Upcoming Events: Planetfall Day Festival

2946-12-09 - Upcoming Events: Cosmic Background Team at Planetfall Day Festival

As a reminder, the entire Cosmic Background team is traveling to Yaxkin City for the Planetfall Day celebrations. No programming interruption is anticipated; the vidcast programs for the next few days were pre-recorded over the past few days. Duncan has also prepared a Tales from the Inbox post for audience ingestion at the usual weekly time.

We hope to see many of you at the Thompsett Tavern meet-up on that day.

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Editor's Loudspeaker: The So-Called Great Purge

2946-11-12 - Editor's Loudspeaker: The Great Purge

The pundits are calling the fallout from the New Rheims scandal "The Great Purge of the Admirals," and it seems at this point the term has stuck, despite its overwrought hyperbole. To date, barely five percent of the Confederated Navy's staff-level officers have been affected as of this writing, and among the captain grades, the number affected is more like one in four thousand; it is only the vast size of the naval edifice that makes the "Purge" seem so massive.

It is true however, and quite concerning, that a number of the most experienced admirals are choosing now to make their exit from military service, and that this includes a number of well-known names who probably didn't have anything to do with Block A50. Most of the senior officers who served in the Brushfire War have been implicated (likely having, as Samuel Bosch did, returned from the brief conflict with a favorable impression of war-fighting automatons), and many of the older senior officers still in the service who served in the conflicts in the aftermath of the Terran-Rattanai War have decided to take early retirement, likely sensing that their relative freedom of action up to this point is to be constrained by increased Congressional oversight.

All of these officers surely have personally groomed favorite subordinates to succeed them, as is common practice in the Navy, so the brain-drain is not likely to prove as disastrous as some of the doom-sayers prefer to lament. It is possible that some of these successors may also fall in time to the continued revelations around Block A50; of more concern than the first-wave resignations is the frenetic pressure around the issue which encourages the officers involved to save a fragment of their own reputations by providing lists of others who were more important to the secret project than themselves. With these revelations moving so quickly, it's far too likely that some innocent men and women will be named and forced out as well.

I fear Delegate Nisi-Bonn is beginning to overstep badly, though I sympathize with her reasoning. A populated world was fired upon by an automated warship during the incident; it is only by good fortune that the world the rogue vessel targeted was a thinly populated colony. Still, in its zeal to root out every officer who put Confederated civilians at risk, it is possible the committee will smear the names of officers who were not involved, especially at the middle-seniority levels. In the long run, this is a minor tragedy compared to what might have happened if New Rheims were a more populous world, but I hope Ms. Nisi-Bonn treats every accusation in successive waves of testimony with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Interestingly enough, Samuel Bosch seems to have weathered the storm so far, despite seeming to be involved on both sides of this issue. His ship, the light cruiser Arrowhawk, has been in the Naval Yards here at Centauri since a few weeks after the New Rheims incident, and is scheduled to be out for trials with its supporting squadron in a few days. If he's still captain during trials, it's likely he's going to emerge from this largely unscathed. I'm still not sure whether he deserves any blame for Block A50, but since the committee isn't screaming for his head, the political class doesn't seem to have any of the same doubts I do.

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Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Stray

2946-12-04 - Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Stray

The identity file for the woman in cell number three was short on information, as was usual for the sorts of people who found themselves in secure solitary lockup in a constabulary annex. As Hugh Apperlo took inventory at the beginning of his shift, she stood out from the usual crowd of junkies, violent drunks, and street scum; most of the prisoners who woke up in the Temerity District annex holding cells were the same sorts, in a reassuring sort of way.

The district was, for lack of more charitable words, somewhat rough and run-down. The miracle of the Coreward Frontier which had lifted Maribel from obscurity to a growing and prosperous planet had passed over Temerity District and its sprawling unmanaged cityscape of slums. For all that, Hugh was fond of the place – it was his home, and though keeping order was an impossibility, he considered it his job to keep the disorder limited to the familiar, local sort.

“What’s her problem?” Hugh asked Aref, the night constable. The man was still hanging around as usual, to make sure his replacement found everything in order.

“Hell if I know.” The weary-looking officer threw up his hands. “Chief Sterling hauled her down here in here in the middle of the shift, and she hasn’t said a peep. She’d be nice to look at if she weren’t skinsculpted all to hell.”

