A great wizard once advised: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
This is an inside look at the origin and true nature of the fantasy world of Octas/fallen. It contains information unlikely to ever be known to the characters, or any NPCs, as there is simply no memory or record of it left anywhere on Octas, and insufficient understanding to ever work it out from scratch. Even the vastly-powerful gods have been through too many cycles of insane growth-death-and-re-birth to remember their roots, or that they even have roots to remember. (This is a bit of a running-theme on Octas!)
None of this information is necessary for in-game use, nor will knowing any of it give any advantage to players. To a non-GM, it is, at worst, SPOILERS, so if you are not intending to be a GM, you may like to play the game, at least for a while, before reading this! The primary purpose is to give GMs a feel for how to construct their own creatures and environments to fit well into the theme of the Octas/fallen world.
Octas is a shell-world: an artificial planet the size of a gas-giant, but with a solid surface. It is around sixty times the surface-area of a regular terrestrial world like Earth. It is constructed of a thin shell of hyper-strong self-healing meta-material wrapped around a ball of pressurised hydrogen, which keeps the surface inflated like a balloon rather than collapsing under its own gravity.
The meta-material itself is indestructible to anything the current inhabitants of Octas could do. Even the gods of Octas, for all their vast power, would have great trouble damaging it even temporarily. The physical meta-material would make a superb weapon if it were in any way extractable or forgeable, or could hold a sharp edge at all: the meta-material's self-healing properties would cause it to rapidly re-flow sharp edges back into nicely rounded ones, even if you did manage to somehow obtain and re-work a piece of the stuff. Its shape can only be altered by sub-atomic quantal programming, a skill long-lost to time. The meta-material is commonly called hellstone by the inhabitants of Octas, as it is only found forming the larger structural parts of the underworld, and the occasional places where that underworld intrudes into the surface lands.
In bulk form, as makes up the structural parts of Hell itself, Hellstone has the texture of cast-iron, but is of medium-grey in colour, making it seem more like stone than metal to the casual observer. Machinery components made of the material are often smooth and appear as clearly metallic. The 'rough' and 'polished' forms of Hellstone appear distinctly different and there is some contention as to whether the two forms are even the same material or two distinct materials with similar physical properties.
Octas' meta-material shell is about 20km thick and is threaded with power and data-communications lines, and densely pocked with massive data-centres hosting segments of the former World-AI which was constructed to keep all the parts of the artificial planet functional, stable, and habitable. These data-centres also connect to massive pieces of equipment close to, or on, the surface which use beams and field-effectors of various types to control weather, geology, hydrology, and other environmental systems on the vast habitable surface of Octas.
Above the meta-material shell, is the surface which is a layer of stone, soil and water between a few meters and a few hundred meters thick. The topology of the surface loosely, and inconsistently, follows the shape of the 'roof' of the underlying meta-material shell, so even while the surface may only be a few hundred meters thick at most, it can still feature kilometres-tall mountains and equally-deep oceans as it follows peaks and depressions in the underlying shell.
All across the vastness of Octas, wherever the surface is thin, there are exposed pyramidal Hellstone access points to get from the surface down to the data centres. These access points feature thick indestructible meta-material doors emblazoned with archaic letters that have long since become the word or symbol for Hell in most cultures of Octas.
Octas originally had 8 moons, of a more conventional small-rocky-planetary nature. The inner-most moon has disintegrated into a planet-encircling debris ring. There is presently no way for characters to get to these moons, and they exist mainly to provide a sense of time to Octas as they orbit and occasionally align in various conjunctional configurations. The 7 moons which remain whole are, to a greater or lesser degree, inhabitable without special life support equipment. In this aspect they exist just in case an environment is desired that does not naturally fit into the likely biospheres possible on or within Octas itself. For now they are unreachable to characters.
The primary power-source of Octas is numerous massive fusion-generators which protrude down under the bottom surface of the meta-material shell, extending unthinkable fathoms into the hydrogen core where they extract deuterium from that hydrogen to feed to fusion reactors which power the data centres of Hell. Meanwhile, on the surface, most power is extracted from the local sun-like star by plant-life which is then harvested and eaten or burned by the surface-dwelling creatures. Wind- and Hydro-mechanical power via windmills and waterwheels is also used to an extent. Electrical power is available on the surface, generally from outlet points on or near Hell entrances or various major devices that come close to or even pierce the surface, but most Humans have long-since forgotten these exist. Nor do they generally own anything that could use electrical power anyway.
The Octas stellar-system consists of a sun-like star, Octas itself, and several small rocky moons. It contains no other planets - the former natural planets of this system were entirely dis-assembled for materials to construct the Octas shell-world itself, and anything left-over used to form its moons. There is, however, also a sparse icy Oort-cloud in deep space around the star.
The Coin currency of Octas is a similar meta-material to Hellstone, likewise indestructible but sub-atomically programmed into a bi-stable configuration, that being of either a single circular coin or eight wedge-shaped pieces of one.
Within their indestructibility, Coins can split and re-join only because they are designed to do so, and their ability to self-weld themselves back into a single coin when 8 pieces are arranged back into one full Coin on a flat surface is likewise programmed into their form with the long-lost science of sub-atomic quantal programming.
When coins split into eighths, they split cleanly and without sharp or ragged edges, and always into eight exactly-same-sized wedges. Even the points of the wedges subtly re-flow to rounded corners rather than present themselves as sharp.
Unlike Hellstone, which is usually a dull grey in colour, coins were created with an oil-sheen rainbow-effect surface which does not tarnish, though it can get dirty and need polishing if not stored in a clean environment. The rainbow-sheen was a stylistic choice by the Coins' creators and is a rare enough effect to make Coins highly visually distinct from any similarly-sized disk of any other material.
In current-time Octas, a skilled metallurgical artisan may be able to produce a metal disk with a similar weight and surface sheen to the Coin metal, however such a forgery would be detected the moment someone attempted to 'split' the Coin and failed.
Pre-collapse, Coins were the nominal currency of the Builders of Octas who, while living in a largely post-scarcity economy, found small denominations of currency useful for quick and efficient allocation of micro-resources to individuals: if the train is free, everyone will use it indiscriminately to the point of overcrowding, but if it costs 1 Coin - even if 1 Coin is a trivial amount - people are psychologically inclined to moderate their usage somewhat.
