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Doctor Who Discussion Thread

Oliver_de_jesus said:
Question the Web of Time is the Time Vortex or simply that the Web of Time was made on top of the Time Vortex?
Click to expand...

you think the doctor is scary is the fact he is simply being kind?

Aka once he stops being kind, your basically dead.


Also how long does it take for a weeping Angel to starve. Cause at that point you can just blow them up with explosives and stuff
 
Pokemonfan807 said:
you think the doctor is scary is the fact he is simply being kind?

Aka once he stops being kind, your basically dead.


Also how long does it take for a weeping Angel to starve. Cause at that point you can just blow them up with explosives and stuff
Click to expand...
1-Yes
2-they take like Billions of Years
 
Also oliver name me the best weapon to kill a dalek.

And since cybermen are no longer weak to gold. What’s the best weapon to kill them with then. (Assuming this is the regular cybermen and not the alternate earth versions)
 
Basic Dalek: Another Dalek or Reverse Engineered Technology based in Dalek, Gallifreyan Fission Guns works too

Cyberman: While not connected to the Cybermind, any complete physical destruction, such as reducing it to steam or frying its circuitry beyond repair
 
We should honestly make a Time Lord physiology page.

There's a lot of shit that's really conditional, but there's no class differences (i.e Greater Demon, Lesser Demon).

I can't see any downside to this. It saves a shit ton of space, copy-pasting and source coding.

Edit: Going to work. Will continue this later if there's any discussion.
 
Oliver_de_jesus said:
Question the Web of Time is the Time Vortex or simply that the Web of Time was made on top of the Time Vortex?
Click to expand...

Also shouldn't have the Time Lords' Acasuality type 5 with the Ultimate Sanction?
ByAsura said:
We should honestly make a Time Lord physiology page.

There's a lot of shit that's really conditional, but there's no class differences (i.e Greater Demon, Lesser Demon).
Click to expand...
It is probably due to the intentional manipulation of the "cradles" in Gallifrey and in addition to the fact that Time lords=/=Gallifreyan

Also why Omega has some characteristics of the time lords?, I am sure that most things were invented after his betrayal
 
Physiology stuff would take even months or years since there are a lot of stuff such as technology, timelord abilities
 
Rabbit2002 said:
Physiology stuff would take even months or years since there are a lot of stuff such as technology, timelord abilities
Click to expand...
Technology not necessarily, note that Warrior Time Lords are different than conventional Time Lords, due to interference from House Military (even after The War in Heaven)
 
Oliver_de_jesus said:
Also why Omega has some characteristics of the time lords?, I am sure that most things were invented after his betrayal
Click to expand...
Good point, although I recall that Omega canonically has at least some of them due to Vortex exposure.

Edit: Nvm, it was technically a non-canonical source.
Rabbit2002 said:
Agree, but this would take a lot of time

Edit: Can you help me fix the infor manip change it to type 2?
Click to expand...
Trust me, I have like 99% of the sources on hand, including obscure bullshit.

Sure.
 
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Oliver_de_jesus said:
Technology not necessarily, note that Warrior Time Lords are different than conventional Time Lords, due to interference from House Military (even after The War in Heaven)
Click to expand...

did they ever explain how a de-mat gun is made or no?



also can time lords actually live forever barring accidents. They can’t die from old age can they?
 
It's made with a quantum computer linked to the causal nexus in a similar way to a TARDIS' matrix.
  • A quantum computer linked to the causal nexus in much the same way as one of the Homeworld’s timeships, the machine would scan its target and read the victim’s complete timeline, then remodel everything else in creation without the target. The weapon didn’t harm anything per se, but from an enemy’s point of view being built out of molecules which the universe doesn’t remember is harm enough. For the target there’s no gap in the air in which to stand, no spare molecules to breathe, no history to demand action and no present in which to act. Never-having-been is crueller than it may appear. The victim doesn’t run screaming to his or her family’s door, and never gets to see the mute incomprehension in their gazes. The victim has no hands. The victim has no eyes. He or she does, however, exist. The gun knows the victim: it had to, to cut the target out of causality. That precision requires knowledge of every particle which ever weaved its way through the target’s body, and that knowledge becomes indistinguishable from the particles themselves, once the data is detailed enough.
Time Lords often die from old age. That War Games quote is severely outdated.
 
Well, when they are transferred into the Matrix, they could theoretically live forever as long as the Matrix is working.
 
I just remembered, Cold Fusion kind of (it's somewhat ambiguous) explains the immortal barring accidents thing.

Basically, it's something The Doctor was taught at a time when non-loomed Gallifreyans, like Patience and Omega, are implied to be considered immortal because they were insanely long-lived.

It'd also explain the extremely inconsistent timeline with that 10 million years of absolute power thing—because Rassilon was literally millions of years old before he died.
 
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Unfortunately, though, the TV show utterly retconned nigh-immortal Gallifreyans with The Timeless Child.

It's something previous EU sources had been inconsistent with, but now there's less ambiguity.
 
talking about inconsistencies

the Web of Time is the Time Vortex or simply that the Web of Time was made on top of the Time Vortex?

I have seen the Web used as a synonym for Vortex sometimes
 
It wouldn't be the Time Vortex, as time travel can be done in the fabric of space-time itself rather than just the Time Vortex.
  • Noel shook his head. ‘We’re in the warp and the weft of the Very Fabric. A much subtler place than the vortex. Being in the vortex. . . well, that’s just like being on the M25, or something. No, we’re between the Very Threads... ’ (Mad Dogs and Englishmen)
  • They all whirled around then, to see that a fissure had opened up in the Very Fabric of Time and Space
Basically, the Web of Time is the totality of interconnected causal events (like a 5-D map of causality) dictated by the Time Lords. They've imposed an entire structure into all of space-time, which is the Web of Time. Although that doesn't mean they can fully control it (according to The Book of the War), hence why there's areas of dead time in the post-human era.

