78 KiB
r!Animorphs: The Reckoning - Chapter 29 (Esplin)
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Author: u/4t0m Chaos Legion*
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URL: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5627803/chapters/25342653
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Score: 48
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Created: 2017-06-27T21:20:34
Post:
Comments:
u/LieGroupE8 [+14] ** (6 hours later)
This was amazing, as usual! Esplin chapters are always the most "rationalist" in the classical hpmor sense. I love how Esplin is a Dark Transhumanist (Transyeerkist?) who wants to end death and make optimal use of resources, but only for himself. He aspires to eventually become an Ellimist/Crayak-level being, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if Crayak himself, who is from another galaxy in canon, had a similar origin story, leaving behind his old galaxy in ruins. Probably most or all godlike beings in this universe have an origin like this. If Esplin ascends in this way, he still has to deal with all the gods in the other galaxies too - which would be a fascinating story in its own right. Of course, I don't want him to get that far...
Specific Comments
One. [Hey, I would use actual numbers, but the numbering interacts weirdly with the quotes and I don't want to deal with that now]
The same was true of the chain of coincidence that had led to the seizure of a Skrit Na freighter during the frantic escape from Ondar—a freighter that had just happened to be carrying the only human that had ever been transported outside of its home system, the woman who eventually became the host of Visser One and who brought the human species to the attention of the Council of Thirteen.
It looks like Marco's mom is still Visser One in this story. She was apparently abducted on earth by the Skrit Na, who made it look like she was in a boating accident.
Two.
Almost without conscious thought, I found myself morphing, my perspective shifting as I rose into the air, the form of an Antarean Bogg
And why does Esplin not first acquire Elfangor in order to sift through his memories later? Even if he didn't yet know about reading thoughts from morph, he might still want to impersonate Elfangor later.
Three.
Kandrona, I had named it, for I was not without a sense of history. A new life form, distilled from Yeerk-flesh and Andalite neurons with the help of the Arn, enhanced with microscopic technology developed by the Naharans.
I bet that the morphing technology was the icing on the cake that allowed him to make exact copies of himself.
Four.
for every thread that would leave the coalescion, a mirror that would not, the two kept in perfect harmony by the self-repairing transmitters ensheathing each axon.
This is probably (also) something Esplin learned from studying the morphing technology. The Yeerk neurons in-morph have Z-space links to the brain emulators. So ... the emulated brain is interacting with a simulated world that mirrors the real world, but can possibly be disconnected from it (hence the intervention in the Yeerk pool). This implies that the gods can only do those impressive interventions to someone in-morph.
Also, given how precisely the morphing tech can perfectly replicate bodies, I bet it just destroys a person's original body and reconstructs it with the right memories every time they demorph. Hence the intervention on Marco, who saw David's true mind in the mirrored simulation but whose body was reconstructed with a different set of memories.
Five.
Today, I would test Kandrona’s true steadfastness. Today, I would see if Kandrona could metabolize a natural Yeerk, in addition to copies of itself
On first read, I thought that Esplin was trying to get the Kandrona to perfectly become the Yeerk that it had devoured, so that Esplin himself could later be absorbed by a Kandrona to become part of the coalescion without a change in his values. I suppose that since he can already create perfect copies of his own mind, there is no need for that, but why does he still need to eat other yeerks? Dude, just copy the oatmeal; you can't eat other yeerks forever anyway.
u/TK17Studios [+10] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (6 hours later)
Woohoo! Thank you for the long and detailed comment.
Last part first ... I think Esplin is probably eating oatmeal these days, rather than Yeerk shards, but he didn't necessarily tell Telor that. I mean, if they're already delivering you a shard every few days, and you've stopped eating them but you want to start using them for mad science ... easier to just not say anything, right?
Morphing tech isn't destroying bodies when it tucks them away in Z-space. I can see that it could, but I'm sticking with the actual pocket dimension thing. But you're right that Esplin's been stealing every individual piece of the morphing tech puzzle that he can—he's figured out how it transmits thoughts, how it scans and duplicates bodies, how it stashes stuff in Z-space. But for some gosh-darned reason, he just can't get the whole thing to add up. Weird, huh?
re: Elfangor, I went with him not grabbing Elfangor's DNA to show that he's still goad-able and, while pretty sharp and on-the-ball, still capable of just going eh, that's low-priority, I can just skip it. I'm hoping it doesn't quite count as idiot-ball so much as realistic bias.
u/LieGroupE8 [+6] ** (6 hours later)
Morphing tech isn't destroying bodies when it tucks them away in Z-space. I can see that it could, but I'm sticking with the actual pocket dimension thing.
Interesting... this doesn't exactly disconfirm my theory about the interaction of physical memories and the emulation; the memories still have to be transferred from the emulation to the original body somehow. Unless there is no separate emulation, and it's all done on the person's physical brain, but that implies that they would need to sleep as normal after lots of morphing, which isn't the case.
I'm hoping it doesn't quite count as idiot-ball so much as realistic bias.
Honestly, it seems pretty idiot-ball to me, unless Esplin didn't know about morph-mind-replication at the time.
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (7 hours later)
Note also that if he acquires Elfangor here, it a) breaks with canon and b) requires rewriting of the first arc so he doesn't just kill those kids as soon as he learns their names from the Ellimist's prophecy that Elfangor knows.
(Either that, or someone has to mindwipe him like what they did to poor Marco.)
I'm seriously considering it, but those are the blockers in my way.
u/LieGroupE8 [+6] ** (7 hours later)
I do appreciate the initial conformity to canon. I can forgive you ... this time. :)
Alternate possibility: previously, Elfangor bluffed and convinced Esplin that he had some personal countermeasure which was hazardous to anyone trying to acquire him. I don't how how well that would integrate with the story, but that is a fun possibility.
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (7 hours later)
Or maybe he acquired him back when they were both on the Yeerk homeworld, pre-infestation, and it was correspondingly that much less likely that there was any extraordinary new information in just the past year or so. Still a sin of rationality, but a believable one (people being creatures of inertia and so forth).
u/blebblee [+5] (9 hours later)
Your fic is amazing and I need more backstory and drabbles of world writing collated somewhere please. I thought I'd go through your reddit account to see if you've said anything else about the yeerks BUT IT'S ALL MAGIC.
u/eroticas [+6] (a day later)
Well, if I had this power and someone was dying, the first thing I'd think to do is grab a copy of their mind state, to save them from permanent death. I imagine if I were evil I'd have all the more reason to grab mind-states as standard procedure.
Maybe he does acquire Elfangor, but the combined resistance of Alloran and Elfangor overwhelms Esplin's ability to rip the relevant information from Elfangor's head, and he can only really awaken Elfangor while restrained to avoid getting a tail blade to the throat, and even that is too risky because the whole thing might compromise his ability to demorph? It would be super poignant, Alloran and Elfangor could interact mind to mind for a short time. Or maybe Esplin predicts this outcome and doesn't even try. It would also be kind of hilarious if he does try and that is how Alloran finally kills Esplin and saves his brother to boot.
Alternatively, I think idiot balls are less blatant if the character later facepalms about them / somehow the story acknowledges that it was a mistake.
Edit: Or! What if one of the incentives for Esplin's experiments to increase his yeerk-tissue without compromising his identity is to successfully unlock Elfangor's memories and solve a piece of the animorphs puzzle, and when he succeeds it leads him to learn about the Ellimist, except naturally the Ellimist knew that it would happen and so it put precisely right memories in Elfangor's head to influence Esplin in a way that twists the plot in exactly the right way...
u/MagicWeasel [+6] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
Maybe he does acquire Elfangor, but the combined resistance of Alloran and Elfangor overwhelms Esplin's ability to rip the relevant information from Elfangor's head, and he can only really awaken Elfangor while restrained to avoid getting a tail blade to the throat, and even that is too risky because the whole thing might compromise his ability to demorph? It would be super poignant, Alloran and Elfangor could interact mind to mind for a short time.
