Previously: Aria was bitten by the Miesti and experienced an unexpected meeting of the minds.
If you’d like to read this chapter from the beginning (probably a good idea if you haven’t checked in for a while), it starts here. If you need a little more orientation than that, we have a Story So Far page for your reading convenience.
“The one from the damaged ship.”
I guess not that many crew-members from the old ship survive as slaves.
Oh– oops. That’s my error. It should read “ones”. When I was digitally erasing the tall, curvy “s”es and drawing in regular ones, I must have erased the “s” there and forgotten to put a regular “s” in its place. I’ll get that fixed later today. Thanks for the catch (although you may not have realized what you were pointing out was a mistake)!
when I read it, I took it to refer to the species. the Miesti may have done this to other kindss, so it makes sense that they speak of different beings in that manner
I think the stakes just got higher with the info that she is from another group with a working ship.
Will they suddenly become very nice because now they want to be friends?
It’s pretty clear from their conversation that the Miesti are aware that they are enslaving sentients and are doing so covertly. This would appear to put them in the exterminate-without-further-discussion class of darksider. I bet you have some mitigating information hidden in your hat.
I’m not so sure that the Miesti are aware that they are enslaving sentients. They know that humans build ships. We know that all sorts of species build complex structures, but that doesn’t mean that we assume that they are sentient. Heck, when we teach apes to sign, they talk back to us using novel constructions and abstract concepts and, even though they are talking to us, we don’t recognize them as sentient. I could readily see the Miesti as not recognizing as sentient beings that not only couldn’t talk to them, but that weren’t even aware that they were being spoken to.
Given the level of technical expertise needed to build a ship, I’d see any species which can do such a things as pretty darn sentient. And I recognize apes as quite sentient.
Amen. Not like smelting alloys, creating, designing systems capable of “warp” drive are the “accidents” of the equivalents of ants. They’d have to be pretty self delusional to not think they were enslaving people at this point.
*chisels a “not” between were and enslaving* I blame the bottle of wine for this
I agree. It’s also possible that – assuming the Miesti make assumptions as we do – the Miesti may first look towards other butterfly-like organisms when it comes to searching for intelligent life. They may therefore assume that the humans are the nonsentient “hands” of a native Miestiform species, and have chalked up the absence of said species to the global war.
(Please note that, based on the two-page spread, I am assuming the Miesti crash-landed AFTER the global war, and are hence not the cause).
Therefore they now have “hands” that have no owners, and so decided to make use of them to survive. Add to this the fact that humans and Miesti did not co-evolve, and any Miesti’s ability to merge with humans is bound to be rough. Communication is one-way only, with the Miesti having no real way of knowing just what is being received by their “hands”.
Now they have a human they know who can hear and understand them – I imagine the shock to be the same as if one of us was to find a crab at our computer, not just poking at the keys, but busily setting up its own blog! What conclusions the Miesti will draw from this discovery will be telling.
I imagine it would be like if we suddenly discovered horses were sentient.
Er, I should have specified that it was a different, possibly better, analogy to make, since horses are working animals, or beasts of burden. Creatures we consider ‘lesser’ and train to use as we see fit. If they suddenly seemed able to understand us and speak back more articulately than ‘tapping’ a number out with their hooves or such…
In any case, any creature we use to accomplish tasks, and consider non-sentient mostly because they don’t speak in a manner we recognize as such or use tools we can identify as such…
You may recognize apes as sentient. The fact that we still keep them in zoos and use them for experimental purposes indicates that many humans do not.
I stand by my opinion that a truly alien species, with a completely different evolution and context, may look for different markers of sentience than we do. As a species that uses tools to adapt to different environments and evolve our abilities, we naturally look at tools like the space ship as markers of sentience. I can readily imagine a telepathic species using telepathic communication as “proof of sentience” and not assuming sentience in the absence of a mind that can “talk back”.
This was meant to be a reply to Jeremy, above.
Spot on- glad I’m not the only one who understands the Miesti haven’t necessarily been fully understanding the situation. Same to Andrew Crisp. I tried to point out differing moral compasses, as well, in the comments of the last page- what’s referred to as Blue and Orange Morality, which is possibly pertinent to this scenario.
WARNING: TV TROPES LINK BELOW:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality
The Miesti very likely want to get their “hands” on a working ship by any means. I’ll bet this is why Jeff Nelson and his crew scrambled the command core of the Hiawatha. http://galaxioncomics.com/1-comic/book-2/chapter-4/chapter-4-p-124/
Possibly- possibly not. They may not have known these details. There may have been other reasons yet to be revealed.
More TV Tropes that applies VERY MUCH to the Miesti: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens
My favourite example of a “starfish” alien is the Caleban species in Frank Herbert’s ConSentiency universe. Just how different they are is esplored in his 1970 novel Whipping Star which is really about the human protagonist’s attempt to establish communication when the thinking is so different that there is practically no semantic congruency.