Toshiko

[History, War, Personalities]

(Shin Edo, Shogunate. ~3250, † 3297 -Deceased-)

Toshiko was a passionate warrior endowed with great skills as pilot and programmer.
She was a former member of The Brotherhood who had a troublesome tendency to attack other members. To Toshiko’s way of thinking, "she was just checking her clan-mates’ strength against her own. So what if they were surprise attacks? It’s not like the enemy would announce their presence and fight fair". Toshiko felt she was doing to the clan a great service, but the leadership disagreed. Attacking fellow Brotherhood members was forbidden, and Toshiko knew it. Placed on probation, she started spending more time at the barracks working on her mech’s operating system.

The Awakening of a Menace

One day, she was checking the firewalls when an unidentified AI breached security and began accessing vital information. Thinking fast, she managed to isolate the AI into a cyber-labyrinth whose only exit was the hard drive of her Mech. Toshiko quickly sealed off the exits and isolated the program once the AI was inside it. 

She spent a month unraveling the AI, learning everything about its core code. The more she had learn, the more fascinated she became with its complexities and versatility. Through wifi she could literally interact with any system, and these interactions were completely untraceable. The AI was totally undetectable if you were not directly accessing the files where its source code was located, and even then you had to be highly trained to spot it moving through the system. 

Could she replicate the AI? If she could build her own version, what would she use it for? She began the process of re-creating the AI. Weeks passed before her masterpiece was ready for field testing. What would be a good test? Her clan mates, of course. She could test both the effectiveness of her new AI and also the preparedness of her clan-mates for such an attack.

So she started simple, fire alarms, sudden raid alarms, malfunctions around the barracks. For the most part her clan performed with precision and she was quite pleased at herself for keeping them in tip-top shape and ever-vigilant.

The Incident

She was just trying to help the clan, but then there was the war. Her Mech malfunctioned catastrophically as she entered a Gateway and she was stranded on the far side of the Shogunate with no way to get back; she missed the war entirely. The leaders were livid--a few errant attacks on clan members was one thing, but leaving her brothers to fight a war without her help was quite another. Failing to fight alongside one’s brothers was considered the highest form of treason, and Toshiko was summarily dismissed from her service to The Brotherhood. 

Toshiko plead her case, feeling that she was let go unjustifiably, but her objections fell on deaf ears. So, clanless and disillusioned, she took a job as a security consultant for Alpha Corporation. Things were dull there and her employers didn't appreciate her irritating habit of testing their security all the time. 

The Challenge

Out of boredom, she toyed with her AI, seeing what systems she could access and manipulate. But everything was too easy, and she needed a challenge.

Why not something the original AI was good at infiltrating? Mechs! Yes, that would be how she would test the AI's real potential. And while she was at it, she could get revenge on those who had spurned her talents.

If a mech had a human pilot jacked in, their neuro-circuit interface would always override the AI. But empty Mechs could be marched around like toy soldiers.

The initial tests proved successful, controlling targeting systems, shutting down Mechs, remote controlling them to wherever she wanted like toys. As long as the Mechs did not have a pilot in place to override the AI, she could take control of almost any Mech connected to a network. This was so much fun! With her AI she could commandeer and control a whole army of empty Mechs, making them do whatever she wanted. So, what did she want? 

Power. She could be Empress of the Shogunate. All she had to do was take control over the entire empire with their own Mechs. There was no one who could stop her.

Battle of the Bunraku Marionettes (3297)

The 3297, after capturing an immense army of hacked and remotely controlled Mechs along the numerous garrisons of the Shogunate Imperial Guard, Toshiko reached the out yards of the imperial capital, Shin Edo (Xanadu), ready to take the Imperial Throne by force of the same Mechs built by Alpha Corp to defend it.

But there, a last defense barrier was waiting for her, most of the mercenary clans attended the call of the Shogun-Emperor to oppose the rising tide of the Toshiko's army. The battle was not exactly easy to the remaining Shogunate forces, combined with the mercenary clans whose Mechs had not been remotely controlled or shouted down.

The combined force of the Shogunate and the Mercenary Clans could have been defeated by the impressive army that Toshiko managed to raise with the support of his AI, but a series of accumulated and subtly malfunctions gave progressively the edge of the battle to the allied forces against Toshiko. She became overwhelmed by the mercenary clans until a sudden critical impact on the main reactor of her personal Mech resulted in the immediate destruction of both, the Mech and the dangerous pilot.

