The Lonely Galaxy Megathread (comments encouraged)

[lurker]

Oh, man . . . now I'm hungry for one of those steadtree fruit.

I bought a bag of Warheads after writing that post just to jog my memory on how sour they were. My tongue is still sore.

Yinrih cooking emphasizes very strong flavors to compensate for their weak sense of taste. They also use things like menthol (as in my last story) and capsaicin, or analogous compounds, very liberally.

[Khemehekis]

I bought a bag of Warheads after writing that post just to jog my memory on how sour they were. My tongue is still sore.

Yaui!

Yinrih cooking emphasizes very strong flavors to compensate for their weak sense of taste. They also use things like menthol (as in my last story) and capsaicin, or analogous compounds, very liberally.

Cool! I like very strong foods, because I'm anosmic and with strong foods I can easily sense the taste, even without a sense of smell.

[lurker]

Cool! I like very strong foods, because I'm anosmic and with strong foods I can easily sense the taste, even without a sense of smell.

I got COVID last year and lost my sense of smell and my sense of taste. That was pretty scary for me because I rely heavily on odors when navigating places like shopping malls. Every store has a unique smell. Fortunately I got both back after about 2 months.

A lot of this project has been about incorporating odors that I find pleasant, nostalgic, or interesting. Yinrih ink smells like petrichor. The interiors of orbital colonies and womb ships have a "dog smell", or as I like to put it, it smells like a friend. Neurogel smells like lavender (although I might change that to something less stereotypically perfumy, perhaps stale gasoline.) Yinrih "tears" (a red fluid exuded from the mouth under very strong emotion) smell like sea spray. Clerical perfume smells like very faint tobacco smoke, like a Motel 6 from the 90s. I could go on.

That's also why yinrih use perfumes where we would use clothing to communicate things like occupation and social status. I really need to write that up.

[lurker]

- Thank you for the description of the fur. I assume that in addition to inborn means, such as their claws, the yinrih use a variety of grooming aids – the equivalents of combs, brushes, shampoo, etc.

They certainly do. I don't see them as particularly fluffy (in spite of my comparisons to foxes and samoyeds, that's regarding color rather than texture or length). They have an undercoat and associated dander, which gives busy indoors areas a distinct "dog odor". They don't have a shedding season, but shed year-round. Hence why Jim objects to Tod lying on his couch without a slip cover.

- I was impressed by your most recent artwork, specifically your drawing of the hind paw.

Thanks. Picturing how the extra thumb looks has been one of the more difficult parts.

- With regard to “Beating the Heat”: …well, that’s not good. (I have faith that Sarah will receive treatment in time to recover.)

Sunshine is definitely "in over her ears" (overwhelmed) as she would say.

- Thank you for the wealth of information about yinrih reproduction and family/community life, as well as about the Tree Dwellers. I assume that the Tree Dwellers, as well as other related species, also reproduce using womb-nests, and that they have various strategies for protecting them?

Yes. This unique form of ovipary is common to at least the Tree Dwellers as well. The setup where some males protect the nest, other males hunt, and the females forage is also how the Tree Dwellers do things. My idea was that, if multiple adults were responsible for raising the children like you see in some primate species, than why not have them contribute genetically so the children are more diverse.

(On a side note, have the yinrih always been exceptionally long-lived, or is this in part a consequence of their development of advanced medical technology?)

That's a good question. It's not a result of things like gene editing or implants. Some of it has to do with the fact that yinrih have more redundancy built into their biology compared to humans. They have a caudal ganglion, or as I like to call it, a butt brain. It was originally used for controlling the tail, like the mini brains that octopi have in each arm. It slowly gained extra functionality as a backup for the main brain. This allows them to shrug off things like brain cancer.

- With regard to clerical corruption: there are certainly a number of Earthly examples, both historically and in the present day, of religious institutions wielding economic influence (including being involved in business activities), although the Bright Way seems like a particularly extreme example.

I'm still on the fence about how exactly the clergy falls into decadence, but that's the front runner. However it happens, it's ancient (literally) history by the time of First Contact. The main controversy now is the hierarchy betraying their principles in an attempt to stay relevant, with a great many leaders openly advocating the cessation of missionary work altogether. The Bright Way is also in charge of a lot of institutions you'd normally associate with religious groups, like social welfare programs, educational institutions, and healthcare. Opponents of the traditional missionaries argue that they should focus on these things instead of howling into the blind uncaring cosmos. This would turn the Bright Way into another secular NGO.

