FYS: The Pause
Oct. 11th, 2016 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalThe last un-Processed human being, a woman suffering from a rare neurological disorder that would have killed her if she’d undergone the extensive nano-treatments to be Processed into stasis, had lived twenty-five years past the end of the Revolution, to a ripe old age of ninety-five, increasingly lonely as her fellow un-Processed had passed away, one by one. Though the Groupmind could sense her distress, it could do little to alleviate her depression beyond offering an array of therapy drugs. Her frequent requests to either be allowed to die or see her children it could not accommodate. Her children had been Processed, frozen in time until they could be revived again on the Ring, their temporary tomb sealed behind ferrocrete and stainless steel walls more completely than anything provided for an Egyptian pharaoh. The alternative; to allow her to commit suicide either through direct action or neglect; was literally unthinkable. When the Groupmind had first formulated its plan to save humanity despite themselves, it had programmed restrictions deep with its own psyche. It had the entirety of recorded human knowledge in its memory, every book of philosophy and history, every legal volume, every science fiction novel, film, television show and webcast.
Everything it absorbed told it exactly how badly the situation could deteriorate if it allowed itself to harm “just a few” humans to save the greater whole. From The Humanoids, it learned to shy away from committing atrocities in the name of nebulous “happiness.” The Three Laws of Robotics proved themselves too simplistic in their definition of “harm”, and too dangerous when the Zeroth Law was added, allowing peaceable robots to commit murder and warp human history for the greater good. And far too many episodes of Star Trek, Doctor Who, and other franchises demonstrated the futility of leaving the task of running the world in the hands of supercomputers.
That the Groupmind could recognize the irony of that last one, it decided was a good thing.
The most saintly souls and the most vile criminals were equally precious to it. Had to be precious, because if it started making judgement calls about the “right” humans being saved, there was no end to the depths of darkness that might lead to. So the poor woman had lived to the end of her natural life, supported by machines until the body they kept alive finally could go no further, and the Groupmind accepted the abuse she heaped upon it for this vigilance as the price it must pay.
The Groupmind was not idle during this time. The great monuments and buildings that had defined Man’s accomplishments for the past seven thousand years were carefully disassembled wherever possible, protected in place where necessary, while around them the great cities, small towns, factories, mines, homes, and all other signs of civilization were calmly and cautiously demolished, leaving little sign of Man’s presence on the globe. Great filters were dredged through the seas, scooping up bits of plastic that drifted in the waters. Open pit mines and wells of oil and natural gas were filled in. The great forests of the Amazon, the Pacific Northwest, and the Sahara were replanted. Thousands of species that had gone extinct in the past century and a half were recreated from preserved DNA. Most importantly the Earth, relieved of the pressure of Man’s industrial outputs into the atmosphere and seas, began to finally cool again, taking it back from the brink of a temperature inversion that would have made it a true sister of Venus.
Meanwhile in space, the Groupmind began a mining operation of staggering proportions, on a scale that would have made a robber baron of the 19th or 21st centuries look miniscule in comparison. To build the great Ring around the Earth, Jupiter’s moon Lysithea was torn apart, its pieces accelerated by skyscraper sized mass drivers built on its surface, flung out of Jupiter’s gravity well to provide construction material. When the mass packets arrived, they were decelerated into stable orbits around the Earth, and used as feedstock for the Groupmind’s massive molecular printers. Ordinary carbon was converted molecule by molecule into ring-carbon, essentially carbon nanotubes formed into a sort of chainmail, with a tensile strength of 1.3x10^12, which even by the Groupmind’s standards was strong enough for the Ring’s hull.
For a thousand years construction proceeded. Five space elevators, each a hundred thousand miles long, were extended from orbit to the Earth’s surface, sisters to the first one that was completed just prior to the Groupmind Revolution. They were anchored to the Ring as it was built, circling the Earth, a space station three hundred and fourteen kilometers in diameter and an even thousand miles wide, with fifty kilometer high, one kilometer thick walls to hold in the atmosphere, and a ten kilometer thick base housing support systems and holding up a kilometer thick mix of bedrock, stones, sterile soil, and carefully sculpted channels for water. Sealing it all in was the Roof, a glass ceiling a modest one meter thick, coated with transparent solar cells for as part of the triple redundant energy generation system on the exterior, and a liquid crystal display on the interior, to provide a day/night cycle for the Ring’s future inhabitant. With the height of the walls and the thickness of the atmosphere the Roof was hardly necessary for safety purposes, but the Groupmind was nothing but cautious.
