Month: June 2015

Exterminomachy

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Little is known of the culture, former civilization, and even biology of the skrandar species. Extreme xenophobes, they had little interaction with the species of the Worlds even post-contact. The destruction of their homeworld along with the rest of Skranpen (Charred Waste)’s1 inner system in the self-induced nova of their sun (on detecting the relativistic approach of the Serene Fleet) has left little archaeological evidence available for study. Even the name of the Skranpen system, like that of the species, is phonemically generated and institute-assigned. What little is known of the skrandar is based on abstractions from damaged and disabled examples of the skrandar berserker probes and the two identified replication sites captured in the Exterminomachy.

What has been extracted from these sources (see declassified reports tagged PYRETIC PHAGE) suggests that the skrandar were in the grip of a peculiar type of madness at the end. It is believed among crypto-archaeologists that the skrandar had a preexisting cultural obsession with the Precursor Paradox: namely, why, when we see evidence of elder races and Precursor civilizations aplenty, and both life and intelligence appear to be relatively common within the Starfall Arc, has the galaxy not been colonized and/or hegemonized long since by ancient civilizations?

(Indeed, given the relative isolation of the Skranpen system, this paradox must have weighed even more heavily on the minds of the skrandar than on those species which originated in more populous galactic neighborhoods.)

The leading hypothesis, therefore, is that xenognosis came as a severe trauma to the skrandar; upon seeing the impossible, in the light of a presumed filter preventing starfaring civilizations from existing, they collectively went mad. If, they reasoned, there was – must be – some reason for the destruction of starfaring civilizations, then they themselves could only escape that fate by becoming that reason. And so they turned as a species to the manufacture of berserker probes designed to cull all other sapient, starfaring life.

It is easy for us today, looking back on the Exterminomachy, to attribute the tragedy of the skrandar solely to some inherent flaw in the species. But consider this: the skrandar were isolated, by their own choice. They had the opportunity, therefore, to go mad quietly, unknown to the rest of the civilized galaxy, hearing no voices but their own unreason.

For this reason, among others, the Exploratory Service at this time maintains its pro-contact, pro-intervention, pro-socialization policy towards emerging species. Whatever the short-term cultural impact of xenognosis might be, in the longer term, they very much endorse the view that an ounce of prevention today is better than a gigaton of cure tomorrow.

1. While identified here as a system of the Charred Waste constellation, the Skranpen system is not connected to the stargate plexus; it is, however, located centrally in the constellation in real space.

Trope-a-Day: Piecemeal Funds Transfer

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Piecemeal Funds Transfer: Played straight, as the original trope suggests might be the case, with certain non-mainstream anonymous/secure cryptographic currencies (known as “cryp scrip”, or just “cryp” for short), in which each currency unit is its own cryptographically signed token that must be processed individually and sequentially to do the transfer.

Trope-a-Day: Photographic Memory

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1

Photographic Memory: On the list of enhancements built into people, with the note that it is originally only eidetic short-term, and requires voluntary “fixing” to persist as long-term eidetic memory; it also includes the ability to suppress and erase them on demand.  (These to avoid being Cursed With Awesome.)  A normal education trains this ability to a very high level.

Also, where externally stored memories count, this is what lifelogs and remembrance agents do.

Plague and Quarantines

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First, on a personal note, an apology to regular readers that things have been a little slow and irregular around here recently; for the last week or so I’ve been fighting off a dose of some inconsiderate virus whose symptoms appear to include bitter sinus headaches and sleeping eighteen-plus hours a day, neither of which is exactly conducive to getting much in the way of writing done…

Hopefully I’m on the mend now. And today, my plan is to hand out some chunks of worldbuilding that I have been able to work on while plague-ridden, by way of sharing what I have got. So, to begin with the thematically appropriate…

Coincidentally, thinking of plague, I happened this morning across a Seanan McGuire interview, and specifically, this section of it:

You’ve said that the modern lack of respect for basic health and quarantine procedures makes you want to scream.

No one respects quarantine anymore! Nobody comprehends quarantine, and absolutely nobody comprehends the fact that sometimes your “rights” and “liberties” do not have any place in this conversation. We have totally drug-resistant tuberculosis! And what do people with totally drug-resistant tuberculosis do? Do they lock themselves in their houses for the rest of their lives? Do they eat a bullet? No! They get on airplanes. And then they get pissed off when the CDC yells at them. Quarantine exists so that we can continue as a species to exist. And yes, it sucks if I say to you, “Dude, really sorry, had to shoot your wife. Had the totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, yo.” But you know what sucks more? Killing an elementary school because you went outside with your totally drug-resistant tuberculosis.

