Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

S H R I E K S

Was in the middle of posting the Update and the outlet my fuckin charger was plugged into goes and decides to give up the ghost in dramatic fashion. There was smoke involved and guess who’s gonna be fuckin paranoid for like at least a couple days. I’ve TOLD mom at least a couple times that I’ve seen that outlet sparking when it gets turned on but nooooo, she says, it’ll be fiiiiine.

Spoiler alert, it was not fine.

Brb, finding a new outlet to charge on. Update should be up in a couple hours.

EDIT: Here it goes.

 

I reread my enormous silly confinement mechpreg megop au and it's making me want to write more in that verse. the terrible thing is, i'm less interested in my plot for the Sequel than in various scene bunnies for a maybe-Prequel, featuring Megatron and how he became Warlord of Kaon anyway. Someone vagued at me once upon a time something along the lines of 'what's the point of a Megatron who hasn't fought to get where he is' in the context of like....royalty aus i guess, and it's bugged me for LITERAL YEARS because I thought it was pretty fuckin explicit in the fic that Megatron had in fact fought to get where he was. I just didn't say it in the first few thousand words or so lol.

ANYWAY. Baby Megs grows up on the surface, among acid rain and snowstorms and surrounded by poverty, and through bloody-minded force of will and a pretty good fusion cannon he took off a dead guy and fixed up himself, becomes first one of Kaon's most celebrated warriors, finds himself surrounded but utter bastards who take their own power for granted, and goes, "Fuckit, I can do a better job of leading than you fucks." And then he does.

 

Japan beat Ireland at the rugby world cup and I'm so happy, aaaaaaaa! I hope they get into the quarterfinals, that would be so awesome for them 8DDD

 

I've taken one fucking linguistics class in my life and I'm in so over my head with this linguistic worldbuilding but i really like what i'm coming up with anyway so here's a ramble lmao

I'm more or less going with the 'Primus creation' theory in Rise; the Thirteen and the Dynasty were real and the Thirteen were created by Primus, who, exhausted by his labors, then slept as part of Cybertron for like a billion years. Primus (and Unicron) were something quite different from Cybertronian, so while Primus gave his kiddos sentience and the ability to communicate they had to figure out the whole language thing for themselves. Cybertronians, from the start, had a huge range of potential communication vectors sound in a much larger range and more varied methods of creation than humans, as well as things like EM and direct data transfers (emotional and sensory experiences, memories shared between people). I think that because of this, it may have taken a good while for the Dynasty as a whole to get around to developing written language - they would have had programming, but would their programming have been structured in a way that maps well to a written language? The basis of (almost) all (human) programming is electrical signals expressed in binary. Humans need higher-level programming languages because binary is HARD for organochemical meatsacks, but what if your brain is mineral and literally runs on the electrical signals binary is expressing? (or maybe you have a different sort of transistor in your circuits and you run on ternary instead?)

I think that early Cybertronians would have spent a lot of time together literally linked up in some way, networked, and that spoken language and especially written language would have developed alongside the development of social ingroups and outgroups - if you have to add someone to your network in order to talk to them, that's potentially a personal risk. But if you can't network with someone, how do you communicate complex ideas to them, and how do you understand the ideas they want to share with you? So we get spoken language, which develops and becomes widespread as society grows big enough that most people are now part of your outgroup rather than your ingroup. And eventually society gets so large and widespread that sometimes you have to talk to people who are neither part of your ingroup nor within the effective range of spoken language due to being separated from you by either distance or time. Theoretically you could prepare a data packet and get someone else to deliver it for you, but what if no-one's willing to take on that risk? Maybe you could route it through multiple intermediaries, but what if there's a gap in the chain? Similarly, what if the content of the message is something you'd rather no-one except the recipient potentially sees? So eventually we get a form of written language as well.

