Waiting in the dark
Nov. 22nd, 2012 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI dreamed I was a weekend warrior on FTL ships. It was kind of like being a reservist now, but sending you on training missions involved relativistic effects. The main difference between that and full time armed service is that you and your friends were at least initially planning on coming back down. After the first few times you skipped a year just to get to somewhere that needed extra hands you either quit or developed a unique relationship to local time. You skim the years, your continuous relationships all to others who work with you, while time skips out from under you whenever you go to work. Planet side people are rapidly foreign, yet people who choose to live that way seem to prefer it.
I was autistic spectrum. People are always foreign. I could cope with the time skips the same usual way I cope with everything. Not rapidly enough for combat, but with plenty of useful skills for the rest of the time.
Planets like the part time sorts, they think it keeps their warriors still attached to them. Full time Fleet sometimes becomes the ghost in the dark, the nightmare of all travellers. They go out, and they never quite come back home, in just too many senses. But they also skip through the dark so fast and far they just outlive any attempts to control them. Anyone that goes up and decides it's too tedious trying to reintegrate all the time can just stay out, and become something the planets aren't fans of.
So I'd been trying on a planet for a while, but their day to day lives just seemed too ridiculous to me, their concerns shallow and uninformed. Time to go up again.
Fleet always let me, when I applied for that. But Fleet didn't quite know what to do with the few of us who would set down planet time generations later and start the whole cycle up again half way across the universe. There weren't more than a handful, and I only knew of others by repute.
I'd been doing this a long, long time. Maybe longer than anyone. I'd been on the second ship to ever leave Earth for the deep, the second landing party on the second planet humans ever claimed from the universe.
Nobody much remembers who goes second. It kind of bugged me.
If I don't fit in on a planet, and I try and live one day per day, there aren't that many options. Become someone new who fits; hope the planet magically changes. But they don't have time to change that much. With FTL available I can just skip out and hope they rebuild more suitable while I'm out there. And the Fleet is always familiar. Too many times represented, too old, to risk innovating and consequent fractures. Fleet Classic is the English of my youth, and the Latin of the modern age, used for scholarship and to link too many other tongues together. I can settle back into it without wearing a translator all the time. The routines are familiar, the jobs all need doing in tangible, understandable ways. Of course after a while that's exactly what drops me out again. My first degree was in English with Cultural Studies; Fleet has a culture, but it's kind of sparse, and not much for novels or television series. Science museums are more likely than art galleries, live music more a thing than big budget movies. Everyone just has better things to do. So when things get too thin, I drop back planet side, and when that gets too much, I go up again.
I am old, old, old now, and not just in planet time. FTL travel skips through spaces most humans have to sleep through, but autistic people never did. It's no more or less confusing than the day to day, and those of us who cope pretty well with that can just stay awake through the long gaps. Time doesn't work quite the same way there, your senses open up in weird ways most humans can't quite parse, and you get a sense like a tugging web that links you to every other person out there, every other mind. Navigators use that, now, to go point to point on the human web, where they'd had to start out jumping blind. Navigators have a lot of tech that can't keep up but can keep them grounded, and they have a lot of people watching out to see if they slip. Most of the crew don't think of them as precisely human, or at least not while they're working. Too wide spread out. But they Nightwalk the whole ship through the Dark.
When regular humans try Nightwalking they have a tendency to switch their minds to the Dark and stay out there. It don't translate when they come back down. All the horror stories have a slippery ghost in them, a Nightwalker who never wakes up, who wants to pull their friends down with them... or silence their enemies for good. Nothing grates quite so much like a million minds you never did agree with. So some of them just switch it all off. The most scarily functional are cold, cold, deep space cold, disconnected from that web just to keep themselves from tearing apart. They make great night watchmen... if you can trust them long enough. But most people, most of the time, they tank the tranquilisers and stay asleep. Just looking into the Dark can tear all their senses loose, and mostly nobody wants to risk it.
