It’s been an eventful few weeks, yet I feel more grounded and anchored in my body and my purpose. Chaos continues to exist all around as it does, but I’m able to say I am well-rested and that I have been able to meditate at least once a day and find pause. It shouldn’t feel like a luxury or a privilege, but these days, in our capitalist context, I feel so very fortunate I get to share with friends that I am in fact getting a lot of time to rest, and that I can and do take a lot of naps.

Making time for my self-maintenance and creating new routines, have soothed and smoothed the body’s wrinkles and bumps that I felt were stuck in my body. I felt these most last year until early this year, when I was still making very unaligned choices. The steadiness of music and in general, more movement have also been helpful to my daily living. Stretching first thing in the morning and also when I remember to, late at night. Even if I don’t have an exact set thing to do yet. Remembering to reach my arms out to the sky and bend to touch my toes, a couple of times a day feels good. Do you have a daily movement routine for your body? I highly recommend adding it to your calendar if you don’t. Next for me is to actually follow a set of movements and repeat them throughout the day/week. Small steps.

I felt things change when I decided to be present, to take things one step at a time, and not inundate and overwhelm myself. No one was asking me to rush. No one was asking me to exhaust myself. No one, except the voices of old societal expectations, was demanding perfection. But, it’s a pattern I kept returning to and repeating. The need to be on top of every little branch and aspect in my life. The need to be busy. The need to feel appreciated through productivity and my work. The need to feel “safe” and “secure” through material wealth and material gain.

The thing with that is, you do start to lose track of the ground and what’s actually there. And what is here, is the life force within my body. When I begin here, I can appreciate every little thing. From the single breath I inhale and then another, to exhale. That I can adjust my posture to feel my breath come through more freely and release it out into the open. That I can even type at all. When I breathe, I can also feel and quietly listen to life happening all around me. My neighbors moving about in their rooms, opening cabinets and drawers. Today, the construction sounds from across the street are gentler, but perhaps they’ve just taken a break for lunch.

I titled this post Theramin Sorceress, because it’s a card I pulled yesterday. Just before I left for the local music festival to meet up with friends. The card spoke of subtle energies, similar to what I was writing in the previous paragraph. When you find pause, and quiet. You can feel so much. Unlike your thoughts, body sensations are enough sometimes to understand and feel apart of the world. To be human is to be able to feel, and to recognize sensations and learn that we have been conditioned to be too attached to these things. We can learn to notice when my body “needs/wants” to straighten, when I realize I am not feeling good hunched over my keyboard, and that’s all there is to it. When you’re quiet, everything comes more naturally. Even the slightest movements. Can you sense the subtle energies?

Starcraft Co 25- The Temple of Light, Part III: The Ancient Ones

The first expedition entered the Temple forty hours after the battle for the summit ended. StarCraft Co. sent no commandos with it, a decision made deliberately rather than from complacency. The upper passages had already been penetrated by the Renegades, and nothing in the surviving reconnaissance suggested that the first few levels required elite troops. Two reinforced marine platoons went instead, accompanied by medics, firebats, several Goliaths and Ara observers familiar with the oldest surviving descriptions of the sanctuary. Their orders were cautious by StarCraft Co. standards: follow the Renegade route, identify where their advance had stopped, recover whatever records could be found, and withdraw the moment resistance exceeded what could be handled without reinforcement. After the slaughter on the plateau, few expected the reconnaissance to become anything more than a careful walk through the wreckage left by another army's failed attempt.

The upper Temple encouraged that confidence. Its first halls were vast, silent and almost unnaturally clean, with pale walls cut from a material that looked like stone until Terran instruments tried to identify it and returned inconsistent readings. Crystalline veins ran through the architecture at irregular intervals, carrying a subdued internal glow that brightened as personnel approached and dimmed after they passed. The Renegades had fought here, but only briefly. Spent gauss casings, shattered spider mines and the remains of temporary barricades marked several chambers, while dead marines and Zerg lay scattered along the route. Farther down, the signs became stranger. One corridor contained the wreckage of three Goliaths and more than thirty Renegade infantry arranged around the body of a single Protoss warrior whose armor resembled nothing in modern Ara service. The dead Zealot had been hit hundreds of times, its breastplate cratered, one arm severed and both psi-blade housings destroyed, yet the surrounding damage suggested that it had crossed most of the chamber before dying.

The Ara officers stopped there longer than the Terrans expected. The warrior's armor belonged to an archaic pattern recognizable only from carvings and ceremonial reproductions, broader through the shoulders than modern suits and built around crystalline plates that appeared almost grown rather than manufactured. Symbols along the dead warrior's helm predated the tribal markings used by the Ara, and one observer eventually identified a fragment as a devotional inscription surviving only in copies of texts more than six thousand years old. Nobody suggested recovering the body. The Ara covered it with a field cloth, performed a brief rite and continued, visibly unsettled by the realization that they were not merely entering an old fortress but walking into a portion of their own history that had remained alive after everything else around it had become legend.

The first living guardian appeared less than an hour later. The marine at the front of the column saw light before he saw the Archon, which stood at the far end of a broad chamber where the corridor widened around a circular depression in the floor. Its familiar blue-white form was denser than that of any modern Archon, the energy compressed around a presence that seemed heavier than light should have allowed. The Ara observers attempted contact immediately. One stepped forward and addressed the guardian in formal Protoss, identifying the expedition, invoking the authority of the Ara leadership and explaining that the Temple faced violation by enemies who had already attacked its defenders. The Archon neither challenged them nor acknowledged the other Protoss. It simply began crossing the chamber.

The marines opened fire at the range established in their orders. Nearly forty gauss rifles struck it at once, followed by the autocannons of two Goliaths and the flame of the firebats as the creature closed. Against an ordinary Archon, that weight of fire would have collapsed its shields quickly enough to make the engagement almost procedural. The Ancient Archon's field rippled beneath the impacts but did not fail, and it continued forward through the barrage until its first psionic shockwave struck the leading infantry and hurled armored marines backward across the floor. Six died immediately. A second attack tore through one of the Goliaths, rupturing the cockpit and folding part of the chassis inward. The remaining walker fired continuously as the Archon advanced, and for several seconds its shields finally dimmed enough that the Terrans believed they had reached the limit of what it could absorb. Then the crystalline veins in the walls brightened, and the Archon's shields began rebuilding while the weapons were still striking them.

The retreat remained disciplined only for the first few moments. Firebats stayed behind to slow the guardian and died quickly. The surviving Goliath walked backward until damage to one leg forced the pilot to abandon it, while medics dragged wounded marines through the corridor and the rear platoon fired past them. The Archon pursued farther than anyone expected, following the force through two chambers before stopping at the edge of a section where the glowing conduits in the walls became sparse. The survivors did not understand why it halted, only that it did, and they used the distance to reach the surface with barely half the force still combat effective.

StarCraft Co. spent the next six hours trying to determine what had happened, and the conclusion pleased nobody. Weapons telemetry showed that the Archon had absorbed enough punishment to destroy several ordinary specimens. Its shields had genuinely weakened, but energy had flowed into them from somewhere outside the unit itself. Engineers examining the upper passages found that the luminous crystalline channels were carrying enormous quantities of power through the Temple's walls, much of it in forms Terran instruments could not characterize, and their brightness had increased sharply during the encounter. Ara specialists reached the same conclusion independently. The guardians were not merely housed by the Temple; they were being sustained by it, and whatever process had strengthened the Ancient Ones across millennia remained active.

That discovery changed the expedition from an assault into a problem for which StarCraft Co. possessed no doctrine. Siege tanks were useless almost immediately; the upper chambers were broad enough to admit some armored vehicles, but the deeper passages narrowed unpredictably, and there was no guarantee a tank sent downward could turn around or withdraw. Goliaths could travel farther, yet the first Archon had nearly destroyed one with a single attack. Infantry lacked the concentrated firepower required to overcome the defenders quickly, while Ara zealots and dragoons faced opponents that appeared to be stronger versions of themselves. Most disturbing of all, the first reconnaissance had encountered only one Ancient One and had lost nearly half its effective strength getting away.

For the first time since Aurelia, serious discussion of withdrawal entered StarCraft Co.'s planning rooms. The commander rejected it, though not immediately, and that hesitation mattered to everyone present. The company had already lost hundreds reaching the Temple and hundreds more taking the plateau, while the expedition's elite commando reserve remained finite and the number of Ancient Ones could not be estimated with confidence. Ara records spoke of hundreds of guardians without distinguishing myth from census. If every one possessed the durability seen above, the coalition could consume itself long before reaching the lower chambers. Voss argued that they already possessed the strategic victory on the surface and could seal the Temple rather than force it, while Talandar, unexpectedly, did not oppose him. The Ara had agreed to enter the sanctuary, but none had promised to annihilate themselves doing so.

The commander listened before asking what happened if they left. The Renegades had found the world once, and others could find it again. The Ancient Ones had protected the Temple for millennia against armies that bore little resemblance to the industrial warfare now surrounding them, while the Renegades had already demonstrated the obvious solution to any finite defense: gather enough bodies and spend them. StarCraft Co. had destroyed that army, but nothing guaranteed another could not be created in ten years or fifty. They had reached the Temple at enormous cost and possessed the strongest coalition likely to stand before it in their lifetimes. Walking away meant wagering the future on the assumption that nobody stronger would ever return. Nobody found the argument reassuring, but nobody could offer a better one.

The second descent included commandos, and their first encounter with an Ancient Zealot established immediately that the Archon had not been an anomaly. The guardian appeared in a narrow gallery lined with crystalline columns and moved with such speed that the lead marine squad barely had time to warn the rest of the formation before it crossed the distance between them. Its psi blades cut through powered armor without noticeable resistance and opened the frontal plating of a Goliath deeply enough to expose the pilot compartment. Commandos hit it with concentrated fire from less than thirty meters while conventional infantry withdrew, and even then the Zealot survived long enough to kill two of them before collapsing. When engineers examined the body, they found no biological modification they could identify. The Ancient One was simply stronger, faster and extraordinarily well protected, its equipment integrated with materials and energy systems none of the Terran specialists understood.

The next Dragoon was worse. It stood at the far end of a long ceremonial hall and fired before the Terrans could establish their heavy weapons. Its first photon discharge punched through a Goliath's frontal armor and continued into the vehicle behind it, while the second detonated against the wall with enough force to shower the corridor in fragments of ancient stone. Ordinary marine fire achieved almost nothing against the Dragoon's armored shell, and the Ara dragoons accompanying the expedition could damage it only by concentrating several units at once. StarCraft Co. eventually killed it by drawing the machine away from the brightest conduits in the hall and massing every available Goliath on the same point of its armor while commandos kept the guardian occupied. The engagement cost seventeen Terrans, two Ara warriors and another Goliath, all in less than four minutes.

A pattern emerged slowly. The guardians were strongest near the major Xel'Naga conduits, and although they never became weak away from them, their shields regenerated more slowly in sections where the luminous channels disappeared into natural rock. StarCraft Co. began shaping engagements around that difference. Commandos entered defended chambers, struck hard enough to force pursuit and then withdrew toward prepared positions where the Temple's energy network was less concentrated. Conventional infantry and Goliaths waited there, accepting the Ancient counterattack long enough for the commandos to recover, reload and return. It was ugly, repetitive warfare measured in rooms rather than kilometers, and the expedition's maps filled with annotations identifying not merely passages and chambers but the intensity of energy flowing through individual walls.

The price was paid largely by ordinary soldiers. Commandos were too difficult to replace to leave in sustained contact, and once the medics confirmed that repeated stimulation and accumulated trauma were degrading even augmented personnel, the commander formalized what had already become practice. Commandos would attack in short, violent cycles, withdraw for medical treatment, and be covered by conventional infantry during the interval. Those infantry units understood exactly what the assignment meant. A marine platoon holding a corridor against two Ancient Zealots was not expected to defeat them; it was expected to keep them occupied for the ninety seconds required to bring the commandos back into action, and some platoons accomplished that mission with half their personnel dead.

The descent became a war of deliberate sacrifice. StarCraft Co. built hardened fallback points every few kilometers, using SCVs to install barricades, ammunition caches, medical stations and portable power systems inside chambers the Ancient Ones had abandoned. Wounded personnel moved upward in steady streams while ammunition went down. Damaged Goliaths were dismantled in place if they could not be recovered. Marine companies that entered the Temple at full strength came back to the surface as reinforced platoons and returned again after being rebuilt around their surviving officers. The Ara suffered the same attrition. Their zealots were powerful enough to meet Ancient counterparts for brief periods but rarely survived prolonged engagements, while modern dragoons discovered that their ancient equivalents could withstand punishment that destroyed them outright. High Templar became precious, held behind the front until enough defenders gathered to justify the risk of using Psionic Storm inside confined spaces.

The architecture changed as the coalition moved deeper, and with it the psychological character of the campaign. The upper levels possessed the monumental precision of a shrine built to impress anyone who entered, but below them the polished surfaces began giving way to older forms, walls assembled from massive fitted blocks whose seams were barely visible and passages whose geometry seemed subtly inconsistent with the mountain around them. Farther still, even those structures ended. The expedition began moving through tunnels cut directly into bedrock, their surfaces rough and dark except where ancient crystalline veins emerged from the stone. Ara scholars admitted that these passages did not appear in any surviving record, and the oldest identifiable Protoss construction ended somewhere above them. Whatever had excavated the deepest portions of the mountain had done so before the guardians arrived.

Communications deteriorated beneath several kilometers of stone, forcing engineers to lay physical relay lines behind the advancing troops. Sensors occasionally reported movement through solid walls or mapped corridors that vanished when scouts reached them. Compass systems drifted. At one point two companies separated by less than a kilometer spent four hours trying to locate one another because every electronic map placed them on the same side of a rock formation neither could cross. StarCraft Co. responded with wire, paint, physical markers and soldiers stationed at important intersections. A military capable of coordinating fleets across planets was reduced to leaving arrows on walls so wounded men could find the surface, and the simplicity of those measures became reassuring in a place where sophisticated instruments could no longer be trusted.

The Ancient Ones never spoke. Ara officers attempted contact after nearly every engagement, transmitting formal challenges, appeals, explanations of the Renegade threat and eventually offers to withdraw from individual sacred chambers if the guardians would negotiate access to the deeper Temple. The answer was always action. An Ancient Zealot ignited its blades, a Dragoon advanced, or photon defenses awakened from the walls. The guardians were neither frenzied nor visibly hateful, and that absence of emotion gradually became more disturbing than hostility would have been. They fought because the expedition was inside, and nothing else appeared relevant.

Talandar came to understand them before the Terrans did. During a pause after an engagement that killed more than thirty Ara warriors, he stood beside the body of an Ancient Zealot whose armor was older than any pattern in his people's living memory and told the commander that the guardians were not rebels, fanatics or enemies in any normal sense. “They have not betrayed their charge,” he said. “We have chosen that their charge may no longer stand between our peoples and survival. Do not dishonor them by imagining they have become something lesser merely because we require them to die.” The commander did not argue. By then the distinction had become impossible to ignore. StarCraft Co. and Ara were the invaders, and the Ancient Ones were doing exactly what they had done for thousands of years.

The most dangerous encounter came nearly three weeks into the descent, when a forward group entered a chamber where two major conduits crossed beneath the floor and encountered two Archons at once. Until then StarCraft Co. had avoided committing large forces against individual Archons inside confined terrain, preferring to isolate and exhaust them with repeated attacks. There was no time for that here. The first guardian emerged from behind a row of crystalline supports while the second entered through a lateral passage that reconnaissance had believed empty, trapping the leading companies between them. The initial exchange killed more than forty personnel in less than a minute and shattered the careful rhythm upon which the entire expedition had come to depend.

Commandos fired until rifle barrels overheated, withdrawing in groups while medics dragged the wounded behind improvised barricades. Goliaths concentrated on the nearer Archon and watched its shields replenish whenever the conduits beneath the chamber brightened. Ara High Templar attempted to overwhelm the energy around the defenders with storm after storm, but the Archons continued advancing through it. One reached the first fallback barricade and broke the position almost immediately, scattering infantry into the corridor beyond, while the second killed two dragoons and drove the remaining Ara force backward hard enough that command cohesion began to fail. For the first time in the Temple, StarCraft Co. did not conduct a controlled withdrawal; it ran.

The retreat carried through three previously cleared chambers. Damaged Goliaths blocked one passage and had to be abandoned while infantry climbed around them. Medics injected commandos who had already exceeded recommended stimulant limits because leaving them untreated meant losing the rear guard. One Ancient Archon followed much farther than any previous guardian, pursuing the retreat through sections almost devoid of luminous conduits and forcing the coalition to abandon a field hospital before the wounded could be fully evacuated. The line finally stabilized around a reinforced junction where every surviving heavy weapon in the sector was concentrated. The Archon reached the barricade with its shields visibly weakened, destroyed another Goliath, killed a dozen marines and finally collapsed beneath massed fire after nearly ten continuous minutes of combat. The second guardian did not pursue beyond the conduit chamber.

The cost of that defeat threatened the entire operation. More than a hundred Terran personnel were dead or missing, Ara losses were severe, medical facilities had been overrun and one of the commando companies had consumed nearly all of its emergency stimulants. Several officers argued that the Ancient Ones had demonstrated exactly what the Renegades had learned before them: there was a point below which brute force became economically absurd. The commander ordered the advance suspended for four days, and for perhaps the first time since the invasion began there was no confidence at headquarters that the pause would end with another push.

