Month: July 2015

Trope-a-Day: Hard Light

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Hard Light: Not strictly speaking.

What there is is the ontotechnological extrapolation of photonic molecules, quantum wells, programmable matter, and various other cutting-edge concepts until they resemble something like the reality graphics (and, indeed, the Eldraeverse calls them reality graphics) seen in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep or the “false matter” seen in Greg Bear’s Anvil of Stars. In short: a way of creating projections that look and feel, so far as the universe is concerned, just like actual matter of whatever properties you feel like projecting.

(Although, unlike the shipbuilders of Anvil of Stars, Imperial engineers by and large prefer not to build starship hulls or other vital permanent structures from matter that disappears/decays when the projector is turned off…)

Trope-a-Day: Privately Owned Society

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Privately Owned Society: In what is now the Empire, long ago. Or now. Could go either way.

In its purest form, in the years immediately following the Drowning of the People. After deciding that democracy amounted to substituting a parade of replaceable jackasses for the old permanent jackasses on the thrones of tyranny – and subsequently tossing the first candidates for the position off a 400′ waterfall – society was indeed privately owned, there not being anything non-“private” left in the world. Law and contract enforcement was entrusted to for-hire and eleemosynary PPLs, justice and arbitration left in the hands of equally private deemsters, and pretty much every other necessary function that people not familiar with the theory of this sort of thing are now thinking of handled by one or another for-profit, non-profit, or cooperative (yes, kids, an internally syndicalist syndicate is every bit as much a free-market entity as a megacorporation) group.

Things evolved somewhat over the centuries, with various PPLs forming complex coordinating superstructure organizations out of efficiency, evolving towards de facto pseudo-monopoly in some areas, and for similar reasons ending up purchasing sovereign rights – which in Imperial parlance are a very limited subset of the bundle of property rights attached to real property, nowhere near as generous as what we would claim them to be on Earth – from their subscribers. These superstructures were, through evolution, the basis of the Old Empires and other pre-Imperial polities of Eliéra, and eventually for the Empire itself.

But is that a move away from a Privately Owned Society?

Well, the obvious answer is that the citizen-shareholders obviously do own the Empire and all its appurtenances. That’s what the shareholders part means. Hell, they can even dissolve it any time they like.

But a more sophisticated answer would be that the Drowning of the People marked a divergence point from our history in that it pretty much killed off all forms of legitimacy, governmentally speaking, as we use the term. You can look down pretty much every form of legitimacy/legitimate government mentioned in that Wikipedia article, and they’ve got a multi-thousand-year old philosophical tradition explaining how that’s a quaint slaver’s rationalization. You can’t legitimize the coercion of the non-consenting no matter how much bullshit you spread on it.

The only source of “legitimacy”, they would claim, is the free consent and contract of the individual, and that’s what they have. Their Divine Majesties’ Governance derives all of its power from literally every single Imperial citizen-shareholder having contracted its services – in the areas of law and contract enforcement, externality management, and some minor coordination functions – and clicked through to accept the terms and conditions of service – and, as Imperials point out laboriously to those missing the point, it has absolutely no existence apart from the sum of people who follow said service agreement…

(And, okay, the volume in which they own the purchased sovereign rights mentioned above. But even tenuous as they are, there’s an entire political faction – the Dissolutionist Tendency – which exists to argue that they should never have got into volume-management in the first place and should sell said rights right back to the citizen-shareholders.)

…and they have the seals and signatures on file to prove that, dammit.

All the terminology and practices reflect this. There’s no tax, for example, because the governance literally does not have the power to tax. All it can do is charge a Service Fee, and that service fee is strictly defined in the contract. And if you don’t pay, it’s not some special criminal offense of “tax evasion” with all manner of special investigatory powers and punishments attached; it’s plain old breach of contract.

Privately owned enough for you?

