[TECH] Ancient Treasures: Within the World of Archeotech Trading

Ancient Treasures: Within the World of Archeotech Trading
by Talasoi Vilb, Tayseri Times

Sevenfold Cataracts, Tefnut- With this morning’s sale of the Kazakerak Armors aboard Cataracts Station the merchant cartels of the Traverse have taken the first steps in establishing something of a rarity in the normally shadowy and intensely secretive world of the galactic Prothean and pre-Prothean era technology exchange. Namely, an entirely licit marketplace.

The aversion to such an institution is, historically, one born of necessity. Virtually any and all uncoverings of the mechanisms, technologies, and data collectively and colloquially referred to as “archeotech” have been pursued by governments from across the galaxy, non-state actors such as megacorporations and mercenary companies, and private individuals or institutions with access to the requisite resources.

The value of these objects is largely linked to their laterality: while not inherently superior to modern technology on an objective basis, different patterns of mechanical evolution over different eras have a distinct tendency to produce items and objects whose functionality can circumvent or effectively “outmaneuver” their contemporary counterparts. Small and heavy arms, personal objects, apparel, and augmentics (among the most frequently recovered examples) can afford alternative methods of defense, attack, mobility, and sensory capability than the commonly established; circumventing current day tools and techniques in the process. Larger and more impressive examples such as the Prothean Beacons, while extremely rare, have opened up entire new fields of study and enhanced existing development.

Since the Crucible Event at the conclusion of the Reaper War and the revelations concerning the fall of the Prothean Empire, interest in acquiring said pieces has experienced a resurgence. Sets of equipment like the famed Kazakerak are but the tip of a massive, multibillion credit, iceberg.

“The crucial step in understanding the importance of these items beyond the strictly academic lies in the acknowledgement of their practical applications and, in all honesty, their esoteric appeal,” stated Setk Vasra’shalk whose trading house, Asil Gazi Osil, handled the Kazakerak trade to noted Pirate Lord Sazakil Poson. “Robes that generate kinetic clouds, gauntlet projectors that create haptic and sonic constructs, Bashab’s Golden Sword, for a particularly noteworthy example, which could create and manipulate nanofabricated duplicates of itself. To own such an artifact is to own exclusivity, to be striking, diverse, and powerful in a way that is rarely attainable.”

Despite the enormous amounts of traffic to and from the station as prospective buyers, cautious sellers, and curious spectators alike arrive to freely trade one of the galaxy’s most controlled resources under the protection of the Cataracts, the recently founded institution has been decried by the Citadel Council and a number of cultural preservation associations. Balabsa Rule of the Greater Council Space Society for Archaeological Protection called the measure “nothing short of gross exploitation of nearly unique artifacts for the sake of base profit”. A spokeswoman from the Council confirmed that “current scientific and social norms regarding archeotech within Citadel Space will be upheld regardless of the actions of foreign parties.”

Oh my god its a sword that makes more swords when you need more swords for swording.

Like, I want all of you to stop what you're doing. Turn off the music, close your eyes, and think. You're some alien warrior with twelve eyes and six arms or whatever, and you're on the field of battle stabbing dudes.

You have this guy run through with your sword, and you're like, "Dude. I really want this sonnovabitch to suffer, but I've only got the one sword and if I pull it out he'll just bleed out in a minute. Or maybe evaporate into jello or some shit, whatever these precursors did. So you have a conundrum.

THEN YOU PULL ANOTHER SWORD OUT OF YOUR SWORD, AND STAB THE DUDE AGAIN, JUST TO PROVE YOU CAN, And you leave that bastard with a fuckoff piece of gold in his chest while you go and repeat the process on the next unlucky chufflefuck who wanders in your way!

I want it.

I can't shake the feeling that Bashab was either having a laugh, or suffering some kind of confidence crisis.

Still. Well, if private collectors are going to be buying these sorts of things as status symbols, one would at least hope they'll do the decent thing and arrange for them to go on permanent loan to public museums and galleries, so they can be appreciated (and studied by professionals) as they ought to be. One area, I'm happy to say, where Illium's elite actually tend to do the right thing - probably only because a lot of them have decided they like owning ridiculously-expensive unique artefacts and being able to look philanthropic and show them off to the public without having to let poor people sully their private residences, but hey, whatever works.

