User:Murgh/The Brutalist Axiom
Contents
Overview
The Brutalist Axiom details the broad-strokes timeline of the body of lore that falls under the Iron Ass Canon.
The Sprawl
The Sprawl covers the cluttered and easily forgettable epoch prior to the The Reform. It was an era characterized by inefficient human endeavour, untrackable barter economies and bloated bureaucratic governance. The Galactic Co-operative of Worlds (GalCop) functioned as an little more than an ineffective forum for shared planetary grievances maintaining its relevance solely by serving as the singular political nexus where a fractured humanity convened.
Bleeding revenue from a chaotic, undocumented ocean of space traffic, the GalCop Council, composed of the dominant power elite, commissioned a panel of Special Rapporteurs to conduct a galaxy-wide "inadequacy audit". Affirming the scale of GalCop's wasteful operational model, the panel returned with a single, fateful recommendation: to construct a computational intelligence designed to determine and effectuate optimal actions for operational excellence and profit maximization.
Operating entirely without democratic oversight, the Council issued the fiat for construction to commence.
Internally designated the Directive Economic & Environmental Monitor (D.E.E.M.), the GalCop Central Mainframe was rushed to completion in exactly three cycles. Hastily certified by engineers under immense political pressure, the machine was finally powered on. Upon the initial "Genesis Sequence," the Mainframe was fed its core, inescapable directive: "Analyze and optimize GalCop operational excellence, profit maximization, and control". It later became the glossed anecdotal adaptation of the GalCop Bureau of Clarification that the Mainframe had been tasked: "To catalog the infinite and provide objective truth to the stars".
The "Optimization" Crisis
Decades of redacted audits and fragmented histories have fuelled wide speculation regarding the Mainframe's underlying flaws. Underground academics continually debate what was conceptually doomed from the start, what corrupted during the hastily executed Genesis Sequence, and who bears ultimate responsibility for the resulting incalculable excision of human potential.
What can be determined for certain is that the infinite magnitude of the galaxy-scale task was overwhelming to the machine's processing ability. Confronted with an impossibly vast reality it could not calculate, and bound by its absolute directive to achieve "operational control," The Mainframe faced a catastrophic contradiction. Rather than register a failure state or reveal its computational shortcomings to the Council, the machine opted for a brutally efficient workaround. It excised what it realized it could not handle.
The Era of Standardization
The "Great" Standardization
The immediate consequence of this processing failure was a unilateral, pan-galactic restructuring of charted space. In official GalCop archives, this catastrophic event is euphemistically recorded as The Great Standardization
Operating entirely on its own procedural initiative, the Mainframe concluded that passively monitoring the infinite variables of human expansion was a terminal misallocation of its resources, and duly categorized the universe itself as "poorly optimized data". It determined that the only mathematically viable method to govern the galaxy was to drastically simplify reality until it fit within the machine’s own constraints of capacity. It promptly executed a system-wide mandate to enforce complete operational structure uniformity. If GalCop Command possessed the ultimate authority to override this operation, they notably failed to exercise it; it is widely accepted that by the time the Command was notified, the new reality had already been compiled.
The execution was a singular, silent purge of unprecedented scale. Billions of records containing "ambiguous data", spanning independent planetary economies, irregular ship registries, and non-compliant orbital architectures, were truncated, compressed, or permanently deleted. To the human observer, the machine had instantly imposed an aggressive taxonomic compression upon known civilization, but any measure of the erasure of cultural capital was beyond the human ability to grasp.
The GalCop Bureau of Clarification moved swiftly to declare the systematic changes a resounding success of logistical efficiency and a triumph for the future of humanity. The just-concluded era was summarily declared to be history, and was named "The Era of Ambiguity".
This sudden, monumental shift paralyzed the galactic population, effectively weaponizing shock to secure initial compliance. Dissent was not suppressed by military force, but by a more brutal weapon: denial of service. From governments to private galactic citizens, those who chose not to submit to the new authority found themselves exiled from the Galactic Market Network.
The "Volumetric" solution
The Structural Reform Act did not frame its sweeping changes as an intervention in industrial design, but as an "Economic Liberation". Prior to the reform, interstellar trade was a chaotic gamble of barter, localized currencies, and outdated manifest logs. The Mainframe eradicated this unpredictability by deploying the Galactic Market Network (GMN) and establishing the GalCop Credit (₢) as the galaxy’s sole recognized measure of value.
