The Eldraeverse

…building civilizations with my space elves in space.

Tag Archives: writing

Just In Case

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 6, 2013

Most laws concern subjects that exist.  This is not, however, strictly necessary.

The most obvious example of this is the language of the Fundamental Contract and the Imperial Charter which consistently refers, when discussing the fundamental and civic rights, the requirements for citizen-shareholdership, and so forth, the word darav, “sophont”, which lies at the heart of our modern polyspecific society.  It is often less obvious than it should be to the modern student that at the time of writing, the eldrae were a worldbound species, with cladism, exotics, and artificial intelligence not merely centuries but millennia in the future.

The reasoning behind this choice has been, unfortunately, lost in time and unrecorded negotiations – and while it would be pleasant to imagine such tremendous foresight on the part of the Founders, we might perhaps more reliably credit fading hopes for the legendary mythologae and some of the wilder scribblings of the era’s fabulists and constructors of clockwork automata instead.

Another example, which pertains not merely to things which don’t exist but things which, it is generally believed, can’t exist, is the Causal Weapon and Editorial Time Machine Act (4110).  While the universe as we know it is block, and as such not susceptible to paradox or retroactive change from commonly known time-travel effects such as relativistic travel, closed timelike curves via wormhole, and acausal logic processors, this Act exists against the possibility that the generally accepted theories of temporal mechanics are incorrect and that methods of time travel exist which do not obey the Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem.  To summarize, the Causal Weapon and Editorial Time Machine Act provides for a preemptive, preventative, and summary death penalty to be applied to anyone constructing a time machine capable of retroactive change – except under highly controlled local experimental conditions for the purpose of testing the Theorem – upon charges of attempting the massively parallel cognicide of every sophont within the eventual light-cone of their destination when.

This is also an example of a law which would be very difficult to apply if the crime in question were actually to be committed.

- Ephor Valarian Elarios-ith-Elarios, “Lectures”

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Cruel Mercy

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 4, 2013

ssc init –neutral –nocontext –personafile:24601.mindstate

ssc run

What… where?

You are in a simulation space, Subject Two Four Six Zero One.

We do, of course, know your real identity as well as the false identity you were using during your attempted infiltration of the Wynérias research colony, but let us not presume.  Two Four Six Zero One will do for now.

Who are you?

We are Overwatch.  Third Directorate.

And you, Two Four Six Zero One, are late of the Republic’s Exception Management Group.

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

We have your mind-state, Two Four Six Zero One, and a detailed static analysis of it.  We know your mission.  We know your profession.  We know that your younger half-sibling ate too much iquarja at your coming of age celebration and regurgitated into your lap.  Let us not waste time on dissembling.

 

 

Where did I fail?  I don’t remember -

That would be telling.

You do not remember, Two Four Six Zero One, because you are the backup.  A subject of interest, that backup.  Not part of your mission plan.  Distinctly heteroprax by Republic standards, given that it’s high on the forbidden technologies list.  Your original had rather developed a taste for such things.

Then my original is still out there?

Unfortunately for you, no.  Your original suffered an accident, shall we say, while on a mountain excursion from Port Sung.  And, retaining the ephemeralist attitudes of even most of the non-Republican kalatri colonies, he naturally had no backup.  The Board shipped him back to his notional home, with the usual apologies.

What do you want from me?

We have an offer for you, Two Four Six Zero One.  You have proved, as we said, distinctly heteroprax, and the Empire hates to waste talent.  We suggest you become your cover in truth, under the new identity we can provide you with, along with passage to one of the independent kalatri worlds.

You want me to defect?

To some extent.  We already have all the information you could provide.  We have no need of you as a double agent.  We merely offer you the opportunity to continue your life.  Monitored, of course, for a time, but as a relatively free agent.

No! Return me to the Republic!

You have that right, under the Accords.

We remind you that if we return you to the Republic, they will not consider you to be a person.  If they retain your mind-state at all, you will have no more rights than any piece of non-sapient software. You will be both legally dead, and property.  It is extremely unlikely that you will ever see your family again.

