Not Cosmic, But Incomprehensible

This was originally a prompt over on Mastodon, the original prompt being: “MC POV: Name one thing that is guaranteed to make you angry? Why?”. I liked the result enough that I thought I’d share it over here, as well.

“Make me angry? The cases that fall into, in our legal code, ‘destructionism’.

“Why? Because I don’t understand it.

“We get – I’d say a lot, but this is still Imperial space, so let’s say an anomalously high level of crime here. We get slash-traders, commercial fraud, thieves grand and petty, stowaways, dockside brawls, too-long-aboard-syndrome on and on, everything a major trade station attracts like flies. But even if you slice off the truly desperate who need a hug, a hot meal, and someone to walk them to the Eleemosynary Exodochium more than what most people think of as justice, I can understand most of them. They’re zero-sum crimes; desire and greed and unfortunate passions are things we all have, and they’re not even wrong in themselves, only in how some folk handle them. Even the murderers – I’ve never hated anyone so much I couldn’t stand to share the universe with them a moment longer, but I can understand how someone might.

“What I’ve never been able to understand about these people — these are people who set out just to make the universe a little bit worse for their existence in it. Destroy or desecrate things just so that other people can’t enjoy them. Go out of their way to ruin someone’s day, or week, or decade, not as a side-effect, but as the point of their actions. Hurt and smash and wreck not for greed or other profit, not even for revenge upon their target, but just because they can, and it – I’d say it pleases them to do so, but it is hard to imagine real pleasure coming from such. These I do not understand, and it is hard to temper anger without understanding.

“And that’s dangerous for me. I’ve escorted people who have done much more damage to arraignment, but it’s these who make me think fondly of — unapproved uses for airlocks, before I quash it. And that they can make me think that, even for a moment, that makes me angriest of all.”

– Jynne Cerron, Enforcer, Watch Constabulary
Mer Dinévál Countermass Station, Seranth

Service

I, [insert name], pledge surety in the light of the Flame that I will faithfully and well, to the utmost extent of my skill and power, preserve the Imperial peace and prevent all offences against life, liberty, and property; and that I shall do so without fear of or favor towards any person, and with malice or ill-will toward none.

I give my allegiance, above laws, thrones, powers, and peers, to the Contract, to the Charter, to the principles for which they stand, and to the citizen-shareholders of the Empire; and in the discharge of my duties I shall hold this allegiance above all other considerations.

By these words, I am the watcher upon the walls, the guardian at the gate, the shield held over the innocent, the Flame that stands against the Fire. My life is the coin with which civilization buys peace. I will sell it dearly, but yield it gladly when I must, knowing that I am a sentinel, and my life is made for sacrifice. Never shall I fail in this trust, for this day and all the days to come.

– service oath of the Watch Constabulary

The Vigilant

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.

Sniffers

Yes, putting guardian dogs on police department logos is a cliché.

But what’s important in this case is the kind of dog. Look at it. Big, broad-chested mastiff. Pure black fur. Black eyes. Disappears into shadows despite being near big enough to ride. That’s a Selenarian nighthound, the kind they used to guard the moon-temples back before history. Best known for three things: they’re silent when they hunt, never letting you know they’re there until they’re on you; once they have their teeth in your throat, they never let you go; and they never stop coming.

So when you see this kindly gent on the arms of the Office of Investigation and Pursuit, Division of Chattelry, you should not need the motto beneath to tell you the nature of the jurisdiction you are within.

It does, however, tell you why. “He who guards a thing, guarants a thing.” This is one of the few places in the galaxy where not only is the Constabulary mandated to protect you and yours, but also to make you good for any occasion on which they fail.

The costs aren’t the real reason, though. It’s the promise – like everyone else in these parts, they hate it when someone presumes to break their word for them, and so cost-effective or not, they’ll hunt you to the ends of the Worlds over a trifle just to keep it unbroken.

So before you commit to this and drag me along with you, convince me that the game is worth the candle?

– recorded via laser microphone 6145/03/02,
Ashe’s Place, Socket City, Opteros (Iesa Drifts),
Office of Investigation and Pursuit, case #6145/729

Shoot Them Later

If They Want To Leave, Let Them Leave

Malefactors in command of a docked starship are always to be permitted to depart if they request it. There are no ‘land-locks’ or armored space doors for a reason. Do not forget that even a tramp merchie or private yacht has point defenses against micrometeoroids, if nothing else, which can do a spectacular amount of damage if used at point-blank range; and, of course, every starship has a drive. While firing up a reaction drive inside a docking bay is of course suicide, it is Imperial policy not to play games of flinchy-flinchy with the desperate.

This applies no matter how clever the plan you have to disable the pd grid and drive systems and/or to board and storm is. Protection of the station and those aboard it comes first. The plan will work just as well when executed by a patrol cruiser a healthy distance from everything expensive.

