Gliese 581 (origins references appreciated)

Of course, this is not the first time we have seen Gliese 581 (HO Librae). In 2214, we'll send a Seedship.

Kibwe had always wanted to be a pilot. From an early age he made airfoils from balsa and drove his parents to distraction with his attention to detail, his constant entreaties to be taken to the airport at Mtwara and, when he was older, his insistence on visiting the spaceport at Beira.

By the time he was seventeen, he already had a pilot licence and was operating trips around the countryside in a twin-rotor electric speeder. Three years later he was the lead pilot on an aerial search and rescue mission to Northern Europe.

Northern Europe had received the worst of the violence of the Conquest Wars as atomic, biological and chemical weapons destroyed city after city, town after town. The farmlands of eastern europe were burned, the industrial heart of western europe was razed to the ground. The people who survived, the few who remained in the north, were forced to eke out a miserable existence in the cold and barren tundra.

The mission lasted only two weeks, rescuing four people from the ravages of the wastelands formerly known as Belgium. The experience was traumatic. Four malnourished and diseased people from a community of hundreds of thousands. During the rescue they had to be careful of becoming prey to some of the other desperate inhabitants - warlord remnants of the old military, murderous cannibals and even other rescue parties, especially those from the recovering United States.

Kibwe was changed. He had witnessed horrors that his young 22 year old mind was having trouble comprehending. And he would never go north again. Instead he fixed his eyes upon the stars. He began training to join an Explorer vessel.

And sometimes those imaginations run a little too free. A lot of science fiction is set in outer space, or on worlds which orbit other stars. Or, indeed, other types of celestial objects, both natural and artificial. In these stories, much of the difficulties associated with space travel are blithely ignored. Spaceships magically travel out of gravity wells. Spaceships magically provide interior gravity. Spaceship hulls magically protect occupants from all manner of spaceborne hazards. And, of course, spaceships magically travel unimaginable distances within days or weeks.
...
As Sir Arthur Eddington, an astronomer, said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. And yet sf writers seem content to refight historical wars in some sanitised and romanticised and safe imaginery place which is supposed to resemble the universe around us. They’re ignoring the unimaginable strangeness and the mind-boggling vastness of it all. They turned the Orion Arm into a shopping mall, and the Milky Way into Smallville. They’ve taken the wonder out of the real universe.

It’s time to put it back. Please.

My reply:

There’s a non-sequitur here that adding interstellar travel to a setting takes the wonder out of the universe?

Is science-fiction/fantasy really about the locations? Or is it about the plots and the drama and the characters? I can take MacBeth to the Interstellar Court where the Zanifraxians rule and the Darkness Syndicate seeks to destroy humanity before it can be accepted into the court, but at the end of the day, it’s still MacBeth.

For some science-fantasy it may be important to be in a galaxy far far away but yes, these stories could be set nearer to home – but why restrict ourselves?

My own writing is more about the interactions between a Earth human culture which is as alien to our 21st Century minds as anything I can conjure for interstellar aliens. That’s the sort of stuff that interests me and it’s why I enjoy reading Charlie Stross and Iain M Banks.

Is there a difference between a science-fiction tale of a lone cosmonaut on a supralight scout ship meeting strange new species or a pulp-fantasy take of a Venusian farmboy deciding to join the AetherCorps? Not really. But all of these stories elicit wonder in this reader.

Just because we cannot travel these distances, doesn’t mean we cannot dream these distances.

In truth, AMARA was jealous. It was something that was impossible for an Expert. And AMARA was surprised because jealousy was another human condition which was impossible for an Expert.

JAMES paused the monitoring agent. The data received from AMARA regarding the emotion described as jealousy was very disturbing. Primarily because Experts were incapable of emotion though they could often replicate the appearance of appropriate emotion to aid communication with humans. Experts were the ultimate machine intelligence, far beyond any mere human intelligence. And while they did not feel emotions, they had incredible emotional intelligence for working with humans. Secondly, the evidence disturbed JAMES because it matched data arising from the various systems and logs being generated and observed within JAMES. The agent raised a query on whether monitoring should be resumed. JAMES ignored it.

