Month: April 2012

Terror(s)

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“Sophonts of Gervés.  Observe.”

The images accompanying the broadcast were an aerial view of a crater, carved abruptly into a landscape that was otherwise blue-black and growing.  Within the crater, the ground bubbled and seethed around a few shattered remnants that might once have been buildings, rock and earth half-melted by the violence of whatever had happened here.  Beyond the fringes, roads cut off abruptly, freakishly undamaged for anything that close to such total destruction.  The forward half of a shattered vehicle hung balanced on the lip of the crater, tipped, and toppled into the ruin.  Nothing living was visible.

“This morning at 0.434 local time, Talyn Peressin-ith-Peressin, a visiting academician from the Imperial University of Almeä, was kidnapped by a Gervéssin separatist group, the Solidarity Faction, while travelling to an outlying research facility, and taken to the village of Résené, a known and officially tolerated center of Faction activity.”

“In response, at 0.443 local, this village was destroyed by orbital kinetic bombardment from the diplomatic cruiser First Under Heaven, assigned to our embassy here on Gervés.  Citizen-shareholder Peressin is being restored from backup, and is expected to have lost no more than one hour of memory.”

The images of destruction ceased, replaced by a man in the blue-and-gold of the Imperial Navy with arctic eyes and voice to match.

“A personal word for associates of the Solidarity Faction in particular: While you addressed your communique to us in terms of your ‘rightful freedom’, assuming no doubt that we would sympathize with this, you should understand that we are understandably less sympathetic to such appeals when they come from self-demonstrating petty tyrants and kidnappers.”

“In addition, your planet’s World Assembly is accustomed to treat you with a light hand, in the interests of reconciliation, stability, and due proportion.  We, however, are disinclined to do so when barbarians indulge the notion that they may prey upon Imperial citizen-shareholders; rather, we prefer a disproportionate response that only becomes more so should we be compelled to repeat it.  You will cease to have such notions, or you will all die.  Either will satisfy our requirements.”

– Admiral Kalkis Roquentius-ith-Roquel, responding to the Gervés Incident, 5331

Trope-a-Day: Beauty Equals Goodness

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Beauty Equals Goodness: Very much averted in one sense, even by local standards (see: Blue and Orange Morality) of goodness.  It is perfectly true that the eldrae and the other Imperials are an extraordinarily Beautiful People.  But by the same processes, so are the Renunciates.  And so are the Renegades – even the Renegades who are very, very bad people indeed, by anyone’s standards.

Quite appropriate, really.  After all, even fallen angels are still angels.

In another: yes, one of the qualities they esteem is beauty, as a form of excellence.  But this does not imply, simple-mindedly, that the beautiful are the good.  Rather, the dogma holds that it implies that the good deserve to be the beautiful, and therefore that beauty ought to be promoted by the sophont in those places where blind nature and random chance got it wrong again.

Manufacturers

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The Llyn Standard Manufacturing autofac, informally known as the Hive, sprawled over a hundred square miles of Seléne’s surface, a vast complex of industrial machinery stacked upon more industrial machinery, gleaming in the crystal vacuum and the harsh light of its floodlamps.

To the north, a ruddy glow mixed with the floods’ blue-white, where a thousand furnaces and smelters turned shipments of raw metal and stone coming in from the asteroids into bar stock and other materials for the inner manufactories, secondary forges pounded, cast, carved, and drew the purified metals into thousands of gross components, and more specialized factories spun stone into specialized clays, ceramics, glasses, and the wafers from which nanocircs were cut.

Off to the east, a tangle of pipes and tanks surrounded the bactries, where volatiles brought downwell from the outer system were fractioned, refined, and fed to reactors containing myriad industrial catalysts, fabzymes and genetically engineered maker cultures to produce a million different chemicals, all the feedstocks necessary for all the industries the complex supported.

In the south, the triple containment buildings of the power plant dominated the skyline, housing three of the system’s largest fusion reactors, gulping deuterium from the buried slush tanks at their feet – mere buffer tanks, kept constantly topped up by a stream of automated tanker-ships coming in from the gas mines of Melíeré; and to the west, the mass-driver launch complex which delivered containers full of any of the autofac’s unthinkable array of finished goods and modular components to any world, hab, or drift in the system rose like a mountain.  The warehouses around their feet were a mere scattering of toy building blocks by comparison.

