Spy Writes - Tumblr Posts
wrote a teaser prologue thingy for a Hyperlanes campaign I want to run, called Orion’s Echo. possibly more parts to come!
Captain's Log // Pathfinder Telamon // 20.5.5240 // 05:15 Fleet Standard Time
[several seconds of silence]
(quietly) ... I never know how to begin these things, even after twenty years of recording them.
(normal volume) This is Commander Akair Vayth of the Pathfinder Telamon, Argo-class capital ship for the Pathfinder Initiative expedition into the Trapezium Cluster. We're currently docked in Palladion Skyharbor, and preparations to leave Athenian orbit are nearly complete. We're scheduled to launch at 0600, bound for 45 Orionis. Our plan is to take the jumpgate routes to Rigel to resupply, then make the jump to Alnilam. From there, we're on our own as we fly into unknown territory.
[beat]
Our fleet is twelve ships strong: the Telamon herself, a support carrier and the capital ship; four Asterion-class exploration frigates, the Archimedes, Pythagoras, Aristarchus, and Eratosthenes; four Hephaestion-class industrial frigates, the Prometheus, Brontes, Arges, and Steropes; two Heraklion-class support frigates, the Balius and Xanthus; and an Asclepion-class medical support corvette, the Dione. I'll admit, when the commission proposed a mere twelve ships for an expedition of such long duration, I was quite skeptical, but in composing the fleet I've grown confident in the crew's capability.
[beat]
Still... I worry. We're going further into the Orion Nebula than anyone ever has, and we don't know what lurks in the dark between the stars. Previous expeditions in the Clouds have described unusual readings from the Trapezium Cluster, hinting at... well, we're not sure. It could be a black hole. Could be a high-arity pulsar, or an exotic star. Or something... organic.
[beat]
I'm overthinking this, I'm sure. We're just going to chart the cluster, gauge its habitability, and set up a jumpgate if possible. But in any case, I'm needed on the bridge again. Commander Vayth, signing off.
[log terminates]
oh right! I wrote another short piece set in the Diaspora the other day: Out of the Cradle [link], a story about the first words spoken on Mars.
Awakening
Voices.
That was the first thing I was aware of, breaking through the tranquil oblivion like a stone cast into a still pool. Someone was speaking, though I couldn't make out what was being said. It sounded distant, as if a league of water separated us. Grasping weakly at consciousness, I tried to call out, to stir...
And the second thing I became aware of was the pain.
I became reacquainted with my body as a dull ache spread through it, starting with my head and making its way down my core and out to my limbs. The ache gradually intensified as the moments dripped by, as did the voices. Though still muffled, as my sentience returned to me I realized I could neither recognize nor understand them. Still unable to move, I found the only muscles that would respond to me were my eyelids. I opened them, eager to test another sense.
I saw nothing at all, just the same oppressive, featureless darkness. The only thing that changed was some sort of cold fluid now pressing against my exposed corneas. I panicked for a fraction of a second, suddenly afraid of drowning, before realizing I was still breathing. As tactile sense surfaced above the omnipresent ache, I became aware of a breathing mask over my face, as well as IV feeds in my arms and electrodes all over my body. What was all that about…?
It occurred to me then that I did not know where I was. The first coherent internal dialog I produced was a simple ‘oh no,’ as my heart began to pick up its pace. The last thing I remembered… I was on a vast ship, bound for a distant star, never to return. Had we arrived at long last?
A loud, beeping alarm startled me. Despite the pain, confusion, and weakness suffusing every fiber of my being, at last I began to stir. So too did my surroundings: there was a quiet rumble and an accompanying hiss as the frigid fluid started to drain. The voices changed cadence, evidently surprised, and got louder- no, closer.
Though the light was dim, it nearly blinded me as the cover of my stasis chamber was lifted open. I squinted at the shapes attached to the voices; they were blurry and indistinct. One of them leaned closer, and I was able to resolve some features. Long, white hair, elegant feminine facial structure, piercing golden eyes. A pair of shapes loomed just behind them, large and white and triangular. Feathered. Were those… wings?
The person said something- a question I couldn't understand. They gently removed the breathing mask. I coughed at the first taste of stale, cold air, and the pain flared in my chest, threatening to shake my grasp on the waking world. The stranger touched my face with delicate grace, concern apparent on their own. I was struck by a thought.
“Are… you… an angel?” I managed to gasp, weakly.
My savior frowned, and said something else that was lost on me. The other voice, from somewhere outside my field of vision, gave a reply that seemed to disappoint them. I understood only one word, a name I vaguely recalled from somewhere in ancient mythology: “Mnemosyne.” The winged being nodded, and placed the mask back over my mouth and nose. Before I could protest, they placed some sort of device against my forehead, and I sunk back into dreamless nothing.
When I awoke again, a different voice greeted me -one I could understand, this time.
“Hello, friend,” it said. It was soft, pleasant… welcoming.
I opened my eyes, but the light was too bright, and I shut them quickly.
