fic-a-day

Things to See, Places to Go (12)

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“Planetary law on Harúnet (Promegi Matrix) states that anything (or more accurately, any rights to anything) can be gambled there, and that all bets must be paid off, and all markers exchanged, before leaving planetary jurisdiction.

“Conveniently, a number of orbital habitats in Harúnet’s libration points specialize in providing asylum, at extortionate rates, to those whose legislatures of domicile frown on either winning or losing unmentionable favors, illegal goods and services, state secrets, sovereignty, organs, memories, identities, indentures, lives, relationships, dependents, major local landmarks or cultural treasures, and/or inhabited planets.

“This guide strongly recommends not indulging in the complimentary drinks.”

– Around the Worlds on ¤1,000 per Sol

Lunch Is On Me

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1

Séralámíya-class littoral restaurant ship

Builders:

(original) Ethring Iron and Steam Works
(refit) Captal Daëntry Naval District

Displacement: 41,000 long tons

Length: 272 m
Beam: 34 m
Draft: 6.18 m (full load)

Propulsion:

  • 8 x Empire Nucleonics, ICC “Kirchev’s Cauldron” nucleonic boilers, driving
  • 8 x Blackstone Industries, ICC turbogenerators
  • 4×4 Hammerforge Tool Company, ICC heavy shaft drive motors

Speed: 32 knots
Range: Unlimited (6 year refueling interval)

Complement: 2,800 (including chefs and longshoremen)

Armament (Secondary):

  • 4 x 6″ Imperial Navy Type Three dual-purpose gun; single turrets
  • 12 x twin 24 mm Black Sky anti-air defense guns

Armor:

  • Belt: 6″ heavy steel plate
  • Deck: 3″ heavy steel plate

A product of the late Third Oceanic Dominance, the Séralámíya-class littoral restaurant ship – or rather, the unique example of such – was a product of the conditions of the island-hopping eastern theater, in which the Imperial Military Service found itself liberating or accepting the surrender of a number of island polities whose infrastructure had been depleted by war to the point at which starvation was setting in, necessitating relief efforts trailing only a short distance behind the front proper.

Modified from one of the then-aging Affíëtelír-class flush-deck carriers (then in the process of being replaced by the new Stormfall-class island-superstructure carriers), Séralámíya maintained the fundamental structure of the Affíëtelír, but replaces its aviation facilities. While the aft end of the flight deck was retained as such to support a small number of light cargo tiltrotors (carried on deck), the forward flight deck was converted into an open area (which could be rigged with a canvas cover in inclement weather), designed to be readily secured from the rest of the ship and with protected access routes from reserved gangways to shore. This was intended to serve as a safe dining area for civilians when suitable areas ashore were unavailable.

Meanwhile, to serve both this and back up shore facilities, the forward end of the main (upper) hangar deck was converted into extensive kitchens and other food preparation areas, while the majority of this deck was given over to food storage including a large refrigerated section. The secondary (lower) hangar deck, including its workshops and aviation fuel tanks, were converted into more food storage, but in their case with the addition of large cargo doors on each side of the ship at bow and stern. At the bow, these doors were intended to permit rapid “roll-off” deployment of self-propelled field kitchens to serve areas remote from the coast, and delivery of stored food to them using carried vehicles; at the stern, to permit the ship’s stores to be replenished from colliers without interrupting other operations.

While a rapidly constructed and in many ways clumsy compromise design, Séralámiya served throughout the later stages of the war and undoubtedly prevented many civilian death due to hunger. Following the Third Ocean Dominance, Séralámíya herself was decommissioned, ultimately to be replaced by a specialized class of littoral restaurant ships (the Galramíya-class, designed as a joint project with the Emergency Management Authority for disaster relief) based on the lessons learned from her design, of which the second carried forward her name.

Some Professions

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2

copperhead: In ancient times, an unskilled laborer who would work for a traditional rate of a selenis (a copper coin) per hour, doing anything, so long as the coin was paid up front. In the modern era, slang for casual contract labor.

My grandfather was a contract barker in Lodendar’s Gyre of Commerce, bringing in copperheads and running jobs for the Towers merchancy. He built his business on reliability and competence, delivering it upchain and keeping ledgers downchain so he could shine his best workers. My father, too, path-pointed labor contracts across all of Mossstone. So you could say that we’ve always been in the same trade.

Faleran Rysakar, CEO, in the Service Gate, ICC, corporate history

dirt farmer: One who produces soil from regolith on worlds undergoing ecopoesis where there is no existing soil, such as eutalentic worlds, or who produces soil for habitat use from asteroid regolith; skilled, technical labor that takes a great deal of patience through physical and chemical processing, followed by the multiple stages of building up the layered soil microbiome from bacteria through microfauna.

It’s easy, by comparison, to farm in dirt. Life springs forth from living soil with the greatest of ease – indeed, half your problem is stopping it. Bringing forth life from lifelessness – ah, now that’s a real challenge.

Tirel Meliane, Sixth Well ecopoesis team, Adírdis

ergtech: a worker with energy production facilities, usually fusion or fission reactors, who routinely works with cryogenic fuels, power metals, dangerous magnetic fields, high pressures, liquid metal coolants, and so forth. A profession descended from the fissioneers of the Era of Steel and Steam who tended the first nucleonic boilers.

Nothing makes you feel so alive as riding the rods on one of the big piles. Nothing’s more likely to kill you, either.

Solian Desúmé, 11th century fissioneer

freehand: An obsolete term outside the Emerging Markets; prior to near-complete automation and ubiquitous robotics, an unskilled laborer guided in the performance of various skilled tasks by AI and v-tag assistance. Also, pejorative; an AI’s meat-puppet.

It’s not the best way to build an orbital elevator; in fact, it’s close to the worst way to build one. But out in the Periphery, where robots are feared, lest they “deprive” the sophonts of work – which they must have; apparently we cannot simply pay them to do nothing – and tachydidactic training would “violate mental autonomy”, it’s the way we’re left with. The frustrating, tedious, centuries-obsolete way. At least we still get to use the management system AIs.

Sartra Beldevil, site director, Empire Constructions, ICC

freemind: By analogy to freehand, a freemind is an unskilled thinker engaging in thought-for-hire; which is to say, the renting of one’s spare cognitive capacity on the specialist cycle spot market for general-purpose neural network applications.