– Orbit Guard Manual OG-134: Negotiations

Trope-a-Day: Do Not Adjust Your Set

Do Not Adjust Your Set: The obvious canonical example is the Emergency Notification System, run jointly by the Watch Constabulary and Emergency Management Authority, which can send out a signal across the IIP mesh network preempting every device to deliver an emergency notification. Subverted inasmuch as it can be overridden freely at the receiving end, on the grounds that if there’s a gorram emergency going on, people might need to use those devices.

(There is also is counterpart, the Emergency Monitoring System. Separate from the basic functionality in which devices that perceive an emergency happening locally will report it of their own volition, the EMS permits a code to be sent out instructing all devices within a specific area to activate all their sensors and report what they perceive to the WC/EMA. Again, this is optional functionality – no-one has to participate for obvious privacy and property reasons – but rather depends on the authorities being trustworthy and individuals being mutually responsible citizens…)

Trope-a-Day: Space Police

Space Police: There isn’t any overall police service for the Associated Worlds – the closest thing is probably Conclave Security, which does answer directly to the Conclave of Galactic Polities, but whose jurisdiction is limited to just the Conclave Drift itself and its containing star system, and possibly the Operatives of the Presidium, who wield this kind of authority as one-off special agents.

In practice, every polity polices its own space, colonies, and the routes in between.  The Great Powers often augment this with various roving fleets, asserting universal jurisdiction over assorted free-space crimes (piracy and such, usually), providing a kind of rough-and-ready frontier law and order. The loose structure of the Accord on Uniform Security provides for limited extradition and limited cooperation between polities (and Warden-Bastion PPLs), provided that hostilities aren’t, that everyone agrees that whatever happened was in fact some sort of crime, and that everyone’s having a reasonably nice day.

Within polities, of course, situations and law enforcement structures vary.  The Empire, for example, doesn’t have a specific organization devoted to policing space.  In planetary orbit, or among clusters of drifts, the Watch Constabulary has the same jurisdiction it does planetside or within habitats, and in Imperial in-system space, the same as its rangers do in the wilderness – the specialized divisions which operate “outside” are called the Orbit Guard and the Stellar Guard, but functionally, they do not differ from the norm.  Major crimes in in-system space are handled by the Imperial Navy, but that’s functionally no different from the way that the Imperial Military Service planetside has generally been called upon to address riot, insurrection, and brigandage.

(In deep space, law enforcement is also provided by specialist units of the IN, simply because they’re the ones who can get there – and it’s outside all traditional borders anyway. And, of course, this excludes all private-conlegial/PPL bodies…)

Privately Owned Warships

Asked in a G+ comment:

How common is it for individuals to own full up dreadnought or super-dreadnought class warships? Am I correct in thinking that individually owned and operated cruiser and frigate class warships are commonplace?

Actually… not very common at all. (Even for corporations and other coadunations, even.)

That’s not a matter of legal restrictions, of course. While there are lots of remarkably illegal things one could do with a personally owned SD or DN (or BB, for that matter), the Empire continues to follow its basic ethical and legal principle that you don’t go around exercising prior restraint on the innocent just because that’s easier than dealing with the guilty, insert opprobrious remarks as appropriate here. It may not quite be the same SD/DN/BB that the Imperial Navy is flying around (given things invented and manufactured internally at BuInnov, and certain timed-exclusivity research and development contracts), but by and large, if you want an SD/DN/BB, Islien Yards and various other Imperial cageworks will be more than happy to sell you one.

(For clarifying the following comments, it might be an opportune moment to revisit Ships of the Fleet and Non-Standard Starship Scuffles.)

The question is more “why would you want one?”

The primary problem is that, per SotF, in addition to being a bloody expensive piece of hardware, a SD/DN/BB is also a bloody specialized piece of hardware. It’s pretty much got one function: counteracting other ships of the plane in the major fleet action battlespace, or dominating the volume in which other such ships aren’t. And to do that, per the implications of NSSS, it doesn’t operate alone: SD/DN/BBs operate in squadrons much of the time, but much more important are their screening elements. They need their associated CC/DD/FF squadrons to counteract the other guys’ CC/DD/FFs, otherwise they get swarmed and destroyed by smaller vessels that can dance circles around them under their guns.

About all you can practically do with an SD/DN/BB is fleet actions, for which you also need a supporting fleet. This is a very limited set of applications for anyone except “navies” and “seriously top-end mercenary groups”. If you had a personal one, you might be able to spend a few months playing “Send me tribute and attractive tribute-sack carriers” with underdeveloped hicksworld colonies before an actual naval force crushes you like a bug, but that’s about it. (Assuming you can get to them, because many polities don’t have the Empire’s relaxed approach to privately owned capital ships.)

