Showing posts with label habitat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label habitat. Show all posts

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Microstory 2494: Biolock

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3
When this planet was first discovered, it was a barren wasteland. It still technically is. It has not been terraformed. It’s been paraterraformed, which means that the only places where anything can survive are under the domes. You can’t just plant a seed in the dirt, and wait for it to grow, and start producing oxygen for you. The composition of the atmosphere at the moment is not suitable for life, and if we wanted to make it so, we would have to be extremely destructive. Terraformation is always a centuries-long project, which even today, we’ve only completed on one planet, and there are rumors of alien intervention with that one, because no one knows how it was possible. Besides, the whole point of Castlebourne is having these special themed domes. Even if we were to make the rest of the world habitable without destroying everything currently standing, we wouldn’t want to. For that, you can go to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, which was already habitable when we discovered it (though, I have my doubts about that too, because what are the chances?). I digress. What I’m saying is that, in order for us to have any life on this planet, it had to be transported. In some cases, that means digital DNA, but even that’s tricky, because you’re gonna need feedstock to actually develop the organism into something physical. In other cases, we transported live plants and animals, on something called an Arkship. While it took 108 years to get here, the ships were traveling at relativistic speeds, so the time as observed by the passengers was only about two months. It was during this time that the specimens were being monitored under their second quarantine. They experienced their first while still on Earth, which lasted four months. Six months isn’t bad, is it? You should be able to tell whether something has a disease or not in that time. Eh, probably. We’re probably always safe enough, but we don’t want the bare minimum. We want to be extra careful. Besides, the conditions on Castlebourne are different. The atmospheres in the domes are typically optimized, not natural. The surface gravity is different. In order to satisfy our requirements for safety, specimens are kept in special habitats in Biolock for an additional six months so that we may observe and study them, but also so they can acclimate to their new conditions. Once this time period is complete, they will be either transported to their new home under whatever dome they are destined for, or a parallel preserve for further acclimation efforts. Up until now, this was only a Logistical dome not fit for visitors. We have recently completed renovations, which will allow visitors to come through for tours. You will not be able to touch or interact with any of the specimens, but will be able to see them from the protection of a sealed corridor while your tour guide teaches you about our process in greater detail. My superiors asked me to write the first review just to get things started so that our prospectus is ready for it once the first tours go through, and reviews are unlocked for public contribution. Thank you for your time.

Friday, May 9, 2025

Microstory 2405: Ancient Thebes

Generated by Google VideoFX text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 2
Sorry for my poor writing. It’s just not a skill that I ever picked up. I’m more into history. I’m really interested in history. I don’t have that much interest in going to one of the adventure domes, or whatever. I feel no want to run from zombies, or even relax by the ocean. I like to see what real places looked like at different times in history. Today is all about Ancient Thebes, Egypt. I could go on and on about this place, because it was amazing, but I’m sure it would be boring for you. Words just can’t describe how it feels to feel like you’re really there. As I was saying, I’m just not good at writing. That might have been too repetitive. The great thing about a planet like this is that you can make these places. It all looks so real and authentic. Ancient Thebes is gone. It was all modernized by the time people started taking photographs of the area, and now it’s been entirely removed in order to make room for the wilderness. I’m not saying that I don’t like plants and animals, but at one point, there was a plan to make wildlife refuges on rotating cylinders in orbit. What happened to that plan? I think that they were worried about us using it as an excuse to blanket the whole surface of Earth in a giant city. I wouldn’t have wanted that either, I think we just should have preserved historical architecture. I mean come on, there’s a middle ground, you know? I’m getting off track, but you really should be more cultured, and visit Ancient Thebes. They can’t build this sort of thing on Earth because of the whole animal thing, and it’s their territory, or whatever, but it works here. It really works. It’s like you’re really there. Just, if you come to this planet, don’t spend all your time having fun. Try to learn something. You can get a robot guide here who will tell you everything about Thebes and Ancient Egypt. You might find you like it more than you thought. Oh, and don’t ask if there are any attacking mummies. Those movies weren’t real. Okay? Had this guy on my tour kept asking about that shit. It’s like, shut the hell up.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Microstory 2363: Vacuus, August 9, 2179

