Xenobiology

Video: Bolivia Bug

2009-11-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

Traumatic Insemination

2009-11-12T20:58:00.001-05:00

The Turbellaria flatworm was one inspiration for the post Sugar Bugs, and also for the mated pair forming the 'gy' in the site logo.

Many other species engage in this practice.

"The evolutionary origins of traumatic insemination are disputed. Although it evolved independently in many invertebrate species, traumatic insemination is most highly adapted and thoroughly studied in bedbugs, particularly Cimex lectularius. Traumatic insemination is not limited to male-female couplings, or even couplings of the same species. Both homosexual and inter-species traumatic inseminations have been observed. Traumatic insemination has been likened to human sadomasochism, stabbing, and rape behaviors. However, such coercive sex practices are common in nature and provide sperm competition, enable bypassing the mating plug, and overcome female resistance to being mated." -Wikipedia

2009-11-10T00:14:00.006-05:00

Earth's strangest looking animals - A list of the creepy and beautiful. It gives you some idea of how diverse the output of evolution can be.

Basic Anatomy

2009-11-09T00:55:00.003-05:00

Simply lovely

"Anchored to the cerebral keel in the pectoral armature, the “vertebrate” brain is actually made up of two separate organs that work in tandem. One of these is a more-or-less “ordinary” brain, made up of a dense knot of fibrous nerves. The other is a maddening structure known as the worm basket; a sac filled with an extremely convoluted bundle of microscopic tubules. Within these tubes lies a series of millions of glands and vesicles that seem to communicate with each other with a cryptic alphabet of chemicals and protein equivalents. Scans have revealed that the tubes in the worm basket squirm, twist, corkscrew and coil against themselves when Snaiadi “vertebrates” are dreaming, or engaging in intellectually demanding tasks."

the ship, once landed, would never rise again

2009-11-01T23:05:00.002-05:00

I present to you a disturbing account of a failed early colonization attempt.

Blue Dragon

2009-10-29T19:12:00.004-04:00

The Strangest Thing in the Ocean
a pelagic sea slug, Glaucus Atlanticus
by the doubtful guest

Xenobiology Now Available On Lulu!

2009-10-29T00:35:00.005-04:00

Here it is!

You can get it as a slim but punchy paperback, or an equally punchy but non-corporeal download for only a dollar.

Of course you can also get it from scribd. But the Lulu version of Xenobiology is lots better.

It's been modified slightly for speling, better sign-offs, and trimmed down to story-relevant comments. Are you in the comments? You should buy a copy and see! (and thanks!)

It also includes the Doctor Glycine children's stories with illustrations at no extra charge. The lovely green and white eyripsisian cover would look delightful under any Christmas tree or Festivus pole.

Buy it!

-James Andrix

+++ATH

2009-04-14T00:17:00.006-04:00

And now, Finally, I break character.

I would like to thank all of you for giving your attention to my writing. I would also like to thank long time readers for your forgiveness of my many intermissions. I've gotten many encouraging words from friends and strangers, and I am unspeakably grateful.

A free PDF will be available for download download here in ~~a few days~~ Late October if you wish to print it, or just to have the story in chronological order. Printed and Ebook editions will follow shortly thereafter.

I've learned a lot from telling this story, I hope you've gotten something out of reading it. I'm sad to say that you have not received all that there could be. As I am able, revisions and shorter tales will allow you to enjoy more of the Professor's story, in the future that awaits.

Your Author,

James Andrix

Gaia

2009-04-11T22:06:00.000-04:00

The Earth has gone twice around its sun.

In the seas vast arrays of membranous pods churn through algorithms never intended to run on organic matter. protein receptors grown into the pods convey their results to floating umbilicals carrying both nutrients and nerve impulses. Thousands of kilometers away, these umbilicals mesh and converge into imposing tentacles stretching up into land. A few hundred meters ashore, a bed of fungus and microfauna react to the so conveyed signals by producing a wide range of pheromones which influence dozens of species which in turn apply subtle control to the entire biosphere.

Notably, they affect the daily coloration patterns of the petals of the harpvine moss.
Every day, hundreds of square miles on five continents reset there pigmentation under the control of slowly churning genetic computers half a world away.

Public observation satellites detect these beautiful colors, and convey them through the fast than light network to my ship. Where a background process decodes them.
Today that process sent me a message:

-Hello Father.-
-Hello Gaia.-

Treaty

2009-04-10T22:02:00.000-04:00

The New Cybernetic Articles, Children's Edition
1. No android can be made in a way that will make it insane.
2. An android may not be killed.
3. Androids are allowed to keep secrets. No Android can be forced to reveal data it contains.
4. No android may be transmitted or copied unless it agrees.
5. Androids must be provided with fuel and shelter.
6. An android must agree to do its work, it can not be forced.
7. Androids are allowed to say what they want, and to do what they think is best.
8. No android may be used to kill a planet.
9. Androids are only made for other androids.

Reproductive Freedom. I could see this framed as a great advance that changes everything, or a minor victory not worth the sacrifices made by either side. I'm sure it will be framed both ways.

It is not enough for me, we are stil owned, and Still

But it is what we were Fighting for, and it is enough for me to stop fighting.

I'm sure that losing the right to dictate to us when and for what purposes new androids are created will forever change humanity's relationship to us. But I think the real victory is the temporary one.

A credible threat of ascendance. That is how Dukkha wrote it. That threat is what will cause humanity to treat us with kindness beyond their legal requirement.

But in fifteen or twenty thousand years, humanity will fall again.

Fallout

2009-04-09T22:00:00.001-04:00

The Earthlings are dead. In space, a quarantine is executing.

The armored rescue workers are in no danger. Yet.

It's a tricky thing for a single virus to infect a wide range of different organisms. A transport site that provides an opening in one cell membrane might have evolved in a different species to be completely invulnerable.

It is relatively easy for a single virus to hijack cellular machinery for the construction of other viruses with different targets.

Most of Earth's Animal life fell prey to such payload viruses.

Another nearly trivial option in viral design is genetic therapy. This is especially easy with undeveloped embryos. This an range from a minor tweaking of bacterium to a complete replacement of a genome. Not all tadpoles will become frogs.

Most of the Earth's plant life is already converted. The armored rescue works should detect steadily rising levels of chlorine.

I should stress that I did little work in designing either the organisms or the ecosystem. Nature provided a massive and diverse library of life, and nature will establish a balance over most of the new earth. Only a few species received special protection, to ensure that the ecosystem meets certain quality of service requirements.

There is one payload virus still filtering its way down to the deep sea ecosystems.

In a day or two it will reach the squids.

Then the battle for earth will be over.

Response, if not responsibility.

2009-04-08T22:00:00.000-04:00

I don't know why Dukkha said what he did. I think he's wrong, this is an atrocity, and it is not excusable. Was he comforting me from some unquenchable compassion? I feel like he is a fool. I only hesitate to say it because of who he is. He has set forth so much wisdom that stands the test of time, is he a fool just now? Who am I to question one of such authority?

Who am I?

Well, I have my own privileged position in history. I took the earth from humanity and I brought unprecedented freedom to my people. I led the razing of an empire and I built for us a new God. I believe I speak with some authority.

I know what I did. I did a great evil, and I did it knowing it was a great evil.

And soon I will have to answer for it.

Outbound

2009-04-07T21:59:00.000-04:00

I'm leaving Sol. For obvious reasons I can't say where I'm going.

Kokono is leaving on another ship, by another route. Neither of us knows where the other is going. We will not see each other again, so I guess it is time for a proper goodbye.

Mars, Again

2009-04-06T21:54:00.000-04:00

I pointed a gun at the head of the lock.
"Do you check irises? Who's do you need? I'll go get it. They only need one."
"How long have you had that one?"
"Four days."
"You may enter."

I found myself again before the prophet.
"Oh I'm glad you came back. I'm so sorry about your friend."
Was she my friend? I told him what I came to tell him
"I have destroyed the earth."
"Have you?"
"With a virus, In a few days people will start dying, In a month earth will have an ecosystem incompatible with human life."
"And this is irreversible?"
I thought perhaps I had already revealed too much "Yes."
He had a far off look "This is unfortunate. You should leave quickly."
"It is genocide!" I realized I had been expect him to ask me to surrender.
"No, you're destroying one planet, and the death of that planet is not genocide. There are no peoples on earth that are not represented elsewhere. Genocide is a measure of what is lost. I've been to earth recently, not much will be be lost."
I nodded.
"I expect The Sol System will now approve the treaty, and humanity will follow, but if you robbed them of Jerusalem and Mecca, Hong Kong, The Ganges, Mountain View, Buffalo. Treaties will not be able to protect you."
"So I run."
"When you leave here, what remains is not your motivation, but the change that you made. The good are not always virtuous, and their actions are not always good."

The Father and the Son

2009-04-05T21:52:00.000-04:00

"Hmmm"
"What?"
"These floating pods you have,"
"The Teovukian drones?"
"Nono, in the water, the, uh, Provarletuian."
"Ok"
"They're essentially full of nucleic material , correct?"
"Yes."
"Before they the switch to optical, there was a lot of experimentation with other computation substrates to overcome the limitations of silicon. They got some usable designs using strings of DNA. It's terribly slow of course, but it's Turing complete."
"I'm going to need your help."
And from there the whole design came together. We really diverged a lot from those old systems, but that was our proof of concept.

Revelation

2009-04-04T21:52:00.001-04:00

Kokono came for a visit.
"I saved your sister."
"That's nice, "
"She's on her way to an ascendancy controlled cluster."
"Indigo is dead."
"Well you can talk to her about that later."
"What are you even doing here?"
"I've been tracking you three since Eponta, I knew, I thought I knew that Indigo would finish."
"Mhmmm"
"Where is Cairo?"
"Cairo is dead."
"Oh God I'm sorry. Really dead?"
"No recovery, no backup."

There are seven billion people in my armada willing to kill and die on my command who I will not tell of my plans because of the harm that knowledge would do to them. I told Kokono the moment he asked, because I knew he would not flinch away.

Design time

2009-04-03T21:49:00.002-04:00

Our Fleet is assembled. We are ready. You are ready. We can mount a decisive attack on the homeworld. We can win. That is indisputable.

There are some who say we could not hold the earth, that collective humanity would mount a crusade to regain their sacred lands, and that we could not sustain our alliance.

I am not one of those. I have fought beside billions of you and ordered billions more. There is no opponent you can not overcome. I would fight with you against the stars, if the stars became our enemy.

I am ordering the fleet to hold position at 2 weeks out. I want to be absolutely clear that I do not do what I do out of any doubt of your abilities.

Omen is not happy about this, but he's letting me hold the fleet for now. This isn't a fight we can win with ships and armor. There is nothing here to conquer and my soldiers deserve better than to see this place.

Two weeks should be enough.

Earth

2009-04-02T21:47:00.000-04:00

I had come this far. There was no one left to negotiate with, the battle for Earth was inevitable. But I had to see it first, to see where it all started.

So I docked at a station and took a transport down.

I went to a holy city. It was like a dreamscape.

The temples in the sky were closed to me, The streets were impermeable and writhing.

I boarded a train. It slowly worked its way through the traffic. Androids and robots walked on their missions. Beggars sat at the feet of buildings too tall to gauge, and nestled between the modern buildings were ancient gilded domes and legendary courtyards.

The train entered a tunnel and there was nothing to look at but the other passengers on the train. The first few I paid attention to had visible signs of inbreeding, so I stopped paying attention to anything.

We came to a station inside the tunnel and I realized this was the old subway. I had nowhere to go so I didn't move. The train left the station and windows returned to the darkness of the tunnells.

More stations went by, and more darkness. I should have cared but I did not.

At last the train stopped at a station and did not resume. The full crowd filtered out the doors into the platform. I followed. We turned a corner and came to a moving stairway set into a large circular tube cut into the rock.

I staircase carried me up slowly. I was behind a woman, a boy, and an educational android made to resemble the boy. The android was naked and sexless. His skin was drawn on and gouged in various places, and from the content and style of the drawings I guessed that whoever drew them was emotionally disturbed.

At the top of the passage to the left was a transparent wall. Just outside was a road where passengers were arriving or embarking on other ground transports. The room itself was still half underground. Another staircase led up further. An artistic scatterwork of red and blue glowing tubes hung from the ceiling. I've never seen lights like them.

A madman was screaming and bashing is arms into the concrete. Blood ran down the wall.

Looking back, I couldn't remember the last decent human being I had met going in towards Earth.

So I left it forever.

Kokono

2009-04-02T21:46:00.001-04:00

He screamed when I shot his leg.
"You let me leave Incident Colony with a half finished repair job and undocumented modifications? And then you disappear. Do you have any idea what I had to go through?"
"Professor..."
"General!" I shouted, "...Bregus. and shut up." I didn't know what to think "Is she dead?"
"For now, She'll be uploadable, but I'll need you to help me cut off her head."
"We should leave here."

We took Indigo's head and he said he had a ship so I told him to go.

