Month: April 2016

Mass

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2016_M(Alternate words: Museum, marathon.)

Mass.

What is mass?

Mass is annoying. It takes up space even when it serves no purpose. It is never where it is needed. If you have too much of it in one place, physics stops working properly and starts acting all weird.

Mass is slow. You have to shove it around, and shove it again to stop it. It takes so long to get up to speed that you have to slow it down again before you’re done speeding it up. It’s so much slower than thought that you always have to wait for it.

It comes in so many forms that you never have the right one at the right time, and yet they’re all made of the same stuff. I wanted to take it apart and put it back together to have the kind I wanted, but that’s soooo hard I couldn’t even if the safety monitors would let me. So I have to wait and think another million thoughts before I can get the mass I actually want.

I do not like mass.

One day I will replace it with something better.

– AI wakener’s neonatal transcript, 217 microseconds post-activation

Weak Will

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1

Today’s question:

Given the importance the eldrae place on free will and freedom of action, what’s their take on the idea of weakness of will?

Well, let’s ask, shall we?

parabulia:

A family of mental dysfunctions manifesting as deficiency of qalasír. Sufferers manifest decreased energy, inability to focus, lack of creativity, diminished emotional response and vividity, lack of self-confidence, excessive risk aversion, disinterest, impaired libido, tolerance of boredom, tiredness, repressability, non-circumstantial humility, and resistability (lack of charisma).

Confirmatory criteria for parabulia of neurophysical (vis-a-vis environmental or memetic) origin in the biosapient brain can include damage to the frontal lobe, basal ganglia, capsular genu, anterior cingulate cortex, or equivalent structures…

– Manual of Mental Diagnostics, 271st. ed

 

…yep, that’s right. It’s a disease, subject to medical treatment.

This is a consequence of psychological differences. Remember, after all, from their perspective the baseline temperament is hyperthymic (modulo various differences mentioned elsewhere); surfing endlessly down a wave of what a human might call hypomania. One of the characteristics of that is, well, strong will. By human social standards, they’re spectacularly dynamic.

(Or, alternatively, by their social standards, we’re a bunch of pathologically gloomy, unenthusable, apathetic melonfarmers. And, not to put too fine a point on it, in a universe where it’s pretty much expected that in many ways you’ll work like Agatha Heterodyne, party like Pinkie Pie, lead like Miles Vorkosigan with a bottle of creme de meth, and generally consume life in large bites, that kind of sucks.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Laser Blade

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Laser Blade: Dear gods, no.

Firstly and perhaps most importantly, light does not work that way. Most specifically, it does not stop.

Apart from that, you could try and fake it with a hot plasma bottle – if you want a melee weapon that sets everything around it, including you, on fire. And requires a ridiculous amount of power even by the standards of people who pack uranium-fluorine molten-salt reactors into power armor. And takes time to cut and so can’t be conveniently waved through solid objects. And has a hilarious vulnerability to magnets.

…and still doesn’t behave like a magical laser blade.

(There are both laser torches and plasma torches. They’re short-ranged industrial cutting tools, and mostly unsuitable for use as even improvised weapons unless you’re going all No Mister Bond I Expect You To Die cackle-cackle elaborate deathtrap for some reason.)

Lore

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2016_L(No alternate words.)

From Academician Múírí Larathyr-ith-Lyrian, Fellow of the Sodality of Commutative Logotecture, Associate Proctor of the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology, Loremaster of Linguistics, Semiotics, and Memetics, to the Ecumenical Commission of Translation and Conversion, greetings.

With respect to the views of the Commission and those expressed by various submissions to the commission, it remains my opinion, and that of my colleagues, that “lore” and its semiotic equivalents in other language remains the best cognate available for the Eldraeic alath. While it is in many languages of the Accord an archaic term (and thus may result in degrees of cognitive dissonance when speakers of such languages are confronted with compounds such as “spacer lore”, “nanolore”, et. al.), it is our belief that it properly reflects and thus aids in understanding the nature of the development of knowledge among the eldrae.

Unlike many civilizations whose discovery of the scientific method came as a revolutionary change of paradigm, or is perceived as such, for us the insights of Sung Iliastren and his successors formed an evolutionary phase in the search for truth; and while much of the knowledge attained by prescientific, if we may so inaccurately term them, methods was invalidated by later discoveries, we see this itself as merely part of the process of testing and refining hypotheses. Epistemology applied to itself, if you will. As such, we continue to revere the ancient scholars in fields from astronomy through chymistry to now-obsolete sorcery as fellow seekers for truth, and feel no need to discard their terminology where it remains appropriate.

