Alpha Centauri 2

Community => Planet Tales => Topic started by: Rusty Edge on April 19, 2016, 10:37:54 PM

Title: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Rusty Edge on April 19, 2016, 10:37:54 PM

This is a work of Larry Niven Fan Fiction in progress, set in his Known Space universe.

Comments welcome

[Story drafts copyright 2016-present "Rusty Edge"]
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The  spy gently descended towards the surface of the small frozen moon on a rocket device. First he pulled the trigger again to turn it off, and glided the last meter or two in the low gravity. Then he detached a mirror-surfaced box from his web harness an placed it on the frozen ground between his feet. He flicked the selector switch on his rocket powered lift, and the device transformed into a hand-held computer. "DON'T DELAY, ATTACK!" it said. Quickly he returned the selector switch to it's neutral setting, and the device became a silver sphere atop a pistol grip. Twisting the silver sphere he transformed it into a cone,  pointed at the planet dominating the sky and pulled the trigger.

A shimmering blue light reached towards the planet. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the planet didn't seem to explode, burn, or melt as he might have expected. It simply shattered. The entire planet.

Then he heard a voice in his mind say "Kill yourself, slave!" and he knew with crystalline certainty that it was the right thing to do. He set the secret weapon to self-destruct, and a second cone appeared on it. The spy pulled the trigger and he and his device vanished in a powerful blue flash.

*****

An aeon or so later, on that same frozen moon, now planetless:

"What do you think you're doin', Smitty?" said the Belter's partner.  Bob, like most resident miners in the Asteroid Belt, was a nudist, with a bald body and a hairstyle that looked like a cross between a Mohawk and a cropped horse's mane which ran all of the way down the spine by means of hair transplants, dyed popsicle blue. Smitty's crest was a natural copper color.

"I was reading about that Sea Statue they found in the muck on the bottom of Earth's ocean centuries ago, and I wondered if there could be anything like a relic hidden there on Ceres, underneath the lake in this ice covered crater. So I'm scanning it with the deep radar", he said, not looking up from the screen.

"Yer wastin' yer time. Mine,too."

"Uh, Bob,... I think you owe me a beer!" hooted Smitty.

********************

"Congrats again on taking the initiative with the Grogs. Please, have a seat," said my great grandfather, affectionately know as G Squared, the founder of the family business. Rather than get fat and soft as he aged, he seemed to get leaner and tougher, like beef jerky. You'd  think he might last forever. He had invented dolphin hands, which allowed them to use tools and computers and become both productive and wealthy, and Garvey Limited, too, in the process. My main accomplishment was discovering another handicapped sentient species, the Grogs, and negotiating contracts with them.

"Thanks," I said, sinking into a hover chair across the desk from him. Hover chairs were like sleeping plates, they automatically adjusted the gravity so that you could float in comfort, without falling off. "I had an inspirational example to live up to." Ripples in the artificial gravity field massaged my back.

"When are you going to settle down and give me my great, great, grandson so I can claim the title of G-Cubed and retire as chairman of the board ?" he teased.

"Well, there is this special girl on Down, Sharon Jilson, but I've got something I need to do first, before I try to get married," I confessed... "It will take time, money, and space travel. I've been preoccupied by a perplexing riddle, and it's dominating my free time. Bandersnatchi shouldn't have such huge brains, but they do. They were designer food beasts. There is was no need for them to be sentient. The less brains, the better. I know they also served as spies, but Tnuctipun sized brains should have been more that adequate for a spy. So what's the purpose? "

  Bandersnatchi were our clients, too, much like the dolphins. My grandfather, "G-Prime" was responsible for finding that market. Bandersnatchi lived in the Lowlands of Jinx, grazing upon yeast on the shores of it's equatorial ocean. They were slug-like single celled life forms scaled up to twice the size of a Brontosaurus. Externally they had a hard shell cell wall with a broad mouth and sensory bristles clustered at each corner. They were created by the Tnuctipun.

The Tnuctipun were a very intelligent race of bipeds, gifted in the ways of bioengineering and other advanced technologies. Unfortunately for them, they were enslaved by the Thrintun, a species of modest intelligence with natural mind control powers so mighty that they ruled most of the galaxy. At least until the Tnuctipun revolted about a billion and a half years ago and everyone died as a result, except for some Bandersnatchi on Jinx.

My great grandfather handed me a mug of Irish coffee, and sat down behind his desk with one of his own.

"G-Prime is our executive expert, what did he have to say about it?"

I savored the coffee. "He thinks maybe they Tnuctipun just scaled up a microbe which could convert anything into palatable protoplasm, and the oversized brain and immutability were simple unintended consequences. The spying was an afterthought, otherwise they'd have been designed with eyes. I wanted to get your input."

G-Squared rubbed his chin and furrowed his brow. "Brains used to be a delicacy until somebody discovered you could get prion and RNA viral brain diseases from eating them. Maybe it's because brains were simply worth more per kilo than meat. Maybe they had over-sized livers, too, for the same reason. Did you think of that?" he asked.

"That's disgusting, of course not. Far before my time. My gut says there's another answer...No pun intended," I said.

He chuckled. "Your gut was right about Grogs, and they're making us a lot of money now. Not just as animal herdsman, zookeepers, and police interrogators, as they suggested, but as pet and infant psychologists, memory retrieval specialists, doctor's assistants, interpreters, etc. They can even cure gambling, smoking, drinking and current addictions. Go figure it out, you have my carte blanche as majority shareholder of Garvey Industries. If it's bothering you, I have a hunch we're leaving money on the table."

"Take this, it came from the Belt. You can have it if you don't ask any other questions of me," G-squared said, handing me a bronze-like metal object he had taken from his desk drawer. Apparently an open stasis box, it could only have been smuggled. Stasis boxes were like buried treasure, they often contained advanced technology, some of it weaponry. Because of that, the UN claimed first right to it in the name of public safety. Stasis boxes were so dense that they reflected everything, they were practically indestructible, and whatever was inside was suspended in time while the box was closed and the stasis field was active. The boxes were relics of the Thrintin Slavers, built for them by the Tnuctipun slaves. This one contained a plasticized claw with 3 fingers, some cubes of meat in transparent wrappings, a flat rectangular gadget, an empty drinking bulb, and a canister of amber liquid. "It should provide some clues in your quest. The labs say the meat is toxic, and that big bottle contains a unique ethanol liqueur."

"Truth be told, I'd rather smoke than drink," continued G-squared.

"Go ahead," I said, following his lead and changing the subject. I was both alert and relaxed, feeling the effects of the fine Irish Coffee. "How has this dangerous smoking habit endured in humanity for over a thousand years, if you don't mind my asking? It doesn't make sense that it would."

"I suppose not," he said, as he took out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, and touched the other end against his ring. There were some blue high voltage sparks, then the cigarette smoldered, and the tip glowed orange as he inhaled. "You might have reasonably expected it to die out after the Surgeon General's warning appeared on the product, and they banned advertising from TV, around the time of the Moon landing. Maybe they should have outlawed it altogether, but Prohibition on alcohol didn't work, and besides, the government was a partner in crime with the tobacco companies through vice taxes. So it survived."

He blew a few smoke rings."Well, obviously it's an acquired taste, but an addictive one. Like all acquired tastes, the pleasure exceeds the pain, at least after the instinctive unpleasant reflex, in the short to intermediate term. So a lot of people continued to smoke, and a lot of people got curious enough to find out for themselves. Meanwhile the commercial interests were trying to revise their business plan with healthier, smokeless, and electronic versions of cigarettes, to grant themselves an extension. When marijuana was decriminalized in the early 21st century, the big tobacco interests muscled in on the market, and added tobacco to regulate the strength of the product, and make it more addictive, too"...

G-squared flicked off the excess ash from his cigarette. "As the population of Earth grew into the tens of billions, the do-gooders ended tobacco cultivation subsidies, and replaced them with stiff taxes. When that failed, they instituted an outright ban, claiming it was immoral to grow tobacco rather than food."

"Why didn't that work?" I wondered.

"The Belters. Before the Moon Landing, the cowboy was the iconic symbol of American self-reliance. It dominated entertainment. People wore the boots, hats, and blue jeans. They listened to the music. The cigarette advertising campaigns were built around cowboys. As the Earth became crowded and regulated, people with those independent streaks moved to the Asteroid Belt. Smoking was their homage to the cowboys, and a way to relax when they got outside of their space suits. The Belter Crest hair style was their homage to the musical and cultural rebels of the 1980s, the Punks." G-Squared took a long pull on his cigarette.

"The Belters were now the new cowboys of the new century. When tobacco production ceased on Earth, the Belters took up the slack, only now most cigarettes were smuggled, which was a way for everybody who used them to identify with their iconic heroes, or defy the U.N., or to appear wealthy. They made smoking cool again."

He let out a long stream of smoke. "Eventually medicine caught up, and you could use the auto doc at the pharmacy every week when you dropped by to pick up your cigarette supply, neutralizing most of the harmful effects, then the UN threw in the towel and deregulated tobacco, making it tax free." Automated doctors were sort of like tanning beds, you laid down in the tank, closed the lid, and the machines scanned you, then used drugs and nanite robots in your blood stream to make repairs and adjustments to your body and personal chemistry while you received a massage.

"The other reason smoking survived the intervening centuries," He took the cigarette out of his mouth and pointed it at me for emphasis, "was those kidnapping organ legger gangs! To them, a person was either a potential product or a potential black market customer, and smokers make way better customers than marketable product. Statistically, smoking made you less likely to die young!"

I went slack jawed. "Damned if you do, and damned if you don't!" 

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 19, 2016, 11:34:58 PM

...I'll need time to digest this, but you've got the style pretty well nailed.

I'm pretty sure your line of dashes is what's borking up the thread width.  If you trimmed it to this long -

Quote from: Rusty Edge on April 19, 2016, 10:37:54 PM

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-I believe it would fix...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on April 20, 2016, 03:49:21 AM

Style was a major aim of reading and re-reading the stories. Yay! 

Before I'm finished I want to put some effort into voice, so that the various characters don't read like the same person saying everything. I don't think that's one of Niven's strong suits, at least not in his earlier writings.

But when it comes to writing stories about gravity, how technology affects society, and puzzles, he's my favorite.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 20, 2016, 02:22:30 PM

It's definitely not a Niven strong suit, distinct individual personalities, no.  He has done better in his more recent work.

Canon alert: I guess I need to re-read World of Ptavvs again to get it exactly right for you, but either Kzanol -or Larry Greenberg working from Kzanol's memories- flatly stated that Bandersnatch brains were a very tasty delicacy.  Kzanol wasn't too bright, so it could easily be a vast oversimplification, if you've got a good idea to justify modifying that, but it needs to be good and/or necessary...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on April 20, 2016, 05:56:18 PM

I had no recollection of the tasty brains in the story, thanks for bringing that up. So the Slavers probably ate them... that could impact my plot, I'll have to contemplate it today. I think I can work with it.

Thanks!

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 20, 2016, 06:34:19 PM

Slavers were very dedicated carnivores - the Tnuctip were hinted to be, too, but we know so much less about them, not having met any in person...  Tasty is the reason given for the big Bandersnatch brains so they could double as spys immune to being mind-read and The Power (which is why there were still Bandersnatch after Suicide Night, not just because suicide would be difficult for something without hands in the lowlands of Jinx) - but that was a guess over a billion years after the fact.

You might want to google In the Hall of the Mountain King by Jerry Pournell and S.M. Stirling from one of the Man-Kzin Wars books -I think the third- which has a similar beginning with a Tnuctipun spy, is in part a blatant ripoff of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and has some ideas you may want to use or avoid about the Tnuctips, which are physically described, and the spy makes it into the present...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on April 21, 2016, 04:47:35 AM

Quote from: BUncle on April 20, 2016, 06:34:19 PM

Slavers were very dedicated carnivores - the Tnuctip were hinted to be, too, but we know so much less about them, not having met any in person...  Tasty is the reason given for the big Bandersnatch brains so they could double as spys immune to being mind-read and The Power (which is why there were still Bandersnatch after Suicide Night, not just because suicide would be difficult for something without hands in the lowlands of Jinx) - but that was a guess over a billion years after the fact.

You might want to google In the Hall of the Mountain King by Jerry Pournell and S.M. Stirling from one of the Man-Kzin Wars books -I think the third- which has a similar beginning with a Tnuctipun spy, is in part a blatant ripoff of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and has some ideas you may want to use or avoid about the Tnuctips, which are physically described, and the spy makes it into the present...

Thanks!

I guess I'll have to order Kzin III.  I believe I read Kzin I and decided not to read any more of them, I'm surprised how many there are.

Well, Bandersnatchi brains delicacies will affect my premise/plot, maybe even adding misdirection, but they won't disrupt it. Meanwhile, I will carry on with Garvey's investigation.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on April 22, 2016, 12:32:06 AM

Okay, I know there are  continuity errors, because I haven't updated the original post in this thread as yet, and there have been some re-writes on my computer since. Anyway, here is the next part of the story-

****

 I chartered Jason and Anne-Marie Papandreou and their hyperdrive star liner, "Court Jester" for my quest, paying a premium for discretion. Jason was a former "Flatlander", or Earthling, and veteran of the Kzin Wars. Anne-Marie was a willowy "Crashlander", from the low gravity planet We Made It, in the Procyon system. Not only were they both able pilots, mechanics, observers, and improvisers, they were proven survivors. I would be in safe hands. I have no idea how, but Anne-Marie could make a soufflé in any gravity or acceleration. Their base of operations was Jinx, the ultra massive moon of the gas giant Primary, in the Sirius system, which was convenient, because I had a feeling I'd end up there sooner or later. That's where the surviving Bandersnatchi lived, and it was also the location of The Institute of Jinx, the greatest research university beyond Earth. That wasn't the only reason I selected them.

****

Aboard Court Jester:

Once we were safely out of Sol System's  gravity hazards and into hyperspace on a Wunderland heading, I told them about my quest, and about my experience with Grogs, small doglike desert animals on the planet Down. Mature females become sessile, that is, stationary, attaching themselves to rocks. Not only do their bodies enlarge, but their brains do, too, while their spinal cords shrivel and everything but their mouths become practically useless. They could summon their prey telepathically, and summon scavengers to groom them. They made telepathic contact with me because they wanted technology and trade. I realized they were the devolved descendants of the Thrint Slavers, who ruled the galaxy with such powers 1.5 billion years ago.

The Papandreous told me about their adventure with a stasis box purchased from the Outsiders by the Piersen's Puppeteers. They were transporting it and a Puppeteer named Nessus when they were ambushed and captured in a secret Kzinti operation, and a computerized spy's weapon found inside the box presumed the Kzinti had killed the rightful owner of the weapon, and self-destructed, killing all of the Kzinti. They narrowly escaped because they were in a crash web at that moment. That's why I hired the Popandreous, stasis box experience.

"How would you go to war against a race of alien telepathic mind readers with mind control, Jason?" I said.

"Hmm...Whenever you decided to act and give a general order, the Slavers would know instantly. There would be no surprise. They would counter-order or ambush. If the Slavers ever failed, they would simply order the rebels to halt, retreat, or commit fratricide/suicide."

Jason paced. "We humans were no match for the Kzinti, in man to "tiger" terms, in size, speed, strength, or ferocity. It was the Kzinti's impatience for planning, preparing, and organizing which was their downfall. But if you tried to organize against the Slavers, they would know before you knew they knew. They would know your network, your plans, your bases and supply caches and time tables.  It would be over before you could start. You'd be fools to try."

"Or desperate," quipped Anne-Marie.

Jay hedged a little."The more you did to prepare, the more likely the Slavers were to find out and thwart you. Perhaps a few living alone on the frontier somewhere could work towards a revolution undetected, but that's it."

"Any communication would probably have to be by secret couriers who didn't know what they carried...or better yet, didn't even know that they were couriers. Computer networks, lasers, hyper waves, and telecommunications could all be monitored, so that's out," Anne-Marie added, throwing her hands up in a gesture of futility. 

"Sure, Tnuctipin  could turn disintegrators against the Slaver planets and compounds, but as soon as you moved against them, or even gave the order to, the mentally interconnected Slavers would retaliate. Most likely making you fight your own. Or if they wanted to make an example, they could force somebody to publicly flay themselves alive with a variable sword until they went into shock or bled out", Jason explained.

Anne-Marie shuddered at first, then she wondered..."But really, wouldn't the Tnuctipun try to kill only the Slavers, not destroy the infrastructure they built and the other innocent slave species? They wanted to commit instant genocide, to liberate all from the overlords, not trigger Doomsday."

"That made it much harder," I realized. "No super anti-matter weapons, if such things were even possible. No disintegrators from orbit, either."

"I just don't see how it could be done. You'd have to degrade the enemy intelligence before you could even hope to plan & prepare," said Jason. "Then you would need a super-powerful first strike, or it would all be over."

"Well", I concluded, " I guess we know why the Slavers ruled the whole galaxy, and for so long."

What do you make of this?" I said, showing them the open stasis box given to me by G-Squared, and placing it on the table in the main cabin.

"It looks just like the one we bought from the Outsiders!," said Anne-Marie. "So does this stuff inside it."

"Tell me about each of these objects," I said, adding "Feel free to touch them, but I should warn you that the meat is toxic."

"And there's more of it," Jason observed. "Our box only had one cube of it, but it was poisoned, too."

"Why?"

"We concluded that the contents of our box were a sort of spy's survival kit. Maybe the meat was for suicide," Jason suggested.

"It could just as easily have been for assassination, since it was for spy use," Anne Marie offered.

"I knew I hired the right people!," I said as I hit the table with my fist for emphasis.

She picked up the laminated claw. "We figured it's a Slaver's hand, and that it was a trophy, hence my assassination theory. The secret soft weapon was more humane than suicide by poison in the self-destruct mode, and contained a variable sword for quiet work, a laser for long range, a stunner for live capture, an energy absorber and a rocket lift for quick escape, a computer to store info, and a disintegrator ray for mass destruction. Spy and assassin gear. Jay figured out it belonged to a spy, not a soldier," 

"Maybe the rocket gizmo for torture", Jason joked. "That soft weapon wasn't like a pocket phone that is a phone, a camera, a watch, a health monitor, a calendar, and a computer all in the same rigid gadget. It was like a swiss army knife that magically transformed into proper tools, one at a time- adjustable wrench, a set of locking pliers, a hammer, a hunting knife, a hand saw, only weapons instead of tools. It was as if it were made out of living liquid metal - total conversion of matter. That's what convinced me it was spy gear."

I was speechless.

"Speaking of pocket phones," said Anne-Marie, "The Kzinti ran some tests on this rectangular gadget, and determined it was a communicator that worked in hyperspace, but they saw no use for it as a weapon, and didn't care about it."

"Typical Tigers!" said Jason.

"WAIT!" I said. "A hyperspace pocket phone?! Where is this stuff you saw before, now?"

"In fragments plastered across the cabin wall of the wrecked Kzinti ship, next to the remains of the pilot", Jason explained, "when the soft weapon got suspicious and self-destructed."

"So this is the only hyperspace pocket phone known in the universe?" I asked.

"Yes," they said in unison.

"Have I mentioned that I hired the right people? I think we just paid for this expedition, and Garvey Limited is about to have a subdivision bigger than the parent company. I'll arrange a generous finder's fee once we successfully crack the device."

Jason and Anne-Marie did a high five and a happy dance.

"There was a cap like this in our box," observed Jason," but the Kzinti had no interest in it either. It could have offered the wearer invisibility for all I know."

Anne-Marie picked up the cap and put it on. "Perfect for bad hair days, or when you run out of makeup. Can you still see me, Jay?"

"Yep."

"Bleep! It doesn't work." Everybody laughed. "Maybe it offered some protection from the Slaver power, maybe our spies should have worn these instead of storing them."

I smiled. "I like that idea even better! I can test it with the Grogs next time I'm on Down."

Anne-Marie picked up the empty drinking bulb. "Our kit had one of these filled with a 40% hydrogen peroxide solution. We never figured out why.. Fuel? Water purification? Torture? First aid? For destroying evidence? Who knows?"

"Well, well, what have we here?" said Jason, picking up the transparent canister which contained about 5 liters of amber liquid and holding it up to the light. "Looks like beer."

"G-Squared said it was "a unique ethanol liqueur"

"That's justification for carrying it in the kit, as far as I'm concerned," said Anne-Marie, "I always pack booze. Can we toast the future of the hyperspace pocket phone?"

"I'm all for that, but let's keep things scientific, for now," I cautioned." Only one of us at a time."

"I volunteer to be the guinea pig," stated Anne-Marie, raising her hand,"because I've never tasted anything more than a century old...and besides, Jay is officer of the watch right now."

"TANJ!" he said.

Anne-Marie transferred some of the elixir to her drinking bulb. "Mmmm. It smells yeasty, like baking bread."

She took a slow sip. "It tastes like fresh bread, too!" She worked the liqueur around her palate, then swallowed.

"Very creamy in texture, and slightly savory. The finish is sweet and there's a hint of something else.."

"So it tastes like a cream ale?" asked Jason.

"No," she said emphatically, and took a long pull from her bulb. " It's a... It's a drink of croissant fresh from the oven, with butter and Myer lemon honey!"

