Month: February 2012

For This, I Joined The Orbit Guard?

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From the logs of the CS Proximate Valiance, assigned to the Mírlan system:

At Courtly falling 17 standard, CS Proximate Valiance, having recently departed the refueling facilities of the gas giant Cálmíeré, received a distress call from the vicinity of Chanith, the 87th moon of the said gas giant.  This distress call, while itself incoherent, carried a valid suit subcarrier stamp for the IS Respondent Avaricious, a private yacht registered with the Mírlan Starport Authority.  Upon establishing that it possessed the greatest reserve Δv of the available ships in the vicinity of the moon, CS Proximate Valiance vectored to intercept and provide assistance.

Upon arrival in the vicinity of Chanith some 3.5 hours later, no extravehicular personnel were located, and transmission of the distress call had ceased.  However, the IS Respondent Avaricious was located, making thrust away from Chanith on an approximate minimum delta transfer vector for Woven Night Station, a corporate/residential drift-habitat registered to Anja Microtechnics, ICC.  Upon being hailed, IS Respondent Avaricious denied being in present distress, but complied with instructions to heave to and be boarded.

On further investigation, the crew of the Respondent (enumeration appended) proved to be students apprenticing at Microtechnics, who had leased the Respondent for an impromptu low-gravity skiing expedition to Chanith, making use of a convenient slope, slipspray application, and solid-fuel thruster packs in order to pull off the “round-the-world jump”.  One member of the group, Citizen Philas Seleyev-ith-Selvia, it appears, had spiked his suit water supply with some home-made distillates of rather dubious composition, and as a consequence of the resulting inebriation had attempted to make the jump using two thruster packs.  The resulting excess thrust, despite a late attempt to dump one of the thruster packs during his jump, led to him inadvertently exceeding Chanith escape velocity when he bounced off the ground at the bottom of the slope and drifting off into space in a deadman’s tumble.  It was during this drift that the incoherent distress call picked up by the Proximate Valiance was transmitted, although he was thereafter recovered by the rest of his party in their own ship.

Citations (enumeration appended) have been issued for misuse of the distress frequency, failure to properly terminate a distress situation, leaving the scene of a distress situation under power, gross incompetence in command of a space vessel, and littering (the Respondent failed to collect the discarded thruster pack).

A routine medical check was performed on Citizen Seleyev-ith-Selvia.  Having been picked up by the Respondent before his suit oxygen was exhausted, it would appear that he has suffered no additional brain damage or other injury from the incident.

Trope-a-Day: Sword and Gun (also, Bow and Sword in Accord)

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Sword and Gun: As they say, it’s a flexibility-maximizing classic for those who find it easy to handle a weapon with one hand (and, y’know, there are some biomods that do that).  It’s usually pistol and the longer of the Two Swords for formal dress, and pistol/carbine and the shorter in its utility/fighting knife role (and yes, there are plenty of people who will say that any legionary who goes into battle without his sword is improperly dressed) when dressed for combat, but either way, this is how a lot of people roll.  In the old days, this was sometimes done as Bow and Sword in Accord, with a hand-clockbow in place of the pistol.

And, of course, there’s no rule that says you have to use any kind of conventional blade on that sword…

Tárvalén Awaiting (2/2)

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(Part one is here.)

“Many long years passed, as the faithful bandal waited before the gate,” the priest continued his story, “until with time and chance the man died too, and his spirit also approached the gate; and the spirit of the bandal bounded up and ran to meet him.  Joyous was their reunion, and for a time, the gloom of the Fugue was lifted by the ring of laughter and happy barking alike.”

“But then at last the time came, and they approached the Twilight City together, and once again Ivrél stopped them at the gate, saying, ‘You may pass, but you alone; for Heaven’s law forbids the City to those spirits of lesser orders.'”

“The bandal whined sadly, and made to turn away, but the man stopped him with a touch, and replied, ‘In life we ran together.  What just cause is there to part us now?'”

“‘It is Heaven’s law,’ Ivrél said again.”

“And anger furrowed the man’s brows, and his hand drifted to the hilt of his blade, and for a moment it seemed as if the clash of arms too would disturb the silence of the Fugue, but he knew well that Ivrél was sovereign in this place; and in a moment, they turned together and left that place.”

