Biblioclasm at New Alexandria

For reasons that will become clear upon further perusal of this article, very little is known about the events leading up to the Biblioclasm initiated at Cyberplanet Nox Dracius, more commonly known as New Alexandria.

New Alexandria
Piecing together sub-tech records from before the Biblioclasm, the push towards the construction of what would become New Alexandria began around 430 FE, soon after the development of the Heinz-Bode transmission process.

Experts argue that the development of the ability to instantly transmit matter and energy across interstellar distances made the need for local data repositories obsolete. Why maintain a local copy when one could just as quickly pull the necessary data from lightyears away?

Royal Engineers were then tasked with developing such a repository for the good of the empire. Construction of the cyberplanet took over 800 years, completing in 1262.

Once built, New Alexandria, as it was called during construction, was moved into place in the Dracustean home solar system after calibrations to maintain gravitational inertia in the system, and renamed Nox Dracius by the Dracusteans. However, its code-name had become an embedded meme in the Zarakkanian collective consciousness, and continued to be used throughout its functional operation.

Presumably, Nox Dracius was selected as a good-faith gesture to the Bejeweled Hermitage in honor of the new Zarakk-Dracust alliance. Or, some have surmised, as a form of payment for Dracust's action in the Extermination of the Marqui’si. Or, if one such researcher is to be believed, the choice was made based on the fact that the Dracustean race was well-suited to maintaining the gargantuan super-structure, given their ability to operate for extended durations in deep-space without the need for artificial life support. However, very little maintenance was required on the super-structure, designed to be 99.996% self-sustaining.

In any case, New Alexandria would become the centralized and sole repository of any and all information in the Zarakkanian Empire from its position nestled in Dracustean space. Over the course of centuries, the New Alexandria would become the veritable backbone of the Zarakkanian Empire. With all the information and processing power one could ever need available instantly and remotely, the Zarakkanians were faster, smarter, and more mobile than ever before. Combined with the newly developed Solar Core Modules, the Empire expanded its reach out into the cosmos.

With the sucess of New Alexandria, the Royal Engineers began building two more cyberplanets, Paris and Agamemnon in order to decentralize operation and provide a level of redundancy to the data storage.

The Biblioclasm
The event known as the Biblioclasm came about during the year 100 of the Second Era on the day of the Feast of Belcross, Capital-time. From the perspective of anyone in the empire, the effect was as if New Alexandria had simply turned off. In reality, however, the facility had been completely destroyed.

The loss of New Alexandria was more than simply a loss of information, it ground the Empire to a complete halt. Over the course of its use, the great library had been expanded to the tasks of communication and trade management, as all banking data and messaging operations were networked and maintained by the cyberplanets continents of processing power.

With that functionality gone, trade completely ceased, as the balances of the trading markets had been nullified. Interplanetary communication shut down, with the Bode Nodes linked to New Alexandria going offline (with the exception of the Zarakk Core Systems, see below).

Starships mid-transit found their navigation systems suddenly reading static, with some coming out of sub-warp to find themselves trapped in the graviational pull of a star, or crashing into population centers due to a lack of landing automation.

Though the number is uncertain, casualties indirectly caused by the Biblioclasm are estimated numbered greater than the First, Second, and Second-and-a-Half Galactic Wars combined.

Recovery
The quickest societal facet to recover was communication. Within hours the Royal Engineers had expanded the decentralized network in place around the Core Systems to the other major trading centers, creating a rudimentary ad-hoc network with very limited functionality in terms of communication, and restricted to government usage.

Seven years later the Orion Corporation would replace these limited Nodes with decentralized versions like those used in the Capital, prompting availability for public use to be re-enabled.

Trade was much slower in recovery, with the effects of the Biblioclasm echoing for decades to come, mostly in the form of debt to the Empire itself, paid out in loans to anyone and everyone in the months following the Biblioclasm in the initiative known as the Fisherman's Basket.

In terms of data storage, the void left by New Alexandria was taken up by the Empire's two new cyberplanets nearing the end phase of construction. The two had already begun to duplicate the repository at New Alexandria before the Biblioclasm, but the majority of data that was housed at New Alexandria was completely and utterly lost.

(aside... The thought of all that knowledge gone in a single moment is enough to drive this researcher to drink.)

Official Cause
According to educational holos from the year 483 SE recovered from the Zarakkanian Galactic University (Go Ultrabadgers!), the official story reported on the matter is that the library was destroyed when a Dracustean maintainer fell into one of the Bode Node portals, triggering a negative reaction due to the organic matter which imploded the entire facility.

Conspiracy
While the holos provide the official explanation, deeper research presents a much darker picture of what took place than this clean-cut explanation.

According to one Leiji Matsuodo, amateur filmmaker and political activist, Dracustean maintainers were not present when the Biblioclasm occurred, since the next scheduled maintenance operation was not for several more solar cycles.

And when the Dracusteans were en-route to investigate the sudden loss of communications to and from Nox Dracius, they arrived to find a Zarakkanian fleet already posted in blockade formation around the planet. Logs from the interchange between the Dracusteans and the Zarakk fleet indicate the maintainers were advised to return home after being told the situation was being handled.

However, the SICs (Ship Identifier Codes) had been redacted from the logs, leading to questions about who composed this fleet and where did they come from. Further, Matsuodo posits that the explosion caused by a Bode-Node's reaction to organic matter could not be sufficient in size to implode a facility as big as New Alexandria if the only catalyzing material was a few Dracusteans, citing the explosion of Sol's Bode Node due to the Hyperchicken incident as an example of the amount of organics required to take out a planet-sized superstructure.

Even stranger is the fact that while the majority of Bode Nodes in operation failed after New Alexandria's demise and had to be replaced with decentralized versions by the Orion Corporation seven years later, nodes in place around the Zarakkanian Core Systems were already outfitted with the necessary modifications.

Given this testimonial, it seems that the Zarakkanian Empire may have had a hand in the Biblioclasm, perhaps aware of a terrorist attack that it was unable to stop, or else the source of the attack outright.

Did the Zarakkanians want to remove such a powerful tool from the hand of the Dracusteans, whom they had been on uneasy terms with since the failed assassination of the Bejeweled Hermitage in 10 FI? In addition, the official explanation of New Alexandria's destruction only further increased tension with the Hermitage, supposedly laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of Dracust, and causing people to question whether the Biblioclasm had been a Dracustean plot all along.

Leiji argues that the Zarakkanians could have copied the entirety of the New Alexandrian repository to its new pair of cyberplanets, Paris and Agamemnon, that were "still in development" at the time, and destroyed New Alexandria which they had comparatively less control over. Leiji points out that due to the operation of these new cyber-planets, the Zarakkanian Core Worlds emerged mostly unscathed from the Biblioclasm, and actually benefited from the situation in the years to come.

Due to the conflicting nature of official and personal testimonials, the loss of the data housed in New Alexandria itself, and the retirement and subsequent dismantling of Paris and Agamemnon, it is unlikely that the general populace will ever really know what occurred on that day.

Lessons Learned
Don't put all your hypereggs in one cyberbasket.