I transferred some liqueur into a clean drinking bulb, in preparation for a toast.

"Is it ...Is it hot in here?" asked Anne-Marie, letting down her long brunette hair, and shaking it out. It floated sensuously in the .8G ship's acceleration. "Hey Jay, where are we going?"

"Anne, are you okay?"

"Never better! Who's your sexy friend and why haven't you introduced me?"

"We're on our way to your home planet of Wunderland, under hyperdrive, at the direction of Garvey, here, who is our charter. We met him a few days ago. Don't you remember ?"

"Nope!" She threw her arms around her husband's neck, held him close and kissed him hard for half a minute.

When they came up for air, Jason said "her mouth does taste delicious."

"We'd be willing to take this canister as payment for our finder's fee..." offered Anne-Marie.

"Not happening," I said. "This is all there is." They started kissing again.  "Okay, you two, take all of the time you need. Jason, please stay sober, and I'll call you if any alarms go off."

"DEAL!" He said, sweeping the dark-eyed beauty off of her feet, as she took another sip. He rushed into their cabin, and I didn't see them again for about 48 hours.

So this "unique liqueur" tasted delicious, got you drunk, cleared your head of short term memories, and was some kind of legitimate aphrodisiac. The perfect weekend beverage! ... Or the perfect way to get your great grandson to give you a great, great grandson faster...G-Squared played me. I love that guy."

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 22, 2016, 03:08:29 AM

When you brought in the Papandreous, I wondered if this was to pre-date The Soft Weapon, the box contents being so similar and all -even though it's not possible, what with your Tnuctip self-destructing with the key device.

Perhaps that sentence should read "I chartered Jason and Anne-Marie Papandreou, who had actual previous experience at this kind of thing, and their hyperdrive star liner, "Court Jester" for my quest, paying a premium for discretion."

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 22, 2016, 03:32:00 AM

Incidentally, you might want to google Niven's outline for the never-written Down in Flames, which is online in several versions in several places - Niven realized an obvious improbability in the Grog/Slaver evolution (though not as improbable as Slaver descendants being at all recognizable as relatives after so long [must've been stasis involved for well over a billion years]  --- there wasn't anything with a spine on this planet 1.5 billion years ago).

-You should enjoy the Down in Flames premise and plot, so google it anyway, but I'll spoil that it was the male Thrintun who were intelligent - and in Grogs, it's reversed.  Hard to see how the switch could've evolved...  That might affect your story, or you might want to think of a handwave to work in, just to be a fan doing fanfic...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on April 22, 2016, 04:31:57 AM

I'm feeling dizzy tonight. I'm going to reread this tomorrow when it makes more sense. Thanks for reading it.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 22, 2016, 01:56:42 PM

I get that mornings, to varying degrees.

You know, the Papandreous' speculations about how hard it would be to keep secrets and fight The Power assume absurdly low limits on range and speed (I believe the range is on the order of a few miles, and propagates at lightspeed) and Grogs everywhere - or they're talking about what the Tnuctipun were up against, which would fit better.  It would be good if it was clear which, unless you're engaging in misdirection.

(Be happy I have nothing to say about the writing, at least; you clearly have a handle already on how to tell a story. ;nod)

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on April 23, 2016, 05:08:20 AM

Quote from: BUncle on April 22, 2016, 01:56:42 PM

I get that mornings, to varying degrees.

You know, the Papandreous' speculations about how hard it would be to keep secrets and fight The Power assume absurdly low limits on range and speed (I believe the range is on the order of a few miles, and propagates at lightspeed) and Grogs everywhere - or they're talking about what the Tnuctipun were up against, which would fit better.  It would be good if it was clear which, unless you're engaging in misdirection.

(Be happy I have nothing to say about the writing, at least; you clearly have a handle already on how to tell a story. ;nod)

We're preparing for travel, things that must be done, also means I got to be stand-in caregiver today. Too much bending over and looking high and low taxes my balance. Also, allergies seem to aggravate  my balance malady. Dizzy again tonight.

OK. I think I understand your comments better tonight.

Garvey instinctively knows that there is more to the Bandersnatch brain than is general knowledge. To figure it out, he's trying to understand as much about the Slaver Empire and Tnuctipin revolt as he can.
That's what his quest is about.

So I need to backfill a little so that that the reader knows that he's trying to wrap his head  around the ancient revolt, not worrying about the potential future one.

Yes, in Niven fashion I am trying to both foreshadow and misdirect. 
Except for the bottle of Liqueur, I'm not trying to introduce new pieces to the puzzle. As Niven pointed out in notes somewhere, with enough mystery tech you can write yourself out of any corner, defeating the puzzle.  That's why I'm using a spy kit virtually identical to the one from the soft weapon. In am drawing inspiration from the biology of the canon, and the idea that Tnuctipun stuff has hidden features. So there will be some new interpretations and secret purposes.

Frankly I'm clueless about the drinking bulb with high strength hydrogen peroxide.  Fuel for the rocket pistol? No idea. That's why this one is empty. I must have added it and removed it three times!

Anyway, it's gratifying to know that my writing passes. It's something I've always felt insecure about. I struggled with creative writing in high school. I was good at poetry and essay style literature, but my stories read like encyclopedia articles.

And storytelling? My grandfather was legendary. He was a preacher. As it turns out, one of the secrets to great story telling is not to let the facts get in the way of a good story... but I didn't figure that out until after he died, and came across some documents. Anyway, by whatever I compared myself to, I sucked at stories.

In recent years I have done some collaborating with a virtual friend from Peru who doesn't speak English well. He likes my writing. That gave me enough confidence to try this.

I guess the difference is that I've read a lot of books since, and met a lot of people that weren't other high school kids. And done stuff.

Probably be mid-week before I have something else drafted and an internet connection to upload it.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 03:05:06 AM

Not a lot of relevance to your story probably, but a sequel by Niven to Relic of Empire set on Silvereyes, the planet in known space with sunflowers.  -I can't quite spot what made it non-canon, but it had to be some detail about the Puppeteer worlds/migration...

http://www.larryniven.net/stories/color_of_sunfire.shtml (http://www.larryniven.net/stories/color_of_sunfire.shtml)

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 03:45:00 AM

...I ended up re-reading it -it's not long- and I spotted the continuity problem this time.  -But it's nothing that couldn't be fixed in five minutes, so I'm confused in my understanding that that's why it's not published...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 03:46:47 AM

Quote from: BUncle on May 01, 2016, 03:05:06 AM

Not a lot of relevance to your story probably, but a sequel by Niven to Relic of Empire set on Silvereyes, the planet in known space with sunflowers.  -I can't quite spot what made it non-canon, but it had to be some detail about the Puppeteer worlds/migration...

http://www.larryniven.net/stories/color_of_sunfire.shtml (http://www.larryniven.net/stories/color_of_sunfire.shtml)

HAH! as it happens, entirely too much relevance. Well, I'll show you what I have written before I figure out a re-write.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 04:02:55 AM

****

Wunderland:


We decided to keep the Jester in orbit and take a shuttle to the surface, that way we didn't have to deal with space harbor pilots or customs officials coming aboard and finding a stasis box. That could only lead to uncomfortable questions and undesirable outcomes. A simple security check when we landed, and then the Popandreous could go visit Anne-Marie's family. I took a taxi to the prominent mansion of

Dr. Richard Harvey Shultz-Mann, the galaxy's most fabulously wealthy author, and Slaver Empire authority. He had a head of close cropped copper colored curls, and an asymmetrical beard with a waxed goatee on the right side of his chin, with a white streak running through it and continuing on his scalp, as if it were a scar. It gave him a very striking aristocratic appearance. We spoke of the Grogs at length. Then about his book.

"How did you safely launch the mature stage trees?" I wondered, "You didn't exactly explain."

"I didn't ignite them, Captain Kidd did."

"Captain Kidd? Like the notorious pirate?" I asked.

Dr. Schultz-Mann gave me a blank stare. "Uh... What's...What's a pirate?"

"Seriously?"

"Frankly," said the Dr., "I must have lost my equilibrium and suffered a concussion while observing that glorious launch, because I don't recall anything between then and the day I returned to Wonderland with my notes, and a lucrative advance check and book deal from Piersen's Puppeteer Publishing Company. Did you know my definitive treatise became the all-time best seller among the Puppeteers? 

"I had no idea." Then I asked, "Was there any possible revolutionary purpose for the bio-relics?"

"I can speculate," Dr. Schultz-Mann began, "but I don't have scientific proof. My intuition tells me that the key to understanding the Tnuctip is that they were inherently duplicitous, that everything they created was designed with an ulterior application for their eventual revolution. The stage trees could easily be repurposed as rockets, explosives, or IPBMs."

"IPBMs?" I asked.

"Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles," Shultz-Mann explained. " There are no surviving racing beasts, they all would have starved with the Slavers, after the slaves committed suicide and the Thrint ate the last Bandersnatch brain.  So while they are examples of Tnuctip bio-engineering, they aren't relics in the true sense. They would have been the obvious choice for spy animals, but perhaps too obvious."

"What about those air plants," I asked? Airplants were biological systems that recycled the air on space ships, or in the mansions of the Slavers in less than ideal worlds. "What was duplicitous about them? Could they be turned off and cause suffocation?"

Dr. Schultz-Mann pondered the problem and stroked the waxed spike of his asymmetrical beard. "There's no method to shut down the biological air plants remotely. Anything that would terminate them would terminate the passengers and crew as well, so suffocation by air plant failure would be redundant in such a scenario. The discovered specimens vary significantly. They've probably mutated considerably over 1.5 billion standard years. Many were contaminated with dormant viruses. I can't generalize, other than to say that they are remarkably reliable to still be producing breathable air in our lifetimes. Certainly no machine could function for such an extended duration."

"And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Deep space 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. They could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were.

"The sunflowers were planted on the estates, surrounding the Slaver mansions, as a solar powered "laser" perimeter defense. Devastatingly effective in daylight, useless without the sun. Perhaps the sunflowers could be queued, or re-trained to become dormant, or even to perceive the Slavers as a menace, and prevent them from entering or leaving their homes at a critical juncture. That would be insidiously problematic.  Nobody actually knows."

"Last, but not least..." I suggested, getting to the point of my quest.

"We all know the Bandersnatchi were spies," stated Dr. Shultz-Mann. "We academics haven't determined how they could have procured anything of use as information. They lack psychic aptitude. They can't see in the least, and never could until you built prosthetics for them. They're tactile. The brain organelles were certainly capable of storing data, but the neurological sensors were certainly inadequate for gathering it. It remains an unanswered question. I might well have gone to the lowland wilds to interview one for myself, rather than accept some Jinxian brute's word on the matter, but the gravity of that mutant moon was torment enough on it's own. The equatorial humidity would have been unbearable. My beard would have curled out of control!"

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 04:05:07 AM

[ninja'd]

[shrugs]  Again, a detail about the Puppeteers makes it non-canon...  You'll find Down in Flames on the same site - definitely irrelevant, but an interesting take on all the Slaver stuff...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 04:20:19 AM

****

Orbiting Jinx:

I was standing next to the air lock, awaiting the authorities, when Anne-Marie placed a drinking bulb filled with golden liquid in each of my hands and winked her eye, then stepped away.

When the door opened and the Jinxian officials, a female harbor pilot and a male customs agent entered Court Jester. They were massive, just like the moon they lived on. I placed drinking bulbs of liqueur in their powerful hands. "Welcome aboard! Garvey of Garvey Limited, at your service."

They looked at each other, preparing to politely refuse, when Anne-Marie rushed over, and seized them by the wrists- "Hey! Don't be givin' away the reserve vintage stuff, it's too good for them. Let me have it!"

The Jinxians just lifted the bulbs to their mouths, and Anne-Marie off of her feet, to re-assert control, taking long draughts. They grunted. "I'd like to see the manifests," said the pilot, placing Anne-Marie aside.

..."And I'd like to see all of the contents of that vault labeled 'DANGER! Airlock Out of Order' because I know this spaceship model, and it only has the airlock by which we entered!" said the customs agent, shouldering past Jason.

Uh-oh, I thought, they are going to find my stasis box with the hyperspace pocket phone, and start confiscating, fining, and asking awkward questions. From there it will go from bad to worse.. Their weight must make them resistant to the liqueur.

I stalled..." What'd you think of  the drink? "

"It tastes and smells delicious, best thing I ever drank, thank you mister....  uh, What was your name again?"

I showed him my passport and credentials.

"Now let me get this straight.." said the agent, loud enough for all to hear. "Your name is
Marvin Gardner Garvey the fourth... Can anyone tell me what a Gardner does?"

"He gardens?" quipped Jason.

"Exactly!"  said the agent. "That means that the guy who has the Monopoly on dolphin hands was named for Marvin Gardens, a location in Atlantic City!"

The two Jinxians doubled over in laughter. Always trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. When they finished slapping each other on the back, they were sweating, holding each other's muscular arms, and gazing into each other's eyes.

"Uhh..." said the pilot, "Look at the time! I think we're finished here, aren't we Attila?"   

"AGREED!" he said, and they left arm in arm.

****

The Institute of Jinx:


The Bandersnatchi Specialist, Dr. Pablo Singh, was bored to tears. He told me the facts I already knew and ignored my perplexing question about Bandersnatchi brains. He droned in a monotone as if he were reciting a memorized speech. He said they are intelligent, but not intellectual. They have remarkable memories, but they're such boors.  All they want to talk about is sex and food, and the sex is kind of biologically pointless because they are all genetically identical. They can talk for weeks about their ancestors and how the texture and flavor of yeast has subtly changed over the millennia. He didn't know who that would be of interest to besides somebody studying the evolution of yeast!

"Taxonomically, except for the shell," said the biologist, "they resemble the Earth protozoan brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, in my opinion. Those are particularly interesting, and the reason I came here to study the Bandersnatch. T. Gondii has all kinds of fascinating abilities. They can go dormant, and they are practically incurable in that stage. Maybe the shell is just a variant of the cyst. They can alter the immune system, to weaken the host in order to spread the infection, or they can boost the host's immune system to fight off competing parasites. Infection is passed from mother to child, too. They infect multiple species, but they prefer to reproduce in cats, and to that end they can dramatically reduce a rat's olfactory sensitivity to cat urine, so that the infected rat will likely be eaten by a cat, which will in turn become infected. When T. Gondii infect cats they can reproduce and shed cysts through the feces, which are incredibly durable and infectious...


Ick! I got out of there quick. The professor wasn't much more interesting of a conversationalist than he claimed his subjects of study were. I decided to take Dr. Schultz-Mann's suggestion, and find out for myself. I made some arrangements.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 04:23:27 AM

[ninja'd again - this is reaction to the previous story post]

...It does seem better than otherwise to follow something by Niven (even with the Puppeteer canon problem - which is irrelevant to your story).

(I still don't believe in biological artifacts -even less than intelligent beings like Slaver/Grogs who might have controlled their own evolution- that haven't evolved beyond recognition in the 1.5 billion years since while everything else evolved all the way up from food yeast.  I think there was a huge Slaver thing full of Slavers and their stuff in stasis until only a million years or so back.  Had to be, for all the plants and such to have evolved so little, and a scant million is plenty of time for the observed adaptions - with all the scattering of this and that over 60 light years of space, there's probably a whole story in it...)

I don't think your fix is all that tough, anyway; put Shultz-Mann on Silvereyes and poor -no lucrative book the Puppeteers loved (if that was even true in the first place and not a cover for blackmail)- and maybe work in a mention in the air plant passage of the bit in COS about remnants in  asteroid belts, and then it's consistent.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 04:31:40 AM

...Could a couple of five-foot Jinxians reach high enough to lift a Wunderlander bumping seven feet tall off her feet?  What the hell were they standing on?  Was she grabbing wrists from a sitting position?  I take it she was pretending to be drunk - did she fall as she rushed in and was lying on the floor, maybe?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 05:13:40 AM

Quote from: BUncle on May 01, 2016, 04:31:40 AM

...Could a couple of five-foot Jinxians reach high enough to lift a Wunderlander bumping seven feet tall off her feet?  What the hell were they standing on?  Was she grabbing wrists from a sitting position?  I take it she was pretending to be drunk - did she fall as she rushed in and was lying on the floor, maybe?

Yeah. I knew that was a problem after I wrote that one, but I kept writing to get the rest of it recorded. Then got caught up in other details on the re-reads.

The point was the salesman's take-away trick- reverse psychology. Otherwise, why do the authorities drink on the job? I got an idea for that fix. Make it about mass, not height.

Well, Maybe I better re-write from the beginning, and fix the discrepancies between parts and with this new-to-me story.

QUESTION- grammatically, what's the difference in usage between Thrint /Thrintun  and Tinuctip/Tinuctipun ? I'm confused and suspect it may not be used entirely consistently between canon stories. What's your sense of the grammar here?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 05:17:25 AM

...My sense is that it's exactly the same as Kzin/Kzinti - if Niven had a consistent idea what form was plural or what the heck the difference was, it's always gotten past me...

(I'd say the prior form is singular in all three cases and the latter plural, but Niven screwed up which was which right left and center for all three.  He's clearly got a little mental blank there.  You can pick and be consistent, at least.)

-Writing past a problem with intent to fix later and get the first draft generated now is always the right answer, provided you don't forget to fix later.  Maybe asterix that sort of thing when you go on, next time...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 05:48:25 AM

Quote from: BUncle on May 01, 2016, 04:23:27 AM

[ninja'd again - this is reaction to the previous story post]

...It does seem better than otherwise to follow something by Niven (even with the Puppeteer canon problem - which is irrelevant to your story).

(I still don't believe in biological artifacts -even less than intelligent beings like Slaver/Grogs who might have controlled their own evolution- that haven't evolved beyond recognition in the 1.5 billion years since while everything else evolved all the way up from food yeast.  I think there was a huge Slaver thing full of Slavers and their stuff in stasis until only a million years or so back.  Had to be, for all the plants and such to have evolved so little, and a scant million is plenty of time for the observed adaptions - with all the scattering of this and that over 60 light years of space, there's probably a whole story in it...)

I don't think your fix is all that tough, anyway; put Shultz-Mann on Silvereyes and poor -no lucrative book the Puppeteers loved (if that was even true in the first place and not a cover for blackmail)- and maybe work in a mention in the air plant passage of the bit in COS about remnants in  asteroid belts, and then it's consistent.

Yes, that was my nod to successful blackmail of the Puppeteers and memory removal, and perfectly legitimate income with no cause for suspicion.

**

Not a tough fix. It's just the ripples. DARN! It's like there's a time traveler messing with my facts. Not that I want to go down the time traveler rabbit hole, just that occurred to me that maybe that would be a way to approach a time travel story- write it, then change a basic premise, watch the ripples, and take it from there.

**

The evolution of bio relics.   I take your point if we presume known space evolved from yeast. But an ark tale is another story.

Bandersnatchi were designed to be immutable. So they're an exception.

Racing beasts are extinct. Not an issue.

Grogs changed a lot, but nothing like yeast to lions. Problem.

Stage trees and air plants and sunflowers. How long can the seeds lie dormant? Or do they wait for an event, like a freshwater flood?, a fire, solar flares, a volcano? Something that would wipe out competing life forms? A certain atmosphere ?



**

I'm blanking here. "COS" ?  What's that refer to?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 01:56:06 PM

Color of Sunfire.

And okay - one could argue that all known cases of stage trees, and airplants taking over asteroid fields, involved long, long, long dormant periods necessary to outer space life in transit - easily 10,000 years traveling to each year alive and active, so those aren't all that many generations along, 1/10,000th, as planetary life would be.

Bandersnatches have chromosomes the size of your little finger, and may have 100,000-year generations or something for all we know.  No way there'd be no evolution just because it took so much radiation to damage a chromosome, but maybe the Tnuctipun built in other anti-mutation mechanisms for God-knows-what reason.  (Good point about what crap spys they'd make - maybe they were really for attacking the overseer's house at the key moment on all the yeast worlds.  How would you kill things w/o the Power that big trying to crush your base when they attacked en mass?)  (I doubt they have sex, if their genes are as you describe - budding.)

But Sunflowers, I don't believe in - they're just flowering plants with a gimmick - they'd evolve.  -I also don't believe in them taking over such large areas on Silvereyes; the Ringworld is so big there'd always be birds coming over the edges, but you'd get border with a dead interior even there - nothing to replenish whatever Sunflowers take out of the soil.  And in as little as 10,000 years, you'd have life adapting to live near/in/among them - and eventually symbiotes and what-have-you.  But only if the Sunflowers survive long enough, impossibly.  Despite COS and Louis Wu's observations and speculation, it has to be not-solid patches, always moving year by year leaving devastated dead zones behind - and still the evolution question. 

It all has to be recent, by geological timescales, but you should probably ignore all that for this story...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 09:34:18 PM

Well, the Bandersnatchi mysteries are the point of my story. The known space canon repeatedly says they are immutable. I have an answer for them.

Sunflowers.... don't exactly make sense to me either....


 

I have it in my head that the stage trees became obsolete about 15 or 20 years before the end of the empire. I think it was mentioned in Relic.  Let's use that as a working premise.


Okay. How about this.-

So the Tnuctip built the Thrintun castles/mansions with mirrored surfaces. The Tnuctipun planted the sunflower perimeter defense. The only access to these homes was through long underground tunnels.