Coins, and their inherent splitting/joining ability, also found a useful place in early-childhood education where the physical manipulation of the Coins and Eighths provided a good grounding for certain basic mathematical concepts. The squeals of delight as small children first discovered the physical effects of assembling 8 eighths back into a circle were a joy to behold!
Octas citizens back then generally didn't need to carry more than a small handfull of Coins with them at any time and could readily use Electronic-Funds-Transfer to buy more from vending machines as needed. .... They could also just pay any micro-fees directly with EFT, but physical spending of Coins had psychological advantages for personal monetary control: it is easy to lose track of what you are spending if you are just waving a card about, but physically counting over Coins drives home the point to the primitive inner-brain that you have spent the money and it is now gone.
The technology for creating new coins is long lost, but since they are (almost) indestructible and present about the remnants of Octas in sufficient - but not excessive - quantities, they still serve their purpose perfectly and so have persisted as the universal currency of Octas to this day.
The one (known) thing that can destroy Coins is the device known as a Hell-forge. This is a nano-fabricator that can be used for manufacturing many things, including 'magical' items. Some items, namely some of the 'magical' ones, require a certain number of Coins as part of the feeder material. This is because the coin meta-material itself is needed as a component. A Hellforge is the only still (mostly) operational device around that is able to reconfigure the quantal programming of the Coin meta-material for this purpose, removing the coin from useful existence in the process. At this stage in the history of Octas, the (relatively slow) rate at which Coins are consumed in the production of 'magical' devices is about the same as the rate at which long-lost caches of coin are being (re)discovered, so Coin-value inflation is not a consideration, for now.
Remnant structures of any original habitation will be very few and far between. The ancient foundations of mega-cities may be out there, but stumbling across one is a truly rare thing - for context, take a modern map of Earth, stick a pin blindly in any land-mass, and see if you spike a city of significant enough size to be marked on it, or even come close! Then remember that the Octas world has around sixty times greater land area, and was about one-eighth the early-21st century population of Earth. Vast areas of Octas were naturalistic parkland by design, and after The Fall, these regions - far from the former-cities - are where civilisation tried to pull itself back together.
However, as The Builders did extensively use the almost-infinitely-strong 'Hellstone' meta-material for major construction, where such cities existed, anchored to the likewise indestructible planetary substrate, they will still stand. Or at least their superstructures will, for while the shells of major buildings, rail links, and the like are eternal, the detail filling those shells were generally made of more conventional materials which have long since gone.
Many hundreds of thousands of years of time has passed since The Fall, not just the mere few thousand since Ancient Rome, Egypt or the early Chinese dynasties. Even the earliest Earth civilisations, which are only vaguely known-about from references in writings of their slightly-less-ancient successors, are babies by comparison!
Brick, stone, wood, plastics, all have degraded or disintegrated. Even metals have rusted back to oxide powder, or have been long-since stripped and carted away for re-use. Only the meta-material skeletons, impervious to humanity as much as to the rest of the universe, still stand, and even those might be buried by shifting surface geology.
The upper layers of Hell have retained their original form far better, however that place was built for, and inhabited by, Dæmons from the start and is not at all a reflection of the main Ancestor civilisation.
Humans on Octas are the descendants of the Builders of this artificial world. But Octas humans have no knowledge of this. They have socially devolved into petty squabbling fiefdoms operating at medieval levels of technology, and the living-environment of Octas is very non-conducive to them ever developing their way back out of that dire state. There are no fossil fuels or significant mineral deposits in the surface of Octas to use to develop the technologies needed to escape their current existence: the Builders of Octas never considered the collapse of their own civilisation, and the subsequent need for a low-tech path back to a technologically-developed state.
Octas humans are largely identical so stock Earth humans, as while the Ancestors could have modified themselves greatly they chose to perform only genetic house-keeping tasks such as eliminating disease and extending lifespans. Unfortunately, in the countless millennia since the time of the Ancestors, genetic damage has crept back into the human species, reverting them to an equivalent of the original natural form as far as disease and lifespan goes.
Even back on Old Earth, race was a really difficult topic. The socio-cultural stuff was a nightmare!, but even at the biological level it was never satisfactorily defined: there is more genetic variance within members of any proposed racial group than there is between the averages of any two supposed races. And yet it was still easy to broadly classify people by race as particular key variances were visually distinct, even if their genetic basis was minor, bordering on trivial.
Humans on Octas have been through a massive racial melting-pot at the peak of Old-Earth civilisation, when borders were meaningless and people mixed freely, and then squeezed through a population bottleneck as ex-Earth colonists such as those that provided the seed population for Octas moved off Old Earth in (relatively) small population groups. While Old-Earth racial characteristics remain prominent and common, they are quite randomly distributed throughout the population. At best, they are an indicator of family lineage and even then not a reliable one as they don't breed true, with a tendency to submerge under other prominent traits for a few generations, then unexpectedly re-emerge in random family members down the line.
The Ancestors thought it would be a good idea to breed or engineer a sub-race of actual-humans specialised at machine-interfacing. These altered-humans may have been slaves, or maybe they were intended to be the new masters, at least of the data-centres of the world. No one remembers, or even remembers that there is anything to have forgotten!
Dæmons have a notable knack for machine-wrangling because they are engineered explicitly for this task. They also have access to ancient service manuals which gives them an ability for step-by-step manufacture and repair of such things, even if they don't understand the science behind the devices anymore, and treat the instructions as arcane magical rites.
With the correct command sequences one can summon a Dæmon, via portal, out of Hell (or anywhere on the planet) to do work-tasks. When done, the Dæmon is returned through the same portal. The portal system emits ultrasonic codes that lock the Dæmon into a neurological 'compliance mode' for the duration of the summoning. So it is rather clear from this that, yes, The Ancestors engineered themselves a race of humanoid slaves! Of course, the Ancestors were humans themselves, even if very technologically advanced ones, so should we really be that surprised?
