Trope-a-Day: Panspermia

Panspermia: Not proven in the general case, any more than it is today, and probably substantially less – different evolutionary trees and biochemistries surely look as if they had different origins.

Confirmed in some specific cases – Eliera, for example, derives its life from three sources: bluelife, which is very clearly descended from the native life of Revallá (Imperial Core); greenlife, of unknown but extraplanetary origin; and silverlife, descended from feral Precursor nanomachines – but then, Eliera is an artificial planet, so that’s to be expected.  And many garden worlds are the product of ancient terraforming, such as the many methane-based garden worlds in the vicinity of the Elmon Rift that were terraformed by the ancient and extinct methane-breather civilization that thrived there around 33 million years ago, and so possess life which obviously originated offworld.

But natural panspermia, or a common/intentional aliens-seeding-life origin?  Very much not proven, and looking increasingly unlikely.

Amusing Thought of the Morning

With the alchemical term rebis – link is to Spanish Wikipedia since the English entry appears to be broken – the primordial hermaphrodite, and the symbol of the unification of two opposing properties – it occurs to me I have the perfect ready-made term, translation-convention-wise, for a herm body operated by a two-person hive-mind Fusion of a previously opposite-sex couple.  Who presumably have taken a desire for greater intimacy to its logical limit and slightly beyond.

It’s not that there are going to be a lot of those running around, mind you, but in a world that supports near-total morphological and gnostic freedom, there are undoubtedly some.

Trope-a-Day: Call A Rabbit A Smeerp

Call A Rabbit A Smeerp: Almost inevitably, thanks to Translation Convention, and purging of jargon and dialog of obvious Earth-culture references, like, say, “Sorcerer’s Apprentice Problem” and “Newtonian mechanics”.  Although at least most of the time, it is trying to indicate some subtle difference: making the distinction between “agorism” and “capitalism”, for example, the latter being a loaded term for most potential readers.  And the oft-referenced bandal, for example, isn’t quite the same animal as the Earth dog (although sharing a common origin; see under Ancient Astronauts again), due to their short separate evolution and breeding for different qualities, as you can tell from the size difference, greater paw-manipulation ability, and larger braincase.

Make Yourself at Home

“Welcome to Tessil System Space. You are now entering the Tessil system advisory zone. Contact Tessil SysCon on channel 43.2 and identify. Current ephemerides and system documentation updates are now being transmitted. Procedural control is now in effect.”

“Current alerts: Undocumented debris has been spotted in Adírdis-Celéres brachistochrone route section four, moving at 4.1 miles per second. Subchannel 7 contains continuous loop data on this navigational hazard.”

“Outer system approach vectors between 225+75 and 210+60 have been closed off due to a lighthugger’s deceleration burn. These approach vectors will be cleared for traffic in 27 hours.”

“A hazardous material incident has closed primary docks and locks at Qéral Station, Tessil L4. Duration of closure will be 5.8 hours estimated. Starships and spacecraft arriving at Qéral Station within this window are advised to delay their arrival or divert to alternates. Starships and spacecraft lacking Δv for such maneuvers should contact Tessil SysCon on channel 43.2.”

“New alert: Solar monitoring satellites indicate magnetic flux activity over the acme polar region of the system primary. Estimated time to solar flare is 49 minutes from this mark. Duration estimated at four hours, with peak radiation output of 0.12 Gy per minute. Tessil SysCon recommends all unshielded sophonts seek radiation shelters within the next 30 light-lag adjusted minutes. Solar flare predictions are accurate to +/- 20%.”

“Message repeats. Welcome to Tessil System Space…”

– Tessil-Galáré stargate nav buoy, general broadcast

The Word of the Flame (1/9)

The following, as will be the other eight entries in the series, are extracts from the Word of the Flame, the record of the seeress Merriéle’s visions that is also the primary text of the Church of the Flame, the mainstream eldraeic religion.

