Moe Lane's Blog, page 100
January 13, 2025
Terrorists, Ritual Nihilists, and the Space-Happy, Part 1 (Unfiltered)
I apparently really want to expand Unfiltered. Go figure.
Terrorists
Terrorist groups differ from the other two in that they generally aren’t crazy. Well. They’re all mass murderers who can kill without sentiment, hesitation, or remorse, and who will cheerfully commit all manner of crimes to achieve their missions – but they don’t act insane. You can have a coherent conversation with one and they always have a basic grasp on reality, right up to the moment where one decides that you’re violating… whatever rules of thumb they use from slaughtering every human they see as too tainted or whatever. Once that happens, they’ll be at your throat until one of you is dead.
What motivates them: stopping evil and corruption. Not civic corruption, although they’ll keep an eye out for white collar crime. No, what they’re concerned about is more spiritual. More esoteric. A terrorist has difficulty explaining what exactly that kind of corruption is except to another terrorist, but they’ll all know it when they see it. And then they’ll do something about it.
Groups
Bureau désavoué
Specialty: Temporary colony depopulation. Bureau operations start with the dismantling of any working space craft and larger population centers via the use of Kinetic Energy Weapons. Once the population is reduced, Bureau teams descend to clean out the survivors with kill-on-sight squads. They will then seed the depopulated area with vicious, but short-lived biotoxins to catch anyone who remains. The Bureau désavoué attempts to minimize damage to existing industrial infrastructure whenever possible, and is notorious for its after-mission reports explaining the reasons for the attack, the measures deemed necessary, reminders on how long before the site can be safely visited, and a formal apology for the lives lost.
Origins: formed from an EDO government department set up to monitor extrasolar workers and wildcat colonies. They were the first group to go rogue, although many outside observers wonder just how rogue they are. The Bureau désavoué is well-funded, and is extremely thorough in its operations.
Galactic Pioneer Scouts
Specialty: Piracy. The Galactic Pioneer Scouts seek out ships in distress. When they encounter one, the Scouts seize control of the ship, secure the crew, and put each individual crew member through a Judging process. Those who pass are not harmed; those who fail are immediately thrown out the nearest airlock. If enough crew pass Judgement to operate the ship, they will be released unharmed – and with their ship repaired. If there are not enough crew, they will be marooned with a distress beacon and sufficient supplies (including a box of cookies) on the nearest habitable Tomb World.
Origins: formed from a unisex youth organization descended from similar Terran groups. The Scouts are unique in that they are young: members over the age of twenty-five are exceedingly rare in the organization. Many are not legal adults, as Earth or the colony worlds would define them. Scouts are trained in a remarkable range of skills and professions, some of which are highly alarming. A Scout training manual can cause nightmares for the unprepared.
League of the Viridian Triangle
Specialty: Mayhem. Triangle operations are not subtle. They are also never, ever proportionate. They are exactly the sort of people who would kill an ant with an anvil, if that’s what it took to make sure that that one specific ant didn’t survive. The League will also spend as much time as they can on a particular terrorist attack, trying to get as many potential targets as they can. Property damage is never a concern.
Origins: officially, it’s another disavowed government agency (elements from the USNA’s Federal Security Bureau). Unofficially, it’s assumed that somebody in the League can contact someone in the FSB if it’s really important enough. There’s a certain rivalry between the League and the Bureau désavoué: the League is indiscriminate where the Bureau is precise, but also quick where the Bureau is slow. Interestingly, the League does take prisoners, typically stashing them somewhere with a lockable door. It also manages to gather a surprising number of recruits during League operations.
Order of Truth
Specialty: Manipulation, subversion, and assassination. The Order of Truth avoids straight-up fights. Their tools are corrosion in the infrastructure, memetic poisons in the inbox, the right whispered word in precisely the wrong ear; when that fails, there’s always the reliable air bubble in the bloodstream. If they do it right, you’ll not only never suspect one of them of being the murderer; you won’t even know that there was a murder in the first place. But their precision should not be seen as solicitude towards the innocent. The Order never lets anything stay between them, and their target.
Origins: the Order recruits from those who have experienced horror up close, and personal. Did your best friend turn out to be a Ritual Nihilist, and manage to kill an entire space station before she was taken down? Would you have been able to stop it, if only you had known? Does the thought obsess you at night? If the answers to these questions are all ‘yes,’ well, usually that ends with an emergency mental health intervention. But sometimes the Order finds you first.
Xenolife Shield Interstellar
Specialty: Contract killing. Members of XSI insist that they are not actually terrorists. They are professionals who take contracts from trusted fixers to go and shoot horrible alien monsters that are preying on human settlements and facilities. That a good number of these monsters turn out to be originally humans themselves is merely an unavoidable consequence of operating in the Tomb Worlds. Is it really murder to kill somebody who’s obviously already well on the way to becoming a Ritual Nihilist? There’s just no sense in waiting for them to kill somebody innocent.
Origins: Xenolife Shield Interstellar officially disbanded as a corporate entity a century ago. That there are still plenty of teams running around using XSI’s corporate logo (a classic Grey Alien with x-ed out eyes) is surely a coincidence. Or that there’s an actual office that purports to be the XSI corporate HQ, somewhere in the seediest parts of the African Protective Trade Pact. The company mostly operates on a cash basis, as none of the banks are really safe. Then again, XSI does have a lot of cash. Business is always hopping.
