City Planet: Alas (?), none of the planet-sized worlds in the Worlds have yet grown to the point of being ecumenopoleis.
On the other hand, the subverted “small planet” version is definitely present: 1 Andír, in the Lumenna-Súnáris System, has been slowly hollowed out over centuries to the point where it actually is a beehive habitat/asteroid city filling all of the Ceres-like dwarf planet that it’s “on”. Or there’s the moon Palaxias in the Palaxias System that houses the IN’s Prime Base, which is similar and even bigger, except that it’s probably cheating when the majority of that hollowed-out space is spacedocks for really big starships in large numbers.
Y’know, I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this article on here before, and I really should have.
Because – as a simple matter of contract law – marriage in the Empire and other Societies of Consent does, in fact, permit all the difficult concepts mentioned here and a few more besides, including all of reflexive self-marriage (mostly pointless as it is), really complicated notions of “sex” and “gender”, polygamy, people being simultaneously involved in multiple distinct marriages, the marriage of non-natural persons which can potentially include marriages marrying each other as a distinct concept from multiple marriages merging, intransitive marriages, double-marriages, and asymmetric marriage. Welcome to the bleeding-edge postsophont universe, although for the good of everyone’s sanity, most people stick to the simple options and don’t try and make use of all of these at the same time…
But it gives you an idea of just how eye-wateringly difficult the job of the DBAs over at the Central Office of Records and Archives can be, sometimes.
Chronoscope: Not literally possible, but the combination of ubiquitous computer/sensor technology coupled with ridiculously huge amounts of computing power to assemble the evidence into a picture can do a damn good imitation of a past-viewing chronoscope. Doing the same thing with prognostication software is, alas, rather more limited, and becomes extremely unreliable more than a couple of seconds out.
(And with a powerful enough telescope, let’s not forget simply looking into/receiving signals from the past with the able assistance of light-lag.)
I have met lots of dar-vorac in civilian life, and while they’re strange in the usual ways that uplifts are strange, dar-bandal possibly somewhat excepted, and they’re mostly cheerful, well-adjusted people. No death fixations or suchlike abound, unless you count their taste in restaurants. Oh, slevanka, please let it not be the eyeballs.
But in the Legions, if your battle goes sideways hard enough that you need to send for a necromancer – sorry, battlefield nonfunctional/deathected asset repurposing specialist – then eleven times out of twelve you’ll see a raven flying in. Accompanied by the rising, swirling, drone-spewed mist of nanites that’s going to chew its way into the plentiful corpses, biophage the spare parts, and use the resulting energy to make the rest shamble their way towards the enemy and pull the trigger from time to time before being shot to sufficient pieces. Well enough to serve as a distraction or cover your retreat, anyway.
You just have to hope the enemy finds it as creepifying as we do.
Centrifugal Gravity: The kind of Artificial Gravity widely used by larger habitats and even starships, because it is substantially cheaper than faking it using powered vector-control apparatus, not to mention substantially simpler to implement and with fewer things to go wrong.
Notable for its amusing Coriolis side-effects, which is why it’s a really good idea not to bet on any ball games with a spacer until you’re used to how spin gravity affects things in practice…
Given the overall emphasis the eldrae place on freedom of choice and freedom of choices, how do they deal with issues of overchoice and the apparently paradoxical consequence that having too many choices on the table makes people less likely to effectively make the right choice due to the need to spend more time and resources (physical and psychological) to effectively evaluate them? How does that in turn manifest in practical terms?
There’s a thing I wrote way, way back in pre-this-version-of-the-‘verse history contrasting the eldrae and human approaches to automotive dashboard design that seems peculiarly relevant here.
Specifically, that starting from what were probably fairly similar arrangements, the latter have stripped down the engine monitoring to a generic ‘check engine’ light and a vestigial temperature gauge, while the climate controls are mostly run by an overall temperature setting and some simple push-button preset configurations…
…while the former have built them up to the point at which you can not only drill down to monitor, say, the exact composition of your exhaust gases in real-time but also rewrite all 438 key parameters of the engine management computer as you go. And the climate controls let you specify individual temperature and humidity settings for each vent.
