Tijian Khaganate/secret

Summary

Tiji has a TL-17 technological database he has been decoding for centuries, sharing some of the secrets and keeping others to himself.

He is a series of clones, as suspected. One of the secrets he keeps is that he can transfer his mind from clone to clone, leaving no trace of the transfer. Further, granting "his" DNA to his people is cover for mass geneering, so as to establish genetic improvements that he can eventually incorporate into his subsequent clones.

Ships with prototype hop drives link the Tijian Khaganate to the Tijian Expanse, bypassing the Pirian Domain worlds in between.

Tiji's Story

Tiji believes his penance for the cons he pulled, is being forced to follow through on them.

Fourth Doctrinal War

Born in 225, he signed up as a hotshot scout for the Pirian Domain in 247 straight out of service academy. His father traced his ancestry to the ancient Mongols of far-off Terra, one of the many who had taken "Kahn" as a surname. His mother's heritage came from what Pirians of the past couple centuries had, in their adoption of Anglic, dubbed "fininja": medieval functionaries who battled with stealth and logistics more than with bow and blade, ensuring the wealth of those loyal to their masters and the ruin of those opposed. His childhood had thus been filled with tales of conquering and building pretend kingdoms (including a study of major historical colonization flights, specifically including the Flight of the Phoenix 2800 and the Yaskoydris' flight from the galactic core to Datsatl Sector); a scout, exploring untamed wilds to conquer, was a first step toward that.

Or would have been, had the Technocracy not been invaded severely enough to call for help. Once the invaders' advance was blunted, he was called in to help search for them. He started with a study of their destroyed ships, looking for clues in the wreckage.

In 253, finding a copy of the map that had guided the ancient Yaskoydri was a major clue that this was not just a random invasion. Annotations on the map provided the seed he needed to begin translating the aliens' language. Claiming he had a hunch, he took his scout on an unauthorized jump (he was already past 100 diameters from the nearest world, so the survey fleet had barely seconds' warning when his drives suddenly powered up, pushing him far enough away to safely jump) - and, sure enough, blundered right into the invaders' main fleet, far enough away that he was able to jump out with pictures before they could intercept him.

He told no one that he had partially cracked the invaders' tongue. He analyzed the transmissions he had intercepted, and volunteered for further scouting runs. During said runs, he risked tightbeam transmissions to the invaders, carefully deleting them from his scout's logs during the jump back. On his fourth pass, the invaders finally transmitted back. There was limited information he could communicate, but he arranged to meet with a lone scout, one on one, in a nearby system two months later (by which point it was 254).

Carefully arranging things to look like a mild misjump, he set off for his meeting. The conversation was not in broken Oynprith, but in the aliens' language - though somewhat broken. During the conversation, he risked a video transmission of his face and hair to prove he was no Yaskoydri, and thus earn enough trust to get an explanation. Although he edited the conversation into Oynprith during the jump back, the content of the conversation was partially correct: the aliens' homeworld was either depopulated or substantially damaged by the Wave of Craziness (the aliens left before the Wave reached their world, and never jumped back over it to see how much damage it had done). Their Yaskoydri neighbors confessed that their ancestors had probably caused it, and helped construct a giant ship to carry their civilization - just them; the Yaskoydri would stay behind and kill themselves in a ritual meant to slow down or blunt the Wave. They believed the map from Grandfather indicated refuge in case of disaster like this, and so sent the aliens along. A less than completely peaceful reception turned into assumption of hostility; by this point, the invaders assumed the local Yaskoydri were descendants of the ones who had triggered the Wave then come here to kill anyone trying to escape.

The scout knew how his commanders thought. Hyped up on pride and vengeance, they would not accept a simple misunderstanding. So, as he edited the conversation into Oynprith, he edited their story into a simple genocidal mission. The story was accepted, and after a further year of scouting and planning, he found himself part of the boarding team to hijack and destroy the invaders' main ship. The operation was successful, and he made off with a torso-sized "decorative bauble" that no one batted an eye at (but that he had spent much of the operation's planning phase privately guessing the likely location of). He managed to smuggle it home before retiring a few months later.

Xenoarchaeology and the Funding Thereof

He found himself with a primarily technological database of a TL-17 civilization, that he understood the basics of the language for. Unfortunately, basics tend not to include advanced scientific concepts, nor the ability to parse through jargon that would be dense even to a native speaker. Heroism in wartime only contributed to so much of a pension boost, and his bank account was dwindling dangerously close to zero when he got to talking with a colleague who dealt in intellectual property licensing. He was thinking of admitting what happened and selling his find, but first he mentioned some processor designs well ahead of anything available in the Domain at the time; his colleague knew immediately of a client who would pay well for that information, and assumed this was an invention. Proceeds from the ensuing sale (and a short term loan from the colleague) paid his rent, food, and utilities for the next year.

With renewed motivation, he got back to translating and decoding. The task got easier over time, but there was a lot of information, much of it beyond his immediate understanding. Some tidbits he sold, some he kept to experiment with, and some he soon realized were the domain of interstellar governments, needing aryus to fund. Remembering his childhood dreams, he gathered together some martial-minded folks, equipped them with superior technology (and lots of robotic assistance: every one of his organic aides was effectively at least a lieutenant, all the "enlisted" ranks filled by drones) and headed out of the Preserve, selecting the balkanized world of Tijia as a starting point far enough from the Preserve and the Technocracy that they would not intervene. (As it was now 284 and he was 59 years old, during the journey to Tijia he suffered a few jokes about this being "one heck of a mid-life crisis".)

