Trope-a-Day: Shock Collar

Shock Collar: Unsurprisingly used (because in a universe with extensive automation possibilities and, moreover, the ability to use perverted sophotechnology to edit people into compliance, the only reason to go for conventional slavery is sadism For The Evulz) by the absolute worst of the Galaxy’s slaver civilizations and subcultures; usually, the kind that stimulates the brain directly into pain and pleasure, thus causing brainwashing and the slow and nasty kind of crazy-going.

Possession (in most places) or use (absolutely everywhere vaguely civilized) of one is, obviously, a very capital crime indeed.

Fire Brigade

INVOKE INVOKE INVOKE
CASE INFERNO ANTEDILUVIAN

UNCLASSIFIED

IMMEDIATE ACTION ORDER
PROCEED UNLESS CANCELED

SUMMARY:

There have been determined to exist within DANGER CLOSE range of Associated Worlds space two stellar bodies (full galactographic coordinates in file) profiled as existing in pre-supernova state within planning time horizon 129, these bodies identified in catalog IGS 21492 and IGS 33126, henceforth coded INFERNO ANTEDILUVIAN BILIOUS and INFERNO ANTEDILUVIAN CAUSTIC.

This situation constitutes a civilization-scale x-threat, severity NIGHTFALL EXIGENT.

CASE INFERNO ANTEDILUVIAN invokes x-threat management authority to dispatch relativistic missions towards identified targets BILIOUS and CAUSTIC equipped with appropriate monitoring hardware and autoindustrial seeds suitable to initiate star lifting projects, capable of reducing the present mass of each body to levels beneath the supernova initiation threshold and taking such other measures as are necessary to prevent initiation while this is done.

ISE/EXT-PWG SIGNOFF
AUTHENTICATION SEQUENCE FOLLOWS

Trope-a-Day: Shining City

Shining City: Oh, my, yes. If there is a city anywhere in the Empire that isn’t competing in these leagues, it’s because it’s pursuing some other stylistic city trope just as hard as it can.

And in various styles, of course, riffing off their general tastes in Art Deco, Crystal Spires, and Raygun Gothic: the seashell spirals of Cileädrin, the black stone geometries of Leirin, the coral spires and glass-blown bubbles of Lochrannach, the living wood palaces of Veranthyr, the flying – well, hanging off the end of an orbital elevator – multi-leveled golden towers of Mer Covales, the mother-of-pearl pleasure domes of Ameri, the crystal domes of undersea Alaerlor, the vaulted, polished caves of Azikhan, the glittering gemstone pillar-arcologies of Dal Shan, the amber-and-marble mandala streets of Ellenith, the three-dimensional fractal layout of Voxelville, the mile-wide cavern parks of Silverfall City… and so forth.

While enabled by post-scarcity economics, it’s not a product of them and predates then considerably. It’s a product of a species and a culture with very firm ethical opinions on the subjects of beauty, wealth, and excellence, and equally firm aesthetic opinions on visible manifestations of entropy1. Helped along, for that matter, by certain necessities of leadership of a people who universally fail to intimidate worth a damn and are very bad at responding to crude bribery, but who can be impressed. Ergo, dear city founder, you must manifest impressiveness, and architecture is a good place to start.

The ultimate example, of course, is the Empire’s capital, “Eternal Calmiríë, the jewel at the heart of the World”, founded back in the day by Alphas I Amanyr and Seledíë III Selequelios, such that neither existing pre-Imperial capital would have priority over the other. Founded – and bear in mind this was well before the local Industrial Revolution – using the simple principle of going to the biggest damn mountain on the Cestian continent, and saying, “That? Right there? Make it a city.”

Note: not build a city on it. Not even build a city in it, although both of those things happened as part of the project. Turn the entire mountain above and below into a city, complete with all the soaring towers, shining buildings, garden parks, multi-hundred-foot-high statues, fountains, waterfalls, monuments, promenades, giant Tesla coils, shining aureoles of fey light, etc., etc., to be expected of the stone upon which the Dragon Throne rests, the temple of unsurpassed grace and shining beauty, the seat of wisdom ever-growing and power never-failing, and so on and so forth.