“Please, take your time adjusting to the burden of consciousness; you have been in stasis for a very long time.”
Stasis. Yes. Now that I was awake, we must have reached our destination. I noted, with relief, that the all-consuming ache was no longer all-consuming. The air was warm, and fresh. I opened my eyes very slightly, letting them acclimate to the revival room.
“That’s it, ease into the heat and light,” the voice encouraged me. “There we go.”
After several minutes, I felt able to look around. I sat up, slowly, carefully, and looked for the source of the voice. To my great surprise, I was not in the revival room… or at least, not one that I recognized. The room was small, clean, and colored in gentle pastels. I was further shocked to discover that the voice was that of a friendly-looking robot, humanoid in shape, holding some sort of electronic tablet.
“Hello!” they said, and smiled. Their smile, amazingly, was somehow reassuring. “I am Mnemosyne, your post-stasis bedside attendant.”
“H-hello…?” I managed. “What… what is… where am I?”
“Ah, let me get you up to speed. Welcome to the fifty-third century of what you most likely know as the Common Era.”
I blinked, failing to grasp the meaning of the sentence. “The what?”
Mnemosyne continued. “Oh yes, it has been some time indeed, but please save all your questions for the end of this orientation. According to your chart, you have missed…” They glanced at the information on the pad. “...approximately three thousand and twenty-four years of intervening time.” They paused, and a look of concern crossed their artificial face.
“Oh dear. You should probably lie back down for this.”
apotheosis
/əˌpäTHēˈōsəs/
(noun) - the ascendance or elevation of a person to divine status.
They say I saved the world.
I have tried to tell my people that the world is not safe; that no world is safe. That no world could ever be safe, not forever. Safety is a tranquil pool through which the river of history flows. I know the truth, or at least part of it, thanks to the man I met that day. No one else knows about that man, and he may not have even been real, but I must speak of him all the same, for he taught me something I will never forget. He imparted to me, in a sense, the meaning of life.
He arrived, perhaps against his own better judgment, in a flash of light at just the right moment. And judgment it was, indeed; I had been given a choice that I could not bring myself to make, and he showed me what I had to do. He helped to fix the mistake that I had made, but he seemed so forlorn while he did so. I could not help but to ask him why: why he was helping at all, and why it made him sad. And when I did, he turned to me, and he told me a story.
Long ago, and very far from here, there was a man who lived on a small blue-green planet, under a small yellow sun, lost in the endless cosmic night. This man was gifted; his work alone accelerated the scientific advancement of his world by hundreds of years over the course of his lifetime. To his beloved people, he brought peace, health, safety, comfort, and most importantly knowledge. But it was not enough for him.
He did not seek power. He did not wish for domination, not over his fellow man or even over nature. What he sought was knowledge for its own sake -a nobler pursuit than power and control, but still dangerous. And as must always happen, one day... something went horribly wrong. He did not speak of what happened, not in detail, but in tinkering with the very fabric of reality, he became... sundered, splintered, undone, and then suddenly… remade.
He could, all at once, perceive the whole of infinity around him. He saw the great nothing at the bottom of everything, and the madness at the top. He experienced every iteration of every universe; all of time and space happening at once in an endless forest of infinitely-branching cosmic trees. He saw the space between and could channel the limitless energy from that aether to reshape reality as he pleased. He was, in an instant, more powerful than any god -truly omnipotent. He understood the meaning of existence and he knew, with omniscient certainty, that there was no meaning. There was no reason for existence at all, no purpose within being. Reality simply is. How does someone, formerly finite and mortal, cope with infinity in every direction, when there is no meaning behind that infinity?
The answer, he said, was joyfully simple.
Existence, he told me then, is a blank canvas upon which to paint meaning. And he added another revelation to help me paint my meaning: existence is not unknowing and uncaring, for we know that we exist, and we must resolve to care. We are each the universe made conscious, he said to me with humble awe in his voice, and the only thing missing from a universe without consciousness is compassion. Only that which has the ability to know and understand, can know and understand others. It was so clear to me in that moment: that consciousness exists to be the door through which meaning enters the universe, and that meaning must be kindness.
I asked him, then, why he was sad, for what he had said brought me tears of joy. He told me that every instance of an event with more than one outcome is another node in the tree, another fork splitting into new branches, each one with their own branches, unto eternity. There is no one true timeline, no one correct path. For him to create a new one through intervention was merely an infinitesimal drop in the aether, and he could see all the futures in which I had made a choice. He knew what would have happened without him -if, that is, the choice had been left to me, in my ignorance. He grieved that he could never ensure the permanent safety and happiness of a world, for that would be a task of infinity against infinity. To forge a new path for a world through kindness may not change much, he said, but it is noble.
