I've been sitting on this for a couple days now, time to see it if it sinks or swims. Comment freely and with great vigor. --Mal
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcript of Federation Council closed session, March 15 2024:
Pres. Alexander Mack: Well, Mal, it’s your show. Go ahead and start.
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): Thank you, Mr. President. Ladies, gentlemen. As per the annexation treaty this is the Soviet giving you formal 24 hours notice before we do something, and I quote, “ridiculous and possibly world-shaking.”
Amb. Roger Goldstein (Utopia/Mars): Well, that’s nicely ominous.
Transcript of Soviet Ministry of (Weird) Science press conference, March 16 2024:
Speakers:
Professor Deidre Griest, Minister of Science (moderator)
Dr. Thomas Palmer, Exo-Archaeology Dept. & Primary Investigator, Project BLUE HEAVEN
MODERATOR: Hello and thank you all for coming, I know that this was a bit of a surprise for some of you, so I’d especially like to thank those who had to mess with their schedules to be here.
As many of you might be aware, the Ministry of Science has been investigating the mysterious alien objects we discovered orbiting the stars Delta Pavonis and Zeta 1 Reticuli for quite a few years now. In the last few months we’ve made significant strides towards understanding the artifacts, and in the process we might have uncovered a deeper mystery.
To my left is Dr. Thomas Palmer, part of the Ministry’s exo-archaeology department and current primary investigator on Project BLUE HEAVEN. Tom is going to open us up with a summary of what we’ve discovered so far, and what we think it all means, then we’ll go to questions.
Tom?
DR. PALMER: Well, alright. Hello, everyone, I’m Tom Palmer, senior researcher at the Ministry of Science and the primary investigator on what we call in-house Project BLUE HEAVEN, the project working on the stargate pair. I’ve been on the program since 2016, and today I’m going to talk about some of our most recent findings.
Okay, so, just to give some background because I know not everybody knows much about the wheres and the whyfores, in 2013 the Soviet sponsored an expedition to the Delta Pavonis system, to check it out and see if there was anything colonizable around it. They found an inhabitable planet alright, but they also found this.
![[Image: OD1sQl8.png]](http://i.imgur.com/OD1sQl8.png)
This is what we ended up calling Tannhauser Gate, an artifact in a semi-stable orbit in between the planet Yggdrasil and its innermost moon Skuld. Now this thing is huge: scale’s a tricky thing in space photos but you have to understand that that ring has an inner diameter of around twelve kilometers, or about a third the size of Daniell Crater. Yeah, it’s big. Just finding this in and of itself was a goldmine, but through an amazing stroke of luck, we managed to turn it on without blowing it up. Tannhauser Gate was paired with another artifact, this one in the Zeta 1 Reticuli system.
![[Image: gJYvx0E.png]](http://i.imgur.com/gJYvx0E.png)
We called this one Night’s Door. Structurally it’s pretty much the same as Tannhauser Gate, but the control system, the software that was running it was way more complex than anything we’d seen before. We’ve spent the last decade picking that software apart, trying to understand the inner workings. There’s a lot of functionality there that we don’t understand, stuff that we can’t access or we don’t want to risk damaging the system trying to access. In the last year or so we’ve made a series of breakthroughs on how to control the stargates, enough to put together a basic user interface. This is some pretty crude stuff for all the scientific and technological know-how going into it, we’ve basically figured out how to turn the thing on and off. But even that is impressive, because our interface allowed us to find something incredible.
![[Image: rOFXnCU.png]](http://i.imgur.com/rOFXnCU.png)
What I’m showing you right now is a library of stargates that Night’s Door can connect to. Right now the accessible library consists of several dozen stargates scattered over hundreds, maybe thousands of light years. We’re still trying to figure out where these things are, the data’s still not firm, but the majority of these are within two thousand light years of Earth. Further analysis, which is again still pending so this may change, suggests that this isn’t an isolated network centered on Zeta 1, that this may, and I want to stress may here, be part of a larger network spanning who knows how far.
And, well, that’s kind of where we are right now. The Sozvezdie Soviet has voted to release all the available data on BLUE HEAVEN to the scientific community as well as the general public, because our world is about to become an order of magnitude bigger and we’ve decided that we can’t keep this to ourselves any longer. It’s big and it’s amazing and everybody should be a part of it. And on that note I think we’ll take some questions.