But if you're autistic, it's just pretty much like usual, only with more singing. Whatever bad behaviour we'd have had, we already grew up with. There's too much and not enough, we're overwhelmed and disconnected, and it's always been that way so we're already getting on with it. Autistic people are always Nightwalkers, though never Navigators. So there's a lot of us out there, in the far off future where there's otherwise ways and reasons to 'cure' us. The brain differences are just too useful in the Dark.
And time doesn't move in the Dark the same way for sleepers and the wide awake. Sleepers get a little more hungry than they would overnight, sleep a little weirder, have other people's dreams. But the awake live at speeds a whole lot more like the planet siders, connected to their time stream and somehow keeping up. The ship and the tech has relativity happen to it, computers becoming next to useless, but the Nightwalkers just live like a weird long day. They don't need to eat much more than the sleepers, don't age worse, but they're living years to their minutes.
Some of the ways that can go horribly wrong happen just because there's only one Nightwalker on a ship. Isolation messes mundanes up. Autistic people can live with it pretty good though. And the data scarcity caused by the computer slowdown, that feels like sensory deprivation to those that grew up cyborgs, not implanted by so intertwined with the net the data flow is as essential as seeing. They need more and new and better, all the time. Autistic people can often be content with their few favourite things, and a nice routine, and everything the same way every day. So ships have a few paper books, old tech solids that keep working in the Dark for reasons best known to mystics instead of physicists. Maybe they'd use microfilm, that'd work too. But solid data stores, not the nice fast stuff humanity is used to. So imagine if every time you travelled FTL you had years and years and years to just sit in the Dark and read.
Those few of us who think it paradise are rather outweighed by other sorts of reaction. Nightwalkers do too many things simply because they're bored. The not-eating and not-sleeping bothers them too, since their bodies do not need it but all their waking knowledge says that would kill them in the end. Some of them get in terrible messes stuffing themselves with food their body isn't going to process. Some of them react like they're sleep deprived, like their dreams come up around them. There are many, many ways to get broken in the Dark.
If you just kind of like it there, like the time to study up and write another Doctorate or something, there will always be reactions from the mundanes like you just declared you're made of glass and swallowed a grenade. They're waiting for it to go wrong. But they can't just tranq you and strap you down. The tranq wears off, the Nightwalkers wake up, and then they're stuck staring at the same patch of ceiling for subjective years. It took an awful while to realise that, when the mundanes were trying to deal with the Dark. All the things that keep them calm and coming out the jump the same people they went in? They'll break a born Nightwalker. Fast.
The earliest ships actually turned out best for those of us just born that way. Nobody knew enough yet to be afraid. We got to set our own routines. We knew from the short jumpers, insystem types, that the Dark could be a waking place, so we tested before we took the long way Out, and thought we were prepared. They figured then the benefits of waking would be spectacular. We'd all live so much longer that way. But it did not quite work out.
Early on the objections were about how few of us could fit in the ships. They meant to send out colonies, not make a select few immortals. People who decided they just liked it in the Dark were people who the colony had to do without, when they'd planned it so careful, down to multi generational genetics. And such people needed ships, and there was only one system building those, back then. It didn't seem fair, to the planet born, to send so few to skip so lightly through the years. And once someone realised it only worked because so few were out there, because the weight of planet minds could pull the rest along... necessarily exclusionary ways to live forever were a war waiting to happen.
But other wars caught up with them first.
The part I actually dreamed, it was just a brief scene, and most of that above I could have written down as 'like CJ Cherryh's space ships, plus empathic navigation', which was all I needed to know to get it.
I dreamed I woke up in the Dark, and I could hear such singing. Other minds sing, always, but most minds don't sing choral. Humans do not have the way to hear, to stay in tune, to even know if they think the same thoughts. Not awake. But up in the Dark... there were ships, early on, where everybody stayed awake. Where they all stepped into the Dark together, one smoothly functioning unit, heading out on a years long blind jump with Away as their main empathic guiding star. They stepped away from the rest of humanity in ever so many ways. Some ships like that, they fell apart, and out in the Dark you mostly hear the screaming. But some just kept getting closer, closer, closer together, until one day the singing turns to harmony, and one day a while after there is only one Song.
