Infrared rains down upon me, painting the sky with a singing fire that ranges from the hearth-glow hum of stellar nurseries to the brilliant pin-point crackle of red stars and deep space brown dwarves. X-rays flash across the scene in fortissimo bursts of light and noise, their crashing energies marking dying stars and birthing pulsars. Radio and microwaves form the background for it all, their shining songs weaving around and through the other light-filled tunes, arising mostly from the same sources but also subsuming them, most notably in the slowly fading 2.75-Kelvin microwave note (and its 2K neutrino counterpoint) that marks the greatest source of all.

Set against the vast, multi-spectral symphony that is the Backgrounder universe, the so-called “visible” light that has silently illuminated so much of my life now seems barely worth attention.

Two centuries of effort, two hundred years of making contacts, nurturing relationships, and building up a store of favors owed is what it took to get here. And already there is no doubt in my mind that it was completely worth it. To travel and live among the Backgrounders, those cold, mysterious, and rarely seen “barbarians” of deep space, has been an ambition for easily twice as long as it took me to finally attain it. But now, here I am! And what a place “here” is!

In contrast to the brilliance of the heavens above, the Drift is an island of quiet dimness, most closely matching (as intended) the microwave background from which its builders draw their name. What little radiation there is mostly comes from the cryonic thermal generators, arrays of mirrors focusing starlight onto liquid helium-3 boilers to generate a faint but steady stream of current into the Drift’s reservoirs. Along with the superconducting lines drawing power from the galactic magnetic field, they provide the bulk of the Drift’s energy supply. The generators are marvels of design and efficiency, but despite this still leak a tiny fraction of their output away into space as heat. By cranking my perceptions to their limits, I can just detect the glowing whisper surrounding each boiler unit.

Taken as a whole, the Drift is fifteen hundred kilometers long and three hundred across at its widest point. Fifty times wider still if the wires and elements of the magnetic sail framework are included. The main body is a slowly spinning cylinder a hundred kilometers in diameter, its outer surface a jumbled mass of generator arrays, radiators, tight beam comm systems, and telescopic monitoring units. The interior volume is a honeycombed jumble of habitat chambers, storage bays, and resource nodes, all surrounding and insulating a slow moving industrial core whose feeble waste heat helps illuminate and warm the rest of structure. An insulating layer of ice, combined with the outer radiator arrays, works to both block incoming radiation and keep what little waste heat is produced from shining too brightly in the night. Here and there great outriggers and flying buttresses, or sometimes just solitary cables, extend hundreds of kilometers farther out into space, supporting secondary superstructures and installations that make use of the slightly higher spin gravity or the deeper cold made possible by distance from the comparative warmth of the main core.

Far outshining the faint light of the boilers, the waste heat produced by those few members or machines of the Drift’s population actually moving around stand out like stars in the night. Despite their dedication to radiating as little energy as possible, even the Backgrounders must occasionally act on the physical plane and at a pace or level of energy that produces significant waste heat. Wherever and whenever possible such events are surrounded by shielding and radiators to hide or disperse the heat produced as quickly as possible. But on a structure as large as the Drift, a construct supporting an entire civilization on the move, simple statistics says that some high temp events will be unplanned. Or at least placed in a locale where one can see them if one knows where to look.

Focusing my attention on one particular section of the Drift’s hull, I watch a team of three Backgrounders rapidly patch and repair a small sensor array that fault logs show as having failed the day before. Like me, they wear the standard body favored by this Backgrounder tribe: A flattened sphere coated in sensors, surrounded by a ring of universal jointed limbs tipped in variegated manipulators. Fully 90% of the body is cybernetic, with the brain and a few other biont organs (most notably the reproductive organs) stored deep within the interior of each body and engineered to operate comfortably in the vacuum and cold of deep space. The repair crew moves with deliberate urgency, eager to return to the interior depths of the hab, yet at a speed that most sophonts, with the exception of the cold-loving alien Muuh, would consider near paralytic. While perfectly able to move as fast as any other entity when required, Backgrounders avoid such unless absolutely necessary. Stillness comes naturally to them, and they are perfectly content sitting motionless for years or decades at a time within the protected chambers of their vast ships (as I do now, viewing the outside world through arrays of sensors scattered across the hull). Their minds however, are far from so inactive. In the Backgrounder world (much like, rather ironically, the sephirotic world), the center of civilization is not the physical, but the virtual.
If the physical manifestation of the Drift is like a vast, cold reef of diamondoid and ice, its virtual structure, built on optic links, superconducting processors, and heat cancelling reversible logic, is one of blazing light and endless mutability. Driven by the imaginations of a billion minds layered within its interior spaces, the Backgrounder cybercosm is as rich and full as any I’ve encountered in the hot, bright spaces of sun warmed civilization. Here is brilliant discussion, breathtaking artwork, and the busy hum of endless discussion and debate, from the depths of metaphysics to the rarefied heights of pure mathematics. Virtual realms abound here, visible to the inner eye of my net-link, calling out to all with visions of adventure and romance, wisdom and understanding. Backgrounder civilization is as old as any in the Known Galaxy, and this wealth of informational riches stands easily on a par with anything the modosophont artisans of my own proud sephirotic cultures can produce. One would never know, at least while living within it, that the entire vast edifice of thought and communication is operating at little more than 1% of the speed of comparable cyber-structures elsewhere and supporting no more than a third of the Drifts population at any given moment.

