248: Jules Khyyan

ENTRY 248: Jules Khyyan

“It was a temple carved into the rock, like some lost fragment of a doomed world cast into the void. Stiglitz and I went out on the tether for a spacewalk. There were six chambers…not Earth construction, because each room was a dodecahedron, supported by cross-bracing pillars. There were friezes on the wall with such detail and color, and a mosaic of broken glass that glowed with a soft blue light…I think it spells something...”

- Miners stumble across “Serreno No. 3”

It is easy for a reasonably competent transhuman to lose themselves in the Vulcanoids. No habitat or political body polices all those rocks, and with a well-equipped small ship a transhuman can live out there for months or maybe a year moving from rock to rock, picking out whatever’s easy to get at, never seeing another transhuman until they come back to port to offload their haul, replace the filters, and take on fuel and air. Many of them are loners, the kind of transhumans that would call themselves brinkers if they didn’t hate the label. Self-sufficient, quiet types that can go strange in their hermitages. Yet most of them keep the radio on to the local bands, to listen in on the chatter and keep an ear out for the tell-tale SOS signals—some to be ready to help, others to scavenge what they can. From these transmissions they know each other by name and callsign: Cap’n Meergan, Black Vanna, Jan-nick-Jan, the Cyberclops…and the seldom heard poetry of Jules Khyyan.

Few have met Khyyan, even among the Vulcanoids miners he’s a recluse, seldom socializing, patently ignoring every hypercorp bugging him for mineral surveys. He trades gold and platinum, but mining is his craft and art. Some estimate he has dug as many as a dozen tombs, temples, houses, and other dwellings out of the asteroids there…digging in to the rock with his tools, spending months finishing off things by hand, with pick and chisel, alone in the dark, signing each one with a poem.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
12	10	15	13	10	14	15	-

Morph: Infomorph

Skills: Academics: Architecture 35, Art: Poetry 55, Art: Sculpture 55, Deception 35, Hardware: Electronics 45, Impersonation 45, Infosec 36, Interests: Exomining 65, Interfacing 52, Language: Native Arabic 85, Language: English 55, Networking: Autonomists 50, Perception 50, Profession: Miner 50, Programming 40

Disadvantages: Mental Derangement (Obsession with art), Social Stigma (AGI)

Using Jules Khyyan

There are people that will pay to find a reclusive poet/sculptor. His work need not be brilliant, for it is detailed and extensive; in a society that values the man-hours that went into a creation more than the end product, Khyyan has unknowingly gained a sizable following in the Planetary Consortium, with many calling him one of space’s native artists. So far, only the sheer logistics of actually moving one of his installations has kept museums and collectors from dragging them out of their existing orbits—not that a sufficiently obsessive and connected effort might not be launched. Still, there remains a question of how many such installations exist, where they are, and perhaps most importantly why Khyyan creates his art…all questions and attention that the reclusive AGI has diligently run from.