IN SIDE OUT WORLD:

20050331 - New character Fidanka

THE STORY:

This is based on a mixture of a lot of things. I started out wanting to do an earlier book I wrote called "Geekworld" which can be found elsewhere here somewhere. But I soon realized that there was no way I could ever make this happen on my own. So I set my sights a bit lower and took elements of that and wrapped it in with a number of other things I'd been digesting. Which includes the wonderful 'hard sci-fi' work of Mike Combs. <http://members.aol.com/howiecombs/hard_s-f.htm> A great deal of which is based on the earlier work of the late Gerard K. O'Neill and his "High Frontier". And everything in between.

It is some time in the future. Maybe late this century. The Earth is completely fucked. Fucked up by wars and ecological disasters on biblical scales. There were just too many humans. So much so that the Chinese had even taken to human culling programs. But some time earlier in the century, Professor Bruce Franklin (from Mike Combs) invented a mass accelerator which could launch things into space very cheaply. VERY CHEAPLY. (You'll have to read Mike Combs' work to get an idea of this.) For years it can only launch payloads because of the acceleration required. To achieve escape velocity with G-forces that humans could tolerate would require somewhat less acceleration and therefore a longer mas driver. Something that had always been talked about but no-one had ever committed the funds to. However massive payloads of food water and other materials have been routinely shot into space for years via a giant accelerator located in Brazil near the equator. Human cargo still has to be transported via more conventional means.

However this hasn't stopped a steady stream of humans living and working in space. By the end of the 21st century, humans had set up a large number of near-earth space habitats of various kinds. And work on a third mass accelerator which is large enough to transport humans into space had recently been completed.

It was fast becoming a new kind of wild west frontier in space. But with one major twist. Instead of it being pockets of segregated human cultures being forced together by an ever smaller world, each habitat was a world in it self and human culture was already fractionalizing and splintering. Not just along cultural and religious lines but also along scientific and even artistic lines. Each world was different and if you didn't like the one you lived in you could probably find one more to your liking. And if not, and you could afford to, you could always build your own.

World building had become cheaper too. As described by both O'Neill and Combs, the general method is to capture a suitably sized iron-core asteroid. Sling it into orbit. Usually at the la'grange point between the earth and the moon. Then, using giant floating mylar mirrors, reflect the sun onto it till it becomes semi-molten. A volitile gas explosive charge drilled into the core of the asteroid is then detonated. The explosive (expansive) power of the charge is calculated to expand outwards and hopefully forming something of a sphere or cylinder which is completely hollow on the inside.

It is rarely perfect but software and charge fabricating technologies have reduced the failure rates to a point where usually it's just a matter of patching a few holes and pumping some air in. Asteroids made of ice can be used to split the hydrogen and oxygen using the abundant energy of the sun. Capturing such an asteroid provides water, oxygen and fuel for propulsion etc.

But not all of these habitats come off perfectly. Some are complete and total failures. All kinds of things can go wrong though it happens less and less as humans get better at it. One such complete failure is the habitat in which "The Man" lives.

The Man is actually a Yeti. This is where I begin to borrow both from the teachings of the church of the subgenius <www.subgenius.com> and from a specific story by Mike Combs. Humans naturally thought they were the only real intelligence on earth. That Yetis, faeries and even vampires were simply legend and the stuff that Hollywood's holotainment houses based features around. In fact they all exist though humans have both over exaggerated and underestimated these legends.

The Yetis and Faeries were the original intelligences on Earth. Humans were actually engineered by the yetis. Perhaps as much as half a million years earlier. The Yetis needed helpers that were intelligent enough to perform menial tasks for them but not too intelligent to ask too many questions. Yeti society is very different from humans. They are super intelligent as compared and any super intelligent race doesn't actually need a hierarchical leadership structure. The questions of what to do and how to do it seem obvious to all when you're intelligent. And being somewhat telepathic, yetis tend to assimilate memetics on a culture wide basis, very quickly. In short. Yetis tend to do things because they are cool. If a task isn't cool then it's of little value to a yeti. They'd rather be off fucking someone. (Or something) Of course "COOL" to a Yeti is a little more interesting than the latest playstation game. An unsolvable problem or an unanswered question is like a magnet to a yeti.