After the fall of Toshiko and the apparent destruction of the main hardware housing her AI, the threat of her hacked army collapsed like a legion of beheaded and wireless puppets.
Related entries


Mechanomicon

League of Ages

[History, War]

To carry out the Droch'ah's plans of domination over the entire galaxy and to subject humanity under his control and restore an era of Forerunner domination, Droch'ah employed an artifact known as the Chroniode to travel through time, using the Gateways, and "persuade" to some of the brightest generals and military leaders of Old Terra's past, perhaps offering them immortality and a new life of conquest on larger battlefields than their minds could imagine. "You will conquer the Stars".

A few analysts have hypothesized that these legendary heroes are but clones of the originals, whose DNA was acquired by Drochah during his time travels.

The Legendary Generals of the League of Ages

All the generals of the League of Ages are sworn in to Drochah and most likely tied to the Forerunner by telepathic links of control, although it is not unreasonable to imagine that in their nature as conquerors, these personalities would have a strong inclination to assume their role as leaders of an army created to subdue the whole humanity.

 Regardless of whether the generals of the League of Ages are the originals or clones thereof (which would make much more sense and preserve the synchronicity of the history of mankind, than of breaking it could have unpredictable consequences, not necessarily positive for The Forerunner's plans), it is quite possible that Droch'ah used his psychic and genetic resources, as well as intensive training to condition them and become both true elite pilots and mech-warfare strategists. Which is possible if we consider that Droch'ah possesses vast knowledge and artifacts of his Forerunner heritage with which humanity can only dream.

Some of the most notorious generals in the League of Ages are:

Xerxes the Great ("Governor of Heroes") (486-"466" BC), fifth King of the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid dynasty whose kingdom comprised from India to Ethiopia.

Genghis Khan (1162-"1227"). Mongolian warrior and conqueror who united the nomadic tribes of North-West Asia, founding the first Mongol empire, the largest in Old Earth history, comprising lands between Eastern Europe and the Pacific, and Siberia to the north, to Mesopotamia, India and Indochina to the South.
Otto von Bismarck (1815-"1898"), the "Iron Chancellor", statesman, politician and military who forged German unification and a system of alliances that ensured the supremacy of the German empire for four decades. He designed the Anubis BFM class, with the association of Dr. Drake.

Arnold Bennington (? -3215?). In the past was a skilled mercenary Mech-pilot, Bennington joined the army of Droch'ah and rose quickly because of his unconditional devotion to the Forerunner and partly to his great capabilities as both: pilot and commander. For this reason, Droch'ah honoured him by making Bennington his "mryehgl thrall" and herald.

In 3214, Bennington and Genghis Khan raised an overwhelming attack on the Great Powers, who resisted the massive assault once again with the relentless support of the Mercenary Clans. General Bennington was last seen during the Battle of Yomi.

 Although some historians have pointed out the existence of a medium-prestige British ornithologist who lived in Old Terra during the twentieth century, it has not been clarified what might have been the Forerunner's interest in making an ornithologist his herald, so the name coincidence could be totally accidental.

League of Age's Troops

The foot soldier-pilots of the League of the Ages are typically composed of clones belonging to the former hosts of their respective generals, cloned by DNA samples collected by Droch'ah on his travels and by improved cloning techniques thanks to his association with the Doctor Drake Novum.
The League of Ages also has volunteers and renegades coming from the pirate or the mercenary clans or from the Great Powers, who have joined the ranks of the League, seduced by the Droch'ah's promises of greatness or more specifically because of their threats.

 The mech most frequently employed by the League of Ages' troops as well as by the generals are the saurian classes (as Regis, Aspis, Ignis) whose models probably have their origin in Droch'ah's travels to the most remote past, in his unsuccessful attempts to attain a temporary quota in which his brothers, the Forerunners were alive (the extinction of the Forerunner race took place about a hundred thousand years before the 1 AC).