On the one hand, I’ve spent the last year working on a bunch of fragmented ideas, with nothing to show for them but a headful of memories I don’t understand. On the other, it’s paid for me to spend next year on projects of my own. Not the worst deal I’ve ever taken.

Sed Mer Lacann, artificer-in-training

nomomach: “war-lawyer”; a military branch whose primary mode of effort is to use legal, moral, memetic, and/or sociological engineering against a target group to attempt a specific goal. Contrast: warbarrister.

Not impressive, you say? Well, while they may not be as majestic as one of the Navy’s dreadnoughts, the mess of controversial lawsuits these amicus briefs will generate will keep their electoral system in turmoil for at least a decade. And a democracy that can’t trust itself is a democracy that isn’t stamping around the trailing marches looking for trouble to cause.

Odera min Toriss, nomomach, Bellatry TAG

public eye: a sophont sensor platform, or the entry-level newsie, the public eye is simply any citizen who permits remote access to sensors on their person or property (or even, via slink, to their sensorium) by the public: for sousveillance, for adding to publicly available datasets, or simply to capture events and viewpoints that might not otherwise have been seen.

The eye is blind.

traditional statement upon entering an area of defended privacy

stigmeologist: Colleagues of the logotects in the Keepers of the Language, stigmeologists are linguistic experts in punctuation and cadence.

What sort of uncultured savage writes a diplomatic threat in hendecasyllabic stanzas?

Sapphíä Corescianos, Logarchy of Engraving, Printing, and Stationery

!tesh: (“ant”) a kind of freehand, a !tesh (“ant”) is someone who is assigned one tiny portion of a task in exchange for a micropayment without receiving any of the surrounding details of the task. In this way, the details of the overall task to be performed can be concealed not only from observers or from those who might ask questions, but even from the workers themselves. In some cases, !tesh labor can be used without the workers even knowing that they are working on a task; for example, when the tasks are disguised as quests in an augmentality game.

Took a photograph of the crowd outside the Fillio Building and sent it to the specified nym: 4,096 points.

Shadow Walkers game system message

voucher: A professional witness trained in observation, remembrance, and precision, able to describe situations and events reliably after the fact without extrapolation, distortion, or assumption. Vouchers often make use of specially-certified mnemonic enhancements, and in a manner similar but not identical to Cilmínár professionals, operate under geas to speak the complete and exact truth.

You should probably know that I have heard the joke ending with “There is at least one nekhalyef in Ossiréï that is black on this side,” precisely 1,597 times. Including this one.

Bríäla Sallantar, senior voucher, Credible Guild

warbarrister: A legal specialist in the laws and conventions of war, including the applications of contract law specific to mercenary work. Contrast: nomomach.

Under Imperial law, your plan includes seven distinct war crimes. Under Republic law, thirteen. Under Galian law, none at all, but you should not consider that encouraging…

Also, I’d shoot you myself.

Delék mor-Valakad, legal adviser to the Black Dragoon Battalion

Time Bomb

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11

WATCH CONSTABULARY / ORBIT GUARD
SPACECRAFT INCIDENT REPORT

REPORT: MERI-11-5122

EVIDENCE BLOCK 2A

DESCRIPTION: The following comprises a transcript of conversation occurring in the forward (open) hold of the Magpie-class debris recovery vehicle CMS Comber’s Bounty, in the minutes immediately preceding its destruction. The transcript was recovered from a surviving buffer memory of the local voice command system node and as such is of limited quality and records only local sounds.

BUFFER STARTS

FLTCOM: — you brought this thing onto my ship without checking, you —

[silence, approximately 6s]

FLTCOM: Because you did not bother to check what this “marvelously intact” piece of wreckage was before you brought it aboard. In contravention of procedure, good sense, and every other consideration but the chime of coin behind your eyeballs.

[silence, approximately 14s]

FLTCOM: Oh, yes. It’s an antique. As I profoundly hope did not occur to you, the VI-4 libration point is most famous for the Battle of Meridian VI-4. What we have here – is your camera on? – is a Type 95 Deep Javelin, one of the most ridiculously deadly torpedoes the Bureau ever came up with. Yes, it’s centuries obsolete, but that doesn’t make it any less deadly.

[silence, approximately 7s]

FLTCOM: Let’s start with the drive. See these nice, shiny nozzles? There’s your first clue. They’re as pristine and unsullied by use as your cerebrum. The nuclear salt-water drive on this never fired. That means these tanks are still full of highly enriched uranium tetrabromide, which is unlikely to have decayed enough to help us. If any of the valves marinating in the corrosive nuke-juice decide to fail, we get a nuclear drive plume in here. And if the damn stuff has crystallized on the baffles by now, we could get a critical assembly by poking it too hard.

[silence, approximately 2s]

FLTCOM: The warhead? That’s just a nice, safe, nucleonic shaped-charge driving a plasmated beryllium filler through whatever’s in front of it. That would be Mechanical Switching Three, Auxiliary Avionics, and most of the rest of the ship, if you weren’t clear on that. That uses the X-rays. The gamma rays, meanwhile, they tickle the off-axis lasing rods to give it some extra punch. And that little thing on the nose that’s less than a foot from the bulkhead? That would be the proximity fuse set for a couple of miles. Arms as it leaves the tube, and yes, it is armed.

[silence, approximately 15s]

FLTCOM: Do? What I am going to do is return to the bridge and put out a distress call for the Orbit Guard and the best EOD tech in the system. What you are going to do [sigh] Much as I would like to strap something with the apparent density of your skull to the nose of this catastrophe as improvised shielding, you – assuming you wish to board any starship in the future as something other than ballast – are going to return to your cabin, stay there until instructed otherwise, and while you are contemplating the number of different ways in which you have probably killed us all, you can memorize every single damned illustration in the Dangerous Debris Diges —

BUFFER ENDS

On Preextant Properties

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8

Little more need be said on the matter of thoughts and chattelry; in truth, the Word is the thing and the whole of the thing:

All the works of your hands:
Stone and metal, wood and water, fire and wind.
All that your will creates.
These things are forged in your Flame;
That which you create is yours.

The Word of the Flame, Truths : 9

This is sufficient for ideas alone, or for the works of the artisan, the crops of the farmer, and the wares of the merchant.

But what of properties which had already existed in their components, such as volumes of land, including within them the passing airs and the still waters? Or what of the initial claim upon the fruits of stone, the development of which inevitably removes them from their source?

