Trope-a-Day: Gaia’s Vengeance

Gaia’s Vengeance: One of the worlds the trikhad invaded and attempted to strip-industrialize during their brief conquistador period was Fynfil (Tanion Wilds), with its highly complex, highly interlinked, universally mutualist ecosystem. To say it went very badly indeed would be something of an understatement, because there’s not a lot you can do when pretty much every lifeform on the planet is willing to cooperate in killing you. Indeed, when pretty much the entire ecology is dedicated to the war effort.

And the word went forth: fuck not with the myriasoma.

Space Is Crowded… For Space

Something I was reminded of – by some of the comments here (…There Is Only Awesomeness) that suggest an assumption of ground combat as a default – is the surprising emptiness of space in many settings.

(I’m looking at you, Star Trek, where even the freakin’ capital of the Federation, Sol System itself, may have only one starship or even none at all present at any given time. Star Wars is usually better about this, but even then, there’s a lot less traffic than you might expect. And so on, and so forth and forth and forth.)

This is, needless to say, not the case in the Eldraeverse, in any reasonably developed star system.

Orbital space, in particular, is insanely crowded. (See the quote from Manna, here.) There’s the orbital defense grid, of course, but even leaving that aside, there are commsats, navsats, weather satellites (both monitoring and control), orbital mirrors, remote sensors of various kinds, space telescopes, junk sweepers, solar power satellites…

And then there are the orbital stations. Highports, research stations, orbital factories, skyfarms, residences (from city-sized habitats to personal mansions), skymalls, warehouses, control centers for some of the satellite constellations, data havens, propellant depots, autochandleries…

And all the OTVs, commuterspheres, satellite oilers, resupply skiffs, dock-n-snacks, and other small craft bustling about between them even before you get to regular traffic like orbital shuttles, tugs, commercial inbounds, commercial outbounds, the Watch Constabulary’s Orbit Guard…

Basically, near-planetary space is an ever-changing maze. And that’s true for pretty much every developed planet or moon in the system, to one degree or another.

That’d be bad enough if the universe worked on the kind of FTL where you can drop out of hyperspace close to planets. But since it doesn’t, then there’s the rest of the system, which isn’t by any means that crowded (it is, after all, much bigger), but which does still contain —

Long-range commsats and navsats, space weather satellites (and, close in, stellar husbandry arrays), bigger space telescopes, power-beam relays, drift stations (more farms, factories, habitations, etc., for people who like a little more distance), inhabited rocks likewise, transshipment stations for through traffic that doesn’t want to have to go downwell, smelterships, prospectors, rock pushers, comet herders, commercial traffic inbound and outbound, the Watch Constabulary’s Stellar Guard, stargates with their associated space traffic control and defense stations, more propellant depots and autochandleries…

…and, oh yes, the Imperial Navy, which in a valuable core system will mean an actual system garrison, but which even in a small, new colony will imply a system picket. With forward-deployed sensor platforms and AKVs thrown in, even by the minimal one-ship system picket.

All of whom are running their own local-space monitoring systems for space-traffic-control purposes, at least, and who are themselves being watched by SysCon’s own big track-everything-in-the-system arrays.

Which is to say, tl;dr, that your chances of making a successful approach from deep space to your target planet and making a successful landing without being detected are functionally zero, and your chances of doing it without being engaged are within delta of zero. To use an analogy, it’d be like trying to fly a Predator drone from mid-Atlantic and park it in the middle of the tarmac at Chicago O’Hare, past everyone in between, at the height of Thanksgiving traffic. Without being noticed.

Trying to do it with a viable planetary invasion force is like doing the same thing, except that instead of a Predator drone, you’re doing it with the battleship Iowa.

Which, to bring it back to comment-relevancy, means there ain’t no ground combat of any size without enough space battles to brute-force your way past that lot first, and there’s definitely no ground combat that the defenders don’t have all the time that they need to get set up for. Period.

 

Trope-a-Day: The Future Will Be Better

The Future Will Be Better: Well, obviously. We’re working to improve the present all the time, and we’re fundamentally awesome, so there’s basically no way the future can’t be better. Why would you even ask that question?