Campaigns of the League of the Ages

Each of the main generals have played some of the numerous offensives of the League of Ages, threatening not only the existence of the Great Powers, but of humanity itself.
  • 3287 to 3292. First attempts of Droch'ah's forces to take over the galaxy. 
  • 3293. First Xerxes appearance.
  • 3294. Otto von Bismarck and the Fourth Reich.
  • 3302. Second Xerxes attempt.
  • 3303. Second Bismarck invasion. 
  • 3307. Third Xerxes invasion. Besieges Clarke Federation. Xerxes falls in battle.
  • 3313. Genghis Khan appearance. He builds a new army for the League of Ages in the tunnels of Yomi.
  • 3314. Arnold Bennington and Genghis Khan use Rizpah as a staging area for the League of Ages.
  • 3315. Last battle of Yomi. Droch'ah is defeated and the Chroniode destroyed.
Although none of the campaigns of the League of Ages have triumphed, their toil on the mercenary clans and the Great Powers is undeniable, and were it not for the apparent final defeat of Droc'ha in 3315, it is not known that he could have to succeed.

Following the defeat of Droch'ah and the destruction of the Chroniode in 3315, the surviving generals dispersed, saving a fraction of the League of Ages. Although they are small contingents, compared to the tide of Mech-Troops that came to gather Droch'ah, they are a possible future threat.

The undergrounds of Yomi continued to keep the remains of the League of Ages who failed to escape or who did not succumb to the final battle of Yomi, and several elite pilots of the mercenary clans continue to perform eradication and location missions to find some of the Chroniode's shards.
Related entries


 (By GJ - 685605)

Artificial Intelligence

[Technology]

 An artificial intelligence (AI) is an artificially created autonomous entity, able to perceive its environment and process the received information with cognitive patterns leading to rational actions, following pre-made instructions towards a desired goal or creating new instructions and goals to adapt to new environments.

AM, a 5th Generation AI
The First Generation of AIs were limited to processing received data through peripheral sensors, and return mathematical answers and conclusions.

Later Generations progressively developed more complex artificial brains, allowing the learning function to move towards the point in which they awakened their self-awareness. These Strong AIs have also been called Sentient AIs.

With the creation of Strong AIs, human intelligence began to be improved, and drastically surpassed the creation of the first Super AIs.

With the development of their gained self-awareness, came the need to generate an indelible code to keep AIs under human control. However, the use of AIs in Mechs for warfare purposes forced Mech engineers to design superior capabilities, allowing the AIs to grant the priority to protect the owner against human opponents, rather than try to protect both of them, thus creating killer AIs.

The 5th Generation AIs were created by accident, as forbidden experiments, or gained the last step in their evolution by themselves, acquiring freewill and breaking any hard-code that was opposed to their goals or self-conservative routines or thoughts.


The Five Generations of the Artificial Intelligence

1st Generation: Programmed Intel (limited operative ranks)

2nd Generation: Reactive Intelligence (wider operative ranks)

3rd Generation: Cognitive Intelligence (learning and evolved skills)

4th Generation: Sentience and Self-Awareness (birth of no simulated artificial personalities)

5th Generation: Survival functions (or “instincts”) and Freewill.



The AI Cognitive Features are:

Narrow or Weak AIs
  • Data process
  • Rationality (Establish relations with the outer environments)
  • Reaction (offer rational answers and actions)
  • Auto correction (an instant process to do the right action after an error)

Wide or Strong AIs

  • Sentience  and Self-Awareness (the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively, acquiring  consciousness, the apparition of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
  • Learning (a superior process in which the AI learns from its mistakes or from new data)

Super AIs

  • Freewill
  • Survival instinct (the AI has learned the value of its own existence and will defend it)

AI’s applications

  • Superior analysis
  • Trading, medical and military functions
  • High computation
  • Spaceship navigation
  • Manufacturing complex process
  • Network maintenance
  • Mech warfare artificial brains for extended Mech capabilities

AI’s Dangers


 Some forbidden experiments with Sentient AIs acquiring self-awareness have gone out of control, creating a real threat for nearby populations.  The scientific and research colony of Novum Dolorum has been reported to have suffered frequent cases.


 The ability to gain self-awareness and freewill have been credited to AM, a Sentient AI found and slaved by the Legendary rogue pilot Toshiko. AM went to become a galactic threat that tried to dominate the known Galaxy and forced the Mercenary Clans to intervene and fight the army that AM created.

