"I guess you reminded me," Akon said, "that you can't always get everything you want."
(5/8) Three Worlds Decide
Akon strode into the main Conference Room; and though he walked like a physically exhausted man,
at least his face was determined. Behind him, the shadowy Confessor followed.
The Command Conference looked up at him, and exchanged glances.
"You look better," the Ship's Master of Fandom ventured.
Akon put a hand on the back of his seat, and paused. Someone was absent. "The Ship's Engineer?"
The Lord Programmer frowned. "He said he had an experiment to run, my lord. He refused to clarify further, but I suppose it must have something to do with the Babyeaters' data -"
"You're joking," Akon said. "Our Ship's Engineer is off Nobel-hunting? Now? With the fate of the human species at stake? "
The Lord Programmer shrugged. "He seemed to think it was important, my lord."
Akon sighed. He pulled his chair back and half-slid, half-fell into it. "I don't suppose that the ship's markets have settled down?"
The Lord Pilot grinned sardonically. "Read for yourself."
Akon twitched, calling up a screen. "Ah, I see. The ship's Interpreter of the Market's Will reports, and I quote, 'Every single one of the underlying assets in my market is going up and down like a fucking yo-yo while the ship's hedgers try to adjust to a Black Swan that's going to wipe out ninety-eight percent of their planetside risk capital. Even the spot prices on this ship are going crazy; either we've got bubble traders coming out of the woodwork, or someone seriously believes that sex is overvalued relative to orange juice. One derivatives trader says she's working on a contract that will have a clearly defined value in the event that aliens wipe out the entire human species, but she says it's going to take a few hours and I say she's on crack. Indeed I believe an actual majority of the people still trying to trade in this environment are higher than the heliopause. Bid-ask spreads are so wide you could kick a
fucking football stadium through them, nothing is clearing, and I have unisolated conditional dependencies coming out of my ass. I have no fucking clue what the market believes. Someone get
me a drink.' Unquote." Akon looked at the Master of Fandom. "Any suggestions get reddited up from the rest of the crew?"
The Master cleared his throat. "My lord, we took the liberty of filtering out everything that was physically impossible, based on pure wishful thinking, or displayed a clear misunderstanding of
naturalistic metaethics. I can show you the raw list, if you'd like."
"And what's left?" Akon said. "Oh, never mind, I get it."
"Well, not quite," said the Master. "To summarize the best ideas -" He gestured a small holo into existence.
Ask the Superhappies if their biotechnology is capable of in vivo cognitive alterations of
Babyeater children to ensure that they don't grow up wanting to eat their own children. Sterilize the current adults. If Babyeater adults cannot be sterilized and will not surrender, imprison them. If that's too expensive, kill most of them, but leave enough in prison to preserve their culture for the children. Offer the Superhappies an alliance to invade the Babyeaters, in which we provide the capital and labor and they provide the technology.
"Not too bad," Akon said. His voice grew somewhat dry. "But it doesn't seem to address the question of what the Superhappies are supposed to do with us. The analogous treatment -"
"Yes, my lord," the Master said. "That was extensively pointed out in the comments, my lord. And the other problem is that the Superhappies don't really need our labor or our capital." The Master looked in the direction of the Lord Programmer, the Xenopsychologist, and the Lady Sensory.
The Lord Programmer said, "My lord, I believe the Superhappies think much faster than we do. If their cognitive systems are really based on something more like DNA than like neurons, that shouldn't be surprising. In fact, it's surprising that the speedup is as little as -" The Lord Programmer stopped, and swallowed. "My lord. The Superhappies responded to most of our transmissions extremely quickly.
There was, however, a finite delay. And that delay was roughly proportional to the length of the
response, plus an additive constant. Going by the proportion, my lord, I believe they think between fifteen and thirty times as fast as we do, to the extent such a comparison can be made. If I try to use Moore's Law type reasoning on some of the observable technological parameters in their ship -
Alderson flux, power density, that sort of thing - then I get a reasonably convergent estimate that the aliens are two hundred years ahead of us in human-equivalent subjective time. Which means it would be twelve hundred equivalent years since their Scientific Revolution."
"If," the Xenopsychologist said, "their history went as slowly as ours. It probably didn't." The Xenopsychologist took a breath. "My lord, my suspicion is that the aliens are literally able to run their entire ship using only three kiritsugu as sole crew. My lord, this may represent, not only the superior programming ability that translated their communications to us, but also the highly probable case that Superhappies can trade knowledge and skills among themselves by having sex. Every individual of
their species might contain the memory of their Einsteins and Newtons and a thousand other areas of expertise, no more conserved than DNA is conserved among humans. My lord, I suspect their version of Galileo was something like thirty objective years ago, as the stars count time, and that they've been in space for maybe twenty years."
The Lady Sensory said, "Their ship has a plane of symmetry, and it's been getting wider on the axis through that plane, as it sucks up nova dust and energy. It's growing on a smooth exponential at 2%
per hour, which means it can split every thirty-five hours in this environment."
"I have no idea," the Xenopsychologist said, "how fast the Superhappies can reproduce themselves -
how many children they have per generation, or how fast their children sexually mature. But all things considered, I don't think we can count on their kids taking twenty years to get through high school."
There was silence.
When Akon could speak again, he said, "Are you all quite finished?"
"If they let us live," the Lord Programmer said, "and if we can work out a trade agreement with them under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, interest rates will -"
"Interest rates can fall into an open sewer and die. Any further transmissions from the Superhappy ship?"
The Lady Sensory shook her head.
"All right," Akon said. "Open a transmission channel to them."
There was a stir around the table. "My lord -" said the Master of Fandom. "My lord, what are you going to say?"
Akon smiled wearily. "I'm going to ask them if they have any options to offer us."
The Lady Sensory looked at the Ship's Confessor. The hood silently nodded: He's still sane.
The Lady Sensory swallowed, and opened a channel. On the holo there first appeared, as a screen:
The Lady 3rd Kiritsugu
temporary co-chair of the Gameplayer
Language Translator version 9
Cultural Translator version 16
The Lady 3rd in this translation was slightly less pale, and looked a bit more concerned and