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): We’re softening the blow a little for the initial release, but the key part is all in the raw data: we’re sure that Night’s Door is part of a much larger network.
Amb. Budi (Jupiter): How are you sure of this?
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): The “version for politicians” as Deidre calls it is there’s a specific flag in the library for gates like the Door. We’ve found two so far, even if we haven’t tried them.
Amb. Vinh Van (Earth): And still no sign of the builders?
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): Unfortunately no. We’ve tested one new address and we think there’s a Tannhauser signature on the planet the gate orbits, but nothing active.
Amb. Vinh Van (Earth): Ruins would be a start at least, the idea of the entire network being… empty, fallow worlds is a little creepy.
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): I won’t say you’re wrong about that.
Q: My question is simple. You’ve had unrestricted access to the gates for a decade. Why are you coming forward with this now?
DR. PALMER: Um, do you mean in policy or?
Q: In general.
DR. PALMER: That’s more a question for Deidre, I think.
MODERATOR: We’re coming forward with this now as part of the Soviet’s continuing dedication to the freedom of information. In addition to this press conference the raw data has been uploaded to our public web site, as well as the Alexandria Archive and Wikileaks among other places. Everybody is free to look at the information.
DR. PALMER: And that’s something we need. To be perfectly honest we’re just about hitting the limits of what we can accomplish on our own here. Don’t get me wrong, everybody on the project are really skilled, capable scientists but there’s a limit to our collective brainpower. By releasing the data we can let scientists from all over the system take a swing at it, maybe find things we missed or improve on our work. That’s how science is supposed to work, after all.
For the record, I can tell you that everybody on BLUE HEAVEN voted to go public, as did the xenoarch department and the Ministry before we took it to the Soviet for final approval.
Q: My question is, have you found any signs of the original owners, and as a followup do you have plans in place if you do find them?
DR. PALMER: To answer the question first, not yet. Sorry. We’re still hoping to find something, but so far all we have are the gates themselves. Now that we’ve expanded our access we’re hoping to find something within the first couple dozen new locations but again, that’s not definite, that’s hoping.
As for do we have plans in place, well yes we have plans in place. Most of them are variations on “lay low while we figure out the next step” but our field teams have at least a basic idea of what to do if we run into the Gatebuilders. More than that you’d have to ask somebody in Fleet, I’m just a lab guy.
Q: You said you don’t have any absolute location data for us yet on these gates. Why is that?
DR. PALMER: Part of it is that space is very big and not very well charted once you get a certain distance away from Earth. The best astronomical instruments we have have gotten reasonably accurate locations for stars up to five-six hundred light years away, but beyond that we just don’t have good information on any of the stars that are likely to be gate candidates. And there’s a good chance that we’re missing objects that are too dim to see within that sphere, like brown dwarfs or rogue planets.
The gates themselves do have some sort of coordinate system, and we’re confident that after enough study we’ll be able to translate that into something human-readable using Zeta 1 as the zero point. But that’s still on the to-do list.
Q: Have you tried any of these new gate addresses?
DR. PALMER: Yes, actually! We’ve tested one address so far, it was, give me a second, the initial address codenames are all randomized so they’re kind of a pain in the ass to remember.
MODERATOR: SILVER SAINT MARY.
DR. PALMER: Right, that’s it, SILVER SAINT MARY. The destination is a good example of our issues with location data. Our very preliminary analysis says that SILVER SAINT MARY is about 600 light years from Earth, on the far side of the Pleiades from us. We only know that much because our initial probe spotted and identified the cluster and the star positions were, well, reversed. It’s going to take a lot of time and observations before we nail down the gate’s location any better than that.
As far as places to go, the system isn’t too different from Alpha Centauri B, the primary is an orange dwarf and the planet looks habitable, a little warmer and drier than Earth if I remember the probe eval right. I should point out that none of this stuff has a proper name yet. I think we’ll be running a contest on the web site at some point?
MODERATOR: If we haven’t put it up already, yes.