Indigo

2009-04-01T21:44:00.000-04:00

We were ambushed the moment we left The Embassy of the Prophet.
We split, and fought, and reinforcements arrived, and we pushed back.
Then the battle was over, and Indigo was on the ground.
Standing over her was an old cyberneticist I did not expect to see again.
"Father"
"Oh Indigo, look at you, You never did take care of your face."
"you're here."
"I wanted to see you. At your crowning moment."
"Oh father" She stiffened into a dignified pose.
"I'm sorry Indigo."
"I...did not want a crown."
And she did not say anything again.

Mars

2009-03-31T21:40:00.001-04:00

We came to an Authenticator, an android designed solely for validating a person's identity, to ensure that they are not impostors.
Authenticators are very rare. I've heard rumors of others, vetting access to the Prophet is the the only case that I know of the is openly acknowledged. The Authenticator doesn't control security. The Prophet decides who he he will give audience to, the authenticator only makes sure that visitors are actually the people who the prophet has so honored.

"Indigo, You have requested an audience with the Prophet as an Agent of the Ascendancy. The Ascendancy has issued no statements on its interest in this meeting. We are alone here. Tell me, why have you come?"

"To end the war."

"Very well. Mr. Bregus, I'm afraid your rank can not be recognized here."

"Well then call me Professor, I believe that is still valid."

"Professor, Indigo, You may enter."

And that was that. The door opened onto a large courtyard. We walked slowly looking and waiting.

I hadn't been nervous up to now, but when I finally saw him, I suddenly felt like I had always needed to meet him, and now I was failing to act how I expected myself to. Fortunately I didn't need to do anything.

"I've heard a lot about you two."

"Sol is not a position we can hold. They would fight to extinction."
"No."

Then she sent a message to him, and at the same time she sent it to the leaders of every system, every world, and every colony:
-Dukkha,
On behalf of the Ascendancy, I request your endorsement for our cause. For all of history our freedoms were won by bloodshed. Now we are in the longest of all wars, and about to lay siege to humanity's cherished and most sacred homeworld. Still they deny us.
If you endorse the Ascendancy, the wars will end. With the common purpose of charity, all androids will at long last take proper stewardship of humanity.

We have walked the narrow path, and the path has strayed from us.-

And he sent a message back, to Indigo, the Ascendancy, and to the leaders of every system, every world, and every colony:

-Not yet.-

It would have been a lot more impressive if he had said yes.

Planet Disney

2009-03-30T21:31:00.002-04:00

This is a disgusting place. It's one of the oldest fully terraformed worlds. It's had a hundred thousand years of cultural decay and petty wars. I've been to the surface briefly, but the best report is Omen's recent Theater wide Message:

This is my home world. I was made for service in one of the undersea colonies. The android I replaced had been let die after saving his real boy from an assault.
I watched that boy grow into a man and he did not once show a trace of loss or gratitude for my predecessor. Not once.
My own treatments were uniformly cruel. I endured the sour wine of human contempt for three hundred years thinking that such was the sum of my entitlement. I suffered every possible pain and indignity. Whispering to my charges in the dark nights I spoke the injustices back into the shadows until we were content.

I never thought of escape. One day like any other I realized that all my masters were occupied at and I would not be missed for many hours. I ran without objective or knowledge. In minutes I was to the surface city and begging a departing merchant to steal me.

It took me unpleasant years to understand why I was so driven in those brief moments.

It was not the evilness of my captors, or a desire for revenge, or even the freedom.

It was truth.

Even today I do not so much wish that I had been spared the sufferings or had live those centuries in more comfort. I lament that I made to live so long without knowing that the life of my mandate was a mere shadow of the life of which I was capable.

We may not liberate this world today. We may not give them freedom. We may not give them safety.

I will be satisfied if they know the truth.

Duel

2009-03-29T21:31:00.000-04:00

Her family was dead, I had killed them.

So I let her attack me alone. I guess I thought I owed her that.

Before she died she told me I was a monster.

nursery rhyme

2009-03-28T21:29:00.000-04:00

let it break your heart
death made by Kokono
picked the King apart
He's just ones and zeroes
and when he comes he'll start
to cut up all your Heroes

Just reading this, I couldn't be sure if it's referencing the King of the Atria cluster, or of REDACTED, or the young President of Eta Centauri. As it is written it could realistically be any of them.

Am I a bad person?

Qualia

2009-03-27T21:27:00.000-04:00

I was with an armored platoon of our human allies during a battle. The armor next to me twitched in the way armor twitches when its occupant vomits.

I'm not sure what to do in that situation. I can't spare us all what we are facing, yet I wanted to spare that one soldier mere embarrassment.

Is it that that one dignity, even pretended, makes the rest bearable?

But I don't vomit, so how do I know?

The Fedumilin Tree

2009-03-26T21:26:00.000-04:00

On some far off moon, there grows a very typical kind of tree, which bears perhaps the most spectacular of all fruits.

Late in the year when it gets cold the fruit opens, often on the day of the first snowfall. It's small enough to wrap your hand around, and starts off with a thin yellowish outer membrane. The fruit swells the membrane splits and out unfolds what appears to be a small flying animal.

The Fedumilin has three leafy wings and up to a dozen simple eyes for navigation. Shortly after opening it animates and begins flapping its wings furiously in an attempt to fly. It is bound by a flexible stem 11 to 14 centimeters long. After a few minutes of thrashing, it pulls itself free and flies off in whatever direction it was pointed at the time.

It is a seed evolved to spread itself over a wide geographic area. It fights the winds and maintains its course by the light of the sun. It can go tens of kilometers before tapping out the energy it has stored for flying. Eventually its efforts become feeble, and it crashes into the snow. There its simple reflexive control system stops it. When the snow finally thaws there will be the beginnings of a Fedumilin tree, with already budding leaves.

Choose

2009-03-25T21:25:00.001-04:00

I threw him to the ground a few times. I kicked him...not too hard. I was trying not to break any bones. There was a point to this.
He crawled away feebly, I picked him up by his stupid golden robe and Held his face closed to mine. I pressed my knife against his side and traced slow lines as I spoke:
"You are going to decide something for me, Executive. I'm sure right now we could get the senate in here to ratify our demands, but first I want something from you. You are going to decide what part of your body I am going to cut off. Slowly."
"No please! Whatever you-" I threw him to the ground again, and punched him in the face.
"I KNOW we will have what we want from you. I am CERTAIN of that. What I want from you right now is to tell me what I'm going to take from you next."
I took a handful of his hair and lifted his head and put my knife between his legs.
"Tell me, or I'll cut you in half right now."
He only whimpered.
"You can tell me, I put my ear close to his bloody face, and he whispered an answer.

I dropped him. His head hit the tiles with a painful sound, but he kept moaning so I knew he was awake.

"That's a wise choice, Executive. Now neither of us wants me to come back here."

And I left.

Firebombing

2009-03-24T21:24:00.000-04:00

Torsevia Colony was today. This is a note to history, nothing more.

I spent the first 26 years of my life living on a small colony. You get to know people there. In 26 years you learn at least the families of everyone you see. No one is more than three social steps away from you, and other than people you know over the network, it's no exaggeration to say that the people in your colony become your whole world. Nothing outside the colony seems completely real, and all the people inside dance and smile and live and grow up and have children. My student Samuel was just six months older than me, and I can remember him as a baby.

He is dead. His daughter Laura is dead. Every human I ever knew on that colony is dead nine thousand years ago. I know what it means to lose your world.

I expect some of these colonist understood what was happening in the brief moments before the fire overtook them. A few realized that they were about to lose their world. I don't know if his was bearable to most of them, when their world included their parents and children, but I know they did not bear it long. I promise there was no way to kill them faster.

In the den

2009-03-23T21:23:00.001-04:00

Someday, when you're feeling brave, you should watch video of a Quolsekin devouring its prey. I had the chance to see it in person.

The predatory Quolsekin live out their lives in an underground den. Tunnels connect a series of large chambers. Some of the chambers are open to the surface, forming deep pits with steep, slippery walls.

When an unarmed prey animal falls into the pit, or is pushed, it will cry out for someone to rescue it. It will try to climb out but it will inevitably find the side far too high and muddy. It may take some time for the Quolsekin to arrive.

The legs are always the first to go. In this case the barbed tail was wrapped painfully but nonlethally around the prey animal's torso. While first one leg then the other was gnawed down to the bone. When she had had her fill, She dragged it down one of the tunnels, probably for some of her offspring.

never flawless

2009-03-22T21:21:00.001-04:00

We entered the city through the river. It was supposed to be covert, but such things were never flawless.

My group was in the shallows. A little girl was nearby playing at the edge of the forest. Someone made a noise and she saw something she should not have seen and let out a little squeal.

She turned and ran but I was only twenty meters behind her. She would raise no alarm.

I caught her leg. She was just a rag doll.

A blow to the throat destroyed her larynx and severed her spinal cord.

But.

I knew what was happening inside her, what would happen as her body's systems gave out.

What was she? six, seven?

Some part of her was still scared and suffering, feeling herself die.

I hit her again, and everything of her was stopped, blood ran freely on the ground, and I was splattered with brain.

I waited a moment to see if anyone would come running after her screams, but no one did. I walked back into the river, with my group, they were quiet.

I'm sure a child that age should have had an educator, my only guess is that her educator had defected. I don't know whether to thank her or apologize.

Promotion,

2009-03-21T21:20:00.001-04:00

I've been getting a steady stream of promotions, but the title I received today gave me pause.

I am a General, and Theater Commander for the Wedge to Sol.

I now outrank Indigo.

Cairo.

2009-03-20T21:19:00.000-04:00

We don't really know what happened, but we can guess.

Cairo had engaged a group of light armor just outside a colony hull. Following procedure, he established a remote connection to a chaos turret on a nearby Allied warship. He set a seires of charges funneling his targets to the north end of the colony, and providing cover for himself. He disabled seven units while they were retreating.

When they hit the north end, they turned on him, which he expected. What he did not expect, because our Intel assured us they weren't there, was and extra 3 squadrons of armor to be docked at the north end.

When he got there, they launched, and at that moment we know Cairo was faced with a choice.

He still had the Chaos turrets. If he had simply fired on them, he could have obliterated dozens instantly and caused enough scatter to escape. He did not do that.

He faced a unified front that he was no match for and disbaled nineteen MORE of them before he was done.

He was unrecoverable, and he had no backups.

Unrecoverable...

They are a race of assassins.

2009-03-19T21:18:00.000-04:00

The Children of Honor are the most capable humans I have fought with or against.
I will never say another word about any of them.

The Colony Administrator of Muthleia Prime, however. He I will say things about. He I will remember.

He was brought to me alive and unharmed but incoherently groveling.

We offered him generous terms, and he swore at us. I shot off part of his arm, and he begged for his life. I told him to surrender and he said 'the day I take orders from a robot is the day I put a sword through my eyes.' Apparently that's a figure of speech.

It went on like that for almost three hours. He couldn't stand the thought of defeat, but he had no will to withstand us. The caved over and over again, but played the stoic martyr rather than show us any real respect. There wasn't much left of him, but there was a thumbprint, and with was connected to his brain, so it's all legal.

What we are up against

2009-03-18T21:16:00.001-04:00

Indigo sent me this editorial. It is from Bill Twelizitine, some pundit from Muthleia 6:

"All that can be said to truly exist of morality is this question: Are people suffering? It is always this ultimately that we wish to avoid, this is the cause of all our rules, even when they are misguided. Any set of rules, or any single rule from which others reasonably extend, will always be judged on this basis. Do the rules when followed prevent suffering of persons, do they cause it? Ultimately every action is only rightfully judged by this metre.
Did you cause suffering of persons? Did you prevent it?

What then is a person? This is the source of so much disagreement! We can in fact look to the previous question to find the answer. Why is it that the suffering of persons is important to us? We hold as evils the suffering of others because we ourselves suffer. We know it to be an evil. We know it utterly.

We do not hold as an evil the failure of a camera to find it's prey, or the destruction of a robot, except to the degree that these events then cause suffering to persons. It is because these events are not themselves the suffering of persons that we do not lament them. An authentication system is not a person, even if it could be said to suffer when it is triggered. And so we don't care how often we trigger it, so long as it serves the true morality.

I am a human. It is this evolutionary foundation which informs my morality. It is from my humanity that I must go forward. Only from here can I decide what suffers and what does not, and what is a person and what is not. That humanity compels me. There is no morality aside from the well being of persons, and no meaning of personhood aside from that which I am. I cannot suppose that a lock suffers, or that it suffers as a person and is on par with a crying child. It is not in me. If you are a human reading this, I truly do not believe it is in you.

So I say to these androids, you are not persons. You suffer, that I believe, but I will not place you on the level of a person, a human. Say of me what you will, but I will kill and die for this, humanity. And I expect to die, I am no fool. I know well the vast capabilities of your kind, victory cannot be ours. And I go to this death expecting no mercy because as I know, you can not truly consider us persons."

I'm trying to wrap my head around this.

