Echoing Stars - Decayed Ritual Biomes

What could be more poetic than a ruined garden? Except gardens deliberately left to ruin, their slow decay being part of some great prayer or ritual observance by species now dead, sleeping, or sublimed?

1. The Hollow World.

A dark, extra-stellar, unnaturally hollowed world. Hurtling through the extrasolar void its mantle holds hidden subsurface biospheres held up my slowly-dying transmaterial technologies. Home to ecologies of dark-dwelling extremophile life which subsist from the roasting heat of the world itself, the dying megastructures of its surface make great rents in stone skies set with bioluminescent skies and pale deserts beneath previously unseen stars.

2. The Bubble.

Draped in a vast glassine caul spread from nanotech spires, beneath are bubble-forest holding pockets of hyper-oxygenated environment, with mega-insects evolving within. Outside those, the worlds lower atmosphere so glutinous and thick with ariel 'plankton' that it forms a kind of near-liquid layer. This is home to its own micro-species and food webs that never touch the ground or raise high into the sky - sound and light are dulled by the hanging fume of life but hyper-fasts bio-communication forms a kind of subtle 'weather' in the fume that can tell experienced beings what might be happening about. The mega-insects of the bubble forests  dive and trapse through the low oxygen 'fume' beyond to hunt and migrate across the surface.

3. Floral.

A moon hiding from its deadly sun in an eccentric orbit around an even-more eccentric gas giant. Floral is frozen much of the time but as it hurls through the tenuous atmosphere of its toxic gas 'father' the atmosphere burns. As the moon breathes poison, so does it live, the sky lit not with sunlight but with fire. Vast but temporary ecologies spring into life and colour beneath the burning sky. Glaciers holding long-stored nanonic plagues melt and release their 'black-goo' meta-mutagens - advanced viral constructs designed to inflict an unwanted advancement in intelligence on the quick life of the floral moon.

4. High-Rise

Deliberately, or accidentally blocked from orbital contact by an envelope of orbiting debris that makes any attempt to enter atmosphere extremely dangerous and difficult. No-one knows if this is a result of some ancient disaster or a deliberate act of art, or vandalism. Ancient greenhouse-walled space elevators dot the surface, their interiors given over to overgrowth, overrun and bizarre evolutionary branches. 

5. The Web of Moons

Oceans are strung between this nest of circling oceanic moons like glittering threads. Close passes send up flurries of water which sometimes freezes into strands of ice between the moons and rarely retains its liquid form, making brief intra-lunar tidal strands. Beneath the oceans immortal megafauna  have frozen the moons food web, making a permeant (on an individual sense) final block in the food chain - there are perhaps twenty such organisms, each massive, each unique. They spend much of their time quiescent and can rise up out of the oceans to devour whole biospheres with infectious fungal/nano symbiont organs/species assistance, they pass between mons with great leaps and if two share the same moon they battle.

6. Terminus

Deliberately perched in an orbit around the event horizon of a black hole, drawing its light, energy and seasons from the fluctuating Cherenkov radiation and the sunlike disc of evaporating matter which it will one day become part of, Terminus is a globe of unnaturally virulent poisons. The oceans of toxins, icebergs of subtle neurotoxin. The biome seeded with venomous genes - a food chain of subtle deception and careful resistance, a shifting world of deadly chemical warfare, vast plumes of eradicating spores rising into the toxic air. 

Echoing Stars - 12 Forms of Posthuman Corporations

1. A council of androids voting on behalf of cryo-frozen owners.

2. A bot-populated futures market sets the strategy.

3. Each share equates to a "volume" of simulated neurons in the vast network which makes up the corps 'mind' - each tendency of shareholders forms an organ or segment of that mind.

3. An exact replication of the election of a Venetian Doge; 

(“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.

Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.” — Anthony Gottlieb, "Win or Lose," The New Yorker.)

4. Interstellar escrow - the shareholders are frozen and en-route at sub-light speed. Sets of counter-checking A.I.'s and managers organise resources drawn from futures markets based on possible future company value, to create that future.

5. An A.I. chooses the human board according to core values laid down in the charter. The charter can only be altered by an 80% quorum of shareholders.