Therefore you can understand how super intelligent yeti DNA found it's way into humans. Some yetis just loved their little humans a bit too much. Humans with yeti blood are often referred to as SubGenii. They tend to belong to a cult called 'the church of the subgenius.' It is a joke cult. Normal humans don't take it seriously. However embedded in the heart of this joke cult is the true meaning. It is really a group of people that other humans would refer to as abnormal, but who's job it is to stave off the threat from the evil CON. More on "THE CON" later.

Humans got out of control however and started evolving civilizations of their own. Over the millennia, the yetis had tried various means to keep them in check. They introduced religion to them. This held them at bay for thousands of years but eventually they developed steam technology and as intelligent as the yetis were, they couldn't keep up. The yetis themselves had evolved in that time. They had become less furry and ironically, more human-like. So much so that it was often possible for yetis to go un-noticed in human societies. Some humans were also unaware of just how yeti they were.

But where yeti brains had continued to evolve, humans were still using the same mental capacity they had 100,000 years before. They had enough brain power to understand menial technology but not enough to understand the consequences of their actions. While the yetis had remained in tune with their surroundings despite their level of technology and sophistication, the humans had wreaked havock.

The Fey (Faeries) have always been explorers. About the time that humans were forming their own early civilizations, faeries had built space craft and were beginning to explore the solar system. By the time of the human civilizations in Egypt, the Fey were long gone. A few remained. Just enough that humans would cite legends of them. Only humans mistakenly believed that faeries were tiny people with wings who lived in gardens and sat on toad stools. Faeries are short but they're not that short. Faeries also have a saying.

"If God had have wanted us to fly, he wouldn't have taken away our wings."

Faeries still have small wings in fact but the wing area to weight ratio is far to small to allow flight. They're usually just for display. You can tell a lot about a faery by the colour of her wings.

Did I say "Her?" Well there are in fact male faeries but they're aren't too many of them. In fact the male faeries are largely useless since faeries are a kind of mutated clone. Not so much hermaphrodites but a kind of cross pollination. They can and do breed with each other. They enjoy breeding and especially with the few males that are around but they are largely all female.

Like the yetis, the Fey are hyper intelligent but are more telepathic. Humans are no match and faeries had been once known to play tricks on them. Thus the legends humans created of them.

By contrast, the yetis are homebodies. Humans rarely gained a glimpse of them and never ever saw their cities. very few subgenii have been to a yeti city. All of which tend to be large, underground structures. Well hidden and protected from humans with a quasi-telepathic force field.

As mentioned earlier, many other strange human-like creatures had evolved on Earth. (Do you really think humans would be the only intelligence. If there's one, there's bound to be dozens more.) Vampires for example. If you believed the legends of hollowood about these beings, mathematically speaking, the Earth would be overrun with them by now. In fact very little is known about Vampires because like the yeti, they tend to keep to themselves. They drink blood and they sleep all day but that could be just that they're suffering ADD. (Attention Deficit Disorder) One of many human terms used to describe humans with more Yeti Blood than the norm.

Despite all these intelligent beings keeping to themselves, they know of each other's existence. Some, like the vampires, despise the yeti for having unleashed the humans. but acknowledge that it probably would have happened anyway without yeti intervention. Yetis belive that if they had not intervened the human problem would have been much less controllable.

Yetis and all other mammalian intelligences with opposable thumbs are descended from Bonobos. Humans on the other hand are descended from apes. While apes are feudal and violent, bonobos just want to have fun and fuck a lot. Bonobos will fuck anything anywhere any time so you can see where yetis get that trait from. The only concession to this that the yetis make is that they are sorry their humans killed off the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals are what would have evolved instead but it is generally recognized that they would have been every bit as violent and destructive as the humans. Perhaps even more so since humans were given some kind of higher conscience by the yetis.

