Botani

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Rhapsody

Posted by Ebonstorm on June 23, 2013

Posted in: Hayward's Reach, Insurrection, Twilight Continuum. Tagged: bioluminescence, Botani, Corvans, entertainment, Humans, music, musical instruments, piano, Symbiotes, Toranor. Leave a comment

a tale of the Twilight Continuum

Humans think they love music.

They will tell you about which musicians transformed the world with music, or how a particular music emphasizes one spiritual aspect or another. If Human religion was to be any baseline, no religion had ever transformed us like music did our hosts, the Corvans.

For them, music is speech, sweeping song, organic light, thumping vibration, a complex philosophy and an all-encompassing epistemology. Born with a four lobed brain, they were able to mix sound, color and bio-luminescence in a way we were only able to do with the most sophisticated of computers.

Born underwater, looking vaguely like the best-possible merger of squid and octopus, they have multiple cavities and bladders to move air around. This made each Corvan a living symphony. Any single entity is capable of a range of thousands of sounds, with the capacity of organizing and sounding eight to ten notes simultaneously.

As refugees to the Toranor system, Humans offered our cultural libraries or what was left of them and our music, which was uniquely ours, as part of our payment for our rescue from our failed Earth.

The Corvans musical masters learned most of the human lexicon of music in a year and considered our most accomplished musicians little more than children in the arts of music.

Until we started making instruments. Corvans had no musical instruments in their native environments.

As Humanity settled on the Botani homeworld in the Toranor system, we began to hanker for the things of our lost Earth and eventually began to make musical instruments. Having nothing but memories, pictures, and the occasional scribbled schematic, we were forced to reinvent our world, one instrument, one piano key, one cello string at a time.

Since few instruments had survived our rapid exit of Earth, we were forced to ask our hosts how we could make something from native materials. The Botani, a tree-like organic computer spanning their planet’s equator allowed their symbiotic partners to help us find what we needed to make new instruments.

The amphibious Corvan musicians would visit frequently coming out of the river whenever we tested our instruments. They were unfailingly polite as we tuned, tested and began reinventing ourselves under these alien suns, with new neighbors, on a world not our own.

The Botani would make us welcome at night and after a few days of listening to us play, altered their leaves and shaped the wind making soft musical notes, subtle at first, but as the winds increased, the tempo changed, the cracking of their bark became percussion which wove itself into the wind-swept whistles, the rustle of leaves, shakers, and their symbiotic partners drummed on various cavities making percussive sounds which echoed and moved randomly around us, slowly woven into a shuddering rhythm.

They learned to do this watching us practice. Untaught.

Eventually, the Corvans came upon us as we played with the Botani and their symbiotes and with nary a pause joined us in awe of the sounds of instruments playing together. Our tiny band of thirty instruments seemed small to us but their fascination and participation heartened the rusty Human musicians and spurred them to continue. The Corvans surrounded the pianist, an older man who was fond of improvisational jazz and played sweetly in sync.

Three aliens species with nothing in common, found each other through music. One group, born to it, another barely able to make music without tools and a third who incredible computation abilities never understood the joy of making music until they did it with us.

The pianist, now surrounded by the Corvans who had all but marveled at the instrument requested a desire to learn. Within hours he had taught them to play. Their perfect-pitched squeals of delight filled the glade.

They spent the next month wondering how many keys their pianos designs should have since they had six arms…

Part 2: Unwanted Visitors

Sun-Drinker’s Proxy ran through the superconducting mining facility toward the Darklight Projection tower. The lights in the building dimmed as the external armor was activated and blocked the ambient light from outside. Fiberoptic cable woven into the structure still streamed concentrated sunlight from outside allowing the station lighting independent of power.

“I know a short cut to the tower. Follow me.” Despite his simian appearance, Proxy moved quickly and I had trouble keeping up. He changed surfaces as it suited his movement, bouncing from the floor to the ceiling depending on which way he needed to go. I activated my null gravity belt and followed as best I could through the twisting pipe ways.

“What about point defense systems? Doesn’t this station have some sort of defense mechanism in case of incoming matter?” Being pelted by multi-megaton wreckage from an alien space craft still hadn’t reached the acceptance phase of cognition for me.

