id I ever tell you about the time when I got involved in the Taxonomy Wars? No, of course you didn’t study them in school. They never teach about these wars in school. Because they’re too confusing, that’s why. What were they about? They started as all wars start: some group wanted something that another group had. In this case, the groups in question were fighting over the naming and definition rights of an obscure offshoot of mineral sciences. Yes, in a taxonomy.
You would be right to question the reasoning behind a declaration of war over something trivial like naming rights. But what was at stake was more than just a label. You see, some generations ago, Lubeck Mining Collective installed a new outpost on a god-forsaken rock orbiting Wolf 504. The Collective had a reputation for thuggish protection of its concerns, and the new mining settlement was no different. When the first Pod arrived, it immediately began excavation. Either its initial surveys hadn’t detected what was already there, or it had simply ignored the findings, because this god-forsaken rock orbiting a red dwarf was already inhabited.
After the debacle in the Proxima Centauri expedition, all of humankind’s near-flung progeny were saddled with the Proxima Accord. You might remember that one, no? That’s when a militant sect of that rascally Arcane Brotherhood of the Actuarial Arts, at the behest of their badly-audited efficiency algorithms, invaded the homeworld of another sentient species and nearly wiped them out with viral spreadsheets. Anyway, the Brotherhood received a severe censure in the subsequent trade summits, and the resulting agreements became known as the Proxima Accord. The upshot is you can’t just plop a new settlement anywhere; you have to check for sentient life with a proper survey.
Now, it’s one thing to crash a colony ark into a rock that’s inhabited by sentient life-forms nobody’s encountered before. I mean, it’s bad, but shit like this happens all the time. There’s even a deniability protocol you can use. If nobody knows about them, it’s not like they belong to the Union or anything. In that case, your best bets are to stall their inevitable inclusion in the Union long enough to get the hell out, or to fudge your surveys. When the sentients haven’t been encountered before, that can work. But that’s not what happened here. No, the LMC drove a colony ark into a rock inhabited by Lupinian Omnipedes, a sentient species already represented in the Union. (Lupinian Omnipedes is our name for them; we can’t pronounce their name for themselves, since we lack both the requisite glottal frequency modulators and the hearing sensitivity to catch the full range of frequencies they produce.)
Their excuses? The first was that their survey equipment malfunctioned. The second was that, while Lupinian Omnipedes are prolific, they normally make their homes on rocks with different material makeup. They’re fond of cobalt-rich environments, for one, and this rock had no cobalt to speak of. As you might expect, the Union didn't buy either excuse. The investigation revealed broken survey equipment, sure enough, but it had been sabotaged. Nobody ever was able to say with any certainty when the sabotage occurred, only that someone had tampered with it. That was bad enough, but the signs of foul play weren't what got the Lupinian Omnipedes' legs in a bind. For most of the previous century, the Union has maintained up-to-date registries describing the known sentient species and their variations. The Omnipedes knew of and had published ethnographic descriptions of the very same variant that lived in Wolf 504's orbit. Not only did the colony ark possess the relevant descriptions, computer logs indicated that they had been accessed numerous times before and after the colonization process commenced.
The colony ark wiped out the native population of Lupinian Omnipedes on that particular rock, of course, which is what it was designed to do. Colony arks, as you know, begin with a calculated barrage of atmospheric conditioners designed to close the gap between the actual composition and that desired by the colonizers. The process is quick enough to kill off most of the planet's organisms, at least those that live close enough to the surface. Sea life and subterranean organisms are a different story, but the short of it is they often are exterminated as well. Lupinian Omnipedes delve into the crust of their planets to extract vital minerals, but they live on the surface in communal structures. Such a species has no chance to adapt when the atmospheric composition changes so rapidly.
Once the Union completed its investigation, it granted the Lupinian Omnipede delegation a Class I Restitution. This is where things went off the rails. A Class I Restitution can be a pretty severe fine to have levied against you. The wronged party can demand eye-watering, bankruptcy-level sums of money or other assets. The LMC could take the full weight of perhaps two such fines, but the Lupinian Omnipedes didn't ask for monetary restitution. It is fully within the right of the aggrieved party to make lesser requests, whatever will satisfy them, and the Lupinian Omnipedes went directly to the heart of what the LMC was about by asking for naming rights for a class of newly discovered eigenminerals. I don't pretend to understand what they are, but they were important to the LMC.
For the LMC, provenance of naming and classification carries prestige and brings in revenue. In the old days on Earth, trade bodies would use such classifications to protect traditional regional specialties from market dilution, granting naming exclusivity according to historic definitions. While this sort of thing still persists here and there, plenty of corps now just try to colonize naming and classification spaces, which they can leverage through licensing schemes. This is all laid out in the Union's charters and resolutions. So just because you're buying a product that carries one of these desginators, that doesn't mean it has anything to do with the traditional producer. Anyway the potential value of such holdings is difficult to predict, which is why naming and classification rights normally fall under Class III Restitution.
