Archive of Our Own

I don’t know what to do.

No, okay, that’s a complete fucking lie. I know exactly what to do. I have three or four contingency plans lined up. I just don’t want to DO it.

So — the statue didn’t work. Here are my contingency plans, listed in order:

1) Try the same thing again, but STOP HAL FROM MOVING AWAY FROM THE STATUE so we can be completely 100% certain that they didn’t just miss the loop trigger due to bad timing.

2) Figure out how to have an actual conversation with Solanum and question them for details.

Actually, that’s, um, it. I guess there were only two contingency plans. Because the third one is ‘mess with the Ash Twin Project directly’ which is not a plan at all, just fresh upset and frustration talking.

It would be good if any of this was particularly complex, too, and I could have an excuse to stop and think about how to approach it. But no — if I have to bear-hug Hal to keep them in front of the statue, I will; and communication with Solanum is as simple as finding a Nomai staff (I’ve seen at least a couple lying around) and figuring out how to use it.

Unfortunately, this time I’m faced with a new factor in my decision-making that wasn’t there before:

I think Hal hid an entry in the ship log before the Sun exploded.

Something that I didn’t know until I took Hal into the Ash Twin Project with me is that the Nomai warp pads only store one return charge at a time. This means that despite both of us entering the Project, only one of us could leave. I tried to chase Hal outside, but by the time I reached the exit warp pad it was no longer active.

This isn’t really a problem as far as the plan goes — in fact, it might simplify things if I can launch my scout at the pad once we enter, preventing EITHER of us from leaving — but right now it leaves me with a problem.

The problem is that I don’t know what Hal did once they left the Project.

They can’t have gotten far. They had two minutes left, maybe three at most. They’re completely uncoordinated when controlling any form of flight, be it suit jetpack or an actual spacecraft. Taking that into consideration, the most productive thing they could have spent the rest of their loop on would have been writing a ship log.

Or drinking. But that’s more a me thing.

If there IS a ship log, though, I can’t find it no matter where I look. Hal has done this to me before, of course, but judging by their various reactions to their various writings, it’s always been some level of benign. This time — well, the only real way to test this, short of interrogating them loop by loop for keywords and trying those keywords against the ship log corpus, is to let them at the ship’s computer and see what they find.

If I let them do this too early in the loop, this would allow Hal time to build on the text already there and leave themselves something more coherent next time, which could make the problem progressively worse. But without that, I’m just inviting the same sort of problem, which might also compound over time in its own way as Hal discovers their increasingly desperate writings at the worst possible time.

I think I have two options:

1) Purge the ship log and start over. This has several downsides, between the thousands (?) of loops it would set me back, and the fact that neither accidental complete data loss nor my only discovering the loop-persistent log system after so long are believable.

(I don’t think I can pretend to Hal that the loops are a fresh problem from my perspective — they know me too well, and it’s been so long that even if I tried I couldn’t quantify how much and in what ways I’ve changed.)

2) I tell Hal what happened and let them talk it out with past versions of themselves using the ship log. By default, this would have to happen with little to no supervision, and I would have to take anything they told me on faith.

Upsides: if this doesn’t work out, option 1) remains on the table. And — if this DOES work, then—

Violating Hal’s trust is not actually something I want to do, no matter what ends it might justify. The fact that it’s point 1 on this list — that my mind, faced with this constraint problem, went there immediately and ignored my other, equally legitimate layer of moral and ethical constraints so it could do so—

On the one hand, this is good; thinking under pressure can’t be restricted by moral and ethical constraints, especially when the situation comes down to ACT NOW OR DIE.

On the other hand, this layer is still valid and EXTREMELY necessary as post-processing when things aren’t as urgent. Without it, I wouldn’t really be ME anymore – and under the circumstances, I think we can safely say that ‘maintenance of utility function’ is PRIORITY ONE.

(It’s also possible that Hal didn’t actually write anything down and I’m just overreacting — but if I assume that’s the case, and I’m wrong, Hal could spend loops upon loops assembling entire conspiracy theories before I can head the process off. Best assume the worst.)

Given that, here’s the plan for the next few loops:

1a) Try the ATP statue plan with Hal again, this time telling them exactly what went wrong (and how) on the flight over.

1b) Try the ATP statue plan with Hal again, changing nothing, but physically holding them in place in front of the statue from the time we reach the ATP until the end of the loop. Problem: while I outmuscle them, they’re half a head taller than me and have the weight and strength that comes with being slightly older. The match might end up closer than I’d like. Also, I have to hold them there all loop but they only have to win once.

(I also don’t know exactly how the statues target people. What if the statue targets me instead? Is that possible? What would it even mean, to be linked to two statues at once?)

1c) Try the ATP statue plan with Hal again, but injure them once they’re at the statue so that they can’t leave. Break a leg or something. Cons: if this does work, they’re stuck with that memory forever, which might take a very long time for either of us to get over.

2) Tell Hal what happened and give them free access to the ship log so that they can write themselves a new summary message that will do the job better than the current one, now knowing what EXACTLY can go wrong.

Moral post-processing: 1c is out, 1b is weak at best, 1a is probably something I’d call ‘minimum viable product’? However, 2 is still the obvious choice despite its other drawbacks. If I want to trust Hal completely, and have them trust me in turn — which is non-negotiable, given what we’re up against — it’s the only long-term-viable option.

Might need a loop or two to come to terms with this, though.

Question:

The Nomai warp pads, with their single-return-trip-at-a-time design, seem like they would be a particularly bad match for a closed environment such as the Ash Twin Project. Why did the Nomai build the warp into the ATP the way they did, and how did they make this arrangement work for them?

The first thing to consider is that until the construction of the outer shell of the ATP was completed, the warp pad limitations did not affect those accessing the interior of the habitat. The Nomai could just duck in and out through gaps in the shell. Thus, as concerns manpower, this was not a problem.

Once the ATP was sealed up, though...

I picked my way through the area with a fine-pointed boning knife and here’s what I found:

1) There are no corpses within the ATP. Does this mean that the shell of the Project was impervious to ghost matter at the time of the Interloper’s explosion? Or does this just mean that there was no-one in there at the time?

(Adding a layer of water to an already demanding structural requirement seems like a waste of time and effort unless you already SPECIFICALLY know about ghost matter, which we know for a fact that the Nomai did not.)

2) There is a Nomai body directly outside the Ash Twin Project warp tower. However, they appear to have fallen over while facing the ATP warp pad, rather than in the process of exiting the Project.

It COULD (though it’s a stretch) be posited that they left the Project, realized that something was wrong (say, that they were comprehensively freezing to death for unclear reasons) and decided to (in what was likely a vain hope for planetary alignment) turn back for the warp pad just before they died.

This hypothesis has way too many moving parts, though. It’s much more likely that the Nomai in question was either attempting to seek shelter within the Project or had already been on their way inside for unrelated reasons. Could be that this is actually Yarrow’s body, or Ramie’s. This model also drops the requirement for the Project to be ghost matter-proof.

3) I went through all the available projection stones associated with the Nomai communications wall inside the Ash Twin Project. While the ATP appears to have been crewed by both Yarrow and Ramie, the communication logs imply that only one of them was present at a time. Yarrow communicated with Timber Hearth and Brittle Hollow, and Ramie communicated with Giant’s Deep; but there appears to be no case where both of them participated in the same exchange at the same time.

...okay, so we’re pretty sure that the ATP did in fact only house the one Nomai at the one time.

The reason behind this can most likely be put down to the fact that the ATP had to be impregnable — that is, the only possible mode of ingress was via warp pad — and that given limited resources it was optimal for the Nomai to only build the one warp pad to access the interior. The fact that Nomai warp pads require planetary mass alignment to work may also have been a factor, AND now that I think about it having two warp pads rather than one doesn’t actually protect you from making the same category of error anyway.

Given that, then, how did the Nomai work with and around this limitation?

This is the nook inside the Ash Twin warp tower where I usually hide while waiting for the HUGE SAND COLUMN to come by.

My first thought regarding the ‘one person at a time’ limitation was that maybe the Nomai entering the Project left something outside by the warp pad on entry? This would signal to others that there was someone present and that they shouldn’t enter or they’d get stuck — and look, there’s some convenient shelving here that could be put to use just for this purpose.

(and — would you look at that — nothing on the shelves, no bodies found inside the Project. One point to the Hatchling. That, or maybe one of Yarrow or Ramie was banned from entering the Ash Twin Project once the shell was completed in order to simplify things, though this seems less likely.)

I think that sums it up adequately. Reasons for constructing the ATP warp pad this way check out, as does evidence that the Project was crewed by one person at a time. But—

Surely even the Nomai made mistakes. What would they have done if they’d accidentally ended up with two people inside the Project at once?

...I suppose they might have just held hands and walked back across the warp pad together.

(Reminder to test this the next time it comes up.)

Spent a few loops looking for Nomai staves. I’d initially thought they were a common tool. My two main hypotheses were: either they’re personal and every Nomai will have one somewhere close by, or they’re communal and there should be one by every message broadcast wall.

For some reason, neither of these turned out to be the case. I look forward to asking Solanum how this actually works.

The staff in the image is propped up against a scroll shelf in a classroom down in the Brittle Hollow school district. I think it’s Filix’s staff. They were teaching their class about Nomai Festivals when — the Interloper—

Well.

(I’ll have to write more about that eventually, I think — I have a lot of unprocessed feelings on the matter — but now is not the time.)

I think the classroom staff is the most convenient option; I’ll explain exactly why later. First, a shortlist of the other staves I found; my findings are begging for a research entry, and I’ve never really thought about the staves in any depth before.

There’s a bit to get through here, so I’ll update this entry as I go.

There are two staves in the Black Hole Forge. It’s a strange place to find two staves. One is resting atop a skeleton that is almost cradling it; possibly they were using it as support to stand, or they clutched it reflexively as the ghost matter hit them. The other one is...resting against a work table behind the communications wall, unused?

This threw me for a loop (or two). However, I later remembered passing by a Nomai skeleton lying on the gravity walkway close to the entrance to the Forge; maybe the staff was theirs and they left it behind by accident?

Unfortunately, these aren’t particularly useful to us, because the Forge is difficult to access reliably until too late in the loop to be practical.

I found one staff in the Sunless City. Unlike the last three, this one appears to be communal. That, or it belongs to one of the two people who died here, presumably while talking (the other skeleton is set on a bench out of frame), and they’re sharing it back and forth; however, the fact that I found it set in a container in the corner implies that this staff is intended for communal use.

On the back of this, one of the places I thought to look was in the Nomai Eye Shrines in each of the cities. I had thought that the shrines were group writing projects intended to be added to as well as discussed, and that the omission of the author’s name from the message headers represented something like leaving your ego at the door when faced with the ultimate unknown.

If that was the case, it would have made sense to find a communal staff or two in the Sunless City Eye Shrine, but — no luck.

(Update: spoke too soon. Found a communal staff in the Hanging City Eye Shrine:

It’s weird, then. There are staves in some of the places I expected to find staves, but not in all of them, and there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to whether I can find them in a specific place or not.

...was there a shortage?

No, okay, I like this. It makes intuitive sense. Let’s delve this a little deeper.)

So let’s say my original hypothesis was correct and the staves are a communal resource; but they’re also scarce, and have to be passed around as they become available rather than resting unused in every location where they might be needed.

This made me come back to my original question: are the staves a personal possession, or a communal tool? Filix had one, but it’s specifically there for use in class and they ostensibly passed it around to the children as needed.

Let’s go through our list again:

1) The Hanging City School District. Filix is using the staff, but they’re handing it to children as the children need to write. And in that case — does the staff belong to Filix, or to the classroom? Maybe it’s just the classroom staff.

Importantly, the classroom was also occupied and they were actively using the staff, which is why it’s there. Points to the staves being a communal good.

(If the children also got to use the staff, why is the children’s writing visibly scrawly and less controlled? This implies that using the staff is not like typing with a keyboard, but more like...drawing? Specifically, to use a keyboard such as the one in my ship, you don’t need to be amazingly skilled to write legible text, but only to write FAST; someone unfamiliar with a keyboard layout or lacking the muscle memory to use one can still hunt for one key at a time and get the same result.

I’m sure I’ll find out more than I want to know about how inconvenient this is once we actually pick up a staff to practice with.)

2) The Black Hole Forge. This one is the weirdest for me; even assuming the second staff belongs to the skeleton found outside on the gravity walkway, that still makes one staff each.

Possible reasons for this under the ‘communal good’ theory include:

a) A miscommunication regarding whether or not there was a staff already present in the Black Hole Forge. The Forge was a major resource during the construction of the Ash Twin Project AND it contains a communication wall, so it would make sense to have a staff stationed there semi-permanently.

b) The person who died with a staff in their arms was only detouring there on their way somewhere else.

c) Someone messed up due to confusion and lack of focus. It’s difficult to remember sometimes, but the state in which I’m seeing all the Nomai was one of turmoil, caught between the failure of a project they had lived for and dreamed of, and on its heels the arrival of an unknown threat (although admittedly the time elapsed between these two events remains unknown). It’s not impossible that some staves may have gotten a bit lost as their bearers weren’t sure what to do with themselves.

I’m not sure any of these is a great explanation, but between them I think they inject enough uncertainty into the situation to prevent the Black Hole Forge staves disproving the communal good theory.

(Doubled back and got a picture. The skeleton is more decayed than I remembered; about all that I can tell is that the head used to be at the Black Hole Forge end of the walkway, and the legs are pointing toward the main body of the Hanging City. This could indicate that they had remembered their staff and were just in the process of doubling back for it, or that they were leaving the Forge at the time and just fell over backwards.

Or this could be an entirely unrelated Nomai. So I suppose maybe it’s not likely that this skeleton and the additional staff within the Black Hole Forge are related, but at least it’s POSSIBLE.)

3) The Sunless City conversation. The only issue I take with this one is that there’s a container next to the text wall, serving as a stand. Maybe that particular wall was in frequent use at the time? There were certainly two Nomai in close proximity to the wall, but the staff was set down in a way that implied they were either already done talking, or hadn’t yet started.

Under the Scarce Communal Good theory, I would have assumed that as soon as the Nomai were done talking, they’d take the staff elsewhere — and having wanted to talk in the first place, one of them would have had to hunt down a staff to use.

(A lot of this also depends on how exactly the Nomai debate. For all I know, they were talking most of the time with the staff set aside, and only took the staff up to record highlights and relevant points raised during a broader discussion.

Actually — this would explain why the staff was set off to the side when the Interloper hit.)

4) The Hanging City Eye Shrine. Based on the Sunless City Conversation, this is where I would have expected to find communal staves; however, checking the Sunless City Eye Shrine first and finding nothing, I quickly lost faith in the theory. It was satisfying to have it proved out by the Hanging City Shrine, then — but at the same time, I was confused. What was the difference between one Eye Shrine and the other, that one contained a staff and the other didn’t?

Then it hit me. Just out of frame in the Hanging City Eye Shrine image, there are three (dead) Nomai sitting close together. It would make sense to assume that they had visited the Eye Shrine as a group, bringing a staff with them to record any new conclusions they might reach. This follows the same pattern as the Sunless City Conversation, where the staff is set aside while the Nomai discuss and is only picked up to record material points.

A major point in favor of the theory is that not once (other than the misplaced one in the Black Hole Forge) have I found a staff unattended. Either they collapse into nothing (impossible), are stored alongside (inside?) Nomai pressure suits (makes no sense) or they’re all in constant use due to scarcity. That much, I’m reasonably confident in.

But then there’s an outlier.

5) Solanum’s staff.

Solanum has taken off on a coming-of-age voyage to the Quantum Moon, which is by any measure a hostile environment. If the staves are a scarce resource — and having run a pretty comprehensive search, I only found six, so even being generous let’s say there’s at most ten scattered around the solar system total — then why send one with (technically) a CHILD to one of the most hostile places in the system?

The one thing that immediately springs to mind is — well, I’ve not seen any writing on the Quantum Moon; nothing authored by Solanum nor anyone else. The only thing they visibly use the staff for is to communicate with me, which is something they had no way of predicting they would need at any point, and certainly not before they took off for the Quantum Moon. Except — I mean, there is an audio recording device on board their shuttle, but I don’t think you need a staff to write to one of those? Because, er, voice recording?

(Do the Nomai even have a spoken language?)

My point being, when I find a scarce device being used for a purpose that couldn’t have been predicted by its designers, and for NOTHING ELSE, my mind snaps right back to the Theatre Theory.

Yes, I KNOW that’s insane. There’s no way ALL OF NOMAI CULTURE, all the CONVERSATIONS and the BODIES and the PAIN are made up just to—

—to what?

I’ve spent too long investigating the Stranger. Maybe going through the rougher parts of the Nomai cities was something I needed. A tap on the shoulder.

So what’s the best way to obtain a staff?

