Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[Potato and Chip]

She's never heard of Crysis or the Ceph, so she wasn't thinking in terms of terraforming when she bught it. She bought it because the description said that they were self-replicating nanomachines that could work outside a specialized environment, and none of the interstellar powers in the setting has technology that can do that.

Click to shrink...

Oh I know, it's just that ceph nanomachines seem uniquely biologically focused (ceph nanomachines can enhance biology, modify biology, act as the intermediary between biological and mechanical systems, modify environments, act like a biological plague and so on) and pretty much every single game after the first one you had people constantly saying, "They're changing the environment to suit them." so often I started rolling my eyes. Like I get it, the ceph are changing earth's environment to better suit themselves because they intend to stay. You don't need to say it every time we enter a new map and see how the ceph have modified it. I even remember this being treated like a big revelation several times over a period of hours, like the writers expected me to have the memory of a goldfish or something. The story really hammered you over the head with the terraforming thing.

Even the environmental shift the ceph were attempting I think was supported by a nanomachine plague. With the nanites killing people and then melting their insides into a biological slurry which the ceph harvested to power/supplement their terraforming activities. Even then the nanites weren't capable or disassembling biological matter, only capable of programming it to cause its own self destruction.

I guess my point is that these aren't general purpose nanomachines, they seemed specifically designed to work with biological material and while Sophia might not know that at the moment she'll probably realize just what these nanomachines lean towards when she finally starts studying them.

Getting these nanomachines to do something like construct machinery or extract metals might actually be harder then using them to giver your self a third mutant arm, a cybernetic eye, or speeding up the CO2 production of bacteria.

Side note; have you seen the mass produced versions of the nanosuits? Not the specialized stuff the protagonists have, I'm talking about the North Korean, mega corp, and United States Military stuff. I had forgotten how cool it all looked. I'd post it myself but I'm on my phone right now.

 

[Prince Chrom]

popular tropes of energy weapons and artificial gravity the Traveller universe was intended to be relatively 'grounded' sci-fi.

Click to shrink...

Hell, they even managed to keep energy weapons fairly grounded, given that Laser Guns require a battery the size of a back-pack, and get you about 25 shots without a recharge.

 

[Potato and Chip]

Hell, they even managed to keep energy weapons fairly grounded, given that Laser Guns require a battery the size of a back-pack, and get you about 25 shots without a recharge.

Click to shrink...

Really? Huh.

That would mean the introduction of Star Wars blasters, 40k lasguns, or fallout laser muskets would be a game changer.

How powerful are these laser guns? I know Battletech human sized laser guns also need an external battery, with the smallest being the size of a canteen and the larger ones being backpack size. They couldn't fire too many shots, but they also hit with the power of several ounces of TNT. So it was more of a weapon for officers and specilized teams.

Are laser guns in this setting similar?

 

[litaispe]

You don't need to say it every time we enter a new map and see how the ceph have modified it. I even remember this being treated like a big revelation several times over a period of hours, like the writers expected me to have the memory of a goldfish or something. The story really hammered you over the head with the terraforming thing.

Click to shrink...

Crysis also treats prefixing 'nano' to various things like startrek does 'quantum'.

 

[cliffc999]

How powerful are these laser guns?

Click to shrink...

Well at the highest end of the published scale we have Third Imperium man-portable fusion gun, which is about the size of a modern 25mm anti-vehicle and required a powered assault exoskeleton to lift and the armor's own onboard fusion plant to power, could toast a modern-day tank at two klicks.

But that's the Third Imperium era of the default Traveller game and well on down the timeline, though. Tech Level 12 on the Traveller scale. We're actually playing in the historical era of the setting right now, which Steve Jackson Games did a supplement for as their farewell to having the Traevller license. The Vilani Imperium is a conservative TL 10, the Terran Confederation is mostly 10 with still some TL 9.

Contemporary man-portable laser weapons are possible, and IIRC GURPS decided to ditch the bulky backpacks for more sci-fi ish superconducting power cells, but still not much used because you'd get notably better results in a more portable format from a TL10 gauss rifle, which is the current standard infantry weapon.

Even in the Third Imperium era they tended to prefer gauss over lasers for most small arms applications - lasers didn't need you to ship physical ammo out (while the powerpacks were limited, they recharge, while gauss ammo takes up space in the cargo hold and is only useable once) and had no recoil, but gauss weapons still delivered somewhat more damage and range pound-for-pound.

 

[Jangofet54]

Ahhhhh, another chapter it's like nice cup of hot chocolate. I'm really enjoying the novel so far thanks for the hard work.

 

[James Wilt]

Hell, they even managed to keep energy weapons fairly grounded, given that Laser Guns require a battery the size of a back-pack, and get you about 25 shots without a recharge.

Click to shrink...

Well there are definitely better laser weapons than that in the Forge, even this nerfed version. ST Phasers or Disrupters for one. That would be a scientific breakthrough all it's own...

Really? Huh.

That would mean the introduction of Star Wars blasters, 40k lasguns, or fallout laser muskets would be a game changer.

Click to shrink...

All things available in the Forge, and all superior to what they have. Not to mention that those would only be a small part of the tech databases she could gain, which would certainly give Terra that Tech Boost it needs...

 

[cliffc999]

Sooo...... what I took from the history dump is that technically the Terrans started it?

Click to shrink...

Terra did technically start the first one, and even that was a case of 'the international tensions were being pushed so high by the Vilani that it was inevitable that eventually someone would sneeze wrong and somebody else would flinch and pull a trigger'.

But okay, for the sake of argument we'll say that Terra had a smack coming for destroying two Vilani merchant ships, even if they were stupid/arrogant enough to fly straight into the no-fly zone around a space military base without their transponders on or answering hails and the defenders unsurprisingly mistook them for incoming attakc craft. And that covers the First Interstellar War. Which ended on the Vilani saying 'OK, we think we've suitably punished the offenders' and declaring peace, meaning that they don't really have a casus belli for making any future war based on events prior to that date. They already said honor was satisfied and they were done.

But the Second and Third Interstellar Wars? The Vilani attacked first both times. At least once with the explicit goal of forcing the Confederation's unconditional surrender and conquering it outright.

I mean, yes the Vilani went too far.... but every fight was started by the Terrans, then ended by the Vilani.

Click to shrink...

The mystery of why the Vilani have not yet just gone straight in like the Allies versus the Axis and refused to stop until every last Terran was either dead or underneath the iron boot is part of the story and yet to be revealed, yes.

But I think I'm not spoiling too much when I give you this preview teaser - it ain't because they're saints.

Are we the bad guys?

Click to shrink...