The vortex extends over the Web of Time, as the detonation of that Dalek fleet in the vortex + its pseudo-eye of harmony and a reactor in The Time of the Daleks would have demolished the web.
 
I'd say no. They're just separate to an extent.

If anything, the Time Vortex logically encompasses the web of time.
 
By the way, since you have the Book of War, what does it say about memetic weapons/beings and the Memeovore?
 
yes, i guess it would be good, there have been people who try to make conceptual weapons and memetic objects anything less type 1 (Or old 2)

Also it would be funny the noosphere of Doctor who were similar to the SCP, not in terms of dimensionality but in terms of abstraction
 
I may have gone too far in a few places.

- Some Important BS

Description of memes
  • MEME [Terminology] An idea which “evolves” as it passes from one individual to another, and in doing so runs the same risks as any other evolving thing, in that the idea may mutate in order to suit a new cultural environment or become extinct altogether. First coined by western Earth culture in the late twentieth century, the word has become an accepted part of standard English even though many now consider the term to be utterly unnecessary: the argument is that all ideas are by definition memes, and that it’s impossible to conceive of an idea which doesn’t evolve as it’s passed from consciousness to consciousness. (It’s perhaps significant that the word first became popular in the scientific community. In one of his last works R. B. Nevitz pointed out that ‘all artists, visionaries and politicians have an innate understanding that ideas are evolutionary’ and suggested that ‘only someone trained exclusively in the hard sciences, but who had no understanding of the subtleties of culture, could genuinely believe that a special word might be needed for [a] thought which mutates’.) Nevertheless, when War terms are translated into English the word “meme” is often used instead of “idea”, and this is hardly surprising considering the arsenals used in the War. In a conflict where weapons are frequently designed to attack identity rather than solid matter, where tools (and even soldiers) can be manufactured using pen option as a medium… in such a conflict, those involved will inevitably use words which underline the organic, visceral nature of ideas. Quite often the ideas are the enemy, and in many cases will literally have lives of their own, some even possessing the ability to exist outside the context of a living mind. This is certainly true of, say, the anarchitects, and it could be said that the Celestis’ realm of Mictlan is the first major world to be composed of nothing but memes.
Description of noospheres.
  • NOOSPHERE [Great Houses: Terminology] As defined by palaeontologist/mystic Pierre Teillhard de Chardin, the noosphere is the living interaction of thought and culture, distinguishable from the geosphere (containing all non-living things) and the biosphere (containing the physically living world). The noosphere is the limit set by a species’ technology, biology and psychology on the data it can find and the data it can understand. If something seems to exist beyond the noosphere, then the data may be out of reach: it’s in this sense that certain dead-time states are considered to be outside any noosphere, even by the Great Houses. Alternatively the data might be beyond the scope of the senses, or just beyond comprehension.
Even if an object is erased from history, it still exists with memetic mass if someone remembers it. This principle can be used to manufacture conceptual entities during war-time.
  • It was known that with the correct application of technology, an object or individual could be put into a forced-paradox state in which that object was entirely removed from the timeline as if it had never been there. Yet although this process removed the object’s matter from the universe, an observer in a null-zone state could still remember its existence. Therefore the memetic mass of the object – its meaning, its importance, its ability to be comprehended – remained. The object survived, but as a pure concept of itself, as a shadow of understanding with no physical mass. It was the same principle which would, once the War began, be used to create the conceptual entities.
In fact, flux entities removed from history are basically held together by those connections. Keep Shifts in mind.
  • FLUXES [Celestis: Engineered Participants/Technology] Individuals transposed backwards in time but not too far in space, using a very high chaotic limiter setting and tied to their home period by a thread of biodata. The subject is turned loose in his or her own history, and the limiter setting allows tiny actions taken by the future version to have considerable effects on the past version. The biodata link then transfers these changes to the future version, which alters it, and thus alters the changes made to the past version. Therefore, the individual’s history is kept constantly in flux.
  • There are suggestions of a stable middle-ground between the two fates, in which the physical matter of the flux is lost but the meaning of the subject/victim is retained, a series of memetic connections with no flesh to support it. Yet this entity exists only on a purely theoretical level, relying on the perceptions of others to survive at all. In theory these fluxes exist only as repeating patterns in the temporal shifts, in the same way that carbon-based beings exist only as repeating patterns in transient matter. As a result, such carefully balanced fluxes are sometimes referred to by the medium in which they prosper: Shifts.
Chaotic Limiters, which manufacture fluxes
  • CHAOTIC LIMITER [Great Houses: Technology] A feature included in many (modern) time-travel devices, the chaotic limiter lets its user regulate the causalness of the era to which he or she is travelling, and thus the operator can decide on the malleability of the timeline. Fixing the limiter on a low setting permits the operator to make a great deal of change to the local timeline without fear of affecting the future, while a higher setting gives the traveller’s actions a much greater impact. In other words, deploying a high-yield nuclear device and treading on a random butterfly would have the same effect when done under the low and high settings, respectively. Generally speaking reconnaissance is performed under low limiter settings, while engagements with hostile troops are often carried out under high settings so as to make the battle actually worth fighting, though obviously this can be a high-risk strategy. An upper limit hasn’t been discovered for the feature, and researchers continue to press the boundaries. Many excursions have been made using extremely high settings, but these have a habit of backfiring, the chaotic changes tending to negate the conditions which created them. (Some thinkers thus question the accuracy of referring to them as chaotic, but another description has yet to be found which is sufficiently appropriate and/or rational.) Various Great House academicians have theorised that the enemy is much further along in scaling the heights of upper limiter settings, leading to the Houses’ difficulty in pinning down the enemy’s forces. Fluxes are created using extremely high limiter settings, and the same kind of technology can be jury-rigged to produce the conceptual entities. It’s also been suggested that different areas of the continuum in themselves have different limiter settings – different levels of socalled temporal inertia – though it’s debatable whether this is a natural effect of the universe, or whether these super-chaotic and sub-chaotic worlds have had their timelines deliberately “weakened” or “hardened” by the major powers. One of the central difficulties in preparing for any battle may be gauging the local inertia. Charts of relative inertiabars, and maps of shoals of “hard” and “soft” time, are usually among the first contraband and forgeries offered to troops landing in a time-aware area.

