Kinetic

I leap from my housing with a howl of mechanical joy, propfans already accelerating to their full cruising spin. I drop a full thousand feet before leveling out, intense acceleration tugging at my airfoils as I nail a near-right-angle skew-flip into horizontal flight, boomeranging and sideslipping my way through the other automatic flyers sharing the free-flight altitudes between the flitter lanes and the near-ground volume reserved for emergency vehicles –

I check structural rating across the local navigational mesh, engage in a quick passing trade of vectors with an Astroburger grill-drone, then reach out with a tethering field and swing myself around the First Distributed offices onto the city’s main drag, a long straight haul that will take me close to my target. Mindful of the monotonic tick of the payload-time-elapsed counter, I kick in my auxiliary rockets, feeling the thrust and the opposing forces as the shock cone begins to form. Warnings flash in my consciousness as the company externality-manager issues inconvenience payouts to the offices I thunder past, but I ignore them, shortcutting through an uncontrolled volume to make a minimal-delta skip onto the Outer Loop –

And I sense my target directly, no more than a mile ahead. I lock onto its transponder, kick in the auxiliaries again, then silence them and apply a touch of air-brake. The target is almost directly above me now as I cruise at the highest free-flight altitude. I receive clearance to enter the lane relayed through the company channels; noting my target’s lack of skydock equipment, I slip sideways a few feet, pip my transponder as a temporary skyway user, and rise alongside it.

I open a narrowband communications link, while the people inside the target are still turning to look at me in surprise.

“Citizen Minnis? I represent Capital Kinetic Couriers, ICC. I have a time-critical package for you – would you please follow me to the nearest parking hive to accept delivery?”

– adapted from the thought-log of Flight Lieutenant Siao 0xFE00DC9B (Retd.)

 

Hatred

Groggily, the prisoner raised his head as the door above him slid open. He tensed his muscles, but the welded wire bonds that attached him to the ore cart were too strong; all his struggles achieved was the cracking open of old scabs, and the oozing of more pinkish-yellow blood from his wrists and ankles. He could not even clear his mouth of the foam that had hardened there. All he could do was glare at the dark silhouette outside that door, and the bulky shapes that flanked it, in impotent fury.

“Boys, watch him and make sure he doesn’t try anything.”

“Uh, estrev -”

“Because I am about to indulge in monologuing. And I hate being interrupted when I am monologuing.”

The bulky shape, a linobir by the sound of its voice, took that as the warning it was and fell silent.

“Since we have never met, my dear Sen Kal, I thought perhaps you deserved a brief introduction. Certainly there will be little time for anything else, given the magnitude of your failure.”

“Beginning, of course, with attempting to contract me and my organization to assist with your meat-market. Did you really expect any different result? I may have abandoned the society and scruples of my prissy cousins for the sake of an ambition suited to my talents, but I am not, shall we say, entirely lost to decency.”

“And then,” the silhouette sighed, “there is the matter of our little game of dominance. You showed no promise at all, I am afraid. Outmaneuvered at every turn. Had you shown even marginal ability, you might have proved a useful tool. Had you recognized how outclassed you were and pled my mercy, you might have lived. Humility can be a virtue… for the low. But if there is one thing that I simply cannot abide, it is an incompetent who does not realize his own incompetence!”

“In any case: know, then, that it is Anatev Sarathos who has defeated you. I’d say it was a pleasure, but I fear it was not even that. And so, farewell.”

The sefir jerked in one last hopeless attempt to escape.

The door closed.

The door beneath him opened.

 

Ecumenopolis

The Empire has no true ecumenopolis within its borders. As those who are prone to wryly comment on such things might say: The many do not exist; the few lack the ecumene; and the one lacks the polis.

The few, of course, are those beehive colonies occupying the biggest asteroids and smallest moons in Imperial space – such as 1 Andír, once the largest asteroid among the e’Luminiarien, then home to the first of the habitats of the growing belter culture, and now cored and hollowed, tunneled, reformed, and chambered, remade in its entirety into Andir Drift, a single labyrinthine city of 79 million embodied souls, nearly 600 miles across – if you don’t include the largest set of radiator vanes ever constructed, which almost double that figure. Impressive, certainly, but an ecumene? Perhaps not.

