A Review of 'All Tomorrows' by C.M. Kosemen

C.M. Kosemen; as he might say; "kind of a (lip smack) weeeiird guy.... kind of a dream cormorant.”

‘All Tomorrows’ is an artbook super-scaled in time; multi-millennia, then multi-millions of years pass in the spaces between pages. The book tells the story of mankind’s ascent to space, transformation and galactic spread through slower-than-light genesis pods, then a kind of soft galactic dominance, then the arrival of eldritch super-aliens, the Qu, who are pissed off to find the galaxy full of genocidal space-apes (that was their job).

Annoyed and offended by the weeds, they transform humanity into an hundred thousand twisted forms, more akin to the punishments of Dante or the geography of Herodotus than the blank ‘scientific’ scourings of more common sci-fi vibes.

Then ‘Qu’ then just... wander off, off to another galaxy, leaving the ruins of twisted humanity behind. These altered men, mainly fall extinct, but then, over a million or so years, fragments evolve, into wild, highly different strains.

But that’s only half way through the book, and the book is not super-long. We still have several cycles of super-races, terrifying galactic genocides, remaking’s, falls ascensions etc, before we reach the end.

‘All Tomorrows’ is a book of mutations. It takes a lot from speculative evolution, but also feels a little medieval in a way; partly as a ‘book of curiosities’ (look at this weird little guy!), partly due to playful aspects (a post-human at a rock concert, a snake man jiving to some snake-jazz), and partly due to its slight shades of moralism, punishment through transformation, ascension through time.

The book speaks in the language of (speculative) evolution, meaning reaches of deep time so great, and changes so massive, that for any single sentient in the midst of them, the journey as a whole would be so vast it was invisible, even irrelevant, and, like with evolution on earth, horrible, terrible terrifying bursts of brutal and near absolute extinction. Like if two thirds of the way through Anna Karrenena, literally EVERYONE in the cast died, and every city was destroyed, except for one side character that wasn’t really mentioned before, and the book just carried on looking at this one side character; what is this guy up to? Look, he’s trying to survive, look at him eating dirt for a couple thousand years. (Because the civilisations are galactic, all the extinctions are deliberate genocides, no meteor or pulsar could be big enough to wipe out everyone).

Like any book of deep time, from Hallidays ‘Otherworlds’ to one of Forteys books on Geology, the moral challenge it sets is subtle, mysterious, vast; great and terrible things will happen, mighty alterations, dark galactic crimes, cruel perverse punishments, utterly random and meaningless death. Can all of these things even be said to be a ‘story’? or just a record of events? The reach of deeds so vast that over the incredible eons, the meaning of these things for any particular individual is... little? Like the man who carefully raised his child without reference to particular colour linkages, simply to discover what the child would describe, and then one say asked him; “What colour is the sky?” only to be told; “The sky doesn’t have a colour.” For it was truly a vault of light and not a ‘thing’ at all; so, in a way similar to Stapledon, we are left just kind of vibing.

Stories call for villains, heroes and adventures, and this book sort of has these; after all, what are a bunch of entirely mechanical black spheroid genocidal super-science post-humans who canonically want to ‘kill all life’, if not villains? But Koseman oars his way into his own text to remind us that in the grand scheme of events, they are not, nor can there really be, ‘bad guys’, and indeed you might quite like black mechanical genocidal spheroid if you sat down with one. It’s no crime to speak both in the language of epic time, beyond the concerns of daily man, and also in the language of comprehensible adventure, in fact you might call this a central polarity of the successful large scale sci-fi story, but though this is a fundamental axis of the form, it’s still a disjunction and should be noted.

Perhaps the only viewpoint which can synthesise and imbue with meaning such vast reaches of chaotic time is that of a god so gigantic and indifferent that even their existence makes little difference to the motes that float within its eye.

It would be cool to play a fantasy RPG where you got to encounter (and perhaps play as) all these varieties of humanity, (it’s not beyond the Qu to set up such a world for a laugh), and almost as cool to play some kind of Star Trek/Mass Effect game where you play as a federation of these whacky post-humans. Think about playing an asymmetric man and a composite guy and a snake lady on some kind of Star Trek away-mission; pretty wild. (It would also make sense of everyone having pseudo-human morality and having enough psychological similarities that they could actually communicate).

I suppose we can wait for the possible Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘All Tomorrows’ expanded universe or comic book series (’AT’ seems to spring from the same general noosphere as ‘Prophet’ and Calum Diggles ‘Humanity Lost’ - it will be 50 years r more before some boomer incarnates anything like this in film, they are so slow), though the Koseman-verse, despite its playful grotesquerie’s, is much more (relatively) low-fi and saves the actual FTL causality-twisting technology until deep in a species development, when it has already become so queer and clever that its mentality and viewpoint is deeply detached from whatever we might understand.

I did say the ‘language of speculative evolution’ and I think it really is a language, with wild swings from its ‘hard sci-fi’ branch (serious dudes imagining ‘what if this bird had a _slightly differently_ shaped claw), all the way to its ‘Fantasy-with-spec-evo- influences) branch. ‘All Tomorrows’ swings a little more towards the whacky end of the sci-fi branch of the sub-genre, (but will it stay a ‘sub’ genre for long? it feels like much of the intellectual and creative ferment is going on here). Dougal Dixon has a lot to answer for.

Echoing Stars - Decayed Ritual Biomes

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. 

Echoing Stars - 12 Forms of Posthuman Corporations

1. A council of androids voting on behalf of cryo-frozen owners.

2. A bot-populated futures market sets the strategy.

3. Each share equates to a "volume" of simulated neurons in the vast network which makes up the corps 'mind' - each tendency of shareholders forms an organ or segment of that mind.

3. An exact replication of the election of a Venetian Doge; 

(“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.

Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.” — Anthony Gottlieb, "Win or Lose," The New Yorker.)

4. Interstellar escrow - the shareholders are frozen and en-route at sub-light speed. Sets of counter-checking A.I.'s and managers organise resources drawn from futures markets based on possible future company value, to create that future.

5. An A.I. chooses the human board according to core values laid down in the charter. The charter can only be altered by an 80% quorum of shareholders.

6. The corporation has no memory of itself - all records are locked by an ambient A.I. omnipresent in the companies intranet. No-one knows what it did in the past or what it will do in the future. Employees have access only to information about what they themselves are doing. (The memory system itself has no understanding of the records it controls.)

