Trope-a-Day: Fantasy Contraception

Fantasy Contraception: Full fertility control is built right into the genome of each alpha baseline, and therefore into every clade built on top of that alpha baseline.  The male reproductive system does not produce gametes and the female one does not cycle (or their alternate-species equivalents) until instructed otherwise by the proper pharmaceutical and/or biofeedback impulses.  And, importantly, default is off.  No accidental children, m’kay?

(Of course, most of the time it’s just off and stays off, since actually producing children in vivo rather than in vitro is the sort of appalling, painful, inconvenient, medically hazardous (for both parent and child), etc., etc., relic of a barbarous past that civilized societies don’t expect people to do.  The Imperials go even further than the Vorkosigan universe’s Betans in pointing this one out.)

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Slur

Fantastic Slur: Assorted people both outside and unfond of the Empire return this with interest, contributing “shinies” (style with no substance, plus tech-obsession, plus a poke at the unfortunately-timed coinage of “Bright Empire” on a public newscast), “coggies” (part-machine), various where-relevant cultural references to zombies, possession and pod people (reinstantiation, mindcasting and the existence of the Transcend’s shared hyperconsciousness), and generically, “Those Mad Bastards”, plus all the usual insults leveled at superpowers that everyone/no-one wants to intervene/not intervene everywhere/nowhere right now/never, etc.

Among the AI part of the Worlds, especially the ones who didn’t, shall we say, get a good impression of biological life from their early upbringing, the use of “meat intelligence” or (especially) just “meat” in place of “biosapience” or “protein intelligence” is a slur.  “Meatfucker” is a term directed at those AIs who maintain relations with biosapiences, even if those relations don’t extend to actual technogamy.

And, for goodness sake, make sure you sound out every syllable in Imp-e-ri-al, unless you’re trying to make a bad impression.

And there are plenty more… but there’s really not enough time in any universe even to think up what everyone calls everyone, it being such a universal trope and all.

Military Uniforms

Among the things I have finalized recently in my notes are the details of the field dress uniforms for the Imperial Legions and Imperial Navy, and since I have them all finalized and polished up as of now, I present them for your envisioning pleasure:

Field dress (Imperial Legions & Home Guard)

The basic field dress uniform of the Imperial Legions consists of the following elements:

Beret: The velvet beret is worn in branch colors (dark crimson and gold for the Legions, emerald and silver for the Home Guard), with the serviceman’s unit crest in front. Non-commissioned and warrant officers add a silver oak-leaf cockade, and officers a gold oak-leaf cockade, around the unit crest.

Tunic: The thigh-length tunic, belted at the waist, is also worn in the branch colors (dark crimson with gold trim, or emerald with silver trim), single-breasted, with a high stand-up collar to protect the wearer’s neck[1] and five brass buttons impressed with the Imperial crown-and-star. The front of the tunic actually overlaps completely – the inner layer fastens at the opposite shoulder to the outer layer’s buttons, thus doubling the protection over the wearer’s vitals, and making it impossible to slip a blade through the seam. It is worn over a double-layered silk shirt.

For rankers, brass collar-pins on the gorget patches also show the crown-and-star, whereas for officers they hold rank insignia, in silver for non-commissioned and warrant officers, and in gold for higher ranks. Rank insignia is also worn as a knot in matching cord on the left breast. Ribbons and knots for medals and other awards are worn on the right.

Runér, exultants, and praetors may wear certain insignia related to their associated rank and office on their tunics in accordance with service regulations; most typically, their family or personal arms may be worn on the left breast, adjacent to the rank-knot.

Detachable shoulder-boards are added to the tunic to show unit affiliation, on a black background for regular units, a crimson background for units designated as Guards units, and a gold background for units designated as Coronal’s Guards. The design on the shoulder-boards is the battle flag of the unit to which the legionary belongs, or the ship’s crest in the case of ship’s troops.

Sword-Baldric: The legionary sword (a teirian) is worn on a wire-reinforced braided synthetic leather baldric hung over the right shoulder to hold the sword at the left hip. The hanrian and sidearm, conversely, are worn on the tunic belt, at the right hip. The baldric also contains attachment points for grenades, replacement heat sinks, and powercells.

Breeches: The breeches, black regardless of branch, are worn tucked into the boots, and have piping to match the tunic’s trim, bordered with silver braid for officers, or gold braid for flag officers.

Boots: The high (mid-calf), glossy black boots have no buckles or snaps, and are made of internally-reinforced synthetic leather.

Cloak: In wintry conditions, a heavy wool cloak may be worn over the field dress uniform.

Special note: Heavy legionaries who do not wear the uniform when in the field wear instead a surcoat[2] over their combat exoskeleton in circumstances that would ordinarily call for field dress, bearing rank insignia, battle honors, etc., as the tunic does for conventionally dressed legionaries.

Field dress (Imperial Navy)

The basic field dress uniform of the Imperial Navy consists of the following elements:

Hat: Imperial Navy officers wear tricorne hats in the Navy’s silver-trimmed midnight black, a tradition inherited directly from its wet navy precursors. Naval tricornes bear the ship’s crest at front right, surrounded by a silver cockade, or a gold cockade for flag officers.