(As I believe may also have been mentioned, there’s a related effect in product design and manufacturing, which can be summed up as: the more options, the better, since products that aren’t hugely customizable don’t sell…
…this has been known to cause a few problems in the export market. There are resellers whose entire business model revolves around taking those choices away from the customer.)
This particular non-human psychological quirk has its origins back in the Precursor Era. The trakelpanis trakóras amán desired servitors capable of managing highly complex industrial and other processes that they did not wish to concern themselves with for long periods of time, something for which choice fatigue and/or overchoice error would have been a distinct flaw. Being giant reality-warping dragons at the height of their civilization, they got rid of it. Or at least pushed the threshold for it so damn high that it’s not a significant phenomenon.
(As a side note, I’d add that this would almost certainly have bitten the trakelpanis trakóras amán right on the ass given time, inasmuch as a lack of choice-fatigue corresponds strongly with qalasír and the spectacularly dynamic temperament of the race. This, though, never had a chance to happen inasmuch as their civilization blew itself up shortly thereafter, freeing the unfinished proto-eldrae to make their very own bloody, destructive mess of their First Civilization.)
Capital Letters Are Magic: They are indeed: prominent local examples include the Flame and its opposite, the Darkness, in their theological senses.
This, though, is Translation Convention for the Eldraeic augmentative affix, in a language that somehow doesn’t have an augmentative affix. It means “qualitatively, not quantitatively, more so”; i.e., more like that which it is attached to than it itself is. Used to create certain words through poetic metaphor – such as lin-runér (“sovereign”) from runér (“noble”), or lin-aman (“deity”) from aman (“dragon”). Not that you could have capital letters in the original, anyway: Eldraeic alphabets have no letter case. Proper nouns are indicated by such things as color changes or cartouches.
So. Thank you all for your comments, ye who commented. I have duly taken on board and rolled around some. It fits, too, with some of what I have been dissatisfied with in myself, a certain darkening of tone which probably is a result of spending too much time observing the world around, which seems to be heading that way these days. Sigh. Must pay less attention.
In any case: it has been a valuable exercise, and I shall see about adjusting some areas and better showing others, which apparently have not been being communicated so well as I may have thought they were.
And now a few specifics…
On error:
Secondly, after having a night to mull things over and sleep on it, I suppose part of the problem is that the Imperials and their members are being portrayed as always certain and always right; we never see what happens when, for instance, the Imperial Navy just straight-up hits the wrong target with a KEW, when (for instance) it turns out that the “biological weapons lab posing as a pharmaceuticals factory” actually WAS a legit pharmaceuticals factory.
Actually, we have seen something rather close to that specific incident at least once, in this part of the Core War sequence, et. seq., with following consequences mentioned.
But it’s something that you shouldn’t expect to see much of, for reasons of world-consistency: which is to say, people with high levels of cognitive enhancement, plentiful internal computing resources, and a fragment of a star-spanning machine-god grafted to their minds can realistically be expected to hit what they aim at, metaphorically speaking, virtually all of the time. Cognitive enhancement has pretty much wiped out the class of mistakes involving miscalculation, in much the same way as Excel can reasonably be expected to get its calculations correct.
What you still see are mistakes at higher levels, like asking the wrong question – such as, to pick a recent example, pursuing FAT NINJA technology, or making certain assumptions with regard to Republic stargate technology.
Kimball Kinnison can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome he’s being.
Aside from describing Denna, though, isn’t Kvothe good at literally everything else? There are brilliant people out there who are good at things right off the cuff. I want to read books full of people being awesome. You can go too far. You can become unrealistic. But I think the fear of writing someone too perfect or too cool leads to a lot of godawful fucking books. If I wanted to watch people sucking and being dumb, I would just spend all my time on Twitter.
…and say yeah, that. I may be a little biased today by a certain “Why am I surrounded by these incompetent fools?” moment this morning, but as a rule, reality contains more than enough meh-duh to more than fulfil my recommended daily allowance. Which is why choose to, and will almost certainly go on choosing to, write about awesome people being awesome.
(I may tweak the level a bit, but that’s kind of a fundamental premise for me.)
