âMirĂĂ«. Idaharis. JĂrileth. Order, progress, liberty. These are the principles to which we have dedicated ourselves, we of this new-forged Empire. â âBut not the externally-imposed kĂłrasmirĂĂ« of the dark times before the Drowning, nor that of the benighted lands beyond the mountains and the ocean. We believe that mĂșratmirĂĂ« â cooperation
Morality Kitchen Sink: The way the universe works, people being complex â sophonts can be found spread all over the moral spectrum from shiny white to deepest black, often at the same time in different contexts. More importantly, bearing in mind the sheer variety of sophont minds despite the constraints placed
âThus it is said that an eldrae thinks pacing; a dar-bandal, sniffing; a galari, hovering; a kaeth, fighting; a dar-ĂĂche, floating; a sssc!haaaouĂș, blowing; a mezuar, standing; an esseli, twitching; a codramaju, merging; a kalatri, sitting; a jĂĄraph, of itself; a selyĂ©va, basking; a vlcefc, hanging; a spinbright, watching;
Black and Gray Morality: If it existed, the Fifth Directorate and its willingness to take just about any measure against existential threats and those other few things that simply cannot be dealt with through normal channels would be practicing this. âŠof course, it doesnât exist.
Just by way of showing how âscruciatingly obsessed with minutiae I am, I have actually spent time this morning computing the precise constituents of an Imperial âstandard atmosphereâ â i.e., what standards documents whose first versions date back to the eldraeâs first space habitats mean when they say âstandard
Bizarre Alien Biology: Well, yes. Fruit of different evolutionary trees, belike. See Starfish Aliens for some examples of just how bizarre it can get.
Monotheism is quite simply insensible. Specialization and division of labor. These things are always competitive advantages. Everyone who makes it out of the sub-literate hitting-things-with-rocks era invents them. Hive minds produce purposive castes. Seed AIs â or just plain extended AIs â multithread broadly, and write specialized routines. Even singleton minds have
Starfish Aliens: Most of them. Digisapiences, of course, have no bodies at all. The galari are sophont crystal-virus hybrids with inbuilt techlepathy and mechanical psychokinesis. The codramaju are pseudo-fungoids which can merge, exchange, and separate bodies and minds at will. The kaeth are vaguely draconic pseudosaurians with a metal-rich biology.
The nodes of the public notification channel had snapped back to full operation within milliseconds of the pinch going off, and geotags bloomed in carmine distress across the wreckage below. She noted approvingly the grounded flitters upstream of the wrecks, their drivers already moving in with unpacked emergency kits, foamsteel
Bi the Way: Actually, pretty common. While the original distribution of sexualities along the Kinsey scale (for the eldrae) would have been pretty close to that found in humans, the brain modifications done under the general category of âxenophobia eliminationâ seem to have compressed the scale at both ends a
Everyone Is Bi: Or at least can be, thanks to advances in sophotechnology making gender identity and sexual orientation as editable as any other mental properties, and reinstantiation in general making actual sex changes not all that much more complicated than flipping a few switches in the preferences screen of
âOn the one hand, yes, we do find it repugnant to restrict the freedoms of speech and information, even to this limited and circumscribed extent.â âOn the other hand, since we have an entire ward filled with babbling lunatics who thought that the Silent Library was âwhere weâre hiding