“‘There is no other way for you,’ Ivrél called after him, ‘for all souls called here must pass into the Twilight City.'”

“‘He stayed here for me,’ the man replied.  ‘Mélith demands, by Star, Stone, and Flame, that I can do no less.’  Saying this, he sat down with his back against one of the leafless trees, the bandal curling up by his side, and wrapped his cloak around them both.  And so their waiting began.”

“The years pass quickly in the timelessness of the Fugue, and as they waited the years turned to decades, and the decades to centuries, as they watched many souls pass through the Fugue on their wanderings.  And yet they prevailed and remained, sometimes walking amid the white-barked trees or upon the bridges that crossed the dark mist-cloaked waters, but for the most part sitting together beneath their tree outside the City’s gate.”

“Thus it was that in the thousandth year of their waiting, they saw the City’s gate flung wide, and from within a shining figure emerge, light wrapped in light and casting no shadow; Elmiríën, the Patterner, the Bringer of Order, the One Word of Truth, and approach the tree where they rested.  And seeing this, they stood to meet Him.”

“‘That you remain is something unheard of,” the Patterner said, ‘for those souls which remain uncalled dwindle until rebirth, and those which are called pass into the Twilight City.  None remain, and yet here you stand.'”

“‘I hear the call,’ the man replied, facing the god upright as one ought, ‘but I will not leave this place so long as my friend is here; and he will not leave this place so long as I am here.  Therefore, we remain.'”

“‘The chill of the Fugue cleanses the soul of those qualities which do not befit Our City.  After a thousand years, you are assuredly ready.  Come now within.'”

“‘My lord of Order, I cannot.  Heaven’s law forbids my friend entry, and thus -‘”

“‘Heaven’s law forbids’, the Patterner broke in, ‘those whose souls are yet stained by terrestrial passions from entering the Twilight City.  That you each remain here demonstrates your loyalty to be celestial in nature, not terrestrial.  Come you both within; there is a place and a purpose for you there, and know that the Twilight City is open to his kin now, and all of his order who can reach such heights.'”

“And with these words spoken, after their long wait, man and bandal entered the Twilight City together, walking side-by side.”

A small voice rose from the crowd.  “That’s the end?  What happened next, after they waited so long?”

“Why, child, they abide there still.”  He pointed to the statue.  “The defining souls of Holy Tárvalén, the Loyal.  One can, after all, only be called to the Twilight City by an eikone.  Even if that call is to become that eikone.”

Delay

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My apologies, fic-a-day followers, but due to a bad case of mental fatigue involving many, many missing hours of sleep, today’s fic-a-day will be delayed until tomorrow.  (And, no, tomorrow’s won’t be delayed; you’ll just get two then.)

Sorry ’bout that, but I’m guessing you’d rather have “late” than “crap”, right?

Trope-a-Day: Hammerspace

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Hammerspace: While there is no actual Hammerspace technology – yet, the ontotechs are still working on it (see: Bigger on the Inside) – the ability of the ubiquitous desktop nanoforge and the hand-held nanolathe to produce small objects essentially on demand does create much of the same effect as being able to stash them Elsewhere.  The recipes, of course, being software, take up practically no room.

Tárvalén Awaiting (1/2)

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The statue stood in the center of the temple’s atrium, a tall stern-browed figure, its left arm holding a bundle of scrolls while its right hand reached down to rest upon the head of, and scratch behind the ears of, the wolfish bandal sitting by its side. With the doors thrown open, the hundreds of fine glass chains fringing the statue’s robes tinkled quietly in the morning breeze.

“In the beginning,” said the priest, “of the First Legend, there was a man and a bandal.  Their names are lost to history.  Who they were is lost to history, as everyone tells this legend differently.  In Selenaria, they say they were one of the first moon-priests, and one of their nighthound guardians.  In Cestia, an Alatian mountain-man and a retired wardog.  In the Crescent, a Telirvéss aman-ship captain and his water-dog.  And on the steles that record the Hal!ast Fragments, he hunts with a lone wolven ancestor while the Winter of Nightmares howls around them…”

“And in the Deeping?”

“Here in the Deeping, we know that all these legends are true.  Fundamentally.”