They also created the stage tree plantations, which continued to grow after the Tnuctipun introduced a gravity polarizer drive which made them obsolete.

As the sunflowers expanded there perimeter..  maybe it was because of  birds in the stage tree foliage, and the sunflowers attacked them. When entire plantations launched and detonated.. the few surviving dimwit Thrint thought it was the long feared slave rebellion. That sort of answers the question- If the Tnuctipun were such genius prodigies, how did they botch their revolution so badly?
It surprised everybody.

Most of the sunflowers were completely annihilated in the searing heat of the rockets skittering across the ground and exploding, but on Silvereyes, the soil was quite sandy. In a few patches, the sand was too dry for sunflower seeds to germinate when they were sealed in by sand above them melted to glass in the intense heat. Time capsule.  Only when there was a powerful earthquake to break the glass and let in rainwater in that spot, were the sunflowers able to germinate again. So it required a sequence of perfect conditions.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 01, 2016, 10:07:55 PM

Kzanol was planet-prospecting because in his youth, his family were major stage tree plantation owners and got wiped out in the antigrav changeover, which caused a major depression along the way.

Hmm.  You know, sunflowers would make a crap defensive asset 19 different ways -underpowered against advanced technology in the daytime, completely helpless at night, to begin with- but maybe they were created as a terraforming tool and Kzanol was too dumb to know that there's sunflowers when you grow up on a frontier planet, or believed a lie.

Consider:  you've got an easily-converted live planet with no native slaves, but life that's poisonous, or ugly or Thrintun want gone for whatever reason before they settle in - Tnuctipun slaves drop sunflower seeds in a choice location -maybe several- come back a decade later and plant whatever needed to start a compatible biosphere going in the dead zone inside the sunflower patch parameter, and build the owner a house before he arrives to move in...

You'd have to strategically napalm sunflower patches every few years from high altitude to keep them under control -or just lots of slaves with slings at night on a smaller scale- but they'd take a long time to wipe out the native biosphere for the whole planet...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 11:10:29 PM

Terraforming.

Interesting. They would follow the fungal fairy ring model, expanding from the center. Burning brush, grass, and forests before them. They could be fenced in with salt, riverbanks and canals.


 The ones on the Ringworld have since mutated.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 02, 2016, 12:19:02 AM

It's a really Niven-sounding model, isn't it?

I really do need to find World of Ptavvs and re-read for you - ISTR Kzanol spoke as if sunflowers were a defensive perimeter close in to the house - that the Tnuctips (might work as a lesser plural for more than one but far less than the entire race like those on his family estate staff) knew how to control and he didn't.  Really; hard to see a sunflower barrier around the big house thick enough to be dangerous yet not more trouble that it's worth as a fire hazard and so forth - or else nothing but a getting-blinded nuisance at more than ten feet back...

The seed-and-come-back-later thing could be made to work (badly, but still) as a biological warfare eco-sabotage weapon in a war against other Thrints, too.  -I sorta doubt those happened, though, or the Tunctipun would have stirred one or several up as part of the revolt.  Maybe Kzanol just didn't know about that, 'cause it hard to believe they spread so far and didn't have wars with each other.  I would suggest it against hostile Power-immune races, but the Tnuctipun would have recruited those if there were any they didn't make, and they would have made more, more useful and versatile than the Bandersnatchi, if it wasn't very hard to do.

-You could also fence in/wipe out sunflower patches with just something like nocturnal goats - no shepherd needed if wiping out is the goal.  The more I think about sunflowers, the less impressed I am at the danger they pose, not even bringing Thrintun IQs of 80 to bear on the problem.  Nature would find a way quick, if some nocturnal herbivore didn't turn out to be already in place.  (The Ringworld is a special case with an eternal noon sun and short, 1/3rd of the day, nights that makes it unusually well-suited to sunflowers.)

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 02, 2016, 03:10:08 AM

I love, love, LOVE kicking this stuff around, BTW.  This is my idea of fun.

Larry would love this conversation, too - I'd be tempted to try to contact him if not for the story and if he had a different attitude about his copyrights.  -I suspect his real attitude is that it's fine, but if anyone knows he knows about a fanfic, he has to say no for legal reasons.

(We've generated enough ideas for a bunch of stories, you know -the sunflowers as land-clearing tool alone could be a whole story- Niven wouldn't blow them all on one Slaver stasis ark story unless he just couldn't figure out how to break them separate more finely...)

He's from a very wealthy robber baron oil trust family and takes money/business-related matters like that very seriously, by intense childhood training, apparently - there's busted rich people in various of his early works -a frequent repeat bit like all the places he's put Cziller's Bar, or used that biker friend as a character- including Kzanol and Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann, so I have a theory about something he worried about - and perhaps had seen or heard of happening to relatives...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 02, 2016, 04:41:39 AM

Hey - problem straight from Niven's oversight; how the hell do telepaths communicate with a Bandersnatch, a creature that after its size is most notable for not being extinct because it's immune to that sort of thing?  He repeatedly mentions telepaths doing that -Larry Greenberg was on his way to Jinx to do that when the Crazy Eight malfunctioned- pre-dolphin hands 'snatches not having a lot of other options for communicating besides giant letters on the ground in an incredibly dead language.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 02, 2016, 07:09:42 PM

Quote from: BUncle on May 02, 2016, 04:41:39 AM

Hey - problem straight from Niven's oversight; how the hell do telepaths communicate with a Bandersnatch, a creature that after its size is most notable for not being extinct because it's immune to that sort of thing?  He repeatedly mentions telepaths doing that -Larry Greenberg was on his way to Jinx to do that when the Crazy Eight malfunctioned- pre-dolphin hands 'snatches not having a lot of other options for communicating besides giant letters on the ground in an incredibly dead language.

Uh... I assumed telepath's  couldn't, didn't and didn't even try. 

That bit about the telepathic hunter, well she was human, so maybe there's a difference. Or maybe she only thought she was reading the snatch's mind, rather than accept the fact that she couldn't.
OR maybe that's the other problem with Color of Sunfire.

I'm worked on the re-write last night. Going to Silvereyes to speak with Mann instead of Wunderland caused a ripple, but I was liking the story when I went to bed.

In my story the 'snatch used the sensory bristle clusters at the corners of their mouths to communicate with one another in a sort of sign language. The tnuctipun could do the same with them, and the Thrint observing would simply see it as scratching and herding the beast, much as if it were an ox. The sign language being too abstract in an algebra sort of way for the Thrint to recognize as meaningful communication. Terribly boring nonsense, like babytalk. Or horse talk.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 02, 2016, 07:24:36 PM

Greenburg... Oh.

Alright. Maybe the snatch don't go insane from lack of stimulation because mostly they don't think.
They are totally Zen and one with the yeast mostly, until they bump into another 'snatch. They only think or communicate when they want to. You can't read a blank slate. You can't hypnotize someone in a coma.

How about that approach, Bandersnatchi as zen masters, grazing on autopilot?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 02, 2016, 07:55:59 PM

I dunno - it would ask for a zen far beyond imagination, or a lot of races would have a few resistant individuals.  They're Immune, which I've always taken as absolute - it really needs to be absolute for story-logic reasons.

Greenberg never made it to Jinx to prove it could be done, COS can be discounted if you want to, and I can't be absolutely sure of anything else from memory - though it seemed clear in The Handicapped, for instance, that more communication with snatches had taken place than a threat written in a field before Hands were invented for them.  Hmm.  Maybe googling Bandersnatch and telepathy together would be fruitful...

I like your ideas about bristle-wiggling.  I'd say that's a lock.  You know, you might be able to get anything a snatch could do done simply by playing on their boredom and being entertaining with entertaining chore requests for chores that aren't just rolling along eating yeast.  I bet they never thought to try that on Jinx...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 02, 2016, 09:47:12 PM

Okay. Good. Less of a re-write, then, although as far as a character voice, I'm thinking that making it  zen-like is a flavor to try.

I did find this with Google-
http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Bandersnatch (http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Bandersnatch)

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 02, 2016, 10:11:43 PM

I saw that, another known space wiki and the Wikipedia article in a cursory search - no joy on the telepathy question so far, but there's some interesting speculation about things Bandersnatch and Slaver era in this chat log - http://www.larryniven.net/chatlogs/dec2009.shtml (http://www.larryniven.net/chatlogs/dec2009.shtml)  -Searching some key terms on the page will save you a lot of time.

The problem is, though, that there IS a clear implicit assumption in the corpus that telepathy with 'snatches works, even of I can't find an explicit statement that made it into print besides a short in a con program.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 03, 2016, 04:44:38 PM

Read a lot of that chat log last night. Interestingly, they reached some of the same conclusions and speculations I did. I intend to finish it.

I forgot to mention Man-Kzin III arrived, but I only read a couple pages of the pertinent story.

I reworked the story to include Silvereyes rather than Wunderland. It's longer, but I like it. I've got time for another re-read right now..

The climax is going to be long. Well, I guess the answer is always start writing, and I can always edit and re-sequence later.

I'm not going to mess with the 'snatch does/does not have a readable mind thing. The Thrintin couldn't read it, that's all that matters.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 03, 2016, 05:57:49 PM

I agree. 

-But it has to be something like they had Shields, better than even mature Thrintun, that are only down when they will it (which bored contemporary 'snatches on Jinx probably do all the time, just in case a telepath shows up to entertain them)...  No reason to think Tnuctipun and other races didn't have telepaths, as long as none managed Slaver-proof shields (or none ever got caught having them, which may have been key to the rebellion) which Larry Greenberg, using Kzanol's memories, established is possible...

Quote from: Rusty Edge on May 03, 2016, 04:44:38 PM

Well, I guess the answer is always start writing, and I can always edit and re-sequence later.

Strongly agree.  The first thing a writer does is write.  Generating the basic copy is job one, and it can always be fixed later.  Very few people anywhere ever were just compulsive writers whose problem was they wrote and wrote and wrote, never doing second drafts to shape up their crap.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 05, 2016, 04:06:28 AM

Busy day, back to writing.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 05, 2016, 04:19:38 AM

Writers write. ;nod

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 05, 2016, 06:37:42 PM

I've still got a lot to spit onto the page in the Bandersnatch interview scene.

Meanwhile, I haven't changed much on the Schultz-Mann interview rewrite in the last two days, so here it is-  Correction, I haven't tweaked it until I put it down here.
****

Silvereyes:

We decided to keep the Jester in orbit and take a shuttle to the surface, that way we didn't have to deal with space harbor pilots or customs officials coming aboard and finding a stasis box. That could only lead to uncomfortable questions and undesirable outcomes.

Since Jason and Anne-Marie wanted to conduct an experiment with the liqueur to discover the effects on men when they drank it, and I was pretty curious myself, but since I didn't have a partner here, I gave them the bulb I poured the other night, and let them stay aboard.

I got a good view of a couple of shimmering silver-green sunflower patches the size of countries on Earth when I took a shuttle to the space port, a simple customs check when I landed, and then a displacement booth to the home of Dr. Richard Harvey Shultz-Mann in Bradbury's Landing. He was expecting me.

He had a head of close cropped hair, and an asymmetrical beard with a waxed goatee on the left side of his chin, all of it sandy or white in color. It gave him a very striking aristocratic appearance, but it showed his age and revealed his poverty. He'd been off of booster spice for decades. He'd been discredited for misusing a spaceship belonging to the Institute. He was rendered unemployable and unpublishable, even though he was perhaps the leading  xeno-archeo-bontanist in Known Space. So he was akin to the Bandersnatch who had intelligence and nothing to do with it. He was willing to pontificate for a price paid in advance.

We spoke of the Grogs at length. Then about the book he intended.

"Was there any possible revolutionary purpose for the bio-relics?" I asked.

"I can speculate," Dr. Schultz-Mann began, "but I don't have scientific proof. My intuition indicates that the key to understanding the Tnuctipun is that they were inherently duplicitous, that everything they created was designed with an ulterior application for their eventual revolution. They always played the long game. The stage trees could easily be repurposed as rockets, explosives, or IPBMs." Mature stage trees were like multi-stage solid fuel rockets, 800 meters high. They were designed to lift ships and payloads out of planetary gravities.

"IPBMs?" I asked.

"Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles," Shultz-Mann explained. " There are no surviving racing beasts, they all would have starved with the Slavers, after the slaves committed suicide and the Thrintin ate the last Bandersnatch brain.  So while they are examples of Tnuctip genetic-engineering, they aren't relics in the true sense. We only know of them from stasis box records and Kzanol. They would have been the obvious choice for spy creatures, but perhaps excessively obvious." Racing beasts were like greyhounds without digestive tracts, to save on weight. They were fed refined liquids and beloved by the Slavers.

"What about those air plants," I asked? Air plants were botanical, (not mechanical ) plants that recycled the air on space ships, or in the mansions of the Slavers in less than ideal worlds. "What was duplicitous about them? Could they be turned off and cause suffocation?"

  Dr. Schultz-Mann pondered the problem and stroked the waxed spike of his asymmetrical beard. "There's no method to shut down the air plants remotely. Anything that would terminate them would terminate the passengers and crew as well, so suffocation by air plant failure would be redundant in that scenario. The discovered specimens vary significantly. They've probably mutated considerably over 1.5 billion standard years. There may be examples which we don't even recognize as being of the same taxonomical division. Most evolved to not only create air, but to store it. Many were contaminated with dormant viruses. I can't generalize, other than to say that they are remarkably reliable to still be producing breathable air in our lifetimes. Certainly no machine could function for such an extended duration unattended, not even for one one- thousandth of that. That's the beauty of bio-engineering!"

"And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Deep space 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had parabolic mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. Normally they focused all of the sunlight onto the black bulb in their center, but they could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were. They could turn predator into prey by broiling it into dry fertilizer.

"The sunflowers were planted on the estates, surrounding the Slaver mansions, as a solar powered "laser" perimeter defense. Devastatingly powerful in daylight, useless without the sun. Best suited to some planet or moon with a light side and a dark side. We know that the Tnuctipun used them as weapons against the Thrintin.  Perhaps the sunflowers could be queued, or re-trained to become dormant, or even to perceive the Slavers as a menace, and prevent them from entering or leaving their homes at a critical juncture. That would be insidiously problematic.  Or some combination of oxygen enriched air from the airplants, stage trees as fuel/explosives and sunflowers as a detonator. Nobody actually knows why the Thrintin used the sunflowers as a defense, or how the Tnuctipun utilized them against them, only that they did."

"As a perimeter defense." Mann stated, "they are excessively hazardous to have adjacent to populated areas, with the significant probability of some inhabitants being burned or blinded. Death to humans is a lesser peril. Intelligent life can flee or seek cover when they begin to be targeted at the range limits. As a defensive system, the sunflowers could be rather easily neutralized by lagomorpha leporidae... "

"Leopards?!"

"Bunnies," Mann declared. "Bunnies love to eat sunflower stalks. They live underground. They are normally active at dusk and dawn. Raptors are primary predators of rabbits, but the sunflowers would burn the birds out of the sky. Bunnies tend to run in zigzags too quickly for the sunflowers to track, run into cover, and circle. In other words, when the sunflowers would attack the bunnies, they would end up burning each other. When things get too hot for the bunnies, they would duck underground, and when they have a plentiful food supply they breed like clichés."

I laughed at the picture he painted of an estate security system overrun by rabbits. "Hardly a credible deterrent, but couldn't a slaver stop the bunnies?"

"Certainly, but if you need a security guard just to guard the security system, it defeats the purpose of it, doesn't it?" Mann countered.

"Well, I gotta admit a system that dangerous and ineffective doesn't seem sensible, not at all. Was that how it was a Tnuctip trap?"

"My research over the decades here suggests that the sunflowers were originally designed as a terraforming tool," Mann continued. "Seed the continents with sunflowers to clear the land, and colonize the oceans with yeast as a future food source. Both could be delivered by stage tree rockets. The sunflower patch expands like a toadstool ring, or perhaps a toadstool ring within a grass fire, killing and burning all before it, then dying off from the center as the nitrogen in the soil was depleted, and leaving organic matter behind. The growing ring stopped when it reached naked rock, water or salt. I think the Tnuctipun devised these for their own use, before they became enslaved. They started with fresh seed from the original source for each application. The plant was designed to self-destruct rather than evolve.

"The sunflowers you see here today have mutated to fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil by means of symbiotic bacteria, so that the center of the patch continues to live. That's what enables them to thrive in various soils. I've determined that they must have been trapped beneath an ice shelf in seed form until relatively recently- say a million years ago, and evolved thereafter. Stopped by a blizzard, most likely."

"Last, but not least..." I suggested, getting to the point of my quest.

"We all know the Bandersnatchi were spies," stated Dr. Shultz-Mann. "We academics haven't determined how they could have procured anything of use as information. They lack psychic aptitude. They can't see in the least, and never could until you built prosthetics for them. They're tactile. The brain organelles were certainly capable of storing data, but the neurological sensors were certainly inadequate for gathering it. It remains an unanswered question. I might well have gone to the lowland wilds to interview one for myself, rather than accept some Jinxian brute's word on the matter, but the gravity of that mutant moon was torment enough on it's own. The equatorial humidity would have been unbearable. My beard would have curled out of control!"

****

Aboard Court Jester in close orbit of Silvereyes: 

I really liked Mann, and I certainly believed him, but not enough to take a risk and offer him a job with responsibility. There was something slightly suspicious about him. Perhaps he was a little too greedy or clever to trust. I wouldn't have showed him the stasis box contents, even if I had them on me. I had a feeling his pomposity was his way of withdrawing from his imposed poverty to protect his pride. But I liked him enough to buy him a booster spice subscription, and call it a retaining fee for a consultant. He was due for a big surprise tomorrow!

The Popandreous confirmed that the Liqueur worked much the same for Jason as it did Anne-Marie, who was able to duplicate her previous results. It cleared his mind, it gave him sexy breath and bedroom eyes, it made him amorous and improved his stamina. I was really looking forward to using it to celebrate my marriage engagement on Down at the end of this trip.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 05, 2016, 08:20:50 PM

Running comments as I go:

-"xeno-archeo-bontanist" -typo.

-I think from the way you put things that you may have missed that the (vrprin?) racing beasts were (the other) utterly Power-Immune species ([they would have starved a LOT faster than the Thrints around them in hard times, because intravenous feeding was necessary, exCEPT they were {scant} food owned by always-ravenous {now starving} carnivores] which was another Tnuctipun sly economic attack, though I forget just how) with any brain - had to be, as they were bet upon and watched racing by crowds of Slavers interested in the outcome.  If you did get that, a handful more words would make it clearer.

-"Racing beasts were like" starving see-through anatomy models of alien "greyhounds without digestive tracts". ;nod  I think Niven said they looked "flayed" because of the (thin, frictionless) see-through skin and lack of anything but skeleton and muscle needed to run.

-I always thought "air plant" was an inept name because plant means flora or mechanical factory, and which would you more expect on a spaceship?

-Deep space 'sunflowers' - instead, Slaver Sunflowers, 'cause deep space sounds like they're in asteroid fields defending the air plant bubbles - and possibly the stage trees that got them there and are growing inside w/ the sunflowers.  (No-longer-running-comment inserted:  that was sarcasm, but you couldn't be sure that wasn't the a Tnuctipun plan, pre-Slaver, possibly, for them to work in concert to build habitats that could be moved into at will if you could control the sunflowers at a distance, which it's explicitly assumed in canon they could -eternal sunshine on the light side, so much more reliable defense/light environment for the sunflowers, possible light-pressure drive, [could there have been a light-sail stage to their lifecycle under the right conditions?] focus light and heat where needed in the habitat - stage trees for launching everything there from a planet, gravity well/orbital maneuvers, and emergencies/get-the-move-done-in-this-lifetime.  Probably endless other biological pieces to the hypothetical whole [mining/soil-creating organisms are missing, you'd want food to live there, etc], including a rudimentary coordinating intelligence [Thrint vulnerable?  Is that why no space collectives have turned up - the 'tips had to get rid of them?],  but those three in concert could take you very far towards making a place to live among asteroids and facilitate mining.  Story idea, I guess - somebody Touring Exploring the Thing is the Niven standard, not the exception.)  I promise that the "Deep space 'sunflowers'" phrasing has thrown me for a bit both times.

---

YAY!  You got Richard Harvey steady boosterspice!

---

There's charm to the Popandreous offstage sexy love time - but I don't believe in (a nivenism) G-Squared's super-delicious love liquor, IF it's really G² being clever and not actual Slaver stuff (which I wouldn't believe in working on Humans or tasting good).  You're probably going somewhere with that, so take this with a grain of salt, but you make it sound effective enough that I suppose it works so well as sexytime love potion that it would immediately be declared incredibly illegal by every human government in Known Space for the mind control potential and sex slavery possibilities - but why isn't Garvey Limited banking trillions of sols selling a taste-alike version with no teeth, if it tastes so good?

So if it's just for the Popandreou sexy love time and such for color, it's cute, but problematic and needs scaling back - if it's in the 'snatch resolution as I expect, well, party on, dude.  -I wouldn't have caught most of this reading the whole story at one sitting, I expect, other than not believing in the Wonder Love Booze...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 05, 2016, 10:21:51 PM

I'll have to read your post a few more times to absorb the nuances.