But then he smiled, and he told me his secret: his purpose. For all his power and knowledge, for all his eternity, he confided in me that he was not infallible. The meaning he ascribes to his everlasting life, therefore, is to strive to be better, for this is a task wherein the goal is always one step further. The quest for compassion is as endless as he and the whole of existence. So, too, is his other task: to maintain the integrity of all universes -as he has seen, there are always some rare few who would seek nothing but destruction. He cares for every infinitely-branching tree of spacetime in Eternity, tends to their ills and encourages their growth.
He told me, then, that his work in this time and place was complete, for now, and wished me well as he left the same way he had come: in a flash of otherworldly light. But I have thought about him every day since then, as my world slowly heals, and I have come to appreciate who and what he really is. He did not create existence, but he bears its responsibility as though he did. He wanders the grand cosmic forest of times and spaces, sowing kindness where it must be sown and fostering compassion across the whole of existence, in hopes of watching it bloom like flowers in an endless summer sun.
I never learned his name, but I know what I will call him.
I will call him the Gardener.
The Lost Starfarers
An excerpt from the book The Lost Starfarers by Dr. Erin Burke, published March 2472 CE. Image: the planet Hemera in 2470, seen from high orbit.
Ten thousand years ago, the apocalypse happened.
Not on Earth, of course; we were spared, and our pre-agricultural ancestors never knew the fortune that had shone upon them. But the ruins of nearly a hundred worlds in nearby space tell us everything: ten thousand years ago, the world ended eighty-seven times at once. Far more, in fact, if one counts the tens of thousands of shattered stations and constructs that lay scattered across the expanse of more than a dozen solar systems. Our own system did not fully escape this fate, and indeed the derelict station over Uranus is how we came to realize that, once, long ago, humanity was watched over by beings far more powerful than ourselves.
In our fledgeling centuries of starfaring we would come to learn that these beings called themselves "skgri'i," and came from a world called "o'Kora" -the planet now known to us as Hemera. Over two thousand metric years, they spread across the stars, developing their science and technology to heights we still will not match for another dozen centuries. And yet, somehow, they did not fully shed their primordial divisive nature –much the same nature as the human race– and this was ultimately their undoing.
Our predecessors, our cosmic kin who once flourished across the stars for millennia, were erased from existence in thirteen short years by the most cataclysmic war in known xenoarchaeological history -so absolute in its destruction that it has been simply dubbed "the Apocalypse." We know very little of the conflict itself, or of the terrible weapons with which it was fought, but we can still see plainly the cost that was paid: billions of souls eradicated by the actions of a few; thriving global ecosystems turned to dust in mere seconds; planets left scarred with radioactive craters and unnatural volcanic glass. Most worlds in space are simply dead, inert from their birth... but can you fathom looking upon a world which was killed?
Centuries ago, Earth’s scholars puzzled over the lack of evidence for advanced intelligent life in the universe. After much thought and debate, some proposed an event common to the development of all sapient species called the Great Filter: that which determines whether a civilization will achieve starflight or collapse into oblivion. The ancient Hemerans show us the sobering truth: only cooperation will see us through the Great Filter, because cooperation is the Great Filter. We must take to heart the lesson which those magnificent starfarers did not survive to learn: if we do not forge our path through the stars with goodwill and camaraderie, all that awaits us is the end.
FTL in Astra Planeta
All known interstellar civilizations in the Astra Planeta canon are capable of faster-than-light travel, in some cases (skae and Calypsians) thanks to the teachings of humanity, but mostly because of their own scientific merits. The only known form of macroscopic FTL travel is the warp drive, which has historically been achieved a few hundred years into each civilization's spacefaring age since the physical and engineering challenges that must be overcome to actually make a working prototype are extremely complex.
A warp drive works by bending spacetime in such a way as to simply amplify the vessel's real velocity; it doesn't actually generate any acceleration. An object's real velocity at warp drive activation determines its FTL velocity, but it takes time to accelerate to that real velocity at a safe acceleration (one standard Earth gravity). What results is a tradeoff between the time spent speeding up and slowing down, and the time spent in warp, which varies depending on distance and real velocity.
Finding the optimal interstellar vector utilizes a simple asymptotic formula (created by @catgirlbionics, thanks again!) involving three variables: the distance to the target in lightyears (d), the warp amplification factor (a), and the maximum real-space velocity of the object as a decimal value of the speed of light (v). This function equates to the total flight duration in days (T).
(707.646*v)+((d/(a*v))*365) = T
By plugging in specific values for (d) and (a), and then deriving the function, its positive local minimum will be equivalent to the shortest possible travel time and ideal velocity for the given interstellar vector. For example: a modern Generation VI warp drive has a maximum amplification factor (a) of about 4000, and the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri (d) is about 4.34 lightyears. Using these values in the formula results in an optimal velocity (v) of about 0.0237c, and a minimum travel time (T) of 33 and a half days!
Warp drives have limited usefulness due to the enormous amount of power they require and the peculiar effects of bending spacetime. Acceleration must be accomplished in real-space or else the exhaust from the engine will reflect off the drive's event horizon and cook the ship, and the same goes for any heat radiated by the vessel. This is why warp drives typically operate in "stuttered" format: an interstellar flight is composed of multiple FTL segments interspersed with periods of real-space STL flight where the ship dumps the heat accumulated by the drive into space via radiator.
