Earth Fanfic (Post-Contact Hilarity II)

General Fanfic
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On some minor lighter notes -

I was visiting Royal Gorge in Colorado in the just-past-Christmas days this year, and observed many succulents and other cacti growing by the track. I take this opportunity to observe that this type of plant will be of particular interest to the biology-focused scouts: Eliéra being a cooler and wetter world than Earth, in general, their greenlife ecosystem is less rich in this particular area.

I was also watching a video this morning demonstrating just how nice it is to make pancakes in a silver frying pan. Silver, you see, having tip-top thermal conductivity and as such tends to lack hot-spots and other products of uneven heating, leading to deliciously smooth and even pancakes.

Of course, silver is a precious metal.

Of course, there, silver is a cheap precious metal, so there are probably sets of silver pans in every kitchen.

You can see where this is going in a post-contact world, can’t you?

“Sir,” said the US customs agent, “this is the tenth time I have seen you this year, and every time you have brought a second suitcase full of frying pans with you. How many pans can you possibly need for personal use?”

(Customs duty, you see, is determined based on the customs value of the imported goods, which is normally determined based on the free-on-board [invoice] value of the goods in question. Of course people are going to arbitrage the shit out of this, even if they do have to remelt the silver themselves.)

Why pans? Well, they could just buy cheap precious metals by the pound at the ingotterie, but this obfuscates things just enough to keep the good times going a few months longer before Congress wakes up and passes the You Cannot Have Nice Things Act.

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See also Valar Atomics.

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Suffice to say I think we’re dancing around the main point both of us want to make, in that the key (and most difficult) steps are
(a) finding those few who wish to maximize something other than suffering, and
(b) preventing the rewards of positive-sum activity from being fed right back into sh**-maximization.

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My baseline scenario assumptions, things I figured would be pretty inevitable, include:

(1) Every already locally-established Ecological Protectorate gets a quick and discreet staff evaluation for (a) competence, (b) rationality, (c) actual commitment to ecological protection, and (d) exophilia. Same for zoos, botanical parks, seedbanks, biobanks, strain collections, cheesemongers, herbalists, bioinformatics repositories, etc.

(2) Protectorate ownership / management / key staff that pass quality control get rapid contact and access to a ton of resource management tools (smartdust, rapid sampling/archival tools for genomic, paragenomic, phenomic, symbiomic, microbiomic, and [when applicable] cognomic data, scientific interchange…) in exchange for the polite and discreet presence of wasp-sized murderbots preventing violations of the protectorate.

(3) Protectorates salvageable by a few key changes in personnel get the attention of folks seconded from Misdirection & Subtlety, then as (2).

(4) Protectorates not salvageable in such a straightforward manner are treated with the null hypopraxis, followed by a not-so-subtle suggestion that the fait accompli be regularized with a long-term management contract.

(5) Places that very obviously should be protectorates and are not get the null hypopraxis without such delicate niceties, and quite possibly with mercs hired by the bioarchivists to kick the butts of any vociferous objectors.

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My main point is actually just, to reiterate, “why would they bother?”

They look at a vast region (sweeping hand gesture) of Earth and see four billion obstacles with legs walking around. Now, sure, they could expend a lot of time and effort[1] in searching for the Reasonably Alignable Unicorns in that zone; or they could just shrug and solve their problems with the reliable contractors they already have.

(One might say “well, that doesn’t help the locals”, but I cannot possibly understate how little the Empire cares about that per se.)

There is also, I suppose, the issue of interplanetary logistics if they happen to need a lot of people, but that is easily solved by talking to, say, China and saying “we need to hire a million people[2] who understand the rule of law and the obligation of contracts and whose cultural foibles don’t make us want to spork our own eyes out, and in exchange we’ll give you some technological goodies and a diplomatic coupon book, what say?”

To sum up, and outwith the non-human biological reasons where this started, I can think of exactly two groups with an interest in the Africa/Middle East region from the Imperial perspective:

  • the Galian desk at Admiralty Intelligence, which is perfectly aware that the Theomachy likes to wear local monotheist fanatics like a hat until the time comes to sacrifice them all for the advantage of the Pure and the greater glory of the Purest; and
  • IN logistics, who need to resupply wandering patrol frigates which occasionally like to lob some KEWs at terrorist training camps or asshole groups like the aforementioned[3].

