Month: February 2012

Trope-a-Day Disclaimer

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Okay, from today, it’s going to look like I’ve just given up on posting the trope-a-day in order entirely, I’m afraid, but in actuality, that’s not true.  The trouble is that the ones that would be today’s and tomorrow’s in linear order, Ave Machina and Awakening the Sleeping Giant, have dependency trees with four and fourteen other tropes in them rather than the usual one or two, and using the dependencies-come-first rule for posting them that I’ve been doing to simplify link-chasing…

Well, you won’t get to see the second of those one until the 22nd, is all I’m saying.  Just so you don’t think I’ve lost the plot.

(At least these only have three loops in them.)

The Eldinimieuthunimis Defined

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<Yellow-Starred Amethyne Motet in E Flat Minor>, Staff Writer

“A sinister syndicate of crime and corruption, whose deeply-buried tentacles cast a grim shadow across the Associated Worlds.”

– Mach Journalist-I’qar, Vonikar Times

My Voniensan colleague’s taste for assorted alliteration and colorful metaphors aside, it must be admitted that certain of his allegations are true, as are those made more quietly by various other news providers within the Worlds themselves.

From my perspective, of course, as an Imperial citizen-shareholder and resident, the Eldinimieuthunimis is merely a perfectly legitimate trading house.  Their public office tower in Mer Covales is visible from my desk as I write this.  Their openly published corporate accounts and other records are unimpeachable.  (Although the list of outworlders holding 38% of their public nonvoting stock under the shield of Seranth’s labyrinthine banking privacy laws would doubtless make fascinating reading, given the sources of much of the foreign criticism of the organization.)  And no executive or employee of the core organization has ever been indicted, much less convicted, on any issue relating to their corporate operations.

Some of this discrepancy is a matter of location, of course.  The Eldinimieuthunimis locates very few of its operations inside the Empire; as their affable estrev-i-ráyestrev (“overboss”) Calin Sargas-ith-Sarathos Methunimis is happy to explain, there’s very little point in trying to run a syndicate inside the Empire, whose notoriously libertist politics and freewheeling attitude make it reluctant to make most of the traditional money-makers for this type of operation illegal; and thus, makes them unprofitable when the competition is made up of more standard commercial organizations.

Outside the Empire, however, the Eldinimieuthunimis operates very successfully through a number of arms-length sub-syndicates in the fields of smuggling, gray marketeering, arms dealing, information brokerage, and trading in locally illegal technology, immortagens, and hedonic pharmaceuticals, with occasional sidelines in black clinics, gambling, negotiable affection, and snakeheading to freesoil worlds.

The notable thing, of course, about this list of operations – as certain of my colleagues have pointed out – would be the virtual impossibility of convicting someone of any of them in front of a Curial court, given the Charter’s restrictions.  And indeed, the politics and attitude of the Imperial mainstream are such that it is most unlikely that the governments whom they do offend – by treading on their ability to restrict their citizens’ access to weapons, biotechnology (especially immortagens), information and hedonics, or to inject tariffs into private contracts – will find much sympathy in the Court of Public Opinion, either.  The rare occasions on which an attempt has been made to extradite an identified thunimidár (“faded person”; lowest-level employee of the core business, overseeing a particular outworld operation) would appear to bear this out.

Of course one does occasionally see some of their agents from the sub-syndicates hauled up in front of a Curial court and either extradited, or subjected to severe censure; usually in cases where they have been involved in something the Eldinimieuthunimis would consider going too far, such as selling arms to terrorist or violent criminal groups, resorting to sophont trafficking, taking up more traditional organized crime activities such as extortion, or some other such.  It would be the purest paranoia to suggest that the Eldinimieuthunimis has a tacit arrangement with the Watch Constabulary to burn its rogue operations in exchange for providing something for the diplomats to point at by way of action against the Sinister Imperial Mafia.

The same sort of paranoia that might lead this journalist to suggest that the operations of the Eldinimieuthunimis are broadly tolerated by a plurality of Accord governments in order to reduce the market share of much less scrupulous crime syndicates, in fact.