Ships that do that? They can't go back to Silence. They do if they have to, skimming through it for supplies, but they'll do that very seldom. It's like surfacing in the Arctic to them. Naked. They dive back in fast as they can.
And if it's a nice Song, no worries, they're just being human in a whole new way, somewhere out there.
But for some ships... the whole Dark hears the ghost stories. Hears whispers about sirens, and a different kind of silence, one of ships that find the hard way how the Singers resupply out in the Dark.
And some of them are worse than wreckers, worse than pirates, worse even than slavers who forget that other songs are people too. Some of them found the song that sticks in your head, and sings itself.
Our ship got pulled down, but not out of the Dark. Somewhere Between, somewhere the tech said shouldn't even exist. The navigator was just puzzled, maybe creeped out by the new neighbour, but I remembered. I recognised the song. Sat out there was a ship, a bigger ship than they built these days, gone Singing in the dark in awful chorus, harmonics reaching notes your human brain heard like sour angles or bright curves. It spun a web of its own, not anchored out to waking humanity, a mind space that had severed so many ties it made a new way to be sentient. You couldn't call it humanity. It wouldn't want you to. And hearing that, most minds had one of two ways to be - torn apart between the two webs, or jumping over, becoming one of them. It was infectious song, and that ship was a relic of the Plague Wars.
The Navigator didn't want to hear that. Didn't believe it. Everybody knew the Plague was wiped out, centuries ago. But what are centuries in the Dark? So this ship, somehow, seperated out and self contained, found a pocket of Between with weird maths, with contours that made sense to them, harmonics with their song. Humans couldn't go their, couldn't conceptualise the place. But by the rags and tatters of who this Song used to be, they could connect just long enough to be lured in. And then the Plague would have us, the group mind too strong, too many tumbled in upon themselves, outweighing any one ship made these days. Ships were redesigned to minimise that hazard. It didn't make them safer, upon meeting it.
Held in the Dark, the tranqs would all wear off, regular Sleepers waking up to hear. And then the change would start. They wouldn't all survive it, would fight it off inside and out. That was the Plague, jumping ship to ship in the Dark, leaving no survivors that could still be counted human.
The only ones immune to it were auties. Again. Most humans, when presented with a set of unequal lines, and surrounded by people who swear that one of them is longest, will eventually start to agree. Physical reality and what rulers say do not have much to do with this. Most humans are social animals, and evolution said survival required the other humans more than it required mere facts. But auties don't have quite the same bugs. We have our own, granted, but autistic spectrum disorders are not so much about following the crowd and fitting in. Primarily because we won't notice the crowd is all going one way, and couldn't fit in with it if we wanted to. Our brains won't take someone else's Song, not even other autistic people. We each have our own, and it does its own thing. So even while the vast majority of Sleepers look at us sideways, waiting for the cracks, there is one and only one way we are diamonds: we'll never join a Song, even a Plague. And that gives a ship carrying us a chance they couldn't get elsewise. Navigators listen hard, they're most likely to fall in with bad Singers. Autistic people kind of think the Songs are made of clashing creaky parts anyway. No harmony for us. We keep our choices.
Mundanes can fight it off though. It'll tear at them, but the stronger they're connected to the many minds, to humanity out on our shared web, the longer they stay hooked up to that whole. And that's why Fleet put up with weekend warriors, with armed bastards in our Dark who don't even want to be there. If Home is out there somewhere, if there are beloveds, sitting patiently on planets thinking of you, then there's anchors. There are places that's an actual paying role, someone to anchor Dark to home, to watch their far off warriors and just get to care about them, and maybe be their beacon or their personal guide star. Fleet? Left all that. Fleet are inward turning, and ship focused. The only out connections that they have are other ships, so the Fleet learned long since that you need to keep crew moving, split up friendships on purpose to make sure other ships stay real. But there's still that long term pulling, turning inwards, minds to one task, choosing the Dark. It's always Fleet turns Singer. And it was Fleet that turned to Plague.
