Eschaton

Valtavech: [History] [Government] [Biology/Noology]

"Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas."
- Lord Acton

The Valtave system was immediately recognized as a point of interest in the early days of the Diaspora, and was colonized in numerous waves by dozens of old earth cultures, although Americans and Japanese descendants came in the greatest numbers. During the millennia of isolation following the Diaspora, the inhabitants of Valtave diverged from their ancestory and their kin, developing unique languages and cultures. Inside the Valtavian polis metaverses, and in their large cities of living humans, time marked its passage. Wars were fought. Entire civilizations formed from the original colonies arose, prospered, and eventually toppled. Over the centuries the Valtavians advanced technologically and economically, expanding to the reaches of their large solar system. By the end of the first millennium PD (post-Diaspora), the Valtavians had developed an extensive industry that came to rival that of Sol itself. Like all the other scattered descendants of the Diaspora, the Valtavians grew largely in isolation. Any news they received from Sol was thirty years out of date, and vice-versa. Both systems were thus unaware of the recent developments of the other, and the high expense of interstellar bandwidth extensively limited intercommunication.

During the Long Silence, the Valtavians launched numerous exploration and colonization missions of their own. One of these missions established a scientific polis named Denasti in the Ghudali system. Exploring and charting the planets of Ghudali, explorers from the polis discovered a strange artifact, evidence of an elder civilization. Denasti scientists announced the discovery of the artifact in the year 2213 PD, and the news reached Valtave in 2234 PD. For the next ten years, all the various cities and polises of Valtave listened attentively to the stream of broadcasts arriving after some 21 years of slow travel through space. They listened as the scientists made each key discovery. The artifact seemed to demonstrate the ability to transmit information faster than light. It was perhaps a very powerful and ancient computer, long dormant. Or perhaps it was an instellar communications device. The brilliant Minds of Denasti unlocked a key secret: they discovered a means to interface with the artifact. The artifact was transmitting an overlapped, multilayered message whose components ranged in complexity from the most elementary to incomprehensibly dense. They determined the simplest layer to be a sort of primer. Deciphering the primer, they learned an alien system of symbolic mathematics which the next layer used to teach them a simple logic language. The more complex layers of the message were encoded in this language.

The last few transmissions from Denasti detailed the theoretical basis behind the workings of the artifact, which used a technique the Denasti scientists called the quantum filament effect to transfer information instantaneously. This was the scientific revolution the Valtavians had been waiting for! The theoretical implications were astoundingly complex, but the more immediate engineering implications let the Valtavians use the quantum trich (as it became known) to construct practical FTL communication networks and develop warp manifold theory, which eventually led to the first displacement drives.

Suddenly, after ten years of continous broadcast, the brilliant stream of light from Denasti ended without explanation. The Valtavians reached Ghudali again in 2255 PD only to find the system mysteriously deserted. The Denasti Polis, and any evidence of the amazing events that happened decades earlier had simply vanished without explanation. Only a dormant artifact remained, a silent witness to whatever madness consumed the brilliant Minds of Denasti Polis.

Thus begun the great age of Valtavian conquest. The Minds in control of the Valtavian government quickly realized the power of their new technology. They built a great fleet of exploration vessels using the new displacement drives. They quickly navigated the surrounding space in their local region of the manifold, and discovered that Valtave happened to lie near a massive manifold nexus. Thus the Valtavians were doubly lucky: first to discover the quantum trich, and blessed with an ungodly dense network of slipstreams converging right on top of their home system. The Valtavian Expeditionary Fleet dispersed across the slipstream network, riding it into dozens and then hundreds of systems in their local topology. The VEF contact policy was very simple. When they established contact with a foreign civilization, they issued an ultimatum: join the Valtavians and prosper with interstellar trade and communication, or be left out in the dark to fend for yourselves. The Valtavians jealously guarded the secrets of warp manifold theory and their precious FTL technology. They used it as a bludgeon to build an empire. Most civilizations accepted de facto rule by the Valtavian government, and even the ensuing stiff taxation, as a worthwhile price to pay for the massive economic and technological benefits of the Valtavians' technology. By 2300 PD, the Valtavian Empire spanned dozens of systems, and by 2350 PD it had grown to hundreds.

Eventually the empire grew beyond its means and began to fall into unrest. In 2359 PD, Torvelle, one of the more prosperous Valtavian systems, declared its sovereignty and rebelled outright against Valtavian colonial policy. Raising the support of sixteen other systems, Torvelle became a thorn in Valtave's side, but not a serious threat.

In 2361, the Valtavian Expeditionary Fleet encountered the first Alephian worldship. A previously uncontacted race, seemingly of human origin, the Alephians possessed FTL technology of their own! News of the Alephian contact and the extent of the Alephians' power quickly spread throughout the empire. Worse, the Alephians were willing to freely share the secrets of their own warp manifold discoveries! The rebellion caught like wildfire, and dozens more systems joined Torvelle. The news was so devastating that it caused a massive political upheavel on Valtave. Using political guile, a group of powerful Minds called the Archons staged a coup. The Archons quickly recalled the VEF forces and hastily converted them into a military fleet. Thus the empire was plunged into darkness. The Valtavian Civil War, or the War of the Sovereigns as it became known, was the most devasting war in the history of man. Entire planets with billions of humans and immortals were annihilated in the chaos. The Archons approached the Alephians with a plea for support, and the Alephians were suprisingly accomadating. With the Alephians' aid, the Archons were able to gain the upper hand in the civil war. Just as Valtave was beginning to gain a definitive upper hand against the rebels, the Alephians suddenly demanded that the Valtavians reach a peace agreement with the rebellion leaders, or they would turn and side with the rebels. The Archons had no choice but to agree, and in doing so they lost their power. In 2397 PD, the Republic was born from the ashes of civil war.