DR. PALMER: Okay, so yes we’ll be running a contest to name the star, planet and gate on the web site.
Q: Dr. Palmer, you talked about “other functionality” you’re hoping to unlock. What exactly did you mean by that?
DR. PALMER: It’s hard to explain without looking at the raw data, but our best understanding of the stargate operating system suggests that it’s supposed to work like a data router.
Okay, example: Take out your phone and look up a web page. Connecting your phone to that page takes a bunch of steps bouncing off the main internet trunk here in Korolevgrad, down to Kandor, back to Earth and to whatever server the page is hosted on. But you don’t have to manually step through all that to get to wherever you’re going, right? It’s all automated. Well, we think the gate network can be used the same way. If we understand it right, we ought to be able to hook into Tannhauser Gate and dial Planet Zug on the far side of the galaxy or whatever and then just step through, while the network does the hard bit.
But, and this is the critical thing, we don’t know how to do that just yet. Right now we’re stuck with stepping through point-to-point connections. Hopefully the data release will help us figure out how to make it work.
FastJack: The big question is, where the hell are they and why didn’t they leave anything more than the gates behind?
walkingcontradiction: Maybe it’s an automated thing, like a fleet of Von Neumann probes somebody lit off centuries ago and never remembered to send a shutdown signal?
FastJack: Could be, but it still doesn’t answer the question of where they are.
0_of_1: Maybe they set it up like this on purpose.
walkingcontradiction: How do you mean?
0_of_1: Okay, let’s say you’re an elder race that wants to foster connections between mature sophont civilizations. So you get your sophonts all lined up.
FastJack: Back in the Neolithic? ‘Cos that’s when the Reticuli gate was put in according to the commies.
0_of_1: Sure, why not? Modern humans date back to 70,000 years or so, might as well start early. Anyway, you’ve got your sophonts, and they’re going to develop naturally. Some are going to go extinct through bad luck or bad choices, whatever. The ones who survive you want to be mature, so you stick the gate somewhere close but generally inaccessible if you’re not starfaring.
walkingcontradiction: Why not pull a Prothean, stick the gate at the outer edge of the system? Getting from Earth to, like Pluto in a reasonable time frame would show maturity, right?
0_of_1: It might, but our hypothetical elder race wants us to be interstellar, which is an order of magnitude or more difficult than interplanetary, wave mushy or hard.
walkingcontradiction: So they want a certain level of skill and, what? Unity? Interest? Something like that, before they let us get to the gates. I suppose that makes sense.
FastJack: Except that your elders have to make people want to go interstellar. There’s always a minority interested in wandering, just look at our fine selves, but if you looked at Earth’s neighborhood before we started really sending probes you’d think it was poor real estate.
0_of_1: And naturally you’d probably be right. But if there was a set of planets within somewhat easy interstellar range with sufficiently compatible biochemistries…
FastJack: Son of a bitch, the Gardeners.
walkingcontradiction: Wait, no. The Gardeners? I thought they were a separate group, rogue artisanal terraformers or something?
FastJack: We think that because we’ve found Gardner work outside of the Builder network, like the aeroforming platform at Annwyn. But…
0_of_1: Yeah, but. So now you’ve got territory that any planet-bound race is going to be interested in exploring and exploiting, so actually discovering the gate becomes that much more likely. If you find one of the tributary gates like Tannhauser, sooner or later that brings you to a hub.
walkingcontradiction: And then once you’re at the hub you can go anywhere. Including where the other sophonts are. That’s a hell of a long game to set up.
FastJack: If the Gardeners are the same as the Builders then hell yeah it’s a long game. Gwynedd’s ecosystem is at least a million years older than either of the gates we’ve found so far.
0_of_1: Well, they might not be. The Builders are/were interested in Gardener worlds, we know that much from Arda and Arcadia. And if you’re building a intragalactic transit network you’d probably know all the stellar orbits. It might even be that they saw a cluster of Gardener worlds coming together at the right point and set up the network that way.
walkingcontradiction: I suppose we won’t know unless we get the chance to ask.
FastJack: Which brings us back to the question of where the hell they are.