Those four days saved the expedition. StarCraft Co. stopped treating the Temple as a continuous battlefield and rebuilt the invasion around logistics. SCVs widened selected corridors where possible, established deeper ammunition depots and installed blast barriers at every major junction. Engineers mapped the conduit network more systematically and identified chambers in which the guardians' regenerative advantage was greatest. Ara specialists studied the energy behavior around defeated Ancient Ones and developed crude warnings for major fluctuations in the Temple's power flow. Commandos were divided into rotation groups so no company remained stimulated for more than a few minutes at a time. Most importantly, the coalition stopped pushing through every defended chamber simply because it lay ahead. Routes that could be bypassed were bypassed, while photon emplacements controlling no essential corridor were sealed behind collapsed rock. The same cold discipline that had carried StarCraft Co. through the jungle returned underground.

Progress resumed slowly and then accelerated. An Ancient Zealot position that might once have cost a platoon was baited into a conduit-poor corridor and destroyed by overlapping Goliath fire. A group of dragoons occupying a broad hall found itself attacked from two side passages that commandos had spent a day opening through maintenance shafts. Photon defenses overlooking a deep chasm were never assaulted at all; engineers collapsed the bridge behind them and cut a new route around the chamber. At another junction, an Archon was drawn several hundred meters from the brightest conduits by repeated commando strikes and then met by every available Ara dragoon and Terran heavy weapon at once. It still killed twenty-seven soldiers before dying, but the coalition no longer lost whole formations learning how to fight it.

The deeper they moved, the fewer Ancient Ones they encountered, though the survivors appeared stronger. That scarcity gradually revealed something else about the guardians. Lower settlement chambers contained workshops, shrines, sleeping spaces and communal halls, but almost no evidence of children or ordinary civilian life. Storage areas had been maintained meticulously, yet many living quarters had not been used for generations. Ara scholars studying the artifacts reached an uncomfortable conclusion: the Ancient Ones were not a hidden civilization of thousands waiting beneath the Temple. They were the last few hundred members of a culture that had been shrinking for centuries.

The Temple appeared to have sustained them far beyond ordinary lifespans, but it had not preserved a normal society. Their purpose had slowly consumed everything else. Generations had dwindled into custodians, custodians into warriors, and warriors into a final garrison that no longer possessed meaningful political or civilian life beyond the sanctuary. StarCraft Co. was not merely destroying an army. With every chamber cleared, an ancient Protoss tribe approached extinction, and although the revelation did not stop the advance, the silence after each engagement became heavier.

By the fifth week, the expedition had descended so far that the surface existed mostly as a logistical abstraction represented by relay stations, supply manifests and casualty lists. Soldiers entering the Temple might spend days moving before reaching the active front. The air remained breathable but dry and metallic, carrying a faint electrical smell near the strongest conduits. Medics complained about exhaustion, stimulant dependence and psychological strain. SCV crews worked around the clock repairing barricades and moving ammunition. The Ancient Ones remained relentless, every guardian encountered fighting until destroyed, and not one attempting surrender or withdrawal beyond tactical repositioning.

Then the tunnels opened into the hollow interior of the mountain.

The final chamber was not a chamber in any conventional sense but a space so enormous that the first reconnaissance team assumed its rangefinders had malfunctioned. The floor descended through terraces toward a central structure of luminous crystal and dark Xel'Naga material that rose hundreds of meters into the cavern, while vast conduits disappeared upward into the mountain and downward beyond instrument range. Rivers of pale green vapor moved through channels cut into the floor, condensing around machinery whose purpose no one could identify. The roof vanished into darkness above, and the Temple visible from the summit suddenly seemed almost trivial. It had never been the structure itself. It had been the entrance.

The Ancient Ones were waiting below in their hundreds. Zealots stood in ordered ranks along the lower terraces, their armor reflecting the crystalline light, while dragoons occupied elevated positions from which they could fire across much of the cavern. High Templar formed smaller groups around the central structure, and among them burned Archons bright enough to illuminate the stone around their positions. Some of the warriors wore armor so archaic that even Talandar's historians could not identify its period. Photon defenses were embedded directly into the cavern walls, not apparently constructed afterward but integrated into the original Xel'Naga architecture. No one suggested negotiation. The Ara had exhausted that possibility several levels above.

StarCraft Co. prepared for two days before committing itself. Every Goliath capable of reaching the cavern was brought down, ammunition was stacked in protected alcoves near the entrance, and medics established field stations far enough behind the planned line to survive the first exchange. Commandos were given strict rotation schedules and enough stimulants to exceed every normal medical recommendation if the battle lasted as long as expected. Ara High Templar conserved their strength, while modern Archons were positioned at the front despite the expectation that they would fare badly against their Ancient counterparts. Conventional infantry filled every remaining approach, and the commander considered withdrawal one final time because the force below represented a concentration of Ancient power unlike anything encountered during the descent. If the defenders held the central machinery, the energy available to them might be effectively unlimited, and the assault could consume every remaining commando and much of the expedition's veteran infantry without reaching the far side of the cavern. Yet retreat now meant accepting all previous losses for nothing more than knowledge of what lay below, so the order was given.

The battle began with Psionic Storm. Ara High Templar cast across the forward Ancient formations while Goliaths and dragoons opened fire on the elevated positions, and for several seconds the cavern disappeared behind overlapping light. Then the Ancient Ones advanced through it. Their zealots crossed the lower terraces with the same terrifying speed encountered throughout the descent and struck the coalition front before conventional infantry had finished emptying their first magazines. Modern Ara zealots met them directly and died in numbers that would have broken lesser formations. Archons collided in bursts of psionic force powerful enough to throw nearby marines from their feet, while Ancient dragoons fired from above and tore gaps through the Goliath line.

StarCraft Co. answered with the one advantage the tunnels had denied it for weeks: mass. Hundreds of gauss rifles concentrated on individual targets under centralized fire direction. Goliaths fired in coordinated groups rather than independently, shifting from one Ancient Dragoon to another until armor failed. Commandos stimmed forward in waves, punched into the Ancient line with overwhelming bursts of fire, and withdrew through gaps opened behind them while fresh groups replaced them. Firebats fought almost inside the Ara formations, burning Ancient zealots already engaged at close range, while medics moved continuously through the second line, treating commandos who returned shaking from accumulated stimulants and sending them back before their bodies had fully recovered.

The first coalition attack gained less than two hundred meters and lost enough troops to fill two field hospitals. Three modern Ara Archons were destroyed fighting a single Ancient counterpart near the western terrace, and when Terran Goliaths finally killed it, several machines were so badly damaged that their crews abandoned them in place. A group of Ancient Zealots penetrated the marine center and reached an ammunition point before being surrounded, killing nearly everyone assigned there. High Templar on both sides exhausted themselves faster than expected, leaving entire sectors of the battle to conventional firepower and close combat, while the Ancient Ones yielded almost no ground.

The commander committed the reserve earlier than planned, and the decision nearly ended the battle. Fresh units pushed the center forward, but the Ancient Ones responded by releasing guardians held around the central structure, including four Archons advancing together through the strongest conduit field StarCraft Co. had yet encountered. Their shields regenerated almost as quickly as Terran and Ara weapons damaged them. One commando company struck them at close range and lost nearly a third of its personnel in moments, while another attempted to flank and was intercepted by Ancient Zealots. The entire center stalled under the pressure, and the coalition line bowed backward far enough that officers near the entrance began preparing demolitions in case the retreat became general.

What held the line was not a hidden weapon but the accumulated discipline of an army that had spent years surviving situations in which neat plans disintegrated under pressure. Individual companies withdrew through one another without waiting for centralized orders. Goliath crews shifted firing positions to cover sectors whose officers were dead. Medics abandoned formal casualty stations and treated commandos where they fell. SCVs dragged disabled walkers sideways to create improvised barricades while marines fired over the chassis. Ara zealots gathered around surviving Terran heavy weapons instead of attempting to reform their own shattered units. Nobody needed to be told that organizational neatness no longer mattered; only the line mattered.

The Ancient Archons finally began to slow as they moved away from the strongest conduits, and the commander recognized the change before the engineers formally confirmed it. Every available heavy weapon redirected toward the leading guardian. Goliaths, dragoons, commandos and ordinary marines poured fire into it until the shield dimmed; it continued advancing, killed another dozen infantry and then collapsed in a burst of energy that knocked nearby soldiers from their feet. The second followed less than a minute later. The remaining two halted their advance, not from fear but because the Ancient line behind them had begun to fracture under the concentration of coalition fire elsewhere.

StarCraft Co. attacked again with no meaningful reserve remaining. The final advance became a sustained act of exhaustion in which commandos stimmed beyond schedules the medics had considered absolute limits, marines fired until ammunition teams replaced magazines directly into their hands, and Goliaths ran dry on missiles and continued with autocannons. Ara High Templar, nearly spent, used their remaining strength in isolated storms intended not to destroy whole formations but simply to open momentary gaps. Zealots advanced through those gaps beside Terran infantry while dragoons fired over them into the Ancient positions around the central structure.

Casualties ceased to arrive in manageable groups and became a continuous stream. Companies became platoons, platoons became squads, and officers found themselves commanding soldiers from units whose designations they did not know. The commando corps suffered losses that would take years to replace, and several augmented soldiers died not from enemy weapons but from accumulated trauma after repeated stimulation and treatment. Medics continued working until supplies ran low enough that triage became brutally utilitarian: personnel capable of returning to the line received treatment first, while those unlikely to fight again were stabilized for evacuation after the battle.

The Ancient Ones died with equal constancy and no sign of collapse. Every Zealot fought until its body failed, every Dragoon continued firing until its chassis was destroyed, and the last surviving High Templar remained near the central structure surrounded by the dead of both armies, casting one final storm into the advancing Terrans before concentrated Goliath fire killed him. There were no attempts to flee deeper into the Temple, no effort to preserve some remnant of the tribe and no appeal for mercy. Their purpose had survived longer than their civilization, and they fulfilled it until there was nobody left to continue.

The final defender was an Archon standing before the inner platform, and by then the coalition was too exhausted for the encounter to feel heroic. It absorbed fire from nearly every surviving heavy weapon in the chamber, destroyed a Goliath with its first attack and tore through an Ara formation already reduced below half strength with its second. Commandos pushed forward under the cover of conventional infantry, fired until their weapons overheated, withdrew through medics and returned again. The Archon's shields dimmed, strengthened when the conduits brightened, dimmed again under renewed fire and finally began failing faster than the Temple could restore them. When it collapsed, the cavern became quiet enough for the survivors to hear damaged machinery ticking as it cooled, and nobody cheered because too many formations had ceased to exist simply to place them there.

For several minutes the coalition remained where it had stopped, surrounded by wrecked Goliaths, shattered Protoss machinery and the bodies of the last Ancient Ones. The battle itself had lasted less than a day, while the descent had taken weeks. StarCraft Co. had lost more personnel beneath the Temple than some of its earliest campaigns had deployed in total, and several veteran formations that had survived Aurelia now existed only as names in casualty reports. Ara losses were proportionally worse. The commandos had remained intact as a corps only because ordinary soldiers had repeatedly been spent to preserve them, and even that calculation had failed to prevent serious losses among the augmented troops.

The commander reached the inner structure with Talandar several hours later, and the Ara Executor stopped before crossing the final threshold. The chamber beyond contained no weapons in the conventional sense. Enormous crystalline assemblies surrounded a central Xel'Naga mechanism whose internal light shifted through colors neither Terran nor Protoss sensors could properly classify, while smaller crystals rested in fitted recesses along the walls and connected to conduits running deeper into the mountain. Terran instruments detected vespene almost immediately, first in trace concentrations and then in quantities so high that the readings appeared impossible. The gas was not leaking from a subterranean reservoir. It was being produced continuously.

Ara engineers reached the same conclusion independently. The crystals formed part of an atmospheric conversion system capable of extracting diffuse chemical components and reorganizing them into usable vespene compounds, apparently drawing energy from a source integrated into the Temple itself that had operated for millennia without measurable exhaustion. The old legend of endless vespene had been wrong only in scale. The Temple was not sitting on a deposit; it was a refinery whose raw material was the atmosphere, and the implications extended far beyond the campaign on Sanctuary. Every Terran military planner understood what vespene scarcity imposed on capital-ship construction, reactor operation and advanced weapons systems, just as every Ara commander understood the equivalent limits on Protoss production. Moria had changed the war because it provided enormous conventional resources. The Xel'Naga crystals promised to weaken the constraint itself.

The second discovery made even that seem almost secondary. Deep within the Temple's archives, Ara and Terran specialists found technical records describing methods of energy focusing and weapons amplification far beyond anything either civilization currently used. At first the StarCraft Co. engineers assumed they had mistranslated the data because the projected gains were too large. Ara specialists reconstructed the same principles through their own systems and reached nearly identical results. This was not a single superweapon but a series of underlying improvements applicable across several forms of directed energy, plasma projection and high-density ordnance, with preliminary estimates suggesting an increase in effective firepower approaching forty percent.

That figure sounded abstract until planners began applying it to existing arsenals. Siege tanks could destroy hardened positions with fewer shots and at greater effective lethality. Goliath weapons could threaten armored targets previously requiring heavier platforms. Wraith lasers and Minotaur batteries could cut through ships designed around surviving the old weapons envelope, while Yamato systems could be refocused for substantially greater penetration. The Ara saw equivalent possibilities in Dragoon projectors, photon weapons and carrier interceptor armament. For years the war had been governed by the arithmetic of attrition, by how many Zerg the Renegades could replace compared with how many trained soldiers and warships the coalition could afford to lose. The Temple offered a way to change the exchange rate itself.

Talandar stood among the recovered archives while Ara specialists worked around him, and for a long time he said nothing. His people had spent generations treating the Temple as something too sacred to touch, and the last guardians of that belief lay dead in the cavern outside. StarCraft Co. had demanded entry because it believed the war justified the cost. The Ara had agreed because events had stripped them of alternatives. Now both stood before proof that the Renegades had been right to covet the place. “They kept this from us for ages,” Talandar said at last. “And we have killed them for keeping it.” The commander looked toward the crystalline machinery before answering that the Ancient Ones had kept it from everyone. Talandar replied that the distinction might comfort Terrans, and the commander told him it did not. That answer surprised the Executor more than any justification would have.

The recovery operation lasted weeks. StarCraft Co. and Ara honored the agreement almost obsessively because both understood what would happen if either suspected the other of withholding discoveries. Every artifact was logged jointly, every archive copied twice, and portable vespene crystals were divided according to the negotiated share while the central mechanism remained beneath Ara custodianship pending further study. Terran and Protoss engineers established parallel research teams and exchanged results under armed supervision. Neither side entirely trusted the other with technology capable of altering the balance of power between civilizations, but both trusted the Renegades with it even less. When the first controlled weapons tests were completed, the preliminary Temple estimates proved conservative rather than exaggerated.

The casualty reports reached Terran space before the full technical findings did, and for several days the operation threatened to become a political disaster. Regional commands had already accepted extraordinary losses during Aurelia, the Western Redoubt and the pursuit that followed, while the Temple campaign had consumed veteran troops at a rate difficult to explain to soldiers and governments who had been told the Renegades were already collapsing. Some governors demanded to know why entire companies had been spent assaulting a Protoss sanctuary when the conventional war was finally turning in their favor. Families of the dead heard that their relatives had been killed underground fighting guardians who had never attacked Terran space. Officers who had spent years accepting StarCraft Co.'s authority began asking whether the commander had confused strategic opportunity with ambition. Even within the military, there was unease at the thought that an expedition launched to prevent Renegade access had become a conquest of its own.

The unrest did not disappear because StarCraft Co. issued a better justification. It began disappearing because information leaked.

At first it was fragments: engineers speaking too freely to officers, procurement requests for unfamiliar crystalline components, weapons-test telemetry copied beyond the teams authorized to see it. Then came numbers that were too extraordinary to remain confined to classified channels. A prototype Goliath battery demonstrated destructive output far above service models. Modified siege ammunition achieved results that analysts initially assumed were instrumentation errors. Reactor teams began discussing vespene conversion systems whose theoretical output made conventional extraction forecasts look obsolete. Nobody released a formal statement claiming that StarCraft Co. had acquired a forty-percent increase in military firepower, but enough evidence escaped that commanders throughout Terran space began to understand why Sanctuary had mattered.

The political argument changed with remarkable speed. The casualties remained real, and nobody could make the dead cheaper by pointing to a weapons test, but the operation no longer looked like a reckless expedition for exotic artifacts. It looked like the acquisition of a technological advantage large enough to shorten the war by years. Regional governments that had demanded inquiries began asking when their fleets would receive upgraded systems. Shipyard directors requested specifications. Army commanders wanted to know how quickly the new focusing principles could be adapted to tanks and Goliaths. The same officers who had questioned the cost began studying simulations in which existing Terran formations inflicted levels of damage that would once have required substantially larger forces.

For the surviving veterans of the UIC, the implications went deeper than the Temple itself. The old Council had possessed more territory, more bureaucracy and, on paper, more military power than StarCraft Co. had inherited after the decapitation of its leadership. Yet the UIC had never transformed that mass into anything resembling what now existed. StarCraft Co. had standardized scattered armies, rebuilt shattered supply systems, reclaimed Moria, integrated regional commands, fought alongside Protoss, created a veteran commando corps, survived Aurelia and then carried a combined army through hundreds of kilometers of jungle and into the heart of an ancient Xel'Naga sanctuary. What had once been a mercenary company was now directing a Terran military whose institutional competence, operational experience and technological sophistication would have been almost unimaginable to the government it replaced.

