Sorry for the lack of fic-a-day in recent days.
Unfortunately, I’ve been sleeping really badly and possibly have some sort of low-level plague, either or both of which have done quite a number on my creative faculties.
Normal service (and catch-up) will be resumed as soon as possible.
The Chains of Commanding: The reason, especially given the circumscriptions around your power to actually effect change for the better, why it sucks to be a rúner.
Casual Interstellar Travel / Casual Interplanetary Travel: It’s a little complicated. Technically, yes, you can travel interstellarly fairly casually, since while you have to drag one end of your wormhole at subluminal speed to wherever you want it, interstellar travel to places where you have one already is pretty damn casual. Step through and you’re there. Ping.
Of course, wormholes and their associated stargates are Really Damn Expensive, and so is interstellar travel to anywhere that isn’t on the stargate networks involving as it does the many years relativity demands of you even in lighthugger starships, the great expense of said lighthugger, and for that matter, the even greater expense of the thousands or tens of thousands or even, for the largest luggers, hundreds of thousands of tons of antimatter you need to fuel the thing.
Further, and to subvert this slightly, while there’s casual interstellar travel, what there isn’t is casual interplanetary travel (speed-wise; it’s much more casual cost-wise). No-one’s invented a convenient magical gravity drive that lets you whip up nigh-instantaneous thousands of gravities of acceleration (while there are vector-control drives, neither acceleration nor delta-v are any better, and indeed usually worse, than equivalent reaction drives; blame conservation of mass-energy), so getting anywhere in-system, including out to the stargate, still takes days or weeks, and for interstellar travel, that means on both ends of the wormhole.
This is resubverted for those with the right metaphysical attitude, because if you don’t go into quivering neo-Luddite theofear at the thought of having your mind separated from your body and transmitted elsewhere to be reinstalled in a different one at the far end (and granted, that’s not exactly most people outside the rampaging postsophontist neophile civilizations), then you can just mindcast where you want to go (assuming of course they have the right receiving equipment, which is by no means guaranteed outside the aforementioned civilizations). Which is substantially quicker and counts as fully casual interplanetary/interstellar travel, because photons and (especially) tangle move a lot faster than your own personal meat/rock can be transported.
Cargo Cult: This happens ALL THE TIME. It is very much against IES First Contact rules, and EMBARRASSING.
“No-no-no-no-no,” Arúaz Váriz Xinak Laníc Kúran viKoriaz said, hsis heads moving in some agitation. “Absolutely not, never. We and our crew cannot be paid enough to take you to Vonis Prime, no. The kalatri do not like visitors of our kind, no-no-no. Cause us/us/ours too much trouble, risk, damage. Cannot pay us/us enough to make that voyage worthwhile.” Hse peered at the suited figure through the hydrocarbon fog. “Why do you want to charter a múrast ship anyway, oxygen-breather? Our icehull has no cabins suited for your air and warmth, and the months to Vonis are a long time to stay in a suit. Besides, the kalatri would only be more suspicious. No-no, no answers, not our business. We and ours will not take you.”
“It is a matter of my cargo, not myself.” The suited figure tossed a cryp-token into the negotiating area. “This, for the charter rate to Vonis. This much again,” as a second token joined the first, “for your trouble, as well as,” a third joined them, “this more, for no further questions. And as much again, and the cost of repairing any damage, when we return.”
viKoriaz stared at the tokens, counting; nearly four times the going rate for the charter lay in front of hsem already. “With no further questions, how can we/we be sure we/we will ever return to see that pay?”
“Be sure? You cannot. But I assure you that I do not plan to throw my own life away on some foolish plan. I am merely… in need of fast transportation, and yours is the only ship for charter in Fínar space right now.”
viKoriaz’s minds argued inwardly for a moment, before hse curled back into his oil-bath and took possession of the cryp with a tongue-flick. “It seems we/we can be paid enough after all, oxygen-breather. We/we/ours can be ready to depart from midwatch tomorrow. The Consensus of Múrethch. Bay 171-RR.”