All of which is to say: you can have one, but by the time you pay for it, and the crewing of it, and maintenance and resupply for it, and the eye-watering amount your tort insurer wants to cover it – well, what you have is a giant hole in space that you pour money into, and almost no applications for the thing to make the money back. Even by the standards of hilariously rich people, and even if you were deeply invested in status games – which people *there* by and large aren’t – there are better status symbols, y’know?

(Which, I rush to emphasize, by no means denies the existence of the Eldraeverse equivalent of Booster Terrik and his Errant Venture – it’s just that all the problems he had with it, with the exception of being leaned on by the New Republic, will also afflict his analog.)

On the other hand, you’re absolutely correct that there are more’n a few privately owned CCs and FFs around (both individual and corporate), although not necessarily intended in a primarily-warship role, just a warship-capability role. A FF makes for an expensive yacht/courier/etc., but if you’re in the habit of visiting the bad parts of the galaxy and/or getting into fights when you get there, it’s probably a worthwhile investment. Likewise, the design parameters for a CC include operating solo and being a heavily customizable part of the design-space – most of the specialized variant starships within and even without the IN tend to be built off a CC base – so if you have a task to do that also requires a decent helping of ass-kicking ability, starting with a CC spaceframe is a good move.

Neither of them is exactly ubiquitous – because most people don’t have practical reasons for investing in the military-grade stuff – but they’re certainly common enough that no-one would be surprised by seeing one or hearing that so-and-so had one in dock somewhere, belike.

More generally: if the imperial military and major mercs were to disappear tomorrow, how much military hardware would still be around and what would the force distribution look like?

Quite a lot, although biased fairly heavily towards the light end. By the time you’ve added together the Watch Constabulary (who use basically the same light infantry, light cavalry, and light starships as the Navy, just with a different paint job and software loadout), corporate and non-corporate branch security forces, military recreationists and other hoplo-hobbyists, huscarles, etc., etc., etc., together, it’s a lot.

If you allow keeping the 95% of the Home Guard that is citizen-shareholder militia and only delete the 5% that’s the central military cadre, it’s a whole lot.

And then, if you first bear in mind that arms manufacturers thereabouts don’t see any dichotomy between products for the military market and products for the civilian market (which is almost entirely created by regulatory requirements *here*), and then, second, bear in mind just how much equivalent-functionality hardware is out there in the form of, say, hazmat-protection “armor” and construction worker’s “exosuits” that don’t take much refactoring, and then third, consider that the one thing that is guaranteed to be around just about every corner is a cornucopia machine…

…well, I’m not saying that losing the heavy stuff wouldn’t hurt, in many ways, and there would be many complaints about the inconvenience of it all, but one would still have to be the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots to try your hand at invading that.

Trope-a-Day: Sliding Scale of Law Enforcement

Sliding Scale of Law Enforcement: Standards vary acutely, depending on where in the Worlds you are.  The Empire’s Watch Constabulary and the PPLs signatory to the Warden-Bastion Compact occupy the idealistic end of the scale (well, one idealistic end of the scale, since they’re perfectly happy to shoot people who won’t surrender if they’re caught in the middle of their special crime) with their great, great respect for individual rights and people’s lack of guilt until formally convicted, willingness to wade in and help out, and generally go above and beyond.

The other end of the scale is, as usual, Nepscia and its fellow Wretched Hives – where “law enforcement” generally means “the biggest brute squad in the vicinity”.  Various more authoritarian states and less scrupulous PPLs occupy the wide, wide middle ground, here.

Questions: Pacifism, Forking, Conflicting Rights, and Lost Keys

Specialist290 e-mails with some questions. (Also some compliments, for which thank you kindly, but what’s getting responded to here are the questions…)

Here goes:

  1. Are there any major subcultures / subcommunities within the Empire that deviate significantly from the “ideal norm” enough to be noteworthy without actually violating the Charter itself? For instance, are there any “pacifist” (using the term loosely) strains of Imperials who attempt to live by non-violent principles inasmuch as they can do so within the constraints imposed by their charter responsibility to the common defense (as opposed to the “shoot first, ask questions of anything that survives” knee-jerk reaction typical to the eldrae)?

