The Jesdic Pasaru has a long history behind it, spanning over one hundred million years, though a good part of it is rather mindless travelling from one place to another. This is a short piece describing its development from the beginning of civilisation to the present day.
The civilisation that eventually banded together to form the J.-Pasaru is by no means unusual or odd – in fact they could be described as eerily humanlike without much alteration in many respects, such as language, psychology and especially biology. This allows us to use more or less homely words and familiar words to understand and describe their development.
In the interests of speed we shall briefly explain what happened before the formation of the empire.
In the beginning, (−12,000 PDN or thereabouts) there was the formation of civilisation. Then separate countries and kingdoms formed, and there was war, trade and various related side-effects of civilisation. For our purposes, not much in the interim matters, except there’s always been something odd going on with regards to causality. It seems like there are quite a few things that, to an outside observer, would look out of place. Effects seem to precede causes sometimes, and there are things whose origins seem elusive, even nonexistent. This would come into play later.
By the time −700 PDN rolls around the stage was set for a fairly large war: the World War. The War itself is also not very important, but what happened afterwards is. The post-War period is called the Restitution, ēwhere there had been various trading of powers and resources to make the world more homogeneous. The most important part about it is that not long after, there was the establishment of a world “government”, though calling it that might not very accurate, as its power is almost strictly less than that of the United Nations. Nevertheless, this is the beginning of the J.-Pasaru as a separate, and later globally encompassing, entity.
Around the year 563, something strange happened to the world. There was a hot new trend and it’s a thought bug that’s truly attained viral status as the entire world has been infected in less than a week’s time. This strange bug is called self-awareness.
Being globally self-aware has a handful of side-effects. Primarily, the pace of technological growth has slowed to a crawl. Other notable slowdowns include language change and fashion cycles.
This creates a period known as the Stagnation, as things just simply stop changing much. However, that doesn’t mean nothing’s changed; notably, the species have been a lot more careful, evaluating new technology before widespread use, rationing resources at the highest level to individual countries, and forming a blossoming research community that looks to why this whole thing began in the first place. At this point, the empire began to take shape as the top-level management, leading the way forward in the general direction but also leaving enough freedom for people to breathe in, somehow. The situation was not always rosy, and at times there has been great spats over the distribution issues, but for the most part things worked out fine.
Twenty or thirty thousand years on, the empire crawled their way to the space age, and then a world-changing thing happened.
On Cipog, just three planets out.
This has been a momentous occasion, and it was enough motivation for the J.-Pasaru to speed up and attempt to match the alien civilisation metaphorically down the road, as it were. With great trepidation they reached out to the aliens, sending the immortal word:
Test
Fortunately, that was well-received.
Gradually the two managed to establish a common ground, then consistent communication, and finally physical contact. The entire process took yet another millennium. Further acclimation of the two disparate species spent centuries like wet paper, but eventually relations normalised in the year 60,000 or thereabouts.
With most of that behind them, there was a realisation: if there are two completely different origins of life even in a single stellar system, then what is the chance that they are alone? Probably not much. So the duo created a resolution to explore the endless void and pick up any other civilisations in the interim. And so a new era begins.
The next ten to thirty million year odd period is the period of relentless but lethargic expansion. At almost no point in this period has there been speeds exceeding 0.5c. Nevertheless, there has been enough time for the combined civilisation to spread itself comfortably to the entire galaxy, and even the neighbouring realms beyond.
There is a rule about the universe that everyone knows: “wherever you go, the light has been there first.” Such a rule imposes an annoyingly low limit on how fast anything moves. Knowing that there’s little one can do to get around that, the J.-Pasaru found the solution within itself: short of making light faster, the only thing one can do is to make it look faster. So a decision was passed to slow down the processing speed of the vast majority of the population instead.
There had been plenty of opt-outs and compromises, of course. Some groups took advantage of this slowdown to appear superhuman: firemen and other emergency response groups are exempt, as are explorers and couriers. The global stock market is not, and that has some rather thorny implications that would be hard to get into detail in this brief history. Almost all of life is affected, seeing how basal this single alteration is. Nevertheless, people got used to it, eventually. Combined with increased lifespan even before the slowdown, this means that one can in principle see the other end of the galaxy and come back and live to tell the tale.
And in this dramatically altered world, they trudged on.
Surprisingly many places have life, but not many have intelligent life. It seems that in here, one of the great filters is the jump from non-sentient to sentient. For first third of their journey they only met about twenty planets with any measure of civilisation. Various actions are taken to ensure the safety of all parties involved, whose details do not interest us for the moment.
It took until they crossed halfway across the galaxy before they actually met something remotely intelligent. And they didn’t find it in any planet or moon, but instead a nebula.
Putting aside the actual details of the contact of the Quaxtion, the situation resolved itself quite quickly – and quite handily. The Quaxtion never really got off their planet, and when their sun expired all they did was to become ethereal and exist as bodies encased in metal and wheels. Their life story aside, they did impart the incoming empire with quite a bit of extra knowledge to extend their lifetimes essentially without limit. Strangely few people took up on their solution.
The power of the Quaxtion was so large they were brought up to become equals among the two worlds that started the empire in the first place, something that’s never been done before.
As probability would have it, there really happened to be one major interstellar war. This is when the conquest was nearly complete, with the contact of the Xaxex. It lasted several million years and about as many corpses. No, really!
(At this point, it might be pertinent to remind you that superluminal speeds remain impossible, but barely seventy generations have gone past since the beginning of the expansion.)
