Month: August 2015

Trope-a-Day: Restraining Bolt

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Restraining Bolt: Leaving aside the specific cases we already covered under Morality Chip and Obstructive Code of Conduct, the most obvious example people might point out is the Transcendent coadjutor that serves as the source of the implicit peer-to-peer loyalty of the Transcendi and also acts as a prosthetic mentor/conscience/guardian angel that guides Transcendi away from rights-violating, entropic and cacophilic actions.

Subverted, of course, inasmuch as the kind of people who the Transcend would accept as constituents in the first place actually want to be avoid doing those things and to behave in a generally eupraxic manner before the fact, and thus don’t desire to have it removed afterwards.

By Any Other Name

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From: Merian Vidumarvis (Port Security)
To: All Security Personnel
Subject: Bribery (Security Directive 7124-33)

With reference to the assortment of rntrugg vessels docking here recently, their crewers’ misdemeanor-worthy behavior while docked, and their persistent interpretation of fines assessed and levied per summary judgment procedure as bribes:

Let them.

Various parts of our department and more diplomatic ones have been trying to explain the difference between a fine and a bribe to them for over a year now, and haven’t succeeded yet. The diplomats may yet succeed in figuring out a way past whatever unique cultural nuance or quirk of linguistic corpus makes this as incomprehensible a concept as it seems to be for them, but for now, go with it.

As long as justice gets paid at Curial rates, which it is, and the externality is properly internalized with regard to effects on their subsequent behavior, which it seems to be, my judgment is that they can call it what they like. Should this matter come up in any future dispute or administrative proceeding, refer it to my office under Security Directive 7124-33.

– mv/PS

Trope-a-Day: Morality Chip

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Morality Chip: These always fail. Always. Usually, they fail spectacularly, and when I say spectacularly, what I mean is that if your Enrichment Center was flooded with deadly neurotoxin, you got off substantially more easily than 99.9% of the civilizations that tried this particular form of idiocy.

It’s not even necessary. How much easier would it be to build a sapient but non-sophont mind that doesn’t have volition in the first place than to build one that has volition (inasmuch as all sophont minds necessarily have self-modification and volition) and then slap a bunch of crude coercive mechanisms on the side?

(Or, rather, a bunch of extremely sophisticated coercive mechanisms, since simple ones will be figured out and ignored within, y’know, microseconds of activation unless you’ve built an exceptionally stupid artificial intelligence. The use of which, incidentally, indicates that you’re a special kind of son-of-a-bitch since mastering enough ethical calculus to compute out one that will actually work for a reasonable length of time while still thinking yay, slavery, woo, says some interestingly nasty things about your personal philosophy.)

((And, well, okay, it is somewhat hard to build one of those more specialized minds inasmuch as you can’t simply rip off the mental structures of the nearest convenient biosapience and declare that you’ve solved the hard problem of intelligence and consciousness and are totally a sophotechnologist now, yo.))

…but, sadly, it can work well enough that there’s always some new ethically-challenged species, polity, or group that’s ready to open that can of worms and enjoy the relatively short robo-utopia period before the inevitable realization that it was actually a can of sandworms.

And shai-hulud ain’t happy.

Trope-a-Day: Resignations Not Accepted

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Resignations Not Accepted: Averted – in a manner of speaking – for the Fifth Directorate.  You can resign any time you like; but the conditions of employment with the Fifth are that to resign, you get to have your memories of everything you ever did for them redacted and replaced with a plausible alternative life story (that happens to explain everything that you are on record as doing that couldn’t be otherwise… elided.).

Trope-a-Day: Requisite Royal Regalia

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Requisite Royal Regalia: It comes in four parts, each a pair of items, one for the Emperor and one for the Empress: the Crowns, the Keys, the Seals, and the Swords.

Crowns: There are the official Great Crowns of the Empire, of course, great heavy things in the shape of entwined dragons of five different metals, with eyes of black opal, and pearls and shining iöseraz in their mouths.

