Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Randomer169]

We had no legitimacy to break in and shut it down. We had no right to interfere in Doma or Ala Mhigo. The WoL is a wandering vigilante, and sometimes that's what the world needs. A lot of horrific things were done with authority and legitimacy. Paperwork shouldn't be enough to justify allowing an atrocity to continue.

[SDaemon]

We had no legitimacy to break in and shut it down. We had no right to interfere in Doma or Ala Mhigo. The WoL is a wandering vigilante, and sometimes that's what the world needs. A lot of horrific things were done with authority and legitimacy. Paperwork shouldn't be enough to justify allowing an atrocity to continue.

You can't really gloss over the fact that Sphene is the aggressor in the situation and that defending yourself from an entity that seeks to wipe out all life in your world gives you ample reason to break in and stop them. Especially when said aggressor refuses any attempts at diplomacy.

[MikkoAkure]

However that misses the main point of my argument: evil or not, we simply don't have neither authority nor legitimacy nor right to do as we please in Sphene's kingdom. Even if existence of Endless is in the end harmful, as long as Sphene doesn't use outside souls for her system, we have no right to intervene. What we have is the right to stop her from threatening souls outside, by force if needed. Erasing Endless within their bubble, however, is an internal affair, a decision that must be done by local legitimate authority, not by us, a hostile outside force.
And if we say that we allowed ourselves do to as we please in Sphene's realm because of situation in extremis, that makes us somewhat of a war criminals, since we were targeting civilians which has no direct effect on stopping Sphene here and now.

And Sphene didn't have the authority to transplant her country into a different plane of existence, steal the land of a different country and absorb the population into hers while eliminating most of their culture, and then making a surprise war on the nation she stole from and killing its citizens in order to power her dead. Alexandria is the hostile force here, they killed Tuliyollal's civilians in a targeted attack with no warning. The Endless aren't a culture, they're not a society, and they're not citizens. They're the projections of people who have already died and were being used as a reason to plunder all of reality of souls that aren't Alexandrian. The country of Alexandria STILL EXISTS with LIVING PEOPLE, but all everyone seems to care about is the country's overcomplicated graveyard and how it made them sad.

Any argument that "this is a them issue" is rendered moot when they are the ones who came here and brought others into their problems. They're the outsiders from a different reflection. The idea that we needed to go through proper local laws and regulations and ambassadorial bureaucracy in order to shut off the machine powering dead people from a hostile nation that is attempting to take our souls is insane.

The Endless don't even care. One NPC you can talk to is fully aware of Sphene's plan but is apathetic as to whether or not it succeeds. We go in and shut down terminals very slowly one-by-one and no one does anything or raises a voice in protest. You'd think if they had a problem, there would be more Endless left over after the terminals shut off if they had a strong enough connection, but the only ones left just wanted to make sure that books are returned to a library or had other unfinished business.

[Astronis]

And Sphene didn't have the authority to transplant her country into a different plane of existence, steal the land of a different country and absorb the population into hers while eliminating most of their culture, and then making a surprise war on the nation she stole from and killing its citizens in order to power her dead. Alexandria is the hostile force here, they killed Tuliyollal's civilians in a targeted attack with no warning. The Endless aren't a culture, they're not a society, and they're not citizens. They're the projections of people who have already died and were being used as a reason to plunder all of reality of souls that aren't Alexandrian. The country of Alexandria STILL EXISTS with LIVING PEOPLE, but all everyone seems to care about is the country's overcomplicated graveyard and how it made them sad.

Indeed, there are lots of living Alexandrians, some with aether-imbalance disorders that aetheroligists on the Source are well-equipped to deal with. Now that Alexandria isn't waging a war to power their very pleasant and friendly soul-eating zombie collection, we can get to tending to the actually alive Alexandrians!

[LuciferMournstar]

Indeed, there are lots of living Alexandrians, some with aether-imbalance disorders that aetheroligists on the Source are well-equipped to deal with. Now that Alexandria isn't waging a war to power their very pleasant and friendly soul-eating zombie collection, we can get to tending to the actually alive Alexandrians!

Yeah, Alexandria still exist in Heritage Found and Solution 9, but they are doomed for good now. We are going to wipe them out too. Their regulators no longer will have souls supplied to them, so everything in the "bubble" is doomed. Hunters in the bubble can no longer use souls, they will die trying to stop the monsters in that Lighting destroyed world. Which means eventually all of Heritage Found, Solution 9, and Living Memory will be overrun and uninhabitable. Also, we're going to put a stop to the use of Beast Souls. We're wiping out their entire culture, way of life, and any hope of continuing. They have one recourse : Abandon their culture, their home, and move to the source. Eletrope won't have use in the source without the abundance of Lightning Eather, so that'll be forgotten too.

There is no "happy ending" to this story. Alexandria is dying, and in about 100 years or so, will fade into obscurity and distant memory. If it takes even that long.

[Loggos]

Hunters in the bubble can no longer use souls, they will die trying to stop the monsters in that Lighting destroyed world.

...but that bubble is literally part of our world now. And the time has been synced at this point, too. We can literally get in and out of the bubble (and so can the citizens of S9/HF).

There is no reason why we cannot trade with them, help them, equip them with other tools or why they can't leave the bubble temporarily and hunt normal game.

Also, the idea that human hunters are the only means by which they can hunt is flawed imo. They literally have robots and space ships and now that Zoraal Ja is gone they have no further purpose. Why would an advanced civilisation with a huge cyber military force that exceeds anything Tural has to offer (we need a goddamn dragon to take them down) not be able to employ these things as tools to hunt or keep normal monsters at bay within the bubble?
Hop on one of those flying bikes and hunt beasts from above. Hell, put a robot on those flying bikes and let them do the hunting for you.