I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE
u/LazarusRises [+10] (2 hours later)
Always love Esplin's chapters. The guy is so insane, so smart, and so evil.
a freighter that had just happened to be carrying the only human that had ever been transported outside of its home system
Aw, Trillian got Yeerked :(
Who is Silat, and why does Esplin have such total control over them? I thought at this point all he had left within the sphere was Telor, who is obviously not on his side. Am I mixing up pools?
Isn't it a bit odd that Esplin, who has keyed into the weirdness going on in this system, hasn't noticed that Ralph's maple-and-ginger instant oatmeal just happens to be a kandrona replacement? Did he just take that for granted?
Esplin has a brain in a box. Ok, not great. Is it sentient? Or just encoded values and memories at this point?
Why did Esplin use the hypersight on Kilgam at all? To give it some shred of his memories to take with it into Kandrona?
Glad that didn't work. But even if it had, would Esplin have been able to control all the bodies at once through Kandrona like he does with his clones? How are they all linked while apart from the coalescion?
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 hours later)
Trillian. :D
Silat has been kept somewhat mysterious, but the gist so far is "a new coalescion that spawned off of Aftran somewhat early on, leaving Aftran all lovey-dovey and peaceful (and so probably Silat is somewhat aggressive)."
It's true that Esplin didn't specifically mark it as weird that oatmeal could provide a kandrona replacement. It might not actually even be weird, though, when you think about it, given the insane biodiversity of Earth (which is unusual in this universe).
The brain in a box is just straight-up another copy of him. Same awareness, same values.
The idea with Kandrona is that half of it always stays behind in the pool, and the other half of it is in instant Z-space radio contact on a neuron-by-neuron basis. So it's always in "the sharing," even as it's controlling dozens or hundreds of bodies. One hive mind, but with enough neural mass to punch right through the multitasking problem and actually do a million things at once.
Our Esplin would have zero control over it, which is why he's so keen to be absolutely sure that it's value-aligned. But! Once it's really up and running, he could merge with it, and become a part of it, in theory. Then he would be it (since it was already him) and that's mission accomplished.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (9 hours later)
Oh! Oh! Like in a recent popular movie which I shall not name least I spoil its plot! By which I mean
u/cheer_up_bot [+4] (2 hours later)
:(
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (4 days later)
Who's Trillian?
u/LazarusRises [+2] (4 days later)
She was the first Earthling to leave the solar system in the Hitchhiker's Guide.
u/None [+9] (a day later)
flag sleep depend shocking melodic squealing deranged bake uppity icky
this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev
u/TK17Studios [+7] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
Yeah, a big question is "Would Ellimist and/or Crayak prefer or disprefer the sudden appearance of a third player?"
u/MagicWeasel [+8] Cheela Astronaut (5 hours later)
I'm going to try and do longer form feedback, because, well, the story is very good and I want to make the author happy by providing long-form feedback. It's mostly going to be squeeing over every minor detail, so if you were hoping for long-form critical feedback then I apologise.
January
First thought: ESPLIN CHAPTER OH MY GOD THEY ARE GOING TO BE IN BIG TROUBLE AREN'T THEY
Why does Esplin think the humans rearranged Z-Space?
Is Visser One some non-human alien or is the description just based on andalite sensabilities??????????????
Insects in amber seems like a strange simile for Esplin to use since I don't think the Yeerk world or the Andalite world would have insects and amber.
Given the yerk hive mind... what is Visser One? Is she a cannibal like Esplin, or is she part of the Visser One pool, or what? I feel like this may have already been answered.
Speaks of a rendezvous with the Gedds. In the series the Gedds are not portrayed as being capable of advanced society. Now I want to know what the Gedds are like here????
February
I'm wondering how much time has passed in-universe since Elfangor crashed. I get the feeling this chapter is 3 months or so long. Is that just bridging the gap between Esplin's last chapter?
Good that Esplin is taking a good look at influential human orgs. Doesn't seem to help him, but he's right, if it turns out area 51 does have secret alien technology, he needs to know yesterday.
March
Ohhh okay so the past two subheadings were "prequels" and now we're meeting Elfangor. That's interesting. But also comforting because I got the feeling that the story had only happened like for a month since Elfangor's death, so my intuition has not been squashed so much.
Backstory is different?? Arbron is a lady?? Is the andalite society not horrifically sexist here? And she's not a taxxon??? I liked arbron-the-taxxon :( I kind of hope she appears "what? YOU THOUGHT I WAS DEAD?" style!
The yeerks here are infesting Skrit Na? That's interesting. (Aside: I have re-read all the chronicles and some of the megamorphs the past week or so, so I'm feeling especially brushed up on the mythology if you can't tell, and ultimately I suspect I'll be re-reading the whole series with a few of the crappy books skipped).
This Esplin/Elfangor scene is amazing. I didn't know I needed it.
"the least unworthy of my opponents" swoon at that line.
"patch the hole at your side, prevent your soul from leaking out" - is Esplin being poetic or does he believe in souls?
~ May ~
WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW I AM EXCITED TO READ THIS SUBHEADING
The idea of humans mastering z-space manipulation as arn have mastered biology and Naharans microtechnology is a cool idea that I've only seen once before, in something I started but never finished on podiobooks back in the day called, I think, "Hospital Earth" - its premise was that each alien race is naturally good at one thing, and humanity was good at medicine, other species being good at FTL drives but not quite grasping germ theory or whathaveyou. We have pretty amazing medicine when you think about it, so I kind of liked that. Anyway, point is, it's a great idea because you'd expect that different branches of science are "further along" by some objective standpoint than others, but we have no way of seeing which those are because of our, well, context in human culture. So I'm kind of holding hope that humanity has an amazing mastery of, I don't know, offshore engineering compared with other species (perhaps due to our large amount of coastal cities). Anyway, I'm sure I"m wrong, but it's a fun thought!
I love the oatmeal. It is so terribly ridiculous but it's wonderful.
I'm not sure if I like Esplin jumping to Ellimist here. I mean, we know he's right, but if I were Esplin, I'd think it was more likely the animorphs immediately started recruiting and the Z-Space thing was a coincidence than that a god has it out for me, but isn't directly killing me, just making humans not quite die - honestly the Chee make more sense like he said...
Two thousand humans for Silat including 600 producing offspring: is he breeding his hosts? Is a baby a useful host? That's all kind of fucked up.
He's giving the dogs a PLANET?
Okay, Visser One is a human, and the other mouth holes that are flapping are nostrils I guess. But wait - does that mean Visser One is Loren, not Eva?
I'm feeling better about him guessing the Ellimist/Crayak thing as he doesn't seem to actually believe it, just tossing it out there. And he's smarter than me, so he'd be more likely to think of something like that.
For those playing along, Luanda and Kinshasa sound like alien places, but they are African capitals - not Ebola, though.
~ New Section With No Heading ~
Living forever??????
oh my god his philosophy is going to be amazing, coming from a culture where consciousness itself is highly mutable
wait he's making some sort of artificial life???
omg his plan is scary AF
oh thank god it didn't owkr
wait he just threw out a mind-clone of himself into the vacuum of space, dooming it to death??? THAT IS COLD, VISSER
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 hours later)
Wahoo! Ten billion Planck constants of extra credit to you. Also, it's sweet that you've recently read through canon—I haven't had the time, my last read-through was maybe five years ago.
JanuaryHumans responsible for rift: It was his immediate, knee-jerk thought; the obvious suspicion given that it happened JUST as they violated Earth space.