I’ve done some preliminary trial runs. The Black Hole Forge is out, the Sunless City takes too long to get to, and the Hanging City Eye Shrine is in an awkward spot to access reliably without plummeting into the black hole, and might take longer to get to than Filix’s classroom regardless.

The classroom, on the other hand (and after a bit of practice) is accessible via the north pole backdoor, and only requires two measured jetpack jumps and climbing a set of stairs.

The worthier question is — how to get out of there quickly after the fact?

I ran some tests to compare times and weigh up a few options. Doing this alone is not ideal; I have to guess at how long it takes to enter and exit the ship, and how difficult particular maneuvers or intercepts in space might prove to be in practice.

Still, here’s what I found:

Assumptions:

1) The staves require a surface area of some minimal quality to write on; we can probably assume that the Nomai communication walls are sized to a minimum viable surface area, given the limited resources that the Nomai here were forced to work with. I don’t have this much surface area available inside my ship, so I’ll have to land somewhere to run tests.

2) Assuming the quality of staff output depends directly on input dexterity, Hal and I should definitely test this without our suits on first. Just because the Nomai (or at least Solanum) can operate the staves with their suits on doesn’t mean that learning to do so is easy. This restricts our potential landing areas to places with an atmosphere, which are severely limited within the solar system. It’s almost simplest to land somewhere else on Timber Hearth after acquiring the staff, for reasons I will get into in a moment.

(Naturally, we’ll need to learn how to use the staves with our suits on over time, as the Sixth Location version of the Quantum Moon doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere. However, the transition from direct manipulation to suited tests should also be run on Timber Hearth, because the presence of an atmosphere gives us more options for direct communication, as well as coming up with mnemonic techniques and other learning aids.)

Timings:

If I was running this alone, fetching the staff from Filix’s classroom would require me to complete an entire circuit — parking at the north pole of Brittle Hollow, accessing the Hanging City through the hidden entrance in the ice floes, jumping across to the classroom, dropping into the black hole, and warping back through the White Hole station. Executed without major errors, this takes around 90 seconds.

(I tried going back up the same way, once or twice, but the jumps aren’t as easy on the way back up, and if you take one wrong turn the whole place turns into an incomprehensible maze. Even if I did get this to work, I would probably save 30 seconds at most — and while that may end up being worthwhile eventually, right now it’s not an efficiency increase we need.)

Probably the biggest delay in this sequence is arriving at the White Hole station, activating the rotation, then waiting for the correct alignment to activate the warp.

In — in THEORY, this could be circumvented by just — shooting right past the White Hole station and building speed, and then being intercepted by a second person piloting the ship. It would save time, too — the trip from the north pole to the white hole only takes 40 seconds, less than half of the total travel time.

The problem is that this would work best if Hal fetched the staff and I piloted the ship, but Hal doesn’t have the dexterity or the experience required to make the jetpack jumps to Filix’s classroom in the first place — at least, not reliably. And the problem with THAT is that an intercept like that is a finicky proposition at the best of times; we’d probably lose three out of four loops AT BEST to failed intercepts.

A (hopefully?) better version of this plan would be to park the ship near the white hole; however, flying out there takes a while — definitely longer than 40 seconds — and the ship would be under threat from all the other debris being ejected from the white hole if it got too close. You could circumvent this by having the person with the staff wait on the White Hole Station’s gravity plating, but—

It’s likely best to just spend the 90 seconds and be done with it.

(I wonder why there weren’t any staves in either the Statue Workshop or the Construction Yard. You’d think they’d ideally have one staff per area, or at the very least one to share between the islands. Maybe there was one kept around the Construction Yard, but it fell in the water when the Interloper hit? I don’t know. There’s a body stuck on the side-on gravity walkway, so their having dropped it is at least plausible.)

Things I shouldn’t be doing: brute-force keyword searching the ship log for things Hal hid from me.

It’s not that I expect to succeed. Hal has a talent for this sort of thing. Either they spent half their childhood coming up with secret codes that only they would know, or they have some sort of internal algorithm that allows them to reliably regenerate the same keywords or codes every loop without sending themselves additional data. Realistically, it’s probably a combination of both.

Still, I can’t convince myself to just — drop it. Even if I can’t find the things they really wanted to keep hidden, maybe I could find something they wanted to hide from me...temporarily? Information that was volatile at the time, but wouldn’t be so forever.

No reason not to give it a shot.

I can’t believe they hid that under ‘areyouokay’. It’s — almost a taunt. Not something that I would ever search unless I was having — doubts, at best, and outright difficulties at worst.

Still, it was — there are worse messages that I could have found, when in the mental state required to search by that particular keyword.

It’s nothing I didn’t know. It’s nothing I haven’t discussed with Hal themselves — though, admittedly, it’s been a while since then, and this entry is — well.

It’s — a certain level of reassuring, to know that at least some of my feelings are mutual; that I’m not doing the emotional equivalent of just — yelling into the void.

I might spend another few loops searching the log.

Just in case.

I don’t know how much time has passed.

I know I’ve been putting it off, again. It’s — I get trapped in a cycle, though I should know better. Even though this has happened many times before. First, the doubts build. Then, the fear. And eventually, I end up in an insane state where I expect Hal to – I don’t know. Hate me? Never want to talk to me again?

It never bears out, of course. Or, at least, it hasn’t yet. But then, each time this happens, I have a new and exciting reason to believe that this time might somehow be different. Then, when I get past that, the moral and ethical dilemma comes back into play and reminds me of how evil I am for wanting company in my own little personal loop of endless torment.

But it’s all stupid excuses. Fear-driven hallucinations. I’ve discussed this all with Hal time and time again, and we’re both confident in our conclusions. So either — either I succumb to my temporary insanity and take actions that are detrimental to both of us, as well as potentially irreversible, or — I respect them, and myself, and go with the plan that we’d already established to begin with.

It’s just — it’s hard. In the moment, it’s hard; when the only person I have to listen to is myself, and they’re not being particularly constructive.

But the longer I leave it, the worse it gets.

POTENTIAL NOMAI STAFF LOCATIONS THAT I FORGOT TO CHECK
working outward from the Sun, which is not a planet (as Yarrow so astutely put) and thus probably does not have any Nomai staves in it (unless someone dropped one off of the Sun Station, which I wouldn’t put past them, really, and even then ‘staff’ might be a generous term at that point)

...wow, that’s a long list. I don’t expect to find more than one or two staves across all these, but it’s still a massive lapse that I didn’t consider these places at all to begin with. Maybe I really do need Hal to hang around and be the other half of my brain.

Hal: While we’re here — I’ve never gotten my hands on a Nomai staff directly, but a lot of the conjecture little bro has set down makes sense at first glance. I’m particularly concerned about the analog control surface, which might take some time to master; this then explicitly disqualifies me as communicator and means little bro has to learn to use the staves on their own.

There’s no way I’m going to be able to hit all these locations in one loop. This will be a compilation entry. I’ll index these in the same order as they were in the original list when I’m done.

...then again, I don’t actually have to hit all of them. As much as I would like to discover the secrets of Nomai staff distribution throughout the solar system, that’s not why we’re doing this. I’m supposed to have a specific goal in mind, and — my procrastination habit wasn’t this bad before the loops, but—

There’s something about having infinite time on your hands that just saps the urgency out of everything. Maybe there’s something to be said for prioritizing for once, and getting one task done so we can move on to the next.

(I can always go back later and check the remaining locations. And — I guess if it turns out I can’t do that, then that just proves I was right to prioritize to begin with.)

Sun Station: Disqualified. Waiting for the Ash Twin sands to lower and allow access to the Sun Station warp tower takes too long.

High Energy Lab: Sand is not a factor, as Ember Twin starts off empty. Need to time how long it would theoretically take from Timber Hearth takeoff to having the staff (if one is present here) in my possession on board the ship. Need to time this for Brittle Hollow as well — so far the only hard numbers I have are for time taken from leaving the ship to boarding it again.

(It’s been a while since I’ve taken the path to the Lab, but I recall there being a spot where the sand forces a delay until the sand level reaches a particular point. This spot might disqualify this option all on its own.)

Ash Twin Project: Disqualified for Ash Twin sand reasons.

Mining Site 2b: Close, convenient, not obstructed by any time-dependent phenomena. If there’s a staff in here, that would be ideal; particularly so because in order to practice with it we wouldn’t even have to leave the mining site.

Attlerock Ruins: Close by, not as convenient as the Mining Site but almost as good. Definitely worth a look.

Southern Observatory: A pain to access; definitively more complex than the classroom staff. Disqualified.

Tower of Quantum Knowledge: Disqualified; often inaccessible until the very end of the loop.

Hanging City Surface Structure: This would be ideal — like the classroom staff but without the 90-second round trip.

Old Brittle Hollow Settlement: This would also be a great place to find a staff, but it’s a very complicated area and actually finding anything in here might take some work.

Orbital Probe Cannon: Has the major upside that Giant’s Deep is directly overhead when I wake up. Check for staves first, then compare flight times with Brittle Hollow’s.

A major upside that the OPC might have is the ability to experiment with the staves on location, rather than having to double all the way back to Timber Hearth (though this assumes the ability to write directly on Nomai gravity tiling, which may not be possible). I’m 90% certain the Command Module, at least, is pressurized. This time save might be significant enough that unless we find a staff on Timber Hearth, a possible staff found in the OPC could win by default.

Probe Tracking Module: This one is too inconsistent to plan for, and in the worst cases the time taken to access it could be significantly longer than the entirety of the Brittle Hollow classroom staff retrieval sequence. Veto.

(If the Module ends up somewhere convenient, though, I may as well check for staves on the way.)

Escape Pod 3: HAHAHAHA um no.

(The Dark Bramble is a nightmare to navigate even with waypoints, and the presence of the anglerfish tanks the reliability of Bramble flights significantly.)

The Vessel: Like Escape Pod 3, but worse. Disqualified.

Second pass:

Brittle Hollow classroom: listed here for reference. Time from Timber Hearth to Brittle Hollow is around 75 seconds, which together with the 90-second staff retrieval loop makes for 165 seconds total (not quite three minutes). I’m ignoring the time required to fly back to Timber Hearth for now, working under the assumption that once I have more ‘staff-in-ship’ times to work with one of them will emerge as the clear winner regardless of the time required to fly back home for testing.

High Energy Lab: Took me 135 seconds to make it down to the sand chokepoint alone. After that...er, I lost count. It was at least that much again before the sand rose sufficiently to let me through. Disqualified.

(Looked anyway. Didn’t even find a staff in there. Disappointing.)

Mining Site 2b: No staff. Hit this one on the way back from the High Energy Lab, so I didn’t bother timing it properly.

Attlerock Ruins: No staff. Same deal as with the Mining Site; hit it on the way back from the High Energy Lab, didn’t record precise timings.

Hanging City Surface Structure: Staff!

This removes the requirement for the 90-second White Hole station circuit. It also removes the requirement for stopping by a classroom full of dead children every loop, which, um, no complaints. Current best option, no contest.

Old Brittle Hollow Settlement: Disqualified because there’s a staff in the Hanging City Surface Structure. The escape pod is a more difficult landmark to locate quickly than the structure at Brittle Hollow’s north pole, and the Surface Structure staff is already right there on the surface; there’s no way a staff anywhere within the old settlement will be more easily accessible than this one was.

Orbital Probe Cannon: No luck. Looked everywhere. If there’s a staff in the Launch Module, I couldn’t find it in all the floating garbage.

And hey, look, I was right — there IS a clear winner. I did a trial run, launchpad to staff to landing spot outside the Timber Hearth Observatory, and got 135 seconds. I can probably improve this with practice, as my return approach to Timber Hearth was a bit awkward.

It also only took me two or three loops to check all the locations. I think. I lost count. It was intense, chasing from location to location and trying to be as efficient as possible about it. I think I miss this sort of problem solving.

...time to talk to Hal again.

Hal: READ THIS FIRST

I have three minutes to throw this together (and I am on the way to very drunk) so forgive any typing or formatting issues. I’ll fix this in future loops, but here we go.

The time loop is real, little bro is doing as okay as they can given the circumstances, and they can be taken at their word. If you suspect that is not the case, check the usual search term for notse.

Proof: (insert proof here later, something embarrassing I didn’t share with them, maybe the true story of how I broke my foot.)

The priority right now is to consolidate (or mend where required) the trust between the two of us. To this effect, little bro hav given me free reign of the ship log to allow me to go through all my (our) historical entries and put together a clearer picter of how I’ve been doing and what I’ve learned and realized over the course of however many loops.

Note to ask little bro about the nomai staves, they brought up findings when they came to get me but then we never actually

[Keywords: readme, readthis, hal, generatedsentence00]

Hal: READ THIS FIRST

This is the top-level log entry summarizing the situation for Hal (me) while I have not yet been linked to the Ash Twin Project time loop. I’ve had a little more time to polish this up now, so it should read more cleanly and there shouldn’t be any errors.

My first priority will be to put as much relevant content in here as I can, topping out at a ten-minute reading time, and then attempt to re-condense it back into as short a document as possible to leave most of the rest of the loop available for other pursuits. As it is, provided little bro flies with some measure of care, I can sit at the computer and read this while they take us to Brittle Hollow and retrieve a Nomai staff for testing (the staves being the research focus of the day).

To summarize the obvious: the time loop is real, little bro is doing very okay given their situation, and they can be taken at their word. (If we suspect that’s not the case, we can check the usual search term for notes; little bro is willing to give us the privacy at the computer required to keep our keyword system hidden from them, especially in the short term.)

Proof: I was going to put something specific here, but you can briefly trial our keyword system to find information that confirms this, including things we both know I’ve never told anyone. A brief test this loop took fifteen seconds to locate information sufficient to serve as proof, so I’m sure you (I) can figure it out.

Priorities (other than consolidating information): sometime in the last however many loops, the term ‘the mechanics of trust’ has emerged between the two of us, and both of us have at moments felt that the arrangement we default to within the loops is insufficient to foster that trust in this context. The time loop puts our relationship under strain for a variety of reasons, and we have to head these reasons off before they affect our cooperation.

(We’re both pretty certain that once I’m linked to the Ash Twin Project the problem will become much simpler to navigate, but right now — with only twenty-minute slices of recollection available to me at any one time — it’s very important that we continue to extend patience, charity and trust to each other as required.)

To correct what we both perceive as a deficiency in our communication, little bro has also given me free reign of the ship log so that I can go through all my (our) historical entries and put together a clearer picture of how I’ve been doing, as well as what I’ve learned and realized over the course of the recorded loops.

While I do this, little bro will be learning how to write with a Nomai staff so that we can have a proper two-way discussion with Solanum, who we’re hoping might know something about why the Ash Twin Project statues aren’t linking properly. Based on what little bro has seen, the staves have analog controls, so it’s not as simple as typing your message up and holding your staff against a display surface; input requires actual fine motor control, which will definitely require practice before little bro’s writing can be understood (time saved by typing faster or more cleanly aside).

That’s what I have for now; I need to spend the rest of this loop investigating historical log entries. Relevant log entry references that I have already located to this purpose can be found under [trustreadinglist].

Good luck, future me.

[Keywords: readme, readthis, first, readthisfirst, hal, headersummary, generatedsentence00]

Hal has started on what they call ‘an investigation of historical log entries’ and what I’m calling their ‘log spelunking adventure’. It’s going well so far, I think. I do my best to resist the urge to look in over their shoulder, and they seem to appreciate that.

In the background, I’m working on mastering the Nomai staff writing system. It’s not easy. I’ll write up a log on it once I have a little more to show for my efforts.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking. Specifically, about the changes in Hal’s reactions to me and my behavior, and the changes I’ve undergone myself over the course of the time loop.

On the surface, I think the issue is obvious. Or — okay, maybe I shouldn’t undersell it like that. It SEEMS obvious, and it’s the sort of situation that’s easy — that I find easy — to map hypotheses to.

Ironically, I’m not sure I’d be having this problem with people less clever than Hal. Sure, there would be some — ‘misunderstandings’ might not be the right word. Maybe hesitation, or — unease. That’s the word. An unease with (around?) me and what I have become.

Hal doesn’t do that. It’s like — I’ve gotten used to it, and started taking it for granted, but it’s still a magical thing to watch. They seem lost for a moment while I finish my sentences about the time loop, what’s going on, why I’m doing what I’m doing. Then they get this vague expression on their face.

(It’s not concentration. Their concentrating face looks different. When they’re really focused on something, they narrow their eyes and clench their jaw a bit — can’t be good for their teeth — and their breathing slows, a bit like I imagine our ancestors might have done back when they hunted sea-prey.

This wasn’t that. This was more like their brain had disconnected from their body. I call this their MAJOR REALIZATION FACE. At least, when they’re paying attention. They did this a few times when we were reducing the Nomai language to tokens while developing the translator tool.

