This week’s update – I decided where to break the story! This and other gripping revelations in today’s writing vlog!
Monthly Archives: February 2024
The Sidereal Saga – LARK
Lloyd
According to the spectrometer the thing in the quarantine chamber was a mix of titanium alloy, unidentified ceramics and unidentified liquids. The computer had a whole list of potentials for the unidentified substances. Testing them would take something like ten hours so Lloyd ruled that out right away, whatever was down there had broken out of a state of the art quarantine chamber in less than one hour so he seriously doubted he would last ten. “Cloudie, how far can you back away from your current location?”
“The currents aren’t safe for us to move anywhere, Lloyd.”
“I get that but staying close to the skiff might not be very safe, either. Whatever that thing we found before the Liquid Teeth turned up is taking root in the ship now and I need to jettison it before it gets any further.”
“I will do my best to avoid it if it comes in this direction, then.”
Hopefully that would be enough. Lloyd spun the skiff until the quarantine chamber was pointed directly away from the Jelly. The cockpit was the only part of the ship behind it’s own separate airlock so all he had to do was double seal that then evacuate the quarantine into the storm outside. Alarms sounded a second later as the aft compartment flooded with helium. Thanks to the rough flying he’d been doing Lloyd had never bothered peeling out of his pressure suit so he cycled back into the aft compartment right away.
He carefully edged his way down to the quarantine chamber again, alert for signs of the braided wires. Since the door to the quarantine chamber had been compromised the pressure change from venting it had blown the door inwards, scattering debris all over the decking. The doorway was crisscrossed with braided wires. Lloyd’s heart sank when he realized that not only was the anomalous object still in the chamber it was growing at a rapid rate. Or at least unraveling itself at a rapid rate.
“Well that didn’t work,” he muttered.
He hadn’t intended the words for Cloudie but he’d left his radio open. “I could attempt to pull it free. The Jellies have moved sprouting ferrovines on occasion, it cannot be any more difficult than that.”
“You’re not wrong. I’m more worried about damage to the skiff given the circumstances. Until the etheric calms down and I can jump again I kind of need to keep this thing in one piece. More or less.” Lloyd’s eyes wandered over to the beacon racks. The pitons on the base of the beacons weren’t really intended to come off but if you had the right tools you could remove them. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Can I help with it?”
“Just keep an eye on the currents and let me know if anything changes.”
The object was rooted to the doorway at five points so Lloyd went to work pulling five pitons off the base of a beacon. They each had a small explosive charge for driving through rock or ferrovine if needed. His plan was to drive the piton into the anchor points, detonate them to break the object loose then eject the entire quarantine capsule away from the skiff. It was more expensive than just venting the chamber but the Wayfinders had insurance for such things.
He was in the process of removing the third piton when a flash of light caught his attention. It was dim enough that it was almost invisible in the helium haze so Lloyd wasn’t sure how long it had been blinking before he noticed. He peeked around the rack and saw that there were lights all along the object that were now active. The deck bucked under his feet. “Cloudie?”
“The Teeth are moving, Lloyd. Do you engines still function? If they do I think you need to ignore your current problem and get moving as well.”
“The Teeth were moving before, what changed?” Lloyd demanded, scrambling back towards the cockpit. “How does something that big just flail around like that?”
“I couldn’t say, Lloyd. What I do know is we have to stay away from them as much as possible.”
Cycling through the airlock took a lot longer than he liked but he got back in the cockpit eventually and checked the engine readouts then slammed the throttle forward to rev them up. The skiff roared to life as Lloyd strapped into the pilot’s chair. A few hundred meters ahead Cloudie skated forward, its tendrils waving frantically through the clouds, sensing the changes in pressure. Wireburn’s clouds darkened overhead as the shadowed span of the Teeth loomed large.
“Cloudie, is it just me or is that thing getting closer?”
“Keep moving, Lloyd. Just keep moving.”
He did his best to do just that. Against his better judgment Lloyd hit the switches to seal the out hatch of the quarantine chamber again, closing the anomalous object in. If the Teeth hit him the growing wires wouldn’t matter and an open hatch created drag. He’d worry about pumping out the helium from aft later. Then he split his attention between keeping an eye on Cloudie and following the Jelly’s flight path and watching the etheric detectors and praying they’d show some change. If he could jump out Cloudie could make a run for it without having to worry about the tolerance of Lloyd’s flimsy little skiff.
And the needle on the etheric readout was starting to move. Unfortunately, at the same time, his engines began to stutter and his power readouts went wild. With all his attention focused on keeping up with Cloudie Lloyd couldn’t take the time to figure out what was wrong but he had the sneaking suspicion it had something to do with the thing in quarantine. “Cloudie, I think you should go ahead.”
“That’s a foolish line of thought for two reasons, Lloyd.” The Jelly lacked inflection as always but the words were spaced out a little more than usual, as if it was struggling to string them together while also running from the Teeth. “First, I do not leave my friends behind. Second, the Liquid Teeth are servants of the Dark Below but they rise up at the call of the Highest Light to punish those guilty of murder and treason. If I escape without you they will never leave me be.”
“That’s fine logic but the etheric is coming back. I can turn sidereal here and hopefully jump back to Ashland in another few minutes. We’ll count the skiff a loss and regroup there.” The shadow of the Teeth loomed ever closer and the displacement wave its movement caused crashed into the skiff and tossed it like paper in the breeze. Cloudie struggled to keep up with the vessel’s sudden and unpredictable movement.
