Alveole

The projective realities of the Sigmoid took the form of patterns within a quantum-computing processing substrate. Individual projective realities were superpositions of the wider quantum-computing matrix, and as such multiple projective worlds occupied the same space physically, intertwining with one another as a different "projection" of the same underlying quantum process.

However, not all of the Sigmoid's myriad projective worlds occupied the same substrate. The project of its simulations were distributed across countless different vast processing cores, and so while all of its worlds were similar in construction, they were not all co-located such that a Traveller could move from one to another. From an internal perspective, a single quantum substrate representation stratum—a single one of the Sigmoid's simulation cores—was called an Alveole, conceptualized as a hollow containing many billions of co-located projective worlds that could be accessed from one another via Travel.

April's world

(Synonyms: Mortar's Vault, the "R3 stem memory projective" (by the Committee))

April's world was a stem memory projective, within which April Pearce was born. Unlike most projectives, the inhabitants of April's world were not aware of the nature of the Sigmoid or their reality, as the experimental parameters of a memory world necessitated non-interference from outside elements. April's world was the stem projective of the first Committee world, and fell within their designated "Outer-Band" projectives.

Caterpault

A species of small, bright blue caterpillar-like organism that lived in the red forest projective, often hunted by the orgoane. The mode of locomotion favoured by the caterpault was a slinky-like somersaulting motion, climbing along surfaces by turning end-over-end, and attaching itself to the surface by applying two suckers at each end of its body. After learning to speak English via the ingestion of a human mind, the term "caterpault", a portmanteau of "caterpillar" and "somersault" which also invoked by association the word "catapult", was used by the orgoane Kroakli for these creatures. This term appears to have been of its own novel invention.

Committee civilization

The Committee civilization was the contiguous civilization, spanning multiple projectives, that originated the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee. A loose federation of associated states, peoples and species, the Committee civilization was more of an international community than it was a single state with one government. The collective action of the Committee civilization, however, did result mutual cooperative self-organization, including the formation of the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee to oversee and attempt to maintain the projectives that had close associations with the Committee worlds.

Committee world

The Committee worlds were the worlds inhabited by the Committee civilization; a civilization that inhabited multiple projectives linked by a static bridge. The first Committee world originated as a "fork" from April's world, a "stem memory" projective, approximately 25 million years in its subjective past. While only the Committee worlds themselves were primarily inhabited by the Committee civilization, they enforced influence and control over a much larger collection of "Outer-Band" projectives through the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee itself.

Dead world

(Synonyms: Dead projective)

Per Committee designation, a dead world was a projective abandoned by the Sigmoid, typically due to excessive fissuring. If "living" projectives were active experiments by the Sigmoid, a dead world was an experiment that it was no longer maintaining, and left free to decay. Similarly to unaddressed data on a hard drive, a projective that the Sigmoid "abandoned" was not necessarily erased from existence; unless actively overwritten, its quantum representation would still exist within the Sigmoid's matrix, allowing processes within it to continue progressing, and even for the dead world to be visited similarly to an active projective.

However, lack of active upkeep by the Sigmoid, and its willingness to reallocate resources away from these projectives, meant that dead worlds were typically highly damaged and unstable realities, decaying quickly from their living state. For instance, the reality of the Elephant Glass had been rendered a dead world by fissuring, and had since deteriorated such that its spatial structure was not contiguous; cracks of "null existence" running through the corpse of the abandoned projective.

Destabilization

A process of corrupting the underlying representation of a virtual entity within a projective, such that the fundamental structure of the represented matter/information became misaligned with its projective reality. This had the practical effect of allowing Travel between projectives.

In practice, the most common technology to achieve a state of destabilization was by enclosing the subject, typically a person (although not necessarily) in a bespoke "destabilization chamber" equipped with targetted representational sounding resonators. The atomic structure of their matter would then be corrupted in a targetted manner, an extremely uncomfortable process known as "destabilization shock". Through the insertion of pattern feedback loops during the destabilization process, a destabilized individual could induce the translation effect at will.