Before we consider Arlannath’s answer to this, the postulate of indisseverability, we will first describe these properties in a state of nature. That is, we shall discuss the ore lying hidden within the earth, the path unwalked, the land unimproved, and so forth.

The consensus of our philosophers is that such things are simply unowned, and belong to none. Challenges were raised to this position in the past, by such philosophers as Milentios of Inisvaen, Lanqin of Sar Andael, or Moréteyr of Ildathach, asserting rather that such things are jointly owned by all. This view has largely been repudiated as korásan arrogance, for who can rightly claim even partial title to an infinity of whose nature – indeed, of whose existence – he is largely unaware, over which he can assert no dominion, and to which he has committed no binding act? Moreover, such theories cavil at the conclusion that if all such things are jointly owned, they are jointly owned by all thinking beings, those dwelling around the farthest star as much as by those nearby who might have an interest, leading inevitably to the inability for anyone to set their hand to the smallest pebble without the consent of all unbounded creation.

Thus to Arlannath and indisseverability. This postulate arises from the simple observation that a creation cannot be separated from its prerequisites. That which exists must necessarily exist in a place; that which is made must be made of something. One cannot build a house without building its foundation upon land; nor can one mine and bring to market copper without removing copper ore from beneath the earth. The one is indisseverable from the other. In the absence of any barrier to the use or acquisition of the unowned – for the benefit of any individual or group which seeks to use it in an act of creation – resting upon prior title, this indisseverability necessarily implies that an act of creation from the unowned, a binding act, confers proper title to that which is created and that which exists to support it. Such binding acts are the basis for all homesteading, roadsteading, minesteading, commonsteading, and other mechanisms by which the wild unowned is brought within the aegis of civilization.

Arlannath did observe, nonetheless, that such acts of creation incurred a hypothetical opportunity cost, insofar as such a binding act necessarily diminishes the unowned. This matter, in his day and for generations thereafter, was considered a self-resolving trifle, since the lands of Eliéra were wide and little-peopled, and under such circumstances the advantage to the community near, far, and yonder of the improvement of land and availability of resources presented an opportunity profit to all believed to far outweigh that opportunity cost.

(The larger opportunity profit redounding to the appropriator is merely the proper reward for foresight and entrepreneurship. Anyone can seize an opportunity, but the rewards rightfully go to those who do.)

Philosophers and economists of later millennia have had occasion to consider this matter in more detail as time has passed, reaching its culmination in Períne Cyprium-ith-Elethandrion’s seminal publication On Externality and Incorporation. The original-appropriation and resource-extraction surcharges applied by the Protectorate of Balance, Externality, and the Commons, discussed in the next chapter, are the legacy of his work.

– from an introductory Imperial economics textbook, circa 3000

A Cure As Epidemic

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6

A shadow fell over the city.

That was, of course, perfectly normal. It was fourteen minutes before the Wakening hour, and four million people’s deliveries were here, packed into a vast warehouse wrapped in an inconceivable volume of vacuum, wrapped in turn in shimmering white fabric bearing the moé winged parcel and hexrunic letters proclaiming its name and ownership for all to see.

Desire Causes Satisfaction, the All Good Things, ICC fulfilment zeppelin, had arrived on its morning rounds.

Perhaps the dark cloud cascading from its vomitories, dense enough to deepen the shadow to true shade to fight in¹ rather than a dissipating gray wisp, was unusual but it was no matter for concern. This was the Empire, such airships did not fail, and the people below could go about their business assured that whatever had caused this alteration of normal routine would become apparent in due course.

From Rectifier Gaelin Septimiel-ith-Septimiel to Citizen-Shareholder Eimil Isilviere-ith-Inviere, greetings.

In response to the ongoing Level 3 (Epidemic) Contagious Disease Warning posted for the Greater Cestia & Proximal regions as of 2049 Cálith 20, the Emergency Management Authority is pleased to provide all citizen-shareholders, citizen-intendants, and metic residents within the affected region and other strongly connected regions a dose of the vaccine to cytomegalovirus VVAR-1472-B and related strains developed under the aegis of the Office of Disease and Toxin Control, Prevention, and Elimination.

For further details of the vaccine and its development process, please see here. Should it prove the case that the information you desire is not available via this link, please contact the office of the Procurator of Transparency.

The provided dose has been packaged in a self-refrigerating autoinjector coded for individual use, which can be operated by pressing the uncapped tip against the body over a muscle mass; an upper arm is recommended.

Should the vaccine payload have exceeded the permitted temperature range, expired, or otherwise degraded, the blue status light on the autoinjector will have turned red and the autoinjector will not function. In this case, please contact the nearest Imperial Services office for a replacement.

Please wait five days for vaccine to take full effect before discontinuing high-level infection control precautions. We request that low-level infection control precautions be continued until the epidemic disease warning is rescinded as a courtesy to your fellow citizen-shareholders.

The contribution to population immunity provided by individual vaccination has been assessed as a positive externality valued at Es. 192.41 by the Protectorate of Balance, Externality, and the Commons. As such, this will be credited to your Active Credit Account upon verified autoinjector operation.

The Empire thanks you for your cooperation and forbearance in these troubled times.

Given under my hand and seal this day 2049 Telenith 9,

Gaelin Septimiel-ith-Septimiel
by appointment to the situation, rectifier
Emergency Management Authority

  1. This somewhat anachronic definition of “shade to fight in” gained currency late in the Consolidation, when Imperial forces were clashing with those of the Alliance over mining and energy production facilities on tide-locked Eurymir and during the long day on Toramir, the innermost planets of the Lumenna system. On such battlefields as the Plains of Glass, one has the choice of fighting in the shade, or of being boiled to death before ever engaging the enemy.

Let’s Break It Down

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liquidator (sovereign): As a member of a satrap’s retinue, primarily in cases of annexation, it is the function of the sovereign liquidator to trim down the newly acquired governance to something approximating the Imperial standard. Since the majority of barbarian governances have arrogated to themselves a certain number of necessary and useful functions – outwith the legitimate functions of governance – and do not exist solely as mechanisms for the application of high-handed interference, presumptuous regulation, and arbitrary brutality, this is unfortunately not something that can be achieved merely by dispatching writs of abolishment to all and sundry.