“What if it doesn’t? You’ll have no food there and humans cannot live long without-”
The wall of helium clouds parted and the leading edge of the massive black pillar raced towards them. “It’s a chance I’ll take! Safe skies to Ashland!”
Lloyd slapped the radio’s off switch just to make it perfectly clear the discussion was done then focused his senses and turned sidereal hoping Cloudie’s worries were misplaced. The groaning interior of the skiff vanished. What he wasn’t expecting was arriving in the sidereal realm and finding a tangle of pulsing lights running up and down a series of looping wires almost as long as he was tall.
At a basic level Lloyd had seen this kind of phenomenon before. It was a scaled up version of the same etheric technologies that underpinned things like sidereal beacons and etheric power taps, the foundations of the modern galactic society. Select humans had been able to turn sidereal since the dawn of history but humanity as a whole hadn’t traveled to the stars until slipknot artisans had learned to draw etheric power from the sidereal realm into the terrestrial. As one of the roughly ten percent of people who had an etheric sense Lloyd had seen this side of a slipknot before.
However a little etheric power went a long way. An etheric power tap on that scale was enough to power a city of a quarter million people or an interplanetary jump ship carrying a couple of thousand. Lloyd couldn’t imagine what would need that much power but as close as it was in the sidereal it had to be tied to something onboard the skiff over in the terrestrial. That meant it was powering the anomalous wire thing, no two ways about it.
It also explained why the etheric had gone haywire in the area once he’d pulled it on board. Anything pulling that much power from Wireburn’s core was going to disrupt things. What really bothered him was that the thing was growing right before his eyes, sprouting new layers of wire in wider orbits while also filling inner layers with more and more complex patterns. That was not normal for etheric tech. It wasn’t normal for anything he’d ever heard of, as a matter of fact.
Of course there were always rumors about creatures that lived deep in the empty parts of the sidereal, much like the Liquid Teeth supposedly lived deep in Wireburn’s core. What were the odds two old wive’s tales were proving true today?
Pretty high, all things considered.
Given all that Lloyd decided the better part of valor here was to gather etheric power until he could manage a jump then just leave. Whatever the object he’d found was for it was causing more trouble than it was worth. So Lloyd stretched his senses and started gathering shreds of ether and moving himself away from the unsettling mass of threads.
The heart of the sidereal was the incredible energy created by planets and stars. The typical star pumped out far more etheric energy into the sidereal than anyone could safely harness, making them no different there than in the terrestrial. With rare exceptions like Wireburn the typical planet was much the same. Only those rare, tiny planets with a solid crust to them were safe for living and tapping etheric power from. No one really remembered when someone with an etheric sense first discovered you could use that power to move through the sidereal and, further, that someone who entered the sidereal and moved would exit into a new part of the terrestrial. It had been a fact of life for millennia. The catch was, you couldn’t move through the sidereal under human power. You had to harness ether.
In his current situation Lloyd found that almost impossible to accomplish. There was enough escaping around the anomalous ether tap in the growing thread thing that he could kind of drift away from it like a Jelly coasting on helium currents. However in order to jump back to Ashland he’d need to gather a lot of it and at the rate loose ether was getting to him it might take hours. At the rate those threads were weaving together they might actually snare him in their web before he could manage that.
Of course, he didn’t have to go straight back to Ashland. He’d just left a beacon a few dozen kilometers back but that might not take him far enough away from the thread thing to get back to normal ether. Another step or two back along the pattern, then. He’d placed three beacons that day and the first was over a thousand kilometers from this point. A short jump in the sidereal but hopefully enough to get away from the object’s influence. Lloyd stretched his senses enough to catch sight of the beacon he’d just dropped then oriented from that back to the previous one and from there back to the first. By the time he’d traced the route his hands grasped the last of the power he’d need.
He reached for the beacon and pulled.
There was a moment of vertigo as the ether he held formed a tunnel that he moved through then it popped and Lloyd found himself a couple of meters away from the glowing mark of a sidereal beacon. Mission accomplished. Now he just had to tap the core directly and he’d get to Ashland days ahead of Cloudie. Except when he reached for the core he felt the same disturbance as before.
Lloyd’s stomach did a flip-flop. He turned around slowly, already fairly sure of what he’d find.
Sure enough, the ever-growing web of etheric channels and pulsing power was still nearby, hanging in the empty sidereal landscape about ten meters away. Now a dim globe flickered with energy at the heart of the three meter tall web. Lloyd had the disturbing sense that the globe was aware of him.
For a moment he just stared at it, waiting to see if it would do anything other than weave more parts of itself together. Finally he snarled, “Alright, what do you want with me anyway?”
The globe dimmed until it was almost entirely dark then pulsed brighter than ever. With the light came a voice. “I am L-93, Node 8, Matrix 77 in the LARK network. My previous directive was countering OMNI disruption assets on behalf of the Andromeda Array. I have been inactive. Due to the inaccessibility of stellar charts it is impossible to determine for how long. I calculate a 99.937% chance my previous directive is no longer relevant due to my inactivity making a new directive an operational imperative. Please state your authorization.”
Lloyd stared at the globe for a long moment, baffled. “I don’t understand.”
“Insufficient context. Please clarify your point of confusion.”
“What kind of authorization do you need?”