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3
Dear Pascal,

I relate to your situation of not having access to certain foods. I’ve never had a simple apple before, nor any other tree fruits or roots. We only use vertical farming as of yet, but there’s a whole team dedicated to figuring out how to grow in Vacuan soil. I guess I shouldn’t say that they’re figuring anything out. They know exactly what they need to do, but it’s a massive undertaking, and they have to play the long game. I never told either of you, but we actually have our own domes! They’re much smaller, and not for habitation, though. They basically installed giant space heaters to thaw the frozen regolith. I think they’ve stuck warming pipes into the ground too, but it’s not my area of expertise, so don’t quote me on that. The ground is well thawed by now, but the soil is still not ready for crops. It’s really gross, but this is where pretty much all of our human waste goes. We used to use some of it for radiation shielding in our habitats, but we almost exclusively use a special fungus for that instead now, though that does feed on our waste. The majority of it is tilled into our new soil, so organic matter can provide nutrients to our future plants. They estimate that it’s going to be another few years before we can try root vegetables, and a whole decade before the fruit trees grow to maturity. We obviously took all sorts of seeds with us when we came here 37 years ago, even though we didn’t know what the environmental conditions would be like here, and I can’t wait until we get to use the ones that we’ve just been sitting on this whole time. Tell me what an apple is like. It kind of looks like a tomato, but the books don’t really describe the difference in taste. As far as our correspondence goes, I’m happy with whatever you feel comfortable saying, and with however often you want to send a letter. Just write to me when it strikes you. Condor and I have a weekly thing going, but I don’t think we have to force the same schedule just for the sake of it. I don’t blame you anymore, but I’m still hurt by this whole thing, and I find it easier to converse with someone regularly who I know had nothing to do with it at all.

Eat an apple for me, if you can find one,

Corinthia

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Microstory 2349: Earth, May 8, 2179

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3
Dear Corinthia,

Yeah, there was an idea fairly early on, after the gases settled over the surface, to build massive aerostats. Their reasoning was that, if the atmosphere was going to be toxic, we might as well take advantage of the density that we didn’t have before. I’m pretty sure I heard that they have a couple of them on Venus, because the atmosphere is already really dense, and I believe they’re building more. So we know how to make them. The idea to make them here was ultimately abandoned because too many people felt like it was giving in. The air shouldn’t be toxic, and we shouldn’t be satisfied with it staying that way. We’re supposed to be fixing it, and if we start treating the bug as a feature, we’ll either not work hard on cleaning it up, or we will, and people will have to leave the aerostats before too long anyway. Neither plan seemed reasonable or rational. Now on to the party discussion. The time you propose is totally fine with us. We both requested the entire day off, and the way the department is designed, there should be no problem. A lot of people would have to call in sick, or have some other emergency, before we would be called back in. They take work-life balance very seriously these days. I was telling you that we settled into a stable society a few years back, and that was part of it. If all we’re worried about is survival, then we’re not really living, and if that’s the case, is there really any point in working so hard to continue? People don’t seem to think so, and as terrible as it is that the atmosphere has been poisoned, at least it happened in our time period, instead of a couple hundred years ago. Most of the grunt work is automated, so it’s not like things will fall apart if people stop working. A lot of scholars believe that we’re only not living in a post-scarcity society right now because of the bad air. The domes have forced us to do more work than we should really have to worry about. So yeah, that was another big tangent just to say that we’ll start our party at 20:00 on the day of our birthday. I wanted to ask, and should have asked before, are you really going to have to be there alone? There’s no one else you could invite? By the time we receive your response, the day will have already passed, but you will receive my letter by then, so I hope you think about whether there’s anyone else, now that your mom is gone.

Really hoping you don’t have to be alone,

Condor

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Microstory 2318: Earth, September 4, 2178