Car Fu: If Tank Fu counts, and they’re vehicles, so it ought to, most of them are designed for this. (Although usually intended for use against fixed obstacles and, well, buildings, it still works.)
“What do you people want from me?”
“Just the usual. That you should continue to be exceptional, live forever, join a transcendent hyperconsciousness, and evolve into a demigod – or at least the closest thing the physical universe has to offer – sometime in the next few millennia. You can make up the rest as you go along.”
“…why me?”
“That’s a little difficult… Look, let me put it this way. I’m a post-soph. I’ve been enhanced with a couple of millennia worth of bio-nano-info-sopho-technology to the point where there’s orders of magnitude difference between me, in cognition, coordination, memory and emotion, and an average baseline. We write software of greater-than-baseline-mind complexity. And so most of us have trouble relating to people who are, from our perspective, temperamental, slow-running, fuzzy-minded, blurry-souled near-automata.”
“So when I say that I find you interesting as a person, that’s a notable event. When our said transcendent hyperconsciousness, on the other hand – the weakly godlike superintelligence that is as many orders of magnitude above me – finds you interesting enough to recruit, that’s a genuine once-in-a-trillion-lifetimes miracle, albeit one that I don’t have a prayer of explaining. If you want more details, you’ll have to ask It. It’s all ineffable to me.”
Capital City: Of the Associated Worlds as a whole, that would be the Conclave Drift, the giant habitat in which the Conclave of Galactic Polities is situated. It’s also a major commercial and cultural hub, it being – due to the room it sets aside for every polity in the Accord to build its own little mini-city – one of the few places you can find everyone together, and its markets are one of the few places in the Worlds where you can rely on finding just about everything that it’s legal to buy anywhere. (The Empire had this in mind, of course, when they donated one of their star systems to build the thing in.) It is slightly subverted inasmuch as not all that much freight gets transshipped through it; it would be rather out of the way. But a surprisingly high percentage of the actual deals get made here.
Other candidates for major commercial centers would be Mer Covales, on Seranth (Imperial Core), which houses several major commercial exchanges and which does play host to a great deal of manufacturing and transshipping; and the worlds of the Free Eilish Confederacy, whose policies of neutrality and openness make it a favorite spot for business – and also a favorite spot for back-door politics and for galactic intelligence agencies to host their away games. Neither of those, of course, are political capitals of anything.
Of the Empire, that would be Calmirie (“center of order”), which is both the political capital of the Empire, and a significant commercial (somewhat overtaken by Mer Covales) and cultural (somewhat overtaken by Delphys (Imperial Core)) center. It plays it essentially straight.
To my successor in office:
I’m leaving you this unofficial note to welcome you to the unique position of being an ambassador to the Empire, to pass on a few hopefully useful pieces of advice, and frankly, to wish you more joy of the position than I had, even before the FO recalled me.
I’ve left contact details in the database for my more useful contacts in State & Outlands. They can help you out on any of the routine administration that comes up under one of the twelve Accords – but only the routine stuff, unfortunately. I’d also call Meris Solanel-ith-Serquel to your particular attention if you find yourself charged with any special negotiations; she’s a good back-channel contact and willing to tell you directly if you’ve any chance of getting anywhere. Which most of the time, you won’t.
As for other matters that will come up:
One might be forgiven for thinking that a country with no visa requirements wouldn’t cause you many problems with visitors, but that’s to ignore their willingness to refuse entry to anyone insane (by their – rather broad – standards), and anyone one of their truth machines deems insufficiently honest when signing up to the statement of rights and obligations they require of anyone entering. Given how much they preen publicly about their devotion to rationality and principle, this catches less people than you might expect, but your staff will still be arranging repatriations on a regular basis.