And then there is Qechra.

Qechra, which is the Transcend’s forge world.

Qechra, where synapse moons and unity spires are born.

Qechra, which while it can spare some capacity now and again to make Ring Dynamics some stargate hulls, or run off some high-density computronium for Bright Shadow, belongs to Mahánárel and Medáríäh from crust to core, in heart and soul.

From the smelters and reactors buried down deep in the fringes of the Mohorovicic, to the webs of automated assemblers, processors, and stranger machinery still in its middle crust, opened to the sky where repurposed oceans thunder through its cooling gorges and blast skyward in a furnace-draught of steam; through all the tangled webs of coolant pipes honeycombing the world, leading out to the outermost branches of sky towers where massive ontotechnological entropy pumps shower hot neutrinos into the depths of space; in the endless assembly caverns and above the crystalline peaks of processor mountains; in all of these, this world belongs to the Forger and the All-Abundant.

Only in the factory-cathedrals of the surface is there any place for sophonts of lesser order than such Powers, those few who serve and command the machinery below, and the pilgrims who come to wonder at this technarch’s heaven.

But Qechra is not their polis, not a friendly home like the hexterranes of Coricál. Qechra is the Transcend’s potency made manifest. It shrugs off lesser powers than its own without a thought.

– Other Wonders of the Galaxy, Ademone Kirvin-ith-Kirvin

Undeath

Ravens.

Why are they always ravens?

I have met lots of dar-vorac in civilian life, and while they’re strange in the usual ways that uplifts are strange, dar-bandal possibly somewhat excepted, and they’re mostly cheerful, well-adjusted people. No death fixations or suchlike abound, unless you count their taste in restaurants. Oh, slevanka, please let it not be the eyeballs.

But in the Legions, if your battle goes sideways hard enough that you need to send for a necromancer – sorry, battlefield nonfunctional/deathected asset repurposing specialist – then eleven times out of twelve you’ll see a raven flying in. Accompanied by the rising, swirling, drone-spewed mist of nanites that’s going to chew its way into the plentiful corpses, biophage the spare parts, and use the resulting energy to make the rest shamble their way towards the enemy and pull the trigger from time to time before being shot to sufficient pieces. Well enough to serve as a distraction or cover your retreat, anyway.

You just have to hope the enemy finds it as creepifying as we do.

Or, at least, as nauseating.

 

Safety

prophylock (n.): Used primarily by free traders, a prophylock is a collapsible docking module used when rendezvousing with untrusted vessels for cargo transfer. Similar to a standard docking module, a prophylock is a cylinder with an IUSI-P or IUSI-F androgynous adapter on each end, one to attach to the host starship and one to dock with the foreign starship.

The prophylock, however, has near its outboard end an armored barrier which prohibits the passage of sophonts, equipped with a secure passage (complete with mechanical interlocks preventing both sides from being opened simultaneously, and sampling systems for testing the contents before opening the inner door) through which the transfers may take place. In the event that both vessels are using prophylocks, the secure passage systems are designed to allow transfers from one to the other without direct integration, but also without requiring anyone to occupy the ‘tween-lock volume.

Rather than the direct data systems connection of a standard IUSI adapter, the prophylock connects the foreign data bus to a limited-functionality terminal, permitting communication and negotiation to take place without information risk.

Finally, the outboard end of the prophylock is equipped, for the case in which a lack of trust should turn out to be justified, with an explosive collar to sever the outboard androgynous adapter, thus reliably breaking the connection between vessels, along with solid-fuel jettison rockets to push the host vessel back immediately upon collar detonation, shortening the time to safe burn clearance as much as possible.

Fly safe. Dock safer.

– A Star Traveller’s Dictionary


(Yes, I was thinking of Out of Gas when I wrote this one…)

Museum

Exhibit 137: The Empty Box

There are lots of empty boxes in the galaxy, but only one is the Empty Box.

This simple, small cube of tarnished silver and lead, recovered from a Precursor site on Omane (First Expanses), is unique because it is exactly that: empty. It contains no mere vacuum.