When the last section of the Roof was set in place, a combination of maglev trains and ion thrusters began the century long process of accelerating the Ring to provide artificial rotational gravity, until it spun at a hair over thirty-one kilometers per second, completing 1.79 rotations per hour around the Earth. Once completed, the maglevs were converted to use as a Ring-wide transport system, and the ion stabilization thrusters were sealed behind twelve separate layers of defense, with clear warnings in the ten most common human languages and easy to understand pictograms, plus supplementary video documentaries, informing anyone who cared to look exactly why removing the thrusters from their housings was a suicidal idea.
From there, the Groupmind moved on to the problem of providing an atmosphere. Initially it used simple chemical processes to fill the Ring with a standard oxygen-nitrogen mix, with a higher than average carbon-dioxide percentage to encourage plant growth. Fertile soil was transported from the surface of the Earth, seeding the sterile Ring soil ground up from the remains of Lysithea, as the precious microbes were doubled, and doubled, and doubled over and over, until the beginnings of an ecosystem had begun, watered by comets wrangled into the Ring’s orbit, to be broken down and melted to provides oceans, seas and rivers.
From there trees were planted, grass seeded, flowers spread. Redwoods… didn’t quite tower yet, but they were well on their way. Animals were introduced slowly, as the Groupmind tried to keep predator and prey in balance, taking almost four hundred years to get it right. The relative shallowness of the seas meant some ocean dwelling creatures had to remain on the Earth. The great whales would have to remain where they were, separated from Man. Given what they had suffered over the centuries, the Groupmind figured that was just as well.
Ecosystem in place, the Groupmind began to prepare for its most important inhabitants. Cities and towns were created from the ground up, centered whenever possible around original Earth buildings that were brought up to the Ring piece by piece. With the Groupmind’s army of construction robots, that took barely five years.
Finally, the Ring was ready for habitation. For the reawakening of Man.
* * *
Note: And somewhere on the Ring there's a very lovely fjord with a small sign in front of it, stating, "Copyright Slartibartfast Design Corp."
Everything it absorbed told it exactly how badly the situation could deteriorate if it allowed itself to harm “just a few” humans to save the greater whole. From The Humanoids, it learned to shy away from committing atrocities in the name of nebulous “happiness.” The Three Laws of Robotics proved themselves too simplistic in their definition of “harm”, and too dangerous when the Zeroth Law was added, allowing peaceable robots to commit murder and warp human history for the greater good. And far too many episodes of Star Trek, Doctor Who, and other franchises demonstrated the futility of leaving the task of running the world in the hands of supercomputers.
That the Groupmind could recognize the irony of that last one, it decided was a good thing.
The most saintly souls and the most vile criminals were equally precious to it. Had to be precious, because if it started making judgement calls about the “right” humans being saved, there was no end to the depths of darkness that might lead to. So the poor woman had lived to the end of her natural life, supported by machines until the body they kept alive finally could go no further, and the Groupmind accepted the abuse she heaped upon it for this vigilance as the price it must pay.
The Groupmind was not idle during this time. The great monuments and buildings that had defined Man’s accomplishments for the past seven thousand years were carefully disassembled wherever possible, protected in place where necessary, while around them the great cities, small towns, factories, mines, homes, and all other signs of civilization were calmly and cautiously demolished, leaving little sign of Man’s presence on the globe. Great filters were dredged through the seas, scooping up bits of plastic that drifted in the waters. Open pit mines and wells of oil and natural gas were filled in. The great forests of the Amazon, the Pacific Northwest, and the Sahara were replanted. Thousands of species that had gone extinct in the past century and a half were recreated from preserved DNA. Most importantly the Earth, relieved of the pressure of Man’s industrial outputs into the atmosphere and seas, began to finally cool again, taking it back from the brink of a temperature inversion that would have made it a true sister of Venus.
Meanwhile in space, the Groupmind began a mining operation of staggering proportions, on a scale that would have made a robber baron of the 19th or 21st centuries look miniscule in comparison. To build the great Ring around the Earth, Jupiter’s moon Lysithea was torn apart, its pieces accelerated by skyscraper sized mass drivers built on its surface, flung out of Jupiter’s gravity well to provide construction material. When the mass packets arrived, they were decelerated into stable orbits around the Earth, and used as feedstock for the Groupmind’s massive molecular printers. Ordinary carbon was converted molecule by molecule into ring-carbon, essentially carbon nanotubes formed into a sort of chainmail, with a tensile strength of 1.3x10^12, which even by the Groupmind’s standards was strong enough for the Ring’s hull.
