Poice

The term Poice is a portmanteau of "Perception" and "Voice", or "Perception-voice", a spectrum of sensation akin to light or sound that can be used to convey certain non-verbal language and communication.

Description (Specifications)

Perception is a sense that detects life-auras and the emotions behind that life, instincts to intuition. It is the background a "perceiving" individual "hears" when all other audible sounds are absent. "Aura" is the name for what Perception is detecting, much as "light" is the name for what vision detects and "sound" is the name for what hearing detects. Perception and the ability to detect aura, as far as can be ascertained, is apparently not itself psionic or any psionic sense, but rather a function of the electrochemical impulses generated by living organisms and the ability to sense and read them. How this differs from psionics is not entirely clear, other than that there is a definite and clearly demonstrable distinction. In particular, aura can also be detected by non-psionic empathy (usually not as clearly and at shorter ranges than by psionic senses).

Poice is a form of unspoken intuitive communication utilizing the ability of the Perception-sense to sense auras and project the same in return. A sophont with the Perception-sense "hears" with Perception and "Peaks" (i.e. "Speaks") with Poice.

Aura is perhaps best understood as the background noise, or static, generated by all living organisms. Aura is strongest around worlds rich with life (being generated by said life) and weakest in the voids between the stars (where there is no life to generate it). Virus does not naturally generate aura (although it is possible to add augmentations which amount to cybernetics, introducing biological components to a non-biological sophont, which then give off a Poice signal).

History & Background (Dossier)

Perception appears to be a biologically-based sense. Poice has no pherochemical component, though it is related to the electrical coronal discharges that can be imaged by Kirlian photography. It is both biological and electrical (that is, it is bioelectrical) in nature.

Poice is sometimes used for psionic communications similar to Telepathy but involving Telempathy. The voices of telepathy are to spoken-languages, what Poice-conveyed signals are to hand sign languages.

References & Contributors (Sources)

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This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Mongoose Publishing or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Marc Miller, Robert Eaglestone, Don McKinney. Characters and Combat (Far Future Enterprises, 2019), 197.