Within its internal “volume”, for lack of a better word, there is nothing; not only the absence of mass-energy, but also of everything else. There is no space within the cube, nor does time pass there. The most sensitive measuring instruments available detect no activity within, not even that of the quantum foam. Most significantly, radiation passed through the cube appears to travel faster than light, passing into one facet and out of the opposing facet with the delay that would be expected were the inner facets of the cube to be coterminous – which we believe them to be, in fact. A captured glitch in the fabric of space, perhaps, or an experiment in creating the ultimate emptiness?

It is, of course, quite impossible. But then, everything here is.

– exhibit label at the Museum of Manifest Impossibilities,
Landing, Víëlle (Thirteen Colonies)

Walk

On that day, eleven years before Alphas I crowned himself, two figures walked down the dusty road striking down from the wooded dales of upland Vintiver into the setting sun. The hills on either side of the road were shadowy, draped as they were with the vines of the purplish-black Vintiver grapes, whose scent hung heavy in the stifling air of late summer, but no such mercy was afforded the road itself.

The elder of them marched steadily in front, face battered by sun and wind beneath black hair, bound back by a leather thong, and bearing a notable gray streak from an underlying scar. Swathed in a light cotton wrap, covered only by a few selected plates of lacquered armor and the pouches and bundles at his wide belt, the sheathed teirian across his back and hanrian ready at his hip made his profession abundantly clear.

The younger stumbled along behind him, face purpling under sweat-streaked blond hair. Wrapped in antiquated bronze chain from neck to ankle, while the thin-bladed knives of his bandolier and the glaive upon which he leaned tried to convey that same impression, his need to lean under the weight of the immense pack slung across his back detracted rather from it.

The younger spoke.

“So.”

The elder replied.

“Mm.”

“This is adventuring.”

“Mm.”

“The books never mentioned this part.”

“Mm.”

“All the walking, I mean.”

“Mm.”

“Epic quests, terrifying foes, romance, treasure, unbelievable sights, forbidden and forgotten wisdoms, ancient artifacts from the era beyond time, and greater than even odds of unpleasant death, yes, but not all the walking.”

“Mm.”

“But I suppose we have to get to them somehow.”

“Mm.”

“I just assumed that we would have some suitably epic mode of transportation, too.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t you have anything to say besides ‘mm’?”

“No. Walking.”

 

Opinions

Displaying random selection of memeweaves (1-12/396,241,117)…

Business/Contract Seeking Contract
Looking for work to do? Looking for work to be done?
MODERATOR NOTE: This memeweave is hosted on servers of Empire domicile and thus defaults to the Common Economic Protocol. Be advised that promissory performatives expressed herewithin are legally binding and enforceable.

Entertainment/InVids/Orichalcium Fist
Discussion about the heaviest metal!
MODERATOR NOTE: Spoiler warnings are MANDATORY for all endings of Orichalcium Fist VI: To All My Sins, Their Slumber and subsequent.

Misc/Or We Could Blow Up The Sun
Dedicated to all those brilliant plans with just one… minor… drawback.
MODERATOR NOTE: To be on-topic for this memeweave, the plan would actually have to work. Technically.

Misc/Brigadoons/Where’s the Floating Meme
Trade tips and theories on the next location of the Empire’s most exclusive nightclub.

Science/Ontotechnology
We pass the laws Science/Physics abides by!

Social/Adventurers/There I Was
…and then we lifted ship without clearance, because everything was on fire!

Social/BeepBoop
Digisapiences only. No meat allowed.

Social/Millennials/Chat
For posters who’ve passed their first ten centuries.
MODERATOR NOTE: Age verification is required.

Social/Politics/General Discussion
Watch people enslave themselves in real-time!
MODERATOR NOTE: After another invasion from people who don’t understand the purpose of this memeweave, we’ve restricted distribution once again to Empire (Internal). For anyone within that distribution who still doesn’t get it – this is a snark ‘weave, sophs! If you want to be taken seriously, you want to be somewhere else! (And we still won’t take you seriously.)

Social/Xenophilia/Advice
Is that your pseudopod, or are you just happy to see me?

Technology/Technological Erotica
All the newest shiny things!
MODERATOR NOTE: All users are reminded that we are nonspecific as to the definition of technology. Anyone other than the moderation agents advancing an argument as to what does or does not qualify as techne will be banned and dropped.

