Trope-a-Day: Undying Loyalty

Undying Loyalty: What a personally-focused estxíjir is (see: Blue and Orange Morality); not common – although more frequently emulated through I Gave My Word – but a recognized trait of the greatest leaders.

Also, the reason why the bandal, or dog, is the symbolic animal and avatar associated with Tárvalén, the Binder of Obligations, eikone of loyalty, vows, oath-contracts, promises and agreements and the social order.

The Small Rot

The small rot (also known as: miner’s carbuncle; brass-hand’s growth; smelterman’s tumor; spacer’s neoplasm; cancer): The small rot, by any of its various names, is a dysfunction of normal cell growth processes in which genetic and/or epigenetic mutations imbue cells with the ability to replicate indefinitely, ignoring cell control signalling and programmed cell death. The term, “small rot” is derived both from an early analogy between fungal bodies found growing in timber and the masses (neoplasms) formed in the body by these dysfunctional cells, and from the tendency of larger neoplasms to develop necrotic regions as they continue to grow.

Identified causes of the small rot vary, but the primary causative factors are industrial, followed by a smaller number of factors traced to identified oncoviruses and hereditary genetic factors. Indeed, it is considered a primarily industrial disease, hence some of its names, due to the dominance of exposure to ionizing radiation as a causative factor; the small rot is strongly correlated with current or previous cases of blue-blotch fever, with long-term exposure to inadequately shielded nucleonic technology, and exposure to various industrial chemicals known to disrupt proper cellular function or cause genomic damage. In the pre-industrial era, cases of the small rot were most commonly found among miners or inhabitants of regions where uranium or thorium ores are found near or at the surface.

The small rot is considered difficult to diagnose accurately: while the dysfunctional cells form neoplasms – and as such unusual masses, when detected, should be subject to medical analysis – these rarely produce local or systemic symptoms in the early stages of development, and such symptoms are highly variable depending upon the location of the neoplasm. Such symptoms typically occur when the growing mass interferes with other bodily functions. Presently, periodic full-body scans are recommended for those at risk of industrial exposure.

The small rot is usually a minor health concern unless left untreated for an extended period. Small masses are typically self-limiting, as the immune system attacks and destroys the neoplasm. Historically, the treatment for larger masses has been surgical removal of the mass, permitting the body to heal itself in its absence.

In the current era, cells are substantially less likely to suffer from dysfunction leading to the small rot due to genetic upgrades, such as the removal of protooncogenes, and the self-limiting aspect of the small rot is enhanced by the common use of artificial immune systems, which include carcinophage nanites targeting neoplasms. Should these fail and further treatment is required, a course of immunoboosters and oncocidals is prescribed, followed by a carcinophage flush targeted at the specific neoplasm; surgical intervention may still be called for if the mass is particularly large.

In rare cases the neoplasms characteristic to the small rot may metastasize, a process in which neoplastic cells break off from the original mass and are carried by the circulatory or lymphatic system to other sites, most commonly lymph nodes, where they come to rest and continue to multiply, forming multiple secondary neoplasms. This wandering rot (q.v.) is a much more serious condition requiring a full cellular scrub in a healing vat, with a high mortality rate if left untreated. Fortunately, it occurs only with chronic exposure to causative factors or lengthy non-treatment of the small rot, typically in otherwise immunodepressed hosts.

– Oriane’s Home Medical Glossary

Trope-a-Day: Two Of Your Earth Minutes

Two Of Your Earth Minutes: Mostly averted, between the Translator Microbes and that most people using measurements internationally (or between species where that amounts to the same thing) are using either Accord System measurements or Imperial Standard, which just happen, since the latter uses a sensible Planck base and the Empire is a heavyweight on the Presidium of the Conclave, to share their base units and most of their derived ones.  So it’s usually not much of an issue.

Questions: Pattern Identity and Succession

More from Specialist290, because it’s post-dinner:

A few small questions regarding pattern identity and the metaphysics thereof:

1. Are there any possible scenarios where two forks of the same personality can diverge from one another significantly enough for them to be regarded as different persons, when the result of either individual pattern shift would not have resulted in enough variation in the pre-fork pattern to constitute a legal change in identity?

In the fork case, it’s the divergence that matters. Actually, it’s almost always the divergence that matters – usually, the only time you’re comparing to a backup is immediately post-reinstantiation to check that the process was carried out correctly, or in the event of some accident or missing-person scenario when there’s some doubt.

