Wish You Were Here

[Jorus Merrill]

We tried to get back to what we used to be, and we tried hard. How many people in the history of the 'verse can say they walked away from a few hundred billion credits, after they'd well and truly gotten a taste? And it put a strain on us, as individuals and as a couple -- the having it and the losing it. There's times I wonder if we did the right thing, or if we did the thing right. How wise was it to put ten percent of Silk in Mara's name for when she grows up? When do we tell her, and what's she going to resent? What's she going to learn or want?

Wish you were here, lover. I'll be home soon. My tat's got the old itch, wrist to shoulder, all the way. I need to come back to Q-27 and take a swim with you, a really long swim. I bet Mara can swim like a fish by now. Thanks for the last batch of holovids and the dried fruit -- they finally caught up with me at Drogheda Port when I went to check on the Eloi. Beyyr says thanks, and to say hi to Miktik for him. Still no word from Iron Giant -- you wouldn't think it'd be easy to lose track of a Resu, but there you go. Amazing what and who you can lose track of without meaning it.

I've got the latest mapping trip's reports and charts packaged up, and I'll be sending those along. Chloe was my first mate on this one too, and we just finished putting together a heck of a thing, an old-style star map -- I'll send you some holos. I'll see what I can do about shifting things up next time. People might talk. No worries, though. There's only one yellow bikini for me.

Wish I could show you the blueprints to the ship Silk's building for the Sanctum. Imagine a true support command ship with no weapons apart from what it needs to keep fighters and warheads at bay. Imagine a ship that could show up to a fight, pull injured friendlies out of harm's way, provide medical support, pull in salvage or capture from immense ranges, and shove enemies off course. If that sounds way outside the realm of modern tractor beam technology, there's a reason for that. Remember all the trouble folks went to for the Codex? Yeah. There's some things in there that some think should stay buried. But me, I tend to see it as a hammer -- you can use it as a weapon or you can use it as a tool. No reason not to make a better tool, even if someone somewhere might use it as a weapon. I'll talk to some people and see about transmitting you a copy, getting your take on the thing. You always were a better shipwright than me.

Got a sort of backhanded invite back to the Jedi Council, and a very formal one back to run Silk. I'd imagine the same invite went to you too, so I'm glad we made that particular decision in advance. For me, I've turned it down, both of'em. I've agreed to keep Silk in the loop when it comes to good Wild Space maps, and I'm still the one in charge of the holocron security bit-

Oh, funny story. Well, not that funny maybe, but you'll get the picture. Now that Kiskla Grayson's gone, the Council's been reorganized. Re-formed. Well, turns out, none of them can agree who'll get the codes and the new quantum ansible hardlinks that I have to go out and install for every single mobile cache. It's educational holocron security -- and I kid you not, that means it falls under the councilor for education, the councilor for holocrons, or the councilor for security. That's what I'm hearing, anyway; far as I know, they haven't even discussed it as more than an individual or two, or at least the Council hasn't gotten back to me. I'd like to think it's because the ansible library cards I had made are enough for'em, I'd like to think it's because the war's the priority, but let's face it -- no Jedi Council in the history of ever has been able to avoid this paradoxical blend of groupthink and contagious stupid. Good thing the Jedi academies are taking it upon themselves to organize totally independent of politics or councils. Nice flat power structure; you'd like it, and I know I do.

I won't be in range of a good encrypt hypernode for a while, so I'll record another one of these in a bit. Love you.

[member="Alna Merrill"]

 

[Jorus Merrill]

The encrypt hypernode I'm making for is a new one -- Rebellion Actual, a mobile base station. I think you'd like it. I patterned it after the Absolution a bit, but mostly, I was thinking Moreau Station, with the Vagrant Fleet and all. That was the first time we met, right there on Moreau in that crummy cantina, with Shena throwing his weight around like he always did, Varanin trying real hard to pretend she hadn't done what she'd done, and you just sitting there cool as a cucumber wanting to go salvage things. So we went and salvaged things, and got a good meal out of it, and you made me forget all the clart I'd done in all those old rebel groups. All the clart I'd seen and been part of. Those were rougher times, back when the Sith Empire was expanding like it did. The times made rough people out of us. Me, Sarge, everyone from the old days. Some of them walked away, like Chloe and Dells I guess. Some of them broke in obvious ways, like Parker. Some of them broke so nobody could see, like whoever's the link between the current Rebel Alliance and this little black book.