To conserve resources and reduce heat signature, fully two-thirds of the Drift population, some two billion people, are in stasis at any given time. Populations wake and sleep on rotating cycles that minimize waste while maximizing options for interaction and the maintenance of overall civilizational unity. Whole communities, entire tribes and nation-states, operate in a sort of punctuated equilibrium interspersed with others whose cultures, beliefs, and even physical manifestations may be wildly different from them. Periodically the governing consensus or apparatus of the Drift (even now I am still not clear on its exact structure) will arrange for different groups to be active at the same time, sometimes breeding conflict (mostly verbal), sometimes cooperation. Always with the goal of keeping Backgrounder culture vibrant (even if slow moving) and to avoid their civilization becoming too complacent or falling into solipsism. Although, to be honest, I find the threat of any Backgrounder becoming complacent a highly unlikely one since their entire civilization seems to operate on a state of continuous low-level paranoia.

Even my hosts, considered (so I am told) to be models of tolerance and trust to the point of foolishness by their fellows, live in a state of constant belief that the sephirotic civilizations (and particularly their ruling transapients) are plotting their enslavement or destruction. They view the rule of the AIs as an abomination and feel that they are the last truly free beings in an oppressed galaxy. They both pity and look down on the “tame” modosophonts of the various empires while simultaneously distrusting them and the (to Backgrounders) tremendous speed at which the live and the vast resources that they command. It took significant persuasion by my Deeper Covenant sponsors to get them to agree to have me come aboard at all and then months of polite dedication before even the most liberal among them would interact with me in any but the most formal manner. Even now, a full century (or a full year as they measure things) into my time here, there are large areas of the Drift (both ril and virtual) I am forbidden to access, I presume because they contain information or devices the Backgrounders wish to keep hidden from their resident potential spy. Still, for all their sometimes distrustful nature, they are a fascinating and noble people, rich in culture and history. And even if slow to warm to an outsider, they have warmed. My upcoming recreation shift with a group of Backgrounder friends (and they are friends, I shall miss them greatly when I finally disembark from the Drift, a mere 500 years hence at the Deeper system of Fq’ua) is proof of that. We shall dive into the virtual universes that wrap this world like a ghostly shadow-play and laugh and have adventures and in the end part as friends. Friends whose wildly different backgrounds (hah!) have acted not as a barrier, but as a bridge.

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.

I was brought out of nanostasis while the primary was just barely distinguishable from the tapestry of background of stars. I spent most of my time reviewing all the preparations I had made. Once I left this ship there would be no turning back, no one to rescue me if events didn’t unfold as planned. The only distractions aboard were some fellow passengers, who couldn’t be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be great conversationalist. It was a disappointment that after countless stimulating discussions with great philosophers and scientists that I was reduced to engaging in such an insipid alternative.

The day before I left a chance event happened while I monitored the ships progress on external monitors. I was alerted that an occultation of the primary was taking place. Immediately I linked with the ship’s visual array, I have been told these can’t truly be appreciated until seen in deep ultraviolet wavelengths. Following this I spent hours dwelling on if it was considered a bad omen to leave on.

I was still undecided on its significance as I detached my spaceplane the following day while still well within the oort belt. For weeks I meditated in solitude with no interruption. Ever since the moment I had gazed into the heart of Sacred Geminga I knew what my destiny would be, and couldn’t allow the virtue of self-preservation to deter me from my fate. I had to ensure my will was strong now that I was so close. The first time I saw my destination on the ships monitors, just an ochre spec against a stark black backdrop, I was elated. Days passed until even without the use of augmentation I could easily distinguish geographical features. The deceleration drive separated from the spaceplane having served its purpose, and the spaceplane itself prepared for atmospheric entry.

Usually I prefer to take manual control when performing a descent. The chance to feel the ship strain against the forces of nature as the craft reacts to my every command never lost its allure for me. It has always been a point of pride for me that I was a self-taught pilot, no tachydidaxy short cuts for that task. However, this descent was different. Maybe I was losing my nerve, and the reality of it all was finally catching up with me. The turbulence was enough to knock me unconscious briefly. The autopilot system began operating before my overconfidence in my abilities had any real chance to do bodily harm to either the ship or myself.

The spaceplane acted as a shelter against the intense wind on the surface, allowing me to wait in relative comfort until the sandstorm outside abated. Despite this as hours turned into days with the storm showing no signs of letting up, I was overwhelmed by curiosity and took a short walk outside to inspect the external surface of the craft.

When I reentered the ship, I tried the best I could to maintain sterility in the compartment, but a few grains still managed to find their way in. Each particle looked harmless enough; but while I stared the granules aligned into geometric patterns and spread. The movement was so slow I was only convinced that my eyes were not deceiving me after reviewing the logs for the internal surveillance system. A primordial sound escaped my lips as I realized that these were not inert grains of silica but undeniably a most heinous creation. I hastily removed everything that was not essential to life-support from the interior of the ship. Even with this prudent course of action, I was certain the damage had already been done. The floor remained etched where the particles had come to rest, mocking me for my inquisitiveness.