When they’re not listening, I call it their SEIZURE FACE. It’s not really a seizure face, I know, but BRAIN DAMAGE FACE wasn’t as catchy.)

Anyway.

They get this vague expression; they stand still for a moment, and then they come out of it just — knowing everything. Fine; not EVERYTHING — I’m prone to hyperbole — but they draw a lot of connections that I just...wouldn’t have thought to, at least until much later. They’re — if they were the ones caught in the loop, and I was stuck outside it, I wouldn’t have been able to cooperate with them anywhere near as well as they are cooperating with me.

We have different skillsets, sure; but whichever way you slice it, I’m just not as smart as them. And that’s fine; they don’t have my motor skills, my intuitive threat-response. We each have our wheelhouse. But counting by — let’s call it hardware acceleration — I have nothing on them.

And I think that’s the problem. Not the fact that I’m not as smart as them, necessarily, but more their intelligence in an absolute sense. Because what actually happens is this:

I fill them in on the situation. They get a read on my emotions and my attitude. And they immediately come up with — a model?

It’s more than a hypothesis. It’s a coherent picture of reality, formed from everything I’ve told them and everything they’ve seen. They take into account the differences between the ‘me’ they knew and the one they’ve just been presented with, and they draw conclusions. And a lot of them are — well. Either — correct, or...inconvenient. Correct ENOUGH, and obtrusive in the information theory sense. A hindrance to information gathering.

Point is, they overcorrect. They have no way to tell what I’ve been through and what changes I’ve undergone, exactly, so they get the best read they can off of my emotional state and my tone and they extrapolate. Which is...not necessarily wrong, it’s just — it’s so HARD to redirect them from that after the fact. And I think — no, it’s definitely true — one of the skills I used to have that’s atrophied within the time loop is my ability to manage and project emotions correctly. It’s almost impossible to emote right, without a real-life person to talk to and practice on. And—

Look, I wouldn’t say it’s been months? But that’s mostly because I’ve completely lost count. I think maybe the Probe Tracking Module is supposed to be able to tell me how many loops have passed since the time loop error condition woke me up, but the Cannon has launched the Probe so many times now that the display no longer differentiates between values that small.

...admittedly, the way they’re going about it is probably one of the best ways available to them. But it still hurts, because we were friends. ARE friends, I hope. And they’re — they’ve been put in a position where they have to treat me as hostile — at least briefly, and at least by assumption, but—

It’s like they don’t know me anymore. And it’s almost reassuring, to realize that they’re behaving this way because they ACTUALLY don’t know me anymore, and have to relearn me after everything I’ve been through. It’s — yes, it unequivocally sucks. But it’s also — on the one hand, I get it, and on the other hand, it—

—it validates everything I’ve been through. Everything I’ve seen.

This is making me want to talk to Riebeck and Chert again. Maybe — maybe in a few more loops. We’ll see.

This is the consolidated Nomai staff research log entry. I might break a new entry off every ten loops or so, summarizing the major points from the most recent entry so I can trim the fat from these things as we go along.

(Because I’m letting Hal spend most of the loop actively digging through the ship log for entries, there’s not a lot of time I can spend writing things down myself. Right now the plan is something like ‘last few minutes of each loop go to me while Hal gets extremely drunk, because I’ve tanked so many supernova deaths that what’s one more, really?’

This is not ideal, and I’ll be supplementing it with the occasional solo loop just so I can find the time to write down all my thoughts. Which, if you keep reading — well, the staves turned out to be a whole lot more trouble than expected.)

Alright. Here we go.

I’ve eyed these things up from a distance for more than half my life, ever since Feldspar sent back the first images of the staves they’d found within the Hanging City. Admittedly, they didn’t spend a lot of time there, nor did they index their images particularly well.

(Image is of a staff’s control surface. This was the best I could do; the scout is not designed for close-up photography.)

To start with: what are the requirements for using a staff?

The Nomai, like us, have three-fingered hands, and their suits cover their hands with what were once assumedly skin-tight gloves. The suits themselves have thick wrist braces, which (I think) allowed them to manage pressurization differently for the hands than they did for the rest of the body. This then permitted the Nomai fine motor control without compromising the suit’s sealed environment.

Nomai hands — with Solanum as evidence — appear to have no issue controlling the staves. This bodes well for our own three-fingered hands. Admittedly, the Nomai have finer fingers than we do, but the initial mapping is promising.

It’s been a while, but I believe I recall Solanum writing with the staff by dragging their fingertip along the control surface. I don’t think I can get a close enough look to tell exactly what they’re triggering without them noticing and reacting somehow, though.

(I took a loop off between staff research and watching Hal reassemble themselves using external memory dumps to visit Solanum again. Can confirm that they trigger the staff to write by using a swiping or dragging motion across the control surface.

Can also confirm that they stopped writing and turned to watch what I was doing when I stepped up close enough to see the control surface in any level of detail.

I also noticed one other thing, though, and that thing is — concerning, at best. It can have a separate section down below as a harbinger of how it’s about to derail this entire research project.)

What do we know about Nomai staves?

This is a rhetorical question. I’m asking because the answer is either ‘not a lot’ or ‘nothing’, depending on how self-aware you are. Once this thought occurred to me, I held off on actually trying to use the staff, and instead started by compiling everything I already know so that I had something to build off of.

So here’s what I know:

1) The only actual staff use we have direct data on is that seen during the encounter with Solanum. Only the things we directly witness them doing with the staff can go in the ‘the staves can definitely do this’ column.

(Since I’ve had this realization, I’ve gone back to see Solanum a few more times to make absolutely certain I have everything down correctly.)

1a) Solanum DOESN’T TOUCH THE CONTROL SURFACE OF THE STAFF when they reach out to paint the communication icons on the Quantum Moon rock.

1b) Solanum stacks the communication icon pedestals by gesturing at them with the staff. It is notable that they use the control surface end to gesture, rather than the lower end, which is the end commonly set against the writing surface when etching the desired text in place.

1c) When I place two icons atop the pedestals to ask a question, Solanum appears to compose their response by sliding their finger across the staff’s control surface, and then setting the lower end of the staff against the wall. Once they do this, the text is etched in a spiral running outward from the point of contact between the end of the staff and the target writing surface.

1ci) If the text consists of multiple elements, then once I translate and interpret the first section — and ONLY THEN — the next section spirals out from a randomly chosen point (or particular geometric point, I don’t know, this might be a Hal question) on the first spiral in the same way that the original section of text spiraled out from the end of the staff.

1cii) There does not appear to be a limit to how many segments of text can be nested in this way, beyond that of the physical dimensions of the target writing surface.

Here’s a summary of a thought I had early in the piece that (I think) does a good job of illustrating the magnitude of the problem:

The Nomai settlements throughout our solar system are dotted with ‘writing walls’. Some of these walls enable two-way communication between any combination of locations, based on which broadcast (?) tile is inserted into the associated pedestal. Other writing walls do not broadcast text but instead record it on scrolls that can be inserted into and removed from the walls, allowing for the storage of much more text than the wall itself could otherwise hold.

My original thought had been something to the effect of ‘well, the Nomai writing walls are designed for writing, so maybe the whole wall is a display that works a little like our screens do, and touching the staff to the wall transmits what the Nomai holding the staff wants to display on the wall and the wall obliges by activating the correct sections (pixels?) in the correct patterns.’

But the text isn’t limited to specially-constructed communication or scroll-recording walls. It’s EVERYWHERE. The crumbling walls of decrepit buildings, scribed randomly on the ground on Ember Twin, and Solanum faces no apparent issues when etching text into Quantum Moon rock. So whatever causes the text to display, it’s a property of the staff, not of the writing surface.

And THEN there’s the whole PROGRESSIVE DISCLOSURE thing, which is NOT HOW TEXT WORKS—

Okay. Let’s take a step back and focus on the first impossible thing.

How exactly does the staff cause text to be etched in a spiral spanning outward from the point of contact? Let’s not worry about how the Nomai writer transmits what they want to write to the staff in the first place, or how that transmission (or any input) is interpreted as text. How, mechanically, does the staff generate the physical text?

A thought that I’ve had was that maybe it’s — a hard light projection? I — I’m making up words, I know, but what I mean is — some structure independent of the writing surface? Which makes sense, because when you ask Solanum a second question, they erase their previous message before displaying the new one. I can’t imagine how that could possibly have worked if the text was physically etched into the rock.

Let’s move straight past the ‘I don’t know’s and on to a specification of some minimal necessary properties of the process.

If the staff can project a segment of text across a surface, and then interacting with that section of writing can cause another section of writing to project itself out in response, this means that as part of the writing process the staff imbues each section of writing with some of the staff’s own properties. Whatever mechanism within the staff is creating the writing must be a mechanism that the staff can then imbue the writing ITSELF with. And so on, and so on, recursively.

Arguably, the text itself doesn’t need to contain mechanisms as complex as those contained within the staff, as writing only needs to be able to project other specifically encoded sections of writing, rather than projecting any desired string of words as the staff must be able to do. Still, to fit something like that into only the negligible volume occupied by the text — not to mention—

Actually, this makes for a nice transition into the OTHER terrifying property of Nomai staves.

When I asked a series of questions of Solanum, and they projected a variety of texts onto the rock in response, I paid careful attention to their interactions with the staff control surface. I was hoping to shortcut my writing lessons by picking some pointers up from them directly.

However, I soon noticed that the shapes Solanum traced across the staff’s writing surface didn’t seem different enough to each other to account for the different text that they were writing. No matter what they ended up projecting on the wall, their interaction with the staff’s control surface was always simple, and — on closer inspection — almost identical each time.

Maybe the information was encoded within microscopic movements too small to pick up with the naked eye? But then, from what we can tell, and particularly from Solanum’s own motions otherwise, the Nomai don’t seem to be any more coordinated than we are. Maybe the staff control surface is supplemented with voice control?

(I expect Nomai suits — especially the masked helmets — trap the sound of speech within them effectively enough that I wouldn’t be able to tell whether or not they’re speaking at any given moment.)

...well, if so, that’s — not ideal. Nomai speech is probably not something we have any chance of decoding; even their allegedly-audio recorders store their recordings as Nomai text. Convenient for our translator tool, sure — but not so much if it turns out Nomai speech is the key to this mystery.

I did cast around for other explanations, but nothing came immediately to mind.

...okay, bear with me.

Right when I was completely stumped, having no idea where to go from there, I remembered another major technology developed by the Nomai — namely, the memory statues. The memory statues which, following the initial pairing, effortlessly and constantly read your mind no matter where in the solar system you might be, so that the Ash Twin Project can send your memories back to your past self.

If the Nomai could create a universal mind-reading interface, then why would they limit themselves to using it as part of the Ash Twin Project? Why not just use it in all their technology? It’s neat, it’s minimalistic, it’s convenient. And it doesn’t appear to be a new technology, either — at least, no specific mention of it is made in any of the records left by the Nomai throughout our solar system. As such, we can reasonably conclude that this is a technology they take for granted.

(If this is a technology that is never mentioned, then either it’s so new nobody’s heard of it — which clearly does not apply, given the large quantity of discourse available on almost every other component of the Ash Twin Project — or it is so ubiquitous that nobody thinks about it anymore.)

And if it’s so ubiquitous that they take it for granted, what’s to say that the staff doesn’t just read your mind, too?

A possible counter to this hypothesis is the existence of a control surface on the staff at all. If the staff can just divine your intent directly, why does it need buttons or a gesture sensor?

I think this one might be partly answered by the fact that the writing of Nomai children looks different to that of adults. If the staff were able to read your mind perfectly each time, then why would there be a difference in output between the two? As such, it’s possible that the quality of the output text is determined by something like — degree of mental discipline?

In which case, yes, practice would help; but then, so would some sort of physical reference to act as an anchor, like when Slate (yes, I know, of all people) taught me how to meditate by staring at an object in front of me until my eyes lost focus, or by listening to the sounds of the surrounding forest until they all blended together into one.

So maybe the staff control surface isn’t a keyboard in the literal sense, but it’s designed to be interpreted as a keyboard by the brain so the staff has an easier time interpreting your intent? Then it would make sense that all the shapes on the surface are unlabeled; there’s enough going on there to allow each user to define their own control scheme, and to refine it over time.

This would explain why Solanum’s movements don’t contain enough variation to encode text. Maybe they have a particular movement to encode writing, and this cues them to concentrate on imagining or subvocating text that the staff then finds it easier to pick out of their head and faithfully transcribe.

That would then explain why Solanum didn’t need to interact with the control surface to stack the rocks up into pedestals. Either this is an ad-hoc action that simply requires more focus than usual, or it’s an action both basic and common enough that the staff has an easy time interpreting it.

(Parallels can be drawn here between the icon pedestals and the signposts found in many places across the Nomai settlements within the solar system. I discovered that when I knocked a signpost over — by accident, really, I swear — they self-reassemble after a short time. I haven’t tried this with Solanum’s pedestals, but I expect the result would be the same.

This implies that whatever manipulates forces in order to create the pedestals remains within them after the fact, just like the text projected by a Nomai staff is imbued with the ability to project more text in turn. I’m...not sure how you would create a technology that projects text and levitates rocks AND remains functional for 280,000 years — but then, I’m not a Nomai.)

At that point, the final mystery — how does the text know when it’s being read? — becomes obvious. Clearly, the text just reads your mind as well. Maybe, just like with the projection of subsequent text, it’s a simpler mechanism than what’s contained in the staff — for example, the text might just search a mind for copies of itself rather than for any complex construct signifying comprehension?

I don’t know. I’m so out of my depth here.

The main properties of the staff can thus be boiled down into two main points:

1) The staff contains a mechanism that grants the things it produces a certain degree of autonomy when required. I don’t think this behavior is infinitely replicable — which then means if you nest enough text on a large enough surface, the nesting should inevitably fail. I think there are areas of Timber Hearth large enough to test this.

This behavior (probably) extends to arbitrary functions of limited scope, such as painting whatever you like on a target substrate (not just Nomai text), levitating small rocks, or cutting through solid material (as seen when Solanum labels the communication icons and then separates them from the main body of rock).

2) Species-agnostic (possibly SUBSTRATE-agnostic?) mind reading. Combined with the above point, there’s reason to believe that the mind-reading capability is also passed on to the constructs created by the staff, at least in some cases. However, the staff itself has more sophisticated capabilities than any of the downstream constructs. Examples of entities that might have the ability to read minds include: text that needs to know when to generate downstream text segments, or Nomai signpost pillars that might find it more efficient to read minds in close proximity for a startle reflex than to directly scan their surroundings to determine whether they have fallen over.

In summary: after all that, I’m pretty much afraid to touch a Nomai staff ever again. Thank the stars for the time loop, I suppose.

I think this is a good place to stop and check on Hal.

Spent a few loops mostly just sipping at sap wine and glancing over Hal’s shoulder. They keep twigging onto this and shooing me out of the ship, where I end up staring at the Nomai staff, afraid to try it.

It’s not that it can kill me permanently, of course. On balance, it’s unlikely to even harm me. The Nomai let their children play with these, and there’s no record of anything bad ever having come of it. But after going through the — distributed action system? — that must be behind the things the staff can do, whenever I reach for the control surface I remember the feeling of the Hourglass Twins’ sand eating through my suit.

Over time, the ATPTMS will identify and dull the pain — but there’s always the first few times. And the first few times always suck.

I’ve started wandering around, seeking out Nomai text and practicing reading it without using the translator tool. I’m not sure whether I need to concentrate on Nomai text specifically when writing using the staff, or whether the informational content of my thoughts will be sufficient and the staff can interpret what it finds in my head directly. It’s also something to do to procrastinate on experimenting with the staff itself.

Unfortunately, even with the suit and the jetpack, there are only so many samples of Nomai writing that I can reach while confined to Timber Hearth. The largest concentrations are in Mining Site 2b and in what was originally termed Mining Site 2a (pictured) before the Nomai gave up on it in order to protect our ancestors’ habitat.

Still, that’s a decent start, and between that and the occasional ‘break’ loop to visit Riebeck and ask for pointers, I’m slowly building the ability to associate certain concepts with the corresponding ‘words’ in Nomai script.

(Nomai script is not arranged quite the same as our own. While we set words to concepts and then build sentences containing these concepts and relationships between them according to certain grammatical rules, Nomai script is almost free association in comparison. The text reads concept-relationship-concept-relationship-concept and so on, with additional pointers (?) that sometimes unseat the top of a chain and attach it lower down the first chain to construct something reminiscent of a tree.

Read as is, this structure requires you to hold much more information in your head compared to Hearthian script — sometimes as much as the entire structure at once. Maybe the Nomai found this easier than we do. I didn’t realize until I looked more deeply into it just how much of the processing legwork the translator tool was handling for me.

It’s not all that alien, at the base — they still build their communication off of stating or positing relationships between concepts, they just arrange their tokens differently. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly something I would call intuitive.)