What does the written language look like? It has to express an existing language that's already very complex. One's programming languages, depending on form, might substitute for some ideas, but for most it just won't cut it. It starts as pictographic symbols, and over time these symbols simplify and become more abstract because it's easier to physically write simple, regular shapes and also because there is no easy pictograph to represent some concepts. Written language in turn makes it easier for societies to spread out over large areas and still remain centralized, so the Dynasty gets BIG. Regional variations start cropping up; some people experiment with ways of expressing new and more complex ideas, and converting supplemental forms of language (body language, EM interaction, to some extent those direct data transfers that let you experience another person's emotions/sensory data) into a written form (tone as a built-in feature of written language!).

And then the Cataclysm happens, right when Cybertron is just starting to get into the idea of writing things down so you don't have to be right there to tell another person a thing. An aeon of collective knowledge is mostly wiped out. There are survivors, and some of them remember what Cybertron and their society was like before the sky turned to fire, but they are individuals, with an individual's level of knowledge. And what happens when they die? The survivors are scattered all over the the planet, hiding in the roots of mountains where the crust was thick enough to bear the bombardment. What if you never meet another Cybertronian before you die? Does your knowledge and the knowledge of your ancestors die with you?

Not if you can write.

The First Generation after the Cataclysm is an age where writing flourishes. Damn near everyone learns how to do it. Spoken language diversified during the Cataclysm into regional dialects isolated by a handful of little geographic islands, and by the end of the Cataclysm most were near mutually unintelligible. Written language likewise diverged to some extent, but that ideographic structure meant that most of those diverse dialects were still reading and writing in a similar way. Eventually, writing and speech, in the form of short-wave radio, databursts and email, and comm centers are deliberately integrated into the Cybertronian hardware blueprints. The First Generation is also an age of experimentation and exploration, mapping the Cybertronian society and environment, doing something about it, and committing that knowledge to history. If there is to be another Cataclysm, as so many of the survivors fear, they'll be damned if they let their culture vanish as that of their own ancestors did. This is also why the written material venerated by the Mythos is called 'the Books of History', and why there's so damn much of it.

That said, Modern Cybertron may have the Books of History, but it lacks context. Information creep, corrupted data, failed backups and societal priorities changing over time meant that much of this early writing was lost despite its authors' best efforts. What remains is generally that which enough people with the resources to preserve the information thought it was important enough to do so. For the power structures of the Golden Age, you can kind of imagine what sort of information that might have been. :'D

 

god that's so delicious I'm gonna stuff all of it into my face FOREVER

and it's very internally logically consistent, I think! esp the thing about 'speech' per se taking some time to develop because a lot of communication can happen in entirely unrelated ways. The idea of early Cybertronians being networked together in a not-quite-hive-mind is veeeeery intriguing s and possibly a good root for the strong emphasis on community over individuality in later periods? Join The Hive, Little One and how the Cataclysm gave that a good hard shove towards writing based on sheer old panic makes a lot of sense, too!

That also tracks well with read and spoken word diverging hard afterwards due to isolation of the latter but I would imagine that writing might also take a tilt towards formality because informal stuff tends to not get preserved - a problem that garden variety linguists have to deal with with humans already because What Did The Peasants Say is just not stuck around while official documents might have. So I can def see the divergence in spoken language happen A LOT faster than the written one!

 

This is EXACTLY what I was thinking! :D Cybertron is a very collectivist society, and it has been from the start. The Dynasty of Primes was literally forged on the teamwork of the Thirteen; the good of the tribe and then of the nation has been a very strong force. There's some mythology there wrt the Cousins' War and why it was such an all-encompassing split in society despite the leader on the aggressors' side being such a terrible person, but i'm in post-meltdown fatigue and it would take more batteries than i have to go off on that tangent, so i'll have to save it for another day. x''D

And ye, I forgot about that but the relative survivability of formal vs informal is definitely one more factor there.

