Birthday Present

Peréä System, far orbit, 4016

“Now?”

“Okay, go ahead and open your eyes.”

“You got me a giant laser! Wait, where did you get me a giant laser? … And, um, why did you get me a giant laser?”

“In order: yes, the Laserider Network’s fire sale, and –”

“Fire sale?”

“Yeah. It hasn’t hit the public ‘weave yet, but word from the Deep Space Relay is that someone back Home has cracked the fittling problem and they’re sending us the necessary, so the interstellar light-sail network concept is dead in space. Helén Inuriannon is taking the news about as well as possible for someone whose reason for being here just took a long walk out a short airlock, but they’re in full close-it-out, sell-it-off mode already. I picked the main laser array up for a short song and a handful of considerations.”

“We have FTL now –  no, never mind, in a minute. So why do we – I – whichever want a giant laser?”

“Think of it less as a laser and more the prospect of being independently wealthy.”

“Right now I’m thinking of it less as an explanation and more the prospect of being annoyingly smug.”

“If they have FTL, we’ll be getting more colonists, more quickly. That means the ecotects are going to be even hungrier for metal than they are now. And that laser…”

“…is going to be a thousand sideritic asteroids smelted down and put on the market first.”

“So, you like it?”

“Be as smug as you want today, love.”

Trope-a-Day: Our Weapons Will Be Boxy In The Future

Our Weapons Will Be Boxy In The Future: Averted in most cases; most guns, while still being fundamentally gun-shaped (ergonomists cringe at the thought of trying to actually hit something with the remote-control-styled ST:TNG phaser, for example) as appropriate to the manipulators of the species they’re designed for, still follow The Aesthetics of Technology in being sleek, curvy organic shapes.  After all, they’re nanofactured – grown, not assembled – and all the field-replaceable parts are modular, so…

Played absolutely straight in just one case by the S-11i Mamabear heavy sluggun, because the Mamabear is a brutally overpowered weapon designed – well, the designers appear to have been thinking about building a weapon to fight kaiju at close range. It looks like a large vaned metal brick with a stubby barrel sticking out of one end because that’s precisely what it is; the mass driver is sufficiently overpowered that the whole mechanism of the thing is built into a giant heat sink to keep it at something close to a reasonable operating temperature. Although if you fire the thing multiple times in close succession, reasonable operating temperature means “only radiating in the red”.

(It has some other disadvantages too, like small magazine size, slow reloading rate, inaccuracy at long range, and a recoil that inflicts compound fractures on anyone who fires the thing whose bones aren’t reinforced with hard-wearing synthetic composites, but sometimes that’s worth it for the ability to one-hit kill damn near anything you’ll ever find yourself staring down the barrel at.)

Aftershocks (3)

From Elyse Corídatry, Psychedesigner Excellence, to Advisory Panel, Involuntary Dysfunction Eleemosynary COG, and Adm. Gileon Cularius, Imperial Navy, greetings.

Gentlesophs, I understand the urgency of your desire for good news concerning the status of the 14,934 mind-states entrusted to the care of the COG by Adm. Cularius, but must regret to inform you that this is an extremely complex piece of repair work. The changeling AIs used by the Iltines in their weapons systems were produced by methods that are, by our current standards, extremely crude as well as grossly unethical.

While I remain confident of eventual success, the Iltine weapon-programmers were, if you’ll pardon me, a bunch of semi-competent butchers stacking wire-and-tape jobs twelve deep. None of these are capable of operating in an organic, robotic, or even infomorph ‘shell at this time; this is the easiest of the problems to repair, since motor and sensory cortices can be patched with standard models. However, aversive and proversive conditioning have garbled the emotive-promotor loops all to dark and hash, and there’s noise all through the supporting structures. The majority of pre-installation memory is nothing but garble to wipe, and the rest of them will take considerably longer to unthread and reroute back to something resembling sanity, and as for the primary personality encoding structures, well, I can’t patch over the problems in those if you give a damn about who you’ll be instantiating at the end of this process.

Give me six months, and I’ll tell you if it can be done at all. A year after that, you might start seeing results.

(Unless there’s any chance you can get me one of the Iltine project team’s mind-states…?)

Question: Terrorism and Open Societies

Here’s another one from the question box: I received a link to this article from a skeptical reader who questions how – or indeed if – the sort of open society I describe could possibly cope with this sort of lone-wolf, home-grown terrorism by individual extremists, needing few contacts and little equipment.