I am honestly flabbergasted that I have now gone two for two with stories that had cities full of civilians get orbitally nuked by alien aggressors and people still wonder if maybe us uppity Terrans are the wrong ones. And unlike the last time, this time the civilian casualties weren't in the thousands but in the millions. And the aliens didn't even try to pretend that it was collateral damage, but openly presented them as deliberate terror strikes.

 

[ryune]

Hmm, the ceph nanotech is actually a really interesting development. While the classic grey goo scenario is surprisingly hard to achieve for nanotech, this stuff is entirely capable of attacking like a virus or producing "invasive wildlife" that would make a decent run at wearing the Zerg hat.

As for what she can do with it if she actually gets off the ground with it? Stuff like direct neural interfaces and onboard computation capability with little more than an injection, ships and other equipment that you can grow like plants or animals by just providing feed stock and tech that can actively reconfigure itself in battlefield conditions are all possibilities.

I suppose the big question that comes to mind for me though is if the normal fiat backing for items is in effect. If the nanotech sample is destroyed, will it respawn next to her or otherwise be returned? It always feels kind of bad if CP ends up being wasted but I could easily see a good argument being made for it being a permanent loss.

 

[MissileTeatime]

Wait, what are the range capabilities of Jump-1 and Jump-2 drives? I wound up with the impression that Jump-1 drives were capable of traveling approximately one light-year at a jump, and Jump-2 drives were capable of traveling two light-years per jump. But that doesn't fit with the descriptions of first contact in the retrospective section, because there would be no way a Jump-1 drive could accomplish any of that travel. Is the X in Jump-X an exponent, like Jump-1 drives are capable of up to 3¹ light-years per jump and Jump-2 drives are capable of up to 3² light-years per jump?

 

[cliffc999]

Wait, what are the range capabilities of Jump-1 and Jump-2 drives? I wound up with the impression that Jump-1 drives were capable of traveling approximately one light-year at a jump, and Jump-2 drives were capable of traveling two light-years per jump.

Click to shrink...

1-2 parsecs, not 1-2 light-years.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

I am honestly flabbergasted that I have now gone two for two with stories that had cities full of civilians get orbitally nuked by alien aggressors and people still wonder if maybe us uppity Terrans are the wrong ones. And unlike the last time, this time the civilian casualties weren't in the thousands but in the millions. And the aliens didn't even try to pretend that it was collateral damage, but openly presented them as deliberate terror strikes.

Click to shrink...

It's a Spacebattler descended forum. It's nuke O'clock for so many people at anyone time that people set their watch by it. Nukes just don't make people realise what is going on. [/Never a Truer Word than said in Jest]

 

[Vrenze]

I am honestly flabbergasted that I have now gone two for two with stories that had cities full of civilians get orbitally nuked by alien aggressors and people still wonder if maybe us uppity Terrans are the wrong ones. And unlike the last time, this time the civilian casualties weren't in the thousands but in the millions. And the aliens didn't even try to pretend that it was collateral damage, but openly presented them as deliberate terror strikes.

Click to shrink...

Have you consider many people are dumbasses who thing being cynical and nihilistic regarding life and the world around them makes smart but actually makes them incapable of seeing humans as good people?

 

[Amrynel]

But okay, for the sake of argument we'll say that Terra had a smack coming for destroying two Vilani merchant ships, even if they were stupid/arrogant enough to fly straight into the no-fly zone around a space military base without their transponders on or answering hails and the defenders unsurprisingly mistook them for incoming attakc craft.

Click to shrink...

Maybe I'm too cynical, that practically screams of "for the greater good" / "can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" shenanigans. Makes me wonder whether some or all of the Vilani on those merchant ships were as surprised as the Terrans. Something something "The computer says the transponder is on!" "The computer also says we're on approach to the highport, not a naval base!" something... or the crew was already dead, etc.

 

[ShaperV]

I am honestly flabbergasted that I have now gone two for two with stories that had cities full of civilians get orbitally nuked by alien aggressors and people still wonder if maybe us uppity Terrans are the wrong ones. And unlike the last time, this time the civilian casualties weren't in the thousands but in the millions. And the aliens didn't even try to pretend that it was collateral damage, but openly presented them as deliberate terror strikes.

Click to shrink...

"We're actually the bad guys" is a meme that has become so deeply ingrained in modern culture that young people tend to assume it must apply to any story that touches on war or politics. So when you show the protagonist's homeland being the good guys it takes heroic efforts to convince them that this isn't just the setup for a big reveal that they're all mustache-twirling villains maliciously cackling as they secretly commit atrocities by the dozen. A lot of people will never believe it no matter what you write, because they're so conditioned to think that the Other Side (whoever they are) must be in the right and Our Guys (no matter who 'we' are) have to be morally suspect in some way.

I think the only way to avoid that would be to write morality plays about some current culturally approved victim group defending themselves from the obvious culturally approved bad guys, which obviously wouldn't make for a very interesting story.

 

[Potato and Chip]

cliffc999 I wanted to say that I wasn't trying to say that ceph nanomachines can't be used like your standard sci-fi nanites, I just wanted to point out an odd quirk in how they are presented in the crysis games and the possible implications of that if you choose to go down that route. Watching some of the trailers that show the inner workings of the suit (I had a nostalgia kick) I was surprised at just how biological the nanomachines look. Sure in the first game they looked at least kind of mechanical (at least as mechanical as a sphere can look) but by the second game you have nanomachine looking like little jelly fish or polyps with the suit itself being this weird shifting thing on a microscopic level. Pretty cool stuff.

Makes me wonder whether some or all of the Vilani on those merchant ships were as surprised as the Terrans. Something something "The computer says the transponder is on!" "The computer also says we're on approach to the highport, not a naval base!" something... or the crew was already dead, etc.

Click to shrink...

Its entirely possible the Vilani captains just didn't give a shit. Scoffing and rolling their eyes at the idea that they needed to respond to a bunch of primitive barbarians, they can go where they please and no backwater power can tell them no.

Apparently each time war has happened the Vilani have been surprised at how powerful the Terran Confederation is and it is a feudalistic space empire with no FTL communications. Your average Vilani might have no idea just how dumb of a decision it was to ignore the local authorities. Having heard of the Confederation from a friend of a friend of a friend of a traveler of a bunk mate of a third cousin.

 

[Knaka]

Ooh, a new cliff story and a CF one as well. This looks interesting. I'll keep an eye on this story.

Thank you for sharing this story. Even if I know nothing about GURPS, it's interesting.