“There is one. And I am certain Sun-Drinker calculated the use of the system in its speculations about our overall survival. Hence the reason we are going to activate the Darklight Projector and save these possibly unfriendly visitors, rather than letting them crash into the station.”

“Even with the active point defense, would we take damage?”

“Absolutely, their ship is very large, unlike the much smaller craft which brought you to us. We will barely be able to cover it effectively before large chucks of their ship begin to ablate away. We will use the point defenses to destroy as much of the remnants as possible. It is simply a matter of mass. The point defense system here is not native and does not pack the power of a Precursor weapon. We added it when we arrived here as a secondary level defense. If our visitors had arrived outside of the fragment’s gravity well, or on the far side of our two closest stellar partners, we wouldn’t even consider rescuing them a possibility, let alone a necessity. They would have died and drifted into one of the two binary partner’s gravity wells first.”

I thought about what Proxy was saying. This fragment was surrounded by at least ten stars at varying distances. The two closest orbited within ninety million miles. Despite what it appeared, the fragment was the big gravity in this star system. If you approached the system at just the right angle, you couldn’t help but fall right toward it. “What will you need me to do?”

“I need you to control and calibrate the point defense system. We will analyze their hull and determine how much hull they are going to lose. Then you will need to make sure you can target the fragments to get the largest first. You will probably not be able to get them all. If you were, Sun-Drinker would have said you could, so go from largest to smallest and do the best you can.”

Sun-Drinkers automated voice rang out in the Precursor control space, dotted with a wide array of alien technologies, each adding some feature deemed necessary by it’s guests. “I have completed my scan of the vessel. It is using a technology from one of the Old Galactic species, the Remur. The ship’s hull is a form of duranium-wafer overlay. Strong and tough, it’s the only reason they are still there at all. The ship is much larger than we will be able to cover at this distance. I have sent you the configuration of their hull.”

The ship was torus shaped to facilitate the Remur predisposition for multiple drive systems. They were considered idiosyncratic among the Old Galactics. The Remur were a silicon species with a terrible fear of space travel. They were one of the exceptions among the Old Galactics, they did not develop aircraft before they discovered space travel.

Once they acquired the ability to travel to other worlds in their star system, their scientists discovered as many ways of returning planetside as possible. They mastered C-space travel and had ships capable of reaching ninety percent the speed of light. They traded and learned T-space where faster than light travel was possible by tachyon conversion. But tachyon conversion made them terribly ill so they are most well known for the singular development which earned them their fame; the J-space drive. With it, they could jump from one sector of space to another. There were plenty of limitations but few other races discovered J-space without consulting and licensing their technology. Their ships were rarely sold to other species, in addition to being fearful of space travel, they were a bit xenophobic as well, though the ones who did travel in space tended toward the other extreme and ended up loving alien diversity.

The alien ship was capable of C-space, T-space, and J-Space transportation. Unfortunately, all three require the ship to be able to target and calibrate its sensors. In this area, they can’t. Looking at the ship, I realized what needed to be done. “We can only save one drive system, the others will be lost. I recommend the central part of the hub because the T-space drive will be there. It will be the only piece of the ship that will still be flight capable once we trim away the other parts.

“Sun-Drinker can you establish communication with them and tell them to grab only what they need and get to the center region of their ship?”

“Of course. My telepathic abilities are less affected by the stellar winds, radiation or dust in this region. I will inform them of our plan.”

* * *

“The shields are failing, Lan-Cer, I am rerouting power from all systems except life support. At this rate, we will bake inside the ship. Internal hull temperature rising.” The gelatinous blob in the engineering section of the ship could not physically appear to be panicked, unless you knew what to look for. If you did, then you knew it was well past freaked out and well on its way to psychotic breakdown.

The entity in the command module of the ship would resemble to anyone human, a cockroach that walked like a man. A rather heroic member of the Remur species, it resembled a cockroach made of carbon and silicon molecules, complete with antennae, six legs with large and rather unpleasant mandibles. It had a mild twitch all the time, always in motion even when sitting still. At the moment, it was preening its antennas while trying to appear nonchalant. The fact its antenna were begin passed through its mandibular area in a ritual of nervous cleansing always caused everyone in the room to turn away as if they weren’t looking…but they were. Most sentients found the Remur’s licking of their antenna disturbing to say the least.