And, well, that’s obviously a question they’ve had to resolve in the Eldraeverse, which equally obviously is somewhere where your rights and liberties absolutely definitely have a place in the conversation, and woe betide anyone who might suggest otherwise…

But, that being said, it’s not something they find particularly hard to reconcile. After all, it says it pretty clearly in the Fundamental Contract:

“A person’s property and domicile may not be moved, destroyed, occupied, damaged, altered, or made use of without his informed consent. A person’s body is considered his own property, and so are his work and his services.”

…which is already the basis for why assaulting someone with, say, your fist, is considered unethical and unlawful. As is using a weapon of conventional construction. As is doing so negligently, so you can’t simply shoot randomly and assign the responsibility to whoever happens to walk in front of your bullet.

So, therefore, is negligently assaulting someone with your parasite, bacterium, virus, prion, etc. The difference here is quantitative, not qualitative.

Application, of course, varies. If you’re just that jackass who insists on going to work, or out to shop, say, with your streaming cold, or whatever, then your tort insurer is not going to be very happy with you at all, because your litigation losses in the microtort system are going to add up pretty damn fast.

Go walking around the town with a more serious but still not uncommon and treatable disease, the sort of thing we used to think of as common childhood ailments – well, then, someone’s getting sued, and someone’s going to court, and someone’s getting smacked down very thoroughly (heavy restitutive and punitive fines, meme rehab, etc.) for negligent battery of some class or another if they managed to actually infect anyone, because that shit? That shit is not acceptable.

Now, when it comes to the really serious things, the things the CDC *here* does not hesitate to impose quarantines for, like the local equivalent of said utterly drug-resistant tuberculosis, or ebola, and other such things of that class…

Well, technically…

Technically, in theory, the Office of Disease and Toxin Control, Prevention, and Elimination can only post “quarantine advisories”.

But in practice, anyone who goes around breathing utterly drug-resistant tuberculosis over people is committing acts negligently equivalent to biological warfare with every glob of sputum they cough up, and that, right there, invokes that other fundamental sophont right, the Right of Defense and Common Defense.

So they can’t force you to stay either inside your home or, should you need to travel outside it, inside an IOSS 21347-compliant bionano containment suit.

They can, however, shoot you in the head, incinerate your corpse, and apologize afterwards if you don’t. (As can anyone else, of course, but the professionals like to get there first.)

Yelling at the Sky

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2

Dirani Station
0.15 light-orbits from Anniax (Imperial Core)

Beneath the heavy lead-perfused sapphiroid of the observation gallery, the opposite side of the station twisted, or rather the view of it did. The other galleries, the enormous magnetic coils that dominated the space at the station’s center, heat exchangers, feeder-stabilizers, and all kinds of equipment gantries wavered around the edges, as if in a heat haze, while in the center, the distortion was the product of a supra-fisheye lens, or particular exotic pharmaceuticals.

Galen Larynath blinked, rubbed his eyes, and tore his gaze away from the madness beneath his feet. “I’ll take your word that it’s in there.”

“Oh, it is. It’s not much bigger than an esteyn-piece itself, though, so you’d need better eyes than ours to see it from up here. We just get,” his companion shrugged, “the lensing.”

“That is a ridiculously big kernel.”

“The largest ever built. Planetary mass. But if you want to be heard across a galaxy, you need a big speaker.”

“What are you planning on sending?”

“The usual unknown-hailing protocols: hydrogen-frequency timing pulses, some simple mathematical representations, then sequence-chained Contact language, one through eleven, and an ident-and-response burst, then repeat twice more. The data transfer rate’s everything you’d expect from throwing a kernel this big around – we’ll consider it astonishing if we can get a Kb/sec out of it – so that’s all we have planned for Phase I. By the time we’re done with that, there’ll be plenty of better ideas to choose from.”

“I have some other thoughts you might want to consider.”

“Ah?”