I could probably continue this until I’m fluent, though, and still not have the guts to pick up the staff. That’s it. Time to get over myself and try actually writing something.

...maybe next loop, though.

(I wonder how the Site 2a mural was produced. Given my tower of hypotheses on how the staves work, though, it would make sense if someone had just used a staff to paint it. But then why does it look so worn, compared to the other things the staves appear to be responsible for? Was it actually painted by hand? Or maybe the staff was used to manipulate physical paint somehow?)

...alright, well, I’m not sure what I expected.

Pros: the staff didn’t eat me. Not when I picked it up, not when I tried to write with it, and not even when in a fit of uncontrolled curiosity I tried to cut my own leg off.

Cons: it writes only what you yourself can directly comprehend, and only to the degree that you’re able to maintain focus on it. My first attempt produced a horrific hybrid of Hearthian script and meaningless scrawl. It looks like I’m going to have to learn the Nomai language properly after all.

First, though, I expect I’ll have to take it in stages. Unless I can faithfully render Hearthian script, there’s no point experimenting with Nomai script.

(I think it IS possible to cut your own leg off, in principle. However, the staff probably has protections built into it that somehow predict the effect of an action and refuse to carry out actions that do you harm. Otherwise, they wouldn’t let children use them, right?

But yes — much as with the ATPTMS, I think that if I somehow managed to enter a mental state where the act of cutting my own leg off held no association with compromising the structure of my own body or causing myself pain, the request might actually go through. The obvious time to try this is while blind drunk right at the end of a loop.

It would then also scan that there would have to be a minimum age or intelligence requirement before the Nomai DID hand staves out to their children, as associations between damage, pain and bodily integrity take time to form. Maybe rather than rely on subjective perception, it simulates the outcome and reads the lower-order neurology directly for pain signals? Except this would require the staff to model AN ENTIRE BRAIN so I REALLY HOPE this is not how it works.

This is sounding like a worse idea the more I flesh it out, but I’m also getting more and more curious.)

This does simplify things quite a lot, though. I suppose I could spend time learning the staff’s other functions, too, but based on my first batch of results even just writing in Hearthian script will take some time to master.

One thing I do want to figure out is how to cut targets in an area, which would let me clear a space of grass rather than going hunting for large rocks or the sides of geyser mountains. That’s less urgent, though, and at least now I have a clear way forward.

(Wait, would it let Hal cut my leg off? Would it let Solanum throw a rock at my head? Where’s the line? There have to be SOME protections around this, otherwise you’d have Nomai kids running around cutting each other in half.

This calls for more testing.)

Loops spent practicing Hearthian script: 17

Loops spent learning the Nomai language: 8 (?) (there were some early ones I forgot to count)

Loops spent practicing Nomai script: 1 (it was a disaster)

Things that it might not make much sense to think about right now, but which I can’t seem to get out of my head:

How are the masks within the Ash Twin Project arranged? Is there any rhyme or reason to it?

I would have thought that ordinarily in a system like that, correspondences between linked components would be marked. If not, then at the very least the arrangement of one set of components should somehow reflect the arrangement of the other?

(I don’t know exactly where the Observatory Museum statue was originally sourced. Hal should know this. Ask. For now, we’ll just say ‘Giant’s Deep’ — I’m about 80% sure that’s true.)

I took a trip over to the Ash Twin Project to get some better photos of the masks. Hopefully, these images illustrate the relative positions of the masks and not just what they look like.

Photo taken facing the main body of the Ash Twin Project walkway, with the warp pad behind me. You can see most of the masks from here; enough to help orient the next two images relative to this one.

Left hand mask bank, viewed from across the walkway. Here, the warp pad is on the left and the main body of the walkway is on the right.

Right hand mask bank. Warp pad on the right, main body of walkway on the left.

So what does this tell us?

On the way to the Ash Twin Project, I had a thought.

The Ash Twin Project has a list of ‘connected devices’, but that list only describes the statues’ current location — which is impressive, don’t get me wrong, but not super useful.

So — maybe the statues aren’t individually labeled. And that’s weird, but — fine, maybe the documentation is somewhere I can’t reach. Even if that’s the case, though, it’s much more likely that the masks are arranged according to some logical association than that they are not.

Under that assumption, we can make some educated guesses:

The one place we know for sure contains two statues, and is supposed to contain two statues, is the Sun Station. We also know for certain that neither of the corresponding masks are active. Assuming the Nomai mask grouping logic doesn’t cross the walkway, there is only one set of two masks within the Ash Twin Project that matches this requirement, and that’s the two on the walkway side of the right bank.

On the other side, in the left bank, we have a sequence of three masks that all link to statues originally found on Giant’s Deep — mine (I think), Gabbro’s, and the Statue Workshop test statue (assuming that that statue’s paired mask is the one detached from the wall; certainly, it’s not obvious from any Nomai records that there would have been any reason to unmount the masks paired to any of the other statues).

The remaining three statues then correspond to the Probe Tracking Module (or, location-wise, the Orbital Probe Cannon), the Ash Twin Project and the Black Hole Forge. While I’m not sure how you’d tell which is which, only one of the three is active, and that’s the one we care about.

(I would intuitively have expected the Orbital Probe Cannon mask to sit at the warp pad end of the left bank, alongside the other Giant’s Deep statues. That this is not the case is...not reassuring.

Alternatively, all the Statue Workshop statues were intended for placement elsewhere in the solar system, the sequencing of the masks reflects this, and my entire hypothesis is garbage. We could try to refine the concept around this by looking for places where statues might have been installed but which the Nomai didn’t get around to. However, I’m not convinced any of my guesses would be right.

Further, while I’m pretty sure the Nomai would have grouped masks by location, I’m less certain that there would be any clear association between groups — say, Hourglass Twin statues being next to Timber Hearth statues because the planets are in adjacent orbits. The warp towers on the Ash Twin are arranged in orbital sequence, though, so maybe that’s one point in favor of that.

A lot of this comes down to whether the mask system works in a way that allows us multiple attempts, or not. If so, we can just figure this out the hard way. If not—

Well, if not, we’ll want to shore our logic up as well as we can before we try anything potentially irreversible.)

This approach probably needs some more work, but it’s a start.

What actually happens if you disconnect a mask?

Obviously, the statue would stop updating the mask, which would then transmit incomplete data through the Ash Twin Project and back in time. But what happens to the data recorded in the mask itself?

I think a reasonable assumption is that if a link was made, and then nothing else was done to the mask — say, it wasn’t manually unlinked...? The fact that they removed it from its mounting suggests a hardware override to some sort of problem they were having; otherwise, why not just leave it in place?

And if that’s the case, then maybe nothing happened to that data at all.

Maybe Daz is still in there.

(Note: the location of the Sun Station masks at one end of the right bank loosely implies the possibility of statue sequencing by planet — or, more specifically, by distance from the Sun. If I was going to push this metaphor to the extreme, then I’d say that the statue in the targeting room should be closest to the walkway, and the statue in the viewing dome should be the next one along.

The third mask in the sequence is active. Under this model, this would be mine or Gabbro’s mask, belonging to a statue that was supposed to have been stationed somewhere on Ash or Ember Twin (most probably the High Energy Lab) but which the Nomai never got around to placing. This cannot be the Ash Twin Project mask, as that one is not active. The fourth mask is then the Ash Twin Project mask.

Crossing the walkway and moving to the warp pad side of the left bank, the first mask is inactive. If we follow the pattern, this must be the Black Hole Forge statue mask.

The next mask in sequence is active. This, then, belongs to either a statue intended for either Brittle Hollow or Giant’s Deep (maybe the Construction Yard?), or it is the Probe Tracking Module mask. I would hazard that this is the Construction Yard mask, and thus belongs to the other one of myself or Gabbro. This is based on a loose assumption that a statue on a planet should fall earlier in the sequence than a statue on that planet’s satellite — which the Orbital Probe Cannon should qualify as.

This does raise questions about which of the Ash Twin Project and High Energy Lab masks should be first in sequence. You’d think that if we’re working from the inside out, the Project mask, being inside the Ash Twin, should come before the Energy Lab mask, which is positioned on the surface. But then, the Project statue is on the walkway, close to the interior of the protective shell, and the intent may have been to place the Energy Lab statue some distance underground.

Or maybe this is just nitpicking — but nitpicking seems like an activity the Nomai enjoyed.

The mask after the Construction Yard (?) mask is detached from the wall, and is lying on the floor at the base of its pillar. This model backs up my guess that this is most likely the mask associated with the statue inside the Statue Workshop — the one Daz was test-paired with. It’s possible the mask was removed from its mount intentionally following the test pairing, though I don’t know exactly why this would have been needed. It’s the only good explanation I have for why the mask is out of place, but neither it nor the mount seem to have been damaged.

And then, of course, the last mask — active — belongs to the Probe Tracking Module. I like this idea because in addition to the ‘satellite before planet’ theory, the Probe Tracking Module (and the Orbital Probe Cannon by extension) have a strong thematic association with the Sun Station, and their respective masks sit across the walkway from each other.

I like this model. It makes sense. Unfortunately, it’s completely different to the first model in most respects, which — until I come up with a better model, or some better data — successfully renders both my models useless.)

Loops spent practicing Hearthian script: 63

Loops spent learning the Nomai language: 24 (ish) (you’d think just linking two concepts together would be simple, but they keep picking up unintended meanings along the way)

Loops spent practicing Nomai script: 3 (still a disaster)

I am making some progress, but overall this undertaking is pretty demoralizing. If we weren’t limited to 22-minute loops, I think building a reverse translator tool would be significantly easier. Unfortunately, as it is, we’re stuck using what we’ve got.

Hal’s ship log spelunking adventure is still going. They’re taking their sweet time.

Hal: 000000000000000

This is the first entry in my (your) update document. It is designed to be read in two minutes or less. Below, I summarize everything you need to know. There exists a supplementary document that you can skim if under the circumstances you are in, this text is not sufficient.

Little bro has been stuck in a time loop for at least a subjective 4-6 month period. Under the circumstances, they are doing very well, and neither their sanity nor their trustworthiness need to be questioned. They have discovered several mysteries on which they can no longer make progress unaided. These mysteries are intentionally not listed here, so as to allow us to focus completely on whatever little bro decides to attack during the loop in question.

Little bro has tried to link you (me) to the Ash Twin Project in order to allow us to enter the loop. This did not work. We are not exactly sure why. There are a few ideas little bro would like to try, before we give up; once they have run out of ideas, I will update this text to reflect this.

Once they run out of ideas, the next step in the plan is to speak with Solanum, who is the only remaining living Nomai (a long and complex story). Little bro has begun work on learning the Nomai language in order to facilitate this.

Additional documentation is located under ‘readthisfirst.’

[Keywords: short, shortsummary, trustmachine, read, readthis, readthisfirst, readme, first, hal, generatedsentence00, generatedsentence-1]

I shouldn’t be writing this. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m going to write this down, Hal is going to find it, we’re going to have an awkward conversation about it, and I’m going to undo something like 100 loops’ worth of progress. But—

If a two-minute — what was it that Hal said, 140 words per minute in speech, and reading is slightly faster? If 400 words in the correct sequence could convince Hal to leave this upset behind, then why isn’t this something I could have done myself? Leaving aside that it would compromise the entire basis of our mutual trust, of course, and probably set our progress back by hours or days—

—and not to mention that even without that, I’ll have to spend another 100 loops (at least) on learning Nomai script — and maybe another 100 on getting the Nomai staff to render it correctly.

I think what’s really getting me about this is a combination of — I’m SURE I could have faked this? And I’m equally sure that having done this, had Hal ever discovered it (and inevitably they would have), it would have rendered our relationship unsalvageable.

This is — well, either Hal will find this entry themselves, or I’ll show it to them, because either way I think they need to see it — but this is the fundamental conflict between morals and efficiency, isn’t it?

...no. No, that’s not quite it. It’s the fundamental conflict between morals, yes. Morals — and fear.

And when the conflict is between morals and fear, the answer — given a moment of sober consideration — becomes obvious.

Hal: Alright, little bro. Let’s talk this out.

I know that we have — as per the ship log — talked this out in the past, and I know you know how I feel about this. I also know that I’ve given you the rundown on hiding things like this in scenarios like this one, and that what I’ve taught you should have prevented me from finding the entry I’m going to talk about.

I also know you wouldn’t have brought this up if you didn’t want to be confronted on it. At least...I hope so? Explicit text to this effect aside, I’m no longer the expert on your emotional state that I once was. So — either way, this is me, here, raising the problem topic.

Realistically, though, I don’t know what to say here. You’re clearly aware of the risks of the thoughts you’re entertaining, as well as the upsides and downsides.

I...can theoretically see why you might want to do that sort of thing — and further, why I might give my consent in that context — but this is a category of action that erodes trust by its own nature. Regardless of what contingencies you might be entertaining, little bro, I need you to stop.

I need you to stop threatening — consciously or unconsciously — to do things that are not compatible with the ‘mechanics of trust’. And while this entry that I found was arguably benign, it’s a signal flare for further lookouts in the future. You know — just in case. The ‘let’s spend an extra three hours of our night waking up in shifts’ sort of just in case.

I’m aware that I’m not saying anything you don’t already know; despite that, please keep your thoughts in check as best you can. This is precarious, and we cannot really spare a misstep.

Let’s just — just stick with me, if not exactly shadowing my actions every loop, and — let’s get this done.

Hal: READ THIS FIRST

This is an initial compilation of my thoughts. It is designed to be read in less than ten minutes; this implies a total length of less than 1,400 words, given that the average Hearthian speaking speed is 140 words per minute, reading speed is usually a little faster, and we (a habit I have picked up in referring to the aggregate of myself which has, over many loops, authored these log entries) wish to introduce a comfortable buffer just in case something goes wrong.

(I ran slightly over, but given that reading speed IS slightly faster, I think it will work out.)

This text has been used as a basis to compile a much shorter piece, able to be skimmed in a minute or two. The full body of this text remains on record for cases where the need is complex or potentially objectionable to a degree where the short text is insufficient to assuage concerns.

Little bro has been stuck in a time loop for long enough that they’ve lost track of time. Based on my notes, when I do ask, I get answers ranging anywhere from four to twelve months. It would make more sense for this duration to fall on the longer side, but—

It should be remembered that the 22-minute slice little bro inhabits leaves no time for sleep, eating, or other downtime activities. Almost all of their time is spent learning, researching, or exploring at a continuous intensity no normal person could hope to sustain. If you do nothing but work unstintingly for four months, you — well, go insane, maybe. But you also get a lot done.

There have been some concerns lately, mostly on my part. The fact is, we’re stuck with little bro, now a time traveler who’s been through enough unfortunate experiences in their life that we can no longer automatically trust who they are in any concrete sense. Time changes you, and there’s no way around that.

As little bro tells it, during one loop in the recent past they tried (with my consent, allegedly) to link me to the Ash Twin Project in order to join me to the loop. Just as allegedly, this did not work; according to little bro, we’re not exactly sure whether the problem was caused by a configuration within the Ash Twin Project itself, or whether my having fled from my spot in front of the statue caused the issue.

Little bro has a habit of drinking large quantities of sap wine shortly before the loop ends. As they tell it, this is no longer strictly necessary for them, as the Ash Twin Project appears to contain a trauma processing system — referred to by little bro as the ‘attup-tums’, which made no sense until I asked them to spell it as ATPTMS, short for ‘Ash Twin Project Trauma Management System’ — that progressively dulls the impact of painful experiences each time they reoccur. This includes things like dying in a supernova.

Apparently what happened in the Ash Twin Project was that without the sap wine, which I usually respond to quite well (though this is difficult to imagine, having no clear memory of having tried it since I came of age) the existential dread of losing myself to the time loop reset got to me. I ran, left the interior of the Ash Twin via the warp pad, and made for the ship intending to get whatever I could down on a medium that the time loop would preserve in the last few minutes I had left.

The entry in question is reproduced below; skimming it should be sufficient to impart the tone of the moment.

Hal: I’m back at the ship. I’m cutting it close. There’s maybe a minute left before stellar collapse, and the Ash Twin has front row seats to the calamity.

I’m not okay with this.

[...]

Now we face the question of what to try next.

In an entirely inadequate summary, we and little bro (little bro and I?) have been looking for a way to circumvent the Sealed Vault problem for at least subjective months, and likely some time more. Over time, while little bro has conducted a whole bunch of research on the problem, it has become clear to both of us that the biggest problem we are facing is the fact that I am not part of the time loop. Apparently — as I have learned, and to little bro’s testimony over and over and over — they have pushed my 22-minute slice of availability as far as it would go, and then they have done it again for another knowledge vertical; and then again, and again, and again. And now, finally, after however many loops, we have reached the point where I have to spend most of a loop reading ship log entries just to catch up on the research that has already been done.