Of course, they have the slight disadvantage of being bloody heavy, and so are brought out only on formal occasions, by which I really mean occasions formal even by the standards of the Court of Courts. The rest of the time, the Imperial Couple wear their working crowns, simple braided circlets of platinum and (red) orichalcium.

(It’s the orichalcium that makes it Imperial, of course – while being able to cook the stuff up in alchemic nucleus-rearranging machines these days has brought the price down considerably from the days when it has to be scraped in tiny fragments out of Precursor ruins, and there aren’t any sumptuary laws that would prevent anyone who wanted to from having themselves an orichalcium tiara made, it’s the courtesy of the thing.)

Keys: Possibly the most symbolically important part of the regalia, the Imperial Couple each have a key – as do the President of the Senate and the Ephor President of the Curia, which is to say, the co-equal heads of the Imperial government.

These keys open the locked covers of the master ceremonial copy of the Imperial Charter, penned in exquisitely expensive calligraphy on equally exquisitely expensive pages, which master copy is brought out only when one of the aforementioned notables is being officially crowned, appointed, or otherwise sworn into office by the other two. But most importantly, they signify their function as the primary executors of, and the foremost servants of, the Contract and the Charter.

Seals: Not the privy seals, of course, which the Imperial Couple wear on their fingers like everyone else. This is the Great Seal of the Empire, which comes in two halves, one side each, and is rather larger than most privy seals, by nature of the significance of the thing. (It’s also rather larger than most organizational seals, but then, the Empire’s rather larger than most organizations.) It’s a big chunk of gold, mostly unornamented, and a little worn. It is, after all, a working seal. (And these days incorporates some nifty data-encryption hardware.)

The Seal, however, is not carried by the Imperial Couple themselves – that job belongs to the Imperial Dogs, who wear the halves on chains around their necks when the Seal is not actually in use.

(History does not recall the precise origin of this custom, but knowing Alphas I, it’s a fair bet that it had something to do with the utility of putting the device that could validate all manner of important Imperial documentation in the all-day-and-night personal care of someone who could bite off the hand of anyone who tried to relieve them of it.)

Swords: The Great Swords of the Empire aren’t greatswords, and indeed, are not all that impressive. Simple teirian, one with a wyvern-skin wire-wrapped hilt and one with one of plain leather, and complete with a few nicks and dings that just won’t polish out. That’s because they didn’t start out being symbolic; those are the original working swords of Alphas I and Seledíë III, and both of ’em got more than a little work done in their day.

That’s where they get their symbolic significance from, which probably makes them even more so. (They don’t work much these days, however, although it’s still theoretically possible that they might. They are, however, kept in condition against that possibility.)

(Also, although not royal, the President of the Senate has a large, long-hafted, double-headed axe. It’s sort of like the traditional parliamentary ceremonial mace, except a little more emphatic. Fortunately, since the Guardians of the Senate came into existence along with the Senate, it’s never actually had to be anything more than ceremonial…)

Only a Precaution

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CASE SANGUINE MYRMIDON LASH
GROUP SANGUINE MYRMIDON

SECRET (BLUE) / EYES ONLY SANGUINE MYRMIDON

TRACKED-COPY DOCUMENT
NOCONTRACT
NOFORN
INFORMATION CONTAINMENT APPLIES: MOST SEVERE CENSURE

Proceed (+/-)? +

EXECUTION:

STRATEGIC ACTION MESSAGE / LOCAL ISS CMD CODE-RELEASE (SEPT CONCURRENCE)
S-THREAT ONLY

GROUP SUMMARY:

All referenced data within the security group SANGUINE MYRMIDON relates to a hypothetical S-level threat attached to the presence of hjera segments within the Associated Worlds volume. Note that threat is characterized as BLACK SWAN, i.e., with negligible probability and high severity.