You might also expect that their equally proclaimed refusal to impose any tariffs or trade regulations would make that a relatively trouble-free area, too. Here, your problems will come from the home office, as while the Imperial government declines to use such things in response to those we set up, any number of corporations, trade cartels, and out-and-out smugglers will shamelessly connive to circumvent ours – and even our prohibitions on certain products – with the tacit aid of local banking privacy laws and the non-cooperation of the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate. I have collected and passed on a myriad of eloquent, polite ways to say, “We regret that we won’t enforce your unethical laws for you,” in my time here, and you will undoubtedly collect still more.
Cultural and military affairs are also problematic. In the name of freedom of speech and information, they insist that people be allowed to publish practically anything and to read anything that’s published, and are not even willing to discuss this issue with us, whatever the reasoning and whatever their notorious data havens may contain. On the military side, you may be able to get some action taken against a particularly controversial intervention, even if it’s only likely to be getting the admiral in question beached for a few centuries until everyone’s forgotten the issue in question; but so far as they’re concerned, mercenary work is legal, privateering is legal, attempting to overthrow or to subvert someone’s government using any technique that isn’t violent is legal, and while they’ve never actually come out and said that filibustering is also legal…
Go ahead and file some protests on any of these if you like; it’s worth it just to listen to one of their State & Outlands people pour honey in your ear for an hour or three. But you’ll realize the next day they talked for all that time without saying anything, and I’ll promise you right now, that’s all you’re ever going to get.
And lastly, extradition. You will face three problems, here. First, they will not extradite anyone for something that is not a crime under their law. Second, if their law would impose a more severe penalty than ours for a given crime, and it’s one they consider particularly serious, they will try their hardest to insist that we prosecute him in their courts, so that they need not accept a criminal back. And third, the inability to reconcile which – in the viKeruaz case – proved my downfall, they may insist on the second at the same time as public sympathies at home demand that he not be prosecuted in their courts.
I wish you the best of luck, and a quiet term of posting.
Sev Din Alar,
Ambassador of the League of Meridian (former)
Can You Hear Me Now?: Averted even when there is a major disaster, because Empire-standard communication devices are designed to use mesh networking, and fall back on peer-to-peer routing between themselves if they can’t reach a hub, either to get the packets through directly, or to bounce off each other until they find one of them that can reach a hub. Even if the fire, flood, explosions, etc., etc., has ruined all the cell-tower-equivalents, the communications network is very, very resilient.
Can Breathe In Space: Technically, you can do this by using a vector-control “envelope” to hold air in around you (although you will still need some means of replenishing it if you plan to do this for long, special provisions like oxygen-carrying hemocules aside). While useful to avoid ebullism and other pressure/temperature syndromes if you should find yourself in a decompressing compartment, needing to leap from airlock to airlock, etc., and it’s a lovely showy party piece… most people still prefer actual vacuum suits if they plan on stepping outside.
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Calvinball: An awful lot of games played in the Empire are like this from our perspective, by virtue of having been designed to satisfy the game-playing urges of people with, well, transhuman intelligence. For example:
One of the simplest is the card game ómith. It’s like poker, except with six twelve-card suits on an elemental theme that the game itself shares (the suits are clouds, coins, droplets, flames, pillars, and staves) and a major arcana, plus a variety of metarules and dice-controlled variations, and a scoring system with an incredible number of special cases.
Larileth, or sigillary, which would most closely resemble mahjong, had mahjong been based on a set of combining rune-constructs devised to reflect the aspects of the universe as defined by (in Earthly analogy terms) a mash-up of Hermetic magic and qabala.
Ithréth, which is a sort of dynamic four-dimensional go, metaphorically speaking. (The lack of four-dimensional playing boards and four-dimensional spaces to keep them in adds an extra level of complexity once people start making moves ana and kata, which is where much of the true subtlety of the game lies. It’s much more pleasantly complicated than the “four-dimensional” games in which pieces just time-travel, for example.)
Iandaër, which is a battle simulation game that is on the one hand like chess, but on the other hand resembles taikyoku shogi rather more closely. It is thorough.