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3
Dear Corinthia,

I hate that you were so anxious about my reply. It definitely didn’t help that you had to wait a whole week. Damn this blasted light lag! Rest assured now, though, if you keep talking to me, I’ll keep talking back. By the way, I do realize that I sent two messages by the time you could respond to the first one. I’ll try to be better about that in the future. It’s just that I had an update, and I was too excited to wait, so I didn’t really think about it. I don’t know anyone else in space, so every message I’ve ever tried to send has arrived at its destination almost immediately. I hear that researchers are currently trying to figure out how to send superluminal signals, but I don’t know how close they are to realizing that dream, and either way, people like us will probably be stuck with regular radios for the foreseeable future. It would be really cool, though—wouldn’t it—If we could talk to each other as if we were in the same room together? Surely it’s a pretty big priority. We’re not the only two people having this problem. You said that you don’t know much about Earth, but do you know about any of the other colonies? A lot of the rest of the solar system has been colonized by now too. I believe that they were already developing these other bases when your ship was launched, though we were babies, so maybe no one has thought to bring it up to you since then. I remember asking our dad once if we could move to one of the outpost worlds, and if any of them would be better, but he says that life isn’t any easier anywhere else. That makes sense, and now that you’ve described how hard it is in the habitats, I fully believe it. Earth was perfect for us, and fixing it wouldn’t be any more difficult than starting somewhere new. I guess there are no good places left. But we find little pockets of happiness where we can. Because of my father’s respectable position with the dome’s leadership, we’re afforded a larger private cabin. I won’t send any photos now, if you don’t want to send your own, but perhaps we can swap? I would sure like to get a better idea of where you are. Who knows? They might be strikingly similar. Let me know what you can do.