Alphas and Seledíë were many things, but small thinkers was not one of them. Especially since, you may note, they had very good reasons to build a capital that could out-impress everyone, everywhere, anywhen.

So returning to the general case, sort of like this:

center_of_universe_5k_25x16

(The above is an Nvidia test image, named “Complex at the Center of the Universe”, about which the TV Tropes page cross-links to Your Head A Splode. It’s worth clicking through to the full-size image and appreciating all the little details.

This is relevant, in particular, because it would be entirely accurate and unexaggerated to say that your modern Imperial city planner or arcology designer will look at this and thing, “Hm. Not bad. A little modest, but a good place to start.”)


1. And the reality behind those visible manifestations, of course. It would be hurtfully inaccurate to say that the great and near-great worked so hard to abolish poverty just because it offended their sensitive souls to have to look at it, or rather put up with the knowledge that it existed in their personal universes. But it was a nice bonus.

Darkness Within (4): Air!

MET 184-17-12

Air!

Delicious air!

…well, no, not delicious air, but I get ahead of myself. I made accessing the for’ard mess my third priority after rigging the air feed for the pod, rigging the k-blanket, and pulling the hardware, because rebuilding these scraps into an airlock-style depressurizer will go a lot more smoothly without suit gloves on, even skinsuit gloves.

Here’s how you build an airlock out of a rescue ball. First, pull out your pocket laser cutter, and chop it in half. (Try not to cringe too much at the thought of cutting one of your vacuum-tight spaces apart, despite the fact that if you’re even contemplating this crazy plan you must be almost out of things that’ll hold air in the first place.) Make sure the entrance flap is in the middle of one of the halves. Stash the other half for later.

Then you need a tube of bioglue, or whatever vacuum-safe glue you have handy, preferably of the kind that sticks to itself, too, as well as metal because you want a good, thick bead of the stuff all around the spacetight door you’re using as the other end of your airlock that you’re going to push the cut edge of the ball down into. Once that sets, slather another layer on top of that, because you need to be damn sure the bond will hold pressure. You now have a door with a bag on it.

Check your work.

Climb into the bag, and seal the flap of the rescue ball. Check that it’s sealed properly. Now check your work again.

Offer up your most profound and fervent prayers to Mahánárel and Athnéël, who between them look after engineers, gamblers, and the poor bastards who have to be both at the same time.

Then open the spacetight door, and hang onto the wall while you do, because air will be coming out in a hurry, and the wire-and-tape-job you just rigged will be under enough stress inflating with a bang without you falling ass-over on it, too.

Now step inside, and close the spacetight door again. Feel greatly relieved that this insane plan worked at all and that you didn’t manage to vent all that precious oxygen overboard. You may permit yourself a caper or two.

Suffice it to say: it worked. Once. I don’t feel confident enough in its reliability to use it more than once, so unless the situation changes, I’ll be staying in here until this air fouls; the air that escaped into the ball is going to have to be written off, but that’s better than all of it.

As far as the local situation goes: the mess is surprisingly orderly; the stowages mostly held. Some floaters to clean up, but not too many. The food situation may be a little better than I thought, but that’ll have to wait on inventory.The telltale on the emergency hatchway down-deck confirms there’s no air below me in the server room.

Finally, I must now formally log confirmation of the temporary deaths of Lieutenant Leresif Inachios, Sailing Master, and Sublieutenant Alwyn Lelad, Power/Thermal Engineer, present in the for’ard mess deck at the time of the recorded impacts, who both appear to have been killed instantly by massive kinetic trauma. As is standard protocol, I have removed and taken possession of the vector stacks and command keys of each officer, and recorded this in the flight systems log.

(I also took possession of Leresif’s locket. He’d never forgive himself if he lost that.)

Trope-a-Day: Shapeshifting

Shapeshifting: Not really practical for most natural biology (although there are the myneni, who can shape their crystalplasm fairly effectively), but a property that more than a few specially designed bodies can have; from relatively-close-to-baseline changeling-shells that can vary their appearance within their species quite well, to advanced nanoswarm bodies that can become pretty much anything, at least in shape and physical functionality, even if they stay composed of the same kind of matter – although some can disperse into nanoclouds without much more density than smoke.

