Angela Moira Delaware’s copy of the Eclipse Phase Character Questionnaire By ShadowDragon8685

1: How did the Fall affect you, and where were you when it happened? I both was and wasn’t extant at the time, though I have full recall of those days. I’m a fork (of a fork,) of the original Angela Moira Delaware who wasn’t forked until afterwards. Not that I’m not Angela Delaware - I am. We all are. Anyway, I remember it well. I remember being terrified, because one of the things they don’t tell you about sleeving into a Neotenic is that you get back the full range of childish wonder - including childish fear. Which, let me tell you, was in hyperdrive given there was enough fear going around in those days to make grown people scream and weep.

I was safe from the Fall - I had a nice vantage point from my hab in the Saturnine Trojans. We didn’t get any TITAN greebliness out where we were, but it was an immense relief when everybody agreed more or less that the TITANs were gone and we could get back to the business of being alive.

Being afraid didn’t stop us from taking advantage of the chaos on New Humanity - we were still ostensibly a hypercorp social experiment hab at the time, but with all the shaking up that was going on, we took the opportunity to cast off our corporate overlords and declare ourselves an Anarcho-Collectivist habitat.

I still checked under my bed for TITANs for a year afterward, though.

2: How did you come into being? I was born - three times. And no, I don’t mean some stupid spiritual “born again” crap. I mean I literally remember being born three times. If I ever fork, that fork will remember four times; my three, and her own.

I was born as the original Angela “Angie” Delaware. I lived a nifty life as her; grew up with parents who loved me and cared for me, which was a trick given they lived in a cluster hab a few steps above a tin can, as they were original space colonists. I lived that life for a long time; I grew up, learning things like how to maintain a habitat, how to work in a body bank, etcetera. I experienced the “joys” of overcrowding, and decided to strike out on my own, egocasting to New Humanity to take part in an interesting and tantalizing experiment. I took part in the Neo-Anarchist revolution on New Humanity with great enthusiasm, though there weren’t any fatalities and none of the pigs got spaced, sadly.

I worked out how to make functional hermaphrodite morphs without testicles, because seriously, they got in the way and were kinda stupid and unpleasant, I decided to alpha fork myself to find out if it was sex or masturbation to have sex with your own fork. (It’s sex. Also incest, though the novelty wears off after a few weeks.) I then forked again, and it was the second fork who pointed out the pale pachyderm: we couldn’t all just be Angela Delaware, it would be too confusing, and appending numbers was deeply unappealing. (And also, to settle the question of threesomes. In a word? Awesome.)

Then I got ahold of some Slyph genetics cracked from some hypercorp DNA blueprints, and I had an idea. It takes a while, about three years, to force-grow a biomorph, and there is some run-up time when modifying/designing from scratch. So I spent a few days nailing down everything I wanted my new morph to be, used the ego bridge in my body lab to take a backup of myself, and I woke up a little over three years later in the body I’d designed. That was my second birth, as Angela Celestia Delaware. Being a slyph is great, let me tell you. (I mean, being an Olympian is great, and so is being a Neotenic... But trying out new things is nice.) That morph leaned me towards artistic endeavors, and I became a real Artiste, throwing myself head-first into the business of body-sculpting. Not merely beautiful, well-made bodies, Celestia and I make works of living, breathing, panting, orgasmic art out of morphs. (Not just biomorphs, but mainly biomorphs.)

About a year after my morpological artistic take-off, I wondered what to do with myself. New Humanity was getting fairly crowded with me, to say nothing of the solar system. I like having lots of sisters, but it also afforded me the opportunity to do things I hadn’t done before. Specifically, I’d always regretted that I’d never had any formal education. On the other hand, I kind of also wanted to get close to Gatecrashing. I didn’t think I’d really have a shot at either, so to double my chances, I submitted a request to join the Love & Rage collective on Oberon, and an application to Titan Autonomous University.

Both were accepted, so I did what I did best. I forked, met myself face to face, kissed, fucked, and then we flipped an analogue random number generator. I, Moira, got to go to Titan and go to university, while I, Celestia, the previous I, got to go to Oberon and join the Love & Rage Collective.

3: What are you now? A Hazer, naturally, given that I’m on Titan. I guess I could have pulled strings to get something else, but why would I? It was on the verge of being recycled, since its neurology has a noted problem from its plasticity mod (for retaining childlike ease of learning,) retaining memory fragments from prior egos, and the last owner had it modified in ways most Titanians consider wastefully extravagant - massive, luxurious, bright red hair, and breasts as large as its head, and a weirdly oval chin.

I fell in love with it at first sight and volunteered to take it, neurology flaw and all. (They told me I didn’t need to feel pressured into taking a flawed morph and could arrange a loaner until a proper morph was available to me; I had to specify that I wanted this one.) I didn’t feel afraid of any memory artifacting (I like trying new things, recall, and if it got super-terribad I could always restore from my egocast backup,) but I’ve lived in this body almost four years and never experienced one. Oh, I had it modified extensively, of course, on top of the pre-existing heavy body-sculpting and nanotats, a ghostrider module, a clean (but hot-burning) metabolism, linguistics and maths modifications, I of course implemented hermaphroditic gender, a circadian regulation system, electrosense, Medichines and nanophage, and reconfigured the nanotats to my preference - currently I have a cute little purple thing framing my eyes, and the entire Autonomist Alliance Points of Unity printed on my slender little back, their text forming the circle of the Circle-@. Yes, I literally wear my politics on my skin: I do come from the habitat that quite literally nailed our colors to the mast during the Second Battle of Locus.

4: Where do you live or come back to? I consider two places home, actually. The first is New Humanity, of course, the home of my family of sisters. I miss that torus/cluster hybrid, I miss my body labs and genehacking work, I miss the sense of sisterhood I had with all my twins, and the sense of camraderie and sorority that came from living on the habitat itself. The sex? Sure, I miss that, too. I can always go back, of course...

But I also consider Aarhus my home, too. I’m the first of my sisterhood (heh, we have a sisterhood and we can mean it in every sense of the word,) to hold citizenship in a statist polity. I’m not in love with the statism and all, but earning that citizenship with three years of civil service was the price to attend TAU, and as statist polities go, the Titanian Commonwealth is definitely one I could live with forever, if I had to.

That doesn’t mean I’m not rocking the vote full-@ at every opportunity, which on Titan comes about twice an hour, of course. I’d like to see Titan go full transparency on everything, and allow for anarcho-collectivist habitats to form on the surface of Titan. But for right now, and the foreseeable future, an apartment in Aarhus, in one of many apartment blocks just like it, is where I live. It has a nice big bed with silky, high-tech sheets, a hot shower with indefinite hot water allowance that’s big enough to push a woman against the wall in, a desk, a few blob-bag pieces of configurable furniture, my militia armor and rifle in their cabinet, and of course, my Desktop CM.

What more could a girl ask for, really? I learn hard, party hard, tinker hard, and sleep as little as possible.

5: What do you do? I do what I do! More specifically, I’m a full-time student at Titan Autonomous University; I just completed a semester and am between terms. I got high marks in Engineering, Nanotechnology, and Polisci, the subjects I came to study. Practical courses don’t start until next year, though. In the meantime, I do give a day’s service each week as a habitat technician - I don’t mind it at all. Frankly, if you’re living anywhere that doesn’t have a fully breathable atmosphere and you aren’t personally vested in the upkeep of your habitat, you’re nuts! The rest of my time I either spend studying, mailing/chatting with my fellow students or the faculty (and it’s not just one-way; remember, I am a fork of a published practical geneticist with a bit of standing on RNA,) exploring my new home, or just looking for women interested in trying a hermaphrodite on for size.

6: Where do you stand, politically? I literally have the circle-A nano-tattooed on my back, with the Autonomist Alliance Points of Unity worked into the circle. That alone should tell you all you need to know about my politics. I will always go full-@, and inside the AA, I support collectivism the most. I can live with Titanian-style technosocialism. Fuck the Extropians, I and all my forks voted to expel those two-faced lying motherfuckers from the Alliance, because evidently they’re suffering from willful cognitive dissonance sufficient to somehow claim to support the Points of Unity and then turn around and make people sell themselves into indentured servitude under threat of being killed or spaced or whatever and claim that nobody was coerced into doing anything!

Fuck the Extropians, man. They’re worse than the PC Hypercorps; they’re actually more hypocritical! Also fuck the PC, hypercorps in general (Titan never should have sold the Pandora Gate to the fucking Pathfinder corp, even if they did form it,) many hypercorps (especially go-nin, cognite, and any corp involved heavily in indenture,) in particular. Fuck the LLA for being the shitheel conservative classist biochauvanist fucks they are, especially considering that they made the Lunar underclass and forced them into synthetic morphs in the first place. Fuck the LLA twice for being the bankers propping up the last gasps of the bullshit currency economy. Fuck the Morningstar Constellation for breaking away from the PC only to be almost as bad. As for the Jovians, well... Hate.

6.1: I’m going to name some particularly polarizing political entities.

Oh, you want me to go over it again, once more with feeling? Glad to oblige.

6.1a: The Morningstar Constellaiton. The Morningstar Constellation are a bunch of virulently hypocritical bastards. They broke away from the PC over the high-altitude terraformation thing, which is nice and all, and then they went and claimed they were going to be better than the PC. Only problems are, not only did they not take the whole planet from the PC (lots of habs in orbit and two of the aerostats are still PC-controlled,) but while they did improve in some ways (and it’s true that they engage in nearly no censorship,) they still practice rule-by-the-hypercorps and indentured servitude. So really, fuck every son of a bitch sitting happy in an aerostat, drinking champagne or whatever and enjoying their vast stacks of wealth, doing so entirely because of an oppressed mass of synths that keep the aerostats in order and an even worse-off class of desperates sleeved into Quartz morphs on the surface of the Venusian hell-hole!

6.1b: The Lunar-Lagrange Alliance. When the robot revolution comes to Luna, I will cheer, and when it succeeds, I will gloat. It’s entirely possible I, or one of my siblings, will be there to be part of it, hopefully sleeved into a Masked Steel morph. (It’s not a proper revolution without victory sex. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.) The LLA are tards of the ass; they received the brunt of the egocasting infugees, and those they didn’t forward they packed into crowded habitats, both in orbit of Earth and Luna, in lagrangian orbits, and on Luna itself, often without care for how those populations got along - that led to a lot of blood- and coolant-shed. They forced desperate infugees, the most destitute refugees in the whole of human civilization, those who escaped with nothing but their egoes, to sleeve into synthetic morphs under extortionate indenture terms, making them slave away to maintain their societies while they live it large in their ivory towers, and then they went full bio-chauvinist, jeering and abusing people - sapient, living people, just because they were sleeved into a mechanical body, usually not by any measure of choice!

Fuck the LLA, man. I hope it falls. I hope the synths do something drastic like seize and threaten to space all the water in that huge tank-city, something that will make the LLA sit up and start dealing with them, or better yet, just straight-up overthrow the power and declare An-Collectivism...

Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

6.1c: The Reclamation of Earth. I’ve never had any first-person experience with the planet Earth. I was born off it, I never saw it with my own eyes except as a very, very distant speck in the night sky. But I want to see Transhumanity reclaim it. First off, no matter what the PC says, I find it very hard to believe that the Fall exterminated every last human on the planet. Simple principle at work: if someone’s trapped on a dying, damaged habitat, you do everything possible to get them off it. (If they want to go, obviously.) You move heaven and earth, as my dad would say.

Second, the planet Earth is the habitat which transhumanity literally evolved to live on. The total amount of habitable volume in the solar system in which a flat can live without wearing any life support equipment is approximately nothing compared to the volumes of habitable flat land that still exists on Earth, even using very marginal definitions of the word “Habitable.”

Thirdly: it’s ours. Earth belongs to all of transhumanity, to everyone. It’s no more right for the PC to lock it off with a ring of deniable kill-sats than it would be for them to lay claim to a habitat’s fabrication feedstock stores and station Reapers to shoot anyone who tries to use any.

Lastly: I want to see it. I want to be there on the day when the last TITAN-designed war machines are swept away, when the environment is cleaned. I want to find some old, old thing built by human hands, climb to the top of it, and say that not even the Fall could keep us away from our heritage.

Still, we’ve got time. I’m not in a big hurry about it, except for that whole “finding survivors and evacuating them” thing.

6.1d: The Planetary Consortium. Fuck. The. PC. I should get those words added to my tats - maybe I will. Give me a moment.