Unofficially, naval officers who are members of various IN internal societies and clubs may wear a variety of feathers in their hats to denote this, according to their own internal traditions, something broadly tolerated even on formal occasions.

Non-commissioned officers and men do not wear hats.

Shirt & Jacket: The single-breasted naval jacket, of black wool and leather trimmed with silver, is worn over a simple black silk shirt. Rather than buttons, it seals to itself along its edge, in a similar manner to many vacuum suits.

Since the naval jacket has a down-turned rather than a high collar, rank is indicated not by collar pins but rather by the arabesque-embroidered cuffs of the jacket, including either silver or gold rings to indicate basic rank, and colored rings to indicate departmental specialty. As with the legionary uniform, rank insignia is also worn as a knot in matching cord on the left breast; in the case of enlisted ranks, this knot surrounds the symbol of their rating. Qualified pilots (in the Flight Ops department) wear their wings above the rank knot. Ribbons and knots for medals and other awards are worn on the right.

Runér, exultants, and praetors may wear certain insignia related to their associated rank and office on their tunics in accordance with service regulations; most typically, their family or personal arms may be worn on the left breast, adjacent to the rank-knot.

The ship’s crest is worn as an embroidered badge at each shoulder.

Trousers: The trousers of the naval uniform are of heavy black wool. For officers, they have silver braid piping, or gold braid piping for flag officers. Sidearms are worn on the belt, as is the naval sword on formal occasions.

Boots: The naval boots are low, black boots, without buckles or snaps, made of internally-reinforced synthetic leather. They include soles designed to interlock with the gratings used in starship engineering sections, and magnetizable clamps for use elsewhere.


[1] A communication transceiver is often woven directly into the collar, into which a visor can be connected.

[2] A huge, long-sleeved tunic that fits over the armor and hangs to the knees.

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Racism

Fantastic Racism: In the universe in general, in many places.  Species vs. species, meat vs. metal, augments vs. baselines, oxygen-breathers vs. methane-breathers, elder races vs. younger races, oh, and let us by no means forget the good old intraspecies kind.  While not all species evolve with xenophobic jerkery coded right into the genome, enough do that this particular meme just keeps coming back.

The Imperials, by and large, eschew old-fashioned racism in favor of traditional Cultural Posturing and, in particular, sneering at the unContracted.  Well, except for the Purity Crusade (who want to wipe out all non-eldrae, or at least non-Imperial, sophont life for being, essentially, a bunch of defective entropy-worshipping slave-cultist creepazoids and therefore not to be allowed to exist, especially if it might one day threaten its betters), but they’re a tiny group of, essentially, the whackos’ whackos.

Fantastic Measurement Systems: Some Notes

Copied and pasted from the G+ comment thread on this trope-a-day, as I deem it worth repeating for other interested parties:

Jasper Janssen:

I assume there is lots of vocal arguing about why don’t you simply adopt a straight duodecimal system, get with the program man, it isn’t 5145 any more!

Actually… no, not really.

This all ties back to one of the fundamental psychological differences between Homo sapiens and Eldrae alathis . Namely, that our brains are literally hard-wired to generate error signals when we see other human-shaped things disagreeing with us. We’re programmed right down at the meat level to tell other people that They’re Doing It Wrong, or to suffer mental stress when other people Tell Us That We’re Doing It Wrong.

The eldrae don’t have that innately, and while they have a scientific understanding that some minds can be wired that way, they don’t really grok the urge.

The powers-of-12 system was invented by the Fellowship of Natural Philosophy (the largest and oldest of the scientific branches) because it was useful for the sort of things they do. But it never occurred to them that they ought to go out and tell everyone else that they were doing it wrong. Sure, they published it for anyone who wanted to use it to use, but that’s about as far as it went.

And even if they had , the Edifacient Sodality of Bakers and Pastrywrights (say), would just have come back to them with, “Okay, so, show me how this will lead to better pie?” As far as they’re concerned, they’ve got a perfectly cromulent system of units already, optimized over literally hundreds if not thousands of years for the purpose of helping them turn assorted ingredients into delicious pastry. They’re smart, rational people; they’ll listen to practical arguments for adopting it, but they don’t feel any urge to change just for the sake of it, because they’re Doing It Wrong, or because there’s a One Right Way to do it, and were you to make that argument to them, they’d still be waiting for your point after you were done.

(As a not unrelated psychological quirk, they find the parallel existence of multiple ways of doing things natural in a way that we don’t. Even the most rabid individualist running on human hardware has to silence or otherwise deal with that little nagging inner voice that wants to conform with the group. We define ourselves, as humans, largely by reference to other people.

They… really don’t. The dominant inner voices an eldrae is listening to concern themselves with devotion to ideals – which they call estxijir – and to their brilliant, shining, unattainably perfect Platonic ideal of themselves – and that one’s valxijir. Notions, on the other hand, like conformity or relative status games don’t form part of their psychology, and even social identity per se barely gets a look in. Those are concepts both alien and, for that matter, deeply creepifying.