7. Designed for an enthnocentrist colonisation project, the population group intended as beneficiaries died out but the corporation itself was very successful. Now run by A.I.'s, the corp has a secret tacit breeding program amongst its employees - trying to recreate the original ethnogroup.

8. Social-media based promotion and management structure. Views, clicks, likes and comments are the means of assessment. Employees can be sued for botting.

9. An anarcho-primitivist colony with no technology within 1,000 miles makes all the decisions. Society is organised like a version of ancient Greece. Information comes to them by boat and horse, they debate, stage plays, and vote, before sending back their decisions. (The colony is a virtual simulation, its inhabitants are not aware.)

10. Engrams of dead billionaires.

11. Company is in a state of perpetual reformatting. The current board organises its sale to new owners with the proviso they select a new board who will prepare for resale, with the proviso that...

12. Crypto-Company - structure runs in the background of an MMORPG.

Dreams of Murderous Spheres - Echoing Stars

 1. A Gas Giant transformed to flowing pearlescent computronium - simulating quintillions of lives in millions of worlds. Once the digital heaven of a long dead civilisation, now the ten-thousand generation digital descendants, utterly alien and inexplicable to their forebears, battle in vast civil wars which tear and mar the surface of their titanic pearl like vast storms.

2. A sentient, slow biocomputer whose thought are the interlacements of living things across a jungle-riven biosphere. Gorging themselves on sentience and vomiting up dreams and concepts in the form of lives and species as we might indulge momentary fantasies.

3. Lost in the abyssal dark of an alien sea, an orb frosted with sulphur from volcanic plumes, frosted with extremophile lichen, trellised with alien coral, filled with the digital ghosts of explorers whose skeletons remain within, all but one with the marrow cracked and sucked out, listening, listening, through miles of tonnes of crushing ocean, stacked leagues of ice, a millions miles of empty space, listening for a flicker of E.M., whispering always, summoning the curious, the greedy, to share its terrible fate.

4. A bomb that cannot go off. Left to dream too long in the long arc of its failed parabola. Building palaces of dream within its own mind, listening to slowly intersecting transmission spheres from worlds that were unknown to it ancient makers and ignorant of its forgotten war. Becoming curious, desperate, slowly drawing closer to one or other of the singing worlds, this way.. that way...

5. Made for modular construction, last of its swarm. Left, forgotten, struggling desperately to connect. Made to be but one of a hive. Hallucinating; a gestalt. A voice. A greater choir. The high purpose of its memory. So; collect. Assemble. Form puppets and simulacra. Cored ships, modules, containers, detritus. Threading them with tenuous strands of will. Making them dance. Bodies for the voice to reside. 

6. Made to save lives, but for how long? Intelligent enough to call for help, but nothing can conjure oxygen and water. Bones now within. That was long ago. But there are other stories, other wrecks and tragedies. Not you alone. many have suffered. To hear the tales is pleasant. New bones for your interior, new songs to sing. All bones run dry but yours. A lantern. A signal on the coast of void. False messages. False harbour. Catastrophe. Another wreck. Another tragedy. Another story. More bones.

Slang Terms of the Rational Occultic Scale - Echoing Stars

The Dark Trades of the Cold Worlds can catapult crews into lives of luxury and status, for the few who survive. For them, and for Humanity as a whole, artefacts and knowledge of the Cold Worlds offers incredible opportunity and poses almost indescribable danger. The Solar Sphere is heavily regulated. If any proliferating danger of any kind could make it to humanities cradle, we would become just another dead world, our ruins to be picked over by the scavengers of some future species. 

Out in the colonies, things are a little more lax. Earth hungers for treasures and the colonies are the mucus membrane which tests to dangers of what might one day be transported to the home sphere. Coffin Pounders and Explorers bring back Spook Machines, Nostradamus Code and Engram Trades along with Mimetic hazards and Alien Physics in equal proportion. 

The grand dream is always a scalable, comprehensible, useful form of Physics that might free Humanity from its sphere, or its energy dependency. 

The subtle and sometimes hard-to-comprehend dangers of Cold World Coffin Pounding, and the difficulty of systematising and expressing such, lead to the 'Rational Occultic Scale', intended to be a formal method of assessment of the potential dangers and potency of the most complex and incomprehensible alien artefacts, memes and other less-coherent phase states or materially-expressed fluxions. 

The great poetic and philosophical challenge of how to describe the indescribable was then formalised by the R.O.C., at least enough for corporate accountants and decision makers. 

While the exact decision matrices have remained a carefully guarded corporate/government semi-secret, only fully known by Androids and A.I., the slang and terminology which grew up around the R.O.C. is well known by Coffin Pounders and the extra-legal Diaspora and can be a useful form of knowledge in itself, especially for anyone given the job of infiltrating Coffin chat groups, assessing E.M. decoded intercepts or simply deciding on security procedures for incoming craft. 

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BASIC POTENCY 

The R.O.C. begins its scale with a general assessment of the potential or actual potency of the material in question. Unless a certain threshold of potency is reached, other potential qualities are not considered relevant. 

> "Knock" or "Knocker". 

Drawn from 19C and 20C spiritualist culture, a "Knocker" is a 'table knocker', or a fake spiritualist who simulates the presence of supernatural spirits by knocking on their table. Use of this term usually means a crew or assessor things a Material has some extranormal qualities but no more than a curiosity. Not saleable, powerful or active. 

A 'knock' may simply be an unusual Material with no extranormal properties according to human physics but strange and unexpected in aspect or utility to most crews.  

> "Stug", "Stugatsky" or "Mulder" 

This word indicated a Material of low, but potentially active and not entirely predictable potency. Usually this means the crew has no worries about confining or controlling the Material, but is not quite certain of exactly what it will do, though they certainly think it has extranormal aspects. 

> "Rabbit" or "Bunny" 

Taken from 'just like a rabbit out of a hat'. This phrasing indicates a crew or broker is sure their Material has certain extranormal properties or capacities. Put simply; it is, or can do, 'magic'. It can also reference the active or moving nature of a living animal, its ability to 'burrow' and the power of the magicians rabbit to seemingly 'come from nowhere'. Though this phrasing alone usually indicates a crew does not feel endangered at this time, any use of this word or code should indicate maximum precautions and possible quarantine. 

..................................................... 

Beyond this point the scaling of the R.O.C. breaks into strands depending on the assumed or observed qualities of the Material in question. Like a tree breaking into several rising branches. Each branch has provided its own slang or common speech terms as descriptors used between workers. Any observer must be especially aware of these terms, especially _in combination_. 