To further dismay, neither is this as simple as centuries of ham-handed “privatization” attempts might make it seem, were one to ignore their results. A typical necessary and useful organization to be broken up by a liquidator is nonetheless ossified; uninnovative; risk-avoidant; accustomed to a position of legal monopoly; in the habit of answering to political masters rather than its nominal customers; derives its revenues in ways separated, to one degree or many, from the satisfaction of said customers’ requests; burdened with a thousand mandates outside its core competency; and whose staff frequently have a variety of unhelpful attitudes including apathy, grim resentment, petty-korásan syndrome, office politicking, political officing¹, cog functionalism², contraproject activism³, and either blind ignorance of or pig-headed indifference to the coquetries of economic reality.

The task of the liquidator is to abolish these slow-motion disasters without allowing them to become fast-motion disasters.

When chopping up an interdependent monolith, making your incisions in the wrong place may produce a mere private monopoly, or a cartel – doomed to eventually topple without a legal monopoly, assuredly, but while fulfilling the liquidatorial mandate in the most technical sense, this is hardly a result to be desired. Worse, it may produce organizations incapable of surviving independently in the short run, meaning in this case before alternate organizations can take up their function. Remember, due to the tendency of these governances to monopolize any field in which they engage, such functions will not be available on the local market to take up the slack.

Of the greatest difficulty, of course, is finding people to direct the new organizations. The nature of the old is unlikely to have created a dynamic organizational culture ready and willing to adapt to the marketplace, let alone thrive there. One may be fortunate enough to find some potential leadership within the old organization not yet stultified by its internal sociodynamics – which may, in some cases, be as simple as eliminating the old hierarchical management structure and replacing it with a bottom-up cooperative structure⁴ – but often one is compelled to resort to such means as bringing entrepreneurial talent in from outside⁵, strapping on appropriate floating initiatives and trusting that the organization will pay attention to them, or as a last resort⁶, transferring core staff and assets to an Imperial organization with local interests, similar purpose, and a willingness to take on the job.

These difficulties, together, make it all-important that the sovereign liquidator be a soph of great patience, calm temperament, and stout of both heart and liver.

– Offices of the Imperial Service, 143rd ed.

For those not familiar with synarchist jargon for various types of dysfunction, the following helpful footnotes are appended:

  1. political officing: the practice of subordinating the function of the organization to one’s own ends, usually unconnected to the stated purpose of the organization; when not practiced by the Directorate or its equivalent, it does not constitute entelechical fraud, but is nonetheless inappropriate and may constitute a subversive breach of contract.

  2. cog functionalism: also known as “jobsworth syndrome”, from the oft-repeated cry of the advanced sufferer that exercising any creativity or stretching beyond the bounds of normal routine is “more than my job’s worth”; the unwillingness or actual inability to do anything beyond the boundaries of existing procedure. Sufferers could, in theory, be replaced by a small automation script, and in practice, often are.

  3. contraproject activism: unlike political officing, which is merely diversionary, contraproject activism subverts the function of the organization to work against its own entelechy. Hard as it is to believe, when you find an education provider deleting advanced courses, a transport service encouraging people to stay at home, or an energy supplier promoting restrictions on energy use, you’ve found contraproject activism.

  4. In some examples of this type of organization (e.g., those which issues with organizational culture have not promoted cog functionalism, apathy, and featherbedding), the staff at the sharp end of the organization care far more about its nominal function and serving its customers’ interests than those in charge, and in those cases, such a structural inversion can work very well.

  5. Carefully screened, of course, since such offers have an appalling appeal to the unscrupulous type of vulture, those more interested in picking apart the wreckage than in building a functional organization.

  6. The Empire generally finds it preferable, from a sociodynamic-development standpoint, for such organizations to be constructed locally by, for, and out of the communities they serve, at least initially. Such convergence as partnerships, mergers, and other arrangements in the future may bring about can then safely be left up to the resulting structure, rather than imposed externally.

When The Guns Fall Silent

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3

The Imperial Military Service has long been considered somewhat unusual among military forces for the degree of respect it offers to those it has fought, and often defeated. This is not entirely accurate as a consideration, since a certain level of courtesy and mutual respect is hardly uncommon between gentlesoph soldiers; it is hardly uncommon to find other military forces which obey the injunction that strength and honor must also act with grace. There are few, admittedly, that afford – indeed encourage – the militaries of conquered nations the opportunity post hoc to award honors and distinctions to those who fought valiantly against them in defense of their homes.

(Since these honors are awarded under the unusual conditions created by the Annexation Act, and necessarily supervised by the appointed satrap, they are considered both foreign and Imperial in nature; for a full list of these unusual Imperial awards, please see Annex B to this book.)

Unique, perhaps, is the Empire’s creation at the Service’s request of three distinctions specifically to be awarded to the enemy after the fact. Displayed as medals carved from blackened osmium, these three are:

The Order of the Valiant Foe: Most frequently awarded of the three, the silver-chased Order of the Valiant Foe is awarded to those who have displayed outstanding acts of gallantry or personal valor on the battlefield while fighting against the Empire.

Since an overwhelming proportion of these distinctions are awarded posthumously, the Order of the Valiant Foe is a stipendiary order; a stipend is paid from the Privy Purse for the support of spouse, children, and other family of the recipient.

The Order of the Noble Enemy: Taking its name from the Jussovian proverb that a noble friend is the greatest of gifts and a noble enemy the next greatest – a sentiment engraved around its perimeter – the sapphire-on-osmium cluster Order of the Noble Enemy is awarded for dedication to the principles of civilized warfare above and beyond the call of duty.

Most famously, the Order of the Noble Enemy was awarded at the end of the Fourth Oceanic Dominance to the captains of the Ildathach destroyers Levinbolt and Thunderblast for their rescue of over a thousand survivors from the Imperial cruiser Dawning Dragon (sunk the previous day in the battle of White Sands Bay) at great hazard to themselves, such operations leaving them vulnerable to prowling submarines and the load of survivors greatly reducing their fighting ability.

The Order of the Worthy Opponent: An award of gold and topaz upon osmium, the Order of the Worthy Opponent recognizes skillful leadership and outstanding generalship, qualities shared by many of those who have most successfully opposed the Imperial will.

In its origins, the Order of the Worthy Opponent, like its counterparts, was a distinction awarded to officers of those nations absorbed by the Empire during its expansion in the Consolidation, but as with them, its use has since expanded. Most famous among these is the Order won by Matron-Admiral Kajiya ihr-Lomas of the rúrathtu, the award of which she declared the greatest honor of her career in her memoirs, and which she wore to her dying day. Her great-granddaughter presented it to the Museum of the Imperial War College during the celebrations of the signing of the Imperial-Rúrathtu Alliance, where it can be viewed today as a reminder that between honorable enemies, enmity need not be eternal.

