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Jan. 1st, 2019 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
contrarianarchonThe long awaited post about Elves! I hope it lives up the interest expressed! Yes, I've been procrastinating about this and also everything else in my life the last few weeks, but what can you do; it's the holidays.
Elves, in my setting, aren't really a species any more. That's not how they survived. They're a hundred hundred madmen and saints and outcasts and geniuses who plotted survival even as the world crumbled around them. Even then, they're just the ones who succeeded. This puts a lot of bias in the Elves which survived; they were the ones who could.
What ultimately killed Elves was a coordination problem. Much like global warming is today, they failed, again and again over the course of their history to unite against the death of their planet, and by the time anyone really started acting to preserve their race, they were limited to eco-domes and artificial environments to survive. Now Mars is a dead ball of ice, and the elves are few, spending the long cold eons in sleep and decay, waking only occasionally to check if anything in the world outside them has changed. (Why didn't they colonize Earth? I'm thinking that they had pretty complex property laws and a strong desire to avoid Terra Nullius type situations, probably due to now largely lost historical events, so they had to wait for earth to be owned by people they could trade with. Call it the prime directive, if you must).
What were the Elves before this long dark sleep? Honestly, I don't really know. I've been brainstorming this and that for a while; maybe they were a eusocial hive-mind of sorts, with individual minds being hard to delineate. Maybe they were humanoids, partially photosynthetic or in symbiosis with some specific kind of plant or algae. Maybe they were sessile themselves, and sending out tamed and trained agents to work for them was their native mode of operation. It's not like I've finished writing yet!
What are the Elves now is a question with a more concrete, though nearly as unhelpful, answer. They are lots of things. I'd estimate that about a third of the elves which are thought to be still extant in some way are now active, and that "A hundred hundred" is a pretty literal count; about ten-thousand; for the most part, on earth and in low earth orbit, but also in a multitude of other places. The means by which elves have improved themselves over the ages are many and varied, and are often unique to the individual. There were once many schools of thought and transformation, and many of them only have a few survivors (and several of groups with many survivors have splintered in the face of the modern environment and the mess of humankind). However, there are four core platforms, I suppose. There are digital and physical distributed systems, those who want to adapt to humanity, and those who want to do their own alien thing (but like having a place to do it in).
A core thematic element I've been going with for elves is that it's hard and complex for them to die. This is in part attrition; any elf who was fragile, easy to kill, already died, but part of it is also legal and technological convention. Mars-as-a-geographical entity is theoretically owned by the extant elves, (including those lost or still in stasis), but the legal procedures required to actual claim this land are complex; it's possible that there is no appropriate legal expert currently active, in fact. The process of an elves death is hard to confirm because they were extremely prone to putting parts of themselves out of their physical form; they would heavily automate responses to interactions, routine behavior and such. So an elf could have died for a decade, and would still be capable of responding to routine checkups, maintaining their financial instruments, and bringing in the groceries. This is further complicated by the fact that while the elves never mastered deliberate uploading (In part as a concession to the tone of transhumanism I wanted for this setting), it was not just heard of, but downright common, for them to be uploaded piecemeal to some specialized substrate, which may or may not be distributed across many pieces of hardware, a network, or enshrined in a large piece of infrastructure like a starship or a building. This process is incredibly slow, unreliable and rarely results in an actual digital intelligence; more often the person in question is simply moved onto some other piece of hyper-specialized single-purpose hardware made custom throughout the process. this may or may not be an improvement, so not all elves take this path, with many simply improving their original body to the limits of their technological capability. Between this and the tendency to use non-sophont drones to telepresence amongst other technologies makes identifying the legal (or practical) death of a Martian nearly impossible (even if they weren't scattered to the four corners of the solar system). I'm sure this would come up in any story I told using this setting; perhaps a human attempt to distribute the estate of a Martian, combined with the remnants of that Elf's extensions trying to avenge their own death?
That's what immediately leaps out at me as interesting about the Elves.
Elves, in my setting, aren't really a species any more. That's not how they survived. They're a hundred hundred madmen and saints and outcasts and geniuses who plotted survival even as the world crumbled around them. Even then, they're just the ones who succeeded. This puts a lot of bias in the Elves which survived; they were the ones who could.
What ultimately killed Elves was a coordination problem. Much like global warming is today, they failed, again and again over the course of their history to unite against the death of their planet, and by the time anyone really started acting to preserve their race, they were limited to eco-domes and artificial environments to survive. Now Mars is a dead ball of ice, and the elves are few, spending the long cold eons in sleep and decay, waking only occasionally to check if anything in the world outside them has changed. (Why didn't they colonize Earth? I'm thinking that they had pretty complex property laws and a strong desire to avoid Terra Nullius type situations, probably due to now largely lost historical events, so they had to wait for earth to be owned by people they could trade with. Call it the prime directive, if you must).
What were the Elves before this long dark sleep? Honestly, I don't really know. I've been brainstorming this and that for a while; maybe they were a eusocial hive-mind of sorts, with individual minds being hard to delineate. Maybe they were humanoids, partially photosynthetic or in symbiosis with some specific kind of plant or algae. Maybe they were sessile themselves, and sending out tamed and trained agents to work for them was their native mode of operation. It's not like I've finished writing yet!
What are the Elves now is a question with a more concrete, though nearly as unhelpful, answer. They are lots of things. I'd estimate that about a third of the elves which are thought to be still extant in some way are now active, and that "A hundred hundred" is a pretty literal count; about ten-thousand; for the most part, on earth and in low earth orbit, but also in a multitude of other places. The means by which elves have improved themselves over the ages are many and varied, and are often unique to the individual. There were once many schools of thought and transformation, and many of them only have a few survivors (and several of groups with many survivors have splintered in the face of the modern environment and the mess of humankind). However, there are four core platforms, I suppose. There are digital and physical distributed systems, those who want to adapt to humanity, and those who want to do their own alien thing (but like having a place to do it in).
A core thematic element I've been going with for elves is that it's hard and complex for them to die. This is in part attrition; any elf who was fragile, easy to kill, already died, but part of it is also legal and technological convention. Mars-as-a-geographical entity is theoretically owned by the extant elves, (including those lost or still in stasis), but the legal procedures required to actual claim this land are complex; it's possible that there is no appropriate legal expert currently active, in fact. The process of an elves death is hard to confirm because they were extremely prone to putting parts of themselves out of their physical form; they would heavily automate responses to interactions, routine behavior and such. So an elf could have died for a decade, and would still be capable of responding to routine checkups, maintaining their financial instruments, and bringing in the groceries. This is further complicated by the fact that while the elves never mastered deliberate uploading (In part as a concession to the tone of transhumanism I wanted for this setting), it was not just heard of, but downright common, for them to be uploaded piecemeal to some specialized substrate, which may or may not be distributed across many pieces of hardware, a network, or enshrined in a large piece of infrastructure like a starship or a building. This process is incredibly slow, unreliable and rarely results in an actual digital intelligence; more often the person in question is simply moved onto some other piece of hyper-specialized single-purpose hardware made custom throughout the process. this may or may not be an improvement, so not all elves take this path, with many simply improving their original body to the limits of their technological capability. Between this and the tendency to use non-sophont drones to telepresence amongst other technologies makes identifying the legal (or practical) death of a Martian nearly impossible (even if they weren't scattered to the four corners of the solar system). I'm sure this would come up in any story I told using this setting; perhaps a human attempt to distribute the estate of a Martian, combined with the remnants of that Elf's extensions trying to avenge their own death?
That's what immediately leaps out at me as interesting about the Elves.