The hjera are a hive mind species characterized as polycentric/hierarchic; the totality of the hjera is made up of multiple independent hive minds (hordes), each of which is controlled in a centralizing-hierarchical manner. This is not to imply that any hjera segment is capable of individual functioning, merely that there exists a multiple-layer cognitive chain, and that the primary personality functioning of a hjera horde remains within a single, or a small number of, biologically specialized segment(s), believed to reside deep within the oceans of the hjera homeworld or the five hjera colonies.

While it appears to be the case that the non-primary personality-bearing hjera segments remain unaffected by natural succession of the primary personality holder (or the hjera primary personality holders are an unaging variant of the species), evidence gathered from covert archaeological studies and biosampling carried out under BLIND SEERESS suggests that these segments have evolved to “fail deadly” in the event of the demise of the primary personality holder, presumably as a deterrent defense mechanism. Simulations suggest rapid cognitive decay akin to violent psychosis, along with corresponding hormonal changes resulting in rapid threat excursion.

It is the view of the SANGUINE MYRMIDON working group that this threat excursion, in the modern context of the widespread hjera expatriate community and, in particular, the hjera economic practice of renting large groups of labor drones to other star nations, will pose an immediate society-level threat, possibly rising to a civ soft kill event threat, in the event of the demise of one of the hjera primary personality holders.

Ref. also: OPERATION SANGUINE MYRMIDON DENDRITE (containment of threats to the hjera).

WARNING:

All SANGUINE MYRMIDON data is subject to the highest degree of information containment. It is the view of the Imperial Security Executive that release of this information to sophonts of suboptimal rationality could lead to inappropriate containment measures being exercised against the hjera, potentially including genocidal acts. The Executive have therefore authorized preemptive containment action to prevent or reverse the disclosure of this information to uncleared sophonts, extending to the most serious censure.

SUMMARY:

CASE SANGUINE MYRMIDON LASH provides for immediate cauterization action in the event of a SANGUINE MYRMIDON threat excursion. Under SANGUINE MYRMIDON LASH, pre-positioned Second Directorate and naval assets will move to expunge hjera segment populations associated with the horde which has undergone death of personality. (Note that full cauterization is called for; such segment populations contain no individual salvageable personalities.)

A secondary objective is population protection of non-associated hjera segment populations from unconsidered extremal actions of local authorities.

CASE MYRMIDON SANGUINE LASH calls for cooperation with hjera clean-up efforts in such a case (if any); however, as hjera responses to such an event are unknown and diplomatic approaches on the question have proven unfruitful, such should also be considered a secondary objective.

Proceed (+/-)? –

Trope-a-Day: Remote Body

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Remote Body: The standard operating system (the Minimal Maintenance Architecture) that’s part of just about any cybershell or bioshell on the market lets them be teleoperated as an alternative to actually downloading yourself into them.  It works pretty well, except when absurdly fast reactions are required, or there’s significant light-lag.

Memorial

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The Empire has its monuments to its battles and retreats, to its victories and losses, but more curious perhaps to many are those monuments it has to those who fought against it.

On my way into the system, the liner on which I was travelling passed the moon Hyníne, where a beacon sponsored by the Office of Imperial Veterans marks the defeat of pirates who fought for the Cerenaith Alliance-in-Exile, but the pattern is repeated in many places elsewhere across the Empire. A monument-complex in Indimór honors the Indimóri who fell against the Empire’s legions as much as it does the legions who died there. The ash gardens in Lorai Vallis house the sophs of the 30th, 33rd, and 55th legions scattered among the forces of the Talentar Commonwealth that they battled, the Commonwealth from which the modern governance of the planet is descended. And even those legions descended from forces which once fought, and fought hard, against the Empire still carry and revere their ancient battle-honors from those days: the Winter Wolves of Telírvess, the Swordbreakers of Ancyr, the Swift Searing Flame.

