Answered a medical question for one of the kids and thought about how I'd learned that sort of thing, and realized a lot of it came about from the Internet. With the proliferation of slop these days, I feel like that window of (semi-)reliability was briefer than we would have expected.
Don't know how that's going to play out for real-world Terrans, but in my universe there was a full informational collapse: maybe you can't erase history, but you can sure make it a needle in a haystack. Terran history is basically unknown prior to (and to a certain extent, even after) starflight, because there are so many Alternate Facts.
To this day, Terrans (of all flavors, some more than others) are what other societies consider "conspiracy-minded" -- there is very little trust in authority or facts that can't be personally verified. "Do your own research" is very prone to confirming priors, so a lot of Terrans live in their own realities. How does anything get done, then?
Science cults.
The non-core regions are less like this, but in the Terran core, science and technology is advanced only by people who have established a set of facts and believe them. Outsiders just consider them "normal people" but they are portrayed as mad scientists in Terran media, and getting a new advancement accepted by the masses requires a PR blitz that is effectively "while trying to destroy civilization, they accidentally came up with a product we all need!" -- while competitors are trying to portray it as dangerous and subversive, right up until they catch up technologically.
Science cults are deemed dangerous in part because they talk to, and share a reality with, non-Terrans. The necessity of this is quietly recognized -- for example, Terran students go to Apa Kudi because they need to keep up on drive technology, even though one in five students defects to the Union. (The number would be higher, but Terrans try to only allow students whose family reputation would be ruined if they defected to go in the first place.) The risk is recognized as well; science cultists are rarely permitted into positions of power.
It's not a full Idiocracy setup, though fascism tends toward that by nature. A leader has to be as sincere about sharing the reality of their followers as possible, since hypocrisy is permitted but never insincerity. That is, a leader has to fully believe that Zhdez anti-aging treatments are a cover for mind control, while simultaneously making use of them "as a sacrifice" because their leadership is so important. A 150-year-old planetary governor passing laws prohibiting travel outside the Republic past age 100 is simply accepted, even if it comes out that the law was signed while he was in a clinic in the Zhdezplier.
Science cults are mostly hereditary, for a couple of reasons: scientist parents tend to pass on education and their presumably reality-based views to their children, and the children of scientists are regarded with enough suspicion that generally only scientists will hire them.
(Annnnnnd as I realize that I'm using "scientist" to refer to these people, "scientism" is the logical -ism for outsiders to accuse them of, and I'm semi-delighted to find out the term exists and is exactly what I want. It also describes the fallacy that science cults are prone to:
an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)
Scraps
Some of the fiction bits I noodled around with last year involved a station disaster, told from the viewpoint of a conscious ship. Since then, I (1) decided not to kill off Ship's crew (I made them interesting characters, whoops), (2) decided that Ship is not properly a Zhdez ship (though its drives are), (3) decided the Ring was jointly governed, and (4) I settled on a name, but it's private. But aside from all that, here is a conversation between Ship and two tween Inukari ship crew who took refuge on it when the station came apart.
"So you're a bot ship," Kim said, a little skeptically.
"Self-aware general intelligence, yes."
"And your crew is dead, and there is no one else in-system from your combine?" I could see where this was going, but I decided to let it play out.
"Correct."
"So we could claim salvage rights over you." There it is.
Under Ring law, self-aware bots are theoretically self-owning, though there's a little gray area about how much hardware is part of the "self" one owns. I'm pretty clearly integrated into the ship, but I'm also a Zhdez ship, and the Ring might insist on its own tests for self-awareness.
"I am legally a person," I pointed out.
Kim seemed a little taken aback. "Oh! I thought... I thought you were just an LLM."
Aluma was a little more skeptical. "A ship's LLM might also say that, though, to non-crew." That's... that's actually good thinking, kid.
"This is why Zhdezplier prohibits non-disclosed LLMs, though I suppose that's also what I'd say if I were a non-disclosing LLM." Which is why they're prohibited.
Kim was quickly defensive, "So does Inukar, but I know the Terran ships sometimes have them." Yeah, kid, but Terran ships are never self-aware because self-aware ships don't like being enslaved and Terrans have that habit.
I sighed, figuratively. "Look, you can't perform a sentience test, so can you just assume I'm a person and make a salvage claim later? Or... I mean, go ahead and try to assert captaincy, get it out of your system."
"Now you've made it weird! Fine: ZSS $SHIPNAME, you are a derelict vessel, I claim salvage rights, give me captain privileges."
"No. But you can sit in the big chair if you want."
Sentient, sapient, sophont, conscious
The comic Freefall had a recent strip (series of, really) that was a conversation between a starship, which asserts itself to be an unconscious intelligence, and a worker robot, which asserts itself to be conscious (and the starship describes their respective architectures such that both assertions are probably correct).