With a clarificatory follow-up:

To clarify on that first question, since I realized on further reading that my example was worded rather vaguely and the use of “pacifist” might have the wrong implications:

Let’s say that you have an Imperial citizen-shareholder who, through the vagaries of whatever process formed their personality, has an aversion to the use of lethal force in any circumstances except when another life would be directly threatened by refraining from the use of lethal force (including their own — they’d be perfectly willing to kill in self-defense as well if they themselves were threatened that way).  They wouldn’t be against carrying or using a weapon, since they realize (as a condition of the previous) that the use of lethal force may certainly be necessary.  Nor would they interfere with the victim’s use of lethal force to subdue a criminal if the victim themself were on hand to defend their own property.  Nevertheless, they view the unnecessary use of lethal force (as parsed through their own moral lens) as an injustice if there is any chance that the criminal in question can be rehabilitated.  Let’s say that, furthermore, they had the means to actually subdue a criminal caught in the act non-lethally and prevent them from inflicting any further harm in a way that would still preserve the criminal’s life (though if the criminal in question would rather die, they’d still honor the criminal’s exercise of free will).

Would that sort of behavior be condoned as acceptable civilized behavior within the framework of Imperial society?

Well, the first thing I must ask you to bear in mind, of course, is that permadeath is hard in a world full of noetic backups – just imagine how hard it is for the people who have to try and implement the death penalty – requiring serious premeditation, and very much not something you are going to be able to inflict in a self-defense sort of situation.

You really can shoot first and ask questions (of the reinstantiated) later, which shifts the effective definition of “lethal force” quite a lot, not so? At least so long as we’re talking about corpicide, and not cognicide.

This is a modern development, of course, but most albeit not all of what’s been seen on-screen is in this era, so it’s particularly relevant.

Anyway, the general case, ignoring that particular consideration. Actually, contra stereotypes, what you propose isn’t actually all that far from the mainstream view. If you were to ask 100 people on the Imperial street, I’m pretty sure you’d get a 90%+ consensus that it’s obviously better to hand petty criminals over to the therapeutic mercies of the Office of Reconstruction to be, y’know, repaired. In an ideal universe.

But that being said, it’s not yet an ideal universe.

And what they teach in self-and-others defense classes is the hardcore version of caritas non obligat cum gravi incommodo. Yes, that’s the ideal, which is why they send the Watch Constabulary’s rookies on the Advanced Non-Lethal Polyspecific Incapacitation Techniques course. But that is a lot longer and more difficult to master than anything that the soph on the street can be expected to master by way of basic self-and-others defense (which, in practice, may well just be what they teach at school-equivalent), and the way this breaks down, per standard mainstream ethics, is this:

a. You are not obliged to place yourself at risk in order to show mercy to an attacker, slaver, or thief, although you may if you choose to;

b. However, you are not entitled to make that choice for anyone else. Their risk management is not yours to decide.

c. Reliably stopping someone and keeping them stopped in a non-lethal manner is a difficult challenge, and not best suited for amateurs.

d. Which is why we teach you to shoot for center mass and make sure that said person isn’t getting up again, because that’s something we can teach you to do reliably in this course.

d. i. Which you are perfectly entitled to do, note, because the Contract is pretty clear on the point that once you deliberately set out to violate the rights of others, you lose the protection of your own. (Note: this is not to say, even though it’s often misinterpreted to say this by outworlders, that permakilling every petty thief you see is the morally optimal solution. It says that it’s ethically permissible, which is not the same thing – hell, it may even qualify as morally pessimal, depending on your own interpretations of same.)

e. And the law is written accordingly, because there’s a limit to the burdens we can reasonably expect people to undertake in pursuit of their Charter-mandated duty to protect the rights of their fellow citizen-shareholders.

So returning to the original question: the governing principle here is going to be “can you make it work?”. If you are going to attempt non-lethal solutions, you’d better be damn sure that you can make your non-lethal solutions work effectively, because you will be held responsible – by the Court of Public Opinion, at the very least – if you fuck it up and fail your duty to protect the rights of your fellow citizen-shareholders because you were flibbling around like an amateur. If you can do it successfully and effectively, that’s great, and you will receive all due plaudits for doing so – but screwing up or exposing people to unnecessarily high levels of risk trying will be looked upon with all the traditional Imperial distaste for incompetence. Caveat pacifist.

(And, well, okay, it’s fair to say that you’re going to be looked at funny if you try and apply this principle to many serious crimes. If you catch, let’s say, a would-be rapist in the act and go to any sort of trouble to restrain them non-lethally, people are going to be asking “Why bother? We’re just going to have to kill him anyway, and now we have to do all this extra paperwork. Dammit.”)

((Further note: I also note “Nor would they interfere with the victim’s use of lethal force to subdue a criminal if the victim themself were on hand to defend their own property.” with the possible implication that this hypothetical person wouldn’t be willing to use lethal force to defend someone else’s property.

…there’s not a let-out clause for that. By that fine old legal principle of el daráv valté eloé có-sa dal, person and property are deemed equivalent, so the exact same self-and-others defense rules apply, and that’s a non-optional obligation.

If you are in a situation where you cannot use non-lethal methods to defend someone else’s property, you must – by the terms of the Charter you agreed to – use lethal methods to defend said property. Otherwise, you will find yourself in court staring down charges of Passive Accessorism/Unmutualism, and your very own appointment with the Office of Reconstruction.))