Visser One: Is human, as-yet-unidentified, the "alien" stuff is just from-Esplin's-perspective.
Insects in amber: I chose that as a planet-neutral "flies in honey." =)
Visser One is an ordinary Yeerk. She drops in and out of a larger pool, and that larger pool occasionally tweaks her, but since she's a pretty capable Yeerk as-is the tweaks are minor and she's basically consistent from infestation to infestation.
The Gedds are still used as hosts in the Yeerk empire, they're just none-too-bright and not very coordinated. A very low-status host.
MarchYeah, I gender-bent Arbron. I want the Andalites to be a bit less sexist, since they're still terrible in other ways. I actually seriously considered having Ax be female all along (after all of the team's assumptions about "Elfangor's brother") but in the end it felt a little too token-y. No promises re: Arbron showing back up as a Taxxon, but I guess she did die off-screen, which is always suspect.
I decided to leave it ambiguous whether they're infesting Skrit Na or just conscripting them. I sort of liked how in canon everybody just left the Skrit Na alone. There've been references earlier in the story to the Skrit Na planet falling to the Yeerks, though.
re: souls, Esplin was being poetic.
MayYep, he's breeding hosts.
Think about negotiating with the Chee: if you're all, like, "I promise I'll be nice to dogs," that might get you somewhere. If you can prove "I've already committed to making a dog paradise; it's half-built already, you can look inside my mind with a Leeran and see that I am 100% never going back on this promise," that gives you a BUNCH more power. (Kudos to one of my colleagues for pointing this out to me.)
It didn't work this time...
^(Also note that even though he can't get the thing to be stable as it eats other Yeerks, he has successfully created copies of himself that share his exact values, and can infest other hosts.)
u/MagicWeasel [+5] Cheela Astronaut (5 hours later)
Also, it's sweet that you've recently read through canon—I haven't had the time, my last read-through was maybe five years ago
I've only read about 4 or 5 of the Chronicles, and they are a 1-2 hour read each, so it's not much of an investment. The worldbuilding mostly happened in the Chronicles so I actually felt like I got a HUGE amount of background/worldbuilding on the back of that.
Insects in amber: I chose that as a planet-neutral "flies in honey." =)
Don't think it's quite there: amber is the sap of earth trees that hardens, and insects specifically are an earth thing. I mean, do the Hork-Bajir or Andalite trees have sap? Is their sap sticky?
The Gedds are still used as hosts in the Yeerk empire, they're just none-too-bright and not very coordinated. A very low-status host.
Just like canon; but it sounds like the rendezvous with the Gedds is the same sort of thing as with the Taxxons or Arn; I got the impression that V3 was negotiating with the Gedds, which didn't seem right.
I sort of liked how in canon everybody just left the Skrit Na alone.
I like how the Skrit Na are older than the Ellimist in canon.
I wonder what V3's dog paradise looks like? I mean, with a whole planet of resources, you could have a pretty big dog population, depending on how nice they play together. I suppose they'd form loose packs or something?
u/TK17Studios [+7] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 hours later)
I imagine that there's a lot of convergent evolution, so most tree-like organisms would require some kind of liquid inside, and most planets would develop small critters that crawl and fly. They wouldn't technically qualify as trees/sap and insects in Earth biological terms, but they'd be clear analogues.
And by "rendezvous with the Gedds," I was more intending "a group of Gedd controllers."
I forgot they were older than the Ellimist! That's pretty metal.
u/FireNexus [+2] (4 days later)
Like the mimic lizards in cibola burn. I'm really glad that idea has stared working it's way into sci-fi tropes
u/keeper52 [+6] (11 hours later)
wait he just threw out a mind-clone of himself into the vacuum of space, dooming it to death??? THAT IS COLD, VISSER
Yes. And the Animorphs do much the same thing every time they demorph.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (11 hours later)
V3 would claim he threw it out 'cause it WASN'T a mind-clone of himself anymore.
u/blebblee [+7] (8 hours later)
The oatmeal was actually in the original series too.
which, while written for children, were surprisingly dark and good, if memory serves me. Although I feel like the ellimist is way beyond deus ex, if there wasn't a god literally looking out for them their survival would be completely unbelievable.
It's a testament to this fanfic and my iffy memory that I keep thinking things from it happened in the originals and vice versa.
u/MagicWeasel [+9] Cheela Astronaut (9 hours later)
Yeah, but in the original series the oatmeal was mentioned once but never came up again. I like that the oatmeal is remaining relevant. But it makes sense: if such a thing did exist, well, then of course the Visser would be all over it.
Whereas that failed experiment to stop humans having free will, or Rachel burping up an alligator, even canon, would have little effect on this universe, if you get me.
(Aside: PLEASE let Rachel acquire an alligator and burp it. PLS)
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (9 hours later)
I ... y'see, I really want to say yes because supportive longtime reader and commenter and all that, but ...
so no ...
u/MagicWeasel [+5] Cheela Astronaut (9 hours later)
TOO LATE. IT'S HEADCANON!
u/cheer_up_bot [+3] (5 hours later)
:(
u/DaystarEld [+9] Pokémon Professor (a day later)
Loved the window into V3's mind and terminal values and goals. My first thought was that he's like a sapient cancer, but really he's more like the ultra-yeerk, wanting not just one host, but a universe of hosts all controlled by the same essential being.
Great villains can make good stories great: an already-great story gets made that much better :)
u/Brain_Blasted [+7] (a day later)
a freighter that had just happened to be carrying the only human that had ever been transported outside of its home system, the woman who eventually became the host of Visser One and who brought the human species to the attention of the Council of Thirteen.
This sounds a whole lot like Tobias's mom than Marco's. Wasn't Loren taken by Elfangor in canon?
u/DaystarEld [+8] Pokémon Professor (a day later)
I thought the same thing, but she was actually taken along with someone else, and I don't think V-3 knew about it in either case? But this is an AU with pre-story-start divergence, so that whole thing might not have even happened.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
Yeah.
u/Brain_Blasted [+4] (a day later)
With that in mind, it could be possible in this alternate world where Tobias was in an orphanage rather than tossed between guardians that his mother was taken, though I may need a refresher on the time scale of the Yeerk invasion and Tobias's orphanage. In my mind it fits nicely within this world, whereas I have a hard time fitting in the theory of Marco's mother being Visser.
u/absolute-black [+6] (48 minutes later)
typo thread -
pools hip -> pool ship
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (an hour later)
^^thank
u/absolute-black [+13] (an hour later)
no thank you for making such a good, not even slightly embarrassing to recommend ratfic
u/ZeroNihilist [+7] (a day later)
I think the really interesting thing here is that it implies that it's Esplin, not the Yeerk council, that is the chosen champion of one of the gods. Things have been engineered to give him the perfect opportunity to achieve his propagation of self. It's not guaranteed, because the other god meddles too, but it may be the best possible situation given the existence of a hostile omnipotent entity opposing his benefactor.
Going off the god-demarcation I presented way back in the chapter 18 comments (TL;DR: Ellimist and Crayak are Order+Unity+Silence and Chaos+Harmony+Noise maximisers, though not sure which is which), InfinitEsplin is a key goal of Order+Unity+Silence.
After all, an infinite entity linked by thought-speech and enforced value compatibility maximises all three literally and figuratively. Order, because InfinitEsplin will enforce it. Unity both as "unity of purpose" and the literal meaning "one". Silence, because there is minimal need to communicate with yourself (and, literally, because they could use thought-speech).
If InfinitEsplin is a goal of Order+Unity+Silence (for compatibility with canon, Crayak), what is the goal of Chaos+Harmony+Noise (Ellimist)?
Well, harmony makes me think that Yeerks are going to be involved here too. Instead of a massive hive-mind, however, we'll have a universal sharing; all sapients united by understanding despite their differences.
