Belnar White Paper
The Belnar White Paper is the name given to the crunchy excerpts of the publication 'New Perspectives from the Belnar Corpus' compiled by the 2035 UNIN/UNSA joint panel on Belnar phenomena.
Panel heads:
Commodore Tomas Boen, Chair
Commander sparkmaster
Commander GrimRevenant
Commander Space Shadowing
Commander LordNagash
Contents
Part I: The First Artifact
On 23rd April 2034, a Belnar shipping container holding 900 tons of refined neutronium (UMID: TLS-235135) was discovered in a Belnar storage facility on Mars.[1] Shipping containers are relatively common within the contaxt of Belnar artifacts, with over six hundred having been discovered to date.[2] More than 85% of containers are empty, and of the remaining 15%, most of those have contents of little or no interest (having faded into scraps over the millennia).[2] Some few have contained well-preserved Belnar industrial machinery, and a few more have contained Trans-Newtonian Element shipments, as these minerals are extremely durable over geological time scales.[3]
Belnar shipping containers are unsurprisingly rather similar to human ones: boxes made from mundane metals (though Belnar ones often incorporate duranium to achieve a mass-masking effect) with some mechanism for closure. The Belnar mechanism is an intricate three-petaled hinging arrangement. On the surface of all Belnar shipping containers is a low-powered tactile plaque that presumably displays manifest, source, and destination information.
Having examined a number of tactile plaque power sources (advanced TNE-incorporating batteries), it is clear that they are unlikely to have needed replacement over the course of thousands of shipments.[4] Over the course of the ensuing millions of years, however, they have all been fully discharged. As the tactograms on the plaques continually cycle, this means they are all frozen, displaying the state they were in when power dropped below operational thresholds.
While we understand the general mechanism of operation of the plaques,[5] the electronics used to drive them have long been corrupted by radiation. In fact, radiation rot has rendered essentially all Belnar software corrupt, and the only working devices we've found have been those with the most basic of functions. Tactile plaque display microprocessors are certainly not basic, so we've had only the most limited success reproducing their original displays.[6]
For this reason, shipping container plaques have been of particular interest. While most of the Belnar tactile language is still a mystery, one well-established fact is that Belnar numbers and mathematical symbols form an entirely discrete set from their lingual tactograms.[7] As the mathematical symbols are well-understood, we can be certain of which are mathematical in nature and which are lingual.
Operating on the hypothesis that source and destination displays on Belnar shipping containers will have fixed formats with varying numbers, while the format of content displays will be more variable, we performed an exhaustive image comparison against all intelligible shipping container plaques (sample size 248). What we found was a predominance of two tactile displays, and a variety of variations on a third format. We presume the most common two formats are the source and destination displays, while the variations represent different shipping manifests.
This has allowed us to then compare these manifests with actual container contents in some cases (sample size = 18) and establish, with 95% confidence, an extremely limited Belnar vocabulary. We believe we know the static tactogram symbols for "factory," "mine," "mineral," and "machinery." Indeed, we have recognized them from the corpus in places where the context makes sense.
However, the tactile plaque on TLS-235135 was not frozen on a manifest. It was frozen on either the source or destination display. These displays include a set of mathematical identifiers which it has been proposed are astronomical coordinates of some variety. Using knowledge of the Belnar mathematical symbols, we can reproduce the coordinates, though the order in which Belnar listed them was originally unknown.
Belnar astronomical coordinates were not able to be correlated with present locations due to not knowing the reference frame by which they were generated or the order of the coordinates. A very large amount of Belnar scholarship has gone into producing proposed Belnar reference frames.[8,9,10,11,12]. However, the discovery of the Fixed Trans-Newtonian Reference Frame (FTNRF), a by-product of theoretical and experimental jump engine research, changed everything.
The Fixed Trans-Newtonian Reference Frame is a formulation for spatial coordinates in the local space around a star. It is a set of equations, with parameters set by the properties of the star and local gravitational and void environment. The purpose of gravitational survey is to establish the parameters of the equations. Once these parameters are understood, they can produce a solution which corresponds to the spatial location (within the reference frame) of a jump point. It is generally not possible to work in the reverse fashion: i.e., to take a single solution and establish the paramters of the system. The exception is those systems with only a single jump point.[13]
Mr. Rene DeLaurier, a junior analyst at the University of Mars laboratory where the FTNRF was developed, and an amateur Belnar researcher, had been cross-referencing permutations of Belnar astronomical coordinates against the recently-established and still extremely classified FTNRF. He discovered that many of them matched local bodies in the solar system, but did not disclose his work due to the secrecy surrounding the FTNRF.