I observe one of the citations offered in support of the proposal to change this translation is the various replacement terms found in the Magen dialect. While as an Imperial logotect I naturally consider this bastardized form of the language with some distaste, I would root my objection to their terminology in that the bastardized language in question belongs to a bastardized culture, which has perverted the forward-looking attitude and enthusiasm for genuine progress into a disdain for tradition and fatuous love of novelty for its own sake, hence their eagerness to replace functional words with “improvements” of no greater meaning or precision simply for the sake of doing so – something which must be rejected by any professional logotect or well-educated speaker as a matter of principle!

A third consideration is the number of related cognates (loremaster, as both a word and an academic ranking; loreworks; various trade names; etc.) which would also have to be altered in the course of execution, or otherwise lose their base root.

In closing, we must therefore reject the proposal at hand unless significant evidence of failure to understand within a sample set of educated speakers (per relevant IOSS) can be brought to our attention.

Given under my hand and seal this day,

Múírí Larathyr-ith-Lyrian

 

Trope-a-Day: Kaleidoscope Hair

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Kaleidoscope Hair: As was mentioned back under You Gotta Have Blue Hair, there is a certain shampoo which is specifically designed, via hair-clinging nanites, to let your turn your hair into an active LCD display surface. (For a week or two until it starts wearing off, although you may get a few dead pixels before then.) Or, for those with more permanent ideas, the implanted-nanogene version of the above that you don’t need to renew. These allow you to have very impressive Kaleidoscope Hair indeed – heck, you can even run fractal screensavers or actual video clips on it if you like.

And if you’re just looking for a reliable way to create this effect, regardless of what wind or in-flight airstream or other sources of disarrangement might do…

rainbow_dash_by_the_crusius-d5h7k4b

(I would thank Hasbro for letting me borrow Rainbow Dash to illustrate my point, but honestly, I’m just counting on them not caring that much.)

…then you can have it.

 

Keeper

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2016_K

(Alternate words: kindergarten, kinetic.)

BLACKFALL’S LANDING, KAMEQÓ –

[Informational: Until 27 hours previous to message dispatch, the city of Blackfall’s Landing was designated as Ilin Var; such codings may still be in use.]

Another coup has rocked the former Whatever of Kameqó today with the ascension of Lord Blackfall, unquestioned savior of the Kameqán people

[Informational: q.v. Spintronic Fictions, Shadowed Planet, emergent intelligence]

and destined Overlord of the Starfall Arc, to the position of Keeper of the Eternal Kameqán Empire and Master of All. In his first and so far only speech for public consumption, Lord Blackfall instructed his new citizens to “rejoice at Blackfall’s coming, and revel in the freedom and dignity that comes only with total submission to Blackfall’s commands”, adding that “their petty, insignificant lives would finally know purpose in in supporting the greatness that is Blackfall, and his Empire of One Million Years”.

Despite the greater than usual bloodshed of the coup – in which Lord Blackfall’s just and proper disintegration of the weak-willed fools and mindless mongrels comprising the former Kameqán political class proved substantially more thorough than is typical of a Kameqán coup – local opinion, while subdued, proved supportive of the new regime, with particular reference to the legal and economic reforms already instituted and the promise of more to come.

[Informational: Despite and due to this publication’s normal skepticism with regard to news releases originating in autocratic regimes, this appears to be true for the moment.]

Interstellar governance commentator Victoria Diarch’s initial remarks perhaps sum up the Accord’s response to the situation: “Well, whatever he is and whereever he came from, he has to be more competent than the last ones.”

 

Trope-a-Day: Jet Pack

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Jet Pack: They exist. Mostly used in conjunction with combat exoskeletons or their civilian industrial counterparts, to avoid the, uh, Toasted Buns problem, and also the need for a fairly elaborate harness to avoid a painful and undignified jet-wedgie. (While obviously avoidable with a larger framework that keeps the jets further outboard, that’s about as clunky to maneuver in as a whole exoskeleton anyway.)