All of which alien minds are alien foo is background to say that the competitive-standards, This Is The Way Of Progress, All Right-Thinking People silent arguments for, say, metrication bounce right off people who see measurement systems only as tools to be used to help them immanentize their awesome, when relevant and best for the task at hand, and not as signifiers of anything at all.)

So, practical arguments (“Makes better pastry! For Great Excellence!”) work. (And, indeed, there are branches which advocate various systems for various things on those grounds.)

Coordination / specific consistency arguments work – everyone understands why the Spaceflight Initiative declares that everyone contracted onto one of their projects will compute trajectories, etc., in the powers-of-12 system and otherwise use Lorith-Llyn Engineering Units.

And some de facto standards exist – when Llyn Standard Manufacturing, ICC, declares that they’re calibrating all their components in Lorith-Llyn Engineering Units, the majority follows suit because it’s just common sense to be compatible with the 800-pound gorilla in the field.

But absent something like that, no traction is there to be had.

Jasper Janssen:

I did say duodecimal, not decimal — nothing wrong with factors of twelve per se. What bothers me about the outlined system is the spurious factor of 2 you introduce by using a 24 there. That makes calculations needlessly difficult when they have to cross that boundary, which is particularly annoying if you have a (monetary) system that goes from macro to micro with all nice and regular duodecimal factors and that one factor of 2 in there.

And conceptually, it also makes it not a power of twelve system, which itches my brain.

Oh, just the money , right. I thought you were talking about weights and measures systems in general (which, aside from the strict powers-of-12 system used for scientific purposes, includes all manner of irregular factors around the same base units).

Well, that started out that way for much the same reason that many non-decimal currencies here did – when setting up the esteyn way, way, way, way, way back in history, it turned out that 1/144th of it was an inconveniently large penny-equivalent unit. 1/288th, on the other hand, was just right , and in practice, since most people just had to worry about the selenis being 1/24th of a lumenis most of the time (an esteyn being a big chunk’o’money), that’s why the difference is where it is.

(There’s also a factor of 6 further up – 6 esteyn = 1 arien – but an arien is almost purely money-of-account used under certain specialized circumstances, like guineas, so.)

Why didn’t they duodecimalize it later?  Well, three reasons:

(a) The size factor of the penny-equivalent unit still applied. Es. 1/144 was too large. Es 1/1728 was way too small. And just as in the weights-and-measures systems that are focused on non-scientific functions, people want to use units scaled to be optimal for their common usage.

It’s not optimal from the point of view of centralizing standardization, etc., or mathematical purism, but – since the people who run the monetary system are the people who have money-focused estxijir and they think it’s optimal from the point of view of how people actually use their cashy money – fitness for purpose kicks both of those in the face and does it its way;

(b) I’m actually pretty sure the “easy calculation” aspect never came up in their context, simply because their society – for a variety of reasons too lengthy to go into in this comment: genetic, demographic, economic, religious – achieved widespread literacy and numeracy both somewhere around the early Bronze Age – so by the time people might have been mooting the idea of duodecimalization, it simply wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that handling these irregular factors wasn’t already about as don’t-consciously-think-about-it mathematically trivial as it could get;

and (c), it being a free society and all, anyone who found it useful (some accountants, the Guild of Numbers, difference engine Stannic cogitator programmers, etc.) was perfectly at liberty to write currency amounts as a single number of esteyn with a duodecimal point in it if they wanted to. And thus, they did.

And as per (b) above, people generally considered it intuitively obvious that something priced as four-and-ten cost Es. 0.46.

Right There In The Name

“…and in exchange, you can keep anything you loot.”

“You’re not too clear on the concept of ‘mercenaries’, are you?”

“We’re fighting to overthrow our oppressors!”

“So, it’s a good cause. My livers are quiverin’… You want goodwill rates? Fine. I’ve got my own bills to pay. Food, fuel, ammunition, transport, medical, battle-damage, and – oh, yeah – mercenaries. Who negotiate their pay rates with considerable vigor. So guarantee to make up six points over expenses minimum if the looting rights don’t work out at three-quarter valuation, pay our death-and-rebirth benefits too, and we’ll win your war for you.”

“You are a mercenary!”

“Proudly. And 24% up front in hard cash – not local currency – plus reflux bonds.”

“24- Your brag sheet said 12%!”

“That was before you tried to pay me in looting rights.”

“And the reflux bonds?”

“Do you want a company of underpaid, unemployed mercenaries hanging around your planet?”

– mor-Lissek Galek negotiates a contract

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Measurement System

Fantastic Measurement System: Well, yes.  Both for money (the esteyn, to match base-12 Imperial mathematics, uses the 288-system: 12 selenis to the lumenis, 24 lumenis to the esteyn, and also goes down so far as to include special units for micropayments and up so far as to include units convenient for major bank transfers – particularly important since there’s not a standardized international clearing mechanism, making correspondent banks, letters of credit and currency transfers matters of some importance);

And for everything else.  The time measurement system has already been mentioned (see Alternative Calendar), but of course, there’s also the Imperial System (sic) of general measurement, notable for basing its core units on the Planck units, and permitting them to be scaled up and down using the equivalent of SI prefixes, or their base-12 equivalents, for scientific purposes, but also including traditional units (after the fashion of the traditional US or Imperial systems) based off the same core units for convenience in non-scientific situations, including a variety of craft- or task-based units which bake sensible basic assumptions, safety margins, etc. right into the measurement system.