  1. Which, in my opinion, includes having to do a big colonialism. ↩︎

  2. That this almost necessarily ends up sending back a million primed meme grenades when the contract is over which actually might lead to a cultural shift in a favorable direction is gravy, but still not the point of the exercise. ↩︎

  3. The IN tolerates this because it’s better than most other things a bored frigate might get up to when it’s a long time between port liberties. Besides, it’s good for relations with everyone whose good opinion the Navy actually cares about having. ↩︎

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On a note specifically here, incidentally, I want everyone to take a moment to think about what the Ministry of State and Outlands really wants. I mean, they’ve been doing this for a long time.

Young, rambunctious countries which have not yet attained enlightenment often see diplomacy as another battlefield in which one can posture and shove and plot to get ahead, even as everyone else does the same.

The Ministry, though? Oceans rise, empires fall, but the eternal Game means that what State and Outlands treasures more than anything else is the ability to pick up the terminal and speak to someone reasonable who can solve the little problems immediately, and can solve the big problems over a few nice, civilized diplomatic lunches and a cup of tea.

As such, if they find themselves in the timeline where they’ve managed to persuade Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore to come together, found the Greater Pacific Alliance of Delightfully Civilized Peoples, and keep the rest of the planet in line with techno-economic advantages and/or big honkin’ space guns such that the Empire rarely has to deal with anyone else, the Ministry considers that an epic win by its standards.

(Worthy of the Yellow Gold Tea Buds, perhaps…)

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Oh yeah, all they’d need to do is slip some easily-reproducible and relatively subtle YGBM Hacks into online versions of various holy texts, and you’ll pretty quickly have a massive diplomatic kerfuffle at best, assuming that the Empire sees deprogramming the affected groups as worth the cost, as opposed to writing them off altogether.

OTOH, I wonder if some of them would consider it to be a self-solving problem, and only intervene insofar as is required to avert (further) major environmental damage. That being said, I doubt that selling them the tools to wipe each other out with minimal damage to the environment would be looked terribly kindly upon?

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Fortunately for the entire galaxy, the Theomachy doesn’t have access to that kind of technology. (It turns out that being a bunch of slaving totalitarian theocrats with an extremely rigid dogma and a dubious grasp on the nature of reality doesn’t do a whole lot for your technological progress. Funny, that.)

Thus, they tend to stick to old-fashioned methods like appeals to presumable cultural/religious commonalities, bribes, lies, and the odd discreetly slit throat.

Ciseflish business ethics hold, by and large, that if what you have is a market filled with the brutish and uncivilized and worst of all entropic, then you might as well reap whatever profit you can from the situation in order that some good will come of it, if not by it.

(Imperial consensus morality as a whole considers this often to be “a mite on the side of bad taste”, but can’t actually find anything wrong with it.)

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I suppose that that would make for even more of a case for ‘if they let themselves get hoodwinked by the interstellar equivalent of the village idiot, is there even any hope for them as a species at all?’ With the hypothetical YGBM Hack situation, at least, one could argue that it was a complete Outside Context Problem for them. Mundane social infiltration and subversion, on the other hand?

Assuming that one or more major Earth religions do get significantly if not totally subverted… which, depending upon the reactions of other Earth powers, the Empire might consider to be something of a self-solving problem. If, admittedly, one where the ecological damage thereof would require significant mitigation.

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So, there’s going to be Imperial spooks watching the place, and IN Frigates etc making an occasional port visit to do their annual functional checks of the KEWs and reload.

Think the IN frigates might be willing to take suggestions for places the semi-locals are might want the IN to use as a backstop for their testing?

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Is the Theomachy actually able to successfully manipulate foreign monotheists?

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Bear in mind that I said local monotheist fanatics.

Specifically, those who the Galians can manipulate through their common culture interests: super-oppressive social structures, ridiculously macho patriarchy and the accompanying misogyny, strong antihedonism and cultural paranoia, totalitarian aspirations, obsessions with purity and ideological conformity, belief in the redemptive quality of violence, burning resentment against the rest of the universe - and, in the case of the manipulatee, ohai space guns.

So susceptibility varies by monotheism. The Galians are best at manipulating those which are relatively close to the Galian pattern, because at least they understand them. For the more benign sort (which the Galians would dismiss as pathetically weak, simply because they’re more benign), all they can get a handle on is the angriest and least stable of the lunatic fringe[1]. (Not that they’re above using them to make trouble.)