Hubert shuddered at the thought, though a casual glance at the cell monitors hadn’t suggested anything amiss about the prisoner. Skinsculpt was illegal on most of the Confederated Worlds, but illegal or no, Maribel’s position as gateway to the frontier meant that it had a strong black market in depravity. Usually, such degenerate behavior and those who catered to it stuck close to the spaceport or to the centers of wealth and privilege; to find it in Temerity District was an unwelcome novelty. “Varinia Villa.” He read the name of the sparsely populated file. “Age, thirty. Native of Cardona’s Landing. Aref, where’s that?”

“Looked it up earlier. Turns out that it’s a drain-circler in the Treaty Zone.”

Hugh was never good at astrography, but he did know the Treaty Zone was on the border with the Hegemony, on the opposite side of Confederated Space. “Hell of a way to come, to end up in lockup here.”

Arif gave a snort of disdain. “Freak like her, she should’ve stayed put.” The night guardsman removed his duty badge. “See you tomorrow, Hugh.”

After seeing his associate off, Hugh started processing morning release forms. As usual for a Monday morning, most of the prisoners who he’d taken charge of would be released in the first third of the shift. The weekened “rush” of drunken brawls, domestic disputes, erratic junkies, and incompetent petty thieves would be set free to wander the streets once more, their records blackened with fresh but minor offenses. Some of the “regulars” spent so many nights in lockup that Hugh would greet them by their first name as they were led out; others would leave looking bewildered as to how they managed to find themselves in lockup in the first place. It was a sorry routine, shepherding Maribel’s dregs through the petty-crime system, but it was a comfortable one.

When he reached the entry for the woman prisoner, Hugh found no criminal charge or term of incarceration, only her name, home-world, and age. If Arif was to be believed, the Chief himself had hauled her in – yet, the arresting officer had put no details about how long she was to be held. That she was a skinsculpt wasn’t even listed in the records.

With a weary, bureaucratic sigh, Hugh punched in the guard-desk intercom code and hooked into the comms system in cell number three. “Sorry to bother you, miss. I can’t find your file. Did your arresting officer give you a reference number?” He could find her file, but its emptiness seemed sufficiently sinister that a white lie might worry her less.

On the video feed, the woman half-hidden by shadow stood up fluidly and moved into the light leaking through the view-glass in the armored door. As she did, Hugh could see what Arif had been referring to; the left side of her body had been heavily skinsculpted, with her flesh seeming to be stretched taut over angular, geometric skeletal extensions. Embedded in this tissue were hundreds of odd, crystalline structures; even in the faint light in the cell, these glittered darkly, as if wrapping the tattered grey light around themselves. A simple, sheer dress of smart-fabric, cut around the modifications which could not be hidden by mere technological cloth, did little to accentuate her slim and relatively curveless frame, but her angular face was quite unmodified and, Hugh decided in agreement with his compatriot Arif, fairly attractive.

“The guard has changed.” She stared into the lens, pointedly not addressing Hugh’s question. “Who are you?”

“Constable Apperlo. First shift lockup guard.” He replied. This was all he was usually comfortable telling prisoners, except the ones he had begun to know from their regular visits.

“Apperlo.” She echoed. “You don’t mind if I call you Hugh, do you?”

Hugh, blood suddenly running cold, didn’t reply for several seconds. Eventually, he decided on his response. He’d never seen the degraded woman before in his life; she couldn’t possibly have known his name unless Arif had let it slip. “I would prefer you did not.”

Her wordless sound of reply was noncommittal, almost whimsical, but the expression on her angular face – angular by nature, not by sculpt, Hugh guessed – was neutral and solemn. “My file won’t be of any use to you.” She eventually came back to the question. “I wouldn’t be here except by choice, and you can be rid of me whenever you want.”

“This is the precinct lockup, Miss Villa.” Hugh reminded her. “You don’t-”

“Varinia, please.”

Hugh soldiered on as best he could. “You don’t have a say in your period of incarceration. We’ll have a time of release as soon as your file is located, and you will be leaving at that time.”

“Will I, Hugh?” Varinia Villa stretched her arms lopsidedly, demonstrating the reduced flexibility of the artificially-shaped and decorated limb over the natural one. “And when I do leave, what will stop some street thugs for tearing a skinsculpt freak like me apart?” The dead tone in which she delivered the phrase was almost more awful than the reality of her appearance.

“Skinsculpt is illegal.” Hugh replied automatically, though it didn’t answer the question.

“A practice for degenerates who have embraced the darkness and tried to erase their humanity.” The deliberately lifeless continued; she was only echoing rote what was law on so many worlds. As if all the animating force had left her, the woman’s shoulders and head drooped, and she turned away from the camera. “I couldn’t agree more.”

