274: Crashlandia

ENTRY 274: Crashlandia

“Everyone gets to where they’re going. Most don’t know where that might be, and find themselves a might surprised at where they end up. ‘s no use crying over crashed spaceships though. It’s your dharma.”
- Raj Fork42

The Glorious Infernal Majesty set off from Luna to Dione, one of the moons of Saturn, with fifteen hundred colonists to create an adjunct mining station aligned with the Thoroughgood habitat. Things did not go quite as planned, and when the ship failed to brake properly, Thoroughgood knew there was trouble. Still, there was little they could do as the silver pencil of a spacecraft skewed straight past the settlement to impact spectacularly on tiny neighboring Helene. Based on the energies involved, it was widely assumed there were no survivors.

This was not quite the case. The majority of the colonists did indeed perish on impact, including all of the biomorphs. However, three synthmorphs and four informorphs survived and were operable. Where other egos might have signaled for help from relatively-nearby Thoroughgood, the colonists all apparently underwent a philosophical epiphany and decided to make the most of life where they landed. Salvaging what they could from the supplies and the wreckage of the ship, the synthmorphs began industriously building their own little utopia. A year or so later Thoroughgood noticed the small habitat going up on their neighboring moon and sent a rescue party, which was quietly but firmly rebuffed. However, the rescuers took the time to get to explore the habitat and survey the local culture.

Government and civil structure is, even by anarchist standards, nonexistent. Instead, the inhabitants of Crashlandia - as they call it - appear to enjoy an almost fatalistic shared vision of a neat, orderly colony. The centerpiece of the colony is a fifty-meter pyramid, the sides lined with solar panels, and which houses the servers and computers that supports the infomorph population, which is comprised entirely of forks and currently numbers about forty members. There are now five synthmorphs, three having been fashioned from whatever material is at hand, each of which has designed and built their own small (3m tall) pyramid with internal and underground chambers for their private use. Despite the lack of biomorphs present on the small moon, the Crashlandia locals have spent considerable energy and resources created a small biomorph habitat, complete with a tiny hydroponics garden and atmosphere. They claim that this is the foundation for the eventual tourist trade, and have plans for install a bar and possibly a spa once they can afford the water-ice.

Using Crashlandia

There are some places that are just weird, where the people are just off. This is a well-beloved trope of science fiction, and Eclipse Phase doesn’t have enough of them. PCs visiting Crashlandia will fine the locals alternately invitingly and secretive, open-minded and close-mouthed. New concepts may run through the habitat like wildfire, upsetting the delicate shared delusion - or just as well may be ignored. There are occasional trade missions to Crashlandia, mainly to drop off supplies for their tourist base, paid for through certain media work and a convoluted banking scheme that everyone purports to not quite understand; accountants who access the books generally suffer as though they’d been exposed to a basilisk hack. The gamemaster is free to make Crashlandia as dire or harmless as they want to: it could be a fun and wacky one-off, a common backdrop or reference akin to Elbonia, or the great pyramid could be a TITAN weapon that they’re merrily building, ready to blast a basilisk hack out to the entire solar system by hacking the Long Array.

147: Blackbodies

ENTRY 147: Blackbodies

Transhumanity is not alone in the universe, but it need not bother the Factors or gate to an exoplanet for proof. They were first revealed by Eva Motowski, an ice prospector/scientist mapping the slow tidal movements of Saturn’s rings, caused by some of the shepherd moons that prevent the rings from dispersing. Overlapping measurements from different angles revealed the presence of a small, angular superblack object which Motowski speculated might be carbon agglutination. A probe sent into the region found no trace of it, but reports of similar artifacts came in from Jol Kebana, an amateur astronomer on Titan. The ice prospector and astronomer collaborated, seeking out other telescopes and sensors pointed in the right direction at the right time, and over the course of several weeks traced out a probable trajectory for the object. Presenting their data, they convinced the operators of three radio telescopes to direct their equipment toward a specific region of trans-Saturnian space for a period of 72 hours.

This time, there were four of them.

That was the last time the blackbodies were seen around Saturn, although a handful of possible sightings have been made around Neptune. Consensus in the scientific community about the nature of the blackbodies is fairly solid: small superblack craft whose hulls absorb the majority of electromagnetic radiation, or at least the kinds of light and radio waves that transhumanity typically uses in its long-range sensors. In theory this is near-perfect camouflage so long as the vessel is not viewed only against black space in a vacuum. The effect is not perfect however, so that different angles absorb and emit slightly more or less energy; a single telescope might get lucky, two or more pointed at the same spot from different angles are much more likely to pick up the craft.

Questions remain, however. If the surmise on the technology is correct, the vessels should build up a vast amount of waste heat—all the energy it absorbs and does not emit. Aside from the heat problem, the technology involved is within current transhuman capabilities. Given that, it is reasonable to assume the blackbodies’ originate from one of the existing factions, the Factors, or the TITANs, though certain parties still prefer the idea of a new, unknown extraterrestrial race that is spying on transhumanity prior to making contact. The Factors for their part have not answered any questions about the craft, and none of the major factions have demonstrated craft with similar capabilities so far.

Seed

• Jol Kebana has a divergent theory about the blackbodies: they think that blackbodies actually are a carbon-based lifeform native to Saturnian orbit, and that the angular shape represents the “tacking” of its natural light sails. Using some arcane calculations (and half-assed guesses), Jol believes that the blackbodies will return in the wake of Saturn’s moon Pan—and wants the PCs stationed at different points with cameras to capture a good close-up look at it. Floating alone in space to capture a maybe-living superblack object…nothing could go wrong with that, except perhaps a pirate ship inspired by the blackbody sightings to mimic their appearance.