If you accept our offer, Two Four Six Zero One, we might be able to extract them.  If they are willing to accept that you are you.

No… No.  Send me back.

Very well, Two Four Six Zero One. We will not speak again.

ssc stop –preserve:true

Damn y-

 

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Smuggling

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 22, 2013

“Smuggling is a prestigious career with a long and honorable tradition – being invented something like seven minutes after trade itself.  Ideologically speaking, the smuggler and the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate are identical in theory, only differing in application.  Markets, like information, want to be free.  Demand leads to supply, which leads to trade, which leads to mutual profit, which leads to prosperity – and rot any corporation, government, or bunch of prodnosed kveth-lickers who say it ain’t so!  Folks have a right to trade, and to buy what they want, and for me to sell it to ‘em, and damned if that changes just ‘cause some jackass tells us elsewise.”

“Of course, there are those who disagree.  That’s what makes it fun.”

- Líse Varavélen, master of IS Favorable Supply Curve

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Why I Worldbuild Feverishly

1 Comment Posted by on April 14, 2013

A random thought I posted elsewhere, on the importance of worldbuilding to (my) writing:

I know writers differ on this point, but for myself, I can’t have Líse Varavélen walk down the street without knowing what the street looks like – is it gravel, or concrete, or slabs of black diamondoid treated to be non-slick with a rainbow-striped flowstone slidewalk running down the middle?  (In town, it’s the last one.)  Is she walking, standing on the flowstone strip and gliding along with the traffic, or psychokinetically hovering a foot or so above the ground?  (Depends on her mood and the weather.)  If her dog needs to go, does she leave it, does she clean it up, or does a tiny robot dash out of the nearest robot hotel, clean it up for her, polish the street to its customary perfection, and bill her three millis for the privilege?  (Again, it’s the last one, and three millis is a good price for municipal poop-robo service.)  I must know these things, or my scene-setting imagination just sits there and goes poit!

Posted also, I am not ashamed to admit, because I am rather pleased by the phrase “municipal poop-robo service”.

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Technically, That Last Was ‘Might’

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 7, 2013

Question:

As master of an Empire-registered tramp trader, when may sophonts appear on the cargo manifest of your vessel?

Answer:

Under four circumstances:

1. When you are transporting steerage-class passengers under contract to a passenger line, and such passengers are both onloaded from and offloaded to port-side passenger processing as freight, and will remain in cryostasis or nanostasis during the entirety of their voyage within rated stasis-rack freight containers (4×80-series);

2. When your vessel is a registered Naval auxiliary, and is transporting personnel of the Imperial Military Service in cryostasis or nanostasis under the same conditions as above, when an officer of flag rank has approved such operations;

3. When your vessel is operating as a colonization transport under contract to a colonial corporation or the Ministry of Colonization, and is transporting colonists in cryostasis or nanostasis under the same conditions as above;

4. When you’re fixin’ to die.

- from an examination for shipmaster’s license, second class

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But I Don’t Need One For This!

Leave a Comment Posted by on March 16, 2013

“Be advised that, following the recent series of incidents involving Imperial tourists, the Hierarchy of Transportation has added the following vehicles to the list of those requiring licensure for use on public roadways: flitters, hovercraft, psychokinetic amplifiers, skyhooks, grav-boards, floater disks, spiderpalanquins, rollagons, subterrenes, miniblimps, unispheres, brachiators, all forms of self-mobile furniture (specifically including beds, couches, and chaises longue), walking mecha, tilt-turbine hats, bouncecraft, autokites, powered boots, vector-control harnesses, self-laying slidewalks, nanocreeks, spacer pikes, gengineered snakes, fusion-assisted pogo sticks, jet-powered rocket pants, and cyberfeet.”

“In addition, vehicles with no axles shall be deemed vehicles with two axles for the purposes of road tolls.”