The comparison became increasingly uncomfortable because StarCraft Co. had never formally claimed to replace the UIC as a permanent state. Its emergency authority had been justified by war, and the commander continued insisting that political settlement would come after victory. Yet power had accumulated where competence accumulated. Governors now planned campaigns around StarCraft Co. logistics. Fleets accepted its operational standards. Scientists competed for access to its research programs. Officers whose commissions predated the company's existence increasingly measured their own organizations against doctrines developed by people who had once been hired by contract to clear Zerg out of basements and orbital maintenance decks.

The Ara understood the shift as clearly as the Terrans did. Their alliance with StarCraft Co. had begun as cooperation with a useful and unusually capable human military force. After Moria and Aurelia it had become a partnership between major powers, and Sanctuary pushed it further still. Both civilizations now possessed access to Xel'Naga technology capable of altering the economics of interstellar war, while the Renegades, already hollowed by a year of defeats, possessed neither the Temple nor the army they had assembled to take it. Talandar's council had feared that allowing Terrans into the sanctuary would alter the balance between their peoples. They had been correct, although not in the way the most alarmed Judicators had imagined. The Temple had not simply made StarCraft Co. stronger; it had accelerated a transformation already underway.

By the time the last wounded left Sanctuary, the argument over whether the campaign had been worth its losses had not vanished, but it no longer dominated the conversation. The more important question was what happened when the new weapons reached full production. StarCraft Co. had entered the war as a contractor, survived long enough to become an army, and then rebuilt the remnants of Terran power into something the UIC had never been able to create while it still possessed all the advantages of legitimacy, territory and peace. Now that military was being handed technologies that could increase its striking power on a scale normally measured across generations rather than months.

The Temple had cost the last of the Ancient Ones their civilization and cost the coalition thousands of dead and wounded to reach what they had protected. Nothing about the price could be undone, and nothing about the discovery made the decision morally clean. Yet as the first upgraded weapons entered testing and the strategic models began changing across Terran and Ara commands, the larger consequence became impossible to ignore. Aurelia had broken the Renegades' concentrated military strength, and Sanctuary had given their enemies the means to exploit that weakness with overwhelming force. Beyond the immediate war, something more fundamental was happening. The old arrangements of the sector had depended on powers everyone believed they understood: Terran industry, Protoss technology, Zerg numbers, mineral wealth and vespene scarcity. One by one, those assumptions were being overturned.

The tides of power were shifting across the cosmos, and StarCraft Co. was no longer merely riding them. Increasingly, it was the force causing them to move.

I am the danger.

Driving a Van

I’m driving Maria, the white van.

I’m going around a big bowl-shaped curve in Roanoke. I take it too fast and drive off the road.

Then I do it again, only faster.

This time, Maria takes off and flies like a jet.

I swoop around through the air. Two other jets begin pursuing me and firing lasers.

Somehow, I realize Maria has become a jet.

I outfly them and shoot both of them down.

LTC

Then I’m in LTC. A job I had 26 years ago. Graphics and prepress house. A big deal.

It’s dark, with illuminated booths, like the old days.

I say hello to several old friends and walk into an area with a stage.

Tommy is working at a computer in the corner. Two women are flanking him. One is a stranger. The other offers him a barstool.

I don’t know her.

I sit down and start talking to him. The woman leaves.

Tommy is playing a video game and trying to hide it from view.

Jerry, an old manager, wanders over and wants to know why.

Then he asks me to paint a mural on the wall—to give the space some life.

We begin discussing what the mural should be. I imagine a violent splash of color and shape.

I wake up.

Kraft Paper

I fall back asleep and return to the same place.

An unruly roll of 48-inch Kraft paper is taking me over.

I wake up again.

Endless Page

I fall asleep once more.

I dream that I’m scrolling an endless page.

11am – Sunday – I could sleep all day. But there is worship, a dinner date, and a movie.

—

A dream about pushing past limits and then wondering what to do with the freedom that follows.

At first I’m driving something ordinary-but special to me. I push it too hard and instead of crashing, it becomes something far more powerful. Maria turns into a jet. I don’t just escape danger; I become the danger. I can outfly it and fight back. Something almost gleeful about that. I go off the road and find out I can fly.

Then I’m back at an old a lauded job, surrounded by my former world and known people, but I’m not really there to resume my old role. Jerry asks me to paint a mural—to give the place some life. I’m being invited to bring something new into a place from my past, rather than simply return to it.

And then teh creative space gets ridiculous: a huge roll of Kraft paper overwhelms me, followed by an endless scrolling page. Both are essentially infinite surfaces waiting to be filled.

This is where I am. I’ve learned that I don’t necessarily have to stay on the road anymore. I can fly. But freedom creates its own problem: there’s suddenly so much space.

The question isn’t only, “What am I escaping from?”

It's, “What do I want to put on the wall?”

As promised in last week’s post on zines, I’m back this week with some nuts and bolts instructions for how to make hand-bound booklets. Because I’m perpetually extra, both of the projects I’m working on right now are relatively complicated, but both of them start from something that’s more straightforward.

One of them is a single-sheet zine that has 16 pages, instead of the usual 8:

And the other one is a 2nd printing of one of my duo-chapbooks, which has two separate stories included in one book:

…which is the more complicated-looking of the two, but actually is easier to make. Here’s how I did both of them, starting from the simple version and then explaining how to do the extra version of it.

Single-sheet zines

This is a common format for zine makers, and the version with 8 pages is super simple to make. The main tricky part is figuring out how to lay out the content, which is like so:

…also notice that the content on pages 2-5 is upside-down. That way, it’ll be rightside-up once you’re done folding.

To start, you want to put some creases in the paper:

1. Fold hot-dog-style with your content on the outside, crease well, and unfold.

2. Fold hamburger style, crease well, then unfold and crease the other direction.

3. With the paper in landscape orientation, fold the outside edges in toward the middle crease. Crease well, then unfold and do the same thing on the other side.

…if you’ve ever done origami, this process will feel familiar, as will some of the folds coming up. When you’re done making the creases, use a craft knife to cut down the center crease between the middle two sets of panels:

…you’ll notice I didn’t get the cut completely perfect, which is fine for my project because I’m going to be trimming off the top before I finish it. Using a ruler as a guide can help to keep your cut straight.

Once the cut is in place, fold the page in half hot-dog-style:

Then push the outsides in until the pages along the slit pop open into a diamond:

Then fold to create the pages.

If you’re doing the standard 8-page version, you can stop here. But every time I’ve picked up a zine like this, it’s bugged me a bit that the whole back half of the paper is unprinted. I thought there had to be a way to print on both sides, then cut the paper a few more times to create a 16-page book.

And there is a way, but it’s slightly more complicated than I initially realized. The problem is, once you make the cuts to create 16 pages, it’s no longer a contiguous sheet of paper. That means the pages will fall apart if they’re not bound together. And you can’t just use a staple binding because of the book’s X-shaped center fold. No single staple will go through all of the folds (I learned through trial and error as I was experimenting with this).

The solution I came up with is to use tie binding. To start, I used an awl to poke two holes in each fold. This meant poking the awl through 4 total times: once through each pair of facing folds at the top and at the bottom.

Then, I started a thread in the center of the book and pulled the needle through to the previous page:

…and ran it up to the top hole, through to the next page and out at the bottom, etc. until I got back to the center and tied the two pieces off. Then the last step was just to cut off the top and outer edge folds with a paper cutter and the book was complete!

I should also note that your page layout will be different if you’re doing a 16-page version. Here’s the front and back:

Double Chaps

There is nothing complicated about the interior of this one. It’s just a simple folded saddle-stitch booklet. For the book content, I laid it out in InDesign and used the booklet printing option to have it paginate it automatically. Once each of the two interiors was printed, I folded it:

…then used an awl to poke 3 holes the entire way through the pages and cover through the central fold for the tie binding:

It could be staple-bound, too, I just prefer the look of the twine. The way I do it is to start in the middle fold in the center hole:

…then go into either the top or bottom, then back through the center and up the other side to meet in the middle:

where I tie a knot and trim the ends:

What’s different about the double chapbook format is really just the cover. It starts as an 11” X 17” piece. This is divided into thirds. Each book’s front cover is on the right-most third, the back cover in the middle third, and the interior of the other book’s front cover on the left-most third (for this book, I left that blank).

To assemble the book, I start by folding the cover into thirds:

Then I trim off the blank portion at the top and bottom:

…and that leaves you with an accordion-style cover, where both books share a back cover but each have their own front cover and spine. Then you just stitch or staple the interior of each book into its corresponding cover, and you have a very cool two-sided book.

Hopefully this has been helpful for folks who want to make their own handbound books! A lot of them do look more complicated than they really are, so if you come across other approaches that you want to emulate, my advice is to buy one then reverse-engineer it once you get it home. That way, you’ll have a physical example to use as a template, rather than trying to figure it out from scratch.

See similar posts:

#Zines #Bookmaking #SelfPublishing #PublishingAdvice

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: FULL SPOILERS

In a galaxy far, far away, The Mandalorian and Grogu embark on a thrilling new adventure filled with danger, loyalty, and the enduring bond of the Force.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ (4.5/5 stars)**

Overall, I liked it a lot. I think Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau do the Star Wars Universe justice. My favorite moments were probably the little guys and Grogu. I love their good baby, bad baby thing.

I also liked seeing Sigourney Weaver in it. My only negative is that it felt a little too long. I think some things would have had more room to develop if this had been a TV series. It could have fit nicely into an eight-episode run.

Pedro Pascal, as usual, did a good job. I thought they might end it here, but the way they left it means it could go either way.

#movies #review

Fifty applications is not an unusual number. Six months is not an unusual stretch. What makes Amanda Bowler's story worth stopping over is the third number, the one that sits at zero: face-to-face interviews. Not zero offers. Zero occasions on which a human being sat opposite her and formed a view. The 48-year-old psychology graduate, whose experience was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 August 2026, is carrying a HECS debt of roughly 44,000 Australian dollars, a figure inflated by the fact that registration as a psychologist in Australia requires years of postgraduate study stacked on top of the undergraduate degree. She paid for the qualification. She wrote the applications. And on the available evidence, the qualification was assessed by software and the applications were read by nothing.

That last sentence is the one that ought to be arresting, and the reason it is not is that we have grown accustomed to it in under three years. The Australian labour market she is applying into is genuinely tight. SEEK's employment report for July 2026, published on 12 August, recorded applications per job advertisement at their highest level on record, having risen for seven consecutive months while job advertisement volumes fell away beneath them, down 0.4 per cent month on month in July and 6.0 per cent lower than a year earlier. More people are chasing fewer roles. That is an old story and a cyclical one.

The new story is what is standing between them. The Australian Responsible AI Index, the national benchmark produced by Fifth Quadrant with the National AI Centre, found that a majority of Australian organisations already use AI in recruitment to some degree, and the Herald's reporting puts the figure at roughly 80 per cent of Australian companies at moderate or higher levels of use. On the other side of the same transaction, jobseekers now deploy generative systems and autonomous agents that scrape boards overnight, rewrite the curriculum vitae for each posting, generate the covering letter and submit before the applicant has woken up. A senior human resources leader, quoted in the same Herald report, described where this ends with more precision than most white papers manage. The bots just botting each other. Little robots yelling at each other.

Refusing Both of the Easy Stories

There are two ready-made articles about this and both are worthless.

The first is the technophobic one, in which the machines have desecrated a sacred human ritual and the remedy is to bring back the handshake. This is sentimental nonsense. Human hiring was never a meritocracy. It was slow, inconsistent, swayed by schools and accents and surnames, and it discriminated with a fluency that no audit ever caught because nobody was auditing. Anyone nostalgic for the CV pile on a hiring manager's desk should reckon with what happened to CVs at the bottom of it on a Friday afternoon.

The second is the efficiency story, in which volume has become unmanageable, automation is the only rational response, and since candidates are automating too the whole thing is symmetrical and therefore fair. This is more sophisticated and more dangerous, because the symmetry is fake. A candidate's agent optimises one person's chances against an entire market. An employer's agent optimises a queue against a budget. Only one of those produces an output with legal and material consequence. The candidate's machine issues a request. The employer's machine issues a verdict. Calling that an arms race between equals is like calling a trial an argument between the defendant and the judge.

The harder and more specific argument is this. The injury is not that judgement has been automated. Judgement has always been delegated, compressed and rushed. The injury is that the loop has closed: there is now no stage in the process at which any human being with time and authority is obliged to read. Once no human reads, the decision loses its author. And a decision without an author cannot be explained, cannot be appealed, cannot be corrected, and cannot be learned from. What Bowler encountered fifty times was not harshness. It was the absence of anybody to be harsh.

The Filter Myth and the Thing That Quietly Replaced It

Before going further it is worth demolishing the folklore, because the folklore is doing real damage to the argument.

For over a decade, career advice has been built around the claim that applicant tracking systems automatically bin 75 per cent of CVs before a human sees them. The statistic has no research behind it. As Leda Salazar de Leon and Mehnaz Rafi set out in an analysis published in July 2026, it traces to a 2012 sales pitch by Preptel, a résumé-optimisation vendor that closed the following year, and no methodology was ever published. The company selling the cure invented the disease. Recruiter surveys since have found the overwhelming majority do not configure their tracking systems to reject automatically on formatting or keywords, and small businesses, which employ most of the workforce in most developed economies, frequently do not use such systems at all. Applicant tracking systems were, for most of their history, filing cabinets with a search box.

So an entire generation of jobseekers spent a decade terrified of a filter that mostly did not exist, buying templates and keyword tools to defeat it. That matters here for two reasons. First, it should make anyone sceptical of vendor-generated panic, including panic that flatters this article's own thesis. Second, and more uncomfortably, the filter has now actually arrived, and it arrived in precisely the place the myth said it was, which means the warning has been worn out by overuse at exactly the moment it becomes true.

Large language models genuinely do rank. They produce orderings, and the orderings are not neutral. Kyra Wilson and Aylin Caliskan of the University of Washington ran a résumé audit through massive text embedding models, using more than 500 real CVs and 500 job descriptions across nine occupations, generating over three million combinations of job, race and gender. White-associated names were preferred in 85.1 per cent of cases and Black-associated names in 8.6 per cent. Female-associated names were preferred in 11.1 per cent of cases. For some intersections, notably Black men, the models preferred other candidates in close to 100 per cent of comparisons. This is not a system that occasionally misfires. It is a system reproducing the statistical regularities of a corpus, doing exactly what it was built to do, at the precise point in the process where the myth taught everyone to expect it and nobody has been checking.

Two Automations Racing Each Other Into a Wall

On the employer side, the screening layer has stopped being software and become a participant. Alex, formerly Apriora, is a Y Combinator company founded by Aaron Wang and John Rytel that conducts live voice and video screening interviews, scores candidates and returns a ranked shortlist. It raised a 17 million dollar Series A led by Peak XV Partners in September 2025, taking total funding to 20 million, and reports having run more than a million AI-led screening interviews, reaching up to 5,000 in a single day for its largest customers. Five thousand first-round interviews in a day is not a faster version of what recruiters used to do. It is a different activity with the same name.

On the candidate side, the tooling is scrappier, cheaper and open. Public repositories host agents that use browser automation and web scraping to read postings and auto-apply with a tailored CV and covering letter for each one. Commercial equivalents advertise applying to thousands of roles in a click. Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru, a product manager at Google's YouTube who writes a widely read newsletter on applied AI, has published a step-by-step guide to building a personal job-hunting agent that runs on a small cloud server, pulls fresh listings each morning, scores each against your CV, and messages you the top five. Speaking to the Herald, he predicted that within five years every jobseeker will have a personal AI agent, and that it will most probably be talking to the company's AI recruitment agent. He is not forecasting from the sidelines. He ships the thing.

The consequences are measurable, and Greenhouse has measured them. Its AI in Hiring report, published on 19 November 2025 and drawing on 4,136 respondents across the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany, split between 2,900 jobseekers and 1,236 recruiters and hiring managers, found that 49 per cent of candidates had submitted more applications than the year before and that 54 per cent had already been interviewed by a machine. Six months later the company asked again. Its 2026 candidate report, published on 1 May and surveying 2,950 active jobseekers across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Ireland, put the share at 63 per cent, a rise of thirteen percentage points in half a year. Whatever this is, it is not settling down. The earlier report also found the trust gap that defines the whole system: 70 per cent of hiring managers trust AI to make faster and better hiring decisions, while just 8 per cent of jobseekers believe AI makes hiring fair. Daniel Chait, the company's chief executive and co-founder, called it an AI doom loop that is getting worse, not better.

Eight per cent. That is not scepticism. That is a population that has concluded the process is illegitimate, still participating in it because it has no alternative.

When the Signal Stops Meaning Anything

There is a clean piece of economics underneath this, and it was written in 1973.

Michael Spence's job market signalling model explains why credentials work at all. A signal only carries information if it is differentially costly to produce: education signals ability because it costs more, in effort and time, for the less able to acquire. Take away the cost differential and the signal stops transmitting. It does not become a weaker signal. It becomes noise wearing a signal's clothes.