If this sounds complicated, it is; their point of view on that amounts to, essentially, “cope”.

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Light Sources

Fantastic Light Sources: Unusual light sources include the fancy “sourceless glow”, or “light-cloud cyberswarm” which is basically a hovering cloud of tiny glowing microbots; and gratuitous use of bioluminescence, from the mundane glowing spheres of microbes in solution used as non-power-dependent emergency lighting, through the bioluminescent organ-strips inside the organic cities of Kythera, to all the fancy and artistically-designed lamppost-trees and other constructs used for aesthetic value as much as illumination.

And, of course, in the pre-electrical era, the prevalence of assorted alchemical “chymelights” to provide light without fire, and thus also without inconvenient degrees of heat and smoke.

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Ghetto

Fantastic Ghetto: The Galith Waste, home to the Silicate Tree loose alliance of renegade artificial intelligences, could reasonably be said to be one of these, especially considering the hostile attitude of the civilizations that gave rise to them, and their habit of running patrols around the connections into the Waste.

This is, of course, not a giant on-going bleeding sore of a galactopolitical conflict with the possibility to explode into open war right in the middle of the trailing Associated Worlds Any Minute Now.

Of course not.

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables

Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Well, yes.  Did I mention the multiple planets? And the genetic engineering?

An important caveat, of course, is that you can’t actually eat most of them, different biochemistries being the annoying thing they are, although trace element supplements, extensive food treatment before/during cooking, and upgraded intestinal flora, etc., have enabled at least some cross-species cuisine.

Good luck ever digesting that cold-ammonia-ocean living luekha worm, though, mister warm-blooded oxygen-breather. Never mind the silicon-based life’s foods or those critters which consider the solar corona a comfortable dwelling place.

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Fighting Styles

Fantastic Fighting Style: Quite a few.

The common characteristic of almost all of them, it should be noted, given the Imperial sensibilities towards casual violence, is that almost all of them are militantly unsuitable for “social” fighting. There are sparring forms, but still.  These are killing arts, even the ones taught for self-defense, and no-one pretends differently.

Starting with the most common and simply named of them, we begin with Legionary armatura, the official fighting style of the Imperial Legions. As such, of course, it is an aggressive, offense-oriented style focused on efficacious, efficient maiming and killing, designed to be very good at utilizing weaknesses and very ungentlemanly, by which I mean appallingly Combat Pragmatic, moves – the distillation of literally millennia of dirty tricks.

Given the aforementioned Imperial sensibilities towards casual violence, it should also not surprise anyone that it’s the source of the basic forms taught to everyone for self-defense – it being considered that amateurs can’t afford to muck about with the more complex arts the constabulary use for capture and restraint, and should save their damn lives by putting their attacker down now.

It also has some other specialized offshoots, such as Military Zero-G – which is a combination of the armatura with freefighting, a martial art specifically designed for microgravity, and indeed with optimized forms for those clades which find four arms a much better option than having legs under such circumstances – and Piston-Driven Fist Form, which is Legionary armatura revised for use by people wearing a half-ton of powered combat exoskeleton, to name the most notable.

Other well-known arts, apart from freefighting, include the Dance of Fang and Claw (a natural-weapons-focused style for quadrupeds with sharp claws and sharper teeth); Moonlight and Shadows Form (a style emphasizing silence, invisibility, and subtlety, favored by spies and assassins); Elegant Twin-Blade Warrior Style (for duelists, who need to look rather sharper at the kill than Legionary armatura permits); Silken Courtesan Style (the defensive art of the courtier and courtesan, concentrating on grace, improvised weapons, countering assassin techniques, and staying alive while unarmored; see also Waif-Fu); and Synthetic Heroism Methodology (kung-fu specifically optimized for robots).

But even this merely scratches the surface. A culture which believes that even unfortunate necessities must be done well, and with beauty, develops – shall we say – a lot of martial arts…

Trope-a-Day: Waif-Fu

Waif-Fu: Some of the Empire’s Fantastic Fighting Styles (coming tomorrow) are like this – particularly those like, say, Silken Courtesan Style, which was intended for the courtier or courtesan required to fight when out of armor and with only opportunistic weapons (and which does include over 200 ways to inflict death and maiming through skillful use of a silk or paper fan, so…), but by no means all of them are.

(It is also somewhat subverted inasmuch as while there are a lot of eldrae who, apart from height, look the part, it’s not the quantity of muscle tissue that counts, so much as the quality.  They may be slender, but they are disproportionately strong – and if they happen to be ex-Legion with the various military-basic upgrades, that may be “ties knots in metal bars for practice” strong.)