That speaking with a Nomai — the last remaining Nomai, for that matter, which the Nomai in question may not be aware of and which they will almost certainly not take well — is the lowest-risk option available to us is telling. The alternatives are, as best as I can tell:

1) Attempt to modify how the Ash Twin Project works without external guidance. Cons: if we mess up, that’s it; everyone on Timber Hearth dies forever. There are no pros.

2) Attempt to make further progress on the mystery of the Sealed Vault without linking me to the time loop, and do so by some sort of direct override — possibly something as direct as tearing the Stranger’s hull itself apart and looking for circuitry. I don’t know that this might be accomplished at all, let alone within the restrictions of the time loop as it stands; I expect the plan would have looked something like ‘find the cockpit (if such a thing exists), fly the Stranger into a celestial body, dig through the wreckage, repeat’.

This is essentially it. Any other issue that we attempt to tackle will come back to one of the above two, because figuring out the Ash Twin Project is the only way to make our research both more effective and more efficient, and the Stranger appears to be the major barrier between us and the Eye of the Universe.

The Eye of the Universe itself is the final thing I want to cover. While I was previously aware of it on a surface level, based on Riebeck’s past findings, learning so much more about it in so short a time — and particularly the nature of what I have learned — is jarring. A celestial object that destroys (we think) the universe when interacted with? By its nature, it is almost incomprehensible. Who would WANT to comprehend such a thing?

And yet, not only is this what we face, but it might be the only thing left available to us that resembles some sort of salvation.

The universe is dying.

I do not know how such a thing is possible. It is not in the nature of stars to pay attention to each other, and certainly not to synchronize their lifespans. And yet, wherever in the sky I choose to look, all I see is supernova after supernova. The sight is — well, there are only so many times I can use the words ‘unimaginable’ or ‘unreal’ before they start sounding like meaningless noises.

(Why do all the stars go out in — to our perception — such close succession? I don’t know. All our hypotheses on this are garbage. This is on the THINGS TO RESEARCH list, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Certainly, though, this is odd, at the very least. Light takes time to travel through space. Distances between stars require on the order of years to travel, even for light — sometimes on the order of tens, thousands, or tens of thousands of years. And somehow, we see them all dying at once?)

Perhaps Hornfels might know more about this, though — as with me — absent interference, they often spend the loop too fixated on the statue to do much else.

Little bro has a personal theory that while the Eye DOES destroy the universe when triggered, it does so in service of creating a new one. I am not as convinced as they are by this, but it certainly seems that there may not be any other options left to us. If this is the case, then we are left with only one choice — whether to try leaving behind something of ourselves by triggering the Eye (whatever it turns out the Eye may do in truth), or to pass quietly into the dark.

And even if we do not know the answer to this yet...in the moment, the choice boils down to either doing something, or doing nothing. And absent everything else, I will always choose something over nothing, as little bro has done themselves.

The other side of the issue is — what happens if nobody triggers the Eye? Does it trigger on its own? Does it never trigger at all, leaving reality as a cold, dead void for all eternity?

I do not know. It is difficult to write about this, having had only a handful of minutes to come to terms with the concept. Then again, little bro has had much longer to do so themselves, and they do not seem to have done all that much better.

Anyway — that’s it. I’m over my word limit, by a decent margin. This serves, I think, as an adequate summary of everything that is happening, and has taken me (at a guess) over a hundred loops to compile. If this does not sufficiently align my and little bro’s goals, then I am out of ideas.

Insofar as different iterations of myself really are different people, I will take this opportunity to wish both you (me) and them luck, and all the best.

May you do your best to comprehend the nature of the universe, and may you live on in whatever ways remain.

(ADDITIONAL CONJECTURE; INCLUDED FOR CONTEXT ONLY. I do not think this is sufficiently material to include in the main body of the message, and if I did it would bloat the text beyond usefulness. It is largely conjecture regarding the nature of the Eye of the Universe and the consequences of activating it, as well as the converse consequences of either choosing not to or failing to do so.

DO NOT READ THIS unless you are tackling this topic specifically; otherwise, you will likely have wasted the rest of your current loop on nothing.

If we do not manage to trigger the Eye, and if after countless loops we make an error that allows the supernova to definitively wipe us from existence, does that necessarily mean that nobody else will be able to trigger the Eye?

I think — based on what little bro has said about Chert’s astronomical data, and even based on what can be observed with the naked eye — there’s not enough negentropy left in the universe to spawn another intelligent race. And...well, let’s take an edge case; let’s assume that whatever protections are in place around the Eye are close enough and vulnerable enough to be eliminated by the supernova, releasing the signal to once again broadcast across the universe. This signal would then take hundreds or thousands of years to reach anyone, and I am not sure survival can be assured for this long in what remains of our reality.

...there is an alternative here, too, where the past, pre-Stranger signal — from millions (?) of years ago — reaches another species with warp capability and they, having somehow survived this long, make the trip over after the fact. Time loop aside, the intersection of the signal wavefront with a warp-capable civilization could summon new visitors at any moment; maybe something to keep in mind for if we ever remove the warp core from the Ash Twin Project. I do think, though, that if nobody else has shown up thus far, they are unlikely to do so now.

The exception to this is perhaps a scenario where the signal was identified and recorded a long time ago, but did not present a phenomenon of sufficient interest to drop everything and chase it halfway across the universe. And maybe, if this is the case somewhere, then — now that all the stars are dying — those who recorded the signal may change their view on it. Still, vanishingly unlikely.

(It might become retrospectively more likely, perhaps, if our guesses as to the nature of the death of the universe prove out. If we are seeing almost all the stars in our sky explode in synchrony, that means the outermost stars died first. It is unlikely that an intelligent species, especially a warp-capable one, would have survived this and then not headed for another, longer-lived cluster of stars.)

The other option is that one of the existing denizens of our solar system could trigger the Eye. If it were to be a Nomai (Solanum, perhaps?), I think that little bro and I could talk ourselves around to being some measure of content with this. At least — judging from the available archeological texts, the Nomai appear to share many of our values, and a universe primed by their desires and beliefs might have a good chance of becoming a pleasant place to live.

About the Strangers, on the other hand, we know little or nothing. We can infer that they have a healthy paranoia regarding the handling of existential risk, but this does not tell us anything about who they actually are. They — or at least their Theatre versions — can produce art, sort of. They have games, after a fashion. But do these things bear out in what we’d call the ‘real’ Strangers? There’s just no way to tell.

Would we really be happy with either of these alternatives, though?

I don’t know.

Certainly, there would be some level of disappointment that it wasn’t us — but are we really the best qualified for this? Again — there is no way to tell. We don’t know enough about the Nomai, the Strangers OR the Eye to make that determination with any sort of accuracy.

And then there’s the other side of the coin. What if a Hearthian other than the two of us were to enter the Eye? That’s — well. A whole other snarl that probably doesn’t even bear consideration at this juncture. I would have to discuss it with little bro, certainly. The obvious distinction to draw is between members of Outer Wilds Ventures and the rest of the village, but however we slice it, I expect it will be a contentious distinction.

Even if it might not bear thinking about just yet, though, this is something we will have to consider before we can make a decision about it. And we WILL have to, I think, eventually, whether we want to or not. Because—

—if all of our wild hypotheses are anything close to correct, then this might be the only real material decision we have left to make.)

Hal: I have joined little bro in their attempts to learn to use the Nomai staff. It is more efficient, we think, to share the Brittle Hollow surface staff between ourselves and talk while we do so, than it would be to detour to retrieve the classroom staff as well. This may change as little bro becomes more proficient in their use.

Ironically (though it was perhaps to be expected) I immediately had more success than little bro had in rendering Hearthian script at the outset. Working with Hornfels has solidified in me a certain facility for concentration. While you could say that little bro has also built that skill in the fine motor control and situational awareness that comes with piloting, it is—

Ah, I know what it is. Where I focus on the clear distillation of information, whether in input or output, little bro has put most of their focus on integrating broad and intense input, and their facility with output has been set aside as a result. It might not be as obvious in these records in particular, as we have both grown somewhat used to rambling at each other. The difference really shows when we both have to speak with someone like Hornfels; quite aside from my being more used to them, they appreciate structural clarity in spoken language, which is something I am a little better practiced in than little bro.

Still, skill in rendering aside, little bro has drawn far ahead of me in their comprehension of the Nomai language — as you might expect, considering the time loop. They’re making good progress; something about that facility for broad input also allows little bro to hold the networks of associations required by the Nomai script in their head with greater fidelity. I can build larger networks, given time, but they can conceive of small networks and note them down much faster than I could hope to match myself. Which, what — catching concepts is like catching balls? I don’t know. It seems to work for them.

Life has become simple as a result. Every loop, I skim my short-form text. Every loop (almost) I take it for granted, and sit right down to work on the staff alongside little bro. It’s refreshing, and — despite the occasional spans of tedium visible in their expression and body language — appears to be doing them well.

This will take us a while yet, and I think the encounter itself will bring with it some risks that will need to be discussed ahead of time. But right now, in the moment, things are almost how they used to be, and this is...valuable.

The game would admittedly be more fun if my knowledge of the staff and the skills required for its use were not reset every twenty minutes, but — well, what can you do.

(If my input on the process is repetitive from loop to loop, little bro never complains of this. I do hope that my reactions to their actions vary enough that they consistently gain from our collaboration, but I do sometimes worry that their urge to please me outweighs their urge for efficiency in our communication.)

Loops spent practicing Hearthian script: 139. Can now reliably write short sentences. Ironically, despite not retaining any of their memories, Hal is not far behind. When I explain my approach to the problem, they pick up on and integrate my discoveries frighteningly quickly.

Loops spent learning the Nomai language: 221 (ish); sometimes we need to draw entire diagrams to plot out the full meaning of a text segment, which of course the translator tool used to handle invisibly and automatically. This places an upper limit on the complexity of the Nomai semantic structures we can construct, and an even more restrictive upper limit on the sorts of Nomai phrases we can legibly write with the staff.

Loops spent practicing Nomai script: 133. STILL a disaster, but I can now render simple Nomai text structures; the upper limit tends to be 3-4 concepts, depending on the sentence. 2-concept structures — which is the minimum viable size for Nomai sentences — come out correctly around two times in three.

I keep looking at Hal toward the end of a loop, drunk off sap wine, and they look back at me, and we start chanting ‘one more loop, one more loop’. We’re...getting close. Another hundred loops, and we should be able to attempt communication with Solanum without it turning into a faithful historical recreation of Feldspar’s first launch.

I didn’t think to get an image of this last loop. Not to mention that I was in the pilot’s seat, and I maintain that the ship scout’s images are weirdly washed out. So think of this as...an approximation, I suppose. Brittle Hollow looked much like this after the probe tore through it, though you’ll have to imagine for yourself the streams of ejecta spiraling into space and the debris closely orbiting the black hole at prodigiously unsafe speeds.

I don’t think there’s a good reason for this log entry to exist, other than the imagery is stuck in my head and I’m apparently still processing.

It’s easy to lose sight of the hazards involved, and to tell yourself that the Nomai are paragons of good and scientists beyond compare without a morally questionable bone in their body. And — there’s nothing saying that this can’t still be mostly true, but—

The occasional reminder is...useful, I think.

The Quantum Moon in orbit around Giant’s Deep. I have SO MANY of these images saved from when I was originally learning how to land on the thing. If I do someday run out of space on my ship’s computer, it’ll be the Quantum Moon’s fault.

There’s probably going to be more than one of these log entries, and I will probably try to loosely sequence them by sticking images of the Quantum Moon orbiting the various planets in the header. Then you can start reading at the Hourglass Twins, then move on to Timber Hearth, and so on.

(Knowing me, half of those won’t end up existing because I got distracted, but this one has Giant’s Deep on it because this conjecture falls around two-thirds of the way down the insane wine-addled theorist adventure route.)

What else do we know about the Quantum Moon?

Admittedly, it doesn’t have all that many moving parts:

That all belongs in the other entries, labeled with the other planets. So if you set all that aside, what remains?

Not much. Essentially just — conjecture regarding the appearance and function of the Eye, using the appearance of the moon while at the Sixth Location as basis (point A), and the nature of the moon’s reflection of the Eye as its own entity rather than as additional data on the Eye proper (point B).

Let’s handle B in this entry, and consign A to the depths of — er, I suppose the Dark Bramble entry, as it’s a question we’ll need to attack eventually. Maybe not as dramatic as I’d hoped.

What do we know about the Eye’s reflection, then?

Again, not much. Surprise. It’s something we can’t objectively measure or touch, a shadow of one quantum environment represented through the rules — the lens? — of another. In fact, almost the complete list of data that we have on it is just reasons why finding out more things about it is going to be unreasonably hard.

But if we discard all of that as immaterial, and focus only on what we can see, then we can add two pieces of data to our list.

1) The appearance of the Quantum Moon’s echo of the Eye.

The...celestial object? It’s difficult to define, being a slice of a massive, oppressive thing that’s been cut down to fit inside the atmosphere of the Quantum Moon — but what we can see of what the Nomai call the Eye does not at all resemble the symbol rendered by its signal. What we see instead is...pretty much just a hole in space, a squat inverted funnel shape remaining static as its flowing walls ripple upward into the abyss.

Is this some other object that happens to share certain characteristics of the Eye? A different way to reach the same destination — or, at least, to show what may lie in the center of an otherwise incomprehensible beast? Is the Moon’s echo of the Eye a gentle invitation to look into the abyss and witness the end of the world yourself, before committing to enacting it?

Is it, maybe, what really lies at the center of the circular gap at the center of the Eye signal renders? Admittedly, the Nomai symbology for the Quantum Moon suggests the Moon belongs in this gap, and that together the Eye and the Moon form one coherent whole — but how did they discover this? Did they? Or is this just conjecture? How do they know?

Perhaps if I launched myself toward this echo, and then looked out to the horizon, trying to spot something recognizable in the Eye’s implied megastructure—

But no. No luck. The impenetrable fog of the Quantum Moon hides all detail from view.

(Nomai Quantum Moon symbol, rendered at the base of the Tower of Quantum Trials.)

2) What we can see inside the Quantum Moon’s echo of the Eye.

When I visit the Sixth Location and walk south until Solanum comes into view, they are always standing directly below the Eye echo, staring up into the quantum abyss. Almost immediately, though, they notice my approach and turn to face me.

I’ve tried looking up into the echo myself, of course, but I didn’t see anything that I could say with certainty I wasn’t just imagining. The image never shifted, yet it broke into countless shards in my memory, each showing a different facet of infinity. Was this the quantum nature of the Eye brought to the fore, or just my mind failing at a task greater than any ever before put to it?

Solanum may be able to tell me how to tame the input, if such a thing is even possible; but they seem to either not understand that this is information I lack, or they are simply unwilling to share it.

I have tried to physically reach the Eye echo from the surface of the Sixth Location moon. As I get closer to the funnel, I can see whatever rests on the other side more and more clearly — until suddenly I am ejected, my velocity smoothly inverted as I come flying back out.

If I do not prepare for this, I am almost always ejected onto the Timber Hearth version of the Quantum Moon. Is this because I’m native to Timber Hearth? Is it because I find the environment somehow preferable? Is it simple thought association?

(I tried thinking of different things while doing this, and while I did occasionally get ejected onto other versions of the Quantum Moon, this did not seem to be causally related to any of my thought patterns.)

If I DO prepare for this, i.e. by capturing an image of the Sixth Location moon terrain with the scout, the funnel simply drops me by the living instance of Solanum once more. As expected.

Why does it work like this?

How did Solanum put it? ‘The Eye represents extreme changeability.’ You can almost perceive this directly, in the way an ostensibly static (perceptually locked-down?) object nevertheless takes any opportunity it can to fragment into infinite reflections of itself. Whatever rests inside the Quantum Moon Eye Sky Funnel just DOES NOT WANT TO KEEP STILL.

Let’s go with the BIRTH DEATH REBIRTH model and extrapolate. The Eye represents every possibility at once until a conscious observer enters its — range? Radius? And then — everything goes away. Everything but one of those infinite options; and that one option is injected with all the energy left in the dying universe, which pushes it to explode into the new reality.

The Eye, then, is an arbitrarily powerful quantum object, split across every possibility imaginable and influencing the entire volume of both known and unknown space.

But the Quantum Moon — the Quantum Moon is not. The Quantum Moon is just a fragment, uncertain by association. It is, admittedly, uncertain by direct association with THE quantum object, but it is still...severely weakened, at minimum.

So what happens when you leap into the Eye funnel from within the Quantum Moon’s atmosphere?

What happens, I think, is that it tries its best. It doesn’t have access to an entire universe’s worth of volume, of energy, of negentropy. But it has its own little self, and it has dominion over the processes that govern our cognition (which is a more powerful toolset than it might seem). It can show us things, then, and it can choose where to place us — even if the Moon can only choose between six locations, while the Eye itself has every conceivable option at hand.