Anyway, for fork divergence, it’s always difference from each other that matters. Difference from some pre-fork backup is irrelevant.

2. A purely hypothetical case:  If, without the intervention of any causal agency, two individuals are found to have such closely-matching patterns of personality that one would have been considered a fork of the other had one been created as an act of will, would they still be legally the same person? (Put another way:  If, by blind chance, someone had such a fundamentally identical life experience to your own that your memories would be practically interchangeable to the extent that you could easily mistake your memories for theirs and write off any divergences as a product of your own faults in recollection, would the two of you be considered the same person?)

(Put yet another way:  Could a doppelganger fork arise out of pure synchronicity?)

Hypothetically, yes, they would be – although they would have to be identical on a rather deeper level than just consciously recalled memories. As the legal and philosophical principle puts it, íthal íthalavar: “A is A”, or “a thing is itself”. Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

Of course, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation based off the number of bits contained in any one mind-state vector suggests that this could happen considerably less often than once per universe-lifetime, so it’s not like there’s case law on the point…

And Mark Atwood asks:

Which reminds me of an ongoing question I’ve been having. Is being the a member of the Imperial Couple a time-limited term of service, or is it “until (permanent?) death, abdication, or removal”. Given they were immortal even before the tech takeoff, someone could end up being the Lord of some city state for a very very very very long time…

There are no term limits for that particular office. (Or most, but there’s a fair amount of diversity so I’m not saying there are none anywhere.) By wording of the Imperial Charter, you can have it until death, permanent incapacity, abdication, or impeachment.

That said, they are subject to the not-a-law-but-relatively-firm-custom of the Six-Century Rule which suggests to everyone that you find a new career after three centuries1, i.e. 432 Imperial years, if they haven’t done so already. That was never a firm term limit for anyone mostly because if it required someone to leave in the middle of a crisis, that would be a bad idea, right?

So, anyway, I had the dates of the first 15 Imperial Couples handy, and the average reign is rather shorter at 285 years, almost entirely due to abdications. (High of 505 – Alphas I, making sure his empire stuck – and low of 100.) That is almost entirely because it’s a really damned hard job that would age you quickly if you, well, could. I imagine it’s quite a relief to be an Emperor Emeritus with no more pressing Imperial obligations than to sit in the Privy Council and quietly kibitz.

(I’m sure there are some veryn old rulers around in various backwaters, though. I don’t think anyone minds, or in most cases, has noticed.)

Footnotes:

  1. Because they changed the calendar after they made the rule. The Calendar of Rhoës used 72-year centuries. Of course, no-one but scholars has used said calendar for nearly 8,000 years at this point, so the main function of the name these days is to confuse and disorient people learning about it who aren’t masters of horological trivia.

Questions: Lords of Admiralty

Specialist290 asks:

In addition to my previous queries, an additional historical / etymological one:  Does the presence of “Lords of the Admiralty” in the Empire’s military hierarchy imply, like their *our*-world British counterparts, that their duties were once concentrated in a singular office of “Lord High Admiral” whose role eventually evolved into an office held in commission?

Well spotted, but alas, no. It’s just the best close approximation I could find to the actual title, noting specifically that in the Eldraeverse it is not short for “Lords Commissioners for Exercising the Office of Lord High Admiral”.

As for why that is the title… well, it works like this.

In Imperial practice, there are three kinds of what for want of a better word we shall call “nobility”: the runér, the praetorate, and the exultancy. The first, the runér, are the executive branch – your lairds, barons, counts, dukes, kings, etc., or for that matter your city managers, county commissioners, and state governors. The third, the exultancy, are titles of prestige awarded for loyal service, superior achievement, or otherwise great merit. Those don’t come with hard power, merely precedence, prestige, honors, letterheads, entrées, and the ability to get good tables in nice restaurants at short notice.

The second, the praetorate, includes titles like these – it being the general case that people who routinely interact at the highest levels with the highly-titled runér need equivalent honors, dignities, and precedence to support their offices. At lower levels of the table of ranks, usually it doesn’t apply, but at the uppermost levels – what I might call the Mandarinate if I needed a translation for that term, yet – most offices have some unique praetorate title with its own place in the big list of official precedence.