As above wrt my lack of batteries, but one idea i'm working with but haven't really had an opportunity to do much with is the idea that most Cybertronians are multilingual to some extent - Orion and his like 40 languages are an exception, but Megatronus knows about... [fart noises] idk, 8 or so? and that's a fair amount for someone of his specific background but historically it wouldn't be that unusual. The First Generation society was a fairly egalitarian society compared to what came later; the roots of the caste system come from the strict class divisions developed in the Second Generation, and then the Golden Age codified and refined those class divisions to such an extent that 'upper caste' and 'lower caste' are literally very different cultures. (I think some of the cultural differences Orion has put down to 'Iacon vs. Kaon' so far might actually be 'upper caste vs. lower caste' instead.) A fair helping of the multiple languages one might speak are probably 'upper caste' and 'lower caste' dialects of the same greater language, diverged to the point that they've become mutually unintelligible. And then there are regional variations and migrant populations that took hold in a certain place, and combine that with the (relative) ease of learning new languages even without the publishers' programs, and (I think) you've got a recipe for widespread multilingualism.

...I thought I had a point there that tied into the stuff from earlier, but maybe not? xD Oh well, more worldbuilding notes for u.

 

Spoiler

Completely unrelated to anything else in this thread but I really need to stop looking at the various megop tags; it just reminds me of how much I hate like 90% of the shit that gets posted there. Having an OTP that is ALSO a NOTP is exquisitely painful lmao. At this point I trust exactly one person to write it in a way that's not gonna give me screaming jibblies, and I'm wondering if I'm angry enough to start trying to write for the fic that got me vagued at and anon hated again...

 

First off: please don't feel compelled to reply right away, recharge those batteries, my excited rambling isn't going anywhere, please take care of yourself, yes?

Onto the actual excited rambling:

I think that is indeed a point That would make for widespread multilinguslism, esp assuming that all cybertronian languages share a root and thus some basic groundwork, kinda like how indoeuropean works. I think for someone like Orion, who also speaks a bunch of dead languages and can crossreference at literal Computer speed, it'd make learning languages the old fashioned way pretty interesting.

Also, another point in the caste system pillar: i do wonder if there was a point in history where someone picked up on the language drift happening and decided to kinda enforce it, because having such separate languages would IMO help enforce the system, ESP if at the same time access to 'highcaste' languages started being gated off to people beneath a certain rank.

 

S'all good, I mostly mentioned it as a reminder to myself, lol, I wanted to remind my future self I'd had the thought xD

This is something I'm wondering about wrt to the thing where buying language packets is so much the dominant way of acquiring new languages tbh. It would be very easy to just price the higher-status languages out of reach of lower-caste buyers, and it fits in well with my conception of Cybertron being completely autocratic but allowing certain arms of society - big business in this case - a certain amount of freedom in return for upholding the power structure. I'm wary of making too many of these smaller restrictions straight-up legislated; I think there's a point where too much legal restriction would choke the whole apparatus much more quickly than I've set up, and I want the existing power structure to be much more formidable an opponent than that - but legal restrictions aren't the only way the powers that be can control people, as Orion has just started to realise. It means there are loopholes, like Orion buying cheap language packets in bulk and passing them on to people who couldn't otherwise afford them, but that's where the other big soft-power arm comes into play: Do not aspire to things beyond your station.

And finally, an excerpt from the chapter to come, because I like chatfic A Lot and I Want More lmao:

Spoiler

Orion Pax: >> The fragment in Second Generation Boreal, what does the University Exchange database say about it?

Atlas Minor: >> Not much. It’s three pages of hardcopy… and actually it’s not titled ‘Theomachy’; it just has a reference number and a related works tag. The author listed is… I actually don’t know what that says.

A screenshot appeared in the media channel beside Atlas Minor’s username, showing the University Exchange’s metadata field with a single glyph in the authorship field. Orion zoomed in on the image. The glyph was one of the most complex he’d ever seen, ‘etching’ and ‘ore’ and ‘horizon’ jammed together with a modifier for shadows or night hovering on the top left.

The modifier he’d seen before. It was a code name, identifying a suspected link between many different works. Many early texts lacked a named author, so the codename was a useful way of tracking which ideas came from which location in which time, and therefore which historical events might give context to the writing.

