by Allan Kaster
Change his mind. Because Hank’s mind was his to change, and his to reprogram if he wanted to, as he’d wanted to then and he wanted to now.
Maggie nodded.
“If you don’t mind some more unsolicited advice,” Dr. Chen added softly, “I hope you’ll talk to someone. There’s more than one way to reprogram your brain.”
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Dear Hank,
Dr. Chen recommended I write to you. I don’t know if you’ll read this. I don’t know if I hope you will or not.
I’m sorry.
I don’t know what to say other than that, that wouldn’t sound like an excuse or dishonesty. But I’m working on seeing your point of view, and not pretending I know what you—you at any time—would have thought. I’m working on . . . not knowing all the answers.
I’m moving. I’m going to go back east and try to build a life. Update my skills, find a job, leave the house, try to make some friends, maybe. Some days I’m optimistic I’ll be able to do it. Some days I’m not.
My therapist says that’s okay.
Oh, I’m seeing a therapist, and I’ll continue once I move back home. They also started me on antidepressants. I think it’s helping. As Dr. Chen says, I’m trying to reprogram my brain to be . . . more of who I want to be.
It just took me a while to get there. I’m sorry.
Maybe someday I’ll change me enough that you’re willing to give me one more chance.
Entropy War
Yoon Ha Lee
THIS IS NOT a story about an alien species who called themselves the ktho. Nor does it have anything to do with the arkworld that they left behind, ancient of years. The ktho didn’t want to play the game; they wanted to game the system, and this is the price they paid. You will never have to worry about ktho armadas or ktho deathspheres. You will never lose sleep looking up wondering if your sun will shudder dark as the ktho engines of war feast upon it.
The ktho are no longer fighting in the Entropy War. The arkworld they left behind has no bearing on any of your decisions. Its secrets don’t matter. That means you have a chance in the game, doesn’t it? This is your story.
Introduction to the Quickstart Guide
Welcome to the Entropy War, a conflict of universe-spanning proportions. In it you will guide ravenous fleets, the rise and fall of civilizations, and, of course, the spindown of the cosmos itself. You should expect unequal proportions of blood, destruction, and heroism, and the occasional leavening of injustice.
We assume in this Quickstart Guide that you have a general familiarity with the divertissement of war and other juried conflicts. If you’re a newcomer, don’t worry! Your Warmaster should be able to get you started with the aid of Entropy War: The Complete Warmaster’s Manual.
For an optimal warring experience, we suggest four to six players who share at least one common language or telepathic stratum. (See The Complete Warmaster’s Manual for optional solitaire rules. As you might imagine, live opponents are not required to flirt with galaxy-spanning ruin. They merely make the process more fun.)
Each player begins with two homeworlds, which may be developed in the course of the game. Developments will allow you to produce conquest fleets or cultural exports to facilitate immersive propaganda programs, or mine native matter for resources, but at the cost of intrinsic instability, as the population will naturally demand a share in any wealth so produced. A player’s assets consist of all her worlds and developments. When all of a player’s assets are removed from play, even the legends of her ossified civilizations, she is considered eliminated from the war.
Meditations on the nature of entropy, Part 1
The overriding resource in the Entropy War is not wealth measured in unpolluted fertile oceans or gravid metals. It is not the flower-imaginings of a star-gazing culture, or poetry whispered into the pulses of spinning neutron stars. It is not even the skeins that permit cognitive weavers to construct specialized artificial intelligences or precarious grand strategies.
No: as you will have guessed by now, the most important resource in this war is order, upon which entropy constantly encroaches.
Entropy War: a simple model
Consider the following simplified rules, in the spirit of rapid prototyping. Rolling six-sided dice is a faster and simpler operation than planning, funding, and carrying out an interstellar war; the question of “fun” has yet to be settled. Advanced students are encouraged to elaborate upon the prototype presented here, then to compare the results with the full rules of the game.
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ENTROPY WAR is a two-player game played with d6’s (six-sided dice).
Each player starts with 2d6 (two six-sided dice) in her Civilization Dice Pool.
There is also a communal Order Dice Pool that starts with 10d6.
On her turn, a player may take one of the following actions:
Build: Roll 1d6 from her Civilization Dice Pool. If she rolls a 1, she scores no points and ends her turn. Otherwise, she adds the number she rolled to her point total for this turn and may roll again or stand pat, accepting her point total for the turn. (This is basically the familiar dice game Pig.)
Expand: Roll 1d6 from her Civilization Dice Pool. The other player rolls 1d6 from the Order Dice Pool. If the active player rolls higher than the Order roll, then she adds the Order Die to her Civilization Dice Pool. If the active player rolls less than or equal to the Order roll, that Order Die is destroyed (removed from play). (The active player’s die is not destroyed either way.)
Attack: Both players roll all their dice from their Civilization Dice Pools. The player with the higher roll wins. The losing player suffers the destruction of one die from her Civilization Dice Pool.
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If, at any point, a player has no dice remaining in her Civilization Dice Pool, she immediately loses the game.
