Post-Contact Hilarity

General
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This thread needs an established character, I ween, so I give it one:

This is Abigail Zhang.

Abby works for the State Department. She’s a diplomatic facilitator for visitors from the Empire.

It might be thought a little odd that a group whose total representation on Earth would fit aboard a single medium-sized spaceliner - and whose population in America has yet to break two digits - would need a dedicated diplomatic facilitator, but, she thinks, that’s only among people who haven’t met them.

But when someone flagrantly ignores local building, employment, and various other regulations on the grounds that they’re the dumbest thing they ever heard, or feels the need to educate the police on courtesy, or hands out non-FDA-approved medical biotech like candy, or resurrects American megafauna without consulting with anyone first, or tells Congress that while they aren’t technically here to destroy their way of life, they won’t exactly mourn if it happens accidentally, or rescues puppies from a now on-fire research lab on the grounds that they always take the side of bitches over sons-of-bitches, or sells radiothermal generators without a license, or accidentally reads classified files because sufficiently weak encryption is indistinguishable from no encryption, or when NASA’s/SpaceX’s extremely expensive starflight consultant takes a nighttime walk which ends with a few dozen local lowlives chopped into gangbanger hamburger, or any of the other half-dozen incidents that happened this last month, Abby’s there.

(Rapidly accumulating enough frequent flier miles to go interstellar.)

Valiantly smoothing ruffled feathers, talking down prosecutors, organizing coverups, and ladling out all the bullshit that a very expensive legal education has equipped her with. For national security, For the greater good of the country. And in the interests of not starting an interstellar war, no matter how eager those idiots in Congress sometimes seem to have one.

And her bosses still won’t let her put “Associate of the Apocalypse” on her cards.

Abigail Zhang, ladies and gentlemen. Buy her a drink. She needs it more than anyone else on the planet.

(Among other things that she may be covering up is the off-books import of a shit-ton of alien stress pills.)

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…the idea of the Dragoncrest showing up in this universe (i.e. a race that heals so quickly and has tech so good they regard most forms of warfare as jolly good sport) would be hilarious.

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Probably works for the Executive Secretariat, and I can so see a whole manga series based on the travails of Abigail Zhang and her misadventures in navigating all of these issues.

Including that incident with the dog fighting ring. Which mostly became that incident because two NFL first-draft linebackers were there, betting on it.

(“I am hideously underpaid for this job.”
“You’re earning, on the basis of overtime and hazard pay, more than a GS-15 does every three months per week.”
“…like I said, hideously underpaid.”)

(Does it say something that I already have her cast? Gemma Chan, btw.)

Oh, and we can’t forget her British version in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lionel Stanford, who is Malcolm Tucker with even more steely self-control and more knowledge of where all the bodies are buried…

(Immensely polite to Imperials, extremely kind to his staff, but anybody at his rank or above, he tends to be a bit…sweary. Did tell King Charles that he was a massive twat, but would never do so in public.)

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As I read today of freight being held to ransom in Chicagoland by organized crime being added to train robberies and organized retail theft in today’s collection of supply chain fuckery, I wish her luck in her ongoing negotiations with the nice gentleman from Kantinomeiros, mor-Kadak, and Ot (“Warbarristers. Bulletproof contracts. Bulletproof suits.”) who would like to explain that this is brigandry, and brigandry is piracy-equivalent, and since pirates are hosti sophi generis, this is totally a good reason to add Q-containers to randomly selected shipments.

(Q-containers, incidentally, are intermodal shipping containers packed with mercenary kaeth legbreakers and booze, who - should the container go astray - are tasked to leap out and beat any miscreants in the area to death with their own spleens.)

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Other random notable event:

Someone will give these people all the funding.

Shimizu Dream | Topics | Shimizu Corporation (shimz.co.jp)

This I foretell.

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Random thoughts:

I see today’s discourse is another variant on “ordering food and stuff online is totally exploiting all those delivery workers, etc., etc.”, and I contemplate the hilarity when someone decides that they can short circuit this whole mess by hiring someone to bring in a shipload of Riantar Ventures, ICC NE-1 Replimenschen¹, modded to cut about a foot off the spines, to do those jobs instead.

“Wait… you weren’t supposed to fix it that way!”

“Gee, thanks, assholes.”