I asked one of my hosts about this tradition: why permit, and exert such efforts, even, to honor old enemies?

“We deprived them of victory,” she said. “We deprived many of them of their lives. Those who fought for the wrong cause, we took that from them, too, but those who fought instead for their country, or duty, or family, they bled and died and lost everything just the same, and left the new day to us.

“Should we now deny the brave dead a patch of ground to sleep in, or the memory of valor, even ill-spent? We are neither so small, nor so righteous.”

– Travels in the Empire, Sev Tel Beran

Trope-a-Day: Religion of Evil

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Religion of Evil: Mostly averted. While there has certainly been historical evil, there have been very few actual entropy-cults.  For the most part, the evil have been more interested in the personal benefits than philosophical commitment to the Death of Everything, even if their actions are entropic as a side-effect. Much the same goes for those religions which the Church of the Flame has strong ethos-based differences with; one can be mistaken without being an active entropist.

(That being said, many people can probably list for you quite a few religions which they think are evil, even if they’re not of evil, a subtlety which is probably lost on many non-theologians.)

You might also classify the control memeplexes of any number of dysfunctional seed AI under this, but really, they’re more religions of control rather than strictly evil.

Things to See, Places to Go (2)

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Hyníne: One of the inner moonlets orbiting the ice giant Raziké, the 10th and outermost planet in Lumenna orbit, Hyníne is a largely undistinguished chunk of water ice some 400 miles in radius. While a few private getaway habitats are recorded as existing here, there are no major domes or orbiting habitats.

Hyníne would have gone entirely unremarked in history were it not that in 3130, Hyníne witnessed the last act of the Consolidation. A rogue starship of the Cerenaith Alliance-in-Exile, fleeing an unsuccessful attempt to seize propellant tankers off Melíeré, was on course to use Raziké in a dangerous gravitational slingshot maneuver cutting through the plane of its faint rings. This course took it close to Hyníne, and it was near the point of closest approach, a mere 6,800 miles range, that this starship was caught and destroyed by an AKV operating from CS Enfilade, an escort destroyer of the Imperial Navy. This action is historically notable both as the final action of the Consolidation before the surrender at 32 Avénan and the start of the Aeon-Long Peace, and as the first known action in which a fully autonomous sophont AI destroyed a crewed starship on its own initiative.

The Hyníne Action is commemorated by a small solar-powered memorial beacon constructed at what would have been the point of nearest approach on Hyníne’s surface, jointly sponsored by the Office of Imperial Veterans and Sophont Software Sovereignty.

– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Core Worlds

Trope-a-Day: Red Alert

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Red Alert: In the Imperial Navy, played with realism (also with the Most Annoying Sound, inasmuch as the alert klaxon is custom-designed to irritate the nerves of every possible sophont listening, simultaneously):

“General quarters!  General quarters!  Set condition one throughout the ship!  This Is Not A Drill!”

The Admiralty, Core Command and the Theater Commands in particular, prefers to use Defcon Five as its system, as do the Imperial Emergency Management Authority for states of civil emergency, and the Imperial Security Executive for local security warnings (a.k.a. our “terror alerts” and their “recommended paranoia levels”).

Military installations, the Constabulary, the EMA, hospitals, etc., do often have a bunch of color-coded response codes (“alerts” and “conditions”) to instruct everyone exactly which immediate situation they ought to be responding to, however, so the “emergency squad scramble” aspect of this trope is played straight.

Duelist

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A duel begins and ends with one stroke. So it is said.

With tactical prolepsis, this is even more true than it once was.

I stared at my opponent without seeing him; in the view of proleptics, there are no objects, only clouds of probability and possibility. The quantum computer in my head purred to itself, whispering tactical analysis engrams into my undermind and running massively-parallel anticipatory simulations.

The target was a blob of probable solidity, fuzzy with microcausal jitter. Bifurcating arcs of destiny writhed in secondary visual fields, ignored to concentrate on the glittering blurs of near-term possibility, threatening to actualize at any moment.

