mithriltabby | Escaped gaming meme: post-Singularity encounters (Reply)

In doing the research for Rise of the Jedi, I’ve been contemplating how an interstellar culture can hover around an equilibrium point of technology for 25,000 years. (The Star Wars universe isn’t the only one with long-term stable galactic culture; Asimov’s Foundation books are another galactic empire.) Living as we do in a time of technological acceleration, that kind of stability is a contrast to our daily lives. I have some plans for looking at mechanisms behind equilibrium technology levels, but first I’d like to deal with what Charlie Stross called the “turd that Vernor Vinge crapped into the punchbowl of SF writing, and now nobody wanting to take a drink can ignore it”: the Singularity.

When examining the effects of the Singularity on space opera and space fantasy settings, I look at it as a form of natural selection. In the long term, technological acceleration selects the strongest technophiles out of the stage of human-scale events. Whether the people remaining at the human scale are there because they’ve turned away from acceleration or they’re fleeing less-than-benevolent transcended entities (as in Stross’ cautionary tale Accelerando), those remaining will tend to be more reluctant to get on the roller coaster again. The stories available to tell at the human scale are all about the people who didn’t and mostly wouldn’t choose to upload themselves given the opportunity. (Imagine if the Ancients of Stargate SG-1 had left a booth with a door and a button labeled Press Button to Ascend at every stargate.)

Even one Singularity can serve as a continuing selection filter on future technophiles. If the route to visiting an existing Matrioshka Brain is known, are you going to try to bootstrap yourself up to that level of technology or go to the place offering free uploads? After disassembling a solar system to make a big cloud of computronium, a forward-thinking advanced civilization would likely keep a few megatons of base matter and utility fog around for maintenance tasks and even welcoming the occasional visitor.

The welcome might simply be a high-bandwidth laser connection. They might use their utility fog to create the simulacrum of a spacedock where people could get out and interact with simulated human-scale beings in a modern-looking setting. Or they might create an entire simulated environment that serves as some obscure form of test of the visitors— there might be an entire adventure involved to just impress the hosts enough to talk to them. (This could be a chance to break genre and put your space-traveling heroes into a swords-and-sorcery environment for a session.)

Why would transcended entities bother with human-scale ones? They might be lacking in data for their models of the outside universe, and be willing to make some effort to get useful information from a visitor. Guest-gifts like an entire planet’s cultural database, gene libraries, or a chance to copy a holocron would be well-received. (In particular, if they used their awesome computational resources to rabbit-hole down a further Singularity, as Ken MacLeod suggests in Newton’s Wake, the entire Matrioshka Brain might be populated by analogous stay-behinds to the humans outside— some of whom might be staying because of an interest in the outside universe.)

The incentives they would offer would be calculated to increase the amount of information in the outside universe: they would never offer disruptive technologies, either as information or as a self-replicating artifact, because that might make the universe outside less interesting. They would always be happy to welcome new uploads. (The uploaded person would, of course, be able to pass every test of being the old one. The paranoid might wonder if that was just a clever simulation while the actual consciousness of their friend was enslaved or destroyed...)

Some ideas of things a canny character could obtain:

Lost information about galactic history.
Biomods with inheritable genes to be turned loose on the galaxy to see if the genes thrive. Never anything with a clear-cut advantage, of course...
- Exotic hair and skin colors and textures. (If you’re running space fantasy as anime, you can go to town with this.)
- Unusual organ arrangements like chimerism and hermaphrodism.
- Unusual mental adaptations like synaesthesia.
- New sense organs that also serve as distinguishing features.
- New adaptations that have benefits and drawbacks. e.g.: “diplomatic digestion”, which allows a character to enjoy nearly any food in the galaxy. One drawback is that they lose any visceral sense of food tasting bad to anyone, and need to simply remember what smells would annoy which people. Another is that your body odor would reflect what you’d been eating— which means that you’ll smell nice to Hutts if you’ve been dining with them for a couple of days, but your BO might now be repulsive to humans.
- Species change. Romantics might be a sucker for star-crossed lovers from different species; they might change one partner to match the other, change both to match an existing one, or create a new one entirely. (“Congratulations, Romeo and Juliet. You’ll need to come up with a name for your new species— perhaps ‘Capague’ or “Montulet”? We’ve stocked your testes and ovaries with a sufficiently diverse set of cells that you should be able to create a viable population through the use of exowombs or host mothers...”)
They would, of course, be able to determine if this was an attempt to evade one’s past by changing appearance rather than to become more interesting. At that point they might do something perverse, like provide the modification to your germ cells but not to you.
Assorted bottles of eggs and sperm from species suffering from a lack of genetic diversity or even extinction.
Unique artifacts: mysterious boxes that you can plug into your droid’s processing bus to give them unusual mental capacities, a one-shot cure for a dear relative’s fatal disease, a weapon similar to the Lazy Gun in Iain M. Banks’ Against a Dark Background but with obscure recharging conditions and a rather limited magazine, unusual lightsaber crystals...
Uploaded people might leave a living gift in their wake— perhaps a loyal pet that cares for their friends and/or family, or a pregnant female from their favorite endangered species.

A more active transcended civilization might be in the habit of seeding the galaxy with upload booths. Objects that appear to be meteors streak into the skies of inhabited planets and drop nanotech seeds that grow into small buildings. Within, anyone can talk with transcended beings about the benefits of uploading and choose to do so, possibly leaving behind exotic gifts. This would be a very active filter for technophiles, and would also be very tempting to oppressed populations looking for a way out. Dictators would tend to have such facilities under guard, and might even place hyperspace interdiction cruisers on the known hyperspace approaches to a Matrioshka Brain. They wouldn’t want people hoping for escape, after all...