Earth Fanfic (Post-Contact Hilarity II)

General Fanfic
342

"Okay, this was back…fifteen, twenty years ago. Back when the first *Constitution-*class heavy cruisers were coming into full deployment. US Navy was doing the whole ‘forward operating in strength’ thing, which meant at least a division of Independence-class light cruisers, a full group of destroyers, and support ships in strength. We were operating coreward and that meant a lot of gypsy ships and crews that needed rescuing, pirates needing to be shot, slavers needing to be nuked, that kind of thing. A-gangs and machinists and snipes working on getting some utter rust buckets actually able to fly towards a station where they could get fixed-or salvaged for the scrap value, that kind of thing.

"We’d picked up-for some reason-five Imperial ships, namely two destroyers, a light cruiser, a log tanker and a log hauler. For nearly six months, we were operating in close company, often covering each other when things got bad, making friends and getting rid of enemies.

"But six months-no matter how good the shipboard food is, how good the porn slinkies are, no matter how much you try and drill everyone to a frazzle…you need some time off and to blow off some steam. So our little fleet docket at…Mazaret Station, I think. Yea, Mazaret, the main station in planetary orbit. Everybody would get at least forty-eight hours leave if they weren’t restricted to ship.

"Bunch of the guys from the Lex and some from one of the Imperial Navy ships found a bar and decided to spend the first day off-ship getting drunk, swapping space stories, and seeing what sort of things they could do within forty-eight hours and still have pay left in their pockets. Unfortunately…a whole bunch of Vonnies came in, crew from a docked heavy cruiser from one of their fundie worlds and decided that they were going to start some shit with the Imperials there.

"What they didn’t know was that the Bosun was escorting some new spacers through their first leave at a foreign port and realized that this was going to go bad fast. He comes up, and as he’s coming up, he’s on his plants to call the Lexington. I’m OOD because I wanted to have at least twenty-four hours uninterrupted time without dealing with my head of section and he’s calling me to get the Shore Patrol over before there’s an incident.

"By the time I’ve got Shore Patrol and telling them where to go…there’s the incident. The Vonnies start trying to pick a fight. The Bosun, who was sober and nearly a foot taller than them, steps in between and is making it clear that a bar fight is Not Happening Today, go find another place to drink. One of our sailors has a friend in the Marines and calls his friend in Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, along the lines of ‘oh shit, we’ve got a nasty fight brewing.’ One of the Imperials calls their OOD and the OOD sends some of their espatiers over to try and break this fight up as well.

"Senior Vonnie there, clearly whatever is two sheets to the wind for them, takes a swing at the Bosun. Bosun drops him with a one-two-three combo and the bar brawl is on. Imperials don’t draw weapons, thank God, but otherwise the fight escalated and one of the Vonnies called for help from their crews and now it’s a five-way race between the Marines, the espatiers, the Shore Patrol, the Vonnie crews, and the local security teams.

"Marines win the race. A full and not at all sober platoon shows up and they stop just long enough to start yelling at places to close their doors, grab anything remotely club-like (including half a park bench…don’t ask me how) and wade into the fight. Vonnie crew gets their next, tangles with both the security teams and the Marines, then the espatiers show up-sober, ready to fight, and with twitch guns.

"By the time the Shore Patrol gets there…just about everybody is injured to varying degrees. Eleven dead, including five Vonnies without stacks so they’re permadead. Bar’s wrecked, couple of places got looted (not, I might note, by our people or the Imperials), and we’ve just had an international incident.

"Everybody’s recalled from leave and anyone drunk was confined to quarters until they sobered up. Manually, no meds other than pain meds. We spent nearly eight days with the depositions, Captain’s Masts, one court-marshal (Vonnie was clearly down for the count when the Marine stomped on his neck, found Not Guilty but spent thirty days on bread and water and basic rats), fixing the bar and the area, and in general trying to keep everyone from getting banned from the station. The local authorities made it clear that they wanted the Vonnies to get out and get out now-and were more than willing to use the station PD array to make that clear.

"Didn’t get banned, but we had to pay one hell of a lot of money for damage.

“Oh, and we had one wedding as well. Imperial and one of our Marines-the Imperial saw her do an epic barbed wire off one of the poles in the bar and she pretty much proposed to her on the spot after doing some background research.”

343

"So I’m not saying that human-kaeth relationships are impossible, but I will presume to offer some advice:

"One. Before even suggesting any intimacy, get yourself to an augmentery, and buy literally every heavy milspec bone, muscle and skin weave they have on the menu, along with full joint and structural cartilage augmentation. Yes, the heavy kind that makes you look crocodilian with all the armor they’re packing under your skin. They’ll probably think you look better like that anyway.