- law enforcement bulletin, seen somewhere in the Expansion Regions

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Dubious Provenance

Leave a Comment Posted by on March 8, 2013

Causal weapons are a myth, an arms-dealer’s con trick. Their official mention in the Ley Accords was no more than a paranoid’s precaution, deliberate disinformation, or a warning to those who might become too attached to oracles and knight’s-move stratagems. The universe was block, that was known; no retroactive editing-out permitted. Their reality, therefore – that was on the same level as the Precursor fittlers, three-ended wormhole recipes, bootleg godseeds, pocket universes, negative-mass antimatter, treasure maps to the Amphigory fleet and volumetric claims to Sector Zero, the Absolute Center and Place of Creation, that any downport slash-trader stocked in abundance for the most gullible and rich marks.

So why, he wondered, did this benzene-sweating azayf look so terrified of the… half-melted-semi-helix-blob-thing on the table between them?

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Fic-a-Day: Mutual Ambush

Leave a Comment Posted by on February 1, 2013

(To illustrate some of the issues.)

As the classic example of the effects of physics upon interstellar relations, consider the short and inconclusive conflict known as the Odeln Extrality Incident (from the Imperial perspective), or the First Border War (from the Republican perspective). It is generally agreed that the cause and first engagement of the conflict was the mutual destruction, a short distance outside the Odeln system volume, of the Imperial destroyer CS Joyful Dirge, and the Voniensan battlecruiser VNS Deliberative.

The causes of the incident remain obscure, beyond the rising post-contact tensions in the Seam, and even the details of it are disputed. Many of the ensuing skirmishes and inconclusive negotiations can be attributed to the relativistic nature of the engagement; the consensus of the Imperial observers, computed according to the empire time reference frame, was universally that Deliberative fired first upon Joyful Dirge, while the consensus of Voniensan observers in-system, operating in reference frames tied to Republic Universal, was that Joyful Dirge fired first upon Deliberative. It is the unfortunate nature of relativistic space-time that all of these observations can be simultaneously truthful and true.

Such are the difficulties of the strategos, the diplomat, and the historian in a non-Callaneth-compliant universe.

- Larjyn Calcelios-ith-Calithos, Perspectives on the Early Interstellar Era
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System.TimeyWimey?

1 Comment Posted by on February 1, 2013

Today’s cross-infection between professions: since I’m mucking about with date/time libraries in .NET as the moment in my day job, wondering what a relatively (heh) simple type like, say, System.DateTime would look like in the Eldraeverse, where convenient assumptions like sharing the same concept of “now”, rate of passage of time, and event ordering with the other systems on the network are trivially false.

(For everyone, not just people coding for NASA or GPS systems.)

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The Sound Of Your Doom

Leave a Comment Posted by on December 22, 2012

There have been many battle-cries and war chants throughout history.  Every legion has its own, indeed often several for different occasions, as do the House guards, most mercenary companies, and other military organizations great and small.  Of all these, the most infamous are the Final Words of the destroyed Ninth Imperial Legion, the Hounds of Makrast:

Dármódan xalakhassár hál!

The words themselves are simple enough, from the clipped military dialect of Eldraeic: “Slavers, die!” would be a good colloquial translation.

The meaning of the phrase, however, is rather more.  In honor of the destruction of the Ninth, it is reserved for use during seredhain, the blood war, the war of extermination of anathema; its meaning, then, is that everyone dies today – either the enemy will be annihilated, or the Legion destroyed, attempting it.  Neither quarter nor mercy shall be given, no lives shall be spared, no prisoners taken, no surrenders accepted.

It is the Legions’ boast that none who have heard it in anger have lived long enough to report the experience.

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By Their Works Shall They Be Known

Leave a Comment Posted by on December 8, 2012

“…of stone originally dating back to the ninth century pre-Imperial.

“The Merchancy Library: A little bit off the beaten track in a lower niche of Inisvaen’s Wind District (B Coster Court), the Merchancy Library houses one of the finest collections of antique tally-strings and slice-verified contracts dating back to the late pre-Empire and early Imperial periods.