(In Earth-relative terms, the Imperial cultural climate successfully blends 1920s-1930s Gernsbackian utopian futurism and 1950s cultural self-confidence into a heady and unshakeable brew powering the Golden Age That Never Ends. Make Way For Tomorrow, Today —

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHOzPuKEnJY]

— hold the irony, and banish the cynicism to somewhere beyond the outer rim colonies, m’kay?)

…There Is Only Awesomeness

So, today I was randomly reminded of In The Grim Darkness Of The Contact Form, and the hypothetical fictional possibilities of a face-off between the Empire and Warhammer 40K’s Imperium of Man, which details I cover there with a note that I can’t really deal with metaphysical mismatches like the wackiness of the Warp.

Well, here’s what occurred to me this morning:

The Tyranid hive mind is known for creating a “shadow in the Warp” that plays merry hell with all psychic communications, Warp travel, Warp-related abilities, and anyone with any sort of psychic sensitivity that happens to be beneath it, which appears to be everyone who isn’t a blank or a Necron.

So, folks: what do you think the Transcend, a hive mind collective consciousness with some additional relevant features, like a core brain the size of a star system and moon-sized local ganglia, looks like in the Warp?

(My take:

Best case, you have a Big Freakin’ Glow in the Warp, which is a lot nicer than the Tyranids’ shadow but which will still interfere with your day and is not to be fucked with.

Worst case (for the existing galactic powers): A weakly godlike superintelligence just got promoted to strongly godlike, and as the Warp’s first Order God/Constructive Power it has issues to raise with absolutely everyone.

We also might have to start calling its part of the galaxy the Eye of Harmony, but I think that name’s been used before…)

 

Trope-a-Day: Future Spandex

Future Spandex: By and large, this class of garmentage is averted. There are a very few specialist exceptions – skinsuits, which have to be skin-tight in order to work; body gloves, which are mocap and environmental sealing devices for hardshell armor; spray-on protection – but by and large what these things have in common? Being either technical garments, underwear, or both. As main garments, they lack elegance.

Cultivating Mighty Oaks

Cimór gazed out over the lectern as her audience finished connecting. The virtual space was crowded with avatars – the glowing spheres with emoticon faces that nym-avatars defaulted to, naturally, hiding identity, culture, and species – haloed with the expected glows marking slow connections and packet loss. Even those telerepresenting from less backward worlds found their connections impaired by the exigencies of encapsulation and multibounce routing.

The avatars themselves were arranged in groups of six: each representing the bundled communications of a single supercell’s membership, six cell leaders from different polities – carefully selected to be safely independent and yet of potential aid to each other, as well as synergistic personality matches – who would be given cross-communications at the end of the introduction. Each group, so far as it could perceive, was the only group in the auditorium.

The last avatar flickered into being, its “face” set to apology-but-necessity. Glancing down at the lectern, Cimór watched the extranet security panel flicker through its final checks, then spill out blue confirmation that the layered overweaves were properly secured, and the termination points were, at least, as secure as dumb agents were able to determine.

A flick of a finger brought the opening of her presentation up in the well, the COG’s tree logo, and the embracing text: Freedom’s Seed. Access to Tools and Ideas.

“Gentlesophs,” she began. “Thank you for attending. At this introductory talk, we’ll be discussing how to find and recruit new members for your seedling, while maintaining the proper security, deniability, and above all, cell structure. I’ll be presenting general strategies along with specific notes on adapting them to different types of polities and cultures, as well as both memetic and software tools to assist in assessing possible candidates for suitability and reliability, as well as eliminating potential spies, saboteurs, and agents provocateur.

“But first, let’s talk about the sort of candidates you should consider – a subject which will also answer a question many of you doubtless have, namely, why we recruited you.

“The first division to be made is that of the loud and the quiet. The loud, whichever kind they are, should be immediately dismissed as possible candidates, although the reasons differ between the loud and violent, and the loud and… shall we say less violent, in their use of violence is generally casual, rather than targeted.