Threats and Other Dangers/Basilisk Watch/Reports
Warnings (only) of cognitive weapon attacks capable of being introduced via sensory channels.
MODERATOR NOTE: Message format, composition and complexity limits, as well as internode permutation requirements, will be STRICTLY enforced.

 

 

Evidence

Memeweave: Threats and Other Dangers/Perversion Watch/Open Access
Classification: WHITE (General Access)
Encryption: None
Distribution: Everywhere (Bulk)
As received at: SystemArchiveHub-00 at Víëlle (Imperial Core)
Language: Eldraeic->Universal Syntax
From: 197th Perversion Response Board

Gentlesophs,

Given the high levels of uninformed critical response to our advisory concerning handling potential refugees arriving sublight from regions within the existential threat zone of the Siofra Perversion, or Leviathan Consciousness as it is becoming popularly known, the Board now provides the following explication.

The present situation is an example of what eschatologists refer to as the basilisk-in-a-box problem. The nature of the mythological basilisk is that witnessing its gaze causes one to turn to stone, and the challenge therefore to determine if there is a basilisk within the box and what it is doing without suffering its gaze. The parallel to the Siofra Perversion’s communication-based merkwelt should be obvious: it won’t subsume you unless you alert it to your existence as “optimizable networked processing hardware” by communicating with it.

Your analogous challenge, therefore, is to determine whether the hypothetical lugger or slowship filled with refugees is in fact that, or is contaminated/a perversion expansion probe, without communicating with it – since if it is the latter and you communicate with it sufficiently to establish identity, you have just arranged your own subsumption – and unless people are subsequently rather more careful in re communicating with you, that of all locally networked systems and sophonts.

Currently, the best available method for doing this is based on the minimum-size thesis: i.e., that basilisk hacks, thought-viruses, and other forms of malware have a certain inherent complexity and as such there is a lower limit on the number of bits necessary to represent them. However, it should be emphasized that this limit is not computable (as this task requires a general constructive solution to the Halting Problem), although we have sound reason to believe that a single bit is safe.

This method, therefore, calls for the insertion of a diagnostician equipped with the best available fail-deadly protections and a single-bit isolated communications channel (i.e., tanglebit) into the hypothetical target, there to determine whether or not perversion is present therein, and to report a true/false result via the single-bit channel.

If we leave aside for the moment that:

(a) there is a practical difficulty of performing such an insertion far enough outside inhabited space as to avoid all possibility of overlooked automatic communications integration in the richly meshed network environment of an inhabited star system, without the use of clipper-class hardware on station that does not generally exist; and

(b) this method still gambles with the perversion having no means, whether ontotechnological or based in new physics, to accelerate its clock speed to a point which would allow it to bypass the fail-deadly protections and seize control of the single-bit channel before deadly failure completes.

The primary difficulty here is that each investigation requires not only a fully-trained forensic eschatologist, but one who is both:

(a) a Cilmínár professional, or worthy of equivalent fiduciary trust, and therefore unable to betray their clients’ interests even in the face of existential terror; and

(b) willing to deliberately hazard submitting a copy of themselves into a perversion, which is to say, for a subjective eternity of runtime at the mercy of an insane god.

(Regarding the latter, it may be useful at this time to review the ethical calculus of infinities and asymptotic infinities; we recommend On the Nonjustifiability of Hells: Infinite Punishments for Finite Crimes, Samiv Leiraval-ith-Liuvial, Imperial University of Calmiríë Press. Specifically, one should consider the mirror argument that there is no finite good, including the preservation of an arbitrarily large set of mind-states, which justifies its purchase at infinite price to the purchaser.)

Observe that a failure at any point in this process results in first you, and then your entire local civilization, having its brains eaten.

We are not monsters; we welcome any genuine innovation in this field which would permit the rescue of any unfortunate sophonts caught up in scenarios such as this. However, it is necessary that the safety of civilization and the preservation of those minds known to be intact and at hazard be our first priority.

As such, we trust these facts adequately explain our advisory recommendation that any sublight vessels emerging from the existential threat zone be destroyed at range by relativistic missile systems.