Vol. 6: Mechal Elementals

Among the first known of all nanorobotic machines were the so-called mechal elementals, the maintenance mechanisms of Eliéra. While the common conception of that artificial world is that its ecology is maintained and guided by the computation and matter editation layers buried in its core, this perception is false – these are merely the most prominent elements in a complex system.

These nanorobotics have existed for the entire history of the eldrae on Eliéra, and from long before, having been part of the world since its construction by the Precursors. This is reflected in their names and taxonomy, since long before robots, mechanicals, or even simple clockwork automata were dreamed of, the ancient eldrae knew them as elemental spirits, emanations of Sylithandríël, eikone of the natural world, and Her first six children/souls, the Six Elemental Dragons.

The traditional taxonomy of the mechal elementals reflect this origin, as they are classified under their presumed elemental aspects, including such elementals as the silt spawn and stone mothers, responsible for counteracting the long-term secular erosion of the mountains; the cloud shepherds and smoke sylphs in the air; wave undines and river carvers; soil churners of the fields and the dryads of the forests; the magma krakens that churn the fires below and the flame swallows that govern their release; and the gemlords and ore ants known to generations of miners and tunnel explorers.

In the modern era, of course, we know all of these to be nanomechanical systems, part of the planetary maintenance architecture answering to the central computation layer. That said, since these systems are now overseen by the archai Sylithandríël and Her subroutines, the ancient theological view is now arguably more true than it was at its inception; and, indeed, the archai maintains the validity of the old lore of elemental beckoning, bargaining, and abjuration that the ancient eldrae painstakingly discovered to deal with the alien animating intelligences of “wild” mechal elementals before the Transcend, despite the ability to communicate directly via gnostic link.

Many of the mechal elemental designs have been repurposed for use as ecopoesis tools elsewhere. This volume describes both these, and also those mechal elementals most commonly seen in the wild and in history, along with both the modern and ancient protocols for interacting with and commanding them.

First, we describe the elementals of the Air, the emanations of the Air Dragon…

– Concordance of Robotic Systems and Animating Intelligences, 221st ed.

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Drug

Fantastic Drug: Why, yes, the Empire has fantastic drugs!

Lots and lots of them.  Nootropics and mnemotropins to think better, stimulants for times of stress, myrmidonics for combat stress, relaxants for times of not-stress, hedonics to serve after dinner, and goodness knows how many more specialized pharmaceutical products.  Hundreds of customized variants.  Far too many to list.

Welcome to the Empire!

(And now a metafictional document of introduction which, in a fictional universe, someone might have just handed “you” a copy of when you stepped out of the starship.

Those of you who’ve read Accelerando may notice something of a Stross pastiche lurking behind this one; that was deliberate, back when this piece started out as a writing exercise I was using to help in my internal world-development process.)

“Order, Progress, Liberty”

– official, Charter-enshrined motto of the Empire

Welcome to the Empire of the Star and the Eldraeic Transcend.  Whether you plan to make the Empire your new home, are travelling on business, or are simply paying a visit, the Ministry of State and Outlands welcomes you, and hopes you enjoy your stay.  This introductory memeplex is designed to orient you, and explain the most important things you should understand in order to make your entry into Imperial society smooth, and your stay an enjoyable one.

Arrival

Since you are reading a copy of this presentation, you have presumably already arrived in the Empire, whether to a planet, orbital habitat, drift habitat, or sovereign city-ship within one of the star systems of the Imperial Core or held by the Empire within the greater Associated Worlds, or to an Embassy Ship or Imperial Exclave outside the Imperial territorial volume, and are now awaiting processing as an inbound traveler.

If you have travelled to any of these other than the first, or the local planetary environment is hostile for your species (please consult the display boards or contact your Entry Officer), we recommend internalizing the supplementary memeplex “Space and Death – Avoiding the Latter in the Former”, even if you are a spacer or other habitat dweller; Imperial environmental protocols and emergency procedures may differ from those you are familiar with.

If you arrived by physical travel, i.e., by starship, you are presently waiting in an inplacement lounge while deep-scan inspection of your exoself and current ‘shell is performed.  If you arrived by mindcasting, you are presently occupying an inplacement buffer with the rest of your party while similar inspection is carried out on the exoself code and other data packages (including but not limited to ‘shell models, genetic sequence information, etc., for body reconstruction) transported with you.

The Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes wishes to apologize for the delay, inconvenience, and intrusion involved, and asks for your understanding that such procedures are necessary to protect the Empire and its citizen-shareholders from contagious disease, toxic memes, thought-viruses, embedded assembler meta-command attacks, Trojan retroviruses, and other such dangers to the public safety.  Thank you for your cooperation.

Once the required inspections are completed, you may leave the inplacement lounge/inplacement buffer.  (Mindcast travelers should note that body reconstruction and/or ‘shell instantiation is not normally performed until entry procedures are complete.)  The next stop in the inplacement process is a meeting with the Entry Officer assigned to you.

(If contraband was detected which does not pose an immediate public safety issue, you will be escorted to an Imperial Customs Officer to discuss that matter before proceeding to see the Entry Officer.  If the contraband’s presence is not malicious; i.e., not a deliberate attempt to violate Imperial law, then the inplacement process will proceed as normal once the contraband has been disposed of.

