Scifi Worldbuilding - Tumblr Posts

TW: Sibling death

--

Sable ignored the tugging on her arm. She ignored the muffled, staticy voice telling her they have to go. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the shell laying in front of her.

The empty husk of the one she once held close. The bare, expressionless face and the lightless eyes that once held a vibrant gold glow. The small line of oil dripping from the frameless casing's mouth that had stained the dusky purple paint.

Her twin. Her dear, sweet twin. The one who knew her best. The only one Sable had called her packmate since coming online. Her beloved twin, her other half, was caught by a Husker.

The voice speaking to her became clearer as the shock wore off. So did Sable's grief.

"Sable, we have to go!" Lyra continued to tug on Sable's arm, trying to get her away from the shell of their packmate.

Sable stared at Maura's husk for a few more moments before wrenching her arm out of Lyra's grasp.

"No..." the lone twin muttered. "We're not leaving."

"I know you don't want to leave her, but it's not safe here," Lyra tried to reason. "I know you love her, but sitting here waiting for a Husker to find us isn't going to bring her back."

"...I can't leave her..." Sable once again muttered more to herself than to her last living packmate.

Lyra drew back from Sable. She just said I. She just said I.

"Sable..?" The red, imp-like android places a clawed hand on Sable's shoulder.

"We were one." The dusky-colored drone sits down on her knees in front of her identical husk. "And now we are none."

--

Wip of a story I might write at some point. For background, Sable and Maura were twin androids who had interlinked code, causing them to say things like "our favorite color" or "we're tired" instead of my or I.

FTL in Astra Planeta

All known interstellar civilizations in the Astra Planeta canon are capable of faster-than-light travel, in some cases (skae and Calypsians) thanks to the teachings of humanity, but mostly because of their own scientific merits. The only known form of macroscopic FTL travel is the warp drive, which has historically been achieved a few hundred years into each civilization's spacefaring age since the physical and engineering challenges that must be overcome to actually make a working prototype are extremely complex.

A warp drive works by bending spacetime in such a way as to simply amplify the vessel's real velocity; it doesn't actually generate any acceleration. An object's real velocity at warp drive activation determines its FTL velocity, but it takes time to accelerate to that real velocity at a safe acceleration (one standard Earth gravity). What results is a tradeoff between the time spent speeding up and slowing down, and the time spent in warp, which varies depending on distance and real velocity.

Finding the optimal interstellar vector utilizes a simple asymptotic formula (created by @catgirlbionics, thanks again!) involving three variables: the distance to the target in lightyears (d), the warp amplification factor (a), and the maximum real-space velocity of the object as a decimal value of the speed of light (v). This function equates to the total flight duration in days (T).

(707.646*v)+((d/(a*v))*365) = T

By plugging in specific values for (d) and (a), and then deriving the function, its positive local minimum will be equivalent to the shortest possible travel time and ideal velocity for the given interstellar vector. For example: a modern Generation VI warp drive has a maximum amplification factor (a) of about 4000, and the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri (d) is about 4.34 lightyears. Using these values in the formula results in an optimal velocity (v) of about 0.0237c, and a minimum travel time (T) of 33 and a half days!

Warp drives have limited usefulness due to the enormous amount of power they require and the peculiar effects of bending spacetime. Acceleration must be accomplished in real-space or else the exhaust from the engine will reflect off the drive's event horizon and cook the ship, and the same goes for any heat radiated by the vessel. This is why warp drives typically operate in "stuttered" format: an interstellar flight is composed of multiple FTL segments interspersed with periods of real-space STL flight where the ship dumps the heat accumulated by the drive into space via radiator.

Warp drives are not the only method of circumventing the speed of light. Wormholes are also physically possible; however, the largest stable wormholes ever documented are of atomic scale, and anything with rest mass passing through the singularity will cause it to collapse. Wormholes, therefore, are only used to facilitate FTL communication in the form of ansibles, passing extremely narrow laser beams around a network of linked wormholes to achieve near-instantaneous communication.

Because of their nature as loopholes in relativity, both technologies incur some very bizarre effects when it comes to temporal reference frames. Ansible connections where one end is moving at relativistic speed create a combination of wavelength shift and frame dragging that render it impossible to communicate in lockstep; a warpship with a relativistic real-space velocity will result in some time-disparity between passengers and their destination upon arrival. However, it's generally agreed that these complications are a small inconvenience compared to an interstellar society without FTL, where time-slips of decades or more would be a haunting reality.

