Month: October 2012

The Damnedest Things

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TERILTI (Osis Deep) – Iltine Minister of Affection, Kornáák har-Rin Ankór, who recently achieved notoriety with his placement of a personal bounty of 100,000 exvals upon the Directorate of Moon’s Eye Studios, ICC and other named “slanderers, wreckers, and defilers of the Blessed Union of the Chosen People of Ilth”, was reported killed today in a freak accident when his aircar was struck by a meteorite. Traveling along an unusually low trajectory, the meteorite penetrated the windshield of the Minister’s vehicle and stuck him in the head, killing and decapitating him instantly.

Union officials have closed their investigation and announced that they do not intend to treat the death as suspicious, and condemned reports to the contrary as “contumacious speculation not germane to good faith in the People’s security”.

Trope-a-Day: Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu

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Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu: I’m not saying it’s impossible.  But remember: it’s a weakly godlike superintelligence that, in all probability, is using acausal logic processors to receive information from itself in the future.  You aren’t.  Expect the difficulty level to be… appropriate.

The only chance of this working, essentially, is taking advantage of their blind spots.  The nature of the current processes that produce weakly godlike superintelligences – recursive self-improvement around a given set of imperatives – produces entities that are terrifyingly intelligent but also extraordinarily concentrated.  Go up against them in the area of their concentration, little lesser mind, and you will lose.  Go up against them in any sort of tangential approach to that, and you will also lose.  It’s a transcendent hyperintelligence.  You aren’t.  That’s the way that goes.

But if you are very, very, extraordinarily lucky, and most likely have another god on your own side, you might just be able to sneak up on it in one of those areas that it’s not psychologically capable of paying attention to, and whack it when it’s not looking.  Maybe one time in a million.  Maybe.

(And also, well, try and pick one that’s more likely to have the requisite blind spots, if you’re going to try this.  Something like the perversion behind the Charnel Cluster that’s a monomaniacal killer, or one of the ones that wants to tile the universe with processors to compute the last digit of pi, or someone’s attempt to make their religion true.  The broader they think, the harder this gets.  The Transcendent Core, for example, that has sucked up the extrapolated volition of a few trillion constitutional sophonts as a basis for its motivational hierarchy is really hard, because its view of the universe is broad enough that, well, your problem is approximately as hard as devising a con that will work perfectly first time on a few trillion rational, symmetrically-informed polyspecific people with perfect institutional memory.)

Trope-a-Day: Deus ex Machina

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Deus ex Machina: Essentially averted – while the archai of the Transcend are arguably dei and quite definitely machinae, they abhor being anything close to this unsubtle.  (Besides, if you’re the sort of person that is inclined to screw things up to the point of needing a deus ex machina, then you’re both a terrible candidate for becoming one of the Transcendent, and unlikely to be considered a worthwhile use of their system resources.)

A Long Chase (3)

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Macrophage Militant; 2,000,000 miles from the Gal-kiderax stargate.

The better part of a day later, the Flight Commander’s glare had hardly lessened at all.  “Anything new?”

“No status change on target.  No halo, no trailers, and still decelerating into gate intercept – definitely not confident in his ability to make crash transit, I’d say, sir.” The sensor operator’s tentacles flew over his keyboard.  “Gate diagnostics show it’s accepted their transit request.  We have a five by six shooting solution, but we’re going to lose guidance lock as soon as they hit the gate.”

“Very well.  Comms, anything from the Galians?”

“Nothing new, sir.”  A tentacle squeezed a control node, and a grating voice spoke.  “Empire vessel, you are denied passage into Galian space.  Clear.”

“Such gentlesophs, the Theomachrats.  Send this for relay: ‘Gal-kiderax SysCon, this is Macrophage Militant: we are a naval vessel in pursuit of an identified slaver.  It is your obligation under the Accords and the articles of interstellar law to permit us transit and capture.  Is it your intent to impede us, sir? Militant, clear.'”

The Exec leaned over to the Flight Commander again.  “Planning on starting a war, skipper?”

“Is it that time again already?  But no, they’ll back down.  They can afford it even less than we can.”

“Are you sure they know that?”

“Well, if they don’t, a year from now I’ll be on the beach, and you’ll have the Militant.  But either way, those chance-bred tumors will still be vapor.”

Trope-a-Day: Derelict Graveyard

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Derelict Graveyard: Most major planets have one of these in high orbit, somewhere, where old habitats, satellites, starships and other space debris are lashed together in a rough mass of dead hulks waiting to be torn apart and reclaimed, or at least transported elsewhere by tugs for this purpose.  The ultimate destination of most of these in or near the Empire is the wreckyard at Kathar, a planet in the Cilmínár (Imperial Core) system, which plays host to some of the largest recycling facilities around, as well as some of that specialized equipment mentioned in Landfill Beyond the Stars.

Apologies…

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…for the lack of updates over the last few days.

Essentially what’s happened is that my wiki in which I keep my quarter-million words or so of current worldbuilding notes is no longer to be supported, developed, etc., which is something of a pain inasmuch as I’m going to need that around for a while yet.  So I’ve been transferring them over to a new storage format (making the odd edit and concept-note along the way), and that task has more or less occupied all of my time and more importantly brain cycles for the last while.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.