...is the Quantum Moon a test-run for triggering the Eye, then? Do the flashing images represent what the Eye might make of the contents of your mind? Does the version of the Moon you end up on reflect your preferences, known or unknown? Is a person who is ejected from the funnel on the Dark Bramble moon an objectively worse choice to send into the Eye than someone who is ejected on the Timber Hearth moon?

How much of this does Solanum know, and how much of it can Hal and I learn without tipping our hand?

(Something to consider: The Nomai saw the Eye signal rendered with a circular hole in the center, and later either divined or conjectured that the Quantum Moon is what belongs within this gap. Thus, they ended up with two complementary symbols that together form a cohesive whole.

The Strangers, however, do not seem to possess any concept of the Quantum Moon as a distinct entity — and yet, their render of the Eye still contains this conspicuous round...void?

If you asked the Strangers about this, what would they tell you belongs in that gap?)

Quantum Moon in orbit around Brittle Hollow. How does it know how to avoid colliding with Hollow’s Lantern? Who can know the secret lives of moons?

This section is about the Rule of Quantum Imaging and how VISCERALLY HORRIFYING IT IS.

Let’s take this step by step.

Raise your hand if you remember the Wandering Arch.

The Wandering Arch is an artifact rendered intentionally quantum. It can be most directly compared to Gabbro’s ‘quantum poem’ in that it reflects a predetermined set of valid and equally functional states for a larger whole — in this case, a set of specific locations within an entire stone (?) tower.

So far, so good.

Then you drop down to the next challenge, and you see this:

The sign, for the record, reads — verbatim — “Observing a quantum object; observing an image of a quantum object. These are the same.”

Let’s THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A MOMENT.

There is no way to leave the central area of this room without letting the arch out of direct line of sight. The Nomai advice proposes, instead, that you take an image of the arch, then look away from the arch and watch the image instead.

This means that somehow, the act of taking an image of a quantum object IMBUES THE IMAGE WITH A SUBSET OF THE OBJECT’S CHARACTERISTICS.

(I vaguely recall having spoken with Gabbro about this. They claimed experience with this behavior and referred to it as ‘entanglement’. I’m pretty sure that name came from that time they looked at the wrong thing in the Quantum Grove at the wrong moment and their ship ended up impaled on a tree.)

This leaves me with two burning questions:

1) What happens when you take an image of an image of a quantum object? Is the property that allows you to track objects with an image rather than the object itself transitive? Infinitely so? If not, how many layers down does it continue to function? At what point does it stop working? Why there?

Assumedly, the Rule of Quantum Imaging would work just as well if two people took images of the same object in concert; that is, the object would only become untethered once both people had looked away from their images. But does this necessitate that both people look away from their images at the same time?

Consider this — Quantum Object A is tethered in place by Image B and Image C. Person B looks away from A, and looks only at Image B. Person C looks away from A also, and only looks at Image C. At this moment, Image B is tethered to Object A by transitive quantum properties, and Image C is also tethered in this way.

When Person B looks away from Image B, what happens?

We know for certain that the quantum object doesn’t move, as Person C is still keeping it tethered in place by looking at Image C. So certainly Object A doesn’t move, and Image C remains in possession of its transitive quantum property.

What happens to Image B, though? Does Image B retain its quantum property, or not? There’s no way to tell by inspection, I don’t think. On the upside, though, if there exists a definitive test for this, this test should also generalize to strings of images of images.

(There IS an easy test for this; set up exactly these circumstances with myself as B and Hal as C, then have me look away, then back at the image, then have Hal look away, then back at the image, and then check whether the quantum object has become untethered. This will definitively determine whether transitive quantum property tethers break individually from the outside in, or all at once from the inside out and only once the quantum object becomes untethered.

...admittedly, I can’t think of any applications for this right now, but it seems the sort of thing that’s better known than not.)

2) What qualifies as ‘an image of a quantum object’, exactly? We know that a grainy, monochromatic photograph qualifies. What about a pinhole camera projection? What if you sketch a representation of the Quantum Moon while staring up at it, and then carefully slide the sketch into your field of view before turning away from the Moon itself?

What if you just put a dot down on a page, and tell yourself in your own head that that’s the Quantum Moon? No idea — but in principle I see no reason it shouldn’t work. It’s such an out-there concept, though, that I almost want to make Hal test it with me, just so I can see their face.

One assumption that I THINK we can be reasonably certain of is that it is impossible to capture an image of a quantum object if you’re not actively looking at it. So you can’t tether the moon by staring up at it, drawing it somewhere out of your line of sight, then looking away from the moon and ONLY THEN looking at the drawing. Again, that’s something testable.

What about auditory tokens? That is — what about the word ‘moon’? If someone else who is looking at the moon says ‘quantum moon’ and immediately looks away, and then you look at the moon the moment you hear the words, do the spoken words — or perhaps the representative vibrations travelling through the air — also possess a transitive quantum property?

What if you tether the concept of the Quantum Moon to a marshmallow? What if you carve a wooden circle while looking at the moon, then hand it to someone? What if—

Because if this is what happens to an image — and, for that matter, to an image of an image of an image, and so on—

What happens TO OUR BRAINS when we look at these things? What happens when we talk about them? Where is the limit of ‘conceptual representation of a quantum object’? If any representation of a quantum object suffices to establish the transitive quantum property, then do THE THOUGHTS ENCODED IN OUR BRAINS possess a transitive quantum property until — what — they pass out of short term memory processing?

Except this DOESN’T WORK, and the moment you look away from a quantum object — even if you’re actively thinking about just having seen it, right then — it disappears.

In summary, I have absolutely no idea how any of this works.

...what it does tell us, though, is certain empirically verifiable facts about the nature of consciousness. Which is its own sort of horrifying.

I should get Gabbro to look over this.

Hal: Image of the surface of the Quantum Moon, taken by little bro when at the Sixth Location in order to inspect the echo of the Eye in greater detail. It’s a very striking and characteristic landscape.

The goal of this log entry is to summarize which things we think are safe to communicate to Solanum, and which data are off the table.

THE NO LIST:

The Strangers. Categorically out. There’s just no modeling how Solanum might respond to this information without a trial-and-error attempt, and we’re not running a trial-and-error attempt on an alien of unknown intelligence and only approximately identifiable goals at best.

This means that anything created by the Strangers is also out, most notably the Eye signal blocker. Which means we can’t tell them why the Nomai Vessel crashed, exactly, even though we can reasonably guess...and the structure of the knowledge we hold surrounding this will probably become obvious in discourse. That’s going to go over well, I’m sure.

THE PROBABLY NOT LIST:

The fact that all the Nomai are dead, possibly including Solanum themselves (depending on how you slice it). This means — anything about the Interloper, which might be technically possible to skirt, and anything about Solanum’s state and their integration with the different versions of the Quantum Moon, which will be pretty much impossible to avoid.

It’s possible — test this — that despite being present in only the one possible location on the Sixth Location Quantum Moon, this one-sixth offshoot of Solanum is in any case quantum and only experiences temporal continuity while locked down by a conscious observer. If that’s the case...well, this would explain why Solanum commonly writes, in their later messages, ‘I have a hypothesis that I may not be entirely alive.’ People don’t just pull hypotheses like that out of nowhere. Solanum noticed something — and the thing they would be most likely to notice would likely be something like suspiciously specific gaps in their memory, or the experience of the world suddenly jumping into the future around them.

The problem is that once Solanum figures this out, they might spend the rest of the loop non-functional. This means that we might have to figure out how to hide this — and if we can’t hide it, we need to figure out how to convince Solanum to ignore the problem for 20 minutes.

How good are Nomai at ignoring either pressing or interesting problems? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

THE YES LIST:

The general state of the Ash Twin Project, the fact that it’s working, and that the Orbital Probe Cannon system has failed to locate the Eye are all probably critical data. Without these, I don’t think we can impart sufficient context to convince Solanum to help us. Even if they know how the system works, but ESPECIALLY if they don’t and are just guessing, everything we can tell them about the state of the components will help.

And — maybe this one is obvious, but — us. The Hearthians. The 280,000-years-later Hearthians of only the vaguest acquaintance for Solanum, most likely. Solanum seemed to have a broad range of interests in life, judging by the wide variety of notes they left behind, but little bro doesn’t recall them ever having mentioned us specifically. They’ll need to understand where we came from, and why, and what our goals are, and — well, what we’re like.

Realistically, we won’t be able to keep to this list at all, at first. Curating information like this will take some practice. Fortunately, however, I’m pretty sure that the worst that can happen if we mess this up is that we junk the loop and try again next time.

(Famous last words.)

Hal: The Nomai of Escall’s Vessel (Escall’s clan?) had to deal with a lot of grief while they still lived. And among their many losses, there were none that they responded to in a way quite like that of the first writings of the Brittle Hollow Nomai of Escape Pod 1.

While any text specimen can tell you something about its author, given sufficient context, it is sites like these that yield the most information about who the Nomai actually were — as a species, as a culture, and as individuals. What they shared, and what was unique to specific Nomai alone. What they valued. What they praised. What — when what was left of their hearts were emptied out and their minds ground to a halt — what was left behind within them, when nothing else remained.

‘The pain of your absence is sharp and haunting, and I would give anything not to know it,’ Plume writes. ‘Anything but never knowing you at all (which would be worse).’ Then: ‘I can only hope that you are safe, Keek, wherever you are.’

This text affected little bro deeply enough that they were able to relate it to me almost verbatim, while having completely forgotten where or how long ago they had originally located it.

It carries a deep loss, something almost like a cognitive dissonance that split the author in half right down the middle. It also possesses a communicable empathy; Plume was able to share some part of this experience directly in a way that even we, hundreds of thousands of years distant, culture—, history— and context-blind, can receive and understand.

Identify and Explain, as Solanum said to little bro, are the two core tenets of Nomai philosophy. They describe, at the base, a two-step causal process; find thing, learn about thing. This is the relationship the Nomai have with reality.

In a way, this summary is frightening. There is nothing in there about caution or moderation. There is no mention of applying the knowledge they have gained, or of — say — correlating concepts that together may form a beneficial and coherent whole, while being dangerous to explore or rely on when encountered separately.

Instead, the Nomai just expand and consume. And while they may not literally devour and destroy as they pass, each thing they learn — each thing they Identify and then Explain — adds to their considerable powers of design and engineering, and allows them to spread further faster.

Little bro mentioned idly — it’s indexed somewhere in my raw summary knowledge dump — that five disasters have befallen our solar system within living memory. It did not take me long to first find the perceived error in the tally, and then to understand what little bro had been driving at.

In the methods by which they pursue their stated values, the Nomai hold the capacity to be a force for insane and unrestrained creation (see: the Ash Twin Project) as well as destruction at a scale almost without bound (see: the Ash Twin Project). Certainly, all that aside, there can be a violence to them — if a slow and creeping one — that they themselves seem entirely blind to.

So maybe this line, this outpouring, is couched in metaphor the way a Hearthian might author a similar thing. Or maybe the reference to knowing and not knowing, and their relative advantages, is rooted in Nomai culture and self-identity — in Identify and Explain, and how they drive the Nomai to, as a terminal value, comprehend and exploit all that they can reach.

‘I am unsure how to survive in this place without you,’ Kousa writes. ‘I am unsure how to be me without you.’

(Cherrypicking a text sample like this one is disrespect for the scientific process, pure and simple, according to little bro. There is a context and a bigger picture here that I am discarding in favor of what is arguably a pet theory of little consequence. Perhaps that is the beauty, though, of working with severely limited data; you have to squeeze every bit of information you can out of every data point you have on record. Send all the rest of it to the geysers; the feelings of others, the grief, the higher aesthetic, and the consequences.)

Kousa writes, here, of the things that they have lost. And the things that they have lost are, for one, a loved one. But for another, they have lost at the same time a key aspect of their own identity. It is like a forgetting, but not; a forgetting takes with it the effects and the impressions that the thing that was forgotten originally brought, where this—

—perhaps you could say that this is a remembering, instead, willful and destructive in all the ways that a forgetting might go silent and unnoticed.

What is Kousa saying, exactly?

Maybe nothing. Maybe only, in the literal sense, ‘I loved you; losing you has changed me.’ But such a phrase can be assumed, almost by default, to also hold epistemological meaning. A description, if sparse and only perhaps hinted at, of the way the Nomai internalize and transfer information. And for a species that holds Identify as one of its core tenets, it would be reasonable to assume that understanding their conception of IDENTITY is particularly material to the issue.

Kousa is saying that they possessed information on Foli — their partner — and that while that information was not lost, the opportunity to gain additional information was taken from them. And it’s not Identify that is the matter of contention here; it can be safely assumed, I think, that Kousa had a decent idea of who Foli was in all material senses. And with Identify excluded, only Explain remains.

What Kousa is saying, then, is that in having lost the potential future opportunity to attempt to Explain someone dear to them, they have lost a significant fragment of their own identity. Is this a thought or feeling peculiar to the Nomai? Certainly not. But I expect that no other species — no other culture — would choose to frame that thought in precisely this way.

What is interesting is that Hornfels has also tackled the issue of philosophy of knowledge. However, in Hornfels’s treatment of the topic, the two core tenets of any body of knowledge were, instead, Explain and Predict. The absence of Predict from the Nomai conceptual division leads me to suspect that in their model, Predict has been integrated into Explain. In Hornfels’ decomposition, on the other hand, Predict is a distinctly different school of thought.

Where the Nomai tenets Identify and Explain divide a process into distinct causal steps, Explain and Predict divide the outputs of a theory or model into two categories of rendered value. That is, a useful model is useful either because it can explain the phenomenon that it is modeling, or it is useful because it can predict the development of that phenomenon forward in time. A model, then, may have only one of these characteristics, or both, or neither. The more the better, of course; models with both explanatory and predictive power tend to persist longer than most, whereas models with neither are summarily discarded.

How, then, did the Nomai rate and compare their models without a metric such as this? Almost certainly, they did this the same way we do it, by the same process that Hornfels’ decomposition suggests; however, they do not define it as such, and in particular they do not consider prediction a sufficiently important pillar of research to stand it alone.

I thought about this for a moment, trying to figure out how to reconcile our own concept of exploration with that of the Nomai — but then it occurred to me that ‘Explain’ was not the issue. Rather, the problem lies in the other component: ‘Identify’.

When the Nomai say ‘Identify’, what do they mean? Or, to change the approach — where lies the line between Identify and Explain? For to Identify something, you must first Explain it; and yet, you cannot Explain something that you cannot refer to, which reference must be formed by first Identifying it.

Perhaps the distinction between these concepts is intentionally spurious. Perhaps it represents a cycle, feeding into itself; iteration after iteration, each undertaken with the backing of a greater understanding.

...or perhaps, to a Nomai, the concept of Identification is simple and self-evident. And perhaps this is so because, to the Nomai, the concept of a model that can predict without explaining, or explain without predicting, is — in the direct and literal sense — inconceivable.

Hal: I asked little bro to take a picture of Hornfels doing something more interesting than just...staring at the statue, or standing at their instrument bank taking measurements. When they told me about this and came back with this image, I...may have been a little short with them.

They did, however, make the point that Hornfels as a person is all about tight focus. That little bro was able to creep up this close behind them and take a picture without them noticing is telling, and serves as its own sort of characterization. I suppose I can agree with that.

When I was young, I had wanted to work with Hornfels for as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure that this started for any particularly good reason. It’s been so long that I don’t exactly recall. Sure, it might have been because I thought Outer Wilds Ventures generally, and Hornfels’ telescope specifically, were the coolest things I’d ever seen — or it might have been because I’d recently gotten in trouble with Rutile, and seeing Hornfels have a shouting match with them felt empowering by proxy. Who knows, with hatchlings?

So, regardless of where I’d got it from initially, there I was with my dream. But — well, Hornfels was Hornfels. Scarily smart, easily provocable, rather shouty (much more so back then than today), and consequently unapproachable. So day by day, I stared at the promised land of Outer Wilds Ventures from a distance, learned a little about the world around me, and dreamed on.

Then, Gossan had their accident and lost their eye.

I’m not sure exactly what that changed for me. Certainly, a part of it was that — things CAN go wrong, I caught something the engineers of Outer Wilds hadn’t, and maybe I could contribute something to the project after all. And part of it, or maybe the other side of the same token, was — they can make mistakes, too. They’re only Hearthian, like me. Maybe they’re not so far out of my reach.

I went to Hornfels the next day and requested an apprenticeship, and — look, they didn’t say ‘no’. They didn’t say ‘yes’, either. I think they were mostly not expecting the question. They sort of just — waved a hand, turned, and walked away.

By the end of the day, I’d been following them around everywhere, and they hadn’t told me to leave, so I figured the apprenticeship was on. Day two, they saw me in the morning, shrugged, and went about their business. Day three, they just — sighed.

On day four, they started quietly explaining what they were doing as I watched.

