Quite.
Thank you. I do try.These dialogues will never stop being funny.
-
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I laughed at this way too hard. There might be something wrong with me.
Well...
For what it's worth...
I've been waiting to be able to make that joke since HK went on the Titan.
Shattered Ice, Part 5
"Shattered Ice, Part 5"
12th Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Rivkah Of Unity
12th Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Rivkah Of Unity
The door to the secondary bridge explodes beneath our charges. HK kind of made a mess of the primary bridge. Now it's our turn.
An Olinbari man throws himself at our feet. "I am Lucius Augustus, and I surrender."
Scipio motions to the rest of the officers. "Walk slowly to the middle of the bridge. Hands on your heads. Anyone who doesn't comply, gets eaten."
I smile.
The bridge officers shudder, then kneel beside Lucius. I turn to him. "Where is Septima? And the human woman Monica?"
Lucius trembles. "They abandoned us, they took a shuttle and left. Told us to escape though the water as a distraction."
I shift my filament into view. "How can we trust you not to be stalling for time?"
His eyes run over my sabres. "I... Don't want to be eaten."
"Then prove she is gone."
He looks at the viewer. "May I?"
He glances briefly at one of the Olinbari women. Her gaze back lingers.
I take a leaf out of the B'Turna book. She howls as I lift her by the hand level with my face. "Double cross us, and she's first."
He gulps. "Diana, I..."
She wriggles uselessly. "Just get them what they want."
He rushes to a console, and brings up all the sensors watching the shuttle bay, all date and time stamped. "We kept these as a safety policy."
We watch Septima - her skin burned off to a subdermal reinforcement layer - and Monica board a shuttle.
I look at Lucius. "Why did you not surrender earlier?"
He shows the view of the primary comms relay as a wall explodes through. "The droid's reactor overload obliterated the comms relay and it caused a feedback loop that disabled the system entirely." He looks at Diana. "And we were afraid."
I put her down.
Scipio stands beside me. "On the order of Appia Flavonius, I am authorised to accept your surrender. You will disclose all command codes and disable all traps. In exchange you will be free to go."
Lucius looks at his feet. "Septima locked us out of the system. She retains full control of the ship remotely."
The viewer changes. Septima stares out at us through artificial skin grafts. "Shame. I was hoping for the harlot, but the harlot's daughter will do." A rumbling sound echoes through. Septima smiles. "Die."
On one hand, that's a very intimidating move to pull.
On the other, you of all people should well know that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and a vengful mother compared to that is like sun to a candle.
Exactly. Would you rather face Naomi wrathful and emotional, or cold and rational?
Honestly, that feels like a choice between plauge and cholera. The former might be moderatly easier to outsmart, but on the other hand if that's not enough to beat her, the chance of survival go from 'rather slim' to 'nonexistent, pain guaranteed'.
Why am I not surprised. Septima's always looking for a way to save her own skin.
The Wreck Of The Titan, Part 1
"The Wreck Of The Titan, Part 1"
12th Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Rivkah Of Unity
12th Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Rivkah Of Unity
"Futuo." My husband exhales as he pushes hard against debris.
"Husband!" I giggle. "You want that right now?"
His face goes lighter. "Oh. You understood?"
I smile. "My Mum taught me Latin. My uncle taught me the expletives."
He looks at my feet, then back at my face. Bites his tongue. He helps me up. "We made it. The rest..."
I shove a chunk of debris off myself, and see Lucius and Diana are... Well, they'll never be apart again. The rest of the bridge is melted and mangled.
I look at Scipio. "At least our armour held."
"Quite."
Now loose, I float. Artificial gravity is offline. Magnetic boots soon sort that.
I look at Scipio. "Maybe making love isn't such a bad idea."
He shrugs. "Rivkah?"
I look at him. "Have you tried to contact the Andronicus?"
"No reply."
"So..." I smile. "May as well relieve our tensions."
"Rivkah!"
I giggle. Then sigh. "Fine. Let's see if we can find a way out of here."
He puts his arms around my waist. "I don't think we are meant for space."
"Oh?"
He shrugs. "Shipwrecked. Again."
"Yeah... All the ships we've been on together in battle have gone down."
He pushes himself to the floor. "I don't know what to do, Rivkah. We can't get a message out, and the rate the ice is freezing..."
I sit beside him. "Scipio?"
He lies back. "...This ship will be our tomb."
I check the atmospheric sensors, retract our helmets, and lick him. "Scipio... No matter what happens, I am so glad we met, and fell in love. I love you."
He licks me back. "I love you, Rivkah."