You have a much better memory for the Niven stories than I do . Whether it's due to more frequent or recent reading, or a flat out better memory, I don't know.

The love potion is integral to the story. Well, perhaps not. Wait till you see how the whole thing hangs together, and then we can talk about the potential rewrites.  Just going with a whiskey that causes blackouts reminded me of the Old Janx spirit from Hitchhiker's Guide, and I didn't want to go there. One universe at a time.

SPOILER-

To kinda reveal the thrust of my premise- The Slavers had big brains for mind control, the Tnuctipun had them because they were smart. Snatches had them for memory. Alcohol from the yeast diet and hormones/ pheromones  were things they sorted into an organelle and discharged, because they interfered with normal memory. Commerce in the liqueur gave the Tnuctipun, a reason to travel to the lowlands of Jinx. The one inhabitable place in the universe too disgusting for the Thrint to read minds for more than a moment.  Snatches were the bioengineer's version of a database and back-up system for a species that couldn't keep a secret from a Thrint. They weren't spies so much as the network into which spy reconnaissance was fed, serving more like combination drop boxes/analysts/controls than field agents. It's more complicated than that as far as how it worked ( I guess spy things usually are).
Bandersnatch sex wasn't about sex, but data transfer through rna transfer as in the story "Rammer", but the Slavers didn't know that... They approved of Bandersnatch breeding.

Consider that.

 

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 05, 2016, 10:56:38 PM

Quote from: BUncle on May 05, 2016, 08:20:50 PM

-Deep space 'sunflowers' - instead, Slaver Sunflowers, 'cause deep space sounds like they're in asteroid fields defending the air plant bubbles - and possibly the stage trees that got them there and are growing inside w/ the sunflowers.  (No-longer-running-comment inserted:  that was sarcasm, but you couldn't be sure that wasn't the a Tnuctipun plan, pre-Slaver, possibly, for them to work in concert to build habitats that could be moved into at will if you could control the sunflowers at a distance, which it's explicitly assumed in canon they could -eternal sunshine on the light side, so much more reliable defense/light environment for the sunflowers, possible light-pressure drive, [could there have been a light-sail stage to their lifecycle under the right conditions?] focus light and heat where needed in the habitat - stage trees for launching everything there from a planet, gravity well/orbital maneuvers, and emergencies/get-the-move-done-in-this-lifetime.  Probably endless other biological pieces to the hypothetical whole [mining/soil-creating organisms are missing, you'd want food to live there, etc], including a rudimentary coordinating intelligence [Thrint vulnerable?  Is that why no space collectives have turned up - the 'tips had to get rid of them?],  but those three in concert could take you very far towards making a place to live among asteroids and facilitate mining.  Story idea, I guess - somebody Touring Exploring the Thing is the Niven standard, not the exception.)  I promise that the "Deep space 'sunflowers'" phrasing has thrown me for a bit both times.

That sounds like a story.

 Here's a theory on Slaver sunflower control ( did I get the term right this time?) Working from "Mann's " blizzard theory, it follows that approaching snow and ice would be a perceived threat. It would kill plants and render parabolic mirrors non-reflective.  Simply squirting a compressed gas at something would turn it into a cold/frosty spot, and cause the flowers to focus on it.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 06, 2016, 01:08:50 AM

There IS no set term for the sunflowers, IIRC - just, if you're go to bother to make the distinction from the earth flowers in a Known Space story, Slaver works better.

So - for the space habitat, some sort of missile to make a distracting ice cloud in the other direction while you fly up and dock?  Maybe - lotta situations where that wouldn't be practical.  It could work better on a planet, especially with a strategic rise at the approach point.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 06, 2016, 05:09:18 AM

SO - I dunno, I think I've read everything Known Space (but the first and last {x} of Worlds books - which I haven't gotten ahold of at all yet) at least twice, and may be only The Girl in Del Ray Crater that few times.

I DO have a memory on me for things I comprehend and find interesting - Solver says my newb-at-the-time butt is probably the greatest living historian of WPC people/events; I was paying attention to the people politics at the time, that forum being born of politics and I born to the community shortly before and studying it.

---

Okay - I like that idea for the 'snatches, at least if you can make me believe in their secretions working on a range of alien to-them species all in some desirable way and tasting good, to boot.  The 'snatch sex thing works, IMAO.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 06, 2016, 05:47:28 AM

Quote from: BUncle on May 06, 2016, 01:08:50 AM

There IS no set term for the sunflowers, IIRC - just, if you're go to bother to make the distinction from the earth flowers in a Known Space story, Slaver works better.

So - for the space habitat, some sort of missile to make a distracting ice cloud in the other direction while you fly up and dock?  Maybe - lotta situations where that wouldn't be practical.  It could work better on a planet, especially with a strategic rise at the approach point.

That was an idea for how did/could  the Tnuctipun control the Slaver sunflowers on the estates.

Well, today wasn't productive, on account of maladies.  Maybe I'll get somewhere with it tomorrow.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 06, 2016, 05:38:41 PM

I was confused because I didn't recall ever using the term deep space sunflowers myself.

I did cut and paste some wiki , because I wanted to remember all of the artifacts to discuss, and I just rewrote.

Alright, I think I can explain the juice working on different species, but I agree that tasting good to different species is implausible.

When I woke up I had a new idea. It tastes different to everybody, because of the hormones and pheromones interacting with the various sensory memories, stimulating whatever is most pleasurable to that person.  That's why the flavor can't be duplicated. Otherwise it's probably just a slightly yeasty smelling moderate strength booze, like a Belgian barley wine.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 06, 2016, 07:25:35 PM

Both versions of the Rich Mann passage:

Quote from: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 04:02:55 AM

"And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Deep space 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. They could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were.

Quote from: Rusty Edge on May 01, 2016, 04:02:55 AM

"And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Deep space 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. They could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were.

---

So everybody's descended from food yeast unless they go back impossibly long, which was biochemically compatible with something Slavers ate -'snatches, at the very least- and I find it incredibly improbable that so long after, so many species on different planets with different conditions and crust compositions still retain enough compatibility to eat each other and get drunk on ethanol -but men and Kzin do, so there that is- and Kzanol MUST have eaten something beside the beef jerky sticks in his pockets extensively in the months he was out of stasis, so it's Star Trek and we just roll with that part.  So sure, the 'snatch secretions effect at least Humans and Thrintun is a pleasurable way - and let's not sweat the tasting good, when the rest was the source stretching credibility.  I don't even believe in Jinx maintaining the equatorial zone habitable to snatches so long...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 06, 2016, 08:27:11 PM

Alright. I'll just get back to writing.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 07, 2016, 03:19:51 PM

You know, surely nothing to do with your story, but kitten-watching thoughts and I came here first.

That isn't Kzanol in the Smithsonian.  ARM was only beginning to be the science police in the Garner/Hamilton era -and/or they couldn't suppress the story entirely because of Belter involvement- but you don't put working hydrogen bombs on display in museums where people know where to go figure out how to steal them.  You don't even put the real casing on display, but a deliberately-poor/misleading replica, if you even bother with anything but a photo, which you don't.  The Sea Statue is actually leaded glass, and Lord Knows what they did with Kzanol - poured 50 tons of metal over him and put the block in the vault with the suppressed doomsday tech, probably.

I met Larry Niven at a con in 1988 - asked him why a being physically capable of chasing down a Ringworld 'rabbit' evolved a smart brain at all.  He said he didn't know, but the other fan standing there and I got to speculating about conditions on their homeworld and perhaps being able to throw rocks being a handy survival skill -Larry just listened; he loves that sort of party chatter- but you know, Speaker being so impressed with agile climbing and asserting his ancestors were plains cats is intensely problematic for imagining why in the world they evolved hands.  -In our sole real Earth example, it's a pretty sure thing that hands come before brains, and only stupid tree creatures need hands...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 08, 2016, 06:38:41 AM

Yes, I agree that only tree creatures have hands, or evolve them.

Exception. I had a great dane once. All of her bones were long. Her toes were so long that she could reach under the couch with one paw and grasp her tennis ball and pull it out through the shag carpet, not roll it. Still, no thumbs.

Well, there was that Niven story  ( was it a Draco's Tavern series?) about the guy who got invited to hunt with wolfhound-like Aliens which called themselves The Folk. I guess he noticed the same thing.

But that's just mammals, come to think of it. Frogs and lizards are pretty "Handy".

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 08, 2016, 11:24:40 AM

That mostly has to do with climbing, though.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 09, 2016, 04:02:02 AM

I've been re-reading and tweaking after a couple days off. I am going to re-read the stuff here now and see if I overlooked anything. Your suggestions, my ideas, descriptions, etc.

And yes, you're right. Hands before brains. Maybe tree climbing is what makes  things like lemurs, monkeys, apes, raccoons and bears live long enough to grow some brains. Assorted cats, too.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 09, 2016, 05:15:38 AM

Brains come into it because a smart squirrel already has hands, so he can manipulate things around him in sophisticated ways when he's born with a smrt mutation.  A smart rabbit just gets suicidal depressed.

...I was thinking some thoughts about pack cats taking down prey too large to wrap limbs around and just weigh down -say twice the size of an elephant- and so improvements in their ability to cling were selected for.  Retractile claws are great, grasping digits along with them better.  They'd scream, leap, hang on - and more and more do it until they bleed and exhaust their prey.  Once they had fingers -forward-facing eyes of predators just as well grant binocular vision, which goes well with the optional upright walking for distance peeking in the tall, tall savannah grass their giant prey browsed- THEN rock-throwing turned out to be useful against vexatious flyers that thought their kzittens tasted fine, and suddenly they're a species with a complex pride pecking order and a cooperative hunting style that needs sophisticated coordination selecting for brains smarter at communicating and negotiating, and they've got hands and the most basic tool of all -a rock- already in use, and they're on the road to becoming the Most Dangerous Predator...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 09, 2016, 06:03:27 AM

Love the part about rocks as a bird defense.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 09, 2016, 01:10:16 PM

Babboon troops will throw rocks at leopards, I've heard.

-Hands also better for reaching into burrows for small prey, the kzinrettes made better birthing nests with them, and the rock-throwing was frequently good for a nosh - nail rabbits that way, and the big eagles made a tables-turned meal...  Eventually, some smart customer took advantage of all the time spent upright anyway and fashioned a shoulder sling to always have both forepaws free and a couple throwing rocks handy at the same time...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 09, 2016, 06:04:12 PM

I've noticed that when you've used the word sling recently, that you're probably referring to what I call a brush hook- an axe handle with a flat, hooked blade.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 09, 2016, 09:25:43 PM

Sort of a roughly triangular loop on the end of the handle with the flat bottom edge a serrated blade.  You swing along the ground standing pretty straight with the handle upright lined up with your arm.  I think they're using them by the road at the beginning of Cool Hand Luke.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 09, 2016, 11:01:58 PM

Okay, I know what you mean now.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 10, 2016, 02:57:31 AM

What you described is what we call a bush ax -shaped almost like a cross between a paddle and a flat shovel w/ an asymmetrical end/spike-that's-barely-a-hook, right?- handy for similar jobs if it's sharp enough, great for thicker bits that need a little chopping heft behind them, and I understand the exact same tool with a slightly longer handle, called a bill hook then, is a good tree limb pruning tool that goes way back and doubled, wielded by peasants pressed into service, as a good knight limb pruning weapon - the primal form of polearm that elaborated into pikes and halberds and such.  You should ask Vishniac about this - I betcha a Swiss soldier and military buff knows LOADS about all things polearm...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 10, 2016, 03:17:48 AM

The Wikipedia article calls it just a bill, or bill hook.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Long_handled_bill_hook.jpg)

A bush ax, the one we have, anyway, has less than half that much hook to it, but otherwise, that's it pictured.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 10, 2016, 03:28:34 AM

Quote from: Wikepedia

An agricultural version, commonly known as either a brush-ax or bush-ax, is readily available in rural hardware and farm-supply stores in the United States today. It has a 4-foot-long (1.2 m) handle, and a 16-inch (41 cm) head. It is extremely useful for clearing undergrowth and unwanted hedgerows. Both the concave and convex edges may be sharpened edges, but spear-points and back-hooks are not available. Expertly used, the brush-ax can fell a 3-inch (7.6 cm) tree with a single blow. Inexpertly used, it can pose a grave danger of accidental maiming to those standing nearby.^{[citation needed]}

;lol ;lol ;lol ;lol ;lol

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 10, 2016, 05:27:22 AM

Yes. It was a blade like that attached to an axe handle. Mostly used it in fence rows.

I've been writing.  I've got most of it out of my head and into print.  I've started a word count.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 15, 2016, 05:12:59 AM

It seems that now that I'm home again, there's always something which needs attention, until I reach a point where I'm trying to work on the story with closed eyelids, which leads to negative productivity.

It's easier to write than count in that mindset, and when we're talking bout Dads and lost kittens, I'm a little too sad to write.

My all day headache has lifted. Back to re-reading and re-writing. Someday I'll finish that word count.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 15, 2016, 05:31:41 AM

I'm very close to finishing White Gold Wielder, and then I'll have to turn up World of Ptavvs and re-read for you...  Relic of Empire is in Tales of Known Space, isn't it?  Or Neutron Star?  I can lay hands on the latter instantly for sure, maybe the former - saw a couple of Niven collections last night...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 15, 2016, 08:01:04 PM

Neutron Star is where I read Relic of the Empire, Neutron Star, and The Handicapped last. I need to get back to reading that Man-Kzin story, but I've been in a gaming rather than reading mode.

 Strangely, it's the game Cookie Cats, a jewel-type game featuring singing cartoon cats, which have a way of cheering me up. That and the tournaments against other players capture my competitive spirit. There's a link on my face book.

I was happy with what I got done last night. The Bandersnatch doesn't have a consistent character voice, but it's going to be ready for your eyes again soon. I have one more anecdote to write.

Then we can discuss what to do with the ending- maybe changing the sequence of the revelations, explaining some things better, not beating the reader over the head with the others. Addressing a loose end I may have missed, embellishing the Epilogue vs. putting another anecdote in the story itself. That kind of thing.

 Or maybe the whole thing/ plot/premise is flawed and the story needs a major rewrite. I am game to try another version and see which we like better. But I'm approaching the point where my ideas are in print, the logical follow-up questions are answered, and it's time to decide if that's a good story in need of polish, or re-arranging or revision.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 15, 2016, 08:40:41 PM

Sure.  Part of the trick is knowing when you're done.

-I don't know about your dad, but mine was bad at that.


We're going to have to decide what to do with this thread eventually, too - it's too cool to just plonk.  You may want to add some at the top of the OP urging readers to read the finished version (linked, of course) before they follow the educational kicking around/development, and let it continue as the comments thread - or lock it (you can do that yourself) and make a new comments thread with the story and development threads linked.

Obviously, the finished story doesn't belong in here unless Papendou funtime comes onstage abruptly, but in public where the lurkers and non-Writer group members will see it.  This thread COULD stay here and have one of the on-going functions of Adult be semi-private workshopping...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 15, 2016, 11:13:33 PM

My Dad would do his best whatever it was, finish and move to the next thing again and again. I have more of a tendency to dwell, but if I don't dwell and keep thinking and revising, I instead fall into the procrastinator-perfectionist trap. Dwelling makes for better finished results in my case, I've found. The rushed parts get refined that way.

I'm pretty happy with Jay and Anne they way I have them in my present draft. I think it's true to Niven's Neutron Star collection and family friendly. Strictly TANJ and Bleep.

I could write erotic, but I don't want to do that in a place that's searchable to my Real Life, and it could hijack the story, which is a quest/mystery rather than a love story.

So, I was thinking along the same lines, the finished story needs to go to the other section when complete, lock it and start a comments thread there. We can leave this development one here if you think it has merit. Stick with semi-private workshopping until the section gets busy enough to split off.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 15, 2016, 11:43:15 PM

Separate folder for that -called Workshop or something along that line, of course- when there's the traffic, or just make it now; why not now?  Good idea.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 15, 2016, 11:50:39 PM

You know, you can lock a thread, in fact, and be able to post in it without unlocking temporarily - just you and people with staff powers...

Daddy was a 13-nail when four would have done sort of guy.  Split a lot of board ends he didn't have to.  Overkill, like I've said.  He stripped the threads of most anything that screwed eventually, and us kids would go for a wrench first when we needed to use an outdoor faucet - Momma usually managed with just a washcloth to protect her palms from having to grip so hard.

You know, this thread could even go in RC, as a cool Known Space conversation that might well draw in other fans, if you don't mind showing first draft in development as part of it...  -Or we need to start a knew one, for sure...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 08:32:56 AM

Hah! My father-in-law was a thread stripper. So is his oldest grandchild, my resident niece.

Speaking of board splitting, pilot holes are fine for cabinet work, but on barn stuff I learned that if you blunt the point of a nail with a hammer, while it may drive harder, it's far less likely to work like a splitting wedge. Try that next time you have an issue.

I just went over the story again. I want to do a word count first, but I think it's ready for here.
We need to talk about titles , too.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 16, 2016, 01:19:22 PM

I like your working title fine, though I don't know that it sounds nivenish - I can't say if he has a title style.  -Maybe drop the "The" and it's good.

I'll keep it in mind about blunt nails.

I see an edit went through after the page stopped loading - I was under the 15-minute time-limit when the forum broke.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 09:41:19 PM

My alternate working title was "The Persistence of Memory" because Niven said he meant the title "The Soft Weapon" in the Salvador Dali malleable sense.

I got stuff going on.... bleep the word count for now. I'll post the draft now. It takes me an hour or two to read through it.  You can get to reading it when you have the time, and I'll get back to the thread when I have the time.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 09:46:05 PM

  The spy gently descended towards the surface of the small frozen moon on a personal rocket device. First he pulled the trigger again to turn it off, and glided the last meter or two in the low gravity. Then he unslung a net bandolier containing a mirror-surfaced cylindrical box and placed it on the frozen ground between his feet. He flicked the selector switch on his rocket powered lift, and the device transformed into a hand-held computer.

 "DON'T HESITATE, ATTACK!" it said. Quickly he returned the selector switch to it's neutral setting, and the device became a silver sphere atop a pistol grip. Twisting the silver sphere he transformed it into a cone, pointed it at the planet dominating the sky and pulled the trigger. A shimmering blue beam reached towards the planet. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the planet didn't seem to explode, burn, or melt as he might have expected. It simply shattered. The entire planet.

  Then he heard a voice in his mind say "Kill yourself, slave!" and he knew with crystalline certainty that it was the right thing to do. He set the secret weapon to self-destruct, and a second cone appeared on it, points end to end. The spy pulled the trigger and he and his shape shifting device vanished in a powerful blue flash.

****

An aeon or so later, on that same frozen moon, now planetless and orbiting it's star in a debris field:

  "What do ya think you're doin', Smitty?" said the Belter's partner. Bob, like most resident miners in the Asteroid Belt, was a nudist, with a bald body and a hairstyle that looked like a cross between a Mohawk and a cropped horse's mane which ran all of the way down his spine by means of hair transplants, dyed popsicle blue. Smitty's crest was a natural copper color.

  "I was reading about that Sea Statue they found in the muck on the bottom of Earth's Atlantic Ocean centuries ago, and I wondered if there could be anything like a relic hidden here on Ceres, underneath the lake in this ice covered crater. So I'm scanning it with the deep radar", he said, not looking up from the screen.

  "Yer wastin' yer time. Mine, too."

  "Uh, Bob,... I think you owe me a BEEER!" hooted Smitty

****

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 09:52:57 PM

In an office on Earth, the following year:

  Everybody calls me by my surname, even my own family. It's our tradition.

  "Congrats again, Garvey, on stepping up with the Grogs. Please, have a seat," said my great grandfather, affectionately know as G-Squared, the founder of the family business. Rather than get fat and soft as he aged, he seemed to get leaner and tougher, like beef jerky. You'd  think he might last forever. He had invented dolphin hands, which allowed them to use tools and computers and become both productive and wealthy, and Garvey Limited, too, in the process. My title was Vice President of Business Development, and my main accomplishment was discovering another handicapped sentient species, the Grogs, and negotiating contracts with them. The young ones resemble cone shaped dogs. Mature females become sessile, that is, stationary, attaching themselves to rocks. Not only do their bodies enlarge, but their brains do, too, while their spinal cords shrivel and everything but their mouths become practically useless. They could summon their prey telepathically, and summon scavengers to groom them. They made telepathic contact with me because they wanted technology and trade.

  "Thanks," I said, sinking into a hover chair across the desk from him. Hover chairs weren't actually chairs, but they served the same purpose. Like sleeping plates, they automatically adjusted the gravity so that you could float in comfort, without falling off. "I had an inspirational example to live up to." Ripples in the artificial gravity field massaged my back.

  "When are you going to settle down and give me my great, great, grandson so I can claim the title of G-Cubed and retire as chairman of the board ?" he teased.