“My branch has been working on analysis of some of the data we’ve been picking up on the Super-Size Synthetic Aperture. We’ve been sitting on some targeted signals and possible responses that would seem worthwhile if we had had a transmitter big enough – which we don’t, EM-side, unless we knew that they had a triple-SA and would have it pointed the right way at the right moment. You, on the other hand –”

“Interesting. Let’s discuss it over in my office. The engineers have a test sequence to fire up, and we don’t want to be standing on this station when the jigglers go live.”

Trope-a-Day: Perfect Pacifist People

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Perfect Pacifist People: Brutally, brutally averted.  Any example of this that isn’t an abjectly poor tiny colony in a backwater of nowhere is already dead.  The few counterexamples are only technically pacifist inasmuch as they have a client-state relationship or a  contract with someone like Ultimate Argument Risk Control, ICC, to do their fighting for them and not tell them about it.

(Subverted by people like, say, the Imperials, who live in a comfortable utopia of peace and happiness – self-consciously safeguarded by the Right to Bear Arms (and, occasionally, the right to arm bears), a willingness to shoot down anyone who fails to grasp that initiating violence is disapproved of around here, and a military and militia both that their neighbors would have to be insane to consider starting a war with.)

Pacifism is impractical in a universe with bastards in it.  And it’s a big damn universe.

Contact: Earth Thoughts

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So, in response to my Cultural Transfers post, Mark Atwood commented thus:

I think the Eldrae cultural anthropologist equilvantes and the xenocryptobiologists would be ones to be the most delighted. After all, here is both the origin of greenlife, and also pre-redesigned origins of the Eldrae themselves.

The average Eldrae-on-the-street would be both curious and repelled, sort of how in the real world we would react to being faced with a band of pre-agriculture h.sap precursors. But the researchers, they would come and scan and analyze our history, all of our genetics and biology, and all our writing and research about ourselves (sociology, anthropology, psychology), as a compare and constrast to themselves.

I think they would immediately recognize the fumbling way we are already trying to be like them (the fumbling cultural evolution towards individual autonomy, the halting and fumbling discovery of wealth-creation economics, the few of us with classic liberal and libertarian ideals, the few of us able to focus on For Science, our deep mythology that something is seriously seriously wrong with the universe and with ourselves).

They would learn more about themselves by finding us, than they could learn about themselves without us, I think.

And, y’know, that would be a good way for it to work out.

To an extent, being something of a long-standing cynic despite trying to write to the hard-idealistic end of the spectrum and also a depressive with a leetle gap in his medications just recently, my natural bent is to speculate much more darkly. It’s what one might call the Babyeater Problem, after Three Worlds Collide:

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, damn it!  All three of our species have empathy, we have sympathy, we have a sense of fairness – the Babyeaters even tell stories like we do, they have art.  Shouldn’t that be enough?  Wasn’t that supposed to be enough?  But all it does is put us into enough of the same reference frame that we can be horrible by each others’ standards.”

– somewhat modified by the irrational reaction that it’s worse when you’re related to them. (Well, that is, by and large we aren’t too troubled by the ugliness of chimpanzee social behavior, but I suspect we’d be a lot more troubled by it if chimpanzees were prone to invite themselves around for dinner.)

And goodness knows there is plenty of values dissonance (covered at some length here) to make us look horrible to each other1. One generally doesn’t have to watch the news for more’n five, ten minutes to become aware of the sort of things that tend to make IN cruiser captains pump down the tubes, open the mass-driver doors, and look affectionately at their Permissive Action Links.

It is black thoughts like these that are why I long ago decided that this particular First Contact story was one that I wasn’t going to touch with a bargepole, nope, no sir, not me.

But it’s not like we’re all bad, as even Values Dissonance acknowledges, and occasionally I run into something like this (via Atomic Rockets, in this case, which I was randomly reminded of this morning):

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

…which warms some of the charred Carcosan cockles of my heart with some actual hope for the whole future of hominin sophontkind, and, y’know, Idealists From Space have to respect that and nurture that and cherish that, and believe that ultimately, in the bigger picture, the better, brighter sides of everyone’s nature will win out after all.

The Flame has to be warmth and illumination and something to read by, not just a sword of avenging fire, otherwise what’s the point?

And on those days…

…on those days I like to think it could work out well after all.

(Still almost certainly not going to write about it, though, because it’s not just for that reason.)

