Human Contact – Page 4

Shock:Retroactive Bundle with Human Contact

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do this before: if you own Shock:, send an email to humancontactbundle@glyphpress.com and I’ll send you freed PDFs of the two Human Contact preview editions, both the January one I made for Dreamation and the March one I made for PAX East!

Human Contact is inspired by Iain M. Banks’ Culture Novels — most notably, Player of Games, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Ekumen novels, in particular The Telling.

It’s about what happens when a liberal, democratic society (called the Academy, in the game) encounters another one that probably doesn’t have its values. What do they explorers do when one of their core values is the inherent value of all cultures? What happens on the ground, between individuals, some inconceivably far from home, the others with a sudden new appreciation of the scale of the Universe?

The PAX edition is about black ops anthropology: the colony being visited will be irretrievably damaged if they Academy just shows up from the sky. Maybe they’ll attack the Contactor, or maybe they’ll attack each other. Maybe their economy will collapse catastrophically. Maybe they’ll spread disease or quarantine the Academics in a single society, preventing them from seeing what the cultures of the world are truly like. It’s the job of three select individuals to change the society as little as possible while subtly preparing it for the arrival of the Academy’s Contactor, seven years later.

If you’re going to be at PAX Prime, talk to Joel Shempert and Joe Macdaldno! They’ll be in room 304 at at The Dreaming in booth 1440!

Human Contact Summer Reading List

I’ve read a good number of books leading up to the creation of Human Contact. They’re all about the challenges of interacting between cultures. If you like these books, you’ll probably like the game!

The Telling, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Left Hand of Darkness, ibid.
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
Use of Weapons, ibid.
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire, ibid.
Second Foundation, ibid.

But you probably (if irate emails and forum posts are any indication) think that I’m grossly negligent because I haven’t read your favorite book. This is your big chance! I’ve started keeping an Amazon wish list of the books that I obviously ought to have read, according to Shock: enthusiasts.

Put your money where your mouth is! Recommend me some books, I’ll put them on the list, and if you really care, you’ll spend a couple of dollars to send it to me. I’ll at least start reading them. If they suck, I won’t finish them! If it winds up influencing the book, I’ll enthusiastically thank you in the credits to Human Contact when it’s a real thing. Please buy me cheap, used versions, as long as they’re legible, unless you’re really keen to spend money or you feel the cover illustration is really beautiful or something. I think there’s even a way to just send one as a gift, without it being on a list, though I’m not sure. If you have to search, I’m the Joshua Newman in Florence, MA.

If you didn’t send it to me, don’t complain that I haven’t read it. If you sent it to me and I didn’t read it, you can complain.

Sound like a good deal?

Quantum Computation and the Contactors

I’m just now writing the Quantum Computation section of Human Contact, and lo and behold, there’s a really weird article on io9 today about a novel — and frankly paradigm-reshaking — use of the (still impractical) technology.

Quantum computing is interesting for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that it can solve mathematically Complex problems in non-eschatonic amounts of time. For instance, let’s say you’re traveling the world. You want to see 50 sights, then come back home, and you want to travel the minimum distance to do it. Solving this problem with a computer like the one you’re reading this on right now would take an impractical amount of time — it would have to try 3*10⁶⁴ routes. That’s 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If each simulated route took 1,000th of a second to calculate, it would take 10⁵⁷ years to have proven that the shortest route is found. (For perspective, that’s well past any prediction of the end of the Universe.) A quantum computer operating at the same computational speed, would take about .061 seconds, or the dark half of a blink.

For problems that involve Complexity like that one — simple systems whose interactions depend on other interactions — quantum computers straight up solve the problem, assuming there’s a single best answer (and greatly reduce the complexity to knowable probabilities otherwise). That means that most forms of encryption are immediately decryptable. It also means that those with quantum computation capabilities have otherwise provably unbreakable encryption. And it also means that, if someone tries to break the code, they leave indelible fingerprints that show that someone tried to tamper with it. With such a thing, you could predict weather with great accuracy, herd behaviors, probably even culture shifts — all assuming you knew what all the parts were in such a system.

In Human Contact, the Contactors (the starship/institutions that meet new civilizations) possess a single, multi-node quantum computer, required for making last-femtosecond calculations when passing through a Bridge to another star system. It’s integrated into the structure of the craft itself to maximize use of the radiation shielding of the vessel (radiation being made of quanta) and reduce error with redundancy. The ubiquitous computation and networking of Academics in the field can access the quantum computer, but their clothing, tools, vehicles, and food lacks the capabilities for that kind of computing by itself.

So, make sure your network connection is up if you want to predict the spread of a meme through the society, huh?

Self-Folding Origami

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZf3lo-16wQ&feature=player_embedded

A little more Academic technology from the real world. If you were to put a 1200 dpi reflective/transmissive display on each of those planes, then increase the resolution to the point of imperceptibility, then pack it full of sensors and computation, you’d get their smart Paper.