The United Nations of Humanity is the international governing body of almost all Earth-descended polities and territories in known space. Founded in 2210 CE after the independence movements of Mars and the Belt necessitated a reorganization of the original UN, the UNH of the 30th century is composed of hundreds of member star systems across a sphere of influence nearly twenty parsecs in diameter. It is the largest member of the United Spacefaring Sophonts Coalition and one of the two founding members (alongside the Ra’na InterGlobal Council). The UNH has no primary seat, as all business is conducted through ansible teleconference: a vastly simpler way to organize representatives across sixty-five thousand cubic lightyears of space. Members of the UNH include the United Sol System, Centauri Republic, New Nations of Helios, and Dogstar Alliance, to name a few.

The symbology of the UNH emblem is simple. The asymmetrical five digits of the human hand provide a clear distinction from the other species of the cosmos; we are the only species with hands like ours. Beyond that, the hand represents something much deeper. Handprints are ubiquitous in prehistoric cave art found all over the human homeworld, Earth, and have withstood the test of time. Even today, leaving an impression of one's hand in media echoes the purpose of the ancient hands: it is a testament to our existence, a call into the future that in this place and time, a human person was alive and awake. A footprint may show that we have stood in a spot, but a handprint shows we have lived there.

“The first rule of starfaring: do not stare into hyperspace. Never, ever, stare deep into hyperspace; not because of what is there -it is not a separate place from the space we know- but because of what it is. Hyperspace is simply normal space in another direction, one you could not think of if you wanted to, and that in itself is the problem. When a ship flies through hyperspace, it moves by vectors that we can only understand through the comfort of abstract math. Watching it happen before your eyes is a sure way to drive yourself mad. Because the second you stop staring at that void, you will know that for a fleeting moment you understood God, and the only way to get that moment back is to confront the void again.”

— Brother Nicodemos of the Order of Saint Mercurion, describing voidthrall

Voidthrall is the insanity which befalls those who have spent too much time directly observing the reality of hyperspace. Within the shifted resonance state of hyperspace the mind can, to some extent, process the nature of fifth-dimensional reality, as the neural connections made to do so utilize the extra dimension. However, upon the return to the fourth-dimensional resonance state, these connections are inaccessible, leaving only the impression of a greater understanding and the burning itch to know something just beyond reach.

Voidthrall is, without exaggeration, eldritch madness: an obsession with the inherently unfathomable. The afflicted are haunted by echoes of things they cannot imagine without the bone-deep humming of a ship's hyperdrive, unable to make use of this knowledge, yet still plagued by memories of a far greater truth. The longer the afflicted have gazed into the abyss, the more desperate they become to regain their comprehension of the incomprehensible.

The madness is, to date, incurable. The only effective treatment able to soothe those who pathologically seek the unknowable truth is further exposure to hyperspace, until the point where the afflicted become unable to neurologically function in normal space.

Within our current understanding of reality and the multiverse, there is a theoretically infinite number of sophont species that have achieved the Hyperichon stage of advancement and have broken free of their Cycle. Though all have differing origins, these omni-beings are collectively called "Hyperichals," or more commonly "Drifters." Drifters exist outside the limits of the cosmos and can travel between universes at will. They have attained final and complete knowledge of physics, and have total mastery over the workings of reality through post-singularity thaumatech.

They are, in every sense, ultimate.

Individual Drifters no longer retain the biology of their ancestors, having transcended the limits of physical form, and can choose to manifest in whatever way they wish while inside a universe. Since Drifters have an entirely different relationship with time, it is possible (though rare) for a developing civilization to encounter their Hyperichal descendants, though they will likely never realize this unless they are explicitly told so.

In terms of society, there are a few paths a Hyperichon-stage civilization may take after ascendancy. Some believe there is still further to be known, and perform increasingly elaborate and esoteric experiments with the clockwork of reality. Most, however, choose to adopt or create a small, stable cosmos or cosmic network as their new ideal home, called a Haven. They harvest mass from dead universes to build, unlimited, inside their Haven, and maintain its entropy in a similar manner to how we maintain marine tanks or the air cycle in a spacecraft. A rare few Hyperichal civilizations are marauders, but these are the ones who have accidentally attained pseudo-Hyperichal status before they were ready and almost always destroy themselves in due time. True Drifters have no qualms with each other; they live in a post-scarcity eternity, where everything is infinite and forever.