  "Well, there is this special girl on Down, Sharon Jilson, but I've got something I need to do first, before I try to get married," I confessed. Down was a planet in the system of a numbered, not named, cool, red star, I can never remember which one... "It will take time, money, and space travel. My thoughts have been dominated by this riddle: Bandersnatchi shouldn't have such huge brains, but they do. They were designer food beasts. There was no need for them to be sentient. The less brains, the better. I know they also served as spies, but Tnuctipun sized brains should've been more than adequate for a spy. So what's the purpose? "

  Bandersnatchi were our clients, too, much like the dolphins. My grandfather, "G-Prime" was responsible for finding that market. He was now the Chief Executive Officer, and my dad, Big G, is the Chief Operating Officer. Bandersnatchi lived in the Lowlands of Jinx, grazing upon yeast on the shores of it's equatorial ocean. Jinx was the ultra massive moon of the gas giant Primary, in the Sirius system, having the most gravity anywhere inhabited by humans. The  Bandersnatchi were slug-like single celled life forms scaled up to twice the size of an Apatosaurus. Externally they had a hard shell cell wall with a broad mouth and sensory bristles clustered at each corner. They were created by the Tnuctipun.

  The Tnuctipun were a very intelligent race of bipeds, gifted in the ways of bioengineering and other advanced technologies. Unfortunately for them, they were enslaved by the Thrintin, a species of modest intelligence with natural mind control powers so mighty that they ruled most of the galaxy. At least until the Tnuctipun revolted about a billion and a half years ago and everyone died as a result, except for some Bandersnatchi on Jinx.

  My great grandfather handed me a mug of Irish coffee, and sat down behind his desk with one of his own.

"G-Prime is our executive expert, what did he have to say about it?"

  I sipped and savored my coffee. The whipped cream on top kept it hot."He thinks maybe the Tnuctip just scaled up a microbe which could convert anything into palatable protoplasm, and the brains and genetic immutability were simple side effects of size. The spying was an afterthought, otherwise they'd have been designed with eyes. I wanted to get your input."

  G-Squared rubbed his chin and furrowed his brow. "Brains used to be a delicacy, called sweetmeats, until somebody discovered you could get prion diseases from eating them."

  "Wait," I said, "what are prions?"

  "Prions are infectious misfolded proteins of a sort. You know how a crystal kind of organizes the formation of other crystals around it? A prion caused the proteins around it to unfold and refold in it's own image, in a sort of slow motion chain reaction or domino effect. Since they infected nerve and brain cells in those with susceptible genes, it was particularly bad. Destructive as a software worm, only incurable and lethal. They once called it spongey brain disease, then mad cow disease. Prions could go dormant for years, making it hard to track and contain outbreaks."

  "Maybe," continued G-Squared, "it's because brains were simply worth more per kilo than meat. Maybe they had over-sized livers, too, for the same reason. Bleep, according to legend they could eat anything, they had to have over-sized livers, I'd bet my shares on it. Did you think of that?" he asked.

  "That's disgusting, of course not," I said. "Far before my time. My gut says there's another answer...No pun intended,"   

  He chuckled. "Your gut was right about Grogs, and they're making us a lot of money now. Not just as animal herdsman, zookeepers, and police interrogators, as they suggested, but as pet and infant psychologists, memory retrieval specialists, doctor's assistants, interpreters, etc. They can even cure gambling, smoking, drinking and current addictions! Go figure it out, you have my carte blanche as majority shareholder of Garvey Industries. If it's bothering you, I have a hunch we're leaving money on the table."

  G-Squared fumbled with biometric keys and combinations on his bottom desk drawer for a moment.

  "Take this, it came from the Belt. You can have it if you don't ask any other questions of me, it's probably best that way for all concerned," G-squared said, handing me a cylindrical-shaped bronze-like metal object the size of a toolbox. Apparently an open stasis box, it could only have been smuggled. Stasis boxes were like buried treasure, they often contained advanced technology, some of it weaponry. Because of that, the UN claimed first right to it in the name of public safety.

  Stasis fields were so dense that they reflected everything, they were indestructible, as far as anyone had proven, and whatever was inside was suspended in time while the box was closed and the stasis field was active. The boxes were relics of the Thrintin Slavers, built for them by the Tnuctipun slaves. This one contained a plasticized claw with 3 fingers, some cubes of meat in transparent wrappings, a flat rectangular gadget, a colorful cap, an empty drinking bulb, and a canister of golden liquid. "It should provide some clues in your quest. The labs say the meat is toxic, and that big bottle contains a unique ethanol liqueur."

  "Truth be told, I'd rather smoke than drink," continued G-squared, putting down his empty mug.

  "Go ahead," I said, following his lead and changing the subject. I was both alert and relaxed, feeling the effects of the fine Irish Coffee. "How has this dangerous smoking habit endured in humanity for over a thousand years, if you don't mind my asking? It doesn't make sense that it would."

  "I suppose not," he said, as he took out a tabac stick, or a cigarette, as they were formerly known, put it in his mouth, and touched the other end against his ring. There were some blue high voltage sparks, then the tabac stick  smoldered, and the tip glowed orange as he inhaled. "You might have reasonably expected it to die out after the Surgeon General's warning appeared on the product, and they banned advertising from TV, around the time of the Moon landing. Maybe they should have outlawed it altogether, but Prohibition on alcohol didn't work, and besides, the government was a partner in crime with the tobacco companies through vice taxes. So  it survived."

  He blew a few smoke rings. "Well, obviously it's an acquired taste, but an addictive one. Like all acquired tastes, the pleasure exceeds the pain in the short to intermediate term, at least after the instinctive unpleasant reflex. So a lot of people continued to smoke, and a lot of people got curious enough to find out what it was all about for themselves. Meanwhile the commercial interests were trying to revise their business plan with healthier, smokeless, and electronic versions of cigarettes, to grant themselves an extension. When marijuana was decriminalized in the early 21st century, the big tobacco interests muscled in on the market, and added tobacco to regulate the strength of the product, and make it more addictive, too"...

  G-squared flicked off the excess ash from his cigarette. "As the population of Earth grew into the tens of billions, the do-gooders ended tobacco cultivation subsidies, and replaced them with stiff taxes. When that failed, they instituted an outright ban, claiming it was immoral to grow tobacco rather than food."

  "Why didn't that work?" I wondered.

  "The Belters. Before the Moon Landing, the cowboy was the iconic symbol of American self-reliance. It dominated entertainment. People wore the boots, hats, and blue jeans. They even listened to the music. The cigarette advertising campaigns were built around cowboys. As the Earth became crowded and regulated, people with those independent streaks moved to the Asteroid Belt. Smoking was their homage to the cowboys, and a way to relax when they got out of their space suits." G-Squared took a long pull on his tabac stick.

  "The Belters were now the new cowboys of the new century. Only they were a worldwide symbol, not just an American one. When tobacco production went underground on Earth, the Belters took up the slack, transforming another asteroid into a hollow nickel-iron sphere, with soil and atmosphere inside, like Farmer's Asteroid, called Nicotina. Most cigarettes were smuggled, which was a way for everybody who used them to identify with their iconic heroes, or defy the U.N., or to appear wealthy. They made smoking cool again."

  He let out a long stream of smoke. "Eventually medicine caught up, and you could use the auto doc at the pharmacy every week when you dropped by to pick up your cigarette supply, neutralizing most of the harmful effects. Booster spice made a big difference, too. Then, under popular pressure, the UN threw in the towel and deregulated tobacco, making it tax free." Automated doctors were sort of like tanning beds, you laid down in the tank, closed the lid, and the machines scanned you, then used drugs in your blood stream to make adjustments to your body and personal chemistry while you received a massage. Booster spice was a supplement people took that not only neutralized the aging process, but made them youthful as well.

  "The other reason smoking survived the intervening centuries," He took the tabac stick out of his mouth and pointed it at me for emphasis, "was those kidnapping organ legger gangs! To them, a person was either a potential product or a potential black market customer, and smokers make way better customers than marketable product. Statistically, smoking made you less likely to die young!"

  I went slack jawed. "Damned if you do, and damned if you don't!" 

****

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 10:09:05 PM

  I chartered Jason and Anne-Marie Papandreou, who actually had previous experience with a stasis box, and their hyperdrive star liner, "Court Jester" for my quest, paying a premium for discretion. Jason was a veteran of the Man-Kzin Wars, and a former "Flatlander", or Earthling, like me. Anne-Marie was a willowy "Crashlander", from the low gravity planet We Made It, in the Procyon system. Jason was brave, but light hearted. Anne-Marie was clever and curious. Not only were they both able pilots, mechanics, observers, and improvisers, they were proven survivors. I would be in safe hands. I have no idea how, but Anne-Marie could make a soufflé in any gravity or acceleration. Their base of operations was Jinx, which was convenient, because I had a feeling I'd end up there sooner or later. That's where the surviving Bandersnatchi lived, and it was also the location of The Institute of Knowledge, the greatest research university beyond Earth. I wanted to pick their brains.

****

Aboard Court Jester:

  Once we were safely out of Sol System's gravity hazards and into hyperspace on a Silvereyes heading, an Earthlike planet in the Beta Hydri system, I told them about my quest. I also told them about my experience with telepathic Grogs on the planet Down.

  I realized they were the devolved descendants of the Thrintin Slavers, who ruled the galaxy with such powers 1.5 billion years ago. The Grogs had no recollection of any past on other planets. Or so they telepathically said. But as long as my mind still harbored doubts, I felt humanity was secure. If I began to think with crystalline certainty, I would be worried.

  The Papandreous told me about their adventure with a stasis box purchased from the Outsiders by the Piersen's Puppeteers. They were transporting it and a Puppeteer named Nessus when they were ambushed and captured in a secret Kzinti operation. A computerized spy's weapon found inside the box presumed the Kzinti had killed the rightful owner of the secret weapon, and self-destructed, killing all of the Kzinti. The Popandreous narrowly escaped because they were safely in a crash web at that moment. The Outsiders were aliens that migrated from the galactic core to it's rim and back, trading in information. The Puppateers  where named for their appearance, but it also described their nature- they were an advanced but cowardly race that acted behind the scenes. The Kzinti were an intelligent martial race that resembled bipedal tigers with ratlike tails.

  "How would you go to war against a race of alien telepathic mind readers with mind control, Jason?" I asked.

"I want to understand how the Tnuctipun did it. I want to know their mindset so that I can know why they made the Bandersnatchi the way they did. So please try to put yourself in their place for a moment."

   "Hmm..." Jason furrowed his brow, then stood and paced. "We humans were no match for the Kzinti, in man to "tiger" terms, in size, speed, strength or ferocity. It was the Kzinti's impatience for planning, preparing, and organizing which was their downfall. But if you tried to organize against the Slavers, they would know before you knew they knew. They would know your network, your numbers, your plans, your bases and supply caches and time tables. Whenever you decided to act and give a general order, the Slavers would know instantly. There would be no surprise. They would counter-order or ambush. If the Slavers ever failed, they would simply order the rebels to halt, retreat, or commit fratricide/suicide." It would be over before you could start. You'd be fools to try."

  "Or desperate," quipped Anne-Marie.

  Jason hedged a little. "The more you did to prepare, the more likely the Slavers were to find out and thwart you. Perhaps a few living alone on the frontier somewhere could work towards a revolution undetected," he said, then folded his arms emphatically," but that's it."

  "Any communication would probably have to be by secret couriers who didn't know what they carried...or better yet, didn't even know that they were couriers. Computer networks, lasers, hyper waves, and telecommunications could all be monitored, so that's out," Anne-Marie added, throwing her hands up in a gesture of futility. 

  "Sure, Tnuctipin could turn mining disintegrators and energy beams against the Slaver planets and compounds, but as soon as you moved against them, or even gave the order to, the mentally interconnected Slavers would retaliate. Most likely making you fight your own. Or if they wanted to make an example, they could force somebody to publicly flay themselves alive with a variable sword until they went into shock or bled out", Jason explained.

  Anne-Marie shuddered at first, then she wondered..."But really, wouldn't the Tnuctipun try to kill only the Slavers, not destroy the infrastructure they built and the other innocent slave species? They wanted to commit instant genocide, to liberate all from the overlords, not trigger Doomsday."

  "That made it much harder," I realized. "No super anti-matter weapons, if such things were even possible. No mining disintegrators or energy beams from orbit, either."

  "I just don't see how it could be done. You'd have to degrade the enemy intelligence before you could even hope to plan & prepare," said Jason. "Then you would have to use a super-powerful first strike, or it would all be over."

  "Well", I concluded," I guess we know why the Slavers ruled the whole galaxy, and for so long."

  "What do you make of this?" I said, showing them the open stasis box given to me by G-Squared, and placing it on the table in the main cabin.

  "It looks just like the one we bought from the Outsiders!," said Anne-Marie. "So does this stuff inside it. Where's the secret ray gun?"

   "This is all that there was when I got it. Interesting...Tell me about each of these objects and the secret ray gun," I said, adding "Feel free to touch them, but I should warn you that the meat is toxic."

  "And there's more of it," Jason observed. "Our box only had one cube of it, but it was poisoned, too."

  "Why?"

  "We concluded that the contents of our box were a sort of spy's survival kit. Maybe the meat was for suicide," Jason suggested.

  "It could just as easily have been for assassination, since it was for spy use," Anne Marie offered.

  "I knew I hired the right people!," I said as I hit the table with my fist for emphasis.

  She picked up the laminated claw. "We figured it's a Slaver's hand, and that it was a trophy, hence my assassination theory. The secret soft weapon was more humane than suicide by poison in the self-destruct mode, and contained a variable sword for quiet work, a projectile pistol, a laser for long range, a stunner for live capture, an energy absorber and a rocket lift for quick escape, a computer to store info, and a ray gun for mass destruction. Spy and assassin gear. Jay figured out it belonged to a spy, not a soldier," 

  "Maybe the rocket gizmo for interrogation", Jason joked. "That soft weapon wasn't like a pocket phone that is a phone, a camera, a watch, a health monitor, a calendar, and a computer all in the same rigid gadget. It was like a hammer that magically transformed into other proper tools, one at a time- adjustable wrench, a set of locking pliers, a hunting knife, a hand saw, only weapons instead of tools. It was as if it were made out of living liquid metal - total conversion of matter. That's what convinced me it was spy gear."

  I was speechless.

  "Speaking of pocket phones," said Anne-Marie, "The Kzinti telepath ran some tests on this rectangular gadget, and determined it was a communicator that worked in hyperspace, but their captain saw no use for it as a weapon, and didn't care about it."

  "Typical ratcats!" said Jason, using navy slang for the Kzinti.

  "WAIT!" I said. "A hyperspace pocket phone?! Where's this Tnuctipun stuff you saw before, now?"

  "In fragments plastered across the cabin wall of the wrecked Kzinti ship, next to the remains of the pilot", Jason explained, "after the secret soft weapon got suspicious and self-destructed."

  "So this is the only hyperspace pocket phone known in the universe?" I asked.

  "Yes," they said in unison.

  "Have I mentioned that I hired the right people? I think we just paid for this expedition, and Garvey Limited is about to have a subdivision bigger than the parent company. I'll arrange a generous finder's fee once we successfully crack the device."

  Jason and Anne-Marie did a high five and a happy dance.

  "There was a cap like this in our box," observed Jason," but the Kzinti had no interest in it either. It could have offered the wearer invisibility for all I know."

  Anne-Marie picked up the cap and put it on. "Perfect for bad hair days, or when you run out of makeup."

  "I can you still see you, beautiful."

  "TANJ! It doesn't work." Everybody laughed. "Maybe it offered some protection from the Slaver power, maybe our spy should have worn his instead of storing it."

  I smiled. "I like that idea even better! I can test it with the Grogs next time I'm on Down."

  "Maybe he couldn't," Jason speculated. "The cap would be great at night, for stealth, but if a Slaver could see him, but couldn't read his mind, it would blow his cover. Slavers would send his own people after him, and he'd be forced to kill them, or surrender. What he would really need is some sort of a temporary amnesia pill.."

  Anne-Marie picked up the empty drinking bulb. "Our kit had one of these filled with a 40% hydrogen peroxide solution. We never figured out why.. Fuel? Water purification? Torture? First aid? For destroying evidence? Suicide? Who knows?"

  "Ostensibly for water purification," I suggested," but since it's a spy kit, secretly for destroying evidence, too, is my best guess. We'll never know."

  "Well, well, what have we here?" said Jason, picking up the transparent canister which contained about 1.5 liters of golden liquid and holding it up to the light. "Looks like beer."

  "G-Squared said it was "a unique ethanol liqueur."

  "That's justification for carrying it in the kit, as far as Jay's concerned," teased Anne-Marie, "He always has me pack booze. Can we toast the future of the hyperspace pocket phone?"

  "I'm all for that, but let's keep things scientific, for now," I cautioned. "Only one of us at a time."

  "I volunteer to be guinea pig," stated Anne-Marie, raising her hand, "because I've never tasted anything more than a century old...and besides, Jay is officer of the watch right now."

  "TANJ!" he said.

  Anne-Marie transferred some of the elixir to her drinking bulb. "Mmmm. It smells yeasty, like... baking bread."

She took a slow sip. "It tastes like fresh bread, too!" She worked the liqueur around her palate, then swallowed.

 "Very creamy in texture, and slightly savory. The finish is sweet and there's a hint of something else.."

  "So it tastes like a cream ale?" asked Jason.

  "No," she said emphatically, and took a long pull from her bulb. " It's a... It's a drink of croissant fresh from the oven, with butter and Myer lemon honey! I could sip this stuff any time, hot or cold."

  That sounded too good to pass up. I transferred some liqueur into a clean drinking bulb, in preparation for a toast.

  "Is it ...Is it hot in here?" asked Anne-Marie, letting down her long brunette hair, and shaking it out. It floated sensuously in the .8G ship's acceleration. "Hey Jay, where are we going?"

  "Anne, are you okay?"

 "Never better, Big Guy! Who's your sexy friend and why haven't you introduced me?"

  "We're on our way to the planet of Silvereyes in the Beta Hydri system, under hyperdrive, at the direction of Garvey, here, who is our charter. We met him a few days ago. Don't you remember?"

  "Nope!" She threw her arms around her husband's neck, held him close and kissed him hard for half a minute.

  When they came up for air, Jason said "her mouth does taste delicious-"

  "We'd be willing to take this canister as payment for our finder's fee..." offered Anne-Marie.

  "Not happening," I said. "This is all there is." They started kissing again.  "Okay, you two, take all of the time off you need. Jason, please stay sober, and I'll call you if any alarms go off."

  "DEAL!" He said, sweeping the blue-eyed beauty off of her feet, as she took another sip. He rushed into their cabin, and I didn't see them again for about 48 hours.

  Maybe we found our 'temporary amnesia pill,' I thought. So... this 'unique liqueur' tasted delicious, got you drunk, cleared your head of short term memories, and was some kind of legitimate aphrodisiac. The perfect weekend beverage! Or the perfect way to get your great grandson to give you a great, great grandson faster...G-Squared played me. I love that guy!

****

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 10:11:06 PM

Silvereyes:

  We decided to keep the Jester in orbit and take a shuttle to the surface, that way we didn't have to deal with space harbor pilots or customs officials coming aboard and finding a stasis box. That could only lead to uncomfortable questions and undesirable outcomes.

  Jason and Anne-Marie wanted to conduct an experiment with the liqueur to discover the effects on men when they drank it. I was pretty curious myself, but since I didn't have a partner here, I gave them the bulb I had poured the other night, and let them stay aboard.

  I got a good view of a couple of shimmering silver-green sunflower patches the size of countries on Earth when I took a shuttle to the space port, a simple customs check when I landed, and then a displacement booth to the home of Dr. Richard Harvey Shultz-Mann in Bradbury's Landing. He was expecting me.

  He had a head of close cropped hair, and an asymmetrical beard with a waxed goatee on the left side of his chin, all of it sandy or white in color. It gave him a very striking aristocratic appearance, but it showed his age and revealed his poverty. He'd been off of booster spice for decades. He'd been discredited for misusing a spaceship belonging to the Institute. He was rendered unemployable and unpublishable, even though he was perhaps the leading  xeno-archeo-bontanist in Known Space. So he was akin to the Bandersnatch who had intelligence and nothing to do with it. He was willing to pontificate for a price paid in advance.

  We spoke of the Grogs at length. Then about the book he intended.

  "Was there any possible revolutionary purpose for the bio-relics?" I asked.

  "I can speculate," Dr. Schultz-Mann began, "but I don't have scientific proof. My intuition indicates that the key to understanding the Tnuctipun is that they were inherently duplicitous, that everything they created was designed with an ulterior application for their eventual revolution. They always played the long game. The stage trees could easily be repurposed as rockets, explosives, or IPBMs." Mature stage trees were like multi-stage solid fuel rockets, 800 meters high. They were designed to lift ships and payloads out of planetary gravities. When gravity polarizer drives were introduced, the plantations went bankrupt.

  "IPBMs?" I asked.

  "Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles," Shultz-Mann explained. " There are no surviving viprin, they all would have starved with the Slavers, after the slaves committed suicide and the Thrintin ate the last Bandersnatch brain.  So while they are examples of Tnuctipun genetic-engineering, they aren't relics in the true sense. We only know of them from stasis box records and Kzanol. They would have been the obvious choice for spy creatures, but perhaps excessively obvious." The viprin were racing beasts like greyhounds. The Tnuctipun improved them, removing digestive tracts, to save on weight, and hair to reduce drag. They were fed refined liquids intravenously and beloved by the Slavers. They were immune to the Slaver's Power. They had to be, otherwise races could be rigged, affecting the gambling. The improved strain revolutionized racing, and wreaked economic havoc, putting most kennels out of business.