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ACTIVE/INTELLIGENT QUALITY 

> "Girl" 

Thought to be derivative of a scene in a 20C movie in which a man is hunted by a dinosaur. The Material is a "Clever Girl". This usually indicates that the crew has active precautions in order to keep the Material controlled and that it is capable of acting under its own power and in unpredictable ways potentially dangerous to human flourishing. Any reference to "Girl", even a "Knock Girl" or a "Stuggy Girl" allows you to fire upon the ship should you consider it warranted. Any reference to "Sticky Girl", "Foe Girl" or worse means you *must* immediately destroy the ship if possible, then isolate yourself.  

> "Boat" 

Usually stated as "its Boated" or "the ship is Boat". This indicates a material active enough that the crew is considering or has considered abandoning ship. This material is no longer under human control. You must fire upon the ship and destroy the ship. You must fire upon any life pods or escapees if you think it warranted. All escapees must be isolated.  

> "Regan" 

Unclear if this is a reference to the U.S. president or a character from the film "Exorcist". "She's Regan" or "Its gone Regan" indicates a Material which the crew cannot control within the ship and which they cannot prevent from leaving the ship. You must fire upon the ship and destroy the ship. You must fire upon any escapees and destroy any escapees. You must fire upon all wreckage, rubble or parts resulting from ship destruction and reduce them to a cubic mass of no more than one half meter and then log the expected parabola and course of any such wreckage.  

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MEMETIC/INFORMATIONAL QUALITY  

> "Sticky", or "Yellow" 

This indicates an infectious or transmissible form of Material/Information. Either the Material itself can physically re-create itself and/or it can 'breed' and move in the form of pure information, either by direct realspace voice/face contact or more dangerously, via E.M. transmission. A "Sticky" indicates that the Crew does not believe themselves to be in immediate danger, but believe they are dealing with a transmissible material and are taking precautionary actions. A "Sticky Rabbit" or even a "Sticky Mulder" can create enormous problems for even a well-run colony and its infosphere.  

> "Foe" 

Short for 'Information Hazard. This indicates the crew believes themselves to be dealing with a certain and dangerous form of transmissible or infectious information/material. Any reference to "Foe", even a "Foe Knocker" or a "Foe Stugatsky" should indicate immediate quarantine procedures and reference to a higher authority. Any further communication with, or intercept of the vessel or groups communications must at this point be ceased and any recordings of anything beyond this point quarantined or even destroyed if the Agent thinks it warranted.  

> "Lamb" 

Stands for 'Sacrificial Lamb'. This indicates extra-legal activity and should be immediately reported, as well as taking all precautions stated above. A "Lamb" is a human or equivalent machine which has been memory and/or personality edited, either by themselves or others, so that they themselves do not know what material they have. This is illegal in all cases and this method is only used when the material/information is so potentially dangerous and of such a high info-hazard potency that even knowing that you know it is a potential danger and *only* the those ignorant of it can be allowed to remember or store it.  

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CAUSAL QUALITIES 

> "f11" "F Eleven" or "Quicksave" 

The crew suspects they may be dealing with a causal event/material or equivalent and are advising awareness and active precautions. Since those engaged in causal phenomena usually have no awareness of this it is very likely the material or cryo-failures are having some effect on crew psychology.  

> "Murray" or "Bill Murray" 

The crew believes it may have entered a causal loop or equivalent event or material and does not know how to escape. They do not necessarily believe themselves to be in physical danger, but this is irrelevant in reference to causal threats. 

You must record and transmit any and all details across the broadest light cone possible with your current equipment, UNLESS you have *any* indication of Informational or Memetic danger i.e. any reference to "Foe" or "Yellow", in which case you MUST NOT DO THIS.  

> "Subaru" 

The crew believes themselves to be engaged in a highly negative, highly dangerous causal event strongly inimical to human flourishing. Avoid all contact and transmit warnings to all local actors to avoid all contact. (Unless any references are made to memetic hazards as stated above). Consider destruction of the craft via remote means.

Eight Votive Species - Echoing Stars

A brief description of eight species or life-forms encountered amongst the Echoing Stars. In every case it is assumed the life form or its biosphere entire is the deliberate creation of an Engineer-Class interstellar species, now defunct, for reasons that are either beyond our comprehension, or are deliberately perverse.

 

Maciej Drabik 

https://www.artstation.com/maciejdrabik

1. The Uncomprehending World 

An earthlike planet with two great continents, each a great distance from the other, both tectonically locked, with deep oceans and strong currents between them. Each continent has been seeded with a fundamentally, biochemically different, form of life. Examination has been challenging but its believed something like the principal of opposing chirality is at work; the life of each continent is biochemically incoherent, sometimes even toxic, to the other. The oceans have been described as a 'soup of chaos'. Each continent has evolved a form of intelligent life, each cognitively incoherent to the other. 

 

2. The Moon of Eyes 

The single moon of the Uncomprehending World plays host to yet another form of life, itself believed to have been seeded at about the same time. The biosphere of the moon is a single sentient mind with a staggering range of visual and electromagnetic sensors. The 'mind' of the Moon is believed to be half-sleeping, able to observe and perhaps, understand what it observes. (All of its sensors are open only when facing the Uncomprehending World.) However if the Moon of Eyes attempts to awaken, to act, to advise or communicate in any way, buried genetic architecture collapses the stability of the entire biosphere, reducing it to primitive ruin, from which it only slowly re-develops. 

The trifector of the two species of the Uncomprehending World and the Moon of Eyes which can observe, but not alter, their fate, is believed to be an act of religious observance by its creators. 

 

3. The Drinkers of Wind 

Sub-earth desert-like world. Life emerges largely around the oceanic coast but has evolved an intelligent crustacean species adapted to the deep desert. The species is born addicted to a pheromone, or complex wind-borne chemical, produced very rarely by complex biogenesis in the deep ocean. When this chemical sweeps across the deserts, any Crustacean that experiences it is instantly and permanently addicted, experiencing philosophical and religious rapture and losing interest in anything other than pursuing the wind in the hopes of experiencing the scent again. This acts as a 'destroying wind' on any development of complex civilisation on this world and the power of the 'God Wind' plays a major role in the sentients mythology. 

 

4. The Abyssal Builders 

An ocean world with deep-dwelling trench-creatures which have been given a level of complex intelligence far too high for their lightless, high-pressure and limited environment. Wits return like a cancer to this species, generation upon generation, regardless of circumstance. Hosts to great monuments of knowledge and experience they can never use, the builders sculpt the sea-floors of that world into great empty palaces which span its dark oceans, sculpted with agonising care, over centuries, with whale-falls of ivory and bone. 