First, just because you have an open society that, by and large, is not interested in investing a lot of time into controlling what people do doesn’t necessarily mean that your security services suck. (Indeed, one could convincingly argue that they ought to be better, inasmuch as they can spend all their time concentrating on things that are actually mala in se rather than wasting a lot of time on authoritarian-moistening bullshit.)

Suffice it to say, canonically, while greatly restricted in what they can do to people who haven’t committed any sort of crime, the Watch Constabulary and the Fourth Directorate are nonetheless very good at what they do.

Second, of course, is that the Empire is rather picky about who can get citizen-shareholdership in the first place, and extends this particular pickiness even to people who were born there. You don’t get it for free just by accident of birth; it comes with responsibilities as well as rights, and if you cannot sit under an alethiometer and honestly declare that, yes, you do intend to honor the Contract and the Charter and all their implications (something that your homegrown radical could not any more than a would-be immigrant one), no citizen-shareholdership for you. And if you fail that test badly enough, well, here’s a ticket, now get the hell out.

(This is naturally decried as extremely culturalist, which it is; the standard response to such criticism is that no, it’s not prejudice, they have a perfectly valid postjudice against cultures that don’t respect the sophont rights of others, and in any case, the opinions of a of bunch of self-asserted advocates for thugs, thieves, slavers, defaulters, and other such degenerates will be filed in the appropriate receptacle.)

And thirdly, the Eupraxic Collegium does have a compelling interest of ensuring that the ungoverned, self-organizing public are, well, sane and rational, that being what permits a free society like this to exist in the first place, and are well equipped so to do.

But lastly, of course and for the major part, is the difference in attitude.

As has been mentioned before, I believe, the Imperial legal view of self-defense (or, rather, self-and-others defense) is somewhat different than ours, in that one is not, for example, obliged to wait until someone actualizes a threat in order to respond to it. You are entitled to take people at their word: if someone threatens you or someone else nearby, you can preempt their attack with your defense all you like. There is absolutely no duty to retreat: someone who attacks, or threatens to attack, is by definition, eo ipso, etc., in the wrong and invited the painful consequences that are about to ensue. And, for that matter, they think “proportional response” is the damn silliest idea they’ve ever heard of (with the possible exceptions of fighting fair and telling the enemy that you’re coming), so if you have to put someone down, you’re entitled to make sure that they don’t get back up.

The Imperial Rules of Civilized Warfare mirror this pretty much exactly on the group level, as you might expect.

In the above article, one quotation given is:

“Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict,” an Islamic State spokesman said in a September audio speech. “Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling.”

…you can say that kind of thing relatively safely on Earth.

Hell, you could say that thing kind of safely to a lot of people in the Worlds who share similar attitudes to people on Earth.

But if you say that thing to or about the Empire, or Imperial citizen-shareholders, that’s a preemptive self-and-others-defense casus belli right there, and it’s probably even the kind that invokes the “we don’t need no steenkin’ central ruling, this is covered under ‘imminent threat that will not admit of delay'” clause that lets any local commander act on their own military authority.

There, you say that sort of thing from any sort of position of authority, and shit is going down. Hell, you just sent said shit a gild-edged, engraved, heavy-bond-paper invitation to come party at your place and bring all its implements of destruction.

And so, when it comes to another illustrative quote:

“They’ve realized, hey, if our intent is to scare the s–t out of people—to trigger heavy-handed responses by government, to force isolation of the Muslim community, pushing them to more radicalization—what do you have to do? Take two guys into a mall, shoot it up, and you’re done. You’ll be out of there in 15 minutes, and we’ll be talking about it for days and weeks and months.”

Well, it’s true that that would be an excellent way to trigger heavy-handed responses from the Imperial governance, yes. The problem, however, is that so far as opinion there is concerned, our idea of a heavy-handed response is so much self-harming (because tightening security inflicts pain upon many-n of your own people for every n bad guys it catches, even before you start counting false positives) theatrical bullshit.

The way you do a proper heavy-handed response to polity-encouraged terrorism is to send out Admiral Cluster Bomb to turn Mister-Likes-To-Make-Threats-And-Encourage-People into Mister-Ash-At-The-Bottom-Of-A-Glass-Lined-Crater, preferably before anyone actually has a chance to make good on any of said threats.

