itsbenedict:

kakunya on Chapter 26

I really want to read Light Marathon. Do you have any plans to write it? If not, could you possibly share a summary of the ideas behind it?

Benedict_SC on Chapter 26

I don’t have any plans to write it- it’s mainly window dressing- but I did think a little bit about it so I could keep Arc and Gavin’s nerding-out about it consistent.

The basic idea is that there’s an interstellar civilization that hasn’t quite managed to completely bypass the lightspeed barrier- human settlements are pretty self-contained, since all interstellar communication is asynchronous. To keep everything synced up, there’s these huge AI-run computers- collectively, the Lightspeed Archive or the Perfect Mind- which form a benevolent godlike superorganism that keeps what are supposed to be perfect records of everything it observes. It functions as a sort of oracle, handing out information that it’s confident of with 100% certainty in order to advise local governments on policy and coordinate interstellar travel and communication. (Yes, that’s not realistic- it’s a conceit of the setting that the computers are Just That Good, and I’m sure Archive05, datacrawlers_georg, and the rest of LMOF have had lots of loud arguments about whether this makes sense and whether the author of the series knows anything about computers at all.)

This state of affairs is objected to by a number of groups with different aims, who’ve formed an uneasy marriage of convenience- the Plausibilists, people who seek to corrupt the Perfect Mind’s data and force it to start reasoning in probabilities and guesswork. Some of them think that the PM should be more powerful, and that making it deal with messy reality would empower it, and others think that it should be LESS powerful, and that making it deal with messy reality would disempower it. They’ve got the same short-term goals, but completely different beliefs about what those goals will accomplish, which leads to internal tension and infighting.

The series as a whole is mainly a cyberpunk spy thriller- hackers and smugglers and various ne’er-do-wells trying to alternatively coordinate with and backstab each other across lightyears of distance, while dealing with double agents and plots upon plots. Everyone has to deal with both bizarre, incontrovertible prophecies from the machine, and the uncertainty inherent in being mutually displaced in time from their cohorts.

(And at one point the Plausibilists win out on the fourth and newest colony, somehow corrupting Archive04, and someone named Zack Mainframe decides to blow it up and force people to rebuild it rather than let it propagate its corrupted data to the rest of the Perfect Mind- hence, Riley’s username.)

Note that apart from the part about the no-FTL interstellar civilization, all of this was made up on the fly while writing chapter O/22 as a post-hoc explanation for the username. Not sure whether I want to write out some excerpts and put them in earlier chapters as foreshadowing, or avoid getting too in-depth because it’d be a distracting red herring…

If anyone wants to pick up this setting and write their own thing with it, be my guest- or, since it’s conveniently Worldbuilding Wednesday, send some asks about it?

You know, I didn’t notice at the time, but reading this it occurs to me: doesn’t the analogy make at least as much sense if you use it to argue the opposite way?

What is St. Shelhart’s goal, after all, if not to destroy part of Arc to save the rest? And what is Arc doing, if not allowing their corrupted systems to propagate and take down everything?

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