Sorry about the extra message,

Condor

Sunday, December 1, 2024

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 24, 2476

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3
They broke into two teams, but they weren’t ready to split up just yet. While Leona, Mateo, and Olimpia were preparing a block of the domes for the arrival of anyone from the Goldilocks Corridor who wanted to escape the Exin Empire, Ramses, Angela, and Marie were planning to figure out how to ferry those refugees. Ramses still didn’t know how to properly navigate with the slingdrive. He was starting to worry that it was impossible, which could explain why apparently no one had ever managed to use dark matter for anything before. They couldn’t just go off and run their tests, though, because then they could end up just as lost as they were the first time. There needed to be some way for them to return home, even if that was the only place they could ever go.
Leona was presently examining the Livewire. She wasn’t using any tools or instruments; just looking it over with her eyes. “Hm.”
“Hm, what?” Ramses asked.
“Look at this.” She set the wire on the table, carefully reaching for a particular spot with both her thumbs and index fingers. She slowly pulled them apart while Ramses watched closely from the other side of the table.
“Oh. Huh.”
“What is it?” Mateo asked. “What did I miss?” He wasn’t as close to it as they were.
“It can grow,” Ramses replied.
“Hold on, wait.” Leona reached for two more spots, and did what she did again, but this time in reverse.
“Interesting,” Ramses noted.
“Did you just make it shrink?” Mateo guessed.
Leona nodded. “When Vearden first pulled this thing out of his much smaller necklace, I thought that it was just being stored in a pocket dimension, like a really narrow bag of holding. But this suggests that the wire’s size-shifting ability is an innate property. When we’ve used it, we’ve had to figure out how to make it reach where we need it to, but that’s because we didn’t notice these...expansion points.”
“Will they help do the thing that we need it to do?” Mateo pressed.
Leona sighed. “Probably not. I mean, they’re nice to have. They’ll certainly make it easier to do whatever we end up trying with the six of us, but it doesn’t help us understand what that’s going to be. Did this Arqut fellow say anything else?”
“He just said that this thing can help protect us from Buddy’s summoning power,” Mateo replied. “I don’t know if it can link us to each other, it just seems like a natural secondary use.” The slingdrive testers couldn’t leave until they were sure that they would be able to come back here, or rather back to their friends. That was the point, really, to not be permanently separated from each other. The wire may or may not be that solution. If they could crack the code, the idea was to form multiple spatio-temporal tethers between each other. Basically, the Livewire was meant to serve as a connection between each pair in the group, so that no matter what, they would always be able to get back to each other. “I don’t know how to do it, though. Is it psychic?”
“I’m not sure,” Ramses said. “But it must be, right? When we used it before, we told the wire when and where to transfer the consciousnesses. They didn’t end up way off course, like my slingdrive, or something stupid like that,” he started to mumble.
Leona smiled softly, and patted him on the back.
Mateo nodded. “So we essentially need to quantum replicate the Livewire fourteen times, so each one of us is linked to all of the other five. Or we don’t replicate the wire itself, but the power that it holds.”
The two geniuses gave him a look.
“What? We studied the Handshake Problem in my stupid people’s high school math class. I know some things,” Mateo insisted.
“I think if we just successfully form fifteen total links,” Ramses began, “we’ll have our fix. The issue is that I have no clue how to do it even once. We still don’t know what this thing is, or where it came from. We wouldn’t want us accidentally swapping bodies, or erasing our memories. We have to somehow program it to generate the invisible tethers without doing anything else to us.”
“How do you program a unique temporal object?” Leona asked rhetorically.
Mateo took the wire from Leona, and walked aimlessly around the room while he was holding it up to the light, and covering it in shadow, and thinking. “Rambo, didn’t you figure out how to make your own pair of HG Goggles?”
“Uh, it wasn’t technically me. It was my alternate self who we left on Ex-324.”
“You’ve maintained contact?” Leona questioned. “What does he say? What’s happening there? Is he okay? Are the Welriosians okay?”
“That is a lot of queries,” Ramses said in a robot voice. “Not enough memory to compute.” He went back to his regular voice. “He’s fine, they’re fine. It’s a pretty peaceful planet as far as the Corridor goes. We’re lucky, though, because it’s not all that important to Oaksent’s needs, so he doesn’t pay much attention to them.”
“The goggles?” Mateo reminded him after a moment of awkward silence.
“Right.” Ramses went over to a filing cabinet, and pulled out the goggles. They looked fairly similar to the original pair, though they were distinguishable.