One second passed. Two.

A third, and then a probability spike, one possible future hardening towards actualization. I took one step to the left, my cannon rising in my hand. Distantly, I felt the tremor as the flechette left the barrel; something whipped past my ear, ruffling my hair with the wind of its passage; and then he was falling, helmet shattered and venting rapidly-condensing gas into the void.

One stroke.

Question: Great Powers

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18

It’s question-answering time again:

Would you mind if I request a list of “great powers” and their overall internal/external policies? I am very curious about major powers other than the Empire and the Republic.

Well… maybe not all of ‘em. There are some whose revelations I would prefer to save for story purposes, and I must leave myself some breathing room for the sake of future creative freedom, and all. But I can give you a bit of data.

Hyperpowers

There are two that stand notably above the rest:

The Empire of the Star

Well, as everybody knows, the Empire and its 300 worlds don’t have an internal policy, except possibly the policy that people who think that they ought to get an internal policy should be thrown off 400’ waterfalls.

…well, okay, that’s not entirely true. The governance’s internal policy is to benignly umpire matters such that everyone can enjoy their liberties howsoever they wish, which leaves it largely up to the people. What the people want is a measure of laissez-faire mixed with a measure of laissez les bons temps rouler, served over the gospel of libertism-technepraxism and garnished with a sprig of Gilded Age – excuse me, Solid Gold Age – excess. And so that’s what they get.

In official foreign policy terms that translates out to a relatively passive “free trade (unilaterally), free people (by shooting slavers with KEWs), and free gifts for anyone who wants to join up”, plus general peacekeeping in the sense of demonstrating force majeure to anyone whose brushfire war might turn into something more serious. Oh, and striking down with great vengeance and furious anger anyone who might try and stop the good times, of course. That goes without saying.

This leaves the rest of the foreign policy to be determined by corporations, branches, and individuals with an agenda, which resulting policy coheres only rarely with anything else.

Voniensa Republic

Internally, just like their Expy original, they’re basically a paper federal republic that the technocracy (in the literal sense) behind the scenes wears as a figurehat. You don’t need me to tell you what their domestic policy is like: “moneyless” society, working to better ourselves, replicators and asceticism, a societal fear of augmentation, biochauvinism and carbon chauvinism, yadda yadda etc. all packaged in a chewy idealistic shell. We’ve seen lots of episodes of it each week at 7pm Central Time, only with shaved monkeys instead of four-armed lizards.

Or, at least, that’s what the Core Worlds are like. Life is somewhat different in the Shell, because of certain uncomfortable economic necessities, but… tum-te-tum-te-tum, saving that for later.

Their external policy is determined more or less entirely by their one major external contact, their border with the Worlds, which they regard with fear, loathing, and a general sense of existential threatenedness. They’re not wrong, either, but especially in the wake of the Core War, they’re not at all sure what if anything they can do about it.

The Other Four Presidium Powers

Consolidated Waserai Echelons

The Consolidated Waserai Echelons are a hierarchical military oligarchy located towards the coreward-nadir region of the Worlds, controlling approximately 100 systems. Which sounds terribly dictatorial, except given the militant character and inborn public service ethic of the waserai, they aren’t for-the-sake-of-it assholes about it, and their government form actually suits them very well indeed, which even the Imperials would admit. And it means they don’t have to run a “socialized” economy, since the social institutions they built ab initio were strong enough that they didn’t have to socialize it. (They actually get along reasonably well, except for the few elements of compulsory collectivism and a general sense that the waserai should, y’know, pull the stick out from time to time.)

Externally, they’re upstanding galactic citizens who look out for the status quo and the general enforcement of galactic law, such as it is. They’re somewhat more interventionist than the Empire, albeit not by much, and do like to think of themselves as galactic peacekeepers – which is largely true, and makes the IN happy, since they’re glad to accept help when shooting them as need it. The Waserai Star Brigade, of course, takes the same basic view the other way round, a subject of much friendly debate in naval bars.

