Month: May 2012

Fries With That

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Afterburner Fly-In, Skyway 51, 5,000 feet above the Selenarian plains.

“We’d like the Trinary Burger with the smokin’ kimaes, the reshkef handmeal with mint, both with grated argórén and smokebite cheese on the side, the kaeth-size roast joint of ftark, glazed ‘on fire’, a box of sevesúr segments with honey dipping sauce to split, some chunked hasérgalrás, rare, for my bandal, a pint of Wintersbreath stout, a large Quicksilver Quaff, no ice, a pint of plum brandy, bloodwarm, and from your ammonia-breather menu, the dry-ice-grilled lúekha worm and a Deuterium Slushie with extra methane, please, all to go.  On my account.”

Trope-a-Day: Blood Brothers / True Companions

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Blood Brothers / True Companions: The (semi-) formalized groups of friends, especially in freelance adventurer/weirdseeker/etc. company, known as circles (short for “oath-circles”, because they are; also the second generalized form of Imperial social structure, after the branch).  Not all of them are formalized by oath, however, hence the “semi”, and they come in plenty of variant forms and intensities, ranging all the way up to “for each other’s names and honor, we will kill and die”.

Princess of Clouds to Archetypes, Gilek-Four – Your Move

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The priest of the Unnamed, unidentifiable behind flowing night-purple robes and serene mask of polished silver, moved steadily through the market towards the statue of Valentia I. The crowd parted as he – or she – passed, leaving a respectful distance. The reputation of the Masked Order made even the bold wary of becoming involved with their intrigues.

Reaching the statue, the masked priest drew a night-purple xaról flower from the folds of his – or its – robe, laid it at the statue’s feet, then turned and stood by the pedestal, settling in to wait.

His – or hesh’s – instructions had been clear, if cryptic, ending, And provide no word of reason, as the Unnamed One commands.

Not that he – or ve – could have given a reason had he desired to; the commands of the Inner Circle were never explained to those below. Upon reaching the Middle Circle, he’d – or they’d – been taught that ”the purpose of the game is the game itself”; that the secrets and intrigues of the Unnamed One required no reason beyond themselves – which was undoubtedly true, but complete? That, only the Inner Circle would know.

There. He – or whoever – looked up from his musings, seeing the one his orders had described – a woman passing the statue at noon, with the rare silver-blonde hair and rose-copper coloring of the sunrise eldrae. Pressing the engraved silver token of the temple’s favor into her hand, he turned and walked away, leaving her looking after him in surprise.

Trope-a-Day: Bling of War

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Bling of War: Except for the brief chunk of time that matched our Industrial Age, played mostly straight by the Imperial Legions.  Beforehand, for much the same regions as Napoleonic (and previous) armies were quite dressy – well, that, and the giant steam clanks stomping around on the battlefield – and afterwards because big stompy Powered Armor with both noise and the ensuring thermal and neutrino emissions tends to make stealth something that happens to other people anyway, so you might as well go back to looking gorgeous on the battlefield if you’re anything other than scouts or special ops (who sneakily enough do have their own “field drab” armor which somehow never shows up on parade).  And, of course, so long as the bling of war is on top of the fully functional deadliness of war and doesn’t interfere with its functionality.

This is, of course, completely unnecessary and not done by most people who advance past Industrial Age warfare – it’s just a local aesthetic preference.  (The trope – which is still generally true in their universe – that the side with the shiniest uniforms tends to lose therefore has at least one qualification to it.  That some people haven’t heard of said qualification and will fall right into the wrong assumptions isn’t strictly intended by the Admiralty, but they certainly don’t mind that it happens.)

The Burning of Litash (3)

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CS Unyielding Order, Litash high orbitals.

The circumambient skies over Litash burned three times over; with the pin-point blazes of wounded ships venting hot gases and of ongoing warhead detonations in the low orbitals, with the long bright streaks of hulks destroyed before they made it to orbit reentering uncontrolled, and with curtains and sheets of brightly-colored auroral fire as the atmosphere reacted to the particles sleeting down from the battle zone.