“We do not support the former because even on the rare occasion that they espouse that they’re emulating the Drowning of the People, the Saryala Disarming, or the Spontaneous Disarchy of Dorentil Major, in practice the overwhelming majority of people whose plan is violent revolution not only cause a lot of collateral death and destruction along the way, but tend to be the sort of kveth-sakkar whose primary interest is being free to oppress someone else. We have, obviously, no interest at all in supporting that – and from your perspective, the reasons why such make bad partners should be obvious, even apart from the high-profile attention such activities tend to draw.

“We do not support the latter, meanwhile, for a variety of reasons – not least that many of these ‘activists’, too, are all too happy to support a heavy cratic hand just as long as it is perceived as working for them. Frankly, gentlesophs, we support groups with libertist values out of enlightened self-interest, and those who merely improve a few of the proximate results without addressing the ultimate causes do not provide a useful return on our investment.

“To you, on the other hand, they are dangerous. The sort of activities they participate in, especially the ones that are themselves coercive, are hell on operational security, break up the cell structure, and attract a lot of attention – the kind that makes more constructive activities harder to carry through under scrutiny, and can be easily spun to turn the general population against them – or, depending on the ruthlessness of the security state, to justify mass arrests or massacres. In either case, they’re just meat for the machine – and so if a seedling goes down this path, we drop it from the network.

“The recruits you want are the quiet ones. The tools and ideas we can supply are attuned to supporting those with an eye on the long term, and with a desire to live free, well, and under the radar in the meantime – and to build. That’s who you need to grow all the institutions of a civilized society in the shadow of the uncivilized, until one day your would-be masters wake up to find themselves redundant, ignored, and impotent.

“That’s why we selected you, and who your best candidates for recruitment, in turn, are likely to be.

“Now, any questions before we move on to practical matters?”

– Freedom’s Seed COG, introductory talks to proto-seedlings

 

Trope-a-Day: Future Imperfect

Future Imperfect: Generally averted, due to the historical greater continuity of civilization (“It has been 7,921 years since the last interregnum.”), general better record-keeping (thanks to the Repository of All Knowledge, et. al., and a religious climate that favors the burning of book-burners, and so forth), and, of course, people who live a long, long time and don’t forget much.

 

The Autocrator Likes His Quiet

“The Venerable and Veritable Autocrator of Chengál Rock, may his reign last forever, will be accepting petitions from all within the Rock during the first shift for the megapulse following the Rock’s apoapsis, as custom dictates. Please note that immediately following shift-end, all vacuum-qualified citizens of the Rock are required to report to Docks and Locks for mandatory civil labor. All non-vacuum-qualified citizens are required to report to Central Recycling, likewise.”

– system announcement on Chengál Rock public notifications channel

“For new citizens and visitors to the Rock, the ‘mandatory civil labor’ is required because the V. and V. Autocrator has a policy of throwing anyone who demands that he have a policy out of his personal airlock, and traffic control start complaining if no-one cleans up after Petition Fortnight. Be advised.

“And may his reign last forever.”

– anonymous classified advertisement immediately following the above

 

Trope-a-Day: Fictional Color

Fictional Color: Proliferate, since it is the nature of exotic species in general that not all of them will use the same chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum for seeing with. Most obviously, if you have typical eldrae eyeballs, before red in your spectrum comes calescent gallé, which we can only feel as infrared, and beyond violet are whiter-than-white iven and naught-but-bright séris, extending into our ultraviolet and making many colorless liquids anything but. But perhaps they do not count, since we could theoretically create them – just not perceive them directly.

But then there are those species with different sensory organs. The retina has many fascinating quirks, but one of them is that it can’t tell the difference (for reasons explained here) between monochromatic yellow light, and yellow light that’s actually red light and green light mixed.

Not all photoreceptors share this particular property. So if a species you’ve never met before asks you to push the green button, you’d better be sure to check that you aren’t accidentally going to push the blue-and-yellow one, which is obviously completely different, dammit, Earthling!