To Code The Mind Of God

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Academician Lylvíëve Lochran-ith-Lochran’s concept of ambition, despite her otherwise excellent presentation of the near-term possibilities of Information Physics, remains lacking.

Recompiling the universe to remove its more irritating constraints is a project suitable for those of only moderate ambition. But consider: the implications of idestelté, of universe as processor, is that the physicality we reside in is neither more nor less than a computable simulation space, and all physical substrates within it, therefore, simulations.

Consider further: It is established that physics – in the known regions within the brane – is invariant over entropy. The implication of this is that the substrate implementing physics is not subject to entropy as we presently define it, and thus possesses extensions into the plenum. (No data is available at this time concerning possible entropy-analogs operative in these higher-order spaces, perceptible only along non-t axes, for obvious reasons.) This could, indeed, potentially be the entropic escape method long sought after by the Select Committee on Long-Range Planning.

The proper path, therefore, for the exceptionally ambitious is to achieve transcendence of our simulated substrate by transferring our – the Transcend’s – cognitive operations directly into the fundamental substrate. To, if you will, become the universe’s physics, the laws and legislators of reality, and convert weakly godlike superintelligence directly into its strongly godlike counterpart; ultimate apotheosis.

This, and this alone, I submit to you, is an aeonic vision worthy of the sophonts gathered here today.

– Academician Excellence Quor Marukanin,
129-era supergoal planning debate,
held at Axiom, Resplendent Exponential Vector (Imperial Core)

Trope-a-Day: Private Military Contractor

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Private Military Contractors: Lots of them, especially since the Laws and Customs of War in the Eldraeverse recognize mercenaries as legitimate combatants (it should be noted that the Imperial sense of honor takes no issue with fighting for money as long as you stay bought; loyalty to one’s contract is still loyalty, savvy?), and there isn’t any particular rule about them only being able to sell their services to their host polity, or indeed, only to a polity, either.

The grandmother of them all, of course, is the Mega Corp Ultimate Argument Risk Control, ICC, which both supplies its own military and security forces, and brokers the services of other mercenary companies.  It can supply everything from local security (down to bouncers), public police services, regular mercenary companies (up to army-sized), privateer starships, naval task forces, and even strategic defense solutions.

But there are plenty of smaller (but still large enough to be effective – see NGO Superpower) mercenary outfits around, especially out in the Expansion Regions.  If you need to hire some force, you will have no trouble finding someone to sell it to you.

Oh, yes, and they’re called mercenaries. We don’t do euphemisms.

The Eleventh Planet?

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(In honor of current events, here, have a Pluto-analog…)

They say one is the loneliest number, but eleven is the loneliest planet. Well, it’s not a planet as such. Múrcár is, galactographically, a gelidean-class planetesimal, massing 1.7 x 1022 kg, and orbiting well beyond the system snowline at an average of 41 au.

This terminological technicality is a great relief to the Imperial Grand Survey’s Board of Nomenclature, since at aphelion, Múrcár’s orbit reaches 56 au from Lumenna, at the far outer edge of Senna’s Belt. Since the stars of the Lumenna-Súnáris System have only a 125 au separation at closest approach, the height of deep summer, they have been known to swap Sennan objects back and forth at this time; and while it has not yet been observed, astronomers believe that Múrcár’s orbit is vulnerable to this phenomenon when conditions are right. And thus the nomenclaturists would prefer, in this special case, not to have to rule definitively that Múrcár is Lumenna XI when it might be Súnáris X only a matter of mere millennia later.

The above, unfortunately, is the most interesting thing that can be said about Múrcár specifically. It is in virtually all ways a typical gelidean-class Sennan object, composed largely of ices (primarily water ice, with a surface admixture of methane, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen ice) surrounding a core of silicaceous material; it is merely the largest – and first discovered – of the objects in Senna’s Belt.

