“One of the most challenging diplomatic posts – in my own opinion, right after being posted to a hostile star nation – is that of ambassador to a planet that has only recently been contacted by the Exploratory Service. While the Contact team will have done their best to explain to the
“Welcome, O traveler, to the Bright City. Be welcome to the stone upon which the Dragon Throne rests. Be welcome to the temple of unsurpassed grace and shining beauty. Be welcome to the seat of wisdom ever-growing and power never-failing. Welcome, O noble traveler, to Eternal CalmirĂĂ«, the jewel at
NOW AVAILABLE: Petra’s Destruction Assurance Returned from a successful six-year contract on Vilisset (Aridias Delve), Petra’s Destruction Assurance is once again seeking long-term contracts from polities in need of deterrent forces. Equipped with a squadron of 16 mobile-launcher-based Cherac III-class strategic-range missiles each carrying eight megaton range antimatter
Bottomless Magazines: Not literally true, but due to the architecture of modern Imperial firearms, it often seems that way. A typical example has three types of “ammunition”, in a consumables-you-need-to-fire sense: a metal-containing “magazine cartridge” that the flechettes the weapon actually fires are produced from; an energy cell to power
As Sev Lan Astrin hurried through the bustling Exchange to his meeting in Gilea & Company’s Golden Tower, the starscrapers of Mer Covales, jeweled and gilded, gleamed in the golden light of Galaion, and reflected back the lights of bright hololiths and scurrying flitters alike in a million multicolored
Deflector Shields: These come in one played-straight kind: kinetic barriers, which are a product of vector control (a kind of Applied Phlebotinium, yes), essentially applying counterforce to, or slapping aside, incoming massy objects, from space dust to missiles, but don’t do anything to massless radiation. And they’re usually
Born As An Adult: Notable on this point, principally, are a lot of digisapiences whose first body, is, naturally, exactly the same as all the other robots or bioroids of the same model. Of course, they’ve usually had a fairly long life in virtuality before then, so it’s
infostarvation: A mental condition caused by intelligence enhancement, infostarvation is the result of the capacity of the mind to process information exceeding the bandwidth available to it to access information, leading to, in effect, intense boredom – if not of the whole mind, at least of part of it. While this
Boom, Headshot: Life got a lot easier for snipers on this point given the amount of fancy hardware (smart targeting systems and auto-assists, predictive target analysis, off-bore firing, etc., etc.) they squeeze into guns these days, and sometimes even into the bullets. ÂEspecially for snipers. (But they still train regular
So, why are imperative drives so important? Well, that experiment’s been done. This university, in fact, once attempted to produce a digital mind free of any drives – not just of the organic messiness to which we protein intelligences are prey, but free of any innate supergoal motivations – imperative drives,
I should perhaps apologize for the current absence/delay in posting the fics-a-day – our air conditioning is currently broken, which means I’ve had to take my servers offline in the heat, which in turn has meant all my Eldraeverse reference material, works in progress, and such is currently unavailable.
Bondage Is Bad: Actually, yes, this one’s played straight. It’s an Imperial prejudice, and for once, it’s a prejudice which they don’t really have a rational justification for – essentially, as you may have noticed in this series, they have a really strong libertist ideology that holds