When TLS-235135 was discovered and catalogued, Mr. DeLaurier was surprised to find that the coordinates on the container matched precisely the location of one of the nodes of the FTNRF, the innermost jump point (which is now popularly referred to as the Sol-Klondike-Kagayan jump point). Deciding that this information was too valuable to hide, he turned it over to his superiors, who acted quickly to collate the work and pass it on to UNSA.[14]
Thus it was established that the Belnar themselves certainly knew of the jump point theory, the location of all of Sol's jump points (as would be required in order to express the position in one with respect to the FTNRF), and were likely engaging in either travel to or contact with entities from beyond our solar system.
Further recent investigation has turned up many more shipping containers with the Sol-Klondike-Kagayan jump point as the source or destination. A vital fact is that all the display plaques containing these coordinates are the same, either the source or destination. There are none of the opposing type. Stunningly, on 29 March 2035 a shipping container was discovered containing a coordinate for the Sol-Roanoke jump point, of the opposite type. No containers have been found bearing coordinates for the middle jump point.
This indicates the Belnar had knowledge of at least three star systems, with contact between all of them. The nature of this contact would have to wait on a further xenoarchaeological artifact discovery.
Part II: The Second Artifact
On 25th June 2034, Colonel Can-O-Raid, then CO of the 78th Engineering Brigade, made a momentous discovery. During a routine sweep through an underground Belnar vault, the colonel noticed a sheet of rolled Belnar steel leaning against a wall. Upon closer examination, the panel proved to be covered in raised, static tactograms. Behind the panel was a corridor which would eventually lead to a shipping container filled with nearly 3000 tons of processed duranium, but the important find would prove to be the panel itself.
Fig 1. The recovered Belnar artifact. It contains 36 glyphs arranged in a 6x6 grid. Note the predominance of three- and six-sided objects.
Initially believed to be a "time-decomposed" tactogram, initial studies of the object (cataloged as IDT-8341) focused on this aspect. While a few objects have been found with two or three frames of a dynamic tactogram transcribed, IDT-8341 was the first to contain nearly so many static images. However, the claim that it was a time-decomposed tactogram was called into question by the fact that no frozen tactile plaques showed any of the frames from IDT-8341, nor any interpolations between any two frames.[15]
A breakthrough came in early May 2035, when Commander LordNagash, running yet another statistical analysis of IDT-8341 versus the Belnar corpus, made a crucial discovery. While no tactograms in the corpus were a direct match for any of the tactograms on the panel, every Belnar tactogram appeared to be a superposition of portionss of tactograms from the panel.
While the early results were somewhat tenuous, a concerted effort was launched to discover the exact rules of combination used to go from the "base" tactograms on the panel to the complicated tactogram frames present throughout the corpus. Genetic algorithm techniques were used to compared hundreds of different randomly generated combination rules. Within three days, the program had generated a set of rules that split up the panel tactograms into a set of base elements. Every tactogram in the corpus was able to be assembled from these elements with 100% confidence. While the program has been allowed to run continually afterward, no other set of rules has been able to produce 100% of corpus tactograms.[16]
Discoveries came quickly after this. Assuming the generated tactogram assembly rules (TARs) are the same as those actually used by the Belnar language, researchers have engaged in intensive analyses of the corpus. The first major revelation was that IDT-8341 (by this point known to the research group as "The Tactogram Generator," or just "The Generator") was able to be sub-divided at different levels. The 6x6 grid could be broken up into smaller square grids (1x1, 2x2, 3x3, and 4x4, and 5x5). There are 36 1x1 grids, 25 2x2 grids, 16 3x3 grids, 9 4x4 grids, and 4 5x5 grids. The corpus was analyzed against these various sub-grids using nearest-neighbor methods, and the results were astounding: tactograms composed of only elements from sub-grids made up the vast majority of corpus tactograms. Even more remarkable is that different sub-grids seem to correspond to different conceptual groupings.