-Conceptual Entities

Description of anarchitects
  • ANARCHITECTS [Celestis: Engineered Participants] Of all the participants involved in the War, none are as misunderstood as the conceptual entities, beings/weapons which take the form of antagonistic ideas and exist only within the framework of their victims’ perceptions. Those who encounter conceptual entities will often attempt to find some “solid” explanation for their existence, when in truth they operate by altering the meanings of things while bypassing the matter altogether. Even the most hard-headed theorist is aware that matter has a component of consciousness; that only the presence of a conscious observer can collapse the many potential probability-states of an object into a “real” object; and that every perceived event therefore must have a “meaning mass” as well as a molecular mass. (In fact, separating the meaning of an object from its matter is really quite straightforward. All that’s required is a time machine and a chaotic limiter.) Yet the idea that a weapon might use this principle to change the importance of something, without having any kind of material presence, is still difficult for many cultures to grasp. The anarchitects are the most misunderstood of the misunderstood, simply because their effects can be so devastating that victims often refuse to believe there’s no physical cause. While most conceptual entities will begin an attack by entering their victims’ perceptions, the anarchitects instead occupy architecture. Architecture has a special importance for most civilised cultures: it defines how a species relates to its entire world-environment, and as a result every architectural construction is a lode-stone of high-density meaning. Anarchitects exploit this by “possessing” buildings. This much is reasonably easy to follow. However, once an anarchitect has taken over a piece of architecture it can then alter that architecture. Bridges can disappear underfoot, simple corridors can become impenetrable labyrinths, while spaces can become oppressively small or horrifyingly large without warning. And yet the anarchitects achieve this without actually changing the substance of the building at all. To an observer the matter may seem to re-arrange itself, but in fact the matter is irrelevant and has quite simply been ignored. If the universe notices this sudden gulf between what’s provably there and what’s obviously there, then it does nothing to set things right again. But then, as generations of theorists have noted, most phenomena already exist in the gap between the provable and the obvious. The anarchitects only make the process more blatant. Indeed, the lesson is so hard for some cultures to grasp that when the first crude anarchitects were encountered by posthumanity, the posthuman forces believed themselves to be under attack from some form of nanotechnology which disassembled and reassembled the architecture on a molecular level (obviously untrue, as the Celestis who engineered the early anarchitects would never have used “vulgar” technology like nanites). Only after the event did it become clear that molecules literally had nothing to do with it.
Description of Gargoyles
  • GARGOYLES [Celestis: Engineered Participants] Single-purpose conceptual entities, which in their natural form have no material substance whatsoever and which were originally the low-grade predecessors of the anarchitects. First developed by the Celestis shortly after the construction of Mictlan, gargoyles are specifically designed to watch the outer perimeter of the Mictlan noosphere as a first line of defence against any hostile force which might threaten the Celestis’s intellectual territory (or, worse, which might try to drag the Celestis back into the main body of the universe). The gargoyles inhabit the outer wall of Mictlan in the same way that larger anarchitects inhabit buildings: but while War Era anarchitects are engineered for a kind of subtle guerrilla warfare, the gargoyles are of limited intelligence and primed only for their task of guarding the boundary. Generally speaking one anarchitect is capable of “possessing” a single structure, no matter how large (physical mass is an irrelevance as long as the structure’s perceived as a single building), but each gargoyle only has the capability to occupy a small portion of the wall at any given time. However, every wall section is an interlocking grid of accumulator chains, field amalgams and memeotraps, spare parts made of the same alter-state superstructure as Mictlan itself. On sighting an enemy a gargoyle will instantly pull together a selection of these parts, removing them from the wall and using its limited intelligence to assemble a battle-form which seems to suit the current combat conditions. Should a gargoyle’s body be damaged it can draw new material from its wall section, or even remove pieces from other gargoyles… although as gargoyles have an unfortunately well-developed sense of self – a flaw of the early anarchitect programme – this often leads to potentially brutal conflicts between the damaged gargoyle and its “donor”. For all the complexity of the spare parts, once the construction fields are in place the gargoyles rely on brute force more than any other weapon. (Naturally, none of the individual parts are critical to the gargoyle’s survival. The gargoyle has no physical brain, and certainly isn’t an “artificial intelligence” in the usual sense of the term. If anything it can be thought of as a complex, self-aware meme.) Thanks to the Celestis’s all-pervading obsession with the Grand Guignol, gargoyles have a tendency to assemble large, bulky, chimera-like forms, favouring bodies of the wings-and-claws variety even though wings and claws serve absolutely no purpose in outer-noosphere combat. On those occasions when two or more gargoyles combine all their bodily parts the results are not unlike the “stone giant” totems of many pre-time-aware cultures, although usually with a lot more arms.