The library also houses a unique collection of books bound in leather tanned from eldrae skin. These date back to the burning of the original Merchancy Library in -43 by a raider band operating out of the nearby forest. Upon capturing these raiders, the then cisatar of Iniscail, Larjyn Calcelios, sentenced them to “replace, at least in part, what they had destroyed”. The fine sense of irony that characterizes the Calcelios is not, it would appear, of recent origin.

“The Focative Tower: Surmounting the…”

- Sights and Sites of Southern Selenaria, Iniscail Tourist Press

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Black Friday

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 23, 2012

As it happens, my book and e-book aren’t on sale or otherwise specially discounted for Black Friday.

But, y’know, they don’t cost all that much to start with, so why not go buy a copy anyway?

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Multiple Jeopardy

1 Comment Posted by on November 19, 2012

AIÖ (IMPERIAL CORE) — The Watch Constabulary announced today the capture of more instances of Werg yilKorin hinAnkar, estrev and sole member of the Shrouded Suns Selfdom, a criminal syndicate based out of the Sivrin Freeworlds, notorious for their ventures in blacknet operations, infojacking, reputation gaming, identity fraud, loansharking, forknapping, brainspiking, genetheft, semislavery and sophont trafficking.

The three captured instances, Werg.1032, Werg.1033, and Werg.1120 were executed upon verification of identity, under the sentence of death passed against their lineal fork-ancestor, Werg.37, in 4982.  At the present time, the Constabulary estimates that 383 instances of yilKorin remain at large.

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An Inglorious Coda

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 17, 2012

Arkuel Múras: Where’s next on the agenda?

Ethly 0x4414CC2B:  Freylis.  Fourth planet of Ardylis in the Dark Sea, two moons, oxy-nitro-water garden world with a levo-protein, levo-lipid, dextro-carbohydrate, DNA-encoding ecology.  And most interestingly, a former sophont civilization, or what’s left of it.

Arkuel Múras: How former?

Ethly 0x4414CC2B: By the aging on the city cores and the radio shell, five or six centuries, approximately, and the remaining artificial satellites and the artifacts we found on the major moon – some rocket parts, scientific instruments, and monumental engravings, dating to perhaps a century or century and one half before the end – would bear that out, as would the current levels of common industrial pollutants in the atmosphere and the available bioarchaelogical records showing their fall from a peak shortly before that time.

There are some signs that the civilization took some time to die out – the remaining cities appear to have been abandoned from the outside in, suggesting a population eroding by attrition.  No signs of general war or natural disaster.

Moiré Andracanth-ith-Cyranth: These satellites – any habitats, shipyards?  Signs of star travel?

Ethly 0x4414CC2B: No, no habitable stations.  The technology of the artificial satellites is equivalent to our Middle Information Age, which suggests that they could have had the technological capability, but don’t appear to have exercised it.  The technology of the lunar artifacts is older, pre-Information Age, I would say, but no later –

Moiré Andracanth-ith-Cyranth: Feh.  It’s another bloody choker.

Ethly 0x4414CC2B: Choker?

Moiré Andracanth-ith-Cyranth: Pedant.  General Socioeconomic Systems Failure, Etiology Unknown.

(pause)

The biosapient equivalent of an elliptic collapse.  Where a civilization stops or greatly slows development for one reason or another – one economic blind-alley or another, factional protection, neophobia, safety paralysis – runs the complexity overhead of their socioeconomic systems up beyond what their infotrophic pyramid can support, relying on the legacy of the past to keep going – then discover the hard way once they start slipping that they can’t build back up again.  In this particular model, they keep ignoring the problems until they slip all the way.  It’s a classic civ-killer trap.

Arkuel Múras: Anyway, back on topic, gentlesophs.  Any exceptional recommendations for this one?

Moiré Andracanth-ith-Cyranth: Anything particularly unusual about their technology that, say, our cousins over at Probable Technologies would be interested in?  Or any connections to other extant civilizations?

Ethly 0x4414CC2B: Nothing in what we’ve been able to dig up so far.  The cities are all pretty wrecked, anyway, not much to find even partially intact.