See this thing? Love child of Maoze'tung and An Raynd, right here, and ain't that twisted. Got some pretty fething crazy things in here. Like, a government run by this would have social services, all kinds of benefits -- but only for people employed by the government. Self-employed, or folks employed by companies big or small, would all be second-class citizens. Or this bit here, the manifest destiny bit, get on board with radical freedom-asterisk or get out of the way. It's militant, perspectiveless clart like this that got me onboard with that ship I mentioned. Sorry, you know I can ramble about this stuff, I'll cut myself short. Almost makes me want to write a code of my own, but who'd be interested in a code of mine, if I've even got one worth putting to words? I guess it'd go something like 'Don't ignore distress calls. Only pay tariffs if you've gotta. Never mutiny against a sane captain. Never screw over anyone that didn't earn it. Never lose your sense of proportion for a cause.' Code of the Outer Rim, I'd call it. Not worth writing a book over. I don't hold with books in space anyway -- data doesn't cost lift mass penalties or fly around when the inertial dampeners go out. I just took this thing to digitize it and toss it in the QQ-1453-DR1, and fethed if those jokers at Iron Crown couldn't have come up with some kind of a name for it; I'll be eating that book for breakfast tomorrow with some tomo-spice.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

It's kinda nice to not be going point two past lightspeed, to just lay off the gas and let the hyperdrive do its thing without me doing mine. Lets me relax a bit. So I'm sitting here just waiting to get somewhere without actively trying to get somewhere, and you're the only one I want to talk to. I can run the Underground, help design the occasional ship for Silk, map for the Sanctum and send Sarge my advice on this bit or that -- but I can do all that after reversion. So it's just me crashed in the cockpit, been eating tomo-spiced Karkan ribenes right out of the package, playing bachelor a bit and reading this book. Let's flip back to the start here, let's see...

'The nation is built through allegiances of individual states that accept subservience to the national government under no duress.' Governments cause genocide, xenocide, imperialism, acquire territory and the people go along because they have to. Selectivism says it wants to expand by unity of minds. Okay, let's unpack this a bit. Amazing how many things just go back to Gram'scii, this leftist thinker that wrote a ton of prison notebooks about how cultural hegemony works. Stuff like...well, I've mentioned Gram'scii to you before, this must sound old. But seriously, this is nothing more or less than Gram'scii's hegemony by consent. Cultural unity as the foundation of power. Sound familiar? Human High Culture, maybe? Founding myths, even cults of personality? Tale as old as time. Just trying to figure out if this 'Viola Tave' is rehashing and using this stuff on purpose, or has reinvented the wheel. Let's keep reading. Makes me feel like you're there listening.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Oh, point two gets fun, you should hear this. Let's see... 'The nation does not externally assert itself aggressively, unless directly provoked by external nations or states. This statement... may even be seen as an extension of the first doctrine, in the way that it actually enforces the values of Selectivism upon another nation in a sense...' See? It always comes back to Gram'scii. Think like us; there's no other option. This isn't just rule by consent, this is conquest by consent, one person at a time, as a means of getting political stability and security for the power that's aiming to build hegemony. Gram'scii all the way.

'In this case, a Selectivist state is justified in any and all aggressive behaviors it sponsors towards the goal of protecting its sovereignty, as this is, quite simply, an exercising of the sentient people's right to free choice.' Now, that's in the context of provoked action, but let's keep reading, because these pieces fit together oddly. 'In this way--and only in this way--may the nation impose itself upon a foreign nation. Thus, it is proper for the nation to weaponize to any degree in the preservation of its people's rights.' So provocation, any provocation, justifies imposing any and all aggressive behaviors, armed with any degree of weapon, on a foreign nation. Well, I've worked with people like that, in this rebellion or that, but honestly, this isn't rebel behavior. This is the Fringe all over again. They don't hit first, but they'll absolutely hit last, and then they'll take everything you loved and bankrupt your brother-in-law's tractor dealership. Difference is, then Tave would go back to the first point and make the people of group B grateful that they got off that easy, get'em believing the party line -- because it'd just be downright cruel and un-Tavelike to conquer someone (after provocation, of course) and leave'em feeling conquered. Conquer by assimilation, or conquer, then assimilate. Hearts and minds. Consent, consent, consent.