The original Valtavech Republic consisted of three prefectures, semi-autonomous nations encompassing former rebel elements of the Valtavian empire that answered to the federal government, but retained a large degree of control within their systems. The Valtave Prefect possessed the bulk of the Valtavians' thinkers and doers; Torvelle held a number of mineral-rich systems and provided the bulk of the Republic's production capacity; and Corvain was the locus of banking and finance in the quickly developing Republic. In 2420 a confederation of independents known as the Eriden Commonwealth petitioned for admittance into the Empire and was accepted, becoming the fourth prefecture.

The Valtavech prospered under their new system of government. They began to rebuild the shattered remains of the Empire, establishing regular trade routes between once-isolated systems and creating new business opportunities for eager entrepreneurs. Making good use of the Alephians' superior navigation skills and uncanny knack for finding new slipstreams, they continued where the old Empire's frontier explorations had left off, albeit with a more conservative approach. Whereas the emphasis in "Valtavian Expeditionary Fleet" had decidedly been on the word Fleet, the new Republic's Contact Corps began to rapidly expand the sphere of known space.

As Valtavech and Alephian grew increasingly reliant on one another, a troublesome social problem emerged. The Alephians, with their emphasis on metaverse life and liberal approach to vastening, began to lure the Republic's promising young Minds into distracting, unproductive lives aboard the worldships. The Alephian cohabitation treaty allowed worldships unlimited access to Valtavech space, and Republic citizens were free to come and go as they pleased; the Republic could do nothing in an official capacity to stop the slow brain drain.

The Alephian problem grew more irksome with each passing generation. In metaverse time, a year's worth of young Minds and recently-vastened Immortals lost to the worldships became a huge generation gap, effectively putting several polises out of business and disrupting longstanding traditions among the elder Minds. Elder valtavian Minds hated the hokey Alephian religion and quickly grew irritated by their endless proselytizing. Alephians wasted valuable resources on pointless thermodynamics research, endlessly obsessed with finding a way to reduce entropy. Worst of all, worldship-based "locust mining" operations were severely undercutting Valtavech mineral concerns with their lower overhead and rapid extraction techniques.

The Archons begun pulling strings in the metaverse and built up a small cadre of supporters, the imperialists. They began to agitate for emigration controls and government-managed mineral rights. Funded in part by Valtavian corporations feeling pressure from the worldships, they bought their first sixteen seats of the Senate and became a bona fide political party. Their power steadily grew until eventually the imperialists controlled almost half of the senate and one of the consuls. The other, the venerable Praxtus fayn Kilwren, was a known Alephian apologist. They engineered a scandal whereby Praxtus was framed for receiving a bribe from an Alephian worldship. The scandal destroyed Praxtus and resulted in a vote of no confidence. When the next newly-elected consul suddenly announced his unconditional support of the loyalist movement, they made their move and declared war.

The Valtavech-Alephian War was long, but nowhere near as brutal as the previous War of the Sovereigns. The War can be divided roughly into three stages: in the first stage the Valtavech were apparently winning, driving the Alephians out of key economic systems with little resistance and minimal losses. In the second stage, it seemed that the war would be a stalemate, as the Alephians moved gracefully across the manifold, anticipating and avoiding the Valtavech fleets without serious engagements. In the third stage, the Valtavians begun to realize that the war was unwinnable. The Alephians destroyed any fixed bases as they retreated, and all of their major industry, in the form of their vast worldships, was completely mobile. They could sweep into an undefended system and quickly mine it, refurbishing their fleet and moving on before the Valtavech could respond. The Alephians had more experience in manifold navigation, and they could quickly strike behind Valtavech lines to disrupt the military supply chain and key communications links. The Valtavians realized the error in their strategy, but it was too little too late, and the Valtavech Navy, although largely unscathed, began to run out of precious fuel and supplies. By the year 2569, it was clear that the war was over, even if neither side had suffered significant losses. The Alephians were suprisingly generous in their peace terms, and agreed to put in place immigration controls on all worldships in exchange for free access to Valtavian space and unclaimed mineral resources.

Living once again in relative harmony, the Republic continued its inevitable expansion. The Reparation of 2582 granted the Alephians some of the systems they had abandoned in the early stages of the war. Within 40 years enough new worlds had been assimilated to necessitate the formation of a sixth prefecture, which turned out to be so large that it was ungovernable. Thus the Valtavech ranks swelled to seven prefectures, containing some 300 systems with almost 500 planets and habitats, and 250 trillion registered citizens.

In 2739, Alephian navigators on the frontier observed strange interference patterns in the coreward slipstreams which resolved shortly into the signatures of ships, of a design completely unknown to them. The Valtavech focused their exploratory efforts coreward, and within two years had made contact with yet another race. But it was a kind of contact for which they had no protocol. Whereas every previous contact had been with a race ultimately descended from humans, the newcomers encroaching on the Valtavech sphere seemed to have no common origin. They are possibly the first truly alien race to be contacted in the entire 8,000 year history of mankind.

Although the Ixtek are now believed by some scientists to share a common origin with the rest of mankind's descendant races, they show no trace of their humanity now and are quite alien in both thought and form. On first contact they seemed petulant, barely acknowledging the Valtavech hailing signals and showing little interest in their visitors. After frustrating months of study by cultural anthropologists, the Valtavech had learned enough about their language to attempt communication with their ships; their friendly greetings were sometimes met with cryptic replies, but more often with silence.

As the Ixtek advance their front, occupying systems and worlds approaching Valtavech space, the Republic grows restless and war seems imminent.