– published in a recent edition of the Accord Infoclast

Physics and Death

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I saw this the other day, quoted on Diane Duane’s tumblr:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

– Aaron Freeman, “You Want A Physicist To Speak At Your Funeral”

Unfortunately (and admitting that from certain nonphysically spiritual points of view, it is a lovely sentiment) you do rather have to hope that there’s not a physicist listening at your funeral, who knows full well that it’s the orderliness that’s the point, belike, inasmuch as while yes, all energy is conserved, all meaning and purpose and love and warmth and memory and other patterns in the energy will have vanished even before the time when the universe is reduced to a flat, cold, soup of unbonded particles in the inexorable grip of energy-conserved heat death.

And more to the personal point, physics – with a little help from information theory – is quite able (in theory; the practical side isn’t quite there yet) to compute the point in the hours after – or even potentially before, with some medical conditions – your corporal death at which all of the youness of you has been lost from the cooling meat that used to be your brain.

Anyway, to bring this back to in-universe relevance, not only did this realization synergize well with existing eldraeic spiritual beliefs (which had long held that the soul stayed attached to the body until it was destroyed; which is why they were cremators, it being impolite to keep your deceased family and friends glued into a decaying corpse, belike), but also provided the catalyst for that Middle Information Age pre-funerary custom of whacking the heads off the deceased without delay and immuring them in colossal underground shrine-vaults filled with Dewar flasks of liquid nitrogen…

(It had some interesting effects when they were finally able to recover all of that mind-state data, too, but that’s another tale…)

Making Your Troubles Have Troubles With You

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Wolfhound Emancipations, ICC, to Brelyne Athanath-ith-Riatha, greetings.

Citizen-Shareholder Athanath-ith-Riatha,

Thank you for your interest in the travel insurance and protection services we provide.

Here at Wolfhound, we can provide you with the standard medical, tort, and repatriation coverage you expect as a matter of course from your travel coverage provider, through our bilateral arrangement with Consolidated Mutual Mitigation & Surety, or our policies can be purchased as a supplement to most other travel coverage on the market.

But this type of coverage isn’t what Wolfhound is about.  Founded by Ríëgh Oúkharr after spending over 300 years exercising his nose for trouble in the PPL industry, Wolfhound exists to bring the PPL business model into the foreign travel arena, providing the protection you need most – protection from would-be protectors.

Wishful thinking aside, there are large regions of the Associated Worlds that are not civilized space in the way that you or I would mean it. Many local law enforcement instrumentalities do not perform up to the high standards of competence or with the guarantees of rights, fair treatment, and objective law we demand from the Watch Constabulary and Warden-Bastion PPLs.  Others embrace corruption and politics as modus operandi, and some are little more than state-paid thugs.

Worse, many polities operate under legal systems which do not recognize the inherent rights of sophonts and their natural corollaries, including the right to defend the life and property of both yourself and your fellows.  It is, we believe, unreasonable to expect an Imperial citizen-shareholder to meekly submit to criminal outrages, or to stand idly by and permit them to be perpetrated against others.  (Last year, over half of our active cases involved our clients intervening to prevent the perpetration of violence and robbery by locals, against locals.)

In such cases, Wolfhound rapid-response forces exist to, when alerted by you or by our monitoring systems, extract you as quickly and with as little collateral damage as possible from the hands of the local authorities, and return you to Imperial jurisdiction.

(It must go without saying that Wolfhound does not exist to permit you to ignore all local laws, regardless of how unreasonable they may be; only those which are direct outrages against sophont rights or administered by agencies known to be partial in their administration of justice.  Further, Wolfhound requires its clients to agree to submit to the jurisdiction of the Curial courts in extradition or external cases, and makes its records available to the Curia for this purpose.)

I have enclosed for your perusal a full brochure giving full details of our services, methods, available types of response and of monitoring during your travels, and, of course, our rates for individual, family, and corporate purchasers.

On behalf of all of us here, I wish you safe travels, and look forward to welcoming you and yours to the Wolfhound client family.

Signed and authenticated,

Ghúrr Oúkharr, VP Sales, for and on behalf of,

Wolfhound Emancipations, ICC

Trope-a-Day: Autodoc

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Autodoc: The primary source of medical treatment in advanced civilizations – in the Empire, for example, there’s one in every decent-sized home in a little room off the bathroom, just for regular tune-ups – reserving sophont medical personnel for the intellectually challenging problems.

Hospitals, too, are supported by a plethora of auto-junior-docs and autonurses.