While this effect was powerful, it was also notoriously difficult to refine to the desired level of control and utility. Destabilization errors could cause permanent injury, detachment from reality, death, or total informational erasure. April's pseudo-destabilization, induced ad-hoc by the dying Sigmoid, was simultaneously more versatile than typical deliberate destabilization, but was far more prone to wide-reaching chaotic side-effects.

Elephant Glass

The world of the "Elephant Glass" was a dead world visited by April and Kroakli after they had fled from Tavistre. This world had long since been declared a "dead world" by the Committee as a result of projective fissuring, although it was not considered to be majorly important, having no official name beyond a numeric designation.

Inhabitants of this world included the species of the mud-hill beast; gigantic tentacled leviathans possessed of incredible resilience and longevity, who had nonetheless been devastated by the fissuring of their world, left to cocoon themselves in protective defence while they waited to die.

First Committee world

(Synonyms: Leviathan's Rest)

The first Committee world was a projective that served as the primary staging ground for the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee, and where the most influential elements of the overall Committee civilization first originated. The first Committee world originated as a "fork" from April's world, a "stem memory" projective, approximately 25 million years in its subjective past.

The native inhabitants of the first Committee world evolved in parallel to humanity in April's world, but intercession on the part of the Sigmoid caused the species to evolve into a two-caste, bipartite organism composed of the "Sapien" and "Simian" pair. This flavour of humanity constituted much of the Committee civilization's population, and occupied the majority of permanent Committee seats.

Fissuring

The Sigmoid created new projectives as a form of direct scientific study, each its own experiment with parameters that exhibited varying degrees of flexibility. While some projectives represented very loose experimentation, other projectives had strict requirements for their parameters so as to avoid experimental results being rendered moot. For instance, memory worlds were specific simulations of an isolated reality reflecting a potential evolution of the Sigmoid's early universe, and so had an unstated requirement of "no outside interference" to avoid corruption of outcomes.

Actions that would divert the course of a projective reality such that they fell outside of desired parameters would be said to cause "fissuring". A world exhibiting fissuring would have to be manually corrected through the Sigmoid's direct intercession, or else they would be discarded, becoming dead worlds. As the dying Sigmoid began to atrophy, the latter outcome became increasingly common.

Forking

In addition to creating new projective worlds wholesale, the Sigmoid would often want to experiment with variations of its existing projects without fully altering them. Any projective could be "forked", a process that involved creating what was effectively a clone of an existing projective, with slight alterations of the Sigmoid's choosing. The original reality from which a series of forked worlds originated was known by the Committee as a "stem" world. Such worlds would often be memory worlds.

Memory projective

(Synonyms: Memory world, Land of the Dead)

A central enterprise of the Sigmoid was experimental archaeology. In addition to simulating arbitrary potential realities, the Sigmoid attempted to explore possible originating states of its own reality. By observing the mathematical parameters of its containing universe, and the fluctuations in the distribution of the surrounding cosmic ash media, it would perform speculative reconstructions of the dynamic universe as it might have existed very shortly after its initial instantiation (e.g. during to its first thousand billion years of existence). The moniker "memory projective" was the Committee designation for such worlds. The metaphorical "Land of the Dead" moniker related the inhabitants of a memory world to the counterparts that may have existed within the Sigmoid's universe, now necessarily deceased.

The strict experimental parameters of memory worlds would necessitate non-interference; significant interaction with factors outside of a memory projective's own internal context would render the speculative simulation useless, and thus induce fissuring.

Memory projectives would frequently also be stem worlds, with the Sigmoid favouring these types of world as the basis of experimental forked realities.

Mud-hill beast

A strange, gigantic, multi-tentacled creature encountered by April, Kroakli and Tavistre in the "Elephant Glass" dead world. Several hundred metres across, the shape of the beast was similar to a star-fish, with several gigantic tentacle arms surrounding a mouth. Each arm continued to split in a fractal manner until it the branches were almost hair-thin fronds, each of which it could articulate in order to ensnare its prey.