Other Earth species too know of the yeti's existence. Animals of various kinds always live in harmony with the yetis. It's only the humans who are kept in the dark.

So naturally when the Yetis guided humans into space, Yetis and Vampires and Werewolves eventually set up their own habitats. But the first of these to do so was the Yeti known as "THE MAN." So called because he came from one of the original Yeti Cities in Tibet but hung out with humans till he could bum a ride into space. He did this decades before the large accelerator was built. And he made the journey because yetis can withstand far more G-force than can a human. So he stowed away aboard a payload that was pressurized and when the humans opened the hatch at it's destination, he used a little telepathy to confuse them. They still saw a staggering yeti emerge from the pod but they were confused enough to think he was just another worker who was with them.

The Man quickly slithered into the humanity on board that space station and disappeared. Only to reemerge again some years later when the lights first came on in "Man's World." (I don't really have a name for the habitat that THE MAN built but "Man's World" is pretty funny.)

In those days, humans were typically lax. Like everything else, they figured space was real big and it didn't matter if you polluted it a bit. THE MAN wasn't sure what went wrong when they tried to make this habitat but went wrong it did. The charge could have been way too powerful. The outer shell was certainly large enough and thin enough to account for that. On the other hand, the shear number of rips and tears in the surface suggested that the consistency of the asteroid they used wasn't even. Or perhaps wasn't heated evenly and some more solid spots remained. Whatever the problem, it was hulk that the humans had simply left there and forgotten about because they were too lazy or incompetent to clean up the mess. They had even left a great deal of their world fabricating equipment behind. And the array of mylar mirrors used to focus the sun in the fabricating process were still floating not 100 kilometers away.

The shell was unique in that it had two gaping holes at each end. Like a north and south pole. This wasn't unusual in the fabricating of TATs but usually these holes had to be widened in order to fit the basic power generation equipment. (I'll get to that also) So THE MAN had the idea of capturing another asteroid and floating it inside the hulk. Then heating it up through one of these giant holes he would re-detonate it like a vulcanizing patch on an inner tube. Only from the inside out.

This didn't quite work either. As the molten asteroid expanded outwards it cooled too quickly in places. Stretched and tore in others. One end received more heat that the other. It only compounded the problem. Not only were there two non-contiguous shells, one inside the other, but in some places they were fused together and in others they were anything up to a kilometer apart. A third asteroid was no longer an option. THE MAN conceded that had he have been able to afford a higher grade asteroid and tug it to his hide-out, he might have done better.

But he noticed how some of the sun's energy focused by the mirrors had been mis-aligned at times and melted and fused some of the material around the edges of the hole. And in terms of space habitats this really was prime real estate. So he programmed the mirrors to respond to a computer control program he wrote. And with the combination of melting and small explosive charges, he patched most of the surface like welding in rock. It took a few weeks but by the end of it, he was so good at it, he was able to virtually sculpture features into it.

The usual method for building a tat is to produce a completely contiguous surface. Somewhere between a sphere and a tube. The more tubular the better as it offers more inner surface area. There are usually a pair of holes at either end which become the virtual poles of the world. One end is completely sealed while the other has a solar collector of some sort mounted in it. Once it is all sealed up and pressurized it can be spun up. The centrifugal force creates an artificial gravity and the entire world can be built on the inside. The solar collector not only provides abundant free power from the sun, but also is pumped through a central light pipe which is controlled over a 24 hour period to provide natural sun-light inside the TAT

If the TAT is big enough, it will even have weather conditions of it's own and clouds will form. Along with precipitation. Seasonal changes need to be regulated but the weather largely looks after it self. An entire eco system and environment can be built just like a real world. The only difference is that it is inside out. If you look straight up on a clear day, you can see the other side of the world.