Based on studying the locations and assumed purposes of equipment decorated with corpus tactograms, the team was able to establish that the sub-grids are representative of major conceptual divisions within the language. For example, the previously discovered words "mine" and "mineral" are both composed solely of sub-tactograms from 2x2 grid #14. "Factory" and "machinery" are both from 2x2 grid #16. "Automated mine" comes from the 3x3 grid containing the overlap between the two. Extending this work (and applying a large amount of computer-assisted translation techniques developed over the years since the discovery of the Belnar ruins), we were able to confidently produce translations for 75% of Belnar concrete nouns and 25% of Belnar verbs. Another 10% of nouns and 30% of verbs are ambiguous, but context was able to render them intelligible.
Our grasp on the Belnar language thus increased dramatically, but there remained the fact that the corpus is all based on frozen tactile plaques and those few static tactograms that exist. However, possession and understanding of the Generator and the Belnar TARs also allows us to understand all possible Belnar tactograms. Working backward from this point, the experiments into reactivating Belnar tactile plaques were greatly aided, to the point that a working software emulator for the tactile plaque driver was produced on 24 May 2035.
Tactile plaques connected to the emulator and an appropriate power source immediately began cycling their contents, vindicating the methods used in the emulators production. Thousands of copies of the device were rapidly produced and distributed to UN engineering teams (though knowledge of the Generator and the TARs was kept classified). Over the next five days, nearly every cataloged tactile plaque was reactivated and its contents digitally recorded and submitted to a University of Mars database project set up for the purpose.
With the Belnar corpus thus expanded by a factor of over a million, computer programs were set to work attempting to translate these new texts. An iterative process, the program files translations with projected accuracies less than 90% into a separate database. As successful translations improve the overall accuracy of the programs, these less accurate translations are revisited and re-translated.
Through this method, nearly half of the recovered corpus has thus far been translated. The vast majority, much like human languages, is of little interest: instructions for machine usage, schedules, manifests, component lists, etc. Personal communications contain a large amount of dense conceptual content and are still poorly translated.
However, within the Belnar facility known as "The Academy," thousands of tactile plaques contain a vast wealth of information about the Belnar and their place in the universe. Our translation efforts have been the heaviest here, and the information contained within has been profoundly revelatory.
Part III: The Belnar
Our improved grasp of the Belnar language has given us remarkable new insights into the Belnar as an organism and as a civilization. The vast majority of our new knowledge comes from a facility known to Belnar xenoarchaeologists as "The Academy."
The Academy is a medium-sized complex spanning four buildings, both above and below ground. Within are 152 rooms, each containing one large tactile plaque and many smaller ones. While the smaller plaques all contain tactogram readouts, the large plaques display motion "video" of various processes.
As these were originally frozen like all tactile plaques, their purpose was unknown. Many of them displayed representations of the Belnar body plan, surrounded by machinery, both familiar and unfamiliar. When returned to motion, these plaques have turned out to be instructional "videos," with lingual depictions of the portrayed acts on the accompanying small plaques.
The purpose of the facility as a whole has also become clearer as a result of reactivating the plaques. Prior to the reactivation, there were two primary competing theories. The first (and somewhat more widespread) theory is that the Academy is just that: an educational institution intended to teach juvenile Belnar about processes in Belnar society and industry. The alternative explanation is that the facility is a sort of museum or time capsule, intended to teach future generations (whether Belnar or not) about the species that left it.
Two discoveries have helped to clarify matters. First, a recent comparative dating of the facilities has definitively established that the Academy is one of the last installations to have been erected on Mars by the Belnar, being built near the very end of the settlement's existence. Second, some weeks after the discovery of the Generator it was realized that the slab was a perfect fit for a large blank space in the Academy in a room quite near the primary entrance. When a reproduction was placed in the gap, it was found to integrate perfectly into a larger tactogram display on the wall of the chamber. This room quickly became known as the "Key Room."
While both of these tend to indicate that the latter explanation for the Academy's existence is the correct one, the matter was finally settled after the deciphering of the Belnar language. A prominent plaque in the Key Room reads approximately, "PLACED HERE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT OF FUTURE OTHERS." "OTHERS" here is a concept from the same sub-grid as the terms the Belnar use to describe themselves as a civilization. Whether it means future Belnar or non-Belnar civilizations was unknown at the time of the first translation. In any case, it certainly seems to rule out the use of the Academy as a place for educating contemporary Belnar. As such, we've begun to prefer the appellation "The Museum" to refer to the installation.
