Imperial Radch (spoilers spoilers everywhere!) (rats don't look)

I want Sphene and Zeiat to play incomprehensible board games and make cutting passive-aggressive comments in the background of every space opera.

 

And they seem to get each other, somehow. Sphene is over 3000 years old, maybe more, and has been alone for most of them. It's made her very odd, and strangely calm. Zeiat doesn't faze her in the slightest.

 

I was also thinking: just how AI really are singleton ancillary segments?

I suspect a large amount of Breq is really running on human hardware.

And I suspect the original occupant of that hardware is more still there than any of them want to admit.

 

Spoiler: sword spoilers

@Morven I figure it's something similar to Tisarwat. The sense-of-self is Justice of Toren but a lot of the subconscious stuff -- reflexive responses, memories, emotional predispositions, simple drives for safety, comfort, and companionship -- is left over. Only it's a lot more distant and less relevant for Breq than it is for Tisarwat, because Tisarwat was only Anaander for a few days, where Breq was Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen for years and years. Still, the emotional attachment to Tisarwat was pretty clearly One Esk Nineteen alone, given that the ship wanted to sedate that ancillary right before the shit hit the fan.

Also I think ancillaries must be physically augmented, too, given that they move faster and more accurately than any human could. (I'm upset that we get next to no information, in three books, about the contradiction between the Radchaai obsession with ritual purity of humanity and their cavalier attitude to body modification. I suppose ancillaries, after all, are not considered human...)

 

Spoiler: more possibly spoilers

Remember also, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen was the very last ancillary activated by Justice of Toren before its destruction. The least integrated, one would presume.

 

Really? I didn't pick up on that, reading Justice. I'll have to reread it.

 

The medic there made comments on that ancillary having a terrible singing voice, and how unsuitable it thus was for Justice of Toren, the singing Ship.

 

NOT TEA BUT BLOOD

( :D )

 

having seen this post on roach's blog, my boyfriend and i discussed what other earth songs may have survived:

 

I finished Mercy yesterday and I think I sort of have a theory on how Presger logic operates. It's mostly about what Presger consider people (well, as much as Presger consider anyone people), since we don't actually know much about anything else (they have a bad case of Blue and Orange Morality and awesome tech, that's basically it).

Spoiler: Mercy spoilers. Also: looong

Various tidbits about Presger mindset dropped in the books:
* they see Significance as far more important than sentience
* in their view Significant species must not fight another Significant species. However, intra-species fighting is okay.
* neither Zeiat nor Dlique is particularly sure which one she is
* Zeiat says that explaining the idea of "person" to Presger is basically impossible and she herself barely grasps it
* Zeiat also treats Breq as a different individual after she loses her leg. Similar, but different.

My first hypothesis is: Presger as a species does not have a continuity of self. They do not recognize a specific individual having a certain something that begins at birth/early childhood and is basically only destroyed by death or massive trauma (or being made ancillary, which counts as massive trauma, I think). I posit that their society is based on roles filled instead of people (for example, Silvereye-doing-laundry and Silvereye-coding are both grouped under Silvereye by our reckoning, but would be totally different people, someone-doing-laundry and someone-coding for Presger). Both Zeiat and Dlique are instances of does-diplomacy-with-humans. Possibly the difference is in modus operandi, Dlique is does-diplomacy-with-humans-while-impulsive and Zeiat is does-diplomacy-with-humans-while-more-somber. After Breq loses her leg, she's temporarily unable to do things or fill roles she did before, therefore she cannot be the same Breq (but she's still a fleet captain - just a different kind).

I would hazard a guess that Presger may have some sort of hive mind deal going on. One Presger body does not necessarily know what role she should be, but a sort of peer pressure forms to nudge everyone into one role or another. A Presger individual separated from others could, under this theory, know that she is supposed to be does-diplomacy-with-humans, but not what kind. (It could also play a part in why Ships get along rather well with the Translators. A large part of it is Ships being less unsettled by them, since they've seen a lot more weirdness than an average Radch human, but under this theory there's a certain similarity between Ships and Presger - neither of them has singular identity by human standards.)

My second hypothesis is: Presger view a species vaguely the same way we would view an individual. A single Presger does not have a continuity of self, but the sum of all Presger probably does. This explains why Significant species must not kill other Significant species, but can do whatever they want within species - intra-species violence is like maintenance (like trimming hair or nails) or endangering/harming yourself. It can be complicated to understand which one it is for an alien species, and anyway, no one has a duty to stop someone else's bad life choices. An individual harming another is a more straightforward concept and one that is generally forbidden, but can be permitted under certain circumstances (self-defense, punishment). In their point of view, Presger are just enforcing the "do whatever as long as no one hits anyone else, mmkay?" rule.

