Trope-a-Day

Trope-a-Day: City on the Water

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City on the Water: Several, even once we discount a few borderline cases like Landing, Phílae, which is really an Underwater City whose uppermost decks happen to stick out of the water.

Also on Phílae, most notably, are the several temporary floating cities likely to be present at any time, agglomerated together from a huge mass of houseboats and facboats and storeboats all lashed together into a giant city-like mass. (This is much more appropriate for Phílae than trying to build single large floating cities, since Phílae is a warm world without much land, and therefore remarkably prone to hypercanes. The ability to scatter and dodge them is very, very important.)

True artificial city-islands, on the other hand – of which the most famous is Calencine – were pioneered in Eliéra’s warm oceans as self-growing, self-repairing biotech constructs, with a customized biotech framework (including nutrient extraction and transport, and a bio-OTEC for power) supporting an island core of seacrete, island coral, and industrial bamboo.

But, in general, any world that has a hydrosphere and many that have an alkanosphere will have at least some of these.

Trope-a-Day: Computerized Judicial System

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Computerized Judicial System: The technical term is cyberjudiciary, incidentally, just as the computerization of much of the executive branch’s working end is cybermagistry.

Of course, it’s easier when you have artificial intelligence, and so your computers are entirely capable of having experience, a sense of justice, and common sense. It’s just that they can also have no outside interests and indeed no interests (while in the courtroom) other than seeing justice done, be provably free of cognitive bias, and possess completely auditable thought processes, such that one can be assured that justice will prevail, rather than some vaguely justice-like substance so long as you don’t examine it too closely.

Trope-a-Day: Citadel City

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Citadel City: Oh, there have been many of these in the past. Eliéra was a friendly world, in many ways, but not that friendly, and much of history has not been as peaceful as the modern Empire. But to choose one? They speak of glacier-bound Miragrann, paranoid-built, with fortifications as much against ice and weather as invaders; of cliff-carved Stonesmight and the Granite Gates of Azikhan; of the Seat of Storms perched in the thin air of its mountain peak; the spiral walls of Cileädrin and the living-wood mazes of Verdancy; the cavern harbors of Ethring; the ancient diamond bastions of Ellenith set amid its crater labyrinth, and a dozen more…

Most, of course, buried deep within suburbs and arcologies in the modern era, but yet the defenses remain.

(The conspicuous exception being Calmiríë itself, which never had any walls or other fixed defenses until later ages made air and missile defenses necessary, despite the Empire’s enemies. That was another of Alphas I’s “little statements”.

Well, that and the capital of Ancyr, which was always unwalled for the same reason Sparta had no walls. Which was one of their little statements.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Color-Coded Emotions

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Color-Coded Emotions: A common way of encoding emotive data for the use of, say, emoji v-tags, along with geometric shapes and other such abstract symbolism. Very handy for passing along this sort of information when you don’t necessarily share body language, etc., with your interlocutors, especially since it tends not to be tied to any one species’/cultures’ interpretations of such things.

Trope-a-Day: Colony Ship

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Colony Ship: More than a few. The most iconic, of course, are the Deep Star colony ships the eldrae used to establish the first Thirteen Colonies subluminally, and indeed the galari equivalents that let them colonize Tessil and Qeraq in a similar manner, but the concept still goes on; even in these days of Casual Interstellar Travel, specialized colony ships still exist, for the purpose of getting everything you need at First Landing there simultaneously and conveniently.

(Also, of course, their smaller cousins, the homesteading ships, which are similar albeit much smaller – intended for households, families, and other small groups looking to homestead an asteroid, join an existing colony, or set up shop on a freesoil world.)

Trope-a-Day: Cloning Body Parts

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Cloning Body Parts: It used to be done, but in the current era is obsolete twice over; first, replaced by organ printing tech (basically, 3D printers for organs), and second, by healing vats and having things built by medichines in situ. Hospitals and clinics probably have some organ printers lying around for special cases, but revolutionary as it was when it was first developed, organ cloning is now strictly for museums.

(Or autophagy restaurants.)

Trope-a-Day: Clone by Conversion

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Clone by Conversion: It’s possible, with the right abominations of technology (basically, start with a healing vat and a cerebral bridge, then add evil) – but since you’re just using the original person as organic raw material, the applications are sharply limited. Basically, if you need reinforcements and have the equipment such that this looks like a reasonable way to go, bear in mind that you can get to exactly the same place in the end by popping along to your friendly local butcher and explaining that you’re buying meat for a family pig roast.

In many cases, this also avoids the ensuring war crimes trial, which is often a point in its favor.

(There is also the technique used by… certain intelligence agencies of covertly implanting sleeper agents with a Trojan device that permits an agent or an intel AI to be remotely downloaded into their brain, overwriting their original mind-state. But decent people shouldn’t think about such things.)

Trope-a-Day: Clone Army

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Clone Army: Just… don’t.

In its simplest form, where you’re just using cloning technology to replicate military-grade bodies as quickly as you can, it may be valuable. It won’t help you with absolute growth rates, since the expensive part is growing the minds to put in the bodies which is much harder to rush, but if you have noetic backup technology at least you can get your casualties back into the field faster.

If you are actually attempting to run what is functionally a non-divergent fork army, however, this will fail dramatically as soon as anyone notices – because, gee, do you think having your entire army react in the same way to every situation and stimulus might just open up a few security holes?

If you’re really lucky, this won’t get everyone killed.

Trope-a-Day: City Planet

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City Planet: Alas (?), none of the planet-sized worlds in the Worlds have yet grown to the point of being ecumenopoleis.