They can exist just fine without extra souls just like everybody else on Eitherys. They do not need extra souls to live and breathe, it's an insurance against very specific causes of death (not even natural causes) that no other culture has and yet every other culture on this planet is doing fine.
And they can easily circumvent these cases of unnatural death with other technical solutions. They can just not face tank a beast's tank buster anymore as a pugilist and get away unscathed.

[Astronis]

Yeah, Alexandria still exist in Heritage Found and Solution 9, but they are doomed for good now. We are going to wipe them out too. Their regulators no longer will have souls supplied to them, so everything in the "bubble" is doomed. Hunters in the bubble can no longer use souls, they will die trying to stop the monsters in that Lighting destroyed world. Which means eventually all of Heritage Found, Solution 9, and Living Memory will be overrun and uninhabitable. Also, we're going to put a stop to the use of Beast Souls. We're wiping out their entire culture, way of life, and any hope of continuing. They have one recourse : Abandon their culture, their home, and move to the source. Eletrope won't have use in the source without the abundance of Lightning Eather, so that'll be forgotten too.

There is no "happy ending" to this story. Alexandria is dying, and in about 100 years or so, will fade into obscurity and distant memory. If it takes even that long.

That's not really so. Life is difficult in Alexandria, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's doomed. They don't have a choice about 'moving to the Source'--they're already 'here'. Yeah, they'll eventually have to learn to live without backup souls to rely on, since Zoraal Ja ate so many of them. That's not exactly a civilization-ending catastrophe. But since they are on the Source already, and the bubble has been breached, that means Alexandria can establish trade with the rest of the Source, can learn new ways to deal with their issues. I'd not be at all surprised to learn that Alexandrians going forward are born with Source-dense souls, since they are now of the Source. They don't have to move anywhere if they don't want to. Electrope is still going to be useful since the bubble (that exists on the Source) still has insane amounts of lightning aether in it, and electrope now exists on the Source, in Yysalani. They'll have to adapt, but now they have a way out of their original destructive cycle. Remember--before Alexandria got fused with the Source, every Alexandrian that died was made an Endless, and the Endless consume souls. So there would always be an increasing number of Endless and a dwindling supply of souls. That is no longer the case. Alexandria *was* doomed. Now it's not.

[Espon]

Yeah, Alexandria still exist in Heritage Found and Solution 9, but they are doomed for good now. We are going to wipe them out too. Their regulators no longer will have souls supplied to them, so everything in the "bubble" is doomed. Hunters in the bubble can no longer use souls, they will die trying to stop the monsters in that Lighting destroyed world. Which means eventually all of Heritage Found, Solution 9, and Living Memory will be overrun and uninhabitable. Also, we're going to put a stop to the use of Beast Souls. We're wiping out their entire culture, way of life, and any hope of continuing. They have one recourse : Abandon their culture, their home, and move to the source. Eletrope won't have use in the source without the abundance of Lightning Eather, so that'll be forgotten too.

There is no "happy ending" to this story. Alexandria is dying, and in about 100 years or so, will fade into obscurity and distant memory. If it takes even that long.

We didn't doom the people of Heritage Found and Solution 9 and we have no plans on wiping them out. Extra souls only save them from sudden death. Getting old is still an inevitability (as we saw was the case with Namikka) and children can still be born. Even if they eventually run out of extra souls, they can still continue on living just like the rest of society, they just cannot be careless anymore with their one life.

[NegativeS]

However that misses the main point of my argument: evil or not, we simply don't have neither authority nor legitimacy nor right to do as we please in Sphene's kingdom. Even if existence of Endless is in the end harmful, as long as Sphene doesn't use outside souls for her system, we have no right to intervene. What we have is the right to stop her from threatening souls outside, by force if needed. Erasing Endless within their bubble, however, is an internal affair, a decision that must be done by local legitimate authority, not by us, a hostile outside force. And if we say that we allowed ourselves do to as we please in Sphene's realm because of situation in extremis, that makes us somewhat of a war criminals, since we were targeting civilians which has no direct effect on stopping Sphene here and now.

Whether or not we had the authority to do what we did, it was the only course of action we could have taken to prevent the destruction of our world and others.

Shutting down the Terminals before Meso was just a bid to try to disrupt Sphene's interdimensional merge and take her attention away from it, but we are told very explicitly that destroying Sphene would also destroy Living Memory. This is not the case of a feud between nations--dismantling a government does not immediately destroy the nation's citizens. In fact, there is no government. This is a rogue AI that has taken onto itself the responsibility of 'preserving' the memories of the departed, through any means necessary. Were this still an actual nation, they would likely have put in significant R&D to determine an alternative to eating living souls, to prevent exactly what happened to Sphene from happening. But she didn't, because her rigid AI didn't allow her to, so she found out what happens when you threaten a population with total annihilation on a whim.

The people of Alexandria do not seem to know that the Endless exist--only that the dying are taken away for end-of-life care, and that their memories of them are taken to be stored in the 'cloud' (Even in Orgenics, the location of the Meso Terminal is classified even to the people who work there). Ergo, the Endless did not ask to become part of this rogue AI's bid to preserve the departed.

[Wojnar]

As I wrote, most likely Endless are just glorified chatbots, so shutting them off is objectively not more evil than deleting a game from your PC.

I have huge issue with that. For example Erenville's mom. She claimed she wasn't alive, but she had consciousness. She was aware of what was happening, her own thought processes and her choices were autonomous. It was basically energy based life form, concept known for decades in scifi. Chat bots were in Amaurot.