The King's Knights

Chapter Twenty-Six: Mind of Wheels

"If you skimp on it, you'll have breakdowns and crashes.

"Did you know Hates Corp has a recurring glitch? Their computer screens go static for a few seconds, and then you enter the atmosphere. A lot of pilots talk about it with me."

"Does that make a difference?" asked Fate, curious. "It's a few seconds."

"In theory?" asked Renfield, smiling. "It looked like the smile you'd have before flaying someone alive. He had a grin like a sharp one because of biology. Not that it had any effect on his character. "You'll have all your calculations up by then. In practice? On a long enough timescale, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

"Sooner or later, you'll be typing your coordinates in when the screen goes haywire. All to press the wrong button. Then you've got to cancel or backspace. What if there is debris out there? You might hit something, and then if you're not space dust, you'll have to make even bigger decisions.

"The problem with space travel usually isn't one thing going wrong.

"We've got systems all over these vessels, so if one thing goes wrong, we can handle it. No, the real problem is when one thing goes wrong, which makes another go wrong. Then someone makes a mistake in the chaos, and even more goes wrong."

"Like a set of dominoes knocking each other over," guessed Fate.

"Right," said Renfield. "Ships don't get blown to smithereens when one system goes down. They have backups for that. Ships get blown to smithereens when everything goes wrong all at once."

"Like what happened down there?" asked Fate.

Renfield nodded.

Fate had been warned something similar about Renfield's people, the serpent folk. They had large populations both on Nabordeen and Falcov. "'Historically, primitive cultures tend to adopt ethics appropriate to their survival.

"'Morality is a work in progress for all cultures. And often see cultures with great thinkers far ahead of their time. The problem is that their progressive views take a long time to become mainstream.'"

"Because nobody likes listening to a nerd?" asked Renfield with a smile.

"Not just that," said Fate. "It's more that modern Morality is impractical for less advanced societies. We're from developed planets. We might have a garden as a hobby, but if we get a drought, we can buy food from a grocery store.

"If we run out of money, there are social safety nets.

"If we want to learn something, we can go to a library and read up on it. We're all taught to read and write from a young age. Even if we don't read the classics, the Morality taught to us is way more advanced.

"You can't expect a population of people who are a crop failure away from starvation to have Morality. That's especially true if they have no education and are in constant war. That's why the Demoration takes a top-down approach to sewing democracy.

"If you can get the cultural elites to embrace it, they can make schools and such."

"Trickle down economics?" asked Renfield doubtfully.

"No," said Fate, feeling slightly offended by the comparison. "Democracy isn't a complete failure as a system. There are numerous cases of monarchies adopting enlightened ideals and reforming themselves."

"Fair enough," said Renfield. "But there are a lot of cases of monarchies bombing their protesting citizens. Or of mass executions."

"It's a big galaxy," said Fate. "You can't expect us to win them all."