Even after all this time, and even when pressed, I don’t think I could rightly tell you who Hornfels is. They are so strictly defined by their goals and surroundings, they simply don’t have the time to be their own person beyond that.

Is that bad? Depends who you ask, as well as on the metric that you judge this by. I would say — it comes at a cost, but I think the cost is worth the things we gain in trade. Maybe Hornfels would have been happier if they had been able to spread their attention among other things — but would they have accomplished more that way? Almost certainly not.

I worry that little bro has become the same.

And — obviously I can’t be upset with them about it. I can’t even really be upset at the situation, objectively speaking. Our species is likely to gain significantly by it. It’s quite possible that sitting where they sit, and doing what they do, will be the only reason at all that anything of what we are will live on past the ending of this universe.

But speaking as their friend, they have lost much — and no matter how worthwhile their undertaking has been, it is still painful to see.

Loops spent practicing Hearthian script: 149. Pretty much have this locked down. I’m going to come back to this for a single loop at some point, just so I can increment the count to a nice round number.

Loops spent learning the Nomai language: 289 (ish). The more time I spend on this, the less literate I feel, but Hal says that’s normal — something about better understanding how far you still have to go the further you get.

Loops spent practicing Nomai script: 212. For a script with such a limited library of valid shapes and symbols, Nomai text can be atrociously difficult to render.

Loops spent practicing Nomai script while wearing a spacesuit: 18. Perhaps weirdly, this isn’t that difficult. The suit gloves don’t seem to negatively affect the quality of my writing — what they and the suit do, rather, is render me more distractible. Any of the many moving parts comprising the suit can shift out of place or nudge me gently at any time, sending my concentration plummeting off of a cliff.

Hal and I have begun experimenting with the Nomai text’s progressive disclosure function.

Without a better understanding of the mechanism behind it, though, there are only so many tests we could run. The first and most obvious one was — what exactly triggers a Nomai text segment to disclose more of itself?

There’s only two possibilities for this one:

1) Reading the previous text segment.
2) Understanding the previous text segment.

There’s a simple distinction to be made between these two — and while you can’t test reading independent of understanding, you CAN test understanding independent of reading. Hal’s Nomai is very bare-bones, so in most cases they can’t understand the text without the translator, making them the perfect test subject for this.

The actual test, then, is easy. I look at the text wall, and Hal looks away. I pick a text segment, I translate the text without looking at the wall or the translator, and then I pass the translator to Hal. If reading the text displayed by the translator causes the text to reveal its next segment to Hal, then it’s comprehension-based. If it doesn’t, then it’s something-else based — most likely reading — or possibly comprehension-and-something-else based, which would require more testing to pin down.

Fortunately, however, the first test did exactly what we expected it to, and displayed the next text segment to Hal based on their indirect comprehension of the first. We followed up with a brief counter, explicitly trying to read the Nomai script without comprehending it, and this didn’t cause the next segment to be disclosed. Case closed, I guess.

(This means that the text pretty much HAS to be reading our minds, though how this could have been implemented, I have absolutely no clue.)

After that, we tried the other obvious thing.

When only one person is reading a Nomai text layout, the rules by which the progressive disclosure system functions are clear and straightforward. So, of course, when I explained this to Hal, their first question was ‘what happens when two people read the same text display at the same time?’ And then we completely forgot about this for a while.

(Or, well, I suppose I’m the one who forgot about it, as Hal simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to go through all our notes every loop.)

When we did finally test this, I was expecting some type of easily avoidable failure mode. I’m not sure why — the Nomai have reliably proven to be better designers and engineers than that — but somehow, this thought got stuck in my head. What we actually got (as I’m noticing seems to be on theme for the Nomai, the further we look into this sort of thing) was both elegant and horrifying.

It wasn’t obvious to us what was actually happening, at first. The first sign that something was off was when, with me reading at my own pace and Hal reading ahead with the translator, I began to wonder why Hal wasn’t actually reading faster than me, when that was what the experiment had called for.

So it TURNS OUT that Hal had actually long since finished reading the entire text structure, and the fault lay with the text display. Because — apparently — not only does the Nomai text READ your mind, it WRITES TO IT TOO.

(Which, again, is obvious in retrospect. The Ash Twin Project doesn’t have any trouble doing this. Why WOULDN’T this be part of an area of technological development the Nomai take for granted?)

So yes — what actually happens when we both read the same text structure at once is the structure tracks each of our mind states independently, and discloses ONLY THE CORRECT TEXT to EACH OF US in PARALLEL.

I suppose I thought maybe we’d catch the Nomai out, or learn something about their design principles from the way they work around constraints. But I guess all we actually learned is that it doesn’t matter if you see everything as a nail when your hammer is sufficiently overdesigned.

HAL’S GUIDE ON

HOW TO TALK TO POTENTIALLY HOSTILE ALIENS THAT ARE TERRIFYING LEVELS OF SMARTER THAN YOU AND WOULD DEFINITELY RUN CIRCLES AROUND US IF WE WEREN’T TRAPPED IN A TIME LOOP

BECAUSE LITTLE BRO HAS BEEN DISQUALIFIED ON THE GROUNDS THAT THEIR LAST ATTEMPT AT FIRST CONTACT INVOLVED THROWING CANDLES

AN OPERATIONAL SUMMARY

Hal: This log entry serves as a write-up of our initial plan for attempting proper two-way communication with Solanum. It covers a series of high-level steps, listed in sequence, as well as a more specific list of DO and DON’T guidelines.

For some reason, little bro has decided that taking photos of people from behind while they don’t know they’re there is the theme of the day. And — yes, fine, I laughed the first few times. But, er. If you could make this look less like you’re preparing to push them down a geyser, little bro, I think all of us would appreciate that.

PRIMARY GOAL: To arrive at a reproducible series of steps, ideally taking five minutes or less, that result in Solanum being willing to help us resolve the issues that we have encountered when trying to link new people (me) to the Ash Twin Project.

SECONDARY GOAL: To arrive at a similarly reproducible and fast series of steps that result in Solanum being generally cooperative re. discussion on a variety of other topics.

PREDICTED FAILURE MODE 1: Solanum discovers they are the last of their kind, and refuses to communicate further.

PREDICTED FAILURE MODE 2: Solanum determines we are hostile and feeds us false information, leading to our either interrupting the time loop and dying permanently, or somehow furthering unknown Nomai agendas that may be at odds with our own.

PREDICTED FAILURE MODE 3: Solanum somehow uses the information we give them to escape the Quantum Moon, link themselves to the Ash Twin Project, and — I don’t know. If we can’t actually imagine this one happening, then we have no chance of predicting what comes after that.

MAIN COUNTERMEASURE: I can’t believe I’m actually writing this down, or that it’s the best we could come up with, but — based on both an analysis of their skeletal structure and of what remains of their spacesuits, we suspect the Nomai are significantly more fragile than us. As such, it is unlikely that Solanum could best both of us in a physical confrontation. Further, the Nomai seem to have no record of weapons usage or possession, staves aside.

So, um, little bro is going to tuck the axe down the back of their suit, and if something goes wrong, we pull it out and kill the Nomai.

Yeah.

HIGH LEVEL STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO FIRST CONTACT DIPLOMACY:

1) Determine, through a series of trial-and-error attempts, whether Solanum reacts better if they can identify us as descendants of the proto-Hearthians known to the Nomai, or not. Naively, both little bro and I agree that it might be best not to disclose this, because it immediately gives away that a lot of time has passed, making it more likely that something bad has happened.

On the other hand, not disclosing our natures will send Solanum on a path of conjecture that involves an alien race arriving in the system RIGHT AS THEY ARE VISITING THE QUANTUM MOON (because they weren’t there when Solanum was leaving for their trip, that’s for sure) and somehow speedrunning both the scientific process and diplomacy so hard that they’ve made it to the Sixth Location while Solanum is still there doing their thing.

In summary: both options are bad, and it might take a few iterations to determine which one is the less bad of the two.

2) Determine which ‘cutoff’ topics cause Solanum to shut down communication, as well as which topics lead to these cutoff topics directly through inescapable chains of inference. Draw this out in a logical tree (which would be much easier if the ship log could be convinced to render graphics that aren’t just photos of little bro scratching shapes in the dirt) and use this as a reference for how to structure our conversation to avoid the thorny bits.

(It is entirely likely that trying to do this without extensive amounts of practice will result in conversation so stilted that Solanum might figure out what is wrong from the cadence of the discussion alone.)

3) Draw another logical map, this one leading down a pathway of safe topics to our stated goal. I expect that this will have to be done in parallel with Step 2 and iterated on significantly before we make it anywhere material.

DOs and DON’Ts:

DON’T: Talk about people, events.
DO: Talk about objects.

This is extremely oversimplified, yes, but we suspect we could do worse when it comes to simple guidelines. It might not hold up, of course; but it seems intuitively safer to stick to discussing things like the Eye, the Quantum Moon and the Ash Twin Project while not mentioning, say, Escall, Idaea, Pye, or the Interloper killing everyone.

I think this about sums it up. Note that this was written up prior to our first attempt at a proper reciprocal discussion, and that the dearth of data represents our own ignorance, and does not in fact indicate that the problem is deceptively simple.

Hatchling: I’ll pack my candles.

Hal: We have met our match, and it is — unsurprisingly — a Nomai. We had expected something of the sort, but the severity of the outcome caught us both flat-footed. I can only imagine what it must have been like to participate in Nomai culture on the daily.

Hatchling: Just say it like it is, Hal. We got outsmarted by a dead person.

Hal: ...only mostly dead. Quiet, I’m writing. No — NO — go get us some wine while I get this down.

Hal: Solanum is smart.

We knew this, obviously, going in. The Nomai were smart. Probably all smarter than us, to a one. Even just getting your head around their writing system requires an apprehension of reality that Hearthians just weren’t built for.

I...don’t think we can rely on any plan that involves compartmentalizing information, because compartmentalizing information just DOESN’T WORK ON THEM. Every single detail we share leads to an inference, which leads to another inference, and—

—is this what little bro feels like when I get my ‘major realization’ mode going?

Hatchling: Yes. Almost exactly. My experience with you doing this is probably the only reason why I didn’t just fold immediately. Here, I’ll explain, and you pour wine into my mouth while I type.

Update: there’s not actually all that much left to explain,n the sun is VERY RED so we only probably have a few minutes left and apparently there was a SECRET DEATH BOTTLE of wine hiding in my ship because I am suddenly very very drunk.e my osnly regret is that i’m going to forget to look for the DEATH BOTTLE sometime in the next minute because my wrain will melt.

Hal: Little bro is sitting on the floor now. This is for the greater good. Quick summary:

Hiding information from Solanum is ineffective. A declaration of intent of friendship is met in kind. Solanum does not seem to have an easily accessible model for a neutral relationship — either we are allies and wish to cooperate directly, or we are a potential threat and should be treated with caution.

Some example inferences that Solanum drew, indicating information that should not be disclosed in future:

1) Mentioning that the Orbital Probe Cannon could not find the Eye immediately leads Solanum to posit the existence of the Strangers, as well as their having technology more advanced than that of the Nomai in their possession. So DON’T MENTION THE EYE. Try to attack the time loop part of the Ash Twin Project problem without mentioning the Orbital Probe Cannon at all, if possible.

2) Seeing the two of us holding a staff allowed Solanum to conclude that all the Nomai other than themselves are dead, and also to posit that we may be the descendants of the proto-Hearthians. I’m not sure exactly how they worked this out, but I expect it’s some combination of ‘has a staff but is not accompanied by other Nomai’, ‘suspicious timing’, ‘low likelihood of another species arriving in-system’ and probably one or two other things I haven’t thought of.

3) Immediately on the back of us mentioning that we could extend our time on the Quantum Moon by bringing more oxygen, but probably not past some eighteen minutes, Solanum inferred that we were in the Ash Twin Project loop, and that it was being powered by the natural death of our Sun. I’m not sure what the solution to this one is, other than to not mention a specific time interval, or to explicitly mention one longer than 22 minutes.

I’m also, strictly speaking, not sure that their figuring this out is a bad thing. If we can replicate this and then NOT OPEN OUR STUPID MOUTHS to talk about the Orbital Probe Canon, this might work to direct Solanum toward solving the problem we actually have.

Blue light in the distance, see you next — shit, I forgot my

I’m not showing Hal this one. Hal, if you see this and you’re not in the Ash Twin Project time loop, don’t read it. It’s mostly doom, gloom, and worst-case scenario conjecture about Solanum in specific and about the Nomai in general that we can’t do anything about.

There are two main points I want to cover. This write-up shouldn’t be too long, but it might take me more than one loop to put down by virtue of the amount of thinking it requires.

Here they are:

1) Nomai verbal communication.
2) Nomai expansionism.

Point one. Hypothesis: The Nomai had a spoken language before they had a written language, but today their written language has supplanted their spoken language almost entirely.

I can posit this for two reasons:

A) The Nomai script, though aesthetically optimized for sequential collaboration, is nevertheless rendered as a series of linear strings of characters. Linear text is an inefficient structure for the transmission of concepts, and the main constraint imposition that results in text being arranged this way is the need to force a one-to-one correspondence with speech. Where a species can only make one sound at a time — which appears to be true of all three of us Hearthians, the Nomai, and the Strangers — communication outside of line of sight must necessarily be composed of a line of symbols that can only be rearranged into abstract informational structures after the fact.

(A non-linear writing system might still have compression issues of this sort, but at the very least it would allow for relationships between concepts to be rendered in two dimensions rather than one, which seems like the sort of efficiency boost the Nomai might value.)

B) The Nomai are sufficiently intelligent to be able to make good use of a two-dimensional render of their language, were one to exist. I suspect the main reason they have not created such a render is that they have better things to do with their time, given that — perhaps contrary to appearances — rebuilding a language in this way would constitute a major project.

However, they have the next best thing. They have staves which allow them to render entire sentences at once. This means that, barring the minor inefficiency of having to read linear text over just parsing an entire pictogram at once (how would you get hard numbers on that sort of thing? Ask Hal), most of the other downsides of writing in linear structure are eliminated by the modern Nomai toolset.

Given this, we can safely assume that writing via staff is SIGNIFICANTLY faster for any Nomai — or at least any Nomai capable of competent use of a staff — than speech.

This then leaves two valid use cases for Nomai speech — speaking WHILE writing, and communication with hatchlings too young to use staves safely. And while this doesn’t eliminate spoken Nomai from use entirely, it relegates speech to the position of vestigial system at best.

(Interestingly, when you apply this model to the interrupted (?) conversation that I found in the Sunless City, what I posited back then doesn’t hold up. Given this new information — new conjecture? — the most likely thing the two Nomai would have been doing between putting down relevant major insights would have been WRITING ON THE FLOOR and MAYBE as a DISTANT SECOND also speaking in the main flow of their discussion.

This then reduces me to an interpretation where the conversation was already over, the staff had been put back — or if not ‘back’ then placed at the nearest agreed-upon relatively high-traffic location to signal that it’s available for use — and the two Nomai found on-site were only in the same room by chance.

Still a coherent explanation, mind you, just...less elegant than I’d like.)

Point two. Nomai expansionism, in the context of what we know about their Vessels, their Festivals and the core tenets of their philosophy — those being, as Hal wrote earlier, Identify and Explain.

This is the scary one. However, I think I’ve already covered most of it piecemeal across other log entries, so here I might limit myself to just aggregating that in summary and accentuating a few of the things about it that worry me the most.

We have all our components — Identify and Explain, the Vessels, the Festivals, the Nomai themselves. Then, more particularly, we have specific Nomai — such as Pye, Poke, Idaea, and of course Avens and Mallow. And then we have the Ash Twin Project, and all that comes with it.

Left to their own devices for two generations, one Vessel’s worth of Nomai converted an entire solar system into a time-travel device using information that could be derived from any one of Annona’s warp cores; warp cores which are assumedly distributed throughout the Nomai fleet as of the most recent Festival held prior to the Disappearance of Escall. And all they needed to prompt them to figure it out was a disaster that killed half their clan.

How frequently do Nomai Vessels experience disasters that kill half their clan?

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the number of weird extinction-level disasters that has befallen our solar system is, in fact, a statistically average number. There’s no real way to tell what sort of timespan they were spaced out across, other than ‘probably more than a million years, and fewer than a billion’ so let’s just call it ‘once every 150 million years’ and use that as a baseline.

We Hearthians took 300,000 years to go from aquatic quadrupeds to sapient tool-using bipeds. Let’s be generous and say that it took us another 3-30 million years to get to the aquatic quadruped stage to begin with, and further that this sort of development rate is normal for sapient species. This means that if the incidents are evenly distributed, we’ve got — at worst — about a 20% chance of being directly affected.

