Microstory 2496: Spydome Network

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This is one of those long-term domes, where you can’t quite get the full experience unless you immerse yourself in the setting, and really forget about your old life. You have to shed your past, and become your character, or you’re playing someone else’s game. The premise is that you are a member of a spy agency in one of eleven nations. Your task is to complete missions for your agency, according to whatever your superiors demand of you. Like I said, this is long-term, so you won’t just instantly become a spy. You will start as a trainee, and work your way up. Or you won’t. There’s every chance that you’ll fail. You have to pass the physical and written exams. I’m pretty sure that they’re easier to take than the real ones on Earth, but I’ve never been a real spy before, so I don’t really know. How well you do is entirely up to your own, natural skills. There is no way to know how far any other player gets, because we’re not technically meant to out ourselves to each other, but my boss may be another visitor. I really don’t know. It really doesn’t matter. What you do is up to you as well. Even though you have superiors, you are not a robot, and you are capable of making your own decisions. If you just wanna lounge about your apartment all day everyday, you’ll probably get fired for that, but you won’t get killed. Unless you’ve done enough spying to put you in danger. You’ll probably only get killed if you go out in the field, or as I was saying, if you’re attacked at home by an enemy. Each nation exists under its own dome, and its backstory is as rich and complex as they are in real life. The relationships between these fictional countries are complicated, and ever-changing. If you were to leave and come back 100 years from now, I’m sure alliances will have shifted. One of them might have been blown up in a nuclear war; I dunno. I couldn’t tell you exactly how far the program will let you take this, but it seems like a pretty decent free-for-all. Each might be one of the eleven most heavily populated domes on the planet, as most don’t need to feel quite as lived in as somewhere in the network. But here, you can go anywhere within your bounds, and if you secure a passport to another country, you can go there too. It’s a really interesting experience, and I’ve only been doing it for about a year and a half at this point. Obviously, I’m writing this anonymously, because there’s no reason a competing agency couldn’t use this information against my own. The android intelligences might not understand where a visitor spy got their intel if it came from an out-of-universe source, but they might act on it anyway. There’s a lot you can learn about the countries, and international affairs, from the comfort of your tablet using the prospectus, but to really grasp what it’s like to live here, you’ll have to sign up, and integrate yourself into this new society. You choose your own adventure. I don’t know the psychological ramifications of starting a new life that could potentially be as long as a standard lifetime, but perhaps that’s part of what they’re studying here. I’m sure the results will be fascinating.

Microstory 2484: The Renaissance

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If you even tangentially like the Renaissance, this is the dome for you. A lot of people seemingly mistake this as one big Faire that never ends, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not really even a faire at all. Faires in the past have not only come and gone, but the actors involved are simply playing characters. They know what year it is, and they sometimes forget to take off their smartwatches. This is more like a form of time travel. The droid actors are fully immersed, and will be genuinely confused by any anachronisms that they might encounter. You are allowed to take personal technology in with you, but you are encouraged to keep it concealed as much as possible to protect the integrity of the experience. Unless you’re in the anachronism sector, where advanced tech is not only allowed, but prevalent. Other sectors have their own rules and restrictions, though there’s generally free movement between them. They’re not divided by unscalable walls, or anything, unless that’s the point of the story of that given area. The droids just believe that they are residents of the time periods, and don’t even know that they’re artificial. Do not—I repeat—do not try to disabuse them of their reality. With enough brute force, you can break their software, and force a repair, but that’s so disrespectful and destructive of you. And keep your kids in line, because they will do this. Humanity has a long history of trying to get its actors to break character, and it’s always been incredibly annoying. Just enjoy this place for what it is. There is a sector for everyone. If you want to be very authentic and historically accurate, you can find that. If you want it to lean more into the fantasy aspect, that’s available too. And like I said, there’s an anachronism sector, where people pretend to be alien space travelers, and time travelers, and whatever. I don’t personally care for that, but I’m okay with it existing. Just stay in your lane, so to speak.