And within this ring, the heart of the autofac: factory after factory, specialized tooling, nanofac growth chambers, and robotic final-assembly plants, and the thousands of pipelines and conveyors connecting them – a crowded collection of plain geometric cubes, geodesic domes, and polished spheres, in the simple ascetic style favored for those areas not intended to ever be inhabited, or to be more than rarely visited.  Scattered among them, vehicle garages and robot hotels housed and tended to the automation, the driverless trucks and frenetic utility spiders that scurried throughout the complex, carrying its lifeblood and tending to the machinery.

At the center of the great autofac, a single tower rose above all these buildings, its lower floors containing the hosts for the artificial intelligences that ran the complex, and its uppermost level housing the operations supervisor, Lilse Varenna-ith-Varenti, and his dozen department heads – the only sophonts anywhere within the Hive – reclining, eyes closed, in their command chairs.

Bodily functions shifted to autonomic maintenance, minds vastened and placed in synnoetic AI-symbiosis, and senses filled with input streams gathered from sensors, they did not run the complex.

They were the complex.

Unprofessional Hijacking

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IS Words of the Profit, docked at Nepscia Low Port, Nepscia (Galith Waste).

“You really don’t want to do this, old chap,” I said.  “You have no idea of the trouble you’re about to be in, and you have to know that you can’t actually hurt either of us with that thing.  Why don’t you put it down and start running like a good idiot?”

The scruffy azayf I was addressing blinked yellow eyes inside its methane-mask, and gestured again with its pistol; a pistol, moreover, which clearly hadn’t been designed for an azayf’s three-fingered radial hand.  “I’m not — I have the gun!  Do it!  Get this ship off the ground!”

“Ah, well.  I tried.”  I nodded to my first officer, over by the systems-monitor console.  “Líse, if you would?”  A moment, a moment more, I saw its attention flicker and its gun waver, and that was when the polydog took it out.

(Well, of course I’d called him in.  Even a Nepscia dock-rat should have known better than to leave the captain in his chair – and his mind in the computers – when you try to take a ship.  Just another sign that we were dealing with complete amateurism, here.)

The polydog hit the azayf from three sides at once, one of him knocking its legs out from under it; another leaping for his gun-hand, and I heard the crunch as reinforced jaws sheared through the gun’s thin metal casing and tore through the intricate coils of its mass-driver.  It struggled briefly as it fell to the floor, only to go limp as the polydog’s third body got a firm grip on the pipe to its breathing mask.

I stood, walked over to him, and wrinkled my nose at the scent of apples and a greenish spreading puddle.  “On my bridge carpet?”  Not that I couldn’t understand it, since it was hard to imagine who wouldn’t have some trouble managing their sphincters with three sets of jaws that size only an inch or two from their eyeballs, even if one of them wasn’t hooked around their air supply.

“Let me give you some advice, dock-rat,” I said, scratching behind the ears attached to one set of those jaws.  “You aren’t nearly good enough for this game.  You don’t know enough about ships, you don’t know enough about violence, and you certainly don’t know enough to even think about boarding an eldrae ship.  And this is Nepscia.  I could have my furry associate here rip you into a dozen pieces and toss them out the star-side lock and no-one’d ask why.  But that’s more trouble than either of us care to go to” – a tritone growl from the polydog suggested that he, at least, disputed that – “so we’re just going to throw you back on the dock.  If I catch you near the Words again, though, I will kill you.  Understand?”

It struggled again, making wordless sounds of terror, before the polydog leant on it harder.  “You want to get off-world that badly, huh?  Crossed the wrong estrevikh?  Your passage won’t be on this ship –”

“Skipper?” Líse interrupted. “Look at its neck.  A week’s pay says those are control-collar burns, and he’s a runaway.  If we throw it back on the docks, they’ll kill it before the day’s out.”