Otherwise, the game ends when a player scores sixty or more points, or the Order Dice Pool has no dice left. In the second case, the player with the most points wins.
Questions to consider, Part 1
1. The greatest works of civilizations, from arkships filled with dreaming colonists to symphonies laced into the accretion disks of black holes, always have some chance of catastrophic failure, no matter how well-planned. How does this relate to the press-your-luck mechanics of the game of Pig?
2. What is the function of the Order Dice Pool? Does it ever recover dice? How does it relate to the concept of entropy?
3. Is the game (the prototype) guaranteed to end? What does that imply about the universe of the game?
The mysteries of the arkworld
Some of the people currently investigating the ktho arkworld are obsessed with finding a dominant strategy in the Entropy War. Civilizations old and young still whisper of the days of ktho dominion. Most of their artifacts have decayed, and most of the old stories have frayed into thin threads of supposition, but that does not stop people from hoping.
Here is what you will see if you approach the arkworld to the radius of safety, and no farther. It is something like a sphere of light, and something like a sphere of shadow, and more than either it is like the ache where your bones used to be before you replaced them with a shatter-proof composite material more suitable for martial pursuits. You’re not seeing the arkworld proper—for reasons that will become clear, there is no possible lens into its interior—but rather its protective shell.
The ktho carved warnings and war-chants into that shell, in a language of fractal misgivings. Lose the skirmish, lose the battle, lose the war, lose it all. Whenever you look into those carvings, you see your own civilization’s ash of worlds sundered.
The ktho were conquerors supreme, yet it wasn’t enough. At the height of their expansion, they withdrew into the arkworld, and never again emerged. That’s what we know. But people cannot help but prod at the arkworld’s defenses in the belief that it conceals some Armageddon engine, some treasure of atrocities, some ungift of conflict unending.
Meditations on the nature of entropy, Part 2
There are more ways to be disordered than to be ordered. As time marches forward, the entropy S of a closed system inevitably increases. As Ginsberg’s theorem tells us memorably:
1. You can’t win.
2. You can’t break even.
3. You can’t get out of the game.
(Notice that the theorem, too, frames entropy in terms of a game.)
The development of a game player
Game players go through the following stages as they learn a particular game. None of this is anything to be ashamed of.
At first, new players are not sure how the game works. They fumble, follow decidedly suboptimal strategies, take agonizingly long times to decide upon a course of action. They may consult with more experienced players when they are uncertain of the interpretation of a game rule.
After they persevere, they gain mastery of the existing rules. At that point, they may assist in teaching others to play, and in enforcing the rules of play, both explicit and nonexplicit.
Finally, some game players, having understood the rules and their advantages and disadvantages, may decide that they can modify the rules by mutual agreement. There are as many variants of tag, chess, or jus ad bellum as the people who play them.
A good set of game rules will account for all of these stages of development.
Differing strategies
Many civilizations, faced with this, make pyres of themselves and those around them in an effort to write themselves more brightly in the years (centuries, eons) they have.
But there are other approaches. The parasitic elei built with corpses. The stysya lied compulsively about the achievements of other civilizations, as though this could camouflage their structures from the annihilating hand of entropy. And the short-lived ooroos were so demoralized that they halted all research mathematics.
Questions to consider, Part 2
1. The participants in a game come together through social accord. There has to be some mutual agreement as to what the game is, even if that understanding cannot be articulated in words or saturated pheromones. To what extent is the same true of war?
2. Games do not spontaneously arise. They are designed, either by individuals or groups or the accretion of culture. To the extent that their rules are conventions, said rules are amenable to redesign. When is it desirable to redesign a game?
3. What does it mean for a game to be fair? Is fairness always desirable? Consider, for instance, a game played between an eggling and an adult metamorph, in which the former’s naivety would put it at a demoralizing disadvantage; a military training simulation that encourages its player to learn the values of ambush and outnumbering the foe; a recreation of the one-sided Battle of Carved Suns, in which a fleet of millions succumbed to the dimensional trickeries of a vastly outnumbered foe, and whose players expect the game outcome to echo that of the historical incident.
Meditations on the nature of entropy, Part 3
There is a difficulty with our game, which is that order and entropy are properties of physics, rather than the results of a social contract. In this case, redesigning the game would no longer cause it to reflect the universe’s reality.
Let me tell you the real story about a civilization ancient of years, which extinguished itself before your ancestors’ primordial ancestors were born—the real story of the people who called themselves the ktho. The ktho discovered their own version of Ginsberg’s theorem. They were young, then, and ambitious; even a slow-moving people made of piezoelectric crystals and metal filaments and fleeting impulses of light can be ambitious. Certainly they proved it by conquering a not inconsiderable fraction of their galaxy during their banner years.
The ktho debated what to do about the all-conqueror entropy. Like others before and after them, they decided to defy it. Using arcane technologies, they created for themselves an enclave—an arkworld—in which order ceased to decay into disorder, in which entropy stopped increasing.