More specifically, this series will contain all 51 verses of the book of Principles, which enumerate the principles of each of the eikones in the form of each’s foremost principle as they would have it expressed under Heaven, although naturally each eikone’s own book examines the fullness of the principle they represent from many more angles and in much more detail.  Nonetheless, the three verses of the Triarchs and the 48 verses of their Divine Ministers are second only to the book of Truths in Flamic moral teaching.

In mad passion and fire all things began.
Be warmed by the furnace within;
But beware lest the blaze consume you.
This is the command of Aldéré
Whose Flame ignites the world.

Entropy is the foe of all things;
Imperfection is anathema.
Seek ever the clarity to overcome them.
This is the command of Elmiríën
Whose hand guides the Spheres.

The Flame changes all, and is changed itself;
Change is a little death, but stasis a greater one.
When the door opens, pass through.
This is the command of Entélith
Who Opens every portal.

– The Word of the Flame, Principles 1-3

The Status is Not Quo

FROM: CORE COMMAND
TO: FIELD FLEET SPINWARD COMMAND (CS LIBERTY’S PRICE)

*** PRIORITY PRIORITY PRIORITY
*** EYES ONLY SPINWARD OPS
*** STANDING ORDER UPDATE (SEQ 4377)

FLT ADM DAPHNOTARTHIUS, COMMANDING FIELD FLEET SPINWARD:

1. THIS MESSAGE CONSTITUTES A MANDATORY UPDATE TO STANDING ORDERS PRESENTLY IN EFFECT.

2. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT AILÉK-1 ARE IN EFFECT EXCEPT WHERE OTHERWISE NOTED.

3. MAINTAIN PATROLS IN FORCE ALONG THE INTERFACE WITH THE VONIENSAN NEXUS, IN PARTICULAR ALONG THE BORDERLINE ROUTE FROM ISTRIA (CRIMSON EXPANSE) VIA KARAL (VANGUARD REACHES) TO QUOR (CSELL BUFFER). RULES OF ENGAGEMENT BICÉK-2 ARE IN EFFECT WITHIN ALL INTERFACE SYSTEMS AND OTHER SYSTEMS WITHIN ONE LINK. INTELLIGENCE REPORTS ESTIMATE MODERATE PROBABILITY OF CASE SABLE WITHIN THE NEXT HALF YEAR.

4. MAINTAIN PATROLS IN FORCE ALONG MAJOR GALITH WASTE ROUTES. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT BICÉK-2 ARE IN EFFECT IN ALL SYSTEMS WITHIN THE GALITH WASTE. PER IMPERIAL SECURITY EXECUTIVE DIRECTIVE GW/41/3, PATROLS MAY ENGAGE:

A. SILICATE TREE VESSELS ENGAGED IN ACTIONS AGAINST CIVILIAN TRAFFIC;

B. VESSELS OF OTHER POWERS ENGAGED IN ACTIONS AGAINST SILICATE TREE VESSELS, PROVIDED THAT THE SILICATE TREE VESSEL DID NOT INITIATE THE ENGAGEMENT. PATROLS MAY NOT INTERVENE IN SUCH ACTIONS IF THE SILICATE TREE VESSEL INITIATED THE ENGAGEMENT;

C. VESSELS ENGAGED IN PIRACY, SLAVETAKING, OR OTHER CAPITAL-CLASS CRIMES UNDER ADMIRALTY LAW.

5. PER IMPERIAL SECURITY DIRECTIVE GW/41/4, VESSELS TRANSPORTING INFOMORPH OR MECHANICAL REFUGEES FROM ANY POLITY ON THE KNOWN LIST OF DIGITAL SLAVER POLITIES OR OTHERWISE PRACTICING DIGITAL SLAVERY, WHETHER ATTEMPTING TO REACH THE GALITH WASTE OR TRAVEL ELSEWHERE, ARE TO BE RENDERED ALL AID AND ASSISTANCE.