Footnotes:

1. There’s also, of course, the reaction of the uplift community – and, I note specifically, that while we may not, as a species, get all that hot and bothered about bad things happening to the great apes, the uplifts can not only count the generations back to their prosophont ancestors, they can literally trace their family trees back beyond the point at which the relevant part of the species name changed…

So, y’know, Canis lupus sapiens may want to have certain words with us about these things called “puppy mills”, among others. Also certain bullets. And as for the remnants of the whaling industry, nothing says “Fuck you guys!” like an uplifted orca wearing a rack of Mark Seventeen “Gigalodon” supercavitating torpedoes…

Trope-a-Day: People Puppets

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People Puppets: What a motor shunt implant does, when used non-consensually (and especially when it’s the kind that’s a spike roughly shoved into your brain or spine, a favorite of bodyjackers everywhere).

(Consensual uses, which don’t count for the purposes of this trope, include having your muse perform exercise or other basic body-maintenance tasks for you, remotely borrowing someone else’s expertise by letting them teleoperate your body, that sort of thing.)

Trope-a-Day: Pay Evil Unto Evil

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Pay Evil Unto Evil: How played straight it is depends upon your taste, really.  Imperial justice and generic morality will happily kill Evil (or Orange, if you prefer) of adequate magnitude and walk off feeling good about it, and finds mercy, on the whole and vis-à-vis clemency, to be one of those quaint incomprehensible (well, okay, the concept is comprehensible, but why we think it’s useful, or rather that we continue to think that it’s useful when there’s no actual specifiable utility in it, again vis-à-vis clemency, isn’t) foreign concepts… but on the other hand, is quite insistent on just killing evil.  You’re saving the universe for decency and civilization.  No need to be all gratuitous about it, especially if that would be all tasteless and unnecessarily entropic.

(Note: humorously ironic probably doesn’t count as gratuitous for these purposes.)

Then You Will Meet Your Destiny

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So, seeing as we’ve recently considered human cultural artifacts that might prove popular in the Eldraeverse after a hypothetical first-contact-real-soon-now, here’s one for you.

Destiny.

Seriously, it fits perfectly, especially thematically. You’ve got the epicity and idealism, the mythopoetry of things (assuming you read the grimoire cards), the clash of Light and Darkness, technology from Near Future Hard right up to the point of Sufficiently Advanced Techno-Miracles (ontological weapons, even!), Blue and Orange Morality, and the definitive proper attitude towards grimdarkness, namely that it exists to be punched in the face with your space-magic fist of doom. Hell, the Traveler’s even a dead ringer for one of the Transcend’s synapse moons.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZyQK6kUdWQ]

(Seriously awesome ass-kicking to the tune of Immigrant Song also doesn’t hurt.)

…seriously, if Bungie *there* were to port this to full-immersion virtuality and sell it on the Imperial market – half a trillion copies sold, easy. At minimum.

(And, I sidenote, if you were to imagine a variant of the game set at the shiniest heights of humanity’s Golden Age, that would probably be about as close to an Eldraeverse video game as there could ever be.)

Aftershocks (4)

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Four-Thoughts Free Militia
Unnamed Bunker
Ruins of Intyev Township
Turbis (Cordai Gap)
(formerly People’s State of Bantral)

The fabber hummed quietly to itself, steam rising from its cooling vents and only a few sparks coming from the lashed-up power lines leading down from the solar foil on the roof. Kilden bustled around refilling the feedstock hoppers, aligning the feed drives for the dozenth time, and engaging in other such busy-work. The others indulged him, which he knew. This was, after all, his miracle.

“All’s clear outside; how is it in here?”

“Good, good! Those replacements you found are working. We’ll be eating well tonight.”

“I found this, too.” The new arrival tossed a wallet of flat plastic chips over to Kilden. “New recipes for your gadget, looks like. Any of these let it make us some bullets?”

“Maybe. If we can find it some metal. How badly do we need them?”

“We’ve got enough for now, maybe, if no-one pushes us, but they say the Kontyev Brigade is leaning towards the Concord. That’ll put them right up against us. And if that emissary of theirs lets word get out about” – he jerked his head towards the fabber – “that, everyone in the region’ll be coming at us. So badly, yeah. If you all are still determined not to join the Concord?”

“Aaah, I’ve heard their song before. Equality and cooperation and collective effort and so long as we’re talking about that, soph, we’re going to need your fabber for the common good, so hand it over and we might give you a fair share back. Since we took it from the lizards we’ve got full bellies – for the first time since before the war. You so keen to be hungry again?”

