high-energy physics

[warpfairy]

Federation political prisons are not particularly uncomfortable. She's not going anywhere, but she can read, she's considering taking up an instrument, the only really awkward thing is that she doesn't particularly want to be supervised while she's sweating her way through her next pon farr one way or another but that's years off. That and she wishes she'd taken longer to get caught. But she was running out of the really low-hanging fruit anyway.

This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.

Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.

Comments

[lintamande]

"Science fantasy?"

[warpfairy]

"...The phrase doesn't mean anything here. Bella?"

[subtly_artistic]

"It's not very namey. I'd put it in a brochure if I were advertising it to Materians but not the name."

[lintamande]

"Elendilmë or Elendil would be Quenya for 'star-alliance' or 'star-friendship'."

[warpfairy]

"Are we planning on having names in several languages, or just one that transliterates?"

[lintamande]

"The more names the better," Fëanáro says.

[subtly_artistic]

"That sounds confusing!"

[warpfairy]

"I mean, if people can't pronounce the name they'll call us something else, we need to either self-translate preemptively or live with anyone who doesn't get use out of the primary name making something up. That is not quite 'the more names the better', though."

[lintamande]

"'The Elendil' works in English and Pax and Davlia," Fëanáro says.

[warpfairy]

"Yeah, the Federation will call us the Elendil if we introduce ourselves that way. The Ferengi or somebody might not."

[lintamande]

"Ferengi? What's their language?"

[warpfairy]

"I don't know any of it, even the sentences I know in Klingon."

[lintamande]

He bounces in his seat. "We'll go meet them and figure out what to call ourselves with them after we are established."

[warpfairy]

"You might want to put off meeting Ferengi till you have monetary economies more figured out. They're very into trade and commerce."

[lintamande]

"I bet in a Year I'll know enough about that to learn from them, at least."

[warpfairy]

"Monetary economies are useful for a lot of allocation problems if you have a large population. I like the Federation model, really - I like almost everything about the Federation except how unwilling they are to let more things be the Federation. And their genetic engineering policy."

[lintamande]

"What's their genetic engineering policy?"

[warpfairy]

"'Don't'."

[lintamande]

"And what's genetic engineering?"

[warpfairy]

"...your home worlds probably don't have genetics to begin with. Uh, the reason cats have kittens and not puppies, and people look like their parents, and so on, is because of descriptions of how to build their structures encoded into every part of the body. The instructions get shuffled around when people have children but it's still half from each parent, in two-parent situations. Genetic engineering is the science of shuffling the instructions around, or editing them, on purpose instead of by luck of the draw, traditionally to make children turn out stronger or smarter or prettier or healthier or all of the above. Genetically engineered people are called 'augments'. There was a war some augments started, and now there's so much bad feeling about genetically engineered people that no one is allowed to have it done or seriously study it."

[lintamande]

"There aren't going to be any rules about what you can seriously study in our kingdom," says Fëanáro fervently.

"I don't know if that's a wise commitment," Rúmil says, "but making children healthier is no question."

[warpfairy]

"Are we being a kingdom? Monarchies aren't very popular in this galaxy."

[lintamande]

Fëanáro looks more excited than disappointed. "How else are things run?"

[warpfairy]

"The Federation is a republic, and so are most of its member states, republics or democracies with various structural customizations - it's possible to qualify for membership without average citizens voting being the central feature of your government but it requires special circumstances. Ferenginar is I think a plutocracy. The Klingons are an empire, ostensibly, but haven't had an actual emperor for a while. Cardassia's run by its military. There are planets that organize themselves theocratically or are governed by a noble class without centralization or implement various buggy attempts at meritocracy or technocracy."

[lintamande]

He mouths the words as she goes, enchanted. "I think all the Quendi are either in small self-organized tribes or are monarchies. I don't think we tried those other things, though."