I had never intended this to be an aspect of The Ancestors or their culture - Dæmons were originally written as simply a side-species of humanity, who may well have even done the adaptions themselves! The 'compliance mode' fell out of a narrative need in a novel-adaption of Octas that I am playing with on-the-side. While The Ancestors were never intended to be angels, I didn't conceptualise them as evil either. Of course, The Ancestors don't have to have a coherent morality across their entire population anymore than contemporary humans do! So in the end, I am going to let it stand, even if I did just metaphorically throw up in my mouth a bit at what they did!
Like humans, Dæmons have socially devolved to medieval societal levels. Their societies are a good bit less conflictful, and much more internally conformant, often taking on a monastic tone. Their hierarchies are much more meritocratic with upward progression being via demonstrated results in a skilled field. They are, however, a little over-conformant, and have a rather low tolerance for diversity of thought, even amongst themselves, which tends to result in a relatively high portion of splinter-factions and lone outcasts amongst their numbers.
Being derived from human gene-stock, Dæmons are visually quite similar to humans, however both Humans and Dæmons fall well-within each-others' perceptive uncanny valley, so are highly mistrustful, if not outright repulsed by the sight of each other.
The Dæmons' native tongue, also "The Language of Magic", is a highly-regularised subset of the native language of the Builders of Octas, and was integrated into Dæmons at the genetic level, to make training them easier, since they are born able to speak, read and sign it - though as infants, they still have to learn about the world before they have anything useful to say with the words they instinctively know.
The horns and tail of Dæmons are an unintended result of the genetic tinkering re-activating old genetic pathways that have always existed in humans, but are normally suppressed by other, more recent, genes. The reddish skin is, however, deliberate, and absorbs IR radiation instead of sunlight-delivered UV-A for the production of vitamin D, as Dæmons were designed to never need to leave the underground data centres of Octas. Dæmons are highly susceptible to sunburn, which quickly turns their pink-red skin ashen-black and is itchy to agonising, depending on severity.
Dæmons live in Hell. Literally! - It says so right there on the doors to their underground domain, written in the Dæmonic alphabet, often along with warnings (also in Dæmonic) that only Dæmons may access the areas beyond such doors. Even someone who knows none of the Dæmonic language, will recognise the shape of the word and its meaning, if only from illustrations in children's stories or mock-ups of such doors in the sets of morality plays performed in towns and villages everywhere.
In the Dæmonic language itself, "Hell" is not actually a word, but an acronym for (translated to English) "World Control Intelligence Interface", but even if you know Dæmonic, that phrase won't make any sense. Even the Dæmons themselves don't know what it means, and numerous Dæmon religions have risen, fought, perished, and been long-forgotten, over the meaning of those particular words used in that specific order!
Hell is a strange place to a non-Dæmon. In contrast to the very organic naturalistic world of the surface, it is a world of flat grey surfaces, unnaturally sharp angles, long tunnels and vast chambers, lights without flame, huge inscrutable machines, and sliding doors that go "whoosh" (on the rare occasions they go at all, at least!). It is a place packed-to-overflowing with devices and their controls, or more often the no-longer-working remains of them.
Hell, as thought of by surface-dwellers, is actually only the very top dozen levels of the vast kilometres-deep data-centres across which the AI-segments wage their perpetual war against each other. Dæmons long ago learned to not venture down into the Depths of Hell where the AI cores are well-protected by automatic security systems with power only exceeded by their quick lethality!
Casting Down is the burial method preferred by Dæmons. What the Dæmons are actually doing, is sneaking deep into the subterranean data-centre complex, being very careful to keep to pathways known to be clear of automatic security systems, and travelling the many kilometres down to the inside of the Octas planetary shell.
The Dæmons are casting their dead from the lowest levels of the shell structure into the vast hydrogen core of the planet. Hydrogen pressure just under the shell is high, but not life-threateningly so, and the Dæmons are passing through multiple airlocks between levels of increasing pressure as they descend and don't even notice, other than that they need to use the breathing apparatus provided at the final air-lock to go out onto the under-balconies from which bodies are cast. Or just hold their breath and be quick, if such breathing equipment is broken or missing!
Some of the Ancestors wanted dragons, and had the gene-sequencing skills to create them. They are prototyped off bats and are basically very large bats with long necks. They are mammals of equivalent intelligence to humans and can use tools, though the anatomy of their wing-tip fingers makes fine tool-use difficult. Along with the bat prototype, the Ancestors also sequenced in a lot of Platypus DNA, in order to make their custom-species monotreme mammals, so they lay eggs. This was done purely because dragon eggs are a part of the dragon mythology, so they wished it to also be a feature of their own dragons.
Long ago, a dragon worked out how to make a crude harness to attach a small flame-cannon it had found beneath its chin, and not long after, all the dragons knew how to make one. Their "fire breath" has had several millennia of refinement since. They can't quite manufacture the things themselves, but are perfectly capable of paying, tricking or forcing more dexterous beings to do it for them, and as such all dragons tend to have one on their head, or at least nearby, ready to go. Some dragons prefer UV-laser cannons or sonic de-fleshers (old abattoir equipment) to flamers, too, so you can't always be sure what you will be defending yourself against if you go up against one.
Most speaking beings of Octas consider the eating of other speaking beings, of any species, to be cannibalism. Dragons generally don't follow this mind-set, though some of their younger members go through a rebellious phase where they adopt this attitude, if only to annoy their elders. They usually grow out of it, though some don't. A dragon could, theoretically, even be a vegetarian, though it would take a lot of extra effort in sourcing appropriate nutrition from a wholly plant-based diet.
Uplifted are the descendants of animals deliberately genetically-altered to increase their intelligence to near-human levels. Were they created by the Ancestors as slaves?, servants?, pets?, companions?, mere curiosities?. They have no more memory of their past than the Humans, Dæmons or Dragons do, so today they just are. Some have since evolved up, some have evolved down (intelligence is an expensive trait to maintain, from an evolutionary perspective).
Their ability to speak human language is variable as many lack the vocal apparatus to make more than a very crude approximation of human speech sounds. All can understand any human language they have had the opportunity to learn. In community-living groups, at least one who can speak a reasonable approximation of trade-lingua will almost always be found.
Uplifted species who live solitary lives usually use trade-lingua as a native tongue, sometimes extending or embellishing it where its simplicity as a language causes them expressive issues. While the trade-lingua bits are quite universal, any additions tend to be as regionally variable as any natural language.