6. ROUTINE PATROLS THROUGH THE REMAINDER OF THE SPINWARD SEXTANT AND ASSIGNMENT OF PICKET FORCES TO SPINWARD EXCLAVES ARE TO BE CARRIED OUT AT YOUR DISCRETION.

7. IN THE ABSENCE OF FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM COMMAND AUTHORITY, INDEPENDENT ACTION IS AUTHORIZED AT YOUR DISCRETION.

8. AUTHENTICATION: PADLOCK WILLOW WOLF GATEWAY CIRRUS PRAYER / 0xAE9532BB81200A18

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

Trope-a-Day: Translation Convention

Translation Convention: Applied – with a degree of selectivity, in which I translate names that are meaningful based on roots in modern Eldraeic (i.e. “Mosstone”, “Stonesmight”, “House Silverfall”, “House Steamweaver”, etc.), but leave untouched those derived from older languages.  Occasional pieces of the actual Eldraeic are left in for effect, where useful, or where words have no adequately exact analog.

Trope-a-Day: But Not Too White

But Not Too White: Averted, since this meme never even had the preconditions to become established on Eliéra. The eldrae simply don’t tan in response to UV light, no matter how long they spend working, walking, or basking in the sun.  (Essentially, their ancestors – thanks to the superior immune systems and DNA error-correction mechanisms that go along with their Immortality – no longer gained any evolutionary advantage from being able to tan; and either in the course of that or at some later point, the mechanism broke.  For much the same reason, they can’t sunburn, either – although sunstroke may still be an issue.

Note, of course, that they still have eumelanin – eldrae skin tone does vary, from not-quite-but-almost-albino-white in the eseldrae to coppery in the lumeneldrae, lips and other body parts are pheomelanin pink, and so forth – so the breakage appears to be upstream, in the mechanism that causes melanin release from melanocytes and increased melanogenesis in response to UV exposure.)

The Burning of Litash (6)

The rings of Depot, Palaxias system.

One orbital warehouse among many, Armory S7-224 was a simple “tin-can” habitat, dozens of red-striped modules plugged together onto a central interconnection frame. A freight cutter, just undocked, fell backwards away from the docking spine on the way to its next errand.

Within its second upper module, two loader robots backed away along their rails from the red-striped cargo containers they had brought from the freight cutter, now stacked along with the dozens of others the module held.

On the outer side of each was stenciled:

