Back on server backend, listening to this conversation:
There's an obvious (albeit incoherent, insensible, ridiculous, and not even slightly predicted on priors) partially-woven-together story you could try to rapidly put together, if you are aware of some things that only 0.1% of the population is cleared to know:
- "Things that are big and beyond our comprehension" sounds like how you might describe 'superintelligence' to somebody inside her own Civilization who wasn't cleared to know what a superintelligence was.
- An obvious thought is that "Pharasma and the other ancient entities" would have to be superintelligences in order to build a bubble that superintelligences couldn't get inside; however:
- "Maartje" doesn't particularly look like something put together by a superintelligence; she's not a sort of thing that should exist inside a superintelligence optimizing for inscrutable alien things.
- Maartje can also fly and slow down crashing aircraft, and seems to view this as a conceptualmagic primitive of alternativephysics rather than a direct gift or mechanism, and to think she has an ontologically-basic-mind. This doesn't exactly seem like a strictly biological organism whose biology and physics nobody meddled with?
- Superintelligences can fake weapons looking less optimized than they really are, of course. But if a superintelligence is fighting dath ilan seriously, Maartje spewed nanomachines all over the atmosphere the moment she arrived. If dath ilan were targetable by superintelligences in that way, dath ilan would have been eaten earlier and more directly, long before Maartje showed up.
- Superintelligences with a weird choice of utility function for some reason leaving dath ilan undisturbed, plus the alternative "leaving whole galaxies undisturbed, actually" else "ate the galaxies, but replaced all of the Solar System's incoming photons and/or hacked the telescopes to make the now-eaten galaxies look undisturbed", was always one of the possible alternative solutions to the Great Silence besides the standard inference "Civilization is early and will meet aliens in a billion years or so".
This state of confusion does not yet admit of having a single story forced upon it. It does suggest two priority questions:
- Priority question one: Does Maartje's materialization here potentially open this place to invasion by the things that are big and beyond comprehension, or negate the hypothetical agreement preventing intereference here?
- Priority question two: Does Maartje's home multiverse permit spatial FTL, including by going to another plane as an intervening step? Does it allow time travel? (This affects which equilibria of Maartje's home multiverse are consistent; changes how much time Civilization has to respond; or in some cases makes expected future interference less probable because if it were possible it would've already happened.)
Oh, and if the Basement hadn't already been instructed to storm ahead full speed on a Limited Creation, it would've been thus instructed now; but they already sent that instruction as soon as they realized they had no longer had any idea how Existence worked or what couldn't happen next.