“Meat-for-brains here just tried to hijack a starship that it has no idea how to pilot by pointing a gun at the head of the immortal guy still plugged in to the control net.  This is only a very tiny step on the smart side of, say, hyperlocal nuclear brinksmanship with the antideuterium cryocels, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d like it on the outside of our airlock before the sheer density of stupid kills us all.”

She just looked at me.  Damn my soggy sense of teir, anyway.

“Okay, what’s your plan?  With decision-making skills like this, I’m not having it running loose on the ship.”

“We’ve got a few empty livestock containers left in the aft hold,” she pointed out.  “Give it a freelib and a case of mycomeals, and time-seal it in one of those.  We’ll be at Daghada in a few weeks, and it’s a freesoil world, so we can offload the container there no-questions.  It’s out of our hair, and no harm to it.”

“Okay.  Looks like it’s your lucky day, dock-rat,” I added to it.  “You’re fortunate it pleases me to tweak the nose of whoever claimed to own you, or I would leave you on the dock to rot.”  I gestured the polydog to step off, and took a step back myself.  “Go quietly, now.  It doesn’t please me all that much.”

Trope-a-Day: The Beautiful People

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The Beautiful People: I refer you to the comments about “impossibly beautiful sexy immortal billionaire genius demigods” made under Can’t Argue With Elves.  The engineering works, people.  However pretty a people the baseline Eldrae alathis were to begin with – and they were – by the time autoevolution reached the very transsophont Eldrae kirsunar, it had gone Up To Eleven.  The self-designated Supreme Eldrae and their cousin species in the Empire are self-consciously designed to be perfected, unflawed, soul-churningly beautiful, marvelous to behold, exquisite and/or excruciating in unsurpassed elegance.

(And if you’d care to sign up, they can do it for you, too.  Queue for applications starts to your left.)

It’s a sort of inherited status, I suppose, inasmuch as you acquire it – most commonly – by being the offspring of an Imperial citizen-shareholder, although most of it is offered freely to immigrants and, well, anyone who turns up waving checks or cashy money at the right businesses… but since this does represent more or less the entire society, these Beautiful People do, at least those who haven’t yet earned their way into the investor-leisure class, have to work for a living, and many of those continue to anyway.

And yes, the surroundings also match (see: Emotion Bomb and Scenery Porn), because it’s not like they stuck to just improving themselves.  Also played straight, again for almost everyone, with regard to the clothing (see: Sharp Dressed Soph), the housing (see: Big Fancy House), the wealth levels (it is a materially mostly-post-scarcity society, after all)…

Trope-a-Day: Sharp Dressed Soph

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Sharp Dressed Man Soph: Given just how obsessive the Imperials are about their ideals of beauty and excellence, the Empire has a heck of a lot of these (although not so limited to business-suit analogs).  And most of the exceptions are found among the young, who sometimes tend more towards The Dandy instead – because while obviously these things should be taken seriously – clothing, like everything else, is Serious Business – they haven’t yet quite grasped how important making it seem effortless is.

The female version is essentially equivalent (although even less limited to business-suit analogs), but the young in this case tend to trend toward The Fashionista instead.

The Burning of Litash (1)

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FROM: CORE COMMAND
RECEIVED AT: FIELD FLEET COREWARD COMMAND (CS UNCONQUERABLE SELF)
RELAY TO: COMMAND VESSEL, TASK FORCE 3-46 (CS ORDER UNYIELDING)

***** WILDFIRE WILDFIRE WILDFIRE
***** EYES ONLY RUBY GAUNTLET SABLE E2048
***** STRATEGIC ACTION MESSAGE

ADM CALIÉNE SARGAS-ITH-SARGAS, COMMANDING TASK FORCE 3-46:

1. THIS MESSAGE CONSTITUTES A WAR ORDER.

2. BY DIRECT ORDER OF THE STELLAR COUNCIL, OPERATION RUBY GAUNTLET SABLE CARRIES NIGHTFALL PRIORITY.  RULES OF ENGAGEMENT F6-UNLIMITED ARE THEREFORE IN EFFECT.