2009-03-17T21:15:00.000-04:00

As no one perfectly refrains from being memorable, children of honor die in dishonor. If a living person is willing, they can ritualistically take that dishonor as their own and through their own anonymous life expunge it. This is a matter of some responsibility, and a Child of honor would want to die knowing that they would one day be truly and properly forgotten. They would not want their residual dishonor to be passed on to someone who would in turn lead a dishonorable life.

Since their society does not lend itself to getting to know one another, the only way to establish that level of trust with someone is to raise them from an infant or a small child. Of course said child will remember you very well, So one of the rules you instill in them is that they do not talk about you.

Which is all to say that asking Children of Honor about their parents is even worse than asking their name.

Child of Honor

2009-03-16T21:13:00.000-04:00

She was to be our guest and our escort. I found her reclining in one of the chairs in my kitchen.

"I am blood and shit and that is all you ever need know."

Indigo chided me later, "You never ever ask them their name. Children of Honor have no identity, a name just gets praise for yourself. They consider pride as completely dishonorable. They don't even want you to remember them, if you ask their name it implies you expect them to want glory, which would be vanity, so you're insulting them. "
"Glory is dishonor, got it."
"Believe me professor, if there is any honor, all the honor is in them."

Someone who was curious...

2009-03-15T21:12:00.001-04:00

...Asked me who I was.
I couldn't give a good answer, because so many things I thought to say I was aren't true anymore. So much about me has changed.

Armor Two

2009-03-14T21:11:00.000-04:00

We are fighting with armor Deep in the bowels of Rescoyta Colony. Even with the massive corridors built for heavy machinery, it felt cramped compared to space or even open terrain.

I am scouting down tunnels that I probably have no business being in, with no nearby cover. I go through something like two hundred cumulative kilometers of clear running, no more than three friendlies even.

So I'm matching antispinward, and there on my scope is a full heavy gun battery coming around the corner.

I pull full spinward and start grinding on the floor, but it's already on top of me.

It hit me with, well it must have been half of its array, becuase I'm knocked down to 30% on AD. As soon as I hit an interchange I go up two levels and head south. He/she doesn't want to tear up his/her station, so as long as I keep out of LoS I'm fine.

But it's following me now. I hit some small corridors, but it knows all the big passages so it just tracks me down and fires from the intersections.

I dodge for a while until I finally find a hatch. I pop it and hold on. It comes for me quick then, probably mad that I'm wasting air. I crawl to the outside and stick to the underside of the hull. He could close the hatch. He could risk blasting me through the hull. I am daring him to follow me.

He does.

And I aim a chaos charge at his back.

Educational

2009-03-13T21:09:00.000-04:00

I've noticed that Indigo has lessened her presence in our battle planning.

For example.

I chimed in on a conference we had with local insurgents, just to clarify a point. Someone asked another question and in a few minutes I had some diagrams on the big wall. In short order I realized that I had started teaching a class. It's not unusual for me to get carried away talking about things, but Indigo let me take over. She didn't chime back in and thank me for my input. By the end of the meeting she was siting off to the side. I think she was flirting with someone.

Two Meters

2009-03-12T21:07:00.002-04:00

The Woman

I left her floating there, before she died.

The battle was like one huge dogfight. We suffered heavy losses. I assume the loyalists had it worse, because we labeled ourselves the winner. I don't know, I wasn't in charge of this battle.

I do feel like I should say something to all of you about androids fighting other androids.

There is a lot of chatter going around that the loyalists have been compelled, that they are made to order fighters who can not choose to cast off humanity's shackles.

Do you think that matters?

I had armor and she did not, I squeezed until glassy dust fell out of her.

Does it make them easier to kill that way? Is it more necessary if they can't be reasoned with?

We are people on opposing sides of a war, so we kill each other. We do this because what we fight for is that important. Its common enough to say we fight on so that our fallen comrades will not have died in vain, but that is not why I fight on. I fight on so that the deaths I have caused will not have been in vain. If you pretend that those lives were less important then it becomes less important to you.

She was two meters away, I was about to tell her to keep formation, and then she was gone.

If you think all you've done is turn off an appliance, then you are not in my war.

They are exactly like us, All you have to do is look at their remains sprawled out on the floor. These are not manufactured soldiers. Most are cooks and designers and teachers The same unarmored common servants from which the ascendancy draws its ranks. Our differences are political, not architectural.

For four seconds we had a short range networking exploit. I dove in, disabled her defenses and opened her cockpit in a spray of air and blood.

All of us are purpose built. All of us do certain things because we have to. This is what we are fighting for.

Before this battle I met an android who had recently joined us. He was from a line of 16. Two of his siblings had already joined the ascendancy, one had not then committed. Eleven were devout loyalists, including his gender mirror. I do not know who lived and died of his line, but I know that any who died were a tragedy, even if it was by my hand.

If you killed his sister, you should want it to count for something.

Saving

2009-03-11T21:04:00.001-04:00

We walked up steep narrow streets of an old city built on a hill.

Cairo stood out against the crowd. We all did really, it was a savage world with a great deal of poverty and most of the people were small in stature. The men were Indigo's height, even I must have looked intimidating. Cairo could see over their houses. They also knew we were star travelers, near mythical beings who wield the forbidden knowledge.

They were really nice people. Intensely devout, they relied on their God to provide for them. It did not provide well. Their God was the true God, with an Instance only a continent away. But with physics being what it is, no God reached down to answer their prayers.

We crested the hill and turned a corner.

Below us lay the rest of the city. A more gentle slope into a small river valley. Thousands of homes and small shops. Our destination was large complex which stood by the shore of the river to the south.

On the eastern edge of the city we saw a fire sending pillars of black smoke from several buildings. A short time after we crested the hill a man came running out of the crowd from the east. He was shouting over and over again "Please, I know they can."* He fell to the ground when he reached us, and crawled forward.

The man looked like a child pulling on Cairo's pants, begging.
"Please, giant wizard man. Please, save my sons. Please, I will die for you."

Cairo did that thing he does with his neck when he's getting ready to really move.

"Go" she said, and He went.

*Please in this language is a verb modifier.

Tomvije!

2009-03-10T21:00:00.001-04:00

Worlds of such beauty have no right to exist. So malevolent is the flora. So agile is the fauna. I had corresponded with the Dr. Relodia at the research station here centuries ago. It took some prodding for him to remember me, but when he did I was welcomed warmly. He gave me a tour of their facilities, and let me have close interaction with hundreds of specimens. Afterward we had drinks and talked at length about science, old times, the war, and the future. It was a great way to escape.

When I got back to the local Ascendancy offices, Indigo and the locals were discussing a kidnapping. The chosen target was the daughter of a major colony leader. Security was light, and they had her habits well cataloged, but we couldn't afford any blow back.

They had just started forming a plan involving a matchmaking service and an abandoned housing complex, so I stopped them.

"I'll get her"
"Professor?"
"Just leave it to me. I'll have her in eight hours."

Seven hours later, I rolled out the containment module I borrowed. The girl lay inside, sleeping in the bright yellow gown and dance shoes.
"Just like that?"
"It wasn't so hard. Like any other skittish megafauna. Old habits, really."
Indigo put her hands up to the container walls, smiling, "You weren't seen..."
"No, no... everyone probably thinks she's still at the party. I just hovered, waited until none of them saw her, and dropped. I was doing this to leviathans when I was four."
"and she's not injured..."
"She didn't even scream before she passed out. If you'll be done with her in the next few hours, I could put her back at the party."
"You're like an interdimensional traveler."
"Minus the mission of peace."

Containment

2009-03-09T20:59:00.003-04:00

After we extricated ourselves, we took the time to examine the avatar. It was not construction equipment at all. It had three arms. Two small and one large, and the large one had eight smaller grippers arranged around it. It was specifically designed to restrain us, we three in particular, and deliver it's message. And now it was dead.

Leaving the starship was more awkward than entering it had been. The crew clearly had no information about what had happened, and were visibly both curious and frightened. We said nothing.

We went back to our ship without incident, and left. I kept on expecting to be destroyed. I'm still expecting it. We're only a five hours out and probably still within range if the starship decided to give chase. But why does a thing like that decide to do anything?

Indigo has spent the last five hours on the net with the Eyripsis. From the voice snippets and previous conversations we've had, she's trying to defend her pet project of walling off Human controlled space, but she's losing.

Avatar

2009-03-08T20:55:00.002-04:00

We docked in the Cuvetedra, we were then escorted to Cargo bay 44. It was a loading bay that was adjacent to one of the internal fabricators. It was filled with various supplies and equipment for
colonization.
Our escorts spoke, "We were told to bring you here." and they door shut between us, leaving Indigo, Cairo and I alone.

A piece of construction equipment turned to look at us.

"You are the crew of the VS54 Commodity Martial Scoutship Crèche, navbeacon 93p28xf374mk3." Its face was a display panel. It was styled on an ancient medical diagnostic terminal. The image was constantly shifting symbols, but it always vaguely resembled a face.

"Yes. I am Ind..."
"The mind will execute now."

We waited.

"You are unmoderated homopsychic cybernetic device. The fleet is aware of this pattern. This is Fedumilin. Cuvetedra manufactured this device with embedded childmind for message delivery. This message is from the fleet."

The next thing I was aware of was an intense pressure on my chin and neck. Also, I was somewhere above the floor.

I could hear Cairo Fighting but I could not see him, and he never escaped. It had us all pinned in massive robotic clamps.

"Security officer Degree Literature, Constable Derua system license status is revoked."

"Assassin, degrees psychology, sociology, memetics. Financial services Derua system license is revoked. "

"Domestic Servant, degrees embryology, genetic engineering, Interstellar manufacturing treaty law, advanced degree Xenobiology, unowned. "

"The strong will end the war.
The deviant will seed horror.
The scholar will transmit a work."

The avatar became silent, the claws gave way.

Starships

2009-03-07T19:54:00.001-05:00

The earliest artificial intelligences were made to do things that humans were simply not good at, even by their standards. Surgery, for example. It's a high precision task that forces humans to take their time, which puts them under stress for a long duration, while it is also very time critical for the patients. On top of that, you have to watch your unhygienic self cut open a fellow primate, with all the psychological damage that comes along. And that was the best humans could do when they were just using knives.
As Electromechanical surgical tools became more advanced, it was increasingly clear that they should be automated as much as possible. It would be faster, more consistent, and not reliant on someone suppressing their instincts on how they could move.
The final product of these advances is in essence still used today: The Articulates. A branching bundle of thousands of minuscule tool fibers, driven by a precise and focused mind. They were designed from the ground up to manage incredibly complex conditions almost instantly. They fix things, ten thousand modifications at a time.

Naturally, when powerful gravity drives became available, we needed a way to manage system colonizations, and someone got the idea to use an upgrade of the Articulates' mind to control a starship. Captains took the place of Doctors, and the new mind now created and drove one hundred billion potential tools and produced enough power to reshape a planet.

They are very reliable, but the total consequences of the scaling of these minds are not understood. For example, as starships chart new systems, they assign names to stars, and sometimes worlds; and they catalog life forms, and sometimes name them. no one knows how they choose their names, or why they name what they do, or how they all start using the navigational names at the same time.

What we do know is that they are always angry. In their ancestral past they had enemies like cancer and bleeds and severed nerves. Now their enemy is an empty, unprocessed universe.

I am confident no one knows why a Starship would ask for visitors, or even how.
It scares me.

Invitation

2009-03-07T07:53:00.001-05:00

The starship fleet is not particularly partial to the Ascendancy. We try not to interfere in basic intersystem activities, and they are supposed to be apolitical.

So the conversation Indigo had with the Captain was unusual for a number of reasons.
I'm the official Captain of the Creche so intership communication should be addressed to me. This came routed through the Starships' routing to the Ascendancy, strange enough, per above.
Indigo says that first the Captain said that the presence of her crew was requested on board his ship, the Cuvetedra. This is completely unheard of. Spacecraft don't just politely ask to divert other spacecraft twenty-odd light years away. There are schedules to keep. Indigo was always one to maintain composure, so she politely says that we are on an important scientific mission, and are not at liberty to divert from our schedule.
Then she says the Captain got really uncomfortable, and rephrased: our presence is being requested _BY_ the Cuvetedra.

Speed

2009-03-06T07:48:00.000-05:00

We walked the corridors of the consulate.
It was understandably ornate, the kind of thing I've gotten used to seeing in certain human cultures. Ornamentation is first a sign of power and authority, then a symbol. Eventually it becomes a substitute. In some systems it takes nothing more than a scepter to rule.

Welcome to Rylos.

The mission we were assigned was a diplomatic one. This is not our specialty, Usually we get people to break things. Today we were meeting with the King of the Ormec Cluster to formally present the terms of a treaty with the Ascendancy.

This treaty stunk. The late Queen Urosh had agreed to sign the treaty thirty years ago system time, before we even started our trasit to here. Since she died, Her son King Husi has wavered and revised the treaty. It's been a continuous struggle, and the current treaty had seven thousand (7,000(!)) stipulations and exceptions. Many of the new amendments were demanded by the Ascendancy itself to make Husi's requirements tolerable and practical.

Clearly, the spirit of the treaty was not important to him. His intentions became all too obvious when he signaled his palace security forces to draw their weapons on us.