Yes, but cold and rational Naomi would do more damage to Septima's systems. Septima is weighing everything up assuming she wins, and that means she wants a Naomi who is not going to delay and damage Septima's strategic position.
Quite. Here, she had the opportunity to distract her enemies and make them split their forces while she gets to escape. Perfect opportunity.
I'll say this, if you designed Septima to be hated, it is working. Her combination of despicable character, arrogance and competence is infuriating in the best possible way.
Livestock Living Standards
Earlier, I wrote on the structure of the ringworld, and touched on the implications for the farming processes used by Septima. I also wrote on the freight fleet required.
Next is to evaluate the standardised farms used.
Lets start off with some guiding assumptions:
1. Minimum welfare standards apply
2. That the occupants inside the barns can be induced by carrot or stick to behave in means desireable to the facility staff
3. Septima invests heavily in sub-sophont automation to reduce labour costs
4. A trillion Kyaese in the total number of barns, laying one egg a month each on average (covered in the second link above; the trillion is naturally a rounded number, and I'd expect it to fluctuate by billions of Kyaese on a daily basis)
Welfare Standards
As we have established, the Galactic Community is either unable or unwilling to stop sophonts from being used for Processing and Livestock. As a result, GC issued welfare standards are... Probably not on the agenda. Any welfare standards are therefore imposed by end consumers and branding requirements. (if applicable)
Setting this at what makes for an intriguing fighting ground in the coming skirmishes means barns or battery farms. (a barn farm means the occupants are confined to a a single shared communual area, and are free to move around in that area; a battery farm has them confined to individual or mating cohort pens)
To make life simple, we will extrapolate from Red Tractor welfare standards, available here, as they exceed the legal minimum welfare requirements in my home country. I opt for this as while Septima cares nothing in reality for the Kyaese, she does care for the optics of being seen to care for the Kyaese.
Keeping in line with the 38kg/m^2 specified on page 22 implies up to 2 Kyaese per square metre. If we aim for 10k Kyaese per barn, that means 5000m^2 per barn. Which on a outside cockerel feed, pullet feed lines, water lines, central egg-laying houses and repeated on the other side basis is roughly 30m wide by 170m long.
These barns are then stacked in an array that spins around the central axis to generate centrifrugal forces that substitute for gravity. How many though?
At 1rpm, we get a radius of 894m (radius = angular acceleration /angular velocity squared = ((9.81x30^2)/pi^2) which gives a circumference of 5615m. We are stacking them side by side around the circumference, which means 187 barns.
Round down to 180 to make the numbers round and allow space for structural elements gives 1.8 million Kyaese per barn framework. And therefore, 555k barn frameworks. Of course, we do have the option of stacking them; at 5 barn frameworks per km in height, we could fit them into 111 framework towers, with the 112th still to be filled.
Suffice to say, it is easy to see why I'm only writing the liberation of one here. We can of course play around with the numbers to allow for space for handling the resource distribution for food, water, bedding, egg collection and so on.
It is at this point that it deserves to be mentioned that if you wanted to use normal chickens in these structures, they mass - depending on the breed, naturally - 4 to 5kg each instead of the 17-20kg I've assumed for Kyaese. So, instead of discussing barn frameworks that house 1.8 million Kyaese, it means a barn framework that houses more than 6 million chickens.
And well...
If you ever wondered how the Holocron looks after the undying food things in Mandate Of Heaven... Now you know.
Occupant Coersion
This leads neatly to getting the Kyaese to make the lives of Septima's systems easier.
Kyaese, being sophont, can be treated with carrot and stick approaches to make life vastly easier for Septima's handler staff:
Already mentioned in the narrative are automated systems that identify and cull ill Kyaese, automated systems that shock pullets to lay the eggs in the belts, while further improvements (from her perspective) are shock systems that make the Kyaese use the toilets rather than just going on the floor where they stand like chickens do, and a means of making dying Kyaese take themselves to be recycled.
This takes out the overwhelming majority of the work of an operative in a present day chicken barn farm, as their day in terms of chicken-interation time consists of collecting dead birds, culling injured/sick birds, floor walks that persuade the chickens not to lay eggs on the floor, and bringing in new bedding when it caps over after sufficent amounts of chicken soilage takes place and the bedding is ruined.
Automated Systems
More can be done still, however.
It is common to have feeding, drink, lighting and egg collection being automated already, and methods of persuading Kyaese to behave in ways helpful to their keepers have been discussed. By automating whatever is possible to be automated, we are essentially left with only a few tasks that still need to be done by an employed sophont Olinbari or Indentured Assets, mostly consisting of maintenance tasks on equipment.