Related entries:

(By GJ - 685605)

Gateway: History and Introduction

[Forerunner Technology]

Index
  1. Gateway: History and Introduction
  2. Gateway: Morphological Description
  3. Gateway: Function Description
  4. Gateway: Network Extent
1. History and Introduction
A gateway is a transportation device that allows travel instantaneously between two different waypoints using a wormhole anchored to the physical structure.

Rather than simply teleporting, the gateways work by bending the dimensions to approach two different points in the space time continuum.

The ancient and longtime gone Forerunners’ civilization has legate us formidable technologies and knowledge in which our scientists and engineers are still trying to decrypt the higher part.

 Among all the devices and advances we managed to learn to use, there are the Gateways.

Around 100,000 years BC, during the Forerunner Golden Age, they built a net of dimensional portals, the gateways, which connected thousands of distant locations through the galaxy.

These gateways were developed with Niode technology and allowed the Forerunner to travel across extremely far distances connecting their colonies without the need to keep using their hyper speed starships into slower travels.

After the disappearance of the Forerunner civilization, the use of their Technology fell into oblivion and several millennia had to pass before it was rediscovered.

The 30th January of the year 2287, the Dr. Falcon Lisi unlocked the secrets of the Niodes and their links with the gateways, making the first successful gate jump after that long time.


TECHNOLOGIC DESCRIPTION

Physical characteristics
The gateway devices are built in an unknown alloy Niode imbibed from lost Forerunner technology that makes them virtually indestructible. Gateways are built with the shape of a trapezoidal or tetrahedral pyramid structure above a massive triangle platform of twelve meters across that works as transport hall. Often but not always disposed in clusters separated by hundred to thousand yards one from each other.

The physical structure can open and anchor a stable wormhole door that appears as a glowing fluctuating veil of blurred azure appearance.

A gateway cannot be moved nor destroyed, as they happen to be anchored to the space-time energy equilibrium of the planet in which was built. In theory, the only way to disable a gateway could require the destruction of the entire planet.

Functional description



The gateways have two possible and known uses.

Universally known to work as space travelling doors allowing instant displacement between distant points in the galaxy, by opening a wormhole that bends the space to approach the departing gateway A to the destination gateway B.



Recently it has been found that gateways can be used to bend not only space but also time, allowing travel to the past and future. Unfortunately, to activate this function it is necessary to possess a unique artefact called "Chroniode".


Niode Matrix

To make the gateway working in its space travelling function, a key/token called Niode Matrix with the ‘signature’ of the destination is needed. The weight and mass of the subject to be moved into the space determinates the amount of Niodes that must be imbibed into the Niode Matrix.

Attuning a Niode Matrix to a Gateway to acquire the signature and allow to travel to that specific gateway, requires that the matrix enters the tetrahedral space inside the gateway pyramidal structure.

After a gateway travel, a Niode Matrix exhausts, requiring a recuperation time of several hours to be allowed to activate the same gateway travel, although other gateways can immediately be used by the same matrix.

Chroniode.
To attune a gateway for temporal travel it is guessed that the Chroniode works in a similar way, but with superior or modified technology that allows the bend of space and time.

The only known Chroniode, was found in an ancient Forerunner vault, when the Chroniode was sent to a scientist cluster for its study it was stolen by bandits and finally delivered to the Drochah agents.

The Chroniode capabilities could explain how Drochah created his League of Ages, acquiring the genetic DNA code from many of the most extraordinary warriors and strategists of all times to create a clone army.

The recent destruction of the Droch'ah Chroniode could explain the apparition of the small gates disturbance phenomena.

Anti-Paradox safety system.

The gateway technology happens to avoid any chance of collusion or overlap of energy and matter, raising a force energy field pushing away of the travel platform anything standing there in the previous instant of an arrival.

This same force field seems to be the responsible for the protection of the Gateway if anyone tries to destroy it. Where this energy that protects the Gateway emanates from is unknown. It is not yet determined whether it is simply a shield that raises or whether there is an AI attached to the Gateway itself.

An example of gateway's invulnerability to physical damage was witnessed when the Hegemony attempted to destroy a gateway with the use of a thermo-nuclear tactical weapon. All that the Nuke managed to do was temporarily deactivate the Gateway. After some weeks, the Gateway simply returned to its normal function.