On fixing things:
I am having a fail day and cannot find it, but you wrote about an organisation once that went out to the outskirts and tried very hard to bring incremental progress and advancement to cultures that were less advanced by Imperial standards. I loved that, because it was an example of actively trying to fix the universe rather than hoping people saw the Empire’s light in the distance and managed to one day stagger their way towards it. Having an example of ‘working’ not-governments is helpful, but doesn’t prevent your attempts of following it from stumbling into the sort of civil war that knocks your country back to widespread famine and anarchy in the most negative senses of the word.
I think that would be the Golden Suns Benevolent Association, seen here.
But, you may note, even the theme of their piece concerns how they can’t save the galaxy, any more than we on Earth can waltz into some other country and bring peace, democracy, and prosperity with any realistic chance of success. (Ethically, anyway – another theme here concerns how modern technology actually doeslet you change people’s minds, and why you can’t do that even if it wasn’t a horrible ethical violation for anyone who cares about free will.) All you can do is try and persuade them (ah, slowly! toward the light) to save themselves – from a practical, as well as ethical, standpoint.
That fundamental paradox of refused benevolence is one of the thematic strands of this ‘verse in general.
There are plenty of people working on one level or another (mostly the personal and oft-illicit) one to improve things, like the GSBA, and the Freedom’s Seed COG, and the Promulgators of Eternal Life, and the Agalmic Education Foundation, and the Venture Altruists COG, and dozens more, not to mention an arbitrary number of snakeheads and tech-smugglers, and so forth. But by and large, their work is a bunch of tiny nibbles trying to shift things one little bit and one person at a time – which may or may not count for more in the big picture than the cultural reach of the shining planet on the hill, as it were.
It’s also, although not entirely absent, something that I haven’t had many good story ideas for. I’ll see if I can give them some more page time.
On letting bad things happen:
I will say that it does seem like Imperials are more than willing to let the vicissitudes of fate throw an individual under the bus and to cheerfully accept that fate, when the alternative would be to open doors that might let in slavery. Which is an oddly collectivist take on individualism, in a manner of speaking: “you get screwed this time, because if we were to prevent it, we’d set a precedent that might reach to the rest of us later”. I suppose for better or worse, it is consistent. It sometimes produces results that a lot of people would consider monstrous, but it’s to prevent worse monstrosities, or so the modal Imperial would tell you. (Then again, when other polities have those monstrosities and the Empire doesn’t, one begins to think they have a point, ne?)
I think we covered most of this in The Hardest Part, which is to say, it’s not really a precaution against consequences, it’s a profound respect for free will at both ends of the transaction. If you get yourself into trouble, you can almost always get help – it’s just that you have to ask for it (because no-one will force it upon you and violate your consent) from someone willing to provide it (because you can’t force anyone to produce it and violate their consent).
(And as I said there, this perhaps shows that I have not adequately been portraying a non-human mindset.)
As a side note, I should perhaps add that it’s very likely that some of the abovementioned tone and for that matter all the answering of questions about specific cases I’ve been doing recently distort the perspective somewhat. Being fate-bussed by these things is a problem they have that is somewhere between our problems with shark attacks and our problems with death by falling meteorite on the “things it’s worth worrying about happening to me today” scale.
On Pain:
Another thought that enters into my head in regards to this matter: I wonder if a lack of understanding of pain in the experiential sense ever causes problems for those seeking to sell the Imperial Dream to what might charitably be called “new and emerging markets.”
Well, yes, principally because when they are unavoidable people come up with plenty of ways to Stockholm pain, death, etc. as natural and somehow virtuous. (Obligatory reference: the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, which probably translates rather well to the sort of thing the Promulgators of Eternal Life distribute.) And there is that experiential gap as mentioned under, say, The White Prince, Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense, and similar tropes.
I’m sure they have ways to deal with this, though, which I will almost certainly not write about because their memeticists and advertisers are orders of magnitude better than me at persuading people, and I can’t plausibly simulate that.
On Renegades:
In another related note, it’s implied that there are Imperial Renegades out there, and that many of them end up leaving the Empire or turning to extremism for what they personally see as good and justifiable reasons (and I do have to wonder if my own thoughts linked above might be voiced in-universe by precisely that kind of person).