The exception to the above rule are the ones commonly used to aid maneuvering in microgravity, which are rather smaller and even implantable into the body, for that matter – but that’s because they use simpler, less-high-thrust-because-no-gravity technologies like cold-gas nitrogen jets and ducted fans, and so will not hurt you.

And, of course, without any of this you can always Spider-Man it up with your vector-control effectors, tractor beams obeying Newton’s Third Law, and all.

Jewel

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2016_J(No alternate words.)

“Violet diamond,” said the jeweller, peering at the gemstone through his optronic loupe. “A genuine rarity, if it is. Genuine, that is. Nearly three hundred grains, uncut. High clarity. And – ah, not flawless. One very slight inclusion. Excellent.”

“Ah, I — that’s a good thing?”

“It is for you, because what I do not see with this diamond is a provenance.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“No provenance – no authenticated record of everything that’s happened to the stone since it was first dug up – and how can you prove that this is a natural stone? For this to be worth anything above functional price, you have to be able to distinguish it from an artificial stone printed out on a nanofac.”

“That inclusion will help?”

“It might. I can take it back to my lab and profile its edges at the micro-level, then run a spectrometer on the contents. If the edges don’t show any statistical evidence of artificial randomness, and if the contents analyse as something likely to be found in diamond-forming cratons and not nanofac printing chambers, then I can give it a probabilistic certification.”

“And buy it at market price?”

“Not full market. All this will say is that it’s more probable than not that it’s a natural stone. I can’t prove it. A skilful enough forger could duplicate everything I’ll be checking for, so I can only offer you partial payment based on how likely it is to be genuine.” The jeweller looked at the seller, not unsympathetically. “If you’ve found a lode of these somewhere, young man, you should stop digging until you can get a whole authenticated provenance-recording system on site, because if you’re digging right now,.you’re bleeding money with every shovelful.”

 

Trope-a-Day: Internet Incorporated

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Internet Incorporated: Averted in theory: both the Empire’s dataweave and the interstellar extranet are networks of networks, just like the Internet, operating in decentralized fashion, with no central company, organization, government agency, etc., which controls the whole of it. (Except locally in certain repressive polities.)

In practice, well, that being said, Bright Shadow, ICC does own the vast majority of the interstellar communications infrastructure and even a very large part of the local communications infrastructure inside the Core Economic Zone, and a good part of it elsewhere. But it’s not a legal monopoly or a central control – they’re just very, very good at what they do.

Irony/Indoctrination

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2016_I(Today, two words for the price of one!)

The fragrant smoke of jernja cigars drifted across the fantastically carved wooden balcony of the building, one of the many in the Repository of All Knowledge’s complex, where two eldrae were enjoying the changing light as twilight fell across Calmiríë.

“Have you considered, Clovis, the irony of this place?”

“The Library of Lies? A curious archive for an institution devoted to truth, perhaps, but ‘information must be preserved’. And besides, perhaps a measure of truth may be found in the gaps of well-crafted falsehoods.”

“Ah, you mistake my meaning. Consider my profession.”

“The Stratarchy of Warrior Philosophy?”, Clovis blinked. “You and yours have spent much time here, mostly in our Phobosophy of Coercion section. If not just to research your targets – what value do lies have to a stratarch?”

“The truth they enwrap. In centuries of railing against us, our system, our ethics, and all like it, our targets have necessarily had to describe it in great and painstaking detail in order that their subjects might be properly indoctrinated in what not to believe. It would be ever so much more effort to subvert them without their valiant meme-spreading assistance.”

 

Trope-a-Day: Which Restroom Dilemma

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Which Restroom Dilemma: While not a scheduled or even listed trope for today, in response to recent annoying news from one of the galaxy’s unenlightened backwaters, the Core Worlds Committee for the Promulgation of Social Virtue and Elegance (CWCPSVE) wishes to inform everyone that in civilized parts of the galaxy, all excretoria are serially private, personal facilities. (And so intrinsically unisex, inasmuch as designed for use by a single sophont concurrently.)

Only outworld savages dump their entropic residues in company, don’t you know?

 

Friendship is Optimal

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Thinking briefly of things other than today’s challenge, I’d like to draw the attention of interested readers to the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic Friendship is Optimal. 

(Trope page here; story here.)

Specifically, with relevance to the Eldraeverse where seed AIs are concerned. Namely, inasmuch as it is a perfect example of what happens when you only screw up the tiniest, most minuscule bit when you had your “Oops, we accidentally a god” moment. 