Note that the Empire imposes no duties or excises upon goods imported to or exported from the Empire.  The only contraband items the Imperial Customs concerns itself with are those illegal to possess without a public safety license or degree of sanity (see: Ciëlle Sanity Scale) which the visitor does not possess; which violate Imperial intellectual property law; or which pose a direct threat to public safety.)

The Entry Officer will verify your identity according to your passport and cognimetric data, if applicable (see: self-sovereign individual), and log them with the Office of Foreign Wanderers.  If you are traveling to immigrate to the Empire and plan to acquire citizen-shareholder status immediately, the Entry Officer will then direct you to your Inplacement Officer, who will assist you through the remainder of the immigration process.

You may be refused entry at this time if deemed a security threat (including holding a citizenship of a polity on the threat nations list or membership in a proscribed organization), a public health risk (due to contagious disease or insanity; travelers for the purposes of medical treatment should indicate this and their use of appropriate infection control precautions to their Entry Officer), possessing a criminal record including convictions on charges valid under Imperial law, or having been previously deported from the Empire.  All others are welcome to enter and visit the Empire for an indefinite time.  No further permissions, visas, or petitions are necessary to acquire and occupy domiciles, to work, to attend academic institutions, or otherwise to participate in any specific activities during your stay.

For other visitors the next step to enter the Empire is to affirm, under alethiometric verification, and place on record by signature or seal your commitment to abide by the rules of the Fundamental Contract during your stay in the Empire:

I, affirmer’s full name and/or identifier, hereby affirm my agreement and attachment to the principles of the Fundamental Contract; that all sophonts are endowed with certain absolute and inalienable rights; that these rights are to life and property, liberty, and the pursuit of eudaimonia; that all sophonts are equal in their exercise and retention of these rights, without privilege or priority; that sophonts cooperate amongst themselves in separate and coadunate action to secure them; and that they do so freely and by their own sovereign will.

Therefore, as a free and self-sovereign sophont of recognized competence, I hereby agree, consent and reaffirm my binding to the rights and obligations of the Fundamental Contract which underlies the civilization of the Empire, on my own behalf as well as that of my guardianship; consenting to be guided first in my actions by the Rights of Domain, of Defense, of Common Defense, and of Fair Contract; and accepting freely the obligations attached thereto to guard the absolute and inalienable rights of my fellow sophonts as my own; and in full understanding that should I Default from this, my own rights shall therefore be abeyed until the default is amended.

Given under my hand this day date,

affirmer’s signature

Witnessed this day by Entry Officer’s full name and/or identifier, who, as a citizen-shareholder in good standing of the Empire and an adherent of the Contract, pledges surety in the light of the Flame for the competence of the signatory and the validity of this Affirmation.

Entry Officer’s signature

Be advised that any breach of the Fundamental Contract during your stay in the Empire may be considered grounds for immediate deportation.

You will also be required to affirm and place on record by signature or seal your acceptance of form I-180, “Responsibilities of the Visitor”, which binds you, the visitor, to abide by the law of the Empire and to pay the Empire Services Fee on any income derived from work done or from other sources within the Empire, while within the Empire.

Finally, the Entry Officer will issue you with a temporary ID.  This identity cylinder contains a Universal holding your personal identification information, and will function in all ways to identify you to your fellow sophonts (see: public identity tag, panopticon tag) and to Imperial and private-sector infrastructure (see: the self-aware city, the self-aware home) during your stay in the Empire.  You should, and indeed are required to, keep this identity cylinder on your person at all times during your stay, and it should be returned to the Exit Officer at the time of your departure to foreign.

And with this, entry procedures are completed.

Money

Imperial society is extremely wealthy (see: cornucopia, post-scarcity) within the scope of standard energy/demand exchange-value transfer systems (see: hypercapitalism, agoric-annealing economic system; if you are unfamiliar with such exchange-value transfer systems, study the supplementary memeplex “The Ethics of Greed”).  Money (see: exchange-value notation) exists, and is used for commercial transfer of values including all goods and services, but basic subsistence items (including but not limited to atmosphere, nutrition, energy, bandwidth, and cornucopia feedstock) and a wide variety of post-scarcity commodity goods (for a strict definition, study the supplementary memeplex “Industrial Economics in the Post-Nanofac Age”, but this can be assumed to include most common devices that do not require intellectual property input, scarce resources, or personal services) are available for minimal cost-of-construction/externality-plus prices from any of a large number of commercial autofac systems, which is to say, for de minimis cost.

Be advised that many interstellar banking institutions outside the Empire, even those which participate in one or more Imperial Banking & Credit Weave gateway programs, are not set up to handle micropayments or aggregated picopayments of this low magnitude, and thus the use of autofac systems may require that you transfer funds to an Imperial banking institution for this purpose.

Doing so, or depositing a letter of credit, can generally be done as soon as you have completed entry procedures.  Most Imperial banks are willing to open accounts against letters of credit for visiting travelers, and maintain branches in starports specifically for this purpose.

