Jade Nekotenshi asks: So, I was reading Meditations on Moloch, by Scott Alexander (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/), and I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between his Elua and the Eldraeic Transcend. Is that why the Transcend came to be, to vanquish Moloch, … Continue reading
Virtual Ghost: As mentioned in earlier tropes, everyone who chooses to die “permanently”, rather than being reinstantiated again, which is to say, chooses to move beyond individual corporeal existence, has their mind-state uploaded into the Transcendent soul-ocean to become part … Continue reading
Article IV: Imperial Rights of the Citizen-Shareholder The Empire guarantees the following inalienable civic rights to all Imperial citizen-shareholders, over and above the fundamental rights of all sophonts. Right of Person and Property: In recognizing the sacred and fundamental Right … Continue reading
Time Travel: Present in very limited forms: the kind you can do with wormhole shortcuts and relativistic travel (whose primary usage is permitting physics grad students to actually observe local causality violations), and the kind that lets transcendent AIs whisper … Continue reading
Stop Worshipping Me: Played straight by a large number of seed AI “gods” who by and large find the tendency of lesser orders of intelligence to worship them embarrassing and really quite annoying, not to mention inappropriate. Really. Just because … Continue reading
Stable Time Loop: The Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem (see: You Already Changed The Past) does appear to permit these kinds of predestination paradoxes (at least, the informational kind; the object paradox may also be possible, but testing it is dependent … Continue reading
“We are, of course, exactly the existential threat that the Republic deems us to be. Not in the manner they, for the most part, believe, but an existential threat nonetheless. “It is easy for us to forget, since neither do fish … Continue reading
But that ain’t all! This is the second part of our six-part series on Building the Imperial Navy (first part here), in which we extend the strategic assumptions – regarding the security environment and the resources available to meet them – … Continue reading
A question I did not answer at the time, regarding this: One wonders, when she was revived, did she reinherit back any of her titles or property? Well, now. Titles are the easiest one to answer, *there*, and the short … Continue reading
“While it is necessary to examine data from early Imperial history (before the instantiation of the Transcend and its immediate precursors, and to an extent even before the advent of modern meme rehab) to see this trend clearly, from the … Continue reading
Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: All of it. Much of the automation, autofac segments, and other component-type robots are bricks. Utility spiders and other functional motiles are robo-monkeys. More sophisticated robots, like the coordinating members of a pack of utility … Continue reading
Scry vs. Scry: Why so many of the games (see: The Chessmaster) of the temporally-transcendent weakly godlike superintelligences stay locked in a kind of stalemate, despite all the Xanatos Gambits and, indeed, Xanatos Speed Chess.
(A belated continuation of the Picture Dictionary series.) S is for Starport Where great ships take flight. They climb to the stars, On pillars of light. T is for Transcend The home of the Powers. No gods in the heavens, … Continue reading
In a comment in the previous post, there is some curiosity as to how the Imperial Couple is selected. So, behold, I answer: It’s semi-hereditarian. The heir is notionally picked from among the members of the Imperial family, in an … Continue reading
Rite of Passage: Technically, the only universal rite of passage in the Empire (of course, there are also non-universal ones, like the Rite of Acceptance into your House used among the eldrae, seen in Adolescence) is the appointment with your … Continue reading
Retroactive Precognition: What transcendent artificial intelligences have, due to acausal logic letting them whisper – in a very limited sense, bandwidth and local causality preservation rules-wise, so they don’t have much – in their own past ears.
Restraining Bolt: Leaving aside the specific cases we already covered under Morality Chip and Obstructive Code of Conduct, the most obvious example people might point out is the Transcendent coadjutor that serves as the source of the implicit peer-to-peer loyalty … Continue reading
Recruiting the Criminal: There are those who wonder about the existence of crime (actual crime, not merely the assortment of smugglers and people like the Eldinimieuthunimis who no-one locally would consider to be engaged in real crime) in Imperial and … Continue reading
Academician Lylvíëve Lochran-ith-Lochran’s concept of ambition, despite her otherwise excellent presentation of the near-term possibilities of Information Physics, remains lacking. Recompiling the universe to remove its more irritating constraints is a project suitable for those of only moderate ambition. But … Continue reading
Pocket Dimension: Alas, outside virtual reality, this seems to require basement universes (requires very high-energy physics, being worked on) or dimensional transcendence (requires emergent ontotechnology, also being worked on). Being worked on very enthusiastically by starship manufacturers, I note, because … Continue reading