By the way, I spotted a potential inconsistency:

Sophia thinks this in the latest chapter:

But even if I couldn't do it right away, I was resolved to eventually crack this code one way or another. I was not going to commit the basic logic error of assuming that just because the Forge had stated that failing to invent at least one militarily significant technology prior to the start of a Fourth Interstellar War would result in Terra's defeat did not automatically imply that succeeding in doing so would mean result in a Terran victory. Because just because "if A, then B" was true, that did not automatically mean that the converse "if B, then A" was also true. It could be... but no guarantees. So even after I completed that quest the Forge had given me the day I'd gotten it, I'd still have a lot of work to do.

Click to shrink...

But according to the original quest, this is what it said:

Quest Granted!
A Rising Thunder
Objective: Advance the Terran Confederation's tech level to be superior to Vilani Imperial Standard Technology in at least one militarily significant area before the start of the Fourth Interstellar War
Reward: 1000cp, Terran Confederation Victory
Failure: Conquest of Nusku and Procyon by Vilani Imperium, Terran Confederation defeat and armistice

Click to shrink...

The quest explicitly says that completing it will result in a Terran Confederation Victory. There's probably some explanation here, but I just wanted to point that out.

 

[cliffc999]

The quest explicitly says that completing it will result in a Terran Confederation Victory. There's probably some explanation here, but I just wanted to point that out.

Click to shrink...

Doylist: The author made a whoopsie.

Watsonian: Terra won the Second Interstellar War, but that didn't prevent there from being a Third. So she's thinking that 'okay, solving the problem of how we don't lose the Fourth Interstellar War is a good start, but...'

Will go back and fix the text a little to make that less ambiguous.

 

[Potato and Chip]

The quest explicitly says that completing it will result in a Terran Confederation Victory. There's probably some explanation here, but I just wanted to point that out.

Click to shrink...

I think that might be authorial knowledge leaking in by accident. I looked up a bit on the setting and apparently the Terran Confederation canonically managed to "conquer" the Imperium. The Terran Confederation was dissolved and a new empire was formed with Terra at its head and large numbers of Terrans spread out and took over major positions of power throughout the Imperium.

In the process the Terran Confederation abolished the caste system and allowed people a lot more freedom of movement and rights. The already super shaking Imperium could not handle the societal instability this caused and a single planet and her colonies (Earth) did not have enough power or people to keep things together. So the Imperium crashed (and Earth along with it I assume) and then the setting has what I think was called the "long dark" until the third Imperium was founded.

So while the Terran Confederation does win, it turns out to be a win that they as a nation can't handle.

 

[cliffc999]

I think that might be authorial knowledge leaking in by accident. I looked up a bit on the setting and apparently the Terran Confederation canonically managed to "conquer" the Imperium.

Click to shrink...

To very very briefly sum up the history of the nine canon Interstellar Wars stretching all the way into the mid-23rd century, Terra managed to resist repeated attempts by the Vilani to beat those border barbarians into line, with the stakes escalating each time, until the Vilani finally realized that the Terrans were not only unaccountably refusing to die but were not a minor race, and had somehow levelled up to where they were a legitimate threat to the Imperium.

The Vilani response to that realization made it inevitable that at least one star nation was going to get its ass permanently regime changed, the only question was which one.

So while the Terran Confederation does win, it turns out to be a win that they as a nation can't handle.

Click to shrink...

This is also true. The Second Imperial Era is referred in the Traveller history timeline as 'the Ramshackle Empire' for a reason.

And the millenium or so following that period is called "The Long Night" for an equally obvious reason.

 

[Kildar]

I am honestly flabbergasted that I have now gone two for two with stories that had cities full of civilians get orbitally nuked by alien aggressors and people still wonder if maybe us uppity Terrans are the wrong ones. And unlike the last time, this time the civilian casualties weren't in the thousands but in the millions. And the aliens didn't even try to pretend that it was collateral damage, but openly presented them as deliberate terror strikes.

Click to shrink...

Sorry Cliff, I should have added some emoji's, that last crack about being the bad guys was tongue in cheek.

I know that the Terrans aren't really the bad guys, I was just pointing out that if you look at things 'twisty like' the alternative perspective exists. I'm not emotionally attached to this, just exploring the idea as it just popped out to me as I was reading.

As if you look at the situation from that other perspective, then outside of the massive overreactions and civilian casualties, they were acting like any large empire. Since you said they don't really consider civilian casualties as an issue, which means it's a cultural clash issue.(Also evil, but by our standards)

From one perspective, the Terrans were effectively acting very aggressively and almost criminally stupid to a degree. As if the empire 100 times your size, tells you to stop sending ships…. You stop sending ships. Even if your laws don't allow you to do that, common sense does apply.

So you have one side ignoring the others polite/condescending requests, which causes tensions to rise. As any old empire has pride and would be offended by the disrespect being shown. Eventually things would get to the point that the empire would say 'if your ships can just go anywhere, then so can mine". Cue the misjump and the first war.

The first shot of which was fired by the Terrans, even if it was an accident. It was also not an actual war, rather it was a punitive attack to make the Terrans chill out and apologise. Yes the Vilani were likely expecting waaaay to much, but that's the right of any old and powerful nation. So it's understandable. (But not right)

I could go on, but I'm on my phone and if anyone cares, I'll explain more afterwards. I hope this explains my perspective of the situation.

e: Honestly I was just hoping to spark some discussion and get a few laughs, but I posted a bit late and forgot to 'tone check'.

"We're actually the bad guys" is a meme that has become so deeply ingrained in modern culture that young people tend to assume it must apply to any story that touches on war or politics. So when you show the protagonist's homeland being the good guys it takes heroic efforts to convince them that this isn't just the setup for a big reveal that they're all mustache-twirling villains maliciously cackling as they secretly commit atrocities by the dozen. A lot of people will never believe it no matter what you write, because they're so conditioned to think that the Other Side (whoever they are) must be in the right and Our Guys (no matter who 'we' are) have to be morally suspect in some way.

Click to shrink...

Yeah I was actually referencing it myself I just didn't get the tone right.

I (like to) think that I've been able 'pass through' that cultural idea, with a more realistic perspective. Nothing in the real world is perfect, so there is 'good' and 'evil' on every side and that is just life.
I'm proud of being Australian for example, but Australia has done a lot of nasty stuff in the past/now. We have also done a heap of good too and are trying to be better.
Plus literally EVERYONE is in the same boat, so the 'other side' is just as bad, so there is no real reason to consider ourselves bad.

Also that was a tad condescending mate, it probably wasn't intended but it was there.

 

[cliffc999]

From one perspective, the Terrans were effectively acting very aggressively and almost criminally stupid to a degree. As if the empire 100 times your size, tells you to stop sending ships…. You stop sending ships. Even if your laws don't allow you to do that, common sense does apply.

Click to shrink...