-Conceptually Adjacent Entities (includes Memeovore)

Casts are physically similar to conceptual entities
  • CASTS [Great Houses: Engineered Participants (Pre-War Era)] Conventional warfare was never a practical possibility between the Great Houses: there was no force prepared to act as an army, or at least no force-prepared to fight. Each House maintained its own constabulary, drawn from the ranks of the servitor classes, but these groups were ceremonial rather than military. Most couldn’t fire a weapon to save their lives. Anyone with the inclination to fight, even on a philosophical level, was drawn to go into exile or hermitage. Nevertheless, there were times when violence was felt to be necessary and the Houses required agents to perform straightforward but hazardous activities on their behalf, usually in the outside universe. In these instances they could call on the service of the casts. With hindsight the casts bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the conceptual entities now used by the enemy, though the Homeworld’s “first line of defence” were a different proposition in many ways. Despite their less-than-substantial natures, they existed physically in ways that conceptual beings don’t and were essentially mindless. The casts were phantom-drones, hardwired into the Homeworld’s noosphere, or into the operating platforms of the Houses’ timeships. In this respect the casts can be considered “peripherals”, extensions of either Homeworld ships or Homeworld culture, employed whenever the need arose to maintain the status quo by force. Once activated, the casts absorbed radiation from nearby space-time events via the lines of causality and converted it either into baryonic matter (giving themselves physical substance) or strange matter (allowing them to manifest in two, one or even zerodimensional form, making them effectively invisible). Most casts were programmed with a simple set of instructions, though in emergencies it was possible to boost a cast’s consciousness to near-sentience. With the outbreak of the War, the casts suddenly seemed useless. Not only were they ineffective against conceptual opponents like the anarchitects, they’d created a false sense of security among the Houses. Most were wiped out during the initial assault on the Homeworld, which fragmented their connection to the noosphere and to the caldera. Those that weren’t killed outright were reduced to plaintive phantoms, haunting their timeships and Houses without memory or reason. A force of some seventy-three surviving casts was mustered and sent into battle against the enemy during the Lethean Campaign: it was a glorious, futile gesture. The casts were destroyed, the timeships eaten from within by the enemy’s ship-eater weapons, their last stand commemorated by the firestorm which raged across the surface of Lethe for years afterwards. However, the legacy of the casts still had a part to play in the conflict. It was only after the outbreak of the War that the Great Houses sanctioned the use of the unstable “second generation” casts: the babels, which had, centuries earlier, been responsible for the notorious slaughter at House Catherion.
Description of Memovores
  • MEMEOVORE [House Military: Theoretical Participant] Any action, any experience, is built of past experience. There is no a priori knowledge; individuals are the sum of their memories; they are what they can perceive. Or so many philosophers have reasoned, pointing out that with a fraction of the brain damaged or re-wired, saints can be turned into foul-mouthed sinners, and sinners can be given the sensations associated with a glimpse of God. The most effective weapon, then, would strike not at life (always wasteful) nor at life’s capacities (which are variable, in the case of the Houses’ War-time enemy almost polymorphously so) but at the stored perceptions and experiential array through which living things view the world around them. Stripped of that, runs the argument, an opposing force of timeships might as well be crewed by babies. The weakness of any life is that it’s not a simple mechanism but a complex one, and complexity can be attacked. There are several theories as to how a memeovoretic weapon, an idea eater, might be developed. These include the forced evolution of a paraomnivore species; the implantation of psychological shut-off triggers in the evolutionary prototypes of the enemy’s servant species; and a direct attack on the way the causal nexus itself functions. Among the Great Houses the proposed development of such an entity has many critics, but despite the obvious dangers (a memeovore let loose on the universe could, if not properly controlled, devour all meaning anywhere in existence) it would be a formidable weapon not just against the enemy but against the Celestis… the Celestis being nothing but ideas, their concept-realm of Mictlan guaranteed to appeal to a memeovore’s appetite. In truth, among the Houses most opponents of the memeovore “project” are critical not because of the dangers but for purely practical reasons. Given that nothing even close to such a creature has ever been known to evolve in the universe, they have difficulty believing that it could ever really exist. Oh, it exists. I’ve got something of an advantage here. I mean, technically it’s supposed to be impossible for information from your own future to come back and pre-haunt you, but… to be honest, as a Shift I’ve come to learn that there are certain advantages in being purely conceptual. You see, I know what the rest of this book doesn’t know. I know how Mictlan falls. I know how the Celestis meet their end. I know what happens, years in the future of your timeline, when the Memeovore gets out of its cage and starts to feed on the really big ideas. The Memeovore was huge. I can still remember my shock when the walls were torn away from Mictlan, which was, if you recall what I told you under Greater Autrobulan Franchise, where I happened to be trapped at the time. I suppose I’m just lucky that the Memeovore went after the Celestis before it went after the servants who still remembered me. And I don’t want to go into how I perceived a creature like that. So, since I was mainly relying on the servants for attention and cognitive time, I set about saving as many as I could. A lot of them were actually celebrating the demise of the Celestis, not caring about the fact that the razing of Mictlan would be their own end as well. To be fair, most of them had been cheated of a death, or of an afterlife, so they probably thought their destruction by the Memeovore would finally let them to go to whatever rest they were originally intended to have. Personally I doubt that’s what would have happened. The Memeovore didn’t just destroy ideas, it ate them. I’d imagine that any servant (or Celestis, for that matter) eaten by the thing wouldn’t have passed on to any idealised afterlife, but lived on as constituents of the Memeovore itself. Or maybe the Memeovore has waste products too. I never found out, and I’m reasonably sure I don’t want to. The point is, I was surrounded by a flock of almost mindless newlyfreed slaves, trapped in a pocket universe that was collapsing, being eaten and being severed from its home universe all at once. How did I survive? Well now. Mictlan had been severed from its home universe by a flotilla of self-navigating timeships, as part of an incredibly complicated plan to dispose of the Celestis’ realm by luring the Memeovore into Mictlan and then sealing it off so that it couldn’t trouble the rest of the Spiral Politic (and to this day I still don’t know whose plan it was, but if timeships were involved then it had to have something to do with the Great Houses). One of the timeships got caught in the substance of Mictlan itself, and was just about to be devoured by the Memeovore when myself and my peripherals – as I’ve taken to calling the servants – found it. By this time, I’d worked out which of the servants wanted to die and which were still hoping to find a way off the sinking ship. I was most definitely in the latter category, so I bundled my like-minded charges onto the beached vessel and convinced my more fatalistic followers to give us a push. I’m going to use a lot of nautical analogies here, by the way, since it seems fairly apropos. We shoved off, with me steering the damaged and dazed timeship while the servants rowed. Mictlan was finally pulled down into the depths by the monster behind us, and nearly took us down in its wake. The Memeovore surfaced again a few moments later, and started swimming after us. I tried steering away from it, but the timeship woke up and seemed to have other ideas. It was heading for the “black box” archival stores that Mictlan kept as a data backup, the repository where the Celestis used to keep copies of all their identities just in case any of them got accidentally erased. That’s when I realised what the timeship was trying to do. We reached the black box a few moments before the Memeovore got to us. Then we quickly manoeuvred so that the box was between us and the ‘vore, and pushed off against it. It gave us a way of increasing our speed, plus it gave the monster something to chew on instead of us. We were also fairly lucky that we were between the “real” universe (or the Inner Sea, as the Celestis used to call it) and the black box. The ‘vore munched contentedly on the archive, while our ship braved the shoals around the Inner Sea. We could see the other timeships nearby, cheering us on. We finally broke through, exhausted, and best of all I can now drop this damned nautical metaphor. This language desperately needs some terminology for high-order science that doesn’t sound like technobabble. I mean, honestly. I think l need to take stock now. You’ve got to excuse me, it’s been a long time since anybody wanted me to tell them anything in a linear order. When the interest level sags again, don’t you worry, I’ll be back. Just wait until the book starts talking about beshielach and Autrobulus and planetesimals again.
Description of Shifts, who aren't conceptual entities, but are made up of memes due to being erased from time.
  • SHIFTS [Celestis: Participants] A form of conceptual entity no, don’t go and look up “conceptual entity”, it’s not important now first developed by the Celestis shortly after the creation of Mictlan, although since then the technology has been passed on to various other groups by those Celestis who choose to take sides in the affairs of the outside universe. To create a Shift, a living (and preferably sentient) being has to be put in a stable state of temporal flux no, don’t go there either until the material existence of the subject/victim is impossible to observe and becomes scientifically unprovable. Once the physical and temporal mass of the being has been nullified in this way, the being theoretically only exists as a series of memetic connections: in effect the meaning of the subject remains, despite having no material component whatsoever. As the resulting Shift only exists as a pattern of meanings – as a series of disembodied ideas – it can go on to implant itself within any other conceptual medium, so that if an object has meaning the Shift can “inhabit” that object. For example, a Shift can plant itself inside any recorded message or piece of written text, and as a result more than one faction has attempted to use Shifts as a form of sentient propaganda in their Let’s be honest, though, it’s embarrassing to think that anybody’s got so little to do with their lives. You see? This is how it works. Somewhere in this book there are probably endless pages of speculation about the exact workings of memetic non-corporeal intelligences, and the word “quantum” must get used in every other sentence, but frankly I’ve got better things to do with my time so let’s just go back to the “Beshielach” entry and I can get on with my story.

