update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/neviim/local/tycho/007.md

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+# Tycho Brahe#Artemis --- 2346
+
+"Alright, are you ready?" True Name said.
+
+Tycho nodded, "Ready as I'll ever be."
+
+The transition from System proper to DMZ was as seamless as any, though when he checked systime, he found that nearly twenty seconds had passed. That would be an unimaginably long transit time within the system, where the transit between sims would take place faster than he would have been able to perceive.
+
+"Well, that was not so bad," True Name said, walking out into the cloistered courtyard that had been set up for the meeting. "Now, let us check communication."
+
+He wasn't able to sense anyone other than True Name and Answers Will Not Help. There was no options for a sensorium message with any others. He strained as hard as he could to sense Tycho#Tasker or Codrin Bălan or anyone else he could think of. There was simply nothing there. The sim was immutable and the disconnection complete.
+
+True Name stood for several minutes in the shade of a tree, looking thoughtful as she ran through some internal checklist. At one point, he felt a sensorium ping from her.
+
+"Fantastic," she said, nodding. "Exos all there, no access to sensoria, no transit, nothing. Reputation market looks on track for the DMZ as well."
+
+Tycho checked his reputation, pegged at a simple *1000 Ŕ*, and then the costs. Sim creation into the tens of thousands, forking well into the millions. No possible way he could afford either. "Will they arrive with the same amount?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. We could not think of a way to decouple reputation entirely from the core functionality of the System," Answers Will Not Help said. "But we could at least make everything prohibitively expensive. This will allow us to pool reputation to modify sim sizes if need be, but forking will be well out of reach."
+
+He nodded and began prowling through the courtyard. It consisted of a large, square area, a fountain in the center, and a large table beside it --- "I will have enough reputation to modify this if need be," True Name explained --- all surrounded by a ring of trees, and that with a ring of covered walkway.
+
+He paced around the perimeter, watching the way the sunlight shone through the trees and cast dancing shadows on the ground. They had been his idea, a lingering remnant from his dream. At two opposite corners, hallways led off to rest and sleeping areas. He walked down the one that led to the humans' quarters, turned around, and looked back toward the courtyard. The view was much the same as in his dreams, though here, the columns from the covered walk offered regularly spaced shadows along the wall.
+
+He nodded approvingly and made his way back out to the central meeting area.
+
+A copy of Jonas had also made his way into the sim and was poking his way around the table, inspecting pads of paper and pens. As he watched, another Jonas appeared and then quit.
+
+"Alright," the Jonas said. "Textual transmission across the border works as expected. Memories transfer without loss, and merging is the same as always. Good job, everyone."
+
+Answers Will Not Help bowed with a flourish. "I am glad that you enjoy, O great political teacher."
+
+He laughed and tossed a pen at her.
+
+"Are you regretting your decision to stay behind?" True Name asked.
+
+"Does it count as regret if I've always wanted to go with?" He grinned, shrugged. "But it's a good setup you have. Only one set of cocladists, only one politician. It gives them a wide gamut to experience."
+
+The skunk nodded. "Perhaps we will open it up at the end and you will get to meet them. Maybe some of them will stay behind and live within the DMZ."
+
+"We'll see." Jonas waved to Tycho as he joined them around the table. "And here's our scientist. Thanks for providing us with your dreamscape. It's a nice place to hold a conference. We've got everything from ancient Roman architecture to contemporary S-R Bloc conference tables."
+
+Tycho shrugged. "It seemed like a nice place. Glad you like. When is this even going to happen, by the way?"
+
+"Three days from now. They'll be one light-hour out, at that point, which will provide minimal risk during transit while still giving us the most time for the conference. With our burn, it should give us about six weeks together until we reach the point where we're at one light-hour apart again."
+
+"Six weeks sounds like a long conference."
+
+"We do not know how long the conference will last," True Name said. "It could be over in an hour if they prove to be pests. All we will need to do is shut down the Ansible, leave the DMZ, and wipe everything within it."
+
+He frowned. "Wouldn't they be able to leave, too?"
+
+"The border is governed by the same ACLs we are used to. One must have permission to transit." She grinned. "But I do not expect that we will need to do this. With all of the chatter we have done in the last few weeks and with what my cocladists say about the language, they sound like a nice enough group."
+
+"How do you figure?" Tycho asked. He prowled through his memories of the language that he'd learned in the interim. "It feels mostly...uh, normal, to me, if that's the right word. They've got all the same concepts for what we have. Bunch of words about fur, seems like."
+
+True Name grinned all the wider. "Which automatically makes them better."
+
+"That's mostly the point, though," Answers Will Not Help said. "They do not have a superfluity of words for war, weapons, fighting, of course, but they also do not have words for discussion that are so fine-grained that we will be out of our depth. They will talk much like us, which makes them easier to predict."
+
+"Besides," the skunk continued. "You have read all of the messages we have received. They sound excited to meet us. They keep talking about how long it has been since they have had one of these 'convergences' that they keep talking about. I am picking up the sense of an ulterior motive behind all that they say. Or, well, perhaps not an ulterior motive such as a deeper version of their explicitly stated motives of having these talks. I think that they might want something out of it that they are not stating outright."
+
+Tycho pulled out one of the chairs at the conference table and sat down, the others following suit shortly after.
+
+"Isn't that kind of shady, though?" he asked.
+
+Both Jonas and True Name shook their heads.
+
+"Political adroitness isn't a bad thing," Jonas said. "It shows that they are a social culture, and that they are willing to at least try and move us in a certain direction. That, in turn, means that we can do the same to them without feeling bad about it."
+
+"One would think that constructing something like this--" Tycho waved his arm at the sim and, by extension, the System that contained it. "--would require some sort of politicking, right?"
+
+"Well, sure, but it could've been an authoritarian regime that press-ganged its population into building their version of the System in the first place."
+
+"What about the other races, though?"
+
+He shrugged. "That wouldn't have proved much. Maybe their System would have remained a totalitarian regime and they subsumed the other races. Still, seeing things like secondrace's language being the *lingua franca* rather than that of firstrace helps. Seeing these little glimpses of individuality are heartening. They sound like a varied culture, which is good for us."
+
+Tycho nodded.
+
+"And before you ask why that does not make it more difficult for us," True Name said. "Them having a varied culture means that there are at least some some that might be sympathetic to us."
+
+"Or susceptible to," he said.
+
+He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. He felt in a precarious position, surrounded as he was by three politicians. Calling them out on their machinations was a dangerous move.
+
+Answers Will Not Help giggled. Even True Name and Jonas were grinning. "You continue to amaze and delight, my dear," she said. "But yes, it does make them susceptible to our wicked ways."