Microstory 1232: Moka Vareli

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In the year 2168, the rogue world of Durus finally became a Democratic Republic. No more would there be an unfair class system, or a corrupt government. The people were free, and justice became the norm. For forty-six years, the planet continued to fly through interstellar space, just as lonely as ever, and still reliant on its quantum connection to Earth’s resources. Then in 2204, scientists and paramounts joined forces, and expedited the journey to a new binary star system called 70 Ophiuchi. No planets orbited the stars already, so it was a perfect place for Durus to settle. They decided on a figure eight orbital pattern, so they would go around one of the stars once, then head for the other star, going around it in the opposite direction, ad infinitum. This type of orbit is so unstable that it requires careful and constant maintenance, and it’s something that would all but certainly never happen in nature. It was meant to symbolize infinity, suggesting that the planet would always survive, and go on forever. So began the Solar Democracy, though it did not function any different than before; it was again, all about symbolism. The primary individual responsible for creating the unusual pattern in the first place was a man named Ashalo Vareli. After his first successful full orbit, he and his wife celebrated, and ended up conceiving their first daughter. Moka was a paramount as well, but was born with what was perhaps the strangest power anyone had ever seen. In fact, seeing as the only kinds of special abilities that should have existed were time-based, it was hard to justify hers. She could create spatial bubbles that hovered in the air. An occupant will experience the same amount of time as they would on the outside, but will not require life’s necessities, like food, water, and a means of disposing of waste. It’s completely self-contained, and self-sufficient. A rather poorly understood substance inside the bubble will keep them alive indefinitely, while they age at a normal rate, providing nourishment and protection from external forces, until such time they are released. No one knows how it works. It was entirely possible for an individual inside one of these bubbles to break themselves free of it, so it could not be used as a prison of some kind, so the most obvious application—at least in Moka and her family’s minds—was for artificial gestation. Since most births could be handled with more traditional medical advancements, her services weren’t required all that much, but she did make herself available at all times, in case of emergency. She ended up going into the medical field, just because the experiences she had helping people as a child led her down that path. She was an imaging technician, operating machines much like the kind invented on Earth, but with special time power components.