- I enjoyed the description of the “dogtors.”

This entire project came out of a medical scare involving sepsis in the family. It was a way for me to escape my worries. I took some ideas from previous projects I never wrote down and transplanted them to a sci-fi setting. One of the questions that started the whole thing was "how would a species of four-legged sophonts handle medical hygiene, given that their hands are also their feet?"

[Khemehekis]

I got COVID last year and lost my sense of smell and my sense of taste. That was pretty scary for me because I rely heavily on odors when navigating places like shopping malls. Every store has a unique smell. Fortunately I got both back after about 2 months.

Oh, man. That must have been really hard on you. I know how a person can feel the world isn't made for him/her when s/he's missing one of his/her senses. And being blind is all that much harder than being anosmic.

[lurker]

I've been stumped for the longest time trying to lay out the rest of Focus, so I decided to take the Elder Scrolls approach and think of cool-sounding names and fill in the blanks from there. Just for review, I'll go over the inner system first, although as you'll soon see, dividing the system into "inner" and "outer" planets is less applicable now.

Focus: The Hearth Star. It's not very different from Sol. I'm deviating from my Anglish translation convention here for the sake of a pun, since focus means hearth in Latin, and a star is the focus of an elliptical orbit, as well as the focal point of a solar system.

Hearthside: The seat of religious government of the Bright Way, and the last remnant of the clergy's secular power. The reason why they're still in charge is because they ruled rather well. They set up a politico-economic system that emphasizes subsidiarity (things should be governed at the lowest level possible) and emphasized the right of individuals to own their own property, fending off both government overreach and corporate greed (you will own nothing and be happy).

Sweetwater: (formerly Waterworld). The second planet to be terraformed after Newhome. It's mostly a planet-wide ocean dotted with islands and archipelagos. It's unsurprisingly a popular tourist destination.

Yih: The cradle of the yinrih species, and the former seat of power of the Bright Way. Specifically, Newman's Dale, the southern bank of the equatorial river basin that the yinrih emerged in, is considered their holiest site. The clergy is initially expelled from the planet and exiled to Hearthside, but a treaty is later negotiated that allows them to maintain a presence in Newman's Dale.

Newhome: The first planet to be terraformed. The first group of terraformers starts a machine-worshipping cult.

Welkinstead: The first of the two gas giants. It has a few moons, but it's most known for its cities floating in the upper atmosphere.

The Inner Belt: The first of the two asteroid belts. Most of the independent spacer city states can be found here, moving from asteroid to asteroid to mine the metals there like perpetual boom towns.

Wayfarers' Haven: One of the above-mentioned independent spacer city-states in the inner belt. Originally a refugee camp formed from people fleeing a Partisan border expansion, it's where the Dewfall departs from, and has grown into a thriving, tight-knit little town while the missionaries were making their way to Earth. It's also the endpoint for the mass router trunk between Sol and Focus, as well as the first place humans visit outside our solar system.

The Split Horizon: A sister city to Wayfarers' Haven. the first human enclave at Focus, and the only orbital colony to use centrifugal gravity. It's a standard O'Neil Cylinder design with two counter-rotating toruses and a connecting axle.

Moonlitter: The second of the two gas giants. It divides the inner belt from the outer belt. It has quite a few colonized moons, hence the name.

The Outer Belt: The outermost part of Focus. It's divided in turn into the borderlands (still looking for an Anglish name) and Partisan territory. The border between the two is supposed to be the orbit of the dwarf planet mentioned in The Artificer's Litter but the Partisans claim the entire outer belt has been an integral part of Partisan Territory since ancient times. It is one of these pushes outside their agreed-upon border that initiates the formation of Wayfarers' Haven.

---

This is all still pretty sketchy, but I'm happy with the results so far. Other than Hearthside and the Partisans, I haven't divided the system politically yet. I suspect Yih will have numerous independent states, Newhome will either be a single government or have two or three independent states, and so forth.

[Visions1]

This looks really good. I would like to know more of the history - for example, what is Sweetwater's deal? Who owns it? What's the history? Is it just a Hawaiian Switzerland?