Steganography: A Poll

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So, I’m still relatively new at this writing-for-other-people lark, and in particular, on that part of it that goes “Show, don’t tell” – because since my original works have always begun with the worldbuilding aspects of things, I start out with something of a predisposition to tell, belike.  Granted, it can be tricky to get this right in a medium as short as my favored nanofic.

Anyway, I’d like to take a moment to ask my readers (rather than I or my lovely wife and beta reader, who have the disadvantage of already knowing the plot) who have a moment to think back to Steganography, parts One and Two, and take a quick poll on whether I have done so little telling as to leave the reader with no clue what was actually going on:

[polldaddy poll=5905355]

(If you’re absolutely swimming in time, you could take a moment to tell me which bits were particularly revealing or unrevealing or what you think you made of it in a comment, and I’d surely be appreciative of that.  Thanks muchly.)

Steganography (2/2)

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Thunimidár,

As requested, I collected the package from the courier at Jerrad’s party.  No problems – the usual watchers were there, but there were no signs that anyone suspected an op in progress.  And with the transfer spread out over two dances and three conversations out of dozens, the statistical alibi should be solid.

I have reintegrated package HALO with packages CRAVAT and BOOZEHOUND previously collected by third-level operatives, and confirm successful reassembly and authentication.  The recipe is ready to deploy to second-level manufacturing on your instruction, and immortagen shipments should be go for street-level distribution within the week following.

Finally, I would note that in addition to the clean transfer, the courier positioned herself at the center of attention to avert suspicion of covert intent without, in my opinion, displaying the memetic tells of intentionally doing so.  In light of this excellent tradecraft, I would suggest that we recommend to the estrev paying this courier the highest level of performance bonus and adding her to the preferred external contractor list.

Awaiting further instructions,

OP2 Grayiron

– archived from the Falish Traverse Eldinimieuthunimis darknet

The S Words: Sentience, Sapience, and Sophonce

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Based off a comment here, some quick definitions for you as they’re used in the Eldraeverse:

(Note, of course, that I’m using a considerable amount of Minovsky cognitive science here; your mileage may vary if you try and apply any of it elsewhere.)

sentience: the property of having sense perception; the capability of experiencing sensation, without necessarily associating mental symbology with sensation.  Includes not only sophonts, but animals, plants, single-celled organisms, and a variety of simple devices (even something as simple as a thermostat can reasonably be described as sentient, if minimally so).  Quantized, for technical purposes, as sensory bandwidth in bits per unit time.

sapience: the capacity for rational thought and creativity; not necessarily associated with either sentience or volition.  Again, includes many non-sophonts, primarily animals, but also various types of computer program.

autosentience: self-perception and self-reflection, metacognition; self-awareness (“I-ness”); the possession of qualia (mental symbology associated with sensation), which for the purposes of Eldraeverse cogsci is a corollary of metacognition.  Most animals (but not the plants, single-celled organisms – this is from an Earth perspective, and such odd plantimal life forms as the mezuar and the selyéva aren’t counted among these plants – and devices) qualify as autosentient to some degree, as does thinker-grade or above AI software (although not simple AI expert systems, which are sapient but not autosentient; they have no qualia, merely data).

In civilized societies, certain civil rights are associated with autosentience, principally concerned with the right not to be subjected to arbitrary suffering since, with autosentience, one attains the ability to experience suffering.

threshold autosentience: the minimal degree of autosentience required to meaningfully describe oneself as “I”; the possession of a meaningful self-associated self-symbol in one’s mental architecture.  (In many sentients, it is associated with the presence of a consciousness loop organizing cognitive processing into a narrative thread, but this isn’t a requisite of these mental architectures; the case of non self-associated self-symbols is odd, but does seem to be permitted – see Stross, here, although this isn’t the path their AI development took.) It is often, but is not necessarily associated with a high level of sapience; many animals qualify as sapients without possessing threshold autosentience, and obviously many programs, including much alife, possess very impressive problem-solving abilities while being entirely devoid of autosentience.  Thinker-grade AI possesses this, too, but does not have volition.

volition: the capacity for nondeterministic choice; in sophonts, associated with possession of one of a class of nondeterministic algorithms known as logoi.  (However, known/constructable sophont mental architectures utilize primarily deterministic choice with only occasional logotic input.)

sophonce: possessing all of threshold autosentience, sapience, and volition; i.e., being “a self-aware, self-defining entity capable of independent reason and volition”.  Biological sophonts and digisapiences, the highest grade of AI entity.