In short: what keeps terrorism out of the Empire’s open society is that, by and large, would-be terrorists’ sponsors and encouragers have much easier targets to pick on than the one that will murderize, tenderize, and vaporize you from orbit the moment after you open your mouth and then pat itself on the back, standin’ up for civilized values and all, for doing it, not a twinge of conscience needed.

And it’s not like this is a hidden or an inconsistent policy. They’re very open about this policy and they do it every time, and have been doing so for ever, which has the decided advantage of ensuring that it’s a very rare occasion when they have to do it at all.

Trope-a-Day: Our Showers Are Different

Our Showers Are Different: Averted, for the most part. Water has enough other uses, starting with radiation shielding, and is prevalent enough in space – and, of course, being built in space, or launched using nuclear pulse drives, there’s plenty of room in the mass budget for the relevant equipment – that most spacecraft and habitats have plenty of water available for real showers. Or even baths (although microgravity baths are relatively small, closed chambers that fill with water, requiring you to use a breathing tube – at least, if you aren’t equipped with those nifty hemocules that let you hold your breath for a couple of hours, anyway.

There are microbot swarms that will clean you quite satisfactorily (a close relative of decontamination mist) without needing water, or indeed requiring you to undress, but those aren’t there because of water-lack; those are there for people in too much of a hurry to enjoy it.

And a “sonic shower”? Well, that’s just a fancy shower-head that helps you scrub.

Unwanted

ALL SECURITY SITES // INFRARED TRANSPARENT
ROUTINE
RED LIST // ANATHEMATIC // UPDATE 7122/03/11

WANTED: Misent yilFerish hinGastref (any and all instances)

DULY OUTLAWED IN ABSENTIA BY WRIT OF THE COURT OF CLAIMS

FOR: reputation gaming, identity theft, forknapping, brainspiking, semislavery, enslavement, sophont trafficking, sophont farming, non-consensual redaction, p-zombification, and sundry other crimes against sophoncy.

BOUNTY: 100,000 esteyn for a derivative fork; 1,000,000 esteyn for a full fork; three-quarter paid for proof-of-kill alone (no intact mind-state); negotiable-upwards for information leading to capture of the primary instances.

AFFILIATIONS: Shrouded Suns Selfdom; Theomachy of Galia intelligence services; gkx-net.

LAST SEEN: outport, Trinmac (Charred Waste), 17 days before publication.

SUBMIT TO ANY OFFICE OF THE FOURTH DIRECTORATE.

Trope-a-Day: Our Founder

Our Founder: Lots of them in various places, of course, but the several-hundred-foot high statues of Alphas I Amanyr and Seledië III Selequelios that flank the main building of the Imperial Palace are the ur-example of this trope.  (The mountain range to the east of the capital that is slowly being carved into representations of the line of the Empire’s Most Significant Historical Figures would be the largest.)

Living Object Protocol

So, a little while back I was having this discussion (scroll down) regarding starships, and where exactly the seat of their identity might be said to lie, with particular reference to the Ship of Theseus problem.

And, as it happens, Imperial technology already has a thing or two to say on this sort of question. Let me tell you about living objects, and about the Living Object Protocol.

Of course, the first thing to say there is that while, technically, a “living object” is just an object that implements the Living Object Protocol, it’s still something of an obsolete term. This is the modern age, after all, and you’d have to go to some barbarous outworld to encounter an object that didn’t implement the Living Object Protocol. Even shrubs and rocks, thanks to the nanoecology, implement the Living Object Protocol. In practice, therefore, they’re just called “objects”.

So what is it?

It’s ubiquitous computing, the Internet of Things at its apogee. LOP turns the objects it’s applied to into smart, meshed (wirelessly connected to the dataweave and to objects around them), self-aware, location-aware objects.

At a minimum (the “base subset”) this supports limited self-knowledge. Every object is aware of its own identity (both hard-coded, by type, and whatever its owner names it); it is aware of its creator (designer and manufacturer); it is aware of its owner (and ownership history); and it is aware of its location.

(Which, as recent fic implies, makes it very hard to steal things if the owner left the ackles at default or set ‘em even half-sensibly. In some cases even more so – you stole someone’s phone? That’s not going to let you call anyone but Emergency Response. Steal their gun, and… well, let’s say getting into a firefight with that would be a real bad idea.)

