Space & Other Worlds

Source: The Association of Autonomous Astronauts

Through technology, transhumanity has defeated the most fundamental challenges to long-term space travel and life in microgravity. The biomods of most biomorphs protect against health issues such as bone density loss and visual impairment. Other enhancements allow us to thrive in the frigid outdoors of Mars and Titan, breathe the partially terraformed Martian air, and even survive in the vacuum of space. Synthmorphs can handle even harsh environments with ease. Nevertheless, various challenges remain to life in space and on other worlds.

The bulk of transhumanity now lives on Mars, with one-third the gravity of Earth. Millions more live in micrograv and lower grav environments. Alternative gravities are mundane for many transhumans; children are now acclimated to them via VR in school. Moving in microgravity is awkward until you acquaint yourself with Newton’s most famous Law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Until you master the motions, you can rely on the handrails, handholds, pullways, grapple points, and fasteners common in most micrograv settings. Even those living in spin-gravity habitats must still learn zero-g maneuvering, as gravity slowly transitions to microgravity as you move closer to the habitat’s rotational axis, where shuttles and ships dock. Slow transition between gravity zones is essential for avoiding motion sickness and accidents.

Just as the people of pre-Fall Earth would obsess over fire safety, transhumans in space must also drill themselves upon the safety procedures for responding to decompression and vacuum events. Fire safety requires more vigilance than ever before, as even a small fire can devastate a habitat’s fragile environmental equilibrium. Synthmorph habitats have no need to worry about hard vacuum, so they simply make do with solar-storm shelters to protect from radiation exposure.

Recent re-instantiates might find the close quarters of micrograv and low-grav habitats jarring. Most items are mesh-tracked for logistics control, maximizing storage capability across all surfaces, as the concepts of “floor” and “ceiling” are meaningless. On average, a given resident must share a zero-g toilet and hygiene station with nine other morphs. Hygiene routines always avoid free-floating water unless absolutely necessary because of the danger it poses to electronics. Expect waterless shampoo, saliva-activated toothpaste, personal plastic sauna cylinders, and urine vacuums with molded funnels.

Spin-gravity habitats have the luxury of space for urban areas with a density similar to pre-Fall Earth. Some are large enough for rail, road, and flyway transportation networks. While micrograv and low-grav habitats can’t support much flora beyond the essentials, spingravity habitats allow for actual landscaping. You may find streams, lakes, dense woods, plains, rocky outcroppings, and entire ecological systems. Such environments may even have wildlife — modded to not attack residents — wandering in these natural areas.

In cramped habitats, residents seek a variety of ways to keep themselves occupied and reduce the physiological and psychological stresses of enclosed spaces. AR makes it easy to personalize your surroundings into something that is airy, open, lush, or otherwise different, and VR lets you escape to other worlds entirely. Hobbies and similar pursuits are strongly encouraged, from gaming and clubbing to arts and handcrafting. Though some furry guests are discouraged due to hygiene concerns, even small stations often allow tiny, contained, or trained pets, and many habs employ smart animals to keep their public areas tidy and well-maintained. Physical exercise is also emphasized as a method of releasing endorphins. Gyms are standard, with larger habs providing bike tracks, pools/diving modules, or courses for wingsuits, gliders, and personal ornithopters. Freerunning obstacle courses and competitions are quite popular, sometimes also incorporating combat and hacking challenges.

Egocasting

Despite what you may presume from classic science fiction, massive freighters and spacecraft are not the primary method of space travel between habitats. Physical travel through space requires extensive preparation, time, and danger, while egocasting provides a faster, simpler, and more accessible solution.

Egocasting is the transmission of your digitized mind to another habitat, where you resleeve or operate as an infomorph. Public or private entities on every habitat provide this service in conjunction with body banks, security, and customs. Quantum farcasting links available between major stations provide a secure and reliable method of transmission, ensuring that your ego will not be intercepted or compromised. Like any communications method, egocast transfers are subject to light-speed limits. Egocasting within the inner system takes only minutes; to/from/within the outer system can take hours; the processing and bureaucracy at either end can take longer.

Space Travel

Several conditions might lead someone to pursue travel via spacecraft. Naturally, shipments of goods require physical transport. Bioconservatives avoid egocasting on principle, and some people — while not bioconservatives themselves — find the concept of resleeving too uncomfortable for personal reasons. The full process of egocasting and resleeving leaves a significantly larger digital footprint than spacecraft travel, so criminals and other groups looking to avoid leaving a record prefer the latter.

Spacecraft burn fuel (reaction mass) in their drives and direct the heated output in one direction to propel the ship in the opposite direction. Long-distance travel typically involves several initial hours of high-acceleration burn followed by the craft coasting at its max velocity for the remainder of the trip. The ship flips over and repeats the burn process to decelerate when nearing its destination. Because craft require significant amounts of fuel to travel, even the smallest movement can have a substantial cost. Traveling without extra fuel can put the crew in serious danger if an unexpected obstacle or attack sends the ship off course. Planning a route before departure is required, and such plans typically include tricks such as slingshotting through a larger planet’s gravity well and/or aerobraking in a planet’s upper atmosphere.

Spacecraft primarily pilot themselves via their onboard ALI, so the crew can essentially set the ship on course and relax. Quarters are tight to reduce the amount of fuel needed, so crews rely on digital entertainments for distraction. Socialization is nevertheless recommended for longer trips, as lengthy periods of isolation can lead to a psychological breakdown. Transgenic hibernoid morphs allow crews to operate with minimal (1–2 hours) sleep or activate a voluntary hibernation that slows metabolism and oxygen consumption.

Intra-planetary-system or intra-cluster travel via spacecraft takes hours. Travel within the inner system takes days to weeks depending on current orbits. Outer-system travel requires several months, and possibly more than a year to distant destinations or across the Solar System.

