Lore:Last Days on Kraken Mare: Difference between revisions

Line 6:

No one breathes.

Down beneath their meeting table, pouches of farmed salmon, beef en culture, buttered carrots, and bok choy drift in the slow turbulence of the sous-vide bath. On Mia's one hundredth anniversary as the New Pacific Systems and Facilities Administrator, she cashed in all (well, not quite all) her favors and installed a pocket restaurant beneath her table on the command deck. She liked the edible metaphor—the idea of watching your food slow-cook all day before the meal. Savor the future you're making.

Down beneath their meeting table, pouches of farmed salmon, beef en culture, buttered carrots, and bok choy drift in the slow turbulence of the sous-vide bath. On Mia's one hundredth anniversary as the [[New Pacific Arcology|New Pacific]] Systems and Facilities Administrator, she cashed in all (well, not quite all) her favors and installed a pocket restaurant beneath her table on the command deck. She liked the edible metaphor—the idea of watching your food slow-cook all day before the meal. Savor the future you're making.

If she's right about what's happening now, then there will be no more long-term thinking, no more patience, and maybe no future at all.

Line 12:

She waits for Xiana to boil over first. Xiana's the water ocean expert. She has the most to lose.

Finch-tiny Xiana McCaig slams her fists down with not a tenth the strength that her chimp-splice muscles could summon. "Now? NOW? We can't leave now! We just finished the borehole—we're ONE DAY from a crewed expedition into Titan's biggest secret! And you want us to just leave it all?"

Finch-tiny Xiana McCaig slams her fists down with not a tenth the strength that her chimp-splice muscles could summon. "Now? NOW? We can't leave now! We just finished the borehole—we're ONE DAY from a crewed expedition into [[Titan (moon)|Titan]]'s biggest secret! And you want us to just leave it all?"

"I do," Mia says, sadly.

Line 45:

"I guess it's not a false alarm," Maury Yamashita murmurs.

The alert scrolls through Mia's mind, in that hallucinatory screen space that matches but never impairs normal vision. "TRAVELER DEPARTS IO. TERRAFORMING INCOMPLETE. ACCELERATING TOWARD EARTH. BEHAVIOR UNPRECEDENTED."

The alert scrolls through Mia's mind, in that hallucinatory screen space that matches but never impairs normal vision. "[[Traveler|TRAVELER]] DEPARTS [[Io|IO]]. TERRAFORMING INCOMPLETE. ACCELERATING TOWARD [[Earth|EARTH]]. BEHAVIOR UNPRECEDENTED."

Sometimes Mia thinks she can feel the New Pacific Arcology moving beneath her, as if the flex of that 160-meter substructure of plasteel and spinmetal that anchors New Pac to the ice shell is also a flex in her sinews. Maybe, like Xiana, her bones are more than bones too. And whenever that happens, she thinks: gasoline rains from the sky here, and it is -180 degrees Celsius outside, and no matter how comfortable we grow, life is tenuous here. Human life, especially.

Sometimes Mia thinks she can feel the New Pacific Arcology moving beneath her, as if the flex of that 160-meter substructure of plasteel and [[spinmetal]] that anchors New Pac to the ice shell is also a flex in her sinews. Maybe, like Xiana, her bones are more than bones too. And whenever that happens, she thinks: gasoline rains from the sky here, and it is -180 degrees Celsius outside, and no matter how comfortable we grow, life is tenuous here. Human life, especially.

And now it's going to end.

Line 68:

"You're right." Korosec paces with her at a safe three steps, inside her turn. He seems like a man comfortable at any distance. "If they just came into the traffic pattern like any other ship, they would be admitting that their precision and urgency are unnecessary. So… this."

"Some American you are," Mia teases him. David comes from the North American Empire, Earth's biggest voluntary retro-nationalist republic, full of people who love military pageantry and muscular aerospace displays.

"Some American you are," Mia teases him. David comes from the [[North American Empire]], Earth's biggest voluntary retro-nationalist republic, full of people who love military pageantry and muscular aerospace displays.

He smiles with those huge, laughing, haunted eyes. "I wasn't always the Good Man, you know."

Line 90:

"Uploaded?"

"She's an Exo now. A troubleshooter for SOLSECCENT."

"She's an [[Exo]] now. A troubleshooter for SOLSECCENT."

"Well," Mia says. "That'll be a weird reunion."