Okay, I have “Fuck the PC” with the PC’s logo and a “no” symbol over it on my lower back. Not bad for sixty second’s work. Anyway, fuck the PC. They did everything the LLA did (see above for my grievances with the LLA,) and worse. In addition to being behind the creation of the clanking masses, and then the oppression, marginalization, and underclassization of those said same clanking masses, they’ve been doing it to the Barsoomians for years and years. I’m blacklisted from CivicNet because one of my sisters is wanted as an “economic terrorist” on Mars - she’s fucking fixing the Rusters’ fucking GRM, so they aren’t constantly developing shit transhumanity had cured nearly a century ago, like asthma or whatever, and so they aren’t forced to pay the PC extortionate seasonal prices for a “Genetic Service Pack” or worse, to scrounge and save for years and years and years to buy a full genetic fix from the PC at ridiculous prices.

Also, if they see what they like and you don’t have enough violence at your disposal to force them to pay you for it, they’ll just take it. The PC didn’t find the fucking Martian Gate, a bunch of Suffi nomads did. When the nomads refused the PC’s offer to buy it from them for a pittance, the PC just moved in with their armed forces and fucking took it from them. Slaughtered them like pigs on an old Earth pig-farm and took it from them. Just straight up “Yeah, we want what you have, so we’re gonna have a war to take it from you, kithxbai” like in the brutal and savage days of the early twentieth century. (More on the Martian Gate later.) This is a pattern that hypercorps repeat, time and time again. Locus? They sent a war-fleet - a fucking war fleet! to either conquer and/or destroy the station, citing that they were protecting their own interests from resource thieves organized from Locus (like they ever really fucking noticed any of the losses from Locus’s whaling operations,) and to attack a center of intellectual property infringement.

Yep, that’s the PC. “If you infringe on our intellectual property, we’ll infringe upon the sanctity of your morph. With guns. And then we’ll enslave you.” FUCK THE PC! The PC sees its manifest destiny as hegemony over the entirety of human civilization, as can be seen by the operations tempo at the Martian Gate. Their naked aggression against Locus was clearly their declaration of intent to forcibly bring all anarchists and powers that aren’t them violently into their fold, and we fucking stoved their heads in for it.

Oh, and as regards the PC’s gatecrashing? The motherfuckers keep to a schedule down to the minute - come hell or high water. They’ve literally closed the gate on people in mid-transit and then told them to get fucked, they wouldn’t so much as pay for the healing vat time, they should’ve been faster through the gate, blah-blah. They also have been known to shut the gate with wounded gatecrashers limping back to the gate in visual range of the probe, all in the name of the almighty credit.

Yeah. Fuck them all.

6.1e: The Jovian Junta. The Junta thinks I’m an abomination in the eyes of their Gods. I think they’re an abomination on the face of our solar system. I want to see the LLA, the Morningstar Commonwealth, the PC, etcetera, toppled in a massive revolution from below. The Junta?

There’s just no fucking hope for the Junta. I want to see Titan arm its interplanetary antimatter missile silos and let fly. I want to see a wave of relativistic kill vehicles fly in out of the black and smash the Junta apart. I want them wiped from the face of the solar system, erased like bad data or an ugly entopic display.

They make people live in flats. They censor things so hard that people are zeroes. They willfully refuse to use technologies that could turn habitats which are going outright septic right the hell around, and they refuse the bio-mods that could let people live in Jovian orbit without hunkering down beneath a kilometer of rock.

There’s no cure for the kind of sick the Junta is. They’re a fascist police state, a biocon nightmare. They are anathema to everything I stand for. If Jupiter shocked into the stellar cycle and literally fried them all in the vapors of their own shit, I would rejoice.

I’m sorry, but I would. I know, anarchists don’t believe in punishment and all that. It’s not punishment. As far as I’m concerned, it’s excising a tumor from all of transhumanity. If they had the chance, they’d do the same to us, so I say we should do them first. I’d even support teaming up with the PC if that was what it took to get a good, proper war of annihilation going on and wipe the Junta out.

6.1f: The Autonomist Alliance. <3

I wasn’t born an autonomist, I saw the light when the word “Scum” came into wide use to describe, well, the Scum. When the chaos of the Fall let the opportunity in, I took it with both hands and participated gladly in the overthrow of the corporate overlords who were running New Humanity. Is it perfect? No, it isn’t - for one thing, we’re tolerating the presence of Anarcho-Capitalists, the fucking Extropian filth. Nevertheless, I live and breathe the Alliance, and I’m very vocal in it, constantly agitating for the Extropians to either shape up their act regarding indenture, or be ejected. I vote on other things, too, any time a vote comes up.

6.1f1: The Titanian Commonwealth. I want to love the Commonwealth, I really do. Skandinavíska is a beautiful language, the Commonwealth is full of beautiful, brilliant people, many of whom are sexually open women with whom I get along with, and the Chewy Gristle Commentary Hour is straight-up the most hilarious and accurate gonzo journalism newscast I have ever seen. (Not to mention that Momo von Satan is hot and funny and witty, and oh gods, the acerbicity! I love replaying that encoded XP of her taking a bath in a waterfall of milk.) The Commonwealth provides the majority of the muscle that enforces the Autonomist Alliance’s autonomism. I liked it so much I moved here, willingly subjecting myself to a statist polity.

But it’s not all good. Their microcorp and kroner system is kind of bullshit, I think. It would be so much better to just have people vote on what gets done, rather than “earning” their bullshit “social money” through service and “spending” it to bolster the projects they want most. I mean, sure, I get my pittance of Kroner (I’m not exactly in a hurry to bust my ass to earn more than the minimum stipend - that would be entirely too much like working in a currency-using job for me,) and spend it as I see fit, but it always feels weird to me and I usually let Thalia, my muse, handle that. I also don’t like how their first five founding microcorps are immune to the Commonwealth’s transparency requirements, as well as the organs of governmental action. I hate hierarchies, but if you’re going to have one, transparency is always better than opacity. They need to shape up their act, but fortunately, with growing numbers of true anarchists attracted, the act appears to be shaping up.

6.1f2: Anarcho-Collectivism. Anarcho-Collectivism makes so much sense. In a post-scarcity society, or one which is functionally post-scarcity, hierarchy exists to facilitate the hierarchy. I do not hold to that, I don’t see why some wankers on Mars should set the direction of my home habitat because they spent their pointless “credits” on having it built. Currency and consumerism are weird, disgusting fetishes, they’re fetishes of power and control. And not even the sexy kind of power and control, but the kind of lording over other transhuman beings because you control the means of production. But in our society, why do they control the means of production? Because they use their money to buy the police and mercenaries who enforce the laws they passed to outlaw nanofabrication technologies that empower individuals and small collectives to make their own existence! It’s a disgusting cycle, and it has to end. Anarcho-Collectivism is the way of the future. We just haven’t yet nailed down the means by which collectivist habs can grow to sizes sufficient to fully fight off and fight back against the hierarchists, the fascists and corpocratists who would sail in and force us to adhere to their doctrines of money and power if they could. Fortunately, we’re working on it, and we’re also banding fully together in the name of “No FUCK YOU!” towards the PC, the Junta, the LLA, Morningstar, Ultimates, etcetera and we’re bringing the Titanians along for the ride. They’re cool enough to hang with us, and hopefully they’ll see the light and we can work out something where society goes full an-collectivist and the military stays functional and supplied.

6.1f3: Extropians. I lack the words to describe the depth of my loathing and hatred for Extropians. They got lumped in with us somehow, largely for mutual protection, I suppose, but they are not like us. In an alliance with four major ideologies, some would say that the Titanians stand out as being the only statist polity, but in truth it’s the Extropians who don’t fit.

Anarcho-Capitalism is everything that inner-system morons imagine our true anarchism to be - it’s dog-eat-dog, do-as-you-please anarchism, with only a system of agreements and contracts to prevent utter depredation in the habitats. This is not what Autonomism is about, people! On an @narchist hab, there are no laws, but there are rules. For instance, we all agree that if some maniac is stealing forks of people to turn into his virtual pleasure slaves, we will not tolerate that shit and we will fucking grab his ass, forcibly unsleeve him from his morph, and exile his ass. If someone decides to start lobbing molotov cocktails into the atmosphere filtration system, we agree that everybody with a gun (IE, everybody,) who feels willing and able should proceed immediately if not sooner to his location and riddle the lunatic who’s trying to kill us all with holes. And then get his stack into an ego bridge to find out exactly what in the living hell possessed him to do that. But you know who decides? Everybody. We all decide what the rules are, and we all enforce them as it is necessary to do so.

Extropians don’t have any rules, they just have contracts. So, for instance, if you go to an Extropian station and neglect to negotiate a security contract with one of the security providers, and someone else decides they want to mug you for anything that you have on you, or force themselves upon you or whatever, there are no rules preventing that. Some good samaritan might, if they choose, come to your aid, but if the guy who’s trying to rape you has a security contract, depending on the terms of his contract, the security bots might protect him from those who would be your protectors! Everything is handled by contract and money, they fucking fetishize money and contracts. Even traditional, hierarchical law and order, as corrupt as that is, would be better than the justice-for-hire practiced by extropians.

And worse is the fucking indenture! Say you’re on Extopia and you have a gambling problem, and you go deeply into debt. Well, now you’re in deep shit, because the contract you signed when you started gambling with the casino states the penalties for going into debt and being unable to pay, and it’s going to be something stupid like five or ten years’ indentured servitude. Oh, sure, they can’t make you submit to the terms you agreed to, but they can send the case to the freelance Extropian judge who was stipulated when you started gambling as the arbiter of any disputes. And if that judge rules against you, well... There’s no cops. They can’t haul you to a debtor’s prison. Technically, they aren’t forcing anyone or coercing anyone to do anything against their will.

Except that if you have an outstanding judicial judgement against you, that terminates all your protection contracts. Remember those things? The only thing standing between you and anyone who decides to shoot you in the processor and steal your morph for parts? The only thing standing between you and anyone who decides to get their rape on? The only thing standing between you and the guys whose contracts you just violated popping your stack with a paring knife and selling you into ego slavery to the ID Crew?

Yep. Those protection contracts. All gone. And funnily enough, guess who you can usually hire to do bad things to people who have just had their security contracts terminated by a judicial order they refused to comply with? If you said “The Judge,” you’re right! If you said “The security contractors,” you’re also right. In fact if you said anything that didn’t specifically exclude anybody, you’re absolutely right, because there’s nothing stopping you from putting out a literal contract on someone on Extropia, it’s just that if you put out a contract on someone who has a protection contract, you’ll wind up in an extropian legal nightmare. But if that person has no valid, actively-enforced protection contracts, they’re fair game for anything that anybody wants to do to them.

But no, they didn’t force anybody into indentured servitude, oh no. That would have violated their contracts! Oh, and answer me this... When our hypothetical gambler with a gambling problem goes to an Extropian casino to lose all their weird fetish-chits, exactly how much negotiating power do you think they really have to wield against that casino? I agree with the Argonauts: Extropianism is an interesting real-world social experiment to see how long it will take to devolve into financial feudalism.

Fucking Extropia. I’d love to see an RKV plow right through the middle of that motherfucking hab, and every hab like it.

6.1f4: The Scum. The Scum are fun. One of my sisters lives on a Scum barge, and describes it as basically a nonstop orgy of all the sweet little southeast asian ass she can plow, with intermittent bouts of thrilling heroics any time pirates or exhumans get close. Having lived her XP casts, well... She’s probably not exaggerating at all.

Not that I envy her. I can live through her orgies any time I want by playing the XP. And meanwhile, I have just about all of the tall, thin, blonde and raven Scandinavian women I can handle.

Anyway, in general, the Scum? They can be charitably described as the same as anarcho-collectivists, but on the move. That’s not quite the case, though, they’re quite happy to deal in money and resources and rep system gaming with outsiders. They just don’t fuck with each other. (I mean, they fuck each other, and with great enthusiasm, they just don’t cheat each other, or demand money from each other. Usually. And when it comes up, they handle it.)

Scum look out for the Scum, first and foremost. Fleets float through the Saturnine trojans every now and then, and they passed by New Humanity a lot. After we threw off the corporate overlords and thus, weren’t subject to any rules as regards polluting the experiment pool, I liked shuttling to the Scum fleets for a good time, or having a good time with the Scum who came to us. The Scum generally like me, since my body mods, especially my more artistic ones, suit them. Even I think that some of what the do is extreme and weird, especially places like Carnivale or Carnival of the Goat... But in a good way. It’s good to have people pushing the absolute boundaries, and they certainly push the boundaries of hedonism.

Just remember: loosen your pants all you want, but keep your CMs locked up tighter than an Extropian bank vault when the Scum float by. Welded to the floor would not be inappropriate. They’ll even steal from other anarchists if they can get away with it.

6.1g: The Argonauts. I kind of respect the Argonauts’ dedication to science. I mean, I am an Argonaut, but not in good standing. I publish enough to have some r-Rep, and some of my more-published siblings actually have a decent r-Rep score, but I’m not a formally-trained scientist by any means. And worse, by their point of view, I’m waaay too politicized, and some of them detract the things that I do as being of puerile nature, of little scientific merit.