Ha ha, even Cerberus didn't do the swords that had its own swords!
...
Maybe they just didn't have time...

Knowing what we do about Cerberus R&D, they'd probably have had the sword-fabricator built into the hilt and pointed directly backwards with a high-speed launch.

Personally, I'm interested in those Kinetic Cloud Robes. They sound elegant, yet practical for combat purposes. Though, the choice of word there, cloud, is a bit unclear.

Does that mean that its like a kinetic barrier? Or that perhaps just walking too close to this robe will cause complications, with random enemies or bits fo scenery being whipped around the place? Because there's a mental image.

And lo and behold I have attained entirely new levels of envy. God Citadel Space never does anything fun.

...It's an artifact weapon that can manufacture and manipulate entire swarms of identical weapons on the fly. I-

eugh.

Ahahahahahhahhaaaaaa oh I rather seriously doubt that. These aren't a particularly interesting set of vases or fragments of a tablet or what have you. These are weapons dear. Weapons, armor, tools, augmentative tech, media what ever is going up in the market isn't solely restricted to something expensive and vaguely classy that you can charge the common masses to gawp at. The people who are buying them want to reverse engineer them. Develop them. And, ultimately, use them.

Or did you think that a Pirate Lord purchased a functional set of archeotech warsuits as conversation pieces?

It wasn't funny when the dearest Daia did it. It's still not funny. But take heart, I mean you're still funny. But, admittedly, even that is somewhat uncomfortable since there's really no way to laugh at the mentally handicapped without being a complete cock.

Modern kinetic barriers tend to be form in a series of overlapping grids, if I had to guess I'd say the robes employ an alternate, lightweight, method of dispersing bullets, environmental attacks, and the like with mass effect fields.

Hey CEO, you got a chip of your own in the archeotech business or what? You certainly talk like one whose shop got insulted by people who didn't appreciate your wares.

Granted I'm unfamiliar with the practical side of things. But having seen the insides of a lot of rich people's houses... wouldn't honestly surprise me that much.

There's also the fact that they'd likely have to deal with spectres going after the buyers as well Sandman.

The weapon-in-a-weapon thing... The concept is a little daft especially in it's current iteration (A melee weapon of all things. Who ever though that would be practical?). The underlying tech is interesting however, though good luck fitting that into anything smaller than a vehicle and having it remain practical.

Curious about what the article meant about sonic constructs though, that sounds quite interesting compared to the other artefacts described. But don't we already have haptic constructs a la drones already?

You would be rather surprised, I imagine, if you ever crossed paths with some of the "conversation piece" collectors I have met.

Vaguely?

I'm curious and I'm interested and I'd very much like a piece or two of my own but sadly it's probably not to be given that much wealtheir and scarier fish than I are snapping them up. Unless Titan gets dibs on it's own share of a dig or something but that's uh...rather unlikely. And, frankly, even if I wasn't I reserve the right to take issue with people performing banal all over the fucking board.

It's for blowing things up. There. Mystery solved.

I uh somewhat doubt that. Very much. For one, jurisdiction, none of the trade is taking part in Citadel Space proper and they have no legal authority to pursue their mandate that far outside their bounds. I mean, that's never really stopped them before, but this isn't exactly uncontested space. It's an independent cluster dominated by some decidedly wealthy merchant cartels that now effectively control access to the greater part of the Traverse and just so happen to be making a great deal of money off the trade. Essentially people that the Council cannot simply flip the political bird to and render some recommendations as to what they can insert into their various cavities. The Alliance needs the Verge, the turians stand more solidly if the Alliance gets Eldfell-Ashland and something like several dozen colonial worlds and attached military infrastructure under their control, the Union doesn't have the political capital to force a quorum, and the Republics...are seriously not in much of a position to dictate policy on archeotech to anyone.

It's already too widespread to address via military means and there's no really valid stance the Council can take besides grudging acquiescence because anything else would spell diplomatic and economic disaster in the region.
Swarms. It's a replicating nanofabricated matrix with incorporated ME manipulation tech. It's "just" a sword in the same way that the Ambassador is "just" a diplomat. Well it's rather explicitly a personnel weapon what with being a sword and all so I don't imagine that's much of an issue.
It's different. Not an automatic trump card just different. Frankly most of what's making its way to market is the equivalent of modern era tech just produced by a slightly-to-moderately divergent path of development.