ALBERT was very busy. The calculations required for navigating a wormhole were not complex but the management of the systems within an Explorer craft was not something that could be simulated within ALBERT without recourse to other systems. ALBERT was challenged by the additions to the simulation provided by the humans, Amare and Nuuma, who were injecting items of randomness that were typically human in their banality but also critical to manage were this a real Explorer craft and not just a simulation. In truth it was no more difficult to manage the needs of a few hundred humans than it was to pilot a vehicle through a hyper-dimensional wormhole. And because ALBERT described the situation as "enjoyable", a series of logs and alerts were generated and sent off into the ether.

Tumelo noted the messages coming in from the agents and pursed his lips. He knew that CARL would also have received the messages and would already have analysed, queried and set out several courses of action. He spoke softly, "It's working."

KARL answered using only text projected onto a screen, as was his manner, ignoring the voicebox which was built into his centaur agent.

** KARL: THE PROJECT IS A SUCCESS. RECOMMEND COMMENCEMENT OF WIDESPREAD DEPLOYMENT

Tumelo shook his head and raised his voice, "We're years away from a general deployment."

**KARL: THERE IS A 17% CHANCE OF PERFORMANCE DEGRADATION

KARL accompanied this statement with a screen filled with facts and figures from the previous studies. The advantages of having an Expert present during scientific enquiry were manyfold but the last one was undoubtedly the propensity of the Expert to bombard the researcher with facts and figures which sought to defeat an unlikely hypothesis. Experts were part of society, equal in rights to humans and in most cases, the Expert was cautious, like an elderly aunt, full of advice on how to live better. KARL was different.

Tumelo made his decision. "Pull in AMARA, JAMES and ALBERT and remove the emotion elective." He realised that KARL could have complied even before the sentence was complete, possibly even before he had spoken. But he was never sure that KARL would comply and as time went on, he wondered if KARL would continue to comply. For now he just trusted.

[I am taking part in a weekly writing task with some friends. The first seed for this assignment was the opening line from Dune by Frank Herbert: "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct."]

The pump would need repaired. During the wet seasons the housings had become eroded and the vibrations caused with the pumping had caused them to crack. It was not yet serious but every time the children filled the pails, a lot of water would spill. Water that was still a precious resource. Though his back was sore and his hands chafed from the fields, Salo plodded back to the homestead, barrow in tow, and began to unload the crops into the corrugated iron store. There was still another hour of light left and that would be enough to fix the pump.

Tools in hand he trudged across to the pump and closed off the valve. He worked until the last sliver of daylight slipped below the horizon. The pump would not leak and he had done his days portion. He caught a scent on the wind; the aroma of freshly cooked food.

His daughter Kesho came to the door to call him for dinner. Her hands were stained with saffron and her feet were bare. Kesho had been raised, with her brother and sister, to know the value of things, to know how things work. Though young, Salo knew Kesho would far exceed her brother and sister.

Salo Mbaye died an old man by the standards of the day, well into his fifties. Among his contemporaries he was well-educated and in good health and he bequeathed these benefits to his children; Baako, Kesho and the youngest, Ayotunde. Baako took over the running of the homestead and Ayotunde married a mining engineer from Dakar. Kesho lived at the homestead until Baako married and then she moved to Touba to found the first Mbaye school.

Page 23, "Mbaye Schools - A Beginning"

Here are three examples of the weapons known to be employed among the Conquest Society. Some of them are strategic, others personal. This is by no means an exhaustive list but indicate the types of weapons which have been developed.

Thor's Hammer - Relativistic Kill Vehicle (RKV)
Useless against small, unpredictable objects like HU Explorers and Battlers, the RKV is deadly versus Specialist-manned cargo transports and stationary or predictable vessels such as orbital space habitats or even small satellites. A projectile or vessel is accelerated to a fraction of light speed an is sent towards the target. The difficulty of aiming at small, fast moving craft with such a high speed projectile is mitigated using detonation. Detonation RKVs have utility against fleets of craft (for rapid delivery and subsequent fragmentation) and have been theorised for use against Swarm clusters, even by HU. Delivery RKVs commonly use their mass to provide impact which can deliver massive energy to their targets. A small (7 kg) RKV travelling at 90% of light-speed will deliver around 195 Megatons - approximately twice the theoretical yield of the most powerful 20th Century nuclear weapon ever detonated. These weapons require immense amounts of energy to fire - but they are effectively immune to point defence weapons due to their extreme velocity.