“Regardless, man and bandal lived a long and full life together, whether it was guarding the lost moon-temples of Iselené, hunting and mining, trading and raiding, or finding food and warmth amid disaster; true partners in life, sharing plenty and lack, joy and sorrow, mélith.  But time gnaws at us all, and few shrug it off as our kind does, and with the passage of years, the bandal was the first of them to die.”

“And soon thereafter, amid the dark waters and leafless white trees of the Fugue, under its misty skies, the spirit of the bandal approached the gate of the Twilight City, and the exarch Ivrél, the guardian of that gate, spoke, saying ‘You have no place here, spirit; the Fugue is not for you, nor yet the city.  Return to the Moil set aside for you, and rebirth.’  But the spirit of the bandal made no answer, and sat itself down to wait before the gate.”

“And Ivrél spoke again, saying, ‘By Heaven’s law, you may not enter here.  Get you gone from this threshold!’  And the bandal‘s growl rumbled in the air, shaking the leafless trees and setting the still waters to trembling.”

“And Ivrél, whose strength was undefeatable for so long as he stood on the City’s threshold, did not press the matter further.”

Painful Nuances

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“I am an algetic composer. I am not a torturer.”

“Indeed, I can recite more detailed information about the selective stimulation of pain centers than most people. That doesn’t change the reality of what I do, you understand? I am not some damned savage dealing out pain for interrogation or punishment. I compose enhanced-realism algetic experiences. The authentic sense of fatigue as your stamina runs out, stabbings real enough to feel the knife, bullets with the proper sensation of impact, shock and pain when they hit… adjusted, of course, for the optimal extreme experience with limiters in the right places, unrealistically fast recovery, and so forth. In other words, art.”

“Yes, I create pain. But I don’t torture people, even if the self-righteous misconceptions of outworld preregressives occasionally make it bloody tempting.”

“I am a game designer.”

Trope-a-Day: Bigger on the Inside

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Bigger on the Inside: Averted… so far (as referenced in Stop Fittling With That and its Author’s Notes).  The possibility is acknowledged to exist – the field of ontotechnology is working on it even now, in the present of their timeline, under the generic name of “dimensional transcendence”, and it really ought to be possible, since both wormholes and vector control demonstrate that it’s possible to muck about with the topology of space in interesting ways, but no-one’s actually done it yet.

Trope-a-Day: Ave Machina

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Ave Machina: Smile when you say that, squishie!

Well, sort of.  The Imperials subscribe to the elegance of design, logic, and purity of the machine parts of the trope, but, well, this is a trans/postsophontist setting (even outside the Empire, which completely idealizes those notions, nothing-but-the-pure-flesh baselines are rare, simply because refusing to transcend the limitations of the average baseline species is the fast track to galactic irrelevance).  You don’t worship the machines that are, after all, merely the components of your personal apotheosis.

(Of course, the Transcend is a weakly godlike superintelligence some of whose high-level routines are wearing the masks of the iconic personifications of concepts that served the Eldrae as deities – but that’s really more a case of Deus Est Machina, which see.)

Is There In Death No Beauty?

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High in the mountains of Cimoníë lies the black-spired citadel of the Aellakhassren, the Order of Beautiful Death, the finest students of ktenology the Empire has to offer.  Not death-worshippers, they would have us be clear; their order takes Ithával and Kalasané as exemplars, save those few who, by profession, look to Pétamárdis or Gaëlenén, or Olísmé the Consoler, and there are but few devotees of Entélith among them.  Rather, the Aellakhassren are dedicated to the principle that even the darkest practices, if they must be done, should be done well, and with their proper excellence.

In the voluminous Outer Court the warrior-poets of the third degree abide, along with the many who seek to learn from them.  The cadre of the Legions study elegance, ease, and beauty in pistol, carbine, and grenade as their forefathers learned it in sword and clockbow, and how to enter battle with song and quip ready to the lips.  Assassins study the artistic use of knife, drug, and thought-virus.  Bodyguard-courtesans learn the subtle arts of killing with the edge of a silken fan, or death concealed in the seasoning of a drink.  And in the Pavilion of Unfalling Shadows, the euthanatrists learn the art of easing the dying out of life with gentleness, dignity, and grace.