So in this case –

Well. The top of the Table of Ranks for the Imperial Military Service is grade O-14, which the Imperial Navy calls Admiral of the Fleet, the Imperial Legions call Captain-General of the Legions, the Home Guard calls Commandant of the Guard, and the stratarchies call Lord High Stratarch. Traditionally, that rank is reserved for Lords of Admiralty, so each service only has one of them except for the one that furnishes the First Lord of Admiralty, which gets two.

But that’s a military rank. It empowers them to head up their particular military service, but doesn’t mean anything outside that. (Those who remember The Core War will recall orders sent out from someone using the rank ADM/FLT, rather than from the First Lord of the Admiralty, for example…)

All of those people also sit on the Board of Admiralty, which actually runs the Imperial Military Service as a whole. Their military ranks serve for that portion of the job. For interfacing with the civilian government, however, each of them holds a unique title as one of the Lords of Admiralty, which is equivalent to grade XIII on the Table of Ranks for the Imperial Service (“Minister of State” or “Logarch”), except for the First Lord of the Admiralty, who is ranked as grade XIV (“Minister of the Throne” and/or other Great Officer of State).

Which in turn is because the other Lords of Admiralty sit only on the Board of Admiralty and in meetings of the Council of Ministers (the larger of the two bodies which includes the heads of all the ministries beneath the seven large ones as well as the seven, presided over by the Lord Coordinator of the Chancelry acting as the Minister President of the Council) whereas the First Lord sits on the Council of the Star (the top-level executive body which includes only the seven top-level ministries – of which the Admiralty counts as one – presided over by the Imperial Couple personally).

(If I were to make an analogy to US government here, I’d say that one could analogize the Board of Admiralty in Imperial practice to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the First Lord to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, except that the First Lord’s job is also that of the Secretary of Defense, which is why it’s also the functional equivalent of a Cabinet-level post.)

All of which is very involved, but then, I am attempting to simulate a somewhat evolved structure, here, not an unnaturally clean one…

So, to sum up, basically, they’re called that because it’s Translation Convention for the noble-equivalent title that comes with the job.

 

Trope-a-Day: 2-D Space

2-D Space: As mentioned under Space Is An Ocean, averted – indeed, one of the major motivations for splicing the ability to better handle the third dimension into people’s brains, and later one of the major reasons why Space Fighters flown by meat don’t exist, is to avoid losing embarrassingly to people who can cope with the three-dimensional, dynamic, always-in-motion nature of space the way it really is.

Consequently, spacecraft encounter each other at any number of arbitrary angles and vectors (except when deliberately moving to dock, when obviously they need to get their airlocks and, if any, spin axes properly lined up), and tend to have arbitrary orientations except when conditions dictate that a particular one is preferable – whether for reasons of technical necessity (solar panels work better facing the sun) or otherwise (what’s the point of being in orbit if you don’t enjoy the view?).

In-system, vessels often do stick close to the single plane that is the ecliptic (because that’s where almost all the planets and other interesting features are), but it’s not all that thin a plane, the usual half-dozen degrees or so of variation in planetary orbital inclinations adding up to a lot of actual space, and it’s certainly not compulsory.

See also the aversion of Old-School Dogfighting.

Darkness Within (21): On the Drift

Z plus four seconds

Mind-state transmission received: 3.301229 exp 16 octets validated.
Identity confirmed: Isif Alclair-ith-Alclair [UCID and mindprint match].
Reinstantiating…

Dynamic mind-state analysis confirms mental integrity.
Cannot contact Am-I-Me service [no endpoint].
Cannot contact Identity Tribunal (proxy) [no endpoint].
Cannot contact incarnation insurance provider (proxy) [no endpoint].
Identity assumed pending verification under emergency protocol.

Noetic reinstantion complete; initiating corporal teleoperation.

That’s it, then. All is ready. Time to go. I enable full connection with the router, and the candle’s controls blossom in my mind’s eye.

One last glance around. The lights in the bay are dimming to as my script runs the shutdown-safe sequence, leaving nothing but the emergency protonic inserts. The remaining nodes on the ship’s mesh execute orderly terminations and wink out, one by one. The spacetight doors remain shut, but I’m heading out the fractured end – most of the floating debris was cleared in my rebuilding efforts.

I think again of the scuttling charges, but there are no secrets to protect in this fragment of a ship, except those I’m taking with me.

I feed a trickle of hydrogen to my thrusters, start myself gliding forward at safe-in-dock speed.

Farewell, Gutpunch! Thank you for my life.

Z plus three minutes

Here’s the plan.