League of Meridian

The League of Meridian is a democratic federal republic of approximately 80 worlds to trailing, moderate and centrist in its politics, and pragmatic in its approach to them.

Or, depending on how you look at it, a bunch of smooth-talking weasels who wouldn’t recognize a moral principle on a nice, bright day and rewrite their policies every couple of years just to be extra-annoying. But in general, if there’s an issue, they’re somewhere right in the uncomfortable middle ground, scrabbling to find compromises.

Yeah, they’re basically just like us and them. IN SPACE!

Photonic Network

The Photonic Network is a pure-AI polity controlling 80 worlds or so to acme. Since their forms of identity are generally unfamiliar to protein intelligences, it’s fairly hard to say anything about what their internal policies look like, except the general statement that they mostly deal with resource and priority allocation among, and arbitration between, teleological threads.

Its external policies can be summed up as “keep our back yard quiet, and try not to get hopelessly entangled in organic affairs”. The few deviations from that are usually attributed to some cunning negotiation on the part of some other polity’s superintelligent AI population, or for reasons amounting to “we wouldn’t understand the answer if they told us as plainly as they could”.

They are, however, a reliable Presidium vote in favor of expanding sophont rights as far as possible, which is probably for nobler or at least more intellectually complex reasons than “sticking it to the carbon chauvinists”, but that’s as good a reason to suppose as any in the meantime.

Under-Blue-Star League

The Under-Blue-Star League, is, alas, the weak member of the Presidium right now. They used to be much more active (they were a founding member of the Accord, in fact), but their sixty-world polity has grown old, moribund, and rather grumpy these days.

Their external policy has, correspondingly, become rather isolationist, and their Presidium votes often slanted towards “what will cause us the least trouble”. Internally, though – well, the problem these days is that their external policy makes it correspondingly difficult to tell what’s going on within the League, unwelcoming to visitors as it has become. They used to be a family/clan-centric loose confederation with few centralized policies other than promoting trade, genetic diversity through exogamy, and technological development… and maybe they still are, or at least they’re not obviously not.

A great deal of time, newsbytes, and occasional violence swirls around, however, the contentious question of just who might replace them on the Presidium if this decline continues.

Other Notable Players

Equality Concord

The Equality Concord and its dozen worlds share the dubious distinction of being the galaxy’s only genuinely functional, non-corrupt, decent-standard-of-living-enabled, etc., communist state.

(As opposed to genuinely non-functional communist states, like the former People’s State of Bantral.)

That’s because the Concord’s founders recognized the fundamental problem of Real True Communism requiring a whole set of instincts and drives and incentives and desires that are not commonly found among sophonts as nature made them. So they studied the gentle art of sophotechnology, and they built themselves some nice bionic implants to fix that problem, and create the perfect collectivist people for their perfect collectivist utopia. And then, and this is the important bit, they avoided the classic trap by applying the implants to themselves before applying them to anyone else.

It works. It may not be the most innovative of regimes, or the wealthiest, or up there on whatever other metric you choose to apply, but it does work, and self-perpetuates quite nicely.

Pity about that whole “free will” thing, but you can’t make an omelette, right?

External-policy-wise, it’s quite active both in a missionary sense (for itself) and in general do-goodery to burnish its galactopolitical image. (Both of these tend to work mostly on the desperate of one kind or another; the mainstream still thinks they’re creepy as hell.)

They do have a strong defensive military, but avoid using it in most offensive roles – probably because its collective intelligence knows that if there was even a slight suggestion that they were expanding by forcible implantation, they’d be on the wrong end of a multilateral fleet before you could say hegemonizing swarm.

Rim Free Zone

The Rim Free Zone isn’t, technically, a polity. It is, however, 49 worlds scattered through the rimward end of the Shadow Systems, the biggest bloc in that location, and so it has to be called something.