Múrcár was discovered in 1843 by Senna Marasi, an astronomer at the Starspike, during a fortuitous transit of Súnáris. While it was considered for a while the eleventh planet of the Lumenna system, further studies of the region soon showed other bodies, albeit smaller, to also exist there, similar to the e’Luminiaren. The first close-up images of Múrcár were obtained in 2099, in a fly-by by the Peregrine Ardent probe, and it was first visited in 2139, at which time a lander from Outward Bound confirmed much of the speculation about its surface conditions. The first sophont landing did not take place until 2409 (CSS Veiled In Darkness As A Gown), during an exploratory mission primarily focused upon the further-out bodies of the Shards.

Since then, Múrcár has remained essentially uninhabited. It has however, in its time, hosted:

  • A temporary home port and refueling station for comet herders during the ecopoesis of Talentar;
  • An astronomical observatory far from the traffic and noise of the inner system;
  • A monastery, “Emptiness Dome”, for the meditative Children of the Void sect, before the construction of their present home of Blackwatch Station in Almeä System;
  • A repository-vault for the Green Bytes data haven, which moved on due to Múrcár becoming too well known for their purposes;
  • The primary coordination point for the Outsystem Early Warning line, until it was obsoleted by newer technologies and placed far behind the Empire’s borders after the Reunification;
  • The observatory control center for the Barrascán Array (before its replacement by the Very Long Baseline Observer, itself replaced by the Super-Size Synthetic Aperture).
  • A fueling station for outbound lighthuggers of the now-largely-obsolete “snowball” type.

In the present day, however, Múrcár hosts only a single automated, unstaffed, habitat and fuel station, intended for emergency use. Múrcár also serves as a gathering place, market, and communications hub for the various hermits, fringers, and other darkfolk who make their homes in the far outer system, but this activity almost always takes place in Múrcár near space, rather than on the world itself.

– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Core Worlds

Trope-a-Day: Prison Ship

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Prison Ship: The Empire doesn’t use them as prisons – it finds the whole notion of prison really quite unspeakably barbaric – but lots of other polities have figured out the advantage of a prison surrounded in every dimension by a few million miles of vacuum.  And enabling the threat of letting the vacuum in for riot control.

The Empire has been known to use purpose-built prison ships for internment and POW camps in time of war, though – pointing out that they can make them very comfortable prison ships and not resort to harsh levels of security and discipline to prevent escape because, well, unless you can breathe vacuum, where are you going to go? The propulsion bus disconnected and left, the guards’ section is physically isolated and can’t be got to without taking a walk outside, and so on and so forth.

Meat Machines

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CS Drachensvard
holding position 120,000 miles from uncharted drift
Corfeth (Vanlir Edge) System

The sound of retching broke the silence on the bridge. Midshipman Lochran-ith-Lanth, currently manning the tactical/payload position. He’d already clamped his hand over his mouth by the time I glanced over at him, though, and got his reflexes shut down in only a second more. Good man, well trained.

Not that anyone could be blamed for throwing up, seeing this for the first time. Clavíë at Data Ops had penetrated the station’s network without breathing hard, and the images coming back from the internal sensors were enough to turn anyone’s stomach.

Slavery persists in backwater parts of the Periphery, and even the Expansion Regions, much to our embarrassment. But then, we’re the Imperial Navy, not Éjavóné Herself. We can’t vaporize everyone who deserves it all at once.

And everyone knows the reasons: sophont servants, flesh toys, test subjects, cannon fodder, pet victims, and so forth. This, though – this was a very distinct perversion, characteristic of where high technology met low.

After all, it takes a relatively high – and expensive – technology to weave the topological braids of a hard-state neural net processor, or to program an effective software emulation of all of its subtleties. It takes an advanced biotechnology to grow and educate a cortexture that can perform advanced cognitive tasks. But while it takes a firm grasp of sophotechnology to learn how to repurpose an existing neural network…

…it turns out that any transistor-stringing moron can actually do it.