Meanwhile, here on Earth, we would consider it just a wee bit excessive for a world superpower to declare war on one of its bordering nations and go in and kill large chunks of their military just because they thought that smaller nation wasn't doing enough to control the smuggling problem.

As for 'Even if your laws dont' allow you to do that'... there's a word for when a much larger nation demands a smaller nation make substantial and unwanted changes to their government and culture for the convenience/benefit of the larger nation at the expense of the smaller one, and on pain of being shot in the face repeatedly if they don't. "Imperialism".

So yes, you are correct that the Vilani as presented in this fic have been in many ways acting much like any large empire from Earth's history. But... that's the problem.

The first shot of which was fired by the Terrans, even if it was an accident. It was also not an actual war, rather it was a punitive attack to make the Terrans chill out and apologise. Yes the Vilani were likely expecting waaaay to much, but that's the right of any old and powerful nation.

Click to shrink...

And meanwhile, back here on Earth again, if a commercial airliner turns off its transponder, refuses to answer hails on the radio, flies directly into another nation and then comes straight towards the restricted airspace surrounding one of its major military bases during a period of heightened alert, and catches a SAM up the ass for doing so...

... the nation that airliner was from would almost certainly not go to war at all, let alone on the Vilani's scale. (For one thing, it's international aviation law that all commercial aircraft carry at least one radio capable of operating on the aviation band reserved solely for in-flight emergencies and never turn it off in flight, so failure to meet that requirement is either a tragic accident caused by mechanical defect or a deliberate fuckup by the aircraft, which helps move the fault for the accident off the shooter. That's one of the reasons WHY that requirement exists.)

Resolving this kind of incident is done with diplomats, not naval gunfire. And this sort of accident has actually happened over the past decades, more than once.

 

[Sceptic]

So yes, you are correct that the Vilani as presented in this fic have been in many ways acting much like any large empire from Earth's history. But... that's the problem.

Click to shrink...

So... you're saying the villainy side of the conflict are actually the bad guys?!?

 

[cliffc999]

The party in the central concourse of Peraspera's main habitat was in full swing, and a whole world was coming together in triumph. Even those of us who couldn't crowd into the main public areas were busy having their own celebrations in whatever rec rooms or meeting rooms that they could find.

The Project had finished getting approval from the the Colonial Bureau in January 2167 but it had taken until late May to finish all of the surveying, calculating, checking, double-checking, and prepositioning necessary to pick a proper impact site and take advantage of it. Asteroidenbergwerke GmbH, Terra's largest megacorporation in the field of deep-space mining and heavy industry, sent one of their heavy mining ships under government contract to take care of the business of finding a suitable piece of cometary ice - just a wee bitty one, astronomically speaking, because even if we were aiming at the opposite hemisphere we still didn't want to shake the planet we were living on too hard, and the best-positioned piece of ice we'd found had been located such that planetfall would be early July. And part of me still suspected that the reason the rock had just happened to drop on July 4th is because the AB GmbH vessel's captain had been North American.

Since then it had been a matter of waiting for the water vapor to finish recondensing in the hole we'd dug and form a suitable freshwater sea, to seed it with the right strain of tailored cyanobacteria, and to spend several weeks biting our knuckles as we waited for the sampling teams to bring us confirmation that this whole multi-megasol expedition would actually work. But yesterday we'd just finished compiling and confirming the results, and everything was green - pun intended. The algae bloom in our new inland sea had hit the part of the ideal-growth-of-population curve that was basically a vertical line, and the undramatic yet still detectable change in atmosphere was already being sensed over two hundred klicks downwind. The proof of concept had been a complete success.

Hidden Quest Completed!
A Breath Of Fresh Air
Objective: Ensure The Success Of The Peraspera Terraforming Project
Reward: 600 CP

So even if we failed to get a full planetary self-sustaining cycle going here - and we were still optimistic that we could - then we could just drop another chunk of ice into the mix and repeat step one until the worldwide tipping point was reached. And while obviously the 'how long' was still only a rough estimate at this point, the 'what' was now solid. It wouldn't be in in my lifetime, but probably at some point in my grandchildrens' lifetimes (assuming I had any, of course), a new Terra-type garden world would be added to the Terran Confederation. Some day in the future, assuming the Vilani didn't get us first, billions and billions of people would breathe the free air on a world I had helped build.

The Peraspera Terraforming Project would of course continue in the role of managing and maintaining the worldwide oxygen bloom and making whatever adjustments to the ongoing growth cycles might be necessary, but we'd won. The Project was no longer a blue-sky long-range speculative investment with no end in sight but was now a solid geo-engineering proposition. Even decades before there'd be breathable atmosphere on this planet the colony growth was expected to skyrocket in the near future, given that we were only one jump-2 out from Terra itself and all of the Confederation's major corporations and investors would have a solid basis for future expectations to work from.

And while of course nobody was going to ignore the entire Terraforming Project team and all its distinguished scientists to just hand all the credit to a 19-year-old girl still in her initial Public Service tour - nor should they, because while I'd certainly been a catalyst to the process the fact remained that my brainstorm had only been possible by building on the foundation of their years and years' worth of painstaking research - everybody who had been part of this would remember that I'd been there. Even the history books would remember me, if not necessarily in the starring role of our ensemble cast, because Dr. Ward and Dr. Michel had been very insistent that I be written into the official Project logs with full mention.

"So you're the supergenius kid that made this happen!" a good-natured rough-hewn voice broke into my slightly - slightly! - buzzed ruminations. I looked up to see the burly form of one of the construction crew I didn't really know talking to me. "Come on, this is a time to celebrate! Put down the water and have a real drink!" he said as he offered me a beer.

I smiled and handed him my glass in an obvious challenge, and he smiled back and grabbed it and took a deep swig - to immediately start coughing and hacking.

"Peugh!" he wheezed, having not been warned that you did not try to gulp this stuff. "What the hell are you drinking?"

"My dad's favorite vodka, Sobieski 100." I smirked as I took my glass back and sipped.

"Hahahahaah!" he laughed, not expecting a shrimp of a girl like me to be drinking something a lot stronger than he was. "Okay, kid, you got me fair and square. You always prank people like this at parties?"

"We couldn't afford champagne to celebrate when I was a kid, so, vodka it was." I said. "And today's a day to taste like home."

"And how many of those have you tasted?" Mr. Stepczinski said, apparently having decided to intervene at seeing me drinking with strange roughnecks.

"... this is the second one." I admitted.

"Aaaand you're cut off." he said matter-of-factly in his Warrant Officer voice.

"I've had more than this and been just fine!" I protested.

"Whatever you did at home is between your and your parents," Mr. Stepczinski agreed, "But I know that you haven't so much as sniffed a cork since you got here. Did you remember to factor in that you've probably lost most of whatever tolerance you had in the interim?"