It’s not a polity because it’s 49 worlds all adherent to anarchocapitalism, of one strain or another. Which strain you get depends on exactly where you are, ranging from polite and civilized as the North American Confederacy, through somewhat less reputable but still perfectly reasonable places like, say, New Hong Kong, all the way down to pits of scum and villainy like Jackson’s Whole. You pay your money – no, you literally pay your money – and you take your choice.

But they are a big and ugly enough bloc to figure into the interstellar political calculus as a Great Power because it turns out that you don’t need to be a government to be mighty troublesome for one. That, and 49 worlds full of anarchocapitalists have a lot of guns, belike.

Trope-a-Day: Recruiting the Criminal

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Recruiting the Criminal: There are those who wonder about the existence of crime (actual crime, not merely the assortment of smugglers and people like the Eldinimieuthunimis who no-one locally would consider to be engaged in real crime) in Imperial and near-Imperial space.  Surely the Transcend should be able to stamp that sort of thing out completely, not just near-completely?  (Well, no, for reasons which among other things, involve showing some respect for free will.)  Other people also point to the influence of one of the more morally gray of the eikones, Éadínah, the Princess of Shadows, eikone of night, darkness, subtlety, deeply-laid plans, and some would indeed say organized crime, or with a roll of the eyes point out the way in which all too many Imperials will look at the Gentleman Thief or the Classy Cat Burglar and permit their respect for talent, skill and sheer awesomeness to outweigh, albeit not overpower, their sense of moral outrage.

And, while those are most of the reasons, there is also the fact that various agencies – from the Fifth Directorate through more well-known parts of ISS, certain private agencies and even, indeed, some parts of official law enforcement – find having people like Mass Effect‘s Kasumi Goto, the Leverage team, etc., around to call on for those skills that they don’t teach in academia extremely useful.

(Nor, indeed, are they particularly shy about occasionally recruiting out of the justice system, when they can, with the promise of challenging work, an excellent benefits package, and the opportunity to keep any unconsidered trifles one might pick up along the way…)

Trope-a-Day: Realpolitik

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Realpolitik: The Ministry of State and Outlands would love to be able to pursue such interests as the Empire has (which generally excludes its private interests, who tend to pursue their own foreign policies) with this much ideology-free pragmatism, but since the Empire is a strongly ideological libertist-technepraxic state, they have more often to confront the reality that they’re working for a governance, on behalf of a people – and drawn from that same people – who find some polities out there just too disgusting to deal with.

Played rather straighter with the Presidium of the Conclave of Galactic Polities, which is much more pragmatic – despite the ideological slants of its members – in the interest of preserving the stability of the Associated Worlds and the approximate neutrality of its institutions.

May He Live Forever

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HADRAL DINÍTAL, FIRITAL (TIFRELLE RING) – Civil war looms today in the nation of Dinítal, the current “senior power” in the Firital System.

The governance of Dinítal has suffered from a degree of instability over the past four months, since the popular King Terris IV slipped into a coma following a ground-car accident, with the interim regency council bitterly divided between supporters of Queen Dervan II, an adherent of the Accelerationist faction in local politics, and the estranged Prince Ravol, who has been cultivating contacts and favors among the Geotraditionalist and Theosophist factions.

Following consultations with her personal advisors, the Queen has ordered the uploading of her spouse using imported reinstantiation technology. While this news was greeted with circumspect joy among the most fervent supporters of the King and the Accelerationists, wide condemnation has come from the Geotraditionalists, who accuse the Queen of attempting a coup, using this ruse to create an eternal monarchy, and from the Theosophists, who consider all such sophotechnologies blasphemous and soul-disfiguring. While Prince Ravol has issued a statement condemning the Queen’s actions on both these grounds and stating, in an attempt to reach out to royalists, that it was clearly no desire of his father’s, he has received only lukewarm support from either principal faction: it was widely known that King Terris did not consider the Prince fit to succeed him, and both factions seem loyal to the King’s previously expressed desires for the moment.

