The Baulomorph 🔮 Baulis Prime

Fractal Masters & Fractal Mystics

The first six thousand years of the Baulian Empire were brutal and dreary. Then the Great Reform changed everything: the two Guardian classes cemented in law the Two Rules of Empire: 1) Control the cosmos; 2) Ensure that subjugated species benefit from Baulian control. Up until the Great Reform, the Baulians had only followed the First Rule and were indifferent to the welfare of the species they subjugated or destroyed. If they destroyed 17% of the population or 100%, it didn’t matter to them at all. The addition of the Second Rule changed their behaviour completely, and cemented the Baulian conviction that they were better than everybody else.

This is when they came up with the 17% Solution: if any species offered any resistance whatsoever to their subjugation, the Baulians would eliminate 17% of their population. After this, all the Baulians needed to mention was the 70% Solution and the remaining rebels would lay down their arms.

At the time of the Great Reform the Baulians still believed that there was only one universe, comprised of about 840 billion galaxies. The orange technology they developed to explore adjacent galaxies, however, was so powerful that it led them to discover and explore two other universes, first the Green Buzz and then the Violet Hoop.

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Fractal Masters

The routes of colonization and subjugation were overseen by the Fractal Masters, who were the grand architects of military strategy and economic integration. From their lofty peak on the top floors of the Great Temple, the Fractal masters determined how quadrillions of fractals filtered into the armoured banks of the orange lines, and at what trajectories these rained down on entire planets. One pulse could contain up to 3 sextillion fractillaries, enough to subjugate a population of 25 million. The calculations of the Fractal Masters resembled the threaded topographies of Maria Lai.

The armed fractal of a Master was superior to any fractal they knew of. It penetrated cells by making them respond to the ‘shallow end’ of the fractillary as if it was nutrition. Once inside, the ‘deep end’ of the fractillary quickly rewrote the large, clumsy codes of DNA, LGB, etc. Once the codes were re-written, the cells were ready to receive the far more extensive complexity of the inner fractals. These were only let loose inside the cells once the environment was conducive to their complete and utter hegemony.

The armed fractals of the Masters were invisible to creatures who could only measure micro-spaces in angstroms, bosons, or leptons. Such primitive creatures couldn’t decode what they couldn’t detect. They were like 18th-century human scientists who believed that their glass microscopes exposed everything there was to see. In brief, the creatures who were about to be subjugated from within didn’t know what hit them.

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Fractal Mystics

While the Fractal Masters occupied the top ten floors of the Nord Tower, the Fractal Mystics occupied the top ten floors of the Sood Tower. The job of the Fractal Mystics was to inquire into questions of ethics, spirituality, and the paradox of finding meaning in infinite fields. Their calculations resembled skeletal versions, or poetic comments, on the threaded topographies of the Masters:

Rablanar was the subtlest, though not the most popular, of the Fractal mystics. He had recently published a paper on the following question: How can we be in control of the cosmos if the more we control of the cosmos the more we’re aware of the spaces over which we have no control?

He started his discussion with the following observations: Throughout our expansion into 2.7 trillion galaxies, we learned that there are always more galaxies beyond the ones we already know. At what point in our expansion do we run into a neighbour like ourselves? Or into a more powerful neighbour? By expanding ever-outward, we increase the likelihood that just as we assimilated other life forms, so we too will be assimilated one day.

Rablanar continued with his inconvenient questions, tearing into the delicate intellectual fabric the other Fractal Mystics had constructed to soothe the restless soul of the Baulian species: At what point do we become victims of our own system? At what point do we become pawns in our own chess game?

But of course no one listened to these inconvenient truths. Rablanar’s paper got filed in a minuscule fractal that circled itself and was only brought out at conferences or when the fractal bin needed dusting. As a result no one seriously considered the danger of expanding from galaxy to galaxy. Everyone took it for granted that continued expansion was itself proof of the unstoppable power of the Baulian Empire.

Rablanar warned his fellow Masters & Mystics that infinity was a deep and dangerous game to play. While Baulians could mine fractals deeply, who was to say that some other power couldn’t mine fractals more deeply?

His argument was unacceptable to the practical Masters, who assured the Mystics that they’d gone almost a thousand times deeper than any evidence of fractal activity by any other species. Going any deeper was a waste of time and resources, especially since every negative power of ten doubled the cost.

Nor did they pay attention to Rablanar’s final warning: In the game of the infinitesimal, the deep players don’t care about negative thousands. They’ll square a negative trillion and then cube it, just to make sure.

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Rablanar got so tired of beating his head against the wall that he left Baulis Prime for good. He moved to a planet that was just outside the Baulian Empire, in order to find out what life was like before, during, and after the Baulian takeover. He wanted to give his countrymen a glimpse of what it was like to see the Empire from the other side. So he took a year to go through the course of Complete Trans-Species Infraction, finally morphing into human shape. He then bought a wood cabin in the Adirondack Mountains, and spent his time writing articles for his little journal, Cosmic Mysteries.

The Masters and Mystics did their best to ignore these articles, even though Rablanar maintained a cult-like following among the No Enders, a group of philosopher-scientists who believed the cosmos had no spatial limits. Sometimes a No Ender would visit him in his reclusive cabin and stay several weeks. Soon, tired of hunting game and chopping wood, he would run back to the cafes and delis of New York City.

While hanging out in a cafe in the small town of Lake Placid, Rablanar met a young woman with piercing dark eyes who told him that she would make it her life’s work to transform the United States into its Canadian neighbour, which was less than 200 kilometres north. Apparently there they had to store their handguns in little locked boxes, could marry people of the same sex, could smoke drugs openly, and never had to pay to go to a doctor. Rablanar wanted to tell the woman that she didn’t need to bother trying to change everything because the Baulians would soon do all that for her, but he was of course strictly forbidden to talk about the Empire. Besides, he loved to watch the fire build up inside those dark eyes. He loved to feel the intensity of her energy, which seemed to come from somewhere else, some far away planet that he’d never heard of. She told him he should come see her some time. She tended bar on Union Square, and her name was Alex.

Increasingly, Rablanar took an interest in human relations, which were stunningly emotional. Trans Species Infraction at his age entailed the integration of very powerful human hormones and pheromones. It took him years to channel these in ways that were acceptable to his fellow New Yorkers.

He also took an interest in human politics and the rise of a man called Donald Trump, who seemed to be creating an epidemic of werewolfism among the backward portions of the electorate. He couldn’t believe it, but people started wearing hats with swastikas on them, yelling on loudspeakers that environmentalism was a dangerous cult, and insisting that the only thing that could save them was if everyone start carrying around semi-automatic rifles. All of this made him anticipate with increasing optimism the takeover of the planet. It also made him want to visit his bartender friend on Union Square, who he suspected had something to say about all that.

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Next: 🧚 The Tyrian Corridor

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