The Lupinian Omnipedes look at it from something of a religious perspective. It is rare to find any cultural value that spans an entire species, but they were very insistent that this be engraved into their Union charter, and in fact brought with them translators to ensure proper labelling for taxonomic entities that were already open-licensed. They are firm believers in what we call Simulationism, which posits that our universe and/or multiverse exist within a simulation. It sounds hokey, but I challenge you to point out any other species-wide belief system with that level of specificity. While nobody has been able to prove any such thing (and believe me, we have been trying to find evidence), the Lupinian Omnipedes say they can nevertheless make reliable predictions based on some of its assumptions. The opacity of their bureaucracy and the obscurity of their cultural touchstones makes a full assessment of these claims quite difficult, and so even today we can't claim much progress.
Among their sacred beliefs is the power of names. You might recall some old Earth cultures that made similar claims, but never from a Simulationist perspective. For Lupinian Omnipedes, assigning a name is like claiming or allocating resources in a computer: you have control over what goes in, and you can lock those resources from accidental overwrite except by those with higher system privileges. They claim to be able to commune with their ancestors this way, by maintaining locks on resources the system would otherwise mark for reuse. By arriving at a location first, and locking it, the Lupinian Omnipedes believe they can access whatever was stored there, something like how data is recoverable from a computer even after it has been erased. Since their methods for doing this involve their own forms of ritual worship, we can't quite figure out what's going on and therefore can't replicate them.
What we didn't know then was that they are far more communal than anyone had guessed, and that they use these memory stores as a collective archive of species history, at least as far back as the methods of access had been known. And so this is why they chose such a seemingly small form of restitution: an individual Lupinian Omnipede is less important than the totality, and even an entire planet representing a nontrivial fraction of the species population isn't an insurmountable loss to them. But also because of this, we were slow to realize that a war had already begun.
The LMC was unhappy about the loss of naming rights. It had prepared itself to pay the maximum penalty under a Class I Restitution, knowing even so that it rarely came to that. But the old phrase, "Know thy enemy," seems to have been omitted from the LMC's cultural curricula. It made that mistake precisely once (in its arcane risk profiling algorithms, the LMC does not consider a misdirected colony ark as in the range of error; after all, it got to keep its colony). Shortly after the Union's verdict, the LMC unleashed a link corruption program on the Union's taxonomy, focused on namespaces known to contain items with Lupinian Omnipedal provenance.
We know this in retrospect, but at the time it looked like any other bit of stray malware. For one, the pattern of primary versus collateral damage was difficult to discern, and the collateral damage was not insignificant. For another, the Lupinian Omnipedes themselves didn't lodge a complaint about the onslaught until some 600 kiloseconds after it started. Even then we were skeptical of the claims, because if it was a war, it was unlike any we had ever seen before. Instead of killing the living, the LMC was slaughtering the dead.
This is where I got involved. I was a young computational taxonomist, tasked with maintaining some of the crusty bits of the system none of the seniors could be bothered with. While I wasn't the first to spot the malware, I was the first to figure out the patterns that confirmed the Lupinian Omnipedes' complaints. The LMC worm was designed to traverse semantic links in the hopes of trashing networked memory access points. I mean, it did this in a real system on the off chance that some aspect of its enemy's beliefs were either literally true, or that it believed them enough to be materially harmed by it, which means it was operating at least half in theory from its perspective.
I stopped it by building semantic firewalls in front of its racing hydra heads, cul-de-sacs whose entry points were weak but traversable inferences set to collapse afterward, preventing any reverse inference, thus depriving it of its destructive pathway. If it exists at all still, it is some thousands of little worms, bouncing endlessly around the circular references that formed the boundary of their island homes.
Tracing the origin of the worm back to LMC was trivial, and the Union took swift action, imposing the closest thing we have to a death penalty and dismantling the Collective with extreme prejudice. Nobody knows how many of the Lupinian Omnipedes' ancestors were destroyed this way, but the loss was considerable. Decades later, they still have not recovered.
Now you see why they don't teach this in school, don't you? As for Simulationism, the jury's still out. Evidence whose collection isn't replicable is difficult to work with.
Once the Union completed its investigation, it granted the Lupinian Omnipede delegation a Class I Restitution. This is where things went off the rails. A Class I Restitution can be a pretty severe fine to have levied against you. The wronged party can demand eye-watering, bankruptcy-level sums of money or other assets. The LMC could take the full weight of perhaps two such fines, but the Lupinian Omnipedes didn't ask for monetary restitution. It is fully within the right of the aggrieved party to make lesser requests, whatever will satisfy them, and the Lupinian Omnipedes went directly to the heart of what the LMC was about by asking for naming rights for a class of newly discovered eigenminerals. I don't pretend to understand what they are, but they were important to the LMC.