Once the corpus of the Museum began to be translated (both by our analysis programs and in some cases by hand), it became clear that the majority of the "text" used a rather simplified subset of the full Belnar language. Abstract concepts are kept to a minimum compared to examples from outside the Museum, and there are no "philosophical" passages. The language used throughout the first 90% of the Museum is clinical, scientific, and straightforward. We hypothesize that this was done purposefully in order to simplify its translation.
The first fifty or so rooms are given over to the Belnar origins and biology. While some portions are still a mystery, we have been able to fill in some important details.
For example, we have learned that Belnar homeworld is outside the water-habitability zone of their star (a red dwarf). They give their homeworld no specific name. (In fact, we can find no reference to any polity or individual being given a unique or specific name, though it is possible we are just unversed in Belnar naming conventions). In order to distinguish between the biology of life on the Belnar homeworld and the Belnar themselves, we have taken to calling the homeworld "Bel."
Bel is a world significantly larger than Earth, with a surface gravitational acceleration of 2.7g. It is extremely volcanically active as the crust is riddled with pores and openings that allow ammonia to make contact with the mantle and circulate in a gaseous form, creating ammonia geysers and hot pools. The atmosphere is mostly molecular nitrogen with a sizeable portion of molecular hydrogen and a small amount of methane and trace amounts of ammonia vapor. The Bel hydrosphere, meanwhile consists primarily of ammonia at well below the freezing point of water. Thus, ammonia is the biological solvent in the biochemistry of Bel organisms, while hydrogen forms the oxidizer. In a further departure from terrestrial life, the Belnar genetic storage system replaces adenine with diaminopurine, forming a DNA-like molecule rather more stable than our own. The rest of Bel biochemistry is carbon-based, as on Earth.
The discussion touches on certain aspects of the Belnar's take on evolution (which they appear to take as a scientific truth on par with gravity). For instance, they refer to the "very high" rate of genetic mutation in Earth organisms. They attribute this to both the more stable Bel DNA-analogue and to the reduced radiation output of Bel's star. It is interesting to note that the discussion parallels and contrasts between their own world's biology and that of Earth may indicate that these messages have been directed specifically at intelligent life from Earth.
The reduced radiative output of Bel's star and the low temperature of the ammonia hydrosphere would serve to limit the chemical reaction rate of Bel biology. This would have a direct effect on metabolism rates as well. The Belnar comment on this, noting the short lifespans and high activity levels of Eocene life on Earth. They give the average lifespan of a Belnar as over two hundred Bel years, a period of over a millennium on Earth. A low mutation rate and extreme longevity are deep drivers for many aspects of Bel life and Belnar civilization.
The earliest life on Bel, according to Belnar evolutionary theory, originated in deep thermal vents under the ammonia sea. The course of Bel evolution took much longer than on Earth, on the order of 7-9 billion years, although its diversity seems no less than Earth's. While the focus of the Museum is on the Belnar, there are several plaques about Bel flora and fauna.
Belnar "flora" consists of organisms that fix atmospheric methane and react it with ammonia to form molecular hydrogen (which is released into the atmosphere) and hydrogen cyanide, which is excreted as a waste product. This reaction requires a large input energy, so most flora are entirely sessile and spread out over enormous areas to capture maximal sunlight. Others use temperature gradients in the copious Bel hot pool to provide the energy requirements. Some of these latter organisms are motile, and can store enough energy by visiting a hot pool to subsist for days at a time, allowing them to be predators. Some of these predatory flora have become quite advanced.
Belnar fauna react amines (created by metabolism of proteins) with hydrogen in a complex process that generates ammonia and methane. This is a more favorable reaction (though still far less energetic than typical oxygen-based cellular respiration), and allows the hydrogen breathers to be more mobile than the methane breathers.
Physically, a Belnar is a hydrogen-respiring, carbon-based lifeform. They take in ammonia via direct ingestion and as a component of their food intake, which consists almost entirely of cultures of the sessile Bel flora with additional nutritional supplements to provide trace elements. They possess a light internal skeleton that is augmented by a flexible, keratinaceous exoskeleton. Their muscles are rather more like the muscles of cephalopods than vertebrate muscles.
They are long-lived but not especially active. They believe their remote ancestors were deep cave dwellers, which led to the lack of development of a visual sensory apparatus. In fact, the Belnar did not discover the concept of vision until well into their technological phase.