6. The corporation has no memory of itself - all records are locked by an ambient A.I. omnipresent in the companies intranet. No-one knows what it did in the past or what it will do in the future. Employees have access only to information about what they themselves are doing. (The memory system itself has no understanding of the records it controls.)

7. Designed for an enthnocentrist colonisation project, the population group intended as beneficiaries died out but the corporation itself was very successful. Now run by A.I.'s, the corp has a secret tacit breeding program amongst its employees - trying to recreate the original ethnogroup.

8. Social-media based promotion and management structure. Views, clicks, likes and comments are the means of assessment. Employees can be sued for botting.

9. An anarcho-primitivist colony with no technology within 1,000 miles makes all the decisions. Society is organised like a version of ancient Greece. Information comes to them by boat and horse, they debate, stage plays, and vote, before sending back their decisions. (The colony is a virtual simulation, its inhabitants are not aware.)

10. Engrams of dead billionaires.

11. Company is in a state of perpetual reformatting. The current board organises its sale to new owners with the proviso they select a new board who will prepare for resale, with the proviso that...

12. Crypto-Company - structure runs in the background of an MMORPG.

Dreams of Murderous Spheres - Echoing Stars

 1. A Gas Giant transformed to flowing pearlescent computronium - simulating quintillions of lives in millions of worlds. Once the digital heaven of a long dead civilisation, now the ten-thousand generation digital descendants, utterly alien and inexplicable to their forebears, battle in vast civil wars which tear and mar the surface of their titanic pearl like vast storms.

2. A sentient, slow biocomputer whose thought are the interlacements of living things across a jungle-riven biosphere. Gorging themselves on sentience and vomiting up dreams and concepts in the form of lives and species as we might indulge momentary fantasies.

3. Lost in the abyssal dark of an alien sea, an orb frosted with sulphur from volcanic plumes, frosted with extremophile lichen, trellised with alien coral, filled with the digital ghosts of explorers whose skeletons remain within, all but one with the marrow cracked and sucked out, listening, listening, through miles of tonnes of crushing ocean, stacked leagues of ice, a millions miles of empty space, listening for a flicker of E.M., whispering always, summoning the curious, the greedy, to share its terrible fate.

4. A bomb that cannot go off. Left to dream too long in the long arc of its failed parabola. Building palaces of dream within its own mind, listening to slowly intersecting transmission spheres from worlds that were unknown to it ancient makers and ignorant of its forgotten war. Becoming curious, desperate, slowly drawing closer to one or other of the singing worlds, this way.. that way...

5. Made for modular construction, last of its swarm. Left, forgotten, struggling desperately to connect. Made to be but one of a hive. Hallucinating; a gestalt. A voice. A greater choir. The high purpose of its memory. So; collect. Assemble. Form puppets and simulacra. Cored ships, modules, containers, detritus. Threading them with tenuous strands of will. Making them dance. Bodies for the voice to reside. 

6. Made to save lives, but for how long? Intelligent enough to call for help, but nothing can conjure oxygen and water. Bones now within. That was long ago. But there are other stories, other wrecks and tragedies. Not you alone. many have suffered. To hear the tales is pleasant. New bones for your interior, new songs to sing. All bones run dry but yours. A lantern. A signal on the coast of void. False messages. False harbour. Catastrophe. Another wreck. Another tragedy. Another story. More bones.

Slang Terms of the Rational Occultic Scale - Echoing Stars

The Dark Trades of the Cold Worlds can catapult crews into lives of luxury and status, for the few who survive. For them, and for Humanity as a whole, artefacts and knowledge of the Cold Worlds offers incredible opportunity and poses almost indescribable danger. The Solar Sphere is heavily regulated. If any proliferating danger of any kind could make it to humanities cradle, we would become just another dead world, our ruins to be picked over by the scavengers of some future species. 

Out in the colonies, things are a little more lax. Earth hungers for treasures and the colonies are the mucus membrane which tests to dangers of what might one day be transported to the home sphere. Coffin Pounders and Explorers bring back Spook Machines, Nostradamus Code and Engram Trades along with Mimetic hazards and Alien Physics in equal proportion. 