And that, of course, is before you even get to the wonders virtuality programmers can create with the ability to stimulate the visual cortex and its subcarriers in ways that physical light cannot, letting one actually perceive wild and painful ulfire, dreamlike, voluptuous jale, and other such colors whose qualities aren’t found in electromagnetism. Irrigo, violant, apocyan, cosmogone, viric, and pelegin may also be on the menu of options. Even octarine is not beyond the bounds of possibility…

 

Worldbuilding: Intellectual Integrity and Non-Utopia

So, in things to think about, let’s talk about intellectual integrity. Or, more specifically, let’s talk about a citation I’m taking from Paean to SMAC (Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri)’s discussion of the Intellectual Integrity technology, and specifically this:

That this is tied to a technology called Intellectual Integrity is quite intriguing, if one is willing to entertain the idea for a moment.  What would it mean for a society to have real intellectual integrity?  For one, people would be expected to follow their stated beliefs to wherever they led.  Unprincipled exceptions and an inability or unwillingness to correlate beliefs among different domains would be subject to social sanction.  Valid attempts to persuade would be expected to be based on solid argumentation, meaning that what passes for typical salesmanship nowadays would be considered a grave affront.  Probably something along the lines of punching someone in the face and stealing their money.

This is essentially the way Imperial society works, thanks to talcoríëf and the efforts of socio-intellectual movements past; there’s a very good reason why teir, typically glossed “honor”, has a lot more to say about self-integrity and intellectual integrity than a human take on its gloss would normally imply.

(Take advertising, for example: it has substantially less glitz – not zero, because you can make a valid and sound argument to someone that this product is awfully shiny and will be found pleasing by them, or that it concretely reflects their abstract values, but simply shrieking SEX! STATUS! MOOOORE SEEEEEX! at maximum volume fails utterly – avoids glossing over details, and in general is much more in-depth – for a product launch, you can pretty much expect interviews and Q&A with the design team regardless of what the product is – and personalized.

Meanwhile, the ongoing parade of SALE! SALE! SALE! tends not to happen, mostly because it’s not terribly effective on people who are (a) aware of hyperbolic discounting, and (b) cured hyperbolic discounting. And in general, if you’re in the Imperial market and trying to compete on price,  you’re doomed. Such price-based advertising as there is tends to consist of automated feeds to AI procurement agents.)

All of which is to say, in non-utopian terms, if you aren’t accustomed to maintaining a certain luminous clarity and consistency of thought, and you move there, you are going to be on the receiving end of certain social consequences. At best, that means spending a lot of time having all the cracks in your Weltanschauung poked into and levered apart by people first trying to understand, and then earnestly trying to help you with your philosophical problem.

At worst… well, self-inconsistent is no more a complement than unprincipled, which amounts to wilful self-inconsistency – or attempting to defend self-inconsistency – which latter has cast a black stain of ickiness over concepts like pragmatism or compromise, due to their frequent invocation to defend self-inconsistency. And let’s not even start on “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion!”, the responses to which are starkly unprintable1.

So, basically, if you don’t enjoy the cut and thrust of debate and/or staring unflinchingly at the consequences of your beliefs… don’t go, ’cause you won’t like it there.


Footnotes:

1. These responses will, eventually, concede that you do technically have, freedom of thought and all, the right to your own opinion however ludicrous and inconsistent it might be. However, they will go on to state, that does not include the right to be taken seriously, the right not to be mocked and shunned by all cognitively capable people, or the right not to be labeled the dumbest piece of crap that ever crawled out of Waste Reprocessing and evolved the power of speech all across the public reputation networks. Which is not defamatory, because it’s obviously true if you believe that.

Best. King. Ever.

“Another of these accidental creations is the governance of the Thanedom of Darazik, a minor azikeldrae city-state in southern Alténíä. Its story begins when the initial charter of the thanedom was drafted, in which the overthane was appointed to his office ‘in perpetuity’ rather than the more conventional ‘as willed’, or even ‘for life’.

“In the ordinary course of events, such a minor drafting error would have been corrected, whether by amendment or by judicial decision. However, after the tragic death of the first overthane, Agaion I, in the earthquake and ensuing tunnel collapse of 971, the Council of Thanes – acting as regent pro tempore – found itself facing an uninspiring successor with no particular desire for the position, and lacking any desire to elevate one of its own members to overthane, being occupied at that time with the problems facing their own caverns. As such, they decided simply to run with the charter as worded.