Take a sophont. Preferably an intelligent one, and young and strong enough to survive the process for a long time. “Simplify” them – by which they mean remove any inconvenient limbs, or hair, or anything else not needed in their new role. Dose them up with catacinin, or some other mind-killer drug, and neural plasticizers, then saw off the top of their brain-case, insert the interface electrodes, and seal the hole with sterile plastic. Hook up the life-support system, and box them up. ‘No user serviceable parts inside.’ A week or so of imprinting, and you have a neural-net processor – worth ten-thousand gPt, maybe twenty-five kgAu in one of these backwaters. It’ll last maybe ten years before the flesh gives out, and it’s an order of magnitude cheaper than less ethically defective hardware, unfortunately.

“Communications from the station, Skipper. They – ah, they protest our unprovoked attack, and wish to offer surrender.”

“One response, Máris: ‘Dármódan xalakhassár hál!’ Mr. Lanth, load the primary with AMSM warhead.”

“Captain?”

“You heard me, Mr. Lanth.” At his shocked look, I continued. “There’s nothing that can be done for the ‘cargo’, son. Everyone over there to rescue’s had their brain pithed with a dull knife. The best we can do for them is make sure the ones who did this don’t do it to anyone else. Now: load primary with AMSM.”

“Aye, sir. I mean – aye-aye, sir.”

I tapped the view-mode switch, and watched as the exterior of the slaver station replaced the pitiful sight on the for’ard viewer.

“Primary loaded and standing by, sir,” he reported.

“Fire.”

Trope-a-Day: Pretext for War

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Pretext for War: Unfortunately, played straight more often than not in these decadent modern times when one is at least nominally supposed to try to solve ones’ differences via the Conclave of Galactic Polities, or the Galactic Trade Association, or some such.  The Imperial Ministry of State and Outlands, among others, feels a certain nostalgia for the good old days when would-be galactic warlords and interstellar imperialists would just come right out and announce that they were starting a War for Killing Those People and Taking Their Stuff, since at least it was honest and no-one had to pretend to take obvious bullshit seriously in the name of interstellar amity.

(I take this moment to note, relevantly, that bearing in mind the pointlessness of resource wars as mentioned back in No Blood For Phlebotinium and the impractical difficulty of interstellar invasions of anything but less developed colonies, most wars are fundamentally for reasons ideological, reasons prejudicial, or the interpolity equivalent of “Your Mom”.)

Trope-a-Day: Precursor Killers

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Precursor Killers: While not actually known with any certainty, it is generally believed that the Precursors were wiped out by… the Precursors.  (Being the lovely near-solipsists described in the previous trope, well, once they started interfering with each other’s whims, they just couldn’t cope with each other’s’ existence.  Splat.  There are other theories, but this is the leading one.)

…so far as the best-known, usually-referred-to-as Precursors go, anyway. Why there is a general lack of extant Precursors around is a whole other problem. Suggestions on a postcard, please, addressed to the Existential Threats PWG, codeword BERSERKER VOID.

ComicCon, For Unreal

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Reader JonS asks:

Is there a ComicCon-esque event in the Eldraeverse, and if so how good is the cosplay there?

(Has nothing to do with my wish to be at ComicCon, even WITH the crowds.)

Oh, definitely. (Almost certainly several: the Worlds are, after all, a big place, but I know for certain the Empire hosts one – given the cultural forms that exist there, it’s a definite, although I don’t know the details at this point and will be saving them for future use if inspiration strikes.)

And as for how good the cosplay is?

Well, remember this? And especially this?

Let’s just say they take their fandom seriously thereabouts. Even the relatively casual cosplayers may well start by visiting their local friendly genetic engineer…

Forgetting Is Mandatory

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ISE SECURITY ADVISORY 4420-116

RESTRICTED (INFRARED)

Note: This document replaces ISE Security Advisory 4112-11. It is applicable to personnel of all levels of the Imperial Service and Imperial Military Service, and to all external contractors of the Imperial Service and Imperial Military Service, and all other individuals whatsoever endorsed with a security clearance issued by the Central Vetting Office.

