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 -
Excellent, that's very helpful! Now, time to see how to make use of some of Amenta's engineering, since they're going to be manufacturing most of his parts...
Piki's very knowledgeable in her field, though her field is pretty narrow; she's actually here half as a networking contact because in her capacity as a metallurgy expert she talks to people in all kinds of industries.
How sensible. (Amenta is usually sensible; he expected more difficulties on first landing on an alien world.)
Eventually Piki bounces off to try some stuff in her testing ground with a person who does construction equipment.
She doesn't come back.
How odd. He should inform the regular greens that she's very helpful, and ask when she'll be back.
(By this point Nau has quietly worked vaguely purple highlights into his upper body, which was otherwise largely matte grey. If he's going to be mistaken for something, he knows what it ought to be.)
"- oh, I'm so sorry," says the green, eyes going very wide. "Piki - Piki Tai, right? She - I'm sorry, she died. We didn't realize that you'd been friendly to the point where you'd want to be told..."
That was a PAUSE. A very DRAMATIC PAUSE.
"Really."
(Nau is rather taller than an Amentan and often casually demonstrates super-strength by lifting heavy things, purely because it is convenient. And an alien with terrifying powers. And also ANGRY. He is not deliberately attempting to make an intimidation roll, he has not in fact considered the possibility, but some people might consider it anyway.)
"Why, exactly, did it burn down?"
The green takes a couple of steps back. "What I heard was that it was - a riot - she knew it was risky -"
He is not HERE to intimidate greens. He is here to ASK WHAT IS GOING ON. That is ALL. He does not understand why this green is reacting this way but he also does not really care.
"Who was rioting, why was it risky."
"There's some - elements who don't want there to be more automation, and the security for the factory was as tight as we know how to make it but there's still some leaks. - here is safer, it's far away from everything."
"Please explain to me any possible motive for wanting LESS automation, and everything about the groups that possess these motives. Use very small words."
The green slows down a lot, possibly to think of small words. "Some jobs... would stop being jobs... if robots could do more things. Jobs are important for... money, and child credits, that you buy with money. Anyone who thinks they could not get a new job that still existed if there were robots, might try to stop robots from happening."
"That is absurd. None of your castes are going to be annihilated so long as purples run shops and yellows program computers, and interstellar trade is about to usher you into limitless wealth, including sufficient planets to make child credits unnecessary. You are all going to be immortal. It is extremely stupid to kill people, when you are all going to be immortal. Please tell me a more plausible story."
"You have six castes. Purples have more sense. Yellows are programmers. Greens are scientists. Blues administer. Oranges look after children, robots cannot possibly render completely obsolete looking after children. Do you mean to tell me that grays have somehow decided that they are obsolete? I assure you our starships have captains! Or is that not physical enough?"
"I have the internet. It somehow failed to mention an entire caste. I suppose I need to look harder."
What does the internet say about reds.
Apparently reds are a small caste, comparable in population to blues, which handle unclean work such as anything involving sewage, garbage, dead bodies, or each other.
Nau sees.
... Well. So. The Amentan governments are planning on cutting all red child credits as soon as they can automate the work. And leave them all to starve, no doubt. He will investigate this further before he officially announces that all Amentans are free, as a fundamental right possessed by any and all sentients, to go to any world that will take them, and half of Imai*'s colonies will take anyone, just in case there's an actual reason for this other than short-sighted greed and an unwillingness to let anyone change castes. (Then he can start pursuing justice against the stupid, stupid murderers, having robbed them of any moral high ground they might possess.)
(He will also quietly have his replicator-factories start producing some situationally useful mining equipment, since his real factories aren't doing anything yet.)
Reds are understood to be intrinsically polluted. If a red has to do some plumbing in an apartment, it's typical for the occupant to be out of the place for the following six hours so the place can be deep-cleaned to a ludicrous margin of error and then aired out; if a red has a traffic accident and is thrown from their vehicle into a pedestrian street it's typical to close off the block and rush everybody within ten yards into the nearest public emergency shower.
It is fair to assume that reds leaving Amenta to set foot on any other planet in any but the most tightly controlled of fashions would not be lightly tolerated by the other Amentans.
A-ha.
Well.
That makes his job more difficult, doesn't it.
He does not want to burn this entire planet to the ground. He does not want to wipe out ninety percent of the population, fill the streets with blood, wash his hands in blue-stained gore. There are a great many Amentans who are really very nice, and who have done nothing at all to deserve any of this. In fact what he would like would be for a professional diplomat, one of the Elders who has gotten so good at conversation that its voice is a type III infohazard, to show up and recite a single poem and then watch all clean Amentans spontaneously weep tears of sorrow that they ever did such a thing wrong, as to care about caste.
But he does want to fantasize about killing them all, just so long as it's only fantasy.
He does not think he can take over the planet with his available resources, not if he wants it intact. He does think he can design a radio transmission for broadcast that will convey the actual history to the next ship that crashes, assuming that ever comes, but although that might ensure the Amentans can't murder him to keep their shameful little secret and then run off with the hyperdrive, it doesn't solve the real problem. Indeed, driving them to kill him would create a worse problem, because then they might think that he'd been lying about the Unity of Man being the Unity of Man, and then there would not be any more Amentans, even though they are, in many respects, The Best Aliens and adorable, because the Unity of Man does not play by any friendly rules.
Let's start with the baseline possibility: If he forgets he ever heard about this, what exactly is going to happen to the reds? Are they going to starve, when robots show up?