Virtually every significant object – anything more than a bolt – comes with the “informational subset”, too, which in combination can tell you virtually everything about them; their user manuals and other documentation explaining how to properly use and care for them; customer support information and links to object-centric memeweaves; specifications and product data; maintenance procedures and history; manufacturing origins and components/ingredients; fabber recipes for customization; the purchase invoice; proper end-life procedures for recycling and/or disposal. Such documentation is self-updating, with information automatically appearing regarding product updates, recalls, and required service calls, along with geolinks to service centers or downloadable service packs.

Such objects are also readily searchable; it’s easy to track down your favorite mug with a simple query to your home dataweave for its location by name, or even for the locations of every object in your house identifying itself as a mug. Search engines can perform a similar task for objects in the broader world – at least, for objects that you own, or which are flagged for public accessibility.

With little effort, therefore, it’s easy to understand where and what anything is, when and where you got it, how much it cost, what it’s made from, where, and by whom, how to use it, how you should never use it, what other models are available, how it’s evolved from previous versions, how it might change in the future, what other users think about it and how they’ve tweaked it, what creative uses it’s been put to by heteroprax users, and how you might dispose of it safely.

More sophisticated objects also support the Interweave Command/Control Protocol (“WeaveControl”) enabling them to be controlled and commanded remotely, and providing access to both their internal diagnostics, and any sensors with which they’re equipped: your bath can report its temperature and the current water level; your chairs know who’s sitting in them; your milk bottles can tell you if the milk they contain is fresh; and so forth.

Objects which naturally come in groups support cooperative LOP and WeaveControl subsets to be queried or commanded as a group; of which the most obvious example is LOP enumeration. A handful of LOP-compliant Imperial coins, for example, can be ordered to count themselves and report their total value.

Likewise, hierarchical objects automatically cooperate and pass information up and down the hierarchy, the superior controlling and coordinating its inferiors. A vehicle or building’s structural members can cooperatively use their localizers to validate the structure against its blueprint, or compute current stresses and strains in the structure.

SO – in relevant context, want to know whose that starship is, or what that module was part of before you got it, or the maintenance history of that booster, or the fuel status of that drone, or the details of the current consist?

Ask it.

You’ll get a valid answer. The LOP protocols will reject any invalid transfers, identities, or assemblies you try to push through them. So it will always know…

Trope-a-Day: Our Dwarves Are All The Same

Our Dwarves Are All The Same: Mostly averted, by not actually being dwarves, of course – the azikeldrae are the same tall, beautiful, immortal, mad geniuses as the rest of their species, with the possible exception of the silvertouched, who have acquired a symbiotic contamination of Eliéran silverlife (i.e., feral and evolved descendants of Precursor nanites), and who can be picked out by the odd skin colors (from metal deposition) and occasional metallic strands in their hair and crystal or stone “freckles” caused by hosting these nonbiological lifeforms.  Also, the women are readily identifiable as such.  Also also, very few beards.

They are, however, descended from the people who moved underground to avoid the Winter of Nightmares (the result of the astrobleme of -14,500), and many of them still do so in adequately vast and echoing underground halls (or in asteroidal beehive colonies in space – just like home only without the gravity), having decided that they like it down there.

They do like technology, crafting, booze, wealth, and a bloody good fight against someone who deserves it, but much the same could be said about absolutely everyone else of their species, if not most of the Empire, so…

How Deep Is That Rabbit Hole?

The Janiastre device is the simplest in a class of devices used to establish, in simplistic terms, whether or not “reality is real”; that is to say, whether or not one is currently located within a virtuality or other simulation space.

To do this, it makes use of the implementation details of said simulation spaces; to wit, that they are implemented on top of members of the well-documented families of Stannic-computable and quantum processors and thus their associated mathematical logics, and as such are incapable of simulating the rare types of computation that fall outside these families. A Janiastre device makes use of synthetic closed time-like curves to perform acausal logic-based hyperstannic computation impossible for any finite or quantum computational device, thus probing the limits of this logic space; while such computation should succeed in base reality, the underlying structure of a simulation space cannot support these trans-temporal operations and will result in randomized or erroneous results, or in the worst case, unbounded processing crash leading to a general reality failure.

It should be noted that a Janiastre device is not a universal ontology-verifier. While effective against simulation spaces based in commonly used simulation technologies, it is theoretically possible that a simulation space operating on a (hypothetical) fully-generalized acausal logic processor would be able to correctly simulate acausal hyperstannic computation, and in the limit, a sufficiently advanced technology could use a basement universe as a simulation space.