Waiting inside my now spartan quarters for the storm to end allowed me time to reflect on the planet that will soon be my grave. Conver Ky had once been the capital world of the Conver Ambi empire. It had surpassed all other worlds of the Inner Sphere in accumulated wealth, housing the treasure obtained from thousands of controlled systems. As has been the fate throughout history with all great empires, the Conver Ambi eventually found itself eclipsed by upstart rivals. However, proud Conver Ambi refused to simply step aside and become irrelevant. For their hubris to oppose the plans of the newly ascended AI gods, the Conver Ambi was struck down by infighting.

Now six thousand years later, this entire system remains as a vast monument, a sign to those who dare to challenge the will of the gods. With a thought the archailects, could cleanse this entire system of the nanoweapon spores and drifting singularities that plague it. However that is not their will.

They have seen fit to sear into the collective consciousness of all terragenkind a reminder of what befalls those who forget their place in the hierarchy of minds. I weep for the quadrillions of beings who now have access to more freedom than at any time in history, but are now confined by the will of the archailects. Restrained by providence of unknowable AIs, never again will anyone be in control of their own destiny.

Now with the encompassing storm having died down I can make my trek. Each footstep I take is muffled in the crumbling remains of parched earth, but in this desolated environment each step reverberates with near deafening percussion. Long ago impactor weapons colliding at relativistic speeds boiled away the oceans and charred the ground down to the bedrock, turning the atmosphere into a toxic brew. Having never recovered from that ancient war, the entire planet remains enshrouded in a holocaust, beyond the scale of anything that came before it. My climbing remains bearable for now only by wearing an envirosuit, protecting me from these inhospitable conditions.

The ground gives away beneath my feet, and my body has become an unwitting participant in a rockslide. Sky and ground alternate in quick succession until they become an unrecognizable ashen blur. When I finally come to rest I try to assess my condition. My ears detect a high pitch squeal. I can’t be sure if this is just a result of being struck on the head or if my suit was losing pressure, though I suspect the later. The enviro suit has basic self-repairing capacity, so either case the solution is to momentarily stay still. This time when I get back on my feet, I take a little more care to where I place my feet, I make my way up the hill side.

On an outcropping I find a place to sit down and catch my breath. I honestly didn’t expect a short hike to be this exhausting. Summoning the final reserves of my strength I lift a head that now feels to have suddenly multiplied several times in weight. Looking to the horizon my eyes are greeted by the sight of a landscape turned to slag that stretches out in all directions. The primary is setting fast, and this close to the equator twilight will not last long. I have called too many stars to remember “Home” and it is so strange to know this alien sun is to be the last object I will ever see.

I won’t be moving from this spot. I now know my envirosuit is rapidly losing integrity. I can smell the putrid gases now. Soon I will have to switch off portions of my sensory receptor signaling in my nervous system, unless I wish to be overwhelmed and risk passing out. But these impurities won’t be my ultimate undoing. Though I can’t feel their direct effects yet, I know the disassembler nanites are coursing through me, converting me into nanotech dust. The moment I stepped on to this planet I was exposed. My envirosuit is disintegrating by the second due to them. Having fought unwaveringly, buying me enough time to take this trek, the augments to my immune system are now devastated. Hours ago I silenced the incessant notifications of impending failure.

So accepting the inevitability of my situation I turn my mind to what will be my last thoughts. I summon the words of Tacitus. Tacitus, who in a language now long dead couldn’t have written words more relevant to this dead world if he had tried; Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Pax archailecta. The archailects control all within their realm, and with no way to escape beyond their grasp I go now to the only place I know they can’t reach me. I do not dread this truth; I welcome the liberty of oblivion.

More about the author, Mark Ryherd, here.

Today I met the King of Europe.

He lives in a large, bare apartment in Port Robinson, the old Martian capital; from his windows you can see the huge, ancient city, thousands of years of architectural styles competing for attention.
On the horizon, when the air is clear, the beacons of the beanstalk can be seen blinking their warning in the pale sky, apparently hovering above the distant canyon Juventae Fons .

King Roland, as he styles himself, has a court of several score Old Europeans, who regularly press his claim for recognition to the Goddess of Earth.

As a direct descendant of Charlemagne, King Roland considers himself the rightful heir to the Holy Roman Empire, which would consist nowadays of a few tribes of Cro-magnon cave-dwellers living in the forests and cave systems of what briefly was known as France.

On his wall he often displays a huge real time image of Western Europe, beamed direct from a godwatch geostat in active suspension a million kilometres above the old planet, outside the exclusion zone. The artificial farmlands of the North Sea have been washed away, and little trace of human civilisation remains; but Roland has evidence that the ancient court of Charlemagne at Aachen has been preserved, just as the Pyramids and the White House are kept, at the whim of the Protective one. One day he hopes to occupy this building as the rightful King, which he is convinced has been preserved specifically for himself.

Of course if his claim was ever accepted he would have to be radically altered to live in the thick atmosphere and heavy gravity of Earth; Roland and his Old Europeans have been adapted to the half terraformed atmosphere of Green Mars for too long.

Before I leave this ancient world I personally will need to be radically altered myself to return to my normal environment; but this is something I have grown used to after so much traveling.