Generative AI drove the cost of producing a competent, tailored, keyword-aligned application to approximately zero, for everyone, simultaneously. The considered covering letter used to be a costly signal of interest. It is now free. Which means it now says nothing, and everybody involved knows it says nothing, and each side has responded by escalating rather than by admitting the instrument is broken.

The escalation has a measurable shape, and the most revealing number in this entire field lives in the gap between two studies. Greenhouse found that 41 per cent of jobseekers said they had used prompt injection, hiding instructions in a document to steer an AI screener, with 52 per cent of the remainder saying they were considering it. Then Mohan Zhang, Yuqi Jia, Zhen Tan, Steven Jiang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Tianlong Chen and Dawn Song went and looked. Their study, presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in 2026, is the first large-scale empirical measurement of prompt injection in a real deployed system: roughly 200,000 genuine CVs collected over several years, of which about 1 per cent contained hidden injections. Prevalence is rising. More than 90 per cent of the injections avoided explicit instruction syntax, which is to say they were subtle enough to be difficult to catch.

Forty-one per cent say they do it. One per cent do it. That gap is not a measurement error, and it is not really about cheating. It is a statement of belief. Two in five jobseekers now consider sabotaging the employer's screening system to be a normal and defensible thing to say out loud about themselves. The moral standing of the hiring process collapsed considerably faster than the technology arrived.

Employers, deprived of a working signal, are hunting for a new costly one, which turns out to be proof that the applicant is a person. Gartner, in research released on 31 July 2025 drawing on surveys of some three thousand candidates, predicted that by 2028 one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake, found that 6 per cent of respondents admitted to some form of interview fraud, that 39 per cent had used AI during the application process, and that only 26 per cent trusted AI to evaluate them fairly. The vendor response has been identity verification products bolted onto applicant tracking systems, selfie-based checks, and a documented drift back towards in-person interviews for no reason other than confirming the candidate exists.

Read that sequence again, because it is close to farcical. The industry removed the human reader in order to save the cost of reading. It has now reinstated costly human verification in order to establish that there is a human on the other end. The cost was never eliminated. It was moved downstream, past the point at which Amanda Bowler had already been rejected fifty times.

What Researchers Found Inside the Loop

Three recent studies get closer to the mechanism than any amount of vendor commentary, and together they say something the industry has not absorbed.

The first, by Aditya Bhattacharya and Katrien Verbert, published in May 2025, built a multi-agent system powered by large language models to guide jobseekers through the recruitment process and explain hiring decisions to them. Evaluated with 20 participants, it was found significantly more actionable, trustworthy and fair than the conventional process. Note what the candidates responded to. Not a better weapon. An explanation. The enormous demand currently being met by auto-apply tools is, at root, demand for legibility, and it is being served by the only vendors willing to sell anything at all to the person being screened.

The second, by Md Nazmus Sakib, Naga Manogna Rayasam and Sanorita Dey, submitted in January 2026 and revised in March, examined asynchronous AI interviewers through analysis of subreddit discussion and interviews with 17 participants, then tested interface changes with 180 more. Its central finding is that applicants suffer from mismatched expectations amplified by organisational rhetoric, and that familiarity with large language models shaped how candidates perceived the process, sometimes producing workarounds and deceptive practices. That causal direction matters enormously. Deception is not a character flaw distributed randomly across the applicant pool. It is a predictable behavioural response to a process that misrepresents itself, and it is elicited most reliably from the candidates who understand the technology best.

The third is the one that should end a particular argument for good. Sajel Surati, Rosanna Bellini and Emily Black interviewed 22 recruiting professionals about generative AI in their daily workflows. Recruiters believed they retained final decision-making authority. The researchers found that the AI had become, in their phrase, an invisible architect shaping the foundational building blocks of the information used for evaluation. Adoption decisions largely lay outside recruiters' control, driven by organisational pressure and competitive anxiety rather than professional judgement. And the marginal efficiency gains came at considerable cost, including reduced recruiter expertise and compromised oversight capacity.

This dismantles the human-in-the-loop defence, which is the single most common answer employers give when challenged. The human is in the loop. She is reading a summary the model wrote, of candidates the model ranked, drawn from a pool the model already narrowed, under time pressure the model's throughput created, having gradually lost the expertise that would let her notice when it is wrong. Her presence satisfies an organisational chart and nothing else. Oversight that cannot be exercised is not oversight, and a rubber stamp is not a reader.

The Particular Exposure of Being Forty-Eight

Everything above lands unevenly, and it lands hardest on people who look like Amanda Bowler.

The Australian HR Institute and the Australian Human Rights Commission run a periodic national survey of employers on age in the workplace. Their 2025 report found that 24 per cent of HR professionals classify workers aged 51 to 55 as older, up from 10 per cent in 2023, and that only about half of employers were open to a large extent to hiring people over 50. That is the human baseline into which the automation was installed, and it is worth naming plainly: employer age bias was already there and already growing before a single model was deployed.

What the model adds is scale, speed and deniability. But there is a subtler and more structural problem with automated matching that has nothing to do with inherited prejudice. A ranking system trained on the profiles of people who already hold a role learns what an incumbent looks like. A career changer, by definition, does not look like an incumbent. A 48-year-old psychology graduate has a curriculum vitae with a shape that no successful applicant for an entry-level psychology position has ever had, because successful applicants for those positions are usually 25. The model will score her as a poor match. It will be functioning perfectly. Not a sufficiently close match is not a malfunction, it is the product specification, and it encodes a definition of suitability that nobody in the organisation ever wrote down, approved or could defend if asked.

The most consequential legal test of this proposition is grinding through the Northern District of California. Mobley v. Workday was filed on 21 February 2023 by Derek Mobley, an African American man over 40 with depression and anxiety, who alleged he had been rejected from more than a hundred positions screened through Workday's software, in several instances outside business hours and within an hour of applying. In July 2024, Judge Rita Lin preserved the disparate impact claims, finding it plausible that the vendor was acting as an agent of the employers. On 16 May 2025 the court granted preliminary certification of a collective under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. In July 2025 the collective was expanded to cover applicants screened using Workday's HiredScore features. The notice plan was approved on 2 December 2025, collective notice was formally authorised on 17 February 2026 with an opt-in deadline of 7 March, and on 6 March Lin rejected Workday's argument that the age discrimination statute does not reach job applicants at all. A third amended complaint followed on 27 March 2026, and on 22 June the court granted in part and denied in part Workday's motion to dismiss it, leaving discrimination claims alive across race, sex, age and disability.

Two figures from the reporting on that case deserve to sit next to each other. Around a billion applications were rejected through the software during the relevant opt-in period. Roughly 14,000 people opted in. That window is now shut, which makes 14,000 not a running tally but a final number, and the ratio it forms with a billion is the accountability gap rendered numerically. Almost nobody rejected by an automated system ever learns enough to raise a hand, because the system's defining feature is that it does not tell you anything happened.

The Law Arrives, and Then Steps Back

You would expect regulation to be closing on this. In the specific weeks around Bowler's fifty applications, it moved backwards.

Under the European Union's AI Act, artificial intelligence used in employment and worker management is classified as high risk under Annex III, and the substantive obligations were due to apply from 2 August 2026, four weeks before this article was written. They did not. The Digital Omnibus on AI, provisionally agreed on 6 May 2026 and confirmed by member state representatives on 13 May, was adopted as Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, published in the Official Journal on 24 July 2026 and in force from 27 July, five weeks before this article was written and days before the deadline it removed. This is not a proposal that might yet be resisted. It is settled law. The obligations for stand-alone Annex III systems now apply from 2 December 2027, with embedded Annex I systems slipping to 2 August 2028. What survives on the original timetable is Article 50, the transparency duty to disclose that a person is interacting with an AI system, alongside the Article 5 prohibitions. Article 86, which grants an affected person the right to obtain clear and meaningful explanations of the role an AI system played in a decision that adversely affects them, hangs off the high-risk regime and slips with it.

The resulting settlement is almost satirical. A European candidate rejected today has a legal right to be told a machine was involved, and a fifteen-month wait for any right to be told what it did.

The American picture offers a preview of what enforcement looks like when it does arrive. New York City's Local Law 144 requires annual independent bias audits of automated employment decision tools, public posting of a summary, and advance notice to candidates. Researchers led by Lucas Wright, with Roxana Mika Muenster, Briana Vecchione, Tianyao Qu, Pika Cai, Alan Smith, Jacob Metcalf and J. Nathan Matias, coordinated 155 trained student investigators to check 391 employers in late 2023, behaving as motivated jobseekers would. Eighteen employers, 5 per cent, had posted a bias audit report. Thirteen, 3 per cent, had posted a transparency notice. Eleven had posted both. The researchers coined the term null compliance for the resulting condition, in which non-compliance cannot even be established because the regulated party controls whether anyone knows the law applies to it. The New York State Comptroller's audit published on 2 December 2025, covering July 2023 to June 2025, found the city's enforcement of the law ineffective.

Illinois has gone further on paper. House Bill 3773, enacted as Public Act 103-0804 and effective from 1 January 2026, amends the state Human Rights Act to make discriminatory use of AI in recruitment, hiring and promotion a civil rights violation, prohibits the use of postcodes as proxies for protected characteristics, and requires employers to notify people when AI is used in employment decisions. It sits alongside the older Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act. Whether it bites is a question about enforcement capacity, and New York's experience is not encouraging. Neither is Illinois's own. The Department of Human Rights published proposed regulations on 15 May 2026, under the heading Subpart J: Use of Artificial Intelligence in Employment, and then on 2 June postponed the rulemaking in order to coordinate with other agencies. No revised timeline has been announced. The statutory obligations have been enforceable throughout, which produces the peculiar situation of an employer bound since New Year's Day to notify candidates that AI is being used in a decision about them, with no final rules describing what an adequate notice contains, and a candidate holding a right whose shape the regulator has not yet been able to state. A law that is in force and unexplained is not the opposite of a law that is unenforced. It is a variation on it.

And Australia, where Bowler is applying, has chosen to do less rather than more. In September 2024 the Department of Industry, Science and Resources published a proposals paper setting out ten mandatory guardrails for AI in high-risk settings, covering testing, transparency and accountability for developers and deployers. In December 2025 the National AI Plan shelved them, opting instead to rely on existing technology-neutral law, voluntary guidance folded into six essential practices, and a new AI Safety Institute. The practical answer available to Amanda Bowler is therefore the Age Discrimination Act 2004 and state anti-discrimination statutes, which she would have to invoke on the basis of no information whatsoever about what happened to her application.

One genuinely enforceable Australian obligation is coming. From 10 December 2026, under amendments made by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024, entities subject to the Australian Privacy Principles that use personal information in automated decisions capable of significantly affecting a person's rights or interests must disclose in their privacy policy the kinds of information used and the kinds of decisions made, with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner able to enforce. That is real, and it is worth having. It is also a paragraph in a document nobody reads, published by the organisation, containing no information about any individual decision. It tells Bowler that a category of thing happened to a category of person. It does not tell her what happened to her.

There is a reason this reticence should alarm Australians more than most. Between 2015 and 2019 the Commonwealth ran an automated debt recovery scheme against welfare recipients using crude income averaging. Robodebt was unlawful, produced enormous error rates, and a Royal Commission reported on it in 2023 with 57 recommendations. The financial reckoning continues: on 4 September 2025 the government agreed to pay a further 475 million dollars to settle the appeal in Knox v The Commonwealth, approved by the Federal Court on 23 June 2026, on top of the earlier Prygodicz settlement, bringing total redress past 2.4 billion dollars. Australia has already run the experiment of automating a high-stakes determination about people's lives at national scale and discovering the error rate afterwards, from the wreckage. Having paid that bill, in money and in lives, its response to the automation of hiring is a set of voluntary practices.

What a Right to a Human Decision Would Actually Have to Contain

The phrase a right to a human decision is currently doing rhetorical work and no operational work. It is worth spelling out, because vaguely stated it will be satisfied by a rubber stamp, and the SCHUFA reasoning already tells us a rubber stamp does not count. In that case, decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union in December 2023, the score the credit agency produced was itself held to be the decision in law, because the German bank relying on it did no more than follow the output. Where the nominal decision-maker adds nothing, the machine's output is the decision.

Six things would make it real, and the first principle underlying all of them is that a review conducted by someone with no practical capacity to overturn the outcome is not a review at all.

Disclosure has to happen at the point of application, not in a privacy policy. Before submitting, the applicant should see plainly that the application will be machine-scored, and what the system is assessing. This costs nothing and changes behaviour immediately, because a candidate who knows can decide whether the role is worth two hours of their life. It is also the reform with the clearest measured demand behind it and the widest gap between that demand and current practice. Of the jobseekers Greenhouse surveyed in 2026 who had been interviewed by an AI, 70 per cent were never told plainly beforehand that a machine would be assessing them, and for 21 per cent the fact only surfaced once the interview had started. Fifty-seven per cent think disclosure ought to be a legal requirement. This is not a protection that has to be explained to the people it protects.

Rejections issued without human involvement must be reversible on request. Not appealable in principle, reversible in practice, by a named person with authority to overturn, within a fixed window. The thirty-second rejection that jobseekers describe as soul-destroying is not painful because it is fast. It is painful because its speed is a disclosure: it tells the applicant that nothing was considered. A reversal route converts the machine's output from a verdict into a triage recommendation, which is what it always should have been. Here too the appetite is documented rather than assumed: 46 per cent of jobseekers want a human interview available as an alternative, and 38 per cent want a human being to look at the outcome before the decision is taken.

Employers should be required to sample. A fixed minimum percentage of machine-rejected applications, chosen at random, read by a human being, with the pass-through rate published. This is the single most valuable intervention available, because it generates a continuous audit of the model's false negatives at the employer's own expense and makes those false negatives visible for the first time. On a role attracting 500 applications, a 5 per cent sample is 25 CVs. That is one morning. Any organisation arguing it cannot afford a morning is telling you the vacancy was not worth filling.

Reasons must be given, and a score is not a reason. A short statement of which requirement was assessed as unmet is sufficient, and it is the difference between a decision and an event.

Auto-rejection rates should be published by age band, and by other protected characteristics where the data exists. Employers already collect this information for equal opportunity reporting. The reason it is not published broken down by automated stage is that nobody has asked.

And verification should be portable. If the labour market now requires proof that an applicant is a real human with the credentials claimed, that proof should be established once, held by the candidate, and presented on demand, rather than repeatedly extracted by every employer and every vendor at the candidate's cost.

It is worth saying plainly that none of this is charity. Thirty-eight per cent of jobseekers have already walked out of a hiring process because it involved an AI interview, and a further 12 per cent say they would. That is half the candidate pool either gone or standing at the door with a hand on the frame, and it is a cost borne by the employer, in the form of the applicants it never gets to see. Only 21 per cent believe most employers are deploying these systems responsibly. Yet only 19 per cent want less AI in hiring overall, and those two findings sitting side by side are the most useful thing in the whole survey. Candidates are not objecting to the machine. They are objecting to the machine being unaccountable, and they are quite capable of telling the difference. An employer that discloses, offers a human alternative and reverses on request is not making a concession to sentiment. It is recovering the third of its applicant pool that the rest of the industry is currently losing before the first question is asked.

None of this is radical, and none of it requires banning anything. It requires accepting a principle that every other consequential decision-making system in a developed economy already accepts: that a decision affecting someone's livelihood must have an author who can be identified and asked.

The Author of the Decision

So, to the questions this began with.

What does it mean when the most pivotal process in a working life is conducted between two artificial intelligence systems exchanging notes about a person's qualifications with no human ever reading the application? It means the decision has no author. Consider the comparison. If a bank refuses Bowler a loan, there is a decision-maker, a reason and a complaints process. If a government agency refuses her a payment, there is a delegate, a statement of reasons and a tribunal. If a university refuses her a place, there is an admissions officer and an appeal. Employment, which determines her income, her housing, her health, her standing and most of her waking hours, has quietly become the largest category of consequential decisions about human beings in a modern economy that has no such person anywhere in it. Not a person who decided wrongly. No person at all.

And what happens to the relationship between employer and employee when the first impression is made by an algorithm that can end a career in thirty seconds? An employment relationship is a structure of mutual obligation that begins in an act of assessment, and the character of that first act sets the terms of everything after it. When the opening move is made by a system neither party controls, that the employer cannot explain and the candidate cannot see, the relationship begins in bad faith on both sides, and the numbers show both sides already know it. Seventy per cent of hiring managers trust the machine. Eight per cent of candidates think it is fair. Forty-one per cent are willing to say out loud that they would sabotage it. That is not a labour market clearing. It is two populations, each correctly convinced the other is not really present, transacting through proxies neither of them chose.

The literature on what this does to the people caught in it is not ambiguous. The systematic review by Tom Sterud, Lars-Kristian Lunde, Rigmor Berg, Karin Proper and Fiona Aanesen, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2025 and pooling 38 prospective longitudinal studies, found a relative risk of mental health problems among unemployed people of 1.95 compared with the employed, and a relative risk of 0.66 after re-employment. Unemployment damages people and work repairs them, reliably, in both directions. Every unnecessary month a qualified person spends outside work because a ranking model scored their history as unusual is a month of measurable harm, imposed by a process nobody signed.

Amanda Bowler is not owed a job. Fifty applications do not entitle anyone to fifty interviews, and there are more psychology graduates than there are psychology posts. What she is owed, and what the entire apparatus described here has been engineered to avoid providing, is far smaller and far more fundamental than a job.

She is owed a reader.