For the Board,

Gém Quandry, Eschatologist Excellence

 

Range

The figure clinging to the side of People’s Security Observation Platform Number Three would have been barely noticeable even to a careful observer. The ambioptics of his chameleon cloak, whose electrostatics held it still and in position against the satellite’s hull, perfectly reflected the appearance of that hull across the entire visual and ultraviolet spectrum.  Some infrared emission was thermodynamically necessary over his four-day vigil, but he had carefully positioned himself over one of the platform’s radiothermal generators: the addition of his body heat would only fractionally increase emissions.

Careful ranging and hull mapping might still detect his presence, of course, but even the infamously paranoid Iltine State Security Bureau did not do that routinely – and, thank Éadínah and Her Shadows, no watchers had detected him on his brief cold-gas jumps from bermos freighter to cargo dropper, from dropper to Terilti’s tiny moon, from moon to shuttle, and most risky of all, from shuttle to this secure platform.

Silently he watched, unbreathing, relying on the stored oxygen of his hemocules. His hearts did not beat: constant-pressure pumps ushered the blood through his veins. Nothing disturbed his perfect stillness as, eyes pressed to the sights of a custom-tailored mass driver, he watched a garage door slide open in the side of a skyscraper on the planet far below. This was the fourth day, and once again, his target was departing precisely to schedule. Consistence of habits, and in such a desirable target! It was hardly even sporting.

(Nonetheless, he permitted himself a slight smile at the thought of the record he was about to set. Let the 75th boast of their prowess; to pull this off from 120 miles above the planet, with a low-angle shot even, would write his name for all time in a book which, admittedly, few would ever read.)

The garage door finished its traverse, and locked home. His brain flashed through final calculations, integrating the observations of the last days with what could currently be seen of the traffic around the building, the current weather, and a dozen other factors. He made a microscopic adjustment to the alignment of the mass driver, and gently squeezed the trigger.

Twenty pulses went by.

A black, luxury aircar nosed its way out of the garage.

Another ten.

The aircar began to turn, slipping sideways to join the flow of morning commuters.

One more.

And the aircar abruptly jerked downwards, shoving its nose into a lower traffic lane with – he presumed – some great effusion of horns and epithets, before its safety features yanked it to an abrupt stop.

Then alarms went off in the offices of the orbital SSB, as the thermal bloom of self-destruct nanotech reducing the sniper and his weapon to a thin, homogeneous, minimal-evidence plasma set off sensors all along Platform Three and beyond.

But by then, Lieutenant Dynari Ejava, 82nd Imperial Legion (“the One Hope”) – or the spray of neutrinos representing him – was already on his way home.

 

Racing

The competitors in the Fourth Sunjammer Cup departed Sarpe orbit today. All the big names in interstellar sail racing were participating, of course: Silvy Janaris’s Silverstar; Taran Kalyn’s red-hulled Meteor; Sithry min Corahill’s Black Ice Mirror with its liquid sails; Sen Kal Ethran’s Pride of Meridia; Tiranjan’s Speedy Sliver, and more. All off on the longest race the Worlds have to offer.

That’s by time, of course, not by distance. While Sarpe and Coramus are less than four light-orbits apart, even a full-rigged sunjammer the full thousand miles from ‘sprit to skyrakers is a slow hauler by lugger standards. The winner should be arriving in Coramus in six hundred years, give or take a few.

Now that’s commitment.

 

Delta

Sixty-two thousand feet above the surface of Eliéra, Gaëlenén’s Cup coasted slowly in its perpetual circuit, seven of her eight fission-driven pusher fans only ticking over, yet still able to drive her through the air at a relaxed 480 knots. The Emergency Management Authority’s superwing was a massive delta of titanium composite, five-decked and fully 600′ from one of her wingtip vertical stabilizers to the other; her underside studded with the blisters of pod launchers, and the closed doors to the flight gantries from which she could dispatch, at need, her multiple wings of reconnaissance drones, rescue and clean-up craft, intervention vehicles, and heavy field constructors.