Warp drives are not the only method of circumventing the speed of light. Wormholes are also physically possible; however, the largest stable wormholes ever documented are of atomic scale, and anything with rest mass passing through the singularity will cause it to collapse. Wormholes, therefore, are only used to facilitate FTL communication in the form of ansibles, passing extremely narrow laser beams around a network of linked wormholes to achieve near-instantaneous communication.
Because of their nature as loopholes in relativity, both technologies incur some very bizarre effects when it comes to temporal reference frames. Ansible connections where one end is moving at relativistic speed create a combination of wavelength shift and frame dragging that render it impossible to communicate in lockstep; a warpship with a relativistic real-space velocity will result in some time-disparity between passengers and their destination upon arrival. However, it's generally agreed that these complications are a small inconvenience compared to an interstellar society without FTL, where time-slips of decades or more would be a haunting reality.
The United Nations of Humanity is the international governing body of almost all Earth-descended polities and territories in known space. Founded in 2210 CE after the independence movements of Mars and the Belt necessitated a reorganization of the original UN, the UNH of the 30th century is composed of hundreds of member star systems across a sphere of influence nearly twenty parsecs in diameter. It is the largest member of the United Spacefaring Sophonts Coalition and one of the two founding members (alongside the Ra’na InterGlobal Council). The UNH has no primary seat, as all business is conducted through ansible teleconference: a vastly simpler way to organize representatives across sixty-five thousand cubic lightyears of space. Members of the UNH include the United Sol System, Centauri Republic, New Nations of Helios, and Dogstar Alliance, to name a few.
The symbology of the UNH emblem is simple. The asymmetrical five digits of the human hand provide a clear distinction from the other species of the cosmos; we are the only species with hands like ours. Beyond that, the hand represents something much deeper. Handprints are ubiquitous in prehistoric cave art found all over the human homeworld, Earth, and have withstood the test of time. Even today, leaving an impression of one's hand in media echoes the purpose of the ancient hands: it is a testament to our existence, a call into the future that in this place and time, a human person was alive and awake. A footprint may show that we have stood in a spot, but a handprint shows we have lived there.
Sphaera has two moons: a larger and more distant one, which is roughly the same size, composition, and apparent size as our own moon; and a smaller and closer one, which is about the same size and composition of the asteroid Pallas and a little less than half the apparent size of the larger moon. By cosmic fortune (read: for my own personal convenience), the orbital periods of these moons are even fractions of the planet's year length, making for an unusually precise lunar calendar: the smaller moon orbits once every 5 days and the larger one orbits once every 25 days, making for 12 months of 5 weeks each.
The moons play a significant role in the various cultures and mythologies native to Sphaera!
In Temoran culture, the moons are called Kune (big) and Selene (small), and were created by the primordial forces of light (Aurin, the sun) and dark (Kas, the night) as a way to pass messages between them. Because Aurin never sleeps and Kas is forever asleep, the moons passing through their phases is said to be them moving between the waking and dreaming worlds: they start as "dreaming" (new) and pass through "waking" (waxing) to peak at "watching" (full) and then pass through "falling" (waning) to visit the dream world again.
In Orniikh culture, the moons are called Lukoh (big) and Lukah (small), or Father Tide and Mother Rain. The moons are the children of the Earth and Sky, and govern all the waters of the world. They are also the parents of the twin primary deities: Ori and Niikh, Brother Blood and Sister Breath, who chose to combine their powers and incarnate as all living things. So, in that way, the moons are seen by the Orniikh people as their spiritual parents!
In Yprist beliefs, the moons were created by Wulc, the celestial being who convinced the others of his clan to fill the world with life. He saw that many creatures were unhappy in the total darkness of the world, so he carved the two lunar cycles into the Ethyp (the cosmic pillar representing the aspect of heat and light energy). This drove Axin, a prideful trickster figure who hated being outdone, to create the sun in the same way.
While Sphaera has two natural moons, for roughly one year near the start of the Second Rise, it had a third: a large asteroid that fell into and out of low orbit on its own. Unbeknownst to the planet’s inhabitants, however, this temporary third moon was actually a wandering ark-ship inhabited by a clan of lamia (another Earth-descended civilization). The clan had noticed a biotic terrestrial world as they passed through the Aurin system and spent the year intently observing it for signs of an active industrial civilization they could trade with. When their search only turned up the remains of ancient Venusian settlements, they broke orbit and went on their way.
Though this event did not significantly affect the course of Sphaera's fledgling civilizations, it did provide an excellent global historical reference point by which all Sphaeran cultures were later able to synchronize their histories –Year Zero of the Modern era.