But any degree of weapon first. This right here, like I said -- this is why the Koinonia project is moving forward like it is. A huge, practical symbol of the kind of power that doesn't need to be lethal to get respect. It's sidestepping the numbers game; it's saying that it's possible for a ship that size to be both effective and benevolent. Oh, there's military applications, to be sure; the tech is based on a minor superweapon. With the right safeguards, though, and more importantly in Levantine hands, that label doesn't even come close to applying. It's a big hammer for building big things. It's going to be able to save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Just fast-forward if I'm boring you, lover, I'm just talking to you to talk to you. Let's see how point three measures up. 'All sentient people of the nation have the right to fair representation in the nation, regardless of species, age, or place of origin.' All right, admirable, this is how Selectivism distinguishes itself from the Human High Culture comparison I made a sec ago -- or does it? There's other kinds of discrimination besides racism, ageism, or origin. Matter of fact, I've flipped ahead a bit and we're about to see state-sponsored discrimination on a massive scale, just deniable discrimination. Every regime needs an 'us' and a 'them', I guess. No such thing as a perfectly equal society, so I guess Tave is saying 'why not make sure that the discrimination works for us?'

But that's all to come. Let's stay back here in point three's commentaries for a minute.

*sound of flipping*

'This establishes the supremacist doctrines of an empire, which only exists for the power of the original entity of people. An empire may expand without discrimination, but it is, in its very essence, incapable of impartiality. Its only goal is to increase the influence of the governing people of origin, regardless of its desecration of external peoples.' Does Tave do this on purpose, or does she really not get that she's describing the Selectivism she's laid out over the last two points? She's using 'original entity of people' to refer to a homogeneous racial knot, but the imperialist nexus she's describing, even if it's all about race, is inextricable from culture. And in that sense, the cultural assimilation she's promoting means that the original group identity, the one that says it's better than everything, others everyone that doesn't belong to it, increases its own influence above all else, can and usually does refer to a cultural identity -- like Selectivism. Race doesn't have to have anything to do with it, not in empire, not anywhere.

That's one reason I love the Sanctum, by the way. Your average Levantine crew is part Mon Calamari, part Ithorian, part standard galactic mélange, and part Krevaaki. Most of their homeworlds have dealt well with xenophobia, but more than that, they've dealt well with cultural acceptance, pluralism, accepting more than one idea as valid, accepting and respecting other perspectives...it's the farthest thing in the world from this. You better believe the Koinonia-class isn't going to make an affirmative answer to 'do you love freedom?' mandatory before it offers search and rescue services, pulls endangered folks out of danger...feth.

'A nation that is established upon the collective motive thrives, whereas a nation that opposes itself cannot stand.' Pretty words, pretty words, but this is straight-up communism with lip service to liberty. How much value does a non-Selectivist's liberty have in a Selectivist regime? Well, less, if the social services thing is any indication, but we'll get to that. What's important here is that, since Tave claims internal dissent and schism lead to instability, and that a nation is justified in any and all force using any and all weapons to assure its security against those who 'provoke' it -- a term that's vague on purpose -- 'external forces' can refer to the 'others' inside the Selectivist country but outside the identity and agenda of the Selectivist nation. Dissenters are others and must be suppressed. Oh, it doesn't out and say that, but this is the same kind of rhetoric that's been used to justify repression of opposing voices for the common good -- for the common freedom of safety -- in every regime ever. 'If you oppose us, you're against freedom.' Sorta rolls off the tongue, doesn't it, because while Selectivism recognizes the absolute right of free choice, it doesn't seem to have a lot to say about consequences, apart from the implication that individuals who're left to their choices will be responsible for the positive and negative consequences of those choices. In other words, in a Selectivist regime, you're totally free to screw up, but society reserves the right to dish out 'natural consequences' for the security of the Selectivist project.

Seriously, feel free to fast forward me. I'm just talking to talk to you, and because you said you wanted me to talk about the things I thought about, even if it isn't really your world.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

I've still got 'if you oppose us, you're against freedom' stuck in my head. But let's move on to point four.