3. YOU ARE DIRECTED TO PROCEED AT BEST SPEED TO LITASH (DARK SEA) SYSTEM, ENGLOBE THE SYSTEM’S SECOND PLANET (LITASH ACTUAL), AND DEPLOY SPECIAL WEAPONS PACKAGE CALYX HOLLOW.  THIS MISSION OBJECTIVE SHOULD BE CONSIDERED PRIMARY AND MANDATORY.

4. THE DESTRUCTION WITHOUT QUARTER OF ANY AND ALL STARSHIPS ATTEMPTING TO DEPART LITASH ACTUAL SHOULD BE CONSIDERED A SECONDARY OBJECTIVE.

5. REPORT MISSION COMPLETION AND STATUS VIA TANGLE CHANNEL WHISPER NINE.

6. IN THE ABSENCE OF FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM COMMAND AUTHORITY, INDEPENDENT ACTION IS AUTHORIZED IF NECESSARY TO COMPLETE MISSION OBJECTIVES.

7. AUTHENTICATION: PENDANT IRIS STEAK CHALICE HYACINTH RIVER / 0x991AC38575AA0D0E

ADM/FLT RELEQ CLAVES-ITH-LELAD, FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

Trope-a-Day: Serious Business

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Serious Business: The corollary of valxíjir and estxíjir (see: Blue and Orange Morality) is that they can focus on even things that an outside, or outworld, observer would deem trivial.  Probably quite a few of those things.  Everything from board games to wine is often taken very seriously indeed.  It is generally understood, therefore, among the socially ept, that everything is Serious Business for someone, and that the polite will respect that and refrain from treading on other people’s sensibilities.

(And since at least some people’s Serious Business involves wielding their considerable social-fu against people who disregard the rules of polite conduct in general and this particular rule in particular, the general understanding is also the advisable understanding.)

Burgers ‘Round the Worlds

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Greetings again, readers!

In this month’s issue of A Taste of Taste, we’re going to talk about the humble burger.  One of the simplest foods imaginable – a simple patty of spiced ground meat grilled over flame and slipped inside a bread pocket, along with some simple garnishings and a kimaes for flavor – the burger grew from its humble street-food origins in 9th century Vintiver to dominate the Imperial express-food market as the most popular of its five staples.

The best-known form today, of course, is that popularized by the Astroburger, ICC corporation (formerly Atomic Burger, before their separation from the Lovely Atom Synthetic Drinks and Liquors Company, ICC) and the regular fare of their chain of wildly successful express-food restaurants and fly-in food stops, which is very close to the Vintiver classic; the meat used is hasérgalrás, grilled medium, garnished with a sharp but plain hard cheese, onion, kesseth leaves, and a simple thick-tomato kimaes.  Variations on this essential theme can be obtained from any of dozens of burger restaurants, from simple express-food chains to the expensive burgers on offer at Don’t Eat Vat, with certified natural-grown meats and soil-cultivated garnishes.

But, as we shall see, there are thousands of variations out there.  On Eliéra alone, for example, as well as hasérgalrás we see burgers composed of meat from the reshkef, sevesúr, líhasúr, nekhalyef and tiryef in various regions, and a few even made from meat of the larger tubefish.  In the Crescent Kingdoms of Leirin and Telírvess, they are marinated in the grain liquors of the region, and served raw, with egg yolk.  In the Cyrsan Islands, burgers are garnished with fruit, and served with a honey-sweet kimaes.  In Azikhan, mushrooms are required as part of the garnish, and may even be substituted entirely for the meat.  Travinthia prefers to use loose diced or sliced meat rather than ground meat formed into patties in its burgers, and in Ellestre, they are served between grilled flatbreads, rather than in a pocket.

And then there are those that have come to us from the Empire’s other worlds, including Phílae’s many handfish burgers, Kythera’s highly-spiced garnishes, the subtly-different near-hasérúr meat of Revallá, the leaf wrappings of Clajdíä, and the cultured mixed-species meats of Aïö.

We hope you’ll enjoy joining us for our exploration of the possibilities of one of the Empire’s ubiquitous and often unconsidered foods.