  "What about those air plants," I asked? Air plants were botanical, (not mechanical ) plants that recycled the air on space ships, or in the mansions of the Slavers in less than ideal worlds. "What was duplicitous about them? Could they be turned off and cause suffocation?"

  Dr. Schultz-Mann pondered the problem and stroked the waxed spike of his asymmetrical beard. "There's no method to shut down the air plants remotely. Anything that would terminate them would terminate the passengers and crew as well, so suffocation by air plant failure would be redundant in that scenario. The discovered specimens vary significantly. They've probably mutated considerably over 1.5 billion standard years. There may be examples which we don't even recognize as being of the same taxonomical division. Most evolved to not only create air, but to store it. Many were contaminated with dormant viruses. I can't generalize, other than to say that they are remarkably reliable to still be producing breathable air in our lifetimes. Certainly no machine could function for such an extended duration unattended, not even for one one- thousandth of that. That's the beauty of bio-engineering!"

  "And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Slaver 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had parabolic mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. Normally they focused all of the sunlight onto the black bulb in their center, but they could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were. They could turn predator into prey by broiling it into dry fertilizer. The heads looked like silver eyes, and so was the planet named.

  "The sunflowers were planted on the estates, surrounding the Slaver mansions, as a solar powered "laser" perimeter defense. Devastatingly powerful in daylight, useless without the sun. Best suited to some planet or moon with a light side and a dark side. We know that the Tnuctipun used them as weapons against the Thrintin. Perhaps the sunflowers could be queued, or re-trained to become dormant, or even to perceive the Slavers as a menace, and prevent them from entering or leaving their homes at a critical juncture. That would be insidiously problematic.  Or some combination of oxygen enriched air from the airplants, stage trees as fuel/explosives and sunflowers as a detonator. Nobody actually knows why the Thrintin used the sunflowers as a defense, or how the Tnuctipun utilized them against them, only that they did."

  "As a perimeter defense." Mann stated, "they are excessively hazardous to have adjacent to populated areas, with the significant probability of some inhabitants being burned or blinded. Death to humans is a lesser peril. Intelligent life can flee or seek cover when they begin to be targeted at the range limits. As a defensive system, the sunflowers could be rather easily neutralized by lagomorpha leporidae... "

  "Leopards?!"

  "Bunnies," Mann declared. "Bunnies love to eat sunflower stalks. They live underground. They are normally active at dusk and dawn. Raptors are primary predators of rabbits, but the sunflowers would burn the birds out of the sky. Bunnies tend to run in zigzags too quickly for the sunflowers to track, or run into cover and circle. In other words, when the sunflowers would attack the bunnies, they would end up burning each other. When things get too hot for the bunnies, they would duck underground, and when they have a plentiful food supply they breed like clichés."

  I laughed at the picture he painted of an estate security system overrun by rabbits. "Hardly a credible deterrent, but couldn't a slaver stop the bunnies?"

  "Certainly, but if you need a security guard just to guard the security system, it defeats the purpose of it, doesn't it?" Mann countered.

  "Well, I gotta admit a system that dangerous and ineffective doesn't seem sensible, not at all. Was that how it was a Tnuctip trap?"

  "My research over the decades here suggests that the sunflowers were originally designed as a terraforming tool," Mann continued. "Seed the continents with sunflowers to clear the land, and colonize the oceans with yeast as a future food source. Both could be delivered by stage tree rockets. The sunflower patch expands like a toadstool ring, or perhaps a toadstool ring within a grass fire, killing and burning all before it, then dying off from the center as the nitrogen in the soil was depleted, and leaving organic matter behind. The growing ring stopped when it reached naked rock, water or salt. I think the Tnuctipun devised these for their own use, before they became enslaved. They started with fresh seed from the original source for each application. The plant was designed to self-destruct rather than evolve.

  "The sunflowers you see here today have mutated to fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil by means of symbiotic bacteria, so that the center of the patch continues to live. That's what enables them to thrive in various soils. I've determined that they must have been trapped beneath an ice shelf in seed form until relatively recently- say a million years ago, and evolved thereafter. Stopped by a blizzard, most likely."

  "Last, but not least..." I suggested, getting to the point of my quest.

  "We all know the Bandersnatchi were spies," stated Dr. Shultz-Mann. "We academics haven't determined how they could have procured anything of use as information. They lack psychic aptitude. They can't see in the least, and never could until you built prosthetics for them. They're tactile, but they lack mammalian hands, mollusk tentacles, and Puppeteer prehensile tongues. The brain organelles were certainly capable of storing data, but the neurological sensors were certainly inadequate for gathering it. It remains an unanswered question. I might well have gone to the lowland wilds to interview one for myself, rather than accept some Jinxian brute's word on the matter, but the gravity of that mutant moon was torment enough on it's own. The equatorial humidity would have been unbearable. My beard would have curled out of control!"

****

Aboard Court Jester in close orbit of Silvereyes: 

  I really liked Mann, and I certainly believed him, but not enough to take a risk and offer him a job with responsibility. There was something slightly suspicious about him. Perhaps he was a little too greedy or clever to trust. I wouldn't have showed him the stasis box contents, even if I had them on me. I had a feeling his pomposity was his way of withdrawing from his imposed poverty to protect his pride. But I liked him enough to buy him a booster spice subscription, and call it a retaining fee for a consultant. He was due for a big surprise tomorrow!

  The Popandreous confirmed that the liqueur worked much the same for Jason as it did Anne-Marie, who was able to duplicate her previous results. It cleared his mind, it gave him sexy breath and bedroom eyes, it made him amorous and improved his stamina. I was really looking forward to using it to celebrate my marriage engagement on Down at the end of this trip.

****

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 10:31:13 PM

Orbiting Jinx:

  I was standing next to the air lock, awaiting the authorities, when Anne-Marie placed a drinking bulb filled with golden liquid in each of my hands and winked her eye.

  The door opened and the Jinxian officials, a female harbor pilot and a male customs agent entered Court Jester. They were massive, just like the moon they lived on. I placed drinking bulbs of liqueur in their powerful hands. "Welcome aboard! Garvey of Garvey Limited, at your service."

  They looked at each other, preparing to politely refuse, when Anne-Marie rushed over, and seized them both by the wrists and pulled as hard as she could - "Hey! Don't be givin' away the reserve vintage stuff, it's too good for 'em. Let me have it!"

 The Jinxians just lifted the bulbs to their mouths, to re-assert control, and pulling the spindly Anne-Marie into the air in the process. Her grip tore free and she safely tucked, rolled, and landed on her feet. The Jinxians took long draughts and  grunted. "I'd like to see the manifests," said the pilot to Jason, ignoring Anne-Marie.

  ..."And I'd like to see the contents of that locked walk-in safe labeled 'DANGER! Airlock Out of Order' because I know this spaceship model, and it only has the airlock by which we entered!" said the customs agent, shouldering past Jason.

  Uh-oh, I thought, they are going to find my stasis box with the hyperspace pocket phone, and start confiscating, fining, and asking awkward questions. Their mass must make them resistant to the liqueur. I stalled..." What'd you think of the drink? "

  "It tastes and smells delicious, best thing I ever drank, thank you Mister....  uh, What was your name again?"

  I showed him my passport and credentials.

  "Now let me get this straight.." said the agent, loud enough for all to hear. "Your name is
Marvin Gardner Garvey the fourth... Can anyone tell me what a Gardner does?"

  "He gardens?" quipped Jason.

"Exactly!"  said the agent. "That means that the guy who has the Monopoly on dolphin hands was named for Marvin Gardens, a location in Atlantic City!"

  The two Jinxians doubled over in laughter. Always trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. When they finished slapping each other on the back, they were sweating, holding each other's muscular arms, and gazing into each other's eyes.

  "Uhh..." said the pilot, "Look at the time! I think we're finished here, aren't we Attila?"   

  "AGREED!" he said, and they left arm in arm. We landed on our own.

****

The Institute of Knowledge, Jinx:

  The Bandersnatchi Specialist, Dr. Pablo Singh, was bored to tears. He told me the facts I already knew and ignored my perplexing question about Bandersnatchi brains. He droned in a monotone as if he were reciting a memorized speech. He said they are intelligent, but not intellectual. They have remarkable memories, but they're such boors.  All they want to talk about is sex and food, and the sex is kind of biologically pointless because they are all genetically identical. They can talk for weeks about their ancestors and how the texture and flavor of yeast has subtly changed over the millennia. He didn't know who that would be of interest to besides somebody studying the evolution of yeast!

  "Except for the shell," said the biologist, "they resemble the Earth protozoan brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, in my opinion. Those are particularly interesting, and the reason I came here to study the Bandersnatch. T. Gondii has all kinds of fascinating abilities. They can go dormant, and they are practically incurable in that stage. Maybe the shell is just a variant of the cyst. They can alter the immune system, to weaken the host in order to spread the infection, or they can boost the host's immune system to fight off competing parasites. Infection is passed in various ways, including from mother to child, by eating undercooked meat, and it can also be sexually transmitted. They infect multiple species, but they prefer to reproduce in cats, and to that end they can dramatically reduce a rat's olfactory sensitivity to cat urine, so that the infected rat will likely be eaten by a cat, which will in turn become infected. It can even make infected rats confuse fear with attraction. In the case of "crazy cat ladies", it seems to regulate their dopamine levels, and change their behavior. When T. Gondii infect cats they can reproduce and shed cysts through the feces, which are incredibly durable and infectious-

  Ick! I got out of there quick. The professor wasn't much more interesting of a conversationalist than he claimed his subjects of study were. I decided to take Dr. Schultz-Mann's suggestion, and find out for myself. I made some arrangements. Since we were at their base of operations, the Popandreous busied themselves with maintenance and re-supply. For two nights we had dinner at their home.

****

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 10:42:43 PM

The Lowlands of Jinx:

  We flew the Court Jester to the company hanger at the edge of the fog belt on the Lowlands of Jinx, where the Bandersnatchi came for their prosthetic surgery. One of the Bandersnatchi, who preferred to be known as "Slick" had agreed to an interview in exchange for a complete set of prosthetics in advance... hands, sensors, and communicators.  The hardware was going to make things easier for us to communicate anyway. At least the atmosphere and temperature was comfortable for me here, in the hanger, even if the gravity was still oppressive. Thank Finagle for hover chairs!

  The Bandersnatchi earned money for trade and to control their population and relieve boredom by selling hunting rights. The hunt was regulated so that the humans in an armored car had a 60% chance of killing a 'snatch, and they had a 40% chance of killing the hunters. Strange, but true. So this was a much safer way of paying for prosthetics.

  The Bandersnatchi made a sound like distant thunder. Laughter? "You are the first to ask!  Well, besides gossip and news, we use our brains for sex- seduction, variation, memorization and telling the stories. Simple really. Isn't it true that the dolphins of your wet rock Sol-3 spend 8 hours of the their day fishing, 6 hours of it napping, 10 hours playing, and 60% of that is sexually oriented? Are not your Sol-3 Bonobos equally salacious?"

  "OH...Sorry." Maybe my gut was wrong, and G-Prime was right about 'snatches. The expert at the Institute of Jinx, Singh, wasn't far off either.

  "Be not sorry," Slick said. "The Creators said it was important to multiply. Frankly we enjoy -"

  "Waait! The Creators?"

  "They called themselves Tnuctipun. Even tinier than you humans, but more clever. They made us from protozoan brain parasites. The Creators said they designed us to live here where no Master would ever go, in fog so thick laser weapons and sunflowers were useless".

  "You talked to the Creators?"

  "We did not really speak before your wonderful devices, we used a kind of sign language, bristle cluster to bristle cluster.. 'Speak' is an idiom. No, not I. The ancestors signed with the Creators... and the Masters observing would simply see it as scratching and herding a beast, much as if we were oxen. The sign language being too abstract in a Morse or binary code sort of way for the Masters to recognize it as meaningful communication when they read the Creator's minds while they signed. Terribly boring nonsense to them, like horse talk. It was many, many ancestors ago. As to when, I can not say. Time is meaningless in the Lowlands of Jinx. There is nothing to see, even with your prothsetics and we only know what we are told. This is my first time out of the fog."

  "What about the Masters?"

  "We never met the Masters, the Creators called them Thrintun, you call them Slavers. The Masters lived in luxury and leisure on their estates. They hated everything about the Lowlands of Jinx - the gravity, the associated joint pain, the gloom, the air pressure, the heat, the humidity, and the smell here made them queasy. Even if the Masters tried to read anyone's mind in the Lowlands and began to succeed, the sensory input would feel like torture to the Masters, and they would be forced to quit involuntarily. The Creators armored our brains against mindreading. Our chromosomes are so big they are immutable, and our minds themselves are impervious to disease, prions, and failure. Perhaps it's because they are organelles, and not brains as you know them. We have neither neurons nor synapses. They told the Masters that we had no minds to read, nor need of them.  The Creators told us we were privileged to be the only sentient species in the galaxy who did not have to serve the Masters."

  "Yeah", Jason whispered, "you didn't serve the Masters, you were served to them."

  "When we become food, and except for our brains we were served to the slaves", Slick corrected, "we achieve the purpose for which we were created. How many humans can say the same? I understand you humans cannibalize each other for spare parts as a form of capital punishment, do you not? We sent our rapists to slaughter to remove them from society. Are we so different? Regardless, that ended many ancestors ago, when the Creators died."

  I considered the 'snatch. Apparently Bandersnatchi  with our products hear better than humans. Could they hear with those sensory bristles? If they were designed as spies as well as food beasts, that only stands to reason. The more acute their senses, the better. But how effective is a spy with no eyes against a species that communicates telepathically, rather than verbally? What good would hearing do? How would it gather useful information? That makes no sense. Well, neither does a single celled animal with immutable chromosomes exchanging genetic material when they are all identical, and perfectly capable of asexual reproduction. Aha! The most effective spy is the one you never suspect. Who would ever suspect a blind single celled animal with no discernable intelligence?

  "I spoke to the surviving descendants of the Slavers," I stated, "They were still telepathic, but they had devolved almost beyond recognition, and had no recollection or history of previous forms and planets. How is it that you and your people remember something from a billion and a half Earth years ago?"

  "I believe it is a matter of intelligent design," answered Slick. "You probably see us as monstrous meat beasts. We were designed to eat anything plentiful and convert it to white food - yeast, grass, ferns, moss, cacti, or even garbage. We had to be able to ingest and neutralize or shed almost any poison. In the cities of the Masters, our people roamed the streets collecting garbage and information. On the estates we normally had fenced pastures. Those Bandersnatchi on other diets were analogous to beef cattle. Here, where we originated, we graze upon yeast and are more like your dairy type cattle than beef type, older and more tame on average. Sure, we normally became meat at the end of our life cycle, but that wasn't our primary function. Our bodies broke down the yeast and sorted out anything that obstructs memories from our bodies, an alcoholic concentrate containing hormones and pheromones for discharge. The Creator couriers brought us protein snacks and in exchange we released these stored fluids to them. It was called Lowland Liqueur -

  Anne-Marie interrupted -"And it was highly prized for it's ability to clear people's heads, relieve guilt and stress, facilitating relaxation, reducing inhibitions, and for enhancing sexual prowess! The perfect thing for a Slaver wanting to forget the stress of slave minds at the end of the week! Or a rebellious Tenuctip wanting to wipe his mind clean before going near the Slavers."

  "You tried some of it?" asked Slick.

  "Oh, yeah!"

  "How, we have not given any away for an aeon or so...since the era of the Creators?"

  "From a Tnuctipun stasis box."

  "Did you find any protein snacks? I always wanted to try some, and I could produce some Lowland Liqueur in exchange."

  "No, just poisoned meat."

  "You mean preserved. It is a protein snack. Do we have a have a deal?"

  "Garvey?"

  "Aha! Yes, it's a deal, Slick," I said. "Of course. To a human, salt is a tasty preservative. To bacteria, it's a deadly toxin. Ethanol is much the same. You Bandersnatchi were designed to eat anything, probably up to and including formaldehyde. The Tnuctipun were duplicitous to the core. They had to be. Everything had a Slaver purpose, and a Creator purpose. This preserved meat was a treat essential to trigger the production and release of Lowland Liqueur as far as the Slavers thought, but to the Tnuctipin spies and couriers, it was a suicide or assassination pill. Your beef type Bandersnatchi cousins on Slaver worlds were garbage recyclers and food, but they were also spies. The stage trees were lift rockets, but they could as easily be missiles, explosives, or message couriers- "

  "Who told you we were spies?" interrupted Slick after Anne-Marie tossed a snack in his mouth. Anne-Marie was obviously more comfortable around this giant than Jason and I were. She went to scrub her hands after touching the toxic stuff.

  "The stasis box records, mostly," I said.


  "Wrong. How could we spy on them?"

  "Uhhh,,," I stalled, "could you hear them with your sensory bristles?"

  "We could, and we could feel vibrations in the ground with our bellies, but since they didn't use audible communication, we could only locate and track them at best, and not too well when they flew."

  "Oh," I said disappointedly, "Well, Anne-Marie, could you please show Slick the other stuff in the spy kit so he can tell us about it ?"

  "Wait..." she said. "African elephants can communicate ultrasonically over several kilometer's distance. They listen through their toes for bone contact and place their trunks on the ground to triangulate direction. Can you communicate like that, too?"

  "Sure, only we place our shells on the ground to hear, and our necks on the ground to triangulate. We signal with our belly foot."

  Coded sign language and multi-kilometer subsonics as communication options in a spy above suspicion sounds intentional to me, but it doesn't add up... yet.

  She held the canister of Lowland Liqueur against Slick's Bristles.

  "This was a Luxury item," explained Slick. "Nectar for the masters. They sent couriers with protein snacks here to get it. Ours had the best flavor. For the Creators it was a temporary amnesia inducer or short term memory eraser, depending on the dosage."

  She held up the trophy claw.

  "A Master's claw, also a biometric key for accessing gates, computers and spaceships."

  The three of us were shocked. We should have thought of that! Next came the colorful cap.

  "The Creators wore these when they crept into the sunflower patch at night and sat down. They would cut sunflowers and attach them to the cap and a net they wore over their body. The cut sunflowers fooled the other sunflowers, the cap shielded the Creator's mind from the Master's. That's how the spying was done," Slick explained.

  "Ghillie suit! That's how they could use a protective cap without being seen, I should have known!" said Jason.

  She held up the gadget next. "A hyperspace communicator. It has a secret feature, it jams Thrintin psionic amplifier helmets," stated Slick.

  "Active countermeasure," Jason declared. "Of course, this would alert the Slavers to the presence, if not the location, of an enemy. An act of desperation or open rebellion."

  Next Anne-Marie held up the empty drinking bulb, saying " Sometimes they held a powerful hydrogen peroxide solution."

  "The Masters thought it was just for water purification. The Creators actually used it for sterilization, critical when handling brain destroying infectious agents", said Slick.

  "WAIT!" I said, "What 'brain destroying infectious agents'? By agents do you mean spies? And why did they sterilize them? To torture them?"

  "No. They did not. No. 'Infectious agents' were bioengineered weapons which spread and went dormant for a standard decade or two. There was a memory destroying prion, but we were designed without the susceptible gene, a brain parasite which manipulated brain chemistry and decreased intelligence as it feasted, but we were modified versions of it, so it identified us as family rather than food, and a designer virus which attacked the brain and central nervous system, degrading psychic powers. Of course as a single cell, we have no nervous system."

  "Your herd serves as your neural network", I said.

  "You might be right," Slick considered. "We never thought about it."

  For somebody that knows so much, these Bandersnatchi guys are remarkably lacking in intellectual curiosity. They seem preoccupied with information only as trivia.

  "What can you tell me about Creator duplicity in bioengineering?" I asked.

  "The air plants were used to generate and recycle air in homes and space ships, but they also spread the designer brain and central nervous system virus. The viprin were used to entertain the Thrintun, but also as a host vector to the brain parasite."

  Jason interjected- "The Creators had turned the tables on the Masters! Instead of the Tnuctipun being defeated before they could rise up, Slavers were all terminally ill with dormant  incurable neuron infections before they realized the revolution had begun. Now we know how they found a way to degrade the enemy intelligence first. " 

  Slick continued- "Sunflowers were designed as terraforming tools for the Creators, before they were enslaved by the Masters, their seed to be delivered by stage trees. They were designed to be gone when the settlers arrived. It wasn't until the Masters started losing their minds that sunflowers were repurposed as a home defense. The stage trees were lift rockets, until replaced by the new ships with air plants and gravity polarizers, then the Creators waited for them to mature on the plantations and fitted them with Anti-matter warheads contained in stasis fields."

  So Mann was essentially correct about the sunflowers, I thought. I'll have to tell him. I guess I know why the Outsiders sold unopened stasis boxes to the Puppeteers. The question is who would pay me more for that secret? Bleep! I need to warn G-Squared not to buy any more unopened boxes!

