Sep 4, 2022 04:57
Fuschia tude posted:
Oh great, one of the minds Ellimist absorbed was Jordan Peterson
If only...
If only...
Animorphs - The Entire Series
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Sep 4, 2022 10:23
Being of immense god-like power: I, TOO, AM A GAMER
I'm a little surprised, I figured Crayak wouldn't appear until Ellimist had started transcending the limits of the physical plane, but this seems to imply they're both (at least at this point) very powerful but still limited to existing in 4 dimensions just like regular beings, whereas their interference in the books implies they exist somehow outside of spacetime as we understand it.
Also good to know Crayak isn't just a big eye, he's also swole as hell.
I'm a little surprised, I figured Crayak wouldn't appear until Ellimist had started transcending the limits of the physical plane, but this seems to imply they're both (at least at this point) very powerful but still limited to existing in 4 dimensions just like regular beings, whereas their interference in the books implies they exist somehow outside of spacetime as we understand it.
Also good to know Crayak isn't just a big eye, he's also swole as hell.
Sep 4, 2022 12:18
This is right up there with MGS as works that become retrospectively hilarious with the continued refinement of the word "gamer."
Sep 4, 2022 17:10
Rochallor posted:
This is right up there with MGS as works that become retrospectively hilarious with the continued refinement of the word "gamer."
If anything, it makes Crayak being a colossal racist, nihilistic, and petulantly destructive peice of shit all the more resonant.
Sep 4, 2022 18:30
Chapter 23
The game's afoot!
Chapter 24
Guess who discovered the primitive Andalites. And morphing, I guess.
quote:
How many years, how many decades had I played Father's games? Losing every game. Until by sheer luck I found the game he could not win.
I couldn't afford to lose that way to Crayak. The game pieces had become real beings. We played for real lives. And I played the weaker side: I had to save; he had only to destroy.
And yet, here is the shameful truth: I needed Crayak as Father had needed me.
Crayak disappeared into Z-space and I followed him as well as anyone can follow another through that shifting nothingness. I found him waiting for me in a solar system with three inhabited planets. One of those worlds was the Capasin home world. I had avoided ever visiting the Capasin world. I didn't want to be tempted by notions of revenge.
Crayak had already been some days in the system. He had laid out his game pieces with terrifying ruthlessness.
"Here is the game, Ellimist: Three worlds. Each inhabited by a sentient race: Laga, the Folk, and the Capasins. I believe you may know of the Capasins.
There are three asteroids strategically placed. Three impacts within the next five minutes of time. Except that one of those asteroids has already been mined and will explode into harmless debris before it can hit - you have my word on that."
"The word of a mass murderer."
"Yes, but an honest murderer," he said, and laughed at his own wit. "You have time to reach and destroy one asteroid. Not the other two. If you guess wrong and destroy the mined asteroid then two planets will die. If you guess right and detonate one of the unmined asteroids, only a single world will
die."
I wanted to rage, to curse the foul beast. No time! No time to cry foul; he would only laugh. Five minutes. Less now.
All data now! What did I know? The Capasin: civilized but extremely violent when they felt threatened as they had upon receiving the earliest Ketran broadcasts. The Laga, subtechnological farmers. The Folk, not yet capable of spaceflight but technologically skilled and obsessed by a eugenic vision that motivated them to kill upwards of ninety percent of their own offspring for real or imaginary defects.
Where was that mine? That was the issue, not which species deserved to survive. The question was, which had Crayak chosen to spare? Would he save the species closest to his own values, or would he spare the least threatening? Which served his needs best: Capasins or the Folk? Who would he keep alive? And what would he expect me to do?
He would expect me to save the Laga. He would expect me to annihilate that asteroid and thus spare the peaceful farmers. And the Laga would be the species he hated most.
But, expecting me to save the Laga he would know that I would guess his mind.
What was the answer?
Seconds ticking. Time passing. I had to choose or make no play at all. Three massive asteroids twirled through black space, falling toward three planets.
I lit my engines, moved to position, and opened fire.
The Capasin asteroid heated, cracked, split, fired again and again, shattering the remaining large chunks.
"Blow your mine!" I cried.
"As I agreed," Crayak said.
A huge explosion blossomed, a red fireball against black space. The explosion consumed what was left of the Capasin asteroid.
Wrong! I had guessed wrong!
I powered, full speed, to intercept the Laga asteroid. Fast! Faster! Too far to fire with any effect,
fire anyway! I aimed, fired, watched my beams impact the distant asteroid. Too far away, and then the asteroid was within the shadow of the planet.
There are no shock waves in space. I did not feel the impact. But I could see the green and blue planet of the Laga shudder. An amazing, awesome, terrible sight. The planet shuddered. Seemed almost to stop, unimaginable momentum checked. Slowly at first, then faster, a crack appeared, many cracks. The land was ripped apart. The seas drained into these craters, into these chasms. The white hot core of the Lagan world met oceans of cold water and exploded with breathtaking violence.
The Lagan world blew apart in steam and fire and debris. Blew apart. A faint bluish haze of atmosphere clung to some of the larger chunks, then evaporated.
Every living creature died.
I had already turned away, already lit my engines, already calculated the utter impossibility, already knew my own impotence, raced for no reason, with no hope, raced and fired and missed, all the while knowing I did it for my own sanity and no other reason.
The Folk died more slowly than the Lagans. The asteroid struck a glancing blow. It shocked the planet, ripped away a continent-sized chunk, and flew on past. The damaged planet wobbled wildly.