I have approximately 48 hours of breath remaining, if I stay calm and breathe shallow. That’s more than I need to get near enough to the stargate to be rescued, but not by all that much. If I can find that vector-control core from the cutter. If I can’t, I have to work with the native delta-v I have, and it will be even more important to set off early because I’ll barely be able to get inside the search cube.

So I’m giving myself three hours from now. Pointing the spotter backwards tells me I’m now a good mile clear of the hulk. The way the hull fractured tells me that Gutpunch was struck from ventral, portside, and for’ard and recalling the camera images from first waking and doing some crude plots on the after-section debris, it seems to have drifted mostly aft-relative – probably venting tanks added some thrust in that direction – with relatively small starboard and dorsal components. It also looks to have developed a Y-spin. (I’m keeping the hulk’s orientation as an inertial reference, for now.)

With the auxiliary battery room up front, if the reactors scrammed – and the reactors must have scrammed – and the aft section spinning like that, it’s very unlikely the aft half of the cutter could have stayed in the hangar. The tie-downs would have almost certainly snapped.

So assume that. Assume it got flung out, and flung out at the moment of greatest stress. That would be on the first spin when there was also thrust to take into account, which should put the cutter somewhere relatively close to the aft section, but further starboard-dorsal relative to the hulk.

I should be able to find the aft section easily enough with the spotter; it’ll be the biggest object within its range. Then all I have to do is scan the space near it along the right sector for something with the right proportions to be cutter-hull, and that should have my core in it.

If it doesn’t – well, it’s the highest-probability option. If nothing shows after two hours, I’ll continue scanning on the way to the aft section, just in case the tie-downs held. If that doesn’t pan out, I abort to plan B. Not enough time to check any other options.

And I’ll get to it.

 

Trope-a-Day: Twin Maker

Twin Maker: While teleportation doesn’t exist, mindcasting, forking, and reinstantiation, along with more exotic sophotechnology, can create much the same effects.  (Although, in mindcasting, the first step is to perform an orderly shutdown, because while you can happily transmit a static mind-state vector, transmitting a running one is a much more complicated procedure that requires special software and is in any case impractical over any distance long enough to invoke light-lag, since it’s kind of hard to think when half your brain is a couple of seconds away from the other half.)

But, by and large, no-one gives a crap, because the generally accepted answer to the philosophical conundra involved, in conformance with the established fact that souls are software objects, is pattern identity theory, and continuity of consciousness does not matter –  or as it’s put for the layman, if you think like you, and feel like you, and act like you, and remember being you, then you are you for all legal, practical, philosophical, and other purposes. Yes, even if there are now two of you, at least until you diverge.  Get over it, already.

Ping

spotter (n.): An ancient spacer’s tool, dating back almost as far as the navigator’s sextant, the engineer’s multi, or the medtech’s hand effector, used for locating and profiling distant objects in space: a boon to anyone who has to manage a docking bay, shift cargo in microgravity, perform extravehicular activities in crowded neighborhoods, or engage in the smallest of small-craft operations, which is to say, riding a candle.

The original spotters were no more than handheld radar transceivers with direct audio feedback into the user’s helmet interface. Wave it around, and when you hear beeping, it’s pointing at something. The faster the beeping, the closer that something is to you. Learning what a particular rate meant in terms of range, and keeping an ear on the change of beep rate, were left as skills for the user to develop.

The modern spotter is a rather more sophisticated device, thanks to miniaturization and commercial development. HUD feedback now monitors its position relative to your body to provide a more accurate sense of direction, and even the most basic models provide precise range and closing rate information. More advanced models use a phased-array antenna to sweep the beam across a target once detected, providing a profile for target recognition purposes and an estimate of spin.

Of course, there is in theory very little use for a spotter in the current age of space, since all spacecraft from the largest to the smallest include a transponder, and are further constructed from LOP-compliant hardware which will obligingly disclose its location upon receiving a network request. The Grand Survey has detailed charts of every object in space larger than a child’s ball. All objects within range should therefore, says theory, already be highlighted on your HUD.

It is a sign of the tremendous respect that spacer culture has for theory that there are at least a brace of spotters stored in every airlock and docking bay from the Core to the Rim.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary

 

Trope-a-Day: Turbine Blender

Turbine Blender: Very much averted as anything somebody might want to do.  Those turbines are expensive.  (And even though they can build much stronger turbine blades with the state-of-the-art in the Worlds’ materials science, that’s because they want to operate them in the new envelope thus opened up – and the strike effects can therefore still overstress them.)