  1. What’s the dividing line between an instantiated fork of your own personality and a new person who shares your memories? Has there ever been a case where a forked dividual has “evolved” (so to speak) into two legally separate individuals?

Well, there’s both a legal one, and a social one.

The latter amounts to “well, do you think you are the same person?” After all, contradicting someone who thinks they’re someone else on that point would be, at best, rather rude.

There is also a legal standard based on sophotechnologically-determined degrees of divergence (somewhat arbitrary, but you have to draw a bright line somewhere for legal purposes) which is used whenever this sort of question winds up in the court system, be it a civil argument over “He’s me!” “No, I’m not!”, or determination of who exactly the criminal liability attaches to, or whether the restored backup or new edit is the same person in fact, or various other possibilities.

(It is, of course, fairly hard to describe the technical details of exactly where that line is without having the actual scientific vocabulary of sophotechnology to call upon, but as your humble author, I can promise that I know it when I write it…)

On the latter question: absolutely. Happens all the time, sometimes accidentally, mostly intentionally. (Hell, some people prefer to reproduce that way.)

  1. If there’s an apparent “conflict of interest” among any combination of the fundamental and charter rights that arises in the course of a sophont being fulfilling its duties, how is that resolved? Is there an order of precedence where one supersedes the other in the case of conflict?

The only hard and fast rule there is that the rights deriving from the Fundamental Contract (absolute and natural) always supersede those granted by the Imperial Charter when they’re in conflict. Necessarily so: they apply by definition to all sophont beings everywhere, everywhen, whereas charter rights only exist by virtue of the ongoing contract between citizen-shareholders, and you can’t contract away natural law. Makes no sense.

By and large, there’s not a major issue with conflict; the fundamental rights are non-extensive, negative-only, and tightly defined, more or less specifically such that conflict wouldn’t be a problem. Which isn’t to say they never conflict –

(The obvious real-world example, of course, being A Certain Controversial Medical Procedure, which in many cases leaves you with the very ugly choice of deciding to violate one party’s life, or violate the other party’s liberty/property, for values of property equal to body, or else making up some magical unscientific bullshit so you can pretend you aren’t doing either.

In the modern Empire, of course, that’s solved by said procedure having joined the catalog of antique and unpleasant historical medical barbarisms along with leechcraft, trepanation, and in vivo gestation itself, but it’s not like they never had to confront the issue.)

– but they don’t do so very often.

In which cases, there isn’t an order of precedence, but there is precedent, if it’s come up before. If it hasn’t come up with before, you are expected to use your own best judgment when it comes to doing as little harm as possible. It may well – almost certainly will – come up for review afterwards, but the Curia won’t punish you for trying your best to do the Right Thing even if it decides you did the Wrong Thing.

(In keeping, you see, with their general policy that if you want people to use their judgment, you can’t smack them down for making a competent person’s mistakes or failing to use it exactly the way the hypothetical ideal person would have; that just leads to paralyzing initiative, or worse, setting up plans and procedures and the equivalent of zero-tolerance policies at a distance, which inevitably turn into stupid, unjust results up close with the sole virtue that since no-one was expected to think, no-one can be held to blame when charlie does the foxtrot.

They don’t hold with that.)

  1. What happens when an Imperial citizen inevitably loses the keys to their own house (whatever form those “keys” may take given the technology available)?

(Ah, now that one actually has a canonical answer from early on: Where Everything Knows Your Name.)

While there are other ways of doing this for specialized applications, in practice identity is stated and authenticated using a convenient device called a Universal – which is itself a little metal ball about a millimeter in diameter containing a specialized code-engine processor, your unique UCID, your megabit identity (private) key, and a few gigabytes of non-volatile memory for supplemental data. This does two-factor authentication against the authentication systems of the Universal Registry of Citizens and Subjects, the second factor being cognimetric (i.e., your mindprint) to prove that you are you, possibly upped to three-factor against attached local databases.

The Universal serves as more or less everything. It’s your administrative ID, passport, licenses, certificates, registrations, contractee ID, financial account numbers, medical information, insurance cards, membership cards, travel tickets, passwords, subscriptions, encryption keys, door keys, car keys, phone number, etc., etc., etc.

(And you almost never actually need to deliberately use it. Things that you are authorized to use/open/log on to/etc., or that customize themselves to the individual user, just work when you try to do those things, because they quietly do the authentication exchange in the background. To the point that you can sit down in a rented office cubicle on an entirely different planet and get your glasstop, your files, the lighting, chair, and microclimate adjusted to your personal preferences, and a mug of that particular esklav variant you like sitting at your elbow. Automagically. You can just pick up your shopping and walk out of the store, and it’ll automatically bill you. Walk right onto the plane, and your boarding pass checks itself. The entire world just knows who you are and behaves accordingly.)