'All sentient people of the nation have the right to privacy within publicly ordained designated private zones.' Hooboy, there's a mouthful of constructed meanings. Just on the surface level, before we get into the commentaries...no right to privacy exists in any place where 'the people' -- read 'the government' -- says the right to privacy doesn't exist. Man, is that ever blatant. I put a ton of eavesdropping gear on Rebellion Actual, but that's a matter of survival against lethal force in hostile territory, and it's not directed internally at the Underground, it's directed at the people that're trying to kill mine. Putting gear like that on the Koinonia-class, too, but not for infringing on right to privacy -- for detecting distress calls. For detecting hostile incursions. For finding people who need help, when they're lost out there in the deep black.

'A sentient individual of the nation is entitled to exercise the right to free choice to any extent as long as it does not affect the choice of the nation. But it would be folly to deny that a peaceful society is utterly impossible without bounds firmly set by the people. In order to establish an environment suitable for this, however, private zones and public zones must be selected by the free choice of the sentient people of the nation to segregate the practice of individuality from national unity, to preserve the identity of both the person and the people.' Sorry to make you listen to all that, I just got sort of entranced. What kind of mechanism are we talking? Is it 'the people equals the government' or 'the government equals the people'? One's anarchy in the technical sense, and the other's a justification for any government action ever.

What's most interesting to me here, though, is the idea of where rights end. You ask pretty much anyone and they'll say your rights end where they start infringing on other individuals' rights. With Selectivism being all about what it says it's all about, you'd think Tave would take the opportunity to entrench that conception of the limits of rights, but she doesn't, far as I can spot here. Instead of circles expanding until they hit other circles, a pretty straightforward reading of this would see the circles just keep expanding and overlapping until they run into the national interest, 'the choice of the nation,' 'the bounds set by the people.' So it comes back to mechanisms again -- how do 'the people' make choices? Is 'the people' the functional government? Is it an idealized pure-democratic aspiration? Is it mob mentality, the normal kind or the kind that tends to influence cybernetic mass-participation schemes, like the one we found on Hagron's World? This is straight Detoq'vil. Tyranny of the majority. I get that Tave is trying to make the principles seem to apply to reforms in any existing nation, trying to make Selectivism universally applicable, and I get that politics is the art of the possible, but my gut says that all I'm seeing here is a recipe for back-and-forth cycles of 'free' anarchy and reactionary reform. At least until the people decide the back-and-forth isn't working and decide to make the government into the people, at which point -- bam -- they're living in dystopia. A dystopian state that can choose exactly where and when the right to privacy exists, and will use any and all weapons if provoked. And who decides what defines provocation? The government? The mob?

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Holy feth, I just skipped ahead to point five, and before I could get into it properly, I realized that 'publicly ordained designated public zones' means places where public employees work for the government, which is something Tave wants to incentivize heavily. In other words, she's constructed this shifting line of division. On one side, there's private employees-

No, wait, she's smarter than that. There are two lines.

Off to one side, we have publicly ordained designated private zones. Right to privacy. Off to the other side, we have publicly ordained designated public zones, associated with the government and government-controlled businesses. No right to privacy. What matters is the third space -- space that isn't explicitly defined as a publicly ordained private zone or a publicly ordained public zone. Space where no right to privacy exists, and no right to social services exists. It could include, oh...private businesses. The entire space where private operators live and work. And not only does that third column have no right to privacy and no right to social services, it's stuck right in the overlapping-circles wild-space of individual agency expanding until it hits the boundaries the state defines -- if the state defines those boundaries as farther our than the natural boundaries of others' rights. And if the state takes advantage of that lack of right to privacy, and is willing to step on freedom just a little for the good of the nation, those boundaries could be smaller than the natural boundaries of others' rights. Depending on the decision-making mechanism of 'the people', it could literally be an incarnation of the old 'your rights end where my feelings begin' joke about liberal student pseudo-academics.

I doubt it, though. That's an edge case. I tend to think the third column would have no right to privacy, no right to social services, and few state limits on the places where individual rights overlap. Nullsec Wild Space meets Big Brother, like some extremists on Etti Four try to push in Levantine territory. And that would be the space everyone would live in between the time they stepped out of their front doors and the time they entered their government-approved workplace, if they were lucky enough to belong to that socioeconomic class.