0_of_1: If they’re running this whole thing as some kind of weird social experiment, I imagine they’ve got some sort of overlook or bluff that lets them see the whole network at once. Maybe the galactic core, or one of the globular clusters. If not, well, I figure we’ll find out what the deal is when we find the end of the line.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” ~ Carl Sagan
Transcript of Federation Council closed session, March 15 2024:
Pres. Alexander Mack: Well, Mal, it’s your show. Go ahead and start.
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): Thank you, Mr. President. Ladies, gentlemen. As per the annexation treaty this is the Soviet giving you formal 24 hours notice before we do something, and I quote, “ridiculous and possibly world-shaking.”
Amb. Roger Goldstein (Utopia/Mars): Well, that’s nicely ominous.
~***~
Transcript of Soviet Ministry of (Weird) Science press conference, March 16 2024:
Speakers:
Professor Deidre Griest, Minister of Science (moderator)
Dr. Thomas Palmer, Exo-Archaeology Dept. & Primary Investigator, Project BLUE HEAVEN
MODERATOR: Hello and thank you all for coming, I know that this was a bit of a surprise for some of you, so I’d especially like to thank those who had to mess with their schedules to be here.
As many of you might be aware, the Ministry of Science has been investigating the mysterious alien objects we discovered orbiting the stars Delta Pavonis and Zeta 1 Reticuli for quite a few years now. In the last few months we’ve made significant strides towards understanding the artifacts, and in the process we might have uncovered a deeper mystery.
To my left is Dr. Thomas Palmer, part of the Ministry’s exo-archaeology department and current primary investigator on Project BLUE HEAVEN. Tom is going to open us up with a summary of what we’ve discovered so far, and what we think it all means, then we’ll go to questions.
Tom?
DR. PALMER: Well, alright. Hello, everyone, I’m Tom Palmer, senior researcher at the Ministry of Science and the primary investigator on what we call in-house Project BLUE HEAVEN, the project working on the stargate pair. I’ve been on the program since 2016, and today I’m going to talk about some of our most recent findings.
Okay, so, just to give some background because I know not everybody knows much about the wheres and the whyfores, in 2013 the Soviet sponsored an expedition to the Delta Pavonis system, to check it out and see if there was anything colonizable around it. They found an inhabitable planet alright, but they also found this.
This is what we ended up calling Tannhauser Gate, an artifact in a semi-stable orbit in between the planet Yggdrasil and its innermost moon Skuld. Now this thing is huge: scale’s a tricky thing in space photos but you have to understand that that ring has an inner diameter of around twelve kilometers, or about a third the size of Daniell Crater. Yeah, it’s big. Just finding this in and of itself was a goldmine, but through an amazing stroke of luck, we managed to turn it on without blowing it up. Tannhauser Gate was paired with another artifact, this one in the Zeta 1 Reticuli system.
We called this one Night’s Door. Structurally it’s pretty much the same as Tannhauser Gate, but the control system, the software that was running it was way more complex than anything we’d seen before. We’ve spent the last decade picking that software apart, trying to understand the inner workings. There’s a lot of functionality there that we don’t understand, stuff that we can’t access or we don’t want to risk damaging the system trying to access. In the last year or so we’ve made a series of breakthroughs on how to control the stargates, enough to put together a basic user interface. This is some pretty crude stuff for all the scientific and technological know-how going into it, we’ve basically figured out how to turn the thing on and off. But even that is impressive, because our interface allowed us to find something incredible.
What I’m showing you right now is a library of stargates that Night’s Door can connect to. Right now the accessible library consists of several dozen stargates scattered over hundreds, maybe thousands of light years. We’re still trying to figure out where these things are, the data’s still not firm, but the majority of these are within two thousand light years of Earth. Further analysis, which is again still pending so this may change, suggests that this isn’t an isolated network centered on Zeta 1, that this may, and I want to stress may here, be part of a larger network spanning who knows how far.
And, well, that’s kind of where we are right now. The Sozvezdie Soviet has voted to release all the available data on BLUE HEAVEN to the scientific community as well as the general public, because our world is about to become an order of magnitude bigger and we’ve decided that we can’t keep this to ourselves any longer. It’s big and it’s amazing and everybody should be a part of it. And on that note I think we’ll take some questions.