Every structure on the planet was flattened, every sea-shore drowned, every lake spilled, millions died.
And yet the Folk lived on.
"Their orbit is badly destabilized," Crayak observed. "You can see that they will slip slowly, then faster, wobbling, tom by shattering earthquakes, slide down and down the gravity well, atmosphere boiling away, suffocating, a few surviving in trapped pockets of air till of course they are roasted alive by their own sun."
"Some of them can still be saved!" I cried.
"Yes. And you can stay here and save them, Ellimist. Or you can follow me to the next game.
Save a few of these creatures, or perhaps save entire worlds. Your choice. It's all a part of the game."
The game's afoot!
Chapter 24
quote:
The next game.
And the next.
Game after game, if you could call these bloodbaths games. Each time I played catch-up, always the beast Crayak was there before me, always he controlled the playing field.
His powers were greater than mine. He toyed with me. Mocked and ridiculed me. Worlds died and the galaxy grew emptier and years passed, centuries, millennia, and always I saved only a few, never all.
I could never find the winning move. My concern for the innocent wouldn't let me walk away. Or was it just my ego?
There had to be another way. I had beaten Father after a long while. There had to be another way.
How had I beaten Father? By possessing a talent he lacked. But music would not stop Crayak.
At last I lit my engines in the wreckage of yet another planet and escaped into Zero-space with Crayak's triumphant howls in my ears.
No more. No more game. Not until I found a way.
I flew for a long time, longer than I had ever stayed in Zero-space before. I emerged finally at a far edge of the galaxy, billions of light-years from the populated core of old systems and old planets.
Out here the skies were darker. Out here even my sensors could not pick up radio or microwave emissions. There was silence out here. Was there even life?
I surveyed planets and found life, often simple single-celled life, but here and there more advanced forms. On one world I discovered true sentience: a simple, primitive species barely at the dawn of civilization.
I had been in space for millennia now. Thousands of years had passed since I had defeated Father. Thousands more years since I had last encountered another free, rational, equal being - aside from Crayak, and could he be called rational?
I was lonely, desperately lonely.
I no longer had a body in any true sense of the word. I was vastly more machine than creature. And now, in the depths of despair, with disillusion poisoning my mind, with a crushing sense of my own weakness, haunted by guilt, I craved the simplicity and comfort of companionship.
I wanted a body. I wanted to go down to the planet below and fly or at least walk free.
It was not difficult, not really. I dispatched one of my drones down to the surface to take a sample of DNA from the sentient creatures down there. With that DNA sample I easily grew a replica body.
The harder question was how I might inhabit that form. There was no chance, no possibility of using the creature's own biological brain to store all that I was. My own brain contained hundreds of times the data capacity of that simple organ.
How to carry myself into the creature? I would have to edit my data. Reduce it down to what mattered most: the ideas, facts, images, memories that were most vital.
It would mean that, for a while at least, there would be two of me. The complete unabridged Ellimist, and a sort of sketch of myself.
I spent a year deciding what should and what should not be placed into the limited biological creature I'd cloned. It was a wonderful year. A year of learning. For what could be more deeply educational than poring over all you know and deciding what truly matters?
In the end what I placed inside the creature was me. Toomin. The Ketran gamer.
I kept the child me. Strange, but all these, years later, all these battles later, it was Toomin I valued most.
I brought Aguella's memory: my one great love. And I carried Lackofa with me, too, for his skepticism, his integrity, and his sense of humor.
And to my surprise I found I could not do without Menno. Rebellion, too, was something I needed.
I took sketch memories, overviews without detail, intuitions. Strange, but I did not wish to edit out all the terrible things. I could not allow myself to remove the destruction of my home world, or the disaster of crashing the Explorer, or my long captivity under Father. I could not even bring myself to edit Crayak.
But at last I was done. I poured this abbreviated version of myself into the brain of the clone and all at once I was alive in two places, in two forms simultaneously.
I looked at myself as my new self looked at me. With eyes and ears and deep-probing sensors. I observed the biological me; I was a strong beast standing firmly on four hooved legs. I had a slender upper body, not so much different from my own Ketran torso, but with, only, two arms and no wings at all.
The four eyes were familiar but on this creature evolution had invented the wonderful device of movable stalks so that two of the eyes could be aimed in divergent directions.
I had shaggy blue-and-tan fur and a tail weapon of limited utility. I ate by running, by crushing grasses within my hollow hooves and digesting bulk and nutrients. I had no mouth.
At the same time I looked at the older, fuller me, the machine-spacecraft me, through two large eyes and two stalk eyes. I seemed vast and overwhelming and complex. I, the new, biological me, stood on an open platform, sheltered only by a force field that held space at bay. The old me was a
machine, there was no denying that. I could still see a wizened, aged, desiccated Ketran enmeshed in the gears, so to speak, but the soaring crystal spars and titanium machines and composite engine housings and weapons systems extended now for a mile or more.
It made me sad, somehow, to really see myself from the outside. In my mind's eyes I was still a Ketran male. To any other eye I was a terrifying device of unrivaled power
The me that was the clone flew down to the planet.
I landed in a wild, untamed wilderness of tall blue grass and fantastically colored trees. I sent my shuttle back into orbit and tried out my legs.
Wonderful! With each step I tasted the earth. My nose filled with the scents of flowers, filled my brain. It had been so long since I had smelled anything. The body was supple, swift, strong. The tail could be used to stab at anything approaching me from behind.