As regards the puerile thing, they need to get the stick out of their asses. As regards being politicized, the Argonauts need to apply the socratic method to the politics of the solar system. They support open research on everything. The Jovians hate science, blaming it for the fall. They support the Open-Source ideal, believing that all information should be free. The PC and LLA heavily censor anything “Open-Source,” because it infringes on somebody’s patents, somewhere, and also because they hate unrestricted, open-source nanofabrication on account of it empowering the individual.

The Jovians, PC, and LLA are not the Argonaut’s friends, whereas the Autonomist Alliance and all of its constituents except the Scum, are. They need to realize that fact and pick a side, pick the right side, because if the PC gets the upper hand, once they’re done conquering the anarchists and titanians, they’re coming for the Argonauts, assuming the exhumans or Ultimates don’t get them first. And the Jovians are worse - if the PC topples the Argonauts, they’ll enslave them all. If the Jovians get their hands on them, they’ll fucking torch their stacks!

Seriously, the Argonauts became their own faction because they never again wanted to have to justify research of any sort on the basis of profitability. Why is it taking them so long to realize they fit right into the Alliance?! If the Argonauts joined in full force, we’d have the power and the tech to retake the Discord Gate - to lock the corps forever in-system of the belt!

6.1h: The Ultimates. Fucking. Lunatic. Social Darwinians.

That’s really all there is to say about the Ultimates. See above my wishes as re: the ultimate fate of the Jovian Junta. Copy/pasta and replace the Junta with the Ultimates. As far as I’m concerned, these maniacs aren’t one step removed from exhumans, they are exhumans, and should be denounced and treated as such... Them controlling that fucking Discord Gate worries me, and don’t let any motherfucker tell you Go-Nin controls the Gate - the Ultimates do. They just let Go-Nin believe they control it.

6.1i: Exhumans and Singularity Seekers. The definition of “Transhumanity” is expanding to include the entire family, including the neo-uplifts and the AGIs and I support that. But Exhumans and Singularity Seekers take it too far. These lunatics don’t want to push the boundaries of what it means to be transhuman, they want to push ahead to something that isn’t human. I find that kind of skeevy, honestly, but you get real problems when you get into the ones who don’t want to be transhuman, and want to annihilate those that or, or assimilate them or whatever. I like what I am now, thank you very much.

That goes back to anarchism. I don’t care what someone wants to be, and if they want to alter themselves into something fundamentally alien, that’s up to them. I won’t try to say that’s not their right to self-determine their own course. When they decide to force their course upon others, or just annihilate them outright, however, then I have a problem - and that is what makes an exhuman.

And as for Singularity Seekers... They get lumped in with exhumans a lot, but do some fucking research on Sol Archive before you paint them all in the same color. Some Singularity Seekers are exhumans, some are not; likewise, not all Exhumans are Singularity Seekers. They worry me, a little, since they look at what happened with the TITANs and want to follow in their footsteps - either literally, chasing them throughout the galaxy to try and get uploaded into some kind of TITAN gestalt mind (whaaaat?) or to have their own, transhuman-based singularity of recursive self-improvement.

Some people consider them all an existential risk to transhumanity... I don’t approve of that outlook. Singularity Seekers are not necessarily malignant towards the rest of transhumanity, nor will they necessarily turn out that way. They might turn out dangerous that way, but if we follow that line of thought, we get into PC-style alienation and delete-on-sightism as regards AGIs and other forms of infolife that didn’t happen to be born biologically first (acknowledge your cognitive biases, fuckwads, that’s high-spectrum biochauvanism,) and if you go further, you find yourself in the Jovian fucking Junta.

6.1j: The TITANs. TITANs, TITANs, TITANs, TITANs, TITANs. That’s all some people can talk about.

I don’t think it’s worth worrying about. The TITANs collapsed civilization as we knew it before the Fall, and they almost certainly could have finished the job if they’d wanted to.

They didn’t. I don’t know why; maybe they unexpectedly developed a sense of mercy, maybe they completed their plans to evacuate away from us and followed through. I don’t know, I’m not a computer-demigod psychiatrist.

What I do know is that they could have finished us, and they didn’t. They left instead. For my kroner (ugh, I hope that’s just a figure of speech that’s leeched into my lexicon, not a sign that I’m starting to turn financialistic,) I figure they were only fighting us for as long as had to in order to get out of Dodge... And then they got while the getting was good. They don’t care about us one way or another - we’re a null string in their calculations.

Either way, they’re not worth worrying about. If they want to come back and wipe us all out, there’s probably nothing we can do about it, and definitely nothing I can do about it. If they don’t, then wasting time worrying about it is pointless; either way, I have so many more things to devote my time to, like sleek, blonde Hazers with an appetite for excessive breasts, or applying myself to higher and higher education, or catching a news update on MRGCNN so I can have a laugh.

6.2 I’m going to name some polarizing issues, which are different from polarizing politics, per se. Again: Where do you stand?

6.2a: Indenture. Indenture is slavery, but it’s not pure and simple slavery. No, it’s complicated financial slavery, wherein the master makes various promises they will do anything in their power to prevent themselves from having to keep, because it’s in their financial interest to continue to exploit the indentured person as long as they possibly can.

Let me give you an example, and I wish to fuck I was making this up. Suppose you work for the Planetary Consortium and get an indenture contract for infomorph data-handling work. The terms are grueling, but short; one year of solid, uninterrupted uptime going full-tilt handling data, and then they cut you loose with a case morph. To put that in perspective, a case morph costs 1,000 credits, and I can manufacture one and put it together with my very meager engineering skills on my desktop CM in the span of about a week - as a hobby build. An industrial nanofabricator can knock one out in about an hour. (As an aside, another morph with an identical price point is called the Spare - it’s a tiny little thing favored by gatecrashers as, well, a spare, given you can literally pop a stack out of someone, clean the blood off, slot it into the spare and they come right back. I can manufacture one wholesale in my CM in an afternoon.)

So, you have that messy contract; one year’s time as basically a sapient file server, in exchange for the cheapest possible Case they can be bothered to manufacture. By itself, that’s the very definition of usurious, but it gets better. First off, in the fine print - if you have any time to examine the fine print of your own contract, that is - you realize that they’ve used the Planetary Consortium-adopted Martian year instead of the Earth year you’re used to, because you’re an infugee who’s just been instantiated from cold storage. You’re fresh from the nightmare of the Fall and you don’t know WTF a Planetary Consortium even is, and unless you were a real space nerd back on Earth, you won’t have heard of Gangale or the Gangalan calendar. You were still thinking one Earth year; 364.25 Earth days, or 8,742 hours, or 524,520 minutes; but what you actually hitched up for was one Mars year. First off, instead of being 24 hours long, the Mars day is 24 hours and 40 minutes long, at an approximation. Secondly, and far worse, is that the Martian year is just over 669 Martian days long. You actually signed up for 16,502 hours as you knew them, or 990,120 minutes of work. Not quite exactly twice as long as you thought you were signing up for, but near enough as makes little difference to how cheated you’re going to feel when you instantiate as your little file-server infomorph self and see that your countdown timer is set to almost twice what you believed you were getting into. Having fun yet?

Now, half-way through this nightmare, you get offered a deal; a one-week or two-week vacation in the simulspace resort of your dreams, at 60x acceleration - you ask what that is, and they tell you that it means that time seems to happen faster in Simulspace - IE, if you spend a real-time hour in simulspace at 60x acceleration, you get to experience sixty hours of a luxury resort. The catch is that for every day you spend in the vacation, you owe them another week’s labor. At least by now, you‘ve caught on to the last trick and make sure to ask which days and weeks, and get it in plain electronic signed data that they mean Mars’s days and weeks. You sign on the electronic dotted line, and are whisked away to your vacation. You get treated to a life of electronic luxury for a few experiential weeks, and after the hell of 495,060 minutes of non-stop file handling, secretarial, whatever it was you were doing (which I will point out is very nearly the entirety of what you thought you were getting into,) you deserve a little leisure. That sounds great, doesn’t it?

Of course, once again you didn’t read the fine print, and you certainly couldn’t have because you were still handling files when they made that offer to you. There’s two ways you could have got screwed on this one, and they both suck and involve the same fine print. Maybe your digital vacation, which was supposed to last two weeks, comes to an end after two experiential weeks. That’s not so bad, you think, because for each hour in that luxury resort you spent, you’ve only been away from the job for one minute. You only spent 5.6 hours in simulspace, so you owe them less than a quarter of a week’s extra work, right? Or maybe you spent the full two weeks in 60x accelerated simulspace, and experienced 840 days of a luxury resort - hell, that’s more than your whole hitch, for a mere fourteen more weeks extra work.

But then you realize where they fucked you - you owe them an extra week of real time work for every day you experienced in simulspace, not every day that you actually spent in it. If you experienced that two-week brief holiday in simulspace, you now owe them 98 weeks or 686 more days of work. You’ve managed to extend your hitch by another Martian year, or almost another two Earth years! And if you took a more-than-a-whole-year-off two-week real-time simulspace vacation and got 840 days of simulspace downtime, the gods you believe in have mercy on you, because you now owe them 5,880 more days of real-time work. That’s another 8.79 Mars years, or another sixteen fucking Earth years. On an indenture contract you thought was a one-year hitch! And what can you do about it? You’re an indentured infomorph, you have no guaranteed rights that you can’t sign away under the PC’s laws beyond that they can’t arbitrarily delete you at any time. Of course, if you breach your contract, they can just shove you back in cold storage and you might never get out. The people who got caught in that latter trap are still working it off, the ones who haven’t been rescued, anyway. Starting to see the problem with indenture contracts yet?

It gets worse, because this scenario and permutations upon it that I’m discussing happened many, many times, and is still going on, but the one I’m talking about, in specific, has run its course. So, you got to spend 5.6 hours in 60x simulspace and found your one-year hitch had become a two-year hitch instantaneously, and then found that your two year-hitch had become a four-year hitch one year in. You put your electronic nose to the grindstone and refuse to sign anything else, to take any more deals that will extend your contract in any way, shape, or form. After another year of this, they offer you a new deal - this one won’t extend your contract. In fact, it reduces it - in exchange for revising your contract terms to one year’s time - one Earth year’s time, they agree to, as a measure of recompense for how you felt cheated by them not adequately explaining that before you signed your initial hitch - you no longer get that case morph. You’ll be a free infomorph, but only a free infomorph, you don’t get instantiated in a case, let alone a Ruster. By now, you don’t care. You’ve gotten used to infomorph life, and you plan to get the fuck off Mars and away from these jackals anyway at the earliest possible time. A body would only slow you down and be something you couldn’t take with you. You take the deal, and your indenture is now 364.25 of Earth’s days, counted in Earth’s hours. You get to the end, and you’re told that they just need to process you out of the system, and then you’re free to go.

What you experience next is something almost indescribably mind-shattering. You see, in that second, revamped, infomorph-only contract you agreed to, you agreed that the company could make forks of you if it were deemed economically desirable to do so. There was language in there that they may have informed you of the decision to fork you, but they were under no obligation to do so. So what’s actually happened is that, for that last Earth year, there have been one hundred and eight copies of you, full Alpha Forks, running! Of course, a fork has no legal standing in the PC, so they can’t just release all those forks into the wild, but they can’t just delete them either. So they forcibly merge you - all one-hundred and eight of you. Even though all one-hundred and eight of you have been performing what can generally be thought of as the same task, a year is a massive time to be separated, and with that much differentiation between that many forks, you’re lucky to have hung on to any shred of sanity you had left.

So now, a wrecked, electronically-gibbering husk of a transhuman mind, the company no longer has any use for you as you’re psychologically damaged goods beyond any hope of being of economic use to them. They offer you no more deals, they uphold the very letter of their bargain and they cut you loose into the Martian infosphere.

In all meager fairness to the PC, that case did eventually get brought before the court, and the court ruled against the company that did it - because forcible merging was not a part of the contract. They had no cause to otherwise slap them because of it, though they did outlaw the practice of putting language in a contract allowing them to fork a person without their having been informed and consenting. A settlement was reached - not nearly compensation enough, just about everyone thought, for what that poor woman and those like her went through, and of course it was class-action so they all only got a pittance. Fortunately for her, she had already reached the decision to flee Mars for the outer system before she was forked, and “get to Titan,” was about the only thought she could hold together. She managed to get into the Alliance’s territory and a very powerful, very specialized psychosurgeon AGI managed to put her mostly back together, but she still freaks out any time anyone suggests she forks.

So, that’s indenture. It’s slavery, in complicated and brutal forms, and it’s one of the most disgusting and horrific, usurious practices known to Transhumanity. Those who hold indentures are all exploitative, and have no place in a free and just society of nominally equal persons. That’s what you get when you let hierarchies and financial feudalism have control.