- Faction Paradox

The Faction Paradox's sacrifices are actually based on memes.
  • SACRIFICE [Faction Paradox: Culture] Sacrifice, especially human sacrifice, is always a dubious topic for discussion. Conventional (and somewhat sloppy) ritualistic thinking claims that during a violent death a form of “death energy” is released, which can be tapped and harnessed by the individual performing the rite, but this is clearly drivel. As life isn’t a tangible thing; but just a level of complexity inside an organic system, it’s hugely unlikely that there’s even such a thing as “life energy”, let alone a “death” version. However, the techniques of groups like Faction Paradox rely not on any form of “energy” but on a series of memetic triggers, on ideas more than scientific reactions. When a Faction agent makes a blood-sacrifice, e.g. during one of the ritual practices which operate the Faction’s shrines, it’s a purely symbolic act. If it has any truly physical effect then it merely triggers something that’s already been programmed into the structure of the Spiral Politic, forging a bridge of meaning between the ritualist and the invisible alter-time machineries which actually do the work.
  • To suggest that he might have erected the Turkish prisoners on spikes as a ritual procedure would be to read too much into his motives: it was largely a demonstration of power, not to mention a product of his psychopathic tendencies. And yet… ritual at that time was messy and unpleasant, traditionally involving both bloodshed and geometry (both powerful memetic triggers).
In fact, their shadow weapons work by erasing objects from causality and using its alter-time memetic existence as a weapon. I will go into more detail on this later.
  • SOMBRAS QUE CORTA [Faction Paradox: Culture/Technology] Literally shadows that cut, the name given not only to the weapons “carried” by most agents of Faction Paradox but also to the ritual by which these weapons are bound to their owners. Those who encounter field agents of the Faction often believe them to be unarmed, and understandably. Very few people would think to examine an enemy’s shadow, and notice that although an agent’s “real” hand is empty his shadow’s hand is carrying a sidearm. This isn’t an optical illusion or even a form of witchcraft, as many witnesses have suggested, but makes perfect sense within the confines of the Faction’s alter-time methodology. When an object is removed from history – say, by the processes of Faction ritual – all material traces of it are excised from the timeline: yet the universe isn’t just made up of matter, but also of meaning, and beneath every physical object is a topography of quantum connections where that object was perceived and understood by anyone who came into contact with it. If a Faction agent removes an object from causality then the agent will still remember that it existed, thanks to whatever personal protocols the Faction chooses to employ, and so the memetic framework of the object will still exist. A shadow of it remains in the universe. That witnesses perceive it as a shadow may be due to the nature of their own minds (no shadow really exists on the wall, but they insist on imagining one there just to explain the difference between the physical and the memetic) or may be due to the alter-time systems built into the structure of the Spiral Politic by the founder of House Paradox (who may have “programmed” a shadow to appear just because it’s aesthetically useful). It was inevitable that Faction Paradox would use this process to arm its members. Whenever a new recruit of the Faction is fully initiated as a Cousin, he or she will be taken to the Eleven-Day Empire and allowed to choose a weapon from the selection kept in the Stacks. Most of these weapons will be perfectly normal, although a few promising candidates may be given the opportunity to select one of the relics, older and distinguished armaments considered to have a greater totemic importance. During the initiation ritual the chosen weapon will be removed from time and stripped of its physical matter, but its meaning – its shadow – will be grafted onto the shadow of the recruit. That recruit will never be able to drop the weapon, at least not without permanently forfeiting it, and as a result the Faction’s agents are not only armed at all times but also perfect for assassination missions in locations where more corporeal weapons would immediately be noticed. The name sombras que corta was coined by the human bystanders who witnessed one of the early Faction delegations to Europe in the mideighteenth century, and seems an appropriate description as the majority of Faction initiates choose a sword, or other bladed weapon, as their armament of choice. This is possibly because agents feel more comfortable having melee weapons bound to them as “extensions” of their own identities, even though firearms would no doubt be more efficient. Though the limits of the bonding ritual have never been tested, as far as is known any weapon can be attached to an initiate, from a wooden stick to a parcel of plastic explosive. Modern Cousins seem unable to carry more than one shadow-weapon at a time, but Faction lore maintains that the Grandfather’s four lieutenants all bore shadows which were not only armed several times over but actually armoured as well. One other thing is worth mentioning here. Though it’s rarely spoken of in Faction circles, many of the organisation’s more experienced agents have often been described as shadowless, with witnesses claiming that they either have no shadows at all or shadows so dim that their weapons are all but useless. It’s thought that this is a side-effect of the techniques Faction Paradox uses to shift its agents through time: with every dislocation the agent loses a little of his or her identity, a little of his or her body’s “understanding”. Although Faction Paradox is far less superstitious than people generally claim, for younger members the thought of losing one’s shadow is a lot like the thought of losing one’s soul, a fate that leaves its victim hollow and somehow incomplete… and as the process of becoming one of the shadowless is technically inevitable, this might say a lot about the fatalistic nature of life with the Faction.

- Time Lords

The Time Lords can make back ups of people via memes.
  • PERSONALITY REBOOTS [House Military: technology] The rigours of time-active warfare are hard on even the strongest psyche. Involvement in constant confusions and incomprehensible shifts of history will inevitably cause personalities to break down, reducing even the toughest and most useful field agent to a confused, incoherent wreck. Fortunately, the Houses have established a solution to this problem. The personality matrix of an agent can be downloaded into an information network, and then be memetically woven into some part of the agent’s personal trappings (this can be a part of the body other than the centre of consciousness, or even an item of clothing or object: one Celestis Investigator was known to keep his spare personality woven into the fabric of a matchbox in his pocket). At a time of crisis, when the core personality has been pushed to the point of collapse, a full psychological reboot will take place with the agent’s back-up matrix reasserting itself over the damaged and battle-scarred current psyche.
History, as determined by the Time Lords, was structured memetically.
  • It’s long been established that although the universe pre-dates the Houses by several billion years, they were arguably the first to imprint their will on existence, and many of the “natural” laws of creation – the all-pervading Protocols of the Great Houses – were laid down at the start of the bloodlines’ ten-million-year reign during the anchoring of the thread. In effect the Houses built history, engineering it as a complex memetic structure running through the entire length of observed time (though certain parts of the far future seem to be beyond their reach, oddly).