It would be quite a show for anyone on the ground, Councilman Cyprium reflected sourly, but then, anyone on the ground with half a mind would have fled for deep-crust shelter when we took the high orbitals.

“Close up the englobement over there, Aís!  You’ll have some punchcraft making a break for it on your shortscan in a quarter – don’t let them reach orbit.  Flag actual, clear.”

The plan, of course, had worked perfectly.  Sweeping in with tangle-aided simultaneity from both of the system’s stargates and ignoring the planet itself, task force 3-46 had caught most of the Litashian fleet between hammer and anvil as it climbed out of the gravity well of the system’s gas giant and burned hard to acme to get clear of their convergence; the superior mobility of the Imperial cruiser squadrons had run it down – the fleet was, after all, mostly composed of destroyers, frigates and the disguised “naval auxiliaries” for which Litash had gained infamy – and destroyed it in a single pass.

“Negative, stay in position, Peremptory.  Leave him to the destroyers.  Flag actual, clear.”

Leaving the destroyer screen behind to picket the stargates, the cruisers had then rejoined forces to sweep down on Litash itself, blasting the highports and defense stations, and occupying the high orbitals in a textbook blockade globe – giving them room and line to sight on any ship trying to leave the planet. The steady stream of would-be escapees, over the last two hours, had dwindled to a trickle.  Few had made it past the englobement, and those wouldn’t escape the destroyers.

The Admiral looked over at him.  “Running out of things to kill down here, Cyprium.”

He nodded.  “It’s time.  Let’s make an end of it.”

“All cruisers, this is Admiral Sargas.  Reform the englobement at twelve planetary diameters, best speed, and report when in position.  Stand by for the deployment of CALYX HOLLOW.  Flag actual, clear.”

Dr. Kajen’s Famous Nanosalts

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The crystals fizzed as they dissolved, salt lattices slipping apart into their ionic components, releasing tiny pockets of oils, aromatic compounds, and CO2 trapped within them.

Nanomachines, too, came free from encapsulation within the crystals. Their triggering conditions met – the latent heat released by the crystal’s dissolution and the presence of water molecules around them – they sprang to life, cilia driving them outward, sensors sniffing for the distinctive chemical gradient of their target. Identifying it, they swam towards its solid surface, and nanoscopic ”brushes” sprang into action, scrubbing it free of even the smallest particles of foreign matter, while other chemical armatures dissolved contamination, smoothed away damaged areas, and extended cleansing probes into its pores.

Aravé Múranios-ith-Murann lay back in her bath, sipped her wine, and savored the tingling sensation as the day’s sweat and dirt effortlessly melted away.

In The Deep

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The World Shaft (under construction), two-thirds below Mile Station 23
Project Elapsed Time: 15 years

The bottom of the great shaft resounded with the clangor of Mahánárel’s own forge.  A few hundred feet apart, the space between crammed with the steam-driven drills, hammers and other machinery that carved the bedrock – and above, that sealed the steel lining sections in place – the walls trapped the noise and reflected it back again and again, cacophony upon cacophony.

In other ways, too, the drill-head reflected the god’s forge; under the glaring light of hissing carbide lamps, men and women half-naked under their protective aprons against the sweltering heat moved through the mist of blasting smoke, vented steam and water-spray from the cooling stream that fell down the 45 wall, tending the laboring machines.

With a screech, the drill-head twisted its way further into the new bore, and the shift-boss cursed as black, oily water slopped over the retaining lip of the catwalk to puddle around her boots, then reached for a speaking-tube.

“Hakal – tell those bloody idlers up on twenty-three to give me more steam for the pumps!  We’re up to the raicve deck-plates in sump-juice down here!”

Even in the office-shack of Hakal Vintar-ith-Vidutar, lined with thick layers of oiled wool padding and softwood panels, the noise was all-encompassing, but it was at least possible to hear oneself think without thick ear-plugs of wax. Pulling the telegraph levers communicating with the mile station up above, he grinned over his shoulder at his visitor.

“Glad you came down for a look, Menys?”

“Glad, yes… is it always this loud?”

