I have been promising specimens from the Ecumenical Register for long enough, and I shall now briefly describe for you a number of them.

Every ecumene in the Register is vanished, excinct; or in some cases irrecoverably obsolescent. We do not observe civilization in progress.

Vastly many of the registered ecumenes have a similar fate, and it is an unsatisfying one to study: they just sort of Declined, for no isolable single reason. In the power law distribution of ultimate fate, “Just Sort of Declined”, as we write on the paperwork, is the most common status. Fully half of all ecumenes meet this fate, even if you only consider cases that are unanimously agreed to fall under it. In fact, these days the paperwork has a checkbox at the top for Just Sort of Declined, to save the trouble of writing it for the most common case. There is of course always a unique story to learn about, to document, and to revere, for every ecumene; even for the ones with the most seemingly banal of endings.

Allow me to pluck one of them at semi-random to illustrate for you in more detail.

A Cerulean Pennon Scribes the Terra Cotta Sky is the name of an ecumene that to you might have looked quite horrific: a one-ton blob of crumbly, sage-green wax, topped with an exoskeletal mask, in turn festooned with recursively branching and ramifying antennae, to a minimum of four branchings. They were particularly motivated to grow these antennae to ever greater length and fractal complexity, via any means possible: pure willpower, which was unusually effective in their species at effecting physical changes; medication and supplementation; orthosis; surgery. The extent of their antennae had a quite direct effect on their overall sense of contentment, for abstruse evolutionary reasons. Of course they also had a full and unique profile of science, philosophy, arts, and governance, but it all inevitably came back to antennae.

They began as two species, in fact, the exoskeleton and antennae species regularly parasitized to the point of total control by the blob species, until a freak blessing of a mutation flipped the pairing into mutually dependent symbiotic partnership. After 12,290 generations, they Just Sort of Declined. As much as we were tempted to attribute it to antenna obsession, that outwardly obvious and easy-to-impugn trait, the facts insisted on truly multifarious causes. As with so many ecumenes, no single satisfyingly explainable internal or external doom “did them in.”

This is of course just a drop from just a draught of the whole Register, of which I wish to give you a full sampling of in good time.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.