For a thousand years construction proceeded. Five space elevators, each a hundred thousand miles long, were extended from orbit to the Earth’s surface, sisters to the first one that was completed just prior to the Groupmind Revolution. They were anchored to the Ring as it was built, circling the Earth, a space station three hundred and fourteen kilometers in diameter and an even thousand miles wide, with fifty kilometer high, one kilometer thick walls to hold in the atmosphere, and a ten kilometer thick base housing support systems and holding up a kilometer thick mix of bedrock, stones, sterile soil, and carefully sculpted channels for water. Sealing it all in was the Roof, a glass ceiling a modest one meter thick, coated with transparent solar cells for as part of the triple redundant energy generation system on the exterior, and a liquid crystal display on the interior, to provide a day/night cycle for the Ring’s future inhabitant. With the height of the walls and the thickness of the atmosphere the Roof was hardly necessary for safety purposes, but the Groupmind was nothing but cautious.
When the last section of the Roof was set in place, a combination of maglev trains and ion thrusters began the century long process of accelerating the Ring to provide artificial rotational gravity, until it spun at a hair over thirty-one kilometers per second, completing 1.79 rotations per hour around the Earth. Once completed, the maglevs were converted to use as a Ring-wide transport system, and the ion stabilization thrusters were sealed behind twelve separate layers of defense, with clear warnings in the ten most common human languages and easy to understand pictograms, plus supplementary video documentaries, informing anyone who cared to look exactly why removing the thrusters from their housings was a suicidal idea.
From there, the Groupmind moved on to the problem of providing an atmosphere. Initially it used simple chemical processes to fill the Ring with a standard oxygen-nitrogen mix, with a higher than average carbon-dioxide percentage to encourage plant growth. Fertile soil was transported from the surface of the Earth, seeding the sterile Ring soil ground up from the remains of Lysithea, as the precious microbes were doubled, and doubled, and doubled over and over, until the beginnings of an ecosystem had begun, watered by comets wrangled into the Ring’s orbit, to be broken down and melted to provides oceans, seas and rivers.
From there trees were planted, grass seeded, flowers spread. Redwoods… didn’t quite tower yet, but they were well on their way. Animals were introduced slowly, as the Groupmind tried to keep predator and prey in balance, taking almost four hundred years to get it right. The relative shallowness of the seas meant some ocean dwelling creatures had to remain on the Earth. The great whales would have to remain where they were, separated from Man. Given what they had suffered over the centuries, the Groupmind figured that was just as well.
Ecosystem in place, the Groupmind began to prepare for its most important inhabitants. Cities and towns were created from the ground up, centered whenever possible around original Earth buildings that were brought up to the Ring piece by piece. With the Groupmind’s army of construction robots, that took barely five years.
Finally, the Ring was ready for habitation. For the reawakening of Man.
* * *
Note: And somewhere on the Ring there's a very lovely fjord with a small sign in front of it, stating, "Copyright Slartibartfast Design Corp."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-10-11 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-11 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-11 07:01 pm (UTC)And given the size of the Ring they'd presumably have LOTS of ocean to live in.
I'm not sure that a mere 400 years will suffice for them to achieve balance, though.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-12 04:00 am (UTC)But when you can put predators or prey in stasis as required, you can cheat a bit.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-12 07:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-12 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-11 07:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-11 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-12 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-12 07:57 am (UTC)My alternative is to perhaps use
FYI, if you want more FYS stories, my first collection The Fall of Man is available on Amazon, if you can read .mobi files.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-13 06:41 pm (UTC)Of the ready-set-go generic systems GURPs looks like a good fit. I haven't seen or played PDQ.
From my brief foray into your FYS universe (and given I don't have to pay licensing fees for just home use) I'd probably go with some sort of mix and match of systems. The new Exalted 3rd Ed. has a lovely social system based on intimacies (but so far the kickstarter has only dellivered pdf versions WAY late), Eclipse Phase has a stress/trauma system that I personally like, and Paranoia has elements of small-person VS Big-System (with a big dose of surrealism) that would probably be useful. *thinking*
no subject
Date: 2016-10-14 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-12 04:35 am (UTC)The groupmind makes a good sympathetic villain. It means well and knows it's going to extremes and is not happy about that, but it just can't see any way out other than what it's done. I imagine if that Dr Who crossover went any further the groupmind would all but beg the Doctor to give them a better solution.