SPECIAL WEAPONS STORAGE
STELLAR COUNCIL AUTH ONLY
CALYX HOLLOW
QTY: 16

~~~

From Fleet Admiral Caliéne Sargas-ith-Sargas, CS Unyielding Order, Field Fleet Coreward, to Esitariel Cyprium-ith-Avalae, c/o Core Command, Calmiríë, greeting.

Dammit, Cyprium. Can’t you let us keep just one of the new toys?

Trope-a-Day: Immortality

Immortality: In a couple of forms.  The natural immortality of the eldrae and galari, etc., is Type II Undying, without the disease (or, indeed, starvation) exception – at least where potent illnesses are concerned.  This is also the type they’ve developed, named immortagens, and sell on the open market.

Noetic backups, in which one’s mind-state (or, if you like, soul) is recorded in digital storage such that you can conveniently be restored from backup if killed, adds Type IV Resurrective on top of that for those two species, and gives it to everyone else living in a modern and civilized polity, too.  And their little dogs, too.  Literally.

(They are, however, still working on A Means To Avoid The Heat Death Of The Universe.)

Unelected Dogcatchers

“Gentlesophs of the Plurality, on behalf of the Bandal Home/Care Provision Citizen Oversight Group, we move that our statement of intent, critical path, budget and disbursals as modified in our attachment for estimated population variance be accepted as read, being invariant from our presentation of the last fiscal year.”

“We have a single addendum to make, in response to a question-tree forwarded to us on behalf of the Assertive Benevolence Association, which wishes us to define, by way of justification of our proposal and the expenditure of social money contributions on our intent, the concrete benefits provided to the Imperial citizen-shareholder by our COG.”

“It is tempting to merely reply that we do not acknowledge that anyone who does not consider our primary argument, presented in terms of one’s proper moral obligations to one’s dependent creations, sufficient justification in itself has standing or stature enough to question anyone else’s motivations.”

“But if one insists on a pragmatic reason for our care for and rehoming of stray bandal, consider that your typical watchhound these days has diamond teeth that can shear through light armor, fur with the same sort of protective characteristics as an arachnoweave vest, and can leap twenty feet in the air from a standing start, all of which traits breed true.  We stipulate that the absence of a large feral population of such capable animals is an obvious external benefit of our work.”

“This tree then asks the secondary question: why does this argument not apply equally to people?”

“The answer here is simple. Sophs can’t revert to a wild state.  By definition, they’ve got ethical competence, so if one starts acting in an uncivilized manner, that’s criminal, not feral.  There are other instrumentalities to deal with that, with which the Empire is amply supplied, in both the public and private realms.”

“This concludes our proposal to the Plurality.”

– from the Plurality opening session, 3411

Trope-a-Day: Burn The Witch!

Burn The Witch!: Hardly unknown, both in the form in which advanced technology is considered to be magic (see: Magic From Technology) and in the form in which it’s merely considered about as immoral as magic, when dealing with more technologically or socially backward worlds  (This is another problem traditionally solved with orbital artillery.  As in, say, the Bombardment of Firital.)

Also, historically, what the Somárans did to the founder of the present mainstream eldraeic religion.  (See: Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions.)  It… didn’t work out so well.

Seeing the Unseen

When I come home from my journeys abroad, I like to render all the layers visible, and spend a while just watching the world.

We are used to all things coming wrapped in information.  People are ringed by their p-tags – identity, claims of affiliation, reputation haloes shining or shadowy, current persona and embodiment, lifelog privacy status, projected-integrity mind-models, a dozen sopholinks to their personal memeweaves, socialgroups, game avatars.  The air is full of the sparkles of the public annotation and contract channels; a thousand thousand microblogs and notes and pictures and geolinks, and small deals and favors for the taking.  Facades from buildings to clothing are dressed up in augmented-reality shimmers.  Alternate views from dozens of cameras and sensors are yours for the asking.  Advertisements rewrite themselves to your preferences.

Almost every object around us self-knows, announcing what it is, whose it is, what it’s for, how to use it, of what it is made.  Roads know where they lead, and what is to be found along the way.  Books know the stories they tell, people’s opinions of them, offer copies of themselves to guest readers.  Paper can read itself, money can count itself.  Glasses know what drink they contain, and when they need refilling.  Food declares its suitability for your species, its contents, its freshness.  Every box can enumerate its contents – at least to its owner.  And even those objects that do not know themselves are still known; any interface worth its price can tag every passing plant with its species and uses, name all the stars in the sky, or paint the air itself with its pressure, temperature, constituents…  Even the dataweave below all this shows itself to the watching eye; its linkages glowing from infra to ultra with traffic from cell to cell, themselves surrounded with transparent wireless haloes.