That's why it didn't matter if we had eradicated the last Plague war. Plague was in us, like the singing, like the Dark. This old relic was too big to be a new source, but you always had to worry.
That's why I kept going back Down. There's too many sorts of real. Get locked in to just the one strand, forget some parts of being human.
So all that makes an excellent setup for a space horror story, or just exploring civilisations where travel between stars really seriously depends on people caring about each other. Cold physics can get you out, but empathic navigation gets you home.
I'd need a bunch of characters and a specific plot though. And an autistic spectrum point of view character, which would make it difficult to introduce said other characters, since they'd all be pretty baffling to her.
In the dream I had to share a dorm with a hyper religious person and someone who accused all the others of being stoned or drunk. They'd put all the, er, interesting people in together. What would a space ship do with their crazies, if they knew they pulled them out off course? But what would be good to do, if a major danger was all thinking the same so long they stop being able to do anything else? Too many crazies scatter the ship focus, maybe get them lost out in the Dark. But there would be such a thing as too few.
Possibilities.
I was autistic spectrum. People are always foreign. I could cope with the time skips the same usual way I cope with everything. Not rapidly enough for combat, but with plenty of useful skills for the rest of the time.
Planets like the part time sorts, they think it keeps their warriors still attached to them. Full time Fleet sometimes becomes the ghost in the dark, the nightmare of all travellers. They go out, and they never quite come back home, in just too many senses. But they also skip through the dark so fast and far they just outlive any attempts to control them. Anyone that goes up and decides it's too tedious trying to reintegrate all the time can just stay out, and become something the planets aren't fans of.
So I'd been trying on a planet for a while, but their day to day lives just seemed too ridiculous to me, their concerns shallow and uninformed. Time to go up again.
Fleet always let me, when I applied for that. But Fleet didn't quite know what to do with the few of us who would set down planet time generations later and start the whole cycle up again half way across the universe. There weren't more than a handful, and I only knew of others by repute.
I'd been doing this a long, long time. Maybe longer than anyone. I'd been on the second ship to ever leave Earth for the deep, the second landing party on the second planet humans ever claimed from the universe.
Nobody much remembers who goes second. It kind of bugged me.
If I don't fit in on a planet, and I try and live one day per day, there aren't that many options. Become someone new who fits; hope the planet magically changes. But they don't have time to change that much. With FTL available I can just skip out and hope they rebuild more suitable while I'm out there. And the Fleet is always familiar. Too many times represented, too old, to risk innovating and consequent fractures. Fleet Classic is the English of my youth, and the Latin of the modern age, used for scholarship and to link too many other tongues together. I can settle back into it without wearing a translator all the time. The routines are familiar, the jobs all need doing in tangible, understandable ways. Of course after a while that's exactly what drops me out again. My first degree was in English with Cultural Studies; Fleet has a culture, but it's kind of sparse, and not much for novels or television series. Science museums are more likely than art galleries, live music more a thing than big budget movies. Everyone just has better things to do. So when things get too thin, I drop back planet side, and when that gets too much, I go up again.
I am old, old, old now, and not just in planet time. FTL travel skips through spaces most humans have to sleep through, but autistic people never did. It's no more or less confusing than the day to day, and those of us who cope pretty well with that can just stay awake through the long gaps. Time doesn't work quite the same way there, your senses open up in weird ways most humans can't quite parse, and you get a sense like a tugging web that links you to every other person out there, every other mind. Navigators use that, now, to go point to point on the human web, where they'd had to start out jumping blind. Navigators have a lot of tech that can't keep up but can keep them grounded, and they have a lot of people watching out to see if they slip. Most of the crew don't think of them as precisely human, or at least not while they're working. Too wide spread out. But they Nightwalk the whole ship through the Dark.