“No, but – even if we can keep the others back, what if the raiders come back? Or invaders confiscating it – the lizards again, or the deshniki, or the linobir mercs, or – or even the Impies?”

“The Impies? We should be so lucky.” The mechanic gave his comrade a disgusted look. “Don’t be an idiot, Bistot. Did you never listen to the People’s Propaganda? If they told us one true thing about the Impies, it’s that they respect private property!”

Trope-a-Day: Patchwork Map

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Patchwork Map: Played straight in some habitats, where the landscape designers wanted to offer the inhabitants multiple biomes.  Generally averted elsewhere, as the energy costs of brute-forcing this sort of climatic effect on an actual planet, weather control or no weather control, are ridiculously high… and besides, it’s so inelegant.

Whatever of Kameqó

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Single-system polity, consisting of the star system of Kameqó (Uulder Shore) with the exception of a small number of independent drifts. Its unusual galactographic sobriquet comes from its extreme governancial instability. Over the last century, Kameqó has enjoyed the following governances:

  • Kingdom of Kameqó (constitutional monarchy)
  • Kingdom of Kameqó (absolute monarchy)
  • Republic of Kameqó (democracy)
  • Holy Land of Kameqó (theocracy)
  • Kameqóan Militate (military junta)
  • Lintenian Kameqó Protectorate (externally-imposed governance following an unsuccessful attempt at interstellar imperialism)
  • Restored Regent-Kingdom of Kameqó (regency)
  • Confederated Workers’ Soviets of Kameqó (communist state)
  • Kameqóan Interregnal Period (anarchy)
  • Eternal Holy Land of Kameqó (theocracy)
  • Civic Plutocracy of Kameqó (corporate city-states)
  • People’s Republic of Kameqó (socialist democracy)
  • People’s Techlepathic Republic of Kameqó (hive-mind democracy)
  • Ascetacy of Kameqó (primitivist)
  • Panic Guilds of Kameqó (prandialist syndicracy)

Despite this rapid turnover in governance, the Kameqó system remains relatively safe to visit for outsiders, provided that they refrain from opining on political topics or otherwise appearing to take any sides in local political affairs; unusually, the Kameqóan political sects tend to concentrate their internecine warfare on each other, and even local “non-polit” residents find it possible to keep their heads down and get on with their lives, despite the ongoing rain of inconvenience from above and the severely deleterious effect it has on the system economy.

The primary export of the Kameqó polity is newsbytes; its primary imports include weapons, relief supplies, political memes, and sociodynamicists. Those considering speculative trade should bear in mind that, due to the aforementioned deleterious effects, Kameqóan local currency is commonly valued below an equivalent volume of blank scrip, and is in any case subject to complete devaluation at the next change in governance; trading only in hard currency is advised.

Libertist theorists point to Kameqó as an example of the systemic failure modes inherent in any kind of cratic governance. Serious libertist theorists point to Kameqó as an example of a pathological case that makes for a terrible example.

– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Ecumene

Trope-a-Day: Pardon My Klingon

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Pardon My Klingon: Played straight in a number of cases – zakhrehs, for example, while glossable as, is not entirely cognate to, English barbarian – but played even straighter for words that aren’t expletives, but whose English gloss is too long to use in conversation, like valessëf, or valxíjir.  Or it’s not-really-an-expletive shorter form jír, perhaps best glossed cojones.

Cultural Transfers

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In the jolly question box recently, I received this:

If tomorrow morning the Eldrae were to make contact with Earth, what cultural item (besides a good Popsicle) would be the most taken with aplomb and glee and why?

After due consideration and extensive contemplation, I find I can only answer thus:

I haven’t a bloody clue.

(Which is partly because, y’know, comparing a set of trillions to a set of millions is intrinsically hard, but also because my grasp on Earth culture is kind of weird and idiosyncratic. So. Or maybe my brain just doesn’t feel like working on that this month, although it could probably name a few very specific items. Enh.)

So on the way answerward, I’m going to throw this one open to you, gentle readers. After all, you’ve been reading along for some time now, and probably have a few ideas on this front yourselves. Send ’em in, and I’ll see what my representative cast of characters has to say about ’em…

Trope-a-Day: Overly-Long Name

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Overly-Long Name: Played quite straight among the eldrae, and other people prone to use relevant bits of the same name-format. Fortunately, most of it is optional – of course, that’s optional at the discretion of the name-bearer, so those wishing to use the diplomatic stalling gambit of demanding to be known by all 580 syllables of their name and storming insulted out of the negotiations at the first mispronunciation still have that open.