In less advanced times, people used to carry these things around in signet rings, or other tasteful accessories, and suchlike. These days, though, it/s integrated into the neural lace and or gnostic interlink, and as such rests about a centimeter below one’s medulla oblongata. (Assuming for the purposes of this answer that you’re a biosapience.) If you somehow manage to lose that, you probably have bigger problems than being unable to prove your identity right now…

They do, however, break down, albeit extremely rarely.

At which point you place a call to the nearest Imperial Services office (a free-to-call-even-anonymously line for situations just like this), report the problem, and get it replaced. Which involves spending an irritating amount of time going through the process of validating your identity the old-fashioned way to the Universal Registry’s satisfaction, then having the faulty one disconnected and surgically extracted, then replaced by its shiny new functional counterpart.

It’s an annoyance, but not much more than that.

By Any Other Name

From: Merian Vidumarvis (Port Security)
To: All Security Personnel
Subject: Bribery (Security Directive 7124-33)

With reference to the assortment of rntrugg vessels docking here recently, their crewers’ misdemeanor-worthy behavior while docked, and their persistent interpretation of fines assessed and levied per summary judgment procedure as bribes:

Let them.

Various parts of our department and more diplomatic ones have been trying to explain the difference between a fine and a bribe to them for over a year now, and haven’t succeeded yet. The diplomats may yet succeed in figuring out a way past whatever unique cultural nuance or quirk of linguistic corpus makes this as incomprehensible a concept as it seems to be for them, but for now, go with it.

As long as justice gets paid at Curial rates, which it is, and the externality is properly internalized with regard to effects on their subsequent behavior, which it seems to be, my judgment is that they can call it what they like. Should this matter come up in any future dispute or administrative proceeding, refer it to my office under Security Directive 7124-33.

– mv/PS

Trope-a-Day: Red Alert

Red Alert: In the Imperial Navy, played with realism (also with the Most Annoying Sound, inasmuch as the alert klaxon is custom-designed to irritate the nerves of every possible sophont listening, simultaneously):

“General quarters!  General quarters!  Set condition one throughout the ship!  This Is Not A Drill!

The Admiralty, Core Command and the Theater Commands in particular, prefers to use Defcon Five as its system, as do the Imperial Emergency Management Authority for states of civil emergency, and the Imperial Security Executive for local security warnings (a.k.a. our “terror alerts” and their “recommended paranoia levels”).

Military installations, the Constabulary, the EMA, hospitals, etc., do often have a bunch of color-coded response codes (“alerts” and “conditions”) to instruct everyone exactly which immediate situation they ought to be responding to, however, so the “emergency squad scramble” aspect of this trope is played straight.

Trope-a-Day: Reading Your Rights

Reading Your Rights: Played straight… but not with the same rights.  The Empire never got around to finding a reason to prohibit self-incrimination, and while you do have the right to an attorney, you’re supposed to know that (and also, you are obliged to answer questions before he gets there.

Rather, the Watch Constabulary would like you to be aware that you have the right to answer all their questions fully and completely, to introduce any evidence or make any statement you wish – which will be conveyed to the court, to accuse anyone – although false accusations are themselves crimes, and the cost of proving them false will be charged to you – and to voluntarily submit a copy of your mind-state to the court (if they didn’t feel the need to subpoena it) for analysis.  In short, you have the right to try and make your case without artificial constraints.

Although the courts do not, it is fair to say, look kindly upon attempted judicial filibusters come the sentencing phase. Remember, you-if-guilty are liable for all the costs of arraignment and prosecution…

The Importance of Physics Class

“Station Ops, this is Clovis One-Four, reporting on-site from incident gamma.”

“Clovis One-Four, Station Ops, go.”

“Station Ops, some damn tourist tried to board the garden ‘fuge by dropping from above again. No secondary casualties, thank Athnéël, but the groundscape’s a mess.”

“Clovis One-Four, do you need a medical team?”

“Negative, Station Ops, just the coroner and a pressure washer.”

“Despatched, Clovis One-Four, and eugh.”

“Ain’t no good way to describe a hundred-yard streak of stupid, Station Ops. Clear.”

Trope-a-Day: Police Brutality

Police Brutality: Usually averted, day to day, as the Watch Constabulary is very well trained, highly disciplined, and – as the instrument of force that is legally permitted to apply it, law for the enforcement of – rigorously monitored and audited to make sure that it’s doing it properly.  Especially where the rights of the accused-and-therefore-not-yet-determined-to-be-guilty are concerned.