You know where to find the arkworld, the way everyone does, although I wouldn’t advise entering it. You wouldn’t get far in any case. Inside the arkworld nothing moves. Nothing changes. Nothing lives. The ktho knew this would be the result. They were defiant but not stupid. They did the math.
Entropy is a necessary byproduct of change. Change leads eventually to death; but without change there is no life.
The last of the ktho
You have no reason to believe a ktho speaking about the ktho, especially not the last of the ktho, the final scribe to scratch admonitions on the arkworld’s shell. We left you a grand and terrible game. Perhaps you will play it better than we did.
Questions to consider, Part 3
1. Entropy War (prototype) can end in one of three ways: the death of order, the death of a civilization, or the triumph of one civilization’s achievements over the others. What are the ideological implications of the end conditions? What commentary do they make on the concept of winning?
2. What is the optimal strategy? Does “optimal” have meaning in the context of an annihilation finale?
3. What will you (your nation, your civilization) do?
Intervention
Kelly Robson
WHEN I WAS fifty-seven, I did the unthinkable. I became a crèche manager.
On Luna, crèche work kills your social capital, but I didn’t care. Not at first. My long-time love had been crushed to death in a bot malfunction in Luna’s main mulching plant. I was just trying to find a reason to keep breathing.
I found a crusty centenarian who’d outlived most of her cohort and asked for her advice. She said there was no better medicine for grief than children, so I found a crèche tucked away behind a water printing plant and signed on as a cuddler. That’s where I caught the baby bug.
When my friends found out, the norming started right away.
“You’re getting a little tubby there, Jules,” Ivan would say, unzipping my jacket and reaching inside to pat my stomach. “Got a little parasite incubating?”
I expected this kind of attitude from Ivan. Ringleader, team captain, alpha of alphas. From him, I could laugh it off. But then my closest friends started in.
Beryl’s pretty face soured in disgust every time she saw me. “I can smell the freeloader on you,” she’d say, pretending to see body fluids on my perfectly clean clothing. “Have the decency to shower and change after your shift.”
Even that wasn’t so bad. But then Robin began avoiding me and ignoring my pings. We’d been each other’s first lovers, best friends since forever, and suddenly I didn’t exist. That’s how extreme the prejudice is on Luna.
Finally, on my birthday, they threw me a surprise party. Everyone wore diapers and crawled around in a violent mockery of childhood. When I complained, they accused me of being broody.
I wish I could say I ignored their razzing, but my friends were my whole world. I dropped crèche work. My secret plan was to leave Luna, find a hab where working with kids wasn’t social death, but I kept putting it off. Then I blinked, and ten years had passed.
Enough delay. I jumped trans to Eros station, engaged a recruiter, and was settling into my new life on Ricochet within a month.
I never answered my friends’ pings. As far as Ivan, Beryl, Robin, and the rest knew, I fell off the face of the moon. And that’s the way I wanted it.
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Ricochet is one of the asteroid-based habs that travel the inner system using gravity assist to boost speed in tiny increments. As a wandering hab, we have no fixed astronomical events or planetary seasonality to mark the passage of time, so boosts are a big deal for us—the equivalent of New Year’s on Earth or the Sol Belt flare cycle.
On our most recent encounter with Mars, my third and final crèche—the Jewel Box—were twelve years old. We hadn’t had a boost since the kids were six, so my team and I worked hard to make it special, throwing parties, making presents, planning excursions. We even suited up and took the kids
to the outside of our hab, exploring Asteroid Iris’s vast, pockmarked surface roofed by nothing less than the universe itself, in all its spangled glory. We played around out there until Mars climbed over the horizon and showed the Jewel Box its great face for the first time, so huge and close it seemed we could reach up into its milky skim of atmosphere.
When the boost itself finally happened, we were all exhausted. All the kids and cuddlers lounged in the rumpus room, clipped into our safety harnesses, nestled on mats and cushions or tucked into the wall netting. Yawning, droopy-eyed, even dozing. But when the hab began to shift underneath us, we all sprang alert.
Trésor scooted to my side and ducked his head under my elbow.
“You doing okay, buddy?” I asked him in a low voice.
He nodded. I kissed the top of his head and checked his harness.
I wasn’t the only adult with a little primate soaking up my body heat. Diamant used Blanche like a climbing frame, standing on her thighs, gripping her hands, and leaning back into the increasing force of the boost. Opale had coaxed her favorite cuddler Mykelti up into the ceiling netting. They both dangled by their knees, the better to feel the acceleration. Little Rubis was holding tight to Engku’s and Megat’s hands, while on the other side of the room, Safir and Émeraude clowned around, competing for Long Meng’s attention.
I was supposed to be on damage control, but I passed the safety workflow over to Bruce. When we hit maximum acceleration, Tré was clinging to me with all his strength.
The kids’ bioms were stacked in the corner of my eye. All their hormone graphs showed stress indicators. Tré’s levels were higher than the rest, but that wasn’t strange. When your hab is somersaulting behind a planet, bleeding off its orbital energy, your whole world turns into a carnival ride. Some people like it better than others.
I tightened my arms around Tré’s ribs, holding tight as the room turned sideways.