  Slick lowered his long neck, which seemed to have a conspicuous blister near the end. A prosthetic hand positioned a transparent plastic bag, and the neck filled it with 10 or 15 liters of the golden Lowland Liqueur. I could almost taste that yeasty fresh bread fragrance. We and the Bandersnatchi were going to have some lucrative commerce, at least until the Liqueur got outlawed for making workers unproductive. If we play our cards right, and find the right price point, it will be strictly a special occassion luxury. That way we can make the government our de facto partners through vice taxes, and it will become addicted to the revenue.

  "Well Garvey," said Anne-Marie, bringing me back to reality, "how about this batch of Liqueur as our finder's fee, plus a pair of free pocket phones if and when you get them into production, with lifetime replacement guarantees? Oh, and we want paid for the charter in shares of Garvey Limited valued at the current market price, before anything is announced about phones or Bandersnatch dairies."

  "Done. You've earned it," I said.

  "So what's actually in this stuff?" wondered Anne-Marie.

  "It's a mixture of alcohol form the yeast digestion, hormones and pheromones from the protein snack, and some others produced by my own body. Allowing this stuff to accumulate in my own body and retaining it interferes with my memory," said Slick.

  Well, that made some sense, sex hormones could interfere with a lot of functions if they didn't dissipate, but I had a nagging sense that as much as I'd learned, I knew even less about what I really wanted to know than when I started. Finally, I got to the crucial question. "What can you tell me about the way your people were designed? Why were your brains so big? Why were you created intelligent if not for spying?"

  "We were designed for converting biomass to white food for the slaves, and sweetmeats for the Masters. The Creators designed us for recycling prions to re-infect the Masters, and data recovery and permanent storage."

  "How did you do that?"

  "We ate brains...and assimilated the information in them via the Rna. Anyone might provide useful information. Creator spies could snatch a Master at night, or a servant, remove the brain and toss the body into the Slaver sunflower patch for incineration at dawn. When a spy committed suicide, or was captured and killed, the memories could be recovered by digesting and absorbing the brain. The fresher the better, of course, but one from a recent grave would provide useful information, too. The slavers got stupid and crazy before they died, forcing other slavers to kill them. Paranoid and demented people with the Power were dangerous. Or brains and pituitary glands could be processed, preserved, and compressed into brain paste cubes- protein snacks for travel. A Master's delicacy, or an essential required for us to produce Lowland Liqueur. To the Creators it was an information medium, suicide pill, or Master poison."

  Jason scratched his head. "You were designed for the Slavers to eat your brains, but secretly for you to eat the Slaver brains, and give them prions in the process? Your Creators were TANJing devious!"

  "So...", I said," not only was the herd a neural network, each of you were cells in a giant brain, only you used bristle sign language or subsonics, not electro synapses, so you're unreadable. TANJ! ...So you were spies after all."

  "Unreadable to the Masters, at least. I think your terms for us are  'contact', 'control', or 'analyst'," explained Slick. "We seldom made covert observations personally. We handled information. We were the network into which the intelligence was fed."

  We all started to laugh at that turn of phrase.

  "Funny," said Jason. "I thought the Creators in the Ghillie suits were the network, and you guys were mouthpiece." We laughed some more...

  "Wait a moment," said Anne-Marie." Your primary purpose is to remember what the Creators couldn't afford to record or remember, for fear of being caught by the mind reading Masters, and to help them forget what they knew when need be?"

  "That is so," said Slick.

  "Your brains weren't big to make big bites," said Jason with a grin, "they were big to make big multi-terabytes!"

  So now I had my answer, their brains were big so that they could contain the memories of many brains. But it raised more questions. "Uh... why do you need to have sex when you are all identical? What did your learn from the brain you just ate? When the revolution started, and the Slavers had already been infected with terminal neurological maladies, and the Tnuctipun fought with everything they had- stage tree missiles with antimatter warheads, mining disintegraters, total conversion destructor beams, sunflower patches, immature stage trees, conventional lasers, and projectiles, etc.,  the Slavers countered with amplified die commands. How is it that the ancestors of the Grogs survived at all?"

  "We have sex to share information, not genes. When we reproduce, we carry a copy of the memories. The Masters would see their food beasts breeding, not sharing data, so they approved."

  "It was a Master's brain. His memory was damaged from prions. He was very wealthy once. He lost fortunes in stage trees, viprin kennels, and a Bandersnatchi dairy. He was forced to sell off slaves each time. When his memory started to go, he began forgetting and displacing things. Then he began accusing family, slaves and other Masters of stealing them. After that he began hiding things, which made matters worse. He became very fearful and suspicious. Paranoid is your term-"

  Jason interrupted "Paranoid is a smart way to be when everybody is out to get you."

  Slick continued-"He suspected conspiracies everywhere. When other Masters were struck with various brain afflictions, they put the Creators to work on it. They came up with a vaccine for the neuro virus. It was given to all of the slaves, but it created a controversy for the Masters. Some, said a vaccine vindicated the Creators. Others, including this one, said the vaccine was actually the cause of the problem, and refused it for their families, and insisted other Masters do the same. He said the only defense was a healthy Bandersnatch brain diet. When the Master's Council ruled that each should decide for themselves, he said it was proof that their brains were already infected, and told them so emphatically. After that, nobody took his conspiracy theories seriously, and all of his younger children perished from the virus. His older ones were waiting to replace him.

  "He blamed the Council and Creators for everything, and he was always looking for proof. One night he hid in the stage tree plantation, and caught the Creators loading antimatter warheads onto the stage trees instead of sunflower seeds... and that was the last thing he saw."

  "I knew nothing of the Grogs before you told me," said Slick.

  "I think I know how the Grogs survived," said Jason. "Their ancestors have been aboard a slow boat to Down when the Revolt occurred. One built before gravity polarizer drives and air plants. They left before the neurological afflictions, so they were traveling safely in a stasis field. When they arrived the sunflowers had cleared the planet, except for the deserts where they couldn't grow. There was an estate built for them, but everything was dead or destroyed in the war when they arrived. So they ate their supplies, then their servants, then started hunting and scavenging in the desert, in a downward spiral into species extinction, cannibalism and devolution."

  I said "I just realized, you don't license hunting parties to hunt your people just to earn credits, you are also hunting humans for brains with new memories and information..."

****

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 16, 2016, 10:46:37 PM

-The nanobot action in autodocs doesn't work for the timeline -maybe- Carlos Wu's autodoc from a long generation earlier was kinda top secret, and worth taking along on the second Ringworld expedition, and Louis -no sign but the surname he knew Carlos was his father, and some he didn't know the father he knew was Beowulf Shaffer, IF Bey made it to Home and raised him- seemed quite impressed by its capabilities...

Only gotten that far just yet...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 10:52:19 PM

EPILOGUE-

   I called G-Squared before he could open another stasis box. I told him it was a very successful expedition and to meet me at the hanger on Jinx ASAP with a team of our best electronics guys. He better bring Big G and G-Prime, too. We had a lot to talk about...

  There was a potential security problem. Civilians with stasis boxes could get a death sentence from the UN, and G-Squared lived on Earth. Jason and Anne-Marie I could trust to keep secrets. But Slick was a potential problem because he would share all of his information with the herd, so he agreed to move to Down without telling the herd, and start one of his own. His price was the rest of those brain bullion cubes he called protein snacks from the stasis box. I have a feeling he would have moved just for the novelty, and the change in diet to alfalfa. He was going to be my Grog monitor and enforcer. My Fail Safe against them, but not the only one.

   All I had to do was get him some human brains to eat to check for Grog mind control. How? Well maybe people would be willing to give their brains to a Bandersnatch when they died, rather than cremate them, so that their memories could be perpetually preserved and accessible by friends, family and historians. Maybe there's another new business...

  I think I might want to import some Jinxian yeast for Slick if he were going to eat some brains now and then, too..

  The Grogs couldn't read my mind with the cap on, so that worked. I labeled it "pilot" and put it aboard the Bussard Ramjet rocketship in close orbit around it's sun, just to be sure. If the Grogs ever got ambitious with mind control, the ship would use the sun as fuel and cook the planet with it's exhaust plasma.

  Dr. Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann was grateful for the Booster Spice. He was delighted for the validation of his sunflower theories. I paid him a year in advance in shares of Garvey Ltd., got him a com link with a 'snatch named Chilli ( Mann was right, they were tactile ) and put him to work interviewing him. He retained the book rights, but this way his clever mind was seeking ways to make us both rich from Bandersnatchi memories..

  Sharon eagerly accepted my marriage proposal, even before she heard about my recent adventures and discoveries. I guess being wealthy enough to buy her planet if I wanted was good enough for her. Then we finished off the original canister of Lowland Liqueur together. Good thing we hologrammed the proposal, because neither of us remembered it! But she absolutely declined to leave Down permanently, so she started house hunting, and Garvey Ltd. made plans to build a regional headquarters. On the bright side, the Grogs there were sworn to stop any invasion, so we didn't have to concern ourselves with Kzinti dreams of recapturing the planet.

  The Papandreous considered buying another ship and become a regular space line, but that would have meant more time apart, more drudgery, and not much adventure. So we formed a partnership as a luxury charter cruise line. I bought the new ship and supplied the Liqueur and pocket phones for the guests. They managed and operated things. They hired some help, and we traveled in style, as needed.. Sharon and I formed a lasting friendship with them. You never know, we might go on another adventure once Garvey the Fifth is born...

****

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 10:58:25 PM

Quote from: BUncle on May 16, 2016, 10:46:37 PM

-The nanobot action in autodocs doesn't work for the timeline -maybe- Carlos Wu's autodoc from a long generation earlier was kinda top secret, and worth taking along on the second Ringworld expedition, and Louis -no sign but the surname he knew Carlos was his father, and some he didn't know the father he knew was Beowulf Shaffer, IF Bey made it to Home and raised him- seemed quite impressed by its capabilities...

Only gotten that far just yet...

No hurry. I'm cooking for extras tonight and I'm just getting started. Looking at unified timelines, this story probably happens in Louis' lifetime, but before he becomes a character. The history of smoking has no bearing on the rest of my story so much as to rationalize why the Bleep do people smoke so much in Niven's stories.

So just booster spice?

Gotta go-

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 16, 2016, 11:06:42 PM

Just leave the nanos out of the 'docs.

Hard to believe it took to Bey's era for someone to work out medical nanos in a 'doc, but given that, the Puppeteers sat on the vanished prototype (biding their time for a business opportunity?  Was General Products moving mass quantities of boosterspice?)  and nobody else tried or something.  (If Carlos made it to Home and settled - maybe he kept the Wu but not the Carlos, and Louis DID know him, but didn't know any super-doc recreated in the basement for family use for what it was and hadn't seen/used it in 200 years...)

The Handicapped was pre-some of the Bey stories, as Grogs were around and not a new marvel as of Grendel now that I think about it, but I wasn't making any assumptions about when other than it wasn't after Ringworld Engineers when Louis left Canyon and Human space for a couple decades...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 17, 2016, 04:09:27 AM

...In fact, there's a timeline problem about G²'s aged appearance - it seemed nobody had to look old in the Beowulf stories -Grendel again- what with boosterspice.  Need to account for that gaunt leatheriness, as Protector indicated that spice went back as far as the later half, and Lucas Garner just missed living forever by a few decades, poor fellow..

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 17, 2016, 05:47:00 AM

Right you are! There is a sessile grog in Grendel. I assume it's in space travel as a sentient, one time line has it as a zoo critter, before The Handicapped.  Regardless this still puts my story approximately in the Louis has been born but hasn't done anything era.

Uh searched another timeline. Well, I guess it's a matter of which facts you choose to overlook. Whether a # in the 2000s on a bottle or space ship model is a hard fact year to work with or not.

Beowulf Born 2600
Neutron Star 2641
Louis was born around 2650.
Relic 2644
At the Core 2645
Handicapped 2646 OR 2728
Soft Weapon 2656-57
Silver Eyes 2685

Well, I'm working with Handicapped as gospel since Garvey is my main character. Of course we could say he had a bad reaction to tannin pills or something.... an overdose maybe from being around the ocean working with dolphins...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 17, 2016, 06:13:33 AM

Could be boosterspice allergy, could be some rare resistance but not immunity to it's effects - Gsquared could have been too old to rejuvenate completely when he first got spice, though that would make him about 600 years old or something -or something like the tannin or something else- not that hard to handwave.

Like the new subforum that was your idea?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 17, 2016, 07:53:47 AM

Yes I do.

Well, I'll think about the leathery skin.

Good night, Buster's Uncle.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 17, 2016, 07:37:43 PM

I hate it when I inadvertently lose pots.

Booster Spice seems to be attributed to an extract of ragweed or tree of life.

Hand Wave Options-

1) Protector- got a dose with some Thallium or Thorium or whatever, and his skin began the transformation. Too much trouble/ too much of a tangent.

2) Allergy - to ragweed essence. But since he can afford the finest medical care, his autodoc found a balance between immune response (increasingly important on a crowding Earth ), booster spice, and drug side effects. It gives him vitality, even if it doesn't fully reverse the effects of aging and/ or smoking.

3) Resistance. It only works up to a point.

4) Tannin. He was a heavy user being in and around the ocean developing the dolphin hand business. That might explin the skin. But it would suggest that he would tend towards body fat in a Polynesian kind of way, and he's lean. Also, Wouldn't it be common among Belters, too? But apparently it isn't.


That leaves 2 and 3.
 2 being the most scifi explanation.

-------------------------------------------

I don't think the Jinx orbit scene flows well. How about this?


  The two Jinxians doubled over in laughter. Always trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. Back slapping one another led to holding...led to hugging...led to squeezing...

  "Uhh..." said the pilot as she let her blonde hair down, "Look at the time! I think we're finished here, aren't we Attila?"   

  "AGREED!" he said, and they left arm in arm.

  We shared a round of high fives and happy dances as soon as the airlock cycled. Didn't I tell you I'd be in safe hands? We landed on our own.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 17, 2016, 07:43:00 PM

I'm still behind.  Surprisingly busy morning on what feels like a weekend day, and I'm running on five hours.  I probably ought to go nap in fact...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 17, 2016, 11:14:25 PM

Don't sweat it. There's other stuff I could/should be doing- except my back is being a pain in the literal sense.

I can always get back to Kzin III.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 17, 2016, 11:19:58 PM

It's looking slow and the nap did me some good now that I've eaten.  I might get on it momentarily.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 18, 2016, 04:57:35 AM

Quote from: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 09:52:57 PM

the Thrintin, a species

Thrintun, isn't it?

Quote from: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 09:52:57 PM

my main accomplishment was discovering another handicapped sentient species, the Grogs,

Handicapped should be capitalized - the story made a point of it.

Passing out now.  More tomorrow.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 18, 2016, 09:51:26 PM

This is why a story needs a second set of eyes, because the writer doesn't exactly read what's on the page so much as remember as they look at it.  As an example- I thought I did capitalize Handicapped.

Thrintun Tnuctipun Viprin.  It's screwed up everywhere... We'll let this last posted version alone to show the evolution, and I'm correcting the working draft I have.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 18, 2016, 09:57:08 PM

Yeah; happy to proof for you.  Sure I'll find more, though you've done a very good job.  You REALLY get the universe and the style.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 19, 2016, 02:26:15 AM

Thanks. Known Space is an interesting place to dwell, and it's been fun talking with you about it. I met a writer on the net when I was still strictly a reader, circa 2001. She said the most important thing about writing fiction is to care about the characters, because it shows. The more I read, the more I think she was right.

So I picked some that I liked. For the benefit of future readers of this thread, I loved Bey's adventures, but he normally deals in hard science that's beyond my education. His life story is mostly told, and I only halfway think like him. Louis is much like his dad, and I haven't read all of his stuff. . But there seemed to be room in their lifetimes with Known Space stories about the relics and remnants of the Slaver Empire.


Here's a link to the predecessor of this thread, to give the curious a look at the process.
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17711.0 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17711.0)

I also noticed that Garvey refers to it as his dad's company in Handicapped, so I rewrote things to make his dad the CEO.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 19, 2016, 02:33:24 AM

Wasn't there a line about problems Big G couldn't handle being kicked up to G-Prime and rarely, something made it up to G Cubed?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 19, 2016, 04:00:37 AM

Yes.
When Garvey and Jilson  were sitting in the bar on Down, talking shop.

Another reason for the change I already made in my draft- Dad as Chief Executive Officer, and Gee-Prime ( that's the proper spelling ) As Secretary/ Treasurer  of the board of directors.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 19, 2016, 04:24:31 AM

Okydoke.

Sorry to let you down another day - I don't know where the time went, and didn't get the improved avatar for Uno done, either.  Beginning to pass out, though...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 19, 2016, 04:33:15 AM

No problem. I wondered how you read so fast the last time.

I still haven't advanced on reading Man-Kzinn story, and I'm making all of these mini changes, so I gave up on the word count, because what I'd already done has changed.

Besides, you'll do a better job with a good night's sleep or a nap.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 19, 2016, 05:08:26 AM

Yeah.

I read really fast and live here is how I do it...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 19, 2016, 07:18:50 PM

Quote from: Rusty Edge on May 19, 2016, 04:00:37 AM

When Garvey and Jilson  were sitting in the bar on Down, talking shop.

Bruno Cziller's, where they used to have flying booths.  -I'm drawing a blank on where/when else it was he placed Cziller's Bar, though I'm thinking also Known Space but improbably hundreds of years and a different planet away - family business?  Who is Bruno, anyway?  It smells of a real person, not even tuckerised, like when he used his biker friend in Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall under different made-up names.

(If there's a skinny black man who's scary smart and probably knows martial arts in any of his recent stuff I haven't read, that's Steven Barnes...)

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 19, 2016, 08:59:36 PM

1st page Google Larry, Jerry, Bruno hits include Mote in God's Eye & The Gripping Hand.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 20, 2016, 03:40:01 AM

The more I look at the Garvey opening, the more I think it's gotten ... too exposition-heavy; you could drop everything about prions completely and the liver thing being disgusting does not compute, as-is.  Maybe be thinking about trimming down on what's not essential to understanding the story for a reader with no Known Space knowledge, and look at what could be moved a little later in the tale?  I'm afraid the smoking passage began too long for the good of the story...

Typical of Niven is rather sparse prose - he tries to use up one idea to a story; not all the scenery in the world, and plot scoots along...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 20, 2016, 03:45:08 AM

"Anne-Marie was a willowy 'Crashlander'" -is that right?  I was thinking Wunderlander -almost as tall- or is that just what you had her in the previous draft?  The Soft Weapon definitely says, IIRC, right at the beginning while Jason puts his arm around her waist...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 20, 2016, 03:57:47 AM

Quote from: Rusty Edge on May 16, 2016, 10:09:05 PM

  The Papandreous told me about their adventure with a stasis box purchased from the Outsiders by the Piersen's Puppeteers. They were transporting it and a Puppeteer named Nessus when they were ambushed and captured in a secret Kzinti operation. A computerized spy's weapon found inside the box presumed the Kzinti had killed the rightful owner of the secret weapon, and self-destructed, killing all of the Kzinti. The Popandreous narrowly escaped because they were safely in a crash web at that moment. The Outsiders were aliens that migrated from the galactic core to it's rim and back, trading in information. The Puppateers  where named for their appearance, but it also described their nature- they were an advanced but cowardly race that acted behind the scenes. The Kzinti were an intelligent martial race that resembled bipedal tigers with ratlike tails.

You are caught red-handed expositing.  TMI.  There's very, very little nothing (I think) here I need to know for this story.  The Papandreous already had been established to have had a stasis box adventure in the previous paragraph, and that's all I needed to know - they're clever adventurers.  Niven wasn't all that much for spoiling one story in a later one any more than he had to for the later one to make sense.  Kill.  Kill the whole paragraph, unless I'm missing something...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 20, 2016, 04:09:32 AM

Quote

"How would you go to war against a race of alien telepathic mind readers with mind control, Jason?" I asked.

"I want to understand how the Tnuctipun did it. I want to know their mindset so that I can know why they made the Bandersnatchi the way they did. So please try to put yourself in their place for a moment."

Formatting - looks like Jason's answer, initially.  It's a good addition to the previous draft, fixing that they're not talking about fighting Grogs, but one/same paragraph.

-Suddenly, I'm parsing the writing, and that's a little harder to take than the fun kicking around ideas.  Note that no "you suck" is being said, even if it feels a little that way.  I have sensitive people in my life who can be very hard to help, so being careful in saying there's no You Suck...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 20, 2016, 04:33:55 AM

Quote from: BUncle on May 20, 2016, 03:45:08 AM

"Anne-Marie was a willowy 'Crashlander'" -is that right?  I was thinking Wunderlander -almost as tall- or is that just what you had her in the previous draft?

Frankly, I don't remember which planet she is from, I'll have to check that fact.  The two weren't very distinct in my mind when I began the project. My hunch is she's from Wunderland, but that suggestion could have come from "The Asteroid Queen"

It's good to get your impressions along the way. The expositions tie together eventually, but there is some redundancy, so there's room to drop some of it and still have it make sense.  I was working from the writers write theory. Get the idea in print, it's easier to delete later than remember later.  I'll stick with the assumption that I'll do a re-write accordingly, beginning with a copy and starting a second draft.

Now as to which themes make the best story, well, that's something to be decided. But if the opening drags and I lose the reader, what good does the rest of it do? .