~***~
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): We’re softening the blow a little for the initial release, but the key part is all in the raw data: we’re sure that Night’s Door is part of a much larger network.
Amb. Budi (Jupiter): How are you sure of this?
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): The “version for politicians” as Deidre calls it is there’s a specific flag in the library for gates like the Door. We’ve found two so far, even if we haven’t tried them.
Amb. Vinh Van (Earth): And still no sign of the builders?
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): Unfortunately no. We’ve tested one new address and we think there’s a Tannhauser signature on the planet the gate orbits, but nothing active.
Amb. Vinh Van (Earth): Ruins would be a start at least, the idea of the entire network being… empty, fallow worlds is a little creepy.
Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): I won’t say you’re wrong about that.
~***~
Q: My question is simple. You’ve had unrestricted access to the gates for a decade. Why are you coming forward with this now?
DR. PALMER: Um, do you mean in policy or?
Q: In general.
DR. PALMER: That’s more a question for Deidre, I think.
MODERATOR: We’re coming forward with this now as part of the Soviet’s continuing dedication to the freedom of information. In addition to this press conference the raw data has been uploaded to our public web site, as well as the Alexandria Archive and Wikileaks among other places. Everybody is free to look at the information.
DR. PALMER: And that’s something we need. To be perfectly honest we’re just about hitting the limits of what we can accomplish on our own here. Don’t get me wrong, everybody on the project are really skilled, capable scientists but there’s a limit to our collective brainpower. By releasing the data we can let scientists from all over the system take a swing at it, maybe find things we missed or improve on our work. That’s how science is supposed to work, after all.
For the record, I can tell you that everybody on BLUE HEAVEN voted to go public, as did the xenoarch department and the Ministry before we took it to the Soviet for final approval.
Q: My question is, have you found any signs of the original owners, and as a followup do you have plans in place if you do find them?
DR. PALMER: To answer the question first, not yet. Sorry. We’re still hoping to find something, but so far all we have are the gates themselves. Now that we’ve expanded our access we’re hoping to find something within the first couple dozen new locations but again, that’s not definite, that’s hoping.
As for do we have plans in place, well yes we have plans in place. Most of them are variations on “lay low while we figure out the next step” but our field teams have at least a basic idea of what to do if we run into the Gatebuilders. More than that you’d have to ask somebody in Fleet, I’m just a lab guy.
Q: You said you don’t have any absolute location data for us yet on these gates. Why is that?
DR. PALMER: Part of it is that space is very big and not very well charted once you get a certain distance away from Earth. The best astronomical instruments we have have gotten reasonably accurate locations for stars up to five-six hundred light years away, but beyond that we just don’t have good information on any of the stars that are likely to be gate candidates. And there’s a good chance that we’re missing objects that are too dim to see within that sphere, like brown dwarfs or rogue planets.
The gates themselves do have some sort of coordinate system, and we’re confident that after enough study we’ll be able to translate that into something human-readable using Zeta 1 as the zero point. But that’s still on the to-do list.
Q: Have you tried any of these new gate addresses?
DR. PALMER: Yes, actually! We’ve tested one address so far, it was, give me a second, the initial address codenames are all randomized so they’re kind of a pain in the ass to remember.
MODERATOR: SILVER SAINT MARY.
DR. PALMER: Right, that’s it, SILVER SAINT MARY. The destination is a good example of our issues with location data. Our very preliminary analysis says that SILVER SAINT MARY is about 600 light years from Earth, on the far side of the Pleiades from us. We only know that much because our initial probe spotted and identified the cluster and the star positions were, well, reversed. It’s going to take a lot of time and observations before we nail down the gate’s location any better than that.
As far as places to go, the system isn’t too different from Alpha Centauri B, the primary is an orange dwarf and the planet looks habitable, a little warmer and drier than Earth if I remember the probe eval right. I should point out that none of this stuff has a proper name yet. I think we’ll be running a contest on the web site at some point?
MODERATOR: If we haven’t put it up already, yes.
DR. PALMER: Okay, so yes we’ll be running a contest to name the star, planet and gate on the web site.
Q: Dr. Palmer, you talked about “other functionality” you’re hoping to unlock. What exactly did you mean by that?