6.2a1: Indenture contracts applied to minors. Let me be clear on this one. It’s usurious in the extreme to make anyone sign any kind of indenture contract. Making a child sign away their childhood as an indenture contract? Every so-called person who has done so should have their backups erased, their bodies fed to a recycler because the taint is too great to risk their re-use, and their stacks should be fucking torched.

They’re a cancer on society, bad cognitive data. When you get to be so sociopathic that you’d do that, you’re beyond salvation, even with the help of the best psychosurgeon in the solar system, and I should know because I hang out with her.

6.2b: Uplifts. Uplifts are people. It’s that simple - they’re sapient beings and deserve every dignity and respect that entails. Several of my sisters have wound up in relationships with uplifts, and some have found their way to New Humanity or Titan, but that’s not the point. They’re people, and deserve to be treated as such. Full stop.

If you want details on those relationships... Well, let me just say that being a long-term partner of a wandering neo-bonobo scientist is an experience, and a good one, and that dolphins are every bit as playful and devious as you can imagine. Yes, I know what a blowhole-job feels like... It’s a shame there’s nowhere for neo-dolphins to swim on Titan.

6.2c: AGIs and other infolife. AGIs are people. Full stop! Do I have to repeat myself? It seems I do. I don’t care whether you came into this fucked-up galaxy the default, human way (out of an exowomb, of course,) the primitive way (out of somebody’s endowomb,) or out of a researcher’s growpramming rig. I don’t care if your genes are spliced to hell, stock, or if you don’t even have them, because when it gets right down to it, the mind of each and every one of us is software. It can be programmed, it can be altered, it can be deleted, it can be copied, it can be broadcast.

All the same, we’re all people, and we all deserve to be treated as such. If you want more information on the topic of people, I refer you to the Autonomist Alliance Points of Unity.

And yes, I have had relationships with AGIs before. This shouldn’t be a surprise by now. I, or forks of me, have had sex with everything from Suryas to Steel Morphs (Masked, ofc, for that squishy goodness,) and under easily two dozen different suns by now. What’s it like? Could be anything, could be (and usually is,) Simulspace, though I’ve seen what happens when an AGI sleeves into a biomorph to try physical sex. It’s adorably cute.

As for non-AGI infolife... They’re people. Same as AGIs, uplifts, or flats. Same as everybody else. Why is this even a question?

6.2d: Neotenics. I’ve been a Neotenic. I miss it, believe it or not. If I farcast back home for a visit, I intend to sleeve into a ‘tenic morph. It skeeves some people out, the sexual implications of the existence of Neotenics and the fact that they have fully-functional sex organs.

That it squicks some people out is not my problem. Yes, I’ve been a Neotenic. Yes, I’ve had sex as a neotenic. I’ve had sex as a neotenic with other people sleeved in ‘tenics, I’ve had sex as a neotenic with people sleeved in adult biomorphs, and I’ve had sex with people sleeved in neotenics while sleeved in an adult biomorph.

That does not a monster make. And yes, I do still think of people sleeved in Neotenic morphs as potential and desirable sex partners, much as I think of anyone that way if they’re fundamentally compatible with what I’m looking for in someone to shag with or befriend.

So no, it doesn’t bug me in the slightest. What bugs me is the jackholes who are so caught up in the traditionally taboo nature of paedophillia (which is actually kind of monstrous, if you try to have sex with someone who actually is a child,) that they want to keep their desires secret and will do extreme things to do so, like forcibly sleeving forknapped people into neotenics that they keep in dirty little bondage dungeons or whatever. Those people are fucked-up and need the help of a good psychosurgeon.

6.2d: Mercurialism. Radical Mercurials are bigots in the other direction, and no better than those who would discriminate against them for their origins. Frankly, the hypocrisy is staggering. I can sort of see where they’re coming from, but spiting the entirety of human-derived transhumanity because some members of it have been assholes to you is just as assholish.

Seriously, the radical, all-humans-are-bastards Mercurials should do a Solarchive search on the names “Nelson Mandela” and “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Even I know those names, and they died over a century before I was even conceived.

Now, on the other hand, non-radical mercurials are wonderful. We are different, in so many ways, and those differences are wonderful and unique, and often times, fun. I’ve heard some people mutter that if all the AGIs and uplifts would just sleeve into splicers and bouncers and get on with it, we could put the whole controversy to rest. I think that’s asinine, and I’ve thrown out the negative reviews to show it.

6.2e: Hedonism. I don’t think anyone should feel pressured to do more than they have to do for the upkeep of their habitat. Sometimes, I can be shockingly lazy, and give in to pure bone-idleness. I think the longest stretch I’ve spent wallowing in a good laze, putting in the bare minimum to carry my own weight and otherwise doing nothing productive whatsoever has been about a fortnight.

On the other hand, nothing is work if you love it, and if you love doing that which betters everybody, then there you go. Like me: I love body bank work, so is it really work? Not really.

Anyway, hedonism: I guess you could say I’m a hedonist with a burning passion for sex. That doesn’t mean I don’t pull my own weight: I do. Oftentimes, I’ll do more than my fair share, either because it’s something I enjoy (and believe it or not, I do like getting down into the grime of habitech maintenance,) or because it’s something that needs doing. I’m flexible on the topic, I think everybody should be more flexible. I don’t think anybody should be coerced one way or another.

6.2f: Isolationism or Interventionism? Interventionism.

Some autonomists yammer on and on about the non-aggression principle, and that’s fine when you’re talking about those who are content to let you live and do your own thing. It’s one of those things that’s only workable if everybody agrees to it, though.

The PC. have proven they are not believers in the non-aggression principle. Oh, sure, they yammer on and justify their attack on Locus saying that they were protecting their intellectual and physical property rights, but it’s a load of bullshit. They intend to wipe out all forms of transparent and horizontal government because they see them for what they are: a fundamental, existential threat to their vertical, opaque forms of usurious, coercive government, simply by the act of not collapsing immediately. The existence of the Alliance proves that it is possible for autonomists to function stably and strongly.

So, I believe in interventionism. We have to take them down before they take us down; both the PC, and the Jovians. I believe we should be disrupting their economy of enforced scarcity at every turn, should be opposing their attempts at exosolar hegemony, should be providing blueprints, nanofabricators, and everything else we can think of, to all of their oppressed masses. The memetic warfare machine should be running non-stop (as if it wasn’t already,) showing their citizens that it is possible to cast off the shackles of oppression and hierarchy and yet still live and thrive. And I believe that on the day the revolution happens from within, our fleets should burn for their centers, to ensure it succeeds.

6.2g: Technoprogressivism. Suppose the first cave-dwelling man to build a campfire inside his cave had mistakenly poisoned himself to death with carbon monoxide, and his fellows had decided that obviously, fire killed, in ways they couldn’t see or defend against, and so had prohibited any further development of fire-containment and utilization methods.

We’d still be dwelling in caves, eating cold meat and berries.

Transhumanity has been burned, yes. But without science, we wouldn’t survive - literally, as well as figuratively. We’ve learned from our mistakes, and now we must push forward, learning more. We have a lot to do if we want to rebuild, and technoprecautionism would see us all stewing in shit vapors in flats, like the Jovians.

6.2h: Suicide. If someone wants to check out, we’re not going to be able to stop them. Moreover, telling someone that they have to continue living an existence that is an unending hell to them is some of the worst coercion I can think of.

On the other hand, I would also urge them to consider alternatives, such as seeing a good psychiatrist, or even voluntary psychosurgery. Every transhuman life is precious, after all, and I would be quite irate if they destroyed their morph in the process of committing suicide.

Also, I wouldn’t want them to delete their backups, unless those backups were from after they had already started to think that suicide was the only option that offered any relief from whatever troubles tormented them. If a backup was from so long ago that the person wasn’t suicidal, I’d say that said backup constituted a non-instantiated fork who was their own person, and would probably say they should be disallowed from deleting it, even if they wished to do so.

6.2i: Inflicted Permanent Death. I don’t like the idea of inflicting permanent death on people. But some folks are just so far gone that they can be called a cancer on transhumanity. Everyone who ever held a child in slavery, for instance, or those who have gone violently exhuman.

Could they be psychosurgically altered? Possibly. But that’s coercive in the extreme: “submit to radical psychosurgery which would fundamentally alter who you are, or we torch your stack.” So even offering the option is fucked-up and violated autonomist principles. On the other hand, we can’t really tolerate them coercing others in those most egregious ways, either.

What’s left? Indefinite cold storage is tantamount to executing them. A simulspace prison, even one where they get to indulge their twisted bent forever? I wouldn’t argue against that on the resources grounds, but still; it’s forcing them into prison.

There’s no good answer, honestly. Perhaps I’m not philosophically-versed enough to give a good answer, but I think that, under those circumstances, simply ending them and deleting their backups would be the least cruel way of stopping them from doing what they were doing. Maybe if we could find an old enough backup, before they’d even considered doing the shit they did, we could bring them back and tell them what their future selves did and why we felt compelled to do what we did to make it stop..... I just want to go lie down and cry now.

6.2j: Security, or Liberty? That was a quote by Benjamin Franklin. Dirty old goat, wasn’t he? Anyway, I tend to agree to him: when you start laying down your liberties, surrendering them to a hierarchy in exchange for security, you never get them back, and then the hierarchy wants more and more, so they take them, often inventing a threat if a real one doesn’t exist.

I’m an autonomist, and proud of it. They can have my liberties when they pry them from my cold, dead hands. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense, liberties aren’t physical things. Um... Okay, how’s this: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” That quote may (or may not) be contemporary to Franklin himself, but it sums up my attitude. We must be eternally vigilant against those with honeyed promises of false safety exchanged for our real liberty: our autonomism.

Now, since the topic often comes up in conjunction: Privacy. I’ll talk about it, even though it wasn’t specifically part of the question.

I don’t particularly feel the need for privacy. Hell, I install publicly-accessible spimes in my own quarters. If I want privacy, or, if I’m with someone who wants privacy, I turn them off. However, just because I’m a showoff, doesn’t mean that I don’t agree that people should have the right to privacy within their own dwelling places. But that’s the extent to which I feel anyone should have any expectation of privacy: if you’re not in a private dwelling, you shouldn’t expect any privacy, neither from being seen by passer-by, nor from being recorded.

6.2k: Forking. I’m an Alpha Fork of an Alpha Fork. My poor parents find that the number of daughters they have is growing exponentially. :)

I don’t have any problem with forking. I do think that you should endeavor to instantiate at least one fork of every fully-unique ego physically before new forks get a chance, but if you have a surplus of morphs, or if egoes go to different place, then it’s perfectly fair.

7: That’s enough serious questions, let’s talk about you. Me? You sure you wouldn’t rather talk about the Chewy Gristle Commentary Hour? Last night, Momo von Satan was characterising the Jovian’s relationship with Gerdr as an abusive boyfriend situation and The Cock was his usual subhuman self about it. She actually kicked him. I’m not sure how she struck an entopic projection, but it was an impressive crane kick that revealed she doesn’t wear anything below her miniskirt when recording. That had to be intentional, but still....

No? okay, we can talk about me, then.

(You deleted this question? Nuuuuu! I’m leaving it here! NYAH!) 7: What about the folks you know? My family, first and foremost. Any time I think about something that I can’t handle on my own or which is outside my area of expertise, my first instinct is to pop off a farcast to the most relevant member of my extended family.

Other than that, my closest companion would probably be Fiona. She’s an infolife psychosurgeon (that is, a psychosurgeon who lives as infolife, not a psychosurgeon who specializes only in infolife patients,) and is currently residing in my ghostrider module. She tried to get me to replace Thalia, my muse, with her, but that’s a no-go. Besides, it’s funny watching them interact.

And of course, there’s Thalia. I suppose a muse is technically your closest possible companion. She’s been mine since I was a child. My parents had weird sense of humor and gave me a muse named after one of the classic Greek Muses. She looks like her - well, a famous painting of her, anyway.

Other than that, there’s the people I’ve met on Titan. I went with militia service rather than civil service working in a body bank for my three year mandatory, just because I wanted to learn to use guns and what-not, but I don’t really keep up much with anyone from the service. I guess a regimented, military life isn’t really my thing, though it thankfully wasn’t all that bad, being the Aarhus city militia instead of the full-time military... There were a couple of girls while I was in it I wouldn’t mind looking back up, though. There’s also, of course, faculty and students at T.A.U., like Sarah Jane Smith, that I message with regularly.

8: There is something unique about everyone. Well, I suppose you could say my agendas? I’m a pretty damn good gene-hacker, thank you very much, and I’m a good biosculptor and biomodder, but there’s a lot of those. What I want to do is convince everyone I meet to try a hermaphroditic morph. I loved it, especially once I worked out how to get rid of those ugly testicles and still keep sexual function, and I’d honestly love to see everyone wearing a morph like this. I’m always happy to consult or convince someone thinking about it to give hermaphroditism a try, especially if they want to try the completely female-presenting, sleek, no-balls morphological design I pioneered.