When regular humans try Nightwalking they have a tendency to switch their minds to the Dark and stay out there. It don't translate when they come back down. All the horror stories have a slippery ghost in them, a Nightwalker who never wakes up, who wants to pull their friends down with them... or silence their enemies for good. Nothing grates quite so much like a million minds you never did agree with. So some of them just switch it all off. The most scarily functional are cold, cold, deep space cold, disconnected from that web just to keep themselves from tearing apart. They make great night watchmen... if you can trust them long enough. But most people, most of the time, they tank the tranquilisers and stay asleep. Just looking into the Dark can tear all their senses loose, and mostly nobody wants to risk it.
But if you're autistic, it's just pretty much like usual, only with more singing. Whatever bad behaviour we'd have had, we already grew up with. There's too much and not enough, we're overwhelmed and disconnected, and it's always been that way so we're already getting on with it. Autistic people are always Nightwalkers, though never Navigators. So there's a lot of us out there, in the far off future where there's otherwise ways and reasons to 'cure' us. The brain differences are just too useful in the Dark.
And time doesn't move in the Dark the same way for sleepers and the wide awake. Sleepers get a little more hungry than they would overnight, sleep a little weirder, have other people's dreams. But the awake live at speeds a whole lot more like the planet siders, connected to their time stream and somehow keeping up. The ship and the tech has relativity happen to it, computers becoming next to useless, but the Nightwalkers just live like a weird long day. They don't need to eat much more than the sleepers, don't age worse, but they're living years to their minutes.
Some of the ways that can go horribly wrong happen just because there's only one Nightwalker on a ship. Isolation messes mundanes up. Autistic people can live with it pretty good though. And the data scarcity caused by the computer slowdown, that feels like sensory deprivation to those that grew up cyborgs, not implanted by so intertwined with the net the data flow is as essential as seeing. They need more and new and better, all the time. Autistic people can often be content with their few favourite things, and a nice routine, and everything the same way every day. So ships have a few paper books, old tech solids that keep working in the Dark for reasons best known to mystics instead of physicists. Maybe they'd use microfilm, that'd work too. But solid data stores, not the nice fast stuff humanity is used to. So imagine if every time you travelled FTL you had years and years and years to just sit in the Dark and read.
Those few of us who think it paradise are rather outweighed by other sorts of reaction. Nightwalkers do too many things simply because they're bored. The not-eating and not-sleeping bothers them too, since their bodies do not need it but all their waking knowledge says that would kill them in the end. Some of them get in terrible messes stuffing themselves with food their body isn't going to process. Some of them react like they're sleep deprived, like their dreams come up around them. There are many, many ways to get broken in the Dark.
If you just kind of like it there, like the time to study up and write another Doctorate or something, there will always be reactions from the mundanes like you just declared you're made of glass and swallowed a grenade. They're waiting for it to go wrong. But they can't just tranq you and strap you down. The tranq wears off, the Nightwalkers wake up, and then they're stuck staring at the same patch of ceiling for subjective years. It took an awful while to realise that, when the mundanes were trying to deal with the Dark. All the things that keep them calm and coming out the jump the same people they went in? They'll break a born Nightwalker. Fast.
The earliest ships actually turned out best for those of us just born that way. Nobody knew enough yet to be afraid. We got to set our own routines. We knew from the short jumpers, insystem types, that the Dark could be a waking place, so we tested before we took the long way Out, and thought we were prepared. They figured then the benefits of waking would be spectacular. We'd all live so much longer that way. But it did not quite work out.
Early on the objections were about how few of us could fit in the ships. They meant to send out colonies, not make a select few immortals. People who decided they just liked it in the Dark were people who the colony had to do without, when they'd planned it so careful, down to multi generational genetics. And such people needed ships, and there was only one system building those, back then. It didn't seem fair, to the planet born, to send so few to skip so lightly through the years. And once someone realised it only worked because so few were out there, because the weight of planet minds could pull the rest along... necessarily exclusionary ways to live forever were a war waiting to happen.