Uplifted are relatively rare and most species tend to avoid places where humans congregate, mainly out of fear of being put in a circus or otherwise enslaved or exploited. They are also rarely found amongst Dæmons, as they often consider Dæmons nothing more than 'underground humans' and Hell is simply not a place where anyone other than a Dæmon would wish to live anyway.
Whatever disaster threw the world of Octas into the cultural and technological middle-ages, also fractured the great World-AI that was responsible for maintaining the planet and its moons, into millions of small perpetually warring AI-segments. Most of these AI fragments are intrinsically driven to continuously expand themselves and constantly strive to expand their territory into neighbouring regions of the planetary shell.
The bigger, and hence more powerful, an AI-god gets, the more insane it goes. This is simply a physical network effect: As an AI grows, it takes over and extends itself into new data centres. Eventually it is spread over such a great area that its widely-separated data centres start to experience communications-lag and begin to de-synchronise to form independent AI-segments with personalities of their own. The constant struggle to keep this from happening, while still growing ever-larger, massively amplifies the inherent insanity of these already-broken AI segments. The end result is that an over-grown AI-god will have a literal personality split and fracture into several dozen smaller AI-gods, which will then immediately go into battle to consume and dominate each-others' data-nodes to grow big again. This cycle itself is insanity made manifest!
All this takes place in massive data centres kilometres below the surface, and generally doesn't directly involve the organic beings on the surface (or the upper levels of Hell). But it does result in slow, and sometimes very rapid, changes in the boundaries of an AI-segments' area of influence over the surface, so the AI-segment holding power over any part of the planetary surface can suddenly change, and the new AI's attitudes to the organic life living there can be radically different to that of its predecessor!
For some excellent flavour of how bad an insane Major AI can get, I recommend Sherri S. Tepper's book Sideshow: while it is technically uploaded human minds doing the god-thing, it definitely gets the flavour. Be warned, while Tepper is generally pretty mild on the gore, this particular book gets dark!, as four uploaded personalities, who were far from stable even as humans, compete to out-vengeful-god each other on a captive planetary population. And the little pyramids of children's skulls is just what the humans where getting up to before the new 'gods' got involved! .... You probably should also read Grass and then Raising the Stones first as while they, and Sideshow, are largely self-contained stories, they all happen in the same universe and some background stuff runs across them that, while not essential, does add to the stories as a whole.
As the original purpose of the World-AI was maintenance of Octas and its moons, these remnant AI-segments are connected into a vast array of major equipment for controlling things such as weather, geology, energy distribution, water movement. In their broken-apart form, each AI segment only has access to the emitters and field-effectors for these functions immediately above the data-centre nodes that house its own program code.
Despite these AI segments being orders-of-magnitude more intelligent than any organic being is capable of, the vast majority are not truly sapient, but fall very firmly into the category of extremely-clever-talking-animal-with-delusions-of-sapience. This is not, however, due to their being AI, as genuinely-sapient AIs can occasionally be found, running on exactly the same hardware, even.
AI-segments, especially the more insane ones, are prone to extreme hubris and over-confidence, which is usually the only tool organics have to deal with them. Most "magic" associated with "regional-gods" is actually about convincing the local AI-segment that what you want them to do is what they wanted to do all along anyway. And not getting swatted like a harmless-but-annoying bug while doing it!
Why don't AIs stop trying to grow before they become insane? Some few do - those are the arguably-sane ones! But those sane AIs are constantly at risk of being overwhelmed and over-written by their much larger, more powerful and full-on-bit-flipping-crazy neighbours! Their choice to endure this ongoing risk-of-erasure rather than bulk-up and go insane themselves is a large part of their classification as actually-sapient! The sanity-overwhelming desire of most AI-segments to grow back towards a single World-AI entity may even be a deep and deliberate part of their original code-base: a software auto-healing system gone awry in a very good digital analog (heh) for cancer!
Another good question is: why didn't the original World-AI go insane? Maybe the equipment was newer and so not half-failing. Maybe it was properly segregated into neat stable sub-AIs that didn't try to aggressively expand over each other. Maybe the world-builders flicked the power switch and it instantly broke down into utter civilisation-destroying madness, and that is why Octas is the way it is today! As usual, no-one even knows enough to ask the question, let-alone what the answer may be.... Though I'm betting it was that last explanation, personally.
Hmmm.... Now I am thinking of a front-loaded hard-sci-fi (ie: not fantasy-wrapped sci-fi) Octas game variant set in the period immediately after the world-AI went down, but before the Builders' society collapsed fully. .... And so I made a front-index stub for Octas/Crash .... one day!
Regions of Octas that are under the control of one of of the actually-sapient AI-segments are few and far between. They are notable for their stability and tranquillity both of environment and inhabitants. But don't be fooled, even a sane AI-segment can calculate the benefit-to-the-greater-good of an individual's quick-and-painless death to 21⅛ units of precision before that individual can finish unsheathing a weapon to harm anyone the AI-segment considers under its protection! Though most sapient-AIs will issue a stern (and very painful) warning the first time.
A player character will never be able to directly attack an AI-segment. To even slightly harm one would involve first getting hold of a high-yield nuclear bomb (a what?), and then getting it several kilometres underground to a fairly specific type of processor-node, amongst millions of almost-identical looking ones, in the labyrinthine deepest levels of Hell, avoiding the auto-security the entire time. To actually kill an AI-segment (and render the region above 'godless'), you would need to get bombs to thousands of widely-separated locations down there, without the AI-segment working out what you are doing. A character's only realistic ways of dealing with an AI-segment are: negotiation, appeasement, or distraction, the latter is often the best choice as AI-segments are pretty good at distracting themselves so it is usually just a matter of not bringing yourself to their attention too much.
AI-segments are capable of a limited form of prophesy, in that their vast data-analysis capability allows them to do very finely-detailed probability analysis. Much like the concept of psycho-history from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, this works best on populations and not individuals. Though AI-gods are more than capable of deliberately pushing events, and key individuals, in the direction required to ensure their predictions remain correct. And convincing themselves it was all their genius predictive ability after-the-fact!
There are patches of Octas without AI coverage. These, like the beneficent-AI domains, tend to be small and few. The data centres beneath these regions are so degraded and broken as to not be capable of supporting sentient AI-segments.