Sources and References

1. Bhattacharya, A. and Verbert, K. (2025). “Let's Get You Hired: A Job Seeker's Perspective on Multi-Agent Recruitment Systems for Explaining Hiring Decisions.” arXiv:2505.20312. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20312
2. Sakib, M. N., Rayasam, N. M. and Dey, S. (2026). “Expecting Too Much, Getting Too Little: Exploring the Challenges and Design Opportunities of Asynchronous AI Interviewers.” arXiv:2601.02775. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02775
3. Surati, S., Bellini, R. and Black, E. (2026). “Resume-ing Control: (Mis)Perceptions of Agency Around GenAI Use in Recruiting Workflows.” arXiv:2604.26851. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26851
4. Zhang, M., Jia, Y., Tan, Z., Jiang, S., Gong, N. Z., Chen, T. and Song, D. (2026). “Measuring Real-World Prompt Injection Attacks in LLM-based Resume Screening.” USENIX Security Symposium 2026. arXiv:2605.28999. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28999
5. Wilson, K. and Caliskan, A. (2024). “Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval.” Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20371
6. Wright, L., Muenster, R. M., Vecchione, B., Qu, T., Cai, P., Smith, A., Metcalf, J. and Matias, J. N. (2024). “Null Compliance: NYC Local Law 144 and the Challenges of Algorithm Accountability.” Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01399
7. Spence, M. (1973). “Job Market Signaling.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), pp. 355-374. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1882010
8. Sterud, T., Lunde, L.-K., Berg, R., Proper, K. I. and Aanesen, F. (2025). “Mental health effects of unemployment and re-employment: a systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies.” Occupational and Environmental Medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12505101/
9. Greenhouse (2025). “An AI Trust Crisis: 70% of Hiring Managers Trust AI to Make Faster and Better Hiring Decisions, Only 8% of Job Seekers Call it Fair,” 19 November (https://www.greenhouse.com/newsroom/an-ai-trust-crisis-70-of-hiring-managers-trust-ai-to-make-faster-and-better-hiring-decisions-only-8-of-job-seekers-call-it-fair); and “Greenhouse 2026 Candidate AI Interview Report,” 1 May 2026 (https://www.greenhouse.com/blog/2026-candidate-ai-interview-report)
10. Gartner (2025). “Gartner Survey Shows Just 26% of Job Applicants Trust AI Will Fairly Evaluate Them,” 31 July. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-07-31-gartner-survey-shows-just-26-percent-of-job-applicants-trust-ai-will-fairly-evaluate-them
11. SEEK (2026). “SEEK Employment Report, July 2026,” 12 August. https://au.seek.com/about/news/article/seek-employment-report-july26
12. Australian HR Institute and Australian Human Rights Commission (2025). “Employer biases against older and younger generations hindering Australian workforce productivity.” https://humanrights.gov.au/about-us/media-centre/search-listing-media-releases/employer-biases-against-older-and-younger-generations-hindering
13. Fifth Quadrant and National Artificial Intelligence Centre (2025). “Australian Responsible AI Index 2025.” https://www.fifthquadrant.com.au/content/uploads/Australian-Responsible-AI-Index-2025_Full-report.pdf
14. Salazar de Leon, L. and Rafi, M. (2026). “What everyone gets wrong about the modern job search, and what actually works,” The Conversation, 5 July. https://theconversation.com/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-the-modern-job-search-and-what-actually-works-285582
15. Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse (2026). “Mobley v. Workday, Inc., 3:23-cv-00770 (N.D. Cal.).” https://clearinghouse.net/case/44074/
16. Callaham, S. (2026). “A Federal Judge, A 1967 Law And A Billion Rejected Job Applications,” Forbes, 29 May. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sheilacallaham/2026/05/29/a-federal-judge-a-1967-law-and-a-billion-rejected-job-applications/
17. Office of the New York State Comptroller (2025). “Enforcement of Local Law 144: Automated Employment Decision Tools,” 2 December. https://www.osc.ny.gov/state-agencies/audits/2025/12/02/enforcement-local-law-144-automated-employment-decision-tools
18. Ogletree Deakins (2026). “Illinois Steps Up AI Regulation in Employment: Key Takeaways for Employers.” https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/illinois-steps-up-ai-regulation-in-employment-key-takeaways-for-employers/
19. European Union (2026). “Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), consolidated text as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (Digital Omnibus on AI), in force 27 July 2026.” EUR-Lex. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02024R1689-20260727
20. Court of Justice of the European Union (2023). “Case C-634/21, SCHUFA Holding (Scoring), OQ v Land Hessen, judgment of 7 December 2023.” EUR-Lex. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62021CJ0634
21. Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (2026). “Consultation on Guidance for Transparency in Automated Decision Making.” https://www.oaic.gov.au/engage-with-us/consultations/consultation-on-guidance-for-transparency-in-automated-decision-making
22. Montreal AI Ethics Institute (2026). “AI Policy Corner: From proposed mandatory guardrails to the National AI Plan, AI governance in Australia.” https://montrealethics.ai/ai-policy-corner-from-proposed-mandatory-guardrails-to-the-national-ai-plan-ai-governance-in-australia/
23. Attorney-General's Department, Australian Government (2025). “Robodebt Class Action Appeal Settlement,” 4 September. https://ministers.ag.gov.au/media-centre/robodebt-class-action-appeal-settlement-04-09-2025
24. Alex (2025). “We raised $20M to help AI hire more humans.” https://www.alex.com/blog/we-raised-20m-to-help-ai-hire-more-humans
25. Sydney Morning Herald (2026). Report on the use of artificial intelligence in Australian recruitment, including the account of jobseeker Amanda Bowler, the remarks of a senior human resources leader on automated screening, and the predictions of Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru, 29 August. https://www.smh.com.au/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * A quiet, relaxing Sunday is what I wanted, and just what I got. Thank God!

Glad I opted for a baseball game to follow this afternoon. Also glad my Texas Rangers won that game vs. the Tampa Bay Rays.

The rest of the evening will probably be spent listening to music and reading before drifting off to sleep.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 153/92 (62)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:55 – 1 banana * 07:50 – 1 little cupcake, white bread and butter * 12:00 – saltine crackers & cream cheese * 12:35 – 1 fresh apple * 13:20 – bowl of pancit

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – wake * 06:10 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 07:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 13:00 – listening to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of this afternoon's Rangers game * 16:46 – Rangers win, 8 to 6!

Chess: * 12:50 – moved in all pending CC games

Dubious Train

“At last it was evening. The lights in the street outside came on, and the Neon restaurant sign on the corner jerked on and off, exploding its hard red light in the air. Into Jim Nolan’s room the sign threw a soft red light.”

— John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle

This is good prose, and it was a beautiful reminder of why I love John Steinbeck. He was an excellent writer dedicated to his craft, no matter how controversial his stories or opinions. I really needed to come back to good prose, and I have not been disappointed by In Dubious Battle. It is a good book for starting a new job (haha if you’ve read it). Speaking of which I am somewhat drained while I write this. It is a good job, but there is definitely extra stress when you have to meet new people and go to a new place. And yet every year is new, so experience can sometimes provide a false sense of security. Kids grow, people move, time rushes.

Writing

I have been writing almost every day, and I have crossed 40,000 words with my new book. If I can get to 50,000 it will be close enough to full length for me to call it a novel instead of a novella. It has been a fun project, and I will still have to do a significant amount of rewriting and editing. It has shown me that writing, just like any other art, ought to be fun. I think the past two books have felt like monuments that I needed to build for myself before I could really admit to myself that I am doing this for fun, not to be a Great Writer. There must be a balance between spiritual gravity and joyful whimsy. This project is definitely on the side of whimsy, or its weird and crazy, I honestly can’t tell the difference sometimes.

I am also making peace with Substack/Medium/Social Media, I think. I have accepted that it will probably never be a significant source of income, and that is freeing to me because it allows me to avoid a “half artistic profession.” Lots of writers and artists have had to earn their bread a different way, and not depending on it for income it means I won’t have to play to algorithms or trends. I am not precluding the possibility of “building an audience,” but I’m not really making it a goal. My goal is to make the best art I can make and write what I love to write.

I have had some positive interactions on Medium despite my frustrations with their recommendation algorithm, so that is nice. I haven’t had as much traffic from Substack and I don’t really like their social media approach. They are not as greedy and creepy as Facebook, but it is still the same model of trapping attention around things that you love. I appreciate that they focus on encouraging people to pay writers, but I find that there is a pressure (if you are really trying to get paid on Substack) to write something “relevant” and/or controversial. It is nice to connect with people over reading and books, but as with all social media, it is important not to let the means overshadow the ends. Going forward I don’t plan to paywall any of my stuff except for books. It just feels disingenuous. It is also kind of insulting how little the Medium Partner Program pays. I have some stories with hundreds of claps, but they don’t seem to value claps anymore because the profit hasn’t even broken a dollar. The fact that you have to pay to become a Medium Member in order to write for the partner program doesn’t feel great, either.

As always, a huge thank you to those who have bought me a coffee. I really really appreciate it! I’ve been trying to add some behind the scenes photos and music stuff for anyone who chips in, as I am able. I’d say the biggest actual “perk” available on there are the recordings that are done for Lit Songs that I haven’t released anywhere else yet. It is probably going to be long time before the album sees the light of day publicly, but I add them on Buymeacoffee as I finish the mixes. There are currently two.

Music

I haven’t done as much music as I have wanted to, or at least, I don’t have much to show for what I have been practicing. I have mostly been playing the same things over and over. One of them is a riff that I am trying to get just right before I settle on recording the vocals for the song, the other is the song People Get Ready, written by Curtis Mayfield and performed by the Impressions as well as Jeff Beck et al. through the years. It is a beautiful song with a beautiful melody and it is really just a song that gives some relief to me. I’m guessing the people around me who have to listen to it get a little sick of hearing it, but I try not to push it too much. I think the lyrics are really timeless, you should go have a listen to both the original by The Impressions and to Jeff Beck at Ronnie Scott’s.

People get ready, there’s a train a comin’
Don’t need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesel’s hummin’
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the lord.

There ain’t no room for a hopeless sinner
Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own.
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner.
There ain’t no hiding place against the kingdom’s throne.

Podcast

Eric and I will be returning for our fourth season of Raise a Glass. We actually have two episodes recorded already, which I am in the process of editing. We’re going to be doing a read through of Lord of the Rings. So if you want to follow along you can join the Patreon for free. There are also actual perks in the form of bonus episodes and blooper content for the different tiers — But I don’t think either Eric or I have a single entrepreneurial bone in our bodies so it’s very much what we enjoy and ways we can try to make it fun for listeners.

Reading

Aside from In Dubious Battle I have been reading way too many books simultaneously again. Death’s End (Three Body Problem book 3) in Chinese, Don Quixote, some Edith Wharton short stories, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Augustine’s City of God. This month, Wharton’s Xingu stands out in my mind. It tells about a hilarious little joke pulled on some stuffy English ladies and their book club. I don’t want to spoil it because it will be better to read it for yourself, but it is one of the funniest things I have ever read and I’ve read Kurt Vonnegut. Edith Wharton was a sharp woman, and I feel like she must have been getting some revenge for something.

I am also almost done with Death’s End in Chinese and I can hardly believe it. It is about 500 pages and it has been several years since I started working through it. I feel like my reading level has definitely gone up, but that really depends on how well I can keep up with my flashcards. Rather than go for 100% comprehension, I look up about five words and add them to a flashcard app. I think it has genuinely helped my vocabulary grow because I am understanding a lot more than I did at the beginning. I also read the English simultaneously just so I can know what really happened and fill in the gaps because there are some pretty crazy things that happen in it. I think Three Body is a special series. It is not very well written in terms of the prose, and neither are the characters particularly deep, but the ideas and the execution of them is astonishing. There are some fresh insights about space and time and our relationship to the cosmos and the earth that I think makes the series worth reading.

#update #September #2026

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Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack

Starcraft Co 25- The Temple of Light, Part II: Ascent

The expedition crossed into the Temple's disruption field on the third day after landing, though nobody could identify the exact moment when ordinary flight became impossible. At first the changes were minor enough to be dismissed as atmospheric interference: navigation systems drifted by fractions of a degree, stabilizers corrected phantom motion, engines briefly lost thrust and then recovered without explanation. The deeper the transports went, however, the less predictable the failures became. One dropship, lingering to unload a damaged Goliath, rolled so violently during ascent that it lost nearly two hundred meters before its pilot recovered, and after that the commander prohibited further flights beyond the forward landing zone. Battlecruisers remained in orbit, Wraiths and Valkyries withdrew to the edge of the field, and the Ara carriers and Scouts were reduced to distant guardians of a campaign they could no longer directly influence. From that point forward, everything needed to reach the Temple would have to move on tracks, legs, or the shoulders of soldiers.

Sanctuary's jungle made the problem worse almost immediately. The canopy was so dense that daylight often reached the ground only as a diffuse green glow, while rain turned every exposed slope into mud and roots thick as industrial piping crossed the routes selected by the engineers. There were no roads in any meaningful sense, only game trails, ancient stone fragments and occasional clearings swallowed long ago by vegetation. SCVs moved at the head of the column with cutting tools, dozer blades and improvised bridge sections, while tanks and Goliaths followed behind in a procession so slow that an army accustomed to crossing continents by dropship measured progress in kilometers per day. Behind the combat vehicles came fuel, ammunition, medical equipment, spare parts, prefabricated bunkers and more SCVs whose only purpose was to repair the damage caused by hauling a mechanized army through terrain never intended to carry one.

The Renegades had spent months preparing for exactly this. They did not waste strength opposing the expedition at the perimeter of the field, where StarCraft Co. still possessed room to maneuver. They allowed the coalition to commit itself to the jungle and then began attacking the machinery of movement. The first major ambush came at a narrow stretch between a flooded basin and a steep wooded ridge, where spider mines erupted beneath the engineering vehicles just as Hydralisks opened fire from concealed positions higher up the slope. Zerglings struck the flanks almost immediately, not in enough numbers to destroy the column but in sufficient strength to pull infantry away from the road, and before the Terrans could identify the firing lanes, Renegade siege tanks began dropping shells from positions beyond visual range. Eleven vehicles were lost before StarCraft Co. located the battery, and by the time commandos reached the ridge on foot, the guns were already gone, leaving behind empty emplacements, discarded ammunition cases and another minefield laid across the pursuit route.

That pattern repeated with variations for weeks. Lurkers buried themselves beside roads cleared hours earlier and waited for medical or ammunition convoys. Vultures swept around the flanks and seeded minefields into terrain the rear echelons had not yet crossed. Photon cannons appeared on ridges that required infantry to climb for hours through wet vegetation before they could be reached, while Renegade marines occupied bunkers only long enough to force the column to deploy. Rebel zealots attacked at night, cutting into work parties and SCV camps before disappearing into the trees, and Zerglings became less a tactical threat than a constant tax on attention and ammunition. None of these attacks was designed to win the campaign outright. Their purpose was to convert distance into attrition, to force StarCraft Co. to spend shells, blood and time merely to move another kilometer.

The Renegades understood something important about the expedition: they did not need to destroy a siege tank if they could make it fire thirty rounds at an empty hillside, and they did not need to overrun a company if they could force that company to spend six hours clearing a ridge that would be abandoned by nightfall. Every bridge could be destroyed after the column crossed it. Every cleared road could be mined again. Every wounded soldier consumed supplies that could no longer arrive by air. The battlefield was not a single defensive line but three hundred and fifty kilometers of ground across which the Renegades intended to grind the coalition down by refusing it the luxury of a decisive engagement.

The Ara suffered under the same restrictions, and the campaign forced them into a form of warfare quite different from the one in which their restored fleet had excelled. Reavers, formidable in prepared battles, proved nearly useless without shuttles and were largely left behind. Dragoons could move with the armored column but required the same roads as Goliaths, while High Templar traveled under heavy protection until called forward. Zealots increasingly operated among Terran infantry, where their speed and close-combat ability compensated for the jungle's short lines of sight. The arrangement developed less through doctrine than through repeated necessity, and over time the two armies began to function with a kind of grim mechanical efficiency: Terran sensors and firepower identified threats at range, Ara warriors intercepted whatever broke through, and High Templar waited for the moment when the Renegades tried to turn harassment into mass.

By the second week, the attacks grew more sophisticated. A line of sunken colonies would force the expedition onto a narrow approach where spider mines had been laid beneath the vegetation; clearing the mines exposed engineers to Hydralisk fire, and when infantry moved forward to suppress the Hydralisks, rebel zealots struck from another direction. Renegade artillery fired from prepared positions and withdrew before counterbattery fire could settle on them. Marines and dragoons advanced behind Zerglings, using the biological mass as cover, while Vultures circled the edges and attacked the supply vehicles. The Renegades rarely stayed long enough to be destroyed. They struck, forced the column to deploy, inflicted whatever damage they could, and vanished before StarCraft Co. could bring its full weight against them.

For the first several days, StarCraft Co. answered these attacks conventionally. Patrol zones expanded, engineers cleared wider security corridors, commandos pursued withdrawing forces, and tanks fired whenever artillery could be located. Tactically, the responses were effective; operationally, they were disastrous. Every success created another patch of ground that had to be searched, secured and then abandoned. Every pursuit carried soldiers farther from the vehicles they were supposed to protect. After seventeen days of fighting, the expedition had covered barely half the distance to the Temple, and the Renegades had succeeded in turning a march into a succession of small battles on terrain of their choosing.