Also… well, it depends what you mean by successfully.

They usually hold together well enough to be a pain in the ass to anyone nearby, which is one definition of success, I suppose.

On the other hand, it’s not like both partners in these arrangements aren’t just waiting for a convenient opportunity to stab these fucking infidels in the back the moment they stop being useful.

On the gripping hand, the Theomachy does sometimes make genuine converts, especially in times and places of instability. (They just don’t tell them that they’re basically selling themselves into the Galian slave-caste for the next several generations.)

It’s more, per the above, a case of “people seduced by the Galians are generally people with the same Asshole Complex as the Galians, so to hell with them”.

Of course, AdmInt and ExSec prefer to head this sort of thing off before it becomes a problem, so if things are working right, it should just look like “oh, look, some troublesome people have mysteriously died in terribly embarrassing accidents that somehow cannot be connected to anyone”.

But there are only so many resources to devote to minor Peripheral worlds…

  1. Mainstream Catholicism, say? Not a Galian target. But if cases of Galian agonizers start showing up in “fundamentalist” cult compounds, no-one should be surprised. And, of course, outfits like IS/ISIL/ISIS/Daesh are positively ripe for this sort of subversion. ↩︎

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So, that would mean that, in the initial situation that I posited (involving a dubiously acquired YGBM hack) the Imperials would be marginally less unsympathetic?

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Surely. You don’t get to choose badly when hit with a YGBM. It pwns your brain.

On a technical note, though, don’t forget that YGBMs are a mostly theoretical class of cognoweapon, because it’s very difficult to pass a memetic payload through limited sensory bandwidth and the nature of cognitive exploits.

That’s why the known examples are things that pass little ideas or memelets, like the Andreth-Calcië emotrophic symphonies, the Out-of-Mind visual textures and their offshoots, the Citizen Nondescript bioshells and the Forget-Me-Do, and the Must-Have-It box, and some general-case YGHMs.

Passing a complex memetic payload, never mind an entire memeplex, through one is the sort of thing that requires a friendly god if it’s possible at all, and suffers from the Grifter’s Law of Complexity[1]. No-one’s going to be producing workable believe-my-theology YGBMs.

…and as a side note, most theocracies (as distinct from theologies) hate memetics. You aren’t supposed to look behind the curtain.

  1. The more parts to the con, the more likely one of them won’t fit. ↩︎

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Was rereading, and realised that there is an international Earth law that prevents someone from selling a torpedo to an orca! It’s actually the Dangerous Goods shipping and storage regulations. There is a section for torpedos. The orca in question would need to have the proper handling permits or be under the direct supervision of someone qualified.

I can also imagine an Imperial reading through the DG code[1] and deciding these laws might be a bit different to the comparable ones in the Empire but they do have a reasonable basis. And being willing to pay the appropriate fine for misproper handling of hazardous substances.

  1. much of which is metaphorically written in blood ↩︎

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I suspect that the Imperials would then work to get said orca(s) trained and qualified for the handling of Dangerous Goods.

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That’s fine, the orcas are possibly more responsible than a quarter of the world’s navies. But I wish to be assured they won’t accidentally blow up anything they do not intend to, like any curious calves in their pod.

And preferably that they will not use the torpedos on any baleen whales they are hunting. That might take a much longer history lesson on overfishing and natural resources and “no seriously we did this and look how it went badly wrong, please try to make some new mistakes instead of repeating ours”.

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Insofar as historical practice has declared the US the Great Satan, the Soviet Union the Lesser Satan, and Israel the Little Satan, I hereby declare that in the post-contact world the Empire shall assume its rightful title as the Humongous Space Satan.

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That depends on who wins the “energetic debate” in Iran. Hopefully the Persians win and the whole “great Satan” bullshit dies out.

But given who would be giving the label, I suspect the Empire would take the title with pride.

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I also suddenly suspect that anyone known to actively study the creation of YGBM hacks is on a minimum of six different No Such Agencies’ watch-with-eagle-eyes-and-err-on-the-side-of-cautery-if-they-look-to-be-succeeding lists, because that kind of tech kinda feels like it’s one minor containment breach away from becoming a galaxy-sized Problem.