Septima is probably still looking at millions of employees to manage the trillion Kyaese however, but that represents a cut to roughly a thousandth over the present day equivalent employment.
In conclusion, we have established some more thorough grounding of how the barns work, and what our protagonists are launching themselves into, and a more chilling insight into how Septima approaches her economic system.
Exploration Of Exo-Self
"Exploration Of Exo-Self"
1st Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Naomi Of Unity
1st Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Naomi Of Unity
I stand opposite the animatronic that seduced Buri. It feels a lifetime ago, comparing my fur to her skin. Looking through her eyes back at myself. We look at my husband. I'm curious - which is more attractive?
Buri stays looking at his more muscular animatronic. I'm sure I didn't use to have such an excessive muscle to fat split.
I smile. Not quite that much. They based it on the weight lifting competition, but they exaggerated some bits.
Both Buris look at me. You look twice as beautiful.
I nuzzle him. Good answer.
TSR192DV joins us. "Welcome. Today we will try something that The Holocron has theorised, but not actually tried with a modified biont. Us Neumanns are designed for this capability innately, but you two have to learn it. We have started by linking you to your respective animatronics as that is expected to be less disturbing to the biont brain."
I laugh. "Oh trust me, it feels very weird."
Buri throws up. "I couldn't stop myself any more."
I feel a headache. Looking through two pairs of eyes... "TSR... Are you supposed to feel sick doing this?"
He disables the input feeds. "You'll adjust in time. Your brain just isn't used to having multiple sets of sensory inputs, but it's just a matter of practice."
I sit down. Look at my husband. "You ok?"
Buri stares at his animatronic. "Urgh... What is all this for?"
TSR looks at us. "A central command node can be beaten far more easily than a distributed command structure. The Holocron, while trivially capable of controlling the drones remotely, intends Neumanns as squad leaders working together at the speed of thought. As your neural structure is theoretically able to support this too, he has asked to test it. An analogy is that you are the entity at the core of a hive mind, and the animatronics are your drones."
I sigh. "How many of these drones can you guys manage?"
"Testing indicates up to four drones is optimal for combat effectiveness."
I look at my older appearance.
You know that feeling when you look at something very, very close to Human, but not quite?
Yeah.
That's how I feel looking at my old body now.
What a weird feeling.
"... Naomi?"
I flick back to the present. "Sorry, I got distracted by myself."
Buri smiles. "Naughty Naomi."
"Not like that!" I laugh. "Just..." I look around the room. "I look at her and it just... Screws with my head." I shiver.
TSR looks at her. "You'll get used to it in time."
I deliberately stop looking at myself. With both pairs of eyes. "So... Where is this going? Combat training?"
TSR brings out a tennis ball launching machine. "No, merely coordination calibration for now. Maybe we will do combat testing by the time we arrive at the Infinite Wheel, but it is too early to say yet." He gives tennis rackets to both animatronics. "We will begin with just the animatronics. Eventually, we will progress on to playing with both yourselves and your animatronics, and add more drones until we discover the limits of your extensibility."
I look at Buri with my own eyes, while my other body takes up position. "Ready."
Less disturbing!? That's an understatement. At least they're honest about how weird this "out-of-body" experience will be.
Well, pedantically it's being in two bodies at once, not out of body as such. Probably just as weird though.
Especially because the bodies are very different, especially for Naomi - the animatronics are equal to their baseline selves, which obviously aren't as capable as their augmented bodies that they are now used to.
Old Friends
"Old Friends"
2nd Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Appia Flavonius
2nd Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Appia Flavonius
I put my synthol on the table. My sister looks up at me. "Appia?"
"Naturally." I sit beside her. "Naomi... About Monica. What do you think of her?"
She stares at the far wall. "I..." She sighs. "I screwed up there."
A waiter places a synthol. I nudge it to her. "Want to talk about it?"
She moves one eye on the drink and one on me. "Not really... But it is unavoidable."
"That eye thing is so weird."
She laughs. "Gift from Yehoshua's Ndlovukazi, she could do it." Then drinks. "But Monica... You know what it is like to be a ruling lady. You want another lady to succeed you."
I nod. "Men can't be trusted with running things."
She leans back on her chair. "But Monica was a mistake... Well, she was after Earth was bombarded."
I lean in. "That's part of the intel that makes me ask. Septima is backing her among the Human colonies. She's a potential rival we may have to deal with."
She stares at my eyes. "She betrayed us. Put Valerius in a coma. Sent assassins after me." She smiles. "Sent assassins after Vorosh." Sighs. "Then fled. We never found her, until..."
