Trope-a-Day

Trope-a-Day: The Future Will Be Better

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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?)

Trope-a-Day: Future Spandex

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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.

Trope-a-Day: Future Imperfect

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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.

 

Trope-a-Day: Fictional Color

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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…

 

Trope-a-Day: Force-Field Door

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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.

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Ship Prefix

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Fantastic Ship Prefix: Several. The Empire alone uses CS (“Coronals’ Ship”) for Imperial Navy vessels, CSS (“Coronals’ Service Ship”) for governance vessels that aren’t part of the Imperial Navy, CMS (“Coronals’ Merchant Ship”) for commercial vessels, IS (plain old “Imperial Ship”) for private vessels other than commercial…

…and that’s before other polities start getting in on the act.

(Hull numbers are usually a three-part compound: ordering organization, ship type, and procurement number – say IN-BC-4129 for CS Machyphage – but are rarely used for anything but database keys.)

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Arousal

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Fantastic Arousal: As I may have mentioned before, not everyone keeps their genitalia in the same place, and likewise, not everyone keeps their erogenous zones in the same place. (Or even in the same plane of reality. Like, say, AIs with unusual cognitive maps whose erogenous “zones” include things like n-dimensional geometric figures, but only if they include ratios of Mersenne primes.)

There is also the matter that they aren’t all sensitive to the same things, too. For example, those engaging in interspecies relationships with the kaeth, whose thick, multilayered skin contains an awful lot of metal – especially where the dorsal plates are concerned – and are not themselves members of remarkably kinesthetic species may well be advised to bring some power tools to the bedroom.

And, um… use protection.

Trope-a-Day: Exposed Extraterrestrials

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Exposed Extraterrestrials: Averted entirely, for reasons as disparate as regulating temperature, protection from environmental hazards, etiquette, and perhaps most significantly of all, pockets. (Literally everyone in the galaxy who isn’t actually sessile has invented pockets, and arguably the ones who are have too, except they call them cabinets.) Even those species (say, the dar-bandal) whose fur privilege takes care of the first three above still wear a Waistcoat of Style for the sake of the pockets.

Trope-a-Day: Explosive Decompression

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Explosive Decompression: No. Just no. (In the trope sense. Obviously it can happen in the technical sense.)

Well, with one exception. The trope quite correctly notes that it can happen if you have a really high pressure gradient, say, 8-9 atm to 1 atm. As such, some people from planets with very thick atmospheres (say, ciseflish) can suffer some serious abaryic trauma if their suit decompresses or if taken out of it – albeit rarely to the extent of literally exploding.

But whether that applies or not, it is a universal truism that sudden decompression sucks.

Trope-a-Day: Evil Luddite

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Evil Luddite: Well, obviously. All Luddites are evil*.

(* Space Amish excepted, for obvious reasons.)

…as the assortment of asshats gathered under the banners of the Enforcers of Mortality, Biotist Alliance, Parents for Natural Children, Never Last, the Ecoprimacy System, etc., etc., would demonstrate. Unfortunately for them, since Rock does not in fact Beat Laser, only the most spectacularly hypocritical of them have a life expectancy greater than that of an ice cube in the photosphere.

Trope-a-Day: Enlightened Self-Interest

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Enlightened Self-Interest: The source of all good things in the universe, and thanks to mélith, a basic principle of life when you’re an Imperial. Doing well by doing good; doing good by doing well.

(Much more reliable than altruism, far less prone to coercive perversion – altruism’s bad enough when it becomes slave morality, but it’s so readily turned into slaver morality – and infinitely less condescending.)

Trope-a-Day: Empty Shell

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Empty Shell: A ‘shell running the Minimal Maintenance Architecture, as they do when no-one’s currently occupying them. It provides for maintaining autonomous functions, interfacing with the systems of a body hotel, diagnostics, and teleoperation, but little more.

Also, of course, createable in all the traditional and several non-traditional nasty ways by bad people.

(That Power, for example, that conducts research into the nondeterministic, paracausal aspects of the logos by running millions of simulations of the same events on captured mind-states, looking for variations, slowly stripping away fragments to find what makes the difference, until there’s not much more than one of these left. They may call its simulation spaces “death cubes”, but they’re really “helplessly wishing for death cubes”…

…fortunately, it’s an urban legend.