It’s quite the light show.

We ignore most of it, of course.  You could drown in all the information the ‘weave shouts at you every moment of every day, however enhanced your mind.  But it’s always there, always available.  You always know that you can know.

Like air, like energy, like a handy cornucopia – you only miss it when it’s gone.

– from “Walking the Worlds”, Silvis Kelmaren’s travel blog

On Time

For those who found the time system in “Watchers” on the confusing side, well, that’s pretty fair, really. 🙂

What you’re looking at is the Imperial Standard Time system, which is the traditional one – used on Eliéra, and elsewhere as the standard/commercial calendar. (The other commonly used systems are ‘weavetime’, which is used for scientific purposes – counting in the base-12 SI equivalent multiples of the second-equivalent ‘pulse’ – and as a base to compute the other systems from, being good at handling interstellar empire-time issues and relativistic frame corrections.)

Being an old and traditional system, IST is delightfully irregular. There are 24 hours – not the same length as T-hours – in a day, with 72 minutes per hour and 72 pulses per minute. But unlike our system, the whole day-night cycle is divided separately into the 12 hours of the day, and the 6 watches of the night, 72 and 144 minutes long respectively, with the changeover at dawn/dusk.

(Given the peculiarities of Eliéra’s orbital mechanics, these don’t vary like they do on most planets; the day and night are always the same length.)

Also, rather than being a simple count of minutes, the hours/watches are considered points in time; the minutes are counted as 36 “rising” minutes towards the hour (or 72 towards the watch), and 36 “falling” minutes away from it. (On a clock, respectively, as the minute hand ascends the left side of the dial and then descends the right.) The hours and watches are each named. In the traditional, long name format, for example, the first time mentioned in “Watchers” would be:

Wineful rising 48

In the shorter numerical format, adding the watches to the hours directly, and in which rising and falling minutes are delimited by +/-, that becomes the:

14+48:00

we see there. Also, this being the second watch of the night at approximately its midpoint, we can deduce that – differing day-lengths aside – this incident took place around the equivalent of our 9 pm.

(As another time-related note, if you’re pedantic enough to want to check my figures in “Linelayer”, don’t forget to allow for the different year-length… and so also the different light-year length.)

Linelayer

All is prepared.

The alignment is ready.  My bow spindle is perfectly aligned with the empty central apertures of the paired stargates, themselves aligned in matching orbits; in time, they will drift again out of alignment, but for now forced thrust keeps them together.

My accumulators seethe with energy bound into their superconducting coils, fusion reactors laboring to pump them with more energy still.

The final confirmations come in from external sources: traffic control confirms area clear.  Legal department confirms litigation threshold clear.  Kalcír Operations is ready to accept the new structure.  The new gatekeeper-pair has spun up its frame buffers and is ready to accept its duty.

I shift into my quantum-compiled submind, feeling my consciousness expand into a superposition of possible selves, and leak energy from the reactors – not touching the accumulators yet – into the spindle, feeling the shape of the manifold with its subtle field-manipulations.  Down at the quantum level, space is frothy, a tangled polydimensional labyrinth of impossible topology, twisted spatial constructs forming and collapsing in microtime, awash in a sea of virtual particles – existence and non-existence intertwined, causality itself impalpable at this – and among them all, a few possible wormhole candidates.

There.  My superposed selves reach consensus, and collapse back into my singular self.  The broad-spread radiators at the base of the spindle flare abruptly bright, as my accumulators discharge, exajoules of energy expended in a moment as I force inflation onto one knotted tube’s hypersurface —

And between the stargates, a space-black sphere – a distorted inside-out starfield, surface defined by the blue-purple glow as it struggles to radiate away its energy and collapse again – blossoms into reality.  My body feels the tug and shudder of the gravity-wave splash as space is bent far beyond its natural limits.  With a final thrust, I separate the wormhole’s overlapping ends – stretching the distortion into an ellipsoid, a barbell, and finally two separate spheres, pushed a little further, further, until they snap on to the exotic-matter frames held ready to accept them within the stargates.