Orion looked through his extended lexicon for the main glyph, and found nothing. Likely, it was a coinage.

Instead, he took the root glyphs and pasted them into the Hall database, put a set of composite brackets around them, and copied the modifier in outside the brackets.

Seven results.

Orion opened all seven in their own tabs. Like the University Exchange database, four were tagged with a meta link pointing to the modern Theomachy. One was tagged with the Book of Lineages, first of the Greater Books of History, but the link was flagged red for lack of evidence. The remaining two had no meta tags at all.

Orion Pax: >> I’m going to try the global database in a minute, but look at this. They’re all fragments.

Azimuth: >> That’s interesting. You can’t find any complete versions?

Orion Pax: >> None older than Nova Prime. Or, rather, there was one, but it was assembled during the last vorn of the Prime before him, Aeterna, when Nova Prime was serving in the High Trine of the Core Temple in the First City, which is also listed as the location of origin on that text.

Atlas Minor: >> I’ll bet you all five hundred credits that Nova wrote it, or at least edited it. My mentor collects his originals, there’s practically a mountain of them.

Azimuth: >> How many of these can you access?

Orion Pax: >> I can download Nova’s version in a digital copy right now. There are digital copies of the first three fragments, but they’re locked behind an Archivist’s access code on the Hall intranet. The other four are hardcopy only. In both cases, I can get you access, but you’ll have to come to the Hall; I can’t take anything off-site.

Azimuth: >> That’s fine. It gives me an excuse to go to the Hall of Records without my clade kings objecting.

Atlas Minor: >> Oh scrap. I’ll have to ask mine.

Azimuth: >> Yours are strict too?

Atlas Minor: >> No, just scary. Temple Guardian is a triplechanger with a big fragoff sword and I’m about the size of his shin.

Azimuth: >> That explains your name, I suppose.

Atlas Minor: >> [>:’C] Help me, Orion, I’m being bullied.

 

I think there's another downside to making the small problems legislated: laws are easy to change.

Like, all it takes is for someone to take a look at the books, go 'well that's a useless law' and start Lobbying, because if you don't/can't want to admit that it's to hold up the chaste system, a law like that wouldn't make much sense at face value.

Wheras 'things just Are Like That' is a lot harder to argue and build base against.

Which i think is something slowly dawning on Orion? Because i think so far he was sure that the system itself is okay, and that he current problems can be solved within the framework, if the right steps are taken.
But now it's starting to sink in that the current problems are a failure mode *inherent to* the system. It's not that something's gone awry, it's going exactly as intended, and any Reform that's supposed to 1) last 2)be actually useful has to start tearing at the foundations of the system.

*Love* that chatfic snippet, seeing Orion socialize with his peers is so good also that's Ye Olde Homestuck raising its head in my chest.

 

Yee, the more flexibility, the better. I'm also wondering about the possibility of like secular laws vs. religious laws, with the former taking precedence and applying to everyone, versus the latter being more of a... community self-policing thing, maybe? I'll have to a) do some research first, and b) see if there's any room for it in what I've written so far, but... yeah. XD

Yup, that's exactly it. He's trusted in the system his whole life, because he's been assured time and time again that The System Is Right And Good and that upholding it is the best he can do for the good of all people... but now he's finding that actually that's not the case, and trying to reconcile that new info with the worldview he has a lot of emotional investment in defending despite the fact that he's one of the people it's hurting most (in his particular sector of society, at least) because he's been trained by people he loved and trusted to prioritize that worldview above his own wellbeing. And discovering that this was not just an accident but intentional is a hard but necessary pill for him to swallow, otherwise he'll just end up repeating the 'mistakes' of the past.