Hugh winced; he realized the blunder he’d made. The Treaty Zone was unmanaged, barbarous, and chaotic, and those who lived there were pirates, fanatics, chattel traffickers, and worse. If she was truly a native of that place, it was entirely possible that her alterations had not been her own choice. “I’m sorry.” He said, without pressing the button to carry his voice into the cell. Reversing an elaborate skinsculpt was often much more expensive than procuring it, whether or not it was done legally; nobody who ended up in Temerity had that sort of money.

“You probably can’t find a file because I asked your Chief to arrest me.” The prisoner sat back down on the cot, where she’d been sitting solemnly when Hugh had done his visual inspection of the cells upon arrival. After shifting so the half-light hid her alterations under a coat of shadows, she looked back up at the camera. “He’s a decent man. He brought me in here. Gave me a few names of officers I could trust. One of those names was yours.”

Hugh didn’t know what to say. Chief Sterling was among the district’s most respected persons, and though he was getting near retirement, his firm hand on the law enforcement tiller had probably slowed Temerity District’s long decline. To be considered someone trustworthy by the Chief was something Hugh didn’t think he deserved.

As he struggled to figure out how to ask how this unfortunate woman had managed to wander into Temerity on her own, Hugh looked down at the desk display and noticed that Villa’s file had changed. There was still no information about the crime for which she had been arrested, but she was now scheduled for release along with most of the others. In a little while, Hugh would have to send her out with the rest, and what they'd do to her once they were outside the building was obvious.

This is the first part of an account sent to me by a Maribel native who is a new member of our wide interstellar community. Hugh A. was happy for me to share his full name and his story. He also provided a more complete account of what his friensd Varinia V. suffered at the hands of the degenerate wretches of the Silver Strand, but I don't think that such a tale is appropriate for this audience. It is sufficient to say that the Strand is not a nice place, and that we all look forward to a time when the treaty-demilitarization of the region is lifted and it can be brought back into the fold of proper civilization. The fact that skinsculpting and other forms of dehumanizing nano-procedure are commonplace there is well-known, but the fact that many are put through such twisting without their own consent is less widely publicized.

The second half of Hugh's account will be featured in next week's Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Second Chance.

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Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Second Beginning

2946-12-11 - Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Second Beginning

In last week's Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Stray, we first encountered Hugh A., a local constable on Maribel, and Varinia V., a woman who survived he horrors of the Silver Strand pleasure-slave market, and did not emerge from this den of degeneracy unaffected. Somehow, she made her way across hundreds of light-years from the Strand to Maribel, largely on her own. On Maribel, she found a few people who saw through her horrific alterations and helped out a person in need - the chief law officer of Temerity District, and Hugh himself.

Hugh and Varinia are now crew-members on an interstellar hauler whose captain, a native of the Strand himself, is very sympathetic to Varinia's situation. Though the stigma against human use of  skinsculpting found on most populated worlds is difficult to dismiss as illegitimate, but it should come as no surprise to this audience that the interstellar community has been far more accepting of her situation than the population of even the wildest of the Frontier worlds would have been.

I would hope that members of this audience try to keep an open mind with persons whose humanity has been lost to some degree - there are many out there who did not come to such a situation by choice, and would, if they could, undo what has been done to them. Be it the torture inflicted by slavers in the backwater Strand or the hideous effects of poorly-understood xeno-contagions, we should always keep in mind that those who are fighting to get their humanity back in the face of great personal tragedy are often among the most human of us all.

Cringing at the idea of releasing the unwillingly-altered Varinia Villa with the usual riffraff, and knowing what the outcome of such a blunder would be, Hugh switched comm lines and called up to the Chief’s office. When someone finally connected the call, it was not Chief Sterling; he had most likely clocked out at the same time as Arif. Instead, the sharp, nasal voice of Lieutenant Porcher answered. “What do you need, Apperlo?”

“Sorry to bother you, Ma’am.” Hugh didn’t like Porcher; she was senior on duty for the quiet morning shift, and she was something of a tyrant when she could get away with it. “There’s a woman here called Villa the Chief hauled in last night. Are we releasing her this morning?”

“We are.” Porcher replied smugly. “The Chief has no right to use our solitary cells as a halfway house. We don’t have the budget for it. She’s not charged with anything, so she’s free to go when you release the rest.”

“Understood, Ma’am.” Hugh ended the call quickly, then shook his head. Releasing such a distinctively fleshsculpted individual among the territorial and often violent petty criminals of the district would be a mess – there would be violence on the very steps of the precinct station, and Porcher knew it. She was marking her territory; the Chief ruled the night, but she intended to undo anything of his that didn’t suit her own management of the morning. She probably also hoped to get some of the regular weekend “visitors” on more serious crimes, that would justify sending them away to the regional penitentiary. Porcher had never liked the awkward rapport many of the district’s petty criminals had with local law enforcement, after all. She thought it unbecoming, and perhaps it was.