This TAT was certainly big enough to have it's own weather but it wasn't possible to seal it all off. Only around the equator and back toward one end was it possible. And even then only with some intricate solar surgery. But THE MAN was good at this kind of thing by now. All he needed was a collection of small rocks. (Asteroids.)

The human who sold him this space aggregate couldn't believe his luck. Often, in the business of harvesting asteroids, one collects a large number of asteroid pieces. Broken fragments that are too small to do anything particularly useful with. Too small, even for refining into useful materials. Usually these have to be accelerated toward the sun by law after a particularly wreakless trader tried to melt several hundred together and accidently burst a hole in his neighboring TAT. So the job of removing the shale was expensive and tedious. THE MAN paid the trader a small sum and borrowed the use of the trader's tug. The trader turned a blind eye as THE MAN used a much smaller mylar mirror he'd made, to tack-weld the asteroids together and then gently tug them back to his TAT.

THE MAN was able to park his collection of iron-ore rocks next to his tat and break one off as needed. He built a large barrier to one end of the sphere on the inside and once the solar collector and light pipe were installed, could be sealed off and probably form it's own environment. The trader on the other hand, became known as the inventor of the asteroid micro-welder. Obviously he didn't close his eyes for the whole time THE MAN was working.

But the MAN didn't care. He was going to have his TAT and it was a big one. He Fashioned a dish collector at one end like an umbrella. A SunBrella if you will. He had designed a far more efficient method of extracting power from the sun by using a semi-crystallized mantel in the centre of the Sunbrella. There were more than enough giant mylar mirrors to focus the sun onto the sunbrella leaving a number of spare ones for on-going construction work. Crystal light pipes embedded on the inside of the structure provided natural lighting into those cavities around the surface that could not be properly sealed with the main interior. He built his own house mounted on one such cavity and styled it semi-gothic just to prove his mastery.

The remaining holes and features were used as conduits and interfaces to provide access ports for equipment and mountings. As well as airlocks and docks. Later, the large internal space at the opposite end to the sunbrella, which couldn't be pressurized, became a gigantic space dock for very large space craft. Where as humans had to park their space craft outside their TATs, THE MAN could park right inside. Even an extremely large faerie battle/exploration cruiser or 20.

I don't know how big this TAT is but it's huge. Probably not the largest TAT ever but certainly in the top ten. Initially humans used their register of TATs purely for navigation purposes. So dead hulks like this one remained on the register. But humans have a habit of creating power wherever they find a vacuum and there's a bloody big one in space. So it wasn't too long before the register became the basis of a form of government control. In order to facilitate this government they tried to impose a register tax on every Tat. When they discovered what THE MAN had done they tried impose the tax on him and his Tat and thus reign in control. They once even tried to use force but force isn't as easy to apply in space as it would have been on Earth. The man simply turned a mirror on them and melted their weapons. Reminding them that they perhaps didn't want to let everyone know they'd been defeated like this so easily because then everyone would want to be independent of the register.

Insulted by their own arrogance, the humans went to lick their wounds and plan their next futile assault. While the Man populated his tat with fellow yetis who are a little more adventurous than their earth-bound relations. As well as some Subgenii, and even the occasional exceptional human. THE MAN became the icon for independence in space. Even some human Tats claimed to be under some kind of federation aligned with THE MAN. Of course there was not such federation or alignment, Yetis just don't work like that but THE MAN's stance against the grip of the CON via the humans, was well known. Even if the Humans didn't know of the CON's existence.

THE CON

THE CON or Conspiracy Of Normalcy, is also borrowed from the Church of the SubGenius. <www.subgenius.com> It is an overriding entity that secretly but blatantly controls humans. Not in any direct sense but by commanding that humans "Do the right thing." The CON may or may not really exist but humans act as if it does regardless. The CON is more powerful and all pervading than all the multinational companies and all the governments and other dictators in the world. It sets the standards and controls the thoughts of individuals. It decides what is right and what is wrong. It decides what you can and can't say and limits freedom of speech. Not just at a societal and cultural level but at a personal level as well. It is the thing that prevents a human from telling another human that they don't like them. Or worse, that they do. It controls what is cool and what isn't. It even allows people to be radical non-conformists. Just so long as their non conformity conforms to one of the CON's designated non-conformities.

