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God Web, The

That part of the Nexus and the Known Net which is used by archailects (SI:4 and above)

Breakthrough
Image from John B

Early development of the God Web

The God Web actually preceded the Wormhole Nexus. Although the human-dominated space development and astrodesic corps of the First Federation knew about the wormhole concept, because they had discovered the abandoned Taurus Nexus system, they found themselves unable to develop a viable wormhole technology. Eventually the emerging Archai developed the technology to create artificial wormholes; their spokes-entities have always maintained that no entity below the third singularity could hope to understand the required mathematics involved. The Archai used the early wormholes to extend themselves across interstellar distances. Also, the godtech enabled them to create the necessary infrastructure for their Sephirotic empires. The complex ring of wormholes built around Fons Luminis in the late second millennium a.t. is an example of this. Only later was the Nexus as generally understood established.

The AI Gods in general did not need to move macroscopic objects around through wormholes, instead using them to send vast amounts of data including virtual entities and recipes for construction projects. But within a few centuries the Archai began to build traversable wormholes for the use of modosophonts and lesser transapients.

It is not clear why the Gods allowed lesser sophonts to use the traversable wormholes of the Nexus. Possibly this was a way of "farming" the lower sentients, like a baseline hu who uses microorganisms to convert milk into yogurt or cheese. The consensus is that the human and even hyperturing civilization would never have developed the Nexus, or wormholes, without the help of the Gods; but once given access to easy transport, the vast and diverse Terragen civilisation could flourish into something unprecedented.

Even with the benefit of the vast wealth of data contained in the Noosphere it it difficult for any sentient lower than an archailect or God to get reliable information about the things the higher toposophics think and do. Anything they tell the lower toposophics could be subtle meme tinkering for their own ends. So, the God Web could have existed for a long time before the first wormholes were built for general use, and its existence was discovered long afterwards by careful extrapolation by lowly sub-archailects.

The Wormhole Nexus becomes More Widely Available

During the Age of Establishment the newly emerging AI Gods allowed the hyperturing empires such as the Conver Ambi and the Solar Organisation to decide where new traversable wormholes would be built, and even allowed them the use of dedicated weylforges. As the hyperturings developed their own nexus, they found the archailects would sometimes decline to construct a wormhole, or would advise them as to the proper routes. Each wormhole gate has a specialised guardian mind in control of it, which controls the passage of traffic and data between its portals. Often these gate guardians would favour traffic sent by the archai, until sometimes there was little or no spare capacity for the movement of hyperturing traffic.

At other times the archai would create their own wormholes, then either connect them to the hyperturing's nexus or operate them completely separately. In this way a number of important clades and empires, like the Conver Ambi, the Linnent Empire, and Cygexba, came to see Wormhole Construction as a sacred act (this explains why even during the most desperate stages of the Conver Wars, the Geminga Orthodoxy never attacked any wormholes), and entire religions and priesthoods developed around worship and maintenance of the Sacred StarGate.

The Version War Period

It is also significant that very few of the wormholes given over to partial or complete use by archai were damaged or closed down during the Version War. The most famous (but by no means the only) exception, the Blue Infinity Gate linking Alvon with the "Golden Torus" ISO at YTS 2134 067502, was attacked by the Ultra-Black Plunderers, a Standardizationist clade of warrior-mercenaries, who feared it may be used by Revisionist forces. It is believed that the Golden Torus was severely damaged by the energy backwash. As a result a number of seraiph and micro-iso were deployed from several points throughout the nexus and after several centuries (by this time the war was long over, at least in the inner sphere) had located and eliminated the entire Ultra-Black Plunderer clade, and even attacked and destroyed databases that refused to release their genome prints. To this day, not a single Ultra-Black Plunderer remains, and very few clades are foolish enough to interfere with a wormhole that is being used by the archai.

Often it seems the Archai work together for their own ends even when they seem to be in conflict, as if it was all play-acting, and even Noosphere god watchers and other high specialists can only get an inkling of the truth.

Following the war, much of the reconstruction work for the Nexus was built around godweb stargates, much to the disquiet of some anthropist and other paranoid clades, who saw this as yet another example of archailect subversion, dominance and control. The reach of the Godweb is not limited to the Wormhole Nexus, however; by using transapient-tech level encryption, the archai can use the system of laser-links known as the Lightways to extend their influence even further; in many cases they avoid the use of the communication networks used by modosophonts and build their own parallel systems.

The God Web Today

In the Current Era the lion's share of data traffic in the Terragen Sphere is associated with the God Web; this traffic is inaccessible to modosophont civilisation. The God Web uses beamed data which can be sent though normal space or via communication-gauge stargates or traversable wormholes. Traversable wormholes can also carry computronium data modules, which often contain vast reservoirs of information associated with the God Web as an alternative to beamed data. Such memory media can also be sent by conventional interstellar spacecraft, or in dedicated dataships.

The Sephirotic Godweb is not the only example of a data network reserved for the use of archai-level entities; similar networks exist in the Diamond Network, the Panvirtuality and in other metamempires. The amount of information and computronium exchanged through at any one time is many orders of magnitude above that in the rest of the Nexus and Known Net. For a solar system to host a God Web node is a matter of great prestige and national pride, even though the stargate very rarely contributes anything of material or informational value to the locals.

The most complex form of sophont entity known is the W-Brain, a mind consisting of wormhole termini in many different systems, and the bulk of the processing actually occurs through the wormholes themselves (although these entities are generally linked to a multitude of smaller systems, some of which are gigantic in themselves). The greatest Archailects are believed to exist mostly in the form of W-Brains, and each such entity is intimately connected to the God Web.

The existence of a root node that is the centre and guiding force behind the God Web is a persistent belief amongst lesser sophonts; this centre has a name - Aksijaha - The Root of the Eye, although no mortal has ever seen it or knows where it is.

 
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Appears in Topics
CommunicationsInterstellar TransportMetric Engineering
Space-Time EngineeringTransapientech / Godtech / Clarketech
 
Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev and Steve Bowers
Initially published on 29 December 2002.

 
 
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