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Mar. 5th, 2011 12:06 amI like the worlds of my imagination, the creatures and the different sense of presence that comes with each. My imagination, in turn, can be very insistent. When it decides I should pay attention, it becomes very clear, as it has lately, with a particular world tumbling about in my mind.
I've seen it many times, and I've never found any special creatures that inhabit it, but there's something about the environment itself. The world is a Dyson sphere with a network of transporter gates, each with an address, each linked to only one other address until the hidden machinery reconnects it elsewhere -- and the hidden machinery is ingenious indeed! By the special way the links are set up, it's possible to go from any gate to any other in thirteen hops - and there are 700 million of them. [1]
On its own, that's "just" an interesting technical invention (and who made the gates in the first place?). Maybe not /just/ since I really enjoy ingenuity, but there's more. The gates just hint, they just permit. Imagine you were really on that world.
There's just so much that could happen there. The gate links regularly shift, so there's always something new at the other end; but there are so many gates and the Dyson sphere's so large you can never visit everywhere. Each hop might give you something completely unexpected, another piece of an eternal frontier. Yet you can go to any address you like by just following a few simple rules, so civilization is never far away if you really need it.
What could you find at the other end of a hop? Perhaps there is more than one sphere and they're all nested, different "realms" of temperature, pressure; lands of birds, lands of fish? Creatures or areas completely unknown could appear as the part of any trip, and all you have to do is walk away from the gate and explore, or disregard it and continue on your way.
Perhaps you'd go from a desert to high in the mountains. Perhaps there's a world's worth of desert at the one end, barren but for the few forms that have managed to carve out an existence, and then the other end of the gate shifts, linking this unending plain to jagged peaks as far as you can see at the other end, the cold washing over the sands nearby. What potential - and the gate network bends the rules less than if it was interplanetary.
( Read more... )
I've seen it many times, and I've never found any special creatures that inhabit it, but there's something about the environment itself. The world is a Dyson sphere with a network of transporter gates, each with an address, each linked to only one other address until the hidden machinery reconnects it elsewhere -- and the hidden machinery is ingenious indeed! By the special way the links are set up, it's possible to go from any gate to any other in thirteen hops - and there are 700 million of them. [1]
On its own, that's "just" an interesting technical invention (and who made the gates in the first place?). Maybe not /just/ since I really enjoy ingenuity, but there's more. The gates just hint, they just permit. Imagine you were really on that world.
There's just so much that could happen there. The gate links regularly shift, so there's always something new at the other end; but there are so many gates and the Dyson sphere's so large you can never visit everywhere. Each hop might give you something completely unexpected, another piece of an eternal frontier. Yet you can go to any address you like by just following a few simple rules, so civilization is never far away if you really need it.
What could you find at the other end of a hop? Perhaps there is more than one sphere and they're all nested, different "realms" of temperature, pressure; lands of birds, lands of fish? Creatures or areas completely unknown could appear as the part of any trip, and all you have to do is walk away from the gate and explore, or disregard it and continue on your way.
Perhaps you'd go from a desert to high in the mountains. Perhaps there's a world's worth of desert at the one end, barren but for the few forms that have managed to carve out an existence, and then the other end of the gate shifts, linking this unending plain to jagged peaks as far as you can see at the other end, the cold washing over the sands nearby. What potential - and the gate network bends the rules less than if it was interplanetary.
( Read more... )