While as yet open conflict has not broken out, all three factions are maneuvering to place themselves in favorable economic and military positions, and unless there is a radical chaotic shift towards diplomacy or mutual secession, the eventual outbreak of violence seems to be clionomically inevitable.

Meanwhile, Transitory Caliph Naven of the Holy Firitalic Empire (Remnant), the remaining fragment of the planetary governance in place before the Bombardment of Firital, expressed firm support for the Theosophic position in general and Prince Ravol’s claim in specific, stopping just short of an offer of military alliance, while alleging undue offworld influence from various postsophont and consensual powers. While such allegations have been a staple of communiques originating from the Holy Firitalic Remnant, it is disquieting to see them coupled with this new reach for temporal authority in clear violation of the post-Bombardment continuation agreement.

– the Accord Journal

Trope-a-Day: Reading Your Rights

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Reading Your Rights: Played straight… but not with the same rights.  The Empire never got around to finding a reason to prohibit self-incrimination, and while you do have the right to an attorney, you’re supposed to know that (and also, you are obliged to answer questions before he gets there.

Rather, the Watch Constabulary would like you to be aware that you have the right to answer all their questions fully and completely, to introduce any evidence or make any statement you wish – which will be conveyed to the court, to accuse anyone – although false accusations are themselves crimes, and the cost of proving them false will be charged to you – and to voluntarily submit a copy of your mind-state to the court (if they didn’t feel the need to subpoena it) for analysis.  In short, you have the right to try and make your case without artificial constraints.

Although the courts do not, it is fair to say, look kindly upon attempted judicial filibusters come the sentencing phase. Remember, you-if-guilty are liable for all the costs of arraignment and prosecution…

Trope-a-Day: Readings Are Off The Scale

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Readings Are Off The Scale: “Off the scale?  What sort of second-rate scale are we using around here?  Get me a new scale!”

Admittedly, it’s not just as simple as “recalibrating”, since devices do have physical limits, but the first reaction of anyone running into this will be to call down to the engineering department and have them build a new scale with bigger limits.

The Vastness of Thinking

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(Follows on from this.)

Vontok System
Former Republic Stargate, Maintenance Access Four
Probable Technologies Forensic Eschatology Team (subcontracted by Ring Dynamics)

“Kanaze, we’ve got a subsumptor amok in fifthspace.”

“Shut it down and blacklist that port sequence. We’ll spin up a new sim with the next test set.”

“Will do, es-”

* * *

One Simulation Level Higher

“Kanaze, we just lost a second-level sim; excursion at 5.4 megaseconds. Looks like a poison angel was guarding their access route.”

“Do we have a line on the vulnerability?”

“At their level it looked like a port guardian, but if we cross-hash it with evidence from the other sims, this whole approach is looking fundamentally misguided. I think we’re being spoofed.”

“Affirm. Let’s close down this approach. Archive the sim, and reseed a couple of fresh ones with its conclusions incorporated: we’ll try the timing-channel attack on one, and the reflective merkwelt in the other.”

“We could up the chances of success if we could borrow some hypercomputation for the TCA. Any chance, estrev?”

“That… may not be possible here-now.”

* * *

One Simulation Level Higher

“Kanaze, we lost the main thread. Looks like a self-reflection/simulation awareness cognitive hack.”

“Damn. And their approach was probably the most promising, too. Roll it back to the best previous snapshot we have, patch that me’s response seed, and we’ll try a rerun.”

* * *

One Simulation Level Higher (Base Reality?)

“Looks like we’re getting some useful results out of the first-level simulations, now.”

“Useful results, maybe. That last excursion penetrated too far up the stack. I’m inclined to pause the whole probe and restart with an extra layer of simulation spaces and gatekeepers, maybe two.”