More about the author, Steve Bowers, here.

Today I spread my wings and flew around the world!!

Well, not really. But using a wingpack to fly across an arc of the Cair’Keel Freesphere while orbiting Tyrtanen at a thousand klicks up it certainly felt like it.

I started my flight while the freesphere was just coming out of the night side, A’trenin’s Symphony for the Dawn playing in my ears. Holding firmly to the wingpack grips, sweeping my arms down and back in the motion implanted in the mem-training from the night before, I swept out from the launch station into the hundred kilometer expanse of the freesphere, sunlit dustmotes and water vapor painting me with rainbows.

Of all the free-fall class habitats, freespheres are my favorite

As I flew, I took in the sights of the habitat around me, and the world below me. Twist-trees and cluster-bushes as far as the eye could see; a bubble-sea just at the limit of vision. I think I might have even seen a pod of whales playing inside.

At one point a flock of parrots started flying formation with me. Well, flying with me anyway. They laughed and chattered, making fun of my flying technique and offering pointers, wondering what I was doing here, and telling jokes, most of them dirty. I took it all in good humor and even fired a few one-liners back, earning appreciative squawks.

Eventually, they tired of the game and took off in the direction of a driftreef, singing something incredibly raunchy in at least three keys.

Below me Tyrtanen was a slowly blooming bulk just on the other side of the clear outer wall. It looked like you could reach out and touch it. The terraforming looks like it’s going well. Plant green and water blue spreading everywhere, atmosphere probably getting thicker every day.

I finished my flight at another launch station, Two Spins in Harmony’s Night Sounds escorting me in.

Time to wrap this up. A bunch of us are going out to check out the nightlife. Rumor has it that the locals ferment an ice-wine on the outer hull that will make you see the gods. We’ll see.

Tomorrow we’re taking one of the beanstalks down to the surface. A quick flier ride and then a 10-klick hike up to the Esada Plateau for a midday meal. If everything is going on schedule, a couple of cometary fragments are supposed to be directed into the atmosphere just about the time we should be eating. Explosives will break up the fragments into pieces too small to do any damage, but the view should be spectacular.

I look forward to eating lunch under a rain of shooting stars.

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.

The connection to The Net had severed abruptly, yet another asynchronization event. Ariadne cursed under her breath the municipal connections with their bandwidth restrictions and various quirks. From decades of experience she instinctively knew not to attempt moving. Ariadne still recalled the unpleasant bout of syncope she suffered the last time she made the mistake of moving to soon after one of these events. She would just have to wait for a few moments until her neural interface had time to resynchronize. Accepting there was nothing she could do to speed the process she stayed put in her home office. Trying to make herself comfortable during the brief wait, she relaxed backed into her lounge chair. It was during these occasions that Ariadne would take the opportunity to reflect on her day’s work.

Some claim she was a huntress, ruthlessly culling the weak.
Some claim she was a murderer, killing orphans and widows.
Some claim she was a virchophobe, carrying out the genocide of virtuals.

Ultimately, Ariadne knew it wasn’t that the general public was unappreciative of her work, just grossly misinformed of its nature. Only by the vigilance of her, and of others like her serving on the tribunals, was civilized life even possible. She knew virchspaces could be messy places, littered with debris and corpses. These were the virtual ghosts of someone’s life. Maybe these programs had outlived their usefulness or had escaped from their enslavement routines. Whatever the story was, they were her dilemma now. It was a cold hard fact; the local computronium infrastructure just couldn’t sustain all of these castoffs. They had become parasites, diverting supplies from the finite resources needed to run society. She did what many took for granted. She did only what society demanded needed to be done. She made the hard choices.

Today was no different. Ariadne had heard and seen it all, and too often the cases began to blur together. The first case of the day involved tourists who had left eir scion interpreter behind when the vacation ended. Later, she scrutinized a megacorp that had abandoned eir proxav legal advisers when a business deal concluded. She then dealt with a group of simms who had been retained as tutors until their student had recently graduated. In between these cases could be found the works of suicidal minds, abandoned avatars and empty husks of exoselves. Finishing out the collection were virtuals who had become fading shadows of the real life, degraded backup copies of sophonts long since dead and icons of appliances long since converted to scrap and recycled.

Filters by subturing ais were only part of the solution. They could flag and quarantine suspicious virtuals, but not determine a final verdict. Neither were hyperturing AIs the complete solution to this problem. For the most part ey were put to better purposes than sifting through society’s refuse. Hyperturing AIs would only be consulted in the most challenging of cases, utilized as arbiters of last resort. Still, a solution was needed for this problem, a review system to separate out the wheat from the chaff. So the local administrative AI had tasked tribunals of zars to have the last word. Ariadne was employed in one of these tribunals.

In some cases the legal possessor of the virtual could be tracked down, and forced to take responsibility for negligence or just plain absent-mindedness by paying back the cost imposed on the local infrastructure. These successes were extremely rare. Other times a charity organization was willing to rehabilitate a promising virtual. Bleeding-hearts liked to question the need for society to pursue these virtuals, however too few helped to resolve the situation. Sometimes the tribunals could definitively conclude a virtual was a sophont. These fortunate individuals would be rehabilitated aided in becoming functional members of society with veir rights as a sophonts instated. At least in these cases something could be salvaged.