Gatecrashing: The Real Story

Posted by: Antonio Soldano, Gatecrasher

Too many people think gatecrashing is some kinda grand adventure, and I’m getting sick of setting them straight, so I’m writing this. You can look up how many missions I’ve done; I know my stuff. I’m gonna give you an idea of what you’re getting into with the gates.

First up: we don't know who made the gates. Yeah, everyone says the TITANs, but we don't know. Not all of the gates out there are the same, and some give indications of being older than life on Earth. You ask me, the TITANs may have just plugged into an existing network. Yeah, try not to dwell on that.

Individual pandora gates are spherical cages of black interlockable angled arms. Nobody knows what they are made out of, and you can’t ding them even with heavy beam weapons. Your vision gets fuzzy looking at them for no damn reason, and whatever metamaterial they are made of eats most high- and low-frequency waves.

The gates rip wormholes between far-off corners of the universe. Best of all? We only have a ghost of an idea how these things work. We can set addresses in the blue box interfaces some boffins whipped up, but we don’t really have any fuckin’ idea where they go until we open ’em. The damn things change all on their own or just stop working. Sometimes, they’ll just turn off — maybe as you're passing through. I’ve seen an unstable wormhole flatten five people with a gravitational surge in .003 seconds. Imagine working with that tech constantly.

Sure, when the gates work, it’s pretty cool. You just step through to another world. Or maybe deep space. Or maybe the surface of a neutron star. Anything goes. Let’s manage those expectations. Don’t go into the job always expecting to find another Earth out there. Finding a planet in a stable section of the galaxy, in the habitable zone of a star system, and in the right stage of its planetary evolution ain’t exactly easy. Get used to a lot of red dwarf stars, ice giant planets, and barren rocks of various sizes, because statistically, that’s what the glalaxy is made of. That said, the Milky Way is bigger than most of us can comprehend, and whatever placed the gates tended to mark points of interest, at least some of the time.

When the gates do open to someplace fun and non-deadly, gatecrashing is just another job:

• Exploration missions are the big game, both in pay and in danger. Since you get the honor of first crack in the field, you get first crack at the discoveries and their fat bounties. Even with the remote probing that goes on beforehand, you can and will run into nasty carnivores, toxic flora, and shit I can’t even describe. If you happen to find something or someplace that looks like another sapient species made it, congratulations, you just made it big.
• Xenoarcheological missions involve scientists doing lots of digging and having aneurysms if you touch anything. They tend to be quiet unless/until you unearth or reactivate something, at which point they become punctuated with chaos and screaming.
• Colonization missions involve building infrastructure, babysitting colonists, and settling their interpersonal drama. If you're a corporate thug, it could mean squashing revolts as well.
• Resource exploitation missions are when the exploring is done and some asshole has decided they want to stake a claim. They're mostly maintaining mining equipment, protecting survey teams, and fighting off the occasional beastie or raid by competitors.
• Research missions are rarely similar. They might involve lugging all types of gear or taking pictures and writing notes about flowers, but then end with you running for your life to the gate before it closes.

First-in Ops

Source: First-In Operations, TerraGenesis Co-Op Members Protocol Manual

Welcome to the TerraGenesis team! An exciting adventure awaits you on the other side of the Vulcanoid Gate. Whether you're an experienced gatecrasher or a first-timer, you need to be familiar with TerraGenesis procedures.

The safety of our gatecrashers always comes first. Upon confirmation of a “live” gate address (reconnaissance microprobes have returned data from the other side of the wormhole indicating a viable environment), your team has one hour to prepare while we send larger “first-link” drones through. Monitor these real-time feeds and their analysis closely to learn about the environment you’re about to enter. Will it be a lifeless chunk of rock? A life-rich planet? A moonlet circling an exotic gas giant? Fine-tune your gear loads as appropriate.

An analysis team of TerraGenesis scientists and consultants will make the final call for the “live” first-in operation. A thumbs-down means the environment on the other side of the gate is too hostile, and you’ll be put back into the queue for the next operation. A thumbs-up means you’re going in!

After your team passes through the gate, the wormhole closes; gate time is carefully rationed according to the needs of our operations and colonies. Congratulations — you’re on your own in a new and amazing place! You will have 6–12 hours before the wormhole reopens.

Your mission parameters are as follows:

• First Priority: Secure the Gate! Establish a base camp and defensive perimeter. The gate is your only way back once the wormhole re-opens!
• Map the Area! Expand the recon radius and investigate any anomalies or features of interest.
• Stay Together! The use of bots and sensors is always preferable to splitting the group.
• Leave No Trace! TerraGenesis asks its first-in teams to respect the environment: don’t damage, move, or kill anything unnecessarily. Document everything, touch nothing. Leave nothing behind, pack everything out.
• Identify Threats! This includes everything from environmental hazards to hostile life to things the transhuman mind has not yet conceived. The safety of future missions relies on you.
• Defend Yourselves! TerraGenesis recognizes that many environments are hostile to transhuman life. First-in teams are fully authorized to defend themselves and ensure their survival and the completion of the mission.
• Always Collect Data! Constantly record your XP and sensor data. Collect samples. Run deep scans. Note personal impressions of what you find. Your opinion is valuable! Backup everything to your mission recorder at base camp, so that it can be retrieved even if something happens to your team.
• Explore and Investigate! Always remember TerraGenesis’s generous compensation program: your reward for the operation directly correlates with what you find!

One final word of caution: watch the clock! If your team is not present when the gate re-opens, a search-and-rescue bot will be dispatched and the gate closed again. It will re-open once more within 6–12 hours. Whether it ever opens again will depend on the perceived value and interest of the location. We value our co-op members. Do yourself a favor and make it back.