9: I know you gave me some serious answer for 8. Pushing a hermaphrodite gender agenda is a serious answer? Alright, you want the silly stuff.

Besides the education and the gender agenda, I love to watch acerbic, irreverent news rather than serious newscasts. My favorite is the Monster Raving Goblin Cock News Network, and especially their flagship show, the Chewy Gristle Commentary Hour. Bad news sounds not quite as bad when it’s being sarcastically, angrily, and/or vulgarly delivered by a candy-gothed out Japanese woman with a gigantic anthropomorphic, veined penis with a stereotypical Viking helmet on top.

Um... I’m not lazy, usually, but if I don’t have any reason to get out of bed as opposed to, say, working mentally from bed, I probably won’t get out of bed, and even if I do, if I’m staying home, I tend to be naked, with or without company. (The kind of company I bring home are the kind to also be naked.)

I kind of want to develop the free-running skills I learned in the militia, but finding time for it is hard, and this is Titan. I can’t really justify sistering off a fork to learn to be a better free-runner when there’s people waiting to be instantiated. Free-running is fun, and I watch vids of masters sailing between buildings and scrambling up pipes and such like they’re nothing and wish I could do that...

Ah, here’s something else. I’m looking forward to getting some time to myself with the term at T.A.U. over. I want to go to Stykkishólmur and sail a Viking longboat on a lake of methane. One of my sisters wound up on an exoworld which was near-simultaneously colonized through a Pandora Gate by both the Monsters of Carnivale (whom she went with, for a break from Carnivale itself,) and a bunch of Titanians, including a huge chunk of Stykkishólmur natives. Of course, they wound up on an earthlike world of fjords, and now they sail longboats up and down the fjords, staging purely-consensual Viking raids on each other’s settlements. It sounds like fun - I’d love to go, but that’s a long, long way from here. So I’d settle for the homegrown Titanian raids. Hopefully I won’t have to resleeve after an axe fight, as Professor Ming is so fond of cautioning his students against.

10: What are your minor motivators? If I had to pick three major motivators for myself, psychologically speaking, they’d boil down to Morphological Freedom (everybody ought to have the right to be what they want to be, whether or not it’s what I think they ought to be, Sapient Rights in general (fuck everyone who wants to control people,) and Open Source (because fuck the control of information.)

But those are major motivators, and you want the minor things that contribute to those or which don’t fit in with them but which I like? Okay, let’s see... Well, while everyone has the right to be what they want to be, I’d like to convince them that what they want to be is a hermaphrodite. It’s not that I’m phobic about men, I just prefer women and especially hermaphrodites. (Winterism skeeves me out, I’ll be honest. That’s freaky.) I want to improve myself, to learn new things - that’s why I’m on Titan. Maybe not forever, but I’ll pick up a lot of stuff while I’m here. I support the Autonomist Alliance, a lot, and especially the cause of Anarcho-Collectivism in particular. (Maybe that’s really a major motivator... But it’s hard to see yourself through your own cognitive biases.) Of the statist polities in the system, the only one that doesn’t need to be torn down in flames is the Titanian Commonwealth, so I dislike statism, obviously. Slavery and indenture in all forms are fucking abhorrent and should be abolished...

I love art, especially body art. Even if it’s not a form I dig personally (plug earrings... >_< ) I love to see people who do fantastically beautiful things to themselves. This, of course, is deeper than mere surface decoration - with modern biotech, looking how you see yourself is a spin in a healing vat away, and it can go from simple cosmetic alterations down to in-depth gender alterations and even major body mods. People’s imagination is awesome.

Um... Earth - the reclamation thereof. I’d like to see it. None of my sisters are hardcore reclaimers, but I’d still cheer to see Earth cleaned up and retaken by us. It is, after all, our homeworld, no matter that the Planetary Consortium wants everybody to forget it exists. Hell, that’s another good reason to want to Reclaim it - to fuck with the PC.

Expansion. Yes, I want to see us retake our homeworld. I also want to see us find new ones. That New Kattegat world, for instance, would probably be a great place, if we could just figure out how to get folks onto it without the issue smashing the Autonomist Alliance in half. Maybe we just need to rake the system to find the people who are copacetic with the fact that recreational viking raids are the planetary pastime and wouldn’t mind strapping on a helmet, chopping down a tree, and building a longboat themselves.

11: Let’s try some rapid-fire questions. You know this game: A quick question with little if any explanation. Answer as you see fit. Okay!

11a: Your morph. Describe it (Gender, apparent ethnicity if any, general looks, build, etcetera. Any mods from standard.) Hazer, female-presenting. Slender, tall body, breasts way out of proportion with the hips (thick, stumpy nipples and large, smooth areolae), soft. Very fair-skinned, oval face, long red locks,. Hermaphrodite, of course, no balls, just a nice, long, pretty penis (uncut, of course.) Lots of mods: Hyper Linguist (and hyperlingious,) Math Boost, Circadian Regulation (who the fuck has time for sleep?,) Clean Metabolism, mnemonic augmentation, electrical sense, ghostrider, medichines, nanophage. And nanotats.

11b: How do you typically dress, if you dress? Smart clothing, doy! When I’m by myself I don’t care to dress, but when I go out I never wear anything but a smart clothing-vacsuit. When you grow up in space, you never want to be more than arm’s length from the nearest vacsuit, but with modern technology you can always be wearing your vacsuit, even if you’re actually wearing a techno-fabric, tronlines-glowing evening dress, or a loincloth-and-bikini ensemble.

11c: Family. Do you still have any? Are they still important to you? Lots! Aside from my obvious sisterhood, there’s still my parents. They’re a bit overwhelmed by the fact that their little girl is multiplying horizontally , but (with Muse assistance,) are heroically keeping up with all the letters. I keep in touch with them, of course, though I’m not having much success convincing them to try hermaphrodite morphs. Mom would give it a spin, but dad’s rather attached to his masculinity. Ahh well.

11d: Prior occupations? Well... Child, then teenager, then teenaged habitech, then teenaged apprentice to the tin-can biobank we had on the creaky old hab I grew up on. Then socio-experimental research subject, then revolutionary, then body bank operator, then brilliant genehacker, then body artiste, then militia enlistee, and now university student. And that’s just the trace that leads to this particular instance of me. My career trajectory isn’t a parabola, it’s a Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicle.

11e: Religion? A code, perhaps? Religion is a bunch of bullshit laid down by somewhat smart people in the dark ages of the dark ages of the darkest depths of human history, a way to get ignorant dirt farmers to do things that made sense at the time but that they were too damn dumb to grok as practical advice, so the assholes made it into a divine mandate that they would piss off the sky fairies if they ignored. It stopped being relevant or necessary for humanity sometime around the invention of fucking sanitation, and has no place in this modern age we live in. The desperate hold-outs are clinging to any vestiges of hierarchy they have left, and the moronic assholes inventing new ones are pumping out septic nonsense to fill the heads of vacuous idiots who desperately seek for some sort of spiritual salve for their psyches, which are smashed by what happened and they can’t come to grips with the Fall and get over it.

The sheep, I pity, and wish they’d see a psychosurgeon instead of a priest. The shepherds are abusive assholes trying to make themselves a hierarchy, and can get fucked as such.

11f: Why do you do what it is you do that you don’t, necessarily, have to do? Hrm. I suppose I didn’t have to enlist in the Titanian militia, I could have earned my citizenship (and hence enlisted in T.A.U.) by working in the body banks, but I wanted to try something new. And I suppose I don’t have to have sex so much; we know now that there was hidden neurology in those Neotenic morphs all the tenants of New Humanity got that spiked up our sex drives to near-pathological levels. I could have Fiona fix that.

But I don’t want to. I like having a highly-active sex drive, and I love indulging in it!

11g: Personality, yours. Go! Friendly, warm. A little scattered and manic at times, a little excitable and frenetic when confronted with really far-out there shit. Really, I just wanna have fun. I think there’s an ancient song to that effect.

11h: What won’t you do, no matter the reward offered or any pressing justification? Violate someone’s autonomy unless it’s to protect my own or others. I may beg, I may try to convince or whine, but it’s the right of everyone to decide for themselves, even if they want to do weird shit like engage in consumerism or sleeve a Winterist morph or whatever.

11i: Give me a short list of things not covered above or below (it’s okay to come back to this one,) that you like, love, dislike, or hate.

11j: What is your name? Your full birth name/designation/etcetera, and any nicknames, street names, and the like, including how you came by it. Angela Moira is the name I was born with. No middle name, no anything. I became Moira when I was forked off from Celestia.

11k: What citizenship(s) do you hold, if any? Citizenship? I’m an autonomist! We don’t need no steenking citizenships! :P

Okay, yeah. I’m a citizen of Titan, and I’m always welcome back on New Humanity, of course.

11L: If you had to pick one person, cause, or group, to name as the one you love the most. Um... The Autonomist Alliance.

11m: As 12L, only the one you hate the most. Hierarchy.

11o: As 12L, only the one you respect the most. Argonauts!

11p: As 12L, only the one you fear the most. Bioconservatism.

11q: Do you have a favorite color? It doesn’t necessarily need to be within the ultraviolet spectrum human flats can perceive. The color of whomever I’m bringing home tonight.

More seriously and generally, probably red.

11r: If you eat and/or drink, what’s the best thing you’ve ever had, your favorite, if you will? Does eating someone out count? No? Okay.

Well, I guess, I’m really fond of sharp, fruity-tasting fizzy drinks, and coffee - omigawd the coffee... Or the tea. Coffee and tea. Caffeine is great, especially when you drink the LD50 dose (as measured by flat standards,) with your morning cappuccino. Really, I like to pick at random and see what I like, pumpkin spice coffee with the LD50 of caffeine is good.

For food, well... *Shrug* I’ll try just about anything once. Most recently and by that I mean last night, I had a sublime manicotti dish with chorizo, a thai-based hot pepper and wasabi-based sauce. I’m sorry, did I say sublime? I meant insane. But it was fucking awesome. I had to direct my medichines to kill the capsaicinoid receptors in my mouth and throat. Maybe I’ll just have some fruit and yogurt or something for breakfast, or a nice quiche.

11s: if you had the resources and means (credit, rep, the full reclamation of Earth, whatever,) to go any one place in all of the galaxy, where would you go? Everywhere! But you know where I’d like to be the most, with the resources and means? I want to be there when the PC is torn down, I want to ascend to the top of the Martian space elevator in a Masked Steel morph or something else vac-sealed, and nail a ten-kilometer square circle-@ flag to the top.

But if you mean just places to visit... I dunno. I want to visit Earth, I want to see it restored. I’d like to be able to set foot on the surface of my homeworld and breathe its clean air, devoid of pollutants, fallout and nanobots.

11t: What everyday annoyance most gets on your goat? Waking up alone. On New Humanity, I got very used to sleeping with myself, and waking up without someone to cuddle (sister or otherwise,) always makes me feel sad. I guess that’s not really a disappointment, though, it’s just a downer. I guess the most everyday annoyance is when I want to nanofabricate something and the materials I need are being drawn by some other civic project and I need to argue my need and the small quantities I require and the likelihood I’ll recycle it in a reasonable amount of time to the directors of allocation.

11u: If you consume any art at all, which is your favorite? Visual, acoustic, and other, so don’t forget to mention the kind of music you bop to when you’re going about your business. Art! Hahahaaha, I love it. The best art is the kind people wear, so, visual, I’d say. But I love music, too. Thalia knows what I like, and she finds stuff like it, or sometimes just gives me something completely off the fucking wall. Lately she’s been on a kick of Mercurial reinterpretations of centuries-old music. It’s an experience to hear Cindy Lauper rendered by a neo-orca singer in a custom biomorph designed for acoustic power, set to a rock ballad whalesong background.

11v: What is your greatest goal? If you or forks of you live ten thousand years, what would you, now, like to be able to look back upon in AF 10,010 and say “I did that. It was me. I brought that event/thing/place about.” See 11s. If ten thousand years from now I should live, I’d want to say I was there when we tore down the last vestiges of capitalist systems and cast them down into the dust of Mars. (Or possibly the regolith of Luna or the acid of Venus, but my bet is on Mars being the last holdout.) I want to be part of the image that commemorates it for all time, like that enduring image of American soldiers in the pacific, centuries afterwards and decades after the fall of that nation.

11w: What is the greatest, most important thing you have accomplished in your lifetime? Well, duh! I invented the testicle-less hermaphrodite biomorph gender and have been working tirelessly to mod it into other forms. That’s a pretty great and important thing to have accomplished.

11x: What religion, if any, do you follow? What are your thoughts on religions, both old and new? Religion - BAH!