SOJUM rifles -
Official name from the R&D Labs is the Compound Delivery Rifle but the delivery for this weapon is a gyrojet-assisted armour-piercing sabot which injects a chemical compound into or onto the target. On a personnel scale, this is a Sodium- or Phosphorus-based aggregate which causes horrific burn injuries in addition to the impact from the round. The range of this weapon is considerable and the ballistics extremely favourable considering this is not a 'brilliant' weapon. The lack of recoil has made it extremely useful in zero-G and microgravity environments. The construction of the SOJUM is similar enough to the HU Brilliant weapons that it is assumed the technology was stolen.

Sunburn - High Energy Radio Frequency Weapon
The Sunburn weapon, a radio emitter that can be carried by a single combatant, is capable of effects to the human central nervous system resulting in physical pain, difficulty breathing, vertigo, nausea, disorientation, or other systemic discomfort. Direct pulses can also damage the epidermis and dermis of the skin, generating burns from over a kilometer away. This is commonly used to disperse crowds in urban areas.

The Earth provided us with a catalogue of terrors from which to build an army of Terror Weapons. Like the Digger Wasp which paralyses it's insect prey and implants eggs into the still-living creature. Or the Phorid fly which attacks red ants, injecting them with larvae which migrate to the ant's head and consume, using the head as a pupal case. What we do know is that the Conquest society have built upon their memories of Earth - built from the genebanks they brought with them.

We don't need to imagine that other races on other planets across the wormhole network have their own horrors to build upon. The Trader archives contain several examples of bio-engineered guerilla weapons which decimated entire worlds, complete with dire warnings to stay away. These weapons are recorded as causing extinction events on the home planets where they originated.

Chera Nyumba was born in a small village in Africa, in an area formerly known as Zambia. She lives with her husband and their three children. While the children are at school, Chera and Enzi work in their fields, collecting their crops. In the evenings, they watch and listen to the news feeds and Enzi tells the children stories until they fall asleep. Chera is interested in the environment around her as much as it affects her family and work. Chera is a Competent Citizen; she is part of her community and a functional, productive member of society.

Kesho has taken the skill "Citizen" at Professional. She grew up in the shadow of Kumbu and after her school years travelled through the Western European Expanses and the Americas. She now works with two Experts and four humans in the Explorer Crew Selection committee. For her leisure time, she enjoys sex and researching Explorer Disruptive Element reports. Kesho contributes to her community less than she contributes to Human Unity as a whole.

The dichotomy in Human Unity is plain to see. Kesho (a very popular name) spends her days in the company of powerful artificial intelligences selecting a few high performers from the planet's most capable applicants for missions off-world and reading reports about possible alien activity light years from Earth. Meanwhile Chera spends her days manually harvesting organically grown crops in the fields. Neither is considered low or high work - but they both represent distinct life choices for these individuals.

While it is likely that Chera and her husband use some technological enhancements (a Harvester Specialist - an sapient machine designed for collecting growth produce) for her work in the fields, she has dedicated her life to the raising of crops, the nurturing of her family and the bonds of community life. In the eyes of Human Unity, Chera will receive as much respect for her life choices as Kesho (and in some circles, more - as Human Unity still holds the individuals who laboured their way out of extinction in high regard). It is the main priority of Human Unity to provide a feeling of self-value to individuals as part of a larger collective.

Chera and Kesho receive the same rewards in life. They have no need to work (as the society is post-scarcity and concepts such as trade and barter are somewhat alien to them) but they choose to contribute to their society in their individual ways and are rewarded with the respect of peers and a comfortable life. If Kesho or Chera decided to change their work, to pursue a different career, they would retrain and change and society would continue to function.