"<Hmmmm, your pineapples are a tad bland. Have you considered adding some burnt buttersctotch?>"
"Pono ʻoe e ʻakaʻaka iaʻu..."
"Bon sang..."

[lurker]

This looks really good. I would like to know more of the history - for example, what is Sweetwater's deal? Who owns it? What's the history? Is it just a Hawaiian Switzerland?

"<Hmmmm, your pineapples are a tad bland. Have you considered adding some burnt buttersctotch?>"
"Pono ʻoe e ʻakaʻaka iaʻu..."
"Bon sang..."

I'm still stuck on who controls what, other than the clergy ruling Hearthside and the Partisans in the Outer Belt. The "easy" answer is that each celestial body is its own state, but I want to avoid that. At the very least, Yih ought to have several polities. Perhaps Newhome has just two or three, and so on down the line of successive terraformed bodies.

Not sure what you mean by "Hawaiian Switzerland" except perhaps a combination rich tax haven and tourist destination. Whoever ends up controlling Sweetwater, they will have invented a game analogous to POGs. Currency comes in the form of plastic coins, and a gambling game is invented that involves stacking the coins and hitting the stack with a heavy flat stone.

[Visions1]

I was thinking more the neutrality, but honestly you've made the idea even funnier to me.

[lurker]

So, more tossing stuff at the wall. I should really detail some of the other groups, but this idea's been in my head all day and I want to write it down.

---

So, the Bright Way gets big, it has a monopoly on interplanetary travel, communication, and energy distribution, and maybe healthcare. All the while, there's still the religion going on in the background, but at this point it's a tiny fraction of what they do. It's all still run by clerics, and all the clerics have to have the same seminary formation, but most regard it as a bump on the road to personal gain, and a mere vestige of the past.

Most seminaries have like one or two courses relevant to actual theology, and acolytes who are actually devout must seek supplemental formation outside the official coursework. These traditionalists are the subject of ridicule by their fellow seminarians.

Interstellar mission work is the last bastion where these traditionalists hold sway. It's not terribly profitable, after all.

Eventually, some event catalyzes an armed uprising against the secular arm of the Bright Way, starting at the outer belt and working inward. But it's not as simple as non wayfarers fighting to divest the organization of its physical holdings while Wayfarers defend against them. You can divide the conflict into four factions on a two dimensional spectrum, with Devout-Secular as one axis and prseserve-dissolve on the other axis.

The original instigators are secularists who want to break up the Bright Way's monopolies. The other major group are Wayfarers who fight to preserve them, either out of a desire to maintain their power or a sense of loyalty to their creed.

There are two smaller factions: The smallest of the four are non wayfarers who, for whatever reason, want the status quo to continue. The other, and most significant to the setting, are wayfarers who see the organization's monopolies as dead weight, a distraction from their divine mission to find other sophonts, and are glad to be rid of them. This latter group is most popular on Hearthside, as well as among the missionaries.

Since Hearthside ends up on the winning side of the war, they get to keep their clerical government while the Bright Way is completely expunged from everywhere else in the system. Some governments, such as those that would become the Allied Worlds, allow the Bright Way to maintain their lighthouses and charitable institutions, although they may expel the clerics who were in charge and install clerics from the Hearthside-aligned camp mentioned above. Other groups, however, think the whole thing must be burned, root and branch. This camp is most popular among the original agitators from the Outer Belt. This group becomes the Partisans. They're responsible for a bloody persecution, the first the Bright Way has ever faced, as up til this point they've either been very popular or too powerful to oppose.

Still on the fence on proverbial match that lights this powder keg. I've already mentioned Cloudbarer the Heresiarch in the Commonthroat thread, but I see him as having been made out to be more importent retroactively than he actually was, with many scholars opining that he never even existed, just a mascott of sorts for the secular dissolutionists.

The other option is that a mission that everyone thought would be the one to finally find other sophonts comes back empty, and that triggers the collapse, but I'm not sure how that fits into the missionaries being seen as vestigial by the ruling clergy.

So yeah, still lots of dots to connect.

[Visions1]

You could always make it a bunch of small things that coalesce into something larger and mad complicated (maybe like the Wars of the Roses) - something that never was one thing, but a million smaller ones, increasing and then decreasing.
But that would probably be pretty intensive to work on.