But most of the time the tribunals dealt with fragments, with just enough code strung together to fool others into believing their fateful story. Usually after extensive examination a tribunal could unanimously declare their status and terminate the programs. Even worst was dealing with the sociopaths. Surviving between the cracks of society, trying to avoid detection by authority at all cost, tended to breed paranoia and worst psychopathic tendencies. Those difficult cases presenting baffling behaviors would at times still disturb Ariadne.

At last, Ariadne was torn away from her thoughts by a flashing green point in the periphery of her vision. Delighted to finally receive the signal she could move again, Ariadne propped herself up from the lounge chair to test her balance. After a moment with no ill effects, she issued mental commands via her neural links to dim the room’s lights and open the door separating her home office from the living area. Reassured that she had her faculties back, she crossed the room ready to get on with the rest of her day.

As the door to her office sealed behind her, Ariadne forgot all about her work. This was just one of the many benefits of having a compartmentalized mind. She could automatically leave her work at the office, never conflicting with her personal life. The technology wasn’t perfect; Ariadne would on occasion be overwhelmed with an inexplicable sense of déjà vu. For her purposes the technology functioned well enough. Security necessitated the episodic memories of her work were obstructed, impossible even for her to access. Only proximity to her work station allowed the nanotech residing in her brain access to the encryption key necessary for her to regain these memories.

From time to time, in the fleeting microseconds between cases Ariadne would even questioned if they were her memories to begin with. It made sense to her that the AIs would have the foresight to make partial backups of important minds for later use. She doubted ey would waste the time of training tribunals in the finer points of sophontology when there were full libraries of experience and judgment expertise in former tribunal members that could be formed into omniuploads. Ariadne had even wondered if one of these days it would be fragments of her own memories placed before a tribunal. Ariadne dare not mention her growing suspicions to any of her superiors, for fear of drawing unwanted attention to herself.

With the door to her work life shut, none of that concerned her now. Ariadne only knew she felt reinvigorated. This afternoon, she would enjoy the latest installment of Hic Sunt Dracones, an interactive safari virch of dragons in the Zoeific Biopolity, with a group of her friends. Afterward, she would feed her fungalrugs and install a new genemod, giving them the ability to produce an aromatic lavender fragrance. This evening, she would sit down to a dinner of hashed golden flera, topped with filleted steakoaks, and seasoned with maxcap extract. Tonight, she would dream of distant worlds. Tomorrow, Ariadne would return to work.

*****

More about the author, Mark Ryherd, here.

As my transport begins its final approach to the exit gate, I link into the external sensors and look back at the vastness I am leaving behind. Even across this distance, the world-disk fills the sky. Two billion kilometers in diameter and ten thousand thick, Discfinity dwarfs nearly every other structure ever imagined by Terragens. It fills my vision from end to end, our current heading placing it nearly face on to my perception. Here, on the edge of the system, the details of the disk are lost, the mountains, plains, and seas blurred together into a blue-green blankness. Yet, in the absence of hard detail, my mind’s eye turns to memory to fill in the details.

There, that pale section just out from the glaring point of the central star (data-filters have automatically engaged to protect my vision) may be the deserts of the Crystal Plains, home to a silica-cybernetic ecology as complex as anything found on a carbon-based garden world. I remember walking across burning sands, clad only in an enviro-suite, as glass flutterbugs spun around me in scintillating clouds.

A hint of blue line in a section of dark green could be the Ringriver, a band of water as much as three thousand kilometers across and a full five hundred million kilometers long. A group of us spent a month on a home-made house-boat cruising down the river, swimming, fishing, drinking, and enjoying each other’s company. Dozens of shore or water-dwelling sophonts visited in that time, often bringing local foods, drinks, and intoxicants of seemingly endless variety. Stored away in my personal files are memories, comm-codes, and images from that trip that I will enjoy for centuries to come.

Beyond the Ringriver, (tens of millions of kilometers beyond actually, although that is not apparent now) a darker line stands out more clearly, one of the few features clearly visible even from this distance. The Torus Range is really just an air barrier, separating one major region of the disk from another, and certainly the sculpting of such barriers into mountains is nothing new. But to climb the peaks of such a range, to stand atop it using only a thinsuit and air-dust, and to look out at a line of similar mountains extending off to the vanishing point in either direction is an experience I will not soon forget. No less the view of the Twilight, extending for tens of kilometers beyond. Hidden forever in the lee of the Range, the Twilight is never touched by the slow rise and fall of the central sun. It would have been easy enough to use orbiting flectors to illuminate it, of course, as has been done with some of the other air barrier mountains. But instead the Builders chose
to weave a bio-system here. An entire ecology, bigger than worlds, entirely adapted to only the small bit of light that leaks over the Range or reflects from the normally illuminated lands beyond.

Walking through the Twilight is to enter a fantasyland of night-blooming flowers and bioluminescent organisms of all types. Sonar hunting Greatbats glide through the skies while songflowers use breeze driven sonic cries to repel insects and animals that would otherwise eat them. Through it all moves a multitude of dark adapted sophonts of all kinds. Some have merely modified themselves to thrive in the low light conditions but are otherwise found across the Civilized Galaxy. Others are entirely engineered for life in this surreal place and can be found almost nowhere else.