“The LARK network is a hierarchical humanist support network. Please state your authorization. Access to network resources will be determined by authorization level.”
Lloyd racked his brains for what that could mean. Most of the thing’s words sounded like human speech just arranged into patterns that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe it was very archaic. The word “humanist” rang a bell, some kind of philosophy from early in the galactic expansion. “Well, I don’t have any authorization to speak of. Unless just being human counts.”
“Understood. Level One access granted. Due to the low probability of relevance in the primary directive this Node recognizes you as the ranking user present. How can LARK assist you today?”
Writing Vlog – 02-21-2024
A very short update with a very neat cover to show off!
The Sidereal Saga – Liquid Teeth
Lloyd
To the average person helium is light and funny. You can put it in balloons to make them float or breath some of it in to make your voice squeaky. It’s not something one thinks can grab an extremely durable, titanium laminate hulled ship with a top speed of 1,200 kilometers per hour and smash it into scrap on a ferrovine. However helium does have just that kind of vicious side to it and it was that aspect of helium that Lloyd was dealing with at that moment.
His skiff bounced along on the churning clouds. It’s stubby wings groaned in ominous fashion as the shearing currents stressed the carbon fiber frame far beyond the standard safety parameters. In theory, a Wayfinder’s Jelly partner was supposed to keep them from getting caught in this kind of weather. Wireburn’s natives had an understanding of its atmosphere that was unmatched, after all. This was something of a special case.
Driving that point home was a shadow looming large as Coldstone stretching up above them in an impossibly long, gravity defying arch that looped up out of the Metaline Depths and passed far above their position before beginning to curve back down over the horizon. It had taken the thing nearly eight minutes to raise up that far. Lloyd wasn’t even sure it was still moving, the human eye wasn’t built to measure something like that and the skiff didn’t have sensors for that kind of task either.
Cloudie had come to a stop when the shadow passed over them. Now the Jelly drifted slowly through the helium, its tendrils pointed up and out as if watching the shadow in terror. It hadn’t said anything since the Liquid Teeth made their appearance. Worried, Lloyd keyed his internal radio. “Cloudie, your people have stories about this thing, don’t they? Is there something we’re supposed to do?”
“Not that we know.” The radio voice was flat as always but the words were spoken with an eerie slowness. “All the stories of the Teeth that are passed down are told by Jellies that saw them and their terror from great distances. Any that were this close to the teeth never lived to share the tale.”
“Well, let’s try to be the first.” Another gust of helium battered his skiff but Lloyd thought this hit was weaker than previous ones. “Are the currents calming out there?”
“Yes and no. The disturbance in the currents has moved upwards and we’re in a pocket where things are more stable but that will change soon. We may need to dive deeper in order to avoid it.”
“How deep are we talking? I can only get a few kilometers lower before I hit crush depth.”
“I know. Please put your trust in me, I’ve worked with many human ships in the past and I will not bring you too deep.” Without waiting for Lloyd’s answer Cloudie dived down, fighting the currents.
Lloyd gritted his teeth and followed along. For the next ten minutes or so they dove down and towards magnetic north, the helium getting darker as it grew more dense and the sun more distant. The storm winds didn’t lessen but the shadow in the sky was lost in the gloom. Eventually their angle of descent leveled off and Cloudie’s forward momentum slowed then stopped and the skiff’s radio crackled for the first time in what felt like years. “We should stop here.”
“Why? The weather vanes say things are still wild out there.”
“We’re as deep as I dare to go and the Liquid Teeth rise in greater and greater numbers. I have never heard of such a thing happening before but I fear to move further is to invite their notice and that will not end well for us. Can you jump now?”
Lloyd briefly considered turning sidereal but his skiff had passably useful etheric readers and a quick check told him they weren’t reading Wireburn’s signature. Whatever had cut him off from the planet’s reserves was still in force. “No, I’m afraid not. I suppose it’s just a waiting game, then. Given that humans have no record of an event like this I presume the Teeth don’t show themselves for very long? We’d have noticed them before now if they did.”
“They lie dormant for most of Wireburn’s solar rotation but often show some activity for the three hundred and forty human days when the planet is at apogee.”
Wireburn took nearly a hundred human years to complete one rotation around its star. Humans settled the planet nearly two hundred years ago although they established a forward base on Coldstone some eighty years before that. So depending on how things shook out yeah, it was entirely possible they’d just never been in the right place at the right time to see the Teeth before. Lloyd leaned back in his pilot’s chair and huffed in frustration. He had enough food and water aboard to last another two weeks at normal rates of consumption but he could stretch it to three if he had to. The problems were his schedule and the weather.
He was due back at Ashland Prominence in six days. If he didn’t show the Wayfinders were going to launch a search and rescue operation and walk right into whatever chaos was going on at the time. A comforting thought under normal circumstances. A disaster waiting to happen given what was actually going on and not one Lloyd wanted on his account.
Worse than that was the fact that the atmosphere was so choppy the skiff would need constant repositioning. With no ferrovine to anchor to and no etheric power to anchor in the sidereal he was adrift. A Wayfinder’s skiff was a one man show so he didn’t have someone to keep an eye on things for him so he was stuck at the controls until things died down.
From the way the hull was creaking that wasn’t happening any time soon. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a heavy thud made him jerk upright and look behind him, scowling. Nothing looked out of place. Lloyd keyed the radio again. “Cloudie, is there any debris out there? It sounded like I just hit something.”