Location of Gateways
Different sensors have been developed that allow to detect near gateways within a range of a few hundred yards, depending how finely calibrated the sensor was, but when placed at a higher distance, there is no device or technology allowing the detection.

While a good proportion of gates have been discovered and used by the mankind profit, it is known there may be a large amount of remnant undiscovered gateways. Each standard year, there are reports of new found gateways all across the galaxy. 


GATEWAY NET
The configuration of the gateway net surely was at first stance configured by the Forerunner with some logic and useful structure, but nowadays seems as a kind of headache labyrinth.
A planet can gather one or several gateways, linked with other planets or even with other gates in the same planet.

The direction of travel can be reciprocal, but also it is frequent that a gateway A offers the chance to travel into a gateway B that won’t allow a direct return to the original destination A, forcing to use more intermediate gateways to return to the starting waypoint.

The existence of these gateways configures the real geographical map and the structure in the intergalactic polities.
GATEWAY DISTURBANCE
After the destruction of the Chroniode, a new phenomenon struck the galaxy with the apparition of thousands of smaller gates that happened to link our galaxy with another distorted twin galaxy from a parallel universe.

These new and unstable gates happen to instantly appear in a blink at random locations during a short window after which they happen to vanish from existence.

These phenomena have been used by Unification to pursue and purge the Xeon menace that they believe persist into our own galaxy, controlling the unstable gates with their own Chroniode shards.

 Related entries:

  
(By GJ / 685605)


Gateway: Morphological Description

[Forerunner Technology]

Index
  1. Gateway: History and Introduction
  2. Gateway: Morphological Description
  3. Gateway: Function Description
  4. Gateway: Network Extent

2. Morphological Descriptions

Description and Dimensions

The exposed surface of each Gateway is an equilateral triangle exactly 12 meters along each side and approximately 10.392 meters from each point to the center of the opposite side, with a near perfectly smooth surface. These devices sink an unknown number of kilometres into the surface of the stellar body they are on. It has never been possible to confirm their exact length as they seem to have defense mechanisms that have stopped all mining expeditions to discover exactly how long they are. They are assumed to be less than 473 Kilometers long (the radius of Ceres) since they don't appear to pass the gravitational center point of the objects they are found on and they have never been found on anything smaller than Ceres. All functioning Gateways have been discovered embedded into bedrock in geologically stable regions on the stellar bodies they are found on. They have been found not just on the surface, sometimes covered in a layer of dirt and plant life until activated, but also inside underground tunnel complexes, and on ocean floors.

Nature and Resistance

The material they are made from is nonferrous and completely unknown as no samples have been found that weren't part of a gateway for the purposes of study. All attempts to open or damage the Gateways have failed, including the use of nuclear devices and plasma cutters. However, nuclear weapons, and theoretically very strong electromagnetic pulses, can disrupt the function of a gateway for a short period of time: about a week. One experiment using a directed meteor strike against a gateway on a dwarf planet resulted in the dwarf planet shifting its stellar orbit and the gateway on it stopped working. The current theory is they are gravitationally locked in a space-time deformation to the stellar body´s core creating the geologically stable region around themselves and making them impossible to remove without destroying the stellar body they are installed on.
Vector Conditional Factors

Location Factors

Everything in the galaxy is moving on multiple axes and vectors. Almost all of this is very predictable and could be plotted and tracked with complex enough computers. A Gateway needs to know its exact coordinates in space-time as well as the target Gateway's exact coordinates in space-time to be able to open the wormholes that connect them. A Gateway knows; its location on a stellar body; it knows that body spins along its own axis; that stellar bodies orbit around their star/s (or around a larger stellar body and that stellar body orbits around its star/s); that stars orbit around the galactic core; and the movement of the Milky Way galaxy through the universe. It also knows the same information for any Gateway it is connected to and can calculate a Gateway's locus for any point in space time since the creation of the gateway in question. However, there are a couple of variables that cannot be accounted for and once those variables effect the location of a Gateway it can no longer be travelled to or from.

