What could be more poetic than a ruined garden? Except gardens deliberately left to ruin, their slow decay being part of some great prayer or ritual observance by species now dead, sleeping, or sublimed?
1. The Hollow World.
A dark, extra-stellar, unnaturally hollowed world. Hurtling through the extrasolar void its mantle holds hidden subsurface biospheres held up my slowly-dying transmaterial technologies. Home to ecologies of dark-dwelling extremophile life which subsist from the roasting heat of the world itself, the dying megastructures of its surface make great rents in stone skies set with bioluminescent skies and pale deserts beneath previously unseen stars.
2. The Bubble.
Draped in a vast glassine caul spread from nanotech spires, beneath are bubble-forest holding pockets of hyper-oxygenated environment, with mega-insects evolving within. Outside those, the worlds lower atmosphere so glutinous and thick with ariel 'plankton' that it forms a kind of near-liquid layer. This is home to its own micro-species and food webs that never touch the ground or raise high into the sky - sound and light are dulled by the hanging fume of life but hyper-fasts bio-communication forms a kind of subtle 'weather' in the fume that can tell experienced beings what might be happening about. The mega-insects of the bubble forests dive and trapse through the low oxygen 'fume' beyond to hunt and migrate across the surface.
3. Floral.
A moon hiding from its deadly sun in an eccentric orbit around an even-more eccentric gas giant. Floral is frozen much of the time but as it hurls through the tenuous atmosphere of its toxic gas 'father' the atmosphere burns. As the moon breathes poison, so does it live, the sky lit not with sunlight but with fire. Vast but temporary ecologies spring into life and colour beneath the burning sky. Glaciers holding long-stored nanonic plagues melt and release their 'black-goo' meta-mutagens - advanced viral constructs designed to inflict an unwanted advancement in intelligence on the quick life of the floral moon.
4. High-Rise
Deliberately, or accidentally blocked from orbital contact by an envelope of orbiting debris that makes any attempt to enter atmosphere extremely dangerous and difficult. No-one knows if this is a result of some ancient disaster or a deliberate act of art, or vandalism. Ancient greenhouse-walled space elevators dot the surface, their interiors given over to overgrowth, overrun and bizarre evolutionary branches.
5. The Web of Moons
Oceans are strung between this nest of circling oceanic moons like glittering threads. Close passes send up flurries of water which sometimes freezes into strands of ice between the moons and rarely retains its liquid form, making brief intra-lunar tidal strands. Beneath the oceans immortal megafauna have frozen the moons food web, making a permeant (on an individual sense) final block in the food chain - there are perhaps twenty such organisms, each massive, each unique. They spend much of their time quiescent and can rise up out of the oceans to devour whole biospheres with infectious fungal/nano symbiont organs/species assistance, they pass between mons with great leaps and if two share the same moon they battle.
6. Terminus
Deliberately perched in an orbit around the event horizon of a black hole, drawing its light, energy and seasons from the fluctuating Cherenkov radiation and the sunlike disc of evaporating matter which it will one day become part of, Terminus is a globe of unnaturally virulent poisons. The oceans of toxins, icebergs of subtle neurotoxin. The biome seeded with venomous genes - a food chain of subtle deception and careful resistance, a shifting world of deadly chemical warfare, vast plumes of eradicating spores rising into the toxic air.
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