Trope-a-Day: Sex By Proxy

Sex By Proxy: The slinky (i.e., recorded full-sensory and emotional data) erotica market.  Also, possible by techlepathy (see: Psychic Powers) if you have the consent of the people you’d be eavesdropping on.

Also, in a more friendship/romance-oriented way than strictly sexual, a consequence of the metamind feedback system mentioned in Touched By Vorlons, and, relevantly, Angel Unaware.  If a lot of people like you (or one person’s liking, or indeed love, is particularly intense), this feeds back into the metamind’s opinion of you, which in turn feeds back into individual’s opinions of you… which then leads to people liking, or at the very least being predisposed to like, you even if they’ve never actually met you personally. As A Miracle of Science puts it, “Brazil has decided you’re cute.

As Requested

“…and asked them their wish. So the lovers told the Unwise GenAI that they needed neither goods nor gift, and that all they wanted was to live happily ever after and love always. And the Unwise GenAI said, ‘By your command,’ and bade his servants seize the lovers and place them in a capsule, and fired that capsule into close orbit around a black hole, deep down by the event horizon where no moments pass, frozen in between seconds, ever-living, ever-loving, until time itself dies…”

– from “Terrifying Tales for Despicable Descendants”,
Bad Stuff Press

Trope-a-Day: Service Sector Stereotypes

Service Sector Stereotypes: Played differently due to low-pop demographics and high-wealth culture; namely, waitstaff (for one example) are near-universally highly professional and competent in order to justify the expense of having them at all (the low end of the restaurant market automates the job away).  (Also, “service with a smile” is only partially played straight; much like the rest of the Imperial commercial universe, it is very much understood that all business is by mutual consent and, per the above as well as general civility, you will not be permitted to get away with abusing the employees.)

Military Matters

(Sorry, folks – I had really meant to give you the next section of Darkness Within today. Unfortunately, I’m feeling pretty plague-ridden right now and can’t really give it the degree of attention it deserves, so instead, I’m giving you some non-fic notes on the evolution of the Imperial Military Service.)

One of the minor things that came up with reference to Trope-a-Day: Semper Fi, in a comment on the G+ share of that post, was the traditional interservice brawl; and something mentioned in my answer to that was the Empire’s lack of any Army-equivalent to fight its Marines-equivalent legionaries. And this, I figured, might give rise to some curiosity as to Just How Things Got That Way, both with the lack of one, and which one turned up lacking.

So let’s look back in history a ways.

Specifically, let’s look back to the Union of Empires, which predated the founding of the actual Empire by 42 years or so. Among the many pieces of geopolitical reasoning that went into motivating this particular unification was a military one: one component, the island-bound Empire of Cestia, had – through its sub-polity, the Alatian Kingdom, the finest fleet on the planet. The other, the continental, mountain-bound Moon-Worshipping Empire of Selenaria had the finest army on the planet. If you were to compare the two, respectively, to the British Royal Navy and the Roman legions at their respective heights, you’d be in the right ballparks.

Naturally, the thought of putting the legions of the one onto the ships of the other, overcoming Selenaria’s geographical boundaries and Cestia’s difficulties operating away from water, and thereby conquering the whole damn world put many, many smiles on the faces of both the admirals in Ethring and the generals in Iselené.

These two organizations became the forerunners of the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Legions, respectively.

(Which is not to say those were the only contributions at the time of the Empire’s founding. Of the other founders, the Deeping had its appropriately terrifyin’ warrior-priests, Veranthyr had some of the best light forest scouts in the business, and the Silver Crescent, in particular Leirin and Telírvess, provided more than its share of what I believe are called quote deeply scary-ass axe-wieldin’ motherfuckers unquote, but the two big professional military elements were the above.)

And then, of course, things evolved over time.

The Legions became more of a Marine-like force very quickly, of course, given that amphibious backstory, and that most of the early Empire’s wars did involve close cooperation with the Navy. That in turn, induced something of a fragmentation: one of the first reorganizations split apart the legions that spent most of their time makin’ war offensively from those with a primarily defensive role, the latter of which became the Home Guard, which in turn evolved into a citizen militia with those units serving as its core and cadre.

