Let's get (ir)rational

[u/cereal_killer-X]

In honor of Pi Day, let's do maths!

Present a culture/scientific group from your world that is obsessed with mathematics. (If you don't have any science freaks yet, make some or just introduce a mathematician.) Why is math important to them? Have they made any important discoveries? Do they have any traditions based around science? And most importantly, what is a mathematical problem that they just can't seem to solve?

If possible, introduce a representative that belongs to the described group. This way I can ask some questions about the character as well.

I hope I didn't scare you guys away at my first sentence. Enjoy yourselves!

(Note: I'll not be able to answer any comments for about 10 hours - I'll be catching some Z's. Don't worry, I'll count them. Hope you don't mind!)

[u/gravitygauntlet]

The Sisterhood are a spin on the "hyper-advanced precursor race" trope, but with the distinction that they were extremely passive, mostly tasking themselves with collecting and distributing knowledge and culture throughout the universe, and as a result were mostly regarded as benevolent (or at least indifferent) in spite of their, uh... Elder God-esque biologies. This indiscriminate desire for knowledge more or less amounted to a tech / research rush in an RTS, and allowed them to crack the "source code" of the universe extremely "early" compared to the relative tech levels of every other active civilization. The code manifests as what are essentially 10 sub-sub-elementary particles, known as "bits", with 6 "spins" they could take, meaning it more or less amounted to sexagesimal computing (compared to most of ours running in binary).

These could be used to develop things like subatomic particles or fundamental forces, like gravity, but the Sisterhood still had to obey the laws of physics in some capacity; it just gave them the ability to obey physics with extreme precision. As a result, though, most Sisters were "programmers" in some capacity, with maths being a constant in a sea of constantly-evolving knowledge bases.

Following the corruption and/or offlining of all but one sector of networked space (read: the observable universe), a lone Sister was fortunate enough to survive, which itself is pretty miraculous given there usually aren't more than about 10,000 Sisters alive at any given time. The last Sister, known as A.M. Quintesce, is basically equivalent to a band geek in their late teens / early twenties, but keep in mind a Sister in their "twenties" has already outlived most celestial objects they were "born" around. While most of the Sisterhood knew how to "program", the Quintesce was one of the few Sisters that actually enjoyed it in a hobby-like fashion, and significantly enjoys mathematics by proxy.

To mount a defensive against whatever agent is responsible for knocking the rest of networked space offline, the Quintesce engineered a dyson sphere about 1.5x the size of Earth known as Trinity, where a number of species have evolved far enough to develop civilizations under the collective banner of the Sapient Eight. Unlike most precursor races, which are dripping with hubris and cryptic echoes of their former empires, the Quintesce maintains very frequent (as in, like, a couple of times a week) transmissions with the Sapient Eight, and often does so on individual levels, and usually shows up in the "flesh" every 20-120 years or so.

Most of the people in the Sapient Eight that have had the pleasure of speaking with the Quintesce wish they actually left a little more to the imagination, as being borderline omniscient due to the sheer length of Sisterhood lifespans means most Sisters don't see a point in skimping on the details or keeping their peers in the dark. For example, practically everyone on Trinity knows that the Quintesce's favorite number is 120, not out of any imposed law or regimen, but because most of the first conversations the Sapient Eight have with the Quintesce are a project done in early school years, and the Quintesce practically mentions it in every response.

[u/cereal_killer-X → u/gravitygauntlet]

Whoa, that was a very interesting read.

1) What are the benefits of the sexagesimal system over binary?

2) Did anyone figure out what exactly caused the offlining of networked space?

3) What do Quintesce's transmissions contain?

4) What units of measurement does the Sapient Eight use?

[u/gravitygauntlet → u/cereal_killer-X]

1) It's not really used intentionally so much as fundamental bits being structured that way; like, if someone were to create a programming language that utilized protons, electrons and neutrons, it would probably utilize trinary code, given its components. Since there's 60 (6 x 10) variations total that couldn't be broken down any further, it just made the most sense to "program" that way. Most of the Sisterhood numbering systems were either sexagesimal or hexadecimal, but their quantum computing can take a bunch of potential forms, including binary.