But other wars caught up with them first.
The part I actually dreamed, it was just a brief scene, and most of that above I could have written down as 'like CJ Cherryh's space ships, plus empathic navigation', which was all I needed to know to get it.
I dreamed I woke up in the Dark, and I could hear such singing. Other minds sing, always, but most minds don't sing choral. Humans do not have the way to hear, to stay in tune, to even know if they think the same thoughts. Not awake. But up in the Dark... there were ships, early on, where everybody stayed awake. Where they all stepped into the Dark together, one smoothly functioning unit, heading out on a years long blind jump with Away as their main empathic guiding star. They stepped away from the rest of humanity in ever so many ways. Some ships like that, they fell apart, and out in the Dark you mostly hear the screaming. But some just kept getting closer, closer, closer together, until one day the singing turns to harmony, and one day a while after there is only one Song.
Ships that do that? They can't go back to Silence. They do if they have to, skimming through it for supplies, but they'll do that very seldom. It's like surfacing in the Arctic to them. Naked. They dive back in fast as they can.
And if it's a nice Song, no worries, they're just being human in a whole new way, somewhere out there.
But for some ships... the whole Dark hears the ghost stories. Hears whispers about sirens, and a different kind of silence, one of ships that find the hard way how the Singers resupply out in the Dark.
And some of them are worse than wreckers, worse than pirates, worse even than slavers who forget that other songs are people too. Some of them found the song that sticks in your head, and sings itself.
Our ship got pulled down, but not out of the Dark. Somewhere Between, somewhere the tech said shouldn't even exist. The navigator was just puzzled, maybe creeped out by the new neighbour, but I remembered. I recognised the song. Sat out there was a ship, a bigger ship than they built these days, gone Singing in the dark in awful chorus, harmonics reaching notes your human brain heard like sour angles or bright curves. It spun a web of its own, not anchored out to waking humanity, a mind space that had severed so many ties it made a new way to be sentient. You couldn't call it humanity. It wouldn't want you to. And hearing that, most minds had one of two ways to be - torn apart between the two webs, or jumping over, becoming one of them. It was infectious song, and that ship was a relic of the Plague Wars.
The Navigator didn't want to hear that. Didn't believe it. Everybody knew the Plague was wiped out, centuries ago. But what are centuries in the Dark? So this ship, somehow, seperated out and self contained, found a pocket of Between with weird maths, with contours that made sense to them, harmonics with their song. Humans couldn't go their, couldn't conceptualise the place. But by the rags and tatters of who this Song used to be, they could connect just long enough to be lured in. And then the Plague would have us, the group mind too strong, too many tumbled in upon themselves, outweighing any one ship made these days. Ships were redesigned to minimise that hazard. It didn't make them safer, upon meeting it.
Held in the Dark, the tranqs would all wear off, regular Sleepers waking up to hear. And then the change would start. They wouldn't all survive it, would fight it off inside and out. That was the Plague, jumping ship to ship in the Dark, leaving no survivors that could still be counted human.
The only ones immune to it were auties. Again. Most humans, when presented with a set of unequal lines, and surrounded by people who swear that one of them is longest, will eventually start to agree. Physical reality and what rulers say do not have much to do with this. Most humans are social animals, and evolution said survival required the other humans more than it required mere facts. But auties don't have quite the same bugs. We have our own, granted, but autistic spectrum disorders are not so much about following the crowd and fitting in. Primarily because we won't notice the crowd is all going one way, and couldn't fit in with it if we wanted to. Our brains won't take someone else's Song, not even other autistic people. We each have our own, and it does its own thing. So even while the vast majority of Sleepers look at us sideways, waiting for the cracks, there is one and only one way we are diamonds: we'll never join a Song, even a Plague. And that gives a ship carrying us a chance they couldn't get elsewise. Navigators listen hard, they're most likely to fall in with bad Singers. Autistic people kind of think the Songs are made of clashing creaky parts anyway. No harmony for us. We keep our choices.