Also, as election year heats up, take a moment to spare some sympathy for the newsies at organs with, well, a little more professional tone to maintain than the Imperial Infoclast, who have to somehow cover all this stuff without making it sound like they’re reporting on the ravings of Gary, the hobo who lives in a shack behind the drugstore and argues with his feet.

(And while we’re at it, take pity on the Earth journalists who ask people who do, technically, work for the Imperial governance for comments on things and get only “I have literally no conception of why you would possibly expect me to give a fuck about that.” in reply.)

  1. A hominiform robot, now long obsolete, designed to fill roles for which there was already equipment etal. designed for that body plan.
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“Look, I’m obligated to ask, and to publish the reply if it is vaguely relevant and not the local equivalent of Fighting Words. But ‘relevant’ is very broad; feel free to make a snarky comment about trading hours or digital security or insistences on using dodgy third-party software.”

This brought to you by my mayor, who was once asked a question about something related to town planning and managed to misunderstand the reporter and instead went on a rant about cycle paths and how they fell under the jurisdiction of a different government body and what they wished they could do better. It was much more interesting and useful than the question which was actually asked.

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"Welcome to St. Christopher Travel, a full featured muse travel and tour package company!
"You have selected a fourteen day tour in Japan, not counting travel time to and from Japan from San Francisco. With travel time, it is seventeen days and we were able to upgrade your non-stop JAL tickets from economy to business without any additional charge to you!
"Your fourteen day tour includes (please select a day to see additional details)-
"Six days in Tokyo, to include two overview tours of the city, a photography-specific tour (costume and street couture), a pop-culture shopping tour with shipping back home, two baseball games, and a tour of the erotic nightlife of Tokyo.
"Two days of exploring the countryside.
"Four days in Kyoto, to include a full overview tour of the city, a full shrine-and-religious tour, a full shrine tour, and a full food tour.
"And finally, two days in Osaka, which include a full overview tour and a ‘day in the life’ tour where you get to explore Osaka as a native.
"Your trip will include a full muse package that has-

  • Real-time transit and tour information, to include both vocal and AR informational overlays
  • Full, real-time translation with cultural context assistance (equivalent to a N1 JPLT certification), and you selected the Acculturation package for future learning so that you can qualify for your JPLT certification!
  • Coverage of all transit and travel plans, including public transit and taxi service
  • Real-time analysis of your satisfaction, to include pushing of psychological boundary layers, so that you have a fully immersive explorative experience
  • Security and legal support, to include extraction by Wolfhound Emancipations, LLC if you are in a situation that requires it
    "-all back up by the experience of over a hundred years of providing curated tours all over Earth, with five-star ratings from all of the major Imperial tourism reputation groups, a 100% score from The Glorious Traveler with winning the “New Tour Organization” platinum award three years in a row, and a “must use” by Worlds Traveler magazine.
    “We have your deposit and once you finalize your travel plans, we’ll have your tickets and your muse ready for your trip!”
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So, a bunch of “Students for Justice in Palestine” at Columbia just headlined their latest press release:

“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”

…man, this is one of those cases where someone could run very hard into the “we take you at your word” tradition of Imperial law enforcement.

“Whether or not you were using ‘hyperbole’ is a matter that will be rigorously investigated during process. For the moment, please exercise your right to shut the fuck up. You rebel scum.”

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“Y’know, at some point, I think too much brainpower and not enough common sense is evolutionarly contra-productive. The moment you said something this stupid…”

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…so, I have some quibbles - okay, actually kind of a lot - mostly when I noticed that this was marketed to offworlders:

First quibble: seriously, no-one goes interstellar for a fortnight. I’ll leave the calculations for per-hop transit time at a comfy civilian 12G brachy as an exercise for the reader :smirk:, but with the small exception of places with a trusted mindcasting provider (rare almost everywhere and downright nonexistent in the Periphery), long transits mean long holidays for it to be worth it. Try six months at the destination as an opening bid.

Second quibble: for interstellar travel, who’s going to land in the wrong place if they don’t have to and inflict the joys of a slow trans-Pacific flight on themselves? Not to mention San Francisco. Or, as my cynical traveling friend puts it:

"We all know the Americans are desperate for hard currency these days, not to mention being seen as the gateway to Earth, but that’s like offering a tour of the paradise gardens and having it start and finish at an out-of-town sewage works.