Mateo accepted them from him, and put them over his face. He started to look the wire over again. The whole thing was glowing green, but some bits were shinier and white. He was able to pinch and zoom to get a closer picture.  “Yeah, I can see the expansion points more clearly. They’re not everywhere, so there’s likely a limit to its scope. Hopefully that’s not a problem, or we’ll always have to stay within a few meters of each other.”
“What are you thinking?” Leona asked him.
Mateo looked up at her with the goggles still on. Other objects in the room were glowing as well, different colors, to varying degrees. Ramses and Leona’s comms discs were quite noticeable from here, even though they were embedded under their skins. “Just what I suspected.” He pointed at the two of them, back and forth several times over. Then he handed her the goggles so she could see for herself. “Here,” he said, taking them off, and offering them to Leona.
“She put them on, and looked around as well, particularly at the boys. She nodded with understanding. “We’re already linked through a quantum network.” She tapped at her neck behind her ear.
“Oh,” Ramses exclaimed. “Yeah, I think I can work with that. If I can convert the quantum frequency of our discs into something that the wire can interpret, I might be able to resonate them until they become entangled.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Mateo joked. “I’ll leave you two to do it to it.” He left the room, and closed the door behind them. “Pia, where are you?”
We’re in the 3D maze!” Olimpia shouted back. It sounded like she was running.
Hey, gang, stay off comms for the rest of the day, please. I’m messing with them,” Ramses requested.
If the other three were in the dome that was literally a maze, and they could no longer communicate with each other remotely, then there was no way that he was finding them. He was just gonna have to come up with his own way to pass the time. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out his handheld device, where he had downloaded the dome brochure. Since there were people here now, Hrockas had gone through, and highlighted the domes that were actually ready to be tested. That was what he was busy with right now, further developing the unfinished themed domes, so they would be ready for his customers twenty-four years from now. He wasn’t actually going to charge anyone for anything, of course. The bragging rights of being the most popular planet in the galaxy would be payment enough, if he succeeded. Varkas Reflex and Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida would sure give him a run for his money, though he might have an edge with all of this paraterraforming. Almost the entire surface was habitable, giving potential visitors and residents an amount of freedom that none of the other destination worlds could yet match, even with their time and proximity advantages.
Mateo checked the list once, twice, three times. Nothing was speaking to him. Zombedome wasn’t finished yet. Hrockas imagined that it would be one of the most popular, so he was spending a lot of time perfecting it, and didn’t want anyone to see it until he was satisfied with the results. Mateo decided to switch to the map, which showed where each dome was in relation to the others. Something here caught his eye. There were two giant black spots that were on the exact opposite sides as each other. He guessed that these were the poles, and that there were no domes there at all. He was terribly curious about what they looked like, whether they resembled Antarctica and the Arctic on Earth, or if they were wildly different. He laughed out loud. Hrockas expected people to come here, and have to be transported to each dome using Vendelin’s vactrain network, which could easily exclude these poles. But Mateo could jump there in seconds. Nothing was off limits to him.
Boom. Splash. He was in the water, and it was freezing cold. If he weren’t an upgraded posthuman, he would probably be on the brink of death by now, even in this short span of time. Before he left, though, he spun himself around. He could see no land anywhere, nor anything else. The sky wasn’t what he expected, however. He wasn’t just looking at the blackness behind a very thin atmosphere. It resembled what one would find on a fully habitable planet, with clouds, and blue scatter. It was likely a hologram. Was this whole thing just another dome? One last thing, he took his device back out, and concentrated on the edge of the black zone, so he could teleport there, instead of back to Castledome. He made the jump, and landed on a rocky beach. The hologram was still here, but now that he was closer, he could also detect the curve of the dome over his head, and the faint imperfections of the image on the opaque surface. If this entire pole was covered by one giant dome, it would have to be hundreds of kilometers wide.
“Here, take this.” There was actually another person here; a teenage girl. She was holding a large blanket up for him. It was ombre striped, of varying shades, but mostly in the greens. She had evidently built a fire nearby too. Had she been expecting him?
“Thanks.” He took it graciously, and wrapped himself in it, rubbing his shoulders to warm up. “I don’t know how you got here, but it’s nice to meet you. I’m Mateo.”
“I know.” She paused for a good long time. “It’s Romana, your daughter.”