There’s also mírlathdaër, the favored game of AIs and other digital sapients. Which is essentially Nomic, only as played by entities which can successfully manipulate rule lists gigabytes or even terabytes in length in real-time. (For extra fun, there’s the simulation version where you do this with physical laws, and the point of the game is to create the most interesting simulated universe. The only acknowledged win condition for that one is to get intelligent life to evolve in the simulation without using any special cases; no-one’s actually won it yet.)
And then there’s kírasseth, the generally acknowledged monarch of eldraeic games; it requires several interrelated boards, sets of cards, dice, and some specially made mechanical computer-randomizers, it is self-referential inasmuch as the players, the rules, and the game itself are all also pieces within the game, to play with any degree of competence requires an astonishing mastery of everything from scientific principles to mythic symbology, and its most commonly used set of victory conditions include that any win which is insufficiently elegant and aesthetically pleasing is actually a loss. It is, of course, incredibly popular – at least to watch.
Call a Smeerp a “Rabbit”: Another unfortunate aspect of Translation Convention. As described under Taxonomic Term Confusion, Eldraeic has a means of classifying – and words for – species-groups classified by homology alone, so that people can talk about the winged flying creatures that exist on multiple planets easily – without having to resort to a bunch of tedious explanations about “bird-analogs”, especially when there’s not a single ecology of origin for everyone to get their analogs from anyway.
Unfortunately, English doesn’t. Which means that, footnote it as I might, “trees” includes many things that are not part of kingdom Plantae, “birds” includes Elieran four-winged flyers, “fish” includes Phílae’s armed – um, arm-possessing – fish-analogues and Revallá’s tubefish, and so on and so forth.
“Got a good one for you!”
“Why is it, Annis, that when you say ‘good one’, I hear ‘utter wire-and-tape job’?”
“Couldn’t say, boss. Anyway, today’s case here-and-now one-thirteen. An infugee from the Republic – one of their scientists who wanted to defect, looks like. He managed to piece together some good-enough brain-scanning equipment out of repurposed lab equipment, then programmed it to rip him and mail him to us in a few thousand steganographically-concealed parts, scrubbing as it went. ExSec picked him out of the stream and shuffled him over here.”
“That’s routine. Don’t make me wait for the good part.”
“Well, it looks like their firewalls are a little bit better than he thought they were. They detected the transmission and cut it off in midstream. We have about half of his mind-state. The other half’s still at the sending point.”
“Okay. Well, call –”
“And the Vonnie ambassador is pounding the table demanding that we send back our half.”
“Hah. If you ever find one to beat this, remind me to go on leave and stick you with the coordinator’s job.” He rubbed his temples. “Right. Get me whoever found this over at ExSec, State and Outlands, the Curia, whoever’s senior on-shift at Instantiations, and a stiff drink.”
To all to whom this shall be presented, be it known that this warrant entitles the bearer:
Rhadam Sinyéren Daemar
Owner and master of the armed merchant cruiser IS Gloriously Acquisitive;
To subdue and to seize goods and citizens, to destroy goods that cannot be taken, and to destroy military assets, belonging to such enemies of the Empire of the Star that Their Divine Majesties shall deem to exist from time to time, states, private sovereignties, or sovereign individuals, armed or unarmed, fixed or mobile, as designated in such separate Imperial proclamations as Their Divine Majesties shall see fit to issue, or by any pirates or brigands at any time;
And to bring the same to a starport, naval base, or roaming fleet base wherein a Court of Admiralty is empaneled, for adoption as prizes, condemnation for sale, or payment of bounty;
And to retake any vessels, goods, or citizen-shareholders of the Empire captured by such aforementioned enemies;
And to bring the same to a starport or naval base within Imperial territorial space, or to a roaming fleet base, wherein a Court of Admiralty is empaneled, for payment of due reward.
Furthermore, this warrant entitles the named bearer and vessel to apply for whatever assistance, whether monetary or not, that Their Divine Majesties shall deem fit to provide from time to time, and to seek succor and resupply at bases and depots of the Imperial Navy, subject to payment of expenses and the exigencies of war.
