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Aliens: Ordinator
An Expanded History of the Dominion Representatives of the Akhaga, the Sthelane, the larger of the younger races and even the Parkry attended this conference, which was mediated by the Moridani. The Parkry had lost some of their xenophobia by this stage, but none of their dogmatism; they could see the problem faced by the other civilisations, but couldn't see any solution that didn't reduce their already-occupied territory. While the major representatives were still debating, three of the Moridani, Six Akhaga and a Sthelane went off by themselves to discuss the problem. They came to the conclusion that the problem was, to them, insoluble; a higher order of thinking was required. The Sthelane proposed an artificial intelligence which would consider the problem objectively; the others agreed, and a prototype machine was built and installed on a moon of a nearby gas giant, Bythe. This device was known as the Ordinator. They gave it only one directive: maintain peace in the galaxy, by whatever means possible. They gave it access to materials and machines by which it could expand itself; then they sat back and waited for a result. At first the device did nothing beyond minor expansion of its hardware systems for some time; it was busy re-designing itself. While its creators were occupied with the continuing wars, it dug out the centre of the planet it had been placed on and began construction of a small fleet of ships, to be manned by a race of beings the Ordinator had designed from scratch; implacable, supremely capable warriors known as Bythians. These beings took control of the warships and took them to the centre of the Parkry territories, killing as they went by the simple expedient of forcing any nearby asteroids down onto the planets occupied by the Parkry. Whenever Parkry attack-craft encountered these ships, the result was inevitably one-sided; no Parkry ever survived the conflicts. The Bythians' ships were a magnitude faster and more powerful than their opponents. Within a year, the backbone of the Parkry's empire had been broken. Their forces became more desperate, more inclined to use suicide tactics against their opponents, to no avail. The Bythians began spreading a virus which altered the Parkry at a genetic level, inhibiting the production of the warrior class. The Moridani and the Akhaga congratulated themselves, but then found themselves under attack from the Bythians, directed by the Ordinator who now saw them as a potential threat to galactic peace. The Akhaga rapidly folded under the Bythians' attack, splitting into their dozen-or-so component civilisations. The Sthelane seemed to vanish completely; their homeworld was abandoned. The Bythians left Sthelanar alone, after incurring serious losses through the traps that the Sthelane had left for the Parkry. The Moridani put up more of a fight. Before, they had been hampered by a need to defend their territories against an enemy who had nothing to lose by complete destruction of the battle-ground; The Bythians didn’t even need to leave the planets in a habitable state; they simply destroyed as they went. Every move the Moridani made was predicted and countered by the Ordinator, whose talent for invention and discovery soon outstripped the Moridani's level of technology. Forced back to their last two systems, the Moridani scattered to the edges of the galaxy, individuals hiding out on previously unexplored worlds, often among developing civilisations. The scattered Moridani maintained communication by a method the Ordinator couldn't trace and watched helplessly as the Bythians gained control of one system after another, enforcing a limit on the level of technological advancement; permitting nothing more advanced than interplanetary travel. At this time, the original series of Edicts were drawn up; the Laws of the Dominion, which proscribed any faster-than-light drive other than that provided by the Ordinator; artificial intelligence of any kind; nanotechnology of any kind; stellar engineering of any kind. Several other minor laws were also enforced, such as limitations on use of virtual reality, genetic modification and self-replicating machinery. At this time, the Ordinator formed the structure of the Dominion as it came to be known for the next forty thousand years; in the Moridani language (which was, ironically, still used), it was known as the Circle Within the Circle, or Nos-a-Nos. Due to minor discrepancies in translation, this became generally known as the NoSanNoOs. The structure was thus: at the head, the Ordinator, which was later known to humanity as the NoSanNoOs Associative-Processing Artificial Intelligence, or NAPAI; next, a series of smaller units, known as SubOrdinators or NAPAISubs (or Friends, or Boxcars – from their general shape – or Little Hitlers, or "Those bloody machines that are supposed to be running everything"), one for each planetary system in the dominion. Below this, the territories were governed by representatives of the races occupying the worlds, or if this was impractical (or if the race refused to cooperate) by a team of Bythians. Many places below this were occupied by remnants of the Parkry race which had been forced into a non-violent attitude. The pattern developed so: a Bythian scout would enter a system, check for signs of intelligent life, ascertain the level of intelligence and whether the race was a threat to its immediate neighbours. If this was the case, the race was contacted and offered the benefits of the Dominion; free faster-than-light travel to anywhere in the occupied part of the galaxy; food resources more than sufficient to feed even the most densely populated planet; access to the galaxy-wide information net and free energy management to maintain a consistently high level of quality of life. Most civilisations, caught on that difficult border between space migration and collapse through exhausted resources, agreed; the few who saw through the NoSanNoOs' offer were soon convinced by a show of strength from the Bythians. Occasionally, the Bythians found existing interstellar civilisations (such as the Ukhur or the Fexel); in most cases, these races were convinced that their opposition was more powerful than they were, and that war would be impractical, wasteful and could only have one final result. Any races stubborn enough to fight were easily defeated, since they were operating under the same drawbacks as the Moridani had. Occasionally, a race within the Dominion was found to be too difficult to control; either they refused to accept the NoSanNoOs' limitations on their technological advancement, or the ongoing analysis of their race by the NAPAISub revealed that they would become a significant problem some time in the future. Such races were exterminated wholesale; the homeworld was rendered uninhabitable and any individuals of that species loose in the Dominion were rounded up and executed. This was the fate of humanity, some two hundred years after being contacted. Aided by the Moridani (who had maintained a presence in the solar system for almost fifteen thousand years, and had made some minor changes in early Mankind, to aid in its survival), several freighters filled with humans escaped from Earth before its destruction. These ships were vigorously pursued and humanity was a hunted race for over a hundred years. A team of altered humans -Metamorphs - Moridani and the few remaining representatives of the Akhaga subverted the program of NAPAI, removing humanity's `illegal' status. Humans once more spread throughout the Dominion unchecked. The modification required to allow this flagrant breach of the Edicts fatally crippled NAPAI; the Dominion collapsed some eighty years later. |
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