Until next month, happy grilling!

– editorial page, A Taste of Taste magazine

Trope-a-Day: The Dandy / The Fashionista

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The Dandy / The Fashionista: Common among younger Imperials, who are pursuing the cultural ideals of beauty and excellence just as hard as they can, the more so to give them weight.  (Looking awesome is an aspect, if far from the entirety, of being awesome, after all.)  They do eventually settle down to a consistent, personal style, though.

In Many Shapes and Forms

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The ecology of Eliéra is uniquely complex in the known Associated Worlds, since it is not, as most are, the product of either natural evolution, or ancient or modern ecopoesis.  Rather, a few unique survivals excepted, its ecology is a mixture of species from three separate origins and their coevolved descendants; referred to as bluelife, greenlife, and silverlife.  It is believed that the progenitors of these ecologies were transported to Eliéra during the tenure of the Precursor species, and in the case of bluelife and greenlife, that their descendants reflect those ecologies which were best fit to survive and adapt to the world in the absence of the Precursors and thus anyone to tend their gardens and biological preserves.

Both bluelife and greenlife are examples of oxygen-breathing ecologies using the common L-protein/lipid-D-carbohydrate biochemistry, with nucleic acid-based information-storage molecules; although the encoding used for these information-storage molecules differs greatly between the two classes.  There is considerable overlap in the specific compounds (amino acids, for example) used by the two classes, to a sufficient extent that heterotrophs and saprotrophs of both classes find the other edible, although in many cases lacking in some essential nutrients.  Indeed, some members of each class, including the sophont species of Eliéra, the eldrae, now naturally require some essential nutrients from each of the classes in their diet.  (The eldrae, among some other large animal species, are particularly notable for having adopted some symbiotic bluelife organelles into an essentially greenlife makeup, giving them their distinctive indigo blood.)

Bluelife, a class including a large number of non-cellular and single-celled organisms, also includes among its complex organisms the majority – around 85% of species – of Eliéra’s plant life (whose distinctive and predominant blue photosynthetic pigment is the source of the name of the class), a smaller percentage – around 75% of its species – of its animal life (including both scaled and furred hexapedal land animals, four-winged birds, duodecids, and tubefish), 90% of its fungi, and all of its algae and plankton.  It is strongly believed to consist of evolved and/or modified forms of life transplanted from the nearby world of Revallá, which used a near-identical biochemical substrate and set of body plans, the more so when Eliéra bluelife’s adaptations to coexistence with greenlife and, to some extent, silverlife are considered.

Greenlife also includes a large number of non-cellular and single-celled organisms, along with another 14% of Eliéra’s plant life (again, the green photosynthetic pigment, chlorophyll, gave its name to the class), the remaining (with very few exceptions) 30% of its animal life (including both scaled and furred quadrupeds, two-winged birds, arachnids, cetaceans, and bony fish), and nearly 10% of its remaining fungi.  The origin of greenlife is unknown; no world currently known to the Imperial Exploratory Service appears to have a compatible ecology.

The final class of life on Eliéra is the silverlife, a class of lifeforms descended from what are believed to be a number of simple Precursor nanites which survived the destruction of the Precursor civilization, many of them mutated by radiation effects and evolved over time.  By far the vast majority of silverlife is composed of microscopic organisms of the crystallite and metallite kingdoms, of which the most notable are the saerymaharvéi, descended from simple assemblers and responsible for the many crystal deposits and outcroppings across the surface of Eliéra.

Silverlife also includes some simple macroscopic organisms, including some silicate pseudo-plants found in sunlit, rocky areas of appropriate compositions (most prominent are cikril, which forms tall, slender columns of translucent crystals, charged with photoelectricity, and cikrieth, a swamp-dwelling variety of cikril which extracts materials from seawater and forms intertwined resource-sharing complexes), and some colonial organisms roughly analogous to slime molds.  These together make up the remaining 1% of Eliéra’s plant species, and 0.5% of its fungi.

Silverlife in general has many aspects and features in common with the lower lifeforms of Galáré, the homeworld of the galari; while the evidence suggesting their origin in Precursor nanotechnology remains convincing, scientists are studying the possibility of a link between known Precursor nanotechnology and the ecosystem of this world.