I was no fool; I knew this tail meant there were predators in this ecosystem, but I was not overly concerned. I carried a small beam weapon strapped around my waist and adapted for my physical hands.
I walked through the forest, pushing and grunting my way through dense thickets, shouldering aside clumps of grass that would suddenly adhere together and become a virtual wall.
I had a goal. I had surveyed the planet and knew it well. I emerged from the forest into openness, a field where the grass had been hacked down to form a sort of rough lawn.
Simple habitations had been created by scooping out shallow bowls in the ground and half covering them with graceful thatched roofs.
I stepped into the open. Three of my "fellow" blue-tan creatures were within a hundred yards.
Their reaction to me was instantaneous. They charged me at top speed, surrounded me, and twisted around awkwardly to aim their pointed tail blades at me.
Three stubby blades quivered nervously within a few feet of my vulnerable throat.
Not quite the welcome I'd been hoping for.
Guess who discovered the primitive Andalites. And morphing, I guess.
Sep 5, 2022 00:51
And now the Ellimist decides to go and play Andalite Jesus? 
Sep 5, 2022 05:26
Turns out tribal communities are very suspicious of outsiders! Who knew?
Considering how Ax was always very suspicious of the Ellimist, I'm guessing the next chapter doesn't go "And they shanked my clone, so I had nothing to do with those savages anymore."
It's ancient aliens but... you know...with actual aliens.
Considering how Ax was always very suspicious of the Ellimist, I'm guessing the next chapter doesn't go "And they shanked my clone, so I had nothing to do with those savages anymore."
It's ancient aliens but... you know...with actual aliens.
Sep 5, 2022 12:14
They were astonished at his doctrine!
<SHUT UP!!>
<SHUT UP!!>
Sep 5, 2022 13:08
And Yea, the Ellimist Appeared among the Tasty Grass; and preached to us the Doctrine of Flight, and the Joy of Thermals
Sep 5, 2022 18:10
Chapter 25
So, that's the lesson the Ellimist thinks he learned from the Andalites, and, obviously he did, but I think there's another lesson there. Ever since the Ellimist merged with Father, all his relationships with other alien races, he's come as the superior, the benefactor. He had what he saw as this holy mission to fix the galaxy, and he came in from this place of power, to meddle, to fix, to feed the hungry, to cure disease, to lead his inferiors.
Then he comes here and he doesn't do that. He comes as an Andalite, and lives as an Andalite, and suffers as an Andalite, even losing his child to a disease that he could cure. And still, he resists the temptation to do it. He's willing to humble himself and thereby learn empathy, and that's the big thing he learns from the Andalites, because he's willing to learn from the Andalites..
Chapter 26
I don't even know how I'm going to record this on my genocide chart.
quote:
I held up my hands, palms out, to show that I carried no weapon and meant no harm. But of course this gesture was less meaningful when dealing with a species that carried its weapon in its tail.
The three creatures flashed a series of complex hand signals at one another. If I'd had my full multitude with me I'd have been able to instantly decipher this gestural language. But I was a more limited me. I could guess but no more.
I decided to try and copy some of the gestures. The creatures watched but were quickly frustrated. Evidently I was speaking gibberish.
And now it was becoming more dear that the three were discussing whether or not to kill me outright as a dangerous stranger Two of them were quite intent on this and made wild, angry gestures.
They cavorted, rose on hind legs, and darted their hindquarters toward me, stabbing the air with their tail blades.
The third, a smaller creature with restless stalk eyes and contrastingly calm main eyes, restrained them, but only with difficulty.
I could sense quite clearly their emotional states. It wasn't just the body language. They seemed capable of projecting a sort of basic emotional language by some means I could not discern.
<I'm not an enemy,> I said. I said it without thinking, automatically accessing my communications system - a system that was part of my other body, no part of this form.
And yet, I saw a subtle relaxation on the part of the creatures. They had "heard" me. Or had at least heard the emotional tone.
I tried again. <I wish to be a friend. I am here to ...> I was about to say that I was there to help. But no, that wasn't it anymore. <I am here to learn from you.>
More rapid hand gestures. Emotions cooled. And then, very suddenly, all three of them spun. I was forgotten. Something was coming from the forest across the clearing. Something large.
It walked on six legs, each as thick as a tree trunk, a knuckling walk. It had a low-slung head that swung from side to side as it walked. The beast was armored with clunky, leatherish plates all down its back.
It was huge but would not have seemed like any sort of threat had I not seen the reactions of the blue creatures. They clearly saw it as a danger. The emotion was all too easy to feel.
Then the beast began to move and I reciprocated their emotion. I would never have believed something so big could move so fast.
More of my fellow blue quadrupeds appeared, rushing up from all angles, racing to cut the monster off before it could reach the cluster of scoops. My three companions attacked as well, headlong, heedless.
I followed at a tearing speed, my hooves kicking up clods of dirt as I ran. The first of my "brothers" reached the monster. The beast killed two effortlessly. It paused to eat, to rip the two martyrs apart and swallow them, all but ignoring the brave stabs of their fellows.
It was a sadly one-sided battle. And I should have stayed out of it. I had not come to fight. But I was, physically at least, one of these creatures, and there would be very little of the companionship I craved, very little learning, very little relaxation so long as they were being massacred.
I drew my handheld beam weapon and shot the monster in the head. It died and fell in a heap.
From that day on I was a welcomed, revered member of the tribe.
