And, based on that last story, it looks like I’ve elected to use the Egan-style ve/ver/vis pronouns for the neuter gender (the friend, although it never comes up, was a kaliatar; a neuter member of a trisexual species). Still haven’t settled on which English pronouns to
I will find my death here in the Exclaves. He – that outworlder – beat my friend to death. Not for profit. Not for a plan or a revenge or some twisted necessity. Slowly, and for his pleasure, because ve was an alien, and he hated all that was wider than his
Wealth is not virtuous. Wealth is virtue. Does gold have value? Does silver, or polished kal-gems, cogs or brights or stones or staves, bars or bills, serren-shells or scrip, shares of stock or notes of hand? Can shining metal feed you? Can a mound of scrip build a home? Will
Ambiguous Robots: Between one advancement and another, mechanical robots, biological bioroids, cybernetic implants for biological bodies (including nanocytes and nanosomes), biological organ-implants for mechanical bodies (including skin and flesh coverings, with active nerve integration), and biomimetic materials… well, yes, the middle ground is getting rather ambiguous, isn’t it? Half
“No, we’re not a democracy, or so they say. They, of course, ignore that the Senate’s Chamber of the People is randomly selected from all our citizen-shareholders, and also ignore planets like Viëlle, that uses the totality of the population as its planetary Assembly, or Meryn, where ever-changing
Ancient Keeper: Remember those elder-race archives left behind by dead civilizations? And the Living Relic mind-states found therein? At least some of those are these, in the form of the index/assistant/librarian AIs that used to manage the archive before it became a relic of a dead civilization. Some
Ambiguous Clone Ending: …as pointed out back in Cloning Blues, people are really quite comfortable with the pattern theory of identity and their personal self-awareness, so no-one from the advanced bits of the galaxy is going to angst over maybe not being the real one, because they all know that
So, with regard to the Age of Flavor and other similar things – well, you’ll notice I used a couple of untranslated Eldraeic words in there (for lack of a directly analogous English concept, and for, as it were, flavor).  In general, am I making the right assumptions, here, that
Rejoice, my fellow canids, for the Age of Flavor has come! While it has taken a few years, ranchers and meatwrights across the Empire are finally beginning to sell the meat they produce in a manner appropriate for those of us blessed with our sense of smell. While a few
Cloning Blues: Just no. Completely averted, even for forks, which are like standard SF instaclones inasmuch as they run a duplicate copy of the original’s mind-state. And occasionally, sure, a fork that’s separate for long enough to diverge will have some problems inasmuch as duplicating yourself doesn’t
I watch the two of them move through the misty streets from my seat in the café, while I wait for the thin rain to stop. The one, tall, pale and dark in the manner of the eseldrae – and clad in rather a nice set of blue-black formal robes, too
Clone Degeneration: Averted. Mind-states (when the clones are forks) are stored as digital information. Much of the time, so are genomes, but even when using tissue samples, the recovered DNA is run through a verify-and-repair process before being used specifically to avoid things like this.