On the other hand, the subverted “small planet” version is definitely present: 1 Andír, in the Lumenna-Súnáris System, has been slowly hollowed out over centuries to the point where it actually is a beehive habitat/asteroid city filling all of the Ceres-like dwarf planet that it’s “on”. Or there’s the moon Palaxias in the Palaxias System that houses the IN’s Prime Base, which is similar and even bigger, except that it’s probably cheating when the majority of that hollowed-out space is spacedocks for really big starships in large numbers.

Trope-a-Day: Chronoscope

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Chronoscope: Not literally possible, but the combination of ubiquitous computer/sensor technology coupled with ridiculously huge amounts of computing power to assemble the evidence into a picture can do a damn good imitation of a past-viewing chronoscope. Doing the same thing with prognostication software is, alas, rather more limited, and becomes extremely unreliable more than a couple of seconds out.

(And with a powerful enough telescope, let’s not forget simply looking into/receiving signals from the past with the able assistance of light-lag.)

Trope-a-Day: Centrifugal Gravity

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Centrifugal Gravity: The kind of Artificial Gravity widely used by larger habitats and even starships, because it is substantially cheaper than faking it using powered vector-control apparatus, not to mention substantially simpler to implement and with fewer things to go wrong.

Notable for its amusing Coriolis side-effects, which is why it’s a really good idea not to bet on any ball games with a spacer until you’re used to how spin gravity affects things in practice…

Trope-a-Day: Capital Letters Are Magic

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Capital Letters Are Magic: They are indeed: prominent local examples include the Flame and its opposite, the Darkness, in their theological senses.

This, though, is Translation Convention for the Eldraeic augmentative affix, in a language that somehow doesn’t have an augmentative affix. It means “qualitatively, not quantitatively, more so”; i.e., more like that which it is attached to than it itself is. Used to create certain words through poetic metaphor – such as lin-runér (“sovereign”) from runér (“noble”), or lin-aman (“deity”) from aman (“dragon”). Not that you could have capital letters in the original, anyway: Eldraeic alphabets have no letter case. Proper nouns are indicated by such things as color changes or cartouches.

Trope-a-Day: Bright Castle

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Bright Castle: Oh, they’ve got lots of these. One of the quirks of having to lead by sheer force of arête rather than force is that it helps to build a bloody impressive seat to impress people with your leadership qualities from; as such, generations of castle architects have concentrated at least as much on awesome shininess as on defensibility – and once defensibility was something that you couldn’t expect out of a castle, switched happily to concentrating primarily on awesomeness.

The ultimate example of this (which also qualifies as a Big Fancy Castle) is Alphas I Amanyr’s Imperial Palace, which starts with a twelve-story five-sided marble Citadel as a centerpiece, then surrounds it with just over 900 other buildings1 scattered throughout its extensive walled grounds, and includes such features as the Long Hall, a public, multi-story hall (complete with cafés on promenade balconies) running a couple of miles from the main entrance to the main doors of the Citadel and giving entrance to all the other areas of the Palace, public and private, on the way. Part of the size, of course, is that it also houses the offices of state and staff attached to the Imperial Household – including the central office of the Chancelry of Coordination – representations from all the Ministries and the Service, the facilities for the Imperial Guard, and so forth, but there’s no denying that it positively reeks of power, wealth, beauty, awe, and suitability to be right at the center of things for arbitrarily large values of things. Which was exactly Alphas’s intent – “We are the sort of people who can build this room – and we’ve got a lot more rooms like this.” – and he hired the very best architects and what-would-later-be-called-memeticists to ensure that he got it.

(If pressed, his heirs might be prepared to admit that he may have gone a little overboard, but there’s no arguing with results. Besides, he’d already demonstrated genius in the fields of governance, military command, economics, philosophy, and technological applications – what more do you want?)

1. In the modern era. It wasn’t always quite so mini-city-sized, but expanding to that size was built right in to the original plans. Because ambition.

Trope-a-Day: Bold Explorer

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Bold Explorer: While I shall leave specific examples to individual fics and so forth, they have a lot of these in the Imperial Exploratory Service, and especially in the first-in scouts and volunteers to crew (as infomorphs) far horizon probes. You have to be a little bit crazy to go boldly where no soph has gone before, and all that.

Trope-a-Day: Body Backup Drive

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Body Backup Drive: Standard practice in civilized transsophont space, using cloned replacements grown specially – or, for budget body use, travel, or temporary copies, any one of a large number of premade ‘vatjobs’. These replacements are designed never to be fully sophont on their own, though; their brains are designed to run the Universal Noetic Architecture platform, with a very simple maintenance OS to keep the body healthy when someone’s mind isn’t inhabiting it.

Trope-a-Day: Blood Sport

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Blood Sport: This, obviously, gets much easier when you have noetic backup technology to ensure that you don’t run out of people quite as fast as you otherwise might. Even so, in the Empire and other civilized polities, this is usually limited to martial arts competitions where death is mostly accidental, and minor outgrowths of duelling culture.

Elsewhere, some downright horrifying examples also exist thanks to the export versions of the tech… but what can you do? Barbarians gonna barbar.

Trope-a-Day: Blood on the Debate Floor

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Blood on the Debate Floor: It’s not usual.

That said, it has nonetheless happened and occasionally still does, especially in the early days when any hint of the sort of sentiments that led up to the Drowning of the People reoccurring would tend to lead rapidly to the defenestration of the misbegotten wight who proposed such a thing. (The Defenestrative Gallery is now on the public tour.)

And when particularly sensitive topics arise, some Senators – especially from more hot-blooded or kinesthetic species – have been known to start the odd brawl.

The Guardians of the Senate always finish it, though. What, you thought those weapons were ceremonial?

Although when it comes to protecting the Senate from itself, at least they usually stick to the electrolasers.