The commander changed the doctrine at that point, and the shift revealed how much StarCraft Co. had changed since the early years of the war. The column stopped trying to make the jungle safe. Minefields that could be bypassed were marked and left in place. Bunkers that did not control necessary ground were ignored. Renegade units withdrawing into the trees were allowed to go unless they were protecting something of strategic value. Tanks stopped answering artillery that fired only a few rounds before disappearing. Damaged vehicles were stripped for parts and abandoned rather than holding the column in place for repairs. Small Zerg concentrations were contained, not exterminated. The mission ceased to be clearing territory and returned to its actual purpose: reaching the mountain with enough combat power intact to take it.

That doctrine would have been impossible with inexperienced troops. It required soldiers who could watch Zerglings moving along a flank and trust another unit to deal with them, crews who could leave a burning vehicle behind without halting the formation, and officers who understood that an enemy firing at them did not automatically become the most important thing on the battlefield. Many of these veterans had fought on Niflheim, Aiur and Aurelia; some had survived the Western Redoubt, where Renegade Ghosts and Wraiths had made predictability lethal. They no longer reacted to every threat with equal urgency. Marines held their assigned arcs even while fighting erupted elsewhere. Goliath crews ignored distractions and concentrated on whatever threatened the column's movement. Medics triaged under fire without waiting for detailed instructions, and SCV operators repaired engines while nearby infantry exchanged fire because everyone understood that a disabled vehicle blocking the road might be more dangerous than the squad shooting from the tree line.

The Renegades escalated, and StarCraft Co. became colder in response. At one river crossing, several hundred Zerglings struck the rear of the column just as Hydralisks and marines opened fire from fortified positions on the far bank. Earlier in the campaign, StarCraft Co. would have divided its forces to preserve both sides of the crossing. Instead, the bridge was demolished after the main body passed, temporarily isolating the rear guard on the wrong side. The stranded troops had been warned in advance and fell back into prepared positions while the main force destroyed the Renegate defenses ahead; twelve hours later, engineers rebuilt the crossing and the rear guard came over through a field of Zerg corpses. At another position, Renegade tanks repeatedly shelled the column from a ridge but disappeared before counterbattery fire could settle on them. StarCraft Co. simply stopped answering. Commandos spent the night moving through the jungle instead, and when the Renegade battery opened fire the next morning, the commandos were already among the gun crews.

High Templar became invaluable as the expedition adapted. The Renegades relied on biological mass to turn small attacks into dangerous ones, and Psionic Storm punished that concentration with appalling efficiency. Zerglings moving by the hundreds could vanish in seconds beneath overlapping storms, while Hydralisk formations that gathered long enough to fire effectively often ceased to exist before they could withdraw. Renegade marines learned to scatter when they saw Templar approaching the front, which made them easier targets for Terran artillery. Ara Archons served as moving bulwarks in narrow ground where armor could not deploy properly, absorbing charges that would otherwise have reached the tanks. Over time, the coalition began to operate with a precision that made the mixed Renegade armies less adaptable than they appeared: Terran tanks broke concentrations, Templar punished mass, commandos removed positions too difficult for ordinary troops, and zealots or Archons killed whatever survived close enough to matter.

The commandos were the clearest expression of StarCraft Co.'s veterancy. They were not wasted against every obstacle. The commander had learned too much about the cost of replacing them for that. Instead, they were reserved for whatever actually stopped the expedition: an artillery position that could not be bypassed, a fortified ridge controlling the only usable approach, a minefield covered by overlapping fire, a bunker complex whose destruction would reopen the route. They crossed ground ordinary infantry could not survive, moved faster than engineers could clear, and hit positions before local commanders had time to reorganize. Renegade zealots could still kill them if they closed the distance, lurkers remained deadly, and siege fire could destroy even the best armor, but by now the Renegades needed highly coordinated defenses merely to slow them.

By the fourth week, the campaign began to turn. The Renegades still ambushed the column, but their attacks increasingly met formations that had already anticipated the likely sequence. A minefield detonated and the army flowed around the wreckage without stopping. Zerglings attacked ammunition carriers and found firebats already assigned to ride with them. Lurkers emerged beneath a medical convoy only to discover redundant ground detection traveling in overlapping groups. Renegate artillery fired and found that commandos had spent the previous night mapping not the guns themselves but the routes from which their crews were likely to withdraw. The enemy could still kill soldiers and destroy vehicles, but it was becoming harder to buy time with those losses.

The jungle behind the expedition became a long trail of abandoned equipment, temporary fortifications and roads that vanished back beneath foliage almost as soon as the rear elements passed. StarCraft Co. no longer cared. Once the ammunition and medical columns crossed a piece of ground, holding it had little value. The army carried enough SCVs to rebuild roads and enough engineering equipment to recreate its own logistics as it advanced. Renegade units occasionally reoccupied abandoned territory and announced that they had severed the Terran line of supply, only to discover that the principal depots had already moved forward and that the column no longer depended on the route they had captured.

The mountain first appeared on the thirty-sixth day, a dark wall rising above the jungle with its summit hidden behind cloud. The Temple itself remained invisible, but its presence could be inferred from the empty sky. No aircraft moved anywhere near the horizon. Even the Renegades' Overlords had been forced to the ground or left outside the field. Fifty kilometers from the mountain's base, StarCraft Co. halted on a broad shelf of elevated terrain between two rivers and began constructing the position that would decide the campaign.

The forward base took shape with the speed of something practiced too many times to require discussion. SCVs cut firing lanes through the jungle, laid foundations for bunkers and built ammunition revetments while tanks rolled directly into preassigned sectors. Within a day, the perimeter possessed overlapping artillery coverage; within three, repair facilities and medical stations were operating behind hardened positions. Roads radiated from the base toward water sources, observation posts and the planned approach to the mountain. For more than a month the expedition had been fighting while moving, always accepting engagements on imperfect ground because the objective remained ahead. Now, for the first time since entering the disruption field, StarCraft Co. had enough room, ammunition and armor concentrated in one place to fight the way it preferred.

The Renegades understood the danger immediately and attacked before the perimeter was fully mature. Their first assault came at night, with Zerglings striking from three directions while Vultures raced along the unfinished southern approach laying mines behind the outer defenses. Hydralisks followed the biological wave, marines fired through the gaps, dragoons engaged bunkers from farther back, and rebel zealots entered from the eastern jungle badly enough to reach the SCV lines before Ara warriors stopped them. The second attack came before the wounded from the first had cleared the medical stations, this time supported by siege tanks. The third brought more than a thousand Zerglings. The fourth began with lurkers already burrowed inside ground StarCraft Co. had believed secure.

For five days the Renegades tried to destroy the base before it became permanent, and for five days StarCraft Co. refused to be hurried. SCVs continued building while shells landed around them. Tanks were repaired under fire. High Templar rotated between sectors so that no part of the perimeter exhausted its psionic support. Bunkers destroyed at night reappeared before dawn, often several dozen meters from their original positions. Commandos counterattacked only when a Renegade concentration threatened construction or ammunition storage, and the rest of the time the company let the enemy come.

On the sixth day, they came again, and this time the base was ready.

The Zerglings reached the outer approaches and disappeared beneath overlapping siege fire. Hydralisks spreading through the jungle encountered firing lanes that had not existed the day before. High Templar waited until the biological formations reached their densest point and then dropped storms across them, while Terran tanks fired into the units still advancing behind. Vultures hit minefields placed specifically along routes used in earlier attacks. Rebel zealots broke through on the west and found Ara Archons positioned behind the bunkers. Renegade artillery opened from three ridges, only to discover that StarCraft Co. had spent the previous five days calculating their likely battery positions and moving its own guns accordingly. Commandos came out of concealed routes beyond the perimeter and struck one battery from the rear before the crews realized they had been flanked.

The entire assault lasted less than half an hour. When the Renegades withdrew, most of the force they had committed remained on the ground around the base.

From that point forward, the war changed direction.

StarCraft Co. had spent more than a month accepting unfavorable engagements because movement mattered more than destruction. Now the Renegades were being forced to attack a prepared position occupied by soldiers who had already fought every species and weapon system represented in their coalition. The veterans inside the perimeter had survived Aurelia's planetary battles and the Western Redoubt's ambushes; some had fought Zerg since the company had been small enough to transport its entire army in a handful of ships. Every bunker had overlapping support, every tank position had alternates, every likely approach had been mapped, and every mixed-unit assault the Renegades could conceive resembled something StarCraft Co. had already survived somewhere else.

The counteroffensive began the following morning.

Its first targets were not the mountain defenses but the production systems feeding them. Intelligence accumulated during the march had identified spawning pools, Hydralisk dens, Terran barracks and factories, and Protoss gateways scattered throughout the last fifty kilometers. During the jungle campaign these positions had been obstacles too costly to attack while moving. From a fortified base with repaired armor and deep ammunition stocks, they became entries on a schedule.

StarCraft Co. dismantled them methodically. Sunken colonies were shelled until they ceased firing rather than stormed by infantry. Photon cannons disappeared beneath concentrated artillery. Spider minefields were triggered with remote vehicles or simply bypassed. Suspected lurker positions received saturation fire before anyone crossed them. Commandos moved only after the artillery had done everything artillery could do, and High Templar waited behind the assault formations for the inevitable biological counterattack. When Renegade units withdrew toward another defensive complex, StarCraft Co. rarely chased them immediately. The tanks shelled the destination instead.

The Renegades attempted to return to the tactics that had made the jungle march so costly, but the nature of the battlefield had changed. Their defenses were now tied to infrastructure they could not abandon indefinitely. A spawning complex meant replacement Zerg. A factory meant tanks and Vultures. A gateway represented warriors who could not be replaced once the structure was gone. StarCraft Co. deliberately attacked those points and forced the Renegades to choose between preserving their mobility and defending the systems that made continued resistance possible. Every time they chose to defend, they concentrated; every time they concentrated, siege fire and Psionic Storm made them pay for it.

One major complex north of the base demonstrated the new arithmetic. Several spawning pools, Hydralisk dens, Terran factories and Protoss gateways had been built into a wide jungle basin under the protection of tanks and photon cannons, with several thousand defenders available. StarCraft Co. surrounded only three sides and deliberately left the northern road open. Artillery began before dawn and continued for hours, grinding down fixed defenses while commandos prevented counterbattery teams from approaching the guns. When the assault finally began, Ara zealots and Archons moved ahead of Terran infantry while High Templar waited behind them. The Renegades committed reserves to stop the breakthrough, and the Templar dropped storms across the reinforcement routes. Then, without warning, StarCraft Co. stopped advancing.

The defenders took the northern road.

Six kilometers away, another line of siege tanks was already deployed.

By sunset the complex was burning, and the force that had defended it had ceased to exist.

There was nothing theatrical about the operations that followed. StarCraft Co. no longer needed spectacle. A Zerg production cluster was isolated from its mineral supply and reduced over two days. A Renegade armored position was encouraged to expend ammunition against repeated feints before commandos destroyed its storage bunkers. One Protoss fortress occupied such strong high ground that a direct attack would have cost hundreds of lives, so engineers cut a road around the opposite ridge and the army passed it entirely; when its defenders finally emerged to attack the rear of the column, waiting tanks destroyed them in open ground. The commander measured progress in production capacity eliminated, usable roads gained and hostile formations removed. Ground had no emotional value.

Within twelve days the principal Renegade production network below the mountain had collapsed, and the ascent began before the defenders had time to reorganize.

The lower slopes still carried jungle, but the vegetation thinned rapidly with altitude and exposed the fortifications constructed above. Photon cannons occupied stone terraces. Sunken colonies grew into narrow passes. Hydralisks fired from caves and prepared trenches, while Zerglings waited behind the defensive lines to counterattack whenever infantry moved too far ahead of armor. Renegade tanks were positioned higher on the mountain where shells could descend onto the climbing force while the guns themselves remained difficult to reach.

StarCraft Co. advanced in bounds. One group of tanks deployed while another moved, and the Goliaths stayed close enough to protect the column from ground assaults even though there was nothing left in the sky for them to shoot. Commandos climbed routes ordinary infantry could not use and struck cannon positions from unexpected directions. Ara zealots became increasingly important as the roads narrowed, while dragoons provided direct fire against hardened points that tanks could not address cleanly. High Templar remained near the center of every assault group, waiting for the inevitable moment when Renegate commanders attempted to solve a tactical problem by throwing more bodies into it.

The closer the coalition came to the summit, the more the Renegades began feeding troops downhill from the army they had accumulated around the Temple. Hundreds of Zerglings became thousands. Hydralisk groups expanded into massed formations. Marines and firebats reinforced positions that had previously relied on static defenses, and more rebel zealots appeared among the trenches. What the local commanders saw as reinforcement, StarCraft Co. saw as depletion. The army on the plateau existed for one purpose: to overwhelm the Ancient Ones through numbers. Every unit sent downhill made the battle above easier.

The commander began encouraging the process. Several attacks were deliberately halted after making contact, inviting the Renegades to reinforce threatened positions. Once the additional troops arrived, the tanks resumed bombardment and High Templar waited until the approaches were packed before casting storms. Commandos abandoned defensible ground so the Renegades would reoccupy it, and artillery destroyed the position with its new occupants inside. The expedition had entered the jungle allowing the enemy to control when and where contact occurred. By the time it reached the mountain, StarCraft Co. controlled the rhythm of the fighting almost completely.

The summit finally came into view near the end of the second month. The Temple of Light rose from the center of an immense plateau, its upper structure so large and geometrically severe that it looked less constructed than imposed upon the mountain. Pale stone and crystalline surfaces reflected the sun through gaps in the cloud, and above it there was only empty sky. No Overlords drifted over the Renegate lines. No Scouts circled the plateau. Nothing flew.

The ground below the Temple, by contrast, was almost completely covered by soldiers.

Thousands of Hydralisks stood in dense formations around the outer approaches, with Zerglings gathered in enormous holding areas behind them. Terran marines and firebats filled trenches and prepared positions between rows of Goliaths and siege tanks, while rebel Protoss zealots stood in ordered ranks and dragoons occupied the higher terraces. Production structures crowded the rear of the plateau, many unfinished or underfed now that the network below had been destroyed. The army was so large that even officers who had fought at Aurelia stopped speaking when the first observation images arrived.

The significance of the formation was immediately apparent. The Renegades had not built that army to defend the Temple. They had built it to attack the Temple, and whatever waited beneath the mountain had frightened an enemy accustomed to sacrificing Zerg by the million. They had spent months accumulating enough bodies to overwhelm the Ancient Ones by arithmetic alone, only for StarCraft Co. to arrive before that number had been reached. Now the army intended for the Temple turned toward the coalition climbing onto the plateau.

The commander studied the images, asked how much ammunition remained, and received the answer he needed. There was enough.

The attack began before dawn.

StarCraft Co.'s tanks opened from below the plateau, their first salvos falling into the Hydralisk formations while Renegate artillery answered almost immediately. For several minutes the mountain shook beneath counterbattery fire as guns on both sides shifted between volleys and commandos moved against exposed positions along the flanks. Photon cannons fired down the approaches until concentrated artillery silenced them, and then the Renegades released the Zerg.

Thousands of Zerglings poured over the plateau and down the mountain roads, followed by Hydralisks, marines and zealots in a mass intended not to delay the coalition but to crush it outright. The High Templar moved forward under infantry protection and waited until the first waves compressed against the narrow approaches. Psionic storms tore across the slopes, ripping entire sections out of the advance before the survivors reached Terran lines occupied by firebats, zealots and Archons. Siege tanks continued firing over them into the formations behind, while commandos attacked wherever the pressure threatened to become unmanageable, withdrawing behind conventional infantry long enough for medics to restore them before returning somewhere else.

After three hours, the commander ordered the coalition forward.

StarCraft Co. and Ara climbed directly into the army coming down.

The battle spread across the southern half of the plateau and became the kind of fighting in which veterancy mattered more than numbers. Goliaths engaged dragoons at ranges measured in dozens of meters while firebats burned corridors through Zerglings and Ara zealots moved into the openings. Hydralisks tore through marine formations until tank fire shattered their concentrations. Renegate firebats held trenches long enough to slow the advance and were overrun by Archons. Commandos became the spearhead wherever the coalition stalled, striking a position at full speed, falling back behind ordinary infantry while medics worked on them, and then appearing again at another point before local commanders could adjust.

The Renegades still possessed more soldiers, but StarCraft Co. possessed an army that already understood what every one of those soldiers was capable of doing. Marines meant suppressive fire and fortified ground. Vultures meant mines and movement. Hydralisks meant concentrated ranged pressure. Zerglings meant mass and speed. Zealots meant close combat. Dragoons meant heavy direct fire. Siege tanks meant zones that could not be crossed casually. None of it was novel anymore. Officers did not need to discover counters while soldiers died because the answers had been learned years earlier, often at terrible cost.

By afternoon, the Renegade line began to fail in pieces. A Hydralisk formation collapsed under artillery and exposed the Terran infantry beside it. Commandos entered the gap and destroyed an ammunition position. Ara zealots followed them through. Dragoons turned to contain the breach and exposed themselves to Goliath fire, while Zerglings committed to seal the same opening ran directly into Psionic Storm. Every attempt to repair one sector weakened another because the army possessed no untouched reserve outside the battle. The force meant to be spent against the Ancient Ones was being consumed instead by StarCraft Co.

