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Rain Cream
252e1b
>>290336
A xox is a copy of a fully sapient brain image or program. It's a term from Transhuman Space by David Pulver, one of the few settings where the writer saw fit to create a short and easy to remember term for the condition of being an active divergent branch of the same brain tape. Other authors have explored the idea in fiction, but usually it's not common enough in their settings to merit its own word. In some cases the authors chose to use older words that have negative connotations and baggage, like "doppelganger."
Xox is a new word, a truncation of the root "Xerox," and only has connotations of being a perfect or near-perfect copy of the mind in question. It's useful enough to be worth using in a setting that involves transhuman concepts like brain taping and mind editing.
>>290329
Djur, varelse, ramen, and framling are degrees of recognized alieness, from Orson Scott Card's Hierarchy of Exclusion, an idea he explored in his novel Speaker for the Dead.
Djur are indiscriminate monsters, think tyranids or the Von Neumann probes from "Von Neumann's War." They're smart enough to be able to destroy everything, and too alien to give a fuck that they're doing it.
Varelse are other species who are so weird that no communication is possible. Think of the xenomorphs from Aliens. It's obvious there's something going on there, that they're too smart to be animals, but it's equally obvious that they're not capable of communicating with humans. Varelse are too weird to be able to talk to, let alone negotiate with. Their idea of happiness is so different from the human concept that they may be actively inflicting harm when they try to share a happy moment.
Ramen are aliens that are capable of learning to communicate, and thus are also capable of learning how to coexist with humans. These are the aliens most prominently featured in fiction. All of the client species in the book Eon, by Greg Bear, are ramen. Tau and Eldar from WH40K count as ramen. Even obvious enemies like the Klingons in the original Star Trek series were ramen, as evidenced by their ability to communicate threats to the crew of the Enterprise (they of course went from being hostile ramen to cooperative ramen).
Framlings are outworlders. People of the same species, perhaps even of the same common heritage, but who have developed on a world that is not the observer's, and thus will have a different cultural background. For the purposes of the Network, we can consider everything in the Network to be one world. Lots of ideas and people migrate between the habitats and planets that make up the entire Network, and they do so freely. Those worlds that Lyan mentioned ages ago, the ones that aren't connected to the Network? They're where this setting's framlings live.
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