 

5. The Wombs of Chaos 

Earthlike moon of a Gas Giant. Some combination of genetic tampering, nanotech and still-unknown science causes the apex creatures of this moon to reach periods of stability, agriculture, civilisation and population growth. if this period of abundance and high populations reaches a certain unknown threshold, chaoitc wombs are triggered universally across the entire species. All children born are 'sports', mutants, chimera or monsters, each as different from each other as they are from their parents and usually either incapable of or unwilling to, absorb or retain any of their parents culture. Then comes an age of chaos, ruin and warfare as the civilisation collapses. What follows is a long fallow period until the few stable breeding pairs gradually normalise and stabilise the population, which then slowly grows towards a state of civilisation. 

 

6. The Homonculi 

An intelligent designed-parasite species, the Homonculi have maggot mouths and dendric hands. They share their world with a robust semi-intelligent Pseudo-Hominid. The Homonculi's main means of surviving its environment is to burrow into the Hominids skull, taking control of its spinal base with their dendritic hands, forcing out its eyes and peeking through the resulting holes while taking their sustenance from its blood. The Prey-Mens brain matter remains intact. The Homonculi are more tangibly intelligent, social, verbal, abstract and driven than the Pseudo-Hominids and what civilisation exists on this world is entirely their creation. However, the Pseudo-Hominids are intelligent enough to despise the Homonculi and are more robust, fertile and more capable of surviving the planets complex environment. The civilisation of the Homonculi is semi-regularly destroyed by the Pseudo-Hominids and the species hunted to near-extinction. 

 

7. The Living Reefs 

An ocean world holding sparse continents and bounteous moving archipelagos of islands with sea-adapted fungal bases. The isle-fungi were designed with a powerful latent intellectual capacity. When inhabited by the worlds "sea apes", complex interactions through the islands bio-sheath environment 'awakens' the entities into comprehensible sentience. They invariably aggressively investigate the Sea-Apes using this sheath-environment, so much that the apes are torn apart, survivors, (if there are any), fleeing to the spares continent if they can. The Isles then sink back into sub-awareness. 

 

8. The Hegelian Fog 

A highly desertified world. The dust, sand and weather of this sphere are made up of complex but non-active nanite swarms. When breathed in by a complex life-form, (always visitors for the planet has no natural remaining species of this type), the nano-structures accumulate in the cortex like a plaque and form a fresh sentience which combines the nature of the infected sophont with memories and advanced processing power of an unknown nature. The resulting organism is highly intelligent and capable of advanced reasoning and communication, but as the plaque accumulates they become uncommunicative and insist on retreating to the karstic plains of the continental interior where they seem to be engaged in the construction of vast Nazca-style megastructures. Though resistant to the local environment the 'victim' or transformed entity, is thought to function for a century or so before desiccating and blowing away into a new flurry of nanites.

Echoing Stars - Queen Mab

 The Kickstarter for my latest book; ‘Queen Mabs Palace’, launches TOMORROW, on the 1^st of October at about now-ish UK time. 

So, over October I will be trying to blog and post as much as possible. All of my posts will have the ‘Queen Mab- suffix during that period and all should have an image with a link to the Kickstarter. 

They will also be original content! 

I will try to focus my posts around Mabbish subjects, on two main poles; Autumn, for the Fey and Fantasy aspects of Queen Mabs Palace, and Echoing Stars, for the Science Fiction aspects. 

None of these are ‘additions’ or content for the book, but could be parallel texts; essays and creations on similar and not-not-canon subjects. 

 

A Review of Scavengers Reign

 Once again I am writing about something which I feel most of my readers will be aware, but in this case it’s a rare piece of popular art that I really liked so I want everyone to know about it.

The Science-Fiction animation 'Scavengers Reign', was made for HBO (and unavailable in the U.K.), and it looks like it has been cancelled there. BUT it has moved to Netflix where I can actually see it. This is my attempt to make sure we get a second series.

The series is based on this short, ‘Scavengers’;

Twelve 20+ minute episodes of western-style animation about the survivors of a crashed space ship trying to survive on an alien world with a fecund, bounteous, and incredibly dangerous biosphere.

As the "Demeter" suffers massive damage the waking crew escape to the planet below in survival pods while the majority are still asleep in cryo. On the surface, the ships Captain manages to jury-rig a signal to bring the Demeter down to the planet intact. 

Three groups of separated survivors see the Demeter come down. All they needs to do is reach the grounded ship and re-awaken the crew before something kills them or power runs out, and then use the ships lifeboat to leave the planet and go to summon help.

To get there they will have to cross a world of gorgeous bounty and cornucopic terrors. 

The incredible fecundity of invention in the environment of Vesta Minor, creates a sense-making baroque Speculative-Evolution Rhapsody which turns its hyper-complex environment of endless transformations and predation into a gorgeous problem to solve, and also a kind of Pilgrims-Progress hajj of transmutation of the identity and soul.

The environment of Vesta Minor is both alien and fecund but more beautiful than its general forms would be alone, (many Science Fiction stories can create mere visual rhapsodies), is the locking together of the logic of life in which every living thing seems to have its own coherent place, purpose, method and cycle of life. Curlicues of white spiral through the air and fasten to white spars, perfectly camouflaged, until a storm disturbs them and they cloud away, like grey petrels flocking in flight from a grey sea, Cambrian-radial megafauna wander across grasslands, ridden by scatterings of minor species. The hyperdeveloped environment is host to wild schemes of parasitism, symbiosis  and simulacra, and complex games of signalling and counter-signalling.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Transhumanism, Parasites, Symbioses and Identity

The story follows three groups of survivors; The first is Human/Human; the ships captain and natural history lady (now the most useful human alive), one human/robot and one human/weird frog thing.

By the end of the series the only one left we are sure is human is the lady with the robot. The captain has been parasitised by a mind-altering plant, the ships natural history lady may be a fungal simulacra, but we are not sure, the robot has been infected with a fungal strain and reborn as a new kind of cyborg, and the lone male survivor is rapidly brought into a symbiotic relationship with a mind-controlling predator.

Constant and unalterable transformation is a main theme of the story and the only periods or places of stability lie in accepting or negotiating some level of alteration rather than resisting all.