But the CON is completely mindless of it self. It cannot make decisions consciously and it has no long term memory. It cannot predict the outcomes of a development. It can only react to it. It did not see the development of the internet otherwise it would never have allowed it. And it did not see the consequences of living space otherwise it would have made sure that Bruce Franklin's mass driver project failed. The CON is a slow moving behemoth and after perhaps a hundred thousand years of human control, could do nothing to prevent it's fragmentation when humans moved into space. It only hangs on through a feeble space-government bureaucracy which is largely in-effective.

Since nearly every Tat is it's own self contained and self sufficient environment, the only practical use they have for this governing body is in the early warning and detection of HUOs. (Habitat Unfriendly Objects) Rogue asteroids etc that may threaten a Tat or group of Tats and the means to take care of them. This bureaucracy tries to make laws and rules but they are routinely ignored as need be and there is very little it can do to enforce them. There was lawlessness from the very first day in space and measures to protect one's self became routine. And since the measures an individual or an entire Tat can use to protect themselves in space are largely the same measures a pirate or other threat could use against them, it's a fairly level playing field. Likewise an individual can easily control the same level of fire power as any tyrannical human government system so it's largely a non-contest. Humans put up with governments because that's what they do. Yetis do not.

THE FEY FOLK:

The faeries had been exploring space for thousands of years and their technology and culture have advanced well beyond that of Humans. They had somehow all wound up based on a nice little earth-like world about 350 light years away called Tralthamadore 5. (Borrowed from Kirt Vonnegurt's slaugherhouse 5 story.) Located in a much more stable part of the galaxy than Earth. They had met up with another race of explorers who'd told them about this place so they settled there. Somehow they had become confused about where Earth actually was. Partly because they didn't really care but Fey historians were continually searching the outer rim as they explored. Only they kept looking at the wrong section of rim. Circumnavigation of the galaxy is going the long way about searching for something but they were explorers after all.

Their meson conversion propulsion systems were advanced but it was still slow going. To make it easier they developed hyperbridges. Jump-gates if you like, which they would assemble at strategic locations through their travels. Allowing them to jump through hyperspace between bridges. The great advantage of this for explorers is that the trip may be slow getting there but the trip home only takes a few minutes by opening 2 doors into the hyperspace field. The field which is similar to the field which existed prior to the big bang, has no space or time or other normal real-space physics. These doorways become positioned right next to each other for all intents and purposes though they may be thousands of lightyears apart. In fact there is no limit since the hyperspace field is truly universal. As long as you can position a bridge somewhere, you can jump to any other active bridge anywhere in the universe. The fact that Faeries had barely explored their own galaxy severely limited their range of use.

Another problem for the faeries is that they also used a similar method for communications. They had been doing this long before they discovered how to pass matter through the field. As it turns out, it is fairly easy to send messages across the quantum barrier in near real-time as compared to jumping an entire star-ship. Even from the earliest days of being able to do this, they detected other signals from their barriers. Well documented but highly speculative signals which were definitely not their own in origin. And there were a lot of them. Obviously, this meant that other entities across the universe were using this method of communications as well and so when using the HS-bridge technology, they were always mindful of the possibility of some unknown entity popping out to say hello. Which may or may not be hostile.

The faeries had exchanged their technologies with their friends the Splugorians. (Appeared at the end of the 'Geekworld' book) Strange vegetable-like creatures they met and even teamed up with from time to time. The Splugorians, requiring a vastly different environment to live in, had no problem telling the Fey about the planet they now call home, when they discovered it. It was no good to them but perfect for the Faeries. After the Splugorians had mastered the hyperspace technology they made a discovery of the kind only splugorians could make. A method of skimming the surface of the universe. Skimming the interface between the universe and the hyperspace field. And doing it so quickly as to become a method of propulsion.

