trope-a-day
Pieces of God: Played straight if unusually in an entirely non-supernatural way – inasmuch as the Transcend is a cross between a regular seed AI and a collective consciousness of synnoetic AI soul-shards (see: Touched By Vorlons) grafted into the minds of all of its constitutionals. So while the greatest concentration
trope-a-day
Piecemeal Funds Transfer: Played straight, as the original trope suggests might be the case, with certain non-mainstream anonymous/secure cryptographic currencies (known as “cryp scrip”, or just “cryp” for short), in which each currency unit is its own cryptographically signed token that must be processed individually and sequentially to do
trope-a-day
Photographic Memory: On the list of enhancements built into people, with the note that it is originally only eidetic short-term, and requires voluntary “fixing” to persist as long-term eidetic memory; it also includes the ability to suppress and erase them on demand. (These to avoid being Cursed With Awesome.) A
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The Philosopher:Â The Imperial educational system is more or less designed to encourage this, on the general principle that the unexamined life leads to many things, most of which should not be encouraged.
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Perfect Pacifist People: Brutally, brutally averted. Any example of this that isn’t an abjectly poor tiny colony in a backwater of nowhere is already dead. The few counterexamples are only technically pacifist inasmuch as they have a client-state relationship or a contract with someone like Ultimate Argument Risk Control,
trope-a-day
People Puppets: What a motor shunt implant does, when used non-consensually (and especially when it’s the kind that’s a spike roughly shoved into your brain or spine, a favorite of bodyjackers everywhere). (Consensual uses, which don’t count for the purposes of this trope, include having your muse
trope-a-day
Pay Evil Unto Evil: How played straight it is depends upon your taste, really. Imperial justice and generic morality will happily kill Evil (or Orange, if you prefer) of adequate magnitude and walk off feeling good about it, and finds mercy, on the whole and vis-à -vis clemency, to be one
trope-a-day
Patchwork Map: Played straight in some habitats, where the landscape designers wanted to offer the inhabitants multiple biomes. Generally averted elsewhere, as the energy costs of brute-forcing this sort of climatic effect on an actual planet, weather control or no weather control, are ridiculously high… and besides, it’s so
trope-a-day
Pardon My Klingon: Played straight in a number of cases – zakhrehs, for example, while glossable as, is not entirely cognate to, English barbarian – but played even straighter for words that aren’t expletives, but whose English gloss is too long to use in conversation, like valessĂ«f, or valxĂjir. Or it’
trope-a-day
Overly-Long Name: Played quite straight among the eldrae, and other people prone to use relevant bits of the same name-format. Fortunately, most of it is optional – of course, that’s optional at the discretion of the name-bearer, so those wishing to use the diplomatic stalling gambit of demanding to be
trope-a-day
Pals With Jesus: Subverted, at least while you’re still alive and therefore not part of the Transcendent soul-ocean; while you can have a much more personal relationship with an eikone than most people can have with their gods – they have e-mail addresses, for one thing – it’s still a
trope-a-day
Overheating: A problem everywhere. The logistics of a post-scarcity society may have eliminated most material-supply problems; advanced ergtech may have made energy not a meaningful practical constraint; computer power may be an absolute bargain everywhere; but even with every fancy high-tech possibility up to and including neutrino-catalyzed cooling in play,