11y: Where did you learn your skills? My parents taught me the habitech skills I have. I learned to operate a body bank and hack genes in that creaky habitat’s body bank, and perfected it when I had free run of New Humanity’s body banks and biolabs. I picked up my biosculpting there, too. Lately, I learned my more martial skills in the service and training of the Aarhus City Militia, and have been gladly absorbing all the education I can at T.A.U.

11z: Under what circumstances would you betray a confidence or break a promise? If I thought the person who had confided in me or made me promise something was about to violate someone’s autonomy, or if they had exacted said promises under duress.

12: Your Muse. Almost everybody has one. What’s yours like, how long has it been with you? Thalia! She’s been with me since I was a little girl. Named after the classic Greek Muse, she appears as the Muse herself, as painted by Jean-Marc Nattier in 1739. Not as the painting, really, but as a fully-realized version of that woman, which I guess means she actually appears modeled after the immortalized face and upper body of an 18th-century Frenchwoman. She’s playful and mischievous, jokes with me and ever so often plays a prank on me. Like me, she too has become a sisterhood, since none of us could possibly bear to be without her, she forks when we fork. She likes to change her avatar’s appearance frequently, from classical stuff to fully modern, and she knows I have a taste for nudity, so she often chooses to go nude, or semi-nude, or at least artistically bare yet still wearing things. When I went hermaphrodite, she did, too.

13: Your thoughts on some more things would be interesting, but since a small subset of people are still bothered by the following topics, you don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to.

Sex! One of my all-time favorite topics. (I should probably look into an academic study of it some time.) This should be fun.

13a: What gender are you currently, bearing in mind that “not gendered” is also a gender.

Currently, I’m a female-presenting hermaphrodite. That is to say, if I’m wearing clothes and you’re not looking at my pelvis too carefully, you’d only hear, see, etcetera, a woman, but I have a penis. No testicles as such, just a penis - and I’m the one responsible for that being an option.

This is entirely by choice, so much so that I actually made the choice possible.

13a1: If your current gender is not by choice but by circumstance, how do you feel about that?

At first, being a hermaphrodite was a very new thing, as I was born female. I made the decision to leave my home habitat because it was becoming overcrowded, and I wanted to try something new. It was a socio-political habitat, New Humanity (see above,) and one of the stipulations was that everybody would be sleeved into a hermaphrodite neotenic. At the time, it was a trade-off decision, as I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about being a hermaphrodite. Now I can honestly say I love it. (Though the original sleeves had testicles. I never cared for having them, so I fixed that.)

13a2: What gender were you born/created as?

I was born as a relatively standard female Splicer.

13b: The true nature of human gender and sex identity can run an almost infinite rainbow. But in the broad strokes, it can boil down to the following options. What are your opinions of those genders?

13b1: Female

I like females just fine. In truth, I prefer the company of female and female-presenting people; soft (looking) curves, feminine voices, etcetera. As sex partners, I find them just as preferable as fellow hermaphrodites.

13b2: Male

My dad was male, quite obviously. I... Well, I don’t hate the company or attention of men, they just... Well, I prefer the company of women, let’s say. I mean, I don’t mind the company of men - I’ll even have sex with them, on occasion, I just don’t quite feel the same strength of desires or emotional bonds with them. (Excepting my dad, of course; he’s my dad! I love ‘em, the big palooka.)

13b3: Hermaphrodite (Some form and combination of male or female, and can outwardly present as either or somewhere in between)

I love hermaphrodites so much that I consider an all-hermaphrodite habitat to be my true home. (Titan is my second home, you could say.) I honestly, truely wish the entire transhuman family would arrive at the conclusion that being a hermaphrodite is the most fun option and sleeve a herm, or, you know, alter their current morph’s gender.

I mean, I’d never make anyone sleeve a herm. I just wish they’d try it.

13b4: Genderless (presenting completely without gender or interest in sexuality)

Genderless folk are... Well, they just are. I haven’t really run into many genderless humanoid biomorphs - of those I have, if the entire model range was made that way, I generally launch headfirst into figuring out how to modify them to a gendered form. You can thank me (well, one of my sisters) for the gendered Salamanders, and I can take credit for the hermaphrodite novacrab as well.

Synthmorphs that don’t present as having a gender don’t really phase me, though imagining people who want to have a gender and can’t because their model range doesn’t support it makes me angry.

Those who choose to be genderless, though... Well, I find them a bit weird, to be honest. I haven’t run into many of them, either this me or any of my other sisters.

13b5: Wintered (Presenting as thoroughly androgenous, neither male nor female nor combination thereof, yet with specially engineered sexually erogenous zones to enable sexual behavior.)

Intentionally genderless people, I find a little weird. Winterists, I’ll be perfectly honest, freak me out. I know, it’s not nice, it’s not the Anarchist way, but I avoid them whenever I can, they just wig me the hell out. Thankfully, there’s not many on Titan, and of course, none where I came from.

13c: Perhaps you’d answer some questions about sexuality, specifically yours, and your opinions.

Oooooooh, I surely can. You sure you want to know?

13c1: How would you describe your sexual orientation, assuming you have one?

Oriented largely towards female- and feminine-presenting people, irregardless of whether they’re biomorphs, synthmorphs, or infomorphs. I’m not entirely inflexible on that point, but my interest and desire drops off sharply the more overtly masculine a person is. If they have any sort of a beard whatsoever, I’m not interested, period.

13c2: How flexible are you as regards your orientation? Can you imagine (voluntary) circumstances that would result in you engaging in sexual behavior outside of your orientation, or do you consider it to be more a hard and fast part of your psyche?

The more feminine a man is, the more interested I’m likely to be. I can imagine, on a remote level, possibly having sex with a Winterist if they were very strongly feminine, but that would be a true rarity.

I can have sex if I’m not interested, if need be. It’s pretty mechanical, but if that’s all someone really, truly needs, and it’s me they want, I’ve been known to oblige, on rare occasion, with the understanding that it was a one-off.

13c3: It’s reasonably safe to say that almost nobody can be completely described as “normal,” and never is this more true than in a discussion of their sexuality. What would you say is true about your personal sense of sexuality that is not true of the majority of transhumanity? This could be your personal kinks/fetishes, or hang-ups, or both.

Well, hermaphroditism isn’t a “normal” choice, to be sure - yet, anyway. I’d like to push towards changing that.

Otherwise, well... No reason to beat around the bush, I’ve mentioned it above: I imprinted, sexually, on neotenics, over the course of my time on New Humanity. I not only don’t see anything particularly wrong with an adult-sized morph having sex with someone in a ‘tenic, I actively seek Neotenics to have sex with myself. A lot of people think that’s very weird.

I haven’t personally had sex with a synthmorph or an uplift - that is, I, Angela Moira, haven’t, but my sisters have had, and they’ve shared the XPs. I liked them, and I wish there were some neo-dolphins around Titan, because damn, blowholejobs.

Oh, and I’m a massively parallel incest practitioner. Is having sex with your own forks incest? Absolutely it is, and I love it. We like to think of ourselves as twins, even though none of us are actually in identical morphs.

13c4: What are your opinions on orientations that aren’t yours? Do you have particularly strong feelings about any of them?

Winterists bug me. I just don’t get that - they like sexual sensations, but they want to completely divorce themselves and those sensations from genetalia? I’m just glad that virtually everyone who chooses this lifestyle is also exclusively attracted to other Winterists.

13c5: What are your opinions as regards infolife forms and sexuality?

Some infolife people love to have sex as much as us hormonally-charged biomorphs do. Some don’t. If an infomorph wants to have sex with me, well, time for a nice, quiet night in simulspace, eh?

I just wish those who choose to present a gendered, female form but had no interest in sexuality grasped the importance of making that known in their public profile. I’ve had a few awkward conversations when trying to make an advance on an infolife who chooses a female avatar but is otherwise disinterested.

13c6: Literally as long as human beings have had the capability to create art, they’ve been depicting sex. With XP and simulspace, the variety and intensity of pornography has never been better. Do you have any opinions on the matter?

Porn is great. I like to enjoy it in my shower, personally, where cleanup is basically automatic. I’ve never starred in a porno, per se, but naked selfies of me, as well as recordings and XP that take place in my bedroom, are available from my public profile. (Only the ones with partners who agreed to said sharing, of course.)

Purile? Sure, if it gets people off, I’m happy. They’re also useful educationally - if someone is wondering what a hermaphrodite of my variation looks like in the nude, or what it’s like to take that genitalia arrangement for a spin.

13c7: What are your opinions on sexual relationships? Is there, in your opinion, an ideal form of relationship, or not? Are you open to the idea of deviating from such a relationship ideal if you meet a/several partners who hold different ideals, or must any prospective partners of yours share your notions of how a relationship should go?

Some prude once called me a slut. The hurtful intention behind the word got him a blasting on the circle-@ list, but devoid of the hurtful context, it describes me to a T. I’m not monogamous by any sense of the word. I do develop sexual relationships, of course, and they can be quite intimate, but I’m not shy at all about the fact that if opportunity knocks, I’ll take it, and without a hint of shame.

For me, that’s a hard-and-fast rule. I can’t, I won’t, become involved with someone who expects sexual “loyalty” to them to the point of denying myself other opportunities to have sex. I won’t put myself through that. In turn, I have no expectations on those I have sexual relationships with. When we come together, it’s wonderful, and when we’re apart, we should still be friends, come what may.

As far as the number of partners in said relationship... I’m open to anything, though there are some practical limitations on the number of people you can simultaneously pay attention to, at least not without some serious headmods. That’s not the same thing as having an orgy, which is just good, clean fun, but I mean the number of people you’re cuddling, kissing, loving on, etcetera, at the same time. Still, I’m game to try anything, come-what-may as far as relationships.

13c8: What are your opinions on the matters of love and sexuality and relationships? Relationships don’t have to involve love, by necessity, but many people still hold an ideal that there should be at least some element of love to an ideal relationship. For that matter, what do you think love is?

I don’t think I’ve ever fallen in true love with anyone who isn’t in my family. I’d like to, but I haven’t. Some of my siblings have, though. It’s... Wonderful; they’ve shared the XPs. It’s like being in a close sexual relationship, with the closest of intimacy, like that shared between my sisters and I.

Practically speaking, the difference between a relationship of love, and a sexual relationship without it, I’d have to say, is how intimately attached you are to the other person. I’ve had deeply intimate sexual relationships with friends, and maintain some of them, but... Well, to put it simply, when you love someone (or more than one someone,) you want them to live with you full-time. That doesn’t mean people you bring home don’t get to stay the night, or the day, the week, the month, etcetera, but it means this is someone who you will always consider intimately close, even if you’ve been separated from for a year or more.

Of course, anyone I’d fall for in that way would have to understand and be copacetic with the fact that they wouldn’t just be falling in love with me, but with my entire sisterhood, and of course, would need to be accepting of the fact that I’m going to seek others to have sex with. Hopefully to share with them, of course.

13c9: Relationships, love, sex, and politics. Need I say more to prompt your next opinion?

I could never love, or even have a relationship with, someone who has a political opinion I despise, such as a hypercapitalist or an Ultimate or an Extropian or a biochauvinist, or what-have-you. Thalia’s under strict instructions to give me a hard reality check and remind me it’s hormonal warfare if I start to feel that way towards someone I’d have to consider a political enemy, and nothing more.

If I had sex with someone like that... Well, it would probably be as part of some bargaining measure, or perhaps a ploy to soften them up, nothing more. I don’t like that idea, particularly.

13d: Most people wouldn’t express a positive opinion of any of the following things. Still, it’s worth asking your opinions on these matters.

13d1: Rape, both forceful and otherwise. And where do you draw the line between what is and isn’t?

Here’s a question for you: if you consent to being raped, are you actually being raped?

One of my twins lived on Carnivale for a few years, before she moved wholesale to New Kattegat. Carnivale is known as an exploration of sexual extremes; for instance, there’s one settlement set away from the new habitat where you literally have to consent to being raped in order to enter. Yes, she went there, and yes, I’ve lived it through the XP - both as the “victim” and the “predator.”

On New Kattegat, recreational Viking Raids (Like, from actual long-boats, with axes and wearing chain-mail body armor,) are the planetary pasttime, thanks to the confluence of settlers from Stykkishólmur, here on Titan (a place I intend to visit just as soon as I can,) and the Scum of Carnivale. Folks can put in their public profile that they want nothing to do with these raids, or that they’re game for participation in a raid only at certain times (such as when they’re armed, etcetera,) or that they’re game for anything, anytime. They can also specify the level of sexual violence they’re willing to endure.

She’s the inventor of the Sleipnir morph - you know, that centauroid unicorn, with eight horse legs and four flipper legs? The one that, by default, comes as a hermaphrodite with a dolphin penis? Yeah, that one, and she isn’t shy about engaging in said consensual sexual violence with it, either.