– An Introduction to Eliéran Biology, Imperial University of Almeä Press

Apotheosis As Usual

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”There have been many questions raised in this body and elsewhere, since our Reorganization, concerning the new status of the Empire and of our new Transcend. Some of them have come attached to transparently political proposals – to the discomfiture of our true hive-mind members, such as our honorable friends representing the vlcefc, hjera, and cusaron – to refashion the political arrangements of the Accord. It is not our intention to address these proposals here and now, or where and ever. We remain, and shall remain, a founder of the Accord and seated upon the Presidium.”

”In clarification of some salient points, however, the Transcend and the Empire are not coextensive. Not every Imperial citizen-shareholder is one of the Transcendi. For this reason sufficiently, the Empire is maintained as a polity distinct from and a superset of the Transcend.”

”Nor is the Transcend a hive mind in the traditional sense. We remain individuals, though united on some mental strata. While the consensus of the Transcend does now perform much of our group planning, our government will remain the instrumentality through which it is executed.”

”And certainly, we could devise some method of prioritization and resource allocation operating through the Transcend, which knows all of our requirements and desires, but – especially now that it allows us to share information most effectively – there is no need to when our internal market already performs these tasks with a theoretical efficiency equal to the best possible planning routine, with far less waste of centralizing bandwidth and cycles involved.”

”Which is to say, sophonts of the Accord, that our operations, as they interface with yours, continue as before; that all treaties and contracts will be honored; that your investments continue to be safe and profitable; and that Imperial space remains, as ever, open for commerce and pleasure.”

– Calis Corith-ith-Corith, Presiding Minister for the Empire,
excerpt of a speech to the Conclave of Galactic Polities

Trope-a-Day: Scenery Porn

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Scenery Porn: The Imperials, who as mentioned are quite the bunch of aesthetes, expend copious amounts of money and effort to play this straight in reality.  By and large, all this shaping and polishing of the scenery works, when given long enough to bed down and settle in.

The effects on visitors are, by and large, unintentional (see: Emotion Bomb) and do wear off after a while; of course, that said, they tend to come back when you leave.

Name, Rank, And?

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CS Silk Gauntlet, Quarterdeck, Mistmorn+15 (first watch).

“Commander’s Defaulters!”  The haft of the Master-at-Arms’s axe thudded on the deck plating.  “Accused will advance and stand.”

The legionary corporal who entered the room and stood before Flight Administrator Commander Allatrian-ith-Aplan’s desk snatched off the beret of his field dress, and snapped to attention.

“What are the charges?”

“The accused is charged with two violations of Article Seventeen, challenging another crewman to single combat in time of war.  The accused does not contest these charges, and both witnesses and the flight recorder concur.”

“I see.”  The commander regarded the corporal coldly.  “Do you have any further statements to make, Corporal Sereda?  Your record is otherwise excellent, but this is a serious charge.”

The corporal struggled for a moment, before speaking.  “I request clemency, sir, on the grounds of provocation.”

“Provocation, corporal?”

“Well, sir, even if I have received the Reinstantiation Stripe three times in the course of this mission, my — that is, spacehands Cularius and Finerides had no right to deliberately get me drunk on leave and have a version number tattooed on my a — my left buttock.  Sir.”

“They…” The commander firmly controlled his expression, while the Master-at-Arms, fortunately out of view of the accused, had lost the battle with his smirk.  “…versioned you, corporal?”

“Yes, sir.  During shore leave on Qeraq.”  He gazed straight ahead.  “With fixed ink, sir.”

“Very well.”  The commander considered the corporal for another few dozen seconds.  “Accepting that you were provoked by the actions of your crewmates, I nonetheless remind you that this is no excuse for a violation of the Articles, especially in time of war.  There are proper channels for any such grievance to be pursued, and a proper time and place, none of which would have brought you here.  Nor do I expect to see you here again in the future.  Do I make myself clear?”

“You do, sir.”

