Spacefarer Union Hab

Travelers’ Notes: In Memoriam, by Todd Drashner

Travelers’ Notes: Flotsam and Jetsam, by Mark Ryherd

Cover Art: Spacefarer Union Hab, by Steve Bowers

Reviews: Review: Blindsight, by Peter Watts, reviewed by Todd Drashner

Travelers’ Notes: Discfinity, by Todd Drashner

Travelers’ Notes: Bolobo, by Steve Bowers

Announcements: Wanted: Associate Editors

Travelers’ Notes: Impressions of the Emple-Dokcetic, by Tony Jones

Travelers’ Notes: Ribblehead, by Steve Bowers

What’s important is what we remember on this date. This is the day, forty one years ago, when our species first set foot on another world.

We now know this can be done. Sooner, or later, it will be done again. Sooner or later, we will go back to stay.

One of our first Grandmasters of science fiction, Robert A Heinlein, put it clearly: “Earth is too small a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.”

This edition of V/FT celebrates the journeys yet to come, in a series of vignettes written by travelers in the OA universe. These “Travelers’ Notes” have long been a staple of the OA setting, and we’re pleased to devote an issue to them.

Want to help with the ongoing publication of V/FT? Consider volunteering for a stint as an associate editor for the project. Details can be found here.

Spacefarer Union Cover Art, Steve Bowers

Our current featured artist, Steve Bowers, brings us this image of a Spacefarer Union habitat.

Publisher: Tor Books

Language: English

ISBN: 978-0765319647
Plot Summary:
It’s late in the 21st century and humanity seems to be teetering on the edge of the Singularity. Or maybe the Singularity has already happened. Or maybe it hasn’t and never will. No one seems to quite know for sure.
Vast numbers of people lock themselves away into fortified crèches, their bodies maintained by automated machinery while they live out their lives in virtual reality fantasies. Others have themselves modified to increase their intelligence or other mental abilities, usually with various inconvenient or unpleasant side effects. Vampires have been discovered in the ancestral genome and resurrected (they had superhuman intelligence, but were also few and far between, and right angles drive them into epileptic fits. When humanity started building with straight lines it was pretty much the end of them). And one day millions of unidentified objects appear out of deep space around the Earth, apparently take a picture of everything on the planet down to a resolution of about one meter, and then burn up in the atmosphere.

In the shocked aftermath of this event, a signal is discovered to have been sent from the objects out to a point in deep space and the Theseus expedition is born. An AI ship, a crew of modified humans, and a single vampire are sent out aboard an experimental spacecraft to try and determine what is going on. What they find is enigmatically alien, very disturbing, and very, very dangerous. Whether more or less so than the crew themselves and the civilization they come from is an open question that may nag the reader right up to the end of the book.

OA Relevance: Moderate to high
While not completely akin to the OA future, much of what is described in the book might be similar to that found in the early to mid Interplanetary Age in OA. Augmentations without the bugs all worked out, social stresses brought on by new technology, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships when the participants may practically (or literally) be different species are all examined here and definitely resonate when considering the early OA timeline.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Watts is definitely writing a hard SF novel here, complete with references and an appendix going into the scientific details at the end of the book. Some of the concepts explored here are downright mind-blowing, particularly when he starts getting into just how buggy the human perception of “reality” really is. I finished the book both impressed and depressed at the same time. Also wondering how some of the weirder scientific facts the story plays with might be translated into the OA universe.
That all said, this is very much a psychological thriller type book, with a heavy focus on the mental states and mental baggage of the characters. The science and technology aren’t entirely secondary, but definitely don’t usually play more than a supporting role. Depending on your preferences, this may either thrill you or bore you. I occasionally found the introspection dragging on a little long, but overall the book does a good job of grabbing and holding the reader’s attention.

Overall Rating: Very Good
Definitely a book that will make you think. If you think that there’s nothing really new under the SF sun, Blindsight will probably make you change your mind. Well and fully developed characters combined with mind stretching science in areas that most SF never thinks to explore. Highly recommended.

More about the reviewer, 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.

Geek Code
GWB/CX/RPG d- s+:+ a C+$ U– P? L? E? W++ N+ o? K? w O? M+ V+$ PS++ PE- Y PGP- t 5+ X R+ tv+ b++ DI++ D? G e++++ h– r++ y+ >H++ OA++ M+++ L+ P+ B S++ D? Sp++ SF++ !TS