The commander never allowed the Renegades the time required to recover. When one sector broke, tank fire shifted immediately toward the next. Units attempting to withdraw around the Temple encountered commandos cutting across the plateau. Ara Archons advanced through positions too damaged to remain defensible but still dangerous enough to slow ordinary infantry, while dragoons fired continuously into formations trying to reorganize farther back. The contest for the summit gradually ceased to be a battle over terrain and became the deliberate destruction of the force occupying it.

By sunset, the plateau belonged to the coalition.

The cost was substantial. Hundreds of StarCraft Co. personnel were dead or wounded. Ara formations had suffered badly in the close fighting, several commando companies required consolidation, and tanks burned along the mountain approaches. The summit itself was covered with wreckage and bodies from all three species. Yet the Renegate concentration that had taken months to assemble was gone, the production system supporting it had been destroyed, and the surviving enemy forces were scattered back into jungle the coalition no longer needed to cross.

The Temple remained untouched at the center of the plateau.

SCVs began building fortifications around it before the battlefield had fully cooled, establishing ammunition dumps, bunkers and medical stations among the wreckage of Renegate defenses. Tanks were positioned facing outward. Ara warriors formed a second perimeter closer to the Temple while Talandar's specialists examined the entrances the Renegades had already opened. At the largest of those entrances, the commander and Talandar found Renegate bodies scattered along the descending corridor, some killed by weapons the Ara recognized and others by something less obvious. The upper levels had been penetrated, but the advance had stopped long before reaching whatever lay beneath.

The army on the plateau had not merely been waiting for enough troops.

It had been waiting because the survivors who came back out had told the others what was inside.

For two days StarCraft Co. repaired equipment, reorganized shattered companies and hauled supplies onto the summit. The Ara performed rites for their dead and for the guardians they expected soon to kill. Engineers mapped the upper passages already explored by the Renegades, while medical officers established casualty stations close to the entrance and the surviving commando companies were ordered to rest. Behind them lay three hundred and fifty kilometers of jungle, broken roads and burned positions; around them lay the remains of the army that had intended to storm the Temple.

Ahead lay the reason that army had hesitated.

StarCraft Co. had reached the mountain, broken the Renegades around it, and secured the entrance. Now, with the surface war finished and the coalition gathered beneath a silent structure older than Protoss history, they prepared to descend.

Hey I almost forgot to write that I saw the moon the other day, not full but with a warm, almost orange glow, and the sky was deep blue with stars?

But I’m smitten by a terrible illness (a cold) and have been bedridden inside, while the sun is shining down the last summer days

Or the moon, as I described.

It’s a comforting thought, the indifference of nature or the world, but it’s unsettling nonetheless

I am the centre only of my own world, just like everyone else, including the frogs

~for Lisa Couturier

Why do we gaze at stars? Birds used to swim, before they could fly. The longer we swim, the more likely we'll grow wings.

The sailors, then, is that why they watch you? Yes, otherwise they’ll never be free.

So, sailors are like fish caterpillars, waiting to emerge? Yes, like an unborn star.

How are stars born? Light, balance, and force.

Just those things? Maybe some fairy dust.

What happens when you fall? A million wishes are made.

Who do you fall for? The purest of hearts.

Do their wishes come true? Look for yourself.

#poetry

Starcraft Co 25- The Temple of Light, Part I: Negotiation

The penultimate mission in Starcraft Co. will also be broken into three chapters, like Mission 23. For the first time, one of the chapters will just be story-building and dialogue, no combat. Narratively it makes sense due to the complexity of this sequence. Enjoy!

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For nearly a year after Aurelia, the war became easier. Not easy, and never cheap, but predictable in a way it had not been since the Renegades first demonstrated that they could breed and control the Zerg. StarCraft Co. no longer needed spectacular victories. The spectacular victory had already happened. Aurelia had destroyed the largest concentration of Renegade military power, eliminated much of their Zerg-production establishment and forced the surviving factions to defend an increasingly fragmented network of worlds. StarCraft Co. spent the following year converting that victory into strategic exhaustion. Shipyards disappeared under Yamato fire. Mineral worlds changed hands. Brood-control installations were raided before they could mature. Convoys were intercepted and industrial systems sabotaged. Worlds too expensive to occupy permanently were stripped of military infrastructure and abandoned after anything useful was removed or destroyed. The Renegades could still fight and occasionally win, but their victories increasingly accomplished nothing except delaying the next attack.

The most important change was economic. Moria continued pouring minerals into the Terran war economy while captured industrial systems returned to production. Regional governments that once guarded their remaining battlecruisers as irreplaceable assets were commissioning new hulls. StarCraft Co. standardized ammunition, communications equipment and replacement parts across forces that had once belonged to dozens of separate UIC commands. The Renegades moved in the opposite direction. Every lost refinery reduced the number of Wraith sorties they could sustain. Every destroyed shipyard made the next capital-ship loss permanent. Every captured technical complex deprived them of personnel who could not be bred like Zerglings. StarCraft Co. intelligence no longer asked whether the Renegades could be defeated. The question increasingly discussed at headquarters was how quickly they could be hollowed out before the remaining factions fragmented or retreated beyond the practical limits of pursuit.

The Ara were conspicuously absent from most of that campaign. They had returned to their own territory after Aurelia, carrying with them a golden armada diminished by the Western Redoubt and an internal war that had never stopped merely because they had fought alongside Terrans. Communications remained open but sparse. Talandar sent occasional strategic reports and received StarCraft Co. intelligence in return, yet months passed without a request for joint operations. Nobody at headquarters considered the silence unusual. The Ara had their own renegades to destroy, and the alliance had never required either side to subordinate every other interest to the Terran war.

The message that eventually arrived was therefore notable before anyone knew what it contained. It carried Talandar's personal authentication and requested an immediate conference with the commander under the highest level of secure communications available to both governments. No staff summary preceded it. No operational attachment accompanied it. Talandar appeared alone when the connection opened, without the military advisers who normally surrounded him. His manner was formal even by Ara standards. “There is a world whose location my people have withheld from yours,” he began. “We withheld it from the UIC before you, and from every Terran authority that preceded it. Few among the Protoss possess its coordinates. What I tell you now has been guarded since before the oldest histories of my tribe.”

The world had no Terran name. Ara records translated its ancient designation imperfectly as something close to Sanctuary, though Talandar warned that the word carried religious meanings the Terran translation lost. It was a dense jungle world orbiting an unremarkable star, valuable neither for conventional minerals nor for settlement. Its importance lay on a mountain near the center of the largest continent. At its summit stood a Xel'Naga structure known among the Ara as the Temple of Light. Nobody knew when it had been built. Protoss records treated the Temple as ancient when their earliest surviving accounts first mentioned it. The visible structure was enormous, but according to tradition it represented only the uppermost portion of a complex descending through the mountain beneath it.

The Temple possessed two properties that made the command staff stop treating the briefing as religious history. The first was an apparently inexhaustible source of vespene. The Ancient Ones who inhabited the mountain had drawn upon it for millennia without measurable depletion. Ara scholars had long suspected that the Temple did not contain a conventional deposit at all, but some Xel'Naga mechanism capable of producing or concentrating vespene continuously. The second property extended far beyond the mountain. For hundreds of kilometers around the Temple, sustained flight became impossible. Engines functioned. Reactors remained stable. Aircraft could sometimes enter the outer edge of the affected region for short periods. As they approached the mountain, however, lift systems, guidance equipment and propulsion behaved unpredictably until remaining airborne became suicidal. Protoss craft were no more immune than Terran ones. Even organisms such as Mutalisks and Overlords lost the ability to maintain flight once sufficiently close to the Temple.

That explained why nobody had simply seized it from orbit. The remainder of Talandar's explanation made the problem larger. An ancient Protoss tribe lived beneath the Temple and had apparently done so for longer than the Ara possessed reliable historical records. Their true name had been lost outside their own society; modern Protoss referred to them simply as the Ancient Ones. They neither expanded nor participated in Protoss politics. They protected the Temple. Earlier tribes had challenged them over the centuries, usually during periods of upheaval when possession of an inexhaustible vespene source appeared worth the risk. Those expeditions had stopped. The Ancient Ones had grown stronger through prolonged exposure to whatever energies existed beneath the mountain, and eventually the rest of Protoss society accepted the simplest solution: leave the Temple alone.

The commander listened until Talandar finished and then asked the question the Executor had conspicuously avoided. “Why are you telling us now?” Talandar's expression hardened. “Because the Renegades have found it.” The discovery appeared to have occurred months earlier through captured Protoss records. A Renegade expedition had established itself outside the Temple's flight-disruption zone and begun moving ground forces inward. It was not a raid. Reconnaissance suggested an army of extraordinary size, including Terran, Zerg and rebel Protoss elements. They had already established production infrastructure on the surface and were accumulating additional troops rather than attacking immediately. Talandar believed they understood at least part of what waited beneath the mountain. “They do not hesitate because they have abandoned their purpose,” he said. “They hesitate because they have learned fear. They intend to place so many bodies before the guardians that courage will no longer be required.”

The commander asked how long before the attack. Talandar could not say. Weeks, perhaps. A few months at most. The Renegades were still building. The Ara could attack them, but the flight-disruption field removed much of the advantage provided by their restored fleet. Carriers, Scouts, Corsairs, arbiters and shuttles could bring forces only to the outer limits of the affected region. From there, an army would have to cross hundreds of kilometers of jungle and broken terrain against an enemy that had spent months preparing ground defenses. Talandar had concluded that the Ara alone could not guarantee success before the Renegades reached the Temple. “Therefore I invoke the bond between our peoples,” he said. “You came to us when Aiur stood beneath rebellion. We came when Aurelia threatened to consume your armies. Now I ask that you stand beside us once more. The Temple must not fall.”

The commander agreed immediately that the Renegades could not be allowed to possess it. He did not agree to the mission. “What happens after we win?” Talandar understood the question. “The Renegades will be destroyed. The Temple will remain beneath the protection granted to it since antiquity.” The commander asked whether StarCraft Co. would be permitted to examine the Xel'Naga mechanisms. “No.” Would Ara? “No.” Would the Ancient Ones permit either side to remove vespene? “They permit no intrusion.” The commander leaned back. “Then you are asking us to move an army three hundred and fifty kilometers overland, without air support, through prepared Renegade defenses, save a strategic resource capable of changing the war, and then walk away from it.” Talandar answered that he was asking StarCraft Co. to prevent its desecration. “You're asking us to preserve it for people who won't use it,” the commander replied.

The temperature of the conference changed almost immediately. Talandar replied that the Temple was not an abandoned mineral field to be divided under a wartime extraction agreement. It was a Xel'Naga sanctuary older than either civilization's recorded history, protected by a people whose entire existence had been devoted to that duty. Terran need did not create Terran ownership. The commander answered that sacred status did not make the Temple strategically irrelevant. If Talandar's description was accurate, the Renegades were willing to sacrifice an enormous army to reach it because they believed whatever lay beneath the mountain could alter the war. StarCraft Co. would be asked to sacrifice its own people preventing that outcome while deliberately refusing to determine whether the Renegades were correct.

Talandar's response came with considerably less diplomatic distance than usual. “There are boundaries your power does not erase, Commander. You have grown accustomed to taking possession of what your enemies cannot hold. This is not Moria. This is not a captured shipyard. You speak of entering a place before which generations of my people have bowed their heads and choosing what shall be removed because your calculations declare it useful.” The commander did not retreat from the comparison. “Moria bought the fleet that saved us on Aurelia. The fleet that your people took home afterward to fight your war. We used what we had because the alternative was losing. If there's something under that mountain that can end this war sooner, I'm not going to bury Terrans because everyone is afraid to touch it.”

For several seconds neither spoke. Talandar finally answered that the commander fundamentally misunderstood the danger. Even if the Ara agreed to such an intrusion, the Ancient Ones would not. They did not recognize Ara authority over the Temple and would certainly not recognize Terran claims. “They have broken Protoss armies that sought what you now propose to take. Their warriors have stood beneath that mountain longer than your species has crossed the void. You speak as though defeating the Renegades outside will place the Temple in your hands. It will not. If your soldiers descend beneath it, the guardians will kill them.” The commander met the warning without hesitation. “Let us worry about the defenders.” Talandar stared at him, and the commander continued. “You called us because you don't have enough ground force to guarantee this. You called us because our commandos can break positions your fleet can't reach, because our tanks can move through that jungle, and because when the Renegades put twenty times our numbers in front of us on Aurelia, we destroyed them. So don't tell me we're necessary all the way to the front door and then suddenly incapable of making decisions once we get through it. If those defenders can stop us, we'll find that out. If they can't, then the Temple has been sitting on something that could help end an existential war because nobody wanted to offend the dead.” The last phrase produced the first visible flash of anger from Talandar. “They are not dead.” The commander answered, “Then they can tell us no themselves.” The conference ended without agreement.

The dispute that followed was far more severe on the Ara side than StarCraft Co. initially understood. Talandar's report ignited an argument that cut through military, political and religious divisions simultaneously. To many among the Ara, StarCraft Co.'s demand was not merely aggressive diplomacy. It was sacrilege expressed as contract negotiation. The Ancient Ones had never betrayed the Protoss, attacked the Ara or aided the Renegades. They had maintained a charge older than the tribes themselves. The idea that Ara warriors might fight beside Terrans to break their defenses and carry Xel'Naga artifacts out of the mountain was abhorrent. Several senior voices argued that the alliance should be allowed to fracture before the Ara consented to such an act. If StarCraft Co. insisted upon desecrating the Temple, they argued, then the Ara should deny them its location and confront the Renegades themselves.

Another faction reached almost the opposite conclusion. The Temple's sanctity had always rested partly on the assumption that nobody could take it. The Ancient Ones had made themselves so formidable that every tribe which coveted their power eventually abandoned the attempt. But the Renegades had broken that equilibrium. They possessed Zerg in numbers no ancient Protoss challenger could have imagined, and they were already accumulating the bodies required to overwhelm the defenders. If the Temple truly contained a means of producing vespene without depletion and Xel'Naga technologies beyond modern understanding, allowing those resources to remain untouched while both Protoss and Terrans fought for survival began to look less like reverence and more like self-destruction. Some Ara military leaders were reluctant to admit another truth: they wanted the Temple's power. Their own rebellion continued. Their fleet had been diminished at Aurelia. If the ancient prohibition was going to be broken regardless, they preferred that the Ara stand on the side that emerged holding half of what lay beneath the mountain.

The two positions appeared irreconcilable. Meetings stretched for hours while Talandar's council argued over whether possession could justify desecration, whether existential danger could suspend ancient obligations, whether cooperation with StarCraft Co. made the Ara participants in sacrilege or merely prevented a greater one. Some demanded that Talandar withdraw the request for Terran aid immediately. Others warned that doing so could condemn both civilizations. At one point the argument moved beyond policy into theology, with one elder insisting that a people who violated their oldest sanctuaries merely because circumstances became difficult would eventually discover they possessed nothing sacred at all.

It was an elderly Judicator who finally ended the argument, not by resolving any of those questions but by declaring them irrelevant. He had spoken little during the preceding sessions and had shown no enthusiasm for entering the Temple. When Talandar finally invited his judgment, the old Protoss regarded the assembled council for a long moment before answering. “We speak as though the choice remains ours. It does not. If the Renegades gain access to the Temple, we are doomed. If StarCraft Co. seizes it without us, we either permit them the entire bounty or make war upon an ally whose strength has been tested beside our own. Neither course preserves what we claim to protect. The decision was made for us before these negotiations began. We must simply play out our role.”

The statement quieted the chamber because nobody could identify the missing alternative. Denying StarCraft Co. the coordinates accomplished nothing; the Renegades already possessed them, and if the Ara failed to stop the assault, StarCraft Co. would eventually learn where the Temple was from captured records or the consequences of Renegade victory. Fighting StarCraft Co. afterward was theoretically possible and strategically absurd. The Terrans had just broken the greatest Renegade army ever assembled, survived a planetary insurgency designed specifically to destroy them and spent the following year growing stronger. Even victory over them would cripple the Ara while their own renegades remained undefeated. Allowing StarCraft Co. to take the Temple alone was scarcely more acceptable. It would preserve Ara innocence only by surrendering every Xel'Naga discovery to a foreign power.

The humiliation was not that StarCraft Co. had defeated the Ara in negotiation. It was that the Ara suddenly understood there had never been much negotiation to begin with. Events had already narrowed the future to outcomes they disliked. StarCraft Co. merely possessed the power to say so without ceremony. Talandar later described the realization to one of his advisers with unusual bitterness: “We came to them believing we possessed something they required our permission to touch. We discovered instead that we possessed knowledge of where it was.” The distinction was difficult for a proud civilization to accept.

For StarCraft Co., the calculation remained considerably simpler. The commander offered to recognize permanent Ara custodianship over the sanctuary world and made clear that StarCraft Co. had no interest in territorial sovereignty over the Temple. What it required was access. If the coalition reached the Temple, StarCraft Co. would lead any operation beneath it. Terran and Ara specialists would jointly examine whatever was found. Portable technology, resources and usable knowledge would be divided according to terms established before the expedition. Neither side would conceal discoveries from the other, and neither would independently claim Xel'Naga technology recovered during the operation. Talandar asked what share StarCraft Co. expected. The commander answered, “Half,” and the negotiation nearly collapsed again.