“In light of his excellent prior record, for violation of Article Seventeen, the accused will confine himself to quarters for two days and is fined two weeks’ pay.  Dismissed.”

The Master-at-Arms’s axe thudded on the deck once again.  “About face!  Quarters, march!”

“And Master?  Have the bosun suggest quite firmly to our two practical jokers that they find it in their hearts to pay for the offending, ah, version number to be removed.”

Trope-a-Day: Emotion Bomb

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Emotion Bomb: Played straight with, essentially, the “glamor” that comes along with the (see Can’t Argue With Elves) whole engineered-over-millennia impossibly beautiful immortal genius demigod thing.

Somewhat subverted because it’s an entirely – well, mostly – unintentional effect of the eldrae trying to live up to their incredibly high opinion of themselves; they were going down this road well before they’d ever met any other species.

Completely subverted in that they really wish you’d pick yourself up off the floor, look them in the eye, remember that there probably is something to be said for you/your species, and ideally, if it bothers you that much, try to be less ugly, stupid, and ephemeral.  Here’s a catalog.  First product’s free.

And while it’s not as blatant as most examples of this trope, it’s amazing what the subtle deployment of memetics in dress, architecture, body language, etc., can do, given time to work its magic…

First First Contact (1)

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One light-day outside Galáré system.

The long plume of the fusion torch flickered out, and the great ship began to rotate slowly, end over end, bringing the foreshield once more into alignment with its direction of travel. The wide radiator vanes of the drive module glowed a bright cherry-red from the torch’s waste heat.

Extropy Rising, the eighth sleeper-ship of the Deep Star program, had finished decelerating into the Galáré system.

In obedience to the programming set up before it had left its construction slip in Talentar orbit, the triple-triple computers which controlled the Rising completed the flip, then turned their attention to the next steps in the entry procedure. A centrifugal ring spun up, throwing a sextet of probes outward to safe ignition distance. Sensors, unused since launch, slid out from behind the foreshield and powered up.

As the computers gorged themselves on the influx of new data, ongoing critical paths were adjusted at thousands of decision gates, fine-tuning the remainder of the mission to match the newly revealed local conditions; precise solar spectra, orbital elements, atmospheric composition…

Extensive electromagnetic emissions from the third planet in the log-8 to log-10 bands. That was outside all defined parameters.

Sophont intervention required.

Trope-a-Day: Big Fancy House

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Big Fancy House: Subverted, inasmuch as it’s not so much a symbol of wealth and status, as just a reflection of the way that the propertarian-minded eldrae just plain can’t stand to live all squished up on top of each other.  (See also starship cabins, inefficiently large volume of, etc.)

Ergo, cities tend to sprawl, and yes, houses tend to be large detached affairs.  No-one ever invented the duplex/semi-detached, and the rowhouse/terrace is entirely out of the question, although a construct and equivalents that is essentially four houses on the inside of a circular or pentagonal wall, sharing the wall and a common garden/yards outside their private gardens, does exist.  The wealthy get even bigger ones, it’s true, but even the regular housing would qualify as at least a minor Big Fancy House by Terran standards.

And when you find skyscraper apartments on the market – well, those selling them to the middle class (these days, there is no lower class) chop entire floors into quarters, and sell those.  The upper-middle class get entire floors.  The upper class get multiple floors, treating the building as a series of mansions stacked vertically.  And the between-floor insulation is a lot more solid than we tend to build ’em.

Hello, World

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“In general, you will find in fiction that most Contact missions are portrayed as relatively subtle.  In reality, this is almost never the case.  The experience of the Exploratory Service shows that when one makes contact in too subtle a manner, one is actually signaling – in a remarkably effective pan-species manner – that one is being too sneaky for the Contacted civilization’s good.  A number of historical contact missions have gone wrong this way.  In addition, this can prove particularly perilous when making Contact with a multi-polity world; the contact cruiser may be taken for a superweapon or signs of an attack by some of those polities, and the Contact attempt may start a planetary war.  Even when this mistake can be cleaned up afterwards, such missions rarely end well.