"Two. Part of a kaeth wedding is being tested for your strength, honor, and worthiness to join the sept. This is not an optional part of the ceremony. Budget at least six months in the hospital after the ceremony - assuming you took my advice in part one - and for gods’ sake don’t try and sign yourself out early to go on your honeymoon. You’ll never survive it.

“Three. Remember those big, burly brothers of hers you saw at the ceremony? If you haven’t fully committed yourself to the exotic offworld notions of loyalty and monogamy, they aren’t who you have to worry about hunting you down. But they are the faces you’ll see in the background of the consequences, handing your blushing bride the power tools and taking bets on which part she’ll slice off next.”

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344

“She called off the wedding. At least before I got all the big mods.”

“Why in the hell did that happen?”

“Her family met my family and she realized that my family was crazier than hers.”

“How in the crucified fuck is your family crazier than a kaeth family…”

“They’re from Florida. Paseo County Florida, the part of Florida when they look at Florida Man and go 'man, that’s tame.’ I enlisted to get away from them.”

“…ah. I can see that.”

345

In today’s news: well, we’ve now got the seeds of a lovely religious conflict to throw in to this splinter 'verse, now that with Magnifica humanitas the Pope has firmly put the Catholic into Orange Catholic Bible.

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Being reminded this morning of our current President’s unfortunate habit of directing personal insults at female reporters, I am wondering and speculating about what might happen when this intersects when she’s a representative of a proud and ancient civilization whose response is to challenge him (on live television) to prove his words in the traditional manner. Sword or pistol, sir?

(Shortly thereafter followed by a call from the embassy to make the necessary arrangements. “We understand that New Jersey at dawn is traditional.”)

(I ran this past an AI this morning. Its depiction of State, Defense, and the media in general losing their ability to even nearly killed me with laughter.

Proposed Onion headlines:

PRESIDENT BRAVELY DECLARES HE WOULD HAVE TOTALLY WON ALIEN DUEL IF SECRET SERVICE HADN’T STOPPED HIM

ALIEN ENVOY “DEEPLY CONFUSED” BY HUMAN CUSTOM OF INSULTING PEOPLE WITHOUT EXPECTING TO BE STABBED ABOUT IT

STATE DEPARTMENT CONFIRMS NEW JERSEY NOT OFFICIAL DUELING GROUND OF UNITED STATES, DESPITE OVERWHELMING CULTURAL EVIDENCE

But still, let’s see what the natural intelligences can do.
)

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Gotta say, your commenters might be out of a job, I can’t top that

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“No, this isn’t the official duelling ground, just like Parth isn’t the official Legion recruitment centre. New Jersey happens to be the place where more of the local population expresses an interest in duelling. We’re not going to declare an official duelling ground because don’t want people travelling to duel. Most prefer to handle that locally.”
~ a very done member of the State Department, who would not necessarily object to seeing a politician stabbed somewhere painful, but who refuses to be responsible for the resulting paperwork

349

So my dishwasher went thunk at the start of the week. Not the good sort of thunk, the bad kind. The one that makes you open it as quickly as possible because you’re afraid that you’re brand new Empire-made dishwasher is about to break or is breaking something.

Ignore the fact that it’s barely a year old and shouldn’t be making those kinds of noises…so I pull out my phone and fire up the connectivity app for all my devices. Before I can even scroll to the dishwasher error message, my cell phone rings. It’s the appliance company that made the dishwasher, the fridge, and the stove and they’re calling to schedule an appointment for a technician to come out. Not because the dishwasher broke…not immediately, mind you…but because there was a part issue and they were going to replace that part.

And according to the error message, that’s the part that broke.

I schedule an appointment for tomorrow before lunch and wash all the dishes by hand. Time and tide doesn’t wait for dirty dishes.

At 11:03 exactly, a nice panel truck pulls up in front of the house and one of the Imperial Space Elves gets out and a dozen work spiders come out the back of the truck. The technician’s name is Eric and he was human before he got this job-branding and the company health plan resulted in him working in an elf body during business hours. He came in with the spiders and in less than a half hour they not only fixed the dishwasher, they also did PCMS on all of the company’s appliances, replaced two parts in the refrigerator that needed replacing, suggested which appliances they could replace next based upon usage and upcoming deals (probably the lowest pressure sales pitch ever, almost an anti-sales pitch), and cleaned up completely after themselves.