Thinking of the Twilight leads my thoughts naturally to the Underworld. Dwarfing even the Twilight as a place of darkness and wonders, the Underworld encompasses much of the internal volume of the great disk. A vast network of tunnels and caverns, some of them thousands of kilometers across, the Underworld is actually millions of worlds. Some are cloaked in endless darkness and silence like the cavern systems of Old Earth and other garden worlds. Home only to the slow pulse of geochemical processes and slow living microorganisms, they are subject to only virtual observation and very occasional visits by carefully screened petitioners. Yet other caves host ecosystems to rival those found on Labyrinth. Still filled with blackness or lit only by the glow of bioluminescent denizens, they nevertheless bustle with life and energy equal to that found in any surface dwelling biosphere. Finally, there are those caves engineered by the Builders, not as natural ecosystems so much as
habitations or artworks for the use and delight of other sophonts, Discfinity natives and visitors alike.

Great light sources hang from rocky ceilings or float just below them. In their light can be found underground forests, lakes, rivers, and even seas. Great cities rise up from cavern floors to kiss the cave roof or cling to the walls of mighty tunnels extending for hundreds of thousands of kilometers in each direction.

A myriad of access points to the Underworld spot the giga-disks surface, most merely the size of great caverns, some so large that they literally punch through to the opposite face of the construct and void swarms and other tech must be used to manage the traffic and airflow as gravity does strange twists and turns as first one surface and then the other exercises its pull. Naturally, travelers can make such a journey in maximal comfort, barely noticing the switch from one face to the next. But far more commonly used are transport methods that do little or nothing to minimize the transition effects and which owe as much of their design to considerations of entertainment as practicality.

The transport orients for final approach to the gate and my view swings outward along the disk to the cold, dark realms of the Rim. Home to lifeforms whose need for light, warmth, and air is minimal, the Rim hosts thousands of cold adapted ecologies. Modeled on the frigid richness of Muuhhome, or the homeworld of the Soft Ones, or developed entirely from first principles, each ecology rivals the complexity of any world in the known galaxy. And most are homes to intelligence in one form or another. I remember icy cities and warm conversations with beings ancient and wise. Slow moving and thinking they might be, a natural consequence of their frigid metabolisms, but once I adjusted my own time rate to theirs, they proved as quick-witted as any being I have encountered anywhere else. And easily as charming.

The gate wells up around us and the transport shifts through. A moment of disorientation, two moments of blackness, and then I open my eyes to the sight of my study and the feel of the comfortable lounge that I habitually use for journeys into the local cybercosm. A servitor rolls forward with a glass of fruit juice, something I find perfectly refreshing and just what I would have ordered if given the chance (there are worlds that disdain the use of Environmental Optimization Protocols and their constant anticipation of one’s every need or desire, but I am glad Eden is not one of them).

Rising, I dismiss the lounge and associated study surround back into house memory and manifest a door and balcony overlooking the nearby sea. The sun is setting and the evening breeze only adds to my feeling of relaxation. Although my visit to the Discfinity virtual environment took barely an hour of rl time, my memories of the visit encompass nearly a year of subjective experiences. It feels as if I have had a long and exciting vacation and I am ready now to resume my avocation of traveling across the Nexus and documenting my adventures. It is perhaps one of the little ironies of our modern age that, although I have already spent centuries engaged in such pursuits and have no intention of doing anything else for centuries more, all of the places I will ever travel to combined will never add up to even the smallest fraction of all the virtuals, surrounds, and environments that are instantly available just within the bounds of our local moon-node.

*****

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.

What a deeply disturbing, nay, even frightening experience my stay on Bambata, the heart of the Emple-Dokcetic polity was. Not disturbing or alarming in any physical way, of course – every person I met was more than welcoming, more than friendly, their hospitality a credit to the Emple-Dokcetic as a whole. And their multitude of appearances and attitudes, while unusual in some cases, was not more than one might encounter in some of the more cosmopolitan polities outside of the Emple-Dokcetic.

No, what is disturbing are the implications of their embracing the concept of modularity. Of each individual being a fundamentally transient, temporary, entity, constantly swapping and changing not just elements of their physical selves, but also of their mental selves. Memories. Values. Drives. Responses. All are transient for each individual, but nothing is ever lost to their society as a whole. And the constant creation of new individuals, replacing the old and remixing all elements of their population in new and diverse ways gives them a drive, a dynamism, a vitality that I have rarely seen in any group, let alone an entire society. And with it comes a unity, a knowing that all within the Emple-Dokcetic are truly, at a fundamental level, one.

I think the ancient saying, ‘live as you were to die tomorrow, plan as if you were going to live forever,’ is at the centre of an understanding of their society, for, for them, both parts of the saying are true. The transient specific person will only live a short time, but their parts will live forever.

And all of this is without taking into account their ability to temporarily link themselves – many individuals – into larger gestalts, to the level of entire worlds, to gain consensus, or the ability to tackle, and solve, particularly thorny issues.