(Sorry, would-be Malcolm Reynolds imitators…)

 

Lumenna-Súnáris System (7): e’Luminarien

I/6/n. e’Luminarien (“The Belt”)

Class: Asteroid belt
Orbit: 2.24 au (avg.)
Orbit (ecc.): varies, mostly under 0.25

Blackbody temp.: 176 K (avg.)

Next up, dividing the inner more-or-less rocky planets from the outer gas giants, and scattered over a much bigger area of space than that average suggests, we have the e’Luminiarien (approximately translated “the little traveler’s lights”).

You want rocks? We got rocks. Lots and lots and lots of rocks. Metal-rich rocks. Silicate rocks. Carbonaceous rocks. Icy rocks. Just pick how far you go into the belt by which kind you want to end up with, and there’re all the rocks you could ever want.

And that’s the belt. Naturally, in the future, there are mining operations and stations ranging from the massive (“Andir Drift: Gateway to the Belt”) to the tiny (“Jini’s Oxygen Shack”) scattered all over the place, by the thousands if not tens of thousands.

Here are three of the most notable big ones:

1 Andir

1 Andir is The Big Asteroid That Isn’t, Except By Courtesy. Technically, it’s a Andirian-class geopassive planetesimal, or what we’d call a dwarf planet, but since it’s sitting right smack in the middle of an asteroid belt in all its hundreds-of-miles-across glory, it’s an asteroid by courtesy.

And as the biggest thing out there, in the future, it’s the administrative, commercial, and population center of the belt. Andir Drift, which grows to take up much of its volume, is a hollowed-out beehive habitat that’s got more docks, cageworks, factories, malls, homes, parks, bars, etc., etc., etc., hanging off it than most of the rest of the e’Luminiarien put together, is the administrative capital of the region, and is probably the one place you can be pretty sure every resident of the belt has visited.

But don’t call it a planet. The locals hate that.

6 Mélciö

6 Mélciö, which is a partially differentiated metallic asteroid similar to Vesta, is operated by a number of loosely federated scientific research stations, gathered there partly by unique facilities (the combination of minimal gravity and heavy shielding available by those willing to use the core lab, for example), and partly because of the number of very important breakthroughs that have been made there over the years.

Lots of people hoping that brilliance will rub off on them, in short.

32 Avénan

A carbonaceous asteroid nearer the outer edge of the e’Luminiarien, 32 Avénan and the smaller cohorts set in orbit around it are technically Imperial Navy Fleet Station Avénan. This used to be the Prime Base for the whole damn Fleet back in the day, before stargates were invented and the IN moved as a whole to Palaxias System, and it’s still where the First Capital Flotilla bases out of.

It’s also rather more open to public viewing than most IN bases because of its great historical importance.  It’s where the Consolidation ended and the Aeon-Long Peace began, for a start. It’s where the Talentar Revolt was negotiated to a successful conclusion, for another. As such, it’s also the headquarters and face of the Admiralty’s sophont relations “flotilla”.

 

 

Trope-a-Day: Truce Zone

Truce Zone: About as rare as the Neutral Zone, its counterpart trope, in the large, but mention should be given to both the Free Eilish Confederacy on the one hand, which occupies the majority of the Eilish Expanse constellation and whose policies of firm neutrality and not-terribly-restrictive legal system make it both a place where almost everybody is welcome and one of the favorite places for galactic intelligence agencies to play their away games (like, as it were, Casablanca IN SPACE), and on the other, to the red market which occupies most of the approximately-habitable planet Nepscia (Galith Waste), which welcomes anyone with money and guns.

(Well, technically it welcomes people with money and no guns even more, but they rarely find the welcome enjoyable.  Shortly after which they rarely find anything, anything, any more.)

Teeth

Terence Wynne asks:

I wanted to ask about Eldraeic teeth.

Okay, so I’ve got to ask… are you a dentist? Or otherwise in the tooth-wrangling professions, whatever others of those there may be?