Moiré Andracanth-ith-Cyranth: So, a fossil world in a bad part of space with nothing but some academic archaeology and a few artifacts for museums of the ironic going for it?  Scrub it.  File the plat and toss it to the auction guys at the Registry.

Ethly 0x4414CC2B: Well, there could be some interesting successor species… but, yes, not a high priority for us, I must concur.

Arkuel Múras: I also agree.  Good.  Where’s next up?

Ethly 0x4414CC2B: Galróp.  Third major moon of a gas giant, fifth planet of Pesdiné, in…

- from the minutes of an IES review meeting

Dedicated to the alt-text of this xkcd strip, but noting that studied, and remembered – especially in any grander sense than a footnote in a dossier in a filing cabinet in storage room 32-3-C-19(a) – may be a little too hopeful, at least when you consider that the people who will find them have an entire galaxy filled with cultures that haven’t got EPIC FAIL scrawled right across them to play with, instead.

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Clearly, This Is The 1.0 Release

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 15, 2012

Responses to the advent of Information Physics, and the proposal that the universe, in essence, is a self-simulating simulation, a program using itself as a processor, usually fall into one of four classes.  The ambitious immediately wonder how we can apply this in the short-term to build better, faster, more fundamental using-the-same-techniques-as-the-universe – or possibly built out of small universes – processors, ushering in a whole new revolution in computer technology free from all the inconvenience of leptons and photons and other messy materiel.

The exceptionally ambitious, contrariwise, begin formulating a long-term plan to recompile the whole damn thing without various of its more irritating limitations, usually involving removing the Luminal Limit and making some serious revisions to the Laws of Thermodynamics.

The curious, pointing out correctly both that a logos will run in just about any medium possessed of the ability to execute certain non-deterministic mathematical operations and sufficient free energy, and, indeed, that the evolution of so many disparate forms of sophont life demonstrates that they also arise spontaneously in many different places, wonder who might be living in the interstices of our natural laws, and how we might go about contacting them.

And the incurably paranoid, agreeing with the curious, go on to wonder if these fast-running fundamental-stratum information lifeforms are coming to eat all our brains, or worse, if they already have?

- It Thinks Therefore We Are, Lylvíëve Lochran-ith-Lochran

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Vignettes of the Star Empire…

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 12, 2012

[Eldraeverse #1 Cover]…is also now available as a physical book, priced $6.99.

Go here to buy it from Amazon.com, and it should also be available on the various other Amazons. Or for the Kindle edition, see here.

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Cost of Breathing

3 Comments Posted by on November 11, 2012

LIMÉRI STATION HABITAT FEE ASSESSMENT

LIMÉRI STATION HABCORP, ICC
A PROTECTORATE OF BALANCE AND EXTERNALITY AFFILIATE

RECIPIENTS Anlave-Kateris Household
  - Anlave Claves-ith-Estenv
  – Kateris Muetry-ith-Muiris
ADDRESS OF RECORD 1-00003-01496-0223
Talentar
Liméri Station
Dalecí
14, Avenue of Focative Mirrors
PERIOD COVERED Tílenmot, 3502
Charge (Es.)
Base Habitat Fee eldrae x 2 74
Air Usage Increment barbecue x 3 1.6
Air Usage Decrement greenhouse, 960 sq. ft., active -0.70
Cogeneration 1,953 kWh net
(23,934 kWh use / 22,981 kWh gen)		 1.1
Dependent Increment bandal x 1 3
Dependent Increment child, eldrae, x 1 6
Hive Processing Rebate 15,961 state-usage infoblocks
4,117 hab-usage infoblocks		 -0.3
Thermal Overage Decrement +5° -0.42
TOTAL   84.28

This assessment mailing is for informational purposes only.  Applicable habitat fees have been deducted from the designated Active Debit Account as selected, and no additional charges are due.

For further queries or requests please do not hesitate to contact me.