Have all the natural rights of people, because they’re the definition of “people”.

Oh, and:

pro-sophonce: the almost-but-not-quites, the creatures almost reaching the requirements for sapience/threshold autosentience to be counted among the sophonts, but not quite.  The dolphins, dogs, octopi, (on Earth) apes, etc.  Again, generally receive some civil rights in civilized societies due to this status (and, by the same metric, generally considered prime candidates for uplift work), but not considered actual people unless uplifted.

Trope-a-Day: Augmented Reality

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Augmented Reality: Ubiquitous, to the point of being built into everyone’s brain.  Includes mediated reality, in which physical-world objects are adjusted before the brain gets to sense them; mingled reality, in which a virtual realm and a physical room coexist as the same space, and physical and virtual objects behave as peers; and hypertextual reality, which goes one step further and feeds the information about objects (rather than displaying it as tags) directly into one’s brain, so that you remember the details about them without having to learn them in the first place.

Also rather notable in this area is the synthetic sense technology that persuades the brain to provide additional visual fields and auditory channels in parallel to the natural ones to display information on/in.

Phoenix Falling

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The Spaceflight Initiative Flight Center was built at the far western edge of the Bright Desert where the mountains come down to meet it, next to the hundreds of square miles set aside as the Orbital Launch Reservation.  The Center itself perches on land cut out of the edge of the mountains, and back into the mountains; even when the Initiative was first proposed they knew that they’d be relying on nuclear pulse drives, and the cold wind that’s always blowing off the slopes keeps the launch fallout at bay.

When you arrive at the Center, down from the mountains or up from the trains, you’re at the west end of Starflight Drive.  There’re roads going off to either side and back into the underways, and a couple of big cuttings going down into the desert, but the Drive itself is a straight shot from the entrance right to the far side of the Center, where there’s a little stubby white box of a building built right into the cliff edge.  There’s a much bigger modern building there too, now, sitting almost right on top of it – that’s the new Operations Control, because they still run experimental flights out of the Center today.  The old one’s a museum now, showing off simulations of the old flights to visitors, but that little white bunker was where everything happened in the early days.

But before you reach Opscon, you come to a section of the Drive lined with weeping blackwood trees and golden statues, each one with its own plaque, inset letters giving mission and crew names.  Swiftrunner.  Sunscraper Four.  Redblossom Twelve.  Oculus Forty.  Copperfall One.  Oculus Three.  And just before you reach the bunker entrance, the last statue – a golden astronaut dressed in one of the old soft-shell crew suits, upraised fist clenching the lumpy shape of a drive pellet and, at her feet, a fragment of hull-metal blackened and seared with plasma scoring.

Phoenix Five

Meris Claves-ith-Lelad
Elissa Corith-ith-Corith
Alvis Peressin-ith-Perise

That one was mine.

*             *             *

I was public affairs at Opscon for Five, and it had been an excellent mission from that point of view so far.  Everyone on the planet was behind the Initiative that year.

It was a cold spring day when Five was scheduled to return, and we were confident.  We’d had five previous flights go up and return without anything but a few glitches in the secondary systems.  The Phoenix stack worked.  And the rest of the mission had gone perfectly.  The new communications array checked out, twelve by twelve.  The research labs were already cooing over the results of Alvis’s microgravity experiments, and clamoring to get their hands on them once they landed.  And Elissa’s spacewalk had come together perfectly, first time.  Fourteen minutes outside the vehicle; no pressure loss, no ballooning.  Able to maneuver; indeed, able to maneuver elegantly.

And we had an experienced crew for the first time.  This was Meris’s – Meris ith-Lelad’s – second flight; she’d been second pilot on Phoenix One the previous year.  Were we less prepared for something to go wrong?  I don’t think so; we all understood we were pushing hard into the unknown.  But we were certainly expecting it – I was certainly expecting it – less than we had been.