The Celestis

Description of Mictlan
  • MICTLAN [Celestis: Location, Major Powerbase (World)] There is, for obvious reasons, no record of how the Celestis managed to remove themselves and all traces of their history from the Spiral Politic. It’s been suggested that the technology which cut them out of the physical universe might have been supplied by the Godfather-lieutenants of House Paradox, as the Grandfather of the House seems to have been scrubbed from the timeline by a similar process (although compared to the Celestis, the Grandfather seems a positively benign presence). Whatever the Celestis did, they did it not only to themselves but to a sizeable portion of the Homeworld. Those agents of the Houses who possess deep-time memory – the ability to remember past-iteration events even if they no longer actually happened – record that there was once an academy on the Homeworld which was used as a prime recruiting-ground by the hard-line intervention groups, and which withdrew from the academic roster mere days before the Celestis seem to have wiped themselves from history. Nobody else has any recollection of this academy, however, so it’s fair to assume that it was removed at the same time as the Celestis themselves and turned into the extra-spatial realm of Mictlan. The fate of the students and academicians who weren’t part of the Celestis “conspiracy” remains unknown, but they may have been used to create the earliest conceptual entities. And Mictlan is, as far as many cultures are concerned, a form of hell. As the Celestis seem to be driven a sense of self-preservation rather than sadism, it’s not entirely clear why, but it’s easy to speculate. Despite their claims to be the true aristocracy of the universe, watching the War from outside the Spiral Politic’s walls as if it were a mere amusement, the truth is that the Celestis’ power is distinctly limited: every Lord of Mictlan is secretly aware that he or she depends on the lesser species to have any substance at all. Fear has traditionally been their best weapon, and Mictlan, with its towers of blackened metal, its factory-smoke walls and its seas of all-consuming empty space, has fear worked into every conceptual minaret and every memetic foundation-stone. Or alternatively, perhaps it’s the Celestis’ own fear that’s given Mictlan its shape. Though none of them would even acknowledge it, it was fear which inspired the Celestis to leave normaltime, and it’s possible that this sense of terror was woven into their kingdom right from the start. Theoretically when a new servant arrives in Mictlan his or her own ideas will be devoured by the realm, but in practice the domain only seems to care about those concepts which can reinforce the stifling, monumental walls of the citadel. Everything in Mictlan is asphyxiating. Everything in Mictlan is death. The servants become faceless after a while, their identities worn away by the environment, featureless slaves whose only function is to observe their masters and thus ensure the Celestis’ survival. The name “Mictlan” is South American in origin, and suggests “the land of the dead”, a title which seems to have stuck among human cultures simply because it seems the most fitting. The Celestis are not only deluded enough to think of themselves as gods, they see themselves (or wish others to see them) as raw and terrible gods… and the war-deities of the South Americas, with their variety of monstrous faces and their constant demands for the hearts of the conquered, would surely appeal to the Lords of Mictlan. As the realm is made out of pure perception it could be said that it has as many aspects as it has occupants/servants, but the most striking descriptions mention a landscape of ziggurats under the smoking roof of the sky, great stepped pyramids which seem to weigh down the visitor with a sense of overwhelming mass. Even the “stone men” that protect the citadels come across as brutal, carnivorous God-totems. (It has to be remembered, though, that the Celestis and their followers take on new forms according to their environment. When Mictlan was attacked via fifteenth century Europe in the wake of the Order of the Dragon, the army was beset by Celestis constructs which were distinctly European and medieval in design, hence the description of them as gargoyles.) But if the establishment of Mictlan was in any way intended to give the Celestis an Olympian perspective, to allow them to look upon the universe with a sound judgement the other Houses could never hope to match, then it was an unequivocal disaster. All the excesses and follies of the other Houses are multiplied in the case of Mictlan: every delusion of grandeur, the derangement that comes from long life and a threatless environment, the Byzantine politicking, the endless and meaningless rules and the arcane social structure (all can’t be right in a society where everyone is a god, a corpse or an assassin). The Celestis lost the last scraps of their efficiency and usefulness as soon as they departed the Homeworld, and their decay has continued ever since. Although the Celestis aren’t in themselves aware of it, Mictlan has become their own personal hell in more ways than they could ever allow themselves to envisage.
They are responsible for the Enemy's conceptual weapons, such as Anarchitects.
  • Although the Celestis have occasionally helped the Homeworld in this way, the fact that they’ve also supplied the enemy with conceptual entities is seen by most House agents as proof that the Celestis are vile, parasitic betrayers, and many units of the House Military are duty-bound by their own codes of conduct to destroy any “spineless monstrosities” who might be discovered in the warzone.
The Celestis, whose entire environment is basically memes, are essentially just a network of ideas.
  • But these little Gods need worshippers. As the Celestis only exist as networks of ideas, they need minds which can perceive and understand them. Still bound to tradition and protocol – albeit their own – their usual tactic is to appear before members of the lesser species, in a typically imposing form, and suggest a Faustian “bargain”. As the Celestis have retained rudimentary control over life and death, it’s within their power to (say) offer a subject an extended life-span, on the understanding that when he or she eventually does die his or her identity will belong to the Lords of Mictlan. The subject will be given the Mark of Indenture, a memetic link through which the subject, on his or her death, can be “downloaded” into Mictlan to act as the Celestis’ servant in perpetuity.