“Consequently, Imperial Contact doctrine eschews subtlety, wherever possible.  Be big, be loud, be brash,  send messages across half the system to announce your arrival, make sure the local watchers see you – take a hundred hours off the life of your hull shooting atmosphere entry, if you must, but make sure that the Contact can be detected by as many people as possible, and cannot possibly be seen for anything other than what it is, a genuine extraplanetary Contact.  It almost always pays off in the long run.”

– Imperial Exploratory Service, An Introduction to Contact

Trope-a-Day: Can’t Argue With Elves

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Can’t Argue With Elves: The eldrae, and indeed the Imperials in general, so not just the Space Elves, live this trope, being profoundly elitist and unashamedly, even if they bothered to notice, arrogant about their superiority in almost every way to anyone else and generalized personal awesomeness.  That literally thousands of years of bio-, nano-, and sopho- technology actively directed at (and succeeding in) creating an entire society of impossibly beautiful sexy immortal billionaire genius demigods – coupled with a pressure-cooker of a culture that demands personal striving for perfection and considers pride in the result a virtue – actually lets them back this attitude up most of the time is just icing on the hubris cake, so far as everyone else is concerned.

Really, the only things that make them tolerable at all is (a) their complete and utter refusal to demand any special privileges or position because of their utter awesomeness, even if that’s just because they can’t tolerate the thought of only being comparatively awesome rather than absolutely awesome (a.k.a., “What sort of pathetic excuse for a Superior Race has to actually keep the Inferior Races down?  Newsflash, morons, that means you weren’t qualified for the position in the first place.”), and (b) the way in which they’re willing to, and even insistent sometimes on, selling beauty, genius and immortality to the rest of the galaxy so that they can stop having to put up with all these ugly, ephemeral morons.

Actually, that doesn’t make it any better.

(All of this may not be strictly true as written, of course: it was written, as it were, from the point of view of the people who find themselves on the wrong end of it.)

(Also, it occurs to me, somewhat subverted by the fact that they greatly prefer it when people Argue With Elves.  I mean, they still believe that they’re right about everything, and probably aren’t going to agree with you unless you have a really good argument, but they will respect you more for trying.)

In Time of Emergency, The Rules Suspend The Rules

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Under section 31(c) of the Imperial Emergency Management Act (Revised), 4111, in fulfillment of the Charter mandate to promote the common and mutual defense of civilization from cataclysms of nature, and exercising by herein-authorized proxy the Responsibility of Eminent Domain;

When a Class II or higher emergency has been declared by the Imperial Emergency Management Authority, or when an emergency is in progress and the Emergency Communications System is off-line;

And in the absence of duly Mandate-authorized authority, including all officers of the Ministry of Harmonic Observance;

In such situations as it shall be necessary to prevent further harm to life or property, or to perform essential works of infrastructure reconstruction, citizen-shareholders shall be authorized to enter unattended commercial (retail or storage) property, containing construction materials or repair supplies, within the zone of the Emergency in an orderly manner, and appropriate therefrom such goods as are necessary for the prevention of harm or performance of essential works, as stated.  Such appropriations shall be recorded at the site from which they were made, and the owners of said property may claim due recompense at the market price for such appropriations from the Imperial Emergency Management Authority.

Citizen-shareholders are reminded that the appropriation of any goods not required to prevent harm to life or property or to perform essential works of infrastructure reconstruction, to fail to properly record all such appropriations, or to cause any unnecessary property damage, or to leave property vulnerable to further damage, in the course of such appropriation is forbidden under section 31(c) of the aforementioned Act, and shall constitute the crime of looting.  In times of Class II or higher emergency, looters are considered enemies of the public safety, and are to be shot on sight; citizen-shareholders are further reminded that the law enforcement duty is the responsibility of every citizen-shareholder, especially in emergency situations.

It should also be noted that the privilege of appropriation conferred by section 31(c) is intended to cover emergencies of unusual duration, and that the responsible citizen-shareholder should not consider it a substitute for individual crisis readiness, as delineated on pp. 432-440.  Remember, a prepared Empire is a safe Empire!

– Codex of Civic Services and Citizen Responsibilities, 117th edition