"She sided with Septima."
She nods. "I don't know whether to forgive her, or kill her."
I glance at Buri, drinking with an Arishkan. "I'm guessing Buri wants a nibble."
She smirks. "Please, my Buri only nibbles me. Nope, He'd give Monica both sabres through the neck."
I take her hands. "Is it... Personal, between you?"
She laughs. "Appia, she married a man."
"Pfft. You know that means nothing."
"No... She married a man. Heinrich Aus Heinrichstadt. A man I had trusted to host Rivkah when she was young, he managed to get the Naungmonese to work together. They settled north of the main colony where he built a city as a homage to his Old Earth nation." She sighs. Downs her synthol. "I trusted them both." Snorts. "Even encouraged her to date him. And she led a rebellion against me."
"And lived?"
"Fled. And now we know to who."
I nod. "Which means... We know she's advising Septima. Could you turn her back to us?"
She shrugs. "I doubt Septima trusts her on anything. Would you trust a turncoat like that?"
I sigh. "Double agents are always tricky."
She plays with her cup. "Hence why Septima wouldn't trust her, and plans for her to turn back to us."
I look around the room. "Would your people let her?"
She shakes her head.
I run my hand along her muzzle. "Would you?"
She slumps. "I don't know. Monica... I will offer, knowing that I'd have to imprison her to keep her safe. But, she knows I'd have to do so."
"She'd pick dying with Septima?"
She sighs. "I want to think I could get through to her."
"Do you think Monica will have thought it through?"
She taps her claws. "She knows I would have thought it through, which means I know that she has thought it through. Which means I know that she has made her choice. Ergo there is no point in offering. She knows that I know this, and therefore knows I would only offer because my internal self-perception as that of a kind-hearted person who can forgive people appears to her as part of my toolbox of personal manipulation even if it is genuine, and she'd assume it is a trap." She sighs.
I stare into her black eyes. "Then why forgive?"
She stares back. "A critic of me would say I exploit the fact that forgiving an enemy offers them a third option between winning and losing. And that is what Monica thinks of my forgiveness."
"So we'll not turn her back."
She shakes her head.
"So... She dies."
Legacy Of A Fallen Earth, Part 1
"Legacy Of A Fallen Earth, Part 1"
2nd Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Naomi Of Unity
2nd Shendredie, 10 (2189)
Naomi Of Unity
Appia leads me to a briefing room. "Yeah, so... This is why I asked about her." She glances at the display.
The holorecording of Tian Fa Wei stands in the centre, hands resting on his jian as the blade cuts the Martian soil.
He begins by bowing.
"Salibonani Naomi Of Unity. The People's Republic of Terra and Colonies thanks you with great gratitude for your fulfilling the terms of the alliance by vanquishing the enemy who burned Earth and Terra Nova. It had been my hope then that we could rebuild in peace following your unification and reform of MSI. Yet, it was not to be. A powerful magnate among the traditionalists has backed a traitor to power in the colonies, and the People's Republic fights for it's life against the one called Monica Aus Heinrichstadt."
What follows next is a display. "Sadly, the Republic has collapsed. Humanity had begun to walk among the stars, but with the loss of Earth and Terra Nova, we are left with a few scattered domed colonies, outposts and starbases. Our Republic holds Sol, Procyon, Sirius, Luyten's Star and Ross 128, nearly all the core systems closest to Sol. But Monica has taken Alpha Centauri, Barnard's Star, and beyond along the hyperlanes out to IL Aquarii, giving her Novaya Rodina in Alpha Centauri and La Isabella in Lacaille 8760."
Damn. That was... Nine systems? Not good.
"Worse, the far colonies in Gilese 667 and Beta Comae Berenices have declared full independence thanks to the lies Monica has spewed, taking away the other two fully habitable worlds from the People's Republic. All told, not one of the four remaining habitable worlds within Human space are in the PDRTC. We have Venus and Mars in progress, but... I fear we do not have the time to finish them."
He pauses, and looks around. "I know things are desperate, and that you have your own war to fight. But please, any aid could make the difference in our darkest hour."
It ends.
I sigh. Then I look around the room. "Suggestions?"
Well...
Considering 17 billion Humans were killed by MSI or in the chaos following the Base Delta Zeroes of Terra Nova and Earth...
It's pretty grim for Humans.
For now; thankfully a local friendly ASI has plans for Earth renewed, and so the future is brighter, and we'll be looking at the transformed 2nd rock from Sol in Stars Of Wonder. But first, we have to deal with Septima.