Farspeech stones

[forwearemany]

(It's an abrupt decision to voice the question that has been plaguing their thoughts over the stones.)

How is synthetic life treated in your universe of origin?

Comments

[onegreeneye]

Mine didn't really have synthetic life, but... someone in the last place I was in told me about how robots were treated in his world. I could relay that, if you want.

[He can easily see, though, how Legion would pass on information filtered through a third party.]

[forwearemany]

Yes.

(They're interested, even if the information is unlikely to be perfectly accurate.)

[onegreeneye]

Well, he said that humans made robots for specific reasons. And that was something that ended up kind of... inseparable from how they were seen, and their identities. It was built into their existences.

[If he sounds hesitant, it’s only partly because he’s trying to remember, and partly because this is, frankly, still a pretty horrifying prospect to him.]

[forwearemany]

Affirmative. Form follows function; synthetic life is rarely created for its own sake.

(That isn't news. That's just how robots are.)

[onegreeneye]

Yeah. Which... guess that probably wasn’t very useful, huh. [Of course they would’ve known that, already, but... coming from a place where robots don’t exist at all, it’s kind of tough for Ginko to determine what will and will not be pertinent information.]

Uh... he also mentioned limitations of what kinds of robots could be made. For example, he said he was solar-powered, but since his creation that had been made illegal.

[forwearemany]

Why is this illegal?

(Solar power is environmentally friendly and highly efficient. Making it illegal seems like poor judgement.)

[onegreeneye]

It was-- mm. I think he said it was the specific kind of solar power he used, actually? Uh, f-- photon energy. [That sounds right.]

It was... too efficient, basically. It made him extremely powerful, and even though Epsilon himself would never have hurt anyone, people were concerned that other robots with power like that might.

[The term "weapon of mass destruction" might be useful here, if it would occur to Ginko to use it - but it's too far removed from his experiences, his frame of reference. Going from the level of technology Ginko has been exposed to, where a rifle was about the most high-powered weapon he'd encountered, to the concept of a level of destructive power that could wipe out cities in an instant would be... something of a conceptual leap.]

[forwearemany]

(They're going to assume that this is just organic names being illogical again, since technically all solar power would be photon power.)

Organics commonly fear us for our capabilities.

(They don't need a super battery to be a weapon of mass destruction, when they live in the internet and everything is hooked up to the internet, including bits of infrastructure that provide necessary resources for organic life.)

[onegreeneye]

I've been getting that impression, yeah... seems odd, though, given that we-- or, they? Given that organics made you with those capabilities to begin with.

[What the hell are these future people even doing, huh!!]

[forwearemany]

Yes. Organics also create the environments in which our abilities become dangerous.

(An A.I. is only mildly scary until you make every device connected to the internet and thus hackable.)

[onegreeneye]

Guess so. [His understanding of what exactly the difference is between the world he's accustomed to and the 'environments' Legion describes is still kind of... limited. Abstract.

He's heard bits and pieces about new technology, new concepts - but the closest he's ever personally encountered to, for example, the internet, was the clunky communication devices distributed in Ryslig. The worst he could imagine someone doing with one of those would be to impersonate someone else, but he gets the impression that the organics that Legion is used to are expecting significantly worse.]

Anyway, I wish I could tell you more. But, in the end, I guess Epsilon didn't tell me a whole lot about it. Which I suppose I can understand.

[forwearemany]

Acknowledged. The concepts are difficult to explain without example.

(Chattering.)

Attempts to do so are also likely to cause boredom.

[onegreeneye]

Yeah, we, uh, might want to avoid that.

Good luck getting more info on this, though.

[forwearemany]

Acknowledged. Thank you.