• DOCUMENT ID: ARB-77-Ceti-Alpha-5
• CLASSIFICATION: Level 2 Territorial & Metaphysical Rights Dispute
• SUBJECT: Formal Arbitration Hearing between the Arborian All-Mother of the Verdant Covenant and the Thanatech Grief-smiths of the Ossuary Collective. Case concerns the eidetic rights to the region designated “The Griefwood,” formerly an Arborian Ancestor Grove.

[TRANSCRIPT BEGINS]

[00:00:01] ARBITER Kaelen-Unbroken-7: This tribunal is now in session under the authority of the Hegemonic Mandate. The parties have presented their initial claims. Arborian delegation, represented by All-Mother Elara, you claim the Thanatech Collective has engaged in an act of “soul-desecration” and “metaphysical theft.” Explain.

[00:00:23] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: [Her voice is calm, resonant, like the rustling of ancient leaves. The living vines woven into her forearms pulse with a soft, green light.] Arbiter, we do not speak of “theft.” We speak of a wound. A violation of a sacred [symbiosis]. The Griefwood was our most ancient Ancestor Grove. For ten thousand cycles, we have laid our honored dead to rest there. Their bodies become the soil. Their memories, their Eidos, become the [life] of the new growth. Our children grow from the very substance of our ancestors. It is a perfect, unbroken circle. A living history. A Fact.

[00:01:09] ARBITER KAELEN-7: And the Thanatech action?

[00:01:12] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: [A flicker of something like pain crosses her features.] They came with their… engines. Their siphons. They did not harvest the wood. They harvested the echoes. They ripped the [remembrance] from the soil, leaving the grove hollowed out. A beautiful corpse with no memory. They stole the last words of our grandmothers to fuel their ghost-machines. It is an abomination. It is a [sacrilege] against the very nature of the life-cycle.

[00:01:48] ARBITER KAELEN-7: Grief-smith Valus, of the Thanatech. Your response to this charge of… “metaphysical theft.”

[00:02:01] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: [His voice is a dry whisper, like bones scraped over stone. The skeletal plates grafted to his form are inscribed with humming, silver runes.] There was no theft. There was a harvest. A salvage operation of the highest order. The Arborians speak of their beautiful cycle, and it is indeed beautiful. It is also tragically inefficient.

[00:02:29] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: Inefficient? Our cycle has sustained us for longer than even this “Hegemony” has existed.

[00:02:37] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: You misunderstand. You allow the most potent resource in the cosmos—concentrated, high-quality Eidos—to simply decay. To become… fertilizer. You take a symphony of thought, of love, of profound [grief], and you use it to grow a sapling. It is the equivalent of using a starship’s core to toast bread. We do not see a sacred grove. We see a library of priceless memories being left to rot in the rain.

[00:03:15] ARBITER KAELEN-7: So you claim a right to this “resource.”

[00:03:19] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: We claim a duty. The [memory_as_resource] principle is central to our Faith. A memory un-used is a story that dies. The Eidos of a powerful life, especially the moment of its passing, is a tangible force. It can be refined. It can be woven. We took the lingering Eidos of the Griefwood’s dead—the sorrow of their partings, the strength of their convictions—and we forged it into a [haunting] engine that can protect convoys from psychic predators. We gave those forgotten memories a new purpose. We gave them work to do. Is that not a more noble end than becoming mulch? We did not desecrate their souls. We gave them a new, more useful body.

[00:03:48] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: [Her calm demeanor cracks for a fraction of a second. The green light in the vines on her arms flares brightly. Her voice, when she speaks, is low and laced with a cold fury.] Mulch. He calls our grandmothers… mulch. Arbiter, the Grief-smith’s argument is predicated on a profound category error. He sees a resource where there is a relative. He speaks of utility. Let us speak of a concept the Mandate understands: consent.

[00:04:22] ARBITER KAELEN-7: Elucidate, All-Mother. The deceased cannot grant consent.

[00:04:28] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: Can they not? To the Thanatechs, a being’s Thread is severed at death, leaving behind a harvestable echo. To an [Arborian], death is not an end. It is a transformation. A promise. The final, sacred stage of their journey back into the soil of the homeworld. Our ancestors are not “gone.” They are… gestating. Their purpose is to become the foundation for the future. Their Eidos is not an unclaimed asset; it is bequeathed to the Grove itself, in a sacred trust.

[00:05:07] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: A trust that lets it degrade into useless sentiment! We preserve it. We give it function!

[00:05:15] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: [Turns her gaze on Valus, her voice dropping to a near whisper.] You gave them a function you chose. You conscripted their souls into your machines. You did not ask. Our ancestors had already consented to a different purpose—to become the very lifeblood of their descendants. The Thanatechs did not salvage an abandoned resource. They desecrated a living crypt and enslaved the spirits within. This was not a harvest. It was a violation of the cultural and bodily autonomy of our dead.