Sphaera has two moons: a larger and more distant one, which is roughly the same size, composition, and apparent size as our own moon; and a smaller and closer one, which is about the same size and composition of the asteroid Pallas and a little less than half the apparent size of the larger moon. By cosmic fortune (read: for my own personal convenience), the orbital periods of these moons are even fractions of the planet's year length, making for an unusually precise lunar calendar: the smaller moon orbits once every 5 days and the larger one orbits once every 25 days, making for 12 months of 5 weeks each.
The moons play a significant role in the various cultures and mythologies native to Sphaera!
In Temoran culture, the moons are called Kune (big) and Selene (small), and were created by the primordial forces of light (Aurin, the sun) and dark (Kas, the night) as a way to pass messages between them. Because Aurin never sleeps and Kas is forever asleep, the moons passing through their phases is said to be them moving between the waking and dreaming worlds: they start as "dreaming" (new) and pass through "waking" (waxing) to peak at "watching" (full) and then pass through "falling" (waning) to visit the dream world again.
In Orniikh culture, the moons are called Lukoh (big) and Lukah (small), or Father Tide and Mother Rain. The moons are the children of the Earth and Sky, and govern all the waters of the world. They are also the parents of the twin primary deities: Ori and Niikh, Brother Blood and Sister Breath, who chose to combine their powers and incarnate as all living things. So, in that way, the moons are seen by the Orniikh people as their spiritual parents!
In Yprist beliefs, the moons were created by Wulc, the celestial being who convinced the others of his clan to fill the world with life. He saw that many creatures were unhappy in the total darkness of the world, so he carved the two lunar cycles into the Ethyp (the cosmic pillar representing the aspect of heat and light energy). This drove Axin, a prideful trickster figure who hated being outdone, to create the sun in the same way.
Life, they say, finds a way.
When humankind sent some of their first interstellar probes, the Sojourner twins, to the neighboring Alpha Centauri binary star system, they had no idea what they would find. The Sojourners' predecessor, the Darwin probe, had already discovered complex life on a frigid moon in the Proxima Centauri system, showing humanity they still had much to learn about the cosmos. With the Sojourners, all bets were off.
The one thing they never expected to find, of course, was an abandoned alien megastructure -which was exactly what Sojourner 2 discovered orbiting Alpha Centauri B. Dubbed the Tellus Ring, after an ancient Roman goddess of the Earth, this thousand-mile-diameter, hundred-mile-wide ring orbits in a debris belt within the star's habitable zone. The ring rotates at the right rate to produce centripetal force just slightly weaker than Earth's gravity, equivalent to the gravity of a planet called Hemera -later discovered to be the origin point of the life present on the ring. Indeed, life thrives on the interior surface of the Tellus Ring, which is sculpted to bear landmasses and seas, under a halo-shaped sky kept in place by centrifugal force and five-mile-high walls on either rim. On Tellus, vast cities lie dormant; thousands of years more advanced than human civilization yet left to ruin and claimed by the nature that their builders had imported.
The discovery of Tellus changed humanity's understanding of the universe forever, and provoked countless questions about its origins that would only be answered with centuries of research and further interstellar exploration. The native people of Hemera, some eight or ten thousand years extinct by now, had a fondness for carrying their ecosystems with them wherever they went. This is evidenced by nearly a dozen terraformed worlds and hundreds of ecology-bearing megastructures scattered around known space, all overgrown and feral with the loss of their mysterious ancient wardens. It was recognized, relatively soon after human explorers arrived in the Alpha Centauri system, that Tellus was the sole surviving construct in its debris belt: the debris was, largely, parts of destroyed ringworlds and similar constructs. Similar destruction has been found in every other system once inhabited by the ancients, leading xenoarchaeologists to suspect a vast and cataclysmic war as the cause of their extinction. Yet, by some grace of powers unknown, some products of their great hubris still survive.
While many other examples of ancient constructs have since been adopted and restored by humanity in their attempt to decipher the lost history of this ancient civilization, Tellus remains a lone monument to the tenacity of life -even when taken from its home and subjected to existential threat, it will endure and, in time, thrive.
For All Mankind
Ares 1 \\ Mission Day 128 \\ Surface Mission Day 30 \\ 11/02/2018
Commander Anna Wilson gripped the United Nations flag in her hands and closed her eyes as she unfurled it. The camera Ari held was now rolling, and despite the isolation lending her the confidence to do this, she was still a bit nervous. The light-lag delay of mission control’s inevitable reaction wasn’t helping the anxiety bubbling under her conscious mind. What would they think? What would the world think?
She thought back to training, years ago, when the mission was still a young idea. She had confessed to her crew, in private, her thoughts about the inevitable flag-planting ceremony. To her surprise -and delight- they were in agreement: planting a flag would send the wrong message. It was an archaic practice too laden with negative symbolism, no matter the intentions. So for the next several months, in moments of free time away from the watchful eyes of NASA, they'd planned an alternative. And now, seven light-minutes away from Earth with no one to stop them, they could enact it.