Trope-a-Day: Our Dragons Are Different

Our Dragons Are Different: Inasmuch as the eldraeic mythological aman (“dragon”) was – if you believe “certain not-entirely-accepted parahistorical theories” – imagined in the image of the local Precursors, as were a number of other similar-looking mythologae of the known galaxy.  What’s known about them is that they were about the right size and shape (from the ruins), scaly (from the fossils), near-solipsists (like the rijzh) who ended up wiping each other out through inability to cope with each other’s’ existence, and possessed of technology which, while in general not all that exotic compared to the current galactic mainstream, included some ontotechnological wonders or natural gifts that made them dangerous force-of-nature-level Reality Warpers to everything around them.

And they’re also responsible for the existence of various of today’s species (starting with the eldrae), various acts of ecopoesis and ecological modification, and contributing significantly to the Galaxy’s piles of archives and ancient, dangerous artifacts.  (And, of course, tend to get other examples attributed to them because, well, they’re there, belike.  Despite not being the only older-than-elder species out there.)

All other dragon-like characteristics are from these extrapolated.

(There are also the ékaláman, translated as “wyvern”, which look like small, non-fire-breathing Western dragons – reptilioid, following the bluelife hexapedal model with the mid-limbs turned into wings – but are not so much terrifying magical beasties as hard-to-kill dangerous flying predators and damned nuisances to people living in their home range, and specifically to their sheep, cattle, and – if flocking – children.  If you’re going out, don’t forget your clockbow.)

Trope-a-Day: Our Doors Are Different

Our Doors Are Different: Well, sometimes.  Automatic, yes, just about all of them as at the Imperial level of technology (or, indeed, the modal level for the Associated Worlds) throwing an actuator on there is cheap, and people are carrying things in all hands often enough that it’s handy not to have to set them down to make the door open.  (Of course, most of these aren’t automatic, so much as operated by thinking “open” at them.)  Also, in microgravity, finding leverage may be annoying for much the same reason.

Leaving aside blast doors, vault doors, and other such things with locking mechanisms designed to survive someone letting off a nuke just outside, etc., and the cog-style spacetight doors designed to be openable regardless of pressure differentials, most of the rest of the Different Doors are the gratuitously fancy non-rectangular-and-with-multiple-moving-parts styles that serve no useful purpose whatsoever except for letting architects and interior designers show off as much as possible.  Which is to say, they don’t so much serve an out-of-universe desire to show off how cool and sciency and futuristic everything is, as an in-universe desire for… well, that.

Special note here to the really fancy swarm-doors made of large numbers of nanomachines pretending to be a wall that essentially melt away to create an opening, or even around you to create the effect that you just melted right through the wall, leaving it intact behind you.  Very expensive, but damn shiny-looking.

And, of course, to the biotech heart-valve or sphincter-based doors.

Trope-a-Day: Our Angels Are Different

Our Angels Are Different: Well, ours are sub-archai emergent executive subroutines of the Transcendent collective consciousness that, on the rare occasions they need to manifest in physical form, tend to do so as brain-rippingly complex fractal nanoconstructs. Different enough for you?

(They do glow with celestial light, though.)

Well, Probably

RESPLENDENT EXPONENTIAL VECTOR PROJECT EXECUTION COMMITTEE
PROJECT PROPOSAL 6200/X/113 – “PROBABILITY KILN”

SUMMARY:

A proposal to make use of moiric-temporal mechanics for engineering functions. It is known (p>6σ) that, per the Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem, the probability of any event-chain violating known causality will be forced to zero via the destructive interference of quantum wavefunctions. In accordance with the worldline-pruning theories of Oricalcios, Steamweaver, <Cerulean Glissando in D Major>, et alii, the proposed device makes use of acausal logic techniques coupled with synthetic closed timelike curves to trim regions of the downstream probability phase-space leading to undesired results, thus elevating the probability of desired results. This enables manufacturing processes of extremely low yield or dependent upon quantum events of otherwise negligible probability to be successfully operationalized.

Granted, this isn’t my specialty, but isn’t this same process almost guaranteed to also magnify the probability of the most bizarre, unlikely, and unplanned-for failure modes?