Line 102:

Xiana, who secretly wanted to impress her, is crestfallen. Dear Maury's diver instincts (never leave your buddy, never hold your breath) puff him up with pride: she trusts him! Ismail makes a small, satisfied sound, as if his prediction just came true. Probably he just won a bet with Xiana.

"Come on." Mia hugs her wayward children. "Come here, you awful kids. I knew you wouldn't leave, because I'm not going to leave either. I want you all to go to Crisis Command and get your staff set up. Ismail, let's assume we're going to lose the satellites; get all the weather forecasts you can, Titan surface and circum-Saturn space. Maury, try to figure out what exactly is about to hit us. Xiana, check on the Duiker, then help Ismail switch everything you can to local management."

"Come on." Mia hugs her wayward children. "Come here, you awful kids. I knew you wouldn't leave, because I'm not going to leave either. I want you all to go to Crisis Command and get your staff set up. Ismail, let's assume we're going to lose the satellites; get all the weather forecasts you can, Titan surface and circum-[[Saturn]] space. Maury, try to figure out what exactly is about to hit us. Xiana, check on the Duiker, then help Ismail switch everything you can to local management."

On the way to the dorsal air lock, Mia flicks through camera feeds, statistics, and telemetry, watching over the evacuation effort. Not so long ago, a few million frightened people would've been an administrator's worst nightmare. Not these days. Titan's citizens have grown up with game theory and applied community ethics; it's as unthinkable to beg for a priority evacuation as it would be to ask for an old man's seat on the tram. The families of rig workers and shipping tycoons wait side by side for their tickets to be called, for their bodies to be processed into coldsleep SMILE pods and loaded by the thousands, all equally silent, equally delicate, equally helpless.

Line 180:

The probe. This must be about the Pell deep-space probe. That "demonstration of self-sufficiency" that caused such vicious, quiet controversy. What did it find?

When Morgan-2's network senses warned her of Pell's flight, Mia thought she'd won. Saved the radically self-sufficient scientist from the big bad Warmind and its paranoid goons.

When Morgan-2's network senses warned her of Pell's flight, Mia thought she'd won. Saved the radically self-sufficient scientist from the big bad [[Warmind]] and its paranoid goons.

But Morgan-2 had just covered her glowing eyes. "Administrator. Didn't you understand that I was the humane option? Didn't you think?"

And down from the sky, swift and stealthy as the Warsat that fired it, came the invisible discharge of an X-ray laser to light the shuttle's propellant like a lantern. The beam path was hot-white, straight as poured silver, collapsing instantly: a crash of pure-tone thunder as the tunnel of burnt air closes in on itself. And the shuttle opening like a ghastly blossom, the shape of a thing going upward very quickly, no longer in one piece.

And down from the sky, swift and stealthy as the [[Warsat]] that fired it, came the invisible discharge of an X-ray laser to light the shuttle's propellant like a lantern. The beam path was hot-white, straight as poured silver, collapsing instantly: a crash of pure-tone thunder as the tunnel of burnt air closes in on itself. And the shuttle opening like a ghastly blossom, the shape of a thing going upward very quickly, no longer in one piece.

"Oh, no," Mia had gasped, not understanding at first: Was it an accident? Had the phantom disaster finally arrived on Titan and struck its first blow? This was the age of life, and governments did not, ever, use force against human beings. There were always alternatives. Every soul sacred. Every evil treatable.

Line 231:

Her moon is squashing.

Titan is deforming from a spheroid into an egg. Something out there is pulling on Titan—a hand with a force greater than Saturn's entire mass. And the moon is answering the only way it can, by bulging outward: already fifteen meters, still growing.

Titan is deforming from a spheroid into an egg. [[Darkness|Something]] out there is pulling on Titan—a hand with a force greater than Saturn's entire mass. And the moon is answering the only way it can, by bulging outward: already fifteen meters, still growing.

The pull will cause strain, tremors, tides. And when that pull lets go, there will be a wave to make Ziusudra and Atrahasis and Noah and Manu and Deucalion cower in fear. Bergelmir might have navigated a deluge of blood, but not even he had to sail on liquid methane.

Nor reckon with the apocalyptic tidal forces of a second ocean, fourteen times as vast as Earth's oceans combined, buried 50 kilometers below the surface.

