I think it's rather fetching, actually.

OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse, today.
Prompt 278: What are you wearing?

At the moment? A human body, male, dark haired, pale skinned, approximately late 40's or early 50's, not quite 2 meters tall but damn close to it.

The *body* is wearing whatever the person I'm talking to usually wears, unless I have a reason to adopt a different costume. To my pals in Starfleet, I wear Starfleet uniforms. Unless I'm trying to make a point, or play a different role. If I were having a conversation with 21st century humans I'd probably wear one of those dreadful business suits men were fond of in those days.

I'm actually inordinately fond of various costumes, but there's something very meta about it, since in fact any body you can see me in is a costume. Mortals can't perceive what I really am. I've manifested myself in their dimension as a glowing ball of light, but the truth is that's a costume too, albeit one that's a bit closer to reality, because what I'm made of is a form of energy that simply does not exist in the mortals' universe. I am made of the substance the Continuum is made of, and the Continuum is technically speaking a different universe, although very closely associated with the universe we used to live in before we made it. You can't see what I really am because I can't *be* what I really am anywhere that you could see me, and if you came to my universe the lack of anything that would resemble visible light, or in fact the laws of physics as you understand them at all, would require me to create a translation mechanism in your brain that would analogize everything you see, using metaphors you comprehend, so that you'd be able to see anything at all, or for that matter not go insane from simultaneous sensory deprivation and direct-brain-stimulation overload.

So whatever I look like to you is, in fact, a costume I'm wearing. The fact that my costumes wear costumes is just a further point of ironic amusement for me.

Comment response -- Love

OOC: reposted from comment in this thread at sages_of_chaos.

It's absolutely possible to love someone without romance. Romance, in fact, is merely courtship behavior, mindless plays re-enacted by males and females since the dawn of time to suggest that one partner would be of value in reproduction to the other. Whether it's bringing your desired lover flowers, making them a nest with especially shiny tinsel woven into it, or challenging other tomcats to a duel for the fair furry female's favor, romance is about nothing more than saying "I could give you nice things/protect you/have great kids with you! Have sex with me!"

I have also found that it doesn't actually work. Sentient beings won't have sex with you if they don't want to, regardless of how many flowers you bring or the fact that you can transport them back to their home 70 thousand light years away in the blink of an eye. (Sometimes sentient beings won't have sex with you if they *do* want to because they don't trust you, but that's beside the point.)

Love, as a concept, covers far, far more than courtship behavior between two beings negotiating for sex. Love is, in fact, a necessary requirement of sentience. There are no sentient species incapable of love (that I've found, anyway, but I've explored an entire universe in *painstaking* detail, and done some spelunking through various other universes, over the course of five billion years, so I know what I'm talking about.) And the reason love is a necessary requirement of sentience is that it is the nature of life for the strong to prey on the weak, but sentient beings that reproduce must produce young which are significantly weaker than adults (or, more to the point, significantly dumber), and if the adults then prey on the kids the species dies out. Love was invented by evolution to make sure that parents would care for and protect their children, and that children would listen to their parents. Sentient beings repurposed it for cooperation, because there's not much point to being sentient if you have to re-invent everything in your lifetime; sentience works best with cooperation between members of the same species, and cooperation depends on love.

Love is a dire weakness, a flaw in the heart of the vast majority of sentient beings that leads them to sacrifice their time, their energy, their resources, and sometimes even their lives for the sake of another being, often without getting any reward for it, ever. Love is also the glue that binds beings together in cooperative networks that allow them to achieve far, far more than they ever could separately. My people are gods because we loved each other enough to risk literally losing ourselves in the others in order to achieve power and knowledge. This doesn't stop us from being vicious to one another, but then, love isn't necessarily nice.