[00:05:58] ARBITER KAELEN-7: A compelling legal metaphor, All-Mother. But the Mandate requires precision. Does the Arborian All-Life Accord grant legal personhood to the deceased?

[00:06:12] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: The Accord grants sanctity to the cycle. The dead are not persons, Arbiter. They are something far more important. They are the soil. They are the promise that life will continue. To steal that promise, to break that cycle for your own… utility… is to murder our future. That is the truth of our grievance. This is not a dispute over property. It is an accusation of attempted genocide, not of our bodies, but of our very method of existence. They are killing our ability to become.

[0.06.55] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: They were memories. Beautiful, potent, and fading. We gave them permanence. We gave them a voice beyond the rustle of leaves. We honored them in a way your “cycle” never could. We made them into art.

[0.07.10] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: You made them into tools. And you will answer for it.

[00:07:28] ARBITER KAELEN-7: Your arguments are noted. The All-Mother speaks of consent and genocide. The Grief-smith speaks of utility and art. These are matters of Faith and Fiction, respectively. The Mandate requires Fact. Do either of you have empirical evidence to substantiate your claims regarding the nature of this… “resource”?

[00:07:51] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: [A gesture from Valus prompts two Thanatech acolytes to wheel forward a large, humming containment unit. Inside, a vortex of shimmering, multi-colored light swirls chaotically. It is beautiful and deeply unsettling.] We do, Arbiter. This is Exhibit A: The “Griefwood Engine.” The very device powered by the Eidos we salvaged. As you can see, the energy is stable, contained, and performing work. We have taken the ephemeral [grief] of a thousand forgotten lives and given it purpose. We have forged it into a tool. Is this not proof of our claim? We did not destroy meaning; we preserved it in a more useful form.

[00:08:33] ARBITER KAELEN-7: The functionality of your device is not in dispute, Grief-smith. All-Mother? Do you have evidence to present?

[00:08:44] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: [She nods slowly. One of her attendants steps forward, placing a simple, grey wooden box on the tribunal platform. Elara opens it herself. Inside rests a piece of wood, about the length of her forearm. It is pale, brittle, and covered in hairline cracks. It radiates a profound… emptiness.] We do. This is the Heartwood of Ancestor Lyra-Vec. She was laid to rest in the Griefwood nine hundred cycles ago. A healthy Heartwood should be the color of rich loam, humming with the faint light of a thousand stored memories. This one is… silent. Drained. This is what remains after your “harvest.”

[00:09:31] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: A dead piece of wood. A compelling argument.

[00:09:35] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: It is not dead. It is waiting.

[00:09:42] ARBITER KAELEN-7: I fail to see how this substantiates your claim of… ongoing existence. It appears to be inert material.

[00:09:55] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: Then I ask the tribunal to perform a simple test. Bring them together.

[00:10:04] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: This is pointless theatrics. We object.

[00:10:07] ARBITER KAELEN-7: Objection overruled. The Mandate requires all variables to be tested. Proceed.

[00:10:15] [The Arborian attendant slowly carries the box containing the Heartwood toward the humming Thanatech engine. As it comes within five meters, the swirling lights within the engine begin to agitate, their chaotic dance resolving into a frantic, focused orbit.]

[00:10:33] THANATECH ACOLYTE: Grief-smith! Eidetic containment is fluctuating! The resonance patterns are destabilizing!

[00:10:41] [As the Heartwood is brought within one meter of the engine, the contained Eidos suddenly lashes out. A silent, concussive wave of psychic energy erupts from the containment field. The tribunal chamber’s lights flicker violently. The Arbiter grips the sides of its chair, its own cybernetic optical sensors glitching, displaying visual static.]

[00:10:50] GRIEF-SMITH VALUS: Impossible! It’s… it’s trying to get out! It’s trying to return to the wood!

[00:10:58] ALL-MOTHER ELARA: [Her voice rings out over the psychic din, filled with a terrible, sorrowful triumph.] You see, Arbiter? It is not a resource! It is a child, crying out for its mother! It is a soul, trying to go home!

[00:11:14] ARBITER KAELEN-7: [Its voice is strained, struggling to maintain its composure against the psychic onslaught.] Guards! Separate them! Now! Cease the test! Cease… [The Arbiter slumps in its chair, its optical sensors going dark for a moment before rebooting with a shower of diagnostic text.] …What… what was that?

[TRANSCRIPT ENDS]

SCI-AN JORIC (off-record analysis): The contained Eidos recognized its origin point. It attempted to re-establish the [symbiosis]. The energy required to break our containment field and bridge that gap was… considerable. We have a confirmed Fact: the harvested Eidos is not independent. It retains a fundamental, causal link to its biological source. This complicates our initial assessment. Profoundly.