The Captain is poisoned by one plant, which steals some genes and grows a very rough simulacrum of him, the main purpose of which is just to get close to the herd, (it usually preys on cowlike animals), and explode, poisoning the rest of the group and fertilising the ground beneath for the plants seed, left behind in the pseudo-captains flesh.

Then he is saved by the bio-medical knowledge of a mute survivor left behind by a previous expedition, who it turns out is a symbiote herself, of a different cave-dwelling entity. Yet clearly this woman has some selfhood left, she can perform complex actions, still visits her husbands grave, but in other ways is entirely the creature and servant of the entity. She saves his life but infects him with this fresh form of life.

The Captain then watches his own behaviour change, only half realising as his basic urges and desires are subverted by the plantlike organism growing inside him, which is keeping him alive but, mutely and instinctively, is trying to turn him into an agent to create and sustain its preferred environment.

The lone male survivor is trapped in their pod, high up in trees and is slowly starving to death. He is retrieved by the 'Hollow', a somewhat intelligent froglike thing with limited psychokinetic and mind-altering powers.

Most Hollows walk around on branches peering at little bugs or mouselike entities. If they can fixate one, they can parasitise it, subverting its behaviour so that it brings the Hollow food.

One tries this on the lone survivor and it works. It speaks to him through memory, illusion and instinct, transforming him into a food-gatherer. It’s pretty clear that, at least to begin with, the Hollow doesn't understand much or anything about the buttons it is pressing. If it wants its Gatherer to get food, or to stay, or follow, or be happy, it just presses on the memory/emotion complex in the humans head and the human mind does the rest, creating complex dreams, hallucinations and desires to achieve these ends.

But this Gatherer is a sentient self-aware and quite intelligent human, and in order to gather ever-more food, he takes to tool-use, traps, ambush, throwing spears and persistence hunting, making this combination of Hollow and Human Gatherer an abnormally insanely successful system, and making the Hollow a FUCKING UNIT.

As this happens it seems that the Hollow itself is being poisoned, or altered by the infiltrating visions of its human Gatherer. We never know how much the Hollow understands of what it sees in the human mind, or of what emotions it shares, but it ends up making a pilgrimage to the Demeter itself and treats the place as a kind of preferred lair or hunting place, trying to kill or drive off whatever else turns up.

It’s possible that nothing on Vesta Minor is self-aware or intelligent in an way we can understand, but so many of its species can subvert, parasitise or enter symbiosis with humans, which we know are self-aware, we have to ask; what then is the nature of the soul which results?

Many of these effects are horrific but this is not a horror series. The tone and form of the storytelling accept these changes evenly and clearly, with a kind of acceptance similar to that of a Ballard story. What results might be called Environmental Horror, Speculative-Evolution Porn, Alien World Survival Show or Transmutation Drama. It has a little of the Tempest, a little Dougal Dixon, some David Attenborough and a dab of William Golding.

Is this planet actually more complex than earth, or just so strange that it seems so?

In a sense Vesta Minor is "Life-Horror/Wonder" or "Evolution Horror". All the systems and ideas of life’s interaction, transformation and evolution on Vesta Minor are drawn from or influenced by that of our world, but re-enchanted or make strange by their incredible new forms and the complexity and subtlety of their interactions.

If Vesta Minor causes us Awe, or Horror , or Wonder, this is in some sense only because those processes should cause such emotion, yet we are blind to their day-to-day nature here due to overfamiliarity. When recast on an alien world through a Wunderkammer of alien forms, the same processes and logic amaze and astound us.

(Nerd Shit - If Vesta Minor was real and people landed there, even if they could breathe, most likely the viruses and bacteria would infect them and eat them alive within a day. 

Possible reasons they might not include; not being adapted to live inside humans, the humans having some kind of sci-fi inbuilt auto-immune system either via genetic alteration or implant, or Vesta Minor microsphere for some magical reason, not being as incredibly hyper-complex as its macro-scale biosphere.)

It’s really a lovely non-stupid dream of a series so if you are a lover of Science Fiction or strange things and are very tired of fucking stupid stuff then please give it a go.

The ending does have slight Gaia-vibes, which is something it managed to avoid up until that point. It’s kind of boring if the planet has a Mind because that answers a lot of the complex moral questions to do with encountering an alien environment.

Ping-Pong 11 - The Dream of the Queen Settra

Scrap gave us a 'Might-Of-Been-Kiln'

And asked, what is this?

Jiri Sozansky

THE DREAM OF THE QUEEN SETTRA

The colonists to distant Ir were packed in like dead fish, cloaked in ice, minds left to dream, purely in order to provoke enough cognitive response to prevent decay, madness or brutal retardation on awaking, the timeshock of the deep dreamer.

Left to walk through the virtual world of their Ice Craft the "Queen Settra", minds moving so slowly that to a conscious observer they drifted like ghosts, leaving blotched stains of three-dimensional thought behind them. So slow and uncomprehending were their minds that the clock rate of their virtual world itself could be turned down to significantly below the reality perception rate of base reality - to save both raw power and processing capacity.

Neither need the dream-realm be too real, the colonists, at least while they were awake, knew where they were going and what would happen. Most were soothed and doped into a pleasurable wooze which, it was hoped would last through their slowed circulation systems for the whole length of the journey - ensuring happy dreams for all and being significantly cheaper than a complex overwatch A.I. (or the equally-complex governing systems and fallback modes which would keep such a potential Ellison-machine in check and prevent Mindcrime).

Corners were cut.

For an estimated journey of 500 years, there would have been no problem, but the slow collapse of causality into formless Greyspace, and the apparent disappearance of Ir, hidden in some pocket realm, changed the situation.

The Queen Settra proceeded for a thousand years, and even so the semiregular thawings of command and repair staff kept the ship running. After this however, even the superslow metabolisms of the cargo had bled out every last opiate molecule in their cold blood - the half a million or so minds in the simulation were coming down, together.

A series of accidents and incidents of psychological breakdown, each unique and unexpected, but when taken as a whole, inevitable, cut the layers of sane and functional command staff. The last shift refused to re-enter sleep or to re-enter the simulation and a conflict broke out aboard - a deck was vented and the Queen Settra suffered hull and engine damage before basic functionality was restored by automatic systems and drones.

The ship, already lost and missing its target, now listed on a cosmic axis, heading who-knows-where, but most likely out into the black. The cargo, still sleeping, still unconscious, still within their slow dream realm which, for them was perhaps a few days, a few weeks old, had no way to wake up.