– Titles, Orders, and Awards of the Imperial Military Service

Invisible Ledger

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While in later chapters we will discuss the theory and practice of such formal techniques of social manipulation as the trafidúr an-enlét (blue gift), it is appropriate at this time to offer a cautionary word on the foundation beneath it.

As a civilized people, we esteem the virtues of liberality and generosity. Selecting an appropriate gift to reflect both the appreciated qualities of the recipient and the nature of its giver blended into harmony is a high art; and it moves the heart both to receive such a gift and to give it.

However, even outside the Great Game or other arenas for deliberate social manipulation, one must – when offered gifts many in number, or a gift great in magnitude, be wary – not of the giver, but of one’s own spirit. One and all, we are bound to mélith, and although by all law and custom an appreciation-gift creates no debt, will we, nil we, the spirit keeps its own accounting.

While to account gifts by the esteyn would ill befit a gentlesoph, you may nonetheless find it needful to decline a gift with all due courtesy rather than permitting yourself to bear the weight of such a heart’s-debt, lest it tarnish the relationship that gave rise to it.

– “On Appreciation, and the Tokens Thereof”,
Madame Allatrian’s Guide to Exquisitely Correct Etiquette

Eight Hells (2/4?)

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3

This is Task Force Fourteen, as it steams at a leisurely twenty-two knots steadily east along the rocky southern shore of Míhayll Island, the southernmost in its archipelago. It had passed the entrance to the Míhayll Shallows yesterday at dusk, the shoal offering a back door to Lothell Bay for those with sufficiently shallow drafts, but not even a destroyer would attempt that passage. TF14 had sighted a few fishermen among the shoals, but if they had been sighted in return – a virtual certainty – it would not matter. Their targets had no option but to break out of the bay, which short of charging directly into the teeth of TG Northern, meant transiting the Adessír Straits; if the fishermen reported their passage to the Alliance command, it would make little difference.

The interception, if it happened – the course and speed of TF14 had been selected to intercept the Alliance ships at the mouth of the Straits, if they were indeed attempting a dawn transit – would be a close-quarters knife-fight. The sharp mountain spine running down Míhayll’s length was an effective barrier to both gunfire and radar, and so they would not know of its success until they were almost upon the enemy.

Meanwhile, the wind blew steadily against them, as it had all night. Vicious gusts out of the north-west carried storm clouds down out of Lothell, bringing with them lines of squalls, flat and heavy rain, and a steady swell that was imparting to the ships of TF14 a miserable corkscrewing motion. The only virtue to be found in the weather – and the worse storms further north – was that it would keep Alliance air cover grounded, and make it virtually impossible for Antinomos to fly off or recover aircraft. Or such was the Admiralty’s contention, although the empty skies above them were some confirmation.

The fast battleship Skybreaker, Vice-Admiral Ardelli’s flagship, trails the midpoint of the center line of the formation, following the wake of Invincible, her elder sister, their silhouettes obscured against the storm by the entangling shapes of their dazzle paintwork. Fast battleship is an unconventional designation for the Imperial Navy, but one earned by their unusual construction; rather than heavy naval steel, their citadel armor was wrought from spinmetal, a composite material harvested from deposits left behind by feral silverlife. Absurdly light and strong – albeit in short supply, uncastable, and extremely difficult to work – the spinmetal citadels of the Invincible-class battleships left them vulnerable to only the heaviest fire, while allowing them to outrun most cruisers with ease.

(A framed letter, presented to the ship by the naval architect behind the project, hung in the captain’s day cabin of Invincible; a purloined copy of a reprimand addressed to a junior Alliance intelligence analyst informing them in no uncertain terms that no-one, not even an Empire recently come into possession of the deposits of the Ossirvel Distributary, would expend the wealth necessary to use such a rare and costly material as warship armor.)

Ahead and behind them as they proceeded in line ahead, their escorting cruisers Seabreeze and Waterspout; refits of the older Tempest-class, now fat with air defenses, but still mounting a respectable main armament of a half-dozen 6″ guns.

And around them, the destroyers. Eight of them, all of the Ulricik Bancrach-class, the Hungry Wolves: Gray. Grinning. Pouncing. Leaping. Ravening. Swift. Unseen. Grizzled.

Almost hidden as they crashed through the swell, water sloshing over their bows – while relatively new, the wetness of the class in heavy weather was well-known – the destroyers flanked the main line four and four to port and starboard, the first pair preceding the others and the last trailing. Most visible was Ravening Wolf, on Skybreaker‘s port bow, flying the white pennant of Commodore Chiomé, commander of the destroyer screen.

The voice of a loudspeaker making a long-expected call cut through the quiet of Skybreaker‘s bridge.

“Radar-bridge. Radar-bridge. Contacts, repeat contacts, appearing through ground clutter, bearing oh-eight-four.”

“Signal to all ships: clear for action. Hoist the battle ensign.”

The Vigilant

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The Watch Constabulary, on the whole, does not think of itself as a police force.

But that’s not a problem, because no-one else thinks of them as one either.

While their watchmen, constables, and inspectors are trained for situations in which the application of force may be necessary, these are not their business¹, and nor is this the primary thrust of their training. Indeed, these skills are almost never, if ever, used; the bread and butter of the constabulary day consists of giving directions, rescuing kittens from trees, reporting issues local maintenance might have missed, returning lost children and dogs, offering a listening ear and a helping hand, arbitrating minor neighborhood disputes, and aiding the aged and infirm on such rare occasions as they can find any. Notable, too, is the incorporation of the Disaster Instant Response teams, the Quenchers, and Gaëlenén’s Scalpel into the Watch Constabulary’s structure as specialists, and the extensive cross-training of all constabulary personnel in the basics of disaster response and paramedicine.

To some extent, this nature is both cause and consequence of the Empire’s implausibly² low crime rate. For the greater part, however, it is merely a matter of ideology. While a society built around the principles of consent and obligation may occasionally find it both necessary and ethically permissible to make use of responsive force – or even preemptive responsive force – it would be nothing short of reprehensible and indeed outright counterproductive to embody this necessity in those charged to preserve the public safety and harmony.