– Galry Aristede, Range Safety

Doesn’t that suggest that we should avoid using any safety systems, in order to ensure the availability of simple and predictable failure modes?

– Symel min Argyll, Range Safety

Damned if I know. I think we need a metaphysical consult.

– Galry Aristide, Range Safety

Could this be used as a synthetic luck machine?

– <clicktrillwhistle>, Potential Applications

Please don’t ask that question in front of the scientists.

– Galry Aristede, Range Safety

Trope-a-Day: Orion Drive

Orion Drive: As we mentioned way back in Nuclear Weapons Taboo, Eliera was always enriched in heavy metals, including the uranium family, and low on fossil fuels; and since the first set of uses of nuclear technology were all harmless civilian applications before anyone ever thought of weaponizing it…

Well, yeah.  Orion drives, or nuclear pulse drives rather, were an obvious development, from the early days of Project Phoenix (orbital shots), for satellite launches, and on through Project Oculus (near-orbit space station) and Project Silverfall (moon shots), and on through the early days of space colonization.  And not just for orbital maneuvering; they were used for ground launch, although replacing fission bombs swiftly with laser-triggered fusion pellets, up until they were eventually replaced with gas core closed-cycle nuclear thermal rockets, and eventually with mass driver/laser ablative hybrid drives for bulk cargo and trimodal NTRs for passengers, and eventually with beanstalks.

(Of course, this wasn’t entirely without consequences.  While the name of the Bright Desert originally referred to the glare reflecting off the pure white sand, the pleasant Cherenkov glow coming off both the glass-lined craters of the Imperial Orbital Launch Reservation and the pyramids of glass ingots stacked in the Burning Brickyard – the primary planetary nuclear waste disposal site – gives it an entirely new meaning these nights. Fancy nuke-resistant fallout-minimizing launchpads weren’t invented immediately, after all…)

That’s Just A Little Bit More Than The Law Will Allow

“While throwing revenue agents out of the airlock naked is a long and honorable tradition, it wastes valuable organics and may create a hazard to navigation. 

“Avoid these problems easily by wrapping the revenuer in a cargo net and tethering it to a safety-line clamp before blowing the lock!”

– Ballistic Brewery tip-a-day calendar

Trope-a-Day: Organ Theft

Organ Theft: In almost all times and places, organlegging isn’t a reasonable proposition – usually, the window between inventing organ transplantation and organ cloning isn’t all that long, and most of the time, it takes place in the kind of scarcity economy that makes it perfectly possible to buy organs from willing sellers (or from penal institutions, for the less scrupulous), even if local prohibitionists mean you have to do it on the black market.

It’s occasionally extended by people stealing genemod organs or cybernetic implants to resell, but it’s still not exactly common.

Trope-a-Day: Order Versus Chaos

Order Versus Chaos: Played straight, by both religion (the Church of the Flame’s Big Bad is entropy and chaos) and state (the Imperial motto is “Order, Progress, Liberty”).  Subverted in both cases inasmuch as they’re very clear that it’s supposed to be emergent order (which includes several of those things the original trope lists under Chaos, like free will, creativity, and individualism, and excludes their opposing counterparts) – because the creation of order is too important to be left to planners.

Aftershocks (2)

Vontok System
Former Republic Stargate, Maintenance Access Four
Ring Dynamics Transition Team

“I don’t like it.”

“It’s going well so far. The interface layer reconfigured cleanly to accept standard blue-box protocol.”

“That’s why I don’t like it.”

“Because it reconfigured cleanly?”

“Because it reconfigured too easily. This thing was ripped out of a dead god’s brain with stone axes. That shouldn’t make it user-friendly.”

“Maybe it was built for them.”

“Okay, then, how do you explain the computronium stacks? Big and clunky this isn’t; it’s just got far more parcycles and dataspace than the stargate manager needs. What are they for – and don’t say nothing, and before you answer, remember dead god’s brain.”

“…that’s paranoid.”

“But am I wrong?”

“No, I can’t say that. What are you proposing?”

“I’m proposing we get this meme-gapped and rig the best emergency-destruct package we can that won’t risk kernel integrity, then call in a Probable Technologies forensic eschatology team. And that we shut down all our probes and mapping operations. It’s one thing if the gate goes diagnostic on us; it’s quite another if our pokin’ around wakes up a poison angel or triggers a prompt intellect excursion, and worse yet if it’s a strongly connected one.”