Ara representatives argued that equal division ignored the fact that the Temple belonged to Protoss history, existed on a Protoss sanctuary world and had been protected by Protoss lives for millennia. StarCraft Co. replied that historical association was not military contribution. Terran forces would provide the majority of the heavy ground equipment, much of the expedition's logistics and the commandos expected to break the Renegade defenses. The Ara countered that their High Templar and Archons would be indispensable without air support. StarCraft Co. agreed and returned to the same number. Fifty percent. The argument became sufficiently heated that Voss privately described it as the strangest procurement negotiation of his career: two civilizations were discussing the division of artifacts neither owned, inside a Temple neither had entered, protected by an army neither had defeated.

Talandar finally asked what else the commander wanted, because by then everyone understood that the Temple was only part of the negotiation. “A commitment,” the commander answered. Talandar reminded him that one already existed. “Not the kind I mean.” The commander placed the strategic map of Renegade territory between them. It contained far fewer hostile systems than it had a year earlier. “We help you take this world. We help you secure the Temple. We go inside together, and whatever we find, we divide. In return, Ara doesn't go home afterward. Not this time. Your internal war matters. I understand that. Ours matters too. You commit forces to the Renegade campaign until their capacity to wage organized war is destroyed. Not until the next crisis on Aiur. Not until your council decides the debt from Aurelia is paid. Until this is finished.”

The demand produced a longer silence than the argument over the Temple. For the Ara, it meant converting an alliance of reciprocal interventions into a strategic commitment to Terran victory. For StarCraft Co., it meant something equally significant. The company was offering to help violate one of the oldest Protoss sanctuaries in existence and share the consequences with the Ara rather than simply seizing whatever it could. Neither side could pretend afterward that the relationship remained a convenient wartime partnership. The Judicator who had ended the Ara debate was present this time. He did not intervene. He merely watched Talandar, and the Executor understood the same arithmetic applied here as before. If the Temple's power was as great as their oldest records suggested, then allowing the Renegades to survive afterward would be an absurdity. They were already crossing the line. They might as well ensure that crossing it accomplished something permanent.

Talandar spoke at last. “You ask my people to bind their strength to yours until your enemy is broken. You ask us to enter a sanctuary our ancestors would not profane, to raise our weapons against guardians who have committed no betrayal, and to divide with you what they have protected since before either of us drew breath.” The commander answered simply, “Yes.” Talandar continued, “And if what waits beneath the Temple is greater than either of us imagines?” The commander looked toward the map between them. “Then it's better that we find it before the Renegades do.”

When Talandar answered, his voice carried none of the anger of their first conference. The Ara had argued through outrage, ambition, fear and theology and arrived at the place strategy had put them from the beginning. “Then hear the covenant I offer. The Temple shall remain beneath Ara custodianship. Neither your people nor mine shall claim sovereignty over the sanctuary through conquest. We shall approach its depths together. What knowledge and resources may be removed shall be divided equally, and neither people shall conceal from the other what is discovered there. The Ara shall commit forces to the destruction of the Renegade war power until that purpose is accomplished. In return, StarCraft Co. shall lead the campaign to reclaim the Temple and shall bear with us the consequences of what follows.” The commander extended his hand across the table. “Agreed.” Talandar regarded the gesture for a moment before taking it. “There is one matter your confidence has not altered, Commander. The Ancient Ones will not recognize this agreement.” The commander released his hand. “Then we'd better reach them before the Renegades do.”

Preparations began within the hour. The strategic problem immediately became apparent in the force manifests. StarCraft Co. could move an army to Sanctuary, but it could not fight the campaign the way it had learned to fight almost every major operation since Niflheim. Battlecruisers could secure orbit but not approach the Temple. Wraiths and Valkyries could protect the landing zone and no farther. Science vessels could operate only around the margins of the disruption field. Ara carriers and Scouts faced the same restriction. Shuttles and dropships could carry troops to the edge of the affected region, but once the expedition crossed it, everything required for the campaign would have to move overland.

The commander selected a landing zone approximately three hundred and fifty kilometers from the Temple, beyond the point where flight became unreliable but close enough to minimize the march. Heavy transports began assembling tanks, Goliaths, SCVs, ammunition, prefabricated fortifications and supplies sufficient to sustain a ground army without aerial resupply. Several companies of the newest commandos were assigned to the expedition. Ara manifests emphasized zealots, dragoons, High Templar and Archons while reavers were largely excluded; without shuttles, their mobility would be hopeless across hundreds of kilometers of jungle and mountain terrain. Engineers studied maps of a world for which no useful modern roads existed.

When the first transports descended through Sanctuary's atmosphere, the Temple was still far beyond the horizon. The jungle beneath them stretched unbroken toward distant mountains, and somewhere beyond those mountains the Renegades were assembling an army large enough to attack something they themselves were afraid to face. Farther still, beneath a structure older than recorded Protoss civilization, the Ancient Ones waited exactly as they had for thousands of years. StarCraft Co. had agreed to save their Temple, but nobody had agreed to leave it to them.

Clermont-Ferrand appears to be a city of music, on Saturdays anyway. In the Cathedral of Notre Dame de l’Assomption, a group led by a woman wearing a summer dress, rehearse for an event of some kind. She begins singing and her contralto voice, helped by the PA, echoes through the stone vaults. She swings one of her arms rhythmically, mustering her accompaniest to keep time. The way school music teachers keep reluctant students in line. I half suspect she may also be a teacher, when she isn’t performing in gothic cathedrals.

She stops for a moment and the echo of her voice decays softly into the shadows. She speaks to the group in front of her about something, away from the microphone. Then;

“On y va!”


 And she begins singing again. A tour group enter from the side door and, confused by the lilting voice of the singer, stop at the front to watch her. We are all secretly thrilled by the unexpected live performance.

Behind the singer, to one side of the altar a priest wearing the kind of headset preferred by theatre stage-managers stands with another woman, this one in jeans and a tee shirt. They stare intently at some piece of equipement on the floor, having a discussion only they can hear. It’s exactly the kind of thing roadies can be seen doing before gigs, in more secular settings around the world. In another life perhaps that would have been the priest’s calling.

Leaving the cool cathedral, in the adjacent square, there appears to be a festival for ham, and associated pork products, getting ready to open. The jarring juxtaposition is heightened by a brass ensemble playing unique cover versions of popular songs. Stopping for coffee, we pick a table with decent shade at a place called The Magma Cafe. The pyroclastic theme is understandable for a city built in a volcanic basin. We order, and sit enjoying the morning heat. The coffee arrives and I begin to feel alert again. At about this point we realise the brass band is covering Killing in the Name Of, including full vocal in French. This seems to be a step too far for the cathedral wardens who pull the doors shut, leaving tourists outside to wonder if the cathedral is open.

It is, for September, unseasonably warm in many parts of France. The French weather service has issued a heatwave warning for many areas in the South East, with temperatures expected to reach 39.5°C (104°F) around Perpignan. This follows a summer of record breaking wildfires, which came on the heels of record breaking floods at the start of the year. Will it be enough to herald the kind of change needed by politicians in Europe? Only time will tell.

A lot of buildings in the older part of Clermont-Ferrand are made with the same black volcanic stone as the cathedral. It makes them look sooty, like relics from the era when coal fires and diesel fumes coated whole cities with layers of black carbon. But this is the stone’s natural colour. Reminding me of the architecture of Edinburgh, and the volcanic basalt used in buildings there.

I sit drinking coffee and feeling self conscious about my jeans. I bought them months ago, and they are too long for me. I intended to take them up, but other things kept taking priority, so instead I just started wearing them as they are. Lying to myself that long flared jeans are stylish. They lost any stylishness they had as I walked the hems to a tattered and holey mess. My self-consciousness is made worse knowing this is France. A culture that, generally speaking, knows how to dress well. Apologies for the gross generalisation. I decide to find a haberdashery supplier, and affect repairs to my jeans. As soon as coffee is finished. It takes about five seconds for me to forget this plan, when I find out there is also a multilingual bookstore in town. I often plan trips based on the bookshops in a given place and have been to bookstores across Europe and the United States. A note to civic leaders everywhere, supporting bookstores to open, and stay open, in your towns and cities also brings in visitors.

One of these days I will write about the bookshop and libraries that started my love of books, but that is for another post. Emma’s Bookshop in Clermont-Ferrand is next to the cathedral, as luck has it, about two minutes walk from The Magma Cafe.

I should make it clear, given the title of this post, that as far as I can tell, Emma’s bookshop is not specifically a queer or lgbt bookshop. It has a broad but well curated selection of subjects, including feminist texts and a children’s section. They also do teas, coffee, and cakes, and had I planned things better, I would have spent more time there than I was able to. Despite it being a flying visit, I couldn’t resist their queer titles entirely. Also in spite of being told off that I don’t apparently have enough space in my motorcycle’s top box for books – I do, there is always a way to make space for books.

I bought a hardback copy of AJ West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World. It fills me with joy and energy when I encounter Queer history texts. Our history is a fragile and delicate thing, it deserves to be treasured and recorded but is so often lost. A.J. West has done justice to his subject collecting these accounts of important LGBTQ+ spaces together. They are inevitably stories of survival against the odds, and of loss. It is sometimes heartbreaking to read about the disappearance of spaces that would have represented safety, connection, activism and liberation, for the communities they served. Communities that are almost continuously under hostile scrutiny for one perceived transgression or another.

To underline this, and tie the past to the present, one of the stories recounted in the book is that of Shakespeare and Company, as it existed in Paris, between 1919-1941.

Describing the proprietors Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, both of who were lesbians, witnessing the arrival of the Nazis in Paris;

“They knew the threat the Germans posed to books and to citizens who didn’t fit with Nazi ideology. After all, Hitler’s thugs had begun their tempest of literary immolation on the 6th of May 1933 with the ransacking and burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin… The Sturmabteiling could hardly get there quickly enough. It systematically confiscated thousands of books and documents from the Institute’s library and archive, burning them days later in a huge pyre. As many as 25,000 of the Institute’s books, many containing unmatched insights into transgender history and medicine were immolated in the Bebelplatz.”

The parrallels with today’s attacks on science, and the ongoing attempt by government to remove transgender people from public life in the USA and the UK, seem obvious. On the same day I was lucky enough to visit Emma’s bookshop, the UK’s new far right blackshirt thugs were disrupting traffic into the port of Dover.

Emma’s Bookstore can be found at 9 rue Phillipe Marcombes, Clermont-Ferrand.

For anyone wondering, I also visited a haberdashers and am now making my jeans more presentable, one stitch at a time.

No AI elements were used, or will ever be used in the production of my writing or research, at any stage of the process.

Back to Baseball Today.

In the spirit of keeping this Sunday a day of rest and relaxation, for my game of choice I'm turning to MLB. It's my intention to follow my Texas Rangers as they play the Tampa Bay Rays. This afternoon's game is scheduled to start at 1:35 PM CDT. As usual I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Finally writing about writing

I wrote a song recently about writing. It is coming on The Kintners album due out Christmas, called “The Kintners – Brand Name Believers.” I explore in song my reasons for writing and encourage folks to do it too. It’s very important in my life. It’s almost like a religion, to me. I don’t “believe” anything on purpose. Writing routinely helps me suss that out. Writing is thinking on the record. Even if you forget, it is right there where you put it.

Forgetting is huge, by the way. Every login, password, glitch, update, ad, lures me away from thinking. I also wrote a Djembe Funk song lately, coming soon, that asks; “how do you ride a train of thought to the end of the line these days?” It really is difficult. I find a blank piece of paper or an offline word processor helps get me to the end of that line. That is where I need to be. I want to share the final stop in my songs. If I never get there, my songs are empty.

How do you get deep without digging?

Much like deep conversation, songs do not get deep unless I am deep into the thought of making them. Conversations rarely, if ever, start off deep. They build, dig. This is what makes me sad about folks who reject me for deep conversations. Don’t let the icebreakers I am terrible at fool you, I am there for cerebral, emotional, challenging. I just have to work up to it. That is not the norm. Most folks size me up before a song is over, or that length of time. I do not give a crap on my end. But I feel sad for folks who walk through life that way. You just don’t get deep without digging.

Google doesn’t help. I am guilty of using them too. But if anyone remembers, it was harder to find information not so long ago. You were on a train of thought until you found it. It was a quest to find what you were looking for. Now it is a search and instant answer on google. Are you going to understand that google as well as something that took a few days or weeks to learn? No. But we are allergic to staying on the train of thought. We have been trained to seek instant gratification instead of embarking on personal journeys for something to keep with us. We keep nothing. Blow and go. It makes for shallow conversations. It makes for shallow people.

Who benefits? …….(the Lenin version, Stalin can suck it.)

Why? Why all this shallowness? I know I keep saying it, but it is true from here. So I’ll say it again; it is so software developers can make more money. You have to look at who is profiting, here. Data and software are the top companies in the world, above oil. They have been for nearly a decade. That’s plenty of time to change the world if everyone has your device that tells them anything you want.

They have the tools, the talent, the budget.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out how to put you on a narrow grid of brand names, beliefs, income level, food preferences, etc.. It does take a data scientist. The software industry recognizes this. Why don’t the rest of us? They have data scientists with all of our data. If I was a big company, why wouldn’t I hire them to get my product moving, besides it being highly unethical? I have known plenty of business owners who find the law as like a green light/red light system. They seem to have no right and wrong sense of their own. Just “if it’s legal, let’s do it.” This is not a quality I look for in leadership, but obviously me and tons of Americans disagree.

It’s not just harvesting, it’s refining. Refining is $$

Data scientists spend on average 80 percent of their time refining and cleaning the data, (google :) ). That’s very important. Just like oil, which powered the industrial revolution, data requires refining to be worth what businesses pay for it. Unless you are a data scientist, you don’t know what to do with all the data collected. This puts a hinge in the process that pivots squarely on the backs of data contractors and data scientists. It might be hard to understand how they’re doing it. But it isn’t tough at all to see who is doing it. It’s them.

I know why you can’t think of lyrics like you used to. If you are like me, you know why too.

If you are like me and struggled for years at creative projects, I’d put down the phone and try it out. I am nearly a month without a cell phone. I write lyrics and play acoustic a lot more without it. Like I used to. That is more valuable to me than anything on profiles or a screen. I struggled with it for years. I shouldn’t have. A one month long test was all I needed. Don’t be like me. Experiment. It helps you think better.

There’s you and there’s the world. Finding a place doesn’t mean staying connected.

I have a lot of theories as to why this is. But we’re all different. I just think being connected to everyone in your brain is a lot like a drug. You probably think better after that illusion is shattered. It’s like a commercial in our heads 24/7. It is just you in there, after all.

Kintners Playlist Alert!!!

PS: I made a 25 song playlist on Subvert.fm of The Kintners stuff I like a lot. I listen to it. Just sharing if you’d like to check it out. Thanks.

Kelly Kintner – Producer, Songwriter

The Kintners, Djembe Funk (Subvert Links)

The hour later thought: Life is like the intro and safety rundown on a plane ride. They tell you to put your own mask on before saving someone. They do not tell you to punch them out and take their mask. I think a lot of folks hear the latter.

A few months ago, I was walking down 7th Street near the arena when a young woman approached me and asked if she could pray with me. Skeptical and curious, I agreed. As I listened to her prayer, I followed the meaning of her words: a plea that I might obtain salvation through her conception of the divine, the supreme, the ordered heaven she envisioned above. I thanked her, declined her invitation to join her religion, and walked on to breakfast another block away.

I did not think much of it at the time. But that evening, in my journal, I kept returning to the odd nature of the encounter — the strangeness of receiving an unrequested prayer on a random Tuesday, on a warm summer sidewalk, from a stranger who wished for my soul in the only way she knew. Nothing I write here is aimed at her. Her sincerity was not in question. What I noticed was the form of the gesture, and what it revealed about my own deliberate distance from it.

She sought, through religious authority, outward rite, and works ordered toward her own divine truth, a blessing and assurance of life beyond death. My interest of late, however, has lain elsewhere: in the deeper, inward act of direct apprehension of the eternal — an act which, as far as I can tell, involves no hierarchical heavenly order, no supreme being, and certainly no omniscient judge with, arguably, dubious designs on humanity.

What I’m pointing to is not a private certainty that entirely dispenses with tradition, practice, or responsibility. I mean a knowledge that completely alters the knower.

And in that knowing, the doing is transformed.

In such an encounter, the ego — with its fear, its self-protection, its claim to be the whole of the self — is metamorphosed. One is, in a meaningful sense, reborn: awakened to a reality that exceeds one’s prior ordinary perception, and wholly reoriented in one's relation to self, life, death, and other people.

Yet there’s a subtle risk.

An inward glimpse of the eternal, however small, cannot remain disembodied or self-confirming. The witness must carry its truth back into the world and give it form there: in humility, compassion, truthful speech, ethical action, and the patient work of sustaining life with others. At least, that is one ideal. Rites, teachings, and communal practices may therefore serve as conduits — through which insight is remembered, tested, and made answerable to consequence — rather than as guarantees purchased from authority and conformity. The inward revelation, however rare, becomes credible only because it teaches one to inhabit the world more truthfully, rather than ignoring or abolishing it.

That morning on 7th Street, I pondered the woman who prayed for my salvation as I drank my coffee. Perhaps we were reaching for the same thing — she from without, toward a heaven I do not see above; I from within, toward what was already closer than closeness, more real than real, more human than human. The difference is that her prayer asked me to leave where I stood. The knowing I trust and practice asks only that I live more truly within it.

#Intermundia

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.