Oh, and dumped the trash as well.

10/10, wouldn’t have something break but if it does, I definitely want appliances from this company just on the basis of customer service alone.

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350

So I can mostly buy this one. Someone’s got to be customer for the one-in-a-billion purchase that turned up a lemon. Although it’s weird that somehow they got two. (“Can we get a picture for the company newsletter? And one of whatever the heck you washed in this?”)

Hell, I can even buy “company health plan”, as this is almost certainly a product from Roselle Better Living, and the Min Rosell Combine Mercantile practically pioneered the comprador/franchise model that keeps the messy details of foreigners with a quasi-indenture fetish and a strange love for non-fungible consideration in kind off the desks of the Rosell-clan.

But then…

Transspeciesism: Not Even Once

Oh, no, he didn’t!

Transspeciesism is a big, big social taboo everywhere in the Worlds, and doubly so when it’s also outside your cultural sphere. (And when I say big-big, I mean it in the “isn’t illegal, but doesn’t have to be” sense.)

Because species, you see, have reputation. And they have an interest in protecting that reputation. All sorts of stereotypes[1] kick in when people see pointy ears and an attitude, and the rightful owners of such are well aware of how those might be leveraged - in a heinous case of passing-off - by assorted grifters and other unsavory types.

They are also well aware of what a sufficient population of Johnnys Somali[2], TikTok “influencers”, and the equivalent of those assholes who are “trans” just long enough to carry out rape sprees inside women’s prisons could do to their precious reputational asset.

I’m not going to say it never happens, because there are a few tiny exceptions carved out: emergencies, long-term spouses in interspecies marriages, and people who have lived in and internalized the species-culture for long enough that they’re functionally indistinguishable from the genuine article and can reasonably be said to have earned it.

But outside that? Find yourself a suitably hinky black clinic, for one, 'cause the reputable guys won’t touch that with a barge pole outside the tiny exceptions. Then, depending on exactly which species you have so offended[3], prepare for severe rep-net penalties and an endless stream of duels, assassins, and the odd person who will steal your marble and instantiate your mind-state in an Aldebaranian sea-slug for the next century or two to give you time to reflect upon your poor life choices.

tl;dr: <Wilhelm>

  1. And I remind you once again that stereotype accuracy is one of the very few incredibly well confirmed results of social science. ↩︎

  2. I assume this pluralizes like attorneys general or asses hole. ↩︎

  3. And if the answer to that question is “linobir”, that friendly crowd of your new conspecifics who just invited you to a clambake? The first thing they didn’t tell you is that you’re the potato. The second thing they didn’t tell you is that you’re gonna be served mashed. ↩︎

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(I am also quite amused that a random web-search click on “pointy ears and an attitude” sent me to a deep well of corgi pics. On brand, I suppose.)

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“Oh mate. That’s not an ‘elf’ body. Sure, it’s an ‘elf’-made body, but that’s nowhere near the same thing. They have a hundred-odd species they grow spare bodies for on the regular, including the musical crystal types.[1] They’re hardly likely to just hand you one of their premium bodies as a health benefit.”

“But I’ve got pointy ears and everything!”

“You have pointy ears because that’s what they expect. But you certainly don’t have everything. I’ll prove it— stick out your tongue.”

“Wha daf dat haf ta dou wif aniding?”

“It’s red. Which is standard for humans— but not eldrae; they bleed blue.”

“I thought that was just to keep from squicking me out.”

“Ohhhh mate, you really don’t get it. That blue is way, way more than just a different pigment —but I’ll skip the xenobiology lesson. They took the public domain human-genetic template and threw in some easy splices for robustness, immunity, and interfacing with their equipment. Probably the pointy ears were part of a hearing upgrade package.”

“So… “

“You’re an upgraded self, but not an upgraded elf.”

  1. Which is a fair description for someone who not only has never seen an galari, but only knows of their existence from by-lines. ↩︎

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353

The impression I got was that they’d discovered a supply chain issue. Doesn’t even have to be malicious or fraudulent; I could see local products being made from local materials, and when it comes to steel made from asteroidal material there’s going to be a fun teething period with “we didn’t even know that impurity could do that!” discoveries in material chemistry to explain why it wasn’t tested for.

Basically, the same reasoning that sometimes a batch of aircraft parts or industrial bearings or other small run, low tolerance margin components get abruptly yanked when a previously unknown issue is discovered.

354

You’d think that being a foot shorter and much pinker would have clued him in.