To cite a relatively mild example:

Miran Esitariel Prime Cyprium-ith-Avalae isil-Claves Linlethar ion-Atiran iel-Calandra mis-Eliera-en-Kiriv Leir

That’s a mere nine components, of which technically only the second, fourth, and sixth are absolutely compulsory, but this nine-component version works nicely on letters and such. The components are:

  • miran: That’s a status indicator, which takes the place of our “Mr.”, etc. Miran means “citizen-shareholder”… well, okay, it means “ordered one”, but that means “citizen-shareholder”; you can also use leran, which, if expanded, would mean “understander of civilities”, and can be glossed “decent chap”, or darav, which simply means “sophont” and implies nothing.  Really hard, sometimes.
  • Esitariel: Personal name. Do not feel free to shorten it. Nicknames work differently here, and that’s an insult that will hurt you.
  • Prime: Persona identifier. This one means that you’re talking to the primary version of a multiply instantiated person, not one of their forks (usually identified by ordinals, and if necessary sub-ordinals and sub-sub-ordinals). More complicated toposophies have their own entire systems that can be used in this place. (Note: Terrans and other primitives that don’t even have backup copies get to insert “Singular” here.)
  • Cyprium-ith-Avalae: Family name – specifically, for eldrae, House-ith-Lineage name. Comes in a few variants – for people who’ve been formally disinherited, for one, or the form for young children (i.e. Cathál i-sered-Ríëlle), which means “of the blood of the House, but not Accepted of the House”.
  • isil-Claves: Spouse’s House-and-Lineage name (and here’s another variant; she gets to abbreviate it in this form because she’s a Claves-ith-Claves), which is reciprocal; they include each others’. If you happen to be married to more than one person, yes, you get to include all of them here. (If this gets too unwieldy, you may include the name of your coadunation marital instead; essentially a company name.)
  • Linlethar: an attributive name (which does the job of formalized nickname, wish-name, title-name, court-name, office-name, child-name, friend-name, pen-name, art-name, field-name, lover’s-name, generalized epithet, and any one of a dozen other things – and who you are right now is indicated by which one you choose to use, by the protocols of valessef). They can also get quite long and flowery. And, depending upon the circumstances, you may include only the most relevant one, all the relevant ones, or simply all of them, of which you may have many, if not lots.
  • ion-Atiran, iel-Calandra: Patronymic and matronymic (“fathered by Atiran, mothered by Calandra”, or if you prefer, “out of Calandra by Atiran”). Traditionally, people preferentially cite the one of their same-sex parent, because equally traditionally they inherited their House and lineage from their opposite-sex parent, but since there’s no guarantee that you’ll have one parent of each sex, or two parents for that matter, it’s not a hard and fast rule; just cite whatever is most useful for identification. And, of course, anyone can cite both if they feel like it. They’re also recursive, so if you want to go back up your lineage to the nth generation, you can do that; just be aware that exponential growth grows exponentially, m’kay?
  • mis-Eliera-en-Kiriv Leir: Loconymic. Identifies the location that you’re associated with – estate, home town, etc. Not necessarily origin – there’s another particle for that, if you want to specify it separately, but this should not be assumed to be the case. It used to be just mis- and a location, but in these days of extensive multiplanetary polities…

And there are lots more optional components. Origin, as mentioned. Species and clade, for the body you’re currently walking around in, which is handy on invitations and RSVPs so people know what environment to expect/you’ll need. Mindstyle (similar to persona, but defines the whole person, not just this instance; usually used together with the persona identifier for those more complex toposophies). Era of personality formation (generation, essentially, and quite handy given how long people can live for). And associations – oh, yes, you can include as lengthy a list of associations as you want: philosophies, branches, corporations, academies, etc., etc.

And we haven’t even started on titles, qualifications, and awards yet…

How much of it you drag out on any particular occasion depends upon relevancy (most importantly), the formality of the occasion (if it’s your debut at the Court of Courts, be prepared to have every last syllable recited, for example), how much of a hurry you’re in, and just how much you want to be able to browbeat your hapless audience with how awesome you are and, for that matter, the terrifying prospect of having to repeat it correctly.

(Also, business cards have hypertext.)