Mundanes can fight it off though. It'll tear at them, but the stronger they're connected to the many minds, to humanity out on our shared web, the longer they stay hooked up to that whole. And that's why Fleet put up with weekend warriors, with armed bastards in our Dark who don't even want to be there. If Home is out there somewhere, if there are beloveds, sitting patiently on planets thinking of you, then there's anchors. There are places that's an actual paying role, someone to anchor Dark to home, to watch their far off warriors and just get to care about them, and maybe be their beacon or their personal guide star. Fleet? Left all that. Fleet are inward turning, and ship focused. The only out connections that they have are other ships, so the Fleet learned long since that you need to keep crew moving, split up friendships on purpose to make sure other ships stay real. But there's still that long term pulling, turning inwards, minds to one task, choosing the Dark. It's always Fleet turns Singer. And it was Fleet that turned to Plague.
That's why it didn't matter if we had eradicated the last Plague war. Plague was in us, like the singing, like the Dark. This old relic was too big to be a new source, but you always had to worry.
That's why I kept going back Down. There's too many sorts of real. Get locked in to just the one strand, forget some parts of being human.
So all that makes an excellent setup for a space horror story, or just exploring civilisations where travel between stars really seriously depends on people caring about each other. Cold physics can get you out, but empathic navigation gets you home.
I'd need a bunch of characters and a specific plot though. And an autistic spectrum point of view character, which would make it difficult to introduce said other characters, since they'd all be pretty baffling to her.
In the dream I had to share a dorm with a hyper religious person and someone who accused all the others of being stoned or drunk. They'd put all the, er, interesting people in together. What would a space ship do with their crazies, if they knew they pulled them out off course? But what would be good to do, if a major danger was all thinking the same so long they stop being able to do anything else? Too many crazies scatter the ship focus, maybe get them lost out in the Dark. But there would be such a thing as too few.
Possibilities.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-22 09:01 am (UTC)People have problems trying to stay attached to planets when their time scales are so divergent, they can't stay that fond of places they barely see and think of them as places rather than people. But if they only stay interested in people on their own ships, the ones they actually share experiences with, they have no anchors and their thoughts tend to converge around the commonalities until they're Choral. But if they have a sufficiently awkward person around, they don't get lost in harmonies. Maybe more than one person, since it's hard to be very close to very many people at once. A leavening of crazies, as mentioned above. But us merely existing isn't sufficient to the Plague threat. To pull our people away from that, they have to care about us. About me. Center of their emotional universe, clearly.
... well, no, wouldn't need to be the center, just an indispensible part. If they care about me enough, me being left behind when they go Sing together would be a problem for them, one that could pull them back from the brink. Same principle as the attachment to worlds, but far easier to maintain the emotional links, on account of me being there all the time.
It would be essential to the emotional and psychic wellbeing of the ship for everyone to care about me.
*basks*
... *worries* ...
I mean autistic people are going to be immune to these other webs because we don't really grok the ones we're theoretically part of already. I can care, but I can't harmonise, can't fit in, and a lot of the ways most people care just plain don't occur to me. My world has me in the middle of it. And most of the edges. And places in between. It is not conducive to close friendships.
So how could that work out? A ship that really cared about its autistic population would have defences against the Plague ships, but autistic people are sort of difficult to get close to.
... the sex pollen version is probably not going to solve anything, yet does spring to mind as a solution someone would certainly try.
Caring about your shipmates doesn't protect from Plague ships because you can all fall together. Unless there's a few immune, by virtue of their neuro-atypicality. Then caring for all your shipmates would mean not falling, because you wouldn't be together. Like if someone's roped to the cliff but not to the rest of you. Can't go with, so it benefits the others if they don't want to go without.