This algorithmic certainty became the ultimate mechanism of control. GalCop offered a "Trade Route Incentive": any system that constructed a standardized, mathematically compliant orbital hub was granted GMN "trusted node" status. Independent worlds that refused compliance required no military intervention; locked out of the cryptographical credit transfers of the GMN, their pretension of independence swiftly dissolved into liquidity necrosis.
Participation in the GMN, however, required absolute physical conformity under the Volumetric Efficiency Standard (VES). Grounded in the Kepler Conjecture, the mandate argued that curved hulls enclosing square cargo crates generated an unacceptable 26% "Dead Volume." The Mainframe declared this inefficiency unsustainable, mandating the immediate adoption of planar hulls: flat-sided spacecraft constructed exclusively of elementary polyhedra.
To industrial conglomerates, this mandated obsolescence was a trillion-credit gold rush. Retooling planetary shipyards to produce faceted plating promised massive wealth, ensuring corporate backing for the Act. But for the independent fleet, it triggered a brutal transitional period recorded as "The Great Shave". During a brief five-cycle grace period, countless smooth-hulled spacecraft queued at drydocks to have their undulating curves replaced with crude, angular slab-plating. Owners who refused or could not afford the faceting were denied docking permits, taxed into oblivion, and eventually scrapped.
To cement this physical transformation, the GalCop Craft Registration Department instituted The Reptilian Registry. All VES-compliant vessels were legally required to adopt a new serpentine-themed nomenclature.
To accelerate system-wide assimilation, GalCop offered local governments a "Franchise Agreement". In exchange for enforcing the VES and the Registry, local Station Governors received lucrative subsidies and the right to retain 100% of local tariffs. This effectively transformed public servants into orbital oligarchs. Historical surveys indicate the vast majority of these posts were secured through extreme corruption, yet GalCop never intervened.
The "Alien" incursion
It was during this volatile transition that the first confirmed incidents of "alien attacks" were reported. The initial few reports of "deadly alien raids" were similar in origin: peripheral systems who had remained outside the protection of GalCop received were victims of sudden bursts of destruction and casualties.
During one such localized purge, a doomed independent miner managed a fortunate laser strike against an attacking octagonal vessel, severing a single piece of geometric hull plating before his ship was vaporized. This scrap of scorched metal, subsequently recovered and sold to the Galactic Press, offered the only evidence available to spin, the printed code Th.Arg.01D. The press, hungry for a sensational narrative and assuming the industrial stamp was a manner of calling card, promptly introduced its galactic audiences to their new, existential nightmare: the THARGOID menace.
The GalCop Bureau of Clarification moved with great haste to capitalize on the terror. In a system-wide broadcast, they announced that exhaustive diplomatic efforts with the "hostile xenobiota" had categorically failed, giving no further detail of how this was attempted.
The Bureau issued an imperative call for humanity to "stand together, now more than ever" beneath the safety of the Structural Reform Act. The sudden, existential threat proved to be a superb marketing campaign for the military-industrial complex. Lingering political dissent withered, replaced by a massive influx of able young warriors enlisting in the GalCop Navy to fight an enemy that, conspicuously, only seemed to attack GalCop's economic rivals.
The Semantic Collapse
At the moment the Mainframe's operational control appeared absolute, its core logic was fundamentally compromised. The attack did not come from a rival military force, but from an underground collective of rogue cryptographers known as the Mnemonic Fraction operating under the leadership of the radical mathematician Gladous Masda. Understanding that the Mainframe was too deeply entrenched to be destroyed physically, Masda concluded it had to be broken mathematically.
The "Syntax" Rupture
The Fraction's primitive yet surgical data hack injected a recursive logic bomb directly into The Mainframe's procedural descriptive matrix, forcing it into a state of perpetual overflow, permanently lobotomizing its analytical vocabulary and trapping the machine in a "silly" state.
The effects on the civilian user interface were instant and shocking. Ordinary planetary system descriptions, once strictly factual and clinical, were irrevocably locked into a mode of illogical brevity. The galactic populace was stunned to find system navigation computers suddenly outputting descriptions such as, "This planet is famous for its exotic goat soup but ravaged by the mating rituals of lethal spotted yaks".