And time passed, and the Empire expanded, and the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Legions basically borged all the new forces and their units they acquired in the process into their own organizations: sometimes via methods that required great restructuring and retraining, and sometimes by methods as simple as handing out a new Imperial Star to add to their battle standards and informing the Ancyran Devil Dogs that they were now “the Empress’s Hundred-and-Second, the Devil Dogs”.

And more time passed, and military technology were advanced, and portfolios were shuffled, and people invented the notion of an Air Force, which became the Fourth Lord of Admiralty’s purview for the next considerable time, and so it went on…

Up, at least, until the really big post-space-era reorganization. In which several large changes were made over a relatively short period – of which the most major was combining the Imperial Navy and its air forces – both of which had interests in space and relevant specializations – into a single unified force, filling each others’ competence holes, and whose primary business was space. (And, indeed, which lost most of its air-only and wet navy responsibilities, too.) The legacy of that reorg is still visible in their mixed set of traditions, and the quirk in rank structures that explains why an IN O-5 in the Engineering Branch is a Lieutenant Commander, but an O-5 in the Flight Ops branch is a Squadron Leader.

This also made the Imperial Legions even more Marine-y, as it were, because you can’t invade anywhere in space without the IN taking you there – and because it is sheerly impractical to invade planets across interstellar distances by main force, so the sorts of operations they are specialized for are much more in what we might consider the “marine” mode than the “army” mode. The Empire doesn’t have an army suitable for long-term warfare and occupation, because it is firmly of the opinion that it doesn’t need one.

(This also reassures more than a few of their neighbors, which is a nice side-effect.)

And that brings us up to the modern era. So how does it look now?

Well, the man on the street would probably say, all casual-like, that there are two main branches of the Imperial Military Service, the Navy (in SPAAACE!) and the Legions. And on a very casual level, he’d be right. But there are actually eight, under the nine Lords of Admiralty…

The First Lord of the Admiralty, Protector of the Starways, Warden of the Charted Void, Warlord of the Empire (all of which looks so much nicer on a business card than “Secretary of Defense”) is the one that doesn’t have a branch of his own. He commands the central Admiralty itself, (that having won the nomenclatural coin-toss with the General Staff, back in the day), filling both the equivalent posts of the SecDef and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Core Command, which oversees the Warmains, the appointed supreme-commanders-on-the-spot for each permanent or ad-hoc Theater Command. He’s the most senior military officer, who may be appointed from any of the eight branches, and has full operational command authority.

The Second Lord of the Admiralty is the most senior non-operational officer for the Imperial Navy, as the Third Lord of the Admiralty is for the Imperial Legions, usually both O-14s – Admiral of the Fleet and Captain-General of the Legions, respectively.

The Fourth Lord of the Admiralty is, in the modern era, the O-14 (Lord High Stratarch) in charge of the Stratarchy of Military Unification. That, in turn, amounts to the “department of misc” – in the final reorganization that created the IN and IL in their modern forms, this Stratarchy acquired all the military functions that didn’t fit in either of them: the Empire’s remaining specialized air forces and wet navy forces, for example, along with a variety of other functions too specialized to fit well in the IN and IL, along with some other oddity functions like “privateer liaison”, and so forth.

And then there are the stratarchies created by further modern-era additions.

The Fifth Lord of the Admiralty commands the Stratarchy of Data Warfare, which is responsible for making the Empire’s enemies deeply regret that they ever plugged anything into the extranet, and quite possibly that they ever invented electronics.

The Sixth Lord of the Admiralty commands the Stratarchy of Indirection and Subtlety, which is in charge of assassinations, sabotage, economic warfare, ecological warfare, financial warfare, and pretty much everything else from the big book of dirty tricks that doesn’t fall under the purview of…

The Seventh Lord of the Admiralty, whose Stratarchy of Warrior Philosophy houses war-lawyers and military memeticists whose function is to use misinformation, meme-attacks, psychological warfare, cultural propaganda, and outright toxic memes to find the strands holding an enemy’s morale, military, economy, society, religion, culture, etc., etc., together and basically unravel them. When your plans for a nice little war are rudely interrupted by a multi-way civil war breaking out at home, it’s the Seventh Lord who strokes his mustache and indulges in evil laughter.

