It was a wet, cold, shivery, gray afternoon at the dying end of autumn. Fog blanketed the waters of the bay and veiled the other towers in a manner that made them look almost respectable; almost. The harbor towers had been little more than frameworks of heavy, rejected ship-timbers and
Longevity Treatment / Immortality Inducer: Immortagens, which are Exactly What It Says On The Tin, along with mind-state backups. (Previously anagathics, too, but technology marches on, etc., and why settle for a few extra centuries when you can aim for eternity?) The Empire, or groups within it rather, works hard on
A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Well, a spiral arm far, far away, anyway, inasmuch as I’m writing about places that aren’t Earth and species that aren’t human. (And as such, strictly speaking, relative time periods are all unestablished.)
Long Game: Happens quite a lot; of course, since many people (eldrae, galari, immortagen-takers, most postsophonts, AIs, etc.) live for very, very long times. Of course, it’s not so much a Long Game from their point of view, except for the immortagen-users; just a question of having a different
Living in a Furniture Store: Played fairly close to straight in most advanced civilizations. This is what a self-aware, AI-driven home and extensive household robotics does for you – everything’s clean and organized and nice, and apart from the odd robot zooming through making it happen, without you having to
Cousins, sisters, brothers, partners, commensals, and any other clan-affiliates you see fit to share this with: Whatever you’re doing, drop it, get off your branches, and get to Torqat in the Csell Buffer right now. Bring anything that can fly and hold mass. Flagrantly was scouting a heat signature
Literally Shattered Lives: What cryoburn ammunition (see: Abnormal Ammo) could do, ideally – but it’s really hard to pull off outside laboratory conditions.
Liberty Over Prosperity: Outright inverted, from most perspectives. The Empire with its tiny apathetic example of The Government is also, by any reasonable standard, the polity with the largest amount of cashy money sloshing around at all levels of its economy, while its economists mutter smugly about ‘deadweight loss’, ‘artificial
Some people have an issue or two with science, because it keeps saying no to all their fond notions. Geocentrism? Turns out that not only is your world not the center of the universe, but it’s an insignificant speck in the middle of undreamt vastnesses and eternities. Souls, destinies,
Libation for the Dead: In a variation. Just as the eldrae burn their dead (to free the spirit, whose nature is of fire, from the body, whose nature is of wood), the equivalent of libations for the dead are burned, not poured out. (Thus, they’re also usually of quite
Letting Her Hair Down: This trope is essentially enshrined into standard eldrae etiquette, (especially for women, although long hair is de rigeur for both sexes); whether one wears one’s hair up or down is universally understood as a signifier of whether one is busy working (and therefore should not
Today’s question for Dr. Science is, “What are starports for? Lots of starships call at my hab, and we don’t have one.” Starports and starships have surprisingly little to do with one another. If there were only starships and drifts, and perhaps the odd rock, we’d have