The Inner Court is the preserve of the masters of these arts, the warrior-poets of the second degree, who have learned to turn their beauty and elegance themselves into weapons; who can paralyze an opponent with a meaning-laden gesture, or with an artistically composed chelír ease the passing of the dying or cast an enemy into doubt and self-defeat.

The Onyx Spire is the dwelling of the few warrior-poets of the first degree, who are reputed to have refined their order’s arts until they are able to kill with an idea, a choice of dress, a single question.  Few enter there but the masters of the second degree.

None return.

Speculativism Index

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The Speculativism Index, under any of its names, is a crude clionomic hack used by free traders, weirdseekers, adventurers, and various other professions which necessarily interact with the starbound and minority civilizations of the known Galaxy in a more amateurish way than the Grand Survey or the Exploratory Service.

The Speculativism Index is calculated thus: Examining as large a sample as you feel necessary of the civilization’s media stores and libraries, across formats, and avoiding specialty locations, compute the volume of data devoted to various types of speculative fiction and the volume of data devoted to other, non-speculative fiction; then obtain the ratio between them.  This ratio, expressed as the percentage of the former, is the Speculativism Index.

(A large part of the difficulty involved in this is the problem of recognizing what constitutes speculative fiction in an exotic cultural context.  The Speculativism Index of the d!grith, for example, was historically underestimated due to the failure to recognize their popular “speculative accountancy” genre, while more severe problems attended properly interpreting, and therefore classifying, the multibranched “quantum fictions” of the star-dwelling seb!nt!at.  When these were corrected for, the recalculated d!grith Speculativism Index matches their observed performance; the unusually alien psychology of the seb!nt!at remains something of a special case.)

The Index is principally used, by its inventors, as a sales/interaction valuation tool.  As one free trader explained the associated rule of thumb: “Anything under ten, just leave – they’re never going to make it off their world on their own, and they’re not going to thank you for forcibly introducing them to so many things outside their context.  Between ten and thirty, a little backward, so probably more effort than most of us want to deal with, but with work, can shape up into a solid customer.  Thirty to sixty, that’s the respectable Galactic mainstream.  Over sixty… then you’ve got a whole different class of problems.  Then you’re fighting off their enthusiasm.”

It has generally been thought in the past that the Speculativism Index was too rough-and-ready a measure to be of use for clionomic purposes.  Recent studies have established, however, that there is a strong correlation between generally accepted estimates of the Speculativism Index of various well-known civilizations and the degree to which they prosper in the meta-society of the Associated Worlds according to various well-known scales (the Integration Coefficient, the Polity Prosperity Index, and the Progress and Innovation Index), and that the Speculativism Index also correlates with the results of the accepted clionomic coefficients of neophilia, xenophilia, and internal cognitive freedom.

Colleagues, I commend this area to your attention.

– Journal of Cliodynamics, Vol. LXXVI

Trope-a-Day: Deus Est Machina

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Deus Est Machina: Done deliberately and intentionally.  When you build a recursively self-improving seed AI, the kind that turns into, in the lingo, a “weakly godlike superintelligence”, then you have to know that you’re committing a willful act of theogeny, right there.  Doubly so when you’re building a collective hyperconsciousness out of shards of everyone’s brains at the same time (see: Hive Mind, Touched By Vorlons), and upload the “souls” (mind-states) of the dead into it.  Lampshaded in internal context when your new e-deity decides the archetypal masks of your mythological deities make nice hats to wear for various pieces of its internal architecture.

Further lampshaded with the God of War-class hyperdreadnought (that’s one better than super).  When it turns up somewhere, it really does mean that Dúréníän, archai-slash-eikone of righteous war, battle, conquest, strategy, tactics, and the sentinel darëssef is taking the field personally to kick your ass.

Six Simple Machines

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In today’s random conlanging post – the Eldraeic terms for the six simple machines, just because I could:

rijvas
Inclined plane.

rijsevas
Wedge (“double-sided inclined plane”, more or less)

saejas
Screw (originally “circular inclined plane”, then worn down)

chalél / charét
Wheel / axle

sekánlél
Lever (“stick that moves things not itself”)

chalánlél
Pulley (“wheel that moves things not itself”)

For The Honor of the Second

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The drone stood in the hangar, its blunt nose and forward-swept wings scarred with the black lines of kinetic strikes and near-misses with explosive-tipped missiles, the capped remnant of one sensory pod dangling uselessly from its side.