They had no name for their race, no special gestural label for their species, only hand-words for their tribe. As far as they were concerned, their planet was irrelevant, their species a useless abstraction. They were this tribe, this group, and no more.
It was I who came up with the hand-word for their race and, for the benefit of my own wordoriented brain; a spoken name as well.
I named them Andalites.
I lived with the Andalites for many years. Happy years, by and large. They were primitive people. Their gestural language consisted of fewer than two hundred words or phrases. They had no art, no science, no agriculture. But they had already evolved from pure grazers, herd members, into distinct individuals. They had potential.
I lived with them, and refused to teach, refused to interfere. On one other occasion I employed my weapon to fend off a monster's attack. But that was all. Aside from that I was an Andalite, concerned with keeping the fire going, with maintaining the roof of my little scoop, with carefully avoiding over-feeding in dry weather, with tending the trees so they would drop their delicious leaves at harvest time, with all the simple minutiae of daily life.
Most of all, I had friends. I "spoke" with living beings who spoke back, not with the canned, programmed, expected responses of computers or dead memories, but with the wonderful unpredictability of life.
I was no longer lonely. I no longer bore the weight of the galaxy on my inadequate shoulders.
From time to time I would return to my other self in orbit and download all my new experiences and memories. That other me was grateful, eager. That other me savored every detail. Felt the warmth of closeness. A warmth denied me since the death of Aguella and Lackofa.
I married.
Her name was Tree. The Andalites only used a dozen or so names - Tree, Water, Star, Grass, and so on. Probably twenty percent of the females in the tribe were named Tree. We had a child: Star. But Star died soon after birth of a disease that attacks the Andalite young.
I had watched entire worlds die. I had lost my own race. How could I care so much about this one small, unsteady creature? How could her death cut me so deeply?
The pain was awful. Unbearable. And yet I was glad to learn that I could still feel. The disease that had killed her was easily curable. The orbiting me took only a few seconds to discover the pathogen and work out simple countermeasures. I had the power to keep any Andalite child from dying of that disease. I could ensure that no other Andalite parent would ever experience that same loss.
I had the power.
I had the power to do it and to eliminate predators, to wipe out disease, to ensure an adequate food supply, to biologically alter the Andalites so that they ...
I had that power. I had used that power before, and ended up annihilating worlds.
And yet, how could I not? How could I not wipe out disease? How could I not stop evil?
"You hide here among these primitive creatures," I berated myself. "You cower and run from Crayak and do nothing to stop him. You want to solve the easy problems and avoid the larger ones? Is that your morality, Toomin the Ellimist?"
Tree came to me and made the hand-words for "child."
"You want to have another child?" I signed back, incredulous.
"Yes."
"But another child may die, too, my wife."
"Yes."
"Then why have another child? If not the disease, then the monsters, or a famine. Why have another child?"
"Disease take one," Tree admitted. Then, with growing defiance, "Monster take one. Famine take one. More children, some live."
I had another child. And this one did not fall prey to the illness. We named him Flower.
By the time Tree died of old age Flower had become a leader of the tribe. His sister Grass was married herself. Their two siblings, Sky and Water, died. Three of our five children had died, two had lived. As I helped bury Tree's body according to the ritual that would allow her spirit to strengthen the
grass, I knew my time with the Andalites was over.
I had gone there making sanctimonious noises about learning, never really expecting to learn anything new. And yet from these primitive, precivilized creatures l had learned how to defeat, or at least resist, Crayak.
More children, some live.
For every race Crayak exterminated, I would plant two new ones.
So, that's the lesson the Ellimist thinks he learned from the Andalites, and, obviously he did, but I think there's another lesson there. Ever since the Ellimist merged with Father, all his relationships with other alien races, he's come as the superior, the benefactor. He had what he saw as this holy mission to fix the galaxy, and he came in from this place of power, to meddle, to fix, to feed the hungry, to cure disease, to lead his inferiors.
Then he comes here and he doesn't do that. He comes as an Andalite, and lives as an Andalite, and suffers as an Andalite, even losing his child to a disease that he could cure. And still, he resists the temptation to do it. He's willing to humble himself and thereby learn empathy, and that's the big thing he learns from the Andalites, because he's willing to learn from the Andalites..
Chapter 26
quote:
A hundred thousand generations passed and I had seeded life on as many worlds. I was growing "children" faster than Crayak could exterminate them. My travels, and the database of my multitude, had left me with an encyclopedic knowledge of habitable worlds and systems. And in some cases I simply created habitable worlds where only barren land had been: Melting ice caps to release water was one method, introducing oxygen-producing plant species was another.
I had the advantage now. Crayak had to try to find my new species, simple peoples who did not announce their presence with radio emissions. Primitive species hiding amidst the billions of planets.
And, for the first time, I grew a wholly new species. They were invented in my body/ship, created of bits and pieces of DNA. I accented their intelligence. I quashed their aggressiveness. I called them Pemalites.
To the Pemalites I gave technology. They became an advanced species within a few decades of my creating them. As their creator, I gave them laws: They would never practice violence, and they would conceal their existence as long as possible.
And I gave them a mission: to carry life everywhere.
With all my powers I still could not equal the volume of work done by the Pemalites. They took to the stars in a cloud of ships, carrying plant and animal species with them as they went. They spread life like a benign contagion.
Not even Crayak could find them all. Nor even a fraction of them all. Life was winning the race against death. Good was outrunning evil.