Chaos would imply that the situation would be highly unpredictable. No one entity nor group of entities would have full and indefinite control of the universe.
As for noise, I'm interpreting it as a stand-in for dialogue/communication. The universe would be full of people talking and arguing and being persuaded, converging on optimality by the glacial, faltering process of democracy.
Initially I thought that Chaos+Harmony+Noise (Ellimist) would be bad for humanity, but I'm coming round to the idea that their goals might be compatible with our aggregate utility function (even if it would take radical changes of society for us to accept it). Bring on the dissolution of arbitrary barriers through implanted empathy.
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
=) =) =) =) =)
u/FTL_wishes [+5] superluminal (2 hours later)
Keep at it, I can't wait for more!
Well this confirms some of the suspicions I had. Silat is in Pyongyang and has probably infested Kim Jong Un and a significant proportion of North Korean high command, and Esplin is planning something big with an Operation Clarke, which I suspect involves North Korea as well.
He really isn't thinking about Telor right now, which may come back to bite him in his tail.
I really hope that after you finish the primary storyline, you flesh out your universe a bit more. I'd love to read about all the sieges and battles between the Yeerks and Andalites, and perspectives from both Andalite and Yeerk leaders as they prosecute the war. There are so many noodle incidents mentioned in an offhand way.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 hours later)
Thanks! I dunno if I'll get around to writing anything official re: universe expansion, but if people want to bug me once the story is over, I'd be happy to at least describe the rough outlines and major points I've thought up.
u/Evan_Th [+5] Sunshine Regiment (a day later)
Consider this a preemptive bugging. I'll eagerly read any and all such descriptions you write.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+5] (16 hours later)
Man, what a crazy chapter. I'm wondering if V1 is Loren or Eva now. Here's some rambling thoughts:
There's something nagging at me...this whole chapter I keep getting the feeling of 'Esplin's going to fuck up and it's going to be his downfall'. I can't put my finger on exactly where...right now I think it's Alloran that's a giant unknown factor, and Esplin hasn't really pursued it. What's going to happen when he perfects Kandrona and leaves his host for the first time in how long?
What would happen if you just chucked Esplin, host body and all, into Cirran?
There is a persistent theme of 'strength in unity' throughout this story, and Esplin stands against that. While Esplin has the Arn, other species, Silat and Telor under his command, I wouldn't say he has allies, he has...servants. No, hold on. His approach is to unify the galaxy under his Kandrona, as one. Unity through silence or unity through harmony? Now we're back to the themes of the E/C conflict. So I think what it boils down to is whether Esplin can achieve his goals in time? If he ultimately fails to capture Earth, or loses too many troops in the process, will he get the opportunity to pursue his ultimate goal like this again?
u/TooShortToBeStarbuck [+4] (an hour later)
Regarding Honoghr - I see what you did there. Nice.
Fantastic chapter!
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (an hour later)
Also Iblis maneuver. Was a good chapter for Timothy Zahn shout-outs. =)
u/TooShortToBeStarbuck [+5] (2 hours later)
Iblis refers to a lot of things, and I wasn't sure which, beyond the Islamic mythology side of it.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 hours later)
General Garm Bel Iblis, who devised the "A-wing slash" maneuver in a battle in (I think) Dark Force Rising.
u/TooShortToBeStarbuck [+2] (5 hours later)
Ah, thank you.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (9 hours later)
Oh, right. I did think that name sounded familiar.
u/royishere [+3] (11 hours later)
And Obroa-Skai! At this point, I'm just waiting for confirmation that this is an Animorphs/Star Wars crossover fic.
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (11 hours later)
Noghri Controllers. ó.O
u/ketura [+2] Organizer (19 hours later)
Hutt controllers. Yo dawg, we heard you like slugs...
u/nonoforreal [+6] (5 hours later)
He spaced his clone for changing a bit, huh? Does he himself not change at all, not even insignificant amounts, when eating other yeerks? It's going to be real rough if he doesn't meet his own standards for being him-like.
I was a bit surprised that he thinks the only realistic explanation for his enemies knowing about the oatmeal is that yeerks are cooperating with them. Couldn't his enemies have just recovered hosts that had experienced it themselves, or otherwise knew about it?
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 hours later)
I think he's aware that he himself changes, but the idea is to have something that stays in resonance with him/changes slowly enough that when he joins it, it's really him still.
Note that he said it was "strong evidence," not "conclusive evidence." You're right, it's also possible that they could have recovered hosts, but the group that was being fed oatmeal was fairly small and tightly controlled, kept isolated and so forth, and most of Aftran's hosts didn't just sort of casually know about it. The coalescion knew, of course, but as individual Yeerks got sorted and dumped into individual heads, that particular knowledge wasn't usually needed.
u/nonoforreal [+1] (18 hours later)
but the group that was being fed oatmeal was fairly small and tightly controlled, kept isolated and so forth, and most of Aftran's hosts didn't just sort of casually know about it.
I suppose that Esplin does seem to suspect treachery easily enough that "they got lucky and found the test group" is less likely to him than "they got lucky and found someone willing to betray everything." Still a bit odd that he seems to have ruled the first possibility out.
The coalescion knew, of course, but as individual Yeerks got sorted and dumped into individual heads, that particular knowledge wasn't usually needed.
Come on, man. The two individual yeerks that they happened to get knew about it. Even if they didn't, the number of yeerks that knew about it being smaller actually just reduces the attack surface for getting the info by corrupting yeerks, and so it makes salvaged hosts who were in the know more likely to be the points of discovery for that piece of intel, relatively speaking. This hurts your own case.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
Are ... are you not crediting the fact that the whole chapter is about a god manipulating chance? =/
Also, I disagree that having fewer Yeerks know about it makes it more likely for the secret to slip out. Can you explain that one again for me? I might have misunderstood your claim.
u/nonoforreal [+1] (20 hours later)
Yes, but given that the POV character doesn't accept the god's intervention as real, it doesn't explain why they would write off possibilities due to the god. Unless you're saying that the gods intervened to make him write off the possibility of a host human being the source of the information, which is... oddly specific, especially since it isn't even true.
It's not that fewer yeerks knowing about it makes it more likely for the secret to be spilled, it's that it makes it less likely, once the secret is known to be spilled, that the source was a yeerk.
It's like the statistics of false positives - you know, how if you have a test that reports that you have a condition 99% of the time if you actually have it, and reports that you don't have it 99% of the time if you don't have it, and the condition happens in 1/1,000 of the population, and you have a person who came up positive on the test, what's the odds that they actually have the condition?
Well, there's a .99 out of 1,000 chance that they have it and the test reports that they have it correctly, and a 9.99 out of 1,000 chance that they don't have it and got a false positive, so there's only about a 9% chance at this point that the positive result was due to them actually having the condition. All they know is that more examination is probably a good idea, since their odds have gone from one in a thousand to one in eleven.
So, say you had a hundred thousand yeerks and ten humans who knew about the oatmeal.
Let's say there's a 5% chance of the enemy being able to identify a given controller, a 30% chance of them being able to capture it once identified, and a 0.1% chance that they'll talk once captured.
On the other hand, let's say there's a 1% chance of them discovering the test humans, a 10% chance of them recovering each one once they find them, and a 100% chance the subject will spill the oatmeal.
At that point, once you know the secret is out, there is only a 0.7% chance it came from a recovered host, and a 99.3% chance it came from an interrogated yeerk.
But if the yeerks controlling humans don't generally know about it? If only 20 yeerks at a time know about the alternate source, and 10 of them are in the test humans at any given time? Once you know the secret is out, it's overwhelmingly likely it's because the enemy discovered and recovered the test subjects, and between the human and the yeerk, who was the one most likely to talk?