Played straight in a lethal, although not any other, sense inasmuch as the Empire, in general, maintains a very broad right of self- and other- and property defense where the regular citizen-shareholders are concerned – which is to say, there isn’t a reasonable force doctrine and you can shoot at criminals to protect any of those – and while the police are somewhat more restricted in that they’re obliged to try and arrest you, they aren’t actually any more restricted than regular citizen-shareholders where preventing crimes in progress are concerned if you are unwilling to be arrested.  Criminals caught by the Constabulary in the commission of a crime are advised to surrender immediately, for this reason.

Subverted where riots, occupations, and suchlike are concerned, inasmuch as Imperial law classifies these sorts of things as “insurrection”, and while the police won’t be brutal, that’s because insurrection is a military matter – and the situation will therefore be handled by people for whom “arrest” is outside their job description.

Question: Terrorism and Open Societies

Here’s another one from the question box: I received a link to this article from a skeptical reader who questions how – or indeed if – the sort of open society I describe could possibly cope with this sort of lone-wolf, home-grown terrorism by individual extremists, needing few contacts and little equipment.

First, just because you have an open society that, by and large, is not interested in investing a lot of time into controlling what people do doesn’t necessarily mean that your security services suck. (Indeed, one could convincingly argue that they ought to be better, inasmuch as they can spend all their time concentrating on things that are actually mala in se rather than wasting a lot of time on authoritarian-moistening bullshit.)

Suffice it to say, canonically, while greatly restricted in what they can do to people who haven’t committed any sort of crime, the Watch Constabulary and the Fourth Directorate are nonetheless very good at what they do.

Second, of course, is that the Empire is rather picky about who can get citizen-shareholdership in the first place, and extends this particular pickiness even to people who were born there. You don’t get it for free just by accident of birth; it comes with responsibilities as well as rights, and if you cannot sit under an alethiometer and honestly declare that, yes, you do intend to honor the Contract and the Charter and all their implications (something that your homegrown radical could not any more than a would-be immigrant one), no citizen-shareholdership for you. And if you fail that test badly enough, well, here’s a ticket, now get the hell out.

(This is naturally decried as extremely culturalist, which it is; the standard response to such criticism is that no, it’s not prejudice, they have a perfectly valid postjudice against cultures that don’t respect the sophont rights of others, and in any case, the opinions of a of bunch of self-asserted advocates for thugs, thieves, slavers, defaulters, and other such degenerates will be filed in the appropriate receptacle.)

And thirdly, the Eupraxic Collegium does have a compelling interest of ensuring that the ungoverned, self-organizing public are, well, sane and rational, that being what permits a free society like this to exist in the first place, and are well equipped so to do.

But lastly, of course and for the major part, is the difference in attitude.

As has been mentioned before, I believe, the Imperial legal view of self-defense (or, rather, self-and-others defense) is somewhat different than ours, in that one is not, for example, obliged to wait until someone actualizes a threat in order to respond to it. You are entitled to take people at their word: if someone threatens you or someone else nearby, you can preempt their attack with your defense all you like. There is absolutely no duty to retreat: someone who attacks, or threatens to attack, is by definition, eo ipso, etc., in the wrong and invited the painful consequences that are about to ensue. And, for that matter, they think “proportional response” is the damn silliest idea they’ve ever heard of (with the possible exceptions of fighting fair and telling the enemy that you’re coming), so if you have to put someone down, you’re entitled to make sure that they don’t get back up.

The Imperial Rules of Civilized Warfare mirror this pretty much exactly on the group level, as you might expect.

In the above article, one quotation given is:

“Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict,” an Islamic State spokesman said in a September audio speech. “Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling.”

…you can say that kind of thing relatively safely on Earth.

Hell, you could say that thing kind of safely to a lot of people in the Worlds who share similar attitudes to people on Earth.

But if you say that thing to or about the Empire, or Imperial citizen-shareholders, that’s a preemptive self-and-others-defense casus belli right there, and it’s probably even the kind that invokes the “we don’t need no steenkin’ central ruling, this is covered under ‘imminent threat that will not admit of delay'” clause that lets any local commander act on their own military authority.

There, you say that sort of thing from any sort of position of authority, and shit is going down. Hell, you just sent said shit a gild-edged, engraved, heavy-bond-paper invitation to come party at your place and bring all its implements of destruction.

And so, when it comes to another illustrative quote:

“They’ve realized, hey, if our intent is to scare the s–t out of people—to trigger heavy-handed responses by government, to force isolation of the Muslim community, pushing them to more radicalization—what do you have to do? Take two guys into a mall, shoot it up, and you’re done. You’ll be out of there in 15 minutes, and we’ll be talking about it for days and weeks and months.”

Well, it’s true that that would be an excellent way to trigger heavy-handed responses from the Imperial governance, yes. The problem, however, is that so far as opinion there is concerned, our idea of a heavy-handed response is so much self-harming (because tightening security inflicts pain upon many-n of your own people for every n bad guys it catches, even before you start counting false positives) theatrical bullshit.