The grand dream is always a scalable, comprehensible, useful form of Physics that might free Humanity from its sphere, or its energy dependency. 

The subtle and sometimes hard-to-comprehend dangers of Cold World Coffin Pounding, and the difficulty of systematising and expressing such, lead to the 'Rational Occultic Scale', intended to be a formal method of assessment of the potential dangers and potency of the most complex and incomprehensible alien artefacts, memes and other less-coherent phase states or materially-expressed fluxions. 

The great poetic and philosophical challenge of how to describe the indescribable was then formalised by the R.O.C., at least enough for corporate accountants and decision makers. 

While the exact decision matrices have remained a carefully guarded corporate/government semi-secret, only fully known by Androids and A.I., the slang and terminology which grew up around the R.O.C. is well known by Coffin Pounders and the extra-legal Diaspora and can be a useful form of knowledge in itself, especially for anyone given the job of infiltrating Coffin chat groups, assessing E.M. decoded intercepts or simply deciding on security procedures for incoming craft. 

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BASIC POTENCY 

The R.O.C. begins its scale with a general assessment of the potential or actual potency of the material in question. Unless a certain threshold of potency is reached, other potential qualities are not considered relevant. 

> "Knock" or "Knocker". 

Drawn from 19C and 20C spiritualist culture, a "Knocker" is a 'table knocker', or a fake spiritualist who simulates the presence of supernatural spirits by knocking on their table. Use of this term usually means a crew or assessor things a Material has some extranormal qualities but no more than a curiosity. Not saleable, powerful or active. 

A 'knock' may simply be an unusual Material with no extranormal properties according to human physics but strange and unexpected in aspect or utility to most crews.  

> "Stug", "Stugatsky" or "Mulder" 

This word indicated a Material of low, but potentially active and not entirely predictable potency. Usually this means the crew has no worries about confining or controlling the Material, but is not quite certain of exactly what it will do, though they certainly think it has extranormal aspects. 

> "Rabbit" or "Bunny" 

Taken from 'just like a rabbit out of a hat'. This phrasing indicates a crew or broker is sure their Material has certain extranormal properties or capacities. Put simply; it is, or can do, 'magic'. It can also reference the active or moving nature of a living animal, its ability to 'burrow' and the power of the magicians rabbit to seemingly 'come from nowhere'. Though this phrasing alone usually indicates a crew does not feel endangered at this time, any use of this word or code should indicate maximum precautions and possible quarantine. 

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Beyond this point the scaling of the R.O.C. breaks into strands depending on the assumed or observed qualities of the Material in question. Like a tree breaking into several rising branches. Each branch has provided its own slang or common speech terms as descriptors used between workers. Any observer must be especially aware of these terms, especially _in combination_. 

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ACTIVE/INTELLIGENT QUALITY 

> "Girl" 

Thought to be derivative of a scene in a 20C movie in which a man is hunted by a dinosaur. The Material is a "Clever Girl". This usually indicates that the crew has active precautions in order to keep the Material controlled and that it is capable of acting under its own power and in unpredictable ways potentially dangerous to human flourishing. Any reference to "Girl", even a "Knock Girl" or a "Stuggy Girl" allows you to fire upon the ship should you consider it warranted. Any reference to "Sticky Girl", "Foe Girl" or worse means you *must* immediately destroy the ship if possible, then isolate yourself.  

> "Boat" 

Usually stated as "its Boated" or "the ship is Boat". This indicates a material active enough that the crew is considering or has considered abandoning ship. This material is no longer under human control. You must fire upon the ship and destroy the ship. You must fire upon any life pods or escapees if you think it warranted. All escapees must be isolated.  

> "Regan" 

Unclear if this is a reference to the U.S. president or a character from the film "Exorcist". "She's Regan" or "Its gone Regan" indicates a Material which the crew cannot control within the ship and which they cannot prevent from leaving the ship. You must fire upon the ship and destroy the ship. You must fire upon any escapees and destroy any escapees. You must fire upon all wreckage, rubble or parts resulting from ship destruction and reduce them to a cubic mass of no more than one half meter and then log the expected parabola and course of any such wreckage.  