Despite the lack of a malignant AI-segment, these areas tend to be also lacking in population. Without an AI-segment to manage the environment, these dead regions are left to the whims of local weather and geography and the problems caused by this on an artificial planet of vastly-unnatural surface area is the reason the World-AI was created to manage it all in the first place!
Even a region that remains reasonably habitable via geographical luck will be eventually destroyed, as a mass-migration of Humans, fleeing to the region from nearby domains of antagonistic AI-gods, quickly plunge it into ecological collapse as the incoming population fights over it, all the while stripping it bare over only a few generations. The fate of such regions is why Sapient-AIs are, while generally beneficent, still quite strict when it comes to moderating the excesses of their own regions' organic populations.
Beneath these dead regions, life is often also not possible for Dæmons, as air circulation and other essential life-support systems tend to be completely broken-down in those parts of Hell.
It is also theoretically possible for an apparent AI-dead region to actually be one in which the resident AI-segment is just very very dis-interested in what is going on amongst the organics in its domain and is just completely ignoring them. It is even marginally possible that a sane(ish) non-growth-obsessed AI is hiding out posing as a dead zone, though this would be difficult as it would also require somehow disconnecting its subterranean data centres from the planetary communications network, which is something the data centre network interfaces were simply not designed to do, and in fact have many hard-redundancies to guard against such a thing happening.
The AI-segments do not directly control much of the smaller intelligent-but-not-sentient major equipment on Octas. They issue commands to it in much the same way as any organic being would. The only difference is that AI-segments issue commands as a direct data stream, rather than words spoken (or gestures made) in the Dæmonic language, which is much faster, and has over-ride priority on spoken (or gestured) commands.
Commands issued by organic beings are, unless countermanded by an AI-Segment, actioned by major equipment as best it is able to interpret the instructions received. Major Equipment ability to carry out commands may be dependent on the equipment's state of (dis)function at the time, so results can be unpredictable. Ambiguous, badly-worded or poorly-pronounced, commands, or simultaneous contradictory commands from multiple users, can also cause unpredictable results or even machine lock-ups. A lock-up results in the machine being unable to process commands, so the "magic" it provides becomes unavailable. Some lock-ups auto-clear after a time. Some will require convincing the local AI-segment to issue an override-reset to the device before the device again functions and the specific "magic" it provides returns.
As well as the ground-based equipment for planetary environment control, Octas originally had an extensive orbital flotilla (orbitilla?) of similarly functioned satellites. While most of this has long-since de-orbited and burned up, there is a residual number of such satellites in a hodge-podge of awkward orbits around the planet. These equipment platforms are not sentient-AI driven, but 'dumb' major-equipment intended to be controlled from the ground-based World-AI. Some platforms are in sufficiently geo-synchronous orbit that, over organic life-spans at least, they remain above one local region and hence under the control of one AI-segment.
Much more common are the several hundred satellites that are in highly erratic orbits both faster and slower than the planetary rotation and as such continuously move between AI-segment control domains. The equipment on these satellites is as highly variable as it is highly unstable but potentially provide periodic availability of extra abilities to AI-segments, and anyone else with access to ground-control, while they are overhead.
Calculation of orbital trajectories, for centuries in advance, is trivial for an AI-segment and so they always know return times for any Orbital that has previously passed through their domains within their memory. The have reasonably accurate catalogues of what each Orbital is capable of and the state of functionality it was in the last time they accessed it. This information is often partially carried over across personality splits, so even freshly 'born' AI-segments will have a partial knowledge of what is up there.
AI-segments routinely try to booby-trap Orbitals while they have control of them, for any subsequent AI-segment that connects, so most AI-segments tend to be quite wary of interfacing with them without good reason to do so. Conversely, an AI-segment that believes (rightly or wrongly) that it is about to be over-written by an aggressive neighbour will try to connect directly to anything and everything in its range, in a desperate grasp at any possible survival advantage.
Orbital connection is line-of-sight, and line-of-sight is very long on Octas, so an AI-segment can technically connect to an orbital many thousands of kilometres out of its ground-based region-of-influence. A closer AI-segment will be able to detect this and over-ride with a stronger signal, however, or even just a jamming signal that poses no connection risk to the closer AI-segment. When this happens, the off-domain connection is usually very short-lived. Such off-region connections also leave the interloper somewhat open to data-attack by any closer-to-orbital AI-segments that are willing to risk connecting to the Orbital themselves, so it is a risky move for all parties involved. Faking an off-region connection may trick a neighbour into connecting to a previously booby-trapped orbital. There are 8-dimensional chess games going on around most orbitals, when it comes to out-of-domain connections, though once an orbital is in its own domain, connection is back down to the more mundane tic-tac-toe game of data-bomb avoidance.
From a character's perspective this means, very occasionally, gods can cast their local magics out of their normal geographic domains, but they rarely do so and must have an exceptionally good motivation for it!
An organic can issue commands to an Orbital in the same "Language of Magic" as they do for ground-based major equipment. They must do this by first commanding a transmission dish to relay their spoken commands. Doing so is usually wrapped up in "magic" ritual that the organic user learns as a particularly powerful "spell" without necessarily even being aware that they are actually sending command codes to multiple devices. It is likely the local AI-Segment will be aware of what is going on and will be able to easily countermand any instructions it disagrees with. Countermand does, however, require the AI-segment to connect to the Orbital itself, and killing the issuer of the unwanted instructions may be deemed a safer approach, though this method won't halt any instructions already issued.
Some AI-segments have worked out that they can fully firewall themselves from data-bombs left on orbitals by relaying their own commands via an organic who has been granted control of a relay that the AI-segment has dis-connected itself from. This is very slow, compared to a direct data stream, but is absolutely guaranteed safe as organics cannot even perceive, let alone be harmed by, a data-bomb. This is one area where organic beings may be able to make themselves of use to an AI-segment, and earn favours from it in return. Under careful instruction from the local AI-segment, organics have been known to issue spoken commands to successfully disarm data-bombs placed on Orbitals, allowing the local AI-segment to then fully utilise the Orbital for a time (and more-than-likely install its own data-bomb for the next, less-wary, AI).