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (20 hours later)
"I think the lecture on Bayes was a bit much," TK17 says dryly. "I mean, did you really think the source of our disagreement was that the author of the 250,000 word ratfic lacks a 101 understanding of probabilistic reasoning? Much more likely that we just had different priors, for some reason."
The actual crux here, I posit, is the phrase "doesn't accept the god's intervention as real." By the moment in the story in question, he is in fact LEANING toward 'the gods did it' as an explanation. He's LOOKING for things that might be indications of divine interference. Which indicates some bias, and I maybe could've thrown in a token sentence about him being sure to consider alternatives, but he was doing that left and right and it should've been taken as implied.
Additionally, 'overwhelmingly likely that they recovered the test subjects' ... those subjects were all locked up in the pool and vaporized prior to the meteor impact; V3 can verify that they were still there via security footage. (Things like that are not spelled out in the text every time, but the hope is that after showing V3's MO they can be reasonably extrapolated/predicted à la 'what would Esplin do?')
Given that the god or gods' actions have always been invisible in the moment, and only noticed afterward via their effects, that lends weight to the source being some shard or human that was under less direct surveillance (as opposed to ' the footage was directly doctored').
One last piece of the puzzle that your calculation didn't take into account is the likelihood of a given host knowing what its Yeerk knows. It's far from guaranteed that a human host would be aware of the details of a highly secret project, given a Yeerk's ability to shut off the human's access to sight and sound at sensitive moments.
u/nonoforreal [+3] (21 hours later)
"I think the lecture on Bayes was a bit much," TK17 says dryly. "I mean, did you really think the source of our disagreement was that the author of the 250,000 word ratfic lacks a 101 understanding of probabilistic reasoning?"
Well, I had assumed that you would immediately recognize what I meant when I was talking about relative odds in the first place. When communication didn't happen I figured that the worst that could happen if I built up my point from principles was that it would become painfully obvious. Plus I had forgotten that bit of math is actually Bayes' theorem, and would be a big name around here, so go ahead and get your yuks in for that. I don't really hang out in this community that much - I only stop by occasionally to see the commentary on a couple of things, your story included.
We've probably wasted a lot more words on this that is justified, but I'm not sure I'd consider "the subjects were all locked up in the pool, as per the security footage" to be a particularly solid defense when the opposition has an unknown number of shapeshifters with an unknown level of fanaticism and who are able to pocket entire people with no outward sign, and I have had access to the same toolset and have an idea of its abilities.
Why couldn't they have say, infiltrated with multiple agents, some of them folded into a morph, rescued people who could provide intel (and possibly captured yeerks) by absorbing them into morph, and left behind agents willing to die for the cause to take on the role of the recovered individuals? The abandoned agents could have just planned to die in z-space, which would prevent them from being used as information sources against their allies, and would leave behind a copy of the person they stole, who knows nothing of the resistance. The controllers have to go to join the pool like any others, right? If someone is paranoid enough to go over the timings of their trips with a fine tooth comb, they're paranoid enough to worry quite a lot about low-probability possibilities.
Though, I guess your later point about yeerks being able to block senses may be good enough to rule that out as a source of leaks, if he trusts them to be vigilant.
Anyway. Yadda yadda yadda, it's not a big deal. It just seemed odd to handwave away what seemed like a pretty valid possibility at the time.
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (22 hours later)
It just seemed odd to handwave away what seemed like a pretty valid possibility at the time.
That's fair.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
"I think the lecture on Bayes was a bit much," TK17 says dryly. "I mean, did you really think the source of our disagreement was that the author of the 250,000 word ratfic lacks a 101 understanding of probabilistic reasoning? Much more likely that we just had different priors, for some reason."
Saying "Don't you know that I have credentials? Waste not your explanations of simple concepts on me, for I already know them" is kind of poor form, justified or not. It establishes an implicit norm of "Don't try to explain simple concepts to people with high status, even for the sake of clear communication, because doing so is a faux-pas social".
u/TK17Studios [+1] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
I wholly agree that saying "Don't you know I have credentials" would be poor form. I disagree that that's what I said, though.
What I think that I said was, you're explaining Bayes to me, but do you think that's the actual root of our disagreement? Or, to put it another way, you're explaining Bayes to me, but did you use Bayes before writing your explanation?
That's definitely what I meant, anyway, even if I did a bad job expressing it. That's what the "dryly" and then further concrete elaboration of what I thought was going on was all about.
Alas, I'm not yet as good as Jake.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
(oh god I'm doing the rational debate police thing again, what the hell am I trying to prove)
I get your point, but it's irrelevant here. Poor form (whatever it is) isn't about what you intend to say or the wording you use, it's about dynamics.
Like, imagine you have a kid whose family is about to move house; the parents are trying to decide whether she should change schools; if the parents tell their daughter "You should stay in your room until we've come to a decision, so you don't make things too complicated", after she asks to be included in the discussion, they're being condescending. It doesn't matter that their wording was neutral (they could have said 'Get to your room, kid!' or that they didn't intend for the child to feel patronized at all. Context is everything, and in context they're not respecting her.
(I suspect this is a big problem in feminism and similar movements; and the big concept behind mansplaining; the point is, you don't get to say 'the rules don't apply to me, it's not condescending because I have good reasons to say that')
u/nonoforreal [+3] (3 days later)
I didn't take it as him claiming some sort of high status, so much as basically pointing out that a person who is presenting a speech on some new metallurgy technique probably knows the basic nature of the role carbon plays in steel, because pretty much everyone who would be at a metallurgy conference knows that. I had just popped in for coffee and didn't think about where I was.
It's kind of funny that you'd bring up "mansplaining."
You know the story behind the coining of that word, the one regarding a woman who had a guy at a party find out what field she worked in and keep talking to her as if she didn't understand it, to the point of recommending that she get a grip on it by reading a book that she was actually the author of?
Actually, that's basically what I did to TK there. Circumstances did convene to find me explaining to him a thing that from context it would be freakishly unlikely for him to not already know. His criticizing me for it is a fair cop.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (3 days later)
Mh, okay. My bad then.
u/TK17Studios [+1] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
I notice that you didn't address what I identified as our disagreement: that however right you are about the dynamic you identify as bad, I don't think that applies, because I disagree I said the bad thing you're claiming I said.
That's a crux, for me--I'm highly skeptical that there's any value in further engagement for either of us until that point is addressed. You can make strong arguments for "be reasonable about how you might be MISinterpreted, and make reasonable accommodations to prevent that," but in the end I like to fall back, as a defense, upon what I actually said in a given situation, and whether THAT is objectionable.
u/TK17Studios [+1] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
Or, to put it another way: I get the context argument, it's valid, but I disagree with you about what the context WAS, maybe. I think a very small line was crossed, and that the subtle condescension I received was inappropriate, and that it was correct for me to gently push back against it.
u/Laborbuch [+5] (12 hours later)
How approachable is this story for someone who has never read any Animorphs whatsoever?
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (12 hours later)
A little confusing for the first chapter, will definitely have settled down by chapter three. Deliberately intended to stand alone without references, and I've heard from multiple readers who say they love it who haven't read canon. Some of the really weird stuff will seem like it comes out of left field because it was meant to reference something in canon, but it'll all make sense.
u/nonoforreal [+5] (21 hours later)
I never consumed any of the original series whatsoever, and I've generally found this story to be pretty comprehensible and interesting in it's own right.