Kodrek, A Game of the Kotaht Archipelago

A Kodrek board — A game of wrestling spacecraft

During last night’s game of Human Contact, there was a scene in a rough ‘n’ tumble bar where there was a gambling game going on between a couple of background characters in the Kotaht Archipelago. There was some hustling going on, so we wound up describing the game a little bit. Vincent wanted there to be stuff you hid under your hand. I wanted there to be a board where you made your commitments based on your hidden hand.

After the game ended for the night (Rob had to go home), Vincent and I talked it out a bit. We came up with Kodrek. The people of the Kotaht have a clan structure and they fight over stuff all the time in a fairly ritualized, low-casualty, high benefit form of spacecraft warfare. This game is to their warfare the way Chess is to ours: grossly abstracted to the point of being a poor simulation, but much more fun, really.

There are a number of local variations to the game, of course, but these things remain constant:

It is played on a triangular grid
Each player has two pieces: a Craft and a Speaker. These represent spacecraft and the Speakers on board who have access and the mathematical skill to plot a course. The big piece is the Craft. The little one is the Speaker.
It’s a gambling game. Everyone antes the same amount into the pot at the beginning of the game, then takes their money back out turn by turn.
The object of the game is to do one of the following:
- Fling another ship off the board on your turn, in which case you win the pot. Some variants have the pot split between the remaining players.
- Impact another craft on your turn (some variants say you must end a turn on top of another craft, some say you end a turn within one “point” of another craft, some say that you merely cross paths in a turn) which gets you money from the target immediately. If the target doesn’t have enough, you take the balance from the pot.
- Get off the board on your turn, in which case the game starts anew. Everyone pays an equal amount to get the pot up to full strength.
You have a number of coins, (5 to 8, determined by the local variation, which also determines the size of the board). You turn coins Heads up to draw ships closer to you and Tails up to move your ship. You cover the coins with your hand and reveal them, then make your moves based on what you see revealed in others’ hands.
You play a bunch of games in a row. In some places, you play a set number of games, and in some, you quit any time, dividing the pot three ways. If anyone leaves in the middle of a game, the remaining players split the pot in half. If there’s a remainder, it goes to the barmaid.

We’re gonna sketch up this game and get the numbers ironed out. Then we’ll do something or other with it if it’s as fun as we think it is.

Science Fiction Language

Over at io9, there’s an article about languages in science fiction, using as an example how much ours has changed since Shakespeare’s time. It’s neat, and timely, as I’m working on the language section of Shock:Human Contact next. If I do another Preview Edition, it’ll be about language and war.

I’m also drawing on The Language Construction Kit, an indie publication by Mark Rosenfelder. The website is good, but the book is more comprehensive. It really twiddles my linguistic fun center and I’m looking forward to reading the book really thoroughly when I’m done laying out Human Contact. It covers syntax (how words are assembled with each other), lexicon (words and what they mean), morphology (how spoken words are formed), and alphabet construction. I’m also wrestling with the nonfiction Writing Systems of the World and the (comically dense) World’s Major Languages.

If you’ve played Human Contact, you know the placeholder rule: you come up with a handful of syllables, then make names for people and places out of them, adding to the syllabary as needed. The primary function, though, is not just to make proper nouns (and certainly not to replace words we already have with alienish ones), but make words that really represent the way a people thinks. When a society has a concept that we, as players, have a word for, we use that word.

In our game right now, there’s a clan structure in the colony. Clans have made up names (Jun and Bri, for instance, which are added to one’s name, and changed when one changes clan, which happens rather a lot), but the word we use for clans is “clans”. On the other hand, those who serve in a clan military are by definition men, whether or not they’re male. It is scandalously impolite to point out that a marine or spacecraft crewman is female. But one’s biological mother might very well be in the military. The society can’t abide homosexuality, though, so they have a word for one’s female father: drokun. It sounds close enough to the word for “father”, drokung, that you can get the idea across without having to be explicit about it. Everyone can make believe that they heard “drokung” when you said “drokun”, but you’ve conveyed the requisite information. Likewise, I’ve got some stuff about the Academic language, Kepho-Rn, in the wiki, covering a few useful Academic concepts and their pronunciations.

My intention is to have a system that floats at a LeGuin level of language construction, where there are words or phrases to describe particular culturally unique phenomena. I also want to give optional rules for broad language construction for those who, like me, get excited about the linguistic-anthropological aspects of the game.

Look Out Everybody! Here Comes the Future!

Fast Company has just posted the kind of panic article I ain’t seen since, oh, Jack Dempsey’s article, “I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot“. It refers to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even. And the company that they’re freeeeakin’ out about? Frog Design. The guys who designed the Macintosh. (And the Frollerskate.)