Quite possibly – and indeed one of the canonical examples of a Renegade-heavy group is the Blood of Tyrants. Of course, the BoT are a terrorist group who favor direct action in the cause of “exterminate all non-consensual governments or government-like entities everywhere, right now”, so they’re probably not the best example…
(A note on terminology: just leaving, technically, makes you a renunciate. A Renegade is that subset of renunciates whose activities are such that the Second and Fourth Directorates feel they have to hunt you down and terminate you with some degree of prejudice, whether that amounts to traditional criminal activities or to Utopia Justifies the Means.)
Might be an interesting exercise to tell a story that focuses on one, both to see how they reach that point in their lives from an Imperial upbringing and to see an in-depth look at how ISS works with those moral and ethical ambiguities in the “moral event horizon” when there’s still a distinct possibility that the “carrot” side of the “carrot-and-stick” approach might actually deescalate the situation before the “stick” needs to be brought to bear.
Might be. I shall roll these ideas around and see what happens.
On tool misuse:
And further, it seems that in places, Imperial society has a ton of slaver’s tools around (ubiquitous surveillance, for example). How is it that these never got put to the kind of nefarious uses that they’d surely be put to in a New York minute, here on Earth? Is it just that anyone in a position of power who dared to do something like that would be strung up so high and so fast that they’d never know what hit them?
Virtue?
Or, to expand on that a little, non-human mindset plus a cultural tradition of liberty and tratalmir ulkith going back for literally millennia. Those sorts of abuses are about as likely to occur to them as desirable as, say, sending out a brute squad to beat wearers of mixed fabrics and menstruating women to death would to the modal 21st-century Westerner. It’s off the edge of the map.
That said, I have often wondered how they deal with issues arising from monopolies and other sorts of predatory leveragings of market power.
In the vast majority of cases, by pointing out that there ain’t no such thing, and that such allegations are mostly a stick used by inefficient businesses against more competitive ones. (Such as in the famous Standard Oil case, in which the people upset by the bad old monopoly were non-competitive smaller oil companies, not the consumer, who was by and large delighted by the arrival of inexpensive kerosene on the market.) If you can secure a challengeable monopoly through legal commercial means, you’re welcome to keep it – as long as you can, which won’t be long if you try Stupid Monopoly Tricks, because it’s challengeable.
Unchallengeable monopolies are a different matter, but it’s virtually impossible to get one of those without leveraging legal monopolies and/or regulatory capture, and that just ain’t gonna happen for obvious reasons.
That just leaves certain types of collusion and cartels, which are almost always a species of fraud in the first place, and are what the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate exists to break into small moist pieces. Metaphorically, of course.
On victim blaming:
While the Drowning of the People may have worked spectacularly well for them, there are similar incidents in human history that have backfired horribly. The common people rising up against their oppressive government and trying to claw back power often results in the government smacking them like a bug. So for the Empire to (seemingly) sneer at others for being ‘mutual slave states’ occasionally comes across as outright victim blaming, as does condemning species for engaging it ‘primate status games’ when a species has fundamental instincts they cannot edit out.
Well, that’s because it is.
On the former, though, that’s because eventually you run into sympathy burnout, no matter how much of it you started with, when in the case at hand the victims being blamed really did do it to themselves.
(This is not the case in the – more sympathy-inspiring – talkorasmóníë, true-force states, but we’re talking about sémódarmóníë right now. In their case, the problem is the cynical-but-accurate observation which comes from historical experience that reality often plays The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized awfully straight and that just because you’re oppressed right now doesn’t mean that you aren’t also a bunch of total bastards. This is where they would point at our experience overthrowing certain dictators only to see them replaced them with ISIL, and argue that that was a result worth spending neither a droplet nor a mill on.)
Anyway. Bear with me here.
Let’s use us (by which I mean the US) as an example. We have a political and gubernatorial system which has a long and inglorious history of failing to follow its own rules (including its own constitutional law), awarding itself additional powers ad hoc, and abusing the heck out of them. It has now reached the point at which it’s on the verge of putting a lunatic narcissist preaching idiot crypto-fascism in the Head of State slot. And still the overwhelming majority of the people cry, “Yay, democracy! Yay, embrace the two-party system!”
Insert obligatory clip here:
Now imagine that you’re old enough to have seen this dance play out over and over again, with slight variations in the steps but all ending up in basically the same place.