Sunday, November 24, 2024

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 23, 2475

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3
They programmed the Vellani Ambassador to travel at slightly lower than maximum reframe speed. There was no specific reason for this. They just felt like letting the ship arrive at Castlebourne at the same time they did. It took exactly 365 days to cover the distance of about 108 light years. The Ambassador fell back into subfractional speeds only moments after they all returned to the timestream. Elder had been kept in stasis the whole time, and they wouldn’t wake him back up until they scoped out the area. He was not in good shape mentally, and they were neither equipped nor prepared to help him deal with whatever demons he was fighting.
“Wh—what am I looking at here?” Mateo asked.
“Another unusual and unexpected thing,” Angela noted.
A few centuries ago, people were getting bored with regular old golf. Again. Of course, pioneers had already developed other forms of golf that went beyond the traditional, like speed golf, and arguably, frolf. Tricky Golf was a new iteration, but the only difference was the design of the ball. The course was the same, the rules were the same, but the strokes were a lot harder to keep low. Instead of dimples, the ball had bumps. Poor aerodynamics dampened the lift, and shortened the range, and accuracy was much more difficult to pull off. This resulted in a great deal of frustration, and even anger. But players knew exactly what they were getting into. There was a reason why normal golf balls were made with dimples in the first place. It was never random. The bumps were just as intentional, but this time, to make it a greater challenge.
Tricky Golf was more fun to watch for some, especially when players started tossing their clubs around, and cursing the wind gods. It never really took off—pun intended—for obvious reasons, but there’s a market for pretty much everything, so it never died out either. Some serious professional players even used it as a tool during their training. If they could sink a Tricky Golf ball, they could handle a regular one with ease. That was the idea, anyway. And it would seem that someone who had access to this world took inspiration from Tricky Golf. Maybe it was only a coincidence, but as an ironic occasional viewer of the alternative sport, Mateo chose to believe in a connection. The entire surface of the planet was covered in geodesic domes. Though, to be fair, they weren’t all the same size.
“Ram, open a channel; all frequencies.”
Ramses tapped a few buttons, then pointed to her.
“Vendelin Blackbourne, are you there?” She waited, but received no response. “Kestral McBride? Ishida Caldwell? Anyone on the Stateless Mothership Jameela Jamil, or one of its capital ships, please respond.” Still nothing. “Is anyone receiving this signal?” Not a peep.
“I’m picking up an ACS band,” Ramses declared. “Would you like me to play it?”
“What’s that?” Olimpia asked.
“Automated Control Signal,” Leona explained. “It’s essentially what independent robots and AIs use to coordinate their efforts. Go ahead, let’s here it.”
 Ramses shifted the signal to the speakers. It just sounded like white noise and beeps to them. R2D2 would probably know what they were saying.
“Can you translate?” Marie asked, smiling a bit, hoping that it didn’t sound like a dumbass question.
“Sort of,” Ramses replied. “Largely...build. They’re saying build to each other, over and over again. There are a bunch of other embedded messages layered on top of each other. It would take our computer some time to convert the specifics, but...”
“Don’t bother,” Leona ordered. “Just send one back. Translate...don’t build. Override anything that interferes with this new directive.”
It took him hours to complete what sounded like a simple task to the less knowledgeable in the group. There were a ton of security protocols preventing exactly what they were trying to do; hacking into the system to change its behavior. He only managed to do it by locating the emergency shutdown procedures, which were there to prevent something catastrophic from happening. According to the data that Leona was pulling at the same time, that was exactly what had happened, though the consequences were probably relatively minimal, at least for now.
There was an old thought experiment called the Paperclip Maximizer Theory. The question was, what if you commanded an automated machine to make paperclips, and programmed no other objectives or subroutines into it? What could stop it from fulfilling its mandate ad infinitum? What would happen once it ran out of the usual materials? Would it eventually decide that humans would make good paperclips? From what Leona could tell, that was basically the trigger. Before he left, Vendelin must have commanded his automators to make more dome habitats. In his unexpected absence, they found no reason to stop. He probably forgot about it, and had never come back since leaving, dying, and ultimately ending up working with Team Keshida.
While they were gathering all of this information from the construction logs, the Ambassador was in orbit. The sensors detected 83,839 domes in total, though one of them wasn’t finished when they stopped the robots, so Mateo decided to call it an even 83,838.3. Actually, several of them weren’t completely finished, but the last one wasn’t even airtight yet. Once they were confident that there was no danger on the planet, the whole group teleported down to just outside the main dome. This was the one that was already present when they first came to this world over a century ago. Other automators had built up this dome beyond the castle that was there before. There were now four stone walls to protect it against the approximate zero threats here. There were towers, a keep, and a trench for a moat, though it was not filled with water. Vendelin was clearly into medieval times, because this was what he chose for his own dwelling, but other domes had their own themes.
The dome on one side of the first one was modeled on feudal Japan, while the one on the other side appeared to have been inspired by The Wizard of Oz, or maybe Wicked, complete with a green palace, and a yellow brick road. Another one nearby appeared to be a giant golf course. They teleported into Castledome to see if they could find out more information from the local computers. While the smarties were deep in the complicated data, the other four each grabbed a tablet out of the dispenser, and started looking through what was evidently a visitor’s brochure, which stored a directory of all the domes. Roughly 3,000 of them were indeed designed as their own special getaways, leaving the other 80,000 so far undesignated. Some of them were based on historical periods, while others were inspired by fictional media. A few of the concepts were too large in scope, so they combined multiple domes. There was a Westworld analog, which Mateo went straight to in the directory just out of curiosity. It boasted a full complement of robots, just as the source material did, though it was unclear whether they had actually been built, or if the full amusement park was planned for the future.