In all that time, millennia, I had not encountered Crayak. But eventually we must meet. It happened without warning. I emerged from Z-space in a previously unvisited solar system. A massive jolt hit me before I could so much as switch on My sensors. An energy beam of shocking power.
For a split second I was simply overwhelmed. Every system flickered. Every synapse and connection stuttered. It was a blow that would have killed me ten thousand years earlier.
But I was no longer quite the creature I'd been when Crayak had last seen me. I had followed the same theory for my own survival as I had for the survival of life itself: I had grown, replicated, expanded.
I had broken "myself" into several dozen separate semi-biological ships. I was three dozen crystal/ships, all connected, all united by real-time communications on several different levels at once: everything from simple microwave and laser to more subtle connections based on mind-crystal harmonics.
Crayak's assault annihilated three of my portions. But that was less than a tenth of what now constituted the Ellimist.
Crayak still inhabited his dark, gloomy world. Still surrounded himself with sycophants and toadies. Still possessed the weapons and abilities he'd had. And now his power was not so much greater than mine. If at all.
"It seems I have survived," I said to him. "Let's see if you do as well." I aimed and I fired with everything I had.
Crayak's dark planetoid staggered. Huge chunks, chunks the size of mighty mountains, exploded into space.
"You've grown," Crayak sneered.
"And you have not. Life has advantages over death."
"Only the most temporary advantages, Ellimist. Life is short. Death is eternal."
"You race from place to place, a fool trying to stamp out a contagion. You're too slow. Life has outrun you."
"Life, no. But you, Ellimist, yes, you have complicated my plans. So now, with deep regret, I must end our little game."
"I see. You lack the courage to play a game you might lose. A coward after all."
"A survivor, Ellimist."
He fired.
The battle was on. He fired, I fired. I threw nuclear missiles at him and replaced them swiftly - one of my "portions" contained an arms factory. The missiles exploded against his force field, sapping his power, dumping the radiation of a quasar down on him and his creatures.
He blazed at me with gravity distorters that twisted and turned space itself and bent and broke me.
I struck back with countermeasures to blind and confuse him. And then Crayak turned and ran.
No. He would not escape me. I was going to follow him, hunt him down, and annihilate him.
I chased him into Zero-space. We carried our battle into another system. The two of us orbited a massive star and sucked the energy from it to keep hacking away at each other. We hurled asteroids, we warped the form of space itself, we stabbed at each other with energy beams.
Crayak ran again. And I followed him. The taste of victory was in my mouth, the hunger for revenge and vindication.
I
struck at him with beams of energy powered by a star. Unimaginable force. I missed and struck a planet and vaporized an ocean. The species that inhabited that world would not last more than a year on their damaged world.
But there was no time to stop. I told myself I would make it all right when Crayak was dead. I told myself I would come back when Crayak was gone once and for all.
But it was I who ran from the next battle. And the next. Crayak had learned from me. He added to his own powers and so did I.
He ran. I chased. I ran. He chased. And as the battle raged through normal space and Zero-space we each grew. That was the strange paradox of it: We each grew stronger. Each more deadly. Each more accomplished at inflicting pain and damage on the other.
We had become symbiotic at some level. Neither of us could kill the other, neither of us could pull away because now, now after so much time, now the other was even stronger.
The destructive power we now employed annihilated solar systems in their entirety.
Civilizations that had barely raised their heads to look at the stars were obliterated. Advanced worlds, arrogant with their space travel abilities watched, helpless, stunned, and were annihilated.
Still Crayak and I grew stronger and more deadly, but if anything, it was I who grew most dangerous now:
There were two lines on a cosmic graph: One was the number of living planets, down and down.
Life was failing around the galaxy as the two mad giants rolled here and there and crushed the helpless beneath them.
The other graph line, though, showed my own slow ascension over Crayak.
It was a hideous race to see which would happen sooner: my triumph over Crayak or our mutual destruction of all life in the galaxy.
And then, sheer accident took Crayak and me down a path neither of us had known existed.
Crayak laid a trap for me. He was ready to gamble anything. So he began to move with a definable pattern. He deliberately laid the groundwork for me to guess his next move.
It worked. I read his pattern and foolishly ascribed it to exhaustion on his part. Thus it was that I emerged from Zero-space within a few hundred thousand miles of a force that neither I nor Crayak could hope to defeat: a black hole.
I don't even know how I'm going to record this on my genocide chart.
Sep 5, 2022 18:20
I love this book. It's so, so good.
Sep 5, 2022 18:30
I always wondered if Andalites eventually evolved Thought-Speech because of the Ellimist's Andalite body introducing some kind of genetic mutation into the population. Because as it is we see them in basically a modern configuration a couple million years before present day... except missing Thought-Speech and only having some sign language.
Sep 5, 2022 18:38
Maybe, but it does say "They seemed capable of projecting a sort of basic emotional language...", which suggests primitive telepathy existed even then.
Sep 5, 2022 20:54
I wonder that too. I'm not sure how to interpret this:
I think what he's saying is that he tried to access his ship body's communication system, but that didn't exist so he accidentally used the Andalite's psychic hardware to make words, which they didn't know how to do before and they learned and snowballed from there.
Though I guess it could also mean that he actually used his ship's hardware to talk to them remotely.
quote:
<I'm not an enemy,> I said. I said it without thinking, automatically accessing my communications system - a system that was part of my other body, no part of this form.