Anna inhaled deeply, faced the camera with the flag, and spoke: “We do not claim this world.” She began rolling the flag back up to stow in her pack. “We will not plant here the flag of any nation or even all nations, because this mission -our presence here today- is much greater than the concept of nations. We came here, to another world, in peace for all mankind. So we cannot plant a flag. It represents arrogance and dominance.” The clock was ticking now. The video stream was hurrying back to Earth, but the whole ceremony would be over before the reply arrived. We’re on our own script now, she thought. Better not mess it up.
As they’d agreed, Oye produced a small aerosol can from his pack -spray paint, specially engineered by a friend to resist the environmental conditions of Mars. Their mark here would endure everything short of a direct meteor strike for millennia. He began to walk toward the rock outcropping nearby, with Ari and Ayami falling in behind him.
Anna brought up the rear, and continued to speak as Ari swiveled the camera back over his shoulder. “Instead, we leave behind only our footprints, which mark our journey…” She paused, and placed a hand on the ancient rock face, making sure Ari was pointing the camera at it. “…and our handprints, showing that we do not seek to claim this world –only to know it.”
Oye gently shook the can and blew the dust from the rock with an airbrush, normally used for geology sampling. Anna blinked a little longer than normal. Here we go.
He aimed the nozzle at her hand and pressed down. The paint sprayed out into the thin air around her suit glove, staining the glove and surrounding rock a deep, cobalt blue. The mission director and tech teams would be pissed, but the crew had taken precautions: covering the tools, wrist camera, and flashlight with tape. When Oye finished moments later, Anna lifted her hand and gazed at the blue stenciled outline on the three-billion-year-old alien sandstone.
As the rest of the crew created their hand stencils, Anna continued. “Maybe in a thousand years, Mars will have its own flag; its own nations. But the marks we leave here today prove to the future that we came not as envoys of nations, but as people, baring our raw humanity for all to see just like our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago. We are here today not only as representatives of our fellow humans, but on behalf of our oldest ancestors, who did not know of nations; they only knew how to be human. These markings are for them as much as they are for us.”
She took a step back as Ari passed her the camera, and aimed it at the four painted hands on the Martian rock. She zoomed in a little to emphasize her closing statement. “Across all of time and space, we are one people, forever.”
“The first rule of starfaring: do not stare into hyperspace. Never, ever, stare deep into hyperspace; not because of what is there -it is not a separate place from the space we know- but because of what it is. Hyperspace is simply normal space in another direction, one you could not think of if you wanted to, and that in itself is the problem. When a ship flies through hyperspace, it moves by vectors that we can only understand through the comfort of abstract math. Watching it happen before your eyes is a sure way to drive yourself mad. Because the second you stop staring at that void, you will know that for a fleeting moment you understood God, and the only way to get that moment back is to confront the void again.”
— Brother Nicodemos of the Order of Saint Mercurion, describing voidthrall
Voidthrall is the insanity which befalls those who have spent too much time directly observing the reality of hyperspace. Within the shifted resonance state of hyperspace the mind can, to some extent, process the nature of fifth-dimensional reality, as the neural connections made to do so utilize the extra dimension. However, upon the return to the fourth-dimensional resonance state, these connections are inaccessible, leaving only the impression of a greater understanding and the burning itch to know something just beyond reach.
Voidthrall is, without exaggeration, eldritch madness: an obsession with the inherently unfathomable. The afflicted are haunted by echoes of things they cannot imagine without the bone-deep humming of a ship's hyperdrive, unable to make use of this knowledge, yet still plagued by memories of a far greater truth. The longer the afflicted have gazed into the abyss, the more desperate they become to regain their comprehension of the incomprehensible.
The madness is, to date, incurable. The only effective treatment able to soothe those who pathologically seek the unknowable truth is further exposure to hyperspace, until the point where the afflicted become unable to neurologically function in normal space.
Within our current understanding of reality and the multiverse, there is a theoretically infinite number of sophont species that have achieved the Hyperichon stage of advancement and have broken free of their Cycle. Though all have differing origins, these omni-beings are collectively called "Hyperichals," or more commonly "Drifters." Drifters exist outside the limits of the cosmos and can travel between universes at will. They have attained final and complete knowledge of physics, and have total mastery over the workings of reality through post-singularity thaumatech.
They are, in every sense, ultimate.
Individual Drifters no longer retain the biology of their ancestors, having transcended the limits of physical form, and can choose to manifest in whatever way they wish while inside a universe. Since Drifters have an entirely different relationship with time, it is possible (though rare) for a developing civilization to encounter their Hyperichal descendants, though they will likely never realize this unless they are explicitly told so.
In terms of society, there are a few paths a Hyperichon-stage civilization may take after ascendancy. Some believe there is still further to be known, and perform increasingly elaborate and esoteric experiments with the clockwork of reality. Most, however, choose to adopt or create a small, stable cosmos or cosmic network as their new ideal home, called a Haven. They harvest mass from dead universes to build, unlimited, inside their Haven, and maintain its entropy in a similar manner to how we maintain marine tanks or the air cycle in a spacecraft. A rare few Hyperichal civilizations are marauders, but these are the ones who have accidentally attained pseudo-Hyperichal status before they were ready and almost always destroy themselves in due time. True Drifters have no qualms with each other; they live in a post-scarcity eternity, where everything is infinite and forever.