Now imagine that all this is happening despite hundreds of thousands of books, monographs, watchvids, InVids, dissertations, clionomic vector projections, memeplexes, FAQs, etc., etc., all openly published and many available for free download, with probably some bluntly phrased diplomatic warnings thrown in, all explaining that this shit right here? This is what you’re signing up for when you institute an off-the-shelf sémódarmóníë.
How long does it take you to get tired of saying, basically, “Stop punching yourself!”?
The second part is more difficult than mere action, for it is right action. To tame the fire of our passions, to discipline ourselves to the Codes and Excellences and to take on talcoríëf, such that we may pursue only our enlightened self-interest with mind and countenance as serene as the moon captured in still water, that is the first challenge of mastery we must each overcome; and yet it is the smallest.
…it’s not like they haven’t got their own instincts to overcome, particularly since the various cognitive enhancements and edits weren’t there at the start of history. But, y’know, as sophonts, volition ought to be able to tell instinct to mostly sit down and shut up. That’s what frontal lobes are for.
Admittedly, we haven’t seen much of the pre-Imperial period, but a lot of it was what might be considered distinctly not nice, which I think is implied in various places. (And certainly, one doesn’t develop the Codes and the Excellences and the whole cult of talcoríëf unless one needs them.) One might make analogies here to pre-Surak Vulcan. Granted, certainly, this could have been made a lot clearer, but they don’t see themselves as asking anyone to do something they haven’t done.
And, specifically, it wouldn’t be that we have primate relative status instincts that they sneer at us for. It wouldn’t even be failing at silencing them; it’s not even trying to and composing elaborate rationalizations for them that’s damnable.
prophylock (n.): Used primarily by free traders, a prophylock is a collapsible docking module used when rendezvousing with untrusted vessels for cargo transfer. Similar to a standard docking module, a prophylock is a cylinder with an IUSI-P or IUSI-F androgynous adapter on each end, one to attach to the host starship and one to dock with the foreign starship.
The prophylock, however, has near its outboard end an armored barrier which prohibits the passage of sophonts, equipped with a secure passage (complete with mechanical interlocks preventing both sides from being opened simultaneously, and sampling systems for testing the contents before opening the inner door) through which the transfers may take place. In the event that both vessels are using prophylocks, the secure passage systems are designed to allow transfers from one to the other without direct integration, but also without requiring anyone to occupy the ‘tween-lock volume.
Rather than the direct data systems connection of a standard IUSI adapter, the prophylock connects the foreign data bus to a limited-functionality terminal, permitting communication and negotiation to take place without information risk.
Finally, the outboard end of the prophylock is equipped, for the case in which a lack of trust should turn out to be justified, with an explosive collar to sever the outboard androgynous adapter, thus reliably breaking the connection between vessels, along with solid-fuel jettison rockets to push the host vessel back immediately upon collar detonation, shortening the time to safe burn clearance as much as possible.
Fly safe. Dock safer.
– A Star Traveller’s Dictionary
(Yes, I was thinking of Out of Gas when I wrote this one…)
With reference to Jade Nekotenshi’s comment here, the graph to the right taken from this survey, methinks, reveals another key application of the so-important primitives-barbarians dichotomy.
See, if you don’t have these technologies, that just classifies you as “primitive”. That’s a term of art, not a value judgement. Every sophont race was there once, and with thought, effort, and will, can rise above it.
Not wanting them, on the other hand, that classifies you among the “barbarians”, and indeed with every “bigoted, knowledge-resenting, knuckle-dragging regressive” stereotype listed in the Big Book of Offensive Terms for Offensive People. Which are value judgements.
It’s the latter, as per said survey, that they’d hypothetically be sneering at us over, not simply our not having teched the tech yet.
Ignorance isn’t only pardonable, it doesn’t need to be pardoned, only cured. Gnosiophobia and its associated family of pathologies, on the other hand…
Bright Castle: Oh, they’ve got lots of these. One of the quirks of having to lead by sheer force of arête rather than force is that it helps to build a bloody impressive seat to impress people with your leadership qualities from; as such, generations of castle architects have concentrated at least as much on awesome shininess as on defensibility – and once defensibility was something that you couldn’t expect out of a castle, switched happily to concentrating primarily on awesomeness.
