Trope-a-Day: Empathic Environment

Empathic Environment: Much of the Empire has one of these, one way or another.  On a  small scale, this is because of the assorted Genii Locorum around the place, the house brains and city manager AIs and planai and other assorted minds at least one of whose functions is to make sure that things are arranged to their people’s liking before their people consciously realize that they want things that way.  (And since they can usually do so in cooperation with their people’s muses, which live inside their heads, they’re very good at it.)

On a larger scale, this is because to some extent people believe that the pathetic fallacy, if not how the world does work, is certainly how the world ought to work.  It would be appropriate.  And so the Transcend, constructed as it is from the trillions of minds of its constitutionals, and intertwined with, as it is, the weather-control systems and other infrastructure of every developed world, makes sure that it jolly well does work that way.

Trope-a-Day: Genius Loci

(‘Bout time I got back to these, I think.)

Genius Loci: Quite a lot of them, from the simple usually-non-sophont AIs that run people’s houses and apartments (the “house brains”) to the increasingly sophisticated “city managers” and other AIs that run cities, provinces, transport networks, ports, and so forth, up to the planai and other archai that are responsible for the infrastructure of entire planets and star systems.  And, of course, to a large extent the Transcend can be interpreted as a Genius Loci for the Empire as a whole.

(This, of course, from the local perspective, is merely the realization of ancient thoughts on animism.)