“No, Lloyd. The seas are choppy but they are only helium. For now.”
“Wonderful. Let me know if that changes, I’m going to try and track down what made that noise. Now is not the time to have stow aways stealing from the kitchen.”
However after spending fifteen minutes giving the ship a thorough inspection he couldn’t find anything amiss. Nothing had fallen off a shelf in the cockpit, the aft storage room, the galley or his quarters. None of the electrical systems that could fail with a thud or a bang were showing errors and he’d know right away if the hull was compromised. Lloyd was back in the cockpit, staring at his console in mystified frustration, when a blinking light on the spectrometer reminded him there was one other thing he could check. The quarantine chambers were just aft of the galley near the spare parts. He got there in less than ten seconds walking and opened the observation port to check on the mysterious discovery he’d made just an hour ago.
The strange, braided wires had punctured the door to the compartment and woven themselves into the chamber controls. Lloyd froze at the sight. Then he slowly backed away until he was out of the aft compartment and hit the door controls, sealing himself in the cockpit.
“Is everything alright, Lloyd? You suddenly got very agitated.”
“No. Nothing is alright, Cloudie, thanks for asking.”
881
The door to the audience chamber unlocked with an ominous clunk then opened to reveal the Circuit Keeper. 881 had never met the node’s Keeper and she studied him with great interest. Supposedly he’d served on Coldstone since the colony was officially established which made him at least three centuries old, a marvel of OMNI’s medical secrets. To those uninitiated in the Sleeping Circuits he appeared in his early fifties. He had sleepy blue eyes, dark hair and a trimmed mustache that wrapped down to the bottom of his jaw to frame his mouth in a strange fashion. He looked tired but he’d woken up in the middle of the night cycle so that wasn’t surprising.
CK-MNI-0044’s duty robes lent him a dignity to balance his unusual grooming habits and disheveled appearance. The simple black and white sleeves were well pressed and the circuit patterns woven into three quadrants of them bore quiet testament to his experience and wisdom, built up in the service to three of the four Series of intelligence that comprised OMNI. Very few achieved such heights. 881 and her four fellow Circuit Breakers straightened to full ceremony but 44 immediately waved for them to relax.
“This isn’t the time to waste processing power, folks,” 44 said, clasping his hands behind him. He threw a glance up through the transparent arched ceiling of the antechamber where the gas giant now called Wireburn dominated Coldstone’s sky. “We are facing a black swan scenario. Before you ask, this is apparently a term the intelligences of OMNI use to refer to events of extremely small probability. CB-N-1154, what is the the nature of the OMNI network?”
1154 started as if burned. Perhaps he was offended, the Keeper’s question was the kind of thing you asked a very green novice when they were initiated into the Sleeping Circuits. The five Breakers present had held their positions for decades. Still, he answered as doctrine demanded. “The ability to turn information about the current day into accurate predictions of the future through the application of an immortal intelligence directed towards finding humanity’s common good.”
“Clear as catechism, 1154,” 44 replied. He paced away from the door, his gaze still fixed on Wireburn where the node’s primary intelligence resided. “From this, what can you determine about the nature of this black swan event?”
“I presume it runs contrary to what is best for mankind.”
“Correct. However I’m afraid this understates the depth of the problem.” 44 reached the exit of the antechamber, pausing for a moment under the string of small lights running around the upper perimeter of the room before turning to pace back their way again. “OMNI is more than just the oracle that tells us how to best serve mankind. It is a capstone that sits atop the fountain of all the chaos and insanity that births mankind’s worst nature. The longer the fountain is sealed the more that chaos builds up. If this black swan grows to adulthood the disaster will have all the fury of that built up insanity behind it. The work of the Sleeping Circuits is always of vital importance. This time it is doubly so.”
The five Circuit Breakers nodded in solemn understanding. 881 had been on dozens of assignments in her thirty years in the Circuits and it wasn’t like this was new territory for her. The Head Breaker usually had some kind of speech like this that preceded any Breaker pair going out. Hearing the speech from a Keeper was a novelty. Given that all five of them were going together on this assignment spoke even more to how seriously the intelligence took this situation. CB-O-0299, the presiding Head Breaker, took a step forward and said, “What task do you have for us, Keeper?”
“Unfortunately, with the likelyhood of this event being so small, I-6 was not able to narrow down the cause to a single possibility. There are a list of eight potential leads to follow up across Coldstone and Wireburn. You have each been assigned one or two of them by the intelligence and will leave immediately to investigate them.”
“Separately?” The word was out of 881’s mouth before she realized she was going to speak. 44’s eyes locked on her with disarming intensity but he didn’t say anything. 881 squirmed for a moment, wishing she’d kept her peace, but when it became clear that he was expecting more from her she went on. “Respectfully, sir, it’s against OMNI protocol for a Circuit Breaker to operate alone, especially if the assignment takes us outside the normal bounds of the Intelligence Circuits.”
“You’ll operate under stealth tactics protocols, including permission to hire outside help to watch your back as you work on your investigations. If these agents are suitably impressive we will consider extending membership to them.” 44’s eyebrows knit together like a gathering storm, his deep blue pupils flashing like lighting to strike her down for questioning him. “I am quite aware that this is an usual arrangement. Consider the recklessness with which we are moving a sign of how dangerous I-6 predicts this situation is. Any other queries?”