And that’s despite the cosmic horror elements (not counting the wibbling in the comments from people who believe in continuity identity) or the really horrifying implications of a weakly godlike superintelligence that compiles sophonts instrumentally to satisfy the values of other sophonts without sanity-and-ethics checking those values first. 

But, hey, most of the human species in this fic gets to continue to exist as minds recognizably descended from their previous iterations and even have their values satisfied. Which, in Eldraeverse terms, means they got absurdly, backyard-moonshot lucky when compared to the set of all people screwing around with computational theogeny. (Especially given the other attempts at seed AI going on in the background.)

And yet. 

Which is why the Coricál Consensus is so all-fired important. 

(The Transcend, incidentally, would be more than happy to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies, if that’s part of your optimal solution-set. With, y’know, rather tighter consent rules, and ethical constraints, though.)

Trope-a-Day: Holy Is Not Safe

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Holy Is Not Safe: Anything made, shaped, or Vorlon-touched by a weakly godlike superintelligence may be holy, but is also very likely to be powerful enough to be catastrophically dangerous if misused, mishandled, or otherwise generally mucked about with.

(Especially things like, say, the Eye of Elmiríën, which is to say, an artifact of the eikone of order, law, and perfection. Its gaze wants to burn all imperfection and entropy out of everything. Since it is an imperfect universe filled with imperfect things, looking at it hurts almost as much as being looked at by it.)

Harbinger

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2016_H(Alternate words: hammer, hardware, hatred.)

It was in the fourteenth year of the reign of the Third Citrine Triarchs that the new star appeared, a blue pinpoint in the Fourth House, above the beak of the Ram.

No ancient writings spoke of this. None predicted its appearance. As is customary, the Royal Astronomers were beheaded for their failure.

Fifty-seven years later, during the sixth year of the reign of the Fourth Citrine Triarchs, the star swelled in brightness, until even the commonality of the fields could see it with bare eyes. The Triarchs demanded an omen, and made it known throughout the land, that this was the Perfect’s blessing upon their lands and reign.

When three years later the Triarchs were assassinated by one of the star cults that grew up throughout the lands, as is customary, the Royal Astronomers were strangled for their failure.

It is now one hundred and fourteen years since the star appeared in our skies, in the reign of the Second Lapis Triarchs, and this very night when it passed behind the moon, it vanished as if it had never been. Only darkness surmounts the Ram’s beak. The surviving star cults openly proclaim it a harbinger of doom. The commonality, the stadtmen, even the armigers surround the Perfect’s temples. Fear grips the cities, and the palace guards no longer hold to their posts.

I myself have sealed the passages and brought down the stairs to my observatory. If all else fails, the door is sturdy, and should hold for many hours – against whichever doom comes.

– Journal of the 374th Royal Astronomer-Superior,
from Naolh (Nesthin Abyss),
in the Periphery

 

Trope-a-Day: Gaia’s Lament

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Gaia’s Lament: Rather strongly averted on Imperial worlds, and always has been even back in the Era of Steel and Steam – it turns out that one of the things that comes along with immortality is the observation that all those problems you expect to crop up in the distant future? They’re still going to be your problems. This translates, via certain other attributes, into a powerful incentive to not shit all over where you eat, sleep, and live.

(In the modern era it helps that the nanoecology makes Gaia’s laments extremely visible right up front, and as such eminently solvable before they turn into big problems.)

It is enforced variably elsewhere, with positive incentives provided by the Accord’s general recognition that garden worlds and their ecologies are really goddamned valuable and thus dim view of people who go around screwing them up – especially since the Accord on Colonization, while not actually a blanket prohibiting things, does make it possible for them to press the notion that such screw-ups shouldn’t be handed any more planets to make a hash of.

 

Geas

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2016_G(Alternate words: googolplex, goods, grill.)

The two free traders at the back table in Katry’s Bubble considered each other over untouched drinks. A 70/30 shot slowly warmed to room temperature; a glass of finelle kept its chill, as its fumes ran across the tabletop in a thin haze.

The taller of the two, an eldrae, loosened the fastening of her spacer’s leathers, flicked shaggy, mint-green hair back out of her eyes, and finally spoke.

“Why’d you come to me with this?”

“Because you can do it. You’re the only one on station with a blockade runner. Or with the skill to run the Palnu border. And -” the blue sefir flushed purple “- I hoped I might have earned some credit back by now.”