“Fires, no!  This is soft rock.  When we were in the granite up by twenty-two, it was at least twice this loud – even without the blasting.  Slower, too.  Couldn’t cut more’n seventeen in a day.  In this, we can cut thirty.”

Whatever Menys said next was lost in the clattering thunder of the mucker bucket arriving downshaft, but the horrified look that came with it was enough to set Hakal chuckling as he turned back to his panel.

Trope-a-Day: Black Box

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Black Box: Quite a few of them lying around in the form of leftover elder race artifacts and other archaeological recoveries.  Sensible civilizations and corporations (like Probable Technologies, ICC) really hate this, because they know exactly how Sealed-Evil-In-A-Can dangerous that sort of thing can be, and the likelihood of unknown side effects, and decline to extensively use or commercialize any of them until they’ve figured out not only how to reproduce them, but also just how, exactly, the things work.  Very minor, very benign examples may be sold off to collectors, but no-one’s making them a part of their infrastructure until they know all about it.

There are, of course, plenty of sense-challenged people out there.

(On a lesser scale, there are some other examples: the secrets of stabilizing wormholes and building stargates, for example, are both a state secret of the Voniensa Republic and the highest possible grade of commercially-sensitive information for Ring Dynamics, ICC, for reasons in both cases less about maintaining their monopoly and more about wanting to discourage people from screwing with the infrastructure of their really expensive interstellar transportation system – so while the rough details of how they work are known to any schoolchild, that’s about it.  Likewise, the algorithms for producing recursively self-improving AI seeds are generally considered proprietary and closely held by informal agreement [the “Corícal Consensus“] of the people who have them, due to the tendency of amateurs to do really stupid things that Go Horribly Right.)

[Of course, in fairness to everyone else, it’s not like in their universe they ever ran into a recovered Black Box that was quite so all-fired useful as, say, Mass Effect‘s mass relay network.  On the other hand, I am fairly certain that, while the Imperials might have been unable to resist the urge to put that one into immediate operation, they also would have been sure to find a less important one somewhere that they could take apart to figure out how the damn things worked…]

Trope-a-Day: Black and White Morality

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Black and White Morality: Depends on the angle you look at it, really.  Outside observers would argue that the Imperials, for example, must practice a black and white morality; after all, they have an objective ethics, or so they claim, and a mathematical calculus of ethics by which to measure everything…

But then, that’s an objective ethics, which is just the core of morality.  They do have several different moral systems, albeit that a very definite majority of them hew fairly close to the knowledge-and-beauty-good, entropy-bad clade that defines the moral mainstream.  More importantly, they are entirely capable of understanding the degrees of nuance in the universe that mean that (a) just because someone is mistaken does not mean that they are evil – and that can potentially be anyone with the possible exception of the Ephors of the Curia, who were designed as self-improving incarnations of Incorruptible Pure Pureness – and (b) there is not just good and evil, there is better and worse.  Reality, as you might have gathered from Morality Kitchen Sink, is much more “White and Pale Gray and Mid-Gray and occasionally Dark Gray” versus “Black and Dark Gray and Mid-Gray and occasionally Pale Gray” than it is White vs. Black.

See also: Blue and Orange Morality, Morality Kitchen Sink.

Subtext

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“Well, firstly, we’re a civilization of dozens of different species with hundreds of races and clades each.  Given the sheer number of shapes we come in, why would you possibly assume that we’d be invested in your morphological bigotries?”

You’re idiots.

“And even if we were inclined to be, it would have to be a more significant one than hue – even if cross-linked with historical accident.”

You’re petty idiots.

“And even if you had a good reason to refuse to ever deal with these so-called inferior people, that’s what you’d do; refuse to deal with them, build fences, live separately.  Not go out of your way to be appallingly unpleasant for no adequately defined reason.”

You’re malicious petty idiots.

“And you don’t have one, because even if you were right, game theory tells us that defaulting to cooperation is always superior in the indefinite-iterated game, and the law of comparative advantage tells us that you’re better off doing so even if you’re better at every single thing ever.”

You’re self-defeating malicious petty idiots.

“And frankly, you’re not right, because in the light of all this, your self-described intellectual and cultural superiority isn’t looking so good, either.”