[lurker]

I'm busy writing part 2 of Beating the Heat, and I'm starting to do "real" writer-type stuff that I swore I'd never do because I'm not a writer and this isn't a writing project, like outlining plots and writing character profiles. So here's what I have on the Dewfall's healer.

Like other natives of Hearthside, Sunshine has larger ears than the average yinrih. This is an adaptation to cope with the sweltering heat of the day side of the planet where most people live. One of her sets of bandpass membranes (secondary eyelids that filter incoming light) is a rich glossy blue rather than the metallic specular appearance expected of other yinrih. This is the other physical characteristic that sets Hearthsiders apart.

Like all yinrih healers, she takes drugs to keep herself hairless in order to maintain medical hygiene. Yinrih otherwise have an undercoat and dander that sheds constantly. Her bare skin is a little darker than similarly pigmented human skin thanks to yinrih blood being maroon. Her paws and muzzle are covered in black splotches. The balding drugs remove all fur, but leave the whiskers, which are very important tactile sense organs. When not taking the drugs, her fur is red like Tod's, but she lacks Tod's black ears. She's about 55 lbs. Humans often compare her to a Xoloitzcuintle.

She's very friendly and talkative. She likes to go for walks around the apartment complex where her host Sarah lives, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, stopping passers-by to ask innocently insensitive questions about human biology in general and their personal medical histories in particular.

While out and about, she typically wears a shear, flowing garment common to Hearthsider healers that covers her entire head, body, and tail save the paws and muzzle. This is meant to protect her naked skin from the sun.

She tends to be overconfident at first, jumping head first into something only to realize she's in over her ears and needs help. Nevertheless, she's a master when in her own element. She has to be in order to be chosen as an interstellar missionary.

Her "job" as a missionary is to catalog as much info as possible about human biology and health. She regularly reports her findings back to Wayfarers' Haven, where the town healer, who was also the mistress of novices of the healers' college Sunshine attended, organizes and publishes her findings to the wider yinrih medical community.

Like the other missionaries and Wayfarers generally, Sunshine is very excited to finally meet other sophonts, and wants to help us humans in whatever way she can. However, she's still pretty naive and ignorant of human anatomy and medicine, as can be seen from my last story.

[lurker]

Spacers (Commonthroat qGKqJqg, {huff long rising strengthening growl, huff, long high weak growl, huff, short low weak growl}) are yinrih who live and work primarily in outer space.

As I've stated many times before, orbital colonies have no artificial gravity since that allows yinrih to use all their paws for grasping while in motion.

Many orbital colonies are satellites of a planet or moon. These are usually exclaves of a terrestrial government. There are also colonies that orbit around Focus itself, usually in the inner or outer belt, but there are a few colonies inside the orbit of Hearthside very close to Focus. These stellar stations are mostly monasteries.

Belt colonies act like perpetual boom towns, going from asteroid to asteroid to mine the minerals to trade for other goods. Some colonies simply exist because there are resources to mine. Others, such as Wayfarers' Haven, only mine to keep the lights on, but the reason the people are there is to come together as an independent and self-governing community.

The first thing you'll notice upon entering an orbital colony is the lighting, or lack thereof. Yinrih can see wavelengths from 12 mm all the way up to the edge of ionizing radiation in the UV range, so what constitutes comfortable "white" light for them is culturally dependent, and it's as often as not outside the human visible range.

The other thing you'll notice is the smell. Yinrih fur sheds constantly, and they have a natural musk, so even though they're just as concerned with personal grooming and cleanliness as humans are, they can't help but have an aroma about them. Most humans liken it to the smell of a kennel. Wayfarers' Haven is even affectionately called "The Kennel" by human visitors.

Orbital colonies come in diverse form factors, but a common template, seen with Wayfarers' Haven, is to have a wide central axis that acts as a "main street", with modules attached to the sides. These modules can even be smaller thoroughfares, with smaller capsules attached to them in tern. The result looks from the inside like a large American shopping mall if it were designed by the people who made the game _Descent_.

The central axis is quite broad, so cabling is suspended at regular intervals to allow residents to pull themselves along and to keep people from being stranded floating in the middle. It looks like a mile-long jungle gym. There's also constant air circulation throughout the colony, both to keep CO2 from collecting and to filter out all the shed fur and other particulates. I can only imagine what the filters must look like when they need to be changed.