Lore:Last Days on Kraken Mare: Difference between revisions

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@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 No one breathes.
-Down beneath their meeting table, pouches of farmed salmon, beef en culture, buttered carrots, and bok choy drift in the slow turbulence of the sous-vide bath. On Mia's one hundredth anniversary as the New Pacific Systems and Facilities Administrator, she cashed in all (well, not quite all) her favors and installed a pocket restaurant beneath her table on the command deck. She liked the edible metaphor—the idea of watching your food slow-cook all day before the meal. Savor the future you're making.
+Down beneath their meeting table, pouches of farmed salmon, beef en culture, buttered carrots, and bok choy drift in the slow turbulence of the sous-vide bath. On Mia's one hundredth anniversary as the [[New Pacific Arcology|New Pacific]] Systems and Facilities Administrator, she cashed in all (well, not quite all) her favors and installed a pocket restaurant beneath her table on the command deck. She liked the edible metaphor—the idea of watching your food slow-cook all day before the meal. Savor the future you're making.
 If she's right about what's happening now, then there will be no more long-term thinking, no more patience, and maybe no future at all.
@@ Line 12: / Line 12: @@
 She waits for Xiana to boil over first. Xiana's the water ocean expert. She has the most to lose.
-Finch-tiny Xiana McCaig slams her fists down with not a tenth the strength that her chimp-splice muscles could summon. "Now? NOW? We can't leave now! We just finished the borehole—we're ONE DAY from a crewed expedition into Titan's biggest secret! And you want us to just leave it all?"
+Finch-tiny Xiana McCaig slams her fists down with not a tenth the strength that her chimp-splice muscles could summon. "Now? NOW? We can't leave now! We just finished the borehole—we're ONE DAY from a crewed expedition into [[Titan (moon)|Titan]]'s biggest secret! And you want us to just leave it all?"
 "I do," Mia says, sadly.
@@ Line 45: / Line 45: @@
 "I guess it's not a false alarm," Maury Yamashita murmurs.
-The alert scrolls through Mia's mind, in that hallucinatory screen space that matches but never impairs normal vision. "TRAVELER DEPARTS IO. TERRAFORMING INCOMPLETE. ACCELERATING TOWARD EARTH. BEHAVIOR UNPRECEDENTED."
+The alert scrolls through Mia's mind, in that hallucinatory screen space that matches but never impairs normal vision. "[[Traveler|TRAVELER]] DEPARTS [[Io|IO]]. TERRAFORMING INCOMPLETE. ACCELERATING TOWARD [[Earth|EARTH]]. BEHAVIOR UNPRECEDENTED."
-Sometimes Mia thinks she can feel the New Pacific Arcology moving beneath her, as if the flex of that 160-meter substructure of plasteel and spinmetal that anchors New Pac to the ice shell is also a flex in her sinews. Maybe, like Xiana, her bones are more than bones too. And whenever that happens, she thinks: gasoline rains from the sky here, and it is -180 degrees Celsius outside, and no matter how comfortable we grow, life is tenuous here. Human life, especially.
+Sometimes Mia thinks she can feel the New Pacific Arcology moving beneath her, as if the flex of that 160-meter substructure of plasteel and [[spinmetal]] that anchors New Pac to the ice shell is also a flex in her sinews. Maybe, like Xiana, her bones are more than bones too. And whenever that happens, she thinks: gasoline rains from the sky here, and it is -180 degrees Celsius outside, and no matter how comfortable we grow, life is tenuous here. Human life, especially.
 And now it's going to end.
@@ Line 68: / Line 68: @@
 "You're right." Korosec paces with her at a safe three steps, inside her turn. He seems like a man comfortable at any distance. "If they just came into the traffic pattern like any other ship, they would be admitting that their precision and urgency are unnecessary. So… this."
-"Some American you are," Mia teases him. David comes from the North American Empire, Earth's biggest voluntary retro-nationalist republic, full of people who love military pageantry and muscular aerospace displays.
+"Some American you are," Mia teases him. David comes from the [[North American Empire]], Earth's biggest voluntary retro-nationalist republic, full of people who love military pageantry and muscular aerospace displays.
 He smiles with those huge, laughing, haunted eyes. "I wasn't always the Good Man, you know."
@@ Line 90: / Line 90: @@
 "Uploaded?"
-"She's an Exo now. A troubleshooter for SOLSECCENT."
+"She's an [[Exo]] now. A troubleshooter for SOLSECCENT."
 "Well," Mia says. "That'll be a weird reunion."
@@ Line 102: / Line 102: @@