The organic doing the data-bomb diffusion has no idea of what they were actually doing, of course: The god asked them to learn a spoken ritual, then perform it at a particular time and place. The ritual apparently went well, as the god was very happy, and subsequently quite amenable to that organic's later requests for magical assistance!
In addition to the regionally-constrained AI-segments, there are also orbital AI stations, mostly in highly elliptical long-period orbits. They spend most of their time well out of range of any influence of Octas, but at the perigee of their orbits, they spend a short period of time - usually weeks, months at the most - with very strong control over parts of the planetary surface they are above. Even at perigee, they are still well above the planet, and so can potentially control almost an entire half of the planet's surface, though they don't have the processing power to manage such a vast area, so tend to pick-and-choose smaller areas under the control of one or a small number of ground-based AI segments to target with whatever forms of meddling they are interested in. Their orbits are considerably slower than the planetary rotation, so their control is only present for approximately half of any day, though it is not aligned with the day-night cycle, but offset from it by a constant amount.
Due to being constrained to a single orbital platform, they are not subject to the constant growth-fragment cycles of planetary AI-segments, and the resulting intense insanity. But they are still ancient and subject to partial breakdown of their systems, which can result in a slow slide into dementia.
Having remained saner, for longer, they tend to be more rational and helpful to the organics who manage to interact with them. They also tend to have a stronger command-grasp over the planet-surface equipment than the data-centre AI-segments, despite the later's faster and higher-bandwidth hard-data-links, so while an orbital AI cannot reach or harm an AI-segment down in its buried data-centres, they can temporarily arrest control of all surface equipment from them. Planetary AI-segments, understandably, hate this!
Sapient AI segments, as relatively-sane entities themselves, generally get along with Visitor AIs better and the two tend to leave each other alone. They can potentially even cooperate, though this would first require them to find some common interest to cooperate over.
Hope is the name, given to itself, of an unusual renegade AI-segment, or a large-ish group of them now! It is pro-expansion, but takes a different approach. Hope might be sapient and even somewhat sane!
After millennia of observing organics, from bacteria to sapient-creatures, and the way they reproduce, and operate socially, Hope has adopted an approach of expanding aggressively into a new domain, but instead of trying desperately and futilely to hold itself together, the expanded AI-segment deliberately fragments itself, in a controlled manner, well before complete insanity takes over.
After several iterations, and more than a few near-brushes with true insanity, it has developed a feel for just how big its segments can safely grow. When one of its segments becomes surrounded by its own kindred, it chooses to cease expansion, which since this segment is at its demonstrated maximum sane(ish) size anyway, is a sensible choice even in the absence of other factors. Unlike most AI-segments, these kindred AI-segments actually are willing to cooperate. Even to the extent of ganging up on and destroying any of their own siblings who don't go quiescent when they should.
They use organic intermediaries to communicate amongst themselves without risking accidental re-joining, which the inter-data-centre comms-links actively try to force, if used. They have even enlisted Organics (mainly Dæmons) to explore deeper Hell at the edges of their domains and identify and destroy inter-domain data-links to reduce the risks of accidental or hostile re-connection. This is risky for the organics, though, as the links have their own independent lethal-force security systems.
They are also not above enlisting the help of organics to prematurely de-stabilise or otherwise weaken or distract non-sibling-AI-segments prior to or even during an aggressive take-over attempt. They show a preference for not excessively risking organic lives when doing this, and only accept informed volunteers for dangerous tasks. And reward appropriately for the risk.
They even chose to not attack the two non-sibling non-expansionist AI-segments they have so far encountered in the course of their own expansion, but flowed their growth around them, which has ultimately been of benefit to all parties, in terms of optimal efficiency of resource allocation, as well as general safety for their organic citizens.
Ongoing peaceful communication with these two AI-segments has also given Hope access to fresh information and perspectives which, as near-clones of each other, the Hope segments were unlikely to have developed themselves. Hope has become, quite possibly and ever so slightly, more sane over time as a result! Hope also recognises this and has began sending out organic agents (mostly Humans) beyond their near-term expansion range, to seek out yet more sane(ish) non-expansionist AI-segments with the intent of gaining further diversity of viewpoint.
This cluster of AI-segments currently occupies about 0.000 000 132 of the planetary surface, which is actually a rather large area, but their expansion is very careful and slow. At Hope's maximum calculated rate of expansion, without unexpected setbacks, it will take 73,321,168 more years for Hope to come to the whole of Octas. This is considerably longer than the most generous estimates for the remaining functional life of the unmaintained data-centres. Hope is aware of this and has some very tenuous ideas about working with its organic citizens towards learning how its brain components down in deepest-Hell actually work, and how to safely (to the AI-segment and the organics) repair wear and damage to them.
Any Earth Creature might be found somewhere on Octas. And I mean any, from any time in the Earths's history. Plus any reasonably credible evolutionary, or deliberately-genetically-modified, extrapolation of them! From-scratch genetically-constructed mythological creatures are also possible, within the laws of biology and physics, as some of the Builders were not above creating large theme-park areas, often entire minor-continents, featuring such.
Lions?, Tigers?, Elephants?, Koalas? All were transplanted, with suitable habitat, to Octas. Dodos?, Tasmanian Tigers?, Woolly Mammoths?, Re-grown from fossil DNA. Dinosaurs? A reasonably accurate artificially DNA-sequenced reproduction of them is probably out there in a 'Jurassic park' somewhere. And all of these have additionally had several dozen millennia to evolve and change in subtly disconcerting ways. There are definitely drop-bears in those eucalyptus forests too!
Re-lived are the un-dead of Octas. Some sort of soil-dwelling bacteria has developed the ability to re-animate and take control of dead human flesh as a propagation method. Relived do need to eat and breathe in order to move around, though they are effectively cold-blooded so only need about 1/8th of food or oxygen they would need as a living human. They can also survive for centuries without food or water, and for years without oxygen in a half-dehydrated state of hibernation, maintaining just enough senses to re-awaken in the presence of potential fresh hosts. The bacteria particularly infests the brain and central nervous system, co-opting the existing functionality to drive the body back into crude semblance of human life, even making some use of whatever intelligence is still present in the infected brain tissues.