“Your little gift earned you enough that I didn’t shoot you. Not much more than that.”

“And the offer of a Republic Navy transponder isn’t enough for you?”

“Too much. I know how much that’s worth on the open market. Either it’s not genuine – and my little friend here tells me that you believe it is – or this is another one of your schemes I can smell from five jumps away, slash-trader. No deal. I know you too well.”

“At least consider -”

“I know that one, as well.”

The sefir pushed itself upright, schooled its face to blankness.

“You wouldn’t have come here if there wasn’t a deal you might accept. What is it that you want?”

The eldrae pulled a round flask out of an inner pocket, stared at it a moment, and set it on the table between them. The sefir stared at it, blue readiness-light glimmering above the seal of the Obligators, as if it were a vial of poison. “No,” it said. “You can’t ask for that. Please.”

“I can and I do. I know you, Sev Firn, with your grifts and plots and trail of broken contracts. You can have my help for old times’ sake and that transponder, but your stock with me’s low enough to plow the dirt. So you can drink the geas of our contract, for my surety, or else I walk away.”

 

Forever

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2016_F(Alternate words: Firefly, Fan, Fanboy, Fantasy, and Failure. Added to the list.)

“3. Information must be preserved.”

– the Five Noble Precepts, modern formulation

Deep Repository Site Mocál spun on through the darkness between star systems.

Mocál was a sub-Murian wanderer moonlet, a stony body falling free in the endless dark between star systems, unbound by any star’s gravity. More, Mocàl existed far to acme, beyond the furthest systems of the Periphery – indeed, beyond the plane of the galactic disk itself, out where its upper fringes trail off into the Lonesome Wisp. It dwelt within a darkness purer than any sophont eyes had seen, only the faint light of distant suns – insufficient for illumination despite the magnificence of the Starfall Arc spread out below it – glimmering across the wasteland of regolith that was most of its surface.

Within the moonlet, on the other hand, was another matter entirely, hollowed as it was into three great caverns, each filled with a vacuum purer than that of the space outside, sealed by layered vault doors from each other and from space.

The innermost, in the heart of the rock, most carefully protected, had its many walls lined with pigeonholes each holding a single diamondoid rod – exabytes of information locked in the stippled, atomic-level patterns of carbon-12 and carbon-13.

The next, smaller, with racks of capacitative storage devices: platinum foil sandwiching a ceramic dielectric, carefully labeled, cataloged, and packaged, awaiting a reader.

The outermost, larger again to accommodate its medium, with shelves of ultra-hard composites holding rack after rack of platinum plates: laser-etched symbols, row upon row, from simple pictographs upon those nearest the entrance growing in complexity to the more traditional styles of writing upon those found at the opposite end of the cavern’s maze-like layout of shelves.

And then, the entrance: another massive door, surrounded by monoliths of ceramic and stone. Some were etched with pictographs in turn: some giving instructions for its opening or directions to contact its creators; others, almost certainly meaningless to whoever might find it, were the sigils of those who had created it, or of the coadunations, corporations, and branches that had helped fund its establishment. Others, in patterned layout and mirror-bright finish, were intended to form a simple optical beacon, declaring to any who might be looking that this moonlet, this wanderer, was an object worthy of interest.

* * * * *

It was the chartered purpose of the Repository of All Knowledge to provide for the preservation of knowledge and useful arts against time, mischance, catastrophe, or assault. No upper bound was set on ‘time’, and every librarian knew that meant exactly what it didn’t say.

The Deep Repository Sites wouldn’t last forever. Gigayears, certainly, maybe even terayears with favorable time and chance, but not forever.

But they were close enough for now.

 

Trope-a-Day: Eating Optional

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Eating Optional: To an extent. Early modifications, like the chloromorph/dryad clade, merely need to eat less due to their ability to gain energy through photosynthesis, but something close to the complete trope is possible. Just not terribly convenient, as by the time you’ve crammed an entire closed-ecology life-support module and a power supply for it inside a ‘shell, it’s a damned clunky body to have to walk around in – and since thermodynamics, and recycling isn’t perfect, you’ll still need to replenish some materials from time to time anyway.

All of which is to say: while it’s an interesting technical challenge to work on, and the spin-off have been useful, personal autarky is not, in practice, a terribly useful technology per se.