Okay gang, this is pretty unorthodox for me but...
I have not only written, but actually posted fanfic. Granted, at this stage "fanfic" is a bit of a stretch? It's the game script rewritten. There will be more deviation later.
Without further ado:
Mercury is a small, airless world in the deep inner Sol system, the closest planet to its sun and consequently a world of thermal extremes. Its solar day is over 1400 metric hours long, meaning that any point of the surface is exposed to sunlight for 700 hours or more. Because of this Mercury isn't an especially populated world –just under twenty million souls live and work almost entirely beneath its rocky crust– but the surface facilities shine brightly because there is no atmosphere to dull their light.
Much of Mercury’s 19.4 million inhabitants are concentrated in the capital city of Lóng Cháo, embedded into and under the surface of Rachmaninoff Crater (seen here on the terminator line, in the northern hemisphere). Its orbital space, however, is busier, serving as a hub for the ore traders hauling raw materials from one side of the solar system to the other.
Mercury is an autonomous territory of the United Sol System, as part of the Inner System Territories. Its flag, an inverted monochrome depiction of its penumbra, is shown below the main image.
more worldbuilding stuff! photobash of a future human-inhabited Mercury, plus its flag, created for my hard science fiction setting Diaspora. done using assets from Space Engine.
Venus is the second planet in the Sol system, an Earth-sized rocky world with a dense, hot CO2 atmosphere and aggressively volcanic surface. The only habitable zone of Venus is a relatively thin layer of atmosphere some fifty kilometers above the surface, where the temperature and pressure closely resemble conditions at sea level on Earth.
Because of this air layer, the skies of Venus are swarming with aerostat habitats to support its 25.4 million inhabitants (seen here as a scattering of hazy glowing dots in the thin crescent of twilight). The largest aerostat is the capital city of Najam Alsabah, nestled in the lower stratosphere. One of the key drivers of Venus’ growing population is its wealth: the territory has become quite prosperous over the last several centuries due to the harvest and export of valuable, rare chemicals such as nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous.
Venus is an autonomous territory of the United Sol System, as part of the Inner System Territories. Its flag, a bicolor high-contrast depiction of its vast atmospheric cloud waves, is shown below the main image.
at last, some more worldbuilding stuff! photobash of a future human-inhabited Venus, plus its flag, created for my hard science fiction setting Diaspora. done using assets from Space Engine.
The planet Earth is the third planet in the Sol system, a vibrant terran world with a diverse biosphere recovering from a near-miss ecological collapse. It has six major landmasses surrounded by vast oceans of liquid water, and its atmosphere is a comfortable nitrogen-oxygen blend at a pressure that is dense enough to protect but not enough to crush. It also has one relatively large, airless, rocky moon, called Luna (or simply "the Moon.")
Earth is also home to an indigenous sophont species: humans, one of the founding members of the Coalition of Spacefaring Civilizations. Because of its deep pre-spaceflight cultural history, it is one of a minority of worlds divided into nations, hence its primary governing body being the United Nations of Earth -the ancestor to most of humankind's modern administrative structure. Being Earth's only natural moon, Luna was the site of humans' first forays into extraterrestrial exploration, and today is an industrial powerhouse under the flag of the UN Autonomous Territory of Luna. The Earth-Moon Union (EMU, for short; top flag) is composed of the United Nations of Earth (bottom left flag) and the Autonomous Territory of Luna (bottom right flag), with its primary seat being Midway Station located at the L-1 gravitational stability keyhole between Earth and Luna.
As the birthplace of the human species, the Earth is the most populous and powerful asteropolitical entity in the Sol system, and quite possibly in the entire United Nations of Humanity. Earth itself has a population of just over 8 billion, which has stayed relatively stable since the 21st century. Together with the Moon’s 240 million inhabitants, the total population of the EMU is about 8.4 billion, almost four times that of the next largest entity in the system (Mars).
While Luna’s primary industry in the modern day is mining, Earth’s rich cultural and biological history makes it a tourist destination renowned across known space, though it has stringent biosecurity. For many, it is even a spiritual experience, some going so far as to make it their life’s goal to retire on Earth and connect with the home of their ancestors. Centuries of ecological engineering and conservation have managed to avert the effects of early human industry, restoring the world to a natural balance and even reviving many species driven extinct by human error. Today, one can watch herds of mammoth roam the Siberian tundra, visit dodo birds on Mauritius, or experience the return of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. 30th century Earth is a good place to be, and humanity is collectively proud of their home: the cradle of the Diaspora.
hey look, more art! been a hot minute. photobash of a future Earth and its well-settled Moon, plus their flags, created for my hard science fiction setting Astra Planeta. done using assets from Space Engine.