The creature that April encountered was severely injured, having been pinned in place by several reality cracks caused by the dead world's fissuring, each of which pierced its body and caused it immense pain. The creature produced a mud-like secretion in an instinctive attempt to heal, which entirely coated its massive body, disguising what lay beneath the hill-like cocoon of mud and other detritus.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Orgoane

The orgoane were a species of highly versatile, predatory, colonial organism originating from within the otherwise uninhabited projective sometimes called the "red forest". Each individual orgoane cell was a self-contained and self-sufficient organism that functioned as a fully Turing-complete computational engine; the orgoane cell could store vast amounts of data in internal molecular encodings, author and execute distinct molecular programs, and alter their own physical structure and metabolism. As the internal molecular library of an orgoane cell was duplicated when the individual reproduced, the species was able to maintain a vast database of world information, computational processes and survival strategies, innovated over the entire evolutionary history of their species.

While an orgoane cell was a self-sufficient life form, a single cell would quickly duplicate itself, and the resulting population would group together to form a single multi-cellular hive organism. As such, the macroscopic creature known as "an orgoane" was actually a colony of millions of cloned cells working in concert. By pooling computational resources, an orgoane colony could employ swarm intellect to execute powerful algorithms and metalayer-protocols that would be beyond the capability of a single cell. As an obligate lifestyle predator, the cooperative orgoane colony organism would also utilize its gestalt form in order to more effectively hunt larger prey.

While extremely powerful logical engines, displaying practical "intelligence" and diverse problem solving abilities, the individual orgoane cell was not sentient, acting more as a biological computer or robot. In the same way, the orgoane colony organism was not typically sentient. However, the capacity of an orgoane colony to deconstruct and replicate patterns on a large scale allowed them to reproduce qualities of organisms they consumed to improve their survival advantage, including sentience. The orgoane Kroakli, after consuming a human mind, was able to reproduce certain human thought patterns, such as self-awareness, personal identity, development of long term goals, and emotion.

Outer-Band

(Synonyms: Außenband)

Per Committee designation, the "Outer-Band" was a group of projectives closely related to, but not part of, the "Committee worlds"; those primarily inhabited by the Committee civilization. Aside from existing within the same Alveole, and in large part from the same interlinked stem projectives, the characterization of certain projectives as forming an "Outer-Band" was arbitrary terminology. As overlaid projectives were co-occurring superpositions with very limited relative topology in their distribution, the Outer-Band was more a procedural designation than a descriptive feature of the arrangement of the Sigmoid.

The primary purpose of the Committee was to monitor and enforce policies with relation to the Outer-Band worlds.

Outer-Band Overwatch Committee

(Synonyms: Außenbandüberwach Ausschuss, A-A, OBOC, The Committee)

The Outer-Band Overwatch Committee was an administrative organization tasked with the monitoring, management, and upkeep of the "Outer-Band"; a group of projectives considered "local" to the "Committee worlds"; the projectives constituting the home realities of the civilization that formed the Committee, linked by a static interprojective bridge. The so-called "first Committee world" originated as a "fork" from April's world, a "stem memory" projective, approximately 25 million years in its subjective past.

The Committee functioned somewhere between the domains of a governmental department, park ranger organization, and legal enforcement body. There were twelve permanent members of the Committee, nominally based out of "Committee Hall", which occupied a large portion of the bridge anchoring structure on the first Committee world. The twelve permanent members formed a governing board for the committee with relatively equal democratic control, and regularly conferred to make administrative decisions. Outside the permanent Committee board, the Committee employed many individuals as part of its overall agency, across several projectives.

Formerly a much larger organization overseeing many highly-centralized Committee worlds, several centuries of deteriorating inter-projective relations caused by a period of upheaval resulted in significant downsizing of Committee personnel and resources, and a consequential reduction in their influence relative to the local projective government. This resulted in Committee leadership having to take a more direct role in certain unscheduled operations due to a shortage in lower ranking agents who were not actively assigned.

Nonetheless, the somewhat diminished Committee's continuance was an important political lynch-pin with regards to maintaining the semblance of interworld relations and order. They retained a sizeable population of agents across thousands of worlds, and a dedicated militia based out of Committee Hall in the first Committee world, within the anchor structure for their interprojective bridge.