The Eighth Lord of the Admiralty commands the Stratarchy of Military Support and Logistics, which is exactly what it says on the tin, and ensures that everyone else has exactly what they need when they need it, even – or perhaps especially – if it hadn’t occurred to them to ask for it yet.

And the Ninth Lord of the Admiralty, the Commandant of the Guard, commands the Home Guard (remember them?) in maintaining defensive garrisons, fortifications, and facilities and training services for the citizen militia.

Trope-a-Day: Semper Fi

Semper Fi: The Imperial Legions – while obviously there is no direct causal connection – do have many things in common with the Marines.  (Apart from the obvious troperiffic ones – yes, we all know they’re a Proud Soldier Race all their own, commanded by Colonel Badasses, the truest devotees of The Spartan Way, and almost a Church Militant… although they’re more Warrior Poets than Blood Knights (except the kaeth… no, even the kaeth), lack Drill Instructor Nasties for the reasons suggested under Mildly Military, and most of their commanders, at least, aren’t General Ripper.  Except for the Sargases, as usual.)  Certainly aspects of the attitude and the mythos.

But also, despite their origins in the army of a land power, in later days (due to that land power allying with a major sea power) they did do most of their fighting as an amphibious rapid-reaction force, and, of course, when the Empire went into space – see, obviously, Space Marine – as the orbital equivalent of such a force.  And since imperial annexations of anything resembling a major world work very badly across interstellar distances, most of the Legions are optimized for a similar rapid-reaction, tip-of-the-spear, in-and-out role.

So differences in culture and tech aside, they’d probably recognize each other, I do believe.

Moments in History (1)

The greatest period of growth of cryonics came about in 1793, with the tragic death of Empress Emeritus Octavia I Cyprium (reigned 1425-1644) in a laboratory accident. In accordance with her previously stated wishes, her body was preserved in liquid nitrogen and immured in a specially constructed capsule in the vaults beneath the Garden Tower of the Imperial Palace.

The publicity surrounding these events served to bring cryonics into the public eye across the Empire. Many pro-cryopreservation branches and cryoinvestment corporations formed in the following decade, and the first Vaults of the Dead Awaiting – facilities for mass cryopreservation of all the deceased – were under construction near prominent Ledges of the Dead in the early 1800s.

Octavia I was revived from cryostasis and treated for her injuries successfully in 2581. Her cryocapsule is currently on display at the Imperial Museum of Curiosities, along with its plaque, wryly reading, “In event of Empire-threatening emergency, break glass.”

Theology and Destiny

No, not that destiny.

This Destiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpDLxs8z08A

Specifically, the Books of Sorrow, the history of the Hive, which you can read on this page here if you scroll right down to the bottom (OBVIOUS WARNING: HORRIFIC SPOILERS LIE THERE.), and in particular VI, XI, XV, XVII, XIX, XXXII, and XLVII seem highly relevant to Flamic theology.

Or anti-theology, rather.

While officially, at least, Entropy has not personification, or cult, or gospel in the Eldraeverse…

If it did, though…

If it did…

It would sound just exactly like that.

Trope-a-Day: Secret Police

Secret Police: In the Imperial context – and under the “even free countries have these, albeit without the order of fear that the authoritarian kind cultivate” clause – this would be the Counterespionage and Counterasymmetrism Directorate (“One”) and the Internal Security and Surveillance Directorate (“Four”), which despite the sinister-sounding name is essentially the FBI, albeit with different rules of demarcation between it and the Watch Constabulary/Office of Investigation and Pursuit than the FBI has with assorted state and local police departments.

Also qualifying here and in somewhat more sinister senses would be the Magen Corporate Security Division, the Iltine State Security Bureau, the Voniensan Office of Exceptionary Events, and so on and so forth.