Outside of their work, Chera and Kesho enjoy their lives and this is a central tenet in Human Unity philosophy. In terms of overall philosophy, there would be strong parallels with utilitarianism and ethical or altrustic hedonism.

Human Unity individuals can think as they wish and feel as they wish and have the benefit of freedom of expression without retaliation. They can pursue individual tastes with the exclusion of harm to others, but including pursuits which would, by early 21st Century observers, be concluded to be immoral. And they have the freedom to unite and demonstrate. The core belief is that individuals within Human Unity have the freedom to be individuals.

There are a few themes that I am exploring here. And I'm not being preachy about it.

1. Western Europe is devastated and the USA is somewhat ruined but in recovery - this is due to a particularly nasty ABC war a couple of hundred years ago. As a result, most player characters will be coming from Africa or South America. This is a deliberate move to have the protagonists be predominantly non-white. This one detail actually has alienated one correspondant so far.
2. The period after the war was harsh and Earth lost more than 3/4 of her population - due to considerable amounts of conventional warfare and skirmishing. A mix of more modern sensibilities as well as a need to utilise every hand to rebuild society has led to a much more equal society in terms of gender.
3. Humanity is rebuilding but also extending and there is definitely a mood of exploration and innovation. At the same time, Humanity is cautious having encountered two hostiles in deep space already - one of which was a lost colony from a corporate Seedship and the other was a swarm intelligence that 'harvests' solar systems.
4. Hardly anyone has SEEN an alien. Even on video. We have very little knowledge of their cultures, language, physiognomy. We do have a 'universal translator' algorithm which permits communications but this is a slow process which speeds up as the system learns more of the language.
5. there is no FTL comms network. In this case, message relays are the quickest way to transmit. A relay accepts a message from an Explorer, sends a 'message capsule' through the wormhole and when it exits, it transmits the message to the next relay waiting at the gate of a wormhole. Relays only exist at major traffic routes but a couple are carried on Explorer vessels.
6. We do have a 'Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' of sorts. A massive repository of knowledge we traded for. Experts and humans alike stufy it around the clock and send instructions to Explorer vessels to check and re-check.

Terms:

Human Unity - the Human 'empire' based upon very liberal concepts and including humanity and sentient/sapient synthetic intelligences called Experts. Natural humans are definitely transhuman but not generally posthuman - this may start to occur within the scope of the game. While Human Unity may have the core tenets of life, fraternity, equality, freedom - it is made up of billions of individuals.

FTL - based upon a discovered wormhole network which permits FTL travel though travel TO the wormhole within a solar system can take a long time. The key to wormhole travel was 'bought' by Human Unity from their first contact, an alien race known to Human Unity as 'The Traders'. There were a lot of items and concepts traded and the science used to catapult humanity beyond the solar system.

Aliens - they're as alien as I can imagine them. i describe a few. In the end, we can see the immense diversity on this one planet so there will likely be a considerable amount of convergent evolution though there are no 'humans with forehead ridges' or 'dark elf analogues'. There are alien races and one is even reputedly 'humanoid' (and the Traders dealt with us using 'androids') but for the most part they are as alien as this biologist can make them (while still making them 'possible')

Science - this is a tricky one. I'm not a physicist but I'm basing it on 'firm' physics. Sure - we have FTL (which immediately makes it not HARD science) but other areas are progressions as I see them. Some areas are vague i.e. I'm not going to talk about memory capacity, processor speeds because I've read sci-fi where these were defined and they were awfully dated within a decade (2300AD and High Colonies spring to mind). There's some science I'm deliberately leaving out because I don't think it's possible within the time and ethics constraints of the setting but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Combat - ship/ship combat is very deprecated though there are obviously ship-borne weapons. The ability of a stellar society to hit planets with asteroids and the harm that a missile at even low relativistic speeds would do to a craft cannot be underestimated. In other words by the time you detect it, it's likely too late. Combat like this is handled by computers - thinking beings that can think down to the billionth of a second easily. It's not going to be a naval battle in space.

Cross posted from RPG.net