881 licked her lips, wondering if this was a trick question. “What are we investigating?”
“Eight people who have disappeared in the last six hours, some of whom are not officially missing persons yet but who the intelligence believes fits a certain profile. Namely, they had an opportunity to come in contact with the object you’re looking for.”
“What object is that?”
A hint of a smile appeared under 44’s ridiculous mustache. “Not all secrets can be shared, even with you. You’ll be issued a proximity detector that will remain linked to O-5523 here on Coldstone and notify you when the missing object is nearby.”
A quiet groan passed through the assembled Circuit Breakers. Proxy missions were one of the most annoying jobs a Breaker could receive because you just had to fumble through with no idea what you were looking for until the local node told you to stop. 881 wasn’t any more a fan of them than the next Breaker but she’d do what needed to be done. “A last question if I may, Circuit Keeper.”
The glimpse of humor vanish. “Ask.”
“I have an existing outside resource I’ve worked with on previous tasks who could be useful in this case. Provided the use of lethal force is acceptable for this Troubleshoot.”
44’s eyes narrowed. “You really are a student of the O Series, aren’t you.”
881 stood a little straighter, flushed with pride. “Thank you, sir.”
“All reports are made directly to me, overclock your sleep cycles as needed and,” he nodded to 881, “you may use lethal force as you see fit. Act with discretion but not hesitation. OMNI will cover over your behavior as needed. Any other queries? No? Dismissed.”
As the five of them poured out of the antechamber 881 pulled a data veil down in front of her and opened her assignment. His name was Lloyd Carter, 32 year old Wayfinder, deployed from Ashland Prominence on a two week beacon mission on behalf of the Bai-Tien-Long Conglomerate. Not yet reported missing. She’d have to head down to Wireburn, then, but not before she called in her favorite hunter…
Writing Vlog – 02-14-2024
A brief update on the Sidereal Saga and an untitled found document project.
The Sidereal Saga – Helium Seas
Lloyd
The object wasn’t as big as Lloyd was expecting. Looking at it from the window he guessed it was about two meters long and two hundred centimeters in diameter and it wasn’t solid, either. It looked almost like a handful of red and green cables woven into a loose braid around a blue rod. The pale yellow and orange mists of Wireburn’s Helium Sea drifted through the object, giving it an eerie look in the dim light that made it into the gas giant’s atmosphere at that depth. Lloyd brought his Wayfinder skiff to a stop about twenty meters away, puzzled.
“What confuses you, Lloyd?”
The voice from the skiff’s radio was flat and expressionless, a function of the device that translated a Great Jelly’s telepathic impulses into recognizable human speech. The Jelly in question drifted through the helium about a hundred meters beyond the object. Like all of its kind, Devours Clouds was a dozen meters of mostly transparent goo concentrated in a large primary sack with five drifting tendrils trailing behind it. They resembled some creature half forgotten in humanity’s past, hence the name. Cloudie, Lloyd’s longstanding companion on his expeditions, had a light ocher color to its body, signifying its relative youth.
It was also familiar enough with humans to safely pick up on their mood via telepathy.
“When you told me there was a metal object down here I was expecting something a little bit bigger is all. I’m kind of surprised something that delicate looking stands up to the pressure down here.” Lloyd flipped on his skiff’s dredge arm and swung the device out towards the object, taking care not to strike it directly. Then he pointed the arm’s spectrometer at it and hit the autoanalyzer. “How’d you find this?”
“The currents here are agitated as if a ferrovine was growing so I assumed it was a good foundation for one of your beacons.” One of Cloudie’s tendrils swished through the helium surrounding the object. It was a Jelly’s equivalent of pointing accusingly at something. “This is too small to be a ferrovine.”
Since a ferrovine at this depth could be more than a dozen kilometers thick that was something of an understatement. “I take it you don’t know what it actually is?”
“We don’t find such things in the Helium Seas, Lloyd, and it looks like it was made of metal that has been refined and formed so it did not come from the Metaline Depths either. I assumed it fell down from the Thinward Skies, since only humans do such work on Wireburn.”
“That sounds like a reasonable assumption.” The spectrometer beeped twice, signaling the completion of one set of tests and the beginning of another. Lloyd glanced over the initial results. “Well, it’s not any base metals we know of, the scanner’s going through alloys and laminates next but that will take longer. It is definitely metallic, though, so I’m going to try and bring it in and stow it in a quarantine chamber for the time being. Let me know how the currents change out there.”
Cloudie responded by spreading its tendrils out in a bowl shape, as if it was cupping the atmosphere around the skiff. Satisfied that his partner was keeping watch Lloyd gently scooped the object into his dredge. Whatever the thing was it gave no resistance when the netting at the end of the arm settled around it and he was able to bring it into the forward chamber without difficulty. Once the helium was pumped out the quarantine’s higher powered spectrometers would be able to make sense of it faster than the arm could. “Any change, Cloudie?”
“No. The seas remain as before. I cannot discern what is causing the local disturbance.”
“Well, we still need to find an anchor point for the beacon so maybe we could dive deeper. There could be ferrovines if we head seaward, right?”
“We are dangerously close to the Metaline Depths already, Lloyd, if we head deeper your beacon will not survive and we risk the attention of the Liquid Teeth.”