(If I can work more of Megatronus' history into the fic I'm gonna have fun comparing their different trajectories toward revolution. Megatronus' Thing is that he makes snap decisions, he makes a choice and he commits and he very very rarely ever decides to go back on it because for just about all of his life doing so would have greatly increased the chance of him fucking dying, so committing 110% is in large part a learned survival reflex. Whereas Orion needs to deliberate before he makes a decision, both because he Needs all the Data in order to make an informed decision and because he's deliberately been taught to second-guess himself.)

I'm simultaneously relating hardcore to both of them right now because I have somehow ended up with a combo of Megatronus' snap decisions and Orion's second-guessing lmao. In my case it apparently manifests as playing both sides for as long as i can before something hits my trigger buttons and I go BOOM. x'D

 

Man i was reading a cute lil thing and had to nope out of it because someone called Optimus 'Opi'. Ugh I have to make this text small, I can't even look at it without being viscerally revolted.

 

Today's worldbuilding question: what is the state of Cybertronian cybersecurity? I've put little bits and bobs into the fic from time to time, I need to go back and have a look at what sort of a framework I've got so far and figure out what else I can squeeze in there.

 

Poor Orion, he's getting his world rocked in the least fun way ever. (Also: religious law = very tasty concept in this fic)

Considering how much cybersecurity im this setting is also the immediate personal security of anyone who hangs his processor into the net, i'd think that on the individual level it works like an immune system maybe? Because that's the function it'd gotta take

Which opens the road to governmemt Mandates 'vaccines' which....opens a few nasty roads later down the road on what else those 'vacvines' could contain... download a government Trojan directly into your brain?

 

so I automatically mentally read this in a bill wurtz voice and it cracked me the fuck up lmfao. thank u for that good laugh xDD

and YES! Orion had a moment about... god it must have been like 12 chapters ago or so where Ratchet noted he had some sort of foreign program hanging out in his processor and he freaked out for a moment before it turned out it was nothing malicious, so it's got to be a Known Risk. I think that given the very personal stake everyone's got in it, good basic security would probably end up being something like... personal hygiene crossed with like eating healthy or some shit when it comes to cultural attitudes, like we teach our kids to wash their hands and eat their veges; Cybertronians teach newsparks and nymphs how to clear their browser cookies and run virus scans, and probably like basic maintenance stuff as well, defragging and downloading/installing program updates... and this is kinda giving me ideas about like, rockstar security specialists and diy tutorials online and random security fads and 'tips' that aren't really tips and could be anywhere from useless to dangerous, the sort of shit you get in IRL health-adjacent industries lmao.

On the other end of the scale, it probably depends on how old the Datanet is, but... I kinda like the idea that even the Government finds it difficult to control anymore. There's a HUGE section of society devoted to working on various parts of it from the Archivists in their strictly monitored, nice and neat and mostly well-contained Grid (which does monitor what goes on in the rest of the Datanet but it's kind of a cursory look because they could never fuckin keep up with the workload if they didn't) all the way down to your office IT specialists who are there in case something specialised goes balls up and the rest of your employees are trained to do basic to midlevel troubleshooting but might break something if they messed with the actual program and you the business owner don't want to lose extra money on downtime you don't absolutely have to have. Shit i had a train of thought here but i got to the end of that sentence and i've forgotten what it was. I probably need to go to bed lmao

 

frankly i just made a dying whale noise on this because i just imagined robot-goop! run by some sort of famous actor who thinks they know what they're doing but Ratchet probably gets like eyetwitches if he hears their name because. no. NO. He'd had to treat ten people this week alone for following their latest tip and they'd somehow gotten their alt-mode pretzeled up during transformation because robotyoga and if he ever meets them he might do them a violence.

but anyhow, back to topic: I suspect that yeah the Datanet would be a sprawling uncontrollable mess (gotta be really for megs and co to get away with their forums like they do) maybe in part because everyone's processor is mostly hooked into there in some fashion and the data influx is just so massive. Just.... tumblr on speed maybe.