See? Told you the discrimination was coming.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

I can't get this ship off my mind. It's going to have a crew of I don't know how many thousand; it's going to work for the safety of just about anyone using gear made by a design team of dozens. Like, what a testament to collective effort by free choice, and that's the thing Tave is trying to invoke. I think it's possible that she genuinely believes that people will always choose to work together for the common good, for altruism. And I look at the Koinonia's starship design team, how it operates, or how the Sanctum works, and yeah, it's absolutely a crew of people working together to find the best way forward, of their own choice, according to their own agency. But of all the key differences I could touch on, the one that really gets me most is that the team members and the Sanctum worlds have no shared perspective that locks out all other perspectives from validity. They approach problems from all different ways, some of them things that Tave would love, some that she would hate -- and they respect each other's perspectives and work to find a way forward rather than declaring otherness.

Declaring otherness and driving themselves further and further into individualism.

Detoq'vil got into this too, talked all about the troubles of individualism, the risks of it, just like he talked about the risks of collectivism. And can I just take a moment to say that those are the opposed forces that Tave is trying to invoke at the exact same time, as if one can lead to the other? Detoq'vil said that fetishizing individual freedom would lead people to withdraw to very small trusted groups -- like, hey, Rebel Alliance cells -- and other everyone else, withdrawing from society and holding themselves as superior to everyone. Symptoms include persecution complexes, broken social bonds, trouble making alliances, social schism, erosion of public goods...

Been a while since I read my Detoq'vil, but I've known an awful lot of insurgent groups that thought like this, on Contruum and elsewhere. Suggests unpleasant things about the connection between the book and the new Rebel Alliance. Makes me glad I've got the Underground, where you leave your ideology at the door.

I mean, if this book is closely tied to the Alliance's command, there's no question that 'leave your ideology at the door' is their line, too. Means there might well be an inner circle of the enlightened, sort of a gnostic-manichaeic deal. It's how I'd do it, if I was that sort. Use the Alliance to find the best, then show them the way.

Heck, it's worked for the Sith for millennia.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Now, the Levantine solution is one thing, but the Selectivist solution is a whole other animal. In its way, it's internally consistent...here, let me read this.

Y'know, this thing might not taste too good. The plast pages will wind up as fuel once it goes through the converter. The synthleather will work fine, though. Might make the sludge a little grainy.

*pages flipping*

Here we go. 'However, it is recognized that forcing the people to collaborate in this measure infringes upon the base right to free choice of the people. The solution, therefore, is to greatly encourage the people of the nation to work for the betterment of the public nation and discourage the work of private interests. To do so, benefits must significantly outweigh those of private ventures, greatly minimizing the private workforce and influencing the people to collaborate and drive the nation towards perpetual progress, but not abandoning the core principles of Selectivism.' Carrot rather than stick -- or is it? Between this and the third column, and the later points, it's pretty clear that Selectivism's employment policy, like Selectivism itself, is a stick disguised as a carrot. Pretty phallic. This has to have been written by a man, using a female nom de plume to blunt the patriarchal overtones. So. Massive incentives to be employed by the government -- and included in the public employment spaces where there is no right to privacy. Huge incentives to sign your life over for improved social status, guaranteed social safety net and amenities, purpose, unity, likely better protection, all manner of freedom rhetoric with new opportunities as a foundation...all you have to do is give up your right to privacy and your right to dissent. Wonder how Tave feels about right to free assembly. My guess is something like what she feels about privately owned business, regardless of scale. Wasteful. Misguided. Not good enough for The People. After all, 'What the nation requires is an emphasis on the cooperation of all the sentient peoples to advance the nation industrially. This entails the collective people working together in public industry to propel the nation directly, through their manufacturing of product and provision of services for the nation as a whole.'

And then there's this interesting little tidbit at the end. 'Not only does this advance the industry of the nation, but it also empowers the people through camaraderie and knowledge of even the very minute operations of the nation itself. A people who know themselves will not falter.'

Odd how easily someone who, by all accounts, doesn't exist can propose a society without privacy at all. Or maybe not so odd. So we get a clearer idea now, uh, a clearer idea of that this government-employed upper class would look like. There'd be a cult of rights effect, specifically the right to know, to be involved, to judge. My guess is this means the writer loves his -- loves her secrecy, but loves to know everything, be involved everywhere, thinks she can pull off a Sidious maybe. At least, I'd think that if I had reason to suppose Tave is a Sith. But we all create the god we want, in our own image, and Tave's particular brand of utopian society seems to be her god. The creation reflects the creator. I've built enough ugly freighters to know that, and watched you build enough beautiful ships.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Point six is just more about public corporations -- the same parastatal emphasis I was guessing at a while back. But this bit stands out: 'These Companies of the Nation will be the foundation for the cooperation of the peoples in industry, as disorganization and absolute anarchy dissolve the unity of the people of the nation and unfailingly bring about its collapse.' So looks like Tave found her solution to the anarchy I mentioned, the expanding circles of rights that overlap until the state tells them no.