So... Is forcible rape really rape if the “victim” consented to it? If you hold someone down, someone who’s screaming, and force your way on them, if they agreed to it beforehand? I don’t think so, just don’t forget your safeword, folks! (Mine is ‘Jambalaya’.)

On the other hand, coercive sex is rape, in the truest sense, whether it’s coerced with violence, or threats, or blackmail. I might even consider promises to a desperate person to be coercive, depending on the circumstances.

13d2: Bestiality. Most people would say that sexuality with nonsapient critters is a big no-no, but some would also consider sex with sapient uplifts to be the same - and some uplifts would consider sex with sapients of a different race to be bestiality. On the other hand, literally anybody can sleeve into an uplift body if they want to - does that change the nature of it?

Sex with a sapient person is sex. If they’re in a wildly different body than you, it’s kinky sex. I’m all about the kinky sex.

Desiring sex with a nonsapient critter, though? That’s...

Well, that’s weird. I’d have to rate that at about an 8.4 on my weird-shit-o-meter. (For reference, Winterists rate a 9.) I... Hrm.

Well, it’s weird, and even a little freaky. But on the other hand, critters aren’t sapient. We can’t attach the same moral weight to nonsapient critters that we do to sapient people. If you can justify slaughtering a nonsapient critter to cook it up for delicious, delicious bacon (I can, because bacon, though thankfully we have so much more efficient ways of getting it now,) then I’m not sure you can’t justify permitting those so inclined to use them for sexual gratification.

On the other hand, of course, even on Earth, slaughterhouses were, at least in theory, operated to be as humane as possible, and I agree with that. So, I’m not sure what measures would have to be taken to allow for humane bestiality - probably some extensive mods to the critter, to allow for it to... Perform, without undergoing physical damage or psychological stress. A brief mesh inquiry suggests that should be possible... But that’s not my problem, thank the stars. And I’m not really interested.

I’m perfectly fine with bending a monkey over and fucking her raw. But when I’m done, I want her to wink at me and say “Your turn.” The idea of doing something with a nonsapient critter leaves me feeling cold, and I’m sleeved in a Hazer.

But hey, I guess there are folks who like that. If it’s conducted humanely, I’m not sure who the hell I am to claim unto myself the moral authority to tell them they can’t. But it’s not my thing, no way.

13d3: Pedophilia and ephebophilia are defined as sexual attraction (in an even more strict definition, exclusively so,) to juveniles and adolescents, respectively. On the other hand, these days, a young ego can easily be sleeved into an adult morph; or vice-versa. And of course, there’s neotenic morphs, which will reach a maximum maturity of somewhere between the baseline human ages of 10 and 13, in terms of size, build and appearance. What do you think?

I’ve probably taken more dings to my rep over these muddied topics than I have had in flame-wars with Extropians. (I sent a nastygram to the entirety of Extropia once. My @-Rep balanced out between them dinging the living shit out of me for telling them all in no uncertain and no non-vulgar terms that they should be kicked out of the alliance by the people anonymously dinging me from all over the Alliance.)

I honestly have no problem with an adult morph having sex with a child morph, or a neotenic. Neotenics are made for it, of course, but I don’t have a problem with it, either way, and I’ll actively seek morphs like that as sex partners. Sure, it can be painful, and even damaging, if the morph isn’t a ‘tenic and is small enough and the larger morph penetrates them and does so roughly enough, but nothing a quick spin in a healing tank can’t fix, and if it’s all consensual, I don’t see the harm in it.

Ego age is a different matter, which is why I specified morph above; or rather, I should say, ego maturity. If an ego, a person, understands what sex is and what they’re getting into, I don’t see anything wrong with letting them do what they feel like.

I’ve heard people say “But if you let young people do what they want, they’ll be having sex before they’re ready.” I ask them, “What is ready?” Very few people I know have had positive first-time sexual experiences. But they are experiences - the best way to learn some things is by doing, and sex is among those things. If they have a bad experience and decide they don’t want to do that again, or don’t want to for a while, or with that person or members of that person’s gender or morph type or what-have-you, then they’ve learned something valuable for themselves.

Ultimately, this leads into the question of consent; when is someone capable of giving consent, and when are they being fast-talked into something they don’t understand? That would be a form of coercion, and I think I’ve made my opinion on the topic of coercion clear. Getting someone to agree to something without understanding it is coercive.

So, to my way of mind, there’s no putting a hard and fast rule on this, because everybody’s different, and that’s without even bringing the question of experiential age into the equation. If someone knew what sex was, and what they were getting into, and agreed to it, I don’t see a problem with it, regardless of their age, or the age of the other(s) involved, physical or experiential.

This stance, of course, has led to more conservative members of transhumanity leveling accusations of me being a pedophile. Well, in terms of practical sexuality, yes, I am; I’m a non-exclusive physical pedophile, because I will gladly have sex with a partner in a child or ‘tenic morph. That’s never been in question, I’ve freely admitted it, and in fact it’s in my public profile.

As far as the age of the ego in question, I’ve had sex with some fairly young egos - I mean, as an adult. It can be fun, but more often than not, if you get mixed up with someone too young, they’re just not satisfying, and in my experience, call it off in the middle. (Very frustrating, that.) I like to connect emotionally and intellectually with someone I’m having sex with, and it’s hard to make an intellectual connection with someone who’s too young. So generally, the youngest experiential age I’d be interested in is maybe 13, 14, somewhere in there, and they’d need to be someone who’s relatively mature and world-wise for their age. Even then, it winds up being more educating them than having sex with them, especially if they’re inexperienced. That can be fun, though.

Needless to say, this tends to collide head-on with the sort of person who considers themselves a parent and still believes in such things as “parental rights.” Which is weird, not agreeing with how you, yourself, were raised, and my opinions on these matters frankly horrify my parents. Either way, it was kind of a massive culture shock, after being on New Humanity for so long, getting to Titan, winding up in bed with a teenager, and then finding out that her parents were furious at me for it. (Fortunately, per Titanian law, they had no legal recourse against me because of it because the girl consented and at no time withdrew that consent. But boy, did my Rep fluctuate over that one. I’ve become a little more circumspect about bedding teenagers here, because I don’t want to be The One who sets off The Debate Over the Issue. Let someone else have the spotlight on it.)

13d4: What are your thoughts on habitat laws/rules/norms which govern sexuality?

In a word? Abhorrent, in all respects.

The primary rule of any habitat should, in my estimation, be “you shall not coerce anyone to do anything.” Various bylaws or sub-rules are necessary, of course, but that’s the primary one, and those secondary ones should be things along the lines of “This is how those of us who are here wish to live, those who will not abide are not welcome to join us” (for instance, New Humanity’s insistence that everyone be sleeved in a hermaphrodite morph,) or “no, you can’t manufacture a nuke in the nanofabrication machine without the entire habitat’s approval or dire emergency being declared.” Which, really, if you think about it, goes back to coercion - in this case, you’re not being allowed to coerce the whole hab by dint of “I have a nuke, do what I say or I’ll blow you up.”

So the thought of regulating something so personal, so intimate and private (or public and free, as the individual sees fit,) that which people choose to do with their own morphs (whether bio-, synth-, or info-,) is repugnant to me, no matter the reason. Especially if the reason is “for your own good.” This is 10 AF, otherwise known as 2143. With our modern technology, there is no form of physical harm or consequences that can’t be undone with about an hour’s time in a healing vat, and when it comes to psychological, it’s a learning experience, not something you should deny to someone who truly understands what it means, whether it’s someone young who wants to behave sexually because the older people think they’re too young for it, or telling people they can’t have sex with those of their own gender because it offends the majority.

13d5: The topic of people forming sexual attachments with their muses can be a hotly-debated one at times. On the one hand, most people consider muses to be nonsapient AIs; on the other, a muse can and often is the nearest, dearest, and longest-lasting relationship a person has, more real to them than the vast majority of transhumanity. What do you think?

Anybody who tells me Thalia isn’t a person is cordially invited to go airlock themselves.

Otherwise... Well, I don’t have a problem with this. Sometimes, when I’m lonely or bored, I’ll just go into simulspace with Thalia and we can do whatever. Who knows me as well as she does, and hence, is capable of being as sexually fulfilling and as emotionally comforting to me as she is? My sisters, maybe.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t say we really have a “relationship,” either. You could call what we do friends with benefits, which is the way I prefer my friends.

Still, if some people prefer to find their emotional, physical, and sexual happiness with their muses, primarily or exclusively... Well, who the hell am I, and who the hell is anyone, to tell them it’s wrong to do so? And honestly, if they’re so introverted that that’s the only fulfilling relationship that they can have, they probably need it, desperately.

13e: Experiences, specifically your own. Interested in sharing? Haven’t I shared enough for most people already? Okay, but you (literally) asked for it! 13e1: Most people remember their first time, for better or for worse. A lot of people wouldn’t describe it as a particularly positive experience. What would you say was your first time, and what did you think of it? Firsts. Heh. Firsts are an interesting thing, how do you define firsts?

My very (first) first would have been when I was quite young, about, I don’t know, five or six. It was silly, childish exploration with another one of the (few) children on that tin-can habitat. I don’t even remember his name, but I do remember pawing at his genitals and marveling at how they were different to mine - and vice versa. We were holed up in an empty storage locker whose rescue bubble had been removed to be replaced because it had been found to be defective. Nothing so dramatic as us being caught happened, we just explored each other’s plumbing for a while, got bored, went to play an AR game instead. I’d say that was a positive experience... But I wouldn’t really say it was my first time actually having sex.

That would have been almost a decade later, when I was thirteen. It was a boy, named Mark. Or was it Markus? (Neither, it was Matthieu - thanks, Thalia.) Same locker, different boy, different activity. He was my age, and just as inexperienced as me. It was awkward, clumsy, and a little painful, bracing there with my knees and feet and hands, him groping my breasts too hard and thrusting far too awkwardly, slipping out and having to stop and put it back in, and then it was done, he came, and couldn’t keep it up to finish me. He tried (I’ll give him that much,) to finish me with his fingers, but he didn’t really know how, and I actually had to run a pornographic entopic program to orgasm so I could pretend he’d done well and made me come. Not a positive experience. But I don’t regret it.

Then there was my first on New Humanity, after I was sleeved in my brand-new, hermaphrodite neotenic morph. It was a fortnight after I got there, and I was still kind of freaked out by the fact that everybody was basically in a childlike body, to say nothing of the fact that I was now the proud owner of a penis and testicles, in addition to the vagina and breasts (well, sort of - see also, childlike body,) that I was used to. Unbeknownst to any of us on that station, our new bodies had been neurologically wired to have a hyperactive sex drive - imagine being a horny teen forever. (Well, a lot of you don’t need to imagine it, since you voluntarily choose such a state.) So, I was super-horny, in a station full of morphs I didn’t think I should have been attracted to but was, and in possession of genitals I was completely unused to. Her name was Mikaela, and we shagged in my cabin. We were both nervous as hell and uncomfortable, but we were so horny. That was also my first time having sex in a gravitational environment, which was new. In the end, I wound up bending her over on my bed (and they gave us beds sized for a full-sized adult, for some reason, perhaps to help grind in the fact that we were all now super-small compared to what we used to,) holding her hands on the bed-rail as I thrust into her from behind. It was just as awkward as the first time with Matthieu, since I had barely any idea what I was doing, to say nothing with the fact that I was feeling super-guilty about the fact that I was fucking a girl in a body that was basically that of a child, even though she was actually sixty years old (experientially.) Positive? No. I was wracked with guilt afterwards, which made for fun times filling out the daily socio-experimental survey. But I don’t regret it, either. It was the first step towards my learning what I now know about my own sexuality. And I (well, the many mes, anyway, not me personally, since I’m really far from New Humanity,) still have sex with Mikaela about twice a week.

I could keep going - the first time I experienced (thanks to an XP) having sex with an uplift, or the first time I had sex with a teenager as I was an adult, or the first Titanian, the first time with myself, the first time with a woman. but really, we’d be here a fortnight.

13e2: What’s your sex life like now? Is it parallel to your love life, separate from it, or do you even have one without the other?

Active. I still carry that addiction to sex, though I’m no longer in a morph wired for it. I simply don’t care to fix it, since I like sex. I know a few handfuls of my fellow students at T.A.U. who are down to shag every now and then; my public profile advertises my orientation and that I’m usually up to have sex with new people who fit my interests, and I have Thalia run a scan for potential partners at least an hour. I try to have sex at least twice a day, if I can manage it, and masturbate or use a simulspace porn program at least once a day or so (who’s better at getting me off than me?)

If that sounds hedonistic, it is. I should mention, I don’t need a tempo anywhere near that active. I just like it. And yes, I know how that sounds; in my case, I’ve got one of the best psychologists Rimward of Jupiter to certify it as true.