...now I'm thinking about robot memes and oh lord

 

lmfao YES. Ratchet would be so fucking annoyed, lol. Maybe that's part of why he got into so many arguments in his short career as a public health advisor, trying to take on all the upper-caste Influencers peddling pseudoscientific medical "advice" lmao

...It occurs to me that maybe the distinction between Grid and regular Datanet is not just that one's regulated and one's a seething mass of chaos, but also perhaps the way they were developed? I can't find the post but there was a thing I saw on tumblr talking about people creating wireless networks basically out of their backyard, and that makes me wonder if perhaps those networks I talked about in the language development post eventually developed like... security and structures/programs that allowed the individual/group networks to connect up. Which would mean that the Datanet is also absolutely fuckin ancient. It would explain the lack of control the otherwise autocratic government has over it, if the whole thing is basically homegrown. Versus the Grid, which in this model is a purpose-built, streamlined network mainly used for Government Stuff and perhaps things like academic and large business databases as well. I've written that it was created in the middle Golden Age, apparently, but I might push that back a little, because it would fit right in with the pattern of "new centralized planetary government tries various innovative soft-power methods of social control/influence in order to retain power" I've got going in the early Golden Age.

Semi-relatedly, a free and chaotic field of social interaction in the form of the Datanet also makes me wonder if it might take on aspects of an inversion ritual. Golden-Age society is super... stratified? in person; there are actual laws governing who a mech can interact with outside of their own caste tier and how, and social mobility is extremely restricted, alongside the focus of society being super collectivist in general. Maybe there's a certain amount of... foolery and disrespect that goes on in the Datanet that's perhaps not just tolerated but expected. You go online, make your edgy jokes and political macros, "get it out of your system", and come back to do your job IRL like a good productive member of society. You can cross the boundaries, but you're expected to come back, and if you don't, or if you do but you bring your online activities back with you, it's seen as antisocial.

And there's an ancient and venerable tradition of robot memes, for sure lmao. I actually have a sort-of relevant bit in the next update; it's more of a local meme than a viral one bUT:

Spoiler

Orion ducked around a steady drip on his way into the Hall of Records’ main hardcopy storage facility.

Long-ago architects had designed the building according to the Imperial fashion of the middle Golden Age, which meant wide sweeping eaves and a shallow concave portico above the main doors. Theoretically, precipitation should drain into an internal gutter system that ran down through the external walls, but heavy snow a few centuries ago had warped the portico, turning it into a temporary waterfall every time the weather turned bad. Every spring, the head of the Restoration department filed a request with the Hall admins to fix the issue. Every spring, the request was deferred, usually citing lack of funding for non-essential maintenance.

At this point, the Archivists working in the building had turned the waterfall into a parody of a tourist attraction. A makeshift sign inside the main doors warned visitors to observe from a safe distance. Another encouraged them to take photos and upload them to the Hall’s employee social page.

------------

...Inspired directly by that one sign someone put up after our earthquakes along one of the main roads that led into the less-affected areas of town: "Caution Easterners: Flat Surfaces Ahead." :'D

 

I'm sooooooo close to being able to update Rise, aaaaaaah. Mirage is Officially in the story now, and I'm slowly figuring out what to do about the Megazarak Problem. There's a thing I wanna do for kinktober so I may take a month off to try and work on that (or more likely work on them together), but we'll see if that gets off the ground or not. I seem to have lost my ability to write smut in the last couple of years lmao. Hopefully I'm just out of practice, haha.

 

1)vibrating both about update and kinktober

2) i do love the idea of the datanet as partial inversion Ritual since there doesn't seem to be official ones like Halloween/mardi gras/Fasching and all the pressure gotta go somewhere
Though now i also wonder if there's stand-up comediabs around on cybertron, or if that's just not a thing in the physical public - or indeed if they only happen in an online space, playing into the net being an accepted outlet again. In which case it would also have the bonus of being a lot more anonymous than a stage performance

 

Chapter 20 of Rise is up! I crashed hard last night and it took me like five hours to write 3 paragraphs jsdhgsfahj. Brain is still v v foggy but I done it.

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