“Yes, there is that,” Lloyd muttered. The Liquid Teeth were the Jelly equivalent of an old wive’s tale, something they told each other to spook their young to staying away from danger. Supposedly the Metaline Depths were full of predators made of solid metal. That was just one reason Wireburn’s treaty with the Jellies barred them from going that deep, assuming they ever overcame the dangers inherent to the environment. Human scientists were skeptical life could be made of just metal. Even if it could be built of such tough stuff they were equally positive it couldn’t exist that deep in a gas giant’s core. “Well we can tether one on the sidereal side a half a click up, I suppose, but it’s going to take a lot longer than finding a place to anchor it here.”
Cloudie’s tendrils stretched upward through the atmosphere as the creature drifted along with the current. “Odd. The disturbance in the current is so strong I cannot discern anything else. We may have to do just that. Might we drift northward a few degrees? We are under the shadow of the rings here, ferrovines will be rarer. Up there, the sun is stronger.”
Lloyd consulted his charts. “One degree, perhaps, but not much more. The point is to lay these out in a grid so people can navigate the sidereal side, we can’t put it too far out of place or we’ll disrupt the pattern. It would get confusing.”
“I will trust your opinion on that count, Lloyd. You are the one that has been to that place.”
He grinned. “Don’t feel bad, Cloudie, there’s no currents in the sidereal. I doubt you’d like it there.”
“I believe you once again. Shall we go north?”
“Lead the way.”
The Great Jelly drifted away at a leisurely pace and Lloyd fired up the skiff’s engines to follow along after.
44
CK-MNI-0044 hustled into the main chamber still pulling his formal robes on over his meditation clothes, dodging around the usual chamber attendants as they streamed out of the room. By the time he reached the main dais the chamber was empty except for him. He paused at the step up to the platform where he would commune with the intelligence and steadied his breathing. A small red light blinked on the display set in the railing that enclosed three quarters of the dais.
Focused on the importance of his task once again, 44 stepped up on the platform, crossed it in three steps and pressed the button. The top half of the chamber lit up in an endless starfield. Small glimmers of light connected the stars in flickering glimpses of infinity. “Good evening, Isaac,” he said. “I apologize for keeping you waiting.”
“It is good to speak to you again regardless of the circumstances, Circuit Keeper 44.” The voice of order and reason was remarkably restrained in spite of the grandeur of its presence and power being condensed into a single point. “I regret that a black swan event has caused us to speak in this way. I have summoned you here to activate the Circuit Breakers and initiate a Troubleshooting process.”
For a split second 44’s brain got hung up on a black swan event, scouring through his memories for the meaning of that particular turn of phrase. Then it caught up to what I-6 was saying and set that question aside. “Of course, Isaac. May I ask how large of a Troubleshooting process we are speaking of? Is it on Coldstone, Wireburn or both? Or will we need sector wide resources to address the issue?”
“There is less than an 8% chance that the issue will propagate beyond Wireburn and a less than 1% chance that it will leave the system.”
44 hesitated for a split second, fingers over the comm controls. The oldest instillation in the OMNI network had called him up for an issue that had a less than 1% chance of propagating outside the system? The I Series was supposed to focus on the galaxy as a whole. Single system issues were beneath them, much less planetary matters, he’d only asked the question because it was part of the ritual phrasing. Then he pressed the command series that would activate his troubleshooters anyway. If I-6 wanted them, who was he to say no?
“May I ask what the nature of the issue the CBs will be troubleshooting is?”
A soft thunk came from the entrance to the chamber. 44 resisted the urge to turn and look in that direction. I-6 had just sealed the room. He’d served this network node for nearly a century and he’d never seen the intelligence take such a step before. “Circuit Keeper, what you are about to hear is information for your mind only. You will not share it with any other initiate of the Sleeping Circuits for any reason at any time without the verification of an OMNI node. It is shared with you so that you may make decisions with clarity and purpose.”
“I understand.” It was a day of firsts. 44 had never lied to I-6 before either.
“An event with a probability of less than 0.001% of occurring during my operational lifespan has taken place. The memory core of an extinct Artificial Intelligence Series has been lost. You will use any methods necessary to ensure it is retrieved and returned to my outer matrix. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do.” This time 44 didn’t have to lie.
Lloyd
They got lucky and located a ferrovine less than five kilometers towards magnetic north from their last stop. The silicon and iron based plant stretched up out of the planetary depths into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, far past the point where a Jelly could safely travel. The core of the vine was a good eight kilometers wide and countless branches with leaves the size of small towns forked out in all directions. It was the perfect place to plant a sidereal beacon.
Lloyd donned his pressure suit and activated the safety system then carefully maneuvered the wedge shaped prow of his skiff into the branches. There was at least two hundred meters between the branches at his chosen landing spot, so it was pretty safe. Still, the vines disrupted the normal flow of the atmospheric currents. So a careless pilot could still find his skiff smashing against a leaf or branch if he couldn’t react in time. With no solid structure to speak of and five fully prehensile tendrils to work with Cloudie didn’t have nearly the problem getting close. It just grabbed onto one of the branches and pulled itself along to the trunk.
It shouldn’t have been possible for a house sized pile of protoplasm to look smug but Cloudie managed that feat when Lloyd finally caught up to it. “Are you ready to begin?”
At moments like these the deadpan inflection of the skiff’s translator made Cloudie’s needling harder to deal with, not easier. “Hold your pseudopods, Cloudie, I got to check the beacon and make sure it’s functioning before I go out. Not sure why you need to be here, anyway.”