I think what he's saying is that he tried to access his ship body's communication system, but that didn't exist so he accidentally used the Andalite's psychic hardware to make words, which they didn't know how to do before and they learned and snowballed from there.
Though I guess it could also mean that he actually used his ship's hardware to talk to them remotely.
Sep 5, 2022 22:14
It seems to me like they could do this before he showed up, a primitive thought-feel precursor to thought-speak. He just tapped into it by instinctively trying for communication.
Does this explain the malevolent aura Visser Three emitted, more often at the beginning of the series?
Does this explain the malevolent aura Visser Three emitted, more often at the beginning of the series?
Sep 5, 2022 22:48
This battle between the Crayak and the Ellimist is so, so good. Just two indescribable space-gods throwing everything they can at each other and annihilating everything in their path on a galactic scale. It's insane to try and think about and comprehend.
I love it.
I love it.
Sep 5, 2022 23:09
I love how unafraid this book is to go buck wild with scale and concepts.
Sep 5, 2022 23:40
Interestingly William Golding (Lord of the Flies) wrote another book called The Inheritors about Neanderthals and depicted them as having a primitive sort of telepathy, more about transmitting emotions than language.
And speaking of other books, I love that Crayak of the Big Red Evil Eye also has an entire floating Mordor planet full of gross species he genetically-engineered himself to cart around on his galactic genocide.
And speaking of other books, I love that Crayak of the Big Red Evil Eye also has an entire floating Mordor planet full of gross species he genetically-engineered himself to cart around on his galactic genocide.
Sep 6, 2022 00:05
freebooter posted:
Interestingly William Golding (Lord of the Flies) wrote another book called The Inheritors about Neanderthals and depicted them as having a primitive sort of telepathy, more about transmitting emotions than language.
I remember finding a compilation of sci fi short stories from around the period that was written, and all but one of them featured telepathy. It seems to have been A Big Deal in the genre for a decade or so there.
Sep 6, 2022 04:32
Vandar posted:
This battle between the Crayak and the Ellimist is so, so good. Just two indescribable space-gods throwing everything they can at each other and annihilating everything in their path on a galactic scale. It's insane to try and think about and comprehend.
I love it.
I remember that the very first introduction to Crayak as a character had the Ellimist note that, in his words, their open war destroyed a tenth of the galaxy and exterminated hundreds of sentient species, and thousands more that might have achieved sentience.
Sep 6, 2022 04:37
A lot of people believed in telepathy then for some reason. Alan Turing said the evidence for it was overwhelming. I'm not sure why. It was a big part of Asimov's Foundation series too.
Sep 6, 2022 08:43
species uplifts $200
data storage $150
exploration probes $800
nuclear arms factories $3,600
z-space fuel $150
someone who is good at the godhood please help me budget this. my galaxy is dying
data storage $150
exploration probes $800
nuclear arms factories $3,600
z-space fuel $150
someone who is good at the godhood please help me budget this. my galaxy is dying
Sep 6, 2022 08:54
Capfalcon posted:
species uplifts $200
data storage $150
exploration probes $800
nuclear arms factories $3,600
z-space fuel $150
someone who is good at the godhood please help me budget this. my galaxy is dying
you must construct additional pylons
Sep 6, 2022 12:29
Acebuckeye13 posted:
you must construct additional pylons
NO!
Sep 6, 2022 18:53
Chapter 27
It's one last change.
Tomorrow, we move to the last section and the last version of the Ellimist....End Game
quote:
I now consisted of four thousand two hundred and twenty portions. I emerged from Zero-space trailing my vast, extended body behind me. The instant I emerged I saw the trap.
Too late!
The pull of the black hole was impossible to fight. I had great power, but I did not have this power. My most forward portions fell into that gravity well with no chance at all of escape.
Crayak had laid the trap to perfection.
I shot an order to my other portions: Do not emerge!
Milliseconds from final disaster the remaining parts of me cancelled their descent from Z-space. I was wounded, not killed. But oh, how I was wounded.
I watched helplessly as vast parts of me, including the remnants of the original ship/body, all that was left of the true Ketran me, fell toward that black hole.
I was everywhere at once, lost, turned, twisted. In Z-space, in real space far away as parts of me emerged randomly, and falling into the horrible crushing mouth of the black hole.
I was bits and pieces.
The pain! My connections were across so many levels. It was not just a data stream, it was more than that. Those were my arms and wings there, falling, diminishing, being crushed by gravity.
Those were my eyes and ears spread out through space and non-space. Stretched.
I felt the connection break down, felt it as if parts of my body were being sawed off. Pain! My mind was closing in, collapsing, no! Fragments. Pieces of me. Distorted cries and shouts of wild disjointed communication.
The universe itself seemed to disintegrate. The stars fell apart, opened themselves up like blossoming flowers. And then and then ...
I seemed to float in a place like nothing I had seen or imagined. All around me I saw massive,
twisted lines of pure power, snapping and color-shifting. I saw numbers, deluges of them, I could hear them roaring around my ears. I reached out a vast hand and could run it over the curves of space itself. I could stroke the very curves of space-time.
I saw ... I saw everything, the inside, underside, inner, and outer of everything at, once.
I lived still.
But where was I?
What was I?
I was within a black hole, within Zero-space, within real space and yet unified into one whole through a medium I could not yet conceive.
I was seeing, hearing, feeling in all places at once. The effect was extreme disorientation.
I tried instinctively to pull my parts together, but I could not. It was impossible that I should still be alive, impossible that I could flap wings that were still in Zero-space, impossible that I should seem to wiggle pods inside a black hole.