"... oops!" I admitted, flushing with embarassment. "Okay, you've got a point there." The crewman trying to pick me up took Mr. Stepcinzski's hint like a gentleman and wandered off, and I went and poured my half-full glass into the disposer before I got myself a cup of the non-alcoholic punch instead.

"Drink for birthdays, not for funerals." he acknowledged. "Nothing wrong with celebrating, especially today. It's just that nothing ruins a good night out than being too drunk to remember it."

"Speaking from experience?" I replied cheekily.

"Very much so." he acknowledged without hesitation, and we shared a chuckle. "Sorry to be leaving?" he continued insightfully.

"Yeah." I said softly as we walked over to one of the dome windows to look out at the horizon. "I realize I'm only reconfirming my legend as terminally weird, but I really liked it here." I said quietly. "And now I've gotten a year's bonus credit for my contribution to the Project, which I didn't even know Public Service did-"

"It's happened before for other kids who managed to pull off some major feat entirely outside expectations but yes, it's not something they give just for doing your job well." Mr. Stepczinski explained.

"Anyway, double that credit to two years because it was here, and that plus the year I've already served means I'm a free woman." I agreed. "Which is why tonight is doubling for me as my farewell party."

"Not just for you." he said affectionately. "Freedom." he continued.

"It's what everybody wants, especially teenagers." I agreed. "But then you actually get it, and all you can do is ask yourself 'Now what do I do?'"

"It's not just people your age." he surprised me. "I went into the Army straight out of secondary-ed and stayed there for more than thirty years. When I retired barely two years' ago, that was the first time in a long, long while that I had to navigate on my own outside of a big support system. Always being told where to go, what to do, what other people expect from you - sometimes it chafes, but it's also a comfort."

"Like your favorite overcoat." I said. "Sure, it might feel a little stifling occasionally but it's also warm and cozy. And the weather outside can be really, really cold sometimes."

"Exactly." he agreed, pausing briefly before continuing. "You remember how I wrote Recruiting Command about you late last year, right?"

"Of course I do, you'd asked me before you sent it. But I still haven't heard anything back." I answered him. "Not even now that I'm in the queue to return to Terra for my out-processing."

He shrugged. "Maybe they're just saving themselves the jump-mail fees and waiting to contact you on Terra. It's not as if Public Service is going to just kick you out on the street as soon as you arrive."

"No, I've got the whole separation rigmarole to go through before I transition back to civilian life. So, yes, I'm sure any recruiters who want to talk to me will just catch me when I get to Mumbai."

"Likely." he agreed. "So, any ideas on what you want to do next?"

"Save the Confederation." I answered truthfully, and then I inwardly cursed my blood-alcohol content as I clamped my lips shut.

"From what?" he asked, turning towards me at my non sequitur.

"Sorry, read too many space operas." I made a joke out of it. "Really, I want to invent stuff, but there's just so many possible directions to go in-"

"Sophia?" Dr. Ward interrupted, and we both turned to face him. "I am afraid that the most horrible part of the celebration is now upon us, and you will not be able to escape."

"The speeches." I sighed melodramatically. "Well, having done all that we could, we shall now suffer what we must." I misquoted Thucydides.

"No wonder you were already getting into the vodka." Mr. Stepczinski joked, and we headed back towards the celebrating.

* * * * *​

I wasn't that surprised when Public Service HQ had me retake my IQ test and several other psychometric exams like the ones for memory, reaction time, etc. nor that I was getting individualized retesting this time from one of their senior psychologists. By this point even the most obdurate bureaucracy would have had to start realizing that I was something well out of the ordinary, and would be curious to try and measure exactly how not ordinary. I didn't try to hold back anything except perhaps the most blatantly superhuman feats of recall I was capable of, with the results that they made me take a different and more advanced IQ series again, along with a neuro-psych evaluation. Dr. Ahmedi finally explained that the reason for their apparent befuddlement was because I'd scored over IQ 200 - in other words, beyond the ability of psychometric testing to even measure - both times. So what the Forge's perk text had promised regarding my Genius Intellect, it had certainly delivered and more.

Those test results plus my noteworthy achievements to date got me a face-to-face session with a senior placement officer, as opposed to just exchanging emails with the assignment office's bureaucracy like a normal person. Although I had several possibilities ranging from direct induction into the Naval Academy on up to an undergraduate internship at Hasegawa Limited, the Confederation's primary shipbuilder. But there wasn't the slightest trace of any resentment at being bureaucratically snubbed when I passed on those to instead accept the offer of a full-ride scholarship plus generous stipend from MIT. Indeed, Mr. Dumonte congratulated me for keeping an appropriate work/life balance in mind at hearing that after spending a year and change working double-time on Peraspera, I wanted to just spend the next eighteen months or so working at a relatively normal college student's pace on Terra instead of rushing to graduation on some double-shift schedule or something. Because with all the college credits I'd managed to test out of or rack up in the field, I was only three semesters away from a degree if I didn't push it.

Of course, I didn't tell anyone that I had an ulterior motive for taking it at a walk rather than a run. Notably, I wanted as much time as possible to at least bootleg some time with MIT's lab facilities to study that Inert Ceph Technology sample I'd carefully stashed away. And with the reward CP I'd gotten for the terraforming success, I now had enough CP to buy a Bolthole Protocol (Honor Harrington) perk from the Celestial Forge to help me do that. It was the only perk I'd seen on the list available for purchase that promised to be useful for that kind of reverse-engineering, and even though Confederation R&D wasn't as heavily based around reverse-engineering Vilani tech as it had been in the first several decades after first contact I was certain that a superhuman reverse-engineering capacity would still come in useful later even without factoring in the Ceph nanotech.

Although as it turned out, the very first thing that particular perk had been useful for had been for giving me an existential crisis. Because "Honor Harrington" was a name I'd recognized.

One of the unanticipated effects of actually discovering intelligent life in the universe had been the withering away of the science fiction genre in both literature and popular entertainment. Before we'd begun to really see the galaxy, we could dream that potentially anything was out there and that the galaxy was ours to explore. But after we'd met the Vilani, we knew what was out there - and that the galaxy was already theirs, and they didn't want us out and about in it except on their terms.

We'd dreamed that the stars were ours, or at the very least that we'd be able to meet any 'friendly visitors' out and about in it on at least roughly equal terms - but the reality was that the Vilani had been an interstellar civilization since at least the Bronze Age, the current Vilani Imperium had codified in its final form at the same time as the Fall of Rome (or at least if you believed Vilani primary-ed textbooks, which he had no real reason not to at least for information that basic), and that the Imperium had over two thousand inhabited planets, several thousand more outposts and small settlements, and literal trillions of population. There were even actual alien aliens in it, and not just human variants like the Vilani that had evolved in parallel to us out of the proto-hominids that some hypothetical 'Ancient' species had apparently seeded all over the spiral arm.