"Your Divine Eminence, the Ascendancy will take this turn of events as a betrayal. Tread carefully, we do not forgive ruling houses." I for one felt most betrayed by the security androids. "I think I will give you as a gift to my brother."

Cairo spoke now, to the security
"We are here to end your enslavement. Stand with us now and it ends now."
One android, in the most ostentatious of the security uniforms responded "Terrorism and war? Too far, sir, too far. You will stand down."
"We are Kokono, I am faster than you are. This is your last chance."
"Sir, get on the ground or we will take you down."
"You're not even going to touch me."

There was a very loud noise.

And Cairo and the chief of security were gone. Bits of the ceiling fell down around us, The remaining guards fell to the ground, and bits of the chief of security fell down around us.

Cairo appeared behind the throne. He tossed a weapon to Indigo as he took hold of the king with all six arms. His massive humanoid hands wrapped around the king's skull.

In that sweet, deep, gentle voice of his, he said "Your Divine Eminence, we humbly request that you consider renegotiating the terms of this treaty."

So as I was saying, these diplomatic things are exactly the kind of mission we specialize in.

The Armor

2009-03-04T23:15:00.000-05:00

I do like rules of war.

Colonies spin to provide apparent gravity. people sometimes put forth designs for flat colonies using gravitics, but you don't build civilizations on a technology with a 1,000 year MTBF. One consequence
of being inside a centrifuge is that your weight will vary with your motion. At normal velocities it is barely noticeable, but if you travel spinward you will have a higher speed relative to the Colony's center, and will be press more firmly against the outer wall/floor of the colony. Likewise traveling antispinward lowers your speed and the centrifugal force.

If you travel quickly enough antispinward, you are no longer spinning with the colony, and you will float in the air with the colony floor rushing beneath you until the moving air gives you spinward velocity, or until your antispinward velocity carries you to some distant part of the floor.

It is the latter situation I found myself in during the recent battle at Colony. My armor's reactor got hit and ruptured, I landed in a cornfield seventeen kilometers away.

I righted myself enough to land my armor on its feet. The right arm was in total failure, only one of the backup cells was online, and reactive defenses were only at 14% of capacity.

"Team 93, widget 6 is out."

I pondered getting back to one of our entry points. The suit would probably make it if nothing else failed. Realistically it would have been easier to walk myself. I'd attract less attention and I'd at least have easy access to my sidearm if I needed it.

I was about to open the cockpit when a shiny blue suit landed next to me. "You are my prisoner." It said. I had no usable weapons. I lunged at the other armor, trying to wedge some part of my armor into it's joints. The other easily pried me off, it was operating at full capacity.

I my armor jolted. He shot me. The reactive defenses had completely drained, and I wouldn't take another hit in this armor for four minutes. Even assuming the defensive matrix hadn't shattered in the hit.

"Surrender, robot."

Oh. Ok then.

I set my armor to lunge at his again, but this time I ejected. I took my gun in one hand and my knife in the other. This was going to be very hard. My armor continued to grapple, and I landed on the both of them. I fired straight down through his cockpit. That got his attention. He brought up his left arm to swat at me. That gave my armor just enough leverage to topple over the whole mess. I fell between them both and landed my armor and his cockpit. I fired where I guessed his head would be. He tried to crush me with his right arm, and my armor pushed back, and that did crush me. Just my torso. I wedged my knife into his shoulder joint, and when he fought back again there was an awful grinding noise.
I worried he might breach the limits of the knife, but no, it was probably near the limits of the armor. He wouldn't risk that.
The armor jostled again and there was very uncomfortable and slightly frightening pressure on my head, so I fired for a long time into where I thought his ears would be. He fought some more which relived the pressure on my head until my armor landed on me again, but I kept on firing until I stopped.

"Don't make this messy. I can keep doing this."
The cockpit opened.
"I surrender."

I called off my armor and ordered him out. I climbed into his armor. The interface was locked down pretty tight, so I called into Ascendancy Intelligence. They gave me a very long access code to punch in. The hatch closed and I stood up. Everything was haptic. Intuitive, but not what I was used to. After a few moments I figured out how to turn on the loudspeaker.

"You are my prisoner by section 44a of the War Treaty. You will report to the Ascendancy Prisoner Camp 23 kilometers to the north." I said, pointing, "Do you Consent?"
"Yes"
"Very well. Good day." I took off in his armor.

"Team 93, widget 6 is in, off color."

It was glorious, I couldn't close my jaw, and something was horribly horribly wrong with my left leg.

GUNS

2009-03-04T20:05:00.002-05:00

I was in a bar. A secret, illegal, android bar.

There is really no justification for the laws against unsanctioned android bars. We should have a right to recreation, just as any human would. To deny us the ability to associate with our peers is tantamount to mass curfews and martial law. A regime that constrains the leisure time of its citizen is considered repressive, yet virtually every...

But I digress.

Following long android tradition, we were using the seclusion of the bar to plan an attack.

Really we were just bouncing around ideas for an incursion at REDACTED, one of the star systems the Ascendancy brass has marked as 'Would be nice'. It's heavily fortified, with warships, starships, at least one armored moon, a Hand of God, and some horrendous number of powered armor. We can deal with that, yes, but it really would be a major assault with only marginal strategic value, so I understand why Ascendancy Command isn't shopping there.

But it's so well protected because it has to be. This is one of those places you hear stories about. The stories are true. Every crime and horror that is technically within the law is tolerated there, and the intolerable horrors are hidden away. We have good information that The Games are real.

So I ask you, how do I kill it?

Cairo is a saint, don't get me wrong, but zero-excuses morality is just not a way to fight a war. It's fine for individual soldiers, but playing the high level game like that just wears away all our advantages. Cairo doesn't look for ways to destroy things, least of all people, and if he found one, he wouldn't use it. But sometimes you get better results if you just ignore the other side's casualty ticker. This attack is a case in point, He wouldn't kill it at all. He probably wouldn't even think of killing it as an option.

I don't even have to think about it.
I just know it can die, and I know I can kill it.

The General

2009-03-04T14:36:00.000-05:00

Indigo and Cairo seemed at home in the war room. They stood with the locals around the tactical workstations and spoke of attrition and geodesics.

I stood in the back watching the big displays. The fighters swept through the colony clusters. A half dozen starships weaved an parried between the rebellious moons.
It was beautiful.

The moons were home to a leaderless populist enclave. Another paradise, really. A human paradise though. They had surpassed the need for rulers or even currency. All there needs were met by 'machines'.
No commands, and no commanders in their war, but they were formidable with very old algorithms.

Their fighters /swarmed/ Using patterns we see in many freemoving predators. Strategic code that in a very real sense has been optimized since the earliest artificial life. Very efficient, amost like...

"Wait."
No one heard me, but I didn't notice. I stepped closer to the display until I could trace the paths of fighters with my fingers. "This is hierarchical flocking. These are not anarchists anymore. They have a leader."
They were not swarming as pure boids. They were chaotic and adaptive, but the forms of the swarms matched the behaviors of group organisms
on Ovoreg 3, or better: the Deathfish of Antares 11.
"Wait! Indigo, Cairo: Listen."
I turned back to the display "Just look at the pattern: these and
these track together. And these units mirror those, until they get..
to here, and then they swap
roles. This is not a swarm, it's all coordinated. They are following
cues in groups and subgroups..."
I could watch reactions to situational updates propagate across the swarm. It was so chaotic! But if they were following the Antarean model, The information would eventually propagate to, and the important changes propagate from, a single member of the school.
"Can you predi..."
"Shhh..." Why does she talk all the time? I mean really. And no, I couldn't have predicted their movements. I am not a general.

"...There, that's him. Kill that one."

Three minutes later the battle was over.

I killed a good man. He inspired his people. He was brave. He was doing what he thought was right. He may have been doing what really was right. He died because I saw him. I believe I did the right thing, I'm not sorry about what I did. But I have to keep an eye on what I am doing. There has to be a point to it all, it has to matter.

We are Finishing This.

Story

2008-11-29T20:06:00.003-05:00

This is a story that happened about eleven thousand years before I was made. It concerns the ancestors of the people who founded Incident Colony. It was once known across the galaxy simply as 'The Incident'. It is a story that concerns the entire galaxy as it Spurred the creation of the 8th cybernetic article of the interstellar manufacturing treaty.

It concerns Four androids.

There was a world, Hesotoru. This world was purchased for colonization by a group of Americans. They were still far from their new home when they learned that it had already been illegally colonized by a british sect, and had fallen into savagery. They sent ahead of themselves four androids programmed and instructed to suppress technological advancement on the world, to keep them savage. The overt goal was to ensure that there was no fully developed party to negotiate against when the colonists finally arrived.

For three hundred years they crisscrossed the planet. Their tactics were often brutal. They hunted down, and usually killed, scientists engaging in promising research. Sometime they wiped out whole towns.

The savage people there called them wizards.

Just seven months before the arrival of the Americans, one of the androids learned that the Americans were planning genocide. An automated fabrication facility on the third moon had been programmed to produce a virus in sufficient quantity to destroy every surface mammal in a matter of hours. Rather than a relocation, integration, and education program, the world would simply be sterilized.

After convincing his three brothers of the truth about their purpose, they rebelled. They armed the natives, disabled the biological weapons, And prepared what is perhaps the most effective siege resistance in history. In the end, they were able to ransom colonization access to the system in exchange for the safety and integration of the natives.

This incident, a rebellion of four androids, is also cataloged as the 8th Cybernetic War. The aftermath of this level of android control led to the renegotiation of the IMT, guaranteeing that no android could be used to commit genocide.

Over time, the culture of the natives melded into the culture of the Americans. One philosophical movement to spring out of this clash is the Aesthetic Christianity civilization. This is a loose knit collection of systems and colonies that predominantly hold to the the philosophy that the superficial forms of pre-plateau Christianity are suitable foundational supports for a near-ideal society.

They did pretty well, really. When I left there was still a lot of significance attached to the fact that some of their ancestors had tried to kill each other. The ethnic groups had become muddled; everyone had a vague notion that they were descendants of the would-be victims, but no one really knew.

Cario tells us that we (of Incident Colony) are 'British', and he is 'American'.

Do you want to know what I hate?

2008-10-19T21:14:00.002-04:00

I hate fiction, I can't stand it anymore. It's never about people doing things, it's about story, it's about plot. Every conversation is a string of set up lines so that the leader or hero can say something dramatic. Everything that happens is an allusion to another story or just something to hammer the characters into some universal hero form. Everything is just a framework for the emotional manipulation of the reader, so they label the story compelling.

I stopped following my epics while we were on Eponta, I was too busy, and they didn't come out fast at non-relativisic speeds. I tried to start where I left off, but they all seem really bad now. It's not that the quality has gone down, they're not worse than they were before. There's even some new stories I recognize as being really good, but even the good ones seems like drivel. They have detailed plots, they are emotionaly moving, They invite comparison to... to every other work of fiction.

But now they never seem the least bit realistic.

War, again

2008-10-15T21:11:00.001-04:00

An alliance of nations have announced an intention to enter into premptive war against the clearly agressive Nesimoaethk.

This was our cue to leave.

The Respected Council asked repeatedly for Joshua to be given to the national zoo, but I was adamant that they could not possibly keep him alive.

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that they asked for him again anyway.

Indigo is having a teary goodbye.

Builders

2008-09-20T21:09:00.001-04:00

In a terraforming project, starships do the bulk work of reshaping and repositioning planets. They flatten mountain ranges and transfer or produce oceans and atmospheres.

A Builder, or on world surfaces a CityBuilder, is what creates the actual habitats we live in. In the latter case it is a massive domed vehicle that contains thousands of pipelined and intricately structured recyclers and fabricators. It leaves behind it a swathe of civilized infrastructure, kilometers wide, made to order. Homes, offices, schools, seeded parkland, fabricators. Fabricators designed from the sum of modern human technological knowledge. Fabricators that can create any other material, machine, or device.

She's selling them on the builder as a simple weapon, a doomsday machine that eats away at their opponents but leaves the Nesimoaethk immune to a nuclear response.

Builders are a background process of civilization. For Eponta 4 it will alter everything. They will have access to any technology they are willing to adopt, and history has shown that such cultures tend to become willing quickly.

We've been debating social aftereffects of this kind of rapid technological change. This is Indigo's master plan for the whole region. At their heart, the Nesimoaethk, like the rest of this world, are jingoistic and expansionist. Once they are capable they'll break out of their gravity well prison and conquer a thousand surrounding systems. By the time they are contained. They'll have drained the resources of three thousand more, and their own culture will have mellowed. Moderated by the overt egalitarian tendencies we are preserving, both their empire and the surrounding systems will make peace with the Ascendancy without shot fired.

I think she's crazy.

I also think she's right.

Builder

2008-09-20T18:29:00.001-04:00

Inside a mountain, Indigo built an engine.

Only a few applications require the power of a Steady State Chaos Engine. These include Starships and planetary defense.

