On Those With Inferior Blood

[Arrendis]

@Rynna_Alcerys

That stupid training stuff hardly counts as a direct attempt on my life. What about my use of jump clones, do those count as successful, direct attempts on my life?

Your use of jump clones doesn’t entail someone else trying to kill you. Also, the clone you jump out of… or, to be more technically accurate, the person who walks into the medbay, lays down in the medical stasis unit, and gets a brain-scan immediately prior to going into cold storage… doesn’t die.

Their brain-state gets scanned¹, converted to data, and the brain² of the person in cold storage that’s being ‘jumped into’ gets a quick bit of additional flash-growth to make the new connections, the chemical state of that brain is adjusted, and that still-living person wakes up. If ‘you’ jump back into the previous clone… that is literally the previous clone. No death involved.

Your pod exploding did, not only see someone die, it also entailed someone attempting to kill ‘you’. However, most importantly?

@Rynna_Alcerys

How far are we going to stretch reality to pretend you have some sort of gotcha against me?

It was pretty blatantly just mild teasing, at most.

@Rynna_Alcerys

But, to counter what you were saying, it isn’t Inahka Manufacturing’s job to build me an Abaddon to celebrate my graduation from the capsuleer program. They didn’t do it because I told them to, I didn’t tell them to. They did it to show their appreciation.

Sure. It’s not the servants’ job to suck up to management. In a legal framework where insufficient bowing and scraping can have someone executed, of course it is.

@Rynna_Alcerys

“A whole battleship?” Yes. I was referring to the action itself, a gesture of appreciation, a gift to me.

Once again, you miss the teasing aspect of things. You could have simply said ‘a ship’, but you came across like you were making a big deal of it being a battleship. So I poked fun at the idea that a battleship is anything significant to most capsuleers.

@Rynna_Alcerys

The whole point is that I was accused of ruling my city by fear, which simply isn’t the case.

Well, mine was that people who are actively dependent upon your goodwill for their continued ability to house and feed their families maybe can’t be trusted to be the most objective or sincere of well-wishers. After all, it’s not like they have much choice.

Purely hypothetically, what would happen if one of your subjects were to express, in a very public forum, with a cogent and well-developed and supported argument, that they felt your rule was oppressive, that you were unfit for your position, or that you’re undeserving of the blessings your position has entitled you to?

I’m not saying any of them feel that way. For all I know, you’re 100% perfectly correct about how they view you. But if one did feel that way, and made their case someplace public… what would the consequences be?

^{1. The medical bay’s scanner doesn’t kill you because it doesn’t have to. The burn scanner in your pod is reacting to the imminent destruction of the pod, and so has to work basically immediately. The medbay scanner… in addition to being a fair bit larger because it’s not trying to all be stuffed into the narrow hull of a pod… can take a few seconds, so it doesn’t have to damage the brain.}

^{2. Remember, now that you’ve gone through the ‘got your implants’ death, your brain is a flash-grown lump of biomass. They just give it another hit of the chemical cocktail they use for the initial growth.}