This is the new and improved cousin of the Post-Contact Hilarity thread for all your not-long-enough-for-AO3 contact-with-Earth fanfic needs.
Let me first, establish what is known about the Imperial presence hereabouts:
-
This will obviously be taking place in the post-Spice-Way timeframe to make it possible for people to get there and back. Your local Spice Way interchange is at Izar (ε Boötis), which is listed as 236±8 ly from Earth in reality, but which canon has established as at the bottom of that range. That means you can get there in about a year’s cruising from Izar under standard early-era frameslip.
-
Light being a laggard means that in our 2024 they’re picking up our radio emissions as of our 1796. Which is to say, bugger-all. At least there’s a biosignature to pick up, although the odds favor them finding someone else on the way to finding you.
-
The Spice Way Program started implementation in 8136. The Transveil gate would have arrived no earlier than 8156, maybe 8160. (Add some more time for wormhole links to get to Earth’s neighborhood. Probably won’t be direct, so maybe another five years or so.) Implications: We’re in the future here, guys. The Republic is 900 years dead, and its successor states have been stable for eight centuries. And the Worlds have grown - even if the Transveil itself is the wild and wooly frontier.
-
While I haven’t yet detailed what the Spice Waystations look like, they’re set up as Regional Centers of Interstellar
ImperialismDiplomacy, so they’re sort of like the Conclave Drift in miniature, except the Conclave Drift itself has gotten bigger, so:-
There’s a central structure, which supports a starport on one end and the assembly chambers at the other, with a synapse moon in the center which also houses the archai that runs the place.
-
Orbiting that, there’s a 36-mile-diameter ring. And, yes, orbiting. It doesn’t need to be connected: transit from ring to hub and back again is done via translocation rings, which in this future are now commonplace. It’s designed such that the inner surface of the ring is mostly a big park, open to space above its atmosphere, and the major facilities - much of which are portioned off like the enclaves on the original Drift - are built on the outer surface, facing down, as starscrapers.
-
And so, when it gets full, they just need to scale up by another factor and add another ring. Easy!
-
“Mostly a big park” makes an exception for the viceregal seat of Her Cosmic Grace Tassyn Lochran-ith-Lochran, Great Lord of the Sextant of the Transveil, by Right of Coronargyr and the Word of Their Divine Majesties Viceroy of Its Dominions, Defender of the Way, and Protector of Liberties. (Basically, she rules.)
-
-
The long-distance stargates that support the Spice Way are basically similar to regular stargates, only bigger. If the Ring Dynamics Mark III is nine miles long, these are closer to thirty. Depending on when you get there, there may be one, two, three, or four in the Izar System.
-
The Spice Waystation orbits Izar A. Izar B holds the associated power generation facility and naval base. You don’t get to go there.
In other notes:
-
All discovered worlds get an initial rush of scout teams, corporate acquisitions agents and market scouts, people trying to sell you civilization-uplift services so you don’t burn all your initial influx of hard currency on shiny beads, and the like. Then having got what they want, they go away relatively quickly.
-
In the immediate post-contact period, who will be on Earth will primarily be official representatives (one ambassador and as many consuls as they need to cover everyone they need to deal with, which ain’t many); an ICNN stringer (maybe an intern); possibly starport people if and only if Earth takes that option; bioresearch teams investigating certain curious anomalies; and a few corporate guys who figure out they’ve found some longer-term angle. (Most of these longer-term angles will be primarily worked through compradors and local franchises, whose managers will all learn that the little chunky guy in the pressure suit on the trinet defined their job as “keeping provincial bullshit out of my inbox”.)
- Where they’re going to put the embassy depends on the details of how contact goes, heavily modulated by where they can actually stand being. (For the US, New York is right out, and DC almost as much so; in one post in the old thread I suggest Concord, NH as a possible location for an embassy/consulate, partly as a homage to the Galactic Mileu series. In general, though, never underestimate the ability of the ambassador’s sensitive nose to declare “Hells with it, we’re putting the embassy in one of the prettier parts of Kyoto and the rest of the planet can bloody well come to us.”
-
Less desirable visitors will include a ragged assortment of free traders, adventurers, troubleshooters, and the like. Plus the odd wacky adventure tourist.
- “Adventurers”, in this case, includes Imperial-style “activism”. Gods help you.
-
Getting more than that takes time. It also takes some serious effort to engage with the galactic community. You’re the contactee. Market yourselves.
-
It’s also worth noting that core worlders are, well, Core Worlders. They come from a land of abundant abundance, abundant leisure, and equally abundant smugness. Anyone who’s willing to trog months out into the extra-Periphery and take the emerging-market lifestyle cut for work is either being paid an amount of hard currency or negotiables that would look more at home in a national budget, or has an adequately unusual reason for being there. Consider the magnitude.
-
Link to Abigail Zhang, for future reference.
-
Link to why no-one wants to sleep with you despite the best efforts of bad media SF to convince humanity otherwise, and also don’t forget that the odds are pretty much against you surviving congress with a large number of species, even if we limit ourselves to just the Empire and not the Worlds.
-
Out in the Periphery, your contact with the Imperial Navy is most likely to a destroyer or a couple of frigates out doing routine anti-piracy and flag-showing patrol. A cruiser/destroyer leader may show up rarely. Even if they have to send a gunboat, a DD is more than enough to explain that You Done Fucked Up, a CC at most.
- It is hard to conceive of anything that Earth could make happen with a few centuries after contact that would require an actual plane of battle to show up. (The IN is not in the habit of swatting flies with howitzers, because much like Putin’s court trying to fine Google multiple-decillion-dollars, such confuses “awe-and-respect-inspiring gesture” with “Monty Python sketch”.)
-
Brief summary of things Imperial culture holds in deep disdain and is not shy about expressing it: nihilism, slavery, defaulting, disloyalty, politics, poor taste, cynicism, pragmatism, vulgarity, ugliness, willful ignorance, stupidity, crassness, crudity, irrationality, unnecessary cruelty, carelessness, impotence, cowardice, indiscipline, sneering, envy, failure to respect the world about you (acts likely to make it less true and/or beautiful), and so forth.
Meanwhile, in gentle guidance for contributors, I repeat the last thread’s:
This is a thread for the various hilarious misunderstandings and snarkings that would arise in the non-canonical scenario in which Imperials meet humans.
Note: the hilarious ones, not the ones in which rocks fall and everyone dies.
And say that I don’t insist on hilarity, per se, but I do insist on a light tone (and not grimdark grimdarkiness or its cousin grimdorkiness) even when one is being serious. The future full of grim horrors all too within human comprehension is over there —> beyond the margin. (Also, please do not squick the author. This is not “Post-Contact Grotesquery”.)
Now. Have at it!
isn’t available as a reaction, here it is as a comment. 