This dome spends so many resources basically policing people’s movements. There are some areas you can’t go to if you’re wearing modern garments, because you’re also meant to cosplay as a typical member of society in that time period. Perhaps they should build walls, so you know exactly how far you can stray before you run into a different theme. For the most part, everything is pretty simple here, with the majority of the work going into measures that uphold the illusion of an isolated reality. There are some advanced aspects of it, though. For instance, there are a few dragons, which while fully mythical, are deeply tied to the historical culture and beliefs of the day. These dragons are not genetically engineered, because even though they could absolutely code the genome for something dragon-like, it would not be able to fly, because dragons break the laws of physics. Stop reading if you don’t want to know how the trick is performed. They’re just holograms. Conventional and totally normal aircraft fly around, usually in an array of synced drones, which project a holographic image of whatever flying beast its programmed to be at the time. They can generate heat, but not fire. That would be technologically possible, but also not safe enough, or they would have to require people come in here with certain types of substrates. As it stands, you can walk in as a normal human, and everything be safe enough, and I think they want to maintain that freedom. You shouldn’t want to be breathed on by a dragon, but if that’s you’re thing, I guess look for a VR simulation. This dome doesn’t always stick to pure historical accuracy, but it’s for leisure and education, not adventure, and certainly not danger.

Microstory 2465: Steampunk Sanctuary

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It’s steampunk everywhere, so I hope you like steampunk! I sure do, but you’re not here to hear about who I am. What you really wanna know is if this place is any good. Does it live up to the spirit of steampunk culture? Why yes, yes it does. Because of course it does. It’s one of the easiest themes to implement, and it doesn’t take much to please the fans. To the ignorant, it may seem like nothing more than an aesthetic. You have brass, and you have steam. How nuanced could it be? But it’s actually a way of life, and one which we’ve never been able to explore at scale. Steampunk communities have existed for centuries, but by the time the technology was available to simulate it in base reality, there really wasn’t any practical space for it. Humanity was trying to rewild the world. We built vertically, and left the majority of the land to the plants and animals. Steampunk survived, but a city based on the concept wasn’t feasible. We could have fought it, and declared independence somewhere, but we understood the reason for shrinking the amount of area that humans were taking up, so we played ball. We limited ourselves to small corners of the arcologies, wherever we could find room. But those modern walls...they were still there, made up of their superadvanced metamaterials. We were only actors in a play, pretending as best we could, but knowing that there was nothing authentic about it. Enter Castlebourne, Stage Right. This is the perfect setting for us; a blank canvas that we can paint however we want. We’re using steam to power our technology, from trains to computing machines. It’s not efficient, but it is fun, at least for us. It’s not for everyone. But the best part about it is you don’t have to live here permanently. You can just visit. You might hate it, and want to leave right away, and that’s fine. Nonetheless, you might find yourself enjoying it a little, and maybe want to stick around longer. That’s great. There’s plenty of room. We have everything they have anywhere else. It just looks a little different. And it’s loud. Some people don’t like how loud it is, but that’s what you get in a world without transistors. I can’t get enough of it. The VR steampunk worlds were great, but nothing beats something you can feel in your real hands. That’s the whole ethos with steampunk. It felt like cheating to immerse ourselves in a computer simulation to live in a world where computers exist without the computer chip. Now we don’t need that anymore. Now we can be ourselves...truly.