The ultimate example of this (which also qualifies as a Big Fancy Castle) is Alphas I Amanyr’s Imperial Palace, which starts with a twelve-story five-sided marble Citadel as a centerpiece, then surrounds it with just over 900 other buildings1 scattered throughout its extensive walled grounds, and includes such features as the Long Hall, a public, multi-story hall (complete with cafés on promenade balconies) running a couple of miles from the main entrance to the main doors of the Citadel and giving entrance to all the other areas of the Palace, public and private, on the way. Part of the size, of course, is that it also houses the offices of state and staff attached to the Imperial Household – including the central office of the Chancelry of Coordination – representations from all the Ministries and the Service, the facilities for the Imperial Guard, and so forth, but there’s no denying that it positively reeks of power, wealth, beauty, awe, and suitability to be right at the center of things for arbitrarily large values of things. Which was exactly Alphas’s intent – “We are the sort of people who can build this room – and we’ve got a lot more rooms like this.” – and he hired the very best architects and what-would-later-be-called-memeticists to ensure that he got it.
(If pressed, his heirs might be prepared to admit that he may have gone a little overboard, but there’s no arguing with results. Besides, he’d already demonstrated genius in the fields of governance, military command, economics, philosophy, and technological applications – what more do you want?)
1. In the modern era. It wasn’t always quite so mini-city-sized, but expanding to that size was built right in to the original plans. Because ambition.
From: Alvis Antarianus, Expansion Renewal Union
To: Heriath Calliste, Inevitable Justice Foundation
Subject: Re: Cleaning up the Union once and for all
Look, your proposed operation is well designed. I’ll give it that. But there’s no chance whatsoever that it’ll pass the Senate. Galactic Relations or State Security’d kill it in a heartbeat even if Military Affairs were to let it pass, which they won’t.
Even if you can persuade all the right people that it’s a worthy cause, preemptive occupations are a dead letter for a reason, and it’s not just a few faded scrolls at State & Outlands with a peace addiction. Academician Doctor Excellence Selidië Cíëlle killed them the moment she figured out how to meme-map a mind-state and back-port alterations to the original living brain. She gave us desire control, meme rehab, psychedesign, and the Guardians of Our Harmony, but she shot the knees out from under the belligerati doing it.
People can tell themselves that they won’t crack under torture, even when it’s a nerve stapler or a death cube. They can tell themselves that they can resist any bribe, withstand any temptation, not succumb to any cunning memetic campaign, and intimidate or plain murder any of their neighbors who do. There’s even some damn fools who convince themselves they have the mental integrity to shrug off a YGBM.
But no-one, no-one, can resist psychedesign applied directly to their brain, and everyone out there knows that.
The Conclave of Clionomy have run the vectors on this. Our reputation for ethical stringency keeps people calm and trusting, under normal circumstances. But take a voluntary trip down into the tar-pit, and you’re going to get rumors and propaganda flying about how we’re mass-reprocessing people into good little libertist meme-bots, or weaponizing infectious nanotech that rewrites the loyalty circuits of people’s brains, or some such bitswarf, and if their projections are right, that has a high probability of taking us to CASE SKYSHOCK RED and a hard civilization kill event within two years, five at the outside.
You know they’d be lies, and I know they’d be lies, but try to imagine just how terrifying literally changing someone’s mind would be to a paranoid peon with a poor grasp of consensuality.
Maybe you could try pitching it to the waserai ambassador?
A new writing blog for a shiny new posthuman SF universe appeared yesterday in my website logs, from a long-time reader here, and I just had to tell y’all to go check it out. The site’s brand new, but there’s already some juicy content there, and if you ask me, it’ll be well worth following in the future.
Bold Explorer: While I shall leave specific examples to individual fics and so forth, they have a lot of these in the Imperial Exploratory Service, and especially in the first-in scouts and volunteers to crew (as infomorphs) far horizon probes. You have to be a little bit crazy to go boldly where no soph has gone before, and all that.
The first part of acting in accordance with jírileth is the easiest: do as thou wilt. To exercise the power of choice comes naturally to all who think, as it must, and in the hearts of the eldrae qalasír burns bright. We do as we choose, obeying only our need for mélith and the dictates of our own necessities. Thus it has been; thus it shall always be, for jír is the core of our nature.