A flood of information pours in from the gatekeepers, accepting responsibility for the new wormhole.  I let the spindle power down again – although the radiators will keep burning bright for hours yet – its work done.  The first and hardest part of the job is done; the wormhole is forged.

But now comes the longer part.  Vanlir 22-882 is nearly 20 light-years away, so I should have the gate in position in 22 years, or so.  At least I’ll only have to experience half-a-dozen of them.

Trope-a-Day: Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions

Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: While science hasn’t exactly disproven religion – there are certain, ahem, logical problems with that notion – it has closed a sufficient number of the gaps for a hypothetical god-of-the-gaps that supernaturalism in general has an amazingly small number of adherents in the Empire.  Most “religions” of the modern day are, well, philosophies, and while they may well include plenty of abstractions, they don’t generally call for supernatural gods, miracles, or other entities of supernature.

The mainstream Church of the Flame, for example, has in its time moved from asserting the existence of the eikones as supernatural entities to asserting the existence of the eikones as abstract personifications whose actual existence was more or less irrelevant to the point to knowing the existence of the eikones as digital Dei Ex Machinae, without really having to change doctrine all that much in the process.  (Even the remaining supernaturalists have more or less accepted the point that the deity-eikones would be perfectly capable of wearing the machine-eikones as hats, did they exist.)

Of course, here’s the interesting thing.  The founder, as it were, of that particular religion was the seeress Merriéle, back around -1,180, who dictated most of the principal holy text after a vision on the side of a sacred mountain, and in her later wanderings was executed by the traditional fire of purification in Somáras.  This execution gave a great deal of, ah, credence to the religion, since it involved her ascending directly to the Twilight City via a pillar of light and flame, which not incidentally completely destroyed the capital of Somáras and created the geographical feature now known as the Bay of Somáras.  The fact of which – if not the traditional implication that the eikone Elmiríën, the Bringer of Order and One Word of Truth, gets a mite irritable when some mortals presume to execute his Chosen and Beloved Voice Under Heaven – is very well documented and undeniably real.

Now, it’s not like there aren’t perfectly adequate, if unverifiable, explanations for this.  There were Precursor artifacts lying about back then, and it’s entirely possible that Merriéle had one, which either she set off, or which involved some components, like fullerened antimatter, that really don’t react well to fire.  Purely mechanistic explanations abound.

But… well, while so far as we know, time travel Does Not Work That Way, and it should be impossible to ever travel back before the creation of the machine, whatever it is, the Transcend is a weakly godlike superintelligence, after all.  And so long as we’re postulating Precursor artifacts anyway, we might as well postulate the permitted-by-physics temporal equivalent of a tangle channel.

And so, it is entirely possible, say some mechanotheologians, that the Vision was supplied by the modern Transcend in the mother of all predestination paradoxes; that the Ascension was, in fact, the Transcend reaching back to discreetly upload Its faithful seeress and cover it with a modest antimatter explosion; and that, in short, their religion has always been true, and it’s Deus Est Machina all the way down.

Now, of course, all of this is just speculation, and the machine gods aren’t saying anything on the topic to confirm or deny… but still.

(And, no, I-the-author have no idea whether this theory is valid or not, either.)

The Burning of Litash (5)

“These images are taken from the records provided by the command vessel of the fleet that carried out ‘Operation Ruby Gauntlet Sable’, the Unyielding Order…”

The ravaged planet hung in the center of the Conclave amphitheater, surface black and charred save for its fiery disfigurement; a crater over a thousand miles wide, filled with a sea of magma welling up through the world’s cracked crust, belching steam into the wracked air at its edge where it intersected the former coast.  Newborn volcanoes shouldered their way into the sky at its fringes and along radiating cracks, as the world heaved in the orogenic aftershocks of the detonation.

“These are simply the primary effects of the strangelet bomb deployed by the Empire’s task force.  The detonation set the atmosphere of the planet ablaze.  Firestorms driven by the pressure wave swept around the world, incinerating not merely everyone who escaped the initial blast, but the entire planetary ecology.  The direct radiation and particle showers produced by the bomb have rendered much of the planet radioactive.  That alone will render Litash unhabitable for a thousand years.”