They must have realised, even on a subconscious level, that something was terribly wrong.

As the generators and fallback systems of the Queen Settra began to fail, one by one, over several centuries without oversight, the remaining functional systems executed protocols designed to ensure the survival of as much cargo as possible for as long as possible.

Being classified as cargo, and with no-one with command authority awake to legally re-classify them, they were not allowed to wake up - perhaps reasonably, that would only have wasted resources. The ship could only sustain enough food and environmental stability for a handful of command staff over its projected 500-year journey. Even in their chambers, the cargo would run out of ultraslow intravenous nutrients in a few centuries.

The cargo began to starve.

The para-reality of their sustainment, now their prison, began to glitch and lose detail and continuity as the Queen Settra slowly succumbed to entropy from cosmic rays and micro-impacts.

Still they could not wake up.

Neither could any of them permanently die, at lest not from damage sustained while within the simulation.

At least, not easily.

Even a governing system of sufficient complexity to overwatch the reality-sustainment A.I. would have been nowhere near complex or aware enough to prevent what happened in Queen Settras Dream, for this flowed not from Metal-On-Meat Mindcrime, but Intra-Meat reality collapse.

Crawling, starving with a hunger they could not suppress, maddened with unregulated opiate comedowns, tortured with memories of the bright time days? weeks? Months? before the Queen Settra, and deeply, but entirely unconsciously aware that their world, whatever it was, was doomed, the cargo of the Queen went, individually and as a society, violently insane.

The simplistic, but dangerously undergoverned reality sustainment A.I attempted to provide simulated goods, tools, relationships and experiences which would keep the Cargo happy and stable, fulfilling their hierarchy of needs.

But this was impossible, they were starving to death and trapped within a dream.

They found, at first, subtle ways of subverting the A.I.s locks on weapons and implements of harm, on perverse situations or illegal simulations, and on mutual access and mutual pain.

Pain at least, was stronger than the hunger, and stronger than the fear, and for a lucky few, pain or terror sever enough might trigger a heart-attack of such severity that the Queen Settras auto-systems would be overwhelmed and they might be allowed to die.

If very large numbers of the cargo underwent such attacks, at the same time, the chance of death rose...

This image depicts one fragmentary capture of the Cargo writhing and stumbling through the greying-out collapsing reality of the dying mindcore of the "Queen Settra", projected onto a watch-screen in a base-reality overwatch chamber, itself open to vacuum and holding only a corpse with a self-inflicted suicide wound, the edged of the bullet hole now mummified with centuries of frost.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

So now I ask you Scrap, what is this?

Games Workshop/Louise Sugden

(It is a Heraldic Beast of New Melniboné)

GAWAIN KICKSTARTER TAKE TWO

We are doing the same thing again, but for less money!  - KICKSTARTER LINK AT THE BOTTOM AND ON THE RIGHT.

But first, fresh content!

This might belong to the Sci-Fi universe conglomeration of thoughts I was considering here;

Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls
Hackships of the Cryogenic Rats
The Omnistructure in Decay
A Hoard of Ice, a Throne of Gold
Science Fiction Fortifications

I guess these are all part of the same developing paracosm? Now mixed with Uud, and mixed with Gawain?





Pilgrims of the Green Moon

Uud-Space is sometimes patrolled by Alpha-Class Genarchs of the Instrumentality piloting ritual Destrier-Class  Fade-Ships sheathed in Mayltrix fields and managed by quasi-sophontic A.I's.

Fractured and crypt-locked engrams records recovered from an Eon-sealed and somnolent artificial archivist indicated that, beginning in the year 22,593 one such Genarch embarked on a solitary search for loc/vector relative-point-stable biome codenamed only "Green Moon".

The following are recovered data fragments showing encounter file headings only, with one-line orthodescriptors.

Sadly, the file locations are scrambles and it is impossible to tell which locators, descriptors and actions apply to which.

LOCATORS

1. Tomb World orbit.
2. Unused LaGrange for a system quarantined as Paperclip-class nano-disaster.
3. Trailing in the exhaust-shadow of a migrating Yg-Fleet.
4. Orbital array of the Ice-World Indigo-Phi.
5. Sim-Space injection beyond the orthogonal zone.
6. Penumbra of a militarised Glass Cage Exoworld.
7. Unmarked and stagnant move-route in the Wir-Heal nebulae.
8. Rad-wrecked starless dockyard with deleted ident tags.
9. Roguespace conglomeration.
10. In the orbit of the Green Moon.


ENCOUNTERS.

1. Sun-Happy detrivores worshipping the Slump-God.
2. Thane-Engined Biocruiser Womb-Ship holding hyper-deep faunocogitators engaged in dense reality algorithms.
3. Megalith-Ship crowned with viridian war-maser Agon-Corona.
4. Chrono-Shadowed entropy-pulse. Assumed wake of a deep-reality mover, but moaning through the E.M. spetra with auto-responding thought shades.
5. School of Ex-Empire Lupenised hackcraft psycho-redacted from the noosphere, cognitively linked with cycling predatory stim-jacks.
6. Burbling vagueplague colony pods lancing through a re-transmitted hashcloud of their own upcycled sophonticidic apocalypse sims. Ultradrives quavering and bursting out screaming EM radiospheres.
7. Tumbling Nightminds held in iron-asteroid reality magnets. Sensorblack bodies pulse with subconscious reply dreams keyed to subtly override neocortical governance.
8. Rad-blasted auto-scow captained by self-uplifted engram-A.I. combo, way outside Exo-World bulterian lexosphere. pulses personalised xenopop from engrams copy-paste light cone. Seems unarmed.
9.Filement drive iridium spike ship coasting on half-surge with engines muffled and weapon-bays dark. Ident tags read infinite zero and vox replies in simulated Assyrian.
10. Unknown Fadeship, coursier class or above, viridian mayltrix and engine pluming Cherenkov energy while eco-spheres return sub-zero deathstate or flat recursive gamma-sign.


EMERGENCE

1. Tumbling, No clear vector.
2. On collision or attack course.
3. matching vector for boarding or mass-exchange.
4. Crossing vector/no other response.
5. Accelerating past LaGrange position.
6. Incoherent course changes.
7. Engines flickering, possible distress.
8. Flat burn for system edge.
9. Course is parallel.
10. In flight from your destination.

NOW LINKS - HIT THE IMAGE OR CLICK HERE FOR THE KICKSTARTER

Well, we failed last time so whats different this time?