The article also misses some important technical aspects: the dating thing is just like current online dating, only you’re actually there with the person. The fast food example doesn’t need to tell anyone but you the information — the only public information is the nutritional value of the food. That’s an input-only situation. And the jacket-oggling situation both works against the market failure of capitalism by giving more perfect information to the consumer and keeps the wearer unperturbed. And all the computer’s doing is recognizing where the consumer can get the jacket, not where the wearer got it, or how much she paid, or what color underwear she’s got on under it.

The article closes by somehow relating this AR, data-rich environment to HAL 9000. The issue with HAL, if you’ll recall, was not that the computer had too much information about everybody. It’s that he was in the service of insanely sui/genocidal plutocratic idealogues. To be sure, there are privacy concerns. But my biggest privacy concerns are about those with power who don’t share. Not the people around us who do.

If you want to see Frog’s original post without the freakouts, it’s over here.

Also, it just occurred to me: this is how Academics see the world(s). Whuffies and all.

How the Academy Figures Out What Planets to Explore

Exoplanet — The first planet ever seen outside our solar system, Fomalhaut B.

Over at Centauri Dreams, there’s an article about seeing alien planets up close, and what would be required. (Emphases mine)

Huge space arrays could help follow up our investigations of such a discovery, but Schneider notes that to get a 100-pixel image of a planet with twice the Earth’s diameter some 16.3 light years away would require the elements of the array to be more than 43 miles apart. Having set up this interferometric system, we could snap images of things like rings, clouds, oceans or continents, and could monitor changes in cloud cover. But we would still be missing something we’d really like to know. Just what do the inhabitants of this place look like?

…To begin imaging even giant organisms 30 feet long and wide on the closest putative exoplanet, Alpha Centauri AB b, some 4.37 light years away, the elements making up a telescope array would have to cover a distance roughly 400,000 miles wide, or almost the Sun’s radius. The area required to collect even one photon a year in light reflected off such a planet is some 60 miles wide.

For us, dealing with practical budgets, international ethnic conflicts, and scarcity — both imposed and amoral — those numbers are fantastically out of reach. But for the Academy, they’re not. What is impractical for the Academy is filling the solar system with sensors that get in the way of other sensors. And that means that there’s competition for sensor time, just like at the VLA and the Arecibo telescope. To avoid that, there’s a lot of poring over data that others have collected — evidence that’s compelling enough to invest a singular resource into.

So it seems likely that one of the missions of every starship is to start setting up a new array when they arrive somewhere. The data will either return on a starship or eventually be picked up by an array in some other solar system, probably centuries later.

Keeping in mind that any information so gathered is decades to millennia old, the Academy can watch out for signs of humanity, from agricultural land change to nighttime city lights and expansion to nearby planets. If they’re lucky (?), they might catch images of nuclear explosions or the sparkling of starships.

Keeping in mind that data would be gathered in single photons over years, there would be nothing realtime about it — no radio data (though they could probably confirm the use of radio) and no images of anything that moves erratically. But it’s enough to know that there’s someone there.

Pumzi—Science Fiction from Kenya

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3elKofS43xM&feature=player_embedded

Three things strike me about this. The first is that it looks gorgeous. The second is that it’s interesting that this “last outpost of humanity that doesn’t know that outside is OK” theme is so resilient — Logan’s Run, The Island (which, OK, was more or less a remake of Logan’s Run), Paranoia, Moon’s busted antenna, THX-1138, and even Planet of the Apes’ Forbidden Zone. It says something about systems of societal control, that we could be exploring the world were it not for the fears we’re fed.

The third is, holy shit, this could be a picture of an Academic:

I wonder if Pumzi interacts with the audience’s knowledge of its ancestors the way Moon interacted with the audience’s assumptions borne of 2001 and a bazillion “OMG IM A CLOEN” stories. It’s probably not fair to judge every indie science fiction movie by the bar Moon set, but shit, if filmmakers are looking at that bar at all, I’m awfully excited.

Homo Floresiensis and the Origins of Human Contact

The existence of Homo Floresiensis is one of the primary things that motivated Human Contact when we first started playing it. This is a three-foot tall hominin that’s been discovered in Indonesia that, while it had a cranial capacity two thirds smaller than ours, was clearly a tool-using, cultural creature, and it looks like major neural architecture evolved into some sort of denser, perhaps more efficient form than ours. It would appear that the last ancestor we shared with these guys was Homo Habilis. That means that these people (for lack of a better term) who existed into the “modern human” era around 12,000 years ago, shared an ancestor with us no more recently than 1.8 million years ago. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, this is what elephants looked like then:

So, while these were certainly people, they were not human. They had culture and tools, and probably a language, but no speech! Maybe sign language? That big face looks awfully expressive to me. I bet they could communicate a lot with it.

If you want, read the Wikipedia article I linked. But when you’ve got an hour, you must sit down and watch Alien from Earth. Not only is it a fascinating story about these previously unknown people, but it’s a lot about how science is done.