The "shops" in this case can be personal quarters, businesses, government offices, schools, and so forth. Personal quarters in particular are an interesting case, as they're often designed to be portable, like a mobile home. They can't move on their own, but can be loaded onto interplanetary ferries and attached to other colonies.

Wayfarers' Haven started out as a refugee camp of mostly other spacers, but also some surface-dwellers of a dwarf planet in the Outer Belt that the Partisans decided they wanted for themselves. While the land grab is mostly just that, it didn't hurt that the natives they were evicting were Wayfarers. The Allied Worlds got wind of the pending invasion, and helped the residents get out before they could be subjected to whatever horrors the Partisans could come up with.

Since Wayfarers' Haven was originally a refugee camp, it looks a lot like someone welded a bunch of FEMA trailers to a giant version of the ISS. That's because it basically is a bunch of FEMA trailers, or the cultural equivalent: Allied Worlds standardized refugee aid capsules.

As you intuit, the culture is very pious, so some traditional practices are maintained, like the engine room doubling as the Lighthouse, and the town hearthkeeper also filling the role of chief engineer.

Since the engine room is also the Lighthouse, every surface is absolutely encrusted with bones. While most of the colony's vital systems rely on more conventional generators, the customary star hearth still powers the individual homes of the residents in accordance with tradition.

After the mass router is perfected, Wayfarers' Haven is chosen to be the endpoint for the trunk line between Sol and Focus since it's technically the only state to have any relations at all with Earth.

As for how the individual missionaries ended up there, Tod was one of the Peacekeepers helping with the evacuation and resettlement, and decided to settle down there after his tour of duty ended. Sunshine wanted to work under one her old teachers who was one of the refugees. The others were refugees themselves.

---

These are just some preliminary thoughts. I have a lot more to say in the future about spacer society and Wayfarers' Haven.

[Visions1]

I really like the ideas so far.
Also, I would like to know a bit more of the six from the Dewfall. How long ago was this rebellion from contact?
Also: how exactly would they keep their muscles going/reproduce? Space's lack of gravity means muscles atrophy from lack of use. Is excercize a mandated thing because otherwise, everybody's limbs will go limp and that'll jeopardize the colony?

[lurker]

I really like the ideas so far.
Also, I would like to know a bit more of the six from the Dewfall. How long ago was this rebellion from contact?
Also: how exactly would they keep their muscles going/reproduce? Space's lack of gravity means muscles atrophy from lack of use. Is excercize a mandated thing because otherwise, everybody's limbs will go limp and that'll jeopardize the colony?

I haven't decided on the exact time between the collapse of the Bright Way's monopolies and First Contact. I do have very rough calendar going, with year 0 being the first evidence of written language, counting forward in Yih years (~1.4 Earth years). Year 246 is the Theophany (honestly that's probably too soon after the dawn of sapience given the yinrih's lifespan, but I think I'll just leave it be.) Then 3400 is the first yinrih in space, quickly followed by the first permanent orbital colony in 3461. This is the start of spacer society. Then skip a few dozen millennia to 67844 when the Dewfall leaves Wayfarers' Haven, and 68010 when it lands on Earth. I imagine the Dewfall departing on July 4th, 1776. I like to peg significant dates to significant events in history/archeology as that gives me a better sense of scale.

The other two IRL points in time I want to pivot off of are the extinction of the neanderthals (or the last non H. Sapiens hominins) and the neolithic revolution. The Collapse has to happen after the yinrih colonize their entire solar system, so I might have their ascent to K2 status fixed to the dominance of H. Sapiens and then have the collapse happen around the time we discover agriculture.

I believe I may be using the Kardashev scale incorrectly, as I haven't specifically said the yinrih are consuming 100% of Focus's output. I originally thought they'd have a Dyson sphere, but that sort of got dropped. I feel like there are also flaws with the scale. What does it mean to consume literally all of a sun's output? Does that mean there's nothing left for plants to photosynthesize and fuel natural ecosystems? What if a civilization discovers a more efficient process for doing something that drops their energy consumption. That would technically lower their Kardashev level. The yinrih have terraformed or colonized every possible planetary body and moon in their system, and can even construct livable environments completely independent of planets or moons. That's more what I'm driving at when I say they're at Kardashev II.