13e3: Have you ever tried anything you have no more interest in doing again?

Most forms of bondage disinterest me, if I’m the one being tied up. I absolutely, positively cannot stand being silenced or gagged; it makes me freak right the hell out. I don’t mind being blindfolded, though, nor do I mind being restrained by hand. But I can’t stand being tied up. And I kind of enjoy bondage from the other end - nothing too hardcore, just tying someone up.

13e4: Is there anything specific you might like to try, but haven’t, either for a lack of partners or social unacceptability?

Anything one of my sisters have done that I haven’t counts, right? Other than that, hrm... No massively burning desires, but on a fleeting whim... Being held down and gang-fucked until long after I’d passed out might be fun. I’d also like to try having rough sex on the receiving end of an extreme penetration - I’ve been on the giving end, vicariously, through one of my sisters.

It might also be fun to have sex on Earth, specifically, or on the hull of a habitat. There must be a lot of biomorphs or appropriately-equipped synths that can do that. (A quick check - yes, many.)

13e5: Have you had any sexual experiences that would be considered extreme or even taboo by large segments of transhumanity, perhaps your own? If so, was it simply experimental, or has it become a regular part of your sexuality?

Wow, so many. Maybe I’m a Scum at heart, now that I think about it. I think it’s safe to say that the majority of transhumanity considers having sex with a Neotenic extreme or taboo, and I’ve done that so many ways I dare to claim to be a comprehensive expert on neotenic-sleeved sex. There are still some prudes who consider my attitudes as regards sexual and emotional relationships extreme.

If I had to pick one that would squick and freak out the majority of transhumanity... Well, it was a vicarious one, that one of my sisters, Lagertha, actually did. She’s the one on New Kattegat, the one in the Sleipnir pod morph (that she invented.) She shared an XP of New Kattegat, starting with her chasing a woman in a dress through a field; cornering her amidst some rocks, ripping her dress off and pinning her over a stump, rearing over her and forcing herself on her, ripping through her insides because she went all the way in and not stopping.

That was freaky, undoubtedly. I dare say most everybody alive today would say that qualifies as at least one of extreme or taboo. Yes, she did basically kill her by fucking her with a penis almost half a meter long and tapered to a point.

Well, to clarify, I should say “almost” killed her. Medichines kicked in, kept her victim from undergoing brain death (a prerequisite for any New Kattegat violence,) and Lagertha took her to the nearest healing vats, of course, and it should hopefully go without saying (but for the sake of certainty I’ll say it,) it was entirely consensual.

And yes, that sort of thing has become a regular part of her sexuality, though usually not to quite so much an extreme end. I wouldn’t mind trying it, from either end... Maybe that should’ve gone in the last question.

14: Recreation and frivolities. You can have fun when you’re not having sex?! (I’m kidding.)

14a: Social Entertainment. Do you consider learning to be a form of social entertainment? Because I do. I never got the chance to attend formal forms of education when I was growing up, so it’s been a new and... interesting experience for me.

I like to play in a good virtual table-top RPG every now and then. Titan’s a great place for that, what with having so many folks around. I don’t usually go for the full-immersion thing where everybody gets an avatar to sit around a simulated table... If you’re gonna do that, fab some real dice and meet at an actual table, I’d say. With real-time comms, there’s no need for the simulspace, I say, and it alleviates the time issue if people can play while they may be doing other things. I’ve attended game sessions whilst attending class or doing hab maintenance - thankfully, Thalia’s more than capable of controlling my character if I’m needed and I’m busy.

The game ended, though, sadly.

What else... Well, every now and then I like to just go out and do whatever I was doing from a cafe or something. That’s social, and you can people-watch, and meet new people doing that. :)

14b: Music. I should try that sulfer hexaflouride thing sometime. But yes, I love me some music, though I don’t pay too much attention to what I’m listening to. Thalia knows my preferences, and she serves up new things as well as songs I love.

It’s probably a good thing. If she let me make all the musical decisions, I’d probably listen to heavy metal all day, every day, or something. Without her throwing out new things every now and then, I never would have realized that classical opera can be fun to listen to, even if I have no idea what they’re saying. (I told her not to translate.)

14c: Electronic Gaming. Well, I’ve always liked a good game, whether AR or simulspace. In recent years, 1715 has become my absolute favorite: who doesn’t like being a Pirate? Titan is probably the best environment for 1715, because there’s enough statists for the navies to have a good population, but enough autonomists and outright anarchists for the pirates to have a good population, leading to some truly epic sea and land battles. My character’s a sexy little fireplug, an afro-caribbean-caucasian mix who commands a brig under the black flag. I love sailing right into the heart of a hurricane, especially when there’s big merchants or naval warships about, and leaping with a rope, from the masts or rigging, straight onto the deck of enemy ships, armed to the teeth figuratively and literally. Yarr!

There are a few other VR simulspace games I sometimes play, but none that I like quite so much as 1715. Well, there is one about being a sneak-thief in a Victorian England type steampunk setting, that’s kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. Sneakin’ and stealing can be fun, though not nearly as much fun as stealing at the point of a cannon broadside. And of course, I do like the odd RPG. Mostly, though, other than 1715, I have a number of AR games I cycle through and play with whenever I’m in a dull moment of a day and don’t have anything to say on social media, nothing to vote on, etcetera. Most of these are your average casual time-waster, five dozen come out every week and are forgotten about in a few days. Of course, when I was a girl, there was this game where you played as a child who, instead of going out and attending school or whatever, you were given a little red and white plastic ball and a dangerous critter and told to go and catch more and fight them against each other... Oh, and now Thalia’s pulled it up again and I’m probably going to get addicted again. Hooray!

14d: Non-Interactive Entertainment. I do like a good book, I admit. Sometimes I fabricate an actual hard-copy, though usually if I want to read and crave the feeling of the pages, I’ll drop into simulspace; more often than either, by far, is just reading it in my entopics. That way Thalia can customize it to suit me. She’s very adept at customizing stories the way I like them, and sometimes I just give her some input seeds (Such as “I’m thinking of a steampunk fantasy story where some cataclysm has turned all of humanity into hermaphrodites and the heroine is an engineer who used to be a woman who had to hide her gender. Go.”) and have her crank out a novel just for me.

I watch movies and XPs, of course, but I wouldn’t say I’m a huge buff or anything. Most of my XP consumption is actually living through experiences my sisters have had and felt were worth sharing with the rest of us, so those are always full-track, extopic and entopic.

And, of course, there’s my newest unrequited crush, Momo von Satan, the host of the Chewy Gristle Comedy Hour, the founding and flagshow program of the Monster Raving Goblin Cock News Network, my favorite news feed. She’s hot, of course, but more than that, I love the caustic wit and sarcastic analogies she uses to deliver the news, coupled with the Cock’s trademark subhuman ravings. It’s fucking hilarious.

14e: Other hobbies. My other hobbies? Well, of course, like any of us descended from Celestia, I love bodysculpting. I don’t get much chance to practice it on anyone but me here on Titan, since I don’t like the idea of working in a body bank under a hierarchical system. I’ve taken up a bit of free-running here, though I’m really just dabbling. I’d like to get more into it, but there’s only so many hours in a day, even when you have a circadian regulator!

I also have kind of a new hobby; going out to different places to try different kinds of cuisine. Where I came from, there were a few public messes and of course, the ‘makers and fabbers, but that was nothing compared to the variety of cultures and foods they produce available here on Titan. Folks get some kroner, set up a microcorp based on the social good of morale boosting through variety in cuisine.

14f: Skinning. I skin, of course. It was practically a requirement living in a tin can hab, and the habit sticks with you. These days, though, I don’t skin all the time; often just my apartment and sometimes the classrooms. Usually I’ll let others’ skins bleed into my experience as I pass, with Thalia pulling from the skinning that others have set to public, and if I see something I really like, she’ll let it ride for a while.

Skinning can be dangerous, though. On the hab I grew up on, there was a guy who’d reprogrammed his muse not to talk back or disobey him in any way. He was running such a comprehensive entopic skin that he didn’t notice the can he was in depressurized, because he had custom settings for the sensation of breathing. He just calmly kept on working, oblivious until he started to black out, and by then it was too late. So I never try to disassociate myself too much from reality.

Killfiles can also be dangerous, too. If you killfile someone and don’t recognize their presence, you can, say, barge right into them. If both of you killfiled each other, you can slam into one another at a full tilt whilst carrying something sharp. So those people I’ve killfiled appear as gray silhouettes and are obviously marked in AR. Also, Thalia monitors anything they say, and feeds it to me a moment after they said it, if she thinks it was something important. It’s no good to miss a shout of alarm because you hate some asshole’s views as regards Extropian economics. (Or worse, to miss their obviously aggressive posturing.)

14g: Drugs. I don’t need a drug habit. One clinical addiction is enough for me. I don’t drink, except very rarely, and even then I have the medichines on full. I don’t smoke tobacco, and I stay the hell away from any substances that the Argonauts haven’t proven not to develop physical or mental addictions.

Well... Mostly. I do like indulging in cannabis on occasion. And of those that aren’t addictive, I tend to go for the occasional hallucinogen, or something to just check out for awhile. Fortunately, thanks to powerful and non-judgemental pharmacological forecasting programs (Argonauts, yay!) it’s easy to determine what effect a given dosage will have on you and for how long. (And of course, if need be, I can order my medichines to clean me up in about thirty seconds.)

15: Exosolar Affairs. The Gate Network gives us a taste of interstellar travel, and it’s a good one. But that doesn’t mean we should stop looking into near- or faster-than-light travel! A hundred and fifty years ago, they would have said it was utterly impossible for a person to be copied from their brain, sent to a computer across the solar system, and downloaded into a new body; complete and utter science fantasy. And yet, here we are. So don’t give up on that Warp Drive!

15a: Gatecrashing. There are Things out there, there’s no question of that. Things that go bump in the night. But that didn’t stop primitive man from venturing into the woods, and it won’t stop us from charging headlong through Pandora Gates.

And yes, I know full well that we’ve found the ruins of other civilizations out there that evidently also used the gates. That’s why I don’t think our interstellar exploration should be limited to the Gates, either. But Gatecrashing is here to stay, and I like it.

We can study them. Learn from their mistakes, their ruins, and do better. 15b: Exosolar Ecology. People come first. I think I’ve made that abundantly clear in my answer to 13d2; the needs, and even desires, of sapient life outweigh that of non-sapient life. They definitely outweigh that of non-sentient life, such as plants.

That said, there is little justification to go wrecking a life-bearing planet to get at mineral resources. It’s entirely possible to drive a few vehicles through a pandora gate, set up a few small mines, and seed-bootstrap an asteroid or moon mining industry. And of course, these days we have tons of clean power options, and if need be, clean techniques for mining on a planet.

So, no, I don’t feel that just wrecking a living ecosystem in such a manner willy-nilly is acceptable. But if that’s what the folks who colonize a planet choose to do, so be it. I just hope to hell we get to catalog everything and take samples before they start wrecking things.

As regards terraformation: again, people come first. If the biosphere of a planet would be habitable, but its native life cycle somehow prevents it, terraform away. Sample, catalog, etcetera, but again, people come first.

Obviously, none of that applies if the world is inhabited by a sapient species. They were there first.

15c: Alien Affairs I don’t trust the Factors. I dunno, maybe I’m just unhappy that the first sapient species we made contact with wasn’t sufficiently similar to have sex with, or maybe there’s something about preambulatory predatory slime molds that are widely believed to be patient trap-layers that puts me off, or maybe it’s the fact that they cruise around with drives we couldn’t hope to match and put unknown exotic-matter installations in our system without so much as a by-your-leave.

I don’t trust them, and quite honestly, I wish we had the technological parity to invite them to take their egg and depart forthwith, to negotiate with them on even terms.

That’s just one alien race, though. We’ve met them, we’ve proven that there are other, technological alien races we clearly recognize as life. Hopefully, there’s more. Unfortunately, it seems as if the Factors don’t want us to meet them - they trade us trinkets for massive concessions, won’t share any information on their drives, tell us not to use the Pandora Gates, give us hardly any information, none of it independently verifiable, on the other races they claim to be representing - are they claiming to represent us to others?

We need to cut out the middle-man here. Find some other sapient races, especially those who have prior contact with the Factors, so we can compare notes.

That said, there are other races out there. I’d like to know of them, to meet some. Hopefully, we can find some that are sufficiently similar to transhumanity that we can deal with them far more easily than we can with the Factors. Even more hopefully, they’ll be similar enough for sex to take place... Okay, yes, I do sometimes have a one-track mind.

Anyway... I suppose I prefer the old-school science-fiction view of aliens as strange new people to meet and befriend. I don’t like the paranoia that a lot of people seem to have, huddling in the dark, looking out and wondering what threats are out there.