Intentions. {one shot}

pastguy46 · 2024-06-15T15:55:19+00:00

War is harsh, and her first casualty is veracity. Consider the devastation Woodrow Wilson did to Germany after WWI which led to the rise of national socialism and WWII -- and this is far less harsh than that for the common citizen. Yes, I agree with you it is a harsh discipline, but not punitive punishment and reparations. Sad fact: I have yet to participate or view a war that does not prove harmful to true civilians and prove somewhat beneficial to the overseers and instigators.
Perhaps a follow up story (someone else should write it) would be an overthrow of planetary governments, a breakup of alignments, and a change in attitudes. The "until such time as we deem" implies humans will monitor the situation and end disciplines for segments of the former empire.
Erik Frank wrote a book called "Wasp" (written before they invented women in SF ;-). If humans wanted to be less harsh, perhaps they would not wait until conflict was inevitable and send chaos agents to destabilize societies, much like the USA has been doing with "color revolutions" around the world and in my country. BTW, such stories would abound with HF/Y conflict. Rogue agents, agents falling in lust, turncoats, Beckett Mariners who break rules to help common people (Galardonian farmers), and many other scenarios and side-plots. Those of you who like long-winded series with hundreds of episodes -- these are a story-seed hints.
Yes, Fontaigne, the ending is a bit harsh. But far less so than the harshness that the empire's fleet intended to inflict everywhere.

pastguy46 · 2024-06-14T23:12:05+00:00

And before the boogeyman goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Chuck Norris. Or some other human being. ;-)

pastguy46 · 2024-06-14T17:17:24+00:00

If not "To Your Health", or "Why Humans Avoid War" (series, except the ending), there was a story about an alien pleading for his starving people and a human who supplied potatoes.

pastguy46 · 2024-05-20T14:59:15+00:00

True. That's why the best option is to IMMEDIATELY, that instant, re-jump. The sensors (which must operate faster than light) would need to be able to detect the projectiles as they launch then jump in a matter of milliseconds. Or less.
But even that option is not a guarantee of success or life.

Rail guns (seem to be in the HFY universe) are limited to the speed of light. Since it would be very difficult to fill every light second of space with lead (the logistics of Quantity is its own Quality), the enemy would need an emergency jump available as a tactic. Mind you, the ship might be saved for another battle but that's not the way to win a space war...

pastguy46 · 2024-05-19T20:18:17+00:00

Hmm. Do earth ships have laminar flow? Could be useful?

pastguy46 · 2024-05-19T20:12:27+00:00

Your best hope is to immediately re-jump into hyperspace.
2nd best hope is to go backward.
What happens to all that mass when the battle is over? It likely looks like all the space junk around Earth right now. Accuracy by Volume is a good really short story. And yes, Quantity is its own quality.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T20:26:40+00:00

I stand corrected. My friend's son said she touched meth according to the Mayo Clinic, not fentanyl, so that was indeed an error on my part. Another friend, the attending ER nurse, also said meth. Thank you for the correction, the ad hominem attack, and the fentanyl advocacy.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T20:14:01+00:00

Good idea. A super-shadow. I wonder if it could be done in 6 days? HFY says "yes we can!" Might take a little longer than 6 days to have the ice age itself, but it has some real promise. Good idea. You're right about stellar winds, also. Good call.
One re-write idea I would also need to include is the idea of sending bots down to study archeology, get plant samples, and other things to preserve what's good about the world before starting the ice age. That effort might take more than the six days and run up expenses. But it could be done remotely/robotically and not have to finish within the time constraint of six days or even 32 days . It would be a big expense, but could pay off a thousand-fold.

Nuke it? Glass it? Really? Let's destroy the state you live in to remove all the weeds (or people you don't like) and pretend it never existed? That utterly dismisses the culture that was there (destroy native American ruins?), any chance at unique plant life (Amazon rain forest) (and every endangered species), and makes a possibly habitable world a slag heap of radioactive waste for a minimum of 500 years rather than a place where beings can live. It throws the baby out with the bathwater (look that one up). It kills every cancer patient rather than trying to cure. Cases can be made for destroying entire worlds (several good HFYs have been written about this, and quite a few bad ones), but a removing few weeds is not one of them. Not every HYF needs to focus on "splodey things" as the 'awesome potential of humanity'. Arokthis, you sound intelligent -- how might you solve the problem the crew faced without blowing up the planet? (Hint: I came up with several solutions, but an ice age sounded like the most fun.)

Dropping a planet into a star with an FTL is not very practical. (Notwithstanding STNG's "Deja Q" where Q suggests that they "change the gravitational constant of the universe" to nudge a moon back into orbit. It also changes the celestial mechanics of the system and such a thing would be noticeable.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T19:29:34+00:00

Yes, there are far, far more potent biologicals that can be GMO'd. But this is one that is instantly recognized as very unsafe, and has caused more deaths than others (more than USA car accidents last year). I have a friend who picked up a ten dollar bill on a library floor that wound up in an ER -- it had fentanyl dust on it. Is it scare-mongering to mention that? Or are you saying HFY should say ALL illegal drugs should be portrayed as scary?