In the course of these privileges here granted, the named bearer and vessel are required to conduct themselves in all ways in accordance with the Ley Accords and the Imperial Rules of War, and to give such assistance as may be requested and required of them by captains and flag officers of the Imperial Navy; and should they attack and seize goods or citizens of any polity, howsoever constituted, that is not a thus designated enemy of the Empire, they shall be subject to such penalties at law as if they had carried out such an attack against the Empire itself.
Given under my hand and seal this day, 4045 Cálíath 14,
Kynéä Valentarios Tentáren, Constellarch of the High Verge
~~~
“We issued a letter to Rhadam Daemar? The man’s a loose cannon, and his crew are worse.”
“Actually, he’s four loose cannons.” The constellarch’s military aide flipped the associated documentation back on screen and off again with a gesture. “And six loose missile racks, four loose launch tubes, two loose armed cutters, and one loose… ‘electromagnetic pulse-projecting xenowidget we picked up in a breaker’s yard on Méklish’. But he’ll get the job done.”
The history of Thalíär remains a mystery.
On this point, I must first acknowledge the salience of my colleagues’ reports. The various shafts, canyons, and large-scale gaps in the upper and middle planetary surfaces do not occur in any geometric, fractal, or other discernible ordered pattern, nor do the edges of these phenomena appear even as regular as cleavage planes, or to bear tool-marks. Variation in atmospheric pressure from the uppermost point of the planetary surface (Sardal’s Peak) to the lowest (the Undersea surface at the Thunder Well), a distance of 3.2 miles, follows natural expectations based upon its composition and the low planetary gravity. The planetary ecology shows no signs of engineering, and while partially differentiated across the world’s layers, clearly shares a common origin. There are no signs of artificial constructions, including the absence of convenient or evidently engineered paths between layers, and the walls and pillars which support the middle and upper crusts appear to be entirely composed of native rock, with no trace of exotic materials familiar to us from known Precursor megastructures, or indeed presently unknown. All these factors, while not in themselves conclusive, are indeed suggestive of a non-artificial origin for this planet.
Nonetheless, I and my survey team are unanimous in concluding that no known geophysical mechanism could result in the triple-crust shell-world structure seen here on Thalíär, nor have we been able to postulate or simulate any mechanism or combination of mechanisms that could result in this or any similar structure. While this is no more conclusive than the circumstantial evidence for natural origin listed above, our inability to construct a reasonable hypothesis to explain Thalíar’s structure in natural terms, in the light of our studies of the hundreds of planets so far examined in detail by the Exploratory Service, strongly suggests that Thalíär is nonetheless a construct.
In summary, therefore, the Thalíär Expedition concludes that it has no damned idea how this world came to be, nor, in the absence of new evidence, new exploratory techniques, or the artist’s signature coming to light, does it expect this situation to change in the near term.
– Geologist Excellence Cymnea Steamweaver,
reports on the Thalíär (Principalities) shell-world
Taxonomic Term Confusion: Taxonomy is even more of a mess than it used to be, having to deal with life originating separately (it is usually thought; see Panspermia) in a multitude of different ecologies, which then got intermingled by ancient and modern terraforming and accidents of star travel to produce the situation as we know it today.
Imperial taxonomy uses something that resembles our current system, but with an additional parameter right at the top of the tree to indicate the ecology which this particular species originated within (wherever it may be found now); i.e., adding to the classification of humans as kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, order Primates, family Hominidae, tribe Hominini, genus Homo, species H. sapiens an initial level of classification along the lines of “ecology Terragenea“.
(Of course, not that this works perfectly even then: humanity – albeit not quite modern man – by virtue of ancient fossils turning up on Eliera with greenlife similarities, exists in the Imperial taxonomy as Pseudoeldrae archaea, ecology Cálenlethis; and in the event that they should discover us, I suspect we would take about as well to being reclassified as Pseudoeldrae novis about as well as they would take being shoved into genus Homo; which is to say, not at all well. This is the sort of thing over which wars, or at least vicious academic infighting and people being cut – as in “cut direct”, not as in “I CUT YOU”… well, at least most of the time – at professional conferences, start.