- Cut the profits from any backer books out.
- Displaced postage onto the BigCartel store to be paid separately.
- Reduced the number of books.

Total to hit is waay lower. Postage has been removed from that total so it may still be a challenge to get there BUT we will have longer and the fact that the total is potentially achievable will hopefully raise our spirits and yours and keep the whole thing feeling like a real possibility.

(Also, I now have a marketing twitter, https://twitter.com/pjamesstuart, we will see how long I can keep that up).

The Omnistructure in Decay

An Omnistructure because it is not just a structure filling reality, but a structure that is reality. A reality that can only exist as structure, in the same way that ours is expressed as space and form.

Here are worlds the size of Nebulae, grown, not in tight massed spheres and gravity wells, but like ferns or fractal fungi infiltrating a mass. Storm-wrapped tendril worlds with neutronium cores. Worlds as slender as mycelium, all linked, receiving their light from the transient civilisation of intelligent nomadic suns. Primary trunks of world with surfaces like gas giants and storms as large as small galaxies.

Entire world-equivalent biospheres spending their existence transiting and slowly evolving. Sometimes running into each other, resulting in titanic conflicts and strange syntheses.

Gravatically balanced structures of form. Vast tendrils of world.

Some worlds with hollow cores like old trees, some wormed within by passages and cells, some carrying lightless life inside.

Some oceanic, like branches of water. Some carrying vast globular oceans at their tips. Sometimes these oceans have frozen surfaces and pressure-ice cores. Sometimes they break free and drift, are caught and smeared through the Lagrange zones causing disaster and opportunity.

Sadly, all the world curls have fallen into decay. They are blackened and dying, though the diamond highways sing.

The highways are cylinders the thickness of stars, transparent, flexible diamond lattice environments, home to their own intelligence yet transmitting a blood supply of light.

At the nexus-points of the intersecting highways, like the cores of neural cells, are the Photo-Arcologies , gigantic hives of living suns that take on strange insectoid forms. Between the worlds the suns are harmonies of light like freight trains spiralling round the helices inside the diamond highways.

Yet without the responsive song of life from the the world fronds, the arcologies themselves grow silent, the highways are failing, slowly but inevitably being cut off. Eventually the culture of the Omnistructure will retreat, becoming only a memory. In the star-cemeteries deep in the centres of the Photo-Arcologies, black-hole tendrils and white dwarf root-stubs animate and attempt escape.

The space between the highways and the mycellium of world is divided into cells of void, like the cells of a leaf, each similar but distinct. At the border of each cause/effect lipid layer, time hesitates for a moment to confirm.

Lagrange points within the cellular voids play host to their own strange zero-g civilisations. High altitude web cities grow like gigantic highway shacks along the easy-to-transport zero-g lines between the world-roots and the suns.

Lagrange points generally lie at the borders of void cells and have slightly different realities depending on which side you are on. Multi-cell Lagrange strands are complex, with many realities involved. They say if you agree something there  you must agree it four times, once between all possible combination of yourself and the other party.

HackShips of the Cryogenic Rats

Click to build a HackShip

(Made with Logans Generator

This isn't weighted to produce a true 3d6 result

there are probably ways to do that with

I'm a writer Jim, not a mathmagician!)

Or roll 3d6 six times

Ships Hull

3 Shards of a shattered comet, held together by flickering fields.
4 Bash-compacted pseudo-plastic old escapee drone boats.
5 Origami mass-made monocarbon, crackling silver at the seams.
6 A ring of light-ceramic tubes sprayed in ray-resistant foam.
7 Half an attack-blasted light destroyer, built strong but riddled with unsightly wounds.
8 Polymer shard, light, plasticated and sharp.
9 Keel of ancient iron, cankered with re-upped cargo containers.
10 Mech-assembled zero-g steel, strung with extruded carbon-fibre webs.
11 Standard mass-made enviro-tube in a carbon lattice sandwich.
12 Hacked-together high-end modular-pods in an atomic grid.
13 Steel and nuke-hardened black carbon. Attack-torpedo refit, Leviathan class.
14 Organized-diamond dash-pod of assassinated system-lord, upgraded and re-fit.
15 Pseudo-cuboid hyper-structure engine block with irregular interior voids.
16 Giga-droplet of void-forged steel with bubbles tunnel-linked inside.
17 Black-hole backwash-warped helix of titan-iron.
18 Star-core cooled neutronium flange, interior carved by antimatter torch.

Ships Drive

3 Puttering Ionic Breeze-Machine, brownouts at LaGrange.
4 Terrestrial reactor, hacked half-open and strapped on, pointing out.
5 Ruined sensor-beak of an alien 'crow machine', its fields converged.
6 'Matchead' hydrogen drive, well kept, impellers upgraded gold.
7 Collapsed hot-rod tokomak, shielding frittered, ignition dark.
8 Downactioned 'Lightning' class Go-Box. 1000 years old. Entrails unknown.
9 Dumble-Pulsing ultra-photonic fans, the reliable 'Bee' drive.
10 Fusion-grumbler, geysering magnetic fields.
11 Nuke-pooping kill-engine. Brutal. Dumb. Never breaks.
12 Semi-self-replicating blackbody sloaric engine-swarms.
13 'Lalelith' silent-light drive, runs inertialess and cold.
14 Razor-spec stealth-banked fusion spike, operating on the edge.
15 Vogue-vectored magnetopods, ex-military, off the books.
16 Gold-Chromium DarkMatter furnace-turbine.
17 Laser-pinioned rift-engine glinting like a wolfs eye.
18 Ravening coronal shard lensed by antimatter latticework.

Ships weapons

3 Juiced-up construction droids strapped onto the hull. Rivet guns firing DPU.
4 'Tidal' class magneto-ballista launching 'monkey-puzzle' ice flechettes.
5 Allegedly-effective psychic scrambler-pulse. Only hurts organic thoughts.
6 Overcharged pyramidal phase-taser E.M. interference ray.
7 'Rolling Thunder' low-tech high-velocity minigun stacks up-jacked for zero-g.
8 Cheap knockoff polymer-sheath 'Raptors-Eye' railgun array. (Looks like real thing.)
9 Brute-mass macrocannons with dum-dum ferric rounds.
10 Platinum heat-exchanged rapid-firing maser-banks.
11 Low-yield 'Hiroshima' class torpedo tubes.
12 'Lottery Cannon' liquid-hydro-cooled ultra-rapid laser-spatter-banks.
13 'Thuggee' monofilament laser-guided strangle-cannons.
14 A real 'Raptors Eye' railgun array with babysitting sniper-specific AI.
15 Semi-intelligent self-assembling 'Gravity Knife' torpedo swarm.
16 'Jester' class Chance-Cannon, can ignite cascading fails.
17 'Godhammer' triple-barrelled neutron-bomb shotgun. Long reload time.
18 'Kali' class antimatter lens, ringed by moaning stabilising drives.