For the LMC, provenance of naming and classification carries prestige and brings in revenue. In the old days on Earth, trade bodies would use such classifications to protect traditional regional specialties from market dilution, granting naming exclusivity according to historic definitions. While this sort of thing still persists here and there, plenty of corps now just try to colonize naming and classification spaces, which they can leverage through licensing schemes. This is all laid out in the Union's charters and resolutions. So just because you're buying a product that carries one of these desginators, that doesn't mean it has anything to do with the traditional producer. Anyway the potential value of such holdings is difficult to predict, which is why naming and classification rights normally fall under Class III Restitution.
The Lupinian Omnipedes look at it from something of a religious perspective. It is rare to find any cultural value that spans an entire species, but they were very insistent that this be engraved into their Union charter, and in fact brought with them translators to ensure proper labelling for taxonomic entities that were already open-licensed. They are firm believers in what we call Simulationism, which posits that our universe and/or multiverse exist within a simulation. It sounds hokey, but I challenge you to point out any other species-wide belief system with that level of specificity. While nobody has been able to prove any such thing (and believe me, we have been trying to find evidence), the Lupinian Omnipedes say they can nevertheless make reliable predictions based on some of its assumptions. The opacity of their bureaucracy and the obscurity of their cultural touchstones makes a full assessment of these claims quite difficult, and so even today we can't claim much progress.
Among their sacred beliefs is the power of names. You might recall some old Earth cultures that made similar claims, but never from a Simulationist perspective. For Lupinian Omnipedes, assigning a name is like claiming or allocating resources in a computer: you have control over what goes in, and you can lock those resources from accidental overwrite except by those with higher system privileges. They claim to be able to commune with their ancestors this way, by maintaining locks on resources the system would otherwise mark for reuse. By arriving at a location first, and locking it, the Lupinian Omnipedes believe they can access whatever was stored there, something like how data is recoverable from a computer even after it has been erased. Since their methods for doing this involve their own forms of ritual worship, we can't quite figure out what's going on and therefore can't replicate them.
What we didn't know then was that they are far more communal than anyone had guessed, and that they use these memory stores as a collective archive of species history, at least as far back as the methods of access had been known. And so this is why they chose such a seemingly small form of restitution: an individual Lupinian Omnipede is less important than the totality, and even an entire planet representing a nontrivial fraction of the species population isn't an insurmountable loss to them. But also because of this, we were slow to realize that a war had already begun.
The LMC was unhappy about the loss of naming rights. It had prepared itself to pay the maximum penalty under a Class I Restitution, knowing even so that it rarely came to that. But the old phrase, "Know thy enemy," seems to have been omitted from the LMC's cultural curricula. It made that mistake precisely once (in its arcane risk profiling algorithms, the LMC does not consider a misdirected colony ark as in the range of error; after all, it got to keep its colony). Shortly after the Union's verdict, the LMC unleashed a link corruption program on the Union's taxonomy, focused on namespaces known to contain items with Lupinian Omnipedal provenance.
We know this in retrospect, but at the time it looked like any other bit of stray malware. For one, the pattern of primary versus collateral damage was difficult to discern, and the collateral damage was not insignificant. For another, the Lupinian Omnipedes themselves didn't lodge a complaint about the onslaught until some 600 kiloseconds after it started. Even then we were skeptical of the claims, because if it was a war, it was unlike any we had ever seen before. Instead of killing the living, the LMC was slaughtering the dead.
This is where I got involved. I was a young computational taxonomist, tasked with maintaining some of the crusty bits of the system none of the seniors could be bothered with. While I wasn't the first to spot the malware, I was the first to figure out the patterns that confirmed the Lupinian Omnipedes' complaints. The LMC worm was designed to traverse semantic links in the hopes of trashing networked memory access points. I mean, it did this in a real system on the off chance that some aspect of its enemy's beliefs were either literally true, or that it believed them enough to be materially harmed by it, which means it was operating at least half in theory from its perspective.
I stopped it by building semantic firewalls in front of its racing hydra heads, cul-de-sacs whose entry points were weak but traversable inferences set to collapse afterward, preventing any reverse inference, thus depriving it of its destructive pathway. If it exists at all still, it is some thousands of little worms, bouncing endlessly around the circular references that formed the boundary of their island homes.
Tracing the origin of the worm back to LMC was trivial, and the Union took swift action, imposing the closest thing we have to a death penalty and dismantling the Collective with extreme prejudice. Nobody knows how many of the Lupinian Omnipedes' ancestors were destroyed this way, but the loss was considerable. Decades later, they still have not recovered.
Now you see why they don't teach this in school, don't you? As for Simulationism, the jury's still out. Evidence whose collection isn't replicable is difficult to work with.
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