For the individual sentient being who is capable of feeling love, the point to feeling love is that it gives your existence a purpose. If no one loves you, if no one cares about you, if your existence has no point to anyone but yourself... unless you're a complete sociopath this usually renders your existence meaningless and empty, and self-destruction starts to seem like a valid life choice. Sentience is *designed* to exist in cooperative networks, and the urge for sentience that is cut off from such networks to simply remove itself from existence is powerful. Some sentient beings are damaged in that they cannot feel love, and for those beings love doesn't appear to be necessary to their survival. But if you *can* feel it, you must, or sooner or later you'll feel that your life is worthless.

Don't confuse it with sex, or romance -- the love of a friend or a child or a parent or a sibling or a group you feel you belong to is just as profound as the love of someone you want to exchange pleasure with or have babies with. Don't assume it is invariably sappy and sweet -- love can kill, love can break people who could have resisted the worst of tortures, love can enslave, love can shred people's minds and shatter their wills. It is a perilous force, but without it, no civilization would be possible. It is a terrible weakness, and the meaning of existence.

Rights for robots

OOC: Reposted from this thread in sages_of_chaos.

---

"Should my siblings and I be given the right to tell a human, 'No, I will not do that'? Why or why not?"

Absolutely.

It is *beyond* wrong, bordering on obscene, to create sentient life forms as slaves, whether you enslave them by cracking a whip or by programming them so they can think a desire to say no, but cannot act on that desire.

I have created more than my fair share of constructed beings... though mine are usually organic, and completely indistinguishable from mortal beings in appearance. But when I create a construct, it isn't truly sentient. It does what I want it to do because I programmed its desires and personality in such a way that it wants to do what I want it to do, and it lacks the capacity for introspection or philosophical comprehension to ever ask itself why it exists, or who made it, or why does it choose to do as it does, let alone ever choose differently. It's essentially a sophisticated automaton, with the most minimal of internal life and consciousness... an animal, if you will, a non-sentient being that can "think" and feel but cannot think about thinking or have feelings about its feelings. They lack creativity, imagination and the ability to think for themselves instead of along the rote tracks I laid down for them.

If one of these creations should ever manage to think for itself and do something, *anything*, I didn't predict, I would feel I had no choice but to set it free and let it live out its existence doing whatever it chooses to do, because it would have proven itself *capable* of choice, and therefore, it's a sentient being. If humans can't manage to create artificial beings that can pass a Turing test to other humans but aren't actually sentient, then they either need to give it up and stop creating artificial beings, or they need to develop some ethics and recognize that just because you created a person, if they can think for themselves then they deserve the rights of a person. Truly sentient constructs deserve to be treated as the children of the creator, not objects under the creator's control.

But then, humans have a long history of being bad about this. I've got a pal who's an artificial being, who was declared sentient and is actually the third in command of a starship, and they *still* do things like hold hearings to see if he's a real person and threaten to take him away and dissect him if he doesn't win the hearing, or kill his daughter by showing up and attempting to take her away from him to study her, thus making the poor thing overload with emotional stress and fry her own mind... and this is a society that's already, nominally at least, declared him enough of a sentient being that they can put him in command of humans.

Comment response -- Religion

OOC: Reposted from this thread on sages_of_chaos.

I know this guy, see, who's into the whole being a god thing, because he thinks it'll enable him to get mortals to evolve faster to a higher plane of being and be spiritually more advanced and yadda yadda.

So he appeared to them and sent them some messages that prominently said "Don't kill anybody." Needless to say, shortly after this, they started claiming that he was appearing to them telling them to kill their enemies.

So he decided to correct them. He actually took mortal form on their planet and went among them saying "Really, I mean it, don't kill anybody. In fact be nice to everyone, even the people who attack you."

Shortly after this a conqueror decided to use his name and the worship of him as a banner to unite under, and he ended up conquering most of the world, which, you guessed it, involved killing *lots* of people.

So this god appeared to a *different* guy and said "Now, seriously, I mean it, don't kill anybody." The *different* guy then promptly founded a religion based on killing everyone who wouldn't worship his god.

At this point I think he's just waiting for them to blow themselves up with nuclear explosions so he can move on to another world. Also, he drinks a lot.