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Chapter: Chapter 1: Dirtball

  • Anonymous asked: Talita, what's a quantum phone, and how is it different from a regular phone? Talita: It's a phone with a quantum computer CPU. It's— this isn't my field, I'm in mechanics, not compsci— but basically quantum computers just use qubits instead of classical bits. This allows them to run more processes parallel to each other than a classical computer.  It's also, like... absolutely a useless extra price point on a personal CPU? Nobody needs that kind of processing to play games or call their mom. If you want to flaunt your wealth just buy hard wood jewelry or whatever. Room temperature quancomps and the vast majority of quantum programming languages also originate from bug ferrets. The legend goes that their code is so spaghetti, it resulted in them accidentally creating sapient AI. …I'm so glad I'm not a programmer...

    RttS Reader Questions 2

    Jun 29, 2024

  • Anonymous asked: Cal, how did you get hired on Dirtball, and what's your job there? Calcery: I had previously been the overseer for a large microgravity recycling station. When Ixion inquired about on-planet work, I was interested, but conflicted about leaving. I compromised by budding off this individual, Calcery, to work at IRP. My parent iteration, Calcine, stayed at the microgravity plant. We keep in touch. My job on Ixion-3... or "Dirtball," haha, was not a huge change of pace. I managed IRP's fleet of autonomous harvesting vehicles. During the workday I actively controlled the vehicles, and during my off hours they followed autonomous routines I programmed for them.

    RttS Reader Questions 1

    Jun 27, 2024

  • Image: A group of bug ferrets exiting a tunnel. Their fur has a variety of colors from dark brownie to reddish pink to white, and their visible unfurred skin is pale green. Most have magenta eyes. Caption: Bug ferrets have been in space the longest of any of the known sapient aliens, and they created the wormhole generating technology that links interstellar space. Avians were the first sophonts they encountered by throwing wormholes into new systems, followed by humans, both of whom had colonized their local systems. Most recently they contacted centaurs, who had only rudimentary electronics. Bug ferrets are reproductively unisex (meaning individuals can both bear children and sire them) and extremely gregarious, living in family groups of up to 30 adults and their children. Native to a cold planet with most of its surface occupied by barren ice caps, bug ferrets evolved to live in the vast biogenic tunnels and cave systems of chemosynthetic organisms beneath their planet's tropics. Although some spacefarers get cybernetic implants that allow them to speak alien languages, native bug ferret communication is a combination of visual sign, tactile sign, and expressive barks. Unlike human sign languages, many bug ferret languages are made of non-representational syllables and can be spoken in complete darkness. Their most commonly "spoken" sign is a constructed inter- national auxiliary language (like Esperanto, but far more successfully adopted) known as BFL-2, as it was ironically the second bug ferret language encountered by humans after first contact. Because of the clunky way that BFL-2 words are transcribed, bug ferret names and entities are usually either given acronyms or nicknames in English. BFL-2 (Bug Ferret Language 2) BFL-2 reading order is bottom up, right to left. Three symbols are transliterated as: [B-X Grasp D-C Drag] Image: The signer grasps their hands around the outside of the receiver's arms and drags them from the second joint to the third joint. [B-P Fist B-D Drag] Image: The signer makes their hands loose fists and drags the knuckles on the outside of the receiver's arms from the wrist to the second joint. [L-P Palm-O B Twist 2] Image: The signer makes their left hand flat with their fingers together and thumb out, and rotates their wrist twice to flutter it, tapping both sides of the receiver's right wrist. Image: A large underground space connects to the cold blue light of the surface through a small skylight. Buildings extend down in a column, cut through by transportation corridors, horizontal areas in reach of skylight growing blue-green plants. Under the column, where it spreads out, a cross section shows homey tunnels flooded with warm light from bioluminescent organisms. Caption: Bug ferret living spaces are a dense tangle of rooms with blurry delineation between public and private spaces.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 37