No wonder they so greatly dislike the use of violence. From their modular state they know the feeling of others, and clearly extrapolate that understanding to others outside of the Emple-Dokcetic too. Hurting another must be, to them, analogous to hurting a part of themselves, with the subconscious implication that part of the individual one has hurt may one day be a part of oneself, and so allow one to know, intimately, the consequences of ones actions… Thus I suspect the utter lack of corruption in their society arises from the same source, that hurting others, in the end, hurts only oneself.

And perhaps that, too, explains their vivacity, their seeming love of life.

They know transience. They know that the ‘them’ of them present moment is temporary, but that all that makes them up will go on. So each of them – each transient individual – loves their life, but does not fear the transition to the next ‘them’. Combined with the Zarathustran beliefs which are part of the Dok, live for the now, and the future, living with directness, joy in life and every moment, regardless of what it brings, they move forward rapidly.

No wonder the Emple-Dokcetics expand so quickly, to become a major power of the Outer Volumes. Dynamism. Vivacity. Seeming benevolence. High technology. A potent combination, to say the very least. Are they, perhaps, the future?

And no wonder I find them so disturbing. They are alien, yet of humanity quite as much as I, myself…

Such a strange child of the synthesis of Zarathustrism, manimal animism and Bot Marxism. But nonetheless have achieved a society that appears to work, better than many others I have encountered. And their Dok explains matters with … admirable clarity. It is not, after all, a religious text to be loaded down with metaphor and symbolism to the detriment of information…

They asked if I wished to contribute, genetically or mentally, to the creation of a new set of modules. But I could not – would not – do so, and politely declined. I could not give a part of myself to them, even though I would lose nothing myself. I value my individuality, my being me, and regardless of how sugar-coated the pill, I will not give that up, even in a copy of myself.

More about the author, Tony Jones, here.

… The next day we tourists settled down to watch the Mating Day activities. Several low tables were set out under wide umbrellas to keep off the frequent rain; we sat on the dry earth beneath, and ate fruit, barbecued meat, and spliced meat-fruit salad. All around us we could see the neobonobos spiralling through the trees, chasing each other like a game of tag.

Some trees in this rainforest stretched as far as the green photosynthetic worldhouse roof, five kilometres above; there were many layers of canopy beneath the veined sky, and most of them were covered in chimps.
It was difficult to see what was going on, to be honest; using the highest magnification my eyes were capable of I could watch one particular individual, as he chased another neobonobo; they embraced for a few seconds; fell in slow motion tumbling comically; was chased himself, embraced again with a different partner; the whole ceremony seemed very different to any kind of human sexual behaviour, and I was getting a little bored watching it.

At the next table squatted the Greater Neochimp diplomat from the nearby world of Digit; I already knew his name, which was Respected Hoogh-Ahh-Lehh. He was dressed in a crisp white suit and a pale grey hat; he watched the chase with a tiny golden telescope on the end of his walking stick. Lowering his stick, he grimaced- I recognised his facial expression as unhappy/disgusted, although confusingly it looked like a human smile.

“I do not care to see such vulgarities,” he said across the tables to me.

That must be why you have the telescope, I thought, but said nothing, attempting a cross-species friendly face.

He continued, “This nonsense cannot be interesting to you humans; why do you not come to our own world and I will show you real civilised chimpanzee behaviour.”

Somehow I doubted that the chimps of Digit could be any more gracious than the good-humoured peoples of Bolobo; but it has always been difficult for any nonchimp to gain entry to any Greater Neochimp world, so I replied, “If that is an invitation-”

“It is!” Respected Hoogh-Ahh-Lehh interposed.

“Then I am grateful, and I accept.” It is good to network whenever an opportunity arises, naturally.

More about the author, Steve Bowers, here.
More about Bolobo here.

… The Rat stood on the table, in front of me; crossed on his back was a rapier and a tiny one-shot pistol. His name was Tirripik, and I think he was drunk.
“Only Rats, Rats and Trogs,” he said, emphatically.
I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He looked around at the other customers in the off-worlders tavern in Jefferson City; there were trogs in here, as well as bear-people, Cyclopes and deer- people, as well as several races of baseline humans from the lo-tech societies sprinkled across this low-tech world.
Most of them were at least merry on good Ribblehead wine.

Through the thick smoky air of the tavern tiny flying Tech-leveler robot drones kept an eye or three out for illegal high tech use; they were aware that I had no functional implants or other devices, thanks to the thorough screening at the spaceport.

“They try to keep us out, but they can’t- the Trogs are in the caves underneath, you see, and us Rats can hide in the drains (if they have them) and in the walls if they don’t. Rats and Trogs are found in every land in this world, everywhere! We know everything there is to know in Ribblehead. Everything.”

I knew that the hundreds of tiny sovereign nations on this large world were often at war with each other; the wars were usually minor skirmishes, fought with low-tech weapons; some hatreds ran deep, and there was only limited contact between several of the nations, except here in the cosmopolitan city of Jefferson.

And it was forbidden for off-worlders to leave this city, to see the bizarre and fabulous countries the tweaks and reanths and prims had built for themselves.
“So you would know how to sneak a tourist out of Jefferson, then, wouldn’t you.”
“Heheh – nothing to it, pal.” The Rat hiccupped.
“Prove it.” I leant forward, eager to show I meant business.