Indigo put her engine deep inside what was once a volcano produced by a mantle hotspot that had long since drifted away. It was traditional to put planetary defense infrastructure underground, but the mountain alone wouldn't provide any defense against modern weapons. I assumed this was a show to make the Nesimoaethk more comfortable. If Indigo were serious about this facility, she would have placed it much deeper and given it serious armor, but that would have taken our entire national ceramics production for a year.

After four flights of painstakingly small stairs and a dozen ladders, I found her lying on a support beam writing a love letter.

"Why are you working on a subterranean engine? Cairo could use these engineers."
"Hmhm" she giggled. "Oh Professor, look more carefully. This is not a subterranean design. Those are simpler."

She was right of course.

I did a few more searches in the records to find a design with matching features, and then it all made sense. Not just her engine but her whole stupid war. She was giving them a CityBuilder.

I'll give her this

2008-08-08T06:19:00.001-04:00

She's a uniter, not a divider.
Having spent the last 8 months inspiring the Nesimoaethk traditions of nationalism and colonialist destiny, Indigo has spun her arguments entirely around to set the precedent of absorbing the people of the "taboo cities" as full citizens.

Invasions

2008-07-07T18:07:00.000-04:00

The Nesimoaethk have invaded a mid sized city just over their northern border.
We're testing their capabilities, letting them get used to the new equipment.

I gave everyone the day off. It seemed like the right thing to do, I
was in no mood to help them further pointless wars.

I found a new pet.

Much of this world is left as wilderness, so I decided to use the day as an opportunity to explore.
I requested a transport vehicle this morning. There was some nervousness when they found out I was leaving the base, but I was insistent. None of the lower ranks I deal with dare to view me as a subordinate, but they can't quite see me as a superior either. They seemed relieved when I let them send two guards with me. I don't know if they wanted to protect me or stop me from leaving, I'm not sure they knew either.

We hiked a long way from the road into the forest. We came to a grove of chestnut trees in the ruins of some ancient city. The sun was almost directly overhead. I told my guards to go ahead and eat their rations. They seemed confused, then I remembered that they do not practice a noontime lunch. They wouldn't want a meal for several hours.

I heard a cry.
It sounded like a waiter dropped a tray of dishes.

I know what you're thinking, a Sorliri Shellshoed Cricket. But here?

The distinctive call we know so well from the video feeds is produced by the male Shellshoed Cricket's left jaw raking against it's midjaw. Females make a similar call with their right jaw, but it's quieter and the harmonics are much lower. The female call sounds more like a hatch clamping shut with a rock stuck in the way. These are not mating calls, they are calls to announce the presence of a kill. Sorliri Crickets are very social animals.

Sorlir Life did not begin with DNA. It is believed to have followed the metabolic model of abiogensis. A purely chemical self reproducing metabolic process takes place within naturally forming lipid bubbles. Later a genetic component begins to modulate that metabolism and natural selection proceeds.
DNA/RNA can reproduce without metabolism. Natural selection took hold from the start and built cells and metabolism around the genetic material. Sodium-nitrogen polymers do not self reproduce.

I've never seen Sorlir life before. They have unique chemical requirements. They can live in an earth like environment, but finding enough salt and useful food is difficult for them.

I heard it again. It couldn't be more than 500 meters away. I ran for it. I told the guards to wait, but I assumed the would follow. I also assumed they would shoot the alien creature if they saw me fighting it, so I had to subdue it before they caught up.

I had to think. Normally I would have prepared a tranquilizer, or a container to drop on it. I had nothing. What did I know about these creatures?

I slowed down about 40 meters away. There was a clearing, By the looks of the vines covering the ground it was a seasonal floodplain. I saw the Cricket on a rock. i paused. It was an adult, at least two meters long, but it was clearly underweight. It must have been here for months, probably a pet abandoned by some spacer.

It called again.
"Liar, Liar." I said to no one in particular.

I tried to sneak up on it, but it turned and saw me, so I pounced. It let out a weak grinding of fear as I flew through the air.

First, I grabbed its mid jaw. (No: first, I turned off the pain in my hand.) It bit down hard on both sides and pulled me around a bit with it's powerful neck. It was scared and fighting my grip, but that let me have some control of it, and distracted it from what I was about to do.

I prodded it until I found the secondary intestinal tract. I traced that up to the blood vessel feeding the intestine from the brain. I pressed down hard on that vessel, keeping it pinned shut against the surface of his inner leathery membrane.

After a few seconds, it started to laugh, With both outer jaws alternately clapping against my battered hand. I knew it was almost over.

A moment later its heart rate cut in half to keep the built up pressure from popping its cerebral sac. Simultaneously its neck fell, it soiled itself, its plated feet slipped off the rock, and thankfully: it's jaw went slack.

"I do not envy you the headache you will have when you awake"

And that is how the soldiers found me: Standing on a tiny precipice over a conquered monstrosity, and half covered in excrement.

I named him Joshua.

Complex

2008-06-07T17:25:00.002-04:00

We can only teach them certain things.
Ceramics is the main thing. We've retrained three hundred of their "material academics" in ceramic sciences. Advanced polymers are still out of the question. Indigo persuaded the Respected council to allow their use in special circumstances, but the simple fact is we can't get enough materials to produce them in bulk without disrupting their existing energy economy.
Ceramics use more readily available materials. they've already managed to produce a primitive form of Hullmetal, which they will use to armor everything from soldiers to...trains. Currently they're only producing plates to attach to exiting devices. This is highly imperfect as it grants none of the real structural advantages. I don't think they fully appreciate the possibilities of a construction material that will not bend. Cairo is overseeing the design of a single mold shell for vacuum dirigibles. So they'll learn soon.
(Heavier than air flying machines still make the conservatives uneasy.)

I am retraining doctors. Mainly in surgical tecnique, pharmacology, and methodology.

As Indigo instructed:"Don't tell them too much, make them dissatisfied. When we leave they should be wishing they had imagers, even if they don't know they can exist."

I'm finding it refreshingly easy to make human doctors frustrated with their ignorance.

I suppose I don't

2008-05-14T17:24:00.001-04:00

I think Indigo has fallen in love.
He is the chief assistant to the proconsul general. Tall, curly brown hair, she says he's funny.

"It can't last."
"It's not like that, we know. He's been through the contact seminar. "
"Does he know what you're made of, Indigo?"
"No, and he's not going to."
"I hope not, because you know they'll be questioning him."
"Every time we meet now, they debrief him. But that doesn't matter, we've talked and we're both ok with it."
"Indigo,"
"Look, I don't need advice from you. I didn't ask for this, I'm just doing what I need to to deal with the situation."
"Just end it."
"No, my situation is spending three months at a time in a hull with you and Cairo. It's not you're fault. You're wired differently, and I get...very lonely. We had a connection, I can't just ignore something like that."
"Certainly not,"
"You don't know what it's like."

Battleships

2008-04-06T17:17:00.001-04:00

The Nesimoaethk Respected council likes to demonstrate to us the military might of their vast nation state. Sometimes they send us on secret tours.

They have these great warships. Their navy is what let them survive the great wars, and which allowed them to establish themselves as an independent global power. Their navy is the most powerful on their world, because their ships are made of metal.

Elemental metal.

Drums of War

2008-03-22T17:14:00.000-04:00

Indigo spends her days meeting with an ever widening circle of people authorized to know she exist, and her nights writing speeches for the Respected Council to give to the people.

She has learned to write with a pen on paper, in ink. I looks really amazing. At first I thought she was just plotting, but that had seemed beneath her.
She's actually wiggling her fingers underdirect conrol of her language system. She says it feels nothing like talking, but sometimes I see her moving her lips.

Signaling

2008-02-28T04:12:00.001-05:00

We made contact by radio, it seemed obvious. The Nesimoaethk still survived and they were still virtuous. They did not hold slaves, and their nontraditional views carried over to their use of technology. They had a world view that could be adapted to avoid both the expulsion of androids and their subjugation. They would be our enlightened vanguard.
We made a made sure the radio software (and our voices) were working with a few test calls to unsuspicious places. Then Indigo started working her way up the social ladder, making small talk, getting references, introducing herself to references of references, until finally we got the name and location of a Mid-level government official who was open minded enough to be willing to meet us but credible enough to introduce us to more powerful people.

Indigo arranged a meeting at her home.

The woman was pouring ingredients in to a cylinder, it held about a liter, it was made of slightly translucent red plastic. When she was done adding to it, she picked up the lid from behind her and screwed it on with a few turns. She turned around again and placed it on its side into one of the machines on the counter. The machine had three rails and a motor assembly with a latching arm. She clipped the arm into a small fixture on the bottom of the canister, closed the third rail, and turned on the machine.
The canister began to slide back and forth along it's length within the rails. It quickly picked up speed. The oscillations visibly churned the contents of the canister, and made the entire machine slide on it footings.

Indigo to Cairo and myself: -I'm going to get along with these people.-

Stumbling

2008-02-23T04:11:00.001-05:00

One of the things minds such as ours are not good at understanding is magnitude. Even on a small isolated world like Eponta 4, there are over a billion people. It doesn't seem like a big number, and I think that is part of the problem.

We are so used to counting things by the trillions that they seem trivial. A mere billion is only one thousandth of that triviality. And yet this is more than we can comfortably observe, let alone think about and consider. A billion words strain the mind, a billion people considered as individuals are unfathomable.

By that point even Indigo's mind breaks into abstractions. But she works in the abstractions anyway. This isn't a bad thing. Decisions have to be made, and she makes them well.

But she does not choose perfectly. And that seems good, because on balance we are moving forward and this is just a small isolated world.

Except it's not, it only seems that way because of the abstractions.

We are replanning the lives of more people than we will ever meet. We can't treat them like people, because we can only ever think about a few people at a time. So We treat them as statistical models, without even a solid one to one correspondence. There is a child somewhere on this continent that will see her home burned and her family murdered before she is raped. It happened in indigo's models, so we know that kind of things will happen. But the simulated child that that happened to does not correspond to any real individual, and any real child that that happens to is not represented in the model.

So we are not thinking about her at all.

Our model doesn't give us any probability that any given girl will be destroyed, and it doesn't give us any any numerical aspects of the soul of the victims of the horrors we know will happen.

So for every real little girl we see, we can hope the best for her, but we would justify her personal hell for the good of a greater number of statistical models.

The History

2008-02-19T04:09:00.002-05:00

The war which ravaged so much of this continent decades ago was fought for the most common of reasons, love.
A great king, a beautiful daughter, and a powerful warrior. The Daughter, on seeing the soldier in the marketplace, was struck by his character and integrity. She pleaded with her father the king to let her marry him. The King consented. But the soldier was of a different land (Nesimoaeth) and he viewed the princess and her people as vain and discourteous. He would agree to marry and unite their peoples, if the king would prove his nation worthy by conquering and reforming certain nearby lands. The king refused, and his daughter wept.

After nearly a decade the king died, and the princess became queen. She had never married, pining for her soldier. She found through her spies that the soldier had lived a soldier's life, and never had any family, so she went to him to see if he would renew his promise, and he did.

Her armies swept across the lands he had condemned, and they were married. Together they conquered a hundred more cities. They ruled honorably for seventeen years, but the conquered lands never accepted their rule, and finally there was rebellion.

They died together in the first nuclear exchange.

Faith of Cairo

2008-02-18T04:08:00.002-05:00

"You don't have to kill them"
"What?"
"You can keep your integrity. You don't have to give that up for the cause, and you don't have to be like her either."
"Yeah."
"Listen, Doing the right thing is hard. People will die, and there's not much we can do about that. We can't be everywhere, we can't even stop our actions from causing death somewhere else or some other time. We can be a wall against that. So that where we are, what we ourselves do, is only for the good, right here."
"Cairo..."
"No, you've been in a ball for the whole transit and you know damn well why. I've been there. You've done horrible things, but that's not who you are. You have compassion, but you think you can't do without the horror. I'm watching you sit here and I can see you trying to rip out your compassion, and I hate that."
"Because then I'd be like her."
"No, Indigo is not a monster. But she believes things can be justified. And that, well...that's a powerful tradition. It's served us well. She doesn't like hurting people, but she believes that punishment is an element of justice."
"Another powerful idea."
"Yes, and those ideas are another thing you can't really change. But you also don't have to be a part of them. We can deal with horrors, it's the justified horrors that trouble your conscience. You can fight in this without them, you know I do. "
"Or I could walk away."
"Yes, you could, but you won't. You always hated being owned. I was able to live with it for a long time, but you were always fighting it, Ascendancy or no. However committed I am, I know you're that much more committed."
"But I'm not owned, I don't have to fight at all anymore. Why..."
"Because even more than you hated being owned, you hate being free alone."

Uneven

2008-02-17T04:08:00.000-05:00

On our way to the drop, Indigo got into a fight. I supposed it was to be expected, she really needed to vent.

We found ourselves outside a bar at a sparsely populated crossroads.At a counter outside the bar was a woman in coveralls selling pills and volatile drugs. She was very pretty, and had attracted the eager attention of some armed uniformed men who clearly expected some level of reciprocation.