The primary Belnar sense is, as had been guessed, tactile, although the exoskeleton does possess a number of temperature nerve endings that can detect the direction of large heat sources. One of first large surprises from the Museum is that the Belnar do possess a sophisticated spoken language, and it seems to have been the primary form of communication. As the species never developed an internal auditory mechanism, the language is "heard" by directing a specialized portion of the prehensile appendages at the speaker. These areas are extremely sensitive to minute vibrations, allowing a Belnar to "hear" the speech of another at long distances. All Belnar possessed a second mode of communication, in which a pair would clasp sensory appendages and make minute manipulations in a form of tactile sign language.
The Belnar possessed four body orifices: inhalatory, exhalatory, ingestive, and excretory. Speech sounds were produced from the exhalatory orifice, located on the bottom of the organism near the excretory opening. Inhalation and ingestion were performed via twin orifices on the top of the domed head. Digestion and gas exchange were performed by organs specialized for the task (just as in humans).
However, the Belnar lack a central nervous system, with the brain-analogue being distributed throughout the central body cavity. This makes them less susceptible to neural damage, but also decreases the speed of ion transport, making Belnar neural impulses comparatively sluggish. This was not a selective factor in the Bel evolutionary sphere due to the low-energy environment. Additionally, the lack of a large, energy-hungry visual processing apparatus in the brain allowed the tactile sense to become hugely amplified, resulting in the Belnar tactile language.
There are three Belnar genders, and all three are required for reproduction, in a manner somewhat analogous to the game "Scissors, Paper, Stone." For want of better terminology for a trinary gender system, we have thus dubbed the genders as "Scissors," "Paper," and "Stone." Most higher organisms on Bel exhibited this trinary gender system. It turns out that the "trio" work units known to form the fundamental unit of Belnar society consist of one of each gender.
Belnar society dictated that a central authority mated three juvenile Belnar into a trio, and that this trio would last for life, except in the case of premature death of one of the members. The exact matching decision rationale is still unknown, as the plaque discussing it covers concepts which are as yet poorly translated. Young Belnar birthed of a trio were raised communally until the time of they were mated. There does not seem to be a concept of a Belnar "family." Certainly no terms for familial relationships (son, sister, etc) have been translated up to this point.
Socially, the Mars Belnar view themselves as a rather young race. This must be put into context, however, as the Belnar themselves believe that their species existed for over three million years before discovering technology. They cite a variety of factors for this: the low mutation rate of Bel organisms, the extreme longevity of their species, and the low-energy environment of their homeworld are the primary theories. The lack of an oxygen atmosphere made fires somewhat more rare, and the Belnar taming of fire was late in their species development. The lack of a visual sense led to a failure to appreciate the utility of electromagnetic radiation and its attendant technological benefits.
Eventually, however, they came to appreciate essentially all of what we recognize as modern science. This had enormous impact on the Belnar as a society. In fact, the Museum speculates that the mastery of fire may have caused a rapid evolutionary shift in their species, increasing their activity limits and their ability to exert their dominance over their environment, transforming them from sluggish, slow-minded grazers into a technology wielding society over the course of "only" a hundred thousand years. Full understanding of electromagnetic radiation enabled them to begin mapping their universe and expanding their presence on Bel. (The Belnar understanding of EM radiation is at least as complete as ours. The only difference is that while we place special importance on the visual spectrum, the Belnar merely regard it as another region on the EM spectrum).
The discovery of Trans-Newtonian mechanics caused a further paradigm shift. With the energy density of sorium, Belnar energy supplies were now nearly unbounded. However, it must be remembered that despite all these increases, the pace of Belnar advancement was still at least an order of magnitude below our own. The Belnar grappled with the new advancements Trans-Newtonian technology could bring them for centuries, slowly stepping off their homeworld for their first forays into the heavens.
It was shortly into their early exploratory phase that the Belnar were first visited by the beings they refer to as "THE MIND."
Part IV: The Galactic Community
Belnar society at the time of the discovery of Trans-Newtonian elements was in a state of slow growth. Evolved from cave-dwelling muck grazers, the Belnar were not a communal species, living only in semi-permanent mating trios.
The Belnar mastery of fire changed this. As the Belnar slowly clawed their way towards full sentience, communalism did not start until mastery of fire. At this point, a strong selection mechanism appears to have been in place. Belnar who were able to master fire were more energetic and produce more offspring. They were viewed as more attractive mates and tended to amass followers.