Pocket Guide to Intercosmic Travel
So, you've just become aware of the multiverse! Eternity, reality, omnicosm– no matter what you call the largest unit of existence that supersedes mortal notions of time and space, you're going to need to reframe your perspective on it. Here's a handy guide to get you started!
Multiversal Structure
The multiverse is composed of two aspects: universes (aka cosmoses or yggdrasili) and nullspace (aka aether or ginnungagap).
Universes
A natural-born universe, also called a “cosmos” or “yggdrasil,” originates as a single infinite point containing all of the spacetime and mass-energy of its existence in compressed form. This is called a “seed singularity” or just a “seedling”: a singularity of infinite potential. This seedling sprouts infinitely-branching possible spacetimes after initial expansion; any possible split fork moment in probability down to the quantum level creates a new timeline (or “branch”) extending off of the previous one.
Once a universe has grown out its branches all the way to the very end, after entropy has rendered every single worldline into a uniform smear of cold, stable, subatomic matter, gravitational force is absolutely uniform across the entirety of spacetime. This causes the ends of the branches to collapse into new seed singularities and pinch off, drifting free through nullspace until accumulated exposure to the primordial background energy triggers germination through quantum flux. Because time and causality don't apply outside the spacetime of a universe, the reproductive cycles of universes form an infinite chain of reincarnation.
Pseudocosms
A pseudocosm or pseudoverse, colloquially called a “Haven,” is an artificial cosmos created by one or more godlike hyperichal beings. Usually created by heavily altering a harvested seedling, these constructs often defy standard universal structure, existing in stable localized monocausality with deliberately maintained (cyclical) entropy. They exist effectively as sandboxes for the transcendent hyperichals, allowing them to “play god.”
Nullspace
Nullspace, also called the “aether” or “ginnungagap,” is the “space” in which universes exist, though it is impossible to actually conceptualize as a “space” because it doesn't technically exist. Nullspace is both infinite and imaginary, meaning that there is no relative position in it: every cosmos exists both adjacent to and far apart from each other. Nullspace is uniformly suffused with a unique form of energy, called primordial or aethereal energy, which has no carrier particle and contains infinite potential. This infinite raw energy is thought to be the driving force of the quantum vacuum fluctuations in each causal universe, which also serves to trigger singularity expansion in newborn universes.
Intercosmic Travel
When an object native to a cosmos exits its branch without a protective pocket of spacetime, its waveform collapses. An object removed from its original spacetime becomes detached from its native past, future, and alternate instances (its “worldline”), inhabiting a new causal lineage tethered to itself alone. When sapient beings accomplish this (except in the case of hyperichal transcendence), their new causal lineage is often called a “personal timeline” or, more succinctly, “lifeline.” Material beings who are capable of intercosmic travel are called, among other things: “Travellers,” “aethernauts,” or “planeswalkers.” Non-material, transcendent beings who have converted themselves to a causality-free post-cosmic format and, effectively, achieved “godhood” are called hyperichals, or simply “Drifters.”
Hyperichals
Hyperichals are sapient beings who have converted themselves into stable, complex superstring resonance patterns which exist outside the spatiotemporal limits of their cosmos of origin. They have attained final and complete knowledge of physics, and have total mastery over the workings of reality through post-singularity thaumatech. This allows them to not only travel freely across the multiverse, but control the structure of reality itself. It is the most literal form of godhood there is; in fact, most universes with known gods are actually the subjects of hyperichal influence.
Cosmography
The best system yet conceived for cartographing specific instants in a given universe is that of the Cosmos Index in the Gardener's Eternal Archive; available in physical, metaphysical, digital, gravirtual, hyperwave, psychonic, superstring compact resonance, and other formats for convenience. Its method is quite similar to that of the hypothetical Library of Babel: a primary starting point followed by a long string of increasingly specific divergence points in time and space. The end result is that the full address of any point in the multiverse is a large paragraph of absolutely eye-watering numerical gibberish, punctuated by the occasional semicolon. Fortunately, the index includes a spot for a cosmic prime-branch's colloquial names as well, making things easier for all Travellers. This is also useful for including pseudocosms, such as the notorious realm of “Crundle.”
A parallel to this project is the Traveller Index, which functions essentially as a “multiverse phonebook” - it is a compendium of all known beings who are capable of intercosmic travel. Each entry consists of a being’s preferred identity, cosmos and specific instant of origin, and a superstring code –much like a hyperichal consciousness, a “superstring code” is a sub-quantum resonance pattern unique to each individual Traveller’s “lifeline.” There are technically infinite entries in the full Index, but its natural form exists in a superimposed state unbound by time or space. When it is localized for active reference, it can have anywhere from a dozen entries to trillions of entries.
Gave the Astra Planeta overview article a HUGE rework. Like... 2000 words' worth of rework. Have a look!
Gave the Astra Planeta overview article a HUGE rework. Like... 2000 words' worth of rework. Have a look!