North pole of a moon - the city on the lake
Posted: 04 Jan 2021 00:39
so during 2020 I had a lot more free time than usual. good thing is, a bunch of conworld ideas ended up congealing in my mind and taking shape. I'll put some of that on this thread.
The Premise
Inanna started its life as a body not unlike a runt mars: a small (for a planet) chunk of metal and rock we might have classified as a dwarf planet a tenth the mass of earth orbiting a faraway sun, its chilly surface covered in various ices of water, carbon dioxide and ammonia. It was one lifeless icy terrestrial rock amongst many, and for countless eons nothing much happened. One fine day it became captured by Enki, a warm neptune, and has been a moon of it ever since. Many hundreds of thousands of years later, an extraordinarily sophisticated technological entity arrived from the plutonic night of interstellar space.
The Probe had been sent from a distant star with the purpose of terraforming. It was highly intelligent, relentlessly methodic and seldom given to communication. For the first thousand years or so it did nothing but build various machines: solar farms, laser emitters, reflectors and receivers, robot factories. It turned itself, initially something like a starship, into a swarm of semi-autonomous robotic spacecraft. When the time was right it began to, with inexhaustible patience, contrive the alteration of the world’d surface to match its idea (it’s program?) of what a world should look like: from memory or samples it reconstructed a version of the biosphere of its makers and adapted it to the realities of the new world. It found problems along the way, and solved them as best its enormous intellect could and, after hundreds of thousands of years of management of the planet’s geology, climate and biosphere it began to break down.
While enormously capable and designed by the finest minds of Earth, given sufficient time all complex systems break down. Its memory was simply too vast, its programming too full of updates and workarounds. It could and did update and improve its own programming, but all of the patches had been written by itself and, therefore, carried the very same unstated assumptions, the same bad habits and inflexible paradigms. Entropy catches up with all things, and by the time its terraformation megaproject was complete, the Probe was forced to turn itself into but a shadow of itself: the vast fields of gigantic machinery that had turned the icy Inanna eventually became scuttled, and to this day many of the inhabitants of the north pole, where most of the infrastructure was located, make some use of various found parts, mostly as extremely good quality metal called Yao so Long, or Ancient Metal.
The world had been already seeded with microbes, fish, insects, fungi and the ecology had been stable for a thousand years. The last proper act it carried out was to seed the world with macrofauna, including humans specimens. Because it didn’t have the time to engage in extensive trial and error it tweaked the genetic code of most of the specimens that were stored in its memory: it made humans smaller, and more resistant to disease and muscle loss. It had lost some of its archived data, and other species it predicted wouldn’t be able to adapt to the microbial systems that had developed on the moon. (you can never know with microbes what you’re gonna get, as all terraformers know). So it modified what it could, figured out its best approximation of an equilibrium, sent down the specimens along with simple machines to assist early development of the first generations and then, after millenia of uninterrupted activity, the Probe went to sleep inside another of Enki’s moons, a small body not 300 kilometers wide with no atmosphere or geology, to wake up seldom and for a short time.Some version of this story is more or less known by a many inhabitants of this world, though for many it is more a legend passed down throughout the generations than a matter of well attested historical facts, and there’s likely no one in the surface which fully understands the concepts of relativistic STL interstellar travel or autonomous machine intelligences. Still, the probe sometimes comes online and communicates with whoever it can. It lacks the initiative to come up with its own grand revelation, but it can still keep up with the evolution of the languages on the ground, and is inclined, in general, to answer questions posed by humans.
The Premise
Inanna started its life as a body not unlike a runt mars: a small (for a planet) chunk of metal and rock we might have classified as a dwarf planet a tenth the mass of earth orbiting a faraway sun, its chilly surface covered in various ices of water, carbon dioxide and ammonia. It was one lifeless icy terrestrial rock amongst many, and for countless eons nothing much happened. One fine day it became captured by Enki, a warm neptune, and has been a moon of it ever since. Many hundreds of thousands of years later, an extraordinarily sophisticated technological entity arrived from the plutonic night of interstellar space.
The Probe had been sent from a distant star with the purpose of terraforming. It was highly intelligent, relentlessly methodic and seldom given to communication. For the first thousand years or so it did nothing but build various machines: solar farms, laser emitters, reflectors and receivers, robot factories. It turned itself, initially something like a starship, into a swarm of semi-autonomous robotic spacecraft. When the time was right it began to, with inexhaustible patience, contrive the alteration of the world’d surface to match its idea (it’s program?) of what a world should look like: from memory or samples it reconstructed a version of the biosphere of its makers and adapted it to the realities of the new world. It found problems along the way, and solved them as best its enormous intellect could and, after hundreds of thousands of years of management of the planet’s geology, climate and biosphere it began to break down.
While enormously capable and designed by the finest minds of Earth, given sufficient time all complex systems break down. Its memory was simply too vast, its programming too full of updates and workarounds. It could and did update and improve its own programming, but all of the patches had been written by itself and, therefore, carried the very same unstated assumptions, the same bad habits and inflexible paradigms. Entropy catches up with all things, and by the time its terraformation megaproject was complete, the Probe was forced to turn itself into but a shadow of itself: the vast fields of gigantic machinery that had turned the icy Inanna eventually became scuttled, and to this day many of the inhabitants of the north pole, where most of the infrastructure was located, make some use of various found parts, mostly as extremely good quality metal called Yao so Long, or Ancient Metal.
The world had been already seeded with microbes, fish, insects, fungi and the ecology had been stable for a thousand years. The last proper act it carried out was to seed the world with macrofauna, including humans specimens. Because it didn’t have the time to engage in extensive trial and error it tweaked the genetic code of most of the specimens that were stored in its memory: it made humans smaller, and more resistant to disease and muscle loss. It had lost some of its archived data, and other species it predicted wouldn’t be able to adapt to the microbial systems that had developed on the moon. (you can never know with microbes what you’re gonna get, as all terraformers know). So it modified what it could, figured out its best approximation of an equilibrium, sent down the specimens along with simple machines to assist early development of the first generations and then, after millenia of uninterrupted activity, the Probe went to sleep inside another of Enki’s moons, a small body not 300 kilometers wide with no atmosphere or geology, to wake up seldom and for a short time.Some version of this story is more or less known by a many inhabitants of this world, though for many it is more a legend passed down throughout the generations than a matter of well attested historical facts, and there’s likely no one in the surface which fully understands the concepts of relativistic STL interstellar travel or autonomous machine intelligences. Still, the probe sometimes comes online and communicates with whoever it can. It lacks the initiative to come up with its own grand revelation, but it can still keep up with the evolution of the languages on the ground, and is inclined, in general, to answer questions posed by humans.