“Instead, take it from an experienced traveler and do what I do: the Rimward Packet Line drops its passengers at Okinawa Down, which smells of the ocean and tropical flowers, not excrement and desperation with a side order of unwanted personal intrusions from Their Nation’s Finest™. If you really must hurry - and I say there’s no good reason not to take a couple of days in such delightful surroundings and hospitable company to sip sake, watch the sun set over the ocean, and shake off the planet-lag - the Ryukyu maglev-shinkansen runs right up the archipelago to the Home Islands and can have you in Tokyo in a matter of hours.”

Third quibble, maybe: I misread this on first viewing as “exotic nightlife”. But that would probably work better, because, well, your customers are generally speaking all of different species, and frankly, interspecies erotica is a specialist taste. (And one which goes better out the other side of the uncanny valley.)

Fourth quibble/side note: While there’s a market for them in the galaxy generally, if you’re marketing to Imperials, tours, meaning guided tours, are not a winner. It’s much the same as the playing-vs-watching sportsball problem; it’s too passive to really appeal. Give them a very knowledgeable and chatty guide-AI (and maybe a backup concierge service) and let them explore on their own to win this market.

Fifth quibble: It might seem a little odd to offworld readers to go into this, insofar as language translation is just, well, something that happens. Unless you’re a contact team or following shortly behind one, your headware will quietly download a linguistic corpus for you on-demand and take care of it.

(And those who wish to learn the language for themselves, as is considered broad-minded and practical, will arrange a quick “I know kung fu!” moment at their local rent-a-thought.)

Sixth quibble: And as a final note, “muse” is probably the wrong word here. Apart from the technical reasons (involving losing access to your personal aide and the constant companion who literally knows you better than anyone else, and inadvisability of allowing semi-trusted software access to your brain), the relationship between a soph and their muse is a very, very close one. Closer than a spouse, a lover, a best friend (And, yes, that makes the suggestion come off about as creepifying as you might imagine.). They’ve always been there for you¹. People almost never even consider shutting them down, let alone swapping them out.

This sort of thing is usually handled by a separate AI running in a VM securebox elsewhere in your exoself, whose access is limited by a trusted API.

  1. Side note: in an attempt to capture the emotional texture here, my brain came up with “…and this is my internal life-mate, Silent Bob.”
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I was thinking of this more along the lines of an Earth company providing these services to baseline humans, but the various points are noted and will be considered in any future revisions.

The concept behind the tour organization is this-it’s like having the best concierge service ever for when you go on your trip.

You want front-row seats for an event? Which side of the court do you want?
You can be walking around downtown New York, enjoying listening to history of architecture, pause, step into a bookstore, spend an hour there, leave, and go onto a tour about the sewer system without losing a step.
For a lot of people, they want to explore, but don’t know how. Their muse does, and they know the points of when they’re getting the right kind of challenge-and the wrong kind that isn’t any kind of fun.
For the exotic nightlife in Tokyo, you’ll get help in dealing with the difference between the stuff for “the tourists” and “the genuine” that you will encounter.
And you’ll also avoid being a big, hulking foreigner in places, because you’ll be able to make the right kind of thank-you, all in cultural context and comments.

This is in the early days post-contact, when humans are still getting used to having muse technology and many people don’t have a personal muse. In fact, the company works with a muse manufacturer that encourages getting the muse after your trip. By bragging about the Imperial contacts that they have (and yes, revisions…), they show off to customers wanting to find something that is distinguishing.

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To revisit this original…

…and update it for the era of reality graphics and hard light:

“This product contains no substances.”

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Looking ahead for when the Empire feels comfortable selling ontotech to California:

“This product does not contain.”

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They could metric-engineer them a Klein bottle right away.

This product contains everything. (Literally.)

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So I was thinking, well, how about Arranging Fighting At A Later Date Words?

Thus, today, from How We Do Political Commentary Back Home:

“Well, then. The lady in question accused these people of price gouging. Their net margin is, according to recently published accounts, 1.81%, which in the course of inescapable mathematical fact implies that either they understand price gouging so badly that they’re doing it backwards, or else that their accuser is a liar, an imbecile, or both. If she takes offense at this characterization, my obligator and my second are at her disposal. Good day to you, sir.”

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Abigail Zhang looked at her desk and wondered if she could get away with day-drinking at her job.

At this point, it might be the only cure for the perpetual headache she had since six months after First Contact.