The way you do a proper heavy-handed response to polity-encouraged terrorism is to send out Admiral Cluster Bomb to turn Mister-Likes-To-Make-Threats-And-Encourage-People into Mister-Ash-At-The-Bottom-Of-A-Glass-Lined-Crater, preferably before anyone actually has a chance to make good on any of said threats.

In short: what keeps terrorism out of the Empire’s open society is that, by and large, would-be terrorists’ sponsors and encouragers have much easier targets to pick on than the one that will murderize, tenderize, and vaporize you from orbit the moment after you open your mouth and then pat itself on the back, standin’ up for civilized values and all, for doing it, not a twinge of conscience needed.

And it’s not like this is a hidden or an inconsistent policy. They’re very open about this policy and they do it every time, and have been doing so for ever, which has the decided advantage of ensuring that it’s a very rare occasion when they have to do it at all.

Pickpocket

Siari’s Bore
Mer Dinévál Countermass Station
Seranth

“Excuse me, ser. Enforcer Jynne Cerron, Watch Constabulary; my colleague, Pén Cieng, Throat-Grip Defense. I’m afraid we require a word with you.”

The lanect thus addressed started, and turned to look at them with an instant protest.

“I haven’t done anything!”

“Regrettably, ser, you are the subject of a complaint we have received from a citizen-shareholder regarding the theft of certain items from their person four point one minutes previously, supported by supplied lifelog and oversight evidence, which constitutes probable cause for this inquiry per Valentia’s Code. You have the right under the Transparency Act to view this evidence, if you wish…? No?”

“This is outrageous! I had nothing to do with this –”

“I regret that too, ser, but I am afraid that a complaint has been made against you and an inquiry deemed justified by overwatch. You may, of course, file a complaint if you wish. Now, I see that you are carrying an embag. Would you open it for me, please?”

“I don’t consent to a search!”

“We don’t intend to violate your privacy, ser, and no search is called for. You don’t need to empty the bag, and may conceal the opening if you wish. Just unseal it, please.”

The lanect fumbled briefly with the seal on the embag, and simultaneously, a small, electronic voice spoke in distress:

…am being stolen! I am an Aelaviel High Fashions ‘Highfall’ purse in flame red, belonging to Citizen Aríë Harradeln, and I am being stolen! Please return me to my proper owner! Repeat: I am being…

“Thank you. Unfortunately, the stolen property has now confirmed that it is in your possession. You are under arrest by the Watch Constabulary. You have the right to give a full and complete accounting of your actions…”

As the lanect took to his heels in flight, grabbing a handguide for the nearest drag, she switched seamlessly to the public announcements channel.

…in answer to our questions. If you feel we have overlooked any information relevant to your case, you have the right to call it to our attention. If you feel we have misunderstood or misconstrued any…

“Why do they always run?” her colleague grumbled. “Ops, give me a two-second kill on autodrag four, Siari’s Bore, frame eleven. Constabular override.”

…of your answers, you have the right to provide further elaboration or explanation. If you are confused by our questions or procedures, we will explain them to you. You may provide evidence against others as part of your answers…

The autodrag slammed to a brief halt, enough to let momentum take over, tossing the fleeing lanect up and over his handguide, breaking his grip on it and sending him hurtling into the air.

…but false accusations will be punished. You have the right to engage an advocate to help you to prepare for trial…

“It makes them feel better, probably,” she replied. The sound of cursing drifted to them from where the lanect drifted helplessly in mid-air. “Briefly, anyway. Tell the courthouse we need a drone pickup to take this guy straight to arraignment. I’ll have the report filed by the time he gets there.”

…but no right to refuse to answer questions before your advocate is available. Do you understand these rights?

Trope-a-Day: Instant Emergency Response

Instant Emergency Response: As a side effect of the AI monitors on the raw feed mentioned under Big Brother Is Watching, which both make sure response is dispatched to observed crimes and accidents as they happen, and which are happy to use predictive algorithms to make sure that its in place before they happen; and inasmuch as the various emergency services have widely distributed robot hotels to make sure that they can at least get cybershell feet or wing on the ground very rapidly, emergency response is very rapid, and most of the time, you dont need to explicitly call it in if youre in public.

Trope-a-Day: Improbable Aiming Skills

Improbable Aiming Skills: Training for the various sentinel occupations, including the Imperial Legions and, yes, also the Watch Constabulary tries its best to achieve these, or at least to avert Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy really hard.  In these modern days in which you can have a top-flight ballistics software package running in your head and arbitrary amounts of computer power, locally networked sensors, etc., etc., in your gun – well, let’s just say that the standards for improbable have been raised a tad.