Overall, the Only War is slow on all fronts. Shots do not get fired more often than once a second anywhere, and lines change on a decade scale rather than a day scale. On the other hand, this is as much a war of words and hit-points as a war of guns and ships, with much of the battle being waged by diplomats and, suprisingly, major-league gamers! The role of the button-mashers in this war is as valuable as the ones wielding the orbital nukes, and all the while the companies making those games made fast ties and fat stacks.
Daily life in the war is just as in ordinary life, with the occasional flash-away as civilians were whisked out of the way (actually, they didn’t move very quickly, but their perception of time is so that it looks very quick, using the mechanism mentioned above.) Then a half a generation later, the war ended, and the two made up, more or less. J.-Pasaru and J.-Xaxex had an uneasy union for another few million years until they finally gave up all pretences they are separate and formed a union, completing the conquest of the galaxy 120 Myr after it began.
Nothing much happened for the next billion years or so. Then, it was time to address the elephant in the room: entropy.
Naturally, there is no easy way out to the decreasing stocks of negentropy. Many have tried to solve the problem, but it seems like there’s nothing that can be done with it. It’s possible to solve this problem in theory, because causality violations open a host of strange things, chief among them being a limitless source of energy, which would be very useful in negating entropy by means of an endless source of useful energy that may come out of nowhere.
Then, something interesting happened.
One day, all over the empire, strange machines show up. It resembles an old computer, with a big block of buttons and a simple flipboard display for output. On it was written, in plain E.-Pasaru, plain for all to see:
Greetings.
We are a group who you may be familiar with, but we will only say for sure who we are when you are ready. We gift your kind this machine to alter and tweak the world as you see fit, unshackled by some – but not all – laws of physics. In particular, this machine will allow you to perform acts that violate causality. We believe you have wanted this for a long time.
We will talk to you again if you can find us. It would be a long while before that will happen.
Also, Ondarȝ will live.
– We-who-live-beyond
There are a number of reasons to believe that this message is directed at the empire:
And with that most problems have been solved more or less indefinitely, including any remaining poverty issues, illness issues, death issues, and of course the impending lack of free energy. The terminals simply conjure them up, and they seem to be immune to most destruction, as indicated by further investigation and its own documentation. And finally, the speed of light was finally broken – throwing enough energy at the problem seems to allow multiple incompatible laws of physics to happen at the same time in different scales.
But with that crisis solved, what would they do? Explore the world, of course. And by world, we mean universe.
With the formerly inevitable death of the universe out of the way, millions of years melt by like butter in the centre of the Sun; with the universal speed limit all but abolished, millions of parsecs vanish like rabbits in the hat of a magician. Over the next few billion years the empire had nothing to do but to become bigger and bigger. But the ultimate question is: can you escape the universe?
The answer is no:
you cannot leave the universe, because you cannot leave existence.
Which is fine, but clearly the we-who-live-beyond live somewhere special,
unreachable by mere spatial travel, no matter what speed
, says the FAQ.
Instead, they suggested
a new direction in life
.
Well, with that kind of clue, who needs a walkthrough?
By now mastery of the terminals has gotten to the point where you can point a specially-constructed stick somewhere and control it remotely, so obviously the people who can do it are called magicians. They, along with the best engineers and such like, attempted to device a new way to move in a literal new direction: one perpendicular to all three spatial dimensions. After a (humanly) long time, they succeeded, and now they can freely navigate beyond to other “universes”, for lack of a better word than “another causal patch in regular rules physics that may or may not have different laws altogether but remain conserved in some other respects”.
After a briefly nasty surprise that at least some of their universes were in fact manifested back home as works of fiction and that they are in fact at least partly in control of the ones that they find, the details of which are undoubtedly massively fascinating and dramatic but also entirely superfluous, the J.-Pasaru has grown to encompass so many and so much that it sounds like a comical scaling of a small city where all the numbers in the datasheet has a couple dozen zeroes scrawled on one side or the other of it. There isn’t much in the way of change or conflict nowadays; it’s just an endless grind now that death himself has largely been made irrelevant.
Recently the Empire celebrated its home’s fifty billionth birthday while being itself a nice young thirteen billion years old, and in the interim of those thirteen billion years barely five thousand single very well mixed[2] generations have elapsed, meaning that the kilis, as a species, has kept its shape more or less the same for far longer than any reasonable estimate. As virtualisation becomes more and more of a thing the population soared to beyond all reason, and this is further compounded by all the old people who are not dying. Overall, much like the universe itself, the J.-Pasaru has managed to engineer itself into a steady state, that is, if it plays its cards right, both it and the universes it lives in will stay that way forever.
However, even though several billion years have passed since the beginning of this eternity, several mysteries still remain, and many paths yet to be explored. For instance, though they have a good idea where they-who-live-beyond are, getting to there seems to be very hard for some reason, much harder than merely switching between universes. And the exact properties of the transformation of the universe, how time travel and acausality ties into what seems to be the only flaw in the theory of a computable and predictable universe, and why random fictional settings manifest in alternate realities are still very much active regions of investigation. But for the most part, the empire is relatively optimistic that these problems can be solved.
After all, they have but an eternity to mull on them.
Ondarʒ is one of many television shows at the time. While it is intensely popular while it lasted, It is otherwise wholly unremarkable. ↩
The difference in the speed of life of the emergency response teams versus everyone else was carefully micromanaged so that speciation does not occur between the fast lives and the slow ones. How this was done is not of interest to this article. ↩