Patreon!
Tweet of the Day, I Would Laugh And I Would Laugh And I Would Laugh… edition.
…and then I would laugh some more. I don’t think it’ll happen, but man. If it did.
Chinese officials are considering selling TikTok US to Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg pic.twitter.com/Xuy4VTZ7E2
— Stocktwits (@Stocktwits) January 14, 2025
Via Wu_Tang_Finance.
Guess I’m skipping Season 2 of The Sandman.
Rough reading, if you can track it down.
Editor's note: This story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including graphic allegations of sexual assault.
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 13, 2025
Last summer, a British podcast broke the news that multiple women had accused Neil Gaiman, the acclaimed British fantasist and author of ‘The Sandman’’… pic.twitter.com/r8ddoek55m
I would rather not believe the allegations, and I fully recognize that there are brutal divorce proceedings interwoven throughout this narrative. It’s just that… yeah, I can believe that he really did a lot of this stuff. It kind of resonates with stuff in his stories.
And I really wish it didn’t.
January 12, 2025
‘Magic Carpet Ride.’
Magic Carpet Ride, Steppenwolf
#commissionearned
Blue Origin Launch (hopefully) at 1 AM.
Neat: “Blue Origin plans to launch the debut mission of its powerful New Glenn rocket no earlier than early Monday (Jan. 13) after a delay, and you can watch the action live.” Feed below:
SpaceX is very cool but we need more companies putting meaningful amounts of stuff into orbit on their own. Plenty of work for everybody…
Via Instapundit.
The Mechanism, Part 3. [Unfiltered]
I think that covers this topic. At least for now.
Grey, Wildcat, and Black Colonies
There are officially only five grey colonies, or permanent human settlements that are not part of the ‘official’ (which is to say, Amalgamation-assigned) colony system. Each one is found on one of the ‘Green’ worlds (planets not only safe for humanity, but also at least as habitable as one of the official colony worlds). At this time, transportees will not be sent to a grey colony unless they have unique skills or natural talents. There are plans in place to change this, once a grey colony can maintain a population of at least two hundred thousand.
An undetermined number of transportees manage to get to a grey colony anyway. Their officially unofficial existence appeals to those who have good reason to hide under a new identity. It’s already been established that asking other colonists impertinent questions can be unwise, or at least highly socially awkward. Great Powers, NGOs, and megacorporations will often put mentally stable but politically embarrassing personnel in a grey colony as remittance men; they get paid to stay right where they are, and never go home. It’s hard to tell them apart from private individuals who just have a briefcase full of stolen money.
Poorer transportees who find the official colony worlds intolerable will gravitate to wildcat colonies. Depending on the planet, this could be a corporation research facility, a collection of salvage operations, an ad hoc refueling and resupply station, or a half-built pirate haven (they rarely survive long enough to be a fully built one). If you aren’t afraid of getting your hands dirty – in any number of ways – you can get quite deep into the Tomb Worlds before you find whatever it is that’s going to kill you. Because eventually something will – but better that than growing corn in Jefferson for the next forty years, right?
As for the ‘black’ colonies… oh, those are just myths. Secret colonies? Places where unwise research paths might be taken, or odd and unsavory technologies can be examined with proper amounts of funding? Cities where bizarre alien theories of sociology and psychology can be tested out, or the human genome can be molded and formed under safer conditions? An entire world where no technology is permitted above that of the steam engine, in order to give humanity one final bolthole in case the murderers of the Amalgamation decide that it’s our turn? Well, space is large — but even so: hiding it would be nigh-impossible. Somebody would talk, surely. It must all be a myth.Although if it were true, then certainly one other thing would also be true. Operations of that level of intensity would unfortunately need a steady supply of research subjects. Ones that would not be missed.
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Patreon Microfiction: Timmy and the Bad Place.
Alas, ‘Timmy and the Bad Place’ just didn’t gel, last month. Such is life. Welp, there’s always next Christmas.
Patreon!
Tweet of the Day, It Was A Great Day For Roc… Excuse Me edition.
I said, IT WAS A GREAT DAY FOR ROCK.
On this day in 1969 a new rock band called Led Zeppelin became known with the release of their debut album.
—
The album was recorded in just 36 hours of studio time and featured the innovative combination of blues, heavy rock, and acoustic elements that defined the band. pic.twitter.com/ONrTccE9n9Rock History
January 11, 2025
‘All I Want Is You.’
I’d never voluntarily engage in time travel. But if I was stuck in 1987 anyway, well… I guess I’d get tickets for this tour.
#commissionearned
Another three weeks until the Fermi Resolution Worldbook Backerkit is live.
I think it’s going okay? I’ve been spending the last month and a bit nagging people to sign up for notifications on the Fermi Resolution Worldbook, and so far it’s been… I don’t actually know, exactly. I have more followers for this one than I did for my Kickstarters last year, but I don’t know whether that’s going to be something I can directly compare. I’ll have more information after this Backerkit launches, but that’s data I won’t fully have until March.
I also need to spend the next few weeks encouraging others to talk up my project. Emails go out to various folks next week, essentially begging for buzz. Always a weird part of the job, really – but one you have to do.
Be sure to click the link to sign up!