– Ten Thousand Parts in Approximate Formation: The Empire from Outside

  1. As previously mentioned, the Empire elects to separate the traditional police functions of patrol, investigation (see Office of Investigation and Pursuit) and force-application in exceptional circumstances (which, on the rare occasions it is required, is the province of the local military garrison), insofar as the skills and traits required for each function are highly divergent and rarely overlap.
  2. Statistical information on this was rejected by the Conclave Commission on Uniform Security on several occasions, until the Ministry of Harmonious Serenity invited the Commission to observe their operations up close. Current thinking, depending on the inclinations of the observer, attributes it to a combination of radical freedom, radical abundance, liberal use of meme rehab, and a steadfast commitment – contra the majority of polities – to deporting all their incorrigibles.

Iterating the Eschaton

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From the introduction to Godwatcher’s Journal, Spring 8072 edition:

The cold red deserts of Meridia IV, Imperial reserve world, are no more.

Now there is only the Transcend’s latest experimental station: the Meridia IV Center for the Advancement of Ecological Amiability.

It is, or should be, no surprise to those who trace the consequences of Transcendent imperatives that such a thing should come to exist. It may, however, surprise those unfamiliar with the scale of divine works that the chosen means of fulfilling such imperatives would remake a world from core to sky.

Under the direction of the Symbiarch, axis submind and exarch of Sylithandríël, the forges and cathedral manufactories of Qerach have brought into being an array of interlocking linear arcologies, godwalls which, delivered by superlifter and skycrane, now divide the surface of Meridia IV, mountain, plain, and ocean, into twenty isolated biomes, unique habitats within which the Symbiarch has total control over the atmohydrospheric environment.

Within the godwalls themselves, the vertices of this shining icosahedron, loreworks and laboratories abound, a domain shared between the Symbiarch’s minor exarchs and the Initiatives whose scientists and engineers – called from the teeming worldlets around Eshtaréä and from all across the Empire – labor on their fraction of the task of wisdom’s perspective.

Every world spins in pain.

This is a consequence of that one inescapable truth: the universe is a broken place.

In this place, at this time, the Transcend attempts the repair of that small piece of it that is not only suffering, but the necessity of suffering: that aspect of cosmic entropy that gives rise to parasitism and predation, that compels life to enslave, exploit, and destroy life for its own continuance.

In the experimental biomes of Meridia IV, beginning with ecosystem samples taken from Eliéra, Revallá, Kythera, Víëlle, and Golden Groves, Sylithandríël’s exarch and its Initiatives devise means by which nature as it is may be brought into accord with the Viridian Dream: a world without suffering, unnecessary decay, or untimely death, flourishing in a perpetual harmony of at worst, costless commensalism; at best, joyful mutualism.

Until the day when the worlds from which they were taken, and all worlds, may likewise be perfected.

Thus it shall rebuke all those who look upon the imperfect world and say: it must be so.

Let all your works be wise,
For knowledge is the light of the Flame;
Let all your works be beautiful,
For beauty is its warmth;
Thus is your Heaven built.

– The Word of the Flame, Truths:15

Bottling Up

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The Sunstone is just what it appears to be – a star in a bottle.

That is to say, what it appears to be to the normal senses is an almost weightless crystalline sphere, roughly a foot across, shedding light and warmth all around it. A close inspection of the Sunstone, necessarily through darkened lenses, reveals whorls of flame shifting endlessly across its surface in patterns of light and dark spots, broken only by fiery prominences erupting from the surface and falling back once again. In short, a perfect model, one might think, of a sun.

Closer inspection, on the other hand, reveals that the Sunstone is a sun-in-a-bottle in the precise sense that a ship-in-a-bottle is not. Its crystalline surface is free of any of the discontinuities characterizing baryonic matter, because its surface is merely the topological defect bounding the dimensionally transcendent cystal universe within – a vast, encapsulated volume containing a true star as its sole inhabitant. The effects of the mass of the star does not cross this superficies into our parent universe, leaving the Sunstone almost weightless. Nor do the majority of the photons emitted by the star, deflected at right-angles to reality by some arcane means to fuel the mechanics of the axiomantic warp, with the convenient side-effect of making it possible to approach and manipulate the Sunstone with some degree of safety.

What is its purpose? Well, aside from its roles as experiment, proof-of-concept, and asírdaëlíthal for the gentlesophs of the Irreality Vault, I expect the principle role of the Sunstone will be to prove to exoarchaeologists of the future, gentle reader, that we have now equaled the Precursors in our ability to confuse, bemuse, and amuse.

– editorial, issue 394, “Scientific Progress Says What?“

Eight Hells (1/4?)

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Vice-Admiral Ardelli, TDMS Skybreaker, commanding TF 14. Battleship CAS Antithemis, carrier CAS Antinomos, escorting destroyers, reported moving out Lothell Bay steaming ESE. Suspect attempting transit Adessír Straits tomorrow at local dawn. Heavy weather over Lothell Is. makes it unlikely fly off air cover. All measures intercept and destroy. 1SL, Calmiríë.

Girls In Red Cloaks Beware

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(In which I noodle around with wet navy designs from the closest to a WWII-equivalent period in ‘verse history.)

Ulricik Bancrach (“Hungry Wolf”)-class destroyer

Builders:

  • Ambriel Dock Guild & Company
  • Consolidated Selenarian Shipbuilding
  • Ethring Iron and Steam Works
  • Ryudailai Pier Shipbuilding Cooperatives
  • Telírvess Naval Yards
  • Tortelsvard Naval Arsenal

Displacement: 3,670 long tons (standard)

Length: 127.48 m
Beam: 12.32 m
Draft: 5.65 m

Propulsion:

  • 4 x Empire Nucleonics, ICC “Kirchev’s Kettle” nucleonic boilers, driving
    2×2 Blackstone Industries, ICC geared steam turbines (and auxiliary turbogenerator)

Speed: 44 knots
Range: Unlimited (6 year refueling interval)

Complement: 285 officers and men

Sensors:

  • Artifice Armaments, ICC, ASR-6/1 air search radar
  • Artifice Armaments, ICC, SSR-12 surface search radar
  • Hydrodyne Group Mk. 0/2 experimental hydrophones

Armament (Primary):