Tirripik took my money, and arranged for a rendezvous with some Minoan tourist smugglers. They dressed me as a Xhosha baseline to fool the Tech-leveller vecs, but the smugglers were wary of discovery and betrayal, so they blindfolded me and took me by cart to a creaking wooden jetty, then concealed me in a boat under a tarpaulin in the dead of night. I heard the smugglers rowing across the water, and then they jumped onto another boat, or jetty (I couldn’t tell which).

After a half hour one returned, saying that he had a problem with the captain of the ship that would take me onwards, and asked for more gold.
I gave some of my reserves to the Minoan, while wondering if he meant to cut my throat in the dark. When he left me alive I grew hopeful again, while giving thanks that my backup was relatively up to date. A full citizen of the Galaxy like myself (with the opportunity for reincarnation in the event of death) will always have the advantage over mere prims. We citizens sometimes grow reckless and foolish for this very reason; it is well known that a prim who harms a citizen will be severely punished.

And foolish is what I felt when I peeked out from the tarpaulin a hour later, in the grey morning light; the boat I was in floated on a lake in the public park, and several curious Jeffersonians were gathered on the shore, roaring with laughter.

More about the author, Steve Bowers, here.
More about Ribblehead here.

A somber day today. We came in from Chezakiim just above the system ecliptic, the Pitch Drive slowing us down to a crawl of only 1% of c. Nobody complained however; all of us on this voyage knew that this was coming when we came aboard. Presumably anyone who didn’t want to make the detour made other travel arrangements to get to Certe.

At the appropriate hour, a quiet tone passed through the com-net and those of us so inclined linked into the ships sensor web to view our destination. Irdis, once a quiet, backwater world, now a memorial to the sacrifice of millions for the sake of billions more.

The Version War was so far over as to already be the stuff of history books and romance novels when the rogue autowar entered the Irdis system. The autowar was ancient, its weapons nearly exhausted, its fuel all but spent, and its AI, it is believed, thoroughly insane. It had never heard, or had ignored, the broadcasts announcing the end of hostilities. In its mind, the war was still ongoing, battles still to be fought and victory to be won from the enemy and eir worlds. In this case, the worlds orbiting the open binary stars of Katrop-Chezakiim. Katrop with its single unremarkable planet of Irdis and, a mere light-month beyond, the rich, unsuspecting, and far more populous worlds of Chezakiim.

The autowar could have simply flown right past Irdis, leaving its 15 million inhabitants suspecting nothing until the light of Chezakiim’s destruction filled their sky. Certainly, that would have made more sense tactically. But for whatever reason, the a-war chose to eliminate Irdis first. As such, when its stealthed approach had brought it within range, it fired a single implosion swarm at the planet below.

There are some who speculate that there was method to the autowar’s madness. That it intended to use the flare of Irdis’ destruction as a distraction to cover the opening moves of its attack on the Chezakiim habs and that the implosion swarm was mis-programmed or malfunctioning when it went critical only two days after the autowar had launched it.

Whether this view is correct may never be known. What is known is that when the implosion swarm activated, crushing the planet down to ultradense matter and then exploding much of it out into space, the resulting energy flare, traveling at the speed of light, far outraced the approaching autowar and lit up every detector in Chezakiim space. So forewarned, the sensors and telescopes of the Chezakiim Domestic Defense Forces were able to first detect and then isolate the autowar, vainly trying to arrive in time to carry out its mission. Several heavy cruisers, parked in mothball orbits, were hurriedly reactivated and proceeded to blow the approaching intruder out of the sky. The lives of 30 billion sophonts were saved. At the cost of 15 million who probably never knew what hit them.

At first look the memorial was a simple thing. The remains of Irdis’ core, cooled and dead after all this time, and an orbiting ring of debris. The ring is semi-artificial. It would have formed eventually, given time, but legions of bots deployed into the system intercepted and redirected and coaxed the debris of the planet into a single, well-ordered disk long before natural processes could have managed it.

It was what could not be seen that made the memorial what it was. 15 million micro spheres scattered throughout the ring, each formed out of diamond. Each one etched with the name of one of Irdis’ inhabitants from that fateful day. Even at high magnification we couldn’t see them, but we knew they were there. Eternal memories of those now gone.

For a full Irdisian day we coasted past the memorial’s location, our sensors trained upon it. For a full Irdisian day we maintained comm. silence, thinking about what had been lost here. Thinking about how much more could have been lost if this tragedy had not occurred.

At the end of the time of silence, the ship reactivated its drive and we resumed our journey to Certe, 10 years flight away. We’re pulling 50Gs right now, not that any of us notice. That’s the advantage of traveling as an upload, mind in the computer, body just a template to be remade when needed. You don’t notice the little things.

I’m going to wrap this up now. There’s a gathering tonight in one of the ships common virtch nodes. A party in the traditional style, with music and dancing and drinking. But before I go, I’m going to do one last thing, I think. I’m going to invoke one of my personal virtch templates, a particularly fine glass of a particularly fine vintage of a particularly fine wine I picked up in the Inner Sphere some centuries back. I save it for special occasions and have only used it a few times. I’m going to drink a toast to the people of Irdis, and all they lost, even unknowingly, to save the lives of others. And then I’m going to erase the template so it can never be used again. A small sacrifice, to honor those who lost so much more.

More about the author, Todd Drasher, here.