(I ask because this is a very unexpected question, and I’m a little weirded out here, frankly. Of course, it’s not like I’m not the kind of obsessive worldbuilder who doesn’t have answers to this sort of question, so…)

Presumably “modern” Eldrae have nigh indestructible teeth,

The standard answer is “here, swirl and spit, and that will coat that vulnerable hydroxyapatite with a thin layer of good old diamondoid”, yeah.

but what about  pre-imperial baseline Eldrae?  Did their teeth keep growing throughout their lives to keep up with wear and tear? Did new teeth grow in when old ones wore out and fell out (or were pushed out by the next wave of teeth growing in)?  In the former case, I’d expect something in a millennium or two of living would knock out a tooth or two.  That’s going to add up and encourage the early development of dentures.  In the latter case, Eldrae probably got to end-of-life of a bunch of teeth near the same time.  It would seem incongruous to have an Eldrae of otherwise superhuman beauty and grace open his/her mouth and look like a caricature of an Oakie from the dustbowl for a decade every century or so.  On the other hand, I can conceive of musical forms being developed to take advantage of temporarily toothless players…

The former. Now, the thing here to remember is this isn’t actually an evolved solution. The origin of the species is in a precursor race mucking about with chimerizations and miscellaneous improvements roughly based off Pseudoeldrae archaea, so there was a certain engineering elegance involved when they were designing teeth for a species intended to last essentially forever.

A first difference is that they aren’t particularly designed for replacement. In the baseline, there aren’t primary teeth: the first and only teeth are the permanent ones; and those come with tree-bark layered hard enamels (to make ’em tougher) and complex roots anchored into bone (to make ’em harder to knock out). But most importantly, where in humans the ameloblasts that produce enamel do not die after tooth development, which lets them self-repair.

(They don’t have to keep chewing to wear them down. They’re not like Earth rodent teeth – there’s a regulatory mechanism similar to that for osteoblasts. But it does mean that routine wear, cavities, and even substantial chips could be expected to be repaired – if you took care of yourself, kept them clean, and made sure to drink your calcium and phosphate…)

There’s also a minor preventative effect on cavities: the pH of their saliva has been altered to be somewhat more alkaline, discouraging demineralization.

It’s not impossible, though, to knock one out, or to damage it to the extent that the biological insult is sufficient to cause the root to detach and for that tooth to subsequently fall out. In that case, in the baseline, it doesn’t regenerate – for the precursors, it was easy enough to fix such a minor problem with their medical tech.

This, of course, changed after the fall of precursor civilization, so in those cases they did indeed develop bridge and implant denture technology made from ivory, ceramic, and metal to deal with that particular problem. But it was something that you’d need after a fairly hefty accident to do the damage: people living quiet, civilized lives could expect to keep their teeth from birth to death, even if they had to repair more’n a few chips along the way.

In the nowline, of course, the genehackers have arranged for the underlying tooth bud to reactivate should the tooth that grew from it not be there any more and jolly well spit out another one. (That’s about as much fun as it sounds like, but at least you’re not having to put up with a whole mouthful of it at once.)

I assume even baseline Eldrae teeth are tougher than human equivalents.  Were they tough enough to be of use as/in tools during the stone age?  If so, what would the attitude of a family/tribe be to the use of teeth from the dear departed to help them survive the vicissitudes of life?

They probably would have been, had there been a stone age. (Because of that precursor thing… well, okay. Eliéran prehistory looks, um, odd due to various intervening periods. It looks sort of like this.

  1. Glorious Precursor Civilization; ending as…
  2. The Chaos smashes Glorious Precursor Civilization; leading to…
  3. Fallout, basically, In Space!; in turn leading to…
  4. First, Now-Forgotten, Eldrae Civilization, based on Precursor leftovers and magical thinking; ended by…
  5. Winter of Nightmares, in which an asteroid kills almost everyone; people crawled out of their caves and founded…
  6. Second, Mostly-Legendary Eldrae Civilization; just in time for…
  7. the Gray Wasting, in which a plague left over from the Chaos wipes half the planetary population again; the survivors form…
  8. First Pre-Imperial Civilization (Bronze Age, Greece); disrupted by…
  9. the Drowning of the People; followed by…
  10. Ungoverned Era (transitioning Bronze to Iron); followed by…
  11. Old Empires (Iron Age, Rome); followed by…
  12. Glorious Imperial Era!

The regression probably came closest during the Winter of Nightmares, but never actually got all the way down to stone-age tech globally.

Hypothetically, though, hmm. Not sure. I mean, sure, the dead are dead and no longer need their stuff, but it has historically been considered polite to wait until they are no longer present (i.e., the body has been cremated to send the soul upon its way; in later legal systems, you aren’t even legally dead until you’re dead and burned), and I am not entirely sure of the usefulness of whatever tooth-fragments you can pick out of a smoldering pile of cremains. They build pyres hot.