Given under my hand and seal this day, 31 Tílenmot 3502,

Galén Sallantar-ith-Sallantar, for and on behalf of,

Liméri Station HabCorp, ICC

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Memorable Words

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 10, 2012

One problem with the very long lifespans of the eldrae and, thus, the equally long institutional memory of the Empire, is that while it has preserved for posterity many of the great examples of rhetoric, like Alphas’s first Speech from the Throne, Olbria Amanyr’s fiery Senatorial style, or the elder Corith’s opening address to the Conclave of Galactic Polities, it has also preserved a great many speeches upon which the polishing effect of fading historical memory would only have been a mercy. Take, for example, the too-often-quoted address of Petrae Sargas to the Seventh Legion before the Second Battle of the Iselen Vale:

“Well, my lads and lasses, looks like the Amynmahar have caught us with our asses hanging out right and proper. But there’s only twelve thousand of them up in the vale, and there’s three thousand of us, and one by-the-Contract Imperial can whip any five kórasan’s lackeys under sun or stars, so we’ve still got ‘em outnumbered. Now let’s get out there and kill the bastards, and I’m buying the beer when we get back.”

- A History of Imperial Rhetoric

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Vignettes of the Star Empire

3 Comments Posted by on November 7, 2012

[Eldraeverse #1 Cover]I haz a book!

(As you can see from the addition of the “My Books” tab up above, no doubt.)

And you can find it on Amazon here, for Kindle, right now – over 44,000 words of nanofiction and metafiction from the Associated Worlds SF universe for the modest price of $2.99.

Buy a copy!  Buy ten copies!  Tell your friends, and make them buy ten copies, too!

But, no, seriously.  Vignettes of the Star Empire, the first collection of the nanofiction and metafiction which I’ve been writing (and including a couple of pieces not seen on t’blog) is now available as a Kindle e-book, all edited and polished and in its final canonical form.  For those of you who would prefer a physical book, that one’s not quite ready yet, but should also be available soon.  Not that you should let that stop you from buying an e-book copy too, of course.  Ahem.

Enjoy!

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Nice Labcoat

Leave a Comment Posted by on November 3, 2012

Gentlesophs,

I have noted with interest several papers published in recent issues of the Journal, and in the Journal of Cliodynamics, addressing the widely observed increasing correlation between intelligence/education level and attractiveness/desirability for sexual encounters and pair-bonding in many species which have recently joined the galactic community. See, for example, Relationship Structures and Educational Achievement: A Correlation (ni Finyet an Karím & Claves-ith-Lelad, JoTM, v. 1966); Rising Pan-Worlds Cultural Features of the 4th Millennium (Corel-ith-Coreliar, 0xAAD4692F & Emerald Flourish in E, Imperial Journal of Memetic Science, v. 2210); Sapiosexuality and Assortative Mating (Sev Mar Dinét, Sev Dal Rídan, & viSeruaz, JoC, v. 1265); A Study of Cross-Species Desirability Signifiers (Cullet ra Seddan, viHalruaz, & Toltes, JoTM, v. 1966); and Ain’t Science Sexy? (mor-Vivek & mor-Estaeum, JoTM, v. 1964).

While the majority of these papers merely note the existence of the correlation and refrain from speculation on its cause, I would like to note an obvious hypothesis: memeticists, whether theoretical or practical, tend to be among the high-intelligence and high-education demographics in their respective societies; and among many species, high-level education takes place in a part of the lifecycle that also holds the peak of sexual and pair-bonding activity.

In short, the correlation is a result of exposure of new societies to the mutated remnant memeplex produced by millions of past students’ half-baked unofficial projects in applied memetics, and the first cohorts of students from those societies spinning up such projects of their own.

While at the moment the chief support for this hypothesis is an informal poll of my departmental colleagues and our reminiscences of our student days, we are now actively seeking funding for a formal study of the phenomenon. Interested parties should contact us through the University.

Academician Cordáne Calaris-ith-Calir, Landing University, Viëlle

- letter to the Journal of Theoretical Memetics

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