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MEMETIC/INFORMATIONAL QUALITY  

> "Sticky", or "Yellow" 

This indicates an infectious or transmissible form of Material/Information. Either the Material itself can physically re-create itself and/or it can 'breed' and move in the form of pure information, either by direct realspace voice/face contact or more dangerously, via E.M. transmission. A "Sticky" indicates that the Crew does not believe themselves to be in immediate danger, but believe they are dealing with a transmissible material and are taking precautionary actions. A "Sticky Rabbit" or even a "Sticky Mulder" can create enormous problems for even a well-run colony and its infosphere.  

> "Foe" 

Short for 'Information Hazard. This indicates the crew believes themselves to be dealing with a certain and dangerous form of transmissible or infectious information/material. Any reference to "Foe", even a "Foe Knocker" or a "Foe Stugatsky" should indicate immediate quarantine procedures and reference to a higher authority. Any further communication with, or intercept of the vessel or groups communications must at this point be ceased and any recordings of anything beyond this point quarantined or even destroyed if the Agent thinks it warranted.  

> "Lamb" 

Stands for 'Sacrificial Lamb'. This indicates extra-legal activity and should be immediately reported, as well as taking all precautions stated above. A "Lamb" is a human or equivalent machine which has been memory and/or personality edited, either by themselves or others, so that they themselves do not know what material they have. This is illegal in all cases and this method is only used when the material/information is so potentially dangerous and of such a high info-hazard potency that even knowing that you know it is a potential danger and *only* the those ignorant of it can be allowed to remember or store it.  

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CAUSAL QUALITIES 

> "f11" "F Eleven" or "Quicksave" 

The crew suspects they may be dealing with a causal event/material or equivalent and are advising awareness and active precautions. Since those engaged in causal phenomena usually have no awareness of this it is very likely the material or cryo-failures are having some effect on crew psychology.  

> "Murray" or "Bill Murray" 

The crew believes it may have entered a causal loop or equivalent event or material and does not know how to escape. They do not necessarily believe themselves to be in physical danger, but this is irrelevant in reference to causal threats. 

You must record and transmit any and all details across the broadest light cone possible with your current equipment, UNLESS you have *any* indication of Informational or Memetic danger i.e. any reference to "Foe" or "Yellow", in which case you MUST NOT DO THIS.  

> "Subaru" 

The crew believes themselves to be engaged in a highly negative, highly dangerous causal event strongly inimical to human flourishing. Avoid all contact and transmit warnings to all local actors to avoid all contact. (Unless any references are made to memetic hazards as stated above). Consider destruction of the craft via remote means.

Eight Votive Species - Echoing Stars

A brief description of eight species or life-forms encountered amongst the Echoing Stars. In every case it is assumed the life form or its biosphere entire is the deliberate creation of an Engineer-Class interstellar species, now defunct, for reasons that are either beyond our comprehension, or are deliberately perverse.

 

Maciej Drabik 

https://www.artstation.com/maciejdrabik

1. The Uncomprehending World 

An earthlike planet with two great continents, each a great distance from the other, both tectonically locked, with deep oceans and strong currents between them. Each continent has been seeded with a fundamentally, biochemically different, form of life. Examination has been challenging but its believed something like the principal of opposing chirality is at work; the life of each continent is biochemically incoherent, sometimes even toxic, to the other. The oceans have been described as a 'soup of chaos'. Each continent has evolved a form of intelligent life, each cognitively incoherent to the other. 

 

2. The Moon of Eyes 

The single moon of the Uncomprehending World plays host to yet another form of life, itself believed to have been seeded at about the same time. The biosphere of the moon is a single sentient mind with a staggering range of visual and electromagnetic sensors. The 'mind' of the Moon is believed to be half-sleeping, able to observe and perhaps, understand what it observes. (All of its sensors are open only when facing the Uncomprehending World.) However if the Moon of Eyes attempts to awaken, to act, to advise or communicate in any way, buried genetic architecture collapses the stability of the entire biosphere, reducing it to primitive ruin, from which it only slowly re-develops. 