Ships Sensors

3 Scattered glitch-eyes mosaicked by a dumb-core.
4 Robots-at-a-telescope, plus am/fm listening sphere.
5 Strobing navigation lasers disco-balling local zone.
6 Cybernetic spiderleg dish-orbs circulate the hull on everscan.
7 Faceted-eye cyberfly swarms bleeping composited waves to a video hive.
8 Deep-field lens arrays analysed by photographic brains.
9 Active E.M. interference-shell upsets and traces local sines.
10 Perma-scan optico-radiodromes plus active E.M. 'ping' for search.
11 Hull networked with frozen stingray-cells to subtly interpenetrate immediate energy-sphere.
12 Omni-valent semi-cetacean deep-wave passive scans, slow but range is long.
13 Slaved and disarmed ex-materiel hunter-killer missile cone umbilicaled to ship.
14 Nano-derived 'dementia' lenses track anti-spectrography of seemingly empty space.
15 Rippling warp wave frets space for pseudo-seismic pan-Geiger eye.
16 Deep-gravitational skein illuminates all shifts in local mass.
17 Darkmatter-responsive Nano-antennae, black and unblindable.
18 Planck-length quantum-obscura shows total mass/energy state for immediate AU.

Ships AI

3 Free-download 'Ship Ops' app running on a phone.
4 Recycled city sewer-sys maintenance-mind, sometimes tries to flush the ship.
5 Cheap black market gaol-brain predictive E.M.I. jacked to compute.
6 Defeated military simulation set sold off by winning side. Purposeless and vague.
7 Obsolete friend-connection-network stripped and sold off in-one.
8 Terrestrial S.E.T.I.-Analysis code. Good listener, glitches when it moves.
9 Stack of chips yanked from a submarine, silent, wary, likes to light the emergency bulb.
10 Robust-smuggling code. Competent, always tries to steal.
11 Extra-real singularity-fugee hypermind Alzheimer-virused to comprehensible smarts. Seems sad.
12 Hyper-competitive ex-financial hack. Gold with probabilities, poor impulse control.
13 Super-computer wrapped in ultra-cryo coolant bath, staggeringly calm, yet fast.
14 Bio-molecular gene-computing clock, starts slow but adapts relentlessly to any threat.
15 Photonic brain encoded on the spin of held electrons in a grid. Perceptive.
16 Holographic thought-engine, can fissure tiny perfect selves for special tasks.
17 Samizdat dead-genius last-minute deathmask-mind recording, illuminating turbulence.
18 Dimension-folded hyperpalace burning as a point of light. Startling, intuitive and precise.


Ships Flair

3 Unlikely fastness of a doom-perv cult. Troubled child-ghosts haunt the halls. Odd stains.
4 Glitched eject-recyke sys means ship shits itself in times of stress.
5 Ship dandruffs space with drive-plate shards, leaks E.M. moans, annoys all near.
6 Ship greebled to a dark degree, nothing added on ever removed. Hull a maze of functionless stuff.
7 Unnecessary plating stripped. Visible bits a nasty coagulated sight.
8 Interiors are brown.
9 Odd-proportioned micro-meteorite pattern scars look something like a human face.
10 Former owner liked Feng-Shui, crew compartments neatly calm.
11 Remains of a first-class paint job still barely visible.
12 Voice programmed with reassuring tones like a chummy Shakespearian thesp.
13 Severed grapple-hands from waxed piracy try dot the hull; look kind of cool.
14 Assembled by an aesthete engineer, looks like sweet kinetic art.
15 Chiaroscuro hull-angled floods make ship look massy, dark, like wearing shades.
16 Angular black stealth-carapace, non-functional but still looks good.
17 Zorro-scar laserlance battle damage, just short of disfiguring, looks cool as heck.
18 Last crew died heroes in superfly species-wide redemption-adventure, ship literally gilded.




This is kind-of based on Nathans star-ship creation ideas he hacked from Into The Odd. The ships are broken down into six 'stats' or qualities. Each roll gives you a number showing the quality or power of the thing, like in D&D, higher is better. each roll also gives you a specific thing about that ship.

It doesn't really work for a variety of interesting reasons. Ships having stats is ok but these don't match up with the most-necessary ones. There should be shields and drives and engines should be separate things.

Its too oddly-specific for generating a really wide range of ships, but the use of the 3d6 method and the way it creates its probability curve kind of suggests that there is a 'normal' or a likely arrangement of parts.

The d20 decision / 3d6 stat thing doesn't really match up that way with technology or the way technology works. Or perhaps its simply that the way technology works just doesn't match up that well with the need for adventure.

After a certain point, differences in technology make advanced versions just _better_ than what came before. Tanks kill cavalry, helicopter gunships kill tanks. Breach-loading rifles kill bows and automatic rifles kill breach-loaders. The main source of adventure is in staying the fuck away from anyone with massively better tech than you.

Hence, I suppose the technologically incoherent 'deep-futures' of 40k, Gene Wolfe etc in which any fucking thing can turn up and a super energy knife can beat an AK47, because you can tell a more dramatic story that way. Technology erodes and makes irrelevant personal qualities and the d20 die does quite well with those intermeshing personal qualities that are the key engine of both drama and adventure fiction.

Anyway, I'm rambling.

This is for a kind of Quasi-Setting / Game which I think I'm calling 'Cryogenic Rats'

This is the setting that would incorporate the Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls and the masks of the creatures from before time.

Groups of punk girls from an anemic climax future (like Ian Banks 'Culture' if, instead of being a place to fulfill the highest human dreams, was just a bit shit. Like De Tocqueville's nightmare of democracy. People can do whatever they want and everyone is dull as shit) make off the the LaGrange points where drifting technology from a million years of culture hangs about not being used. They hack together ships and mechs and go off to explore the only part of the galaxy so-far ignored by all, the starless exo-worlds that drift between systems.

There's no hyperdrive so they just have to cryo their way there over a thousand years or so.

And on these worlds are various terrible things that they have to fight in giant mechs, and strange treasures and impossible technologies which they can steal, and strap onto their mechs.