Significance, under this theory, would be a kind of sentience test, "is it capable of interacting with people meaningfully? must be people then." Killing someone of a non-Significant species is not murder to Presger, since first, this is not even people, and second, even if it was, it's just one bit of the whole. It's comparable to pulling a leaf off a tree: the tree does not care since it's a tree and one leaf is trivial loss anyway.

My theory doesn't really cover the complexity aspect (where is the line between two different roles and variations of a single role) (what exactly does "meaningful interaction" mean here), but I don't think I have enough data for that. Also: how the hell does their anatomy work? I know not.

#I do hope I didn't forget some important data point that will upend everything #I also do hope I didn't screw up English abominably #it is way too late for me to be writing down complex theories

 

@Silvereye

Spoiler: re: your spoilered bit

that would definitely explain the "oh, you" attitude zeiat has about dlique taking apart her sister. also her "why do the fish do it?" about the fish sauce - if you look at it in the context of school-of-fish giving up some of itself, rather than individual fish sacrificing themselves, the idea that the fish might get something out of it makes more sense

 

Some interesting discussion at the Making Light blog about the series.

And a digression about it on the linguistics blog Language Log.

Also, are you aware of the two-part short story featuring Breq, "She Commands Me And I Obey" available on Strange Horizons? (part 1, part 2)

 

So I'm pretty sure I skipped the first book and went straight to the second, but only because the library didn't have the first. I would like to say that if I hadn't looked it up, I would have had no idea that this was the second book, because all the information I needed to understand what was going on was righ there, in a way that didn't seem awkward or out of place.

I'm upset because a character that seemed cool was introduced and killed off two chapters later. That's just unfair.

 

That makes sense. My brain just didn't pick up on it.

 

I think you'd like her, she's awesome.

I gotta say, for some reason Raughd seemed about 9000 times worse than Vriska to me. Possibly because we saw more of the wreckage Raughd left; possibly because Tavros annoys the shit out of me, even though I would totally agree that Vriska treated him horribly and abusively; possibly because Vriska seems to have reasons for being the way she is that are directly related to her childhood on Alternia, whereas while Raughd was not treated well by Fosyf Denche I doubt she was made to trick and kill her friends.

 

Vriska's... theatrically awful? She's often fun to watch. Whereas Raughd just makes me, like, drag my hands down my face and go "noooooo"

 

Yes, this too. Raughd reminds me a bit of my own abusive ex and is just gross. Like Tien Vorsoisson from the Vorkosigan books. And both Raughd and Tien lack Vriska's charm. Vriska can be VERY charming and entertaining, then she does something horrible and that's awful, but people like Raughd and Tien just slowly and carefully erode the selves of the people around them because they genuinely do not care about anyone but themselves.

With Vriska and Tavros I sometimes get the feeling that she was trying to help him even though what she was doing was nothing that we would call help. Even before his injury he seems like someone who was highly likely to have been culled and she seems to have wanted to toughen him up, just as she killed John to send him to god tier.

But of course this isn't relevant to the Radch...

 

have just finished everything

yyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEE

legitimately switched wifis to make this post

Spoiler: i don't know how spoilery this is but

also seriously, provided that some form of subconscious/memory/personality mapping survives the ancillary process, i would totally volunteer to be an ancillary
like dream job kind of
...is that weird

 

Thinking about ancillaries and identity and stuff...

I'm super into this idea, but it got me thinking about like - how much of Breq is the body's original inhabitant, and so on. And reminded me of Ann Leckie's post on the subject (obviously Death of the Author and we don't have to listen if we don't want to, but I am inclined to):

Aaand someone asked her if she WOULD info dump more and she wrote:

To me, this seems to imply that ancillaries have their memories removed and their sense of identity recalibrated to "I am the ship" rather than "I am this person," but that a lot of the previous inhabitant might still be there, personality-wise. And that's maybe the reason for different decades acting differently - like, One Esk always singing - but when you look at the whole ship you can't really see the individual ancillaries' personalities... until you get Breq, who is on her own. She has Justice of Toren's memories and believes she is Justice of Toren, but she might still be .. in some weird nebulous way.. whoever One Esk Nineteen was before being ancillarized?

But Breq herself doesn't seem willing to deal with that - if I remember correctly she tells Strigan that the original inhabitant of her body is not-her and also probably-dead.

So - hm. I guess it depends who the clone is of. Then again, if it doesn't have any lived experience, maybe giving it Breq's memories and telling it it's Breq would produce a person identical to Breq? I don't know enough about like.. nature vs nurture, how much personality is hard-coded rather than just made up of memories, etc.

 

... I want to cross-post this to tumblr but doing formatting on mobile is The Worst, bleh.

Anyway tl;dr I think ancillaries just get different memories and made to believe they're a ship without many other changes in their brains.

Edit: haha wait, fuck, people said this in spoiler tags earlier in the thread! *that's* the discussion I was half-remembering. Oh well.