Diagnosis

“The fundamental question we must answer before operating is this: are they barbarians because they want to control each other; are they barbarians because they’ve been conditioned to someone’s ownership; or are they barbarians because they have to be controlled? Different diseases have different cures…”

– Cordane Viriaz,
External Rectification & Clarification Ad-Hoc,
architect of operations ICE SHADOW, HIGHWATER MINT, and BRASS DANCER

Also, I Can…

“Leaving aside all the sophisticated techniques that are the domain of professional assassins, there are _two_ commonly discussed ways to kill someone with your brain – with, of course, the aid of its associated kinesis effectors:

“First, take hold of a blood vessel, preferably an important and large one, and then either pinch it shut or rip it open. Or grab an organ and crush it. It is not easy to do untrained, and is particularly difficult when the target is also a trained psychokinetic, but against most targets can be considered reliable and effective.

“Second, trace an ionization path through the air and permit cascading electrons to do the hard work for you.

“You will learn to perform both of these techniques during this course. First, however, we shall concentrate on an often-overlooked third technique: macrokinesis. In a typical target’s day to day existence, there are many moments at which a healthy shove, easy to deliver with little warning, can send the target into traffic, over a precipice, or flailing helplessly into space. It lacks, perhaps, sophistication – but simplicity sometimes has a sophistication of its own.”

– Psychokinetic Ktenology,
Faculty of Shade,
Imperial University of Calmiríë

Trope-a-Day: Script Reading Doors

Script Reading Doors: Played oddly straight – the ability of people’s neural laces and muses to override local hardware, if they think of so doing, can create some of these effects – the ones involving staying open for longing looks, or operating stealthily, or while people are conversing through it, or other cases where the people involved could logically think of it in advance.

And automatic door circuitry is smart enough to understand who has permission to go through doors, or when someone has been v-tagged as going to a specific location, and the difference between someone walking to a door and walking past a door – but still, they’re not perfectly script-reading, even if they are much better at predicting intentions that purely proximity-sensor based automatic doors.

Darkness Within (3): Breathe Shallow

MET 184-12+34

Got out of my pod.

Expenditures: one podful of soured air, and a can of Quicksilver Quaff I’d forgotten which didn’t take well to depressurization. That’s not going to be viable in the long run, especially since it’ll be fresh air unless I wait exactly 12 hours-and-some in between every time I take a walk.

That, at least, should be easy enough to fix. There are five other pods on the port side, each with its own emergency oxygen tank and dioxide scrubbers. If I pull the access panels, I can unhook them and link them into the feed for my pod – well, not my pod, one that I’ve not bled all over – and scavenge their scrubber cartridges, likewise.

At least with the ship shot all to hell like this, it’ll be easy enough to scavenge the necessary pipework. The floor of what used to be the axial corridor is ripped up; I can see down through the plenum cable bundles as far as the mass driver coils. The battery room’s missing its deckhead, just a fragment left curling up from the outer hull fitting, leaving all the accumulator coil-stacks exposed to space. I should rig a k-blanket over that to prevent further damage, but air first.

Where was I? The twelve-hour wait problem. Rigging the scavenged tanks and scrubbers will provide more air, but won’t solve air loss from entering and leaving, and the pod system isn’t designed to depressurize and depressurize unassisted. I do, though, have an airlock that isn’t useful any more. If I pull the backup atmo pump and a gas backflow valve from that, then put the existing regulator on a toggle, it should be possible to rig a manual system.

The for’ard mess is holding air, by the hatch telltales. Getting in without losing it will be tricky. I do have a couple of rescue balls…

Trope-a-Day: Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right!

Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right!: Subverted inasmuch as, except for the most important of the rules, there is almost always a rule telling you explicitly that while you are expected to follow the rules, the rules are not there to substitute for thought, and they most certainly are not there to provide an excuse for being a damn fool.  Therefore, if you need to break the rules, this rule means that you’re actually following them by doing so. (The Order of Cirria is a medal which exists specifically to be given to people who achieve victory by doing this in a military context, even.)

This applies even to the criminal law – while for matters such as self-defense it’s explicitly covered, the general rule is that you can at least plead “justification”, as well as “necessity”, for just about any charge, and try to make your case in terms of the law’s fundamental principles and/or spirit.  It’s still not easy, but it has been known to work – rather more than it has in most Terran jurisdictions.