The last diplomatic incident was fun to deal with-Imperial citizen went into the Haight, found an overnight partner, then promptly sued said partner because they had every STD on Earth and a few that weren’t from Earth, and filed a very public health notice about said partner. The flurry of lawsuits and discovery and legal wranglings was going to keep lawyers paid for years.

Just as Abigail sat down and was about to look at her inbox, Jake Sullivan came in her office door. Abigail had to wonder who he had pissed off to get assigned to this permanent disaster zone. She suspected that it was because he was honest, hard-working, had personal integrity, and was openly a moderate Republican.

Which probably would have kept him from being anything more than the coffee bitch in the Kyrgyz Republic for the remainder of his short time in State Department service.

Having an uncle who was the senior Republican on the Senate Interstellar Relations Committee probably helped. “Boss,” he sighed, “I’m sorry to bother you, but…”

“Give me the highlights,” Abigail interrupted gently and swallowed two aspirin, following it up with last of the Starbucks she brought with her from the airport.

“We have a major diplomatic incident brewing in Cranton, Ohio,” Jake sighed, and laid down the manila folder. After the last data breach, they had resorted to air-gapped computers, analog phones, and a Xerox machine older than she was to keep information safe. Hard copies whenever possible, in a secure safe in a secure wing of the building that was swept three times a week for bugs.

“Cranton, Ohio,” Abigial’s right eyebrow was raising itself so hard it was threatening to take flight. “What happened in Ohio of all places?”

“Imperial citizen, a dar-bandal, went there. Visiting friends from work,” Jake started.

Once upon a time-when she could laugh without it becoming a hysterical cackle-she was a fan of Christopher Titus and and somehow she fell into the patter of one of his more famous sketches. “And…”

“He was attacked by about eight Haitian immigrants in the area. Recent relocations under some Unitarian Church program with PRM help. We’ve got secondary sourcing that they thought he was a really big dog and were planning on cooking and eating him.”

“And…”

“Self-defense homicide of all eight, Trilling handled it, no problems,” Victoria Trilling was one of her assistants that handled fairly routine (for values of routine at this job) disasters like this out of Seattle, and Abigail sighed happily at that result.

“And…”

“Well, he’s connected to a middle-high family in Empire circles. And they didn’t like the idea that we have people here that would have ate anyone, let alone a family member. They’re already spooling up so many different lawyers and lawsuits that it’s going to be another mess for everyone in Permanent Undersecretary-and-above level to deal with.”

Abigail winced. Mind you, seeing most of the Permanent Undersecretaries getting microtomed and put under a microscope would normally make her smile, but she knew that shit always ran downhill and she was the bottom of that particular hill. “And…”

“And we’re already getting reports from the usual sources that the family is talking about doing some cultural engineering in Haiti with mercenaries and societal engineers. Open contracts, hostile drop, the works.”

Abigail moaned, closed her eyes, and rubbed her eyebrows with the heels of her hands, hard. “And…”

“Secretary of State’s already making noises along the lines of ‘no regime changes by outside powers on Earth, especially in a freelance manner.’ He wants a stronger statement before the next courier goes out tomorrow morning. He wants you to draft and present it to him personally before lunch tomorrow.”

“And…”

“Somebody put up a GoFundMe to help defray operational costs for dealing with Haiti. It’s been up for twelve hours and it’s already earned a million dollars. Entirely human, as far as we can tell.”

Abigail opened her eyes and looked up at Jake between her forearms. “Okay, that’s new. Do you have…”

“Preliminary statement ideas are in the folder, along with additional information and hopefully some way to keep this from becoming a massive cluster-fuck, ma’am,” Jake tapped the folder with his index finger.

“I’ll get to work on it, remind me to follow up after lunch,” Abigail sighed and opened the folder up. “Order lunch in, we’re going to be busy.”

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“You know there’s a cure for that now, right?”

“Mm?”

“Nerve stapling.”

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“If I stapled every single person that was an idiot, there would be absolutely zero free will on this planet left! And believe me some days I’m very tempted!”

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It’s not the idiocy.

It’s, well, these things -

(I am assuming here that we’re omitting the approximately 87% of the Empire’s population for whom such things would require technical assistance ranging from the merely NSFW to the not-safe-for-anyone-in-several-miles-radius. I mean, not to single anyone out, but when you’re a 30’ long multitentacled worm who enjoys temperatures in excess of 1,800 K, you’re gonna need more than the usual line of sex aids.)