As for health issues relating to microgravity, right now I have chemicals in the water supply that counteract bone and muscle atrophy, like how we put fluoride in the water to help dental health. Yeah it's a hand wave, or a flick of the tail as they'd say in Commonthroat.

If you want more info on the missionaries, I have a very rough idea of their personalities.

Tod is a bit of a showoff. He's sick of being stereotyped as dumb and unlucky, and while he's initially pleased with humans calling him sly and clever, he'll eventually get sick of that too. He wants to be a seen as a person, not a phenotype.

Stormlight tends to worry about everything and lacks patience when walking people through technical problems (Think Roy from The IT Crowd.) Since he's the one in charge of communications, he's the first to make contact with the radio club while the Dewfall is still in orbit, and he's the one that builds the mass router that links Earth and Wayfarers' Haven.

Sunshine jumps into things without thinking things through. She also has to deal with some stereotypes, although not from the other missionaries. Hearthsiders are regarded with some suspicion by other Wayfarers thanks to their reputation for scamming pilgrims on Hearthside. Some, especially people living near the Eternal Hearth/city of eternal noon, absolutely play to type. But most are just normal people.

Iris is scrupulously meticulous as an engineer and traditional as a hearthkeeper, but at the same time tries to avoid the creeping insularity effecting the traditionalist wing of the Bright Way. For some reason I imagine her having a southern accent, which makes no sense.

Lodestar is a kind of paladin (literally and figuratively). The order he belongs to was once an active military force, but now does mostly charity work, like the Knights of Malta. He lodges with a blind human. He has to learn the difference between a hand-up and a hand-out (i.e. doing everything for someone because you think they're helpless vs enabling someone to be more independent.) He's also massive for a yinrih at 80 pounds.

Pascal is the standout of the group, as he's not technically a missionary. He was pious as a pup but has since lapsed. However, the other missionaries are essentially his whole circle of friends, and he'd never see them again if he didn't go on the mission with them, so Iris twists a few ears to get him on board (What healer does not abide among the sick?) Like Stormlight he tends to worry, although his preoccupations are more existential than mundane. Like Sunshine, he can come off as unintentionally offensive, although he's like that with other yinrih. It's not just out of unfamiliarity with human culture. He's just bad at filtering his thoughts.

[lurker]

Manny glanced at the clock on the dashboard as he pulled into the parking space. 4:36 PM. He was over half an hour late for his last appointment of the day, and a mere 24 minutes away from the nominal end of his shift. He pulled the key out of the ignition and opened the door, the perspiration-soaked back of his work shirt peeling away from his skin as he moved to exit the truck. The hot Texas air greeted him as he alighted the vehicle, a welcome respite from the even hotter air inside the cab. He shut the door, perhaps a bit more forcefully than necessary. He turned to look at the apartment number written atop the front door. Unit 38. He glanced down at the work order affixed to his clipboard and sighed. "Unit 38: Broken air conditioner". He definitely wasn't clocking out on time today. At least he'd get paid overtime. He tucked the clipboard under his arm and walked up to the door.

***

Sunshine took a deep breath, letting the sharp smell of alcohol fill her nostrils. Sarah's unconscious form was sprawled out on the floor before her, her left arm draped across her chest, rising and falling steadily with each breath. The contents of Sunshine's satchel were strewn across the coffee table: a just-used bottle of paw disinfectant, yellowed only slightly by its two and a half century stowage inside one of the Dewfall's cargo holds, and an electric healer's razor, also none the worse for wear despite its age. The remaining item she had seen fit to include in her impromptu medical bag, a human anatomy text recently borrowed from the college library, lay open on the floor at her side.

«OK, Sunshine, you can do this. Everything's going to be alright. Sarah's going to be alright, alright?» She began a cursory examination of her friend. She slid a pair of azure bandpass membranes over her eyes, shifting her visible spectrum down into the infrared. «Her temperature hasn't changed, and she's still breathing. That's good. First thing's first...» She picked up the razor, only to change her mind and place it back on the coffee table. «No no, that's not right. No fur. Why did I bring this thing anyway?» She began thumbing through the book with her right rear paw. She was greeted by page after page of incomprehensible diagrams and labels written in a dead human language she didn't understand. What little confidence she had been able to muster ebbed away with the turn of each page.

«Light blind me!» She kicked the book under the coffee table and crumpled to the ground, heedless of her now contaminated forepaws. «I can't do this by myself. My ignorance got her into this mess. I'll only make things even worse. She needs a human healer.» Just as she rose to her feet, there was a knock at the door.