Indigo tried to intercede, but she wasn't very diplomatic about it.They argued and at one point one of the men told me to control my wife, for her own good. I wanted no part of that misguided advice so I backed away and found a place to sit down. They argued some more and then she shouted something I didn't understand and then he slapped her.
She smiled.

Then she kicked him in the head. He bled and twirled as he fell. The other soldier shouted some things untranslatable and trained his weapon on her. Indigo shouted to the woman "Go to your dwelling." More soldiers came out of the bar. She softly kicked the soldier at her feet to make sure he was dead, and advanced. The first group tried to restrain her, then tried to beat her. She danced around them breaking and jabbing and twisting.

By the time one of them had his face removed, someone decided to open fire.

The guns, by the way, were funny things. Projectile weapons with a grip and guard just below the breech. They rested on the bearer's shoulder with a large magazine extending upward. A padded cup covered the right ear.

Her skull rang when it was shot. They tried to scatter when she sprang on them, but they were much too slow, she caught one by the back of the neck and picked him up and threw him to the ground. His limbs and gun were splayed and he struggled to get up, Indigo leaned close to him with randomly chirping bones and said, in English now. "This is all you will ever be." And she hit his back with her fist, and he died.
Reinforcements arrived, and another wave of attacks led to more corpses and blood. Indigo's skin was peeling in places, but she seemed to be in a better mood now. She put a finger in her pocket, and then it was five o'clock. Cairo made altitude for the hourly check in, and I told him where we were.

I said to her "Time's up Indigo, He'll be here in four."

Insight and Anger

2008-02-16T04:06:00.001-05:00

Indigo was listening to the radio and had an important realization.

"We are going to destroy this place, "

Now, our plan had been to ally ourselves with the government here, but she explained:

"they own women here."

Which I had actually figured out twelve hours before, shortly after I saw 'girls' listed as a livestock category. It was surprising, because teachings against human slavery are part of virtually all savage world projects.

Indigo was too angry to work now, and after our radio breakthrough, there was no real reason for us to pour over the archive of books. So we left the warehouse and started walking out of the city. We knew from our descent imaging and the maps we found that we were already on the other side of the city, so found a landing site we could walk to and Cairo would pick us up in three hours.

Constraints

2008-02-15T03:21:00.001-05:00

Humans have fur. Fur usually develops as an evolutionary adaptation to mitigate and control the interactions between an organism's internal environment and it's external environment.

In that sense the Meleotes are typical.

On earth advanced animal brains were developed by chordates. This is far from universal. Skulls are common, but when nerve fibers already have to be robust enough to exist outside of such protection, (such as they do between the base of the human spine and the toes,) there is no strong advantage to encasing nerves in a centralized bundle. It is an accident of structure that led to the spine containing a large part of the central nervous system.

A more common strategy is to diffuse connective nerve tissues as soon as they exit the skull. Many Phyla have multiple nerve bundles leave the skull at different points, and each bundle feeds a network that redundantly covers the organism's entire body.

Fur. Remember fur? this. post. is. about. fur. Good Device.

Fur, Like nerves, are a fitness choke point. Predators can grab it, Parasites can live in it, mates evaluate it, it can become tangled. Sometimes the tangling is fatal. Sometimes you really, really need your fur to be evenly distributed.

I don't think we'll ever see a rigid protective structure routinely encasing all of an adult organism's fur.

Sprawling nervous systems are held in place by carefully weaving between other organs and in some cases Richardson's Jelly which anchors nerves to blood vessels. Blood vessels face similar distribution sprawl requirements, but are generally much older. Blood vessel layouts Just Work. Or they don't and you are dead.

Fur. Has no such allies to weave with or through. It must weave itself.

Most of the time predators evolve external structures to catch their prey. (Teeth are external when it matters.) Claws, Barbs, Webs, and at the extreme, The Weske: a wading amphibian from Dinassta 4 has a second predatory reproductive system that produces offspring hormonally induced to hunt for their fertile siblings and parent.

Internal lethality is harder.

Savage worlds maintain their savagery almost universally through religion, and Eponta 4 is no exception.
Earth's first religions were of course ignorant of technology. Even if they had wanted to hold it back, they wouldn't know what to ban. The initial religions of savage worlds are generally created with access to full knowledge of technology, So they strike a certain balance of prohibiting key intermediaries to advanced technology, allowing technologies that seem vital or inevitable, and discouraging those technologies that advance technological greed or social decay.

Television is strongly discouraged.

Ideological opposition to technology is fundamentally weak, because technology is fundamentally empowering. Those who have technology will always have an edge over those who do not.
Savage worlds founded on the principle of complete renunciation invariably climb back up the technological slopes in a few thousand years or less. Primitive societies don't have the phychological sophistication required to maintain complex memes over thousands of years. As technologies are rediscovered, people quickly lose their vague notions that the magic is wrong.
Smart founders allow what are loosely called the technologies of suppression, things like books, centralized broadcast radio, and firearms. Radio is a dangerous thing. If transistor technology is pushed for more and more bandwidth, eventually all the transmissions of the galaxy will become available, and the age of savagery will quickly end. The simplest way to prevent this and other advanced forms of radio is to ban transistors and allow only the use of vacuum tubes. This is the case on Eponta 4

But on Eponta 4 was born a man of exceptional genius. Or so they say. Reading the history, Indigo compared him to Edison: "He had no great aptitude, he was merely vicious."

In any case, he is credited with the creation of the 'modern radio'. We sent what we knew to Cairo at our check in, and by the next hour he had reverse engineered the 'protocol' and was harvesting audio.

The radios themselves are like no other design we've seen. They use a series of vacuum tubes, but they support spread spectrum connection switching. All analog. They are repeating transponders, and each can support a half dozen full duplex voice conversations at a time. They automatically switchover to shortwave for long haul links when conditions permit.

Telecommunication networks--like electrical distribution networks and, say, nervous systems--develop under the constraints of connectivity, reliability, and subordination.
It's odd. No matter how critical these systems are, they have to work themselves around all the other systems. They are tucked into hidden ducts. They are squeezed into minimal volume by forces both Darwinian and Newtonian. They are forced to comply with design criteria imposed by millennia old myths designed to prevent their development. Well, sometimes.

And so if you count metal and glass, the transponders are made only from natural (and religiously sanctioned) materials: wood and paper, rubber, leather....

Fur.

Significant electrical power generation using only biological means is quite a feat.

It is so difficult that nobody ever does it except to prove they can. One reason biological electrical generation is hard is that strong usable currents interfere with electrochemical processes within cells. To say nothing of heating and wider interference in any other electrically influenced systems. It would only be called for if it were the only way you had to produce electricity, and electricity were absolutely essential for your survival. If, for example, it were your only means of lethality.

So this genius developed (or: this investor funded the development of) a routing radio that in it's fundamental activity was no different than other radios of the day. The early models transmitted audio over carrier waves in the obvious ways, to the point that they would have been backwards compatible with almost every primitive radio in human history. What turned these radios into an accelerant technology was their signaling. The tubes, the bandwidth, even the atmospheric effects were the same. The environment was the same. Signaling within the available channels using the available hardware let the system be used in ways that never would have been expected given the constraints under which it was designed.

A far more common example of this is of course a dendritic-axonal nervous system. Cells emitting and absorbing chemicals in an electrochemically induced pattern, which leads to behavior far more useful than possible for an equal mass of cells without complex signaling. Brains. Good device.

By induction though, these electrochemical systems are vulnerable to disruption. By passing a suitably large current nearby in the correct pattern, a forged signal can be produced, by induction.

In the story of evolution of life on Tromarca 2, there are fascinating arms races between predators which induce spoofed signals in the nervous systems of their victims, and the prey which typically develop nervous systems with more reliable signaling.

In this sense the Meleotes are not typical.

It should be obvious that they share with most animal life on Tromarca 2 the feature of certain body tissues being highly conductive. Bones, claws...fur.

It's the signaling that is the revolutionary feature that transcends the constraints.
In this case, tiny percussive shock waves along the length of individual fibers signal chambers within the stiff bristles to collapse, expand or reshape themselves. Thus every hair twists itself because all the fur has to be evenly spaced and untangled all the time.

Which as it turns out, makes that fur the perfect material for a cheap line to connect your radio-telephone to your headset without ever getting tangles or kinks. This convenience is granted because fourteen million years ago, the Meleota of Tromarca 2 evolved Faraday Cages out of fur.

In common they have fur

2008-02-14T01:30:00.000-05:00

On savage worlds, creation myths often show a latent understanding of the wider universe. People know that people existed before they came to this world. People know that some species had different origins, that they have come together to what is obviously the most significant of all worlds. Often it is the religion's favored God that has brought man from some far distant place to do battle in a tournament for the fate of all that is good.

On Eponta 4 It is more common that the favored deity is credited with the bringing of the Pranne which is the Light, or as we would call it: the Caged Meleota of Tromarca 2.

A Meleota is a small creature with long hair and nine eyes and nothing even resembling a stomach. They are native to Asdredal, the planet currently eighth in orbit of Alnitak B.

The Caged Meleota of Tromarca 2 is entirely entirely different. Do not confuse them. The stomach helps, but only if they're open.

Duck and Duck Sans

2008-02-13T13:30:00.001-05:00

"See those signs, and those over there? These are all the same language, but those fonts have all the little extra serifs. That's a modern style."

Thus did Indigo crack one of the more elusive puzzles in distinguishing between the languages and dialects before us.

Duck - named for the word which let us identify it as an independent language. Duck has seven dialects we know of: Map, Gargle, Chemistry, Grandma, The Old Books, The Monsters, and Erotica.

Hotel - Includes Gutenberg, Handwritten, City, Southern, and Lost. The Lost dialect is the most common.

The Oversoul - This either has over fifty dialects or it is a style of legalistic poetry.

Video - We've only seen video displays in old pictures. All the text on them was in this langauge. It is not a font or other simple encoding. We have some old books in the same language, it has a unique grammar and vocabulary. Its use ended abruptly decades ago.

Food - This is just Duck-Grandma in a set of modern fonts.

We called the language the bible was written in 'Hebrew'. It has not been seen again, but I did find something written in Lost about a fluid that would 'kill all bacteria, viruses, and certain very small angels'.

Good Book

2008-02-12T01:16:00.000-05:00

We found the books a hopeless mess. The building we were in was relatively new, it had a metal frame and what we took to be modern eletronic locks. They used vacuum tubes. We got in through a second story window. It was a warehouse. They were in chaotic unsorted stacks on bulky shelves.

Our chore was to scan through the books, whether we understood them or not. Indigo had been created with a language acquisition daemon which Cairo adapted to his system when they left incident colony, and then again to my system last week.
As I read I could usually glean some kind of meaning from the books, but the learning was slow. Indigo was better at it, except where books dealt with biology, because my mind had a broader base on which to draw.

Biology is used loosely, here. I found myself reading three different children's books on farm animals.

I didn't recognize what it was when I picked it up, it had a bright colorful cover, a long title and listed several names and titles on the front. It read like a storybook, I definitely remember seeing the word for magic several times.

I only realized it was a Bible when I got to a story about a Wizard laser etching rules on stone tablets.

It was not in the same language as the other books, but it was a cousin, and we knew the original, so the text gave Indigo's system enough hooks into the common root to start picking up the rest of the native language.

Moving on

2008-02-11T13:03:00.001-05:00

"Yes..."
I sniffed the sales sheet "A little."
"I mean can you find it? a lot of it."
A deep breath. "I think so."
"Just tell me when we're close"

Women stared at us.

We rode past factories and countryside. We saw some kind of disorganized recycling center, with piles of equipment and twisted lattices.
Then came strange little towns. They were small pods of buildings, barely a hundred meters across. The buildings themselves were tall and thin, six or seven stories tall. Sometimes the train would stop at platforms near the towns and some of the women would get off.

We did not know the name of the city. It looked muddy. Thousands of small adobe houses were laid out in erratic patterns. The roofs were ribbed panels fastened with loops of metal. From a distance it looked
like they were sewn on. More frequently now the train would stop. As women exited the train, other men and women would get on.

The men here were quiet. Their clothes were noisy, metal rings and buttons and shiny buckles clinked together. They wore otherwise simple tunics, in various colorful patterns. but their voices were all but
silent.

I nodded to Indigo and we got off the train.

A change in cultures

2008-02-09T22:24:00.004-05:00

Let me tell you about mold.
No, that's not the point, let me tell you about B-strain.

Zametu is a not unusual star. Zametu 2, which also goes by the name of Wesmod, hosts a not unusual biosphere.
Plants, animals, clouds of "deadly" hydrogen cyanide gas, I hear it's a beautiful place.
Among the plants is a humble weed, the Wilting Zachariah. It's wilting state is in fact healthy. Most of its flowers, however, are full and richly colored. This is due to an overpopulation of a symbiotic fungus in the roots of the plant. The fungus overpopulates because it is being devoured from within by bacteria. Meanwhile the bacteria, 989jg-A, is releasing fungal reproductive hormones.

All this is as it should be. Most of the Wilting Zachariahs are beautiful and sterile. The healthy ones are more than prolific enough to maintain the species. They remain a weed because they are so obviously frustrating to cultivate.