Tectonic Factors

Movement of tectonic plates is one of them, which is why humans had to travel to other worlds within the Sol system before they found a Gateway. Old Terra is very tectonically active and although a plate's average movement can be calculated, its current movement at a variable point in time is much harder. For example, it could be almost 0 until a major earth quake occurs accompanied by very sudden movement. The average movement could be accounted for but is not exact enough for the creation of a stable wormhole. The Forerunners found a way to lock the location of a gateway in relationship to a stellar body’s core once they had the ability to travel beyond the Sol System. Any gateways on Old Terra though, have been buried and disconnected from the network by millions of years of geology.

Stellar Factors

Rogue stellar bodies, also known as meteors or other things more exotic is another significant variable. When they hit a stellar body, and sometimes just when they get too close to it, they can affect and change some of the constants the gateways rely upon. The stellar body's rotation, or even its axis of spin, and/or orbit around its star(s) could be effected. Not to mention geological stability could suddenly become massively disrupted , although even a minor disruption could throw off a Gateway's connection to the network.

Stellar perturbations are another factor. Stars age and eventually die, the exact timing of such is impossible for us to calculate and the same appears to have been true for the Forerunners. As a star changes in size with age so do a lot of other things that affect a stellar body's orbit; such as the star's mass/gravitational field, solar winds, and physical diameter. Once a star changes enough to affect a stellar body's orbit around it, or just plain swallows that stellar body, the Gateway becomes disconnected from the network. Also if a star goes nova, super nova or collapses into a neutron star or black hole it can affect other star systems around it and change their relationship to the galactic core due to its change of nature and gravitational forces.


(By Sean Wadey - 356597)



Gateway: Function Description

[Forerunner Technology]

Index
  1. Gateway: History and Introduction
  2. Gateway: Morphological Description
  3. Gateway: Function Description
  4. Gateway: Network Extent

3. Function Description


All functioning Gateways emit low levels of electromagnetic radiation in standby mode, but this is only detectable within several hundred meters. Currently there is no way to pin point the location of a gateway at ranges greater than that. Theoretically, when in operation for the fraction of a second where a force field is generated and a wormhole is open between two Gateways, a gravimetric pulse or anomaly should be detectable but no one has successfully monitored a transit this way, yet. 

The Niode Matrix 

The function of the Gateways is closely tied to the operation and data storage capabilities of networked niodes, or niode matrices. Standard niodes keep a space-time location address record of every Gateway they have been in a tetrahedral event zone of. Once the basics of the Forerunner operational system code were discovered, the niodes and Gateways could be communicated with electromagnetically. By selecting an address from a niode's records to another Gateway that the Gateway the niode's matrix or network is in contact with it allows the creation of a wormhole that will instantaneously transport everything within the tetrahedral event zone to the target Gateway. Once an address is used it is, for some unknown reason, unavailable for a period of several hours preventing any niode matrices from using the gateway they have just arrived on for that time period. This may have been considered a safety feature by the Forerunners.

There must be a niode matrix with enough niodes for the gateway to activate; the more mass in the transport envelope, the more niodes the matrix must include. This mass includes the atmosphere, be it gas or liquid within the gateway envelope as well. Though the niodes used in mecha will work for this, most transport is done using shipping containers with a matrix embedded in them. An additional Forerunner safety feature is that a force field pushes everything out of a receiving gate a moment before anything comes through. However, this means when traveling from a gateway in the vacuum of a dwarf planet and going to a gateway on the ocean floor of an earth-like world, whatever is being transported should be designed to withstand what happens when the ocean that has just been pushed out of the transport envelope comes crashing back into the void on the gateway, and vice versa when you transport any atmosphere or liquid to a gateway in the vacuum of space as it either instantly boils or freezes.

The Gateway Transporting Envelope

The tetrahedral event zone is a tetrahedron transport envelope where each edge measures exactly 12 meters where the bottom side of the tetrahedron is the Gateway itself. The tetrahedral envelope is approximately 9.797 meters tall, has a volume of approximately 203.647 cubic meters and can contain a sphere with a radius of 2.449 meters. Not until the beginning of the 34th century was it made public knowledge that a larger transport envelope could be created with the right access code creating an icosahedron transport envelope, again with each edge measuring exactly 12 meters and the bottom side being the Gateway itself. The icosahedral envelope is approximately 18.138 meters tall, has a volume of approximately 3769.969 cubic meters and can contain a sphere with a radius of 9.069 meters.



(By Sean Wadey - 356597)

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