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 -
I don't know a lot of purples, no. It's possible it exists, there's a lot of ways I might not have heard of it - if a company that only sells candles does this I can't imagine reds buying candles so they might not have ever noticed, if it's widespread in Tuviri I definitely wouldn't know, maybe they do it in Ereith but the machine translation was too lousy for anyone to notice the difference in descriptions of product availability.
Reds have doctors. The doctors are also red, and they can't go to conventional medical school; I think they apprentice with other red doctors and do as much Internet research as they can. As far as I know they're acceptable for run of the mill issues but probably can't do much that requires equipment they don't have or specialist training they can't spend the time on given how few doctors they can support.
If they have their own supply chain, we might be able to solve the problem just by having red doctors run red prenurseries*, given that the machines are tried and true technology -
(whatever shell he puts them in)
- and the only hard part would be getting the government of Tapa to implement it that way. I don't suppose you know any brilliant speechwriters who believe in red rights, either?(*This time * is used as a signal for 'this is a neologism in your language'. * is a versatile character.)
If red doctors can manage the prenurseries where we store and run the artificial wombs themselves, that will eliminate or greatly reduce the unwanted terminations.
...
The speechwriter would just be because I'm bad at writing persuasive speeches.
I don't see how reds running prenurseries would stop someone from sabotaging their supply shipments or for that matter just walking into the neighborhood with a gun.
... No, no, I understand, the situation is worse than I could possibly comprehend. I don't think I have a solution for people walking into red neighborhoods armed with guns, other than 'turn all the reds into invincible cyborgs'. I do think I can make these !@#$ing things run on hot soup if that's all the reds can find for them. I am an engineer and I will ENGINEER A SOLUTION.
I don't think it's common for people to walk into red neighborhoods with guns, but it's the sort of thing that, if it were prosecuted at all, would be prosecuted as sabotage to essential services.
I am presently trying to come up with some way of suggesting that their present state of murdering reds will look bad if it is still ongoing when Imai* arrives, without sounding like the sort of person they can dismiss because he thinks reds are entities of moral relevance. I don't think I'll find one.
OK, change of topic.
Do you have any idea how to make the cyborg conversions self-funding? In a weak sense they could be pitched as an investment in increasing supply of red services without increasing the number of reds, or as a test for the conversion process for clean Amentans, but I'm worried the positive effects would be limited to Tapa, if that.
I don't think you can get all the reds through the process as a test. As a way to increase the services:reds ratio, maybe, but that plays badly with anything intended to keep their credit access intact.
And the credit loss would be temporary, because Imai* and the League are going to land eventually and fix everything, except that the reds have no reason to believe that, and we'll have riots and massacres if the credits are cut. I keep circling back to - I need to boost demand for reds. Fusion plants, population growth, any more garbage-heavy methods of production... anything that makes the government say, 'so, we can issue twice as many red credits or make the reds we have clean cyborgs, which would you prefer?'
Still, he's starting to put together a program. Will any of this work? Will all of it work? Maybe some of it, at least...
What he really needs is an organization loyal only unto him and his Cause, located on an impenetrable island behind invincible fortress walls, which he can have do things like research directed towards his goals, and cyborg conversions that are actually safe, and all that. He is highly tempted to actually do this, though he admits that it would make the government of Tapa very annoyed at him. What are the laws on purchasing random miles of ocean like on Amenta?
Inconveniently, they usually avoid bumping up red credits unless they know for sure they have to, and if they're constantly on the cusp of figuring out robotics that might look like waiting until enough reds have already gotten in trouble for struggling with their workload that they can't assume it's just reds being lazy any more.
OK, the next time there's a big fire in their city or red riots or whatever, he's going to ask Tapa if he can build himself a private island at the edge of their coastal waters, then set it up so he can move there if he quarrels with them. It shouldn't be very hard if he can devote some of the product of his personal totally-autonomous-factories to the project.
So if everyone else's credits double because of increases in carrying capacity, they won't just assume that red credits will need to double too?
It hasn't happened that abruptly before, but I wouldn't bet on it. Maybe they'd go up but not double, figuring there's probably some slack in the system or that in the short term they don't want too many reds distracted by trying to parent their kids or that technology should be able to make reds more efficient if they design new cities with no technical debt.
Reds count as population, and credit numbers are public. If someone uses a population increase on reds, that's somebody else who doesn't get a baby. They have to have really airtight justifications to do that.
I recognize that, but I don't understand why "the population is growing by X% and so the reds also need to grow by X%" is not sufficiently airtight.
The credits are how they rejigger caste balances; they're not static. The share of purples drops a little now and then as more of their work gets more efficient. The share of yellows keeps going up as software gets bigger.
I see.
Really, he's starting to become impressed that Amenta functions at all.
Can you think of any important topics we have not addressed during this conversation, or critical blind spots I might still possess?
Understood. I appreciate the offer. If I do end up relocating to a manufactured island, I will be sure to offer you employment.
I'd have to run moving to a manufactured island by my wife but I'd sure look over the offer.
Understood.
And the next step is to send a brief description of his plans (I've been talking to people about this, I think the key thing is that we need to increase demand for red jobs to offset productivity increases from cyborg conversions if we're going to do that, more population growth might help but the best idea I've got at this point is to try to convince them that my advanced power plants should only be worked by reds, even robots are not nearly safe enough, any obvious flaws with all these programs) to the community organizer he was talking to earlier.
He's also wondering about other possibilities. He does not, in fact, want to have to set up a global red rights movement. Global red rights movements are likely to offend people in power and get brutally suppressed; his win condition is to build a spaceship and get off this rock and call in the cavalry. Please, please, just let that happen.
I think people might ask you if you have reds in your civilization working on this kind of power plant.
No, the work is done by robots and waldo-drones*, but we have trained onsite technicians with specially armored brains on-site at all times in case there's any problem, and also - my entire species is hyposensitive and nuclear power is still sufficient to make us panic about pollution, even though most other Amentan conditions only elicit a mild response if that. Disposing of the waste is done by robot and drone with, again, trained technicians to make sure it is safely done.
Actually this, is, um, not so much false as it is 'precautions taken by a more advanced civilization that spends ridiculous amounts of resources panicking about radiation-induced brain damage because it is completely immune to everything else.' Also the 'trained onsite technicians with specially-armored brains' are honestly just bored twentysomethings who just hang out in VR because there aren't any actual accidents because it is a mature technology and Imai* is not basically stupid.