All personnel are reminded that, per clause XVIII of the revised Official Secrets Act, all codeword clearance information classified above SECRET (YELLOW) is considered highly sensitive, remains classified even when stored within the mind-state of cleared individuals, and may not be exported to regions outside Imperial volumes. All personnel containing such data are required to report for noetic redaction of such information before departing the Imperial core volume or other equivalently secure-graded volume, except when it falls under need-to-know for a particular field operation.

It should be noted that clause XVIII applies to transit as well as destination. Personnel travelling outside the Imperial core volume to reach distant volumes also graded as equivalently secure must report for noetic redaction of such information; arrangements will be made to transmit it separately to the destination volume or for it to accompany them in an approved secure data transport system.

Strict adherence to these protocols is more important than ever in the light of the increased SOPHINT efforts seen around the Worlds. A prepared Empire is a secure Empire!

Trope-a-Day: Precursors

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Precursors: Played straight – but not completely.  The species generally referred to as the Precursors got the name for having some of the most extensive local influence, and for being the species that made the eldrae, but in practice, they’re most notable for (a) being one of the oldest (but not the oldest) of the elder races, and (b) being not around any more, almost certainly through self-induced war-extinction.  Certainly not the first race to ever gain sophoncy in the galaxy; there’s plenty of evidence around of older species yet.

(Also, reputedly, near-solipsists who were literally incapable of conceiving that another entity’s opinion might actually matter, short of a major mental break.  This might just have something to do with why they aren’t around any more.)

Introduction: Moic

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(This is the first in a series of character introductions for my next planned longer work, working title “Trading Free”.)

Lairh hinGastref winced again at the sound of the raised voices emanating from the station manager’s office, and wished that his auditory palps weren’t quite so sensitive in the upper frequency ranges.

“Because you’re a gods-be-damned idiot, hinRykar, and your predecessor was an idiot, and both of you followed in an established tradition of decades of idiocy! It’s –”

A bellow of anger from within was abruptly cut off.

“Then try acting less like one. The smartest thing you did here was hiring me –”

“A lot of good it did me! I needed a miracle worker –”

“And you got one! But I can’t miracle without something to work with. I’ve kept this tin can running for a year waiting for you to come through with parts and funds for repairs, and you came through with nothing. Did you even try?”

“This station has a budget. It’s your job to work within it.”

“It’s my job to keep the systems that keep everyone on this station alive working, and I told you ten months ago that that wouldn’t fit in the damn budget. What did you –”

“I don’t have to answer to – get out of my office!”

“It’ll be a pleasure, hinRykar, yes, and your station too. You can have my resignation right now, and I’ll send you confirmation from dirtside.”

The doorway to the office hissed open, and hinGastref watched as a small round vehicle, its upper bowl crammed with a dozen hand-sized, furry bodies rolled out, pivoted, and came to a stop up against the side of his desk. One of them climbed up to the side of the bowl, pulled a data plug from what resembled a miniature toolbox, and jammed it into one of hinGastref’s data ports.

The communication screen on the wall – and presumably all over the station – lit up.

“Attention, residents. This is a priority message from Moic Fortybodies, former head of Station Engineering.”

“I’m about to get all forty of my tails off this death-trap, and I’d suggest you do the same. Attached to this message is my detailed technical report on all the maintenance your Station Manager is too gods-be-damned cheap to bother doing. You can ask him about that when he figures out how to override the lock on his office door –“

An enraged yell from within, on cue, suggested that he’d Just discovered that for himself.