Descriptions of meme-mines, and it creating ghost architecture
  • GCI PROCESSOR [Remote: Technology (Earth, C20)]Or, Genuine Concept Imagineering: the corporate name given by Faction Hollywood to the recovered meme-mine used between 1995 and 1999. Though the meme-mines were first engineered by the Celestis, and designed to boost the Celestis’s influence in areas where they were only partly understood and therefore partly tangible, in human terms the most significant use of the device was in California, September 1999, by Faction Hollywood’s leading light Michael Brookhaven. Considering the meme-mines’ ability to generate false (or ulterior) world-environments it could be said that Los Angeles was the perfect place for it, and Brookhaven himself may have seen the GCI processor as nothing more than an extension of the digital technology in use ever since The Silver Mountain in 1989. By 1996, Hollywood was already geared towards the ritual massproduction of film, although by this point the ritual served no real purpose apart from maintaining Hollywood’s role as the cultural master of the western world. Digital technology had already replaced the “prayer wheels” of earlier eras, with industrial animation departments performing billions upon billions of ceremonial calculations per day and thus keeping the loa of Hollywood permanently at their beck and call. Furthermore the level of satellite and cable transmission in the area ensured that every cubic inch of local air and earth was charged with the signals of past productions, the constant image-bombardment virtually becoming a kind of seance, perpetually calling on the past output of the industry and burning it into the skin of California. Hollywood had been cut off from the rest of the world not by any conspiracy of magicians, but just by the walls of broken, discarded culture which had been accumulating there ever since the 1920s. Brookhaven’s decision to use the meme-mine, a device “accidentally” discovered by Chad Vandemeer, could be interpreted as his attempt to complete the process. It was the function of the mine to enhance the ulterior worlds of the Celestis, to allow the manifestation of “ghost” places, and Brookhaven may have seen in this the potential to genuinely set Hollywood apart from the real world. It’s no coincidence that the project took the title The Ghost Kingdom (or, in full, Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom), envisaged as the greatest of the hollow spectaculars. There’s evidence in his later e-mail correspondence that his aim was to haunt the world, to insert his own cinematic histories into the gaps of human culture on a global scale, with Hollywood itself as the intangible, untouchable heart of his phantom empire. Work on The Ghost Kingdom began in 1996, and it was to take three years for the project to reach completion. Yet remarkably, Brookhaven intended that the actual shooting of the film would be done in a single day, the 3rd of September, 1999. The prior three years were spent in preproduction, as every aspect of Mujun was conceived, sculpted, and programmed into the GCI processor, with Brookhaven ritually composing every shot and scene. If the hordes of artists and conceptual designers were puzzled by the three years they spent working on a project which never seemed to materialise then they must have put it down to Production Hell, and there’s no reason to think anyone questioned the fact that the crew’s efforts went no further than a small, shiny, landmine-like object which sat in its shrine in an office of its own. It’s impossible to judge whether the finished film was a commercial or critical success: it’s proved itself immune to conventional history. But the events of the 3rd of September – the activation of the meme-mine, the intervention of the House Military agent Christopher Cwej and the ultimate fall of Brookhaven – are generally referred to, somewhat ominously, as the Hollywood Bowl shooting.
  • By that stage the film had virtually been completed inside a recovered mememine GCI processor and only the presence of the actors was required, speaking the lines already laid down by the processor’s memetic “script”, almost as if the recitation was the trigger needed to bring the finished product into being. The intention was that the production should require no sets, no props, no costumes and no real camerawork: the complete world-environment of the film would be summoned to the staging area, briefly over-writing everything from the local architecture to the actors’ biological makeup. The complete experience would be transferred directly onto celluloid via the same process Brookhaven had once used to trap the loa on film, but this time trapping an entire ghost world, although in truth Brookhaven probably found the actual transfer of the movie to film to be a minor detail.
It's implied that Vlad III may have made a deal with the Celestis to sort of (unwillingly) continue on in meme-form as Dracula.
  • Of course, the Celestis will take any opportunity to provide themselves with new servants and/or meme-donors. On first sight it seems impossible to believe that Vlad III could possibly agree to become anyone’s servant, not even in the face of certain death. But evidence does exist to suggest a later connection between Vlad and Lord Halved Birth of the Celestis. And perhaps it wouldn’t have been so hard for Vlad to justify a deal of some kind. After all, since childhood he’d considered it his place to be a conduit for the higher forces, chiefly as God’s hand of justice in the Balkans. If at Gragov he began to understand that the Celestis weren’t literally devils, then he might have been prepared to accept these Mephistophelean visitors as, well, almost equal in rank to himself.
Celestis investigators have memetically implanted technology.
  • Physical appearance is a malleable concept when it comes to the Investigators. Memetically implanted aperture technology allows them to move through time, space and any other accessible dimensions at will, and their default appearance tends to be a humanoid gap in history, through which the continuual strata and other such phenomena can be seen.