Where it diverged from the cockroach metaphor was its crystalline appearance and ability to reflect light across its shimmering exoskeleton. It had two sets of eyes, a compound set and a more forward facing set of four. Those four targeted the navigator, a young Corvan who had currently turned an unpalatable shade of brown, pretty much defining the situation without speaking a word. “Why haven’t we jumped, HeDa? Or is boiling in your water containment field an acceptable life choice for you at the moment?”

“No, Captain, nothing of the sort. I have been trying to gather navigational data but the dust and tightly bound stars are blocking my ability to lock onto any galactic navigational aids. The only aid I can lock on to is a tiny station on the massive gravitational stellar fragment, dead ahead. This is also where the trail of the superconducting support craft was heading before it disappeared.”

The last member of the crew stood impassively connected to the panel in front of it. A number of thin-crys cables snaked away from the panel into several plates on the its chest. A bipedal humanoid, it stood over seven feet tall and was covered with a rock-like skin.

The Omuri was another silicoid life form, but unlike the Remur, it seemed more simian-based. The Omuri were once a more organic species, with softer more human features. A spate of genetic engineering somewhere in their planet’s history caused the species to become a dimorphic race. One set of the Omuri are still as their ancestors made them, but the second population appear to be more rock than humanoid. The stone Omuri spend most of their time in space working with manufactured intelligences as a living computer interface. Their stone skin was designed to act as a computing surface and with the right design specifications, could work faster than any normal crew member dealing with shipboard operations outside of piloting and hands-on engineering.

“Zero-Zero-One, status report,” the Captain turned toward his second in command and noted his focused attention on the ship’s systems. Zero-Zero-One’s relationship with their ship was a precarious one since they deactivated the manufactured intelligence. The moral imperatives of the MI meant their career as pirate mercenaries was against its programming. Zero-Zero-One’s internal computer now provided control for all of the ship’s vital functions.

“Zero-Zero-One reporting: Ship shield integrity at thirty two percent and dropping rapidly. Ship’s hull integrity at eighty three percent and holding. Activating regenerative hull armor, for an additional fifteen minutes of hull integrity. We are moving in C-space at .78 C. We are within the immense gravity field of a stellar fragment. If we are planning to try to escape, we must do so in the next eight minutes before shearing pressures from the star fragment make it impossible. Even so, we will have to release at least fifteen percent of our cargo to compensate for shearing stress. The navigation array is still unable to establish a lock to any viable jump beacons or location beacons.”

Fifteen percent! That would make their most recent outings barely worth the time it took to rob their ships. This was supposed to be the score of a lifetime. We were supposed to be hitting a cargo ship filled with superconductive material mined from the heart of a core fragment. Needed on nearly every planet with advanced Manufactured Intelligences, high quality superconductors was one of the few things unable to easily be made by Hegemony science. Even the Old Galactics preferred to mine it than make it artificially. Now this mission is coming apart. We missed the cargo ship, we’re flying blind and surrounded by blinding white gas in every direction, and the ship is being torn apart by this region of space. A bit of good news would go a long way to improving my mood.

“Attention, Remur space craft, you have entered restricted Hegemony Space. We are the source of the T-space command beacon you should be detecting. You will need to use that beacon to jump to the following coordinates. We are aware of your condition and recommend you have your crew enter the T-space section of your craft. The other drive mechanisms we have detected are in the outer ring of your ship and will be destroyed once we lock onto your craft.” Sun-Drinker’s telepathic voice held no tone of malice or rancor.

The Captain sat and thought for a moment before Sun Drinker continued. “You are not obligated to acknowledge this telepathic message. But be aware, I have calculated your chances of survival at less than 8% unless you follow my course of action. Even if you do, your chances will only increase to sixty percent, due to an inability to determine what will happen to your ship once it is converted to non-baryonic matter. We can increase your odds of survival if we reduce the amount of mass your ship has. Your survival increases if I remove the J-Drive and the C-Drive which are found on the outer ring of your ship.”

The cargo areas are also found on the outer ring of the ship as well; our entire haul for the last year. If we come back with nothing, Nimile will kill us for sure, slowly and painfully.

Zero-Zero-One’ broke the Captain’s distasteful reverie of their mercenary employer. “Shield failure is imminent. Hull armor is being activated. We have breaches on decks eleven and fifteen. Structural reinforcement is holding.”

“Navigation, prepare to jump to these coordinates. We will need everyone else to move our most precious cargo to the center of the ship. Only the good stuff. Everything else, leave it. We have less than eight minutes.”

As Lan-Cer and his crew ran through his ship moving their most valuable cargo to the transport sleds, he entered the telepathic field and responded, “We will accept your offer of hospitality.” Broke or dead. Both of these choices equaled dead. The crew also considered their employer and realized the precarious nature of the current predicament. Ever hopeful, each pondered that there might be some way to turn their fortunes around. Not trusting to luck, each carried everything they thought they could move in the time allotted.

Sun-Drinker’s voice came back to Lan-Cer. “Get your crew back to the core segment of your ship and jump. You will be taking fire upon arrival.”

“Excuse me?” thought the Captain?

“To save your lives and protect our station, we will have to fire upon your ship as soon as you drop out of J-space. Deactivate your C-drive and your T-Drive and prepare to be fired upon.”

“You heard the nice alien, move it, grab your gear and prepare to be fired upon!” As the crew ran back to the central module, the Captain had a sudden thought: What in the seven hells was non-baryonic matter?

End of Part 2.

Star Light, Star Bright (1)

Posted by Ebonstorm on April 7, 2013

Posted in: 30 Characters in 30 Days 2013, 30 Stories in 30 Days 2013, 30 x 30 x 30, Short Story. Tagged: Botani, Darkhouse, darklight, ebonstorm, graviton beam, Master Gate, Precursor Gate, Proxy, stars, Thaddeus Howze, wormhole. Leave a comment

Waking from cold-sleep is still one of the most terrifying things I have ever experienced. When I signed up for deep space exploration, I was told we would be on the fastest ships ever created, and would travel distances few could even imagine. This boggled my young and impressionable mind. Then they told me the one thing which would undermine everything I had ever imagined about space travel, I could not be awake for the journey itself.

On shorter journey’s within the heart of the Hegemony, between the fast ships and the Precursor Gates, coldsleep is rarely used, the flights barely take more than a couple of weeks at the longest. People mingle, aliens share their stories, and lifestyles depending on whether they are C or NC lifeforms. C life tends to be able to share quarters and tend to have similar if odoriferous atmospheres. NC or non-carbon life comes in so many flavors and needs so many unique environments, most NC life carries its environment with it, within an environmental bubble allowing them motility and life support.

As a Human Scout of the Hegemony, I have the rare honor of flying the fastest ships possible to reach the core of the Galaxy. Even with the speed of my ship and the Master Gate near the galactic core, it will still take me almost two years of travel time to reach the Darkhouse. It’s said the caretaker of the Darkhouse is a bit eccentric and a non-human, making his jokes painful and incomprehensible. He is at least a C so we will be able to share an atmosphere and relatively similar gravity.

Returning to consciousness from cryo-sleep is likened to dying in reverse. You start in a place of supremely bright light as the activation sequence restarts the brainstem near the optic nerve. This mean for a while all you can see is whiteness. No depth perception, no ability to range it, it is a perfect white. You know when you are starting to be able to see when you find yourself experiencing a feeling of falling, slowly at first but soon it becomes a rushing sensation, complete with wind noises. You find yourself falling into a dark pit whose darkness slowly absorbs the white light pushing it backward away from where you are falling.

Then there is the jarring and sudden stop.

No warning, no sense of time or distance. Everything stops and you become aware of coldness, a cold more bitter than anything you remember. No winter day can compare; not even close. You can feel the burning on your skin, the cryotube filling with a saline solution designed to return you to life, slowly, steadily raising both your inner temperature and your outer skin temperature. It takes twenty four hours until you are able to leave the cryo-chamber. Fortunately you are not truly aware of what is happening around you until the last couple of hours, so you don’t resent the lost day.

By the time the chamber is emptied, you are wearing the finest in fiber-extruded clothing and have been fed intravenously. This does not stop you from wanting to fill your stomach with the biggest, juiciest burger you can think of. You don’t do it of course. Your body will have to adjust to eating again, just like it had to get used to not eating. In three to five days, you are ravenous and are allowed to have your first bite. It’s heavenly no matter what it is.

After my first meal, I got to meet Director SunDrinker’s Proxy. He was a tiny creature approximately a meter tall, and resembled a squirrel monkey more than anything. He was definitely less than I expected from a Botani.

“Welcome, welcome, Technical Scientist Sarah Collins. We are pleased you could make the trip. Our preparations for your visit have gone well and we expect you will want to observe the ore samples and the distilled metals as soon as possible. We need to explain some of the rules of the facility and then I will take you to meet Director SunDrinker.”

Looking more closely at the SunDrinker’s Proxy, I thought he was a rather handsome creature. His fur a deep purple, was slightly lighter on his chest and inner thighs and inner arms. His head was a mixture of feline and monkey with a wide mouth and overly large teeth he showed at every interaction. His hands and feet both had six fingers and toes and were prehensile in their appearance. As if to prove the point, he took a bounding leap to the wall and then to the ceiling landing with his feet on the colored pipe-way.

“If you get lost, the blue pipe always leads to SunDrinker’s main facility. Always establish a comm and let him know you are on your way. He tends to leave the shields at minimum opacity so he can enjoy the rare radiant configuration of this area. One more thing,” he locks my eyes with his large golden orbs and I can feel his intensity, “never leave the confines of this facilities artificial gravity without an environmental shield. Ever. Away for even a moment without the proper technology and you will be a molecule thick paste on the surface.” He taps the belt he is wearing and points to my own.

I am sure the look on my face asked the question my lips didn’t but he smiled and swung down the corridor. “Now you get to meet the boss.”

The size of this place baffled me. The technical journals told of a place that was easily nine miles wide, but the habitation area seemed cramped and tight. The air seemed a little under processed for a place with so few C lifeforms. Nothing seemed to make any sense at all. Things became even less sensible in the next five minutes. As we approached the central air processing plant, the Proxy began to brief me again.

“Turn on your environmental shield. It is automatically calibrated to provide you with maximum intensity protection against a completely failure of the solar protection of the facility for thirty minutes. By then you need to be within a protected region of the base or you will be dead.”

“Okay, I was trained in using this technology before I left the Toranor system. I should be able to survive in nearly any environment for nearly a week using this environmental shield. Is this a bargain model?” The Proxy turned to me and activated his shield. He was replaced with a bubble I could not see through at all. Total and complete blackness, a matte black, no edge, no curve, almost like a hole in space.

I activated my shield and the world disappeared. Inside my environmental sphere, I could see a heads-up display which replicated the appearance of the world in outline, so important features were still able to be seen. But the rest of the world had vanished into darkness.

The Proxy’s orb was displayed and he moved into what appeared to be an airlock. I followed closely and the door snapped shut behind me. The metal in the airlock was highly polished and mirrored. There was a mild pressure differential adjusted for and then the door to the inner facility opened. I could suddenly see the Proxy and felt an intense heat and incredibly white light. I looked down at my belt and it was still activated. All the lights were active. The Proxy waved at me. He pointed inward and I could see the Botani. A magnificent grove of trees, easily a hundred and fifty feet tall, dark magenta trunks and leaves the color of blood. Their leaves were broad and each directed outward absorbing light from every direction. There was air purification equipment all around the room. Most of it was in standby mode. Then I thought for a moment and realized with such a large copse of Botani, they were able to act as the primary air processing unit with the hardware only utilized as a backup.

I had never seen such a large group of Botani away from the Toranor system, I wasn’t even sure they could leave their world until now. They were magnificent.

Then the Proxy pointed upward and only then did I notice the vault of the domed ceiling, it was so far away, it seemed to fade into the background. What I saw outside of the vault took my breath away and explained why I could suddenly see even through the environmental suits.

There were nine suns visible at different points in the sky and they filled it with light. There was no darkness, no region of space that was without light. One sun was so bright it filled sixty percent of the sky all by itself. The others had to be fantastically close to throw off as much light as they did. I couldn’t take it all in.

“You should go now, young one. Your time to be here is almost expired. What are you called?” The voice came through the comm but it was not the Proxy who had his usual smile on his face.

“My name is Sarah Collins, Director SunDrinker. Will there be a better time to meet with you?” There was a strange rumbling coming from the comm. When it stopped, SunDrinker continued “You have been with me all day.” When he said this, the Proxy looked at me and waved. “We can meet later after you have had a bit more rest.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, sir.” More of the strange rumbling. The Proxy grabbed me and we ran to the exit. Once the inner door closed, I could no longer see through the environmental shield again. There was a longer period of waiting before the airlock cycled and the inner door opened again.