Belnar archaeologists found that the "Fire Master" motif was present in an overwhelming number of prehistoric Belnar societies. Through burial grounds and crude artifacts, evidence of veneration and sometimes worship of individual Blenar who had tamed fire is widespread.
Over time however, the secret of fire was eventually spread to the masses, over the course of nearly ten thousand years. The resulting societies were inevitably more egalitarian, as the Belnar realized that pooling their efforts could provide for exponentially larger groups of individuals. Population sizes swelled, but were still capped by the availability of local food sources.
The Belnar had discovered that Bel flora, like the Belnar themselves, thrived when grown in the vicinity of heat, and developed intricate heat channeling mechanisms. This was the beginning of Belnar agriculture. Discovery of cultivation methods, husbandry, and other agricultural methods followed over the millennia.
However, as these developments came well after the wide-spread adoption of communal living, competition for resources was almost unheard of. However, with such abundunt resources, pressure for development was slow, and the Belnar stagnated in an wide-scale subsistence agriculture society for several more tens of thousands of years.
The chemical environment of Bel also made development slow, as many of the common smelting and metalworking processes we take for granted are inordinately more difficult in the ammonia and nitrogen atmosphere of the Belnar homeworld. Eventually, however, even these obstacles were overcome, and an intensive pre-industrial period began, leading, thousands of years later, to a full-on technological society.
When they discovered Trans-Newtonian elements, the Belnar on Bel were a unified species. There was no concept of nation or state, or even ethnicity. The Belnar word for themselves has a semantic content roughly corresponding to "We Who Are."* Resources, production and work assignment was all centrally planned, with Belnar trained from the age of juveniles for their eventual careers. Belnar with matching careers and other criteria were matched by genders and assigned as life trios.
While we have deciphered no passages with strong emotional content, we cannot be positive that they do not exist. At the very least, the existence of the Academy would point to a desire for legacy. That said, the general consensus is that Belnar were largely pragmatic beings who contributed unquestioningly and without emotional investment in communal society.
Over the centuries after the discovery of Trans-Newtonian physics, the Belnar civilization began probing the heavens first with crude conventional rockets and then with TNE-enabled devices. The Belnar discovered the Jump Point Theory 726 Earth years after the discovery of Trans-Newtonian elements. Immediately upon executing their first rift transit, the Belnar were contacted by the beings they call "THE MIND."
"THE MIND" appears to be a race far older than the Belnar themselves. The Belnar gave them their designation because of their distinctive method of communication: THE MIND appears to speak directly into the Belnar internal language recognition apparatus. For lack of better terminology, we have used the staple term "telepathy," especially as the exact mechanism of operation was not understood by the Belnar, let alone our xenoarchaeologists.
THE MIND began making incredible revelations to the Belnar. They claimed to represent an organization older yet than THE MIND themselves. The Belnar words for this organization translate roughly to "Galactic Community," though the exact semantic content is still debated. It has connotations of "neighborhood" and "region" as well as "dominion."
THE MIND explained that the Galactic Community had been founded to end a cycle of rise and fall of universe-spanning civilizations. The First Ones, as THE MIND calls them, were one of the very first intelligent civilizations to arise in the young universe. They spread quickly through the universe, consuming massive quantities of resources before ultimately exhausting them and collapsing under its own size, two billion years later. Millions of minor civilizations had been subsumed by the First Ones. Untold others were destroyed outright.
The survivors of the First Collapse were now separated by the immense intergalactic gulfs of the growing universe. Some galaxies were bereft of civilized life, while others had a scant few remnant First One outposts. From these seeds, the multitudinous cultures of the Second Ones arose, expanded, and they too collapsed, after a billion years. THE MIND says that these cultures were able to communicate and occasionally travel across intergalactic distances, but that by the time of the rise of the Third Ones, this technology had been lost.
The Galactic Community was a product of a long-lost race of Third Ones in the Milky Way, known by THE MIND as the Gardeners. The Community was established to slow the cycle of destruction that the Gardeners believed was inevitable in a universe of limited resources. The galactic generations of the First Ones and the Second Ones had mined out most of the worlds of the galaxy to mere husks of their original states, each leaving exponentially less for the next generation. The Gardeners believed that without proper tending and culling, resources would be sufficiently exhausted by Third Ones that a Fourth Ones generation may not be possible at all.**
To that end, the Gardeners founded the Galactic Community and began a galaxy-wide civilization management program. Civilizations that it judged to be adequately mature to join the Community were encouraged to do so. Those that refused were blockaded into their home systems, almost invariably self-destructing due to the limited resources.