You’re hypocritical self-defeating malicious petty idiots.

“So I don’t really think there’s a terribly good basis for an alliance of mutual interest here, I’m afraid.”

Your mothers.

– overheard and underheard in the Crescent Bar, Conclave Drift

A Brief Pronoun Note

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You may notice that in “Purpose” I used the male-default pronoun and person-reference – i.e., “men of every kind”, “him and his”, etc.

This is, of course, a decidedly imperfect translation of the Eldraeic original, which uses, of course, the word daráv – “person, sophont” – in formations like the former, and whose pronouns are all entirely ungendered unless deliberately gendered, which in this case they weren’t because there’s no reason so to do.  Unfortunately, while in modern texts I can use “soph” for the former, at least, English has no slightly-archaic gender-neutral constructs that would fit into a text set in this era without seeming, well, clunky.  At least in my opinion, and since I’m the one doing the writing here, it’s my opinion we’ll be going with.

But if you were wondering why Her Divine Majesty Seledíë I Selequelios, by Right of Coronargyr and Chartered Mandate Empress of the Eldrae, Chief Executive Officer of the Imperium Incorporate, First of the Free, Defender of the Star’s Flame, Heart of the Realm, Sovereign Lady of the Heights and Depths, Dyarch of the Infinite, etc., etc., was speaking in the masculine, that’s why.

Purpose

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”Miríë.  Idaharis.  Jírileth.  Order, progress, liberty.  These are the principles to which we have dedicated ourselves, we of this new-forged Empire. ”

”But not the externally-imposed kórasmiríë of the dark times before the Drowning, nor that of the benighted lands beyond the mountains and the ocean. We believe that múratmiríë – cooperation – is superior to autarky, tyranny, or strife, that men of every kind may come together unforced to order their affairs for the greatest good of each, and thus of all. Our Empire is but one of these associations, one dedicated to the defense of this principle, and in whose shadow many more may grow.”

”In our new common language, as in my own native tongue, idaharis means ’charging the future’, and that is what we shall do. The challenge is before us, and we shall rise to it. The secrets of the world are before us for the taking, the eikones point the way, and we shall not rest until the promise of idaharis is fulfilled – that every day shall dawn brighter and better than the day before.”

”Jírileth is the prize and the cost of our order and our progress. In its name our ancestors cast down tyrants great; in its name, we shall cast down tyrants petty, too, and carry their work abroad until there exists no place under heaven where one man may command another, nor need any fear for him and his, and all may freely pursue their qalasír as they will.”

”And as that work is done, we shall seize freedom, too, from all else that dares constrain us. By the cunning of our minds and the skill of our hands, by the wisdom of our libraries and the wealth of our storehouses we shall free ourselves from labor and lack, from the weaknesses of the flesh and the chance of mortality, from every insufficiency, and even from the very circles of the world. And we never again shall be bound.”

”For we are the eldrae, the doers of deeds and makers of works, and bold enough to voyage wherever dreams have gone before.”

– Seledíë I, first Empress of the Star, excerpted from her first speech from the Throne

Trope-a-Day: Morality Kitchen Sink

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Morality Kitchen Sink: The way the universe works, people being complex – sophonts can be found spread all over the moral spectrum from shiny white to deepest black, often at the same time in different contexts.  More importantly, bearing in mind the sheer variety of sophont minds despite the constraints placed upon them by sharing a physical reality-substrate, they can also be found in blue and orange, purple and red, green, yellow, brown, puce, taupe, and fuchsia.

A Penny for How

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“Thus it is said that an eldrae thinks pacing; a dar-bandal, sniffing; a galari, hovering; a kaeth, fighting; a dar-ííche, floating; a sssc!haaaouú, blowing; a mezuar, standing; an esseli, twitching; a codramaju, merging; a kalatri, sitting; a járaph, of itself; a selyéva, basking; a vlcefc, hanging; a spinbright, watching; an embatil, arguing; a múrast, many times; a seb!nt!at, already; a digisapience, continuously; an azayf, afterwards; and a ulijen, too late.”