“For great valor in the face of the enemy,” the Wing Commander read, “when on Theater Elapsed Day 17 of the Liir Conflict the Second Squadron off CS Calencine Upreaching was ambushed by a numerically superior force, six squadrons of Liirian wingdrones. While englobed by the hostile force, the order to immediately retreat to low orbital positions was given, although with the expectation of heavy losses.”

“In defiance of standard procedures for such circumstances and the order as given, unit Calencine-2-18 of the Wing remained in the battlespace to cover the retreat of its fellows, utilizing innovative tactics to draw the attention of the Liirian wingdrones to itself and avoid destruction, allowing the majority of the Second Squadron to escape from the ambush with only minor damage.”

“Wingdrone Calencine-2-18’s innovation and valor saved his squadron and defeated the ambush laid for them, and reflects the highest traditions of the Imperial Navy and the Military Service.”

A small utility spider scuttled across the dais, and in a shower of sparks and the thunder of applause, welded the silver medal to the side of the drone’s carapace.

Calencine-2-18 itself, not being designed to be sophont, thought very little during the ceremony.

But not nothing.

Trope-a-Day: Hive Mind

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Hive Mind: The Transcend is not a traditional Hive Mind, it’s a collective consciousness, or group intellect.  The difference, as it will point out to you at some considerable length, is that all of the members retain their individual personalities and perspectives as well as contributing to the whole, that while knowledge is shared, individual memories aren’t (at least until one is poured into the soul-ocean on permadeath), and that the true hive-mindedness is that of the Transcendent soul-shard that’s grafted into your personal consciousness (see Touched By Vorlons), but which does not constitute all of it.  And that the Transcend has a (very large) metamind of its own (see Deus Est Machina), over and above and simultaneously within the collective aspect.

There are also, of course, genuine Hive Minds which do abolish individual identity, which are called Fusions, but since (a) resistance is not futile, because they only take volunteers, and (b) by far the most common type of Fusion is the Self-Fusion, made up of multiple instances of the same mind, they’re not anything to worry about.

(Okay, yes, in civilized space.  Hegemonizing swarms with a degree of intelligence are not unknown outside it, even to the extent of things like the Leviathan Consciousness, and the less said about things like the Calphrast Hordes the better, but still…)

The temporary kind (see the Mental Fusion trope) are known as confluxes, often used for tactical military purposes and in other situations where close teamwork is required.

Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor

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Just throwing in, now it’s not on my nonexistent regular blog, a plug for the blog Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor, of which I approve thoroughly in the interest of not making my suspension of disbelief hurt any more than it does already when reading Generic Fantasy or other genres that really ought to know better.

(Speaking for my own universe, there are more than enough layers, in between the fabric jacket, the tech compartments, the cerametal-composite armor-plating, the superconductor meshes, and the ablative layer sprayed over the top of all of that, to make telling the gender of anyone wearing the entire-body-enclosing standard-legionary-issue N45 Garrex field combat armor or its cousins damn near impossible unless they’ve got their equally-all-enclosing helmet off, which is never done under combat conditions. But then, that’s a design feature – you’re not supposed to see a person, you’re supposed to see one mean bastard of a legionary who may just be about to ruin your whole day. The key words here are studied memetic overkill.

As for its big brother, the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton – well, considering that piece of armor is a couple of tons of personal mini-tank that lets you punch out buildings and survive getting in a nuclear-bazooka fight at implausibly close ranges, frankly, you’re lucky to be able to tell what species the wearer is. At least without the sort of prolonged study no-one’s ever been inclined to do when there’s an occupied M70 wandering around the vicinity.)

A Diamond Is… Really A Very Simple Molecular Structure

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“The models you can see in this room,” said the guide, “represent some of the first models of carbon organizer.  Carbon organizers were the earliest and simplest form of dry nanotechnology, capable of building simple molecular structures from carbon and hydrogen atoms only.  While this may seem trivial, they formed the basis of the synthetic oil manufacturing industry that we’ll talk about later in our tour, and, of course, were responsible for the Diamond Crash.”