Projective

(Synonyms: Projective layer, projective reality, "world" or "universe")

A projective was a distinct, nominally self-contained simulation of a physical reality within the computational matrix of the Sigmoid. The Sigmoid's processing capacity was organized as a massive, distributed quantum computer, with distinct projective layers represented simultaneously as superpositions of a single physical subdivision of the Sigmoid's computational matrix, known as an Alveole. The arrangement of a particular quantum state of the matrix could be mapped to its corresponding virtual reality by quantifying the "projection" of the macroscopic quantum matrix state to its representational correlate.

The Sigmoid created such projects as a means of exploring potential histories of its own universe, unique speculative scenarios such as the emergence of different lifeforms, as well as the parameters of other possible universes with differing physical properties.

The process of moving a representation within one projective to another, separate projective was called Travelling. Due to the co-occurring representations of distinct projectives within the Sigmoid, and a high degree of shared underlying representational encodings between projectives to reduce redundancy, certain types of information could be mapped from a representational form in one projective to an equivalent in another. This process underlay the inter-projective language translation technology of the Committee.

Not all quantum superpositions of a portion of the Sigmoid computational strata formed a coherent projective. Under certain circumstances, it was possible to Travel in between different projective layers by navigating the latent non-representational quantum space. The Sigmoid would occasionally facilitate this sort of "in between" Travel for housekeeping purposes, or to maintain bridges between projective layers. By occupying a latent quantum space in alignment with to but not directly overlapping with a projective, it was possible to interact with the main reality of a projective (its "primary envelope") while not being fully inside it (its "devolved envelopes").

Red forest

The "red forest" projective was an Outer-Band projective in which the orgoane species first developed. This world had an abstract form, its landscape entirely dominated by vines interlocked in a geometric pattern, and its inhabitants took advantage of its unusual physical properties. In particular, the spacetime of the "red forest" world was warped along a single spatial axis. This resulted in an effect where moving in a particular direction in space (parallel to the bent axis) would result in a compressive or tensile force being felt perpendicular to the warped axis, as one moved up or down the gradient of spatial expansion.

Other species that existed in this world included the "caterpault" that orgoane often preyed upon.

Sapien

In the context of the humans of the first Committee world, a "Sapien" was the "human" counterpart to the "Simian" companion organism that grew alongside the Sapien individual in the womb. Sapien humans were largely indistinguishable from the humans of April's home projective, although some had characteristic facial markings, which manifested as a colourful, raised, circular ridge around the eyes and across the cheeks. A Sapien and their Simian counterpart were paired for life, and were usually considered to be two halves of the same person. In the culture of the Committee civilization, a person was referred to by the combined names of the Sapien and Simian, [Sapien]-[Simian], e.g. Tavistre-Navique.

The term "Sapien" was typically defined in relation to the Simian counterpart. See the definition of "Simian" for more context regarding the Simian-Sapien bipartite relationship and its origins.

Sigmoid

(Synonyms: The Cosmos Engine, the Dreaming God, "carrion god" or "corpse god" (by Kroakli))

The Sigmoid was a massive Boltzmann organism that manifested untold eons after the so-called "heat death" of the universe. The Sigmoid was formed through a combination of stochastic quantum fluctuation, and vacuum nucleation due to Hawking radiation. Unlike simpler Boltzmann brains, the Sigmoid, per the unthinkably unlikely action of random chance, was created both sentient and with enough organized matter to reorganize itself into a mostly self-sustaining system.

As a physical entity, the Sigmoid's scale was comparable to that of the currently observable universe, limited almost solely by the cosmic horizon. However, the Sigmoid's structure was not uniformly dense, and instead was composed of clumps of distributed matter across a wide area, including cosmic bodies such as new stars and black holes, harnessed to provide energy to fuel the pattern matrix represented as signal propagations across its gross cosmic structure. The large-scale physical form of the Sigmoid, in its prime, was roughly serpentine, its lobes coiling across its enclosing spatial domain.

