The phenomenon of unknown or otherwise unidentifiable vessels is not new. Since humanity first mastered interplanetary space, the liberalisation of spacecraft construction has resulted in a vast number of divergent, difficult-to-identify vessels. One of the founding principles of the neural net - a trans-sirian digital VI network that dominates all human-to-human art, media and communication within Sirius, was from the need to reduce the ever increasing information deficit of a cosmos in flux. Till the Nomad War, truly unidentifiable contacts were rare, the phenomena of cheap holomovies - the trope of an alien apocalypse all too common within the undertones of the social psyche. With the spread of objectivised information, came the spread of subjectivity, and the general rise of Sirius-wide cynicism as each individual became privy to the unlimited reserves of a thousand years of virtual archives. Whilst the exchange of physical assets forms the dominion of Sirian stellar trade - a monopoly that the evolution of the jump drive may yet derail, information remains a premium in value and yet notoriously difficult to obtain in originality. Human experience, limited by what is considered pragmatic to mechanical engineering, has ascended to near-godhood through the neural universe, yet the manipulation of physical objects, the output to the neural sphere, remains at a low.
Since the Nomad War, the Sirian public has become well acquainted with the notion of entities that are intractable to our understanding and perception - the Nomads, modern-day applicants to the vedic mythological concepts of previous millennia, are certainly able in their role of the dragons of our time, their terrifying evolutionary acceleration a pace-test to a neural sphere that thrives in flux, in the steady evolution of our technological consciousness. Yet the challenge presented by the Nomads has always been one of charting information, and of the human recipient and their ability to perceive the information; if the human noosphere is being altered by the rise of the K’hara, then what of the ‘humanity’ charted within the confines of the Neuralnet? Is the Neural sphere subject to its user-base?
Yet the advantage of the Neuralnet is that it reaches a certain objectivity previous systems, such as the Mars-Earth-Jupiter Solarnet and the terrestrial Internet, never fully achieved. By sourcing its data from the objectivity of AI mainframes in globalist production - from the gate traffic processors in every Ageira trade lane to the vast insurer’s archives of Wall Street, the Neuralnet has achieved a paradigm of cognitive efficiency that simultaneously neuters it from sentience, yet remains perpetually of evolutionary use to its consumer base. Whereupon the Neuralnet of the twentieth century was an agent of war, and the Solarnet of the twenty first and twenty second centuries was a product of war’s objective tendency to taper technology towards both acceleration and complexity, the neural net remains shackled by nothing. Anything that is unknown, on the Neuralnet will eventually be known by its users - the case in point being the Wilde themselves, which are so transparently unknowable to the general public that all the prerequisite elements to countermeasure them have become well-disseminated; red, means dead.
Only with the emergence of the Cult of Technology has the integrity of the Neuralnet itself entered conscious crisis. How do you reason with a society that is so completely above the technological cognition of humanity, as to transcend it? If our communications are jeopardised utterly, how can we remain reliant on conventional metrics of technological exchange? Should we resign ourselves to the dark ages, or embrace the steamroller? And what of those motes within the star field, that elude all childs of the neural web who dare try to grapple with them? What of the Kansas system, with its vast, naked tracts of empty space, filled with nothing but…. silence? A taped patch on the spotlight of Liberty house and all of it’s innumerable tendrils into the destinies of those who came after? It is time for the Sirian Neural community to digest the truth - there be ghost ships out there.
As the Neural pundits are fond of recapitulating to the public: we will keep you up to date as the story develops. What the story may develop into, remains unknown. Are we in a horror? We like to think we are our own heroes, or there's no grand narrative at all. Unfortunately, any phenomena which can be explained away by luck, can be equally rationally be justified by sufficiently exotic technology.
- Provost Achemi, University of Harburg, Planet Hamburg, extract from 'Treatise on Digital Synthesis', University of Harburg lecture notes.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
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