355

Ah, yes. Let’s hope it’s some seriously obscure chemistry, or someone’s having that real awkward conversation.

“You know what the supply chain is? It’s the chain I go get and beat you with ‘til ya fix my ruttin’ supplies!”

  • Jayne Cobb, purchasing manager

And other variations on the specifications dance.

(Got to love clashes in business cultures - I actually have a whole thing in process about that. Still, at least it wasn’t as bad as the misunderstanding about the implications of “human resources” as terminology…)

356

I’m thinking stuff like a paper I once read on some interesting organic reactions that went weird at one particular laboratory and couldn’t be replicated elsewhere, but could be replicated in this one building. They eventually tracked it down to low-parts-per-billion airborne contamination from nearby construction site that was putting tiny amounts of dust on their glassware that turned out to be catalysing a reaction.

And nobody had looked for that sort of stuff in any of their quality control, because what the absolute fuck? But once it was unveiled it was exploited into new nanoscale catalysts.

But that seems like the sort of thing that could pop up in new markets. “We didn’t have any idea we should have been checking for this sort of thing, this is a completely new problem for us”. Ignorance more than incompetence.

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To be fair, the shell is over six feet tall. And if the blue-blooded Kree can have pink variants, why can’t the elves?

(This not being a universe within the Marvel world-sheaf, the logic axioms here might not be fully sound.)

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I merely observe that despite human enthusiasm for the let’s-see-how-close-to-the-line-we-can-get-without-going-over-it game, no-one there’s had any patience for it for, oh, the entirety of recorded history.

(Watch your pillows.)

Edited to add:

It occurs to me that the real people you need to watch out for here are the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate, Gilea & Co., and the First Mercantile Bank of Ólish, all of whom are acutely aware of the chunk of the galactic economy that rests upon the Imperial reputation for dictum meum pactum and pacta sunt servanda and absolute commercial probity (or, depending on how you look at it, the full faith and credit of the trans-ciseflish metaclan) that people have become used to relying upon.

And thus what havoc a less than well-intentioned grifter (or more likely thousands of them) could wreak by faking an Imperial identity in the Expansion Regions, in the band where such reputations are easy to believe and harder to verify.

And thus of the magnitude of the crisis of confidence that might result if people stop believing in said full faith and credit, etc., even just regionally.

Dodeciads of basis points, possibly even more! Capital flight, defaulted contracts, factories sitting idle, closed businesses, freight rotting at the dockside, hard-working contractees not being paid, empty shelves, shortages and losses living together… mass hysteria!

(They may not have special ops teams or sneaky assassins[1], but what they do have are vivid memories of the Great Slump and certain historical events on Ólish that don’t have proper names yet, a steely determination not to have that happen again, thanks so much, and essentially all the money to ensure it with.)

  1. Although I wouldn’t count on it. ↩︎

359

I just found myself having an exasperated, one-sided conversation with my washing machine. “Yes, I know you’re beeping to let me know something is wrong, but could I have slightly more information please?”

Presumably, the Roselle Better Living appliances will be happy to assist this sort of polite request, instead of having the user attempt a variety of things in the hope one works.

(I’m still not sure if the load was distributed unevenly causing the drum to give wonky readings, or if the door wasn’t sealing correctly. But either ruffling the load or scrubbing the rubber seal a bit seems to have fixed the plaintive beeping.)

360

Presumably.

The original model they cut down, certainly, will have the built-in diagnostics that characterize Imperial designs in general, which will go all the way to providing user-friendly walkthroughs and augmented-reality diagrams of what to do to fix the problem, including where to put the replacement part that’s already on its way, if needed.

The question’s just how much they cut the systems down in serving the export market, which in turn depends on what the visiting market makers thought of the local customer base (and how high-end a model you bought).

There’s almost certainly a decent amount that can be cut down, the core market tending to like, say, cars which let you upload python scripts to the engine management computer in real time, but still, one hopes they didn’t take one look at our “Check Engine” lights and conclude that Earth consumers obviously would prefer the anoetic models.

(There’s a standard and totally not at all bitter joke thereabouts among the simplification engineers that all too many people - or at least foreigners - want a two-function user interface: one blue button labeled “Do The Thing” and one red light labeled “Can’t”.)

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In today’s RL discourse discoveries: that people who hate space colonization and immortalism really want you to argue with them, and throw major tushytantrums when they receive only a dismissive shrug and a cheery “Crawl in the dirt and die, then!”

Applications to post-contact conversations would be left as an exercise for the reader, but honestly, who among you needs the exercise? :grinning_face:

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