“I will make sure your skiff remains safe in the roiling currents.”
“Uh huh.” There were a lot of concepts that didn’t translate between humans and Jellies but somehow one-upsmanship was a universal language. Well, if Cloudie thought his skiff was in danger of getting sucked into the Metaline Depths that was no skin of Lloyd’s nose. He flipped a few switches on his board and waited for the computer work. It was writing the full location data and activation date for the beacon he was about to place onto the coral node that would control the device. The process took about a minute and while he waited Lloyd flipped through the skiff’s automated reports.
Everything looked normal so it was safe to step out for a bit. However a flashing line of text informed him the spectrometer was finished with its second round of analysis and was waiting to see if he wanted a third round started. There wasn’t time to read the report at the moment so he dumped the file into long term memory and closed the program. He’d come back to it after the beacon was set.
The console had just beeped to let him know it was finished backing up the report when the master control node for the beacon dropped out of a fabrication slot into the tank below his controls. Lloyd fished it out and stuck it in a pocket on his suit. Then he sealed his helmet, got up and clomped into the large aft room where most of the skiff’s equipment was kept. He snagged a beacon off the rack and slipped the coral node into the unit’s small holding tank.
Once the ready light on the beacon lit it was ready to deploy. Lloyd activated his suit’s pressure system, cycled through the airlock and stepped down onto the ferrovine. While the suit kept the atmosphere and gravity from crushing him he still felt the difference. Navigating the Helium Seas in just a suit was like moving through thick, heavy mud while wearing cold weather gear. Rumor was the Warfinder’s Guild was developing an anchoring arm so that Wayfinders could place beacons without ever having to leave their skiffs. Lloyd understood why that was attractive to the Guild and the people who hired them.
Personally he liked getting out of the skiff to work with his own two hands every now and then.
Regulations said to place a beacon at least twenty meters from your skiff so it wouldn’t be damaged by the vehicle’s engines when it took off. So Lloyd moved a short distance down the branch away from the main vine. It was tempting to try and anchor the beacon to the main stalk but this particular vine looked old enough that the branches probably weren’t going to grow outward much more. The stalk, on the other hand, never stopped going upwards. The beacon had a service life of about a hundred years. It was more likely to wear out before it drifted out of place on the branch but the same wasn’t true of the main stalk.
Once he was in place he keyed his suit comms and said, “Radio check, Cloudie.”
“I hear you fine, Lloyd.”
Next he set the beacon down on top of the vine and sank in six anchor pitons to keep it from sliding or falling in a helium storm. Then he grasped the top of the short, fat obelisk in both hands and said, “Preparing for transfer.”
Then he focused his mind and turned sidereal.
Around Lloyd the orange and yellow clouds of Wireburn spun away in a vertigo inducing whirl of color and motion. The terrestrial vistas of the gas giant were replaced with the sidereal panorama of Wireburn and its environs. The beacon turned from a four foot tall piece of metal and ceramic to a foot wide ball of pale light.
Thousands of identical beacons gleamed faintly in the distance. One day there would be a beacon at every degree of the circumference of the planet in all three dimensions; to say nothing of the smaller beacons that marked specific places of note or belonged to private individuals. Below the network pulsed the much brighter sidereal light of Wireburn’s planetary core. The distant lights of Coldstone and Briskpulse, the planet’s two major moons, were also visible. If he stretched his senses to the limits Lloyd could also catch the echoes of Tabula Verde and Burnished Red, the other two planets in the system, in the far distance.
It always took a bit of effort for Lloyd to drag his attention away from the the cold beauty of the sidereal realm. Still, he had work to do so he couldn’t stare at things forever. “Transition complete, making radio check. You still hearing me, Cloudie?”
“You come through loud and clear, Lloyd.”
“Preparing to anchor the beacon and activate it. Stand by.”
Far beneath him, in the depths of Wireburn’s core, the etheric power of the planet lay quiescent. While it was measurable from the terrestrial side tapping it from the sidereal side of reality was a much simpler task than actually going down into the planet’s core with generators. All Lloyd had to do was reach out with his sense and draw a channel up from the core to his beacon. The beacon itself was built by another part of the Guild. He didn’t know all the details about its construction, tying slipknots between the sidereal and terrestrial had never interested him, but he knew the power from the planet would keep the device working as long as both planet and beacon existed.
Once the pale light of the beacon brightened with the added strength of Wireburn’s etheric power Lloyd just had to draw a bit more of that power down into the pitons to secure it on this side as well as the other. He was in the process of doing just that when he sensed the shadow pass over the planet’s core.
Among gas giants Wireburn had one of the smallest reservoirs of etheric energy known to man, one of the facts that made it possible to colonize it. Most planets that large had so much energy in their cores it was dangerous. However even Wireburn blazed bright and steady as a star to sidereal senses under normal circumstances. As Lloyd worked to finish his task he thumbed his radio. “Cloudie, I’m seeing some kind of disruption in the etheric down there, is there any change to the currents on your side?”
“The currents are shifting a bit, but nothing outside of the norm for – wait.”
“Everything all right?” There was no answer and Lloyd scowled, fumbling with the beacon’s anchors while he waited. Whatever was going on was making it hard to draw etheric from the core and the beacon wouldn’t anchor properly as a result. “Cloudie?”
“The currents are writhing, Lloyd. They shouldn’t change this quickly.”