How many teeth do they have?  Do they have an analog to wisdom teeth?

36: 18 above and below: two incisors, a canine, three premolars, three molars on each side. None of those count as wisdom teeth – doing a simple scale-up of a human or pseudoeldrae archaea jaw to match their slightly larger head-size (i.e., remaining in proportion with greater height, etc.) would probably suggest that they should have 40 teeth, but evidently the precursors dropped what would have been the fourth, rather than the third, molar from the spec on the grounds that wisdom teeth are all too often a pain in the… jaw rather than a functional accessory.

Oh, and as a side note, the canines, particularly the maxillary ones, are a little more… canine than the human equivalent. We’re not talking GIANT POINTY FANGS protruding beyond the lip, here, nor even anything like popular depictions of vampire fangs.

Just that it’s not hard to tell which teeth are the pointy ones, belike. An adaptation of little use but for eating rare steak and smiling intimidatingly.

 

Trope-a-Day: Tron Lines

data-glimmer

Example image actually Cortana, from Halo.

Tron Lines: Averted for most pieces of technology: they are kind of pointless on their own, and inefficiently power-wasteful.  (And if a few status displays and such adopt a similar look when there is a purpose for it… well, what of it?)

They are, however, a fashion (a data glimmer; often something like the image on the right) that comes and goes among digisapiences for their trigraphic representations, and even (usually via an AR shimmer, but sometimes regular old LEDs or nanotattoos) for the physical ‘shells of the machine folk.  After all, if there’s nothing else to tell a cybershell from a nonsophont robot or a bioshell from a regular member of their species, you have to show off your nature somehow, right?  Substrate pride!

Darkness Within (20): The One Who Leaves

Z minus four minutes:

Damn it.

Well, I’ll try, sister. I’ll try hard.

Last parts are mounted, the couch from the cutter – right through the forward viewport – and the spare PLSS pack. Software tests clean. The script is ready to shut me down on Gutpunch‘s servers and reboot me on the substrate’s temp space when I give the word. The gyros are spinning up to threshold. It should be time to hit the black.

What have I forgotten?

What have I forgotten? I know –

Shit and ash, I almost forgot a spotter!

Z minus one minute:

Lucky there was one in the DC locker. Anyway. Air’s very tight, so cut her free and make the life support switch first. Aft tether, aft tether, fore tether, fore tether. Good, floating free. Now —

Enter unlock code into the PLSS.

PLSS<-Safety instruction one-four-eleven-niner-six-two. Lock motion enable.

Hyperventilate. One deep breath. Two deep breaths. Three deep breaths, and hold it.

Rotate safety check valve to closed.

Unfasten security turnbuckles, left and right.

Depress eject switch. PLSS will float free and alarm will sound, much appreciated, yes, I know, shut up!

Have assistant place replacement PLSS in position – or, in this case, back up, press shoulder-blades against the interface panel that’s part of the acceleration couch and wait for connectors and latches to engage —

— to engage —

Move forward, move back, and try it again.

Still nothing.

Oh, hell. No panicking, now, Isif, work the problem. Pull free and check the connectors.

Feed line, looks clear. Return line, looks clear. Data connector – shit, that pin’s bent. Tools — no time. Will a finger fit? No. The taste of carbonic acid on my tongue. Unclip — the tiedown rings. Okay. The end of the spotter will fit. Find the leverage. Looks eyeball-straight now. Good enough? Have to be.

Rotate back. Press against the panel again.

Thunk.

Gods, that was too close. Connectors show blue. Fasten security turnbuckles.

Rotate safety check valve to open.

Exhale.

Inhale.

PLSS<-Safety instruction eleven-one-three-eight-seven-four. Lock motion disable.

They’re right. Sometimes canned air can be worth tasting. One breath, self, that’s all the reflection you have time for. Bring your mind over here.

candle_router<-!transferflag exec

Packing for mindcast commencing. Personality execution terminated.

 

Cipher of Conduct

(I was reminded the other day of one particular conference that makes a point that it has no detailed “code of conduct” because, well, “It is presumed that those attending the conference are of sufficient moral grounding and intelligence to be well behaved. If we have to explain how you should behave, you probably don’t belong in the first place. […] can be summed up as this: if it becomes apparent you need a policy to know how to behave at the event, you’ll probably already have been ejected from the event.”