  • 6 x 6″ Imperial Navy Type Four dual-purpose gun;
    two single turrets (immediately forward of primary superstructure (A);
    immediately aft of secondary superstructure (Y));
    two twin turrets (fore (B) and aft (X) of primary superstructure, deck 01)
  • 18 x 18″ torpedo tubes in three stacked-hex turret mounts
    (bow, forward of A turret;
    in between primary and secondary superstructure;
    stern, aft of Y turret, elevated above depth-charge racks),
    firing 18″ low-signature LS/85 unguided torpedo with 292 kg high explosive warhead
  • 2 x 108 kg depth charge delivery racks (stern)

Armament (Secondary):

  • 3 x quad 36 mm Black Sky anti-air defense guns
    (one forward on primary superstructure, deck 02;
    two aft on secondary superstructure, deck 01, either side of mast/secondary director)
  • 12 x twin 24 mm Black Sky anti-air defense guns
    (two on bridge wings, deck 03;
    two forward on secondary superstructure, deck 01;
    remaining eight on main deck, four per side as space permits)

Armor:

  • Engineering space (engines and boilers): 0.75″ heavy steel plate
  • Pilothouse: 0.5″ heavy steel plate
  • Gun directors: 0.5″ heavy steel plate
  • Torpedo tube covers: 0.25″ heavy steel plate
  • Elsewhere: None

Designed during the middle years of the Third Oceanic Dominance, the Ulricik Bancrach-class destroyer was the second and most common¹ of the “modern” types of destroyer that would dominate the last great era of wet naval combat, specifically designed for the multiple roles of serving as protective screening forces for battleships and carriers (especially against air attack), of mounting deadly “wolf-pack” torpedo attacks against enemy forces during surface actions, and of addressing the then novel threat of the militarily effective submarine.

(A later ASW variant and refit of the class, as the need became more apparent, would replace the midships torpedo tubes with a pair of depth charge projectors.)

The name of the class comes ultimately from their flush deck construction² (that would later become near-ubiquitous in later designs around the time of the War of the Twelve Tyrants), eliminating all well decks³, reducing the overall height of the superstructure (divided into two, the swept-back forward superstructure accommodating the bridge tower and primary gun director, and a lower, one-deck secondary superstructure to aft surrounding the base of the tripod mast, carrying the radar and wireless antennae and the secondary gun director), and even eliminating the forecastle, which along with her slender dagger profile gave Ulricik Bancrach and her successors a particularly lean, prowling, hungry look relative to their contemporaries. The substantial increase in firepower over the preceding Sar Anpeng-class only added to this reputation.

The removal of the forecastle – although the flared bow was retained – combined with the weight of the forward armament – proved to detract unfortunately from the class’s seaworthiness in heavier weather. While at the time this was considered an acceptable compromise, with then-dominant doctrine calling for heavy salvoes of unguided torpedoes from destroyers squadrons, the advent of the guided torpedo tipped the balance back in favor of quality, and the Ulricik Bancrach-class ships in Imperial service were refitted to remove the forward torpedo mount in exchange for better seakeeping.

Serving through the remainder of the Third Oceanic Dominance and the War of the Twelve Tyrants, and with refits, upgrades, and successor classes based on their design continuing to fill out the squadrons of the IN into and through the Consolidation, the Ulricik Bancrach-class is perhaps the most iconic of all the destroyer classes commissioned by the Empire.

  1. 224 Ulricik Bancrach-class destroyers were commissioned, of which 148 served on the Upperside and 76 on the Underside.
  2. It should be borne in mind that, using nucleonic propulsion as they tended to, Imperial steamship designs near-universally lacked smokestacks.
  3. Meaning here the older usage of decks lower than those fore and aft of them (e.g., between a forecastle and full-width superstructure, or between such a superstructure and a poop deck).

Curiously Enough, This Came Before Software

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contract module: To avoid both unnecessary repetition, and to avoid the additional labor of poring over the mass of said repetition in search of differences from the commonplace form, Imperial contract law has long embraced the use of contract modules, sets of predefined and referenceable clauses and specifications to address specific issues within the contract in standardized manners, controlled by equally standardized variables introduced at the beginning of the contract. A variety of contract modules are available covering matters as disparate as arbitration, assignment and transfer, choice of law, confidentiality, delivery, escrow, execution, force majeure, notice, translation, waiver, and indeed allow for many more areas in which the obligator and his client may choose to rely on existing, well-established terms for a specific scope, with which terms they are already thoroughly acquainted.

Agabanda: In common use, this references the largest collection of form contracts and contract modules in common usage, more properly known as Agabanda’s Compleat Obligator: Form Contracts and Modules for the Practical Contractor, published in annual volumes by Academy of the Quill and Coils Press. Citations from Agabanda are typically given by volume, chapter, and number.

Wistio interpretation: (from it’s establishing case, Wistio Automatics v. Ryudailai Pier Eleven Shipbuilding Cooperative) A rule of interpretation for modular contracts specifying that, for the avoidance of doubt, clauses and specifications from any and all relevant invoked contract modules shall override any clauses and specifications found within the contract itself, except where the intent for the base contract to override the module is explicitly stated in the clause or specification in question. The function of the Wistio rule, if examined from that angle, is to ensure the usability of contract modules by preventing situations of uncertainty from arising in which invoked contract modules and the base contract contradict each other without clear statement of which has legal priority.

One exception to the Wistio rule of interpretation (established by the later case, Jacaranda Graving Company v. City of Dal Épareil) is that strict sectioning clauses or contract modules may not be overridden by any clause or specification not given at the point of invocation of the module itself, since to require the study of the entire contract (and all its referenced modules) in order to determine whether or not the strict sectioning rules apply as given vitiates the essential purpose of the strict sectioning clause or module itself.

strict sectioning: A strict sectioning provision (or contract module – most typically referenced as Agabanda IV/1/3) within a contract provides that (a) the contract is divided into sections whose scope is limited to a particular function, or aspect, of the contract, defined by the heading of that section; and that (b) any clause or specification located in a section other than that to which it applies is automatically null and void as out of scope. In this way, one may be assured, when reviewing the contract, that all provisions relevant to one’s use-case are found in their appropriate sections, and one need not hunt through the entire document for hidden traps, buried clauses, or counter-illegibility assurance.

– Salvarin’s Dictionary of Legal Principles

Not-Earth

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(Note: this is not canon. But every time someone wants to know when the humans are going to turn up and acquire some suitably starring role in the narrative, it gets a little closer to being canon, y’know?

…assuming I do not just go ahead and canonize the notion that in this universe, Pseudoeldrae archaea was literally the only member of The Genus Otherwise Known As Homo and all greenlife originates from the homeworld of Equus amica. I am, after all, one of those temperamental artistes.)