Our Advice to You

To be considered a competent individual within Imperial jurisdiction (see: minors), you must hold a quantity of self-signed tort insurance (see: insurance bond alternative) adequate to cover the full risk spread of routine activity, as defined by the IQI (Insurance Quota for Independence).  You are advised to make purchase of tort insurance your first priority, since certain legal privileges are denied to, and many organizations will decline to contract with, anyone not carrying sufficient tort insurance.  In addition, the consequences of a lawsuit for someone not carrying tort insurance may be severe, as Curial courts are empowered to collect any and all property a losing defendant possesses, up to and including the defendant himself (see: distraint, legal consequences of self-ownership).

Additionally, while the cost of routine health care is also minimal within the Empire, since health care is a market good, visitors are advised to purchase standard health coverage against the possibility of accident during their visit.  Medical personnel and institutions are under no obligation to provide treatment if payment cannot be arranged.

Most agents arranging travel to the Empire can arrange tort and health insurance coverage as part of a travel insurance package.  If you have arrived without previously making such arrangements, or if you intend to remain for an extended period, insurance agents are available within the starport to enable you to purchase adequate coverage.  Those intending to remain for an extended period may also wish to purchase incarnation insurance and avail themselves of noetic backup services against the possibility of accidental death.

(Warning: neither the Empire nor noetic backup service providers operating therein assume any responsibility for legal or fiscal complications resulting from your home polity’s legal position on the identity and personhood of the reinstantiated, including refusal to readmit you on your return, nor are they able to intercede with your home polity’s government on your behalf.)

While the Empire is polyspecific and polycultural, it operates on the basis of a common interlanguage (Eldraeic), ontology (the Imperial Ontology), and a common set of defined intersophont interactions and etiquette as a baseline; the Common Social Protocol and Common Economic Protocol.  Basic translation software and editions of the Imperial Ontology, CSP and CEP are made available at no cost in every starport by the Ministry of State and Outlands as a courtesy to visitors.  It is strongly suggested that you avail yourself of these facilities, at minimum, if you are not familiar with Imperial praxis and etiquette.

Further guidelines for coexisting with your fellow sophonts may be found in any number of publications.  The Ministry of State and Outlands recommends “Madame Allatrian’s Garden of Exquisitely Correct Etiquette” as the ideal guide for the outworld visitor who wishes to present himself in the best possible light and avoid giving unintentional offense.

Be advised in particular that the Empire operates on the basis of pacta sunt servanda; UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you enter into any oath-contract, given word, promise, or other fiduciary, contractual or promissory arrangement, no matter how casual it might appear by the standards of your own or other societies, without full intention and capacity to carry through said fiduciary, contractual, or promissory arrangement.  Imperial law and custom mandates the most severe censure for default.

Your Liberties

As a visitor to the Empire, you enjoy the same fundamental rights as any free individual and many of the civic rights of an Imperial citizen-shareholder by courtesy.  You enjoy the ownership, under Imperial law, of your mind (mind-state vector) and body (‘shell), including intellectual property rights over your memories and, where relevant, individual genome (excluding common species genes, race-and-clade specific genes, and copyrighted biomodification genes), of your frame (individual appearances, phenotypes, styles, fashions, logos, and so forth), and of any property which you have transferred into Imperial jurisdiction along with yourself.

The Empire is a Society of Consent; a society in which the absolute and inalienable rights delineated in the Fundamental Contract form the basis of all legislation, and in which government operates via unanimous and mutual contract of its citizen-shareholders to provide civilization-infrastructure services while placing only the most minimal restrictions upon individual liberties.

Thus, many activities that have been or are considered crimes in other societies are legal in the Empire.  These include but are not limited to: freedom of speech (including art, political views, scientific theories, and so forth), freedom of self-mutagenesis (see: morphological freedom), freedom of gnosis (see: cikrieth lifestyle, derivatives, forking, Fusions, gnostic overlays, mental architecture, mind-machine interface, mnemonesis, psychedesign, Self-Fusions, synnoesis, and vastening), freedom of movement and residence, ownership of property (of whatever kind; stipulating that no sophont entity can be considered property within Imperial jurisdiction), freedom of contract, personal privacy, and acts of association/disassociation (including but not limited to friendship, formal relationships (see: branches, circles, coadunations, corporations, marriage, and contract relationships), and sex (see: sensory mapping, neovirginity, xenophilia)), communication, and commerce between consenting competent (see above) sophonts of any species, race, clade, and gender, providing that such acts do not violate the rights of any other sophont or the strictures of Imperial law.