DR. PALMER: It’s hard to explain without looking at the raw data, but our best understanding of the stargate operating system suggests that it’s supposed to work like a data router.
Okay, example: Take out your phone and look up a web page. Connecting your phone to that page takes a bunch of steps bouncing off the main internet trunk here in Korolevgrad, down to Kandor, back to Earth and to whatever server the page is hosted on. But you don’t have to manually step through all that to get to wherever you’re going, right? It’s all automated. Well, we think the gate network can be used the same way. If we understand it right, we ought to be able to hook into Tannhauser Gate and dial Planet Zug on the far side of the galaxy or whatever and then just step through, while the network does the hard bit.
But, and this is the critical thing, we don’t know how to do that just yet. Right now we’re stuck with stepping through point-to-point connections. Hopefully the data release will help us figure out how to make it work.
~***~
FastJack: The big question is, where the hell are they and why didn’t they leave anything more than the gates behind?
walkingcontradiction: Maybe it’s an automated thing, like a fleet of Von Neumann probes somebody lit off centuries ago and never remembered to send a shutdown signal?
FastJack: Could be, but it still doesn’t answer the question of where they are.
0_of_1: Maybe they set it up like this on purpose.
walkingcontradiction: How do you mean?
0_of_1: Okay, let’s say you’re an elder race that wants to foster connections between mature sophont civilizations. So you get your sophonts all lined up.
FastJack: Back in the Neolithic? ‘Cos that’s when the Reticuli gate was put in according to the commies.
0_of_1: Sure, why not? Modern humans date back to 70,000 years or so, might as well start early. Anyway, you’ve got your sophonts, and they’re going to develop naturally. Some are going to go extinct through bad luck or bad choices, whatever. The ones who survive you want to be mature, so you stick the gate somewhere close but generally inaccessible if you’re not starfaring.
walkingcontradiction: Why not pull a Prothean, stick the gate at the outer edge of the system? Getting from Earth to, like Pluto in a reasonable time frame would show maturity, right?
0_of_1: It might, but our hypothetical elder race wants us to be interstellar, which is an order of magnitude or more difficult than interplanetary, wave mushy or hard.
walkingcontradiction: So they want a certain level of skill and, what? Unity? Interest? Something like that, before they let us get to the gates. I suppose that makes sense.
FastJack: Except that your elders have to make people want to go interstellar. There’s always a minority interested in wandering, just look at our fine selves, but if you looked at Earth’s neighborhood before we started really sending probes you’d think it was poor real estate.
0_of_1: And naturally you’d probably be right. But if there was a set of planets within somewhat easy interstellar range with sufficiently compatible biochemistries…
FastJack: Son of a bitch, the Gardeners.
walkingcontradiction: Wait, no. The Gardeners? I thought they were a separate group, rogue artisanal terraformers or something?
FastJack: We think that because we’ve found Gardner work outside of the Builder network, like the aeroforming platform at Annwyn. But…
0_of_1: Yeah, but. So now you’ve got territory that any planet-bound race is going to be interested in exploring and exploiting, so actually discovering the gate becomes that much more likely. If you find one of the tributary gates like Tannhauser, sooner or later that brings you to a hub.
walkingcontradiction: And then once you’re at the hub you can go anywhere. Including where the other sophonts are. That’s a hell of a long game to set up.
FastJack: If the Gardeners are the same as the Builders then hell yeah it’s a long game. Gwynedd’s ecosystem is at least a million years older than either of the gates we’ve found so far.
0_of_1: Well, they might not be. The Builders are/were interested in Gardener worlds, we know that much from Arda and Arcadia. And if you’re building a intragalactic transit network you’d probably know all the stellar orbits. It might even be that they saw a cluster of Gardener worlds coming together at the right point and set up the network that way.
walkingcontradiction: I suppose we won’t know unless we get the chance to ask.
FastJack: Which brings us back to the question of where the hell they are.
0_of_1: If they’re running this whole thing as some kind of weird social experiment, I imagine they’ve got some sort of overlook or bluff that lets them see the whole network at once. Maybe the galactic core, or one of the globular clusters. If not, well, I figure we’ll find out what the deal is when we find the end of the line.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"