Intergalactic Summit

Oh look! You guys have the same tailor!

The coming Blood Age will be united, peaceful, and human.

It will be united because all humanity will under the imperial sway of the Amarr-Blood Raider Empire-Covenant.

It will be peaceful because all resistance to the Amarr-Blood Raider Empire-Covenant will be crushed and all subject peoples given Vitoc, the glaive collar, 24/7 propaganda and brainwashing, and TCMCs. No resistance will ever rise again.

It will be human because the filithy, subhuman Minmatar people will be exterminated and everyone else will either become human like the Chosen or be exterminated themselves.

If I remember, he actually came up with a recipe for how to de-Minmatarize yourself. It's basically a loyalty test writ in sweeping gestures.

It involves a lot of Matari blood. A lot of death, too.

It's pretty predictable, and sad for the usual reasons.




(I would be curious to find out if there's any way for "people in pleasure hubs" to cleanse their pleasure-hubbishness. It's probably similar, but the reasoning behind the details might be interesting.)

Entry Thirty-one: Tool Use

Zoom in close on people's lives, and you'll see just that: people. Zoom out a ways, though, and you start to see things in terms of social utility: teachers and "stay-at-home" parents to supply a highly-functional citizenry; doctors and, in a completely different way, stay-at-home spouses, and, in another completely different way, entertainment services to keep your population functioning at a high level; tradesfolk to support your infrastructure; soldiers to ward off threats to your control, or to increase its breadth; police, lawyers and lawmakers to arrange and maintain order.

Just about every career path one can take has its rules, its structures and strictures, designed to make it a reliable tool.

At a glance, we don't. We're exceptions to so many rules....

It's pretty disturbing.

The obvious, logical thing for each and every empire to do with the hydrostatic pod is just to treat it as just another weapon in the arsenal, and an infomorph capsuleer as just another specialized military role. To an extent, they do actually do this, but then there's us.

A capsuleer, by default, is an independent, nearly-indestructible mercenary armed with a ridiculously potent weapon. It's an absurd thing for any normal society to willingly allow to happen. Yet someone did that on purpose. The pod didn't just slip into our hands. It was placed there. We're subject to a regulatory system, however limited. We're part of some system, somehow, like doctors, lawyers, tradesfolk.

But what are we for? The obvious answer is wetwork of the kind we do all the time, but we could have done that as part of national militaries. We've gone far beyond that kind of utility.

It's possible that we're actually not doing our job. Every job is subject to corruption of some sort, whether it's the bribe-taking official or the parent who gets drunk and beats the children. But there's usually some point at which authorities step in, and I think we're long past it, so the most likely answer is that we are doing our job, according to ... someone.

Whoever's purpose we serve.

Well ... you can usually infer a tool's purpose from its shape. So....

We're a warrior class. That much is clear. If we don't fight conventional forces, or Nation forces, or Drifters, we fight each other. If we don't fight, we build weapons, or trade in weapons, or design and improve on weapons. It's hard enough to find exceptions that they seem mostly to prove the rule.

Another rule the exceptions prove: we're not servants of any one nation. We move freely among them, potentially serving any, all, or none. We choose our own allegiances, and not for life, but at whim, like we're picking out what colors to wear for the day. (Okay, not quite that far, but it's pretty close.) We trade and fight, often (usually?) without much regard for national borders.

We're useful for (and used for) all sorts of things, but actually I think our "use" is probably something we serve just by being what we are. By ignoring those borders, we make them permeable. By our travels and shifting allegiances, hard lines on maps between politically deadlocked powers start to fade.

If we assume that this effect is intentional, a lot of our purpose takes form: taken collectively, we're a dissolving agent, breaking solid structures down so that new, larger ones can take their place. We're not gentle-- our influence seems to be most easily measured in megadeaths-- but maybe we're gentler (and more reliable) than more traditional methods, like the heat of massive, civilization-threatening wars.

If we serve any one master, it's one entangled in the meta-society of New Eden's nations. And it has to be strong enough to dictate terms (probably with a lot of diplomatic tact) to the empires that train us, maintain our infrastructure, and build our pods.

That last observation suggests whose design we probably follow. The hydrostatic pod wasn't something the Caldari scientists at Ishukone just came up with. It was a gift.

There's also just one national border we can't cross.

The Jove created the pod, probably a long time ago. They'd know its applications and its effects. They'd be able to predict what sort of role we'd play. There's no one else who would be as well-placed to anticipate that we'd become exactly what we have.