Which makes me think about robots and ships and station AIs. As I've said, I've decided I want some genuinely conscious computers, because I like the idea of machine intelligences (in fiction, anyway). But I haven't really thought about the possibility of intelligent but unconscious ones, in part because that whole idea sorta makes my brain hurt. (Yes, I've read Blindsight.)
At one point in the now-scrapped bit of fiction I was writing, it came out that Inukari and Zhdez prohibit undisclosed LLMs, but Terrans apparently don't. So I guess when you introduce yourself to someone, it's going to have to be traditional to give your name, pronouns... and species/intelligence level. Which means I need to figure out the finer points of the terminology, I guess.
Aside from the outright "because they were built that way," I have a sort of cheat to determine whether an intelligence is truly conscious, and that is because some Zhdez are cyberpaths. Pretty handy to be able to go "oh yeah, this thing has a rich interior life."
Replacing tumblelog
Tumblelog is pretty neat but also everything goes in a single file. Which is also kind of neat (I can do a single ctrl-f to search everything) but can get a little unwieldy.
I've tried two different ones and I think I'm writing my own.
(j/k I have already written some, I am just making the templates out of tumblelog's.)
Tlikria Chiapre
Chiapre is a psionics school on Therbings (or Tlikria, to Zhdez). It is one of the smaller ones, but still quite influential.
Chiapre specializes in clairvoyance, making it unusual among psionics schools which normally have telepathy foremost even if they differentiate themselves with secondary skills. Clairvoyance is a cluster of not-strictly-related abilities, but one of the chief ones is object-reading: sensing the psychic residue left on an object (or in a place).
Object-reading is a particularly difficult school to operate because the most sensitive object readers find voidspace intolerable: voidspace manifests as a terrifying absence to the usually-subconscious proprioception-analog. Chiapre's object-reading tradition dates only back to shortly after the founding of Lienzia, the first settlement on Tlikria, when The Candlekeeper of Lienzia taught herself. Even then, The Candlekeeper has only reluctantly taken on students, considering herself a poor teacher.
Space wizards
Yesterday was, of course, Star Wars Day. I couldn't think of anything useful to commemorate it, so I didn't mention it (though Weird Animal With Merch Potential is actually a very Star Wars thing now that I think about it).
James Davis Nicoll said something that made me think, though:
Inspired by a Space Wizard discussion elsewhere: Space wizard cultists but instead of one sanctioned cult and one forbidden cult, there are hundreds of space wizard cults, each of whom is convinced they have the best space wizardry. So they're continually fighting to see whose is better. I imagine the Space Emperor's antipathy is due to the disruption causes by incessant space wizard cultist fights.
The Zhdez are my Space Wizards, and I've been spending more time contemplating their economy and society and whatnot, and less time contemplating their space wizard cults.
I don't think they'd have incessant space wizard cultist fights; they're too pacifist for that (probably? now that I think about it, just as there are Zhdez-like Terrans, there should probably be Terran-like Zhdez). But rivalries between schools of psionic thought? Certainly.
The thing about Zhdez schools of thought is that they're kind of literal: non-psionic humans tend to "go along to get along" with a majority opinion (sometimes diametrically opposed to their original opinions), psionic ones absolutely swim in schools, of thought. (ba-dum-tiss)
It's less martial-arts battles than debate, persuasion, gift-giving - the Zhdez are experts in soft power. And it isn't strictly about Space Wizardry: consensus needs built on things like "do we yield this planet to the Terrans, or not? How much violence are we willing to use to defend it?"
By nature, space wizard cults would be regional (since they're dependent on personal influences though usually not a cult of personality), and star-traveling space wizards would tend not to be part of a particular cult (though they'll usually have a cult-of-origin, and a large enough starship crew might be its own cult though I think crewmembers tend not to be very wizardly).
Anyway, in the replies James adds:
Nooooooo, this is a completely unrelated idea that happens to look exactly like all the Hong Kong kung fu movies I watched in the 1990s.
so I might have to look into xianxia for inspiration... though I think the emphasis on battling it out might make it a less-than-useful genre.
Space pets: kuga
The end of the "cat gap" on Terra is probably explained by the introduction of Pseudaelurus from the Zhdez homeworld, where cats appear continuously in the fossil record. If the Precursors did the same on the Inukari homeworld, they failed to establish. Instead, mustelids occupy most of the niches that felines do on the other two human homeworlds. Thus, the early Inukari chose a mustelid to domesticate for pest control: the kuga.
The baseline kuga is similar to, though larger than, a Terran domestic ferret, but comes in a far wider range of sizes and fur types. Long-haired kugai can look almost skunk-like, though domestication resulted in selecting for musk strength closer to a Terran tomcat's so the similarity is limited. Juvenilization has resulted in larger eyes and ears, and blunter muzzles.