 Xiana, who secretly wanted to impress her, is crestfallen. Dear Maury's diver instincts (never leave your buddy, never hold your breath) puff him up with pride: she trusts him! Ismail makes a small, satisfied sound, as if his prediction just came true. Probably he just won a bet with Xiana.
-"Come on." Mia hugs her wayward children. "Come here, you awful kids. I knew you wouldn't leave, because I'm not going to leave either. I want you all to go to Crisis Command and get your staff set up. Ismail, let's assume we're going to lose the satellites; get all the weather forecasts you can, Titan surface and circum-Saturn space. Maury, try to figure out what exactly is about to hit us. Xiana, check on the Duiker, then help Ismail switch everything you can to local management."
+"Come on." Mia hugs her wayward children. "Come here, you awful kids. I knew you wouldn't leave, because I'm not going to leave either. I want you all to go to Crisis Command and get your staff set up. Ismail, let's assume we're going to lose the satellites; get all the weather forecasts you can, Titan surface and circum-[[Saturn]] space. Maury, try to figure out what exactly is about to hit us. Xiana, check on the Duiker, then help Ismail switch everything you can to local management."
 On the way to the dorsal air lock, Mia flicks through camera feeds, statistics, and telemetry, watching over the evacuation effort. Not so long ago, a few million frightened people would've been an administrator's worst nightmare. Not these days. Titan's citizens have grown up with game theory and applied community ethics; it's as unthinkable to beg for a priority evacuation as it would be to ask for an old man's seat on the tram. The families of rig workers and shipping tycoons wait side by side for their tickets to be called, for their bodies to be processed into coldsleep SMILE pods and loaded by the thousands, all equally silent, equally delicate, equally helpless.
@@ Line 180: / Line 180: @@
 The probe. This must be about the Pell deep-space probe. That "demonstration of self-sufficiency" that caused such vicious, quiet controversy. What did it find?
-When Morgan-2's network senses warned her of Pell's flight, Mia thought she'd won. Saved the radically self-sufficient scientist from the big bad Warmind and its paranoid goons.
+When Morgan-2's network senses warned her of Pell's flight, Mia thought she'd won. Saved the radically self-sufficient scientist from the big bad [[Warmind]] and its paranoid goons.
 But Morgan-2 had just covered her glowing eyes. "Administrator. Didn't you understand that I was the humane option? Didn't you think?"
-And down from the sky, swift and stealthy as the Warsat that fired it, came the invisible discharge of an X-ray laser to light the shuttle's propellant like a lantern. The beam path was hot-white, straight as poured silver, collapsing instantly: a crash of pure-tone thunder as the tunnel of burnt air closes in on itself. And the shuttle opening like a ghastly blossom, the shape of a thing going upward very quickly, no longer in one piece.
+And down from the sky, swift and stealthy as the [[Warsat]] that fired it, came the invisible discharge of an X-ray laser to light the shuttle's propellant like a lantern. The beam path was hot-white, straight as poured silver, collapsing instantly: a crash of pure-tone thunder as the tunnel of burnt air closes in on itself. And the shuttle opening like a ghastly blossom, the shape of a thing going upward very quickly, no longer in one piece.
 "Oh, no," Mia had gasped, not understanding at first: Was it an accident? Had the phantom disaster finally arrived on Titan and struck its first blow? This was the age of life, and governments did not, ever, use force against human beings. There were always alternatives. Every soul sacred. Every evil treatable.
@@ Line 231: / Line 231: @@
 Her moon is squashing.
-Titan is deforming from a spheroid into an egg. Something out there is pulling on Titan—a hand with a force greater than Saturn's entire mass. And the moon is answering the only way it can, by bulging outward: already fifteen meters, still growing.
+Titan is deforming from a spheroid into an egg. [[Darkness|Something]] out there is pulling on Titan—a hand with a force greater than Saturn's entire mass. And the moon is answering the only way it can, by bulging outward: already fifteen meters, still growing.
 The pull will cause strain, tremors, tides. And when that pull lets go, there will be a wave to make Ziusudra and Atrahasis and Noah and Manu and Deucalion cower in fear. Bergelmir might have navigated a deluge of blood, but not even he had to sail on liquid methane.
 Nor reckon with the apocalyptic tidal forces of a second ocean, fourteen times as vast as Earth's oceans combined, buried 50 kilometers below the surface.