Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced

by Cordial Nova

Intermission: Drafting a Message Home

Author's Note:

Sorry for super-short chapter, especially after this much time, but please consider it less of a chapter in itself as a promise to get back to this more often and at greater length in 2019. Really! I mean it!

I've added the meanings of the various codewords - well, except the ones spotting which gets you a virtual cookie - to the reference chapter if you're interested now, or you can infer what's behind them as we go on with the plot. I don't think they're particularly spoilery, but I know tastes in such things vary.

FROM: FLT. CMDR. CORDELIA VINTAR-ITH-VIDUTAR, COMMANDING CSS ISTRY LOCHRAN
TO: OVERSIGHT*, ADJUNCT CONSTELLATION 219

*** WILDFIRE
*** IES SECURE E4096
*** CONTACT CONTACT CONTACT

1. This is a SERAPH BLUE ALERT, origination point IGS 254672 III. Event footprint includes OVERLOOK HIGH, PATTERNED EM, and DIRECT ENCOUNTER class indicators. Contact event type INTENTIONAL and INTERPLANETARY.

2. I regret to report the loss of CSS Istry Lochran, hull number 1129, in the course of the contact event. Contact was NOT, repeat NOT, HOSTILE. Negative casualties; souls and substrates intact. Negative loss of small craft. Severe impact on starside mission readiness; minimal impact on groundside mission readiness.

3. Planetary civilization contacted is WORLDBOUND (special anomaly) and MULTIPOLITAN. Landing-local civilization is preliminarily profiled as FRIENDLY (indeed, here friendship seems ubiquitous) and EXOCURIOUS, with governance within the parameters of diplomatic acceptability. Technological level based on preliminary profile is ANOMALOUS (estimate Gwyath 5+ (1) in general use, varying to big angelic, possible SKYSHOCK BLUE-equivalent.) Probable PRECURSOR FUGUE DAWN.

1. The Gwyath logarithmic development scale is an attempt to wrap a whole bunch of different indicators of technosocial progress, acknowledging the non-linear, fractal, branching nature of these things, up into a relatively simple number. In technical terms, a Gwyath 5 would be roughly equivalent to Earth in 1890-1920, but like the lady said, it's anomalous.

4. Communication has been established successfully. I detect no signs that my interlocutors have been in any way mendacious. While current communications depend on big angelic translation technology provided by the autochthones, I anticipate becoming quite polyglottal.

5. PROVISIONAL NEGATIVE on CASE DEMIURGE DREAMING. However, I advise readiness for CASE GOLDEN SUNRISE.

6. Nomenclature designations follow:

• Star IGS 254672 :: PHOSPHOROS (system designating entity)
• Planet IGS 254672 I :: EPONA (moons pending designation)
• Planet IGS 254672 II :: RHIANNON (moons pending designation)
• Planet IGS 254672 III :: EQUUS
• Moon IGS 254672 IIIa :: LUNA
• Anomaly IGS 254672 IIIb :: CELESTIA

7. Open sophont species file as follows: PONY (pl. PONIES), homeworld EQUUS. Note: species may be polytaxic (three primary subspecies); also note additional sophont species share homeworld. Details to follow.

8. Open contacted governance file as follows: DIARCHY OF EQUESTRIA, throneworld EQUUS. Note: no single planetary governance exists. Based on limited data at this point, suggest listing system under this designation as space-capable governance (see special anomaly above).

9. Suggest provisional hold on transfer of all systems within two links and all golden worlds within Adjunct Constellation 219 to Accord administration, pending further evaluation. In absence of other contact reports, suggest preliminary designation of Adjunct Constellation 219 as EPONIAN CLUSTER.

10. For confidence of local governance, request that you discontinue overdue response and send no further vessels into Phosphoros System until further advised.

11. Revised mission continues according to standard IES first contact protocols. Mission status is shiny-optimal. Request bounce transmission of mission codeword redesignation and secure pad to gate relay for postal hold.

12. More follows.

13. AUTHENTICATION SLICE GLACIER KINETIC HIVE WYVERN PLUME / 0x0ae01b2d339684aa

ENDS.

Comments

[Dinoguy1000]

HYPE

[zakueins]

Nifty and a great way to round out the New Years.

The only thing more interesting will be the response when this gets in...

[emanwe]

please consider it less of a chapter in itself as a promise to get back to this more often and at greater length in 2019

Huzzah!

[Booster Spice]

If these guys have quantum comunicators, then they can at least theoretically understand why it is so dangerous listing Pinkies and Discords names in the messages, since it gives them a direct localisation bypass to whatever destination, such as spacially or even memetically?

[Flashbunny]

Oh wow, nice to see this starting up again!

[ZarPaulek]

9377506
You're confusing quantum entanglement (law of physics) with the principle of contagion (magic).

[Cordial Nova]

9377506

I'm pretty sure the only limits on Pinkie's power to appear places are --

1. She knows that they exist; and
2. It would be funny.

[FanOfMostEverything]

I detect no signs that my interlocutors have been in any way mendacious.