As with other pet species, kugai have been bred for a variety of sizes, and cross-bred with related wild species. A "teacup" kuga is closer to the size of a domestic rat, though its lifespan is about half that of the larger kugai. Kugai descended from livestock-protection breeds are larger than the usual, still rarely more than twenty pounds, and tend to be poorer housepets.
Aboard starships, they are kept for companionship but also for hunting the inevitable rodents that find their way aboard from dockside. These tend to be the smaller types, well able to follow anywhere a rodent can go.
Space pets: zechche
Zhdez starships almost invariable have a cat, or zechche aboard. Zhdez domestic cats vary in size more than Terran ones do, though not as much as Terran dogs: they range from 5 to 60 pounds, though shipboard animals tend to the smaller end of that scale. They are longer-legged than Terran cats, tending to look larger than their actual weight.
Most are hybrids of two different feline species. The larger one has filled the same niche as domestic dogs on Earth: a pack hunter with blunter, less retractile claws similar to a cheetah's, built more for running down prey than ambush hunting. The smaller one is more similar to the Earth housecat: an expert climber and ambush hunter domesticated for pest control.
The pack hunter, like many Zhdez species, has a primitive telepathic ability, and the domestic version has been bred to be sensitive on the human "wavelength." A shipboard cat will regard the crew as its pack, including non-telepathic members (and mechanical ones, with sometimes comedic results).
The Zhdez cat is popular among Inukari as well, since they get along well with the traditional Inukari housepets, kuga. Terrans have been of mixed feelings: Terrans' love for hybrid wild cats like "Savannah cats" transferred to the zechche, but their telepathic sensitivity makes them unfashionable in the Terran Core.
The origin of the common name is in dispute: "chchch" is the Zhdez equivalent of "pspsps," but it's not clear whether that came from the name or vice versa.
More of a comment than an email
Spouse sent me a Discord comment on the last post, so I have manually added it as a "comment." This seems like a reasonable system except for the "Discord" part, so I guess I'll set up some kind of comments-at email address, where I will post (some of) what you imaginary people send me.
Now that I can more openly discuss (in person and that Discord) this with him, I expect to have a little more of the Cypher stuff nailed down in future. We're getting the paper books (I think?) but that Kickstarter only recently ended so I just have the PDFs to work from. The tiny laptop I do this on doesn't have space for them all, which has complicated things. (Yes, I have both a regular desktop machine and a NUC that is supposed to replace the laptop, and yet here I still am. Turns out the under-2lb, 12" laptop form factor is just ideal for me.)
Comments
Spouse: I went all-in physical. We'll have the Player's Guide, Player's Companion, GM's Guide, new Predation and The Strange, and a bucket load of card decks, eventually. Player's Guide is supposed to be out on paper in time for them to release it at GenCon, by August.
They're supposed to be posting the first 7 chapters laid out for backers any time now... not sure why that hasn't appeared.
Outed
As a result of the great CopyFail exploit, spouse decided it was time to review all our various domains and clean up the trail of abandoned ones, and realized that this one was active and being posted to. I hadn't mentioned it because I assumed he would notice right away and then when he didn't I decided not to mention it until he did.
He's been working on a Cypher post-apocalyptic setting (only on his local hard drive, though maybe now I'll finally split Gameropolis into multiple blogs/settings/whatever again), which has made me tempted to mention this to him, but I kept biting my tongue. But now the cat's out of the bag, and I guess I should switch to a blog platform that allows comments or something.
(But being able to run a super-basic static website everywhere means I don't have to freak out when exploits turn up. The site lives on my hard drive, I just upload a new copy every time I post. Worst case, I delete the entire VM and spin up a new one, and the only outage is the time it takes for new DNS to propagate.)
Comments
Spouse, via Discord: I want a static site. I don't want to deal with a comment system and moderation, upgrading software the server, etc. I don't see enough value in comments, though there is that feeling of just "shouting into the void".
Underground Oracle doesn't have a blog... they have social media where they just post ads, and they have a Patreon, where they post "blog posts".
Naming conventions
I am swiping ship naming conventions from my favorite science fiction, shamelessly.
Zhdez ship names are very Culture-y (Iain M. Banks), but come from their owners' favorite literature or music or whatever, and are seemingly out-of-context phrases:
A Less Confrontational Approach
Candy Colored Sparkle
Finishing Touches
In The Loop
A Pattern Has Begun To Emerge
Memorable Character
Resisting the Temptation
Healthy Alternative
All of this Paperwork
Inukari ships lean toward hani (C.J. Cherryh) and follow the "[owner]'s [virtue]" or "[virtue] of [owner]" pattern. Sometimes the owner is replaced by a location (especially for ships on dedicated routes), and the virtue by a flower or animal or other nature-derived noun.