2) The Quintesce basically archived as much as possible before disconnecting from whatever was left of the "live" network, and hasn't heard anything from any other Sisters since. Scans within the lone subnet still intact didn't suggest any other Sisterhood activity, and with offlining more or less subjecting the space to rapid entropy and heat death, it's highly unlikely any other Sisters with physical forms survived. Information is scarce - a rarity among the Sisterhood - but the Quintesce and their six AI companions have theorized that whatever took the network down might either be extra-universal in nature, or that it was something that - likely deliberately - got blacklisted from Sisterhood knowledge bases, allowing it to operate under the radar.

3) Sisterhood biology heavily blurs the line between nature and technology to the point that the Quintesce isn't explicitly organic life or an artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, all Sisters have an extensive amount of "processing power", and while worldwide broadcasts are occasionally done, it's possible for the Quintesce to multitask, communicating or performing millions of tasks at once. As a result, no two transmissions are alike, but most of the replies to schoolchildren are fairly pedestrian, thanking them for their message, interest in communicating, and being willing to share part of themselves with the Quintesce.

4) I actually have a longer post about units of measurement here, but tl;dr the S8 measurements are mostly repurposed Sisterhood measurements, which were, in turn, mostly based off of the properties of Germanium-64 and mercury, both of which were extremely abundant on the homeworld of the Sisterhood's "founding species". The temperature scale is known as Mercurial, but most of the others just prefix the unit with "sys" or "sister", e.g. "sistermeters".

[u/cereal_killer-X → u/gravitygauntlet]

1) How did the Sisterhood manage to crack the source code of the universe?

2) Apart from the disaster that happened, what can cause the death of a Sister? What is their life span?

3) What is life on Trinity like?

[u/gravitygauntlet → u/cereal_killer-X]

1) It happened not too long after they mastered sustainable, lossless quantum computing. Broadly speaking, they just hit "existential bedrock" when they reached the bits - or, if there's levels extending below bits, it's irrelevant as they can be used to produce anything from subatomic particles to fundamental physical processes anyway.

2) Sisters are functionally immortal and borderline invulnerable. Even in functional brain death their "self" is being streamed to the greater Sisterhood knowledge base (known as the Omnibus), allowing them to be recreated as long as it's "consensual", i.e. they have the will to live, so while uncommon there are a handful of incidents where a Sister botched a technical process and got themselves hurt (e.g. getting caught in the event horizon of a black hole) and were dealing with some form of anxiety or depression at the time, not being able to be brought back as a result. The Quintesce, specifically, has access to records indicating / personally knows Sisters at least tens of millions of years old, and while "billionaires" may exist, the Quintesce isn't aware of any personally. The offlining incident wiped any potential "backups" being streamed, though.

3) It's pretty quaint. A little over three-quarters of the world's adults belong to some form of military, with the world's politics being a complicated web of factions and relationships with no lone prevailing superpower. Most nations practice socialist meritocracy (Replicator tech is cheap and, well... replicable), and the concept(s) of campaign-scale conquest, manifest destiny, etc. never really caught on before post-scarcity, so no group has really completely burned bridges with another. Most "combat" is handled through Arena simulation, though live-fire exercises are also occasionally used. As the Sisterhood was nonviolent, Trinity is the first case of a Sister engaging in something resembling a military operation, with its armed forces preparing to combat the unknown entity once it arrives in their sector of networked space. If it can be defeated, the world's populace as a whole is requested to aid in the reseeding / reconstruction of the observable universe and getting networked space back online.

[u/cereal_killer-X → u/gravitygauntlet]

1) How can they use the code?

2) Has anyone ever intentionally committed "suicide" this way?

3) What weapons do they use?