  1. I should first note that the eldrae have exactly the sort of sexuality that might be expected of Wellsian “intellects vast and cool and [mostly] unsympathetic”:

My id is crushed to a tiny nub under the weight of my enormous neocortex!
My id is crushed to a tiny nub under the weight of my enormous neocortex!

Not like Vulcans, either; they’re not bottling it up for one big explosion. They just live intellectually, love intellectually, laugh intellectually, and hard as it probably is to empathize with from the human point of view, lust [desire] intellectually.

You can see this in the literature: in all the great classical tales and legends, you can find plenty of heroes led astray to their doom by beliefs, ideas, and tragic romances, and exactly none of our popular genre of those doomed by letting their dick do the thinking.

  1. See also here and here and here for more specific reasons why this is not in the modal instinctive/cultural sphere.

Yes, their quote-sex-industry-unquote is basically like the Companions’ Guild turned up to eleven because without the ability to form a real and meaningful intellectual-emotional relationship, no-one would be able to see the point. That this is essentially the same industry that sells products like “a fine dinner and a satisfying philosophical debate over it” to lonely salarymen far from home should not surprise anyone.

  1. Not to put too fine a point on it, human sexuality or the psychology of same is gross and horrifying to them.

Blame porn tropes for this, because even if you ignore the porn tropes in actual porn (and in so doing claim that one of our largest cultural products is somehow nonrepresentative of our culture), there’s enough power dynamics, status games, degradation, and occasional violence in popcul sex to be incredibly squicky by their cultural norms.

This, incidentally, is almost certainly called out in travel warnings as it’s the kind of thing in which cultural misunderstandings can escalate to extremely serious violence very, very quickly.

(Don’t the kaeth mingle violence and sex, one might ask? Well, yes, but not in that way. They like steamy post-victory sex, which is why the love hotels on Paltraeth come with arenas and disposable mooks. It’s not the same thing at all.)

  1. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth mentioning again: not the same species. To be fair, intellectual desire as mentioned above is really the root of exophilia in any species, since you don’t have instinct working for you, but it doesn’t help when you’re close enough to hit the uncanny valley - defined in this case as looking like the creepy uncle-species reconstruction at the Museum of Paleontology.

  2. I haven’t said this one before since it only just occurred to me, but man, consider the age difference. Not just the literal bio-age difference (“Wait, you’re forty? That’s not old enough to know a goddamned thing about a goddamned thing.”), but also the “ancient, sophisticated culture” aspect.

By which I mean, more or less, that while I’ve got less of a butt-stick about imperialism than most, if you’re taking port liberty from the aircraft carrier in the bay, trying to pick up a local who only realized that there was something bigger than a canoe last week is, well, just a mite tacky.

(Side note: also remember, they don’t have - actually, most of the Worlds doesn’t have - our brain bug about considering peoples, cultures, nations, etc., basically equal. If you were to ask directly and get an honest answer, the Empire - “eldest of the younger races, bright center of civilization” - would admit to having maybe three peers, one of whom is the dutiful younger brother and another one of whom is the senile grandfather of the metaphor, and everyone else is “the children”. That applies on a civilizational level, of course, and individuals are treated individually… but it helps to be John Sheridan, if you know what I mean?)

  1. Humans don’t have a liacoré complex in their brains - the one which enables farspeech/telepathy/telempathy - notwithstanding some extraordinarily expensive brain surgery of limited local use. Now, any reasonably cosmopolitan knows that exotics have exotic senses on which one may or may not show up, and for most purposes, people politely ignore this fact. Unfortunately for exophiles, intimate moments are one of those times when it’s real hard to ignore the fact that one’s partner has less psychic presence than house pets and server racks.

So, y’know, what you have here is apparently the equivalent, in human terms, of someone who flies to south-east Asian slum brothels to dubcon-fuck zombified baby chimps.

(And as such, Abby’s got this, even if she doesn’t know it yet. All that’s needed is to keep it quiet until the nice soph from the Shadow Ministry of Image turns up to explain that while they may have avoided giving the organs of the law a case against them, they might want to consider dropping everything and taking a nice long holiday somewhere so far off the map that the first light of creation has yet to reach it.

Because the organs of society can and will make him wish the organs of the law got to him first.)