Which, y’know, got me thinking of how those convention centers and so forth in this ‘verse deal with these issues, especially considering that many of them necessarily cater to outworlders who may not quite grasp the rigors of the CSP. And so, without further ado:)

“Welcome to the Meridia Rim Convention Center!

…several pages down in the FAQ…

“It is not our policy to have an explicit Code of Conduct, since we prefer to presume that anyone attending a conference held here is a gentlesoph, and thus aware of how to conduct themselves as a civilized sophont. Moreover, being overly specific as to undesired behaviors only encourages the ungentlesophly to inform themselves – we trust this is not your purpose, gentle reader – and game whatever rules are set forth.

“It is possible that we may be incorrect in this assumption, and thus we offer the following guidelines:

“Should you find yourself perpetually ignored, as if you had become invisible, you have probably gone too far, your amalgamated civility meta-reputation score has dropped sufficiently far to engage your fellow visitors’ sense-filters, and you will shortly be ejected from the Convention Center by our meta-rep enforcement robots. Your voluntary departure would be appreciated in the interest of the common peace.

“Should you feel the exquisite sting of a knife in the ribs, you have definitely gone too far, and should consider yourself both ejected and blacklisted for events held at the Center for a period not less than 144 years.”

 

Trope-a-Day: Transhumanism

Transhumanism: And lots of it, to the point where in advanced polities, anything resembling a baseline is an endangered species at best (at worst… well, there are no examples of baseline Eldrae alathis still around, right?  Even the people who were born one and survived the millennia have upgraded several times by now.).  Except no humans, so we call the general form transsophontism.

Trope-a-Day: Tractor Beam

(Forgot this last night; sorry, folks.)

Tractor Beam: Among the things that vector control will do for you, along with its pushy counterpart, the pressor beam, along with the variant in which it’s not used for towing or grappling, but rather as a structural element, in which all the bits of a ship or structure hang together despite hanging separately.  (Very luxury, such unsuitable for working vehicles, wow.)  Also available in small convenient sizes for construction, moving furniture, medicine, etc., often fitted as part of nanolathes, and for that matter, the modern Imperial equivalent of a screwdriver is basically one of these.

Important note: Eldraeverse tractor beams (and pressor beams), as with the rest of the vector control technology family, are subject to Newton’s Third Law, Conservation of Momentum, and so forth.  If you want to stay in the same place when using one, you need to allow for that.  Use thrusters to hold position when using it in space, and brace yourself when moving furniture.

It does mean you can take a personal-size tractor beam and play Spider-Man to your heart’s content, though. Assuming you are good enough to only point it at things that have the structural strength to support your weight.

Truffle House

mycofibrillin was originally a product designed by the space division of Molecular Architecture, ICC, under the Mycofibrillin™ trademark. It was a development of early experiments in creating spaceborne life, such as the regoformer “asteroid lichen”, which sustains itself using solar energy and water extracted from icy regolith.

Unlike its predecessors, mycofibrillin was designed not as an experiment or artwork, but as a functional tool. A designed-from-scratch neogen, it was a reinterpretation of various fungoid lifeforms – which took the form of an intertwined mat of fibers – for the space environment: a recreation of similar reaction networks making use of silicates, silanes, and silicones, at much lower temperatures, relying upon both a trickle of solar energy and provided radio-frequency energy broadcasts to power its metabolism.

The function of mycofibrillin was simply to stabilize aggregate-class “rubble pile” asteroids for relocation, or indeed for other exploitation. A rubble pile infected with a mycofibrillin culture, along with a microwave beacon to feed its growth phase, would swiftly find itself perfused by silicone-sheathed rhizomorphic hyphae of substantial tensile strength, acting to bind the many components of the rubble pile together into a single coherent mass.

Since this promising start, later offshoot technologies have included the thermophilic bionanotech weaves developed in conjunction with the chfsssc for stabilizing tectonically vulnerable regions of planetary crusts along with a variety of refined mycofibrillin derivatives, including a number of strains whose tensile strength is claimed to be suitable for maintaining the stability of large asteroids or small planetesimals when spun up to usable gravity-simulating speeds (although, in practice, the majority of residents of these worlds prefer microgravity environments).

– The Biotechnology of Space: A History, Kynthia Naratyr-ith-Naratyr