The second part is more difficult than mere action, for it is right action. To tame the fire of our passions, to discipline ourselves to the Codes and Excellences and to take on talcoríëf, such that we may pursue only our enlightened self-interest with mind and countenance as serene as the moon captured in still water, that is the first challenge of mastery we must each overcome; and yet it is the smallest.
“The Fire burns in the Heart, Through choice its blaze is stoked. Can a fire burn without fuel? When one man takes another’s will; By this the Flame is quenched.
“This is the first Darkness. Vile and accursed are they Who would command another’s soul. They shall know death beyond this world, The Twilight City denied them.”
It is the renunciation of kóras, the power of compulsion. At first this seems simple: we may say to ourselves, “I shall not tyrannize; I shall not enslave,” and this task is easy. At second glance, we come to realize the myriad ways in which kóras and choice-theft may hide themselves behind good intentions, and justifications, and by guising itself as mere persuasion, or as duty, or as implicit obligation, and rooting it out of our minds’ gardens becomes a worthy challenge. But this, too, is not the pinnacle.
There will come a time in all our lives when another’s choices, we perceive, will lead them to loss, ruin, even death; when example, advice, and warning all fail; when they stand at the brink, and begin their leap. The highest test of our commitment to jírileth is, when that moment comes, to stand aside.
It is the power of choice that makes us sophont; the Flame that elevates us above clank automata and the lower beasts. To commit choice-theft – even with the best of intentions, and in what you perceive their best interest to be – is to reverse this, to reduce them to little more than an infant, an animal, or a clank; it is to fundamentally violate their self-integrity. Even if it was done out of one’s highest motives, it remains a rape of the soul; the conversion of a person, an end in themselves, to a mere instrumentality for our choices, a chattel of our will.
Thus, we must permit a lesser destruction, for in its avoidance lies a greater one.
“To trade the eternal for the ephemeral is to sacrifice a greater thing for a lesser. This trade has no worth.”
– writings of Sardonyx, student of the philosopher Arlannath
Body Backup Drive: Standard practice in civilized transsophont space, using cloned replacements grown specially – or, for budget body use, travel, or temporary copies, any one of a large number of premade ‘vatjobs’. These replacements are designed never to be fully sophont on their own, though; their brains are designed to run the Universal Noetic Architecture platform, with a very simple maintenance OS to keep the body healthy when someone’s mind isn’t inhabiting it.
There are lots of empty boxes in the galaxy, but only one is the Empty Box.
This simple, small cube of tarnished silver and lead, recovered from a Precursor site on Omane (First Expanses), is unique because it is exactly that: empty. It contains no mere vacuum.
Within its internal “volume”, for lack of a better word, there is nothing; not only the absence of mass-energy, but also of everything else. There is no space within the cube, nor does time pass there. The most sensitive measuring instruments available detect no activity within, not even that of the quantum foam. Most significantly, radiation passed through the cube appears to travel faster than light, passing into one facet and out of the opposing facet with the delay that would be expected were the inner facets of the cube to be coterminous – which we believe them to be, in fact. A captured glitch in the fabric of space, perhaps, or an experiment in creating the ultimate emptiness?
It is, of course, quite impossible. But then, everything here is.
– exhibit label at the Museum of Manifest Impossibilities,
Landing, Víëlle (Thirteen Colonies)
So, what I’d like to do is for you to go and read the comment series starting here – and note, this is an invitation for y’all to criticize me, not the commenter, so however much we may disagree, let’s keep it civil, please – and give me your thoughts on any and all topics raised.
‘Cause it’s not like I haven’t had some thoughts of my own regarding a little dissatisfaction of mine with some things lately, and before I try to figure out whether I’m right about that, wrong about that, or whether it’s a sertraline artifact, I’d like to take the temperature out there in readerville.
(Although I will certainly admit to presenting them as smug. Forvariousreasonssuchasthese, I maintain that it would be horribly unrealistic if the Imperials, and for that matter the rest of the Core Economic and Cultural Zone, were not quite splendidly smug by our standards. For all the reasons that the Culture gets to indulge its smuggery, with the added side-benefit of not being pets.)
Anyway. Please think at me, gentle readers. I’ll respond once I’ve got a feel for the temperature out there.
With reference to Jade Nekotenshi’s