The World Shaft (under construction), two-thirds below Mile Station 23 Project Elapsed Time: 15 years The bottom of the great shaft resounded with the clangor of Mahánárel’s own forge. A few hundred feet apart, the space between crammed with the steam-driven drills, hammers and other machinery that carved the
Black Box: Quite a few of them lying around in the form of leftover elder race artifacts and other archaeological recoveries. Sensible civilizations and corporations (like Probable Technologies, ICC) really hate this, because they know exactly how Sealed-Evil-In-A-Can dangerous that sort of thing can be, and the likelihood of unknown
Black and White Morality: Depends on the angle you look at it, really. Outside observers would argue that the Imperials, for example, must practice a black and white morality; after all, they have an objective ethics, or so they claim, and a mathematical calculus of ethics by which to measure
“Well, firstly, we’re a civilization of dozens of different species with hundreds of races and clades each. Given the sheer number of shapes we come in, why would you possibly assume that we’d be invested in your morphological bigotries?” You’re idiots. “And even if we were inclined
You may notice that in “Purpose” I used the male-default pronoun and person-reference – i.e., “men of every kind”, “him and his”, etc. This is, of course, a decidedly imperfect translation of the Eldraeic original, which uses, of course, the word daráv – “person, sophont” – in formations like the former, and
”Miríë. Idaharis. Jírileth. Order, progress, liberty. These are the principles to which we have dedicated ourselves, we of this new-forged Empire. ” ”But not the externally-imposed kórasmiríë of the dark times before the Drowning, nor that of the benighted lands beyond the mountains and the ocean. We believe that múratmiríë – cooperation
Morality Kitchen Sink: The way the universe works, people being complex – 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
“Thus it is said that an eldrae thinks pacing; a dar-bandal, sniffing; a galari, hovering; a kaeth, fighting; a dar-ííche, floating; a sssc!haaaouú, blowing; a mezuar, standing; an esseli, twitching; a codramaju, merging; a kalatri, sitting; a járaph, of itself; a selyéva, 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. …of course, it doesn’t exist.
Just by way of showing how ‘scruciatingly obsessed with minutiae I am, I have actually spent time this morning computing the precise constituents of an Imperial ‘standard atmosphere’ – i.e., what standards documents whose first versions date back to the eldrae’s first space habitats mean when they say ‘standard
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 – or just plain extended AIs – multithread broadly, and write specialized routines. Even singleton minds have