Furthermore, some activities are prohibited under Imperial law which may have been legal in your previous jurisdiction.  These include: chattel slavery, willful deprivation of ability to consent or deny consent (see: semislavery, conscience redactor), interference in the absence of consent (see: Right of Domain, meddlement), invasion of defended privacy, non-consensual cession of privacy (see: anharmonic indecency), distributing your private identity key (see: cypherclerk), breaking one’s given word (see: breach of promise), passive accessorism to crime (see: Altruism Statutes), possession of strategic nuclear, biological, chemical, self-replicating nanotechnological, near-luminal high-mass kinetic or similar weapons (see: instruments of regrettable necessity) without formal licensure (see: public safety license) and a “high optimal” sanity rating (see: Ciëlle Sanity Scale), coercive assimilationism (see: hegemonizing swarm), unlicensed reproduction (see: Citizen Eugenics Board, dysgenesis, Reproductive Statutes), maleficial memetic transmission (see: toxic memes, proscribed groups, Riot Act), genetic or memetic theft (see: intellectual property and self-ownership), and informal acts of violence or non-consensual physical or virtual contact on whatever scale.

We would advise that the following activities, which remain legal in the Empire, be avoided for your safety unless you are previously familiar with them.  These include: breaking promises given without one’s word (see: cut direct, reputation network), entering into financial contracts which waive one-body inalienability (see: distraint), entering into indentures without well-defined termination provisions, giving out your exoself access codes (see: brain hacking, thought-rape) to non-bonded practitioners, selling copies of your mind-state vector, the use of various chemical, cerebroergetic, or software psychotropes (see: dreamware, drugs, hedonic inducer, thought-viruses) without proper preparation, or undergoing mental modifications which abolish individual identity (see: Fusions, subsumption, threshold of identity, zombie).

If you are in any doubt as to your ability to avoid such illegal or unsafe activities, you should consider signing a Declaration of Situational Mental Incompetence and appointing a guardian-overseer to prevent you from engaging in them.  Commercial artificial intelligences are available to serve this purpose according to standardized criteria.

If You Want To Stay

A surprising number of visitors to the Empire enquire about the possibility of permanent immigration.  If you are interested in exercising this option during your stay, be advised that you may acquire Imperial citizen-shareholdership at any time at any Imperial Services office.  The process requires a permanent affirmation of your attachment to the principles of the Fundamental Contract; affirmation, under alethiometric verification, and signing or sealing of the Imperial Charter to assume the rights and responsibilities of the citizen-shareholder, as defined in sections III.III, III.IV, and III.V of said Charter; and purchase of one citizen-share in the Empire at the current floating market price.  Further information is available from any Imperial Services office upon request.

Be advised further that the Empire explicitly does not recognize non-consensual limitations on an individual’s right to emigrate from another polity, including but not limited to emigration restrictions, time-limited exit visas, involuntary servitude obligations, and irrevocable citizenship.

Once again, welcome to the Empire!  On behalf of the Ministry of State and Outlands, we hope your stay is enjoyable and productive.

Trope-a-Day: The Fair Folk

The Fair Folk: While this is not a trope that strictly applies to anyone in the Eldraeverse – and, and I would like to be absolutely clear on this, in-universe as well as out-universe there is absolutely no causal connection whatsoever between these chaps and any of the applicable legends – you really don’t have to look far to find the amazing, beautiful, graceful and – in the Clarkian sense – magical (see: The Beautiful People, Can’t Argue With Elves, Inhumanly Beautiful Race) and the proud, nor for that matter their society and customs extravagant and elegant but amoral and inscrutable (see: Blue and Orange Morality).

They do, however, have empathy, although given the number of truly stupid problems to have in the universe, sympathy is in rather shorter supply.

And, of course, the rest of the trope doesn’t apply.

Trope-a-Day: Failsafe Failure

Failsafe Failure: Averted.  Strongly.  Given the extraordinarily dangerous technologies they’re quite happy to use, the failsafes have failsafes.  On their failsafes.  And as this is not Starfleet engineering, the reactors don’t run hot (i.e., with ludicrous amounts of excess reactivity), prisoners and diseases are never contained with force-fields when a bottle would do perfectly well, and just to be absolutely clear about this, EVERYTHING COMES WITH FUSES.

[A comment on the original posting of this trope read as follows:

“Do they have seat belts?”

This, actually, I am not sure about.  I know that if they do, it’s certainly not legally required for the manufacturers to fit them or for anyone to use them (although your tort and health/incarnation insurance underwriters may insist on that point, if their actuaries are of the opinion that it’s worth it, on pain of higher premiums).  And I’m fairly certain that ground vehicles do, although since they’re mostly working vehicles and rugged all-terrain types like Mass Effect‘s Mako, they may well be the multipoint harness type, rather than conventional seat belts.

As for the regular “family car” type flitter, though, it may well be that since they’re high-speed flying vehicles, the number of potential “mid-air collision/fall right out of the sky” issues left, after the failure of all the other assorted safety systems, for which a seat belt could have any impact on your chances of survival, is small enough that it’s just not worth doing.  Most small-vehicle collisions or falls from operating altitudes are, I think, pretty clearly raspberry-jam time, with later restoration from backup.

But I haven’t yet run numbers on that point.

(There’s also one part of me that suggests that the last-resort safety device for a flitter should be a bomb, on the grounds that the passengers are already near-certainly dead, and it’s better for everyone below, especially in a city, that it come down as metal confetti rather than one, or a few, big lump(s).  But I don’t think that part is entirely serious…)]