Caveat: I have looked up some things that seemed like they might have had a lot of background and may have artificially boosted my understanding of those things for future references to them.
u/Evan_Th [+3] Sunshine Regiment (a day later)
I read several books of canon about twenty years ago when I was a kid, plus several fanfics five years ago or so, and I'm enjoying this without any problems at all.
u/4t0m [+6] Chaos Legion (59 seconds later)
FFN: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11090259/38/r-Animorphs-The-Reckoning
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sabien
u/ketura [+1] Organizer (3 minutes later)
Bah, sniped me as I was fixing the fact that I submitted the mobile link accidentally, lol.
u/4t0m [+2] Chaos Legion (4 minutes later)
:P
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (16 minutes later)
4t0m had the advantage of being in basically the same room as I when I posted it.
u/ketura [+7] Organizer (21 minutes later)
It's treason, then.
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 hours later)
... execute order 9466?
u/entropizer [+5] (2 hours later)
Dendrites are terrifying. Good job TK.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
I am astonished that nobody has been vocally upset about the coercive demorphing ray yet. I continue to be terrible at predicting what will catch people's attention.
u/CouteauBleu [+7] We are the Empire. (a day later)
In canon, I thought the demorph ray was kind of a gimmick; basically the equivalent of Team Rocket showing up with electricity-proof gear so everyone would go 'Oh no, the single most effective tactic of the heroes no longer works'!
I mean, yeerks have nukes, orbital strikes, bio-filters, gravity waves detector and antimatter paintballs. The demorph ray doesn't bring that much to the table in comparison. Any mook that has the occasion to point the thing at an Animorph could also pump them full of holes anyway.
The two major impacts I see this having is: Garett is now vulnerable to infestation if he's captured, and it will be even harder to infiltrate yeerk facilities now (not that it was really a possibility at all at this point)
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
I always thought of it as more counter-espionage and counter-infiltration ... just occasionally randomly flood your space with demorphing fields and shoot anything that starts growing up out of the floor.
u/kleind305 [+2] (2 days later)
You know, there's a limit to how many constraints you can add to a problem before it really is impossible, you know that?
Excellent work as always. But as a fellow writer, I admire your ambition most of all.
u/royishere [+2] (3 days later)
The demorphing ray was namedropped in an earlier Esplin chapter, so we were probably all expecting to see it start working eventually.
u/None [+3] (2 days later)
Random thoughts:
- Poor Garrett. Visser 3 wants to kill him and also disagrees about having multiple yous instead of one big you. At least their thoughts are parallel, if not convergent.
- I had the same idea as the Visser on how it would be awesome to have instacommunication between each yeerk so they remain in the hivemind, and yet somehow I failed to predict that the Visser might try to pursue this idea.
- This image comes to mind while reading the interaction between 3 and 1.
u/royishere [+3] (2 days later)
Regarding Cassie's family:
Hot DAMN, Visser Three is straight evil for torturing them just to provoke some kind of reaction. And indeed, his releasing them in Washington was confirmed a trap rather than a gesture of goodwill... though what kind of trap, I'm not sure of. Is it a trap Cassie would have fallen for, if someone hadn't taken steps to remove her from the game?
Anyway, point is, they're still alive. Announced dead back in book II, but still alive, taken off-planet.
The Chapmans were also announced dead. Could they still be alive and off-planet as well? Will Rachel get her happy ending with Melissa ?
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
Nope; the yeerks tried to fake the Chapman's deaths, but Hendrick Chapman managed to kill himself and his family while they were driving to the extraction point.
u/royishere [+2] (3 days later)
I must have forgotten that detail. There are a LOT of moving parts in this story and it's often difficult for me to keep track of all of them.
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (4 days later)
Long form review, because apparently those are important to some people or something and also this is literally the single most productive thing I have energy for right now:
January
So is the Council of 13 made of controllers, or hives? The interlude mentions "simulated faces", which could mean holograms of hosts, or computed-generated images. I'd guess they're controllers, since Telor needed one to speak with Esplin. Even then, I'd guess these particular council-controllers are kept on a very short leash by their respective hives.
On the other hand, we have definitive confirmation that Vissers are all controllers. Which brings the question: what species do they control? We're told that each yeerk has a host IQ+20 intelligence, which means there's probably not going to be many Taxxons/Gedd/Hork-Bajir Vissers. Maybe the Vissers are disproportionately Naharans? Being the only human-controller, Visser One would be the smartest of them all after Esplin. (unless there's other smart species we haven't come across yet, or Visser 3 asked the Arn to produce smarter Hork Bajirs for his political rivals and... yeah, probably not)
I like Visser 3's hypocrisy when complaining about Visser 1: "How dare you keep secrets to pursue your own private agenda! Do you not see how destructive it is? Why, don't you realize how easier it would be for me to pursue my secret destructive agenda if we would all trust each other and cooperate (except me)?"
How often do Vissers and other yeerk leaders lie to each other? Esplin seemed to think "Visser 1 lied to the council" was more likely to be true than "This happened by coincidence". But given that, as she said, V1's memories can be checked by other coalescions, I doubt she would casually lie to them. On the other hand, V1 is not a static entity, and the hive that produces her might create a shard with fake memories who sincerely believes whatever lies her hive wants to feed the council. On the first hand, maybe V3 is projecting. He spent his entire life crafting elaborate lies, and manipulating everyone into furthering his selfish agenda. His perspective is probably biased.
Also, yeah, Visser One! And for added mystery she is Schrodinger's Tobias/Marco's mom! (I vote Marco, because some of my favorite Animorphs fics are about Eva and her life as Visser 1; also I think her book rocks even more than Andalite Chronicles).
I see Esplin went to the Tom Riddle school of pretending to lose. You can feel the frustrated rage between each of his "Yes, Visser"s.
So Visser 3 gave Visser 1 the Andalite world, knowing that his better understanding of Andalites meant he could set it up as a trap that Visser 1 wouldn't detect until it was too late, and wouldn't be able to prove to the council. Once he got past the "Holy shit I'm stuck in space" stage, it didn't seem to occur to him that Visser 1 might have done the exact same thing. More on that later.
February
"At first I thought I could breach the secrets of the mysterious Z-space rift, and acquire impossibly advanced FTL technology if only I managed to infiltrate the fringe group known as 'Trekies'. Didn't work out. But then I learned about this incredible secret place called Hogwards, and then..."
I like how many Alloran quotes Esplin manages to dig up. He's like those people who keep quoting The Art of War all the time, excepts he's telling them to Sun Tzu, who just can't stand them anymore.
This chapter shines an interesting light on the previous Esplin chapters. He's been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since he arrived; he thought Cassie "morphing without going back to Andalite" was it at first; and then when the tunnel arrived, he went "Alright, fine, it's an actual god. Happy now, Alloran? Alloran?"
So Esplin's method for investigating secret conspiracies is to expose one of their members to Leeran hypersight and hope they don't talk about it because people would think they're crazy. He does that because abducting them and reading their memories directly would leave a trail of corpses behind. That's questionable logic; a conspiracy with the means to detect a worldwide series of murders would definitely react to one of their members being exposed to hypersight. Though I guess even if the patsies talked about their hypersight vision, they would mostly talk to their own conspiracy, so to an outside observer a trail of bodies would be more noticeable.
I liked the Bayesian Conspiracy shout-out, by the way.
Something that Esplin doesn't seem to have considered: if his search for worldwide conspiracies did not dig up the Chee, how does he know he didn't miss others highly improbable weirdly-aligned societies? There is no "There is no perfect crime", after all.
March
More Chronicles references!
It sounds like Elfangor's various titles come from a specific campaign of ambushes, where he disappeared yeerk fleets in "The Deep", which I'm guessing means either interstellar space, or a specific location? Probably the second, since zero-space travel means fleets wouldn't spend much time in interstellar space.
Which brings the question, how did the yeerks even identify Elfangor? Apparently no one came back from those ambushes, which means the yeerks somehow learned Elfangor's role from either Andalite civilian media or military intelligence. Didn't Esplin discourage that kind of information gathering? Or was it just on the Andalite side?