It also doesn’t help that the eldrae, E. alathis, E. anthalis, or E. kirsunar, are already a taxonomic mess by virtue of having at least as much claim to being in ecology Fidúrlethis [bluelife] as ecology Cálenlethis; hybrid engineered lifeforms are like that. And the continued production of neogens makes this problem worse by the day – while, yes, the Applied Biotics, ICC Bactry Template Organism EC-7 is descended from organisms in kingdom Bacteria, it’s descended from about a dozen of them, taken apart and the best bits kept. This is hard to classify in anything resembling the normal manner.)
There are also at least two alternative partial taxonomies in use simply because they’re useful: one, a classification of species by their biochemical features, simply because it’s useful for some purposes to have all the methane-breathers or all the silicon-based life, and so forth, classified together regardless of origin; and another more approximate classification by homology alone, because for non-biologists travelling between planets, it’s useful to have relatively simple terms to call all the avioids, the ichthyoids, the arboroids, and so forth even if they’re not related by anything but general similarity. (Which terms I still, despite this fine feature of the “original language”, I still “translate” as “bird”, “fish”, “tree”, etc. when writing just like the first set, because the clarity in the original language is the bloody-minded wordiness in English.)
On the use of “race” to mean “species” in particular: In formal speech they’re usually good at maintaining the race/species distinction, but then, the whole race concept is also a mess – inasmuch as it used to be that the former was used in much the same loose sense as we use it for natural phenotypic distinctions within a species, and then clade came to be used for artificial ones (as people started producing aquatic people, photosynthetic people, space-adapted people, etc., etc.), which are messy categories, because they overlap quite a lot (one clade can include all races; one race can include all clades), but some clades rewrite for perfectly good reasons the same phenotypic elements that were used to define races (for practical reasons: all naked-to-space-adapted-clades have high-melanin [etc.] skin for radiation protection, but all photosynthetic clades have to have low-melanin skin to avoid conflicting with the chloroplasts [etc.], for example), and some clades exist to be cosmetic phenotypes that are essentially new races in the casual sense, and aaarrrgh.
(It’s clade that’s used for classification, when relevant, because it’s the one that tends to be medically relevant, environmentally important, and so forth, on a regular basis.)
From the earlier – which is to say, closer to the fervor of the revolution – days of the Empire’s history:
“Congratulations on your polity’s recent annexation by the Empire of the Star!”
“Whether we have come as the result of a war with your previous government, or merely to put an end to the oppression and anarchy of its former rule, we do so with good will to all who have not, and do not, act against us. Please accept our assurances that we do not come to plunder, enslave, or exploit. All your personal freedoms and property rights will be respected. Nothing will be taken from you – any goods that we require will be purchased openly – nor will any forced labor be required, and no legionaries will be housed in your homes or businesses. Any crimes committed against you by our forces will be punished most severely.”
“Furthermore, our requirements are few. We have little interest in regulating your lives and culture; we demand only that you refrain from practicing violence or compulsion, against Imperial citizen-shareholders or against each other, respect the property of your fellows, adhere to any agreements which you voluntarily make, and pay the same minimal tax as Imperial citizen-shareholders for the maintenance of public works. Such restrictions under which you may have previously labored are hereby abolished.”
“While it may be necessary to continue to maintain a military government in your region for a short while, until the public safety can be assured, we look forward to establishing a civilian government as soon as possible, at which time weapons restrictions will be removed, freedom of travel throughout the Empire restored, and full sharing of technology and upgrading of public infrastructure will commence. Also, at this time, any of you will be able to take up Imperial citizen-shareholdership on the same terms as the Imperial-born, and we hope that many of you will exercise this option. For more information on the new order of the world, please consult the remainder of this publication.”
“If we all cooperate and work together, we should soon be able to bring this new province, your home, out of the darkness and into the new era of enlightenment and civilization.”
– Authoritative Guide to the Empire for the New Peripheral,
Ministry of Civic Information, 1480