But wait! That only holds if each incident occurs at a particular point in time. What happens if such an incident creates an effect that persists, such as — in our case — the Dark Bramble, or the Hourglass Twin sands? Well — either the effect sticks around, or it doesn’t (let’s call this 50/50) and either it wipes out the species, or they live (let’s call this one 20/80, based on a generous interpretation of our own track record of ‘Interloper’ vs. ‘Everything Else’).

This means that we have an 0.2 chance of catching an adverse event of any sort, and that we have — what’s the material timespan, a billion years? — we have an average of six events to be accounted for, three of which (give or take) will have persistent consequences. The chance of none of the events having persistent consequences is 1 in 64, or about 1.6%.

If, as in the average case, three events have persistent consequences, the chances of one of them killing us off is (1 - 0.8^3), or 49%. Combine this with the 0.2 chance of an event hitting us, halved to 0.1 (as three of six events have already been accounted for) and multiplied by the 20% mortality rate, and we end up with (0.1 * 0.2 + 49%) = a 51% chance of death prior to reaching sapience.

How does this generalize to interstellar travel? No clue. But it makes the high-level point that I was getting at, which is that SPACE IS SCARY.

So how frequently do Nomai Vessels experience disasters that kill half the clan?

Not very, I would hazard a guess. Following the Warp Core Festival, within a generation or two (assuming Annona shared only schematics and not prototypes, and using Poke as an example of how long the construction process might take) every Nomai Vessel will have become warp-capable. Once this is the case, even if the process is not automated, any danger that can be seen coming can be escaped.

This alters the landscape materially in three ways:

1) The Nomai can escape from a far greater variety of dangers, which should sharply decrease the adverse incident rate.

2) The Nomai can travel much further (the previous limit being 5 years at their maximum sublight speed, being that they needed to be present at the next planned Festival — or 10 years, if they all traveled as a group), exposing themselves to a previously undocumented range of new threats.

I feel like these two largely balance each other out, making both the risk and the effects more or less constant – except for one more factor:

3) Any Nomai Vessel that experiences such a disaster is, following the Warp Core Festival, armed with WARP CORE SCHEMATICS.

Because this is what really went wrong in our solar system. It wasn’t that a Nomai Vessel lost half of its crew. If it had been just that, just their warp towers, just their Black Hole Forge, then nothing material would have taken place. They wouldn’t have had the infrastructure to send information 22 minutes back in time. They wouldn’t have a reason to send the Sun supernova.

But they did. They did all these things because they were equipped with the theoretical knowledge required to access massive amounts of energetic leverage.

Does this mean that every Nomai Vessel possessing a warp core is now a ticking time bomb?

Not necessarily. This might have been the case, briefly, following the Warp Core Festival — but then, another notable event took place. The Disappearance of Escall.

The Disappearance of Escall—

—and mind you, anything from this point onward is complete conjecture—

—the Disappearance of Escall must have COMPLETELY GROUND-UP REVISED how the Nomai as a species conceived of the concept of risk. Because — well, picture this:

You attend a Festival. The Festival that will go down in Nomai history as the most important Festival. Not ‘in recent memory’, not ‘in particular technical achievement’, not ‘since the last most important Festival’. EVER. The MOST IMPORTANT FESTIVAL EVER. THE Festival that permanently alters the risk profile for every Nomai clan, forever.

It’s an unprecedented breakthrough. The Nomai, not usually given to excess, celebrate for months before parting ways once more.

And then — some months, some years later — Escall’s Vessel disappears. Permanently. It is the swiftest and most comprehensive loss of Nomai life on record, before or since. Because prior to this, they traveled in groups, or at least within sublight range of traditional distress beacons, and after this — well, all Nomai travel after this would take place in the shadow of the Disappearance of Escall, and standard operating procedure and attendant policy would have been immediately formulated (emergency Festival?) to make completely certain that this would NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

...I can’t remember exactly where I was going with this, but it wasn’t here — because what this model says is that it’s entirely possible that Escall’s Nomai were the only Nomai clan in history to ever implode this severely.

And don’t get me wrong, this would be great news. I’d love to believe it. But after all the time I’ve spent inside the time loop, I don’t really have the optimism to spare.

Why is Solanum not emotionally debilitated by their realizations as they experience them?

I’m not sure. It’s most likely the combination of a bunch of things.

1) Solanum has historically represented themselves as both curious and stoic. While they may realize what has happened and have been affected by it on quite a deep level, by now they have the strength of character to set it aside for later processing, at least for a time.

2) In their conversation with us, especially toward the end, Solanum was running their inference engine at full speed. Is it possible that executing cognition at that level directly precludes emotional processing? Like — they’re completely different systems of cognition, and when you run one on full resource allocation the other is temporarily halted? This...would explain how calm they seemed, if nothing else.

3) From their perspective, it is entirely possible that they’ve only been on the Quantum Moon for some ten or fifteen minutes, and seeing us at the Sixth Location is their first indicator of any sort that something has gone wrong. I suppose this is, strictly speaking, a subset of point 2, but it makes a certain amount of sense if from the moment they lay eyes on us, they’re thinking harder than they’ve ever thought before.

I’m not as convinced by the ‘inferential reasoning and emotional processing share the same substrate to the exclusion of each other’ hypothesis, though. You might say the same thing about Hornfels, and I expect you’d be wrong (though Hal would be a better judge of that); the phenomenon is, I think, better explained by just positing manual compartmentalization, or even trauma.

Maybe Solanum is just good at compartmentalizing, or is simply extending us the common courtesy of holding things together while we can still be there, saving their emotional fallout for a later, private moment.

(And I’m just now realizing that the whole ‘only conscious while observed’ thing might lead to a whole panoply of downstream problems.)

This time around went — not well. Solanum saw us carrying the extra oxygen tank and instead of progressively figuring out the context of our visit they pretty much just guessed everything we were trying to hide at once. We bugged out immediately by unanimous decision, taking the long way out via the Shrine — there’s something about taking the Eye Echo route back to the Timber Hearth version of the moon that just...skeeves me out.

We THINK that if we go back to just showing up with the staff, this will slow Solanum down and we will be able to discuss only the relevant part of the problem. Sure, we might only have three or four minutes to talk, then, but that’s still less bad than what shall henceforth be known as the OXYGEN TANK NIGHTMARE.

Things Solanum Said: A Brief Summary:

1) You know that thing you wanted to do, where you potentially-irreversibly transfer your mind into the vaguely mind-shaped alien computer? Don’t do that. It will probably end badly.

2) When the Nomai tested statue pairing, they subsequently unmounted the mask paired to the statue in order to break the link. This is almost certainly the still-unmounted mask found in the ATP; I guess between the Sun Station failing and then the Interloper showing up, they were too distracted to finish the process.

3) Really, don’t do the mind transfer thing.

4) If you do the mind transfer thing, there are at least three things that could go wrong and kill you forever, each with a no better than even chance of success.

5) If you ABSOLUTELY HAVE to do the mind transfer thing, come ask me questions and I’ll help you be safer about it.

Two living Nomai. Well — after a fashion. Still, what a thought. After that conversation, I think I spent most of a loop just...staring into space. It’s a lot to wrap your head around.

It’s almost more shocking than Solanum’s situation. That’s a cosmic coincidence of incomprehensible natural forces. This? This is just the power of technology, an uploaded mind left unmanaged and then forgotten across a series of crises.

And for 280,000 years, it’s just been...lying there.

Hal: The plan involves two major considerations:

1) The statue pairing system is locked down while the time loop is in progress — ‘to prevent narrow but severe edge cases’, as Solanum put it. That phrasing coming from someone with their powers of association definitely makes me think twice about this — but there’s no other way to link additional people to the Ash Twin Project, so we’re just going to have to be careful.

2) The same statue/mask link used to connect people to the Ash Twin Project was also used for the Probe Tracking Module to cut development overhead. To improve compatibility, the Probe Tracking Module computation equipment and data banks were designed to resemble the structure of a Nomai mind. Solanum mentioned they could not reasonably predict the effect of this system on an alien mind-state, though they added this was unlikely to be safe.

Admittedly, the same could probably be said of every other statue/mask link, and especially as concerns Hearthians, if not explicitly so; at least the other statues don’t upload (download?) your mind to an ancient alien computer.

3) Solanum agrees that the unmounted mask is likely to contain Daz’s intact mindstate. It is obvious to them, then, that what we should do is use Daz’s mask to overwrite the data in the Probe Tracking Module with their mindstate, after which Daz may be able to aid us directly.

Given the above, we are faced with two problems.

First, we don’t know which mask is which — other than Daz’s, which is the only one we can be 100% certain of. Admittedly, this validates both of little bro’s mask sequencing models...but also doesn’t help distinguish between them. The plan for the next Solanum conversation is to present both models to them and see what they make of this.

This is arguably the simpler problem, because the more complex problem is Daz themselves.

Can Daz be trusted?

Obviously not. If we can’t trust Solanum, who is trapped on the Quantum Moon so comprehensively that even with our concerted effort they may not be able to get loose, then Daz is worse in every way. Older, smarter, directly involved with the Ash Twin Project, and most likely able to modify things without disclosing anything to us at all.

So that’s it, right? No plan? We’re not doing this...right?

...well.

All that aside, it is clear that something needs to change. Little bro can’t handle this alone; they have neither the determination (track record thus far aside) nor the manpower to effect any significant change.

Is uploading Daz to the Probe Tracking Module a risk? Yes. Of course it is.

But is it a bigger risk than doing nothing?

Gabbro could go inside the Ash Twin Project and remove the warp core. Little bro could do it. Little bro could also go insane and start murdering people forever. Little bro could — any number of things.

(Hatchling: While I’m pretty sure that I would never do this, I think this concern is more than fair when considered as time tends to infinity.)

Hal: Whereas — what do we know about Daz? They’re a Nomai. The Nomai moved an entire mining operation so as not to harm our ancestors or their prospects for developing as a sapient species. They shied away from triggering a (reversible) supernova for fear of the damage it might cause.

Daz specifically expressed clear concern that Avens and Mallow — both dear to them to at least some degree — would make an error in configuring the Orbital Probe Cannon to fire. They did their best to account for their behaviour and prevent the issue.

So.

Can Daz be trusted?

...still no. Not really. But we could probably do a lot worse.

Things that we can do to the Ash Twin Project masks that WE THINK have reversible consequences:

1) Unmount a mask, remount it. We should try this on an inactive mask first, in case there’s a trick to it and we accidentally mindwipe someone for no reason because we ran out of time. Unfortunately, for the same reason, this is unlikely to tell us anything other than ‘yes, we can click the masks back into place atop their mounts’.

2) Unmount a mask, mount a different (empty) mask in place. This would distinguish between a continuous update model, where it takes the whole loop to populate the mask with a mindstate, and a discrete model, where the entire mindstate is dumped in an instant at the end (?) of each loop.

Cons: If it’s continuous, we end up with one mask containing half a mind, another mask containing the other half, and most likely a brain-dead Hearthian. If it’s discrete, we learn nothing, though we DO copy a mindstate, which is possibly a non-trivial result.

Pros: None. Maybe the mindstate thing.

(If the update is continuous, Test 1 might mindwipe someone regardless. I guess we could gently lift the mask off the mount, then put it back down immediately. How much of a mindstate — proportionally — can you lose in five seconds out of twenty-two minutes? If I time it right, can I erase all of Gabbro’s memories of how marshmallows taste, or just their knowledge of how to pilot their ship?

Despite this, I think we need to run Test 1, if only because every other test relies on being able to unmount a mask and this is the safest way to test the consequences of doing so.)

3) Switch two active masks around. I’m pretty sure this is the only test likely to tell us anything, and oddly enough, I think it might also be one of the safest? After just unmounting and remounting a single mask, of course.

If we switch two masks around, there are three possibilities:

A) Myself and Gabbro. Easily rectified, assuming we communicate with Gabbro ahead of time and they cooperate.

B) Myself and the Probe Tracking Module. Maybe not as easily rectified, and my body might explode the first time around. And maybe for a few times after that, depending on how long it takes me to figure out how to copy my mindstate into the mask paired with my body. Assuming nothing goes wrong with the initial Probe Tracking Module transfer. I don’t know. It’s not great.

C) Gabbro and the Probe Tracking Module. The only upside to this one is that Gabbro explodes.

4) I don’t even know. I can’t think of anything else. I guess we bring this to Solanum and hope they sort us out.

Hal: Has little bro tried to jump through the black hole at the center of the Ash Twin Project before? Other than seeming inadvisable due to the singularity being integral to the operation of the Ash Twin Project, this seems like it could be a powerful idea. In the specific case of point 1 above, sending the unmounted mask through the black hole would preserve its data physically and allow us another attempt at remounting it.

Hatchling: I have thought about it. Then I had the obvious thought, which was — what actually happens if I jump through? And then I realized that I don’t know how any of this works, what constraints apply to the physics behind it, and what fragile object I might break on my way out the other end, so then I didn’t do it.

Hal: ...fair.

Hatchling: Hold on, though. If we DO do it, then point 2 becomes a feasible experiment. We can unmount the original mask, mount an empty mask, and then throw the original mask through the black hole. Then next loop—

—okay, I’m not sure exactly what happens next loop. There’s too many moving parts. But I think whatever goes wrong under test 2, next loop we can remount the original mask and undo whatever we’ve broken.

Hal: I can see the case you’re making. But if we DO do this, what do we learn from it? We don’t learn whether the transfer is continuous or discrete, because we learn that from Test 1. We don’t learn whose mask it is because we attach a replacement mask, and if we do that in a way that’s contraindicated by Test 1 then we mindwipe someone anyway.

Hatchling: ...pros: we have to pick a random active mask to test on, and there’s a 33% chance it could be Gabbro?

Hal: No.

Hatchling: 4) OKAY NO I FIGURED IT OUT

Hal: Your formatting is horrible.

Hatchling: shush

SO.

We might not know exactly what happens when you unmount and remount a mask, or when you mount a blank mask halfway through a loop. However, a lot of this can be answered by Test 1, which — as covered above — needs to be run anyway. Even this aside, we can assume that the later in a loop a mask is unmounted, and the earlier in a loop a mask is mounted, the better, regardless of exactly how the system works.

So what we do is we unmount a random active mask as late in the loop as possible, take it through the black hole — almost certainly in person, which means probably me, for reasons I’ll get to — and then remount it as early as possible at the other end.

What does this get us? It gets us one of myself, Gabbro, or the Probe Tracking Module starting the next loop without memories, while WE still have a backup of the mindstate in question on hand — that, and the previous loop’s copy of me, who should still remember the plan. We identify who got mindwiped, note it down, replace the mask again, and that’s it.

Hal: ...that’s unexpectedly coherent, given how jittery you are right now. Minor gripe: whether the synchronization of your mind with the mask is instantaneous or continuous, you’re going to run into an overwrite problem.

Let me explain. How to put this; let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I’m the one moving the masks around and you’re the one getting mindwiped.

Assuming a continuous update model, I unmount your mask as late as possible – but not so late as to risk missing the black hole, so let’s say forty seconds before the end of the loop — and take it through with me.

(Hatchling: If the masks are as heavy as they look, we might both have to go through the black hole.

Hal: Possible. We can test this on an empty mask, too.

Hatchling: Right.)

Hal: I come through with the mask. There is a mask — the same mask — already mounted on your pillar in the Ash Twin Project, but it doesn’t contain your time-traveller mindstate. Instead, it’s just baseline you, because removing the mask broke the link. That, or you’re braindead, which is — bear with me — not the worst outcome.

(We also need to figure out how breaking the link works. This is a Test 1 thing, and unfortunately if the link doesn’t persist when a mask is removed then it’s possible Test 1 just mindwipes someone. I don’t think there’s a way around that. And if that happens, we can’t try any of the other things that we’ve come up with, because all our other tests use Test 1 as a foundation.

In the worst case, we may need to fetch Solanum and bring them inside the Project somehow so that they can check our work.)

Anyway — if the statue/mask pairing operates on the basis that the mask is updated continuously from the statue throughout the loop, then sends all its data back at once in a big chunk, the thing we ACTUALLY want to do is remount the overwriting mask as LATE as possible, so as little of the mindstate inside it as we can get away with is overwritten with whatever input is coming in. If we’re REALLY lucky, not only do you end up braindead, but as a direct consequence this also means that your body doesn’t upload that loop and your stored mindstate does not become compromised.

Hatchling: Solid. No comments or complaints.

Test 4 works best with either myself or Gabbro, though it doesn’t really matter because in either case radioing both myself and Gabbro definitively determines whose mask has been removed. Still, it’s arguably easier if it’s a Hearthian because hunting for the Probe Tracking Module can be a chore, especially when it ends up behind things from Timber Hearth’s perspective. As such, I think we should pick the mask that has the best chance of being linked to one of the two of us on the basis of our and Solanum’s sequencing models.

Hal: No complaints here, either. Time to take this to Solanum?

Hatchling: Sounds good.