By literary convention, it ain't dead until the body is onscreen. So do we really know that Elfangor killed those yeerks? He could have captured them or trapped them in time-stasis fields or made friends with them! So many exciting possibilities.
Elfangor knows about Esplin being an abomination; which may or may not mean he knows about the coalescions. But if he does... why didn't he tell his people?
While we're playing the 'who knows what' game, how much of this did Marco know after going through Elfangor's mind? Did he learn about the z-space rift? Elfangor's campaign of ambushes in The Deep? The coalescions? Esplin's nature?
I like Esplin's philosophy. On the one hand, 'Villain rants to defeated hero/mentor about how he's not evil, it's just other people who are weak and/or stupid' is a bit of a overused cliché; on the other hand, this scene still felt like a smart spin on these ideas.
I also like Esplin's speech: "I will not monologue about my motivations like an idiot. Why would I? As much as you desire it, you have no way to enforce your will; in fact, the whole world is like you, in that they [...] and this is why I want to take over the world. Uh. I did monologue. Feels kind of good. I should do this more often."
April
And nothing else important happened in April.
May
Screw you, Esplin. "Incomprehensible" is a perfectly valid label.
Not exactly relevant to this chapter, but I wondered if it occurred to the Animorphs that their recruitment drive might not be as useful as they thought. Visser 3 was likely to move his operations away from America anyway, since it probably has one of the worst population-density-to-security ratios from his point of view. Hundreds of morph-capables resistance fighters in one country won't do much good if most of the invasion takes place in... well, any other continent.
Still not clear why the ship's sensors did not detect the kids after Elfangor's ship was destroyed.
Quirrel Rule n°10: I shall not rant about the unworthiness of the meddling kids who disrupted my operations so hard I had to throw an asteroid at them to cover the damage.
It's been remarked upon already, but wow, the "producing offscreen" comment has some disturbing implications. It's also kind of a strange decision; we're told that the entire Yeerk War has lasted less than 4 years, and a lot of things already happened; it takes at least 10 years and a lot of effort to raise children to the point they might become valuable soldiers. Those 600 kids they're "producing" seem like a waste of efforts when they should be focusing on the billions of humans they need to subdue (no small task on its own, more on that later). Maybe these humans they're raising will have special, valuable properties?
I like how the number 13 keeps popping up arbitrarily all the time. We're building a factory that makes more factory parts? It will make 13 other factories, exactly. Of course we don't realize how arbitrary it is when we're using base-10.
So Esplin decided to commit random acts of destruction and cruelty to see if the gods would react. First off, that's awful; second, it seems like a desperate approach; after all, the gods' goals might be seriously hampered by, say, the pandemic he set off, but still not make any intervention he might detect, to keep him from having an edge on them.
(post split for length)
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (4 days later)
Kandrona
Oh god, here we go, Esplin becomes gray goo. That ain't good.
Esplin is discarding redundancy pretty quickly. He makes the argument that having many independent copies is not as good as having copies with distributed version control, but it's still unambiguously better than no copies at all.
Overall, I like the whole philosophical dissertation; the sci-fi examples sort of make it seem more grounded, somehow; it's maybe a little on-the-nose (who is Esplin even talking to?) but even that fits his personality.
Although I think Esplin's dichotomy between "the object / the method" and "the meta / the ultimate goal" is somewhat arbitrary.
"And I struggled to answer questions that no one had bother to ask before. Except the Bayesian conspiracy. I actually made a lot of headway capturing these people, reading their mind and then releasing them as more pawns to take over the Earth."
"It had doubled seven times" Interesting. I wonder if Esplin makes faux-pas like that when discussing with his lieutenants. "And we will make a factory with the ability to build seven spaceships a month!" "You mean thirteen spaceships, Visser?" "Uuuum yes. That is what I meant. Because I like base thirteen. I don't think in base seven at all." "..."
Poor Kilgam 1. We hardly knew you. Not that there was much to know.
It's interesting that Telor would give unique names to the yeerks it feeds Visser 3. If I had to discard parts of myself on a regular basis, I would just go ahead an call them Tribute #451 or something. (I wonder how the coalescions even give names to their individual parts?)
I wonder if it occurred to Telor yet that, with oatmeal, they don't need to feed tributes to Esplin anymore. They might not know about oatmeal (unlikely, Aftran would have told them, it's pretty important intel); if they do know, would they wonder about exactly Esplin does with the yeerks he's still receiving?
So Visser does realized he's fused with Alloran.
Esplin is using a poor scientific methodology here. He apparently doesn't have any objective mean to detect value drift, and relies on his own perception instead; that means he should do a blind trial; create 2 Kandronas, one 'pure' and one altered, put them each in a space shuttle, and approach one of them at random with a Leeran, and try to determine which one is altered, then see if he gets significantly better-than-random results. As it is, he's likely to get false positives, see value drift that isn't there, etc.
While we're nitpicking his approach, it also seems a bit hasty of him to immediately discard the altered Kandrona; there might still be insights or experiences gained from it. Also Esplin could probably parallelize a bit more, and build Kandronas in assembly-line, instead of one by one.
I wonder how Kandrona could absorb new yeerks without value drift? As I said, there's not much concrete difference between methodology and ideology; I'm pretty sure they're not stored in separate areas of the brain (I could be wrong). How would Kandrona absorb one and reject the other? Real-life version control has merge conflicts, and those can only be solved by a higher authority (someone manually editing the files). Although now that I think about it the 'higher authority' would simply have to be the original.
Even if his experiments don't work, could Visser use Kandrona as an advisor? It's basically a smarter, bigger version of him, with less immediate perception. He could give him a set up similar to Telor's, humans or other sentients with yeerk-rope going through their brains, linking them to Kandrona. Then he'd have better analysis abilities, better memory, more throughput, and his chapters would be even harder to write! Win-win for everybody (who happens to be Esplin)!
Logistics
I've been wondering about how logistically feasible taking over the Earth might be for Visser 3. He says he will have to build a thousand pools to be able to infest everyone on Earth, and that having a few dozen factories means he will be able to outproduce all the major players.
But... how would he build those pools? It's kind of a catch-22: he needs pools to control the humans, but he needs humans to build the pools. Moreover, I don't see partial conquest working. Ideally, Esplin would want to take over a small country for long enough to build enough Kandronas to sustain a complete takeover, but even that would be hard. Countries are not islands, people come and go from them, and you can't infest them all. Even North Korea can't get you that far, since they don't have enough infrastructure to keep their streets lit at night. Once your yeerk country is found out, surrounding countries will try to invade it, the major powers will try to nuke it, etc.
More importantly, everyone will stop exporting anything to this country. It's like those videos about how crazy complicated supply lines are needed to build even a crayon. A space-capable fighter would require extracting, refining, and working a lot of materials. Not all countries have the huge coal and iron mining facilities needed to produce steel (and that's before we get into rare earths and petrol). Not to mention, an increasing proportion of western infrastructure is getting dependent on GPS and the internet. Yeerkistan is not going to have those (or at least, not for long).
A possible strategy is to keep the secrecy, and seed pools and factories throughout industrialized countries, but I don't see that working either. The problem is always the same: to build spaceships, you need materials and engineers, which means you need supply lines, and those can be traced. A government-employed engineer can say on his tax papers "I spent the last six months working on a secret military project"; a private engineer can't.
Another strategy is to destroy all governments with orbital bombings until they aren't able to detect your presence, but that runs into problems too. First off, the yeerks only have around 13 fighters (less now that they gave some away). By the time those fighters are done destroying all military bases and killing all Senators in, say, the USA, the other countries will have had time to prepare themselves, decentralize, hide their leaders and their aircraft, etc.