Today, though, Cup was not alone in the sky. A K-50C Roustabout paralleled her course only two hundred feet above, auxiliary thrusters battling the wake turbulence, such that it could keep station above and in front of the open dorsal hatch of Cup’s silent engine. The Roustabout had its rear hatch fully open, exposing the cavernous length of its fuselage, and its cargo crane extended, lowering lines down to where Cup’s aircraftsmen waited to catch them with rocket grapples, and hook them onto the pellet containment of the engine’s dedicated reactor. A second containment module, pregnant with fresh thorium and borate, waited inside the Roustabout.

Emergencies, after all, wait for no soph, and take no account of the necessities of maintenance or refueling.

And so Cup had never landed in her eighteen-year service life. And with proper care and attention, she never would.

 

Ugly

Probably the ugliest of these weapons was the windblade, a product of Merianvard artificery. A windblade resembled, in form, a smaller version of the Variasotec double scimitar without its hilt: i.e., two opposingly curved blades joined in the center, and sharpened to a razor’s edge.

No hilt was required for the windblade, as it was a specialized weapon designed to be wielded by a psychokinetic adept (of strength estimated at 288-plus, Revised Impulse Scale). The adept would levitate the windblade and cause it to spin rapidly; then, would propel it in looping curves amid the ranks of the enemy, slashing through everything in its path.

It proved less than useful as a battlefield weapon, both due to armor halting the blade’s rotation even when penetrated, and to the limited number of psychokinetic adepts with sufficient strength to use the windblade; on such occasions as it was deployed openly, the windblade battle often turned into a contest between multiple adepts, each trying to deflect, or seize control of, their opponent’s windblade while forcing their own to conclusion. Such contests were typically inconclusive, except when one adept possessed both great strength and the ability to handle multiple windblades simultaneously with dexterity.

Rather, it was as a weapon of mass assassination that the windblade was unparalleled. Wielded from ambuscade, a windblade could slash an entire rank or file of enemy troops to ribbons before a defense could be mustered. Likewise, scout troops armed with blackened windblades could scourge an overnight encampment clean of life while those within slept and, often, before the guards could be alerted.

– Ranged Weapons of the Era of Hand and Fire

 

Pornography

Querying today’s new catalog entries in category:erotica; displaying (8) highest-rated results:

Meiose With Me
An esseli bioengineer rediscovers the wonders of sexual reproduction.

Naked Singularity: When Particles Collide
Those naughty, naughty particles.

Prompt Criticality IV
Further unbounded lust among the orgiasts of the Atomic Age.

Ricatra Today: Vol. CCXLVII
The galaxy’s finest xenophilia.

Thrusters Firing! 2: Engage the Retro-Rockets
The microgravity adventures continue.

Tunnels of Love
In the mines of the Mohorovicic, the passion runs as hot as the magma!

Warm, Sticky and Moist
Hilarity ensues when virtual lovers meet in the flesh for the first time.

You Spin Me Around
Erotic-comedy star Lalíríë Celestial discovers the Coriolis effect.

(more)

 

Relay

Other than the FTL squirt routers integrated into the stargates themselves, the most important parts of the interstellar communications infrastructure – and before it the interplanetary communications infrastructure – are each system’s relay stations.

Customarily located above and below the acme and nadir poles of the system’s primary star, relays are statites, hanging in position from and stabilized by variable-geometry solar sails. This positioning at a sufficient distance above and below the ecliptic gives them the best possible line of sight on every object on the system: stargates, planetary geostat constellations, major drifts, and starships operating in the normal (i.e., along the ecliptic) traffic lanes, with the minor exception of the most epistellar of planets, coronal habitats, and other sun-hugging operations.

While for the most part, intra-system networking is done using standard mesh protocols, coordinated via shortest-link routing protocols based on current light-lag, occultation ephemerides, and traffic-control data, the relay stations’ positioning enables them to serve as the route of last resort for all backbone traffic in the system. In particular, they handle traffic between planets and drifts currently on opposite sides of the primary, and interstellar traffic without an endpoint in the system; i.e., stargate-to-stargate traffic. In these functions, both relays function as load-balanced peers, although scaled such that each is capable of handling the total expected load alone if necessary.

The relay stations also function as management points for the interplanetary mesh, and as such at least one is continuously manned by a site systems administrator, usually an infomorph.

– IIP Elucidated, Volume I: Perspectives