- Miscellaneous

Anchormen can plunge themselves into cultural noospheres via memetic connections.
  • ANCHORMEN [Remote: Group (Earth, C19)] Highly-specialised male witches, first trained by the North American warrior tribes in the late nineteenth century. The anchormen were originally employed during the rituals of the peyote dream runners, who would transmit their “astral” selves across the Indian-occupied territories for communications and reconnaissance purposes (in truth probably not a spiritual process at all, but more likely an extension of the memetic connections linking the runners to the noosphere around them). In these ceremonies it would be their job to provide the peyote runners with a constant link to the world they knew, reducing the risk of the runners becoming lost in the noo-stream, although it soon became clear that the anchormen were a power in themselves. Their training allowed them to experience direct contact with the bewildering memetic landscape around them – in effect plugging themselves directly into the local culture – without becoming traumatised by the overload of high-intensity images.
Memetic fields will stretch if maintained between universes.
  • GROTESQUES [Lesser Species: Participants (Earth, Mal’akh)] Name given to the Mal’akh who, having stopped feeding upon the blood of humans, have turned upon themselves instead. Without the ingestion of a suitable, untainted biomass the memetic field of the Mal’akh – already strained by their link to two separate universes – is stretched to breaking point. The result is that the individual’s form is distorted into unpredictable shapes, but tending towards the animalistic, as the mind tends to degenerate along with the body.

TL;DR Memes extend to pretty much every aspect of a culture, meaning that controlling memes does some pretty insane shit. For example, the Time Lords structured the Web of Time memetically.

Even if erased from history, objects will still exist as memes if remembered. This is used (or at least part of the method) to make conceptual entities, or similar beings, during the War in Heaven.

The Celestis is literally a meme environment, and they can use meme technology to make ghost architecture or readily manufacture conceptual weapons.
 
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So in short, a lot of shıt about the type 1, Subjetive reality, EA 1, Immortality type 8, Space-Time Manipulation and Acasuality.

since the memetic beings of doctor who are erased from time, would that be Acasual type 2?
 
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