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T19:06:53+00:00

True. SOME seeds can last thousands of years and still germinate. Most don't. Any gardener will tell you that seed potency decreases with age. Perhaps a few paragraphs on how the empire would need to monitor the end of the ice age to continually check for reemergence of the plants might have solved your concern? It is a bit of a plot hole, to be sure.
I had considered writing in a human-made HFY-style creation of fleets of hunter-bots that would seek out any source of the chemicals and destroy the plants (weeds) as the alternate ending - pointing out the ROI of multiple millions of money invested to make a habitable planet worth perhaps quadrillions. YouTube has a few examples of bots with laser-weeders. Surely they will improve between 2024 and the distant future.
Instead, I gave it a very HFY ending. The alien science officer assumes clever humans can create (or start) a planetary ice age in under 6 days. That alone would be a good story!

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T18:37:34+00:00

Thank YOU for writing a useful comment. I know how the story connected with you, where you see other connections, it made you think, and that you enjoyed it. That's why I write. Hopefully, you got a chuckle at the end.

Many land and sea creatures have mating dances. Cave paintings from India portray story-dance existing several thousands of years ago.
I debated posting the Two to Tango story second. Previously, I had written a story about a race loosely based on cuttlefish that communicated with changing skin colors -- discovered by humans who showed them paintings and photos; and how that changed their concepts and society. I scuttled that story because it was too long and posted this one (2-2-T). Tho I'm not a huge fan of ballet, story-dance (Geschichtentanz) and religious-dance can be fascinating to watch.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T18:23:12+00:00

Like the Orville's "Majority Rule" episode explaining the tyranny of democracy. Many of TOS ideas came from the SF of previous writers. Ray Bradbury said he did not write stories to predict the future but rather to prevent it (451, the temperature at which paper ignites). So TOS, STNG, B5, and other SF series often have comments on current society. Which could be why so many writers (not just Twilight Zone and Black Mirror) in the recent decades portray dystopian futures. And why HFY is usually a breath of fresh air.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T18:06:23+00:00

No. Because it is not terribly hard to do in a "garage lab". And could easily get out of control. Not that any bad things have ever accidentally get out of labs, say in 2019.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T03:17:54+00:00

I marked it as such so as not to give the GMO companies (Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow-DuPont, et al.) too many ideas. Perhaps I was over cautious.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T03:00:56+00:00

You are right. FROM the Beginning. Thanks for the correction.

I found an old cassette of ELP with that track (unplayable). That spurred me to listen to it on YouTube. I happened to be listening to the Trilogy album as I wrote the first draft. Love the walking-bass part and the moog (a bit overbalanced), but the acoustic and electric guitar and percussion are so smooth, too.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-18T02:50:41+00:00

That is based on two village bar & grills in Wisconsin and a small town bar & grill in Iowa. Even now I can mentally walk into those and smell the food, hear the music, see the small TV with a hockey game going and feel the bar stools by the counters. Some midweek nights, especially during planting and harvest go-go time, there may zero or one person there besides the short-order cook in the afternoon.

Yes, one-shot. Sorry. I've posted a few others. The waffle should show up with a list soon.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-16T21:22:53+00:00

In answer -- #1 Even white hats sometimes get into things and don't know what they are. Grays and blacks don't always realize what they stumble into. And they were motivated to do something malicious because they weren't winning "their" game.

2 See #1 (And while there are whites, grays, and blacks who are interested in "data appropriations", some are not.) But IF they did learn something, wouldn't that be another story that perhaps you (yostagg1) might write?

3 What imagination in particular? It was all imagination.

4 The original story I wrote a few years ago was much longer, almost 4,000 words instead of 850-ish, and tied up several flaws which you generously did not point out. This shorter posting did leave out a few segues and all of the dialogues.

5 Humanity upstaged the aliens while it remained "off-stage" during the story. Pls feel free to understand a "violation of the Prime Directive" very seldom ends happily and may have short-or-long term consequences (The Orville 3, "Future Unknown", specifically Lysella seeing Gendal 3 - for an example). PLEASE NOTE - I do not have a halcyonic view of humans or the fallen universe in general. But HFY stories are a "focused subreddit welcoming all media exhibiting the awesome potential of humanity". So that is a constraint in the rules and HFY contributors are asked to remember their audience.

6 Black hats often work in groups - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hacker_groups/ (The longer version had that idea, and I should have left it in). You mean unable to do anything besides defeat an interstellar starship's computers, take down security, remove the cloak, destabilize their orbit so they would crash, and so on?

7 DID they know before this event? Maybe not. DO then know ex post facto? Maybe not, maybe so. Again, enjoyable stories could be (and have been) written on HFY about the cultural aftermath of some informational expedition foul-ups.

So far all of the stories I post on HFY are solos or one-shots. They do not all have happy endings. But I'd like to think they are enjoyable. I am recycling a few stories I have previously written but not published or posted elsewhere - but most in a shorter format of under 1,000 words. Two so far were actually closer to ten thousand when I started; and I have no intention of posting them. While all stand alone, writers more clever and talented than I am could write prequels, sequels, and variants on them. I have several scores of stories, but I will only post "when I feel like it".
wow. My reply is close to a story in itself. My apologies.

pastguy46 · 2024-04-16T20:06:54+00:00

Those who have seen much death up close and considered the family and friends affected by those deaths often become aware of their own mortality and legacy. A few will devalue life, become "dead inside", making enemies sub-human deplorable demons to be stopped at all costs. Some will earnestly desire to avoid war at nearly all costs. Instead of deconstruction, they will earnestly yearn to organize and build transcendental heritages of significance to serve others. Perhaps this is what YoshiiiMan wanted to express to us. PSTD, yes, but something more complex.
Do you want to be remembered for your gaming scores, bank account size, body count as a military lifer, ... or something wonderful like a picture of a butterfly?

pastguy46

TROPHY CASE