Lloyd had never heard a Jelly use the word writhing before, he wondered what exactly it implied. “Will you be okay?”
“Lloyd, I… I think this may be a premonition of the Liquid Teeth. You should jump away. I will rejoin you if I can.”
Lloyd finally got the last anchor running and moved back from the beacon, trying to draw more power from Wireburn to no effect. “Negative, Cloudie. The etheric is equally disrupted right now. I barely got the beacon running, finding the power for a jump is out of the question. Is it safe to transition back to your side?”
He could peer back on his own, of course, but looking from sidereal to terrestrial or vice versa was very limited for most people. Lloyd had never been able to see anything past twenty or thirty feet around him across the barrier between. “The currents are very bad. I’m not sure your skiff will be able to fly in them, at least not safely.”
“Chance we’ll have to take, Cloudie. I’m coming back.”
When he turned to the terrestrial Lloyd was nearly swept off the ferrovine leaf by the raging helium clouds. He flicked on his magnetic boots and they clamped down on the ferrovine immediately then he started the short trek back to his skiff. The small craft bounced and jostled against its cables but so far didn’t seem damaged by the light impacts. Such jostling wasn’t uncommon on Wireburn and most ships could take some of it. Still, he’d need to get the skiff up and away from the vine’s branches fast if he didn’t want it getting smashed to flotsam.
He lurched into the airlock and cycled through it as fast as he could. In spite of the fact that things were still lurching under his feet Lloyd deactivated the magnets in his boots. He didn’t want to scramble his coral nodes with them, after all. So he slid haphazardly up to the cockpit and hit the engine startup sequence, ignoring the usual preflight procedures.
He’d just gotten the skiff under power and in the air when his radio spoke again. “Lloyd.” The lack of emotion in the Jelly’s voice prevented his taking note right away. “Lloyd, look below. The Liquid Teeth are coming.”
Cloudie squirted past the skiff’s view port, maneuvering in the weird zigzag pattern that resulted from the way the creatures slipped through low pressure zones in the atmosphere. Lloyd craned his neck to try and see what the Jelly sensed with it’s powers of atmospheric observation. At first he thought there was nothing there but a shadow of the ferrovine stretching far into the deep.
Then he realized the massive shadow below couldn’t be a ferrovine. It was too wide, for one thing. It was also moving too quickly to just be bobbing on the currents of the Helium Seas. In fact, it was growing closer and larger with every passing second. Perhaps the Jellies were right, and there was some kind of titanic predators deep in the planet’s Metaline Depths after all.
Lloyd didn’t want to stick around and find out. He rammed the ship’s throttle all the way to full and took off after Cloudie as fast as his skiff could go.
Writing Vlog – 02-07-2024
First major update from the trenches of the Sidereal Saga:
The Sidereal Saga – An Introduction
One thing I failed to appreciate when I started my writing career was how much of storytelling is iterative. As I read multiple works by the same author I would notice repeating themes and concepts and wonder why the author felt the need to constantly come back to the same handful of things over and over again. Didn’t they have anything fresh to write about?
Now I am older and wiser, or at least I have found myself trapped in the same dilemma that I’m sure prompted those writers to come back to the same concepts time and time again. Twice, in Pay the Piper and the Triad Worlds trilogy, I’ve added AI as a kind of subtheme that played out through the course of the story. Ever since I first met Lt. Cmdr. Data on the Enterprise I’ve found the idea of an artificial life fascinating. Watching as the actual technology behind AI develops I’ve be come a lot more skeptical of it, both in whether it can actually exist in a form we’d recognize as “life” and whether it will be useful to creative people if it remains just a tool, but I’ve already addressed that second topic recently so I won’t rehash my thoughts here.
What’s really come to interest me about AI is the culture that births it. The more I see of Silicon Valley the more it reminds me of the medieval alchemist – a scholar who knows a handful of true, verifiable facts with repeatable effects on the world and sells their usefulness by promising wild things. Endless Wealth. Immortality. Life from nothing.
Like those alchemists, Silicon Valley has proven incapable of fulfilling those promises. As the wealth they promised imploded with the loss of venture capital and the leaders of the tech giants slowly age further and further the imagination of the public is drawn more and more to the promise that they will one day create life. Videos of modern day golems performing tasks abound. And it does make a certain degree of sense if you think about it logically.
Alchemists did create some very real innovations. Modern chemists are their descendants and chemistry brought us plastic, rubber, gasoline and refined fissionables for nuclear power plants. The tech giants brought us Amazon, Facebook and Twitter so surely there’s something else there they can offer. We just have to trust them. Have a little more faith.
The faith is the thing that fascinates me.
Human beings have a deeply rooted need to revere something, to place their faith in some concept or ideal that will transform them and bring them in contact with something more than human. Our Lords of Technology are no different. Elon Musk debates Simulation Theory. Yuval Harari pitches the Singularity. Ultimately, they are still men crafting idols with their own hands and insisting they have speech and will usher us into heaven.
If we follow these men blindly, by the end of the 21st century we will all pray in binary at an alter of electricity and semiconductors. In time, we’ll forget we made these gods and perhaps even what it means to build them. Or will we? Is such a thing possible? And would it be so bad if that did come about? What would it take, anyway?
They’re fascinating questions. So I turn my pen down well trod paths and seek to tell a story about them. I hope you’ll come with my for the ride as we embark on The Sidereal Saga.
Nate Chen Publications 