ORIGIN ASTROCOORD // FARHORIZ // CSS BEYOND THE PALE
CONTACT MORBID CONTACT MORBID

This is a KALPA NIGHTFALL ALERT, profiled as POSSIBLE LOW ENERGY (GWYATH 7-) SOFT CIV-KILL EVENT. Patterned electromagnetic emissions placing system on evaluation schedule ceased at ~-140 years mission inbound time.

Event coordinates are approximately 230 light-orbits from proposed SPICE WAY site TRANSVEIL, star system designated IGS 170-4138294. System primary is G2V-class dwarf, sustaining a system of eight planets, the four outer being gas or ice giants. Of note, the sixth planet in the system maintains an unusually prominent ring system. Of the four lithic worlds in the system, the fourth is a eutalentic-class with potential and the second and third both sialhain-type glass-garden worlds, dry and wet respectively.

Third planet is classified as ANOMALOUS due to rare double-planet formation; unusually high level of hydrocarbons and C/HC/HCO-breakdown products in atmosphere (determined by remote spectrographic analysis); unusually high level of residual radioactivity; ring of metallic debris in planetary orbit; detection of metallic debris/potential structures on airless secondary body. This planet is designated as most probable source of prior patterned electromagnetic emissions.

No attempts to contact the far horizon probe were made. Contact signals were transmitted on all designated frequences to no response. No biosignatures or technosignatures were detected by passive sensing or active scanning.

Recommendation: promote to EYEBALL and CORTÈGE PILLAGER for further study, routine priority. In absence of remnant biosignatures or technosignatures, no further action required. Mission continues.

ENDS.

High-Trust Society

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CALMIRÍË, ELIÉRA – The cancellation of next year’s expected state visit of President Ostrid Nallen of the United Viridian States was announced today by Subrector Quíëlle Oliviscios of the Office of Foreign Wanderers, stating only that the cancellation had come at the request of the States after the Empire had regrettably been unable to fulfil all the necessary requests of the States regarding President Nallen’s visit.

The documentation provided to the OFW by the States, however, included a lengthy list of security requirements, including but not limited to exclusive use of the Ilinth Altaport during his visit, along with closure of other starports, skyways, and highways near his entourage’s transit routes, similarly exclusive use or restrictions on simultaneous public use of visited facilities including restaurants, hotels, and even potentially-used hospitals, and, of course, special police powers to be provided to the providers this ostentatious security perimeter. Obviously, as ultra vires powers outwith the scope of the Charter, such requirements are impossible to fulfil.

Asked for comment, sources close to the rector of the OFW reminded this publication of the famous statement made by Alphas I Amanyr, “The gates of my House shall be open to all.”1, and of the long-standing custom of the Imperial family of not placing boundaries between themselves and their people, adding that inasmuch as Alphas and his successors deemed both it appropriate and themselves sufficiently secure in walking the streets of their capital accompanied only by a few discreet Imperial Guardsmen, it would do little for the repute of the Viridianite presidency in the eyes of the citizen-shareholders to refuse to appear without a small army insulating them from any contact with the world.

  1. The Imperial Palace has, in addition to the Supreme Portal, nine gates, all of which have only ever been closed – even in time of war – as part of a scheduled test by the Office of the Palace to make sure that they can close. (It means very little to leave open a gate which cannot close, after all.)

Purity Of Essence

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Among the artifacts first discovered in the lower levels of the Iniscail excavation were the sophotechnological artifacts now known as purity-of-heart switches. These devices resemble the hexagonal touch-plate switch used by the Precursors in several of their sites, but are in actuality complex systems capable of remote neural scanning and analysis.

The term “purity-of-heart switch” was derived from a translation of Precursor glyphs accompanying descriptions of the item found in the area of the Iniscail site identified as “the Instrumentery”. However, as with all translations from the Precursor, this is at best an combination of these linguistic best-fits in uncertain relation.

After a degree of spiritual experimentation, it was determined that a more accurate translation would be “purity of intent” or perhaps “singularity of will”. The purity-of-heart switch is a quantifier of qalasír; a device that detects one’s mental focus upon a single task or topic. Installed in control mirrors and security gates in sensitive areas of Precursor facilities, the purity-of-heart switch served to deny access to these to individuals distracted, or otherwise not adequately focused upon the tasks they were to perform.

Moral perfection, sadly, neither required nor detected.

– Simples of Complexity: Precursor Commonplaces

Today’s Quotations

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We are, undeniably, tool-using creatures. Eldrae sómintár. More, we are undeniably creative creatures, builders and makers – eldrae mahavár – who build in order to have tools, and have tools in order to build. An endless cycle of creation. Observe, too, the lesser Flames: the problem-solving ingenuity of the bandal, the hunting tools fashioned by the vorac, the multifold creations of the cúlno.

Creation, then, is the nature of the Flame.

Is it not then clear that both the tools of creation and the fruits of creation, to such poor extent as they may be distinguished, are necessary parts of the inviolable self? These are the means by which it acts upon the world. One who does not control these means is reduced to the level of the naked savage, less than the lowest of animals, denied the ability to express or to better their inner nature.

Beware, O students mine, of he would would take, control, or deny you means, for in this way he would make himself your master…

Nephrite, student of the philosopher Sardonyx

Governance is, fundamentally and always, a technocratic art. The questions of how to deal with a recession, or a pandemic, how to manage the infrastructure of a city, how to regulate the value of a currency, how to keep the peace – these are no more matters of choice than the structure of an aqueduct, the foundations of a highway, the cure for the bloody flux, or the value of pi. They are technical problems with technical solutions, even when the solutions are known poorly, or not known at all. Even ethics – for those who do not confuse it with morality, into which realm we may not trespass – is a scientific field whose implementation is a technocratic matter, not subject to popular preference.

The wise man does not seek the agreement of his neighbors before shuttering his house against the storm; the doctor does not consult onlookers before cleaning a wound; the good man does not ensure the victim was well-thought-of before saving a life; and nor then ought we to require such before executing the duties of our offices in accordance with our merits.

This is the fundamental flaw of democracy: it trades away competence – and, indeed, reality – for a fool’s pleasant illusion of control. And, of course, for someone to blame when it turns out that you needed competence after all.

Sardal Amanyr-ith-Amaranyr, Minister President of the Council of Ministers, 1651-1739