I was aware of Crayak, I felt him approach my real-space portions. He was attacking me piecemeal, exploding parts of me with great glee.
I felt physical parts of me evaporate, burned away by energy beams. And yet my mind was not diminished.
Portions of me were now fully within the black hole, they were crushed to dots, crushed to the size of atoms, destroyed for all intents and purposes.
And yet I lived.
Something was happening. Something ...
One by one Crayak annihilated the component parts of me. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And when nothing was left of me in real space he chased me into Zero-space and squeezed those helpless, inanimate bits of machinery and flesh and crystal out into real space where they could
be destroyed. And still I lived.
How much time had passed? Unknowable. I was no longer within time. I could see time as a series of interwoven strands, a trillion trillion strands of possibility.
Was I dead? Was I in some sort of afterlife?
Dead, no. The dead do not see, and I saw! I saw things no living creature had ever seen before. I was deep within the structure of the universe, I was within the code of creation.
There was nothing left of me, nothing that any one could see or touch. I was gone, and yet I lived.
It's one last change.
Tomorrow, we move to the last section and the last version of the Ellimist....End Game
Sep 6, 2022 19:23
Where you're going, you won't need eyes to see.
Sep 7, 2022 18:46
End Game
Chapter 28
The dominant species, as we've learned, being the Nesk.
It's an intesting dilemna, though, because doing nothing effectively surrenders to Crayak, but acting and revealing yourself boosts his power.
Chapter 29
UIltimately, for all that the Ellimist is, he's a game plater, and Crayak is his twisted mirror. And what the Ellimist said last chapter is true. Nothing that's happened to him changed his nature, and the same is true of Crayak. Ultimately, for both of them, there must be a game.
Epilogue tomorrow. The end is the beginning.
Chapter 28
quote:
I don't know how long I floated through this eerie, brilliant, wondrous landscape of pure energy and purest beauty. Time was for other creatures. Time's arrow did not carry me along with it.
I knew nothing of this. I was a mere creature, for all my multitudes, for all my powers, I was, after all, a mere mortal creature.
It was as if one of the primitive Andalites I'd known had suddenly been thrust into the command center of a starship. I was an ignorant savage. An extreme primitive.
But I knew this: As simple and primitive as I might be, I could literally touch and move the vibrating lines of space-time.
Was I grown extremely big? Or had I shrunk to submolecular size? Size meant nothing. There was no size in this place.
I lived, and that was all I knew. I was alive without form, alive without synapses to fire, without food to devour, without limbs to control. I saw without eyes and tasted without tongue and moved with no wings or pods or engines to move me.
This I knew.
And I knew one other thing as well, a lesson hard-learned from millennia of war: My foe would find me.
An absurdly rare event, a cosmic coincidence had fashioned me. The odds? The odds were billions to one, trillions to one, incalculable.
But those were odds of this thing happening once. The odds of it happening again were great. Crayak learned. Crayak watched. Once I revealed myself to him, once I acted in such a way as to show myself, Crayak would find the way to follow me here. And as I was unchanged in mind and morality, so he would be unchanged.
Carefully, frightened at last into true humility, I began to study this new environment. I found I could see into the real world, see the events and peoples who made up these space-time strands.
They seemed to rise and mature and age and fall in the blink of an eye, and as I watched and studied and learned I knew that hundreds of thousands and finally millions of years were passing in real space.
I saw Crayak out there, still at his evil work. I saw lines go dark, unravel, coil up into nothingness as he massacred planets. Billions of lives become nothingness. I had planted a great deal of life, and my Pemalites still lived to spread more, but the tide was turning once more in Crayak's favor. At last, knowing I had so much more still to learn, knowing my own deep inadequacy, I struck back.
Crayak entered a system of nine planets orbiting a medium yellow star. Two of the worlds, a red planet and a blue, were populated. The red planet was already doomed, its atmosphere was oozing away, and Crayak could do no real harm there.
But the blue planet teemed with life. The dominant species type were huge, brutish beasts in a fantastic array of forms. Giant, slow-moving plant eaters and violent, rapacious killers with tearing teeth and deadly talons. There was intelligence there, but no sentience, I could see it so clearly.
Not in the great, domineering brutes, but in a handful of small, swift, fur-bearing prey animals did the future of this world lie. They had only to be left alone and in forty or sixty million years there would emerge a great people.
Crayak saw none of his, he saw only that there was life there. He aimed his weapons at the blue planet and fired, and I drew gently on the fabric of space-time and his weapons struck nothing. The planet was gone, halfway around its orbit
He tried again, and each time I applied my crude but powerful countermeasures.
And then, in confusion, Crayak withdrew to consider.
I knew he would be with me soon.
The dominant species, as we've learned, being the Nesk.
It's an intesting dilemna, though, because doing nothing effectively surrenders to Crayak, but acting and revealing yourself boosts his power.
Chapter 29
quote:
"So here you are, Ellimist"
"I've been expecting you, Crayak."
He appeared to me as he always had. As a dark monster. I knew how I appeared to him: I had mastered the simple trick of projecting myself in whatever guise suited me best. I appeared to him as a simple Ketran.
"Your advantage is gone, Ellimist."
"We are equals now," I agreed. "You can no longer harm me personally. You understand that?"
"I cannot harm you, Ellimist, but I can hurt you. I can kill the things you love."