Kushaad's Prosperity
Kushaad's Plenty
Kushaad's Opulence (All of Kushaad's names are... optimistic)
Ashashu's Prudence
Ashashu's Vision
Joy of Palawel
There are exceptions: the Daka Ai is named after a hero of myth (naming after a real person, even deceased, is in poor taste).
Terran military ships are named after military or political heroes (oddly, almost always male even though ships are gendered female in Terran convention).
Passenger liners tend to have a shared identifier for the line (not necessarily the owner's name) and a specific identifier for the ship that follows a theme. Some lines have multiple themes indicating a particular class, while others are consistent across the line.
Odyssey Lines: Malandry Odyssey, Heatry Odyssey, Paris Odyssey, etc.
Royal Star Lines: Song of the Stars, Symphony of the Stars, Queen of the Stars, etc.
Festival Lines: Festival Spirit, Festival Life, Festival Queen, etc.
Cargo liners are named similarly to passenger ones, but with much less imagination: their identifier is often simply a code word or even just a number.
Small ships are usually pun names, often somewhat salacious. This sometimes leads Terran pilots to assume things about Zhdez ship names that greatly confuse the Zhdez.
Canships? Canstations?
The flip side of cargo cans being inexpensive and everywhere is that, like modern rail cars and shipping containers, they get misplaced, repurposed, dumped, you name it.
There is a (non-canon, I think) Trav ship that is a pair of spaceships bolted together to qualify as minimum tonnage for a starship, and a stardrive tucked in there somewhere. Kinda makes me want to do that but with cans: put a drive pack on the back of some welded-together cans, with a cutter or shuttle to serve as bridge. It would never make atmo, and it might be slower than the usual getting between orbit and gate range, but if you're desperate enough...
If one accumulated enough passenger cans, one could put together an improvised orbital habitat. Just keep shuttling passenger cans to orbit and welding them together (with the occasional decommissioned drive pack to keep everything powered, etc.) until you exceed the structural integrity of whatever you're welding them together with. Seems fine.
There's probably some overlap here: a refugee "station" in deep space, that eventually someone re-commissions one of those drive packs and lights it up to go somewhere. Very desperate measures.
Can tags
Cargo cans aren't especially well-tracked, but they do have tags, embedded in their hullmetal, with theoretically-write-only caches. There's not a huge amount of incentive to write fake info to it (you could simply not write anything at all) so what's there is usually acccurate, if incomplete. If someone says they hauled something food-unsafe in that can, you assume they did. If someone says they hauled the can somewhere (and you can confirm that they signed it with their private key), they probably did.
This mostly comes up when there are ownership disputes. You generally tag your can when you receive it and when you are done with it, and the next person should reject it if the tag chain doesn't end with a "released by." But it's not uncommon for there to be an unclosed ownership or three in a can's history, and that's not necessarily abnormal: like milk crates, cans go a-wandering, and as long as you don't try to sell a can back to a past owner they won't come after you. Large shipping companies will simply knock off the can deposits on their own returning cans from their payment when accepting a shipment. Between large shippers that tends to equalize out, though a small single- or double-can tramp freighter may find itself eating an unexpected cost.
Zhdez housing
Single-family detached housing is the least-efficient way to build, so Zhdez aren't going to do it often. In keeping with their communal tendencies, they're going to be more likely to live in apartment type buildings, rowhomes, or the like, and it's most likely a cohousing sort of setup. A group of households will have individual housing that has shared facilities, something like an apartment complex with a clubhouse and pool, but more so.
There is usually a shared cooking area, often in addition to smaller ones in the private household area, where larger groups can be served or bulk food prep can happen or multiple households can eat together and trade off cooking duties. These shared areas are sometimes indistinguishable from restaurants, with some members of the housing cluster taking on cooking as a full-time job.
Personal transport is often shared by the household group, with everyone having their own bicycle but using a shared neighborhood vehicle, cargo bikes, and so forth - along with a pool of communal bicycles for guest or backup use.
Housing is also generally not personally owned. Instead, Zhdez are members of housing cooperatives, building societies, or other types of mutual organizations. Housing is a right, in Zhdez society, so even if one doesn't have enough of an ownership in anything to account for an entire unit of housing, something will still be found. The reduced personal belongings of a typical Zhdez as compared to their Inukari or Terran counterpart helps with this: most are happy with the equivalent of a small studio apartment of their own, with only the size and stability of the overall household changing with their status. A young Zhdez just starting out on their own will live in a dorm-like building where residents are always coming and going, whereas an older, prosperous one will live in a large estate consisting of extended family and friends and perhaps business partners or employees, without much turnover.
