hadn't found one until now was that I was searching incorrectly. I had assumed that the Necrons were active warp-suppressors, like the human 'blanks' described in the alternate timeline, and in a way they are, but what may be a naturally occurring phenomenon in some humans has been refined to an impossible degree with the Necrons. Rather than being a void that actively combats the immaterium around them, the energy is instead purely funneled into being unaffected by the warp entirely, to the point that they have no warp signature at all."

Genuine surprise. "Even comets and airless moons have a warp signature. I had assumed that everything in realspace had at least some presence."

"Exactly, hence why it took so long to find. One of the strangest effects I've seen. Psychic effects slide off even the base Necrodermis building material they use like it isn't even there. It also answers the question of how a race with no souls can remain safe from warp-corruption. Chaos simply cannot see or interact with them at all. It's as if they severed the realspace/empearean mirror entirely, and I don't have the faintest idea how it was accomplished." I was actually rather frustrated at that. I had hoped that Necrodermis would be a cornerstone to advancing warp-resistance, but it was too good at its job. I didn't have any effective means by which to analyze it properly.

"Hmm. So some indivisible property of the material they build everything with. I would appreciate a sample to work with, when you get the chance. I know you have some technological capability to analyze materials like this, but I also know that your capability doesn't scale well in that regard, as a primarily psychic entity. It will need to be handled correctly, but perhaps a few grams shipped to a few thousand research institutes each will yield something, although I will temper expectations to a degree."

I sent a wave of acknowledgement. "I would appreciate it. It feels like working blind, since all of my primary senses don't seem to function on it. It also means that we'll need to be more careful with planetary surveys moving forward, since you need to physically locate a Necropolis to know that it's there in the first place."

We sat in relative silence, half formed ideas bouncing back and forth as we both considered the idea.

The Emperor broke the silence first. "May I ask what's unique about life on that garden world?"

I nodded along. "I can see where you're going with this. Yes, it's a rare example of a phosphorus-starved ecosystem. Which doesn't mean anything in and of itself, since planets formed after the fall of the Old Ones often share that characteristic, but it could be a key indicator to look out for. It would also explain why Tombworlds are frequently described as lifeless deserts. Even if they were otherwise suitable for colonization, the Old Ones wouldn't bother seeding phosphorus onto Necron controlled worlds, and thus, life is far less likely to evolve there."

"Certainly something to watch, now that we're aware of the possibility. Now, how goes the project to totally enclose the pair bond network in the impermeable membrane."

"Well, as you know I finished excavating and laying the foundations about four hundred years after the Eldar attack on Damascus. It took a further five hundred to build the framework for the barrier itself, and then for the past three hundred the barrier has been growing in strength as it repairs itself. I estimate it's at about ninety percent strength, which means I can only catch glimpses of the network myself, despite surrounding it. Within a hundred years it will be totally enclosed, and I will be cut off from the network entirely. Beyond that point, new bonds that fit the conditions and precisely match the bond type can be added and the network itself can change the empyrean conditions within the barrier, but no external force will ever be able to influence the network through the warp."

A wave of satisfaction. "Good. It will be nice to finally have actual immunity for anyone who's formed a bond, rather than 'just' a strong resistance."

I waited a beat, before hesitantly adding my next point. "Actually, I have a hypothesis, now that the network is entirely enclosed."

"Yes?"

"Throughout all of human history, departed souls that lacked the strength to tear themselves free of the immaterium were simply dissolved back into the medium from which they emerged. Currently a peaceful, albeit very final, end. But when the warp storms come and daemons start actively hunting rather than acting as opportunistic feeders, souls will instead be devoured. But… If my hypothesis is correct, finishing the enclosure will give bonded pairs the ability the Eldar either naturally exhibit, or that they probably stole from some other Old One project of some sort. Namely, the ability for departed souls to retain their coherence for as long as they wish in the immaterium. Specific to this case, within the pairbond barrier."

The Emperor was thinking hard. "Now that will be interesting. I'll have to ponder the implications. If it is indeed a similar mechanism that the Eldar use, then I can foresee the ability for pairs to step back into realspace, provided they have a sufficiently isolated vessel to enter and their souls wish to make the leap."

Tyranids "R" Us [40k Tyranid Hivemind SI]

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?

I trust you know where the happy button is?