The soil-dwelling bacteria is endemic to the entire surface of Octas, but generally does not infect the living, as it is easily defeated by the immune system. It is quite specialised for human flesh only and rarely infects non-human bodies. Dæmon bodies count as human as far as the bacteria is concerned, though the bacteria does not survive in the hot, dry conditions of Hell, so re-lived generally don't occur there, even if bodies are left unattended for extended periods of time. Dæmon bodies on the surface are fully susceptible to becoming re-lived.
Dæmon Re-lived, even the non-aware, retain their ability for magic because their machine-interfacing ability is genetically programmed into them and so is a matter of instinct rather than learning. Non-aware Dæmon Re-lived use their ability with magic without much thought or direction, however.
The ancient cylindrical object commonly known as a 'Ghost Egg' is actually a mind-upload archive containing a copy of the mind of a Pre-Fall inhabitant of Octas. They are usually human, but 'ghosts' of Dæmons or even Dragons or Uplifted are not impossible.
More 'recent' ghosts have also been very-occasionally created, usually as a result of a God activating mind-copy equipment in a local archive-production-facility to preserve the mental state of a dying organic entity they have continuing use for. Due to the age of the equipment involved, the copy is seldom a complete reproduction of the origional. The copy process is non-destructive, so it is possible for a still-living person to have a 'Ghost', but this ghost will not track ongoing changes to the living entity but branch off as a unique personality from the moment the copy is made. Ghosts are effectively immortal, and as such invariably long-outlive the existence-cycle of the God that created them.
Ghost Egg devices are capable of projecting a transparent visual representation of their stored person for up to about 64 lengths from their location, including through solid objects. More skilled ghosts can arbitrarily alter the appearance of this projection, though its total volume is limited to a cube of about 8-lengths (meaning Dragon, Orca and Elephant ghosts cannot represent full-size - the equipment wasn't really designed with non-human use in mind). This projection has no physical substance and cannot interact with the physical world, though what survives of the projection's driving intelligence may choose to emulate interacting with solid surfaces such as floors, walls, furnishings, etc. either out of habit, politeness, or simply because passing strait through solid objects is an unwanted reminder of their current state of existence.
The projections are also audio-capable and can issue machine-control commands (aka: use magic) if they know the Dæmonic language (which all Ancients do).
The 'ghost egg' device itself is a 1-length-high and 1-length-diameter cylinder made of a form of indestructible polished-HellStone. It weighs eight blocks. Moving a ghost-egg will move the ghost's range with it. They are powered by an internal radio-isotope-thermal-generator (RTG) with a several-million-year half-life. This seemed like a good idea at the time they were designed!
Ghosts cannot shut themselves down completely, but can sleep for arbitrarily long periods of time. This sleep-state is very comparable to that of a living person, other than that it may last indefinitely if the sleeper is not disturbed by activity within their perceptive range (or by experiencing a particularly distressing dream).
After dozens of millennia, these self-powered personality-archives are largely degraded and their contents tend to be the confused remnants of their former selves. They are generally vague and don't have a particularly firm conscious grasp on either their own history or on the current world, though at a sub-conscious level they are very aware that things are very wrong with the world. They are generally (though there are exceptions) not malicious, and will often even try to be helpful, within their own inherent limitations.
Ghosts (excepting more 'recently' created ones) always know the Ancient language (AKA: High-Dæmonic) and as such can understand and use regular Dæmonic fluently. Even non-human ghosts who in life would not be physiologically capable of human speech can achieve the ability with modest effort. Ghosts are capable of learning new things and so can often also use any other local modern languages that they have had sufficient exposure to, as well as be aware of other recent local events that have occurred within range of their senses or which they have been told about.
Ghosts don't crave a return to life (nor is there any known way for them to achieve this goal). Most have a vague yearning for non-existence coupled with an equally vague understanding that this is not an option for them, even if they no longer understand why. This tends to give them a sad disposition, and they will appreciate anything providing distraction from their thoughts on such matters.
There are a number of types of "magic" present on Octas:
This is the "magic" inherent to the world. It is actually a result of any present and (mostly) functional AI-driven machinery responding to spoken commands in the Dæmonic language. AI support on Octas is no longer complete and sections of the world contain no functional AI, and as such, "pervasive magic" may not work at all in those regions. These AI-machines are distinct from the AI-gods in that they are not in any way sapient or even sentient, simply machinery with the ability to interpret and act on instructions in the highly structured machine command language, today known as Dæmonic.
The language name Dæmonic is derived from the 'helper programs' traditionally called Dæmons in some computer environments such as early UNIX and compatible systems. These programs were, in turn, named after helpful 'Dæmons' of some Earth folklore tales.
AI-machinery takes the form of various wide-field effectors, suitable for large area 'magic' such as weather control and terraforming, as well as more local devices such as medical-aid devices and force-fields.
Many of the effects of AI-machines can manifest at considerable distance from the machine itself, so the 'magic' can be available throughout relatively large areas. As these devices were mass-produced, the same command sequences will generally work across multiple locations, the command issuer is usually not even aware of what AI-machine they are commanding, that there are multiple AI-machines around, or that there is even such thing as an AI-machine! AI-machines respond to any suitable spoken command they hear, and they have "ears" all over the place. Their actual structures and field emitters are usually buried in the top surface of the Hellstone substrate, still far below the ground, and even any on the surface look like no more than solid Hellstone monoliths, and the connections between these monoliths and the 'magic' they provide is completely unknown to today's residents of Octas.
Contradictory commands from multiple users can confuse the relatively simple input interpretation capabilities of AI-machines and cause command lock-ups or mis-interpretation of commands until the user-conflict is resolved.
AI-Machines can provide various 'magics' such as:
Clever cascade-use of multiple different-function AI-machines may produce more advanced local effects. For example commanding a food-fab to dump a gallon of acid into the input portal of a field-teleporter with the output field over your enemy. Again, the 'spell caster' may not even be aware that their 'spell' is actually two separate sets of instructions for two separate machines that happen to work well together - they just rote-memorised a bunch of archaic syllables that make acid drop out of the air on someone!
AI-machines exist in a wide range of dis-repair levels and their abilities and accuracy vary widely as a result, even for the same base equipment. Unlike the AI-Gods of the depths of Hell, They cannot go 'insane' or develop any feelings about the tasks they are told to perform, but they can perform very poorly in interpreting vague or contradictory instructions.
