Nomination Clarifications #1

[koraki]

Thank you to everyone who has submitted nominations for 2022 so far! As a reminder, nominations are scheduled to close on Sunday, April 17 at 11:59 PM UTC. This may be earlier than midnight in your time zone.

We have one clarifying question, raised by a participant in the exchange. 

RESOLVED - The Texicalaan Series 

Comments

[lemniskath]

I am not the nominator, but I have read the novels (and have requested, received, and written fic about them for exchanges).

Mahit and Yskandr perceive themselves as entirely usual humans to some extent, and having the memory-implant with the memories of a person who has died is usual for their home culture (Lsel). This implant records all their memories and also, more critically, allows them to create in potential a merged personality between the person who died and the person who receives the implant. Yskandr is one such merger with his predecessor; events in the story intervene to prevent Mahit from merging properly with Yskandr, so they remain separate, but share Mahit's body.

I would say that this makes them qualify as (Yskandr) technically an AI of the uploaded-human-mind type, and (Mahit) technically a cyborg. In addition, these features of their home culture are very touchy and even taboo in the culture they are ambassadors to, which makes them outsiders, and both have somewhat bought into that (Teixcalaan) culture, which makes them to some extent conceive themselves as *not* entirely human anymore.

So, I'd recommend you allow the nomination to stand.

[flowersforgraves]

I disagree that Mahit would qualify as part of this exchange. I would argue that most of the treatment of Mahit and/or Yskandr is due not to the physical augmentation of the Lsel implants, but to their outsider status as people who are not part of the Teixcalaan Empire (either legally or ethnically). Yskandr, provided that he is portrayed in his memory-engram form, might qualify; however, I think Mahit's inclusion would be a stretch at best. She's dehumanized by Teixcalaanli characters not because she necessarily is nonhuman, but because she is not Teixcalaanli, which doesn't feel like it fits the spirit of the exchange.

[lemniskath]

I think allowing Yskandr and disallowing Mahit would be a reasonable judgment.

Here's some examples from the book:

<That’s what looking at it is meant to make you think,> said her imago. He was a faint staticky taste on the back of her tongue, a flash of grey eyes and sun-dark skin in her peripheral vision. The voice in the back of her head, but not quite her voice: someone around her age, but male, and quicksilver-smug, and as excited to be here as she was. She felt her mouth curve in his smile, a heavier and wider thing than the muscles in her face preferred. They were new to each other. His expressions were very strong.

Get out of my nervous system, Yskandr, she thought at him, gently chiding. An imago—the implanted, integrated memory of one’s predecessor, housed half in her neurology and half in a small ceramic-and-metal machine clasped to her brainstem—wasn’t supposed to take over the host’s nervous system unless the host consented. At the beginning of the partnership, though, consent was complicated. The version of Yskandr inside her mind remembered having a body, and sometimes he used Mahit’s as if it were his own. She worried about it. There was still so much space between them, when they were supposed to be becoming one person.

and another:

Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador,
has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.”

“How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.

[...]

“What does the implant do, Ambassador?”

Hey, Yskandr, Mahit thought, reaching for the silence where the imago should be, watch me. I can commit sedition too.

“It makes a record,” she said. “A copy. A person’s memories and their patterns of thought. We call it an imago-machine, because it makes an imago, a version of the person that outlives their body. His is probably useless now. He’s dead, and it’s been recording brain decay for three months.”

“If it wasn’t useless,” Three Seagrass said carefully, “what would you do with it?”

“I wouldn’t do anything. I’m not a neurosurgeon. Or an ixplanatl of any kind. But if I was, I’d put the imago inside someone, and nothing Yskandr had learned in the last fifteen years would ever be lost.”

“That’s obscene,” Twelve Azalea said. “A dead person taking over the body of a living one. No wonder you eat your corpses—”

“Try not to be insulting,” Mahit snapped. “It’s not a replacement. It’s a combination. [...]"

[koraki]

Hi, thank you for the quick clarification and for sharing these quotes! Even without taking our historic permissiveness into account, based on this information from canon it seems like these characters both fall under the umbrella of AI/cyborgs and fit the spirit of the exchange. The tags will all stay as they are.

[(Anonymous)]

The nominations don't seem to be in the tag set? Did you change your mind and decide to remove them?

[koraki]

While AO3 has listed the Texicalaan series under “Uncategorized Fandoms”, not “Books”, the characters and ships in question all appear to be there. Please let me know if you do not see them.