She was in re-entry phase, balancing on her pusher plate, when it happened, having entered loss-of-signal at 76 miles up, and I’d finished giving the usual briefing to the press.  All normal, nothing to worry about, even if being out of touch did raise the level of tension around here.  I was halfway through recapping earlier parts of the mission briefing to keep them busy – we’d learned on Zero that it did nobody’s calm any good to have the press asking questions during the white-knuckle no-communications, no-telemetry part of the flight – when the discreet anomaly light lit up on my console, telling me to wrap it up and clear the room.

I don’t remember what I said then.  I do recall that they left the press room a lot more quietly than I was expecting, but all I can remember is staring through the window at the radar display, where the blip showing Five in her descent had elongated to a streak.  There was debris coming off the ship.

By the time I got down to the control room, we’d got partial telemetry back.  Beran ith-Issarthyl – flight communications – was calling over and over.  “Phoenix Five, Opscon, do you read?  Phoenix Five, Opscon, confirm status,” but the board was lit up, crimson as death, with the status we did have.  ACS BURN.  Attitude thrusters firing, which wasn’t a part of any entry program.  AXIS INSTABILITY.  Which explained the thruster burn, at least, but — BUNKER LOW WARN.  HYD2 PRESS LOW.  C BUS UNDERVOLT.  VIBRAT EX-PARAM.

The radio crackled and spat, then produced words.  Meris’s voice, loud over a roaring that for one lunatic moment I thought might be static, but was the roaring of the ACS jets trying to nail Five in the right attitude for entry, keep her balanced, keep her alive…

“–scon, Five, do you read?  Opscon, this is… nix Five… you read?”

“Yes, Five, we have you.  This is Opscon.  Report status, please.  We show…”

“Anomalous readings and debris, yes.”  Her voice stayed calm, professionalism overcoming strain, and I tried not to think about just how bad things must be in the ship that I could hear any strain in her voice.  “Status is pessimal, Opscon.  We had structural failure about four minutes into LOS.  The port-dorsal pellet silo is gone, looks like it pivoted outside the plate shadow.  I say again, the port-dorsal pellet silo is gone.  By the system failure pattern, we’ve got penetrations all along the core structure. Sssht–abin integrity stable, for now.  Over.”

“Five, Opscon.  Acknowledge your status… ah, wait one, Five, we’re running models.  Over.”

“Time’s running out, Opscon.  Static moment’s shot all to dark with the silo gone.  We’re running the ACS at hard burn to maintain attitude.  ACS fuel remaining shows 15% and dropping.  Estimate four minutes remaining.  Over.”

Running feet.  The rustle of engineers paging hurriedly through blueprints.  A babble of voices, suggestion after suggestion, none viable.  No way to use the gyros to stabilize.  Not enough fuel pellets left to abort back to orbit even without the missing silo, and even if the core penetrations hadn’t wrecked the ship’s ability to stand up to thrust.  No way to get more fuel to the ACS…

“Opscon, Five.”  The signal cut through the chatter.  “ACS fuel remaining now 7%.  Stable flight time now one point five.”  A pause before her voice returned, all strain now gone from it.  “We’re, ah, all agreed up here.  Are we go for STARBURST?”

Program STARBURST.  A contingency that we never briefed the press about.  The Phoenices were big ships compared to anything we’d put into space before, or that had burned up harmlessly on the way down.  If Five went into tumble, she’d shred, and tear, and melt, and kill her crew, but she wouldn’t burn up… and shortly thereafter, most of her six thousand tonnes of flaming metal and plutonium fuel would come slamming back to earth in a few large pieces – and so we all knew that the one thing that couldn’t be permitted was for her to come down in those pieces.  STARBURST existed to ensure that, in the simplest way that a nuclear pulse-drive ship could.

I looked across the room, all chatter stilled, at Beran.  Tears were running down his face – my own face was wet, not that I’d noticed – but he kept his voice steady as he replied.  “Five, Opscon concurs.  You are go for STARBURST.  Go well, my friends.  You will be remembered.”

“Roger, Opscon.  Programming for STARBURST now.  Tell our families we love them.  Tell Six… tell Six to have a drink for us when they get up here.”  A burst of static.  “It was a good fli-”

Nuclear fire blossomed in the desert sky.  Phoenix Five had fallen.

Dedicated to the crews of Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger, Columbia, and all the other astronauts and cosmonauts who have died furthering the cause of human spaceflight.  Per ardua, ad astra.