“Here, for scale,” he continued, crossing to one particular stand, “you can see the largest gem-quality diamond ever found in nature; the Heart of the Moon, which in its rough state weighed in at just under nineteen ounces.  In its cut state, as you see here, it still weighs twelve ounces, and in the pre-Crash days, was valued at over 124 million esteyn.  After the Diamond Crash, House Selequelios donated it to one of the Museum’s predecessors.”

“And now, gentlesophs, if you’d care to turn around…”

The curtain slid back.  Light blazed from the sixty-foot obelisk, and the tour group gasped as one.

“This is our very own Monument to the Crash, or looked at another way, to the start of the Prosperity.  What you are looking at is a single internally perfect diamond crystal, weighing a little over 5,800,000 pounds.  It is, a few cases of diamond plating on structures aside, the single largest pure diamond crystal ever grown, a record that is unlikely to be broken, since few of its industrial and commercial – mostly low-end ornamentation – applications call for crystals quite this large, and since pure diamond is both brittle and quite flammable, its potential structural niches are for the most part filled by various adamant-type diamondoids, sapphireglass, and more advanced nanocomposites.”

“Of course, it’s rather less valuable than the Heart of the Moon was pre-crash; the value of raw diamond on today’s market is a little under one taltis per pound, which makes the whole Monument worth approximately 45,000 esteyn in total.”

“If you’ll follow me into the next room, you can see a carbon organizer in action, a simple model that extrudes bar diamond from ambient atmospheric gases.  This particular model is still on the market, because while there’s little demand for the product per se, many worlds find it useful on a larger scale for pulling excess carbon out of their atmospheres in an easy-to-store and readily releasable – by simple incineration – form.”

“We slice up the bars into half-foot sections for souvenirs, which you’ll see on the table to your left.  Please, help yourself to one, or two, or as many as you like to take home.  No charge.”  He coughed.  “Although I should perhaps mention that most jewelers, even the ones who don’t insist on an authenticated provenance, will check to ensure that there are at least some natural-looking flaws in the stones they buy, these days.”

Trope-a-Day: Mental Fusion

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Mental Fusion: See Hive Mind for the permanent version (Fusions and Self-Fusions).

The temporary version, called a conflux, is a standard part of the arsenal for a variety of situations – merged fireteams for greater military efficiency and coordination (and, y’know, battlefield omniscience, when done really right), guard webs that share knowledge and raise the alarm simultaneously, research teams thinking in perfect coordination in which the brainpower of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and so on and so forth.  It takes a lot of attention paid to mental discipline and interpersonal relations to build a team that can do it well, but when it works, it really works.

Trope-a-Day: Touched By Vorlons

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Touched By Vorlons: The thing that happens to you when you join the Transcend (see: Deus Est Machina, Hive Mind), inasmuch as the core of the process is taking a tiny piece of the metamind and grafting it into your own mind-state, where this soul-shard then assumes the role of a “hyperego” (to coin a Freudian term) – that handles communications with the greater metamind; that is the wellspring of the Transcendent peer-to-peer loyalty; that is a semi-conscious prosthetic mentor/conscience/metamind feedback system (termed coadjutor); that enables you to tap into Transcendent processing/mass memory; that extrapolates your telos (something like what the Singularity Institute refer to these days as coherent extrapolated volition on an individual level – what your goals would be if “we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted”) for the metamind’s use in its supergoal development process; and that performs assorted minor functions of lesser importance.

(The technical term for this little piece of mechanical divinity, by the way, is an “entelechically-annealing recursively-optimal distributed logos bridge”.  That’s why everyone calls it a “soul-shard”.)

A somewhat unusual example inasmuch as the “power” you gain isn’t direct (virtually all the immediate kind of superpowers come fitted to individuals), but rather is an emergent consequence of on the one hand, the consequent mental amplification, and on the other hand, having a friendly god-equivalent intellect looking out for you.  Fortunate coincidences and useful intuitions abound when you’re a member of the Transcend, because God exists, loves you, and wants you to be both happy and the very best you that you can be.  (You just had to build Him first.)