"You can try, Crayak. But in the end you are a fool. Do you not see that everything you do I can undo? You can slaughter and I can reverse time itself to restore life. But I tell you this: If we carry on our war inside the bowels of space-time itself we will end by collapsing this universe and killing ourselves as well as every thing in it."
"It's a pointless game that has no winner," Crayak admitted. "But what else is there for the two of us?"
"We could watch. We could admire the advance of evolution."
"Unacceptable. I would choose my own destruction over that. To live for all of eternity as a passive observer? There must be a game. If there is no game there is nothing for me."
"Then let us play a game, Crayak."
"There will have to be rules."
"Yes, there will have to be rules."
"And a winner?"
"That, too, though it will take millions of years."
Crayak smiled his hideous smile. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Then come," I said, "let us play the final game."
UIltimately, for all that the Ellimist is, he's a game plater, and Crayak is his twisted mirror. And what the Ellimist said last chapter is true. Nothing that's happened to him changed his nature, and the same is true of Crayak. Ultimately, for both of them, there must be a game.
Epilogue tomorrow. The end is the beginning.
Sep 7, 2022 19:06
Is this, like, the Zoroastrian version of the Narnia books? Introducing kids to theistic dualism?
Sep 7, 2022 19:20
introducing kids to gamer culture
Ellimist cracks open a can of mountain dew and lazily licks Cheeto dust from his fingers. "Looks like it's just the two of us, Crayak."
Crayak cranks his microphone to full blast and shouts a bunch of racial slurs as loud as possible, followed by, "Git gud, noob!"
Ellimist cracks open a can of mountain dew and lazily licks Cheeto dust from his fingers. "Looks like it's just the two of us, Crayak."
Crayak cranks his microphone to full blast and shouts a bunch of racial slurs as loud as possible, followed by, "Git gud, noob!"
Sep 7, 2022 22:21
Epicurius posted:
Chapter 26
I don't even know how I'm going to record this on my genocide chart.
Wait, it's spelled "Pemalite"? I think I've been reading it as "Permalite" this whole time.
Sep 7, 2022 23:26
The hairdresser planet was also destroyed by Crayak, rip
Sep 8, 2022 00:03
So the Andalites have only marginally evolved over several dozen millions of years? How odd.
Sep 8, 2022 00:22
They achieved physical and cultural perfection, you see, and so did not require further change.
Sep 8, 2022 01:51
cptn_dr posted:
They achieved physical and cultural perfection, you see, and so did not require further change.
sharks, crocodiles, many kinds of bugs, andalites
sometimes you hit a winning idea
but also you know what? The imagery of Toomin being trapped by Father is horrifying. Just floating in an endless kelp forest graveyard
Sep 8, 2022 04:37
Flowers For Algeria posted:
So the Andalites have only marginally evolved over several dozen millions of years? How odd.
yeah I think that the scale is a little off, it being maybe 1-2 million years in the past would make a little more sense
Sep 8, 2022 04:43
Ellimist did it
Sep 8, 2022 08:19
Soup du Jour posted:
yeah I think that the scale is a little off, it being maybe 1-2 million years in the past would make a little more sense
On the other hand, we're just hearing things from Ellimist's perspective. Dude was thinking he was so humble, living down with the "primitives" for a while, with only his laser gun, fully realized telepathy, complex grammar while everyone else was speaking cave-Andalite, and orbiting supercomputer the size of a moon. He definitely accidently jumpstarted the Andalites so hard that even a lackluster student like Ax immediately knows who he is when he shows up the first time.
Sep 8, 2022 08:37
If we imagine the Andalites he lived with are the equivalent of like Homo Habilis it kind of works? Especially if you consider Ax's history lesson from earlier in the series where he says Andalites took several times longer to develop from flight to spacefaring than humans did and extrapolate it out a bit. Culturally we see that they're incredibly slow to change as well if we take Aldrea's thoughts on how the Andalite military works into account. Add onto this that in general there aren't that many Andalites, at least not compared to humans. Even now they probably top out at fewer than a billion across all their colonies and the homeworld.
Its still a bit wonky and clearly just because they wanted to line up the scene where the Ellimist saves Earth circa the Triassic period from Crayak.
Its still a bit wonky and clearly just because they wanted to line up the scene where the Ellimist saves Earth circa the Triassic period from Crayak.
Sep 8, 2022 09:44
Ax also points out in another book that at one point, Andalites lived in cities and then rejected that urbanism for the way they live now, spread out, and the Andalite Chronicles talks about how the Andalite government regulates the birthrate (Elfangor mentions that, with the war on, the government is probably going to give his parents permission to have a second kid), so it's not just stagnation. The Andalites actively work to preserve their way of life. The impression I get of the Andalites is that they, as a rule, tend to be very cautious and conservative, worried about upsetting the status quo that makes them the dominant power in their region of the galaxy.
And there's not many of any alien race compared to humans. The reason that the Yeerks have Earth on their target list is because there are billions of humans, compared to millions of every other intelligent species out there.
And there's not many of any alien race compared to humans. The reason that the Yeerks have Earth on their target list is because there are billions of humans, compared to millions of every other intelligent species out there.
Sep 8, 2022 13:17
Epicurius posted:
The dominant species, as we've learned, being the Nesk.
I think she means dinosaurs. The impression I get was the Nesk and the broccoli farmers were there relatively briefly on the timescale before the Animorphs genocided them.
Were the brocolli farmers from Mars, I can't remember? Otherwise it's weird she also casually drops that oh yeah Mars used to have life.