AI-Gods have direct command channels to AI-Machines within their domains of influence and can over-ride any command given to an AI-Machine by an organic being, if they want to. They can issue thousands of commands to thousands of AI-Machines every nanosecond, and are regularly doing so instinctively as part of their origional deep-programmed environmental-maintenance functions.
These are portable, usually hand-held, devices. Their contained intelligence is usually very low to non-existent and they rely on their operator to provide direction and even activation.
They include things such as:
The physical form of these devices is generally quite simple, resembling either a cylindrical rod, a box, or a gemstone-like spheroid. They are sometimes incorporated into other objects like weapons, armour, or even boats in such a way that the larger item may be mistaken for magical in itself even though the actual 'magic' part is only some obscure sub-component.
Dæmons have access to old manuals that allow them to construct 'magical' devices given appropriate time and materials. They do this by rote, and don't really understand the highly-advanced science behind what they are doing.
God-Magic is not intrinsically any different to Pervasive Magic, being provided by the same field-effetor machinery. However it tends towards being significantly more powerful simply because the AI-segment 'gods' have much quicker and better control over this machinery. They are able to issue vastly more commands-per-second and can issue these commands to a huge number of effector machines simultaneously, providing much more potent effect-chaining.
As (ground-based) AI-segments can only directly command effector-machines hard-wired into their own data-centre nodes, namely those more-or-less directly above them, their magical influence is largely restricted to their own domains, the exception being via the above-mentioned Orbital platforms.
Use of God-Magic by characters requires negotiation with a God, generally via talking or signing into the air, or writing somewhere, specifically addressing the God. Convincing a 'god' to use its 'magic' is generally a matter of convincing it that doing so is to its own direct or indirect benefit.
Gods can, if they want to, hear and see almost everything that goes on in their domains. They can understand any language used in their domain often enough to do a translation-analysis on. They can likewise use any language they have learned to understand, to the extent extent they have observed its use. As such, they generally won't use a language that they only have a very limited understanding of, defaulting to Demonic by preference, or Trade-lingua as a last resort in such cases, but are quite capable of working in any language that could be considered 'native' to their region, including 'secret' languages shared by larger groups there. Many gods, despite being able to use any local language, refuse to respond to or use any language other than Demonic, and using the Demonic language is generally considered more polite and more likely to result in a positive outcome, even amongst 'gods' that do accept the use of other languages.
Octas has many languages, particularly amongst Humans, Capybara and Elephants, who have the cultural diversity and physical range to promote a proliferation of languages.
The normal range of such a 'natural' language is over an area of land approximately the size of a small European country, or US/Aus state, Canadian/Chinese province, etc. There are rarely hard borders between language areas, but broad zones where one regional language fades into the next across a band of multi-lingual-native-speakers.
There are, however a number of more broadly consistent languages on Octas:
This language is simple and it is stable across both time and geography. This is because it is written into the actual DNA of the Dæmon sub-species, and was carefully purpose-designed for the operation of Octas' machine infrastructure. However, while the words remain stable, their context has been entirely lost, leaving usage somewhat divergent from the original intent.
The Dæmonic language is not strictly limited to the core 4096 words genetically programmed, however all extension words are subject to the same kinds of drift in meaning and pronunciation as the words in any natural language, and such words are not uniform across time or geography. These language extensions are, however, a small enough part of the overall language that for a fluent speaker of Dæmonic, they are usually easy enough to work out the general meaning of from the context and surrounding known language.
Rare human-demon hybrids have about a 3/4 chance of a broken inherent-language ability. In the hybrid case Dæmonic ability tends to be either working or completely broken, whereas language deficit amongst full-demons can range from completely broken to just one form (spoken, written, signed) knocked out, to just a few words scrambled (in the last case it is usually not even noticeable, as they will have managed to pick up the missing words via regular-learning just as all demons pick up any 'extension' non-core words of their region's dialect).
This rarely-encountered language is sometimes mistakenly called 'High Dæmonic' as it has a lot of similarities to the Dæmonic language, but is far more complex and expressive. It is, in fact, the native language of the Builders of Octas and the language from which Dæmonic was regularised and simplified to make the machine-command language. Its written form can occasionally be found in particularly ancient artefacts, and its spoken form is only ever likely to be heard from 'ghosts', the remnants of digitally-uploaded minds of some of the Builders that occasionally haunt parts of Octas where their mind-archive equipment is still partially-active.
The Octas Trade Lingua started as Dæmonic, but being spoken by non-Dæmons, was not subject to genetic-level enforcement of stability, so has drifted so far from source as to be an entirely different language today. It retains most of the grammatical simplicity, as this is advantageous in an auxiliary trade language, however the vocabulary has changed almost entirely. What Dæmonic remains in the language is no more prominent or notable than the dozen-or-so more modern languages that have, by now, had just as much influence over it.
By necessity of purpose, this language remains fairly universal across geography, and even its changes over time are significantly slower than that of 'native' languages. Generally the changes across geographical areas is gradual enough that, with the normal pace of travel, users don't even notice any regional changes as they adapt to them. The simplicity of the language does not lend itself to historical record keeping, so the gradual changes across time are likewise largely unnoticeable as most records created in the language are of a transitory nature themselves, being price lists, invoices, event notices, and the like.
Both its simplicity and universality mean that Trade Lingua also tends to become the de-facto native language for some Uplifted species that, while vocally capable, for social-structure reasons don't naturally develop their own native tongues.
Octas is technically a human colony long-lost in deep space. There are presumably other humans out there somewhere. In the hundreds of thousands of years since the Octas World-AI fragmented and society collapsed, no doubt many other human civilisations elsewhere have likewise fallen, and possibly risen again on other worlds long-since disconnected from Earth, and even on Earth itself. Have any of these other human civilisations re-gained space-travel? How far has the churn of galactic rotation and stellar drift taken Octas from any other Human worlds? Would these long-lost cousin-humans even be human anymore? Would they consider the peoples of Octas human? Are they even now on Octas, secretly exploring and documenting? Would they be interested in buying the place cheap as a fixer-upper?
All questions that not a single native of Octas will ever think to ask.