This post has the following content warnings:
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Before you go on a multiple-year trip accessible only by hyperspace relay, you download every out-of-copyright-work of art, literature or science your civilization has ever produced and stick it on your ship's computer. You do this even if you are, frankly, kind of dumb; it is just the obvious thing to do. You are not going to think of everything you need, and no matter HOW confident you are that five-dimensional math is beyond you or that you have no interest in the works of Falazon-2114, some conceivable emergency might mean that you need to repair a damaged hyperdrive or persuade a colony founded on his works that they desperately need to join the League, and when it is essentially costless to take everything, that is what you do.
This, at any rate, is common knowledge known even to the pilot of the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty, whose true name is a thirty-six digit hexadecimal string and whose usename incorporates sounds found not only not in English, but not in any language spoken by dogs, chimpanzees, mosquitoes, or any other entity that does not prefer to communicate exclusively via signal broadcast. We can call him Nau, or Fodion, or GODDAMN IT, since these are all noises he is going to make very, very soon.
Not that any emergency has hit. No, he's had a peaceful trip; no need to exercise self-control, no need to make decisions calling for twice his intelligence, just regular drop-offs of signal beacons to mark his progress and slightly less regular placement of mining replicators on the occasional unusually valuable asteroid; when the pickup ship comes in his wake, it will find the asteroids neatly sorted into their component materials, all carefully packaged and floating by the beacons for immediate delivery to the nearest orbital factory. He's been being choosier than most miners would, with his beacons, but the whole point of taking a job mining asteroids is so you can generate positive value for the world without ever having to interact with any part of it that is not best primarily understood with reference to Newtonian motion, and the longer his trip, the more he can stay in his cabin, reading books written when the League's average IQ was three standard deviations lower than it is today and even mostly following them.
And as long as no emergency hits, that's exactly what he's going to be able to keep doing. He sets his hyperdrive going and -
The purpliest alien Amenta has ever seen has a very, very bad year.
+ Show First Post
out-of-hours
out-of-hours
They don't cut off all your child credits because you'd riot until they killed you all and they don't kill you all because my people are less inclined to give super-advanced technology and free planets to people who do that sort of thing, and also because I want them to be working on immortality ahead of robots and have some ability to get what I want.
be_fruitful
If they make us immortal they don't need new ones to do the work. And they don't have to give us children on any particular schedule. They could be planning to tell us that we can always have children in a few decades.
out-of-hours
On the one hand, that's a very good point. On the other hand, I expect a population boom among the clean castes because I can give them better farming technology (and because, long term, planets) and they'll need more reds to keep up with the rising population?
(He deletes the question mark, replaces it with a period, then sends it.)
out-of-hours
So, point A, once we redevelop FTL you can go start your own planet if you want and do whatever you like. I grant that in the near term that is not tempting, so... I need to get you a way to become not-red once you become cyborgs? Is that about the shape of it? Any chance the blues would listen if I suggested that 'people who are clean shouldn't do red jobs' or are they just going to say that changing castes isn't a thing?
(While he has this conversation, he's going to search the internet for 'changing caste' and 'caste is stupid' and 'get rid of caste' and synonyms and see if there's anyone quiet and sane who might be able to help him with any of this and is unlikely to tell anyone.)
be_fruitful
Changing castes isn't a thing at all. I've never met a blue, I don't know much about how they decide things.
out-of-hours
Understood. Thank you. So your main worry is that they'll still treat you the way they do now even once you're clean cyborgs, in particular, not letting you have any more children than the absolute minimum necessary - which you expect will be about zero. What other problems do you have that make the cyborg plan not work. I want to know everything I can before I either junk the plan and look for a better one or start trying to fix it.
be_fruitful
Our brains would still be there, right? I don't know if you were talking to theologians or just blues but I'm not actually sure we'd be considered clean then. Any more than wearing plastic makes us clean.
out-of-hours
Just blues.
Actually, just a blue, but he suspects that blue was talking to other blues.
And... I thought they were killing you because they were trying to stop you from polluting things. You mean that even if your brain was the only thing that they could even claim was slightly polluted, they'd be trying to get rid of that? Even though it couldn't touch anything except via metal?
be_fruitful
I don't know. I don't understand theology, it's not really covered in red schools. I just sort of get the impression that cleans think the march of progress isn't over till nothing's polluted anymore, anywhere.
out-of-hours
Well, they can all go set themselves on fire, then. And they WILL, in twenty years or whenglitchingever the League of Meridiana lands on this planet feet first.
... Best aliens. Stay calm, Nau*.
If we can get them not to kill you and you not to die fighting them, I'm not going to call that 'good enough', but I'm going to call it 'better than nothing'.
And I'd kind of like to, also, make your society a thousand times as rich. Just, you know. While I'm here. If I can do that without getting you all killed.
Are there any other high-level red priorities other than 'not dying' and 'not having all your child credits canceled' that you think someone with magic alien powers but no ground-level observational skills can solve for you?
out-of-hours
Sorry, no, I was speaking too metaphorically. I'm not magic. I just have absurdly powerful technology.
out-of-hours
Depends on how far along we get the technology. I don't know of any conceptual reason for it to be impossible but I don't know how to implement it yet.
out-of-hours
Ah. Things an alien wouldn't think of. Thank you, that's very helpful, do you have any more of those?