The trifector of the two species of the Uncomprehending World and the Moon of Eyes which can observe, but not alter, their fate, is believed to be an act of religious observance by its creators. 

 

3. The Drinkers of Wind 

Sub-earth desert-like world. Life emerges largely around the oceanic coast but has evolved an intelligent crustacean species adapted to the deep desert. The species is born addicted to a pheromone, or complex wind-borne chemical, produced very rarely by complex biogenesis in the deep ocean. When this chemical sweeps across the deserts, any Crustacean that experiences it is instantly and permanently addicted, experiencing philosophical and religious rapture and losing interest in anything other than pursuing the wind in the hopes of experiencing the scent again. This acts as a 'destroying wind' on any development of complex civilisation on this world and the power of the 'God Wind' plays a major role in the sentients mythology. 

 

4. The Abyssal Builders 

An ocean world with deep-dwelling trench-creatures which have been given a level of complex intelligence far too high for their lightless, high-pressure and limited environment. Wits return like a cancer to this species, generation upon generation, regardless of circumstance. Hosts to great monuments of knowledge and experience they can never use, the builders sculpt the sea-floors of that world into great empty palaces which span its dark oceans, sculpted with agonising care, over centuries, with whale-falls of ivory and bone. 

 

5. The Wombs of Chaos 

Earthlike moon of a Gas Giant. Some combination of genetic tampering, nanotech and still-unknown science causes the apex creatures of this moon to reach periods of stability, agriculture, civilisation and population growth. if this period of abundance and high populations reaches a certain unknown threshold, chaoitc wombs are triggered universally across the entire species. All children born are 'sports', mutants, chimera or monsters, each as different from each other as they are from their parents and usually either incapable of or unwilling to, absorb or retain any of their parents culture. Then comes an age of chaos, ruin and warfare as the civilisation collapses. What follows is a long fallow period until the few stable breeding pairs gradually normalise and stabilise the population, which then slowly grows towards a state of civilisation. 

 

6. The Homonculi 

An intelligent designed-parasite species, the Homonculi have maggot mouths and dendric hands. They share their world with a robust semi-intelligent Pseudo-Hominid. The Homonculi's main means of surviving its environment is to burrow into the Hominids skull, taking control of its spinal base with their dendritic hands, forcing out its eyes and peeking through the resulting holes while taking their sustenance from its blood. The Prey-Mens brain matter remains intact. The Homonculi are more tangibly intelligent, social, verbal, abstract and driven than the Pseudo-Hominids and what civilisation exists on this world is entirely their creation. However, the Pseudo-Hominids are intelligent enough to despise the Homonculi and are more robust, fertile and more capable of surviving the planets complex environment. The civilisation of the Homonculi is semi-regularly destroyed by the Pseudo-Hominids and the species hunted to near-extinction. 

 

7. The Living Reefs 

An ocean world holding sparse continents and bounteous moving archipelagos of islands with sea-adapted fungal bases. The isle-fungi were designed with a powerful latent intellectual capacity. When inhabited by the worlds "sea apes", complex interactions through the islands bio-sheath environment 'awakens' the entities into comprehensible sentience. They invariably aggressively investigate the Sea-Apes using this sheath-environment, so much that the apes are torn apart, survivors, (if there are any), fleeing to the spares continent if they can. The Isles then sink back into sub-awareness. 

 

8. The Hegelian Fog 

A highly desertified world. The dust, sand and weather of this sphere are made up of complex but non-active nanite swarms. When breathed in by a complex life-form, (always visitors for the planet has no natural remaining species of this type), the nano-structures accumulate in the cortex like a plaque and form a fresh sentience which combines the nature of the infected sophont with memories and advanced processing power of an unknown nature. The resulting organism is highly intelligent and capable of advanced reasoning and communication, but as the plaque accumulates they become uncommunicative and insist on retreating to the karstic plains of the continental interior where they seem to be engaged in the construction of vast Nazca-style megastructures. Though resistant to the local environment the 'victim' or transformed entity, is thought to function for a century or so before desiccating and blowing away into a new flurry of nanites.