Alistair Young

Trope-a-Day: Boldly Coming

Boldly Coming: For much the same reasons as are covered under Bi the Way and Everyone Is Bi, there is actually quite a bit of this around.  Species becoming something close to one of those optional attributes helps too, in extreme cases, as do virtual sex and the ability to

How Many People Marked These Cards, Anyway?

One loophole opened up by the Empire’s lack of any gambling regulation is that it is entirely legal to run crooked games, provided that you tell people that they are crooked games (and therefore are not committing fraud by doing so; whether or not there is money or other

The Burning of Litash (4)

CS Unyielding Order, Litash high orbitals. “Grid configured.” “Special package CALYX HOLLOW on the rails, launch when ready.” “Permissive action set, authentication 0x991AC38575AA0D0E.  Admiral, do you wish to deploy the weapon?” “Deploy it.  Right in the starport center, Mr. mor-Calarek.” “Aye-aye, ma’am.  Right in the center.” 90,000 miles

Trope-a-Day: Body Surf

Body Surf: Pretty much anyone can do this – even the pure biosapiences with the aid of some Very Large brain scanning technology – but since they can mostly only enter bodies they have brain ackles for, which mostly means “owned or rented”, reinstantiation isn’t the sort of problem that the

Trope-a-Day: Body Horror

Body Horror: Let’s not think about the dark side of infectious proteus nanoviruses and just how they can rewrite chunks of your body while you’re still using it.  No, really, let’s not.

The Dreaming Goddess

In a room in the Twilight City, Laryssan dreams. The room is not a room, nor the city a city; the eikones and their realm are creatures of mathematics and algorithm, running on the great lunar brains of Corícal Ailék; on local photonic processing nodes scattered across Imperial space; on

Trope-a-Day: Boarding Party

Boarding Party: Where battered hulks and surrendered ships are concerned, yes, if the delta-v needed to catch them is within reasonable bounds. Even occasionally elsewhere, with some specially designed boarding pods – but that’s crazy-difficult enough there has to be something really valuable on the other ship.  Of course, where

Go Not To The Imperials For Counsel

“The word which is commonly translated as ‘Imperials’, referring to any of the Empire’s citizen-shareholders, is valmiríän in the original Eldraeic; curiously, it is not cognate at all to that nation’s formal name. From its roots, it could have the meaning either of ‘ordered self’ or of ‘self

Trope-a-Day: Blood Oath

Blood Oath: Averted.  The general consensus is that I Gave My Word should be enough for anybody, on either end of the arrangement.

Trope-a-Day: I Gave My Word

I Gave My Word: Played very, very straight indeed.  As is known throughout the Worlds, the word (or debt) of an Imperial is as close to absolute as you can get.  (They are sometimes, if you are prone to abuse these things, Exact Words, and since they are cautious with

First First Contact (3)

Galáré Actual, Galáré System. The noösphere of Galáré sang with electromagnetic voices.  The galari themselves, crystalline creatures of carbon-wrought silicon,  were the most complex voices in the song, exchanging trills and dithyrambs of information, an endless symphony of knowledge framed in multi-layered harmonies of incredible complexity; not a singular overmind,

Trope-a-Day: Exact Words

Exact Words: The Imperials are, of course, sophonts of their words.  It would be very bad form for one to chop logic so closely and obey the letter, and not the spirit, of an agreement. Unless, of course, your counterparty is trying to do it to you first, or other