People say the Jove are dead. Maybe that's true; I don't know. But I think it's their tune we dance, even if they're not playing it for us anymore.

The beast should have been kept in a cage.

I'd prefer to see the Empire not resort to godless and abominable technology to defend itself.

Capsuleers without cloning and only permitted chained into the direct service of the Imperial Navy would be a start.

Yet, Ms. Jenneth, I believe I do my job.

Killing enemies of the State is duty of every Caldari citizen. Unfortunately, as capsule interface was leaked outside of the State now we have to deal with enemies inside these capsules as well. And since I possess the same technology, it is them, capsuleers who are acting or speaking against the State, they must be my priority targets.

You should do your job as well. As Tibus Heth said, "Everyone must do their part."

Miz, it's pretty rare that major powers just fold their cards and say, "Nope. This one's too dangerous for us to try to control by any of the ridiculously large number of means at our disposal even though this technology is so complicated and delicate that we could trivially slip in traps and fail-safes every-which-way."

In the past, the Jove have showered us with gifts: the Apotheosis, the Gnosis. Tokens, maybe, but significant tokens, with no demands or favors asked in return. Their technology is what created us, and they've been giving us presents as though we were favored children.

The Jove had the information, the position, and the leverage. I don't for a moment think they didn't know what their toy would do. After all, they had it first. And they gave it to us, before we really knew what to do with it. They helped form CONCORD, helped form the regime that would govern us-- helped establish the rules that would ...

... pretty much fail to control us.

Here we are.

I don't think we brought ourselves here.

Miz? Respectfully, I think a conspiracy by agents of a nation state to mess with the affairs of other nation states and their citizens is usually called "foreign policy." The Gallente are really good at it (take for example the Federation-sponsored rebellion that freed so many of your people), but it's the Jove who are famous for their intelligence network.

An intelligence network-- that's another thing that can be called a conspiracy, but I think when someone's actually and actively been studying you from 100-km-long cloaked observatories for your entire history, it's not really a "conspiracy theory" anymore. It's just fact that they've been watching us for a really long time, and it's likely that they've been using that information.

There might be some confirmation bias influencing my thoughts on this somewhere, but I'm not saying someone's brainwashing us through our fluid routers. Yes, I am saying that there are probably failsafes (and, yeah, CONCORD's ability to shut us down in highsec does smack of somebody pushing that button), but my main reason for thinking that is that it would be really stupid not to have them.

A lot of the rules that seem to govern us are implicit, woven not into what we're supposed to do, but what we can do. Like targeting a planet with a doomsday weapon or blasting our way out of a station from the inside-- I think, for us, for now, we just can't do it. There are rules at work there, systems that take priority over capsuleer will. And mostly we don't notice, because this is just how our world works.

You and I look at all this really differently, though. Maybe the whole world.

You talk about villains. You don't say it, but it sounds like you'd think anyone who arranged this would be ... well, a villain.

I don't believe in evil at all. The worst people I've seen, including Nauplius, just seem really damaged, to me. And if someone arranged for us to be where we are, I think that's part of the game of empires and diplomats-- a game of civilizations, and of all civilization as a whole. We're frequently ruthless people, so maybe that makes creating us a ruthless move, but that seems to be something the interplay of civilizations often is.

What's more, the endgame might very well be an attempt to erode national barriers away and let civilization slip past its current deadlocked state, without having to tear everything down. Would that be a bad thing?

And, in terms of what to do about it, if it's true it puts both of us in a strange position. If I want to cooperate, there's no clear way for me to do such a thing. If you want to rebel, there's no clear way to do that, either. We probably do what we're supposed to just by being as we are.

You seem to think I'm telling a scary story, and I guess if you're loyal to something that already exists, maybe it is. I actually think it's a little bit of a comfort, though. Unless we're ready to return to a dark age, people need stable societies to live. Everyone takes advantage of everyone else; that's sort of what a society is.

The situation as it stands is kind of stable. But the empires are deadlocked, and sooner or later something is going to give. We already know what the eventual threat is: total war. Dust and ashes. Empires spent against each other, crumbling into chaos. A new dark age, maybe presided over by the Cartel or the Guristas, if we're lucky. If we're not, the winners could be the Sani or (please shoot me dead if this happens) Sansha's Nation.

The alternative is to use the deadlock to bleed tensions away. That's something we seem not to be terrible at doing.

So I guess ... I don't think someone using us in a way that would help expand civilization if it succeeds is necessarily a bad thing. Even if it's true, it's just ... a thing, a bit of history ...

... a little context for why we exist.