Monday 4 September 2017

A Report on the Titan Diamonds

The Titans lying beneath Wir-Heal are quasi-living multidimensional hyper-intelligences from an unimaginably distant future.

Their 'minds' are actually curled up inside specifically-created low-entropy folded dimensions; almost impossible to destroy.

They do, however, require material hyper-technology to interface with 'real space' and operate the Titans systems and bodies, to 'wake up'. Without that technology they are simply isolated minds living at light speed in realities constructed entirely from their own thoughts (and the influence of whatever theoretical beings might be able to penetrate or effect such a space).

So the 'machinery' in a Titans 'brain' is actually a form of highly sophisticated receiver combined with complex and semi-intelligent cybernetic processes that allow control of the Titans physical forms.

Sending the Titans 'to sleep' meant disabling, or altering the function of this machinery. That could only be done by inflicting massive stress on its elaborate ego-defence systems. The nature of this stress needed to be both physical and ontological, attacking the Titans embodied structure and its 'will to resist', its capacity and desire to fulfil what it thinks its programming intends. This extended and chaotic process is referred to as the Titanomachy.

But this machinery has elements of nanotech, with their own, low-level semi-autonomous repair systems. Even in an extremely low-energy environment, these systems will try to re-build and fulfil their design.

The effects of this regeneration will mean three things;

Firstly; an increased, but chaotic and uncontrollable, interaction between the folded spaces where the Titans 'mind' is stored, and this reality, leading to partial and fragmentary 'fold-overs' of the two dimensions.

Secondly; increased activity of the Titans self-repair, self-defence or primary-function systems. Many of these functions themselves involve partial time/space folding and micro-reality collapses, either for the purpose of energy generation, importing active agents from secure dimensional mothballing, or as tactical elements pursuing the Titans functions and aims.

Thirdly; massive and irregular chronal backwash related from the Titans forcible insertion into this time and reality. Since they are hugely and irreversibly 'out of time' and, possibly, also out of space, the fracture damage of their original incursion remains and, like scar tissue being twisted and teased by the shifting of shrapnel under the skin, any increased Titan activity will produce multidimensional spiderweb distortions in the immediate environment.
  

Preventing This


The last-stage, low-tech backup elements of the Titans ego machines make a great deal of use of a pure carbon lattice and of gold. To the human eye, these would seem to be fractally complex diamonds containing elaborate helices’ of pure gold.

Because of the heavy elements involved in their creation, even the nanotech of the Titans repair systems cannot rebuild them quickly, especially in a low-energy, high-entropy environment. It takes several centuries, or even millennia, for a meaningful stage of Ego-Machine to be developed.

It would be enormously helpful and useful if, at this point, some random humanoid barged into the titans reality-adjacent control interface space and vandalised it in the crudest possible way; literally ripping the backup ego machines out of the control cluster before carting them off and exchanging them for goods and services.

In human terms; somebody beat the shit out of these giant robots, now they are in a coma, but they are trying to wake up.

If you can get in their brain and rip out their thoughts you can stop this happening.

Their thoughts are also money.


The Gems Themselves


The Nanotech inside a Titans Ego-Machine stays active, but with nothing to connect to, its self-repair drives are meaningless. The result of this is that individuals who commonly wear Titan-Diamonds close to their skin often find that a delicate and hyper-complex web-work or tracery of gold infiltrates their epidermis like a gold tattoo.

The gold is pure and non-reactive and this web-work is simply the equivalent of an auto-repair system infiltrating an alien environment, so the effects are harmless, 99.9999999% of the time.


In very rare instances some individuals wearing Titan Diamonds for long periods, and perhaps having some pre-existing capacity, may experience marginal and drifting interface with the Titans extra-dimensional intelligence, although a single diamond, and a single individual, could never provide enough processing power enough for a Titan to incarnate more than the smallest fraction of its self-awareness, even if it wished to.

7 comments:

  1. "The gold is pure and non-reactive and this web-work is simply the equivalent of an auto-repair system infiltrating an alien environment, so the effects are harmless, 99.9999999% of the time."

    Gotcha, so that's harmless unless the PCs get to it.

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  2. I'm really loving this series. If you've already answered these questions I apologize: How many titan-diamonds do you see existing out in the open (i.e. not in the body of a buried titan) at any given time? What is their approximate value in the nearest markets? Obviously the titans are immensely powerful even on a purely intelligence-based level without a physical form in our reality: how were they put to sleep in the first place? By another hyper-intelligence?

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    1. Last diamond raid was centuries or millennia before the adventure starts so, no idea.

      Also no idea who or what took down the Titans originally. Presumably Gods, its usually them that do it.

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  3. This is eerily close to the adventure I'm writing right now. My titan lies comatose in an impact crater, surrounded by tent towns of scholars and cults, and when you go into their brain (eye sockets easiest) its half architecture and half memory/concept realities simulated by an ancient god with brain damage. The sword that killed it is still stuck through its head, pitted and eroded, keeping it asleep, and it'll fuck you up if you touch it and it'll fuck monsters up if you shove them into it.

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    1. God dammit, I already did the sword thing in mine.

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  4. The temporal and dimensional parts of your writeup are excellent (the whole thing also) and I imagine incurring on Titanspace creates a Primer-like (or Cube 2 Hypercube what with the cannibalism and looting) fracturing of reality and timeline in a way that doesn't make sense to anybody playing. The party makes it out just in time with a handful of diamonds and now two of them are from a reality in which the other three died in room 1, and there's an insane duplicate of the cleric still stuck in titanspace who's going to come fuck up the game later

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