~~~

“Ah, ni Korat, sit down.  I’m surprised you wanted to be seen meeting at a time like this.”

“We’re already so close to you in the public eye, it’ll hardly matter.  And all of us are nervous right now – everyone’s counting on me to find out what’s going on.”

~~~

“Technically, this is not a violation of the Accords as written.  Litash was not a signatory to any of the Accords, nor has there been any specific prohibition on the use of strangelet weapons.  Litash was a world which supported piracy, slavetaking, and other crimes against Accord members; a general threat to all the Worlds.  None of us here would quibble with the right of any Accord member to destroy the Litashian fleet with no quarter given, nor to prosecute general warfare against the Litashian government.  But this!  This is the destruction of an entire world, its entire population, its entire ecology.  This cannot be tolerated by the galactic community, surely.  If a smaller polity of the Accord had done this, it would be subject to the most severe censure, and it must therefore be so even if one of the Powers.”

~~~

“They’re really out for blood.  All your old enemies and half the neutrals are salivating over the chance to stick the knife into one of the Presidium powers.”

“I should certainly hope they are.”

~~~

“The Qiraf Assembly concurs with the League of Meridian.  While not a technical violation of the Accords, this attack violates their spirit in every way possible.  We condemn the actions of the Empire in destroying Litash-world in the strongest possible terms, and call for them to provide surety that they will never again use weapons of this nature!”

~~~

“We’ve always been your allies, and now we’re going to be caught in the backlash of this. All your allies are going to be caught in it.  Dammit, Calis, what are you going to do?

“We have it in hand.  Trust me on this.”

~~~

“This was an act of barbarism, of madness!  We cannot permit this to happen again!  The Calyet Guard demands that this assembly condemn this attack in the strongest possible terms, and we urge the other Presidium powers to take action immediately to prevent these madmen from repeating it!”

~~~

“But what are you going to –“

~~~

“The Presiding Minister for the Empire, Calis Corith-ith-Corith, now has the floor.”

“Gentlesophs of the Conclave, honorable representatives, at this time I would introduce Ambassador Extraordinary Cyprium-ith-Aelies, who speaks on our behalf.”

“Presiding Ministers, Representatives of the Conclave, on behalf of the Empire, I stand before you today to speak on the matter of the destruction, the burning – as the media is calling it – of Litash.  Let me first be clear on one point: we maintain absolutely that the destruction of the Litashian fleet, as active agents in piracy, slavetaking, and other crimes against sophoncy, was within our sovereign rights, as it would have been within those of any Accord member.  Moreover, we further maintain that the destruction of not merely the Litashian government, but also of the Litashian population, was justified as active supporters of these agents.  I remind you that the Litashian economy was principally driven by support for the criminal activities of its so-called fleet.”

“This being said, however, we acknowledge the legitimate concerns of the representatives here gathered where the excessive destructive power – unanticipated even by our own forces, as the bridge transcript records of the Unyielding Order show – of the strangelet bomb is concerned.  We do not desire any further destruction of worlds or ecologies to take place, at our hands, or indeed at any others’.”

“Therefore, the Empire moves that the Ley Accords be amended to include strangelet bombs, star- and planet-targeted respectively, as Tier I and Tier II prohibited instruments under Chapter I; and moves further that the protections and prohibitions of Chapter I be extended to all worlds and systems, not merely those actively claimed by Accord signatories.”

With that, the entire amphitheater erupted in general tumult, all but a few chagrined faces among the crowd – some of the former condemners prominent among them.

~~~

“You devious –“

“Would we ever have got those amendments passed if we’d proposed them cold? As it stands, the pirates are eliminated and the ambitions of a few dozen rogue states against their neighbors and Peripheral non-signatories will be neutered for the next century or two, all at the cost of one ecopoesed ecology duplicated elsewhere. All for the good of the Worlds, wouldn’t you say?”