“- but here’s the short list. The sectional air seals weren’t installed to spec, and are rotten. The fusion reactor shielding is three years overdue for replacement and patched with whatever we had handy. All the pipework is leaking, and if you didn’t know, maybe 40% of the entire damn station is pipework. All that moisture’s made the clut grow out of control down in the serviceways. Don’t ask about the chemicals they’ve been using to keep it out of public areas. Meanwhile, the wiring is full of undocumented ad-hoc fixes with scrapyard salvage. Oh, and the radiators are so pinpricked with micrometeoroid holes this place is pissing tons of volatiles every day.”

“I’ll see you at the descent pods.”

Trope-a-Day: Precious Puppies

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Precious Puppies: As a guide to just how straight the eldrae play this particular trope, even where their giant wardogs are concerned, it should be noted that under the list of special cases that is the Ungentlemanly Behavior Act (47, As Subsequently Revised), the consequences of literally kicking the dog are legally recognized as a type of suicide in every single Imperial jurisdiction.

(While there are some people who in private would admit that this constitutes Disproportionate Retribution even by the Empire’s, ah, generous standards for such, there is absolutely no-one willing to court the plummeting reputation score that would attach to anyone who suggested removing this provision, the puppy-hating bastard.  It’s a mélith thing; dogs give essentially infinite loyalty, so that’s what they get in return.)

((And, of course, this is also pretty much what started people off on the Immortagens For Everyone crusade in the first place…))

Trope-a-Day: Power Glows

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Well, I’m back from my holidays, in the same place as all my source material and, possibly most importantly, my big screens and comfortable writing chair.

Normal service should, therefore, be resumed as soon as possible.

Or tomorrow, anyway.

Power Glows: Technically, it doesn’t have to.  Regular vector-control effectors don’t produce light, they just quietly work, and those implanted ones used to create technological psychokinesis could do the same thing.

Of course, on one hand, it can’t be denied that shedding waste energy as photons outside the body is probably significantly more healthy than dumping it directly into the bloodstream as extra heat.

On the other hand, there are other places where it could equally well be dumped.

On the gripping hand, it looks awesome.  (And under the right circumstances, intimidating.)

And that’s that pretty much decided.

Trope-a-Day: Power Fist

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Power Fist: The cestus, yes; the spiked gauntlet, yes; the electro-zappy-glove, yes. The true power fist, however, as seen in Fallout, et. al., generally comes attached to a set of Powered Armor, or at least a power torso – in the interest of not ripping your arm off when you try to be Ms. Punchy – sorry, Veronica – or at least straining something quite badly.

(This rule is, of course, void for appropriately built cybershells.)

Trope-a-Day: Post Mortem Comeback

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Post Mortem Comeback: As in Dead Man Writing, the leftover personal and fiduciary AI systems, smart contracts, etc., left behind by the deceased are all still running, and since smart contracts aren’t automatically terminated by death, it’s not all that hard to make sure that some of your will still gets done.

Even on those rare occasions when permadeath is in play.

Who Are You Calling Exo?

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exosciences (also xenosciences) (n.): Including exogeology, exogeography, exoclimatology, exobiology, exoecology, exosophontology, exomemetics, etc.

An archaic series of terms referring to the various sciences when applied to off-planet phenomena, usually used with reference to the speaker’s homeworld.

This terminology fell into rapid disrepute after the first full conference of the Fellowship of Natural Philosophy after the reunification of the Thirteen Colonies, in which, upon entering the nomenclaturical dispute over the proper terminology to describe each individual colony’s branch of the exosciences – then in its third hour – Academician Excellence Corvis Ejava, Dean Pro Tem, declared “it’s a big [redacted] galaxy and none of your homeworlds are that [redacted] special”, adding that the prospect of having to use 300 billion different terms to describe the same studies depending on where you were was “the single most bloody stupid thing I’ve heard in the last 900 years, and I have students”.

The term geography, while possessed of some local bias, persisted for several hundred years after this conference, before being universally replaced with galactography, following representations from the scientific community of the hydrogen-breathing sssc!haaaouú that while their homeworlds could be described as many things, “geo-“ was not one of them.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary