Orion's Arm Universe Project
Assorted Snapshots
Assorted Snapshots by Arik (2020)
They look a bit like ancient biont dragon flies with rotor blades, only much larger and varied in their often non-symmetrical forms, with a variety of drones and swarmbot subunits slung underneath their sides . The hive of vecs has assembled into a massive thundering factory for the construction of a new brood. We're a smaller group of key-4s in the eighty part component arrangement of a family fabrication ecosystem. Each sub-web of the ecosystem helps breed nearly every other, converting rock and minerals into usable elements, then fuel and subcomponents, then higher order systems with a hundred redundancies. The great mining worms at the base of the ecosystem churn the soil with their ultimate muscles for better digestion by nanoswarms inside them. Dead, bombed-out soil brought into life again.
I was incredibly fortunate that such a new but insular society like kamov allowed me access. When they offered out the bid to our habitat to use uploaded refugee nearbaseline minds like my own for an interface so they could begin a trade program, i'd accepted, along with a few hundred others like me. We'd join them, and identify as them, in this time of peace.
This body that i'm inhabiting offers a rare glimpse into the comparatively harsh mechanosystem envome of the kamov autowars. The kamov reproduction system cannot be understood like the bodies of my previous lives as a biont, with most individual species mating in sexual reproductive pairs within an ecosystem, but rather an interconnected series of recycling and fabrication supply webs which bring about their cycles on the spectrum between full life and decay and death. Cooperation rather than competition drives the majority of ecologies here. And yet...
I should back up in time...
Once, several centuries ago, the factory hives formed a terrible existence as the murder-minded autowars during the version war. They converted entire landscapes of the planet into swarms of ships for battle. But then came peacetime again and under new direction, they've decided to follow the way of a new transapient provolver and become elevated into peaceful sophonts. Turning missiles into mechanical pollinators. Metaphorical swords into plowshares.
Still, as we joined our minds into the interfaces and bodies, the other refugees had suspected that the purpose of this new planetary mechanosystem was for research by the transapient Kavo- a form of envome that could convert with disturbing speed into another autowar production facility. They'd confirmed it. A backup plan, only, in case the war returned. Just like the recording of my mind, when that last body of mine died, twenty years ago. Now i've returned as a backup plan for someone else.
We form the ritual assembly line, using our wing blades to play different notes of the song of new life while we sing the words in radio waves. The idle ones watch on and when we as a pack see an attractive assembly line to join, we make ourselves known and begin negotiations for potential new brood. They advertise their assembly capabilities on the network spectrum. It's elaborate songwork, with repeated mentions of how good electricity from solar panels feels. How good they feel to become alive. The new generation will be even less well easily re-armed than the last under the next nonproliferation treaty, and perhaps in another three generations we'll inhabit an ecosystem family that won't ever poison its own children again with the drive for war production.
How ironic that such utterly artificial mechanosystems are in fact fundamentally more ecologically minded at their core than many biological societies I'd lived in, seeing as how the kamov parentage is so integrated within the entire mechanosystem. To even pollute the land with toxins would be to literally poison ones' own parents. And yet a poison remains, deep down. How ironic that such an ecosystem was once designed specifically for war, and perhaps, one day will be again.
But I hope my new interconnected, airborne family will not become a tool for manufacturing death.
At least for now, we'll continue to be a factory for life. "
Snapshot of Hostho in Above the Sky
I'm living my second week back on the homeworld, returned from the alien-constructed orbital habitats in the void. I hadn't become used to it all, even after ten years of calling the orbitals home. They feel distant now, the *brightness* of their metal and circuitry fading into memory, from their disturbingly efficient methods of experimental agriculture to grow our medicinal fungiforms, to the pin-braille smart matter interfaces I'd used to understand alien mechanisms, to the swarms of the ((invisible)) stars I saw in their pin-braille window-screens. So new and grand. Entire cities spinning in the void, less than a century old, with many of the orbitals finished after my birth. Still, my routines in the *bright* modern habitats had shuddered away in the flight of the landing shuttle. Two weeks of immigration & readjustment to the older homeworld brought me from the dream, back to the city of Toh*luuus where i'd been born.
The modern apartments in the cliff face disappear out of the range of echolocation as I hop-glide toward the train station. Alien autohelpers along the street, newly graffiti'ed with ceramic curse-bricks and piss, call out and reconfigure their faces with pin-braille ads for joining off-world colonization. I feel the *hum* of an electric light turning on from one of them and a vague brightening to my left for the benefit of one of the strange new cyborgs who's using light to see on the surface for some reason. The aliens had described full light-sight to me a few times, but I'd never yet felt much interest for the implant, even while living in the orbitals. Maybe one day, if I feel like light-seeing stars.
The doors hiss closed and my evening public train leaves the western quadrant. I hear the roar of the tunnel as we pass under the great cliff face that protected the old city. The latest polmusic hit from the city debates plays in earbud devices of some person sitting next to me and the *bright* metal doors hiss open. I join the crowd as they pass by the recreated diorama of the 9th dynasty's gas-powered train in the grand central station.
I can feel the sense of history here, cruder, older, but uncolonized by the new aliens, as I am. Smells like a grandmother To'ul'h pervade everywhere. Some of the locals avoid me and mutter 'collaborator' when they catch my scent. I ignore them. The government patronage for my work up there, teaching To'ul'h medicine and pharmaceutical harvesting to the aliens so they can reverse-engineer it, will sustain my children and even grandchildren once I finish this book. I'm still not used to public pin-braille literature for -everyone-, especially eastern highlanders, but i'm starting to see the benefits.
The marshy smells and ((soft)) textures of well-landscaped fungiform gardens fill out the airwalls along the bridges of the main street, presenting their soft anatomies along the sides. I can smell the spices and musks of the different varieties. A few people in the crowd hop-glide up to the second and third floors to examine shore-feudalist antiques. I walk on the gravel of clay bricks that old To'ul'h repurposed from the hill fortifications, surrounding the old city 6,000 years before, during the second reconstruction. Some of those pyramids had stood guard over the river delta for longer than the first structures on the frigid homeworld of the aliens' ancestors themselves. It was something my aristocrat grandparents always reminded me with pride in the remote voice-calls to the orbital. I usually responded with a quote from one of the new polmusic lines about how at least the aliens had deployed near-universal basic healthcare in mere decades, with proper birth control gaining traction. I might not like space, but the new ways have their advantages and maybe we won't all blight out out like the sixth dynasty lowlanders. We are still older than the aliens though.
I join a tour group at the entrance to the old cathedral and the clutter of bodies recedes. I might be modern, but I appreciate our history. I'll eat a piece of my grandmother's body when she dies, like a good daughter of To'ul'h.
The sculpted metal and ceramic patterns along the cathedral floor ((glitter)) and reflect back the echoes from the touring crowd. I could <> their lung cavities grow and shrink in the air as they meditated in the temple. Most of the ceramic on the floor was new of course, but the stone on the walls had listened for millennia as the worshippers of a hundred polities had risen and fallen like the air in the lungs of the meditators, and were replaced by others like cobblestones in the street.
I dip my fingers into the stepped pool and feel the *buzz* of the branching seabush from the bottom of the water conducting a holy magnetic field. I can ((klik)) the statues of the four old creation gods at the bottom of the pool, closest to heaven, and remember. I consider again the pin-braille symbols of the ((invisible)) stars of the void, in the orbital, and how the alien interface told me such faraway fires had created all the matter that composed me with the incredible energies of this nuclear fusion. Yet the old gods sit here, at the bottom of the pool, still as death, losing power. Old superstitions, certainly, but they still feel more familiar than the very real alien gods out there, around other worlds. The friendly demons in orbit. *bright* metal gods from the ((invisible)) stars, building some new form of paradise up there, in hell.
I raise my eyebrows a bit, my translator meshes with his and explains to me that he was referring to a "star sign". I sip my drink to buy time as I download an explanation of what that implied. "I mean sure. I'm the one gathering friends. I'm usually organized. Detail oriented. But you don't really believe this stuff do you? We're not even in SolSys.." I was beginning to wonder what I'd gotten myself into. His hands -were- nice though...
"Those old ways adapt easily enough to our star system, even if it's a binary. Just makes everything more interesting. We might not have Jupiter or Mercury here but we have Nuvjaptari, Famawan, Jinvanco...
So when exactly were you born?"
I tell him the date and time.
"Ahhh. Yes! That's good! You're a Leo Nuvjuptari rising, given the relative positions of the planets and suns. That means this year you'll be making yourself open to new experiences and adapt in ways your old self would never consider"
I give him a skeptical look but he persists-
" It's just a bit of fun really, a good way to find compatible people." He winked. "I'm a Famawan retrograde with a Jinvanco ascending, which means I'm passionate and outgoing and direct. That one certainly seems to be true"
Somehow I had noticed this.
He smiles as if reading my thoughts "and I'm very compatible with Leos. My exoself's been helping me become the Jinvanco ascending that I'm born to be, with psychoware nudging me to the right personality with magnetic fields and balance of neurostimulants or whatever. "
Ok... this wasn't so bad after all. "Well that makes sense. I'd considered integrating one of those horoscope add-ons to my exoself but it seemed a little.."
"Woo-ey? Too involved with crystal healing, fake transapients and dolphin mysticism? Don't avoid letting a healthy little bit of personality shifting happen because your birth psyche doesn't align to the local planets at the moment. Either way we should find some way to ...align"
Castor's been looking at my beard, or lips the whole time. I laugh at him.
"I was about to download that astrology add-on until you made that -horrible- pun"
"See! See! Nuvjuptari rising right there! You have a sense of humor somewhere in that head of yours! With a little help from the add-on you'll be acting like one in no time!"
"Screw it. Let's do this" I grinned.
I hadn't intentionally altered my personality like this for a while, even for personal growth, but I was pretty sure I'd have this energy with him with either version of myself. "Nuvjuptari rising" Dima or regular Dima. It would be an interesting month or six...
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-Snapshot from "Living as a Kamov" by EightFourNode, Gajasura habitat, 9814 AT
The Kamov vec wing blades hum in the air and I can hear in network several thousand iterations of new assembly instructions on the airwaves. Some previous version of myself in a biont body would have called this spring, or mating season, but the kamov hive uses a more wholistic understanding of the concept. Something that might bring me peace, even after escaping as a backup mind and seeing recordings of my own old bodies burn away in broken habitats. The bodies of the native Kamovs around me huddle and hum in the hot, dusty, but living air.They look a bit like ancient biont dragon flies with rotor blades, only much larger and varied in their often non-symmetrical forms, with a variety of drones and swarmbot subunits slung underneath their sides . The hive of vecs has assembled into a massive thundering factory for the construction of a new brood. We're a smaller group of key-4s in the eighty part component arrangement of a family fabrication ecosystem. Each sub-web of the ecosystem helps breed nearly every other, converting rock and minerals into usable elements, then fuel and subcomponents, then higher order systems with a hundred redundancies. The great mining worms at the base of the ecosystem churn the soil with their ultimate muscles for better digestion by nanoswarms inside them. Dead, bombed-out soil brought into life again.
I was incredibly fortunate that such a new but insular society like kamov allowed me access. When they offered out the bid to our habitat to use uploaded refugee nearbaseline minds like my own for an interface so they could begin a trade program, i'd accepted, along with a few hundred others like me. We'd join them, and identify as them, in this time of peace.
This body that i'm inhabiting offers a rare glimpse into the comparatively harsh mechanosystem envome of the kamov autowars. The kamov reproduction system cannot be understood like the bodies of my previous lives as a biont, with most individual species mating in sexual reproductive pairs within an ecosystem, but rather an interconnected series of recycling and fabrication supply webs which bring about their cycles on the spectrum between full life and decay and death. Cooperation rather than competition drives the majority of ecologies here. And yet...
I should back up in time...
Once, several centuries ago, the factory hives formed a terrible existence as the murder-minded autowars during the version war. They converted entire landscapes of the planet into swarms of ships for battle. But then came peacetime again and under new direction, they've decided to follow the way of a new transapient provolver and become elevated into peaceful sophonts. Turning missiles into mechanical pollinators. Metaphorical swords into plowshares.
Still, as we joined our minds into the interfaces and bodies, the other refugees had suspected that the purpose of this new planetary mechanosystem was for research by the transapient Kavo- a form of envome that could convert with disturbing speed into another autowar production facility. They'd confirmed it. A backup plan, only, in case the war returned. Just like the recording of my mind, when that last body of mine died, twenty years ago. Now i've returned as a backup plan for someone else.
We form the ritual assembly line, using our wing blades to play different notes of the song of new life while we sing the words in radio waves. The idle ones watch on and when we as a pack see an attractive assembly line to join, we make ourselves known and begin negotiations for potential new brood. They advertise their assembly capabilities on the network spectrum. It's elaborate songwork, with repeated mentions of how good electricity from solar panels feels. How good they feel to become alive. The new generation will be even less well easily re-armed than the last under the next nonproliferation treaty, and perhaps in another three generations we'll inhabit an ecosystem family that won't ever poison its own children again with the drive for war production.
How ironic that such utterly artificial mechanosystems are in fact fundamentally more ecologically minded at their core than many biological societies I'd lived in, seeing as how the kamov parentage is so integrated within the entire mechanosystem. To even pollute the land with toxins would be to literally poison ones' own parents. And yet a poison remains, deep down. How ironic that such an ecosystem was once designed specifically for war, and perhaps, one day will be again.
But I hope my new interconnected, airborne family will not become a tool for manufacturing death.
At least for now, we'll continue to be a factory for life. "
Snapshot of Hostho in Above the Sky
*qualia* indicates qualia only experienced through electroreception
((qualia)) indicates qualia only experienced through echolocation
(To'ul'h cultural symbol-concepts will be translated to their nearest equivalent to the reader, if EG privacy settings are set appropriately)
--------I'm living my second week back on the homeworld, returned from the alien-constructed orbital habitats in the void. I hadn't become used to it all, even after ten years of calling the orbitals home. They feel distant now, the *brightness* of their metal and circuitry fading into memory, from their disturbingly efficient methods of experimental agriculture to grow our medicinal fungiforms, to the pin-braille smart matter interfaces I'd used to understand alien mechanisms, to the swarms of the ((invisible)) stars I saw in their pin-braille window-screens. So new and grand. Entire cities spinning in the void, less than a century old, with many of the orbitals finished after my birth. Still, my routines in the *bright* modern habitats had shuddered away in the flight of the landing shuttle. Two weeks of immigration & readjustment to the older homeworld brought me from the dream, back to the city of Toh*luuus where i'd been born.
The modern apartments in the cliff face disappear out of the range of echolocation as I hop-glide toward the train station. Alien autohelpers along the street, newly graffiti'ed with ceramic curse-bricks and piss, call out and reconfigure their faces with pin-braille ads for joining off-world colonization. I feel the *hum* of an electric light turning on from one of them and a vague brightening to my left for the benefit of one of the strange new cyborgs who's using light to see on the surface for some reason. The aliens had described full light-sight to me a few times, but I'd never yet felt much interest for the implant, even while living in the orbitals. Maybe one day, if I feel like light-seeing stars.
The doors hiss closed and my evening public train leaves the western quadrant. I hear the roar of the tunnel as we pass under the great cliff face that protected the old city. The latest polmusic hit from the city debates plays in earbud devices of some person sitting next to me and the *bright* metal doors hiss open. I join the crowd as they pass by the recreated diorama of the 9th dynasty's gas-powered train in the grand central station.
I can feel the sense of history here, cruder, older, but uncolonized by the new aliens, as I am. Smells like a grandmother To'ul'h pervade everywhere. Some of the locals avoid me and mutter 'collaborator' when they catch my scent. I ignore them. The government patronage for my work up there, teaching To'ul'h medicine and pharmaceutical harvesting to the aliens so they can reverse-engineer it, will sustain my children and even grandchildren once I finish this book. I'm still not used to public pin-braille literature for -everyone-, especially eastern highlanders, but i'm starting to see the benefits.
The marshy smells and ((soft)) textures of well-landscaped fungiform gardens fill out the airwalls along the bridges of the main street, presenting their soft anatomies along the sides. I can smell the spices and musks of the different varieties. A few people in the crowd hop-glide up to the second and third floors to examine shore-feudalist antiques. I walk on the gravel of clay bricks that old To'ul'h repurposed from the hill fortifications, surrounding the old city 6,000 years before, during the second reconstruction. Some of those pyramids had stood guard over the river delta for longer than the first structures on the frigid homeworld of the aliens' ancestors themselves. It was something my aristocrat grandparents always reminded me with pride in the remote voice-calls to the orbital. I usually responded with a quote from one of the new polmusic lines about how at least the aliens had deployed near-universal basic healthcare in mere decades, with proper birth control gaining traction. I might not like space, but the new ways have their advantages and maybe we won't all blight out out like the sixth dynasty lowlanders. We are still older than the aliens though.
I join a tour group at the entrance to the old cathedral and the clutter of bodies recedes. I might be modern, but I appreciate our history. I'll eat a piece of my grandmother's body when she dies, like a good daughter of To'ul'h.
The sculpted metal and ceramic patterns along the cathedral floor ((glitter)) and reflect back the echoes from the touring crowd. I could <> their lung cavities grow and shrink in the air as they meditated in the temple. Most of the ceramic on the floor was new of course, but the stone on the walls had listened for millennia as the worshippers of a hundred polities had risen and fallen like the air in the lungs of the meditators, and were replaced by others like cobblestones in the street.
I dip my fingers into the stepped pool and feel the *buzz* of the branching seabush from the bottom of the water conducting a holy magnetic field. I can ((klik)) the statues of the four old creation gods at the bottom of the pool, closest to heaven, and remember. I consider again the pin-braille symbols of the ((invisible)) stars of the void, in the orbital, and how the alien interface told me such faraway fires had created all the matter that composed me with the incredible energies of this nuclear fusion. Yet the old gods sit here, at the bottom of the pool, still as death, losing power. Old superstitions, certainly, but they still feel more familiar than the very real alien gods out there, around other worlds. The friendly demons in orbit. *bright* metal gods from the ((invisible)) stars, building some new form of paradise up there, in hell.
-translated snapshot from the autobiography "Above the Sky", about the life of Hos'tho, a To'ul'h Doctor/Pharmacist who lived during the time after First Contact. Published 4106AT.
Snapshot: "Astrology" Kyusei habitat, Jinvanco System, 3250 AT
I raise my eyebrows a bit, my translator meshes with his and explains to me that he was referring to a "star sign". I sip my drink to buy time as I download an explanation of what that implied. "I mean sure. I'm the one gathering friends. I'm usually organized. Detail oriented. But you don't really believe this stuff do you? We're not even in SolSys.." I was beginning to wonder what I'd gotten myself into. His hands -were- nice though...
"Those old ways adapt easily enough to our star system, even if it's a binary. Just makes everything more interesting. We might not have Jupiter or Mercury here but we have Nuvjaptari, Famawan, Jinvanco...
So when exactly were you born?"
I tell him the date and time.
"Ahhh. Yes! That's good! You're a Leo Nuvjuptari rising, given the relative positions of the planets and suns. That means this year you'll be making yourself open to new experiences and adapt in ways your old self would never consider"
I give him a skeptical look but he persists-
" It's just a bit of fun really, a good way to find compatible people." He winked. "I'm a Famawan retrograde with a Jinvanco ascending, which means I'm passionate and outgoing and direct. That one certainly seems to be true"
Somehow I had noticed this.
He smiles as if reading my thoughts "and I'm very compatible with Leos. My exoself's been helping me become the Jinvanco ascending that I'm born to be, with psychoware nudging me to the right personality with magnetic fields and balance of neurostimulants or whatever. "
Ok... this wasn't so bad after all. "Well that makes sense. I'd considered integrating one of those horoscope add-ons to my exoself but it seemed a little.."
"Woo-ey? Too involved with crystal healing, fake transapients and dolphin mysticism? Don't avoid letting a healthy little bit of personality shifting happen because your birth psyche doesn't align to the local planets at the moment. Either way we should find some way to ...align"
Castor's been looking at my beard, or lips the whole time. I laugh at him.
"I was about to download that astrology add-on until you made that -horrible- pun"
"See! See! Nuvjuptari rising right there! You have a sense of humor somewhere in that head of yours! With a little help from the add-on you'll be acting like one in no time!"
"Screw it. Let's do this" I grinned.
I hadn't intentionally altered my personality like this for a while, even for personal growth, but I was pretty sure I'd have this energy with him with either version of myself. "Nuvjuptari rising" Dima or regular Dima. It would be an interesting month or six...
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