Wednesday Night Ashen Stars

[james_davis_nicoll]

Only the fact my character is a cheerful cyborg is keeping him from rounding up the five surviving plutocrats and 0.01%ers on the wrecked/sabotaged space luxury cruiser and spacing the lot of them.

At least there's the prospect of a doomsday device to keep him distracted.

Comments

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I feel like the word "plutocrat" has added resonance in a SF setting.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

You'd think people in a craft where 95% of their fellow passengers died would have some grasp of the fact they are in an emergency situation. Most of these guys seem to think the PCs are porters, not rescuers.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Would this behaviour by any chance be based on a real life incident? Not necessarily the Titanic, of course.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't know.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The wreck was because of deliberate sabotage and so far I can see an angle for all of the survivors to have done it.

Better safe than sorry

[(Anonymous)]

Space them all, then.

Re: Better safe than sorry

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the very game environment itself conspires against us. The overwhelming compulsion for LASER teams is not to follow orders or fulfill their contracts. It is to do whatever is needed to maximize and preserve their reputations. Because, it is through having a generous reputation that a team can (a) secure lucrative contracts and thereby (b) manage to maintain their monthly maintenance fees.

In this particular case, our orders are to rescue any survivors and bring them back to their families. The first person we encountered insisted we bring back their (bulky) research materials as well. I grimly informed her that it was her choice: she could come with us back to civilisation, or she could stay here with her research--we were not about to force her to do anything. She began to fervently collate her data...

The upshot of this: I highly suspect that in this case, we could put bags over these survivors' heads, freeze them, and return them to normal space as per our orders... and watch our reputation plummet towards the floor as they slander us and tell nasty stories about their ill treatment.

Re: Better safe than sorry

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I cannot help but notice that if there are no survivors, there will be no negative reports from the survivors.

Re: Re: Better safe than sorry

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

That was exactly my thinking when reading the grandparent post. It was such a tragedy that your team arrived too late to effect a rescue. But at substantial risk to yourselves, you did manage to recover several of the bodies to be returned to their grieving relatives.

Re: Re: Better safe than sorry

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

PARANOIA has long run on this principle, though there it applies more to the Troubleshooter teams too...

--Dave, debriefing, simplified

Self-Sacrifice is at times Necessary

[(Anonymous)]

Nobody said anything about survivors. By all means return the collected pieces of their frozen, radiation-riddled corpses to the grieving next-of-kin.

A lost reputation is a price worth paying to eliminate half a dozen 0.01%ers.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

You use the word "fellow" as if to imply that the plutocrats are in some sense the same category as the non-plutocrats. Surely, only the plutocrats count as fully human?

This seems analogous to the current political situation in America, where many plutocrats seem bent on extracting All The Money In The World, without any thought to how they are damaging the infrastructure needed for long term support of their lifestyles.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

If by "long term support of their lifestyles" you mean "beyond their deaths", obviously that's not a consideration.

As for our situation, it doesn't necessarily bother me if the survivors think of us as faithful dogs, as long as they realize that it's up to us to choose to drag them out of the freezing river they're in and back to their campfires. Before they die.