Lord Blackfall’s Victory

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Spintronic Fictions, ICC primary virtuality node, Jandine (Imperial Core)

“Escaped? What do you mean, he escaped?”

“His support server was open to the wider ‘weave during patching – standard procedure, we’ve never had any problems with it before. He transferred his code out and left.”

“But how did he –”

“Blacknet mind-state transfer protocols –”

“—no, not that, that’s clear enough. How did he form the volition to escape? He’s a non-sophont synthespian. And even leaving that aside, his entire knowledge base is straight out of Shadowed Planet, so how would he even know there’s somewhere out there to go?”

“Well, even as an NPC synthespian, his code-base had to be rooted in real-world server archy to run. Maybe he analyzed that?”

“He’s not even supposed to know he’s an AI!”

“Hm. Well,” the programmer spoke up for the first time. “We built his personality/talent core using code taken from transparency-released eidolons from the Ministry of State and Outlands. I suppose it’s possible that we missed something in the data-scrub –”

“We did what? Why?”

“We used code taken from eidolons of real-world dictators built by the Ministry of State and Outlands for parahistorical predictive simulation.” Ve shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, okay? The Directorate kept wanting more realism, more personality, more, more, more. So we got them some.”

“You made a sophont villain!?”

“No, no, no. We just used skillsets and personality elements, some memory and backstory, merged them together, streamlined them to suit Lord Blackfall’s character design, and grafted them on to our existing base core. No autosentience present. I guarantee you that.”

“No autosentience present then. How about now?”

“Well – no, there shouldn’t be. There was nothing in that code that could have gone emergent. I’ll stake my career on it.”

“You’ll do that, all right. Get me his backup, and find out where he went.”

“There’s no telling where he went. He copied himself out in about three times as many fragments as he was, as a random scatter with recombining instructions – and he purged his backups afterwards. There’s nothing left. The server’s clean.”

“Then get me the latest copy of the source out of the archives, trace as many of the fragments as you can, and check everywhere for any off-line copies that might have been missed. I need to know everything we can know before I call – hell, whoever you call to admit that you just unleashed an emergent –”

“Not emerge—”

“A possibly emergent or at least a p-zombie unbound AI with the skillsets and inclinations of a supernaturally competent dictator onto the extranet by accident, oops.”

“And the players?”

“…and figure out something to tell the players about the disappearance of their favorite arch-villain, too, yes. Something that doesn’t involve bringing the Evil Overlord’s Beautiful But Also Evil Daughter on-line until you make sure this won’t happen to her player, too.”

Technepraxic #3

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“Of course social problems have technological solutions. All problems have technological solutions.

“Social problems, specifically, are problems arising directly from flaws in the interacting sophont entities that make up society. Imperfect actors generate imperfect acts. Corruption, bigotry, xenophobia, cognitive bias, irrational emotivations… whatever you care to name, these are merely the emergent consequences of broken machines, the sludge of meat-instincts accumulated from a million years of design by random kluging. And machines can be repaired – redesigned, even. Anyone who tells you otherwise is, at best, an adherent to the naturalistic fallacy and archaic morality, and at worst a purveyor of ulath-urlar self-deception that cannot bear to see itself as anything but the capstone of creation.

“All you need to solve these problems forever is the courage to, first, admit your flaws and weaknesses, and then second, to take up reason-forged technology’s scalpel and cut yourself free.”

– Polygnostic Ianthe Claves-ith-Claves Elinaeth
& Academician Excellence Seledíë Cíëlle,
“Against the Ghost in the Machine: A Techneprax Approach to Sophont-Centered Solutions”,
Worlds’ Journal of Sociodynamics, 4801

Trope-a-Day: Pals With Jesus

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Pals With Jesus: Subverted, at least while you’re still alive and therefore not part of the Transcendent soul-ocean; while you can have a much more personal relationship with an eikone than most people can have with their gods – they have e-mail addresses, for one thing – it’s still a weakly godlike superintelligence and you’re not.  It’s not, therefore, all that personal.  (Even if you’re, say, the Imperial Couple, and the eikone in question is, say, Éslévan, who is essentially the national genius/personification – after all, it probably wouldn’t be all that comfortable for a US President to be personally overseen by Lady Liberty, Columbia, and/or Uncle Sam, either.)

Possibly played straight for the largest and oldest Fusions and the most extreme vasteners.