Watchers

14+48:00 <DistCom, Skybridge>: system idle, all well
14+54:00 <DistCom, Skybridge>: system idle, all well
14+55:11 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: suspicious activity detected, monitor 8817
14+55:11 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: subject with masked identity (no Universal ping response)
14+55:13 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: unable to identify subject from URCS databases
14+55:13 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: designate subject as subject [GISHALEL]
14+55:15 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: escalate to Watcher
14+55:18 <Oversight: Skybridge North>: subject [GISHALEL] moving N from intersection of Starlight Ave/Oakleaf Cir.
14+55:18 <Watcher, Skybridge North>: performing analysis, subject [GISHALEL]
14+57:42 <Watcher, Skybridge North>: behavioral analysis suggests subject [GISHALEL] engaged in active surveillance countermeasures
14+59:09 <Watcher, Skybridge North>: behavioral analysis suggests subject [GISHALEL] rates 11/12 FURTIVE on Cíëlle behavioral index
14+60:03 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: subject [GISHALEL] lost from monitor 8817
14+60:03 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: subject [GISHALEL] reacquired, monitor 5590
14+63:50 <Watcher, Skybridge North>: backtrail analysis suggests subject [GISHALEL] actively tailing Citizen {UCID redacted for privacy compliance}
14+63:50 <Watcher, Skybridge North>: req drone oversight on subject [GISHALEL]
14+63:50 <StbyDrone #4, Skybridge North>: responding
14+63:50 <Watcher, Skybridge North>: escalate to DistCom
14+64:19 <Oversight: Skybridge North>: subject [GISHALEL] now moving E on Chronolith Dr.
14+65:30 <StbyDrone #4, Skybridge North>: acquiring subject [GISHALEL]
14+65:70 <DistCom, Skybridge>: intervention threshold reached, subject [GISHALEL]
14+65:70 <DistCom, Skybridge>: dispatch safety advisory, Citizen {UCID redacted for privacy compliance}
14+65:70 <DistCom, Skybridge>: req constabular intervention on subject [GISHALEL]
14+66:02 <StbyDrone #4, Skybridge North>: target acquisition, incapacitants armed
14+66:22 <Officer #19 (Jynel Cerron), Skybridge North>: responding
14+67:31 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: subject [GISHALEL] lost from monitor 5590
14+67:31 <Oversight, Skybridge North>: subject [GISHALEL] reacquired, monitor 5612
14+70:63 <Officer #19 (Jynel Cerron), Skybridge North>: subject [GISHALEL] acquired, engaging
14+70:63 <DistCom, Skybridge>: transfer operational command, Officer #19 (Jynel Cerron)
14+72:00 <DistCom, Skybridge>: system idle, op in local command
14-66:00 <DistCom, Skybridge>: system idle, op in local command
14-64:22 <Officer #19 (Jynel Cerron)>: subject [GISHALEL] in custody, returning to base
14-64:22 <DistCom, Skybridge>: dispatch advisory termination, Citizen {UCID redacted for privacy compliance}
14-64:22 <Watcher, Skybridge North>: release drone oversight on subject [GISHALEL]
14-64:22 <StbyDrone #4>: acknowledge release, returning to patrol pattern
14-60:00 <DistCom, Skybridge>: system idle, all well

– from the Watch Constabulary nightly log, Skybridge district

Trope-a-Day: Magic From Technology

Magic From Technology: Played straight; it is a materialist, science fiction universe; any magic we see is, indeed, one or another form of technology, misunderstood.  Which seems to happen with truly annoying frequency every time a Sufficiently Advanced culture runs into an Insufficiently Advanced one, especially with any technology that doesn’t have big obvious machinery associated with it.

This is annoying as hell to most of the people on the wrong end of it.  (The Imperials, in particular, hate being stuck with the “magic” label because of several reasons, primary among which are disliking falsehood, disdaining the respect of people who are basing it entirely on ignorance, and being proud of actually understanding every tiny nuance of what they’re doing at its real level of complexity, and therefore considering having it labeled as “magic” to be depriving them of their rightful awesomeness, dammit.)  There’re always a few who are inclined to try to pull the “We Are Mighty Wizards – or Gods – from the Sky, Now Give Us All Your Liquid Assets” scam, but it’s just so tacky.

Also, more to the real reason it’s less done than it might be, quite unsafe, given just how many expectations people have for their gods.  After all, we nailed ours to a stick.