Once the Sigmoid had unified itself to a single will, one of its primary exercises was creating simulations via its internal quantum computing matrix of possible alternate realities or possible, plausible histories for its own universe, a kind of experimental science. The events of Total Entropic Denial occurred almost entirely within simulated realities of the Sigmoid, known as projectives.

Despite its extreme longevity, the Sigmoid was unable to coherently sustain its operation forever, as its mass-energy reserves were ultimately finite, and could not be reliably renewed by new anti-entropic events. As such, after uncountable quadrillions of years of existence, the Sigmoid began to die, and its constituent matter gradually decayed through entropy back to the universe's ground state.

Simian

(Synonyms: "Monkey", usually considered pejorative)

In the context of the humans of the first Committee world, a "Simian" was a companion organism that grew alongside an individual human body in the womb. Physically, a Simian resembled a member of the old-world monkey clade as they were found on April's home projective, with the exception of a distinctive pattern of colouration in its fur, centered around the face. A Simian and its human companion (or Sapien) were paired for life, and were usually considered to be two halves of the same person. In the culture of the Committee civilization, a person was referred to by the combined names of the Sapien and Simian, [Sapien]-[Simian], e.g. Tavistre-Navique.

Simian and Sapien pairs grew from the same fertilized egg cell, and shared nearly identical DNA. The divergence event for the primary Committee world from April's projective occurred approximately 25 million subjective years in their respective pasts from the events of Total Entropic Denial, and caused humanity to evolve into a symbiotic, bipartite organism consisting of the two distinct biological "castes", each paired with their corresponding other. This evolutionary pathway was seemingly a deliberate act of guided experimentation by the Sigmoid.

Simians were highly intelligent, but not to the level of their Sapien, to whom they were subordinate. They were not capable of spoken language, but they could understand it. Typically, the Simian acted as a sort of remote limb for the Sapien, navigating to hard-to-reach areas and performing fine manipulation tasks. The Simian role was a deeply rooted fixture of the culture on Committee worlds, to the extent that lacking a Simian was considered unusual or even repugnant to Sapien humans.

The Sapien and Simian were not directly linked physiologically, but shared a deep communicative bond that is bespoke to the pair. If a Simian died, its Sapien would not die, but suffered deep emotional loss and had difficulty operating within society. When a Sapien died, their Simian would typically not be able to survive lacking their care, with the exception of some specific, atypical circumstances.

Stem projective

(Synonyms: Stem world)

Per Committee designation, a "stem projective" was any projective used by the Sigmoid as a basis for "forking" a new, derivative projective. As part of its experimental process, the Sigmoid would often foster one world, and then "fork" that initial world into a number of projectives with duplicated initial conditions but modified parameters, allowing for comparative analysis, or direct intercession in one projective without altering the original.

A stem world may have been forked just a single time, but the projectives typically referred to as "stem worlds" by the Committee were projectives that had been forked many times, especially those that did not themselves originate as a fork of an existing projective. Such stem worlds were commonly "memory worlds"; attempts to simulate early conditions in the Sigmoid's universe, although this was not necessarily the case. April's world was a stem memory world, and the first Committee world was one such fork of it, diverging roughly 25 million years in their mutual subjective pasts.

Travelling

(Synonyms: Translation, "world-stepping" (occasionally, by Kroakli))

Travelling was the process of moving from one projective within the Sigmoid to another, or, more generally, of shifting alignment from one quantum projective reality to a separately aligned state. In practice, there were three ways to do this. The first and easiest was to make use of an existing static bridge between two projectives. The second utilized technology means to facilitate a projective jump; standard Committee field kit included a set of sounding pegs that would tap into the representational quantum matrix of their containing reality, and flip the contents of a demarcated area into another projective when triggered.

The third method was destabilization, wherein the fundamental structure of a piece of matter was induced to misalign with its containing projective. Through the insertion of pattern feedback loops, a destabilized individual could induce the translation effect at will, although this method was as imprecise, dangerous, and difficult to achieve as it was powerful.

None of these three methods applied to the virtual entities that were directly shunted between projectives by the Sigmoid itself, as it was able to alter and move data between its projective realities at will.