It involved the creation of a small artificial field and then pulsing that field into the quantum surface of the universe and back out again. Rather like skipping a stone across the surface of water. Only more elastic. The larger the pulse width, the further the artificial field would travel in real space. And it only takes a microsecond pulse to travel a very long distance. Thus the term the faeries used for it. A MicroSpace engine.

The Splugorians of course, were happy to give the faeries all the details but the faeries themselves are still experimenting with this technology when we join the story.

(Annotation) 20030714
Despite the Spludgorians being advanced spacefarers they are like innocents. Evolving as plants on their home world, the Spludgorians had virtually no predators. They feed directly from the environment without needing to kill or harvest anything.

When the Fey first meet them, they are in a stand-off situation with another race of beings who are particularly aggressive. Even by human standards. Cornered and being bullied like innocent school children, the Spludgorians faced certain death until the Faeries stepped in and rescued them. The Faeries evolved on Earth where human bullying is the name of the game.

Thus the Faeries and the Spludgorians had a great deal to learn from each other and became great friends. When word got back to the Spludgorians' home world that the Fey were looking for a planet to settle, they already knew of just such a place. The Faeries showed the Spludgorians how to build weapons and defend themselves in the galaxy if need be. And despite being so vastly different, they found they had much in common.

Like most plants, Spludgorians require a third party to pollinate. And the Faeries have been known to lend a hand from time to time. Both the Fey and the Spludgorians are adventurous like that. Spludgorian is simply the name that the Faeries use when describing them. Spludgorian communication is somewhat less vocal as one would expect. "Spludge" was the description of a Spludgorian giving up Pollen . (Ooo yuck!)

I wonder if any of those backward, primative, bible bashing states in the US have any laws about having sex with plants? Even between consenting adult flora?

THE STORY:

Despite the above description, the story is fairly simple. And this is mainly due to the complexity of the animation and what I can reasonably achieve.

The faeries locate Earth again only to find things have changed a lot. They find their way to make contact with THE MAN and the other space dwelling yetis and a cultural exchange begins. The two species are like long lost friends. Due to overwhelming complexity, it will mainly concern the comings and goings around the Tat but I hope to have lots of space action. and very little of that star-wars space noise bullshit.

The humans are continually trying to badger the yetis and are generally too stupid to realize what they're up against. They aren't much more than a constant pest. When the faeries arrive in force, they are really confused.

The CON continues to be the real threat however. A secret campaign of terror, both psychological and physical is waged against all Tat dwellers but the CON does not differentiate between the yetis and the humans. It simply tries to assimilate all into conformity. The CON is ultimately doomed due to stagnation and an anti-evolutionary stance but for now it must be held at bay.

That's how the story is looking so far but it's continually evolving till I know for sure what I've got to work with. Characters and models etc. I don't even have anyone to do the voices but before I can do that, I have to have a whole bunch of characters and character animation is quite difficult.

It's about life and diversity living in habitats. It's about cultural tolerance and the belief that if you don't give a shit about intangibles then you'll probably get along. That government and corporate intervention in culture, such as the internet, is ultimately counter productive. That the whole notion of trusting a bunch of self serving leaders and handing power to them is proof of human stupidity. That religion is bad but if you must practice religion, go do it somewhere the fuck else! And for Christ sake leave well alone anyone who doesn't agree with you or is different from you. That punitive laws achieve nothing except to protect those with power.

And I'd like it to get right up the nose of every dumb fuck prude bigot that comes across it.

Any constructive comments are welcome. Send mail about this page here. <isoworld@all-electric.com> Any questions you think need answering are most welcome. Keeps me on my toes. And of course, any offers of help are more than welcome.