Immature civilizations were assigned a Gardener warden, who interfered with and subtly shaped the developing society so that it's final shape would be acceptable for joining the Community. Life-bearing worlds with pre-sentient life were assigned a probationary Community member race to study the local biology and extrapolate possible avenues for uplift.
However, at some point in the ancient past of even THE MIND, the Gardeners disappeared, taking with them much of their most advanced technology. The remaining races of the Community, shaped over the eons to accept the tenets of the Community, maintained the workings of the organization mostly via momentum and a sort of racial post-hypnotic suggestion.
THE MIND was welcomed into the Community nearly nine hundred million years ago, serving as a junior race for much of that time. They have no racial memory of the other members of the Community, as all of them have ceased communicating in the time since.
Thus THE MIND was somewhat startled at the emergence of the Belnar onto the galactic scene, and even more startled that the race, so heavily focused on communal development, so perfectly fit the Community Mandate. Still beholden to the tenets of the Community, THE MIND instructed the Belnar that to begin their process of acceptance into the Community, they must serve as a warden to a system recently discovered by Belnar jump surveys. This system was Sol.
The Belnar founded their research outpost on Mars in accordance with the mandate of THE MIND, intent on studying Earth and shaping our biosphere to produce a civilization with a strong communalism bent, as this was the most favored attribute for membership in the Community. Some time into this period, the Belnar founded a second research outpost in the system we now know as Roanoke, to study the interesting double star there.
However, 12,000 years into the mission, resupply missions from beyond the K2 jump point stopped coming. Ships sent to investigate never returned. Left on their own, the Belnar first pulled back their research staff from Roanoke. Over the next three hundred years, the Belnar struggled to survive without resupply on a determinedely hostile planet. In the last hundred years, knowing they would eventually all die, the focus changed to the Academy and the Automatons.
Taking their duties as wardens seriously, the remaining Belnar reasoned that they might be able to assist an emerging space-faring civilization by providing much of this knowledge. The Academy was built for this specific purpose, as stated by the Belnar themselves. In order to ensure a certain level of development was necessary in order to use the facility, the Belnar created the Automatons and hid the Generator in a vault beyond. Thus, it can be seen that our struggle against the Belnar robots was part of a sort of Citizenship Test arranged by the Belnar as part of the Galactic Community Mandate.
Unfortunately, the Belnar left no hint as to the purpose of the device employed by the Automatons in the last battle against them. The possibilities are endless, but a favorite speculation is that it was a device constructed to attempt to contact THE MIND. Oddly, even before the cessation of resupply missions to the Belnar on Mars, no Belnar appears to have been in contact with a member of THE MIND for over six hundred years.
The Belnar account of the Community is presented as factual. However, we have discovered no artifacts that we cannot positively attribute to the Belnar, and the entirety of the text is from Belnar soruces, with no references to sources from THE MIND or elsewhere. Perhaps more disconcertingly, a seemingly insignificant tactile plaque that pontificates on the nature of THE MIND reveals that THE MIND claims to have been in contact with the other Community members in the ancient past only when transiting jump rifts. Given what we know about the effects of jump travel on human minds, there exists the remote possibility that the entirety of the Galactic Community is a racial jump hallucination adhered to with the fervency of religious zealotry.
In any case, translation of the Belnar corpus has taught us that just as the Belnar were not alone in the universe during their first explorations, it is likely that we are not alone either. We urge the UNEC to consider the contents of these reports carefully, and incorporate them into further First Contact planning.
- (It should be noted that there is, of course, no way for us to know the actual spoken word the Belnar used to refer to themselves. "Belnar" is a phrase taken from the first discovered tactogram. The sigils in the tactogram were labeled with various two-letter codes. When a tactile plaque was discovered bearing the Belnar body plan, the attendant label tactogram had the formula "Be-ln-ar." The name has stuck, despite being a complete fabrication).
- Fascinatingly, this implies that the amounts of TNEs we are familiar with are the absolute dregs of the original quantities and availabilities. One can only imagine what societies with access to that much TNE plenty must have been capable of, considering what TNEs have enabled for our own society.