Nah. Well, as to how criticism feels, a lot of it depends on the day I read it, as I'm sure you know personally. Today, no big deal.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 20, 2016, 04:37:39 AM

...I totally have the days when EVERYthing sounds like You Suck...

Bed now.  Sleep tight.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on May 20, 2016, 04:39:05 AM

Aha.
Well, I know what's happening here. My wife wanted to know why I was typing so much. I explained. She said she wanted to read it when it's finished.

So I wind up trying to explain Known space, writing for her and other uninformed rather than writing for the AC2 audience who is knowledgeable.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 20, 2016, 12:00:24 PM

No, that's doing it right -Niven's pretty good about not assuming the reader knows background- just, too info-dense with the exposition slows the flow of the plot and all that.  There's also the thing that Garvey is first-person, and he wouldn't explain stuff contemporary children probably know in telling his story, though you and Niven alike have to fudge that one a lot...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on June 15, 2016, 10:07:01 PM

It's that time of year again, I'm packing for the fishing trip, so this month is shot in terms of me advancing the story. It's not on my mind. So you can procrastinate about this. But, for me to finish the thing, I'll need somebody to read it and give me input about what the real core story is here, and then we can discus why I included what I did, and I can work out revised versions accordingly, for comparison.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on June 15, 2016, 11:16:34 PM

I suck.

That is, Roger that.  Catch some big ones and be sure to tell even bigger lies...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on June 16, 2016, 07:13:21 AM

Nah. You're working on all of these graphics, which will be really cool if the new game doesn't suck.

Short explanation- there will be bad connectivity at the lake this year. mostly phone.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on July 08, 2016, 10:41:41 PM

Interesting thought in re: making sense of Know Space: Earth's solar system is non-trivially variant from our own -Mercury and Pluto, not to mention Persephone in Protector- and I'm not sure if it's possible to reconcile The Coldest Place's tidally-locked Mercury with the one that seems to rotate properly in Madness Has its Place.  Less problematic, perhaps, is agreement between Wait it Out, though the Nerva rocket should have set Pluto afire, and World of Ptaavs - the protagonist of the former must have landed on the hemisphere away from Charon, if that Pluto has a Charon, and may have landed at a very different part of the Pluto year and missed the oxygen ice layer.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on February 23, 2018, 03:17:11 AM

Two things:

I finally found my copy of Neutron Star a few days ago, and have now re-read Relic Of Empire, The Soft Weapon and The Handicapped - no new insights, though.  Anne-Marie IS a Wunderlander, and in the middle of the story, Jason even says, worried that the Kzin in the room will overhear their whispered conversation, "I wish I spoke Wunderlander" She replies "I don't speak Wunderlander.  It's a dead language."

And irrelevant to this project, but there's a post-Crashlander Beowulf Shaffer story in one of the Man-Kzin War books that I haven't read called Fly-By-Night set during the flight to Home.  One can only hope that it includes at least a handwave to account for all the Louis never allowing anything about knowing either of his Dads, despite being confronted with related artifacts - Carlos is even constantly mentioned by name throughout Ringworld's Children.  (Did Louis just grow up strongly indoctrinated to keep his fugitive family's secrets?)  (Louis is also in the last {x} of Worlds book, which I also have yet to get my hands on.)

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on February 23, 2018, 05:08:42 AM

...The possessive of "it" is "its", not "it's".  You'll want to fix that in a few places.

Not absolutely sure, but I think both the beginning Garvey exposition and the whole sequence talking to the 'snatch would profit from ruthless trimming for pace.  Everything in the middle with the Papandreous is gold.  Big Gee et al bringing some electronics experts to Jinx could maybe be clearer it's for the hyperphones (how can those work inside a gravity well, anyway?  The Regional President of General Products Jinx had to spend over a month sitting outside the Sirius system for At the Core to make sense, as written) and they really should have been told to bring some experts in booze chemistry, too...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 19, 2018, 12:32:10 PM

Fun fact about kicking around ideas with an author:  you put my Sunflowers-as-terraforming-and eco-warfare tools in Rich Mann's mouth, got in, got out, no one got hurt.  That gives me some proprietary pride in an excellent story.  A ruthless trimming draft to make the exposition terse and the snatch less verbose would yield a narrative lean and deft and clever, in an excellent Niven voice.  PROFESSIONAL quality.

-In fact, come up with a rationale/role and a character to rewrite to put a kzin prominent into Garvey's team, and you've got yourself a Man-Kzin Wars story I think they'd pay you to include in the series (not all that many of the stories honor the war part) and you'd find our ideas about Tnuctipun bio-artifacts turning up in other people's stories in the future.  You could sell it, I'm pretty sure.  It's that good.

In fact, I'm going to edit the OP to put in a copyright notice for you - though this folder doesn't legally count as public publication, I think, having so very few able to see.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 25, 2018, 12:19:19 PM

Bumped for Geo.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2018, 08:07:16 PM

Syn -and anyone else looking- do yourself, me and Rusty a favor, and start here:
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17817.msg93719#msg93719 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17817.msg93719#msg93719)
and read the latest draft of Rusty's story, then comment. It's most of the page with only one interruption from me, before the Epilogue.

He wants your input even if you dislike Larry Niven's work, of which this is a fanfic.  He wants it to be good, full stop, wants reaction.  Peacemill reading commenting is great as only he and I are known to have read.  If you don't finish on the first try, discuss what you did read.  That's still a big plus, even if you never finish.



If you DO like the Niven's Known Space oeuvre, then do follow-up reading the whole thread and start quoting and commenting as the whim strikes.  I think it's golden conversation for, especially, the Slaver corner of Known Space.  I wanna conversate more.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Syn on March 28, 2018, 08:13:56 PM

I have no idea who Larry Niven is, but I'll read this thread after I finish work today.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2018, 09:46:54 PM

;b;

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2018, 09:58:05 PM

Hey, bring in the Kzin, because the Tnuctipun were nasty and aggressive, as a war expert/thinker, since a non-veteran Earth human would be bad at it, and Garvey may not have known that about Jason, and/or wanted more thought and diversity of perspective, a very Niven way of thinking. 

Small low-caste one desperate for work, OOH! a telepath (obvious where that would come in, and maybe a security precaution, too, like a Garvey Grog precaution already on company staff since Down, a mind-bodyguard for when he goes to fetch Jill and all) and avoid all the obvious Speaker-to-Animals slashing Louis when woken-type action, for minimal impact on the shape of the story.  -Also, write as few new lines for him as you can - give him Jason's thoughts on fighting telepathic overlords, again to minimize change and also a telepath would be more qualified to speculate.  He doesn't have to take over the story; he mustn't, as it's already fine as-is.

And that right there, it'll be good, and get you MONEY and Man-Kzin Wars publication.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Geo on March 28, 2018, 10:16:03 PM

Quote from: BUncle on March 25, 2018, 12:19:19 PM

Bumped for Geo.

Cheers! :danc:

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Syn on March 28, 2018, 10:25:44 PM

I read it. Necessary disclaimer that I'm not familiar with Larry Nivens and thus cannot opine on whether or not it's faithful to his style.

As a reader, I didn't like it. This is, however, because of my own personal -- and very, very picky -- tastes. I'm not a fan of light-hearted/comedy-esque stories. I've never read one that I enjoyed so that automatically puts the story here at an extreme disadvantage.

So with that in mind I won't comment on the storyline. Since I have a bias against the way it's being told, my opinion about it is pretty much null and void. Nothing you can do about that and I'm not going to waste anyone's time by poo-pooing on the story.

Instead I'll comment on the writing itself. There's a balance to be found between dialogue and exposition. For storytelling, a little more dialogue than exposition is usually best. Short, to the point, and usually keeps the reader's attention. I think this was partially imbalanced in the story. The beginning and end had a great deal of exposition while the middle had close to none. Dialogue is good, it's the easiest way to develop characters, but the absence of exposition means someone with a layman's understanding of the universe won't become any more familiar with it. They might come to care about the characters but the world these characters live in will continue to be an abstract concept. My recommendation would be to include a little more exposition. Help build the universe while you're developing the characters so the reader will care about everything and not just certain parts.

My other point is that you're victim of a really common blunder in writing. I was a victim of it all the time years ago and I still slip up today quite a bit. It's a really tough habit to break. I struggle with it a lot. This blunder is inserting commas when separating thoughts and subjects in sentences. You write a sentence and you don't notice doing it. Your fingers put in the comma because your mind switched gears midway through the sentence and you instinctively portray this as a pause and change in thought.

This is mostly fine when you're addressing a completely different idea despite being a part of the same sentence or trying to insert a deliberate pause. However, you're doing it a lot when you say one thing and then go 'and'. You're also doing it when you're contradicting/changing the first part of the sentence. In most instances, you can safely remove the comma before an 'and' or 'but' and you won't hurt readability. Sometimes you may even improve readability by reducing comma use.

Examples of what I'm talking about:

Quote

They could summon their prey telepathically, and summon scavengers to groom them.

Quote

Hover chairs weren't actually chairs, but they served the same purpose.

Quote

I know they also served as spies, but Tnuctipun sized brains should've been more than adequate for a spy. So what's the purpose?

Quote

"What do you make of this?" I said, showing them the open stasis box given to me by G-Squared, and placing it on the table in the main cabin.

By themselves it isn't a big deal. But if you keep in mind that most people who read your work also use their inner-voice to 'narrate' what they're reading, you'll realize that these commas are putting pauses in a great deal of your sentences. This downplays the importance of a pause in tense moments and it'll also prevent them from falling into a rhythm while reading. Commas are powerful, but too many commas can make your story go from smooth to choppy. With 'ands' and 'buts', you need to consider if it's worth adding an accompanying pause.

If you are someone who adds a lot of commas in their work I usually recommend cutting out 10-15% of them. There's no point in changing your entire style. A lot of the time, the pauses contribute to your writing cadence. Hitting the point of 'too many' is easy to do, though, so if you really like commas you're better off going through afterwards and plucking some out where applicable just to make things read a little better.

That's it. Everything else is fine from a mechanic perspective, as far as I can tell.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2018, 10:38:01 PM

For a somewhat-contradiction, google the Oxford Comma; I'm another literate who decided same independently, and use it in posts often.  Sometimes the English style in taught in school is foolish, like when/where punctuation goes at the end of a quote...

However, no disputing the observation about flow...

You might consider part of the trimming narrative exposition at the beginning that I advised be done by breaking it up real fine and short and moving/dispersing stuff into the dialogue-heavy middle where Syn suggested more expo, as you need it.

The Niven-savy will not make the complaint, after all, and they're your only audience.

The snatch part at the end still goes on too long, and the brains-eating piles it too high and needs toning down and fixing to work.

---

Gentlemen, Rusty's family medical distraction is alleged to be easing, and this is an excellent present for when he has time to look.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Syn on March 28, 2018, 10:55:20 PM

The Oxford Comma is different and I'm a big proponent of its use. :D Anything different is barbarism.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Geo on March 28, 2018, 11:01:41 PM

As far as I remember Niven's way of writing, the light-hearted flow of the story is similar.
Some technic remarks after a quick read through:

Bunnies on Silvereyes? Not in the Thrintun era I hope...

And why couldn't Schultz-mann go for himself interviewing a Bandersnatchi? With gravity belts or a dedicated vehicle with its own gravity plates -and atmospheric/climate settings he could have gone himself in sufficient comfort.

There's probably more, but reading those parts, something cried "foul" in my mind.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2018, 11:07:38 PM

[ninja'd] BARBARISM, I tell you!  Barbarism, and I'm right about that.

---

Geo, you'll see later I said "something like nocturnal goats", and Rusty did some research or just knew rabbit-habbits and used them.  NOT in Slaver times, though any natural biosphere ought to have nocturnal herbivores and the Tncutipun must have had a reliable way of repelling them until they needed the sunflowers gone.

Richard was churchmouse-poor -a Nivenism- or I'm sure, despite what he said comfort and all, he'd have gone, the trip, the equipment, the treaty w/ the 'snatches about human access to the lowlands, all costing serious ducats he never had after losing his ship and grant...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Rusty Edge on March 29, 2018, 03:47:58 AM

Well, I wrote the story to help the new section of the site get going. Then I forgot about it.
I do appreciate the serious consideration and advice everyone has given this.

 I forgot about bunnies and sunflowers. You should probablly know that I raised sunflowers as a farmer. So what seems as obvious to me as gravity, may not fit science fiction.


If the story is worthy of serious effort, I'll have to re-read some Niven to get back into his voice first..

Speaking of serious, I've got RL compications today. The root of it is a good sign, but it means changing and coordinating plans, just when things seemed to be arranged and settled.
I suppose that's pretty much par for the course with brain damage, Buncle?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 29, 2018, 04:04:31 AM

My experience of it -my own I was six and who can say for sure?- is that my loved one is the same, same person, only one of the manifestations is exacerbated her worst previous habit of aggressive arguing/fighting daring me to beat her up -not literally, but very close- and probably more often.  She is mostly just herself, much as she seemed before, but complains more.  That is really the main thing as it looks from outside, though it drove her to early retirement from a job she had LOOOOVVED.

In mild traumatic brain injury, our therapist said subtle coordination errors in the cerebrum, the thinking brain, cause failure of varied sections to cohere/work together as smoothly as before, and one of the first things to go is basic self-control stuff riding herd on the lizard hindbrain sending out emotions, especially fight-or-flight impulses.  In the case of which I speak, there are also some seizures, headaches sensitive to low barometric pressure until the storm breaks, and sensitivity to flashing/florescent light and lastly, overstimulation/avoidance for noisy crowds, like I've always been.  Also some quick spells of pretty crazy paranoia, (tending to be accompanied by mildly slurred speech, very subtle and you wouldn't hear it if you didn't know her well). 

(I've always been more evenly paranoid, but I believe my tendencies were taught, not innate, as I only got that way after my life became a hell of abuse in adolescence.)

If someone has TBI, you can expect the manifestations to shift and change over long periods.  My brain maps, showed VERY old, diffuse, damage, 40 years old when I was quite young, and my brain had pretty much re-routed around the bad spot, right on my crown.

Is this sorta what you're asking?  Helpful?  More?  Questions?

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 03, 2023, 08:16:08 PM

Testing something post.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 03, 2023, 10:01:13 PM

I hope Rusty will forgive me the presumption of moving this out into public w/o prior permission, but it's just too good to leave in a semi-private forum, mostly unseen.


Folks, this has languished for years in the Writers' Workshop subforum that you can see if you join the Writers usergroup.  It is, right there on the label, a -very successful- workshopping thread.  It is my very fond hope that Rusty will take a final pass at the text, and post the story in a locked Story thread, crosslinking this thread in the OPs for reader comments.   -I'll also be sullenly annoyed with him if he doesn't add the Kzin telepath I suggested and try to sell this to the Man-Kzin Wars book series.


It's THAT good.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 04, 2023, 04:28:17 PM

...The more I look at this thread, the more I think a good third of the story should be excised, maybe half - on the grounds of using up so many story ideas in one go.  Like, IF you could be talked in into writing more stories, Rusty?  Everything on the general area of Slaver era bio-artifacts and such that doesn't directly advance the Bandersnatch story ought to be, if kept in at all, at most made extremely terse and low detail so Garvey and the Papandreous can go follow up on leads from Harvey and Slick in new stories unspoiled and kept fairly short... 

Garvey is insanely rich and can do it for just the lulz -and take Jill along (honeymoon trip?) and you can develop her- though Gee-squared would/will tell him new knowledge has a way of paying off in spades.

The air plant/sunflower/stage tree asteroid habitats would be a gimme; you just have to have a plot idea for Exploring The Thing, write it up, and there's your story.  Keep the Kzin telepath I suggested in the mix, and once you've sold one story, you ought to be able to sell them the rest.


You're REALLY good, and there's money in it for you.  -Also, I want to read your new stories.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Rusty Edge on March 10, 2023, 03:26:54 AM

The original idea was to sort of tie off all of these loose ends in that aspect of Known Space, but I suppose I could break it down and do more stories once I'm re-immersed in the headspace. As you suggest, Niven didn't throw too many ideas into a single story.

For starters I want to rewrite that smoking portion into a single explanation. Then I'll see about all of the commas, but before I do that I'll probably re-read the relevant Niven to get a grip on his writing style again. Not averse to a Kzin, but maybe our pilots are. I think I can unravel some of the Thrintin faillsafe plans I proposed for use in another story.

 Oh, I'm thinking the magic elixir doesn't actually have a scent or a taste as such. Instead it is a powerful stimulant of favorite long term memories while it wipes the short term ones. So everybody smells and tastes something different. Well, that's a mystery that a telepath could sort out.

The bunnies will be replaced with another subsurface peril so that the sunflowers are still defenseless- worms or root rot.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Rusty Edge on March 10, 2023, 11:01:39 PM

Quote from: Rusty Edge on April 19, 2016, 10:37:54 PM

This is a work of Larry Niven Fan Fiction in progress, set in his Known Space universe.

Comments welcome
[Story drafts copyright 2016-present "Rusty Edge"]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
"Truth be told, I'd rather smoke than drink," continued G-squared.

"Go ahead," I said, following his lead and changing the subject. I was both alert and relaxed, feeling the effects of the fine Irish Coffee. "How has this dangerous smoking habit endured in humanity for over a thousand years, if you don't mind my asking? It doesn't make sense that it would."

"I suppose not," he said, as he took out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, and touched the other end against his ring. There were some blue high voltage sparks, then the cigarette smoldered, and the tip glowed orange as he inhaled. "Actually it faded away in a couple generations."

"What?" I said, "I don't understand."

He blew a few smoke rings. "The reason smoking survived the intervening centuries," He took the cigarette out of his mouth and pointed it at me for emphasis, "was those kidnapping organ legger gangs! They terrorized the Earth. To them, a person was either a potential product or a potential black market customer, and smokers make way better customers than marketable product. The best way to advertise yourself as unfit for death and dissection was to chain smoke. Smoking made an overnight comeback. Statistically, smoking made you less likely to die young!"

I went slack jawed. "Damned if you do, and damned if you don't!"

"Eventually they bio-engineered the symbiotic organs which would replace hearts, lungs, and livers, etc. duplicating the function in exchange for what they could get from the blood supply. It put an end to the organ legger menace, but it also meant that the downsides of smoking were curable surgically. So there was no reason to quit smoking if you don't want to."

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 10, 2023, 11:55:28 PM

I hate to see the belters left out of that, but story length concerns and all...

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Rusty Edge on March 11, 2023, 05:09:55 AM

Quote from: Rusty Edge on March 10, 2023, 11:01:39 PM

Quote from: Rusty Edge on April 19, 2016, 10:37:54 PM

This is a work of Larry Niven Fan Fiction in progress, set in his Known Space universe.

Comments welcome
[Story drafts copyright 2016-present "Rusty Edge"]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
"Truth be told, I'd rather smoke than drink," continued G-squared.

"Go ahead," I said, following his lead and changing the subject. I was both alert and relaxed, feeling the effects of the fine Irish Coffee. "How has this dangerous smoking habit endured in humanity for over a thousand years, if you don't mind my asking? It doesn't make sense that it would."

"I suppose not," he said, as he took out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, and touched the other end against his ring. There were some blue high voltage sparks, then the cigarette smoldered, and the tip glowed orange as he inhaled. "Actually, it perished from the Earth in a couple generations."

"What?" I said, "I don't understand."

He blew a few smoke rings. "The reason smoking survived the intervening centuries," He took the cigarette out of his mouth and pointed it at me for emphasis, "was those kidnapping organ legger gangs! They terrorized the Earth. To them, a person was either a potential product or a potential black-market repeat customer, and smokers make way better customers than marketable product. The best way to advertise yourself as unfit for death by dissection was to chain smoke. Smoking made an overnight comeback with help from Belter smugglers. Statistically, smoking made you less likely to die young!"

I went slack jawed. "Damned if you do, and damned if you don't!"

"Eventually they bio-engineered the symbiotic organs which would replace hearts, lungs, and livers, etc. duplicating the function in exchange for what the symbionts could get from the blood supply. It put an end to the organ legger menace, but it also meant that the downsides of smoking were curable surgically. So, there was no reason to quit smoking if you didn't want to."

I changed it so that - 1) Smoking perished from the Earth (where it originated) rather than from all of Known Space 2) The Belters supplied the tobacco, leaving the door open for the explanation in a future story. 3) changed "death and dissection" to "death by dissection" which reads scarier 4) fixed a tense incongruency and clarified a pronoun.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Geo on March 18, 2023, 07:05:05 PM

A problem with this is why would the ever-stoic, efficient Belters waste precious space to cultivate enough tobacco to serve the needs of billions of Flatlanders. At least, I reckon a couple billion Flatlanders would keep the habit if the opportunity was there.

Title: Re: The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)
Post by: Rusty Edge on March 29, 2023, 05:07:17 AM

Quote from: Geo on March 18, 2023, 07:05:05 PM

A problem with this is why would the ever-stoic, efficient Belters waste precious space to cultivate enough tobacco to serve the needs of billions of Flatlanders. At least, I reckon a couple billion Flatlanders would keep the habit if the opportunity was there.

I take your point. Would substituting the Moon colony solve the problem?