“I’ve got your records now, Varinia.” Hugh didn’t catch himself using her first name until it was too late. “The Lieutenant says with no crime on file, we can’t legally keep you.”

There was no answer from inside the cell, and Hugh didn’t need to look at the video feed to know that Varinia Villa was aware of the danger a release in broad daylight would put her in.

“I’m going to make sure we process all the others out first, then we’ll see about your case.” Hugh offered.

“Don’t risk your job on my account. It’s not worth it.” Her tone was light, but she seemed to have grasped the situation from what little she’d been told.

Hugh didn’t think that delay would earn him any reproach, but with Lieutenant Porcher, anything was possible. He would, of course, have to risk it.

Less than a minute later, the Lieutenant came down to collect the prisoners for release, with two fully-armored constables in tow to wrangle the occasionally-disruptive prisoners. Hugh stood to salut,e, then triggered the cell-release controls for the other prisoners to be released one by one, letting the other officers escort them out of the cell block one by one, as usual. The lieutenant watched with a withering stare until all the prisoners except Villa were mustered along the wall, kept there by two armed officers, though Hugh could tell they weren’t interested in trouble inside the annex.

“Well, Mr. Apperlo?” Porcher looked at him with one icily arched eyebrow. “I thought there was one more.” She knew full well there was, of course.

“Go ahead with these, Ma’am. I’ll handle the special prisoner myself.” He did his best to sound confident with this assertion, hoping to remind her that she was still Chief Sterling’s subordinate.”

The other prisoners muttered amongst themselves at this choice of words, knowing the situation was unusual. Hugh paid them no mind; he met his superior’s eyes and didn’t look away. At first, Lieutenant Porcher looked ready to make an issue of this change of plans, but as if remembering the Chief’s involvement in Varinia Villa’s case, she suddenly backed down after several tense seconds. “Process these ones out. Apperlo and I will see to the last one.” A wave directed the other two constables to escort the prisoner train upstairs.

Hugh let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, then turned away to do as he had said. Varinia Villa would still have to fare in the open, the Lieutenant was allowing her to escape outside the notice of the petty criminals. He had to hope it was enough to let her get out of Temerity in one piece, though the neighboring districts wouldn’t be much more hospitable for an unwilling skinsculpt.

“Guard Apperlo.” The Lieutenant’s sharp voice stopped Hugh short just as his hand rested on the cell-door release control for the final cell. “Bring that degenerate up here.”

Hugh winced at the epithet, but did as he was ordered, releasing the door lock and then trudging down the silent cell block to number three. Varinia was seated calmly on the cot, and when the door opened, the light drew back the shadowed curtain over her disfigured nature. Trying not to shudder, he held out a hand. “Come on.”

With a curt nod, the skinsculpted woman stood fluidly and walked past Hugh into the hall, ignoring his outstretched hand. She stopped as soon as she saw Lieutenant Porcher standing at Hugh’s guard desk at the end of the block, halted as if by the force the officer’s unconcealed antipathy. Closing the cell door behind the woman, Hugh urged her onward after only the briefest hesitation. Porcher was a firebrand, but she probably wouldn’t risk her own rise to Temerity’s highest-ranking law enforcement position over one of the Sterling’s mercy projects.

“I don’t know how a freak like you sweet-talked the Chief into getting a warm bed for the night, but we’re not a charity.” The Lieutenant stood in the way, preventing Varinia and Hugh from leaving the jail.

Varinia kept her gaze studiously on the floor. Hugh focused on her, rather than on the Lieutenant, because it was his duty to keep her from causing trouble, even if his superior was more likely to instigate something. In the much better light near his desk, he saw what he could only suspect from the camera feed – the skinsculpt job that had been inflicted on the woman was more extensive than it had first seemed, with tiny crystalline patterns, seemed to radiate across her body, starting at the arm and shoulder covered in crystalline spikes. The whole effect was one of incompletion, as if the effort to strip her of her humanity had been interrupted.

When it was clear that there would be no response to her invective, the Lieutenant, flying into a sudden fury, backhanded Varinia viciously, sending her reeling back against Hugh. “Listen to me when I’m talking to you, wretch!”

Hugh caught the prisoner to keep her on her feet, ignoring the unpleasant feeling of the geometrically-sculpted arm and shoulder under his hand, and the macabre, chime-like sound of the crystalline extrusions rattling against each other. “Lieutenant.” There was no hiding the disgust and anger in his voice. “Get ahold of yourself.”