Microstory 2438: Raindome

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Oh, this one is interesting. There are two lakes, one of which is higher than the other. They are appropriately named Upper Lake and Lower Lake. I’m a little disappointed at the lack of creativity, but there’s no mistaking it, and it’s not that big of a deal. The water flows from Upper Lake, into a river. Can you guess what it’s called? You’re close, it’s not just River, but Spiral River. This river flows all along the entire perimeter of the dome, and then some. There are bridges all over, so you can step out to your left any time you need, and head for the nearest exit. They’re hidden behind the dome’s immersive hologram, but will illuminate once you get close enough to the wall, so if you get lost, just find the border. You won’t get trapped, I promise you. I say this because someone on my boat did have an issue, and they were struggling to get out. They probably should give you the instructions ahead of time, so that’s a bit of constructive feedback. Let’s get back to the river. You can take all sorts of leisure boats on this thing. Canoes, kayaks, riverboats. You choose whatever you want. You may be with a group, and they may be humans, or NPCs. It really just depends. The river flows out of Upper Lake, and down a steady slope in a spiral. It isn’t perfectly circular, it still meanders a little bit, but if you look at the drone feed above, it still doesn’t look natural. It’s often raining, which is why this isn’t called Lake-Spiral River-Lake Dome. These aren’t the sprinklers that I think they use in Nordome. This is real rain, powered by the process of evaporation and cloud formation above, supplied by all the water that’s around. Since there’s no sun inside the dome, they use extremely precise heating lamps to trigger this evaporation, but they try to keep visitors from seeing it. I suggested to our captain that they should heat the water from below, but he says the physics doesn’t work out all that well, and they would like to put fish in there at some point. That would be cool, I wish they were already there. I hope they don’t have to transport them all from Earth, or we could be waiting for over a hundred years. Here’s what’s amazing about this. You can request a boat that’s completely sealed up, which has its own holographic display. You collectively decide on the apparent environment. You can make it look like it’s raining when it’s not, or not when it is. That was such a great idea. I never would have thought of it myself. And it really works. Anyway, I think you can guess the rest. The river keeps going down the spiral until it reaches Lower Lake in the very center. Keep in mind that while I said there were all sorts of boats, that doesn’t include all boats, full stop. There are no motorboats or personal watercraft. This is meant to be a relaxing environment, not an invigorating adventure. There are plenty of other places for that. Have you tried Polar Tropica? Like, stop complaining. Sorry, it was annoying that our boat ride was delayed because of a belligerent visitor who was demanding them to give him a water jetpack. They literally didn’t have them. Again, that’s not what this is. This is an amazing feat of engineering, and nothing you could get on Earth. It’s against the law to rupture land like that these days. One last thing so you don’t wonder, but you don’t have to be in a boat, or be on it the whole time. You can just get out and relax, maybe have a picnic under a mini-dome where it’s not raining. Don’t be rowdy, though. Just sit back and enjoy it.

Microstory 2378: Earth, October 21, 2179

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Dear Velia,

I know what it’s like to feel a connection to a place or event that I’ve never actually been a part of. That’s what happens when I’m reading a good book. Corinthia and I have been reading The Winfield Files, and watching the corresponding seasons of the adaptation. Even though the stories are very personal and intimate for the characters that we’re following, the writer manages to do a great job of going into great detail with everything that’s happening around them. It’s set in a fictional universe, but it almost plays like historical fiction, because the background is so rich and intricate. It might as well be a version of Earth that really does exist somewhere out there. I sometimes feel more attached to it than my own world, probably because of all the darkness and sadness that has defined our past down here. I also know what it’s like to have a job that makes sense for you, but isn’t necessarily something you would have chosen if you had had every option. My dad was good at what he did, and it was more practical for us to stick together, which meant me finding my own way to contribute by becoming a sort of flight attendant. I don’t know what I would have done if I lived in the kind of world that I read about in some of the classics. The tales are fascinating, but they take place in mundane settings. If you were privileged, you got an education, and pursued your dreams. Not everyone was able to do what they wished, of course, but it was at least there in front of them. We lost so many options when society fell apart. I think maybe, if I were one of the lucky ones, I might have become a scholar. I could have dedicated my life to learning, and possibly become a teacher. I appreciate the characters who wear nice but not overly fancy clothing, and spend their days indoors, reading books of their own, and searching for answers. In the real world, it’s always been about survival, but in a more perfect world, we would mostly have everything that we needed, and could focus on things that aren’t absolutely vital. What would you do if you were born on Earth, and the poisonous gases never befell the lands? Do you think you would have gone into fashion anyway, or is there anything else you find yourself daydreaming about. I must say, you’re not bad at what you do, if the outfit you’re wearing in your photo is any indication. In my opinion, it’s not too much cleavage, though I admit to being a bit biased. I hope it’s not too forward to say that you’ve a very beautiful woman.

Warmly,

Condor