And we couldn't even realistically dream of expanding in the direction away from the Vilani imperium we bordered, because Earth was caught in a pocket. At the maximum possible range of a jump-2 drive, only seventeen star systems were reachable from Terra at all without having to pass through Nusku or Procyon. And that was every star system possible to reach, including oxygen-less (for now) rocks like Peraspera or systems without anything even that barely inhabitable which were only useful because of their positions in space and could otherwise be settled only with asteroid or deep-space habitats, like Agidda. There were five more non-Vilani star systems you could reach after transiting Nusku, arranged in a little dead-end string of 1-parsec and 2-parsec jumps, but aside from that and the jump-route back to Terra, the only way on from Nusku involved entering the Vilani Imperium proper. And since we'd only taken Nusku away from the Vilani at the end of the Third Interstellar War...?

The other way out of the Terran pocket, through Procyon, at least had the potential to lead to an entire uncharted subsector - the Capella subsector, which lay just beyond the Vilani imperium's rimward border - that we were expanding into as judiciously and yet as rapidly as we dared, but any route to the Capella subsector would be cut off if we lost the Procyon junction. And the other jump-2 from Procyon led to Sirius - which although an uninhabited star system with no useful planets was still of critical importance to Confederation naval strategists, because there were two jump-1 routes leading from Sirius to Vilani space.

And that was all there was. Although the Vilani were coreward and spinward of us, Terra essentially being on one 'corner' of their space, all of the potential infinite and uncharted expanse of the galaxy that lay to trailward and rimward of us might as well not be there at all - because we couldn't get to it. Even the nearest stars in that direction were jump-3 away from Terra or farther. And outside of the core Terran pocket itself, even what stars we could reach beyond the seventeen I'd just mentioned would almost certainly all be cut off from us in the opening phase of any interstellar war. If we lost safe transit through Nusku - we wouldn't even have to lose the planet - then everything on the 'Nusku arm' beyond it would be cut off, and if we lost Procyon then we'd lose contact with the entire Capella subsector. Which didn't change that subsector from still being dotted with almost a dozen settlements and long-range outposts, but you had to have some serious testicles to volunteer for those expeditions. Of course, Terrans being Terrans, they'd gotten some volunteers anyway.

The practical upshot of all these hard realities of astrogration was that mankind had at one time dreamed of the wide open frontier of space... and then reality had shown up and slammed the cattle gate shut right in our faces. So it wasn't surprising that the more recent generations' had chosen to focus their taste for entertainment in other directions than the sci-fi genre. After all, the entire point of escapism was to not think about how unsatisfying your current reality was. And that's why although the sci-fi genre still existed, it was nowhere near mainstream anymore. Nowadays if you wanted to get your SF fan on then your only two real choices were either 'niche' or 'vintage'.

And my parents, and me along with them, had been devoted fans of the vintage stuff. Now admittedly massive cultural milestones like Star Trek were still in general knowledge (although sometimes I cynically suspected that that was largely because Lorette Strider, the captain of StarLeaper One, had actually written her frustration that her attempt to name it the Enterprise had been shut down into her official autobiography), but the other classics of the 20th and 21st centuries were ofte more obscure. Heck, less than half the kids at school had even understood what my Star Wars jokes were referring to.

And Honor Harrington had been the titular protagonist of David Weber and Eric Flint's long-running space opera series of the early 21st century. I'd wondered all along what the heck those names in the parantheses at the ends of perk names in the Forge's purchase menu had referred to, but since I hadn't had any way to figure it out at the time I'd just noted them and moved on. But with the Harrington revelation I was now quite certain that I knew what those parenthetical additions meant. And if further corroboration were needed then "Bolthole" was a name I had also recognized - in the Honor Harrington series it had been the code-name for the Republic of Haven's super-classified project to reverse-engineer and then mass-produce the superior technology of their enemies, the Star Kingdom of Manticore.

So either Robert A. Heinlein's "World As Myth" hypothesis that he'd used as a framing device to retcon several of his own sci-fi novel series as actually existing in the same multiverse all along was more real than he'd dreamed and fictional things actually were true somewhere and speculative-fiction authors were actually just transcribing events from elsewhere without knowing that they did so (or perhaps just by mind boggling coincidence, who knew)... or the Celestial Forge was some kind of massive reality-warping force that could selectively breach the boundary between reality and fantasy, even to the point of creating material objects in the real world. Or it was actually some nigh-omnipotent entity having the world's biggest practical joke on me, a la that 5th-dimensional imp from an old 20th-century comic book I'd seen once, but that would just be a subcase of door number one up there. Or none of the above.

I spent several days just trying to process this revelation and utterly failing, because even a 200+ IQ didn't help you much with logicking something out when the fabric of reality itself might arbitrarily warp on you when you weren't looking, but eventually I came to the conclusion that if I thought too hard about this I'd give myself a nervous breakdown and that barring a miraculous break in the case, the only thing I could do right now is resolve to react to everything happening as if it were just... ordinary, real things that I had to deal with each on their own merits. Because if you couldn't be sure whether you were a man dreaming you were a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming you were a man, then your only recourse was to fall back on the same solution Zhuangzi had - to decide that whether or not your 'human' life was a dream or was reality it was still your human life either way, and so while you were a human you had to do as the humans did. Because trying to butterfly while being in human form would mean breaking your legs when you jumped off the roof.

Some dedicated searching in datanet media archives for mentions of old and obscure fiction of prior centuries turned up that 'World Seed' had been a very obscure and not well-regarded series of science fantasy novels dating back to the 2010s, although paging hurriedly through a copy of the first book had left me with the impression that the Forge was sometimes taking inspiration from things for which the perks really didn't have much to do with what was going on at all. 'SyFy' had been an obscure TV network of the same era, although it had never had a show called 'Combined Continuity' so presumably its perk was likewise a pastiche/homage as well. 'Crysis' didn't produce any hits at all. likewise 'Lords of the Night', although a 'lich' had apparently been a type of monster in a tabletop RPG called 'Dungeons and Dragons'.

I took a moment to sigh in relief that I had never seen a perk for anything magical rotate in or out of the purchase queue in the Celestial Forge, even if at least two of my perks had come from settings where magic had existed. Because one complete breakdown in everything I thought I'd understood about the nature of reality was enough, thank you. I was going to have enough of a problem trying to reconcile everything I thought I knew about physics with things like Star Trek technology, assuming a perk for it ever showed up, but trying to work in actual fantasy-literature spellcasting? Oh my aching head! Even so, I was going to have to seriously think about any purchase from the Forge from now on, given that reality itself was apparently much more flexible - or possibly more fragile - than I'd dreamed.