Porcher’s furious glare met Hugh’s, and once again, he struggled not to look away, even though he knew what he was doing. She would be Chief soon, and when she was, he would be out of his job. Once again, the Lieutenant backed down, though she abandoned none of her irrational fury as she whirled on one booted heel and stalked away. “Get her out of my precinct.” The barked order came only as she was halfway up the stairs to the main floor. “Then make sure that cell is well cleaned.”

Hugh waited until Lieurenant Porcher was gone before moving or making a sound. “Sorry about the Lieutenant, miss. I can take down a statement if you want to file a complaint.”

The woman regained her footing and pushed Hugh’s hands away to stand on her own. Already, a red mark was forming on her cheek where she’d been struck, but the blow seem to have done any serious damage. “Would it do any good?” Hugh suppressed a shudder at the grotesque juxtaposition of her untouched, pretty face framed on one side by gaudy, dark crystalline spines sprouting from her shoulder, and on the other by her tangle of dark, unkempt hair, cropped asymmetrically to keep it away from the garish sculpting which would certainly trap it.

Hugh shook his head sadly, unable to voice the simple admission that the complaint would go nowhere. Porcher was not popular in the precinct, but she had earned the grudging respect of everyone, including the Chief, because she ran a tight shift. One minor incident of violence against such a disreputable prisoner might even aid her career prospects, in such a rough place as Temerity District. “Let’s go. Since you’re not charged with anything, I’ll take you out by the alley.”

Varinia followed Hugh upstairs down the hall between the two constabulary ready-stations, past the interrogation room, the mess, and the evidence vault. The alley door was intended for bringing in supplies; it was a loading dock rather than a public entrance, and it refused to open until Hugh tapped its status panel with a bypass chit.

After peeking cautiously out into the dingy alley, littered as it was with reusable crates waiting to be picked up by the reclamation service, Hugh led the skinsculpt out. “Do you have some place to go?”

“I’ll find somewhere.” The reply was optimistic, but Hugh knew she wouldn’t find anywhere in Temerity District that would welcome her, even if she had money to pay for lodging.

“Miss Villa-”

“I told you to call me Varinia.”

“Varinia.” Hugh grudgingly corrected himself. “Are you-”

“Stars around, what a freak.” In the mouth of the alley, a trio of slouching local troublemakers had taken notice of the pair at the loading dock. These were, Hugh recognized, some of the very people who’d just been released from his cell block. “Officer, we’ll make sure she gets out of the district.” His two friends chuckled unkindly.

“You tried, Hugh.” Varinia observed quietly. “I suppose not everyone here is as decent as you and the Chief.”

“Mr. Apperlo.” Lieutenant Porcher’s voice barked in Hugh’s ear, courtesy of his comms earpiece. He could hear the undisguised smug satisfaction in her voice, and knew that she had made sure somehow that the local miscreants had taken notice of Varinia’s departure. “Back to your post.”

Hugh looked at the three men, then at Varinia, then up at the surveillance camera perched above his head, watching the alley. Porcher could fire him without the Chief’s approval, and then he would be no better off than the very drunks he had spent several years guarding. Good employment in Temerity District was nearly impossible to find; the junior constable position he had was among the best available.

“If you lot don’t go home, I’ll have you back in the block in five minutes.” Hugh warned the men, but they only sneered at him. They knew how little Maribel authorities – especially in a place like Temerity – usually protected indigent off-worlders who washed up on the already thickly populated planet.

“Mr. Apperlo, back to your post. That was an order.”

Hugh looked up at the camera again, intending to make it only too clear that he had heard the order, then deliberately pulled out his earpiece, dropped it to the ground, and crushed it under one foot. “Come on.” He told Varinia, leading her toward the men. He had a side-arm and a shock baton, in addition to the protective body armor contained in his uniform; the trio quickly thought better of their approach and slunk away.

Varinia finally found her voice after they had gone. “What are you doing? Hugh, your job-”

“Chief will have my back.” Hugh didn’t have the confidence he placed into those words. Chief Sterling would do what he could, but disobeying a direct order to return to his post, then smashing his earpiece in a show of open defiance, was not recoverable.

Varinia threaded her unaltered arm through his and leaned her head on his shoulder gently. “I’m sure.”

Hugh looked down at the damaged woman next to him, for once not having to suppress a shudder at her twisted appearance. The Chief had seen something in her, and in him – if he had to guess, it was that neither of them was a good fit for rough, tumbledown Temerity District.

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