I know it's just a word, but part of me can't help but think that Cordelia has only just met the local confectioner...

PROVISIONAL NEGATIVE on CASE DEMIURGE DREAMING.

And she definitely hasn't met Discord yet... though I may not have a full appreciation for what weakly godlike entities are capable of.

Always happy to see more of this. Thanks for the update, and here's to many more in 2019.

[LostArchivist]

Yes! It updated!
Although I'm not sure how much a half-page of technobabble counts as a chapter...
It's cause for hope, though.

[emanwe]

9379096
If you're not familiar with Cordial Nova's other work, messages and log files like this are pretty standard story delivery mechanisms for him.

[Arzoo]

You write such a fun sci-fi setting. Glad to hear we'll get to read more of this!

[Cordial Nova]

9383641

Righto, then. (Spoiler-protected for those who don't want to know, as discovering lots of this is in the plot.)

Some questions:
The machinery in the actual sun -- I assume that is beaming power to the visible one, but does that also fuel everyone's magic, or is that innate like the psi-abilities of the eldrae?

It's innate, for the same values of engineered-innate applicable to the eldrae. (Which does not mean that magic can't borrow power from elsewhere, and there are certainly circumstances where Celestia, for example, benefits from having a functionally-unlimited supply of solar energy to draw upon. But you don't need an external source for the little, day-to-day magics.)

There's a bit of a fridge horror moment currently because we don't know how long / if the collectors are still working properly; If they fail, since Equestria does not have a space program, there's going to literally be a dark day coming.

That, at least, is probably not something anyone's going to have to worry about. Surviving paleotech tends to be abnormally resilient in the first place, or it wouldn't have survived -- and this has to have top-of-the-line self-maintenance and self-repair systems anyway, just to cope with the solar environment. Good for another few hundred thousand years, at least.

How did Celestia gain control of the devices actually powering the sun?

The Canterhorn is not just the innocuous mountain it appears to be; it's the casing on one of the two major pieces of Precursor tech that keeps the world working. If you can attune to that - which in itself is something that most can't do - you get access to the control systems for sun and moon.

(And Luna's 120G flight -- innate or external power source?)

Both, sort of. Her special talent, generalized, amounts to control of gravity and therefore orbits throughout the system. While even an alicorn of her experience probably couldn't generate that much acceleration on their own, what she can do is shift just a tiny part of one of the planets' momentum, which gives her all the acceleration she needs and then some.

How is it that alicorns are more powerful, or is that just the sisters because of the dyson devices?

While alicorns tend to come from the top end of the power scale thanks to the way pony genetics work, they're not all that much more powerful than non-alicorns in raw strength terms where any one type of magic is concerned. What makes alicorns more powerful is that they can reinforce any one type of magic with the other two, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

(Applying this to later in show-canon, butterfly effect notwithstanding, the reason Starlight was able to overcome Twilight was that Twi hadn't had time to bring her pegasus techniques and earth pony tools up to match the level of her unicorn magic, limiting the amount of synergy she could get out of them. With time, study, and practice, she'll reach the sisters' power levels. Probably faster, since this is Twilight, who consumes knowledge the way Pinkie consumes baked goods.)

Any plans to use tech to make everypony immortal or an alicorn (it would make Twi's life less stressful, and I bet a lot of other people would be happier too.)? If I wrote, I'd include that somewhere.

Alicorning everypony - unlikely, since it's a really, really complex process. (Star Swirl's spell, in this 'verse, doesn't do much in the way of alicornifying by itself; it relies on calling existing routines embedded in the Elements of Harmony and by extension the Tree, which do the heavy lifting. It also requires that the users/subject be attuned to the Elements of Harmony, which limits its general application quite a bit.

Other attempts to do this, lacking the Elements, have tended to end in disaster because there's so much complexity involved: to describe everything the Tree does to create a stable alicorn would be some huge 890-volume ritual monstrosity of a spell, and no-one has even a fraction of the knowledge needed to write it even if they weren't looking around for short-cuts.)

Immortality? Definitely. From original-'verse canon, as members of the "naturally ever-living" set, the eldrae policy on this is, well...

Hey, I just met you
and this is crazy
But here's a phial,
live forever maybe?

...to offer immortagens to pretty much every non-immortal species they meet, on the eminently reasonable grounds that it is annoying and unpleasant to meet all these new people who then keep dying on you, not to mention a horrific waste of knowledge and experience and awesomeness, and basically, if this is the natural order, the natural order can bite them.

So, yeah, Cordelia will be pitching that one at the first opportune moment. Doesn't hurt that offering to cure death makes a mighty fine diplomatic gift, either.

[Nightfire2]

The phrasing and style of code naming you use in the report reminds me of Rasputin from Destiny.

[Greatazuredragon]

Nice work, keep it up.

[Gray Sage]

New fan eagerly awaiting more!