Once we stepped out of the airlock, the Proxy turned off his shield and I followed suit. “I think he likes you.”

“How can you tell?” I asked. “I mean he’s a plant-like organism, no way to read his expressions.”

“No way for you to read his expression, you mean. What do they tell you in your human academy about the Botani and their Proxies?”

“The Botani are a species of super-intelligent plants whose root systems comprise an organic network computer more powerful than most of the hardware tech used by all but the most sophisticated Sentients in the Hegemony with a degree of accuracy and computational capability unmatched by any machine-tech anywhere. They say the Proxies are a lifeform which evolved in symbiosis with the Botani helping to provide mobility and protection for the plants in their infancy.”

“That was a nice textbook definition. But it is only partially correct. I can read his leaf impressions to determine his mental state, but I can also feel those impressions within my being. Our symbiosis has reached a state where I am able to interpret his thoughts directly as if they were my own. He can also if he chose, control my movement as if I were a remote device. While we may appear to be two separate beings, it is more accurate to call us a single being sharing a dual consciousness in two separate locations. I know he liked you because he was laughing. The rumbling noise you hear was interpreted by the translation matrix. It was his laughter.”

“Oh. I am still tired. Can you take me to my quarters?”

“Certainly. We can tour the rest of the processing plant tomorrow and you can begin your survey of the superconductive materials mined here.”

My quarters were simple, utilitarian with just enough comfort to remind you this was not home, but not enough to make you resent it. I laid my head down and I was still tired to the bone. When I was awakened by a loud clarion and flashing lights, I thought I was coming out of cryosleep.

“Proxy, what happening?” A long minute before he answered.

“Someone is trying to make an emergency landing without the Darklight.”

“Were we expecting anyone?”

“No. Their ship is not registering any recognizable markings or transponders.”

“Pirates?”

“Not this far from the Hegemony. It’s not impossible but highly unlikely. They would have had to have traveled as long as you have and we would have been informed long before now.”

“Can we ignore them?”

“This far into the Collective, unless their ships are tougher than ours, they should be experiencing distress due to the proximity to the prime star. Our scanners indicate their ship is already showing signs of shield failure.”

“So we don’t know them, and if we leave them out there, we’re murderers.”

“Or at least highly irresponsible. They didn’t have to come here. You have to make an effort to find this place. We are sitting on the remnant of a star surrounded by other stars, it wouldn’t show up on a map. So the only conclusion we can come to is they followed your ship.”

“Without the Darklight, they won’t survive. If we bring them here, we don’t know what they might do.”

“SunDrinker says we have a responsibility to other Sentients. The Darklight is still calibrated for your last heading so it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to acquire a lock on them.”

I could appreciate the Director’s sentiments, but from where he’s sitting, he is in the safest place in the building. The rest of us weren’t so lucky. I know I shouldn’t but I have to ask. “What happens if we don’t use the Darklight?”

“We would have to in any case, even if they weren’t going to land because now that they are in our gravity well, even if their ship were destroyed, it’s pieces would rain down on the base.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Were you listening when I said we are sitting on a star fragment? Without artificial gravity, you would weigh millions of pounds. When those fragments fall out of the sky, they will hit the star and our base with the force of a multi-megaton nuclear weapon.”

“This place was designed by Hegemony standards, a nuke shouldn’t even penetrate the shields.”

“Under any other condition I would agree with you. This isn’t any other condition. We are using our shields to protect us from the light of at least nine close suns and thirty others at more respectable distances but under a light year away. This ship used a jump drive so it appeared in this space from a great distance away and does not seem prepared for the conditions here. But the damage would not be from a single nuke. Every single scrap of that ship would weigh millions of pounds. Together, at the very least they would drop the shield with the hundreds of fragments raining down on us. Even if the building survived but the shield was gone, it would only be able to survive a few hours before radiation stress would tear it apart.”

Great. I am working on the most dangerous facility in the known universe and I am being told I have to save people who didn’t have any idea of what they were getting into. And I have to save them because if we don’t they may kill us all when they die from their own stupidity.

What else can go wrong?