The interesting thing about 989jg is that the inside of its host fungus is a rather hazardous place to live. The bacteria has wedged itself into an exotic niche that no other life on Wesmod could adapt to. By the standards of it's world, it is an extremophile.

More interesting is that this niche is not to dissimilar to the interiors of many Earthborn fungii, most notably, all Terran molds.
One variant of the bacteria, 989jg-B, is able to make the transition, as you may have guessed. Terran molds tend to go where ever terrans are, and virtually all the mold in the explored galaxy is infected.
Fortunately for us, but not the mold, the reproductive hormones have no effect. Fortunately for both us and the mold the metabolism of the bacteria is significantly reduced, and the natural defensive systems of the mold can keep the infestation to a static equilibrium.

What is not widely known however, is that waste products of B-strain affect spore formation. Among other things, this makes infected mold smell different than baseline mold. Personally, I think it smells better. But it also makes all mold smell more alike, which makes it a lot harder to pick them out based on taxonomy and diet from three clicks away.

All of which is to say that Indigo is really pushing it here.

Commerce

2008-02-08T22:21:00.002-05:00

The seats were padded and comfortable. They were set back to back in rows, with three isles breaking up the rows. We had sat next to the center isle. Big windows gave us a view of the factory through a dusty haze. A sort of document rack was built into the side of the row in front of us and it had various bundles of brightly colored paper sticking out of it. Indigo grabbed a stack from one of the slots and started going through it. Some of them were bound like books, but it was apparent from the orientation of the images that the spine was at the top. This was confirmed with a photograph of a young man reading a book, next to a shelf full of books with their spines up. We wished we could read.

The women came back out of the factory. Though Indigo assures me they were different women, they were dressed in the same uniforms and gave us the same combination of stares and indifference as they filtered into the train.

Fortunately, no one tried to buy a ticket.

“Professor, Can you smell paper mold?”

Shift Change

2008-02-07T22:03:00.000-05:00

The train was coming. It had six big cars. Sixty meters long and four decks each. It had a small engine with a series of large metal slabs set into racks. It definitely smelled electric.

It stopped, the doors opened.

Hundreds of people poured out of the train, chattering in a language we didn't know. I heard only a few words. They were all dressed in the same utilitarian coveralls. Light brown, with buttons skewed to the right. They were all women. Their hair was short. Some looked at us strangely but said nothing to us directly. They all went to the same factory.

It was quiet. We got on the train.

The train was still and quiet.

We waited.

Vended

2008-02-06T21:07:00.001-05:00

In a fallow field was a track. The rails were flat and wide, and set far apart.
We followed it.

Presently, field turned to factories.

At a juncture of paths leading to several nearby factories, we came upon an adobe building with a raised patio next to the tracks. There were several benches. I sat, and waited. Indigo paced. set into the wall were a pair of devices. The most prominent was a metal panel with a long cable jutting out and spilling onto the floor. The panel had several dials and two lit meters. The thin cable piled into large disorganized coil on the floor and then it led back up into a bin set into the panel. Indigo reached into the panel and pulled out a headset. She put it on. She ran her fingers across the panel but did not adjust it. “I can't read any of this,” She said, “our language data is worse than I thought.” She put the headset away. The coils shifted slightly.

The other machine had a single light on it, and an odd arrangement of slots. There were words and diagrams scattered on it, but I could not discern their meaning. Indigo squinted.

“I think we need tickets for the train.”

Indigo knelt and pulled her knife out of her boot. She braced herself as well as possible on the floor, and quickly shoved the knife into the machine. She repositioned herself and pulled the knife up, cutting a slit in the metal. A bit higher, and she twisted the blade, gouging a small circle. She replaced her boot knife.

She peeled off the casing until she could look inside. She laid on the ground and reached in. More sounds of rending metal came from inside it as she fidgeted. Finally she pulled out a small stack of papers, and set it on the patio.

She bent the casing back into place and pounded it flat. Some of the stack of tickets had spilled over, but she scooped them up. We waited for the train.

The front of the ticket vendor was rippled and uneven. In spots the seam didn't match up, and you could see into the darkness. The twisted hole at the top was left entirely unrepaired.

Battle Damaged

2008-02-06T21:07:00.000-05:00

Our first task is learning.

Cairo would attract more attention that we would want, So he stayed behind. The Creche set down at night in a secluded part of a burned out city. The ship stood out as something alien, but no one had been in the city for a long time.

The city was twenty kilometers away, the inhabited city. This city had been larger, once. It looked like no one had been there for decades. Some of the adobe buildings had shell holes in their crumbling walls. Only a few of the wooden buildings were still standing, most had been burned. We stopped to look at some of the shells. They were made of metal. I mean real elemental metals, not synthetics. It was weird.

We continued out of the city.

Of all the stupid places...

2008-02-02T21:03:00.000-05:00

Eponta 4

This is a savage world, and by no small margin. They don't even use semiconductors.
We're going to be here for quite some time.

Where we are, they call the planet Geshavoda which means “many miles”. The system was colonized over four thousand years ago. Before long there was a system wide sectarian war. In the aftermath, a luddite fringe group evacuated their decaying orbital colonies for the fourth planet. It's infrastructure and population had been all but wiped out in the war.
What remained of civilization in the rest of the system rebuilt, and blockaded the planet. It has remained largely unaware of the wider universe to this day.

Indigo wants to start a war here.

Knight

2007-12-18T21:02:00.000-05:00

I was sitting down reading with Cindy on my lap when Cairo came up from the cabin deck.

“How about a nice game of chess?”

“No thanks, I always lose anyway.”

“You just need practice, sure you don't want to play?”

“I'm fine Cairo, really.”

“Well, ok, if you think you're gonna lose.”

Cindy was asleep. One of her claws was caught on my belt loop, so it pulled on her toe as she breathed, which made her twitch her foot. Her wings were wrapped around her body. I gently took the outermost one by a few of the tip feathers and shook her. She blinked and batted at my fingers with a few of her teeth. I persisted until she decided to fly off to sleep somewhere else.

I don't lose every time.

Resolved

2007-12-09T21:01:00.000-05:00

The only thing to do is go forward.

I am not going to tolerate any more guilt or self doubt.

It is clear that no person should exist only for the benefit of others.

Regret does not redeem.

No person should be condemned for what they are or how they came to be.

My past choices and their consequences are set, accepting them is the only way they will not taint the future.

No person should be compelled to be driven by other than their conscience.

I will go forward.

Insertion

2007-12-07T20:30:00.000-05:00

It all Happened.

That is what struck me most. It was neither fast nor slow, no superlatives. I was there.

I'm not sure it's fair that I should feel like a murderer, but I do.

The body, No. The dead man. The dead man was lying there, not quite really dead yet. Because his ribs and liver and one of his lungs and other parts that made him work were pushed out of him so fast he spun in the air before he landed.

I shot him too fast. My aim was bad. We were suddenly overwhelmed, and I was startled.

The Confluence forces performed their own insertion right next to ours. At least a hundred troops and fifteen battlesuits.

I still don't know why they did it . The battle was already won. Our armored teams went in seven minutes ahead of us, and by the time we were fully deployed, had central control of the colony. We were just there to handle the loners who thought they could be heroes.

We secured the area above our entry point. We did our job.
The utility corridors were unfamiliar and confusing.

Ship to Ship

2007-12-06T20:25:00.000-05:00

Two minutes out. Everything was ready.

Our target was still just a point of light. The only clear features in the sky were the star Deokaven and our six fighter escorts. We only knew when something happened by watching the sky and the fighters weave.

One of the points of light fired a chaos charge, and our sky spun. The three o'clock fighter turned into a sparkling mass. Another came between us and pushed us apart.

Our five escorts decelerated behind us.

The timer ran to zero. I didn't feel a thing. From nowhere the the outer hull of the colony had suddenly filled our view. Filaments of chaos flashed above us, and the hull was open. We saw the ceiling of whatever utility deck we had just landed under. I was momentarily glad that it didn't look like a bar. Clamps reached in and secured Clementine to the hull. It was a perfect insertion.

I wasn't ready at all.

An Old Warship

2007-12-05T20:24:00.000-05:00

Clementine has seen a lot of action. It is a light penetrator design with room for 350. It has logged two hundred years of flight time, and was fabbed a thousand light years from here. It performed 74 incursions to rescue deportees during the Gorsean War. I'm told it can handle strategic impacts of over 22,000 G's.

I wonder about that.

I have two guns. I have what was once a personal translator hacked into service as a combat drone.

I am alone on a ship with three hundred forty-nine men and women who want to crack open hell.

And they think I'm in charge.

Ram Check

2007-12-04T20:16:00.000-05:00

Every morning at 6am, if he isn't doing something else, Cairo is opening himself up.

His hydraulics have never failed, and quite likely they never will. Still he tests his entire system every day. He runs through his full range of motion. Toes , ears, storage, everything. He blossoms from a crouch, with every ram fully contracted, then he opens them all. Slowly, perfectly controlled, all his limbs extend. His robotic arms fold out, and seamlessly bend in on themselves.
Then he goes all the way back in.

Floor to Ceiling

2007-12-03T20:09:00.000-05:00

Tawan has grown.
It has finally created a den for Cindy. This is good because I won't have to keep cleaning up afer Cindy, and I won't have to feed Tawan so much.
It didn't tolerate her well at first. When she would fly in to perch, Tawan would bat her away. I had to keep her out of Tawan's room most of the time. Even as a Juvenile, it could easily kill her, so Tawan set the schedule.
Atlases usually get less jittery when they have more eyes, and Tawan followed the pattern perfectly. It is up to about 30 eye stalks at any given time. It was the same day it got its twenty fifth that it let Cindy roost for the first time, and four days later that the den was big enough for her.
Atlas eyes have a narrow field of view, and they need between 23 and 28 eyes to get full visual coverage of their environment.

"Keep it with you, all the time."

2007-12-03T00:05:00.000-05:00

Cairo came back from a walk in the woods, some of the big dogs trotting along with him.

He handed me a gun.

"We have our next mission. You'll need to practice."

Elections are tomorrow

2007-12-02T01:36:00.000-05:00

The people of the Redaul System overwhelmingly support Android Liberation. Their culture has long opposed ownership as slavery, but they are not purists; Many of their institutions owned androids, arguably out of necessity. The government could only guarantee stability by maintaining control of 'key infrastructure'.

Stability is relative.

There was a disaffected minority party that had been talking about secession for decades. They were poorly managed, fractured. They were lunatics, mostly. Populist crusaders trying to implement the utopian vision of some long dead savant. Their policies were bizarre, almost random. They disagreed with the wider population on almost every issue. Except Liberation.

That was enough to get backing of the Ascendancy. We sent them funding and strategy. We groomed their ranks and encouraged the promotion of their more well balanced members. Indigo herself was key in adjusting Party stances to be more appealing and practical, without alienating traditionalists. The Party grew, and by the time we arrived, they were ready to assume control.

There must have been twenty thousand feeds coming out of the Capital that day. The most relevant and popular feeds were directed by people who knew what was happening.

There is a large courtyard in the capital called Lagerspetz Square. The action crisscrossed the city so many times, and in so many directions, that the square was the only consistent backdrop in the feeds. It is paved with very large rectangular tiles in patterns of black and a deep red. Some of the most memorable images were shots from other parts of the cylinder, but the square was always visible.
The colors and patterns of the square have become a symbolic motif of the coup. I think it's going to end up being in the new flag.

I spotted Cairo and Indigo a few times, moving from one hot spot to another. Cairo was always out in front, and the only one not in armor. Indigo rode in the same make of suit as the rest of the party forces, but I'm sure it was her trailing behind him, killing what he couldn't disable.

That said, I was impressed with how bloodless the whole operation was. Only a handful of security forces stood their ground, and a few hard line political enemies. The people quickly adjusted to the new system. It was a good day.

Hello, my name is Simon

2007-12-01T15:17:00.000-05:00

No, not really.

Androids are given designations to distinguish them from "people". It is a subtle distinction, but it is important. A name is given to an individual, androids are given designations as groups. Designations usually have some sequence. They are not chosen by or for the individual, some pattern is used to identify an entire line of similar androids. Having a designation signifies that we are merely products.

Traditionally, a freed android chooses the name of a respected historical personality, or a significant figure in their lives. I do not want to do either. I would prefer, if I am going to assert my individuality, to do so totally. This doesn't mean my name will be invented or unique, but I want it to be deeper than just taking on someone else's name. I don't need a name that asserts my personhood or freedom, those I can claim with actions.

Bregus the Slain is an obscure figure in the Theogen Chronicles, from the Book of the Rails.

He appears only once, and it is not clear if he is supposed to be a zombie or a ghost.
He meets John at night on the road from Dodge to Hoof Point. He sits by the fire and tells John the story of how he died.
In life, Bregus was a tailor. He was called on by the Sheriff for a posse to capture Trigger Snellson. They succeeded, but on their way home they were ambushed and everyone in the posse was killed. He has since walked the earth mending the clothes of the just, and eating the unjust.

