Darkworld: Earth

“And this is one of the sleeping quarters for the Sulivans. They mostly sleep in packs, but this is one of the rooms for those who are higher in the current social rankings. You will notice that the netting of the communal nests is of a softer fabric, and the lights and ambient sound is more like the homeworld of the Sulivans compared to the previous sleeping quarters that I showed you. While the truth is that there’s no reason to make one of the sleeping quarters of lower quality than any of the others, the Sulivans believe that it increases their morale to compete for little priveleges, and so they deliberately make some of their quarters of lower quality and compete with each other over who is forced to sleep in them,” Eolai explained.

“That sounds … human of them,” Diego said.

“Does it?” Eolai asked. “I believe that they might have acquired this from observing human habitation, although others remain unconvinced. They believe that it began due to necessity over economic inequalities in the Sulivans distant past and simply became part of their culture despite the fact that they are now more or less a post-scarcity society.”

“Our society hasn’t reached the point of being considered post-scarcity. Not even close,” Diego admitted. “But I can definitely understand why they would compete for the better sleeping quarters. On the Seeker, the sleeping quarters are all superficially the same, but there are subtle differences. I had to trade two weeks into the mission because the wine of the one of the ventilation ducts kept one of my collegues awake at night. It didn’t bother me any though, but I’ve traded three times since then for various reasons.”

“Yes, well, there are some definite paralleles between those situations,” Eolai agreed. “However, for the Sulivans, it is very common to swap back and forth between the high quality rooms and the low quality rooms from sleeping period to sleeping period until one has established oneself as a dominant member of their complex social ranking system. Every night, the highest ranking females will select one of their member to sleep in a private room. This is actually a punishment, or it is seen as a punishment to most of the Sulivans as they do not sleep very well when they are not in the presence of three to five others of their species. However, the matron who sleeps alone determines the sleeping arrangements for the entire rest of the ship.”

“Oh,” Diego said. “That sounds … complex.”

“It is. Especially because the lower ranked and newer Sulivans do not know who to support from day to day in order to assure that they receive the best sleeping arrangements. Many times the ranking matrons fix the order in which they sleep alone in order to flex their power over the lower ranking members of their community. The rest of the individuals are constantly fighting to predict the order in which the Matrons will be selected so that they know who to attempt to please the most on any given day. They are often wrong and it causes them some disappointment when they have spent all day pleasing the rival of the one who will be determining their sleeping arrangements that night.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.”

“It is very amusing to watch, but the interactions are often very subtle and require experience and training to pick out. Some of them are very obvious, however. Anyone who is brave enough to speak an idea to a human will almost always earn favor, for example, no matter which matron assigns the beds that night. However, speaking something foolish that gets them teased or rebuked by a human will often lead them to sleeping in poor quarters for a week or longer.”

“So you guys get in on this game too?” Diego asked.

“To some extent. You must understand, there is often very little to actually do aboard this ship except for watching the Sulivans. This is their ship, after all. They are supposed to be the ones running it and protecting the star system.”

“I thought you were their captain,” Diego objected as they walked out into the hallway and continued past more of the sleeping quarters.

“I believe that’s not exactly an accurate translation. This ship belongs to the Sulivans. The Sulivans will trust the judgement of a Yonohoans beyond any judgement of their own, and ten times more when it comes to interacting with other tribes or cultures of humans. However, while I am able to control this ship on my own, it is generally not my responsibility to oversee its maintenance or surveilance of the local cluster. I spend most of my time speaking with my children on the planet or interviewing potential mates,” Eolai explained.

Diego looked sideways at the man. “Um, how many children do you have, Eolai? And are the Yonohoans polygamous?”

Eolai touched the device on his ear, signalling that he was listening to the computer for a moment, then launched into the explanation. “As to the first question, I have thirty-two children in this star system. My situation is a little unique. I will attempt to explain it, but I believe that there are cultural differences between our people which I am hoping will not cause you distress. Due to various factors, the Sulivans strongly encourage me to breed. However, there are many laws which restrict their ability to share my genetic information for procreational purposes without my express consent. I wish for all of my children to grow up in loving homes, so I often spend time interviewing both the mother of my potential children and the man whom she believes will make a good male role model and has promised to act in that regard. It is usually a monogomous couple who receives my genetic information. Sometimes the woman concents to being my lover and sometimes the child is created using indirect methods. It is always a discussion between myself and the other parents of my children. Does this make sense?”

Diego’s eyebrows rose during the explanation. He eventually nodded. “I suppose that’s different than how we do things on Earth. On Earth, many men would be very upset at the idea of a man having another woman’s child and passing it off as his.”

“As they should be. Deceiving a child on who its biological parents are is very much frowned upon in our society. But there is an honor in raising a child whether that child carries your genetic line or not. Many men in our society view being the male role model of a child as an admirable pursuit. More importantly, however, it is significantly easier to agree to earn a license to have a child if they agree to a genetic donation from someone who is on both the Yonohoans list of preferred parents and the Sullivan’s list of priority genetics.”

“Okay. I guess it’s not so different from adoption in our world. We do have a long tradition of adopting orphans or unwanted children into families who for whatever reason can’t have children of their own,” Diego said. “It’s just that most of the time the biological parents aren’t involved in that situation. Sometimes the kids don’t even know until they’re older, they might not even figure it out at all. Captain Moon was adopted. I don’t know the whole story, of course, but I know her biological parents were Korean and her adoptive parents were white. There wasn’t really any hiding it from her when she was young, so she grew up knowing the entire time,” Diego explained.