Right?

Right?)

Trope-a-Day: Enhanced Archaic Weapons

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Enhanced Archaic Weapons: Lots of them, thanks to a plentiful supply of enthusiastic hobbyists more than willing to apply the latest technologies to their personal obsessions, all the way down to blades hand-knapped from Isimír trench ice with micro-manipulators. For the most part, these qualify as Awesome, But Impractical, if fun, fascinating, and artistic, but there are occasional gems, such as mollyblades and other swords and daggers manufactured from modern nanocomposites, and the use of technologically enhanced crossbows, clockbows, and even longbows with sluggun-ammunition-type arrows as stealthy covert operations weapons.

Trope-a-Day: Eldritch Starship

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Eldritch Starship: Oh, there are a few.

Take esseli starships, for example. Unlike the link!n-Rechesh (who would be another fine example), they know better than to try to grow fully organic starships, so from outside the hulls and drives look relatively normal. Then you go through the airlock, and it’s all flesh, all the time, with heart-valve doors, neuron-cluster control interfaces, food-secreting glands, recycling intestines, and suspicious organic gurgles everywhere. Mining ships have refinery stomachs and tentacles.

Múrast starships are carved out of ice bodies, with the necessary technology fitted within, and then refrozen. Which is all very sensible when you consider their favored environment, but doesn’t explain why they always carve them into baroque cathedral-like structures rather than anything more utilitarian.

And then there are the seb!nt!at, who as creatures of nuclear forces that dwell deep within stars, do not build their starships out of matter in any conventional sense.

Starfish Aliens build Starfish Starships, basically, just as far as physics will allow.

The tortured structures built by rogue mining drones and other wild mechanicals are about as Gigeresque as it gets, though.

 

 

Trope-a-Day: Endless Daylight

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Endless Daylight: A property of more than a few worlds in the Empire. Some, like Eurymir, because they’re tide-locked, and the noon pole always points at the sun. A similar situation applies to the hexterranes of Coricál Ailék, which are oriented such that “up” is always sunward, and the danglehabs of Esilmúr, in which down is always sunward.

In other cases, it’s because the world inhabits a binary system. Eliéra, for example, has this periodically – in a manner of speaking – because for half the year, the summer, it is located between the two suns, and as such each side of the world receives some insolation. (Although, obviously, not identical – it still has a day-night cycle; it’s just that it alternates between full daylight and a red-tinged twilight that’s bright enough to read by, somewhat more so than a full moon.)

Trope-a-Day: Dyson Sphere

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Dyson Sphere: The Empire has two, although neither by that name, the concept *there* having been devised by Cirys Minaxianos. One, a Cirys bubble, is at Esilmúr (Imperial Core); a thin layer of light-sail material surrounds the star, held up by photon and solar wind pressure in much the same manner as a statite, and managed by magnetic manipulation and selective releases of solar wind. The material, in turn, is coated with energy-producing solar foil, powering massive arrays of antimatter production facilities.

The other, a three-layered incomplete Cirys swarm is at Corícal Ailék, where the Transcend keeps its brain: the innermost being golden-winged energy-collection complexes skimming the corona of the star and powering the rest of the swarm, the middle layer being fractal chandeliers of organic crystal nanocircuitry, providing the Transcend with its massive processing power, and the outermost being the hexterranes, a lattice of hexagonal habitat-plates providing living space here at the heart of the light.

Trope-a-Day: Drugs Are Good

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Drugs Are Good: The Empire’s culture has no problem with hedonic, et. al., drugs. You have, after all, the right to do anything you want to yourself, and really, they’re no worse than any other form of entertainment.

Especially since you buy them from legitimate businessmen, not “legitimate businessmen”, scrubber nanites let you sober up really damn fast when you need to, standards of quality and purity are maintained, and advances in medical science have abolished addiction and practically every other harmful side-effect imaginable, and along with creating lots of more selective, more entertaining, less awkward/harmful/etc. designer drugs.

Better living through chemistry, man!