John B.
Editors’ note: This vignette continues the narrative started in Travelers’ Notes: Getting To The Ground, found in our last issue.
Ambling forward on my now-dirty feet, I get to head down the hill. As
usual, air pressure grows quickly, as does ‘gravity’. Nodding in
greeting to someone struggling up the incline I am descending nets no
reaction – either antisocial or I’m using the wrong body language
here. Of course, that turns on my learn-by-see.
The line of sophonts waiting for their birdsuit to extrude from the
fabjob are showing little interaction, acknowledging each others’
presense with about 2 decimeters’ spacing. Two towards the end of the
line are interacting, verbal signalling in old anglish with local
drift. Eye contact is maintained, as are facial patterning, tonal
modulation, and other neb body language standards. The learn-by-see
indicates that the other sophont apparently was just antisocial, but
remains in coprocessing mode for the moment to ensure minimal social
gaffes.
I always forget to turn things on before I need them, unfortunately.
However, the reminder has been given, and I sample the environment.
Some light EM signalling, apparently coordinated with some microflux
in the sunthread. Subsonic ground-scans of some sort, or at least a
rhythmic stimulus. Non-trivial amounts of pheromones, some quite
widely divergent from nebbish norms. Oh, perhaps a scentmeister or
the like’s been through here!
Triggering a high-probability olfactory decoder nets nothing but
chemical noise. Either they’re using some encoding scheme I’m not
used to, or it’s a blackbook cypher – given the number of nebs around
here, most likely the latter. Tossing the problem back to the ship’s
cryptographs and linking in olfactory input for future discoveries, I
put the problem aside.
The LTS pops up a warning about the amount of bandwidth I’m using
being “in contravention of” some local more. Following instructions,
I set up a densepacked channel of micropackets instead of an open
comm. A little extra processing at each end- but onboard resources
are still very adequate to my needs.
“Contravention” – who programs these things, anyways?
A further suggestion pops up, suggesting I find lodging for primarily
social reasons. Travellers who intend to stay a while apparently find
some way to contract with one or more of the locals to set up a semi-
secure shelter for inactive periods. Mentally shrugging (it’s easy to
fall back into body language, it seems) and accessing local
information, I find that there are several establishments nearby
which cater to these contracts. No warnings appear from the LTS, so I
amble off towards the furthest one, on general principles.
Passing people in the street respond apparently positively to eye
contact and nodding, so the learn-by-see indicates high probability
of nonverbal language mapping success and goes back offline.
A fairly common sight here appear to be various independant helper-
augments. Each of the forms I’ve noticed in passing are unique,
indicating a high probability that they are some form of local social
status. The LTS confirms this is the case, and copies a common rating
scheme for social status apprehension keyed off of helper-augment
capability. As is often the case, the more energetic the capability
the higher the status, up to some maximal practical cap beyond which
status can be negatively affected due to ‘overreaching’.
Two sophonts in almost-identical garments wander by with nearly
identical helper-augments. A LTS override keeps me from directly
scanning them and maintains my forward progress even as I wish to
identify this irregularity. Further clarification from the LTS
indicates these individuals are responsible for some form of public
safety and are not necessarily the most cosmopolitan of sophonts. My
lack of a helper-augment appears to be noticed as well, but no action
seems predicated on that lack.
These helper augments are quite interesting. Standing between one and
three decimeters high, they skitter along with myriad different
technologies. They typically seem to have multiple scales of
manipulators, upper-end sensory capabilities, and are nearly the sole
sources of the environmental EM chatter I noticed earlier. This seems
to indicate that they are narrowcast-powered by devices in the
sunthread, rather than with onboard power systems.
Interestingly, there seems to be little comms traffic other than the
power-linkage. It’s almost as if they’ve gone off and disconnected
any interpersonal communications other than their nebbish ones!
My innermap indicates that I’m now by the portal to the, umm,
‘housing rental’. It opens at a polite knock, and I head in to
make a socially expected deal.
More about the author, John B, here.