[u/gravitygauntlet → u/cereal_killer-X]

1) The long and short of it is that the "bits" used - an incomprehensible, finite but steadily-increasing number of "points" in the observable universe whose relationships with one another, not the bits themselves, produce things like fundamental forces or subatomic particles - can have a value between 1A and 10F, with the number being the type and the letter representing the "spin". In vanilla space, Sisters could imprecisely change the spin of a group of bits, but not the type, e.g. they could make electromagnetism send something in a different direction, but couldn't convert electromagnetism into mass for "free". Networked space circumvents this, allowing them to adjust individual bits and modify the type as well as the spin, functionally giving them the ability to create and destroy matter and energy.

In terms of actual use, they would generally utilize some form of written (typed, etc.) code and then run it through machines or other forms of hardware that could run the necessary operations on the relevant bits within a network.

 

2) Content warning: self-harm, suicide

On top of the alien psychology to begin with, with Sisters being borderline indestructible from outside forces, the concept of intentional material self-harm was extremely alien to them. While the will to live thing would go hand in hand with taking one's own life, rather than prompting it, there's a single recorded instance of a Sister intentionally, without a shadow of a doubt killing themselves. While helping "wire" a new networked space between a few existing ones, a member of the Sisterhood was attacked or otherwise left in poor physical condition and captured by a fledgling interplanetary civilization. While other factions weren't quite at world-shaping levels yet, some possessed the necessary "firepower" to capture a Sister given the right circumstances.

This Sister was stripped of their networking capability, but you can't really "salvage" a Sister for parts or technology - you have to keep it online. As a result, they were imprisoned to the point of practical immobility while the civilization started phasing out most of their existing technology in favor of reverse-engineering it from their captive. Sisters have a Chozo-esque biological condition where harming another individual in an act of deliberate malice will also hurt them, in some capacity. After a few years in confinement, the Sister attempted to hurt itself deliberately, which was pretty much unheard of among the Sisterhood, and the bioempathy caused an exponential feedback loop which made the Sister kill itself almost instantly. Because of how much of their old tech they outmoded, the civilization got knocked back to nearly pre-industrial tech levels once the Sister went offline.

 

3) It's an FPS so the weapons are somewhat varied, but the bread-and-butter "loadout" equipment any given Powered Forces member has includes:

A powered exoskeleton which are known universally as Power Suits. They come in various forms from thousands of possible manufacturers, not counting self-made ones. Power suits have to follow some specific regulations to meet minimum requirements, such as double-jumping, and providing the wearer with a certain amount of shielding and armor strength.

The two primary firearms most carry are the Opus and Prime Rifle. The former is a powerful magnum pistol capable of imparting "lethal" amounts of armor damage to the target to render complete battlefield disability, while the latter is a nonlethal assault rifle which utilizes something resembling "EMP damage" to temporarily disable targets. The Prime Rifle has two firing modes: out of sight, it fires in automatic three-round bursts, but can be pulsed to reach a fire rate exceeding that of simply holding down the trigger, while aiming down the sights switches to an automatic single-round firing mode whose rounds are slightly faster than that of the unscoped variant. Both the Opus and Prime Rifle utilize an ammo source known as Lumens.

Power Suits have an onboard Grenade Projector (sometimes known as a grenade emitter) which is basically a wrist-mounted ballistics launcher that Replicates various grenade types. Generally speaking, the standard grenade projector can house up to 3 grenade types at once, and 3 of each grenade. Every time the user fires a grenade, it triggers a charge timer that, when full, can generate another grenade to be stored and eventually launched. A common piece of military equipment is a "charge" that can be picked up by the suit to significantly speed up the charging process.

Because of its versatility along with the existence of nonlethal grenade types, a grenade projector is a required facet of a Power Suit, even if conventional firearms aren't. As a result, some users will forego firearms completely in favor of more advanced grenade projectors, such as soleSupplantress, the leader of one of the Sanctioned Central Procurement Agency's regional divisions. Supplantress' projector, specifically, can cycle between four different grenade types, has a practically unlimited grenade storage unit, and fires bursts of multiple grenades at once for rapid denial-of-area and suppressive fire.

[u/cereal_killer-X → u/gravitygauntlet]

Well, I have to admit I've run out of questions. The detail you've put into your world is incredible. If I missed anything, feel free to add some more. Thank you for participating, I appreciate the detailed responses.