Pets wouldn't be part of the new mind web, but I don't think they'd have the protective effect either, because they'd get on with being themselves either way. Does that apply to autistic people? Could they leave them to get on with their lives, just surrounded by weird Plague mind?
... I am not a pet. Or a queen. But these are interesting tension / solutions to this setup where emotional connections matter.
Also, this story isn't science fiction. It's fantasy. It's making physical-literal that thing where groups of people drift apart if they don't spend time together and don't have reasons to care about each other, then blowing it up to epic scale. That isn't consequences of technology, that's fantasy dream logic. With spaceships. Leaving out the spaceships wouldn't work as well because you've got the alone-in-the-night effect of a little box full of people.
If the autistic people don't mind the Plague people then they wouldn't anchor the ship or try and save it, because what would be the problem? But if they're like me and quite like the idea of going home and talking to humans, if they care and have emotional connections and are just really awkward at it, then they'd try and stop the ship from Falling and they... I was going to say they wouldn't be tempted by the Song, but buggery wouldn't they. Wouldn't I. The idea of becoming Part Of, that's quite appealing, when you've felt isolated for long enough. But we can't, so that's that.
The Plague ships must have a very Wrong mind for autistic me to be bothered about it. IDIC is a way of life when you can't see how other people even think alike in the first place. Very diverse, we are. So what kinds of diversity would be brain breaking enough that we couldn't go along with it, couldn't let people we care about go along?
What kinds of mind would it be better to fight a war against than to let yourself become?
... well that's a historically very long list, right there.
I like Free Will. I rather value it. Also diversity, and having opinions, and having arguments about opinions. So the idea of going Choral is rather a problem in itself. Yes, they're new ways of being human... but there's only one individual per ship, rather than one per body. I wouldn't like that idea at all. But to be Plague, to pull away from caring about humanity to the extent that one is no longer connected and one makes one's own world... if it was just like being animals or making a fairyland, if it involved getting on with your own business while humans got on with theirs, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But I kept going back up to that war. There's something about it worth fighting. Worse than the psirens pirating supplies. Something totally Lovecraft, waiting out in the Dark, waiting for more bodies to become it.
... suggesting what that might be, with only exactly enough detail, is going to be tricksy. and I'd have to think on it extensively to know exactly what the edges of it were.
To not care about humanity makes the ship have its own realm in the Dark. There's probably ships that just wandered off to do their own thing.
But a Plague ship has disconnected from caring about humans, yet still lures them in. The Psiren sort make slaves of the outsiders, the Plague ships force them into a new shape.
Ah! Daft becca, that's it: It's infectious disconnection from caring. It's a plague of lack of empathy. Get too close and you don't give a damn. It's not quite a Dalek transformation, it wouldn't need to involve hate, but it empties out everything you ever cared about before and tells you it meant nothing to you. Big big problem. It's not making you care about new people, it's severing the old ties that's the bugger.
(that took me a while to remember / figure out. oops.)
If the Plague ships are so cast loose from humanity, are they connected to anything? Are they Choral in there, or quite the opposite? Cacophonies. Screaming.
A Choral ship would have you only care about the things they do, lose free will and emotional attachments ... no, not necessarily, you could bring them and harmonise. There's good ways to do it, and ways to get drowned out. There's a whole spectrum of ways to go choral.
But a cacophony, where they aren't just the normal human hum drum but something that actively hates to connect or empathise or hum along with anyone else... that would be a problem. A very problematic neighbour. That would look a lot like hate.
Like the Nightwalkers who can't be having with all the noise.
I wrote all the parts of this down already, didn't I? I just haven't worked them through enough to understand what I already wrote!
The being disconnected from other people is what keeps auties safe from Choral absorption, but to be safe from Cacophony they'd need to still care about humanity.
Any part of it.
Like their best favourite TV shows...
This stuff is interesting chewy ideas, but I haven't quite got my head around them yet. I keep losing bits of what I had figured already. :eyeroll:
no subject
Date: 2012-11-28 06:53 am (UTC)