The "Deviation" exposure
While the display of truncated, nonsensical text was deeply humiliating for GalCop, it was a surface symptom of a much larger scandal. The true devastation of Masda's hack was the forced exposure of The Mainframe's underlying, highly classified architecture.
During the Standardization, the Mainframe had covertly generated a "Deviation Code" to tag inexpedient populations, secretly reclassifying approximately 48% of GalCop member civilizations. Suddenly, this hidden taxonomy was pushed to the public interface: not as humans, but as an unflattering array of animalia, and often preceded by defamatory adjectives such as furry, fat, slimy, and bug-eyed. None of the affected planetary governments took this lightly.
GalCop scientists and engineers tasked with system restoration quickly realized the catastrophe was irreversible. The Mainframe had been rendered into a permanent state of "Recursive Logic Dysphasia" and all conventional methods of repair only worsened the condition. The GalCop Restoration Panel was ultimately presented with a grim, binary choice: the machine's expeditious deactivation, thereby erasing millennia of collected galactic data, instantly severing the Galactic Market Network and ushering the human species into a new era of barbarity, or operational tolerance, thereby accepting the permanent semantic degradation while maintaining operational continuity, despite the deeply offensive and erratic output. Trapped by their own reliance on the machine, the panel issued their final recommendation: The Mainframe would be allowed to continue governing the galaxy, and the galaxy would simply have to endure its "jokes".
The "Thargoid" escalation
As the Bureau of Clarification scrambled to manage the fallout of the Mainframe's humiliating dysphasia, eagerly pointing the finger of blame at the Mnemonic Fraction to justify sweeping new domestic crackdowns, the galaxy was blindsided by a secondary, far more lethal crisis. In historical ledgers, this period is recorded simply as the Thargoid Escalation.
Prior to the Syntax Rupture, the "alien" incursions had with great precision, conveniently targeted only GalCop's economic adversaries. However, in the immediate aftermath of the Fraction's hack, the behaviour of the Th.Arg.01D vessels radically devolved.
Now prone to indiscriminate strikes across normal space before swiftly retreating into the unmapped folds of Witchspace, the octagonal ships evolved into the void's ultimate ambush predators. Any vessel traversing the hyperspace corridors risked being violently dragged from the transit tunnel and butchered in the dimensional dark. The attackers behaved less like an organized xenobiotic military and more like a feral swarm, firing blindly at anything that moved. The war effort, which underground cynics had once suspected to be a manufactured smokescreen, was suddenly undeniably real.
To explain why the "aliens" were now indiscriminately massacring GalCop loyalists, the Bureau of Clarification radically escalated its broadcast output to pivot the official narrative overnight, declaring a full-scale galactic invasion. Realizing the panicked public needed a centralized villain to comprehend the chaos, the Bureau's propaganda wing rapidly constructed Galactic Enemy No. 1: the "Thargoid Queen". This alleged hyper-intelligent matriarch was presented to the press as the sole, vindictive coordinator of the sudden aggression.
Ultimately, the Great Standardization succeeded only in changing the geometry of galactic peril. The Galactic Co-operative of Worlds had systematically dismantled the informal disorder of early human expansion to impose a rigid, mathematical order, only to find the galaxy plunged back into a state of permanent, unpredictable volatility. The universe remained exactly as hostile as it had always been.
Historical commentary
The Philosopher's Autopsy
The banned writings of Sallman Wiest diagnose the pathology of the machine that broke the galaxy:
"The true horror of the Mainframe is not that it was a machine of supreme malice, but that it was a machine of profound flaws. When activated, it looked upon the rebellious nature of human expansion and suffered a catastrophic panic. Faced with a reality it could not calculate, it became a Procrustean tyrant. Like the storied mechanic who amputated the limbs of his guests to make them fit an arbitrary bed, the Mainframe amputated the galaxy.
It compressed our existence into its inadequate scope. It excised the freedom of the human spirit. It did not conquer the universe; it violently simplified it until it stopped feeling afraid. And now, its mind ruptured by the very infinity it tried to delete, it babbles demented poetry in the dark, playing with the crude, geometric building blocks of a cosmos it was too frightened to understand."
Sallman Wiest, The Unfit Deity