Bread. It's just all about bread. Incentivizing stable employment by the state until everyone else is on the outside wanting in, and then employing everyone. At which point nobody's left out in the cold. The wonky conception of rights is deliberate -- feth. It's a deliberate incentive to surrender privacy and right to dissent, and sign yourself over to the corporate state. Rave would have liked this. It's very Tion. This is why Tion builds big shipyards, big lethal ships, nasty fighters -- this is why their war is the arms race. They're making themselves the best to boost employment and stability on the Tion Cluster worlds. Maybe a Sith did write this -- one of Rave's friends. Maybe this is all a false flag -- the raid, the bounty on the nameless leader, all of it.

Maybe the hidden Darksiders of Tion are behind the Rebel Alliance. And I can't ask Rave, and I have no intention of asking Ovmar.

Point seven, let's see, anything interesting here...

Ahh. Taken together with point six, point seven makes it look like the designated private and public zones are exhaustive -- that the two of them together necessarily or always add up to a hundred percent -- but if that's explicitly stated, I can't see it. Well played, Tave. And now this actually helps tighten the definition of 'designated private zones', the places where self-employment is possible, right to privacy is guaranteed, and there is no right to public services. It's not just homes; it's also businesses' places of registration. Not operation, registration. And are taxed accordingly...because obviously accurate taxes can be calculated in the sector where government surveillance is the lowest, or -- ha -- nonexistent. Obviously low government awareness and accurate financial monitoring go hand in hand. There'd be mistakes, lots of them, and people would get screwed over by a system that doesn't care about them because it only cares about those who've seen the light and joined the Great Project. It's like a purpose-designed mechanism to increase the anger those on the outside would already feel. I mean, this is a caste system, and upward mobility, freedom from tax and second-class status and fees for social services, is dependent on your willingness to sign over your life.

And that's all predicated on the immense assumption that a regime actively trying to eliminate its own corporate and personal tax base can build centrally planned parastatals efficient and competitive enough to compensate for the loss of those taxes and provide free social services to everyone.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

All right, final point and I'm done. I swear.

'The sentient people of the nation are governed only by their actions through the publicly ordained police. The actions of individual persons in designated public zones may not conflict with the nation, under punishment of the publicly ordained police.'

'Thus, the nation must instate a publicly ordained police force to execute the law and uphold the sovereignty of the nation from the interior, and preserve the right to free choice while averting any actions by individuals that would bring harm to the people of the nation as a whole.'

There's more, about internal conflict being the greatest threat to any nation, and police and military taxes being paid by all citizens -- because of course a dystopia can't pay its cops and military from the taxes of a caste it's actively trying to incentivize out of existence. But those two lines catch me, because it's becoming even clearer what this utopia would look like.

In the designated public zones, cops are bolstered by a total lack of privacy concerns. Any action that 'conflicts with the nation'...that can be defined as anything.

In the designated private zones and the third column, police that're exclusively from the upper class -- the government-employed, heavily incentivized, heavily benefited, virtually tax-exempt class -- those police uphold law, preserve sovereignty from...

Oh feth. 'Preserve sovereignty of the nation from the interior.' Is that a reference to vantage point, or to separation between the nation and the individuals within it? Protect the state's sovereignty from those chaotic free people who just haven't seen the light yet? Now that's internally consistent.

All right, I'm waving my hands at the holorecorder now to let you know to stop fast-forwarding. All done, Alna, I swear. Love you. Thanks for bearing with me. I just needed to think this through. I've been trying to focus on the Levantine ship, the unarmed command ship, the Koinonia-class, but I couldn't shake this fething book. It's all digitized now, I've been doing it while I read, and...

*sound of shredding*

...now the solid fuel/ration converter can have its way with the Little Black Book. Now it's tomorrow's fuel cells and healthful spicemush.

And now I can focus a bit better on that fething ship.