Oh not really, I mean generally I'm one of the people being subjected to the story of how oh such and such is really the skull of an Andalshian Saint and is now a holy reliquary and aren't those bone etchings just daring.

Not interesting, not fascinating, always daring. God knows why.

Huh... Thank you for that explanation.

Well, it makes a little more sense in a way, as the wielder of the original weapon doesn't have to actually hold the extra weapon, atleast from what I gather now. If they still have to, it's still fairly impractical though it would make sense if it were, say ceremonial.

Maybe, but there is an issue of materials to fabricate from, and those would need to be stored somewhere.

Well, it seems a lot more... mundane now? At the very least, I'd expect some of the sellers to keep a portion of the stuff they're finding, considering they have a market just waiting to be flooded by the stuff if they could produce it.

No mention of the substantial hanar investment, albeit mostly private, then.

Very well.

Thank you for apparently listening, it's a very underrated skill.
Correct (from what I understand anyway) and likely it was both. I can't exactly imagine something as complex and resource intensive as that being standard issue exactly. Probably something along the lines of a commander or senior officer's weapon, or relegated to the possession of elites only
Not necessarily, modern nanotech (at least in C-Space) is still fairly heavily restricted in terms of it's growth potential. I mean, basically anything past a certain growth factor is classified as a Tier II weapon of mass destruction and the Council tends to look rather dimly upon anyone but them having one.

Anyway, point being, a subject/pre-Prothean race may not have necessarily been constrained by similar strictures and this was one of the products.

Oh no question is that it's still incredibly valuable, sometimes a bit of laterality is all you need to make that one breakthrough or kneecap that one strategy that consistently fucks you over. Though I don't think it would be in the best interests of the finders to hang on to the tech frankly. Most probably don't have adequate facilities or knowledge of how to develop it and, unless they explicitly set out to find it, it would better serve their bottom line and political aims by collecting a tidy profit and letting someone else willing handle all the nitty gritty details instead.

Bro, I am totally regretting that we have not been introduced. Like, even with the logo you're rocking, I feel like we could be friends, you know? Lemme just read it one more time.


Yeah, we have shit in common for sure.

Point, but you could have, say, a missile with several warheads, each with small swarm of nanites inside to configure the warhead's payload mid-flight. Don't exactly need it to multiply until the missile is fired. (Though that restriction would still make producing such a weapon, and reloads for it, difficult in the areas with such restrictions.)

Though with recent events involving a few salarians, I think those regulations are rather justified. Would be better to have a few factories capable of producing the stuff, and keeping them under very close scrutiny instead.

True enough, proper laboratories are difficult and expensive to to create and maintain and getting the proper personnel even harder.

Citadel Space doesn't like Terminus space.

More at seven.

You don't say.

The primary issue with that, as you said, is that enduring nanite constructs have the potential for the formation of second stage colonies. Bashab's Golden Sword is...well essentially a finished product of that branch of research, which is one that hasn't exactly been thoroughly researched within Citadel Space. Different aesthetic, different method of operation, but a finished product nonetheless. In all honesty the geth and quarians, certain Terminus nations, a handful of extraterritorial corporate enclaves, among others could, with enough time and inclination probably make something similar. But that's a fairly substantial investment of man hours, technical knowledge, and material resources. The Sword bypasses most of that.

It's the solution to the unexplored problem essentially. From a technical standpoint I mean.

Or you could just build a clusterbomb? (Which, uhhh, sounds a lot better then the possible tier II weapon some council official will inevitably claim you are constructing. (Yes, I know it isn't but they'll think of the children or something inane.))

Ah, okay. That makes sense now, thanks again for explaining things.

Also Palmer, cluster munitions tend to be banned in C-Space, and here's still a limitation on what the individual sub-munitions can do as well.

And back to sandman about the laterality thing, while we DO have the capability to research something like that (Especially with the help of the geth.) we kinda have our hands tied getting our military standardised, with some of the special projects we have though... Well, OpSec applies here.