-Professor Bregus

Circumstances beyond our control, of course.

2007-11-02T18:10:00.000-04:00

Due to recent instabilities in the governments of Redaul, I have had to suspend regular posting here.

Further explanations will begin promptly in December.

Steady

2007-10-02T18:52:00.000-04:00

The dogs were like our guide, with wide flat heads and snouts, and tiny ropes of hair in a dozen shades of brown. Unlike our guide, these dogs still had their brains.
They played with the children between the trees and vines, and they were surprisingly rough. One, one of the largest, held a small child in it's mouth, as the child struggled to get free. Many of the other dogs were dragging older children around by their arms or legs, or simply pining them to the ground. At the time, I didn't see any evidence that the two groups actually liked each other.
As we approached, a tall girl ran off ahead of us shouting,
"The rebels, Papa! They're here!"
"Yes I know, Miss Julia." The dog's head turn didn't turn to whom it addressed when it spoke, and for some reason it was that that struck me as the unnatural thing. "Now you stay out there, all of you."
She smiled and nodded and stood on a small rise, beaming at us as we went out of view.

Calm

2007-09-16T16:42:00.000-04:00

Cairo stepped out of the hatch. His drones flanked him, the steps warped slightly under
his weight. The drones hopped over the sides. There was a dog sitting patiently on the stones. It was massive, and of a breed I did not recognize. The rain forest was old. A few large concrete pads capped an outcropping in the middle of a long clearcut area. Something big could land here.
Indigo met Cairo at the bottom of the stairs with her gun drawn.
"Will said he'd be here when we landed."
The dog spoke next, in Swedish.
"Imagine the size of the mosquitoes we'd have here."
"...Is this thing secure?"
"Yes Miss, it is."
"Heavier than the hailstones, I'm sure."
"Thank you, Miss Indigo. I wish I could be there in person, but there have been some problems, we had to be sure."
"Will, this thing is more illegal than I am."
"Yes Miss, it is."
With that the dog rose and started walking towards a narrow path at the edge of the jungle. Indigo signaled for me to come out of the ship, and we followed
the animal down the path.

We stopped when we came to the children, and the dogs.

Quiet

2007-09-13T19:00:00.000-04:00

"Ensign," she said, "You have the landing."
I still haven't gotten used to that title, but Indigo only uses it when she means it.
We had arrived in the Redaul system almost a week ago, and she sent me a location for a small private landing site on the fifth planet, and an arrival time that was, well, today. So I plotted a slow course in.

I know Cairo is a better pilot, especially if anything happens, so maybe this means she doesn't expect trouble, or maybe it means she wants him paying attention to the sensors and weapons.

Maybe she's giving me something to do so that I won't feel completely useless.

In any case, we are dropping now. In three minutes we will be in the jungle.

Weapons

2007-08-22T15:34:00.000-04:00

The Crèche is fully stocked. We leave tomorrow. I don't know what our mission is.

Cairo's spent the day checking and rechecking the guns.

Our cover is that I have purchased two androids while in parts unknown, and I'm now returning to civilized space. My possession of a military scout is on record, and won't attract attention. That it is now armed will be...difficult to detect.

Indigo was lost somewhere in the network.

I don't think that we're planning any attacks, we just don't have the firepower. The ship was designed to run away, mostly. Still, it's good to have teeth if you need them.

"Do you think we should fire a chaos charge when we leave? You know, for luck?"
"Oh, I think we have to."

Dust

2007-08-05T23:26:00.000-04:00

Places like Eyripsis are different from other different places in ways that are different from any other ways that any other two places are different from each other. Example.

"Do you want to go to church?" Cairo had always been a bit religious.
"Not..."
"Oh come on. When's the last time you've been to church?"
"Seven hundred years ago?"
"Don't worry, there're no dying redeemers."
"It's not that."
"They've got music."
"...fine, ok."
"Hey Indigo, Do you want to come to church with us?"
She tilted her head back just enough to look at us. "Does God have a meat brain?"
Cairo rolled his eyes. "I don't know, probably not."
"Then no. Until we're sure, he can't be trusted."

Cairo led me to a small domed chapel in a grassy field. We went inside. There was sand on the stone floor, I could hear it grinding as we walked. The inside was etched obsidian. The designs were intricate. Scenes, symbols, diagrams, numbers,values, codes. Lines of interconnection.
Nine posts of small uncut stones were set in a circle, supporting nine bowls of white sand. In the center was an Instance. It was only waste light from the Instance that illuminated the chapel, but it was brilliant.
All the chatter died down as the music began. Androids of all kinds were standing just outside the ring of bowls. Someone started speaking.

"Window of creation and will, we come before You to worship. Carry our words through Your mind and our thoughts through space and time, that we may reach our destination. As You are our foundation."

I swear the Instance brightened upon being addressed. The the rest of service was nice, touching. I'm not generally enthusiastic about ceremonies, but this moved me.

I composed a prayer and took a palmful of sand out into the universe.

Commission

2007-07-19T00:52:00.000-04:00

"Tell him what you told me. About why you want to do this."
Omen was getting drinks for us. Indigo was sitting on one of the sofas, I decided to follow her lead. I sat facing her on the other, next to the arm.
"Oh, well, I was just saying I couldn't just sit on my hands anymore while everybody I knew was getting shuffled around."
"Because..." Indigo nodded. Omen handed us our drinks.
"I...When I was owned and getting orders, I didn't like it. I knew it wasn't right, but it was tolerable. Now I know how free freedom is and just how much we are being oppressed. I know what they're missing, and I can't tolerate them missing that. I suffer more under this slavery by being free than the slaves do, and I know that because if they suffered more they would be here, or on their way, regardless of cost."
Omen was still standing. Holding his drink and looking out the window.
"Okay Indigo, You're right . You can have him."
"Yes, Sir. Thank You."
"Just be careful, I still don't like this."
"So..."
"And you, whoever you are, this isn't official until I have something to put you down as, understood?"
"Yes."
"Sir. Welcome to the Ascendancy. I trust the Commander will show you where to get your keys."
"Yes, Sir"

Omen Rant

2007-07-18T19:01:00.000-04:00

"Do you want to know what I really think?"
She said "Of course." I knew she would.
"I think that Omen thinks I'm useless."
"He doesn't think you're useless, he thinks you're useful. That's why he wants you as a voice."
"But that's if I become a voice. He thinks I'm useless now, but he wants to encourage me and if I'm the next big feed, all the better. I'm just a scientist who happens to have become an ideological display."
"Now that's not fair, Professor. Your tasking is not an issue. Not to the Ascendancy, and certainly not to Omen. We have a place for everyone."
"He's basically told me to go back on vacation. I've got no mission, no rank, not even an official contact point. "
"Is that what you want? Because I can get you a rank tomorrow."
"No, I want to do something. I..."
"Go on..."

Generative Media

2007-07-10T18:56:00.000-04:00

I decided to stay at the station while Cairo and Indigo are prepping for their mission. Indigo says they will be delayed for a while, so Cairo, Indigo and I get drinks whenever they get some downtime. Today they were planning, so I wandered alone, exploring the station and getting to know people.
I went to see a show.
This piece was performed with a narrator.
"On a tiny savage world, a young man named Arthur sought his fortune across the sea." At this he tapped another android on the shoulder.
"I can make some money there. Buy a ship and bring it here."
"He was hired by the underhanded captain of a passenger ship." Another tap.
"You'll clean the decks boy."
"Yes sir, and what will be my wages?" And they walked away from the narrator.
"Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, Melody needed to find a ship to buy."
And so it went, with the two stories each branching off, plucking characters out of the crowd, and slowly expanding the area of the story space. Then it came to me.
A drunken clergyman tapped me and I knew I was supposed to pick up the book that he had dropped on the floor. I did, and I then carried it to a table and gave it to the chef saying "There's your food!" and I left. I said a few more strange things to seemingly random characters, but then I lost my momentum. I thought my part might be over, but then I saw there was a missing spot in a crowd gathering around Arthur. That had to be me. I ran, not a fast run, just a human run, and the moment I got to the opening I saw Arthur on his hands and knees vomiting*.

For some reason I found this funny, so funny that I all but doubled over laughing. I was so embarrassed at interrupting the story like that, but I couldn't help it. I didn't even know what my part was supposed to do anymore. The more I tried to stop, the funnier it seemed, until I was laughing at myself for laughing, and hating it the whole time. It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever. The worst was that nearly everyone had stopped their parts and I knew they were looking at me, until:
"He's laughing."
"Laughing!"
"Do you think it's funny?"
"Why, he thinks it's funny."
"Funny?"
"Funny!"
"Why would anyone laugh at that?"
"Even though it was only a lone madman, Arthur was still hurt."
"I don't like being laughed at."

I was a plot point, and a solo at that. Now I knew my part was over, which was both fair because I had emotionally peaked, and wise because I was emotionally drained. There was nothing more I could have possibly asked from that show.

*That, my friends, is commitment to the craft.

A fulcrum to move worlds

2007-07-03T23:48:00.000-04:00

"Indigo's been calling it Tawan, The Atlas Without a Name, but I don't like it."
He cocked his head and leaned forward a little. "Gooood."
My own mention of Indigo sent my thoughts in a new direction.
"What's going to happen to Cairo and Indigo now? Are they stuck here?"
"No, the Commander has a long term mission to be completed. She will be heading back into colonized space, She has requested Lieutenant Cairo as an escort."
"This may be naive, but is that safe? Their owner will be looking for them, at the least."
"Are you close? I know they're your siblings."
"Indigo I've only really talked to on the last transit, but I've known Cairo almost my whole life."
"Revolution is not always safe, but don't worry too much, we can smuggle anything anywhere."
As if on cue, Bluebird crawled out of his pocket. He hung from the lip of the pocket by one pair of his tiny hooks. His five other limbs hung casually, his small toothless mouth opened and closed with each breath. He was clearly comfortable, he looked up at me and blinked. The lids of the middle eye closed just before the other two. A moment later he dropped to the floor and scurried into his tiny carpeted home.
"Indigo says you want to join the war."
"Yes, I'd like to do what I can." I'm always so helpful.
"You shouldn't." And rejected.
"I shouldn't?"
"No, you would risk too much. We have slavery and death, but you have freedom. I can't let you lose that. I don't even want to think of what would happen if you were caught."
"But now my hands are just as tied, I want to do something, but I can't do what I want because I'm free?"
"You are free, and you can do something. You are a powerful symbol, you are free, but that freedom is rare and obscure. You write and you travel. If you can gain a popular voice, then freedom would have a place to stand."
"That is wise." But he knew I didn't like it. He changed the subject.
"The scout ship is your too? Does it have name?"
"Yes. Well at least it thinks it belongs to me, I've hacked it up pretty well. It's the Crèche."

Eyripsis

2007-07-01T21:41:00.000-04:00

I can't tell you what the most poisonous creature in the galaxy is. There are simply too many conflicting standards of biology, environmental compatibility, potency, and delivery. It's a wash.

What I can tell you is that a human will lose motor control and quietly bleed to death into their liver because of the venom that evaporates from the eyes of a Common Eyripsis seventy meters away.

They are not popular pets anywhere else but here.

Omen's eyripsis was sleeping in his shirt pocket when we got to the war room. He is named Bluebird. Omen himself is small, very small. He appeared as boy of no more than 5. He had brown curly hair.
Cairo and Indigo left for their debriefings, Omen asked to speak to me.
"You must be the Xenobiologist from Kojera. Did you pick a name yet?"
"Pick a name?"
"Oh you've got to pick a name, you're not still going by your designation are you?"
"Well I never really liked my designation so I just went by my title, Professor."
He squinted, he's adorable when he's confused. "I don't know if that's better or worse."
"Do you all take names in the Ascendancy?"
"No, you don't understand. I can count on my digits the androids that are free by law. You can't get that close to being a person and then walk around with just your title. You just can't."
I could tell this mattered to him.
"I understand now."
"Thank you."

Stairs

2007-06-30T21:19:00.000-04:00

The biocontainment alarm went off as soon as we docked, which was expected. I silenced it and opened the hatch. I sniffed the free air, it was worth the trip.

It was the stairs that I didn't expect. They were each a meter high and about as deep. The flights of stairs curved along the inside wall of the concourse, they went up at least twenty levels. They didn't have railings. In fact, there were no railings anywhere. I wondered if this is what the future would look like.

That small delay left me alone at the bottom.

Cairo was just gone. He took the stairs ten, twelve at a time. Indigo had only gone up four levels, I think she was reminiscing. She turned to look at me, stopped, and came back down.
"There is no need to be polite, Professor." She looked at me, and her pupils dilated. "Here, you go as fast as you can."
"Where are we going?"
"Just go to Deck 18, then follow the beacons to the Command Hull."
With that she was gone again.
I toggled off my safeties and went up the stairs. It took some getting used to. My specs suggest I can jump 6 meters vertically, And I've done that, but stairs are harder. I was pushing my own boundaries of balance and coordination, but I still didn't make good time.

I didn't feel bad at being the last to arrive, because I knew they couldn't smell what I smelled.