Which is all to say: secret alien invasions are complicated. Anyway, my original point was that I wondered if Visser 1 had thought about this, given this nut to Visser 3 hoping it would be too hard for him to crack.
And... that's it. Well, this was a lot more thought-intensive and time-consuming than I expected. Anyway, great story, and keep up the good work!
u/None [+2] (9 days later)
Bayesian Conspiracy shoutout? Where?
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (9 days later)
ctrl+f it.
u/None [+2] (9 days later)
I'm an idiot. I thought you meant it was written on a different chapter
u/TK17Studios [+1] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 days later)
Wahoo! Bleu is back! At least for this chapter! Though they still sound stressed and busy! So no pressure for the future! But lots of appreciation this time! Hooray!
The Council is the thirteen largest/most influential pools on the homeworld, which got a lot more complicated after the war started and some of those pools uprooted themselves entirely and others stayed and now there's a blockade and agents of pools that stayed behind went in and out of coalescion with other pools and who knows how much they stayed exactly the same and boy howdy.
But generally speaking, they're each represented by a consistent ambassador or set of ambassadors. In my mind, Visser One is a shard derived from Edriss, which is the first among the pools and is no longer on the homeworld.
Sticking to canon, I'm going to say that the Council is made up of a semi-representative mix of hosts, but that this will likely change soon. Going with the sort of HPMOR "we're starting at a dumb status quo, but we'll let people evolve away from it quickly" thing. In particular, the impressiveness of Visser One's host has caught the Council's attention, and "export us a few dozen humans" was probably high on the list before the Z-space rift.
I guess I did say "V1 lied to the Council," but I think the real emotional core of that was "V1 and the Council all lied to me!" V3 and the entire Yeerk species have had this uneasy sort of cease-fire alliance since the beginning, so V3 is paranoid that they're all scheming against him because they probably are.
re: 600 kids ... yeah, it's always wise to remember that V3 has access to the Arn, and regardless of the fact that it's poor literary convention to use the Eagles over and over again, it's pretty good strategy ...
Oh, man. I'm now seriously regretting not having him investigate Trekkies and Hogwarts. Missed joke opportunity. I think I'll actually edit that in, Galaxy Quest style.
Yeerks learned about Elfangor through some eavesdropping on Andalite propaganda, and through the fact that Elfangor has a single, identifiable ship, and through the fact that he himself was carrying out a campaign of demoralization against the Yeerks and while most of his kills were silent, would occasionally be very, very blatant about it, à la leaving one survivor. That just made it so that when ships disappeared by actual accident, they would still attribute it to the demigod Andalite warrior ...
As far as Elfangor keeping secrets from his people, it hasn't been clarified in text, but note that he claims to have spent several years in human morph, and that he was aware of Ellimist fuckery. I'm basically conceiving of him as the mirror to the canon Drode—the character who'd be closest to playing r!Dumbledore's role of "constrained by prophetic knowledge."
Marco got a lot. But probably not all, and there's a lot there to get.
re: recruitment drive, I'm hoping that Tobias and Garrett leaned on some of them to travel internationally and set up shop elsewhere, but even if they didn't, I think it's still narratively good—teenagers fail to overcome their ethnocentric bias makes sense to me.
Sensors not picking up the kids was direct god intervention, bringing the total of on-screen, incontrovertible god interventions to four, I think (Z-space rift, sensor malfunction, kids' rescue from the asteroid, Marco's mindwipe).
re: redundancy, don't speak too soon. Note the line "sent a drone with seeds and copies," for instance. He's read Vision of the Past and Specter of the Future by now, probably.
Except the Bayesian Conspiracy
... I'm actually seriously considering having the Yeerks make crazy headway on a bunch of issues after having caught and infested Andrew Critch.
I also love you forever for noticing that he's vacillating between base 7 and base 13.
Telor does know about oatmeal; they were running the factory, after all (they were running everything outside of Ventura). They think V3 isn't eating oatmeal because the tests were never fully conclusive; he is, and he's just using the ongoing stream of Yeerks for his experiments. It seemed easier not to bring it up—"I want you to stop sending me sacrifices to eat, but keep sending me sacrifices to play with ..."
Hmmm. You're right about his poor scientific methodology, and that might be worth a significant rewrite as well. That's the sort of thing that used to get fixed when I was better about using my volunteer beta readers and did less writing-right-up-to-the-wire.
I think the only actual non-value-drift method is for Kandrona to start basically "digesting" other Yeerks and simply using their raw, physical components to grow new Kandrona tissue according to a rigid, preset form. That lends itself to other failure modes, of course ...
If V3 starts using Kandrona as an advisor, that's good, but it also introduces the AI control problem (which, even though he's theoretically solved with Leeran hypersight, he's still wary enough to be suspicious of).
I like the idea of V1 having given this to V3 hoping he would fail. It's a nice, rationalist-compatible update to their political brinksmanship from canon. V3 does have some plans, though, and I think they're plausible.
Thank you so very very much for the long review. Made my afternoon.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (5 days later)
re: 600 kids ... yeah, it's always wise to remember that V3 has access to the Arn, and regardless of the fact that it's poor literary convention to use the Eagles over and over again, it's pretty good strategy ...
I don't think it's poor literary convention, as long as you move to challenges that can't be easily solved with eagles, or where using eagles isn't practical, etc.
I think it's still narratively good—teenagers fail to overcome their ethnocentric bias makes sense to me.
Sure. I mean, I'm French and I keep seeing movies about New York being invaded by aliens, so of course I notice these things pretty quickly. (although Edge of Tomorrow was an awesome exception)
... I'm actually seriously considering having the Yeerks make crazy headway on a bunch of issues after having caught and infested Andrew Critch.
It would make sense. I mean, you don't have to namedrop your boss, but if the yeerks keep nabbing humans (especially the highly educated people they'd need for their engineering/logistic projects), they're bound to get a few that are pretty good philosophers, if only as a side thing.
Thinking about, at this point in the story Telor already knows quite a bit about human (well, American) culture. They demonstrated knowledge of cognitive biases when talking to Esplin; they probably know about the Prisoner's dilemma, the Holocaust, Stargate, and those Star Trek episodes with the mind slugs. Wonder what it'd make of all that?
re: redundancy, don't speak too soon. Note the line "sent a drone with seeds and copies," for instance. He's read Vision of the Past and Specter of the Future by now, probably.
You mixed those titles. It's actually Specter of the... wait wait seriously? V3 read some Timothy Zahn? Because - 1 - this definitely deserves an interlude/omake - 2 - this opens up a can of worm. Does that mean he named Honoghr and the Iblis maneuver after the books? Retroactively, in the second case, after realizing that an Earth sci-fi writer had the same ideas as him? Or does Timothy Zahn really exist at all? Maybe he was Esplin all along. What does Visser 3 thinks of Star Wars? Of the prequels? Did he watch Star Wars Rebels? (okay, probably not)
Also I'm going to drop what I was doing and resume reading Hand of Thrawn now.
You're right about his poor scientific methodology, and that might be worth a significant rewrite as well.
Well, it might be believable. I can't imagine yeerks would know much about the scientific method at the time Esplin was formed. Alloran probably would, if Andalites generals have to study as much as occidental military officers do; but even then, "Do randomized blind trials" might be something he knows in abstract, but wouldn't think to apply to his situation. (I like the idea that he's not as self-aware as he thinks he is)
u/TK17Studios [+1] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 days later)
He thinks the prequels were strictly inferior, with the exception of Rogue One, and he's already quietly murdered Kevin J. Anderson.
I didn't seriously intend that V3 has read Zahn. =) Also, I can't believe I inverted the titles. I must've been more tired than I thought.