Transcendence

**Transcendence** is a victory type in *Alpha Centauri*.

## Overview

The highest form of victory is the Ascent to Transcendence, the next
step in the evolution of sentient life. In order to ascend, you must complete
the secret project Ascent to Transcendence, which can be started only
after one faction has completed the Voice of Planet project.

## Score

Players who ascend to transcendence are awarded 2000 points minus
2 for every game turn elapsed. If cooperative victory is enabled,
all Pact Brothers and Sisters participate in the win, and points
are split between all winning factions based on relative population.

## Narrative

*EPILOGUE*

*from*

*The Book of Planet*

*M.Y. 1,027,823*

*After a million or so orbits around Your primary, You pause to reassess Your efforts. The stellar encapsulation is proceeding smoothly, and in a few hundred thousand more orbits will provide You with a 90% draw on Your primary's radiation, trapping all of the energy off the plane of the ecliptic. Deep space Aux links allow You to watch the frame assembly in low stellar orbit, and follow the progress of buglike Jovian freighters loaded with resupply mass.*

*Occasionally You spot one of Your transhuman friends/symbiotes supervising activity on a scaffolding; even the immortals sometimes crave the risk and adventure of independent incarnation. Some of the most daring souls even undertook to resume interstellar travel, beginning with a return to Your nearest neighbor to sift through the ashes of its third planet and recolonize their home system. In the present age You hear a nanotech civilization is thriving there once again.*

*In such times of repose, You often sift through Your personalities and recall Your former selves. Your alpha self derives from an individual once called $NAME1. Over the millenia the exceptional focus and judgement characteristic of this fragment have proven effective on numerous occasions. The $NAME1self now drives all of Your long and short range planning, and is the principal force behind the encapsulation project. Ponderous but playful is the Voice/Planet personality, avatar of Your sessile precursor, who in the present age has devoted her centuries to philosophical pondering. Many others flit about within You. Some, like the prankster $SHIMODA9 and the demon $NAME5 are semi-dominant and often hover near the plane of Your Thought. Others plumb the depths and create new worlds within the abyss of Your open-ended neural network.*

*Sunlight plays across Your mottled surface and provides pleasing warmth to Your organic components. Recently, You have edged somewhat further away from the primary and purged Your atmosphere of certain gases in order to allow the occasional friends/symbiotes who choose to live among Your organic gardens an easily breathable mixture. In another eight billion orbits the primary will drop off the main sequence and alternate arrangements will have to be made, but for now You maintain Your gardens as a paradise. The transhumans who live among them call it Eden.*

### If another faction wins

*EPILOGUE*

*from*

*The Book of Planet*

*M.Y. $NUM2 (Seed Year 1)*

*The cold-sleep unit finally cycles open and you stretch muscles rusty from decades of computer-managed disuse. But they are young muscles, shockingly young, and it will be a pleasure to beat them back into shape. Orbital insertion begins and you tingle with the excitement of your new mission and with the joy of having returned to human form. Yes, you left a copy of your personality among the Planetmind's giant matrix, but this copy, this human being $NAME1 now waking to lead the first Seed mission, this is the only self now immediate to you and therefore the only real you. You are flesh again, and so quite mortal, and for this too you rejoice.*

*You despaired when Planet invited $NAME5 to join its dominant self, and for a decade or more you moped about the bizarre virtual reality of the Undermind with no coherent purpose, a lost spirit unable to die. But when the Seed missions began, the Voice/Planet personality herself sought you out in the abyss and convinced you to accept command of the {Prodigal Son}.*

*"Earth$NAME3, you are unfulfilled here and I have need of you. In ages to come I shall have need of allies, sister Minds, if I am to keep the flame of conscious thought from guttering out as the universe contracts or else expands to dust. Take with you the gift of life, the seeds of all our species. Spread them to the stars, across the galaxies, creating new civilizations, new minds, and enlisting the aid of any you encounter. Go forth, Earth$NAME3. Go forth and multiply."*

*The maneuver at last complete, the safety shutters retract from the viewport and you behold a sight lost to human eyes for over $NUM3 centuries. Deep blues, swirling whites, the azure tint of a rich oxygen atmosphere. Inviting browns and greens of continents basking in the sun, a few scattered impact craters the only visible signs of a war now buried in the aeons. Third planet. Earth. Home.*