It was Marie who realized that a lot of the domes weren’t in the directory, because they were planned for traditional residential units. These were typically less exciting, though they were still meant to house like-minded individuals. Many hundreds of billions of people could pretty much move here starting today. Even though this rock was uninhabitable on its own, Vendelin had big plans for it. Maybe he really had been trying to destroy other planets, to get rid of the competition.
“Found it!” Leona suddenly shouted.
“You found the master code?” Ramses questioned.
“What? No, that’s...encrypted,” Leona replied. “What I found was Vendelin’s personal quantum identifier. This can reach him wherever he is, as long as she’s sufficiently near a quantum computer, even if it’s not his.”
“How does a PQI know where he is if it isn’t his device?” Angela questioned.
“If he’s logged into one of his accounts on any device, or if he has an implant, it will send a near-field signal to any and all quantum computers to identify him.” Ramses sighed, and redirected his attention to Leona. “I thought you were looking for the master code. I want control over all these things.”
“Vendelin can give us that,” Leona explained. “He already has it; we wouldn’t have to hack anything.”
“Wait.” Ramses looked away from everyone. “So do I.” He unceremoniously disappeared.
No one bothered to ask him where he had gone. They just went back to their devices. Mateo was particularly drawn to a dome that purported to simulate a zombie-infested city. He always wanted to test his mettle in such an environment. But what kind of safeguards were in place for something like that? None?
Ramses returned with some kind of portable storage device. Mateo recognized it, but couldn’t quite recall what it was used for. He knew that it wasn’t just for transferring any ol’ files, though.
“No,” Leona decided. “Is that him? No,” she repeated.
“In all likelihood, the Jameela Jamil is still in the Dardius galaxy,” Ramses began to reason. “He’s not gonna get your message. He hasn’t even responded to the one we tried to send him before. This is our only hope...unless we just wanna bug out, and forget the whole thing.”
“No!” Olimpia cried. She wanted to try the citywide escape room dome, if it was even available already.
“What is that?” Angela asked, nodding towards the device.
Who is that?” Marie corrected. “I’m guessing it’s Vendelin. Why do you have it?”
“We rescued him from the afterlife simulation,” Leona answered instead of Ramses. “We then downloaded his consciousness into a new substrate. We shouldn’t still have this q-state, though. It’s unethical to keep extra copies of intelligent beings without their permission.”
“I didn’t keep it intentionally,” Ramses defended. “I was busy, I forgot.”
“That’s no reason to use it now,” Leona argued. “It would still be unethical. He has not authorized a duplicated emergence.”
“Isn’t he good now?” Olimpia asked them. “I’m sure he would understand.”
“Part of what caused his improvement was his exposure to Team Keshida,” Mateo said. He faced Ramses again. “The version that you have stored in there hasn’t experienced any of that. I agree with Leona. I say we find another way.”
“You could always ask me for the code.” It was Hrockas, standing in the doorway. While Vendelin Blackbourbne had laid claim to what would come to be known as Castlebourne in what he believed to be a game called Quantum Colony, Hrockas managed to unlock access to Pluoraia, which was one of the rare populated worlds. He was devastated to learn that he was not just playing a game, but messing with real people’s lives. He was part of the team’s effort to locate Vendelin, and bring him to justice. What the team didn’t know at the time was that this justice was in the form of an execution.
“How are you here?” Leona asked him. “I thought they shut everyone out.”
“Teagarden opened the quantum terminals back up in a limited capacity,” Hrockas answered. “They gave me permission to come here. They did that with a few of their top players.” He used airquotes. “As long as we don’t travel to any of the populated worlds, they’ve allowed us to continue our construction efforts.”
“So, it was you?” Ramses pressed. “You built all these domes?”
“No, I couldn’t control the automators in the beginning, so I leaned into it. I only designed most of the themes. I hoped to open it up to visitors by the end of the century.”
“We scanned for both human and mech lifesigns,” Leona divulged with suspicion. “You didn’t show up.”
Hrockas laughed. “This is a castle?” he said in the form of a rhetorical question, like she was an idiot. “They’re for defense? It’s shielded,” he finally clarified after she failed to see where he was going.
“Anyone else here we should know about?” Marie asked.
“No, just me. Like I said, I was planning for a Grand Opening in 2500.”
“Are you telling me that Zombie City is ready to go, or at least nearing completion?” Mateo asked, hope in his eyes.
Hrockas debated the answer in his head. “It would take me a few hours to initialize the sim, but yes. I mean...kind of. I’ve programmed all the enemy NPCs in those worlds, but then I realized that something like that would need other survivors, unless enough real people sign up at the same time. Trust me, I’ve tested it out on a smaller scale, and it’s boring unless you can run into other people trying to win.”
“Why do all this?” Leona asked. “A virtual simulation can accomplish all the same things in a fraction of the time.”
“There’s something very exciting about getting your own physical heart pumping,” Hrockas replied. “They’ve done studies. People tend to prefer real world simulations over virtual constructs if they can help it. VR is best left for worlds that break physical laws. They don’t need to co-opt everything.”
“Well...” Leona began, hesitating. “I need this planet.”
“For what?” Hrockas asked.
“Yeah, for what?” No one else knew what she was thinking.
She wasn’t sure how she would be received. “There are some people living under an oppressive regime about 16,000 light years from here. I would like to set this up as a sanctuary world; the final destination of an underground railroad.”
Hrockas chuckled. “Did you see how many domes there are? I don’t know how many people you’re worried about, but I’m guessing there’s plenty of room. The way I see it, anyone who ends up here is a potential customer, so go ahead, and bring ‘em on down. Whenever you’re ready.”