– Stereotypes of the Worlds, Imperial University of Almeä Press

Atmospheric Composition, or Vacuuming Airy Cats

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Just by way of showing how ‘scruciatingly obsessed with minutiae I am, I have actually spent time this morning computing the precise constituents of an Imperial ‘standard atmosphere’ – i.e., what standards documents whose first versions date back to the eldrae’s first space habitats mean when they say ‘standard atmosphere’, since obviously different planets and different species have their own ideas, here – to three decimal places…

And so now I’m going to show you my work.  Standard atmosphere:

74.864% N2
21.930% O2
3.164% Ar
0.042% (i.e., 420 ppm) CO2

at 13.2 psi / 91.0 kPa.  Sprinkle with enough H2O vapor to bring relative humidity to 40% for your preferred temperature set-point, and serve.

(This is, as you might expect, substantively identical to Eliéran sea-level atmospheric constituents and pressure, except for various minor trace gases all at least an order of magnitude less present than the CO2. The substantially higher than, say, Earth’s percentage of argon is due to the higher quantities of radioactive elements in its crust that I may well have mentioned before.)

Not a One-Man Show

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Monotheism is quite simply insensible.

Specialization and division of labor.  These things are always competitive advantages.  Everyone who makes it out of the sub-literate hitting-things-with-rocks era invents them.  Hive minds produce purposive castes.  Seed AIs – or just plain extended AIs – multithread broadly, and write specialized routines.  Even singleton minds have enough different tasks to manage that they function as a collection of loosely unified cooperative agents.

And how much more complex is the plenum entire?  So even if you were one god in the first place, why under – or indeed in – heaven would you stay that way?

(In support of the inescapability of this argument, I would adduce the number of monotheisms that feel the need to provide their purportedly singular and totipotent deity with an arbitrarily large number of varied and specialized divine servants.)

– excerpted from a student essay on comparative theology

Trope-a-Day: Starfish Aliens

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Starfish Aliens: Most of them.  Digisapiences, of course, have no bodies at all.  The galari are sophont crystal-virus hybrids with inbuilt techlepathy and mechanical psychokinesis.  The codramaju are pseudo-fungoids which can merge, exchange, and separate bodies and minds at will.  The kaeth are vaguely draconic pseudosaurians with a metal-rich biology.  The hydrogen-breathing sssc!haaaouú are fragile collections of membranes that dwell in the upper layers of gas giants.  The myneni are crystal-based carbohydrosilicate amoeboids with built-in chemosynthetic talents.  The mezuar are a network of collectively sophont purplish-blue trees.  (Yes, as sessile as that implies, although the selyéva are green-blue plantimals – non-sessile photosynthetics – who probably most closely resemble walking broccoli.)  The esseli have engineered themselves into brains with manipulating tentacles and customized personal auxiliary organs, and don’t even remember what they used to look like.  (And the link!n-Rechesh are heading that way.)  The qucequql are ammonia-metabolising octopi from a world of nitrogenous oceans.  The múrast would be simple multiheaded snakes, except that they breathe methane, live in oceans of hydrocarbons, and their primary body structures are constructed of ice.  The ulakha are metal-plated, fast-moving lizardoids who think Venerian conditions are just about right for a planet.  The linobir resemble furless, leathery-skinned, hexapedal, hermaphrodite bears.  The shan kari resemble larger versions of Terran mustelids fairly closely, actually, except they prefer to breathe warm methane.  The mirilasté are legged-serpents with skin we would recognize as essentially plastic, who breathe the most astonishingly noxious fluorine-hydrocarbon soup.  The ktelaki are furry arachnids with trilateral symmetry and multi-branched legs.  The seb!nt!at are star-dwelling creatures of plasma and electromagnetic force.  The celsesh are quadrilaterally-symmetric with a fused-barrel body plan, and sensory organs on stalks in lieu of a head.  The embatil are worm/tentacle creatures whose life cycle begins with individuals, but which merge into single creatures as they mature – while transforming a ganglionic into a collegiate intelligence.  The tennoa are chlorine-breathing radial-crabs blessed/cursed with obligate utilitarianism…

And that’s all before we get to uplifts, neogens, and exotic neomorphic bioshells.