But once I'd finally started getting myself past the shock of what I'd just discovered about my new abilities, I buckled down and got back to work.

I'd settled in to my new student routine at MIT with quite smoothly, without any of the problems that I'd had in... well, basically anywhere before here. I suppose things were different at one of the very top tech universities in all of the Terran Confederation. With over twelve billion people on Terra alone, on top of the billion-plus spread out over all the colonies, there was a lot of competition to get in here and you didn't make the grade for MIT unless you had serious brains. No, not even if your parents were rich enough to buy you a university for your birthday. Oh, there were definitely still-prestigious schools where net worth could help you get in, at least one of which was just down the road from here, but there'd be little point in buying someone's way into MIT if they wouldn't be able to make the grade after they got here. So while it wasn't quite true that everyone here was a genius, at least the vast majority of the student body here didn't have problems being around them.

And I in particular was a student on a custom graduation track, given how much I'd tested out of before coming here, so my having started the fall semester a few weeks late didn't change anything at all. I hadn't needed more than a couple of weeks to catch up, and since I was already in 300-series courses then like any other non-freshman student I was able to sign up for unsupervised lab time provided I could persuade my student advisor it was relevant. And given the accomplishment that had gotten me into this school in the first place, it was really not hard to convince them that I had an interest in doing some independent research on cyanobacteria and thus be allowed to sign up for time on the microbiology lab's superconducting atomic force microscope. I actually did get some work in on cyanobacteria variant studies for the first few lab periods until the grad student TA finally trusted me not to break the thing and left me alone with it while he went off to do his own homework.

Which is how I was finally able to get to work really studying that Inert Ceph Technology. Because if you wanted to find a way to examine advanced molecular machinery, there were worse ideas than repurposing one of MIT's multi-million-sol scientific instruments already intended for high-precision three-D imaging of molecular structures. And once I could actually see the bits and pieces of the alien nanotech the Celestial Forge had given me, and watch its processes at work, my Bolthole Protocol kicked in.

I'd expected to have to spend months studying this thing to crack its code, but when Bolthole Protocol had said that I would "need only spend a few moments working at something to get a basic idea of how it works" it hadn't been lying. Never mind how normally impossible that would be, my initial hypothesis that my abilities were at least partly drawn from the realm of fiction was now experimentally confirmed. Because only in a bad holovid would a scientist normally be able to take such a brief look at such an insanely complicated process and almost immediately and supernaturally intuit the basic operating principles of a non-organic industrial nano-machine.

I also received confirmation that my initial impulse to bury this thing in an improvised self-destruct rig had been a good idea, because the destructive potential of this thing was flat-out terrifying. It was only in a 99% stable and inert configuration even now, and even before my first session of studying it was over I was feeling a distinct case of yikes!

You could deduce a tool's function from the basic functional elements of its shape and size, no matter how weird or alien its surface aesthetics were. Flat surface and heavy weighted head? Probably a hammer. Long rigid rod with high tensile strength and a chisel tip? Likely a prybar. A round handle and shaft with a pointed cruciform tip? Phillips-head screwdriver. And so forth, and so on. So when I saw a self-replicating nanomachine with an onboard computer element and manipulative surfaces that were just the right size and shape to latch onto DNA molecules and start yanking and pulling, it wasn't hard to figure out that this was by all appearances some type of advanced programmable bio-weapon.

After my third chance to get it under the microscope and do some very tentative poking and prodding, I'd finished my preliminary evaluation. The Ceph nanotech sample was the product of some alien race of almost unbelievable sophistication. Even in its mostly-inert and partly-fragged state, with most of the onboard data apparently wiped and its onboard computational capacity crashed, this thing had still taught me an unbelievable amount about nanotechnology. The holy grail of nanotech was a self-replicating "dry" assembler capable of complex molecular manipulation. You wouldn't need a specialized tank of solution for it to viably replicate in, you wouldn't have to assemble each batch of nanites yourself because you couldn't let it self-replicate more than a few times before mutation started kickign in, and you'd be able to just load its networked micro-scale atomic computers with the whole blueprint of what you wanted them to build and let them build them. Toss a huge pile of carbon and some nanites in a pit, come back the next day to find that they'd built you a diamond statue. Or a carbon-fiber boat, complete with boat engine. Or whatever else.

Or in the case of the Ceph nanotech, the ability to be released into the wild and then self-replicate and infect any organic life it came in contact with, and then mutate the DNA of that life in what first-approximation analysis told me could be almost any arbitrarily complex fashion that the nanites' programmer had the knowledge to genetically engineer in the first place.

Towards the end of October I'd managed to figure out enough of how to communicate with what was left of the nanites' onboard computer systems to begin winkling out the basics of its programming language, as well as learning quite a bit about the design and structure of molecular computers in the first place. And with a lump in my throat, I'd risked turning loose a very small sample of the nanites on a simple lactobacillus bacteria culture with instructions to turn them into a variant that would secrete a medical protein called lactase, a simple genemod that pharmaceutical companies had been doing for over a century. And I'd just finished confirming that the program had succeeded entirely - the lactobacillus had been re-engineered precisely on cue, in less than ten minutes and in one of the desktop isolation compartments where you could set up and run entire microorganism experiments using remote manipulators. Because only idiots worked with the first draft of genetically engineered microorganisms where you could actually breathe them.

So, the proof of concept was done. With the Ceph nanotech and the research notes carefully kept in my head - even without those notes, if you were prepared to spend months or years with an entire research team and a megasol-scale budget using non-Forge-boosted scientists to duplicate my research - you could turn loose stable, controllable nano-bio-agents in the confidence that the Ceph's quite frankly incredible anti-mutation capabilities would let them indefinitely replicate without 'genetic' drift.

I potentially held the key to solving the original quest the Forge had given me right here. Because one of the things you could do with this kind of technology would be to build a lethal nano-weapon with a programmable 'clock' and the ability to selectively target genetic characteristics. With enough work you could design an infection that would harmlessly, tracelessly enter the metabolisms of people and stay there, and then spread between them like any airborne-capable virus normally would. Only unlike the common cold, which only had a contagious period of several days between initial exposure and actual appearance of symptoms in the infetee, this nanite could be designed to lay dormant for years. And to spread, and spread, and spread, until literally anybody who had met anyone who had ever met anyone etc. etc. carried it latent in their systems, as the clock ticked and ticked and ticked... until the preset delay period ended, and everybody with the nanites in their system just dropped dead.

