The Interstellar Sapience Congruity Accord
("Interstellar Accord", "Accord", "ISCA")
The Interstellar Sapience Congruity Accord (ISCA) is an agreement created by the Gaian race as a means of unifying as many known sapient races in the universe as is possible, and providing a set of baseline rights for all sapient beings to ensure their prosperity.
As formal as the ISCA may seem, it's a quite loose organization with relatively simple joining requirements. Specifically, races joining the ISCA must meet the following requirements:
- Members must not display malice or contempt for other ISCA members.
- This is expected at a government level only. The actions of citizens will not be considered, granted they are handled appropriately.
- Members must enforce all ISCA rights and cannot rescind them or create exceptions under any circumstances.
- Individuals that request political asylum from the ISCA must be granted this asylum universally under all ISCA members.
- Members must positively represent the ISCA and their inclusion as a member.
- Members do not need a dedicated homeworld; those sharing a world with another species is acceptable.
- A species sharing a world with another must have an organized and stable government.
History
The ISCA was drafted before Gaia's conception as a means to try to ensure a treaty existed between Earth and Gaia as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this goal never came to fruition, as Earth had been rendered uninhabitable well before the future Gaians had found the world that they would colonize and make into their new home. For context, please see the Gaian race page. In short, Gaians are Humans who left Earth after realizing that it was effectively doomed from issues like climate change and its political environment, choosing to take their chances with space travel.
Despite this unforunate reality, the Gaians still created the ISCA in anticipation of possible alien contact now that interstellar travel was demonstrated to be a reasonable capability. Within the first century of their presence on Gaia, they had surpassed parity with Earth's technological advancements and developed warp technology. The ISCA was now ready to create new relationships with species across the cosmos.
They would not have to wait long to find new races. Turns out, Gaia was on the edge of a star cluster harboring several unique inhabited planets.
Member Species
The first species to join the ISCA was the Avelian race. These posh avian people were an already interstellar species that was ecstatic to meet another interstellar species. While they initially found the concept of the ISCA somewhat absurd on the count of how new Gaia was to interstellar warp travel, they realized that it was an outstanding opportunity to create something meaningful in their galactic neighborhood and opted to join. They quickly became a crucial part of its administration. The Avelian also own the XGRF (Cross-Galactic Research Foundation)
The second species to join the ISCA was the Kirivian race. The Kirivians are close allies to the Avelians due to their assistance in saving the Kirivian home world, Numala, from catastrophe. The Kirivians, while warp-capable, were not prepared for the issues their home world would face, and lacked sufficient external colonization to help themselves. While they mostly joined up with the ISCA due to their close friends doing so first, they also saw it as an opportunity to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again.
More races would join or ally with the ISCA through the following couple centuries. In particular, the ISCA found itself among the presence of an extremely diverse assortment of robotic lifeforms, most of which are derivations of their kin with discrete modes of reproduction and component standards. Additionally, many engineered bioforms joined the ISCA, especially those derived from fauna, and occasionally flora, native to the worlds of member races.
Note: See "Fan Content" section below!
Nonmember Species
The Novan race is the only species within the star cluster (and which is in control of their home planet) that has shown a lack of interest in joining the ISCA. They own the NEC (Novan Exploratory Committee), which has allied itself with the ISCA, but otherwise chosen to remain separate from it.
Neural Translator
One crucial piece of technology for the ISCA is the Neural Translator. This is an advanced neural network designed to recognize patterns in language to form reliable translations on the fly in real-time. Everybody speaks their own language, and everybody else understands. It is also equipped to understand new languages in as little time as possible.
The system is designed to operate on all existing environmental context (for example, if two ships meet, what did they do before starting communication?) as well as known patterns throughout linguistics that various races tend to follow. It will perform several types of analysis in parallel to try to understand a new language as quickly as possible. It can fortify its knowledge through literature and spoken audio.
Fan Content and Mods
This section is a bit meta!
This isn't lore. It's more of an author's note.
Understandably, a lot of people who interact with this game are the kind of people who love to make fan content. Here is me telling you that you are allowed to make your own species be members of (or allies of) the ISCA. Seriously, go right ahead! I love it when people feel like they can integrate and be a part of my story. I literally left it open ended and easy to get in for this exact purpose. I want your creative little self-inserts and fanons!
For example...
A small part of the Avali community has shown an interest in the game. For this reason, I gave my thanks in the form of (hopefully1) allowing Scratch to be used in-game. Additionally, some stuff such as the ability for a Species object in game code to declare native temperatures/pressures that are survivable came from realizing someone might want to mod it in.
"Hello, Avalikin."
And...
My request to use Akolouthos (often just called "Ako") in-game was accepted. This is something used in Antiheat's universe (which I mark as a source of inspiration over on the About page). This one is particularly interesting; it is a vertical typeface designed for use by synethetic (robotic) races. It can still be read manually if you know the symbols. Typically, typed phrases do their best to remain square. Each glyph is square as well. This is a 4x4, with two characters overflowing to the right:
O, S
YNTH
ETIC
S.
"Hello, Synthetics."
O, S
YNTH
ETIC
S.
This way →
Then bottom to top.
-
This may not actually be included. I will need to make my own font for Avali Scratch because all of the ones I can find online are CC-*-NC, thus my game is disqualified (because I sell it commercially). And then, on top of this, I don't know if I have permission from the species's creator to include it natively. Even if the de facto use of the species is entirely public and open source, the de jure usage is vague. I'm selling this game and making a profit, the last thing I want to do is get into some lawsuit because the CEO of space birds doesn't like me doing that.
The game's mod loader will allow for loading custom fonts in though, so if worse comes to worst, you can just add it yourself. ↩