    Jun 25, 2024

  • LOG 1.1 Avians Caption: Avians ("Chew" in Tiiliitian) are a genus of small, winged sophonts that walk on their forelimbs and have a bisex reproductive system comparable to Earth animals like seahorses. Though there are five sapient species, the most commonly seen in space are skimmers, who form the majority population of a large colonialist monarchy called the Dominion of Tiiliit. SKIMMER AVIANS Population: roughly 12 billion Image: Two skimmer avians stand next to on another. The one labeled "dun" is taller with drab clothing that covers the back of their head. The one labeled "bright" has a blue and yellow striped crest and eye stripe, and is wearing elaborately sewn blue and yellow clothing. FLIGHTLESS AVIANS pop: 5 billion Image: Bust of avian with a bulky head, small ears, and a huge crest. PYGMY AVIANS pop: 5 millon Image: Bust of a small avian with grey feathers, large ears and a rounded crest. DIVER AVIANS pop: 4 billion Image: Bust of a black and white avian with a pointy face and a flattened, fin-like crest. POLAR AVIANS pop: 3.2 billion Image: Bust of fluffy white avian with almost no visible crest and fluffy ears. Caption: The two sexes of avians are referred to as brights and duns in English. This is due to a mixture of concerns from sexually conservative avian cultures about alien terminology influencing bright-dominated hegemony, Anglophone humans wishing to distinguish between alien genders and their own, and linguistic limitations. Avian languages often have two-tone vowels that sophonts with only one set of vocal cords cannot pronounce. Tiiliitian, for example, is a tonal language with five vowels. But each of these vowels has five different tonal slides, which can be combined, similar to musical chords (although the avian voice has been described less as musical and more like a duet of yowling cats). Alien xenointerpretors specializing in bitonal avian languages often use a keyboard recorder device to layer tones while they speak. The 5 Basic Tiiliitian Tones level tone sinking tone rising tone upwards warble downwards warble The Tiiliit Image: A skimmer avian bright reclines in a huge luxurious robe, and a fancy metal headdress on top their crest adorned with feathers, inlaid stones, and fabric. All of their clothes and the skin of their crest are shades of mint and seafoam green. Behind them is a banner with a symbol made of a circle with three equally spaced radial lines entering from the outside and meeting in the center. Caption: Only the Tiiliit is permitted to wear this hue of green. Other greens are generally only worn by royalty.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 36

    Jun 22, 2024

  • Talita lies asleep in her bed, directly across from the 8 boxes of recharging phones. Unbeknownst to her, a single phone screen lights up, casting a glow over the foot of the bed.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 35

    Jun 20, 2024

  • Talita: Ugh, I'll shower tomorrow then... She walks back into her storage unit apartment. Inside, she puts down her tablet and glasses down at her bedside and gets under the covers, watching the tablet from a couple meters away in her bed. In the video on the tablet, two humans sign to each other next to a board reading "ASL LESSON 74: Provided by the North American Republic College for the Deaf". The scrolling caption reads "—ODAY WE'RE LEARNING NEW SIGN VOCABULARY. REPEAT AFTER ME—" Talita watches drowsily from her pillow, but slowly her eyelids slide closed and she falls asleep.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 34

    Jun 18, 2024

  • Talita looks up in surprise from her bench at the large central pillar of the habitat as it emits a loud chime. SFX: BIIIIING BOOOOONG Overhead, the dozens of bar lights on the habitat ceiling begin to noisily switch up, abruptly plunging the city into nighttime. SFX: CLAK CLAK CLAK Talita: Goddamnit!! How is it bing bong already?

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 33

    Jun 15, 2024

  • Talita puts on headphones and selects a podcast on her tablet, tapping the touchscreen with her trunk. Podcast: Welcome back to J-tech labs, your one stop shop for Jovian polity tech news. I’m Mark— And I’m Kylie. As you may have heard, aerospace company Vspear acquired– Talita puts away the junk on the floor into boxes. Podcast: –their competitor Unitine, though it’s unknown if they’ll continue Unitine’s revolutionary material science research– Talita vacuums underneath the couch cushions. Podcast: –It’s certainly on our minds after the wormhole station failure at Mars L5 caused 11 month shipping delays— Talita hangs up some laundry on a wire. A commercial sized laundry machine tumbles clothes. Podcast: –But the element still needs to to be mined— by infamously slow chemical rocket drones— Talita lies supine on her workout bench and lifts weights in her backyard next to the laundry machines. The weight machine has heavy duty chains connecting the push bar to the weight stack, and the metal plates she's rowing with her midlimbs are several inches thick and about a meter wide. She pants in exertion, the air leaving her body through the excurrent nostrils behind the ribcage of her lower torso. Podcast: –So it may be decades before enough is commercially available to lower prices and raise ship speed— that is, unless ship recycling operations can step up to the demand— Talita: Yeah, right.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 32

    Jun 13, 2024

  • Talita looks around at the mess throughout her living space. Used pitchers and dishware next to the couch; an electronics desk cluttered with parts, tools, and half finished projects; her floor covered in random supplies and open storage bins. She heaves a long sigh and looks exasperated, then walks into the bedroom portion of her apartment, pushing open the large curtain that separates it from the rest of the living space. She rolls out an extra large charging mat there on the empty floor there and puts the 8 boxes of phones down on top. All of the screens briefly blink white as they begin to charge.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 31

    Jun 11, 2024

  • Talita walks past Gillie and the ferret line, rubbing the back of her neck in embarrassment about the interaction. She approaches one of the small, half cylinder shaped dry storage units and punches a code into the door number pad. The door noisily rattles as it rolls up to open. Inside is Talita's messy apartment. Most of the furniture looks vaguely cobbled together and homemade, or adjusted from human furnishings that were slightly too small. Windspinners hang next to air circulation units, shop lights hang from the ceiling, and a model space ship hangs from one of the shop lights. To the left is an enormous couch and TV surrounded by used dishes and pitchers, a fridge covered in weirdly shaped magnets extracted from electronics, a sink, and a range. To the right there is an overflowing electronics workbench with a twin-sized mattress on the floor as a crude chair, standing tool chest, and drafting desk covered different types of 3D printers.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 30

    Jun 08, 2024

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