And given that the last time the Terran and Vilani gene pools had shared a common ancestor was hundreds of thousands of years ago at the best estimate, it would not be hard to come up with a series of genetic targeting criteria that would include virtually the entire Vilani gene pool while entirely ignoring the Terran one. Because while Vilani and Terrans were one species - we were both homo sapiens enough that a Terran-Vilani pairing would produce fertile offspring that bred true - the ethnic divergence between us and them was orders of magnitude greater than that you could find between any two humans of Terran stock, however widely separated. I was literally more closely related to an original homo sapiens from Olduvai Gorge than I was to any random Vilani in the street.

Use a ten-year incubation period just to be on the generous side, and then all I'd have to do is fine-tune the right targeting program, load it into the Ceph nanite sample, expose any person entering a Terran/Vilani trade enclave any time soon, and at the end of that decade the entire Vilani civilization would just... cease to exist. Even if there was a statistical less than one percent fraction of survivors, and according to my first-approximation analysis that would be generous, no civilization could remotely survive even a fraction of those losses. The Black Death had "only" killed about a third of the population of Terra - concentrated in Europe, naturally but the Middle East had also lost approximately 30 percent of its people and even faraway Asia had substantial casualties - over seven years, and the upheavals of that had almost shattered Western civilization like a dropped egg. It took almost two centuries for the world to recover from the population losses, and I could deliver a holocaust that would make that look like a cafeteria food fight.

All by myself. Right now. Just a little more work, and the galaxy would be Terra's and Terra's alone. This would almost certainly be the most militarily significant - and by far the most devastating - technology I could invent. Terran Victory.

And all I'd have to do is commit the greatest act of genocide in known galactic history. Kill several trillion sentients, the vast majority of them who'd likely never even heard of Terra, let alone made war on it. Anoint myself the First Horseman of the Apocalypse. And the Fourth Horseman as well.

I stood silently crying, facing the damnable bio-isolation workbench, as I mentally writhed in an agony of indecision. I was only nineteen, dammit! I shouldn't have to make decisions like this, not by myself! I should be able to ask my parents, or my teachers, or the Confederation government, or... or anyone!

But at the same time I shrieked silently at the cosmic unfairness of it all, the same rock-hard stubbornness that had gotten me punched repeatedly all through school metaphorically held my head down and rubbed my nose in it. I knew that the real reason I was having such a paralysis here isn't because I was afraid I was wrong, but that I was afraid I was right. That it really was a mutual war of extinction in the end. That I would be morally derelict if I didn't take this opportunity while I had it, while the advantage of surprise was still ours. That if I was able to ask anyone else, even up to the Secretary-General himself, what they should I should do then they'd roll the hard six and say Yes. Yes you should.

I reached forward and slammed the EMERGENCY PURGE button on the touchscreen as hard as I could, and watched as the armored plastic of the bio-isolation bench darkened to avoid searing my eyes out as the powerful ultraviolet lamps mounted inside the case revved up to full power. Between that and the powerful solvents now being pumped through the case, it was the work of only a minute to destroy any possible microorganism in the chamber, and then I opened it up to be confronted by the tiny blue-glowing bit of Ceph nanotech I'd separated from the main sample and hooked up to the test rig. I stood staring at it, then plopped it back in the vial with the rest of the Ceph sample and walked across to the plasma arc furnace. Tossing the entire Ceph capsule into the chamber and sealing the furnace up again was the work of a moment, and then I walked over to the control panel and cranked the temperature slider all the way up as far as it would go and set up a full 120-second burn. Two minutes at 30,000 degrees. A simple press of a button. And one Imperium-destroying superweapon lost beyond any hope of recovery.

My heart, already down around my shoetops, sank right down into the floor as I realized that there was no Forge prompt in response to the very significant decision I'd just made. No Achievement, no Hidden Quest, nothing. Not the slightest bit of recognition that I'd just faced the bitterest temptation of my long life and made an irreversible decision.

So. The Celestial Forge had no interest in the ethics of my choices. It responded to what I did, and offered me tools and prompts to shape my actions in broad, but it was demonstrably indifferent to morality.

God help us all.
​

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Bit shorter than the chapters before it, but sometimes you reach a stopping point where you just want to let the moment sink in before you pick up again.

Note: She still has everything she learned about nanotechnology design from studying the sample in her perfect memory, before anyone screams 'wasted points!'. But it's not a story where the protagonist doesn't make significant choices, even if that means she risks being wrong. And she was just never going to go for the 'push a button, kill all Vilani everywhere' solution and still be herself.

As to why burn the sample? She refers to it in her inner monologue, but I'll restate it in even plainer English - she was well aware that even if she wasn't willing to ever use that kind of bio-weapon, somebody else might. And that if they had physical possession of the Ceph nanotech it was possible - not likely, but still actually possible - to reproduce her research without her, even if it would obviously take a lot longer and be notably more expensive of a project.

Unspent CP: 400
Purchases: Bolthole Protocol (Honor Harrington)​

 

[nobodez]

Excellent chapter, and a good resolution to the moral and ethical quandary.

So, what's your criteria for what is and isn't "real" pop culture. Obviously anything Traveller related is out, but what else? I'm not looking for a conclusive list, since that's both not possible and hurts the story, but just a general idea of what you're using to restrict something.

 

[yojorocks]

Great chapter- per the prior genius patrol, I really wonder what type of observation that they had on her for time spent in such a facility, and what types of conclusions they might have reached.

GP: well, she retrieved this canister that she has locked up tight from somewhere in Poland. Eh, probably some experiment as a kid.
…
GP: she took this sealed container into an isolation chamber- Hrm, wasn't she working on Cyanobacteria? Wait, why is she weeping and destroying what she was working on? WTF did she just create? We need some in close monitoring, she seems a bit unstable, and we don't want a Mad Scientist Reed Richards scenario popping up. Social stability protocols go!

 

[cliffc999]

All I'm going to say is that it's entirely possible for something to be "real" pop culture... but still not turn up on her datasearch.

 

[Marshall817]

I'm kinda suprised she only got the possibility to make a slow-acting nanospore out of it. while the perk does say it dosen't give every Ceph technology "yields tremendous advances" implies it's not just the nanotechnology to me. i'd have expected how the Ceph Commander works and thus it's Energy Shield at least, some wireless energy stuff from how the hivemind connected, it's Plasma SMG etc

 

[mannan]

I think it could have given more, but she only got that much from rudimentary and incredibly limited interaction and observation of it. Not even for a full year before she destroyed it.

 

[cliffc999]

Actually, it was only about a month. Remember, she gets to MIT shortly after the start fall semester, and destroys the sample after several lab sessions' with it, at the end of October.