His army was small enough that, had Tijia united against him, he might have been stopped. As it was, he landed on the small but tough nation of Alazed, which clung fiercely to its democratic principles; when they saw the size of his army, they thought he had millions of soldiers, outnumbering Alazed's entire population, and thus surrendered to the "new majority". Neighboring countries Bhumat and Eurael noticed this, and swore to ally if he would first execute the other one's king, so he invited each one to a "peace conference" in an orbiting spaceship. Once both kings with their staffs were aboard, he opened the airlocks via remote control from another spaceship nearby (the royal guards had no experience with space, so no one was wearing a space suit), and broadcast a fabricated video wherein both kings abdicated in favor of him. The people, tired of having been sent to war for the amusement of their kings, celebrated the change in leadership and their new union. This left him in control of slightly under half the planet, in a span of about 2 years; while a few of the remaining planetary polities resisted (the longest holdout took another 12 years to fully subdue), most accepted his offers to become a sub-polity under the new planetary government.

Conquering was one thing; ruling, another. His new friends proved less than useful, so he placated them by sending them to conquer neighboring worlds while he made new new friends (and inviting to his coronation some old friends from the Solomani Preserve navy, who he had served alongside during the Fourth Doctrinal War, so as to get connections to import anagathics from Anagathica, as he was getting on in years). He intended to deal with them once his rule was secure - only to find the neighboring worlds (which had less people, and tiny enough armies to be conquered conventionally) soon pledging loyalty to him too, especially once he came to them with pledges of improving their infrastructure, as opposed to the sudden violence that had just decapitated their governments.

A simple miscommunication started his name change. When asked what they were conquering in the name of, his crew said they were "from Tijia", which got misheard as "from Tiji" and taken as referring to a person. By the time Tiji found out, entire planets were referring to him by the new name, with no connection to his prior one. He rolled with it, and before long even those on Tijia who had heard his old name were proud to promote one who renamed himself to represent them. Many began saying he had always had that name, at least since setting foot on Tijia.

His crew took over 13 worlds before running out of steam, though a few of them held out as governments in exile elsewhere in their systems. One did not formally surrender until 199 years after Tiji's campaign on Tijia began, and then only because the last generation that cared died off, leaving a few dozen exiles who wanted to live on a planet they had only seen from far away but that their great-grandparents had described lovingly.

With his empire established and a greatly expanded source of funds secured, Tiji returned his attention to the alien database - in between fulfilling the duties of his new job.

The Longest Con

Cloning was already known, so he funded the creation of a facility to clone people to create replacement organs - and, secretly in its basement using "surplus" equipment, made backup clones of himself. His stealth was not perfect, and it was obvious he was experimenting - but as he was only doing something to "himself", those few who learned of this research agreed to keep the secret and keep out others. They reasoned that Tiji was getting on in years, and wished to create heirs who would continue to govern in his mold. They could not have guessed that Tiji was testing out another piece of technology: personality transfer, using his clones as vessels for copies of his mind, with none of the signs or drawbacks of more primitive versions.

Between the secrecy, his governmental duties, and the advanced research, it took Tiji almost 10 years before the first viable copy was up and walking around. Plans for careful testing were thrown out the window when the original Tiji, having rationed his anagathics too carefully, suddenly died of heart failure while talking to his copy. The clone put on some makeup to look older, incinerated his "father", and picked up his original's work, slowly using less makeup over the following months. When people pointed out how young he looked, he credited the joys of helping people and the bounty of their faith in him with restoring his youth. Few people took such claims seriously, though testing for known signs of personality recordings turned up nothing (just as Tiji had planned), and the new Tiji was able to recite from memory several things that a mere offspring clone could never have known. That said, he soon co-opted the medical community by allowing anyone to sample his DNA and add it to their own - which was cover for geneering experiments via eugenics.

Basic protocols were soon established to ensure viability of offspring created using "his" DNA. Variances were officially blamed on impurities of the extract (Tiji wanted "his" children to still express part of their parents), errors during implantation (especially by any doctors who tried to reveal the truth), and sometimes impure thoughts or deeds by either parent (scientific nonsense, but a number of people believed it). Within several decades, Tiji was able to have offspring clones growing up in society with no one the wiser, then "retire" the least socially connected, copy his mind over theirs (killing his "son" in the process, thus the need to use ones no one would miss), and leave the body in a low berth, reviving to update the copy or if no update signal was received by a deadline.

Thus did a chain of Tijis survive over the next several hundred years, always destroying the prior body as soon as possible. Occasional assassinations interrupted orderly transfer from older clone to younger, but usefully enhanced his legend, especially the ones that conveniently disposed of his prior body. When no such interruption came along, he copied his mind to his younger body, woke it up, went to sleep, and let his younger self execute his older self about every 40 to 50 years. He was already on his fifth body in 483 when the last, nearly-forgotten remnant of his conquered khaganate worlds officially surrendered. His ninth body was the first one he allowed to be enhanced, using genetic tweaks whose utility and lack of side effects had been demonstrated over the prior century.

After the Wave

In 1050 he was getting bored, and considering finally coming clean from his life of lies, when word of the Empress Wave reached his ears. Creating and reusing the low berths was a simple (though active enough to stir him from the dreariness of routine) matter of organizing the khaganate's workforce, the riding with the few who could not use low berths (along with every one of his frozen backup clones) to jump the Wave. Although he had long dreamed of letting his people "invent" the hop drive, the Wave interrupted that project when he barely had a few prototypes. Recycling the low berths did not occur to him until the Wave was almost entirely through the khaganate, at which point he realized the Pirian Domain would be distracted for the next few decades - and a certain cluster of systems the Domain blocked direct access to, that the Zhodani Consulate might charge coreward through once roused, lay wide open, reachable (if barely) by his prototype hop drives, performing jumps that the Domain thought were impossible. Under the excuse of grabbing land, he sent out colonists to create a giant canary if the Zhodani chose to invade.