“I cannot understand why you would hide a child’s parentage from them,” Eolai commented. “Not unless one of the parents had done something particularly shameful.”

“You don’t, like, descriminate against the children of criminals or disidents or anything, do you?” Diego asked.

“It is unfortunate that there are some actions which reflect on the entire family,” Eolai admitted, “Including the children who are of course innocent. I do not personally support the shaming of entire families for the action of individuals, but not even the Yonohoans are a perfect society. Many of the families of those individuals who decide to hunt the Sulivans will flee to another empire in order to escape the shame of what their family member has done.”

“Wait, you hunt those guys?” Diego asked.

“I would never. It is most heinous. It is … it is a very complicated subject. One which will take some time to explain, and I would prefer to discuss lighter topics. My youngest son turned six years old recently, and when he learned that your ship was sending out Rocktala messages he was very excited to try to communicate with you.”

“Yeah, so explain that a little more. What exactly is a Rocktala,” Diego asked.

“You know, when I realized that you were attempting to use toys to communicate with our people, I was forced to look into the history of the Rocktalas more closely. You see, most of what you would consider our computer networks use methods of faster than light information transmission. It is not just for speed of transmission, although that is a concern. It is also due to security. A network that runs on paired subatomic particles is far more secure than one which relies on simple electromagnetic radiation.”

“Yeah, with you so far,” Diego agreed.

“I believe that is one of the pitfals of your current method for seeking out new worlds that your people are facing. It is entirely possible that you have flown past one hundred inhabited worlds while completely unaware that your search for life would have been solved if you had just gotten a little bit closer. It is extremely ironic that you would notice the radiation of the Rocktala and come to investigate for reasons that will take some time to explain.”

“I’m listening,” Diego continued as they walked through the halls of the alien spacecraft. He was still wearing his vacuum suit, and his nose really itched something fierce, but he was curious to hear Eolai’s explanation.

“Well, everyone considers the Rocktala to be an obsolete tool because it relies on light speed,” Eolai began. “On top of that, it has a very ugly history during the Liberation Wars which I do not wish to get into at this time. I will simply say that it was used in the commission of atrocities.”

“Okay. But it’s, like, a comunication protocol, not a weapon, right? You wouldn’t let your kids play with it if it was a weapon.”

“Exactly. Most of the children who are playing with it have no idea about the darker part of the Rocktala’s legacy. They view, and the way that I viewed it in my youth, was of a way of declaring your existance to the universe. Once you have sent a message through the Rocktala, it is duplicated throughout the entire network at every single receiver and stored for eternity, constantly being rechecked by the database of that receiver and compared to the receivers that it is connected to. From the moment of transmission until the radiation is too feint to detect, there is no taking that message back once it is sent.”

Diego blinked in surprise. “I’m not certain that I follow.”

“That is because you have only seen the surface of the Rocktala network, which is all that most of our children ever see as well. Before we stripped it down for them to play with, it was a redundant system which used electromagnetic transmissions to confirm the accuracy of the message which was sent using a FTL communication methodology. At one time, the preservation of recorded Rocktala messages was extremely important for legal purposes. As it became less important, we stripped out the FTL portion of the protocol because we were putting it in toys and the limitation of light speed communication for our children was somewhat quaint, as well as poetic because it allowed our children to declare their voices to the universe.”

“Okay. So the microwave signals that your toys use are a stripped down old confirmation method of an old communication protocol that nobody uses because it’s not secure. Got it,” Diego said.

“It isn’t because it’s not secure. It’s because the radiation was a layer of redundancy, along with the constant error checking, which was determined not to be worth the extra effort. If there were any secure Rocktala devices left in use on the planet, they would have not been confused because your ship is not connected directly to the Rocktala network and would have triggered defensive protocols to protect itself from your radiation. If the network was still in use by any military forces, they would have logged the messages and flagged your ship for review. And that is why it’s so funny that you came to this world.”

“Okay. I’m not certain why you think that’s funny,” Diego said.

“Because the Sulivans spent ten thousand years trying to convince us to make our children stop playing with the Rocktala before the galactic community at large legislated that it was an obsolete technology and stopped using it for military purposes. For ten thousand years we would get swarm ships who came to investigate why our planet was causing strange errors in their networks from an area of space which was considered liberated. Every time that would happen the Sulivans would panic for a decade, even though it would only take a single conversation between the leader of the swarm and the leader of the Yonohoan to convince the Swarm to leave.”

“Okay … so why were the kids allowed to play with a military communications protocol?” Diego asked.

“Partly just because it was funny,” Eolai explained. “But more seriously, it is because despite being ‘obsolete,’ it is possible that there are still darkworlds out there which might rely upon it to call for help. The Swarm Ships did not come seeking to destroy the Sulivans for any particular crime they might have committed, they came because they were worried that the Yonohoans might have been abandoned and were seeking aid, shelter, or succor. Every time the swarm ships arrived, it proved that they still existed, and were continuing to carry on their duty to atone for the sins that they had committed during the long liberation wars, as they have dedicated their lives and their deaths to such a duty.”

Diego considered the explanation, then shook his head. “I’m not quite certain that I understand.”

“That is okay. Over here is the Sullivan’s exercise hall. I will show you some of the instruments that they use to keep themselves fit with and try to explain the way that the games involved fit into their society.”