“Thus, even to the present day, the titular head of the Thanedom is the vitrified and exquisitely sculpted and adorned corpse of Agaion the Undying, Heart of the Pillar, Lord of the Undernight, Overthane of Darazik and Her Vales Beyond the Dark Sky, who continues to preside over his court, attend ceremonial occasions, and receive – although not pass judgement upon – petitions, all with his customary silent élan. The actual Mandate rests in the hands of the Council of Thanes, whose decrees, et. al., are issued in the voice and by the consent of their glassy monarch, who to this day has not seen fit to veto any of his Council’s actions.”

– The Six-Fingered Hand: Unconventional Governance Among the Empire’s Nations

 

Trope-a-Day: Force-Field Door

Force-Field Door: Not generally used, since sensible engineers and architects by and large put doors there for a reason, and prefer it when the doors do not vanish as soon as the power goes out. Even less used as airlocks or spacetight doors, since it’s even more embarrassing when you lose your entire starship’s air supply when the power goes out…

…well, okay. Some ships and stations do use kinetic barriers across bay entrances to make it easier to maneuver things in and out without having to (expensively/slowly) depressurize the entire bay, or leave it depressurized all the time and thus require everyone working in the bay to wear vacuum suits all the time. However:

  1. They are not used as a substitute for regular bay doors, which exist because while you can set the barrier strength such that the modal molecule will lack the KE to penetrate, the statistical distribution of molecular KE still means a kinetic barrier any less solid than actual matter is effectively a continuous slow leak. Caveat life support engineer, and hence you fit actual bay doors to close when you aren’t needing to get stuff in and out through the barrier; and
  2. Said bay doors are fitted with fail-safe automatic high-speed closers, because when the power goes out, you don’t want to lose any more than you have to, especially since the escaping air may take other things with it; and
  3. The doors between the rest of the starship and the bay are airlocks, because a kinetic barrier or anything else power-dependent should not be considered a reliable pressure boundary; and
  4. Anyone working in the bay will keep their emergency breathers close to hand.

…With Justice For All

SYSTEMIC INTEGRATED TECHNOLOGIES TICKET-TRACKING: CASE 921632

From: Supervisor of Police, Behibehin Rock
Mail Subject: HELP US NOW YOUR SYSTEM LOCKED EVERYONE UP AND WE CANT FIX IT WHAT THE —

Subject: Assent-Panopticon Ubiquitous Law Enforcement Instrumentality (all components)
Version: 3.4.0.49120
Issue: Stupidity (was: System imprisoned entire population in error)
Priority: Urgent

Resolution: WILL NOT FIX – WORKING AS DESIGNED/SPECIAL

Notes:

Does no-one read the gorramn manual?

The Behibehinti have become another entry in our list of customers who failed to read the warnings in sections 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 concerning the need to lint your legislation before activating it, because the Assent-Panopticon ULEI has no way of knowing when you intended parts of it to be obsolete, symbolic, or selectively enforced. That said, managing to get the entire population, including the governance – although that latter is surprisingly common – jailed and awaiting trial before the now-inelegible-to-serve judiciary when the system was enabled is perhaps a new low in this particular failure mode.

Although this is closed WONTFIX, as per company policy we have dispatched a service engineer with the override code and a customer service lawyer with copies of sections 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, and the service agreement to free the customer and otherwise clean up the mess.

On the bright side, I won a week at the High Cysperia Luxurium in the departmental betting pool.

 

State of the Writer

Tired, but somewhat refreshed for the New Year; apologetic, for the unannounced and mostly unplanned December quasi-hiatus; busy, due to a new contract at the day-job, or day-business rather, which may affect volume somewhat, but it should still certainly be better than said December quasi-hiatus.

I think that about sums it up.

Also, I see that thanks to two more Patreon pledges – thank you kindly, if you’re reading this! – we have now crossed the reward threshold at which there will be artwork.

Oh, god, I promised y’all artwork.

Welp.

I’ll get right on that, then.

Also also, just as a side-note, this is Amazon’s recent patent filing on airborne warehouses with drone delivery:

heliwarehouse

…I hereby declare this to be exactly how, in canon, the All Good Things, ICC delivery service works on garden worlds, on the grounds that (a) the Imperials do love their airships, and (b), it’s freakin’ awesome.