***

Manny approached the door and knocked. "Maintenance." he declared in his best "How can I help you" voice. He could hear the sound of the tenant's dog skittering its way toward the source of the noise. Without so much as a "down, boy!" from the resident within, the door burst open. Manny braced himself for a physical encounter with yet another pet far too large to be kept in an apartment. When the assault was not forthcoming, he glanced down at the open doorway.

His mood immediately brightened. "One of our little visitors!" He thought. Manny had seen her walking around the neighborhood many times, all wrapped up in a white cloak with only her ebony paws and snout poking out. He had heard through the grape vine that she was some sort of doctor, but didn't know much else. He had always wanted to meet her, but could never find the courage to start a conversation. What do you say to an alien? The mundane happenings of a broke college student who had never even been out of state must seem terribly dull to someone who was born under a different sun. Now he found himself thrust into this little first contact, at a loss for words. He had just settled on a simple "Good afternoon, ma'am." when she wrapped her tail around his forearm and began attempting to drag him inside, yipping and growling frantically. Attempting, but not succeeding. Manny was surprised by how strong her tail was. The only way he was getting free of her grip was if she decided to let go. On the other hand, her claws scrabbled uselessly across the hard floor of the entry way, failing to find purchase against the slick surface.

«By The Light! Another human! Please, sir, I need your help. My friend is in trouble.»

"Hay! Slow down. I don't speak space doggo." Manny protested.

Sunshine stopped her fruitless attempt at pulling Manny inside and glanced down at her empty paw. She had been making her desperate supplications in Commonthroat. Without disengaging her tail from Manny's arm, she reared up and grabbed a keyer and HUD specs that were nestled along with Sarah's keys and wallet in a bowl atop the entry table. She wrapped the keyer in her right front paw and donned the HUD specs, the claws of her left rear paw clicking impatiently against the floor as she waited for the computer to boot.

"Sir," said the keyer held in her paw, "Please, I need your help. My friend is in trouble."

Manny stood back up and attempted to enter the apartment. Sunshine's tail was still constricting his arm like a snake. "OK, what's going on?" he asked. "And can I have my arm back?" Sunshine refused to let go until he had entered and shut the door behind him. She hobbled on three legs around the breakfast bar and into the living room, Manny following behind.

As he rounded the corner he noticed Sarah lying on the floor. Sunshine kept switching her gaze between Manny and Sarah, as though expecting he would immediately know what to do.

"OK, tell me what's going on here." said Manny.

More urgent yipping and huffing from Sunshine. «I... I didn't think it would be a problem. We breathe the same air, drink the same water. This book here,» she pointed at the biochemistry textbook with her muzzle, «says you humans consume proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, sugars, amino acids... all the same stuff we eat. I didn't think it would hurt to share a little snack.» she swept her tail angrily across the corner of the coffee table, knocking off the little carton of cooling bark.

"Mind repeating that in English." said Manny as he bent down and picked up the carton, turning it over in his hand, examining the alien lettering on the label as though it would provide a solution.

Sunshine repeated her self-recrimination via the synth while Manny took the time to examine Sarah. He noticed her hand resting over her chest, gently rising and falling in regular time with her breathing.

Sunshine's ears perked up in sudden realization. "Don't you have emergency medical transport?" She grabbed Sarah's phone from the arm rest and attempted to unlock it. The gentle tick-tick of her claws on the glass failed to elicit a response from the device. «How do you use this stupid thing?» She had just figured out to touch the glass with the pad of her writing claw when Manny rested the phone from her paws. Sunshine gave voice to a frustrated hiss like an angry goose. «Hay! I was using that!»

"Hold on there." said Manny. "Let's not get the wee-yoo wagon involved if we don't have to."

"What?! Why not? She needs a human doctor." Sunshine said, desperately wishing she could inject more emotion into the tiny synthesizer.

Manny took a few seconds to respond, considering whether now was a good time to introduce Sunshine to the particulars of the American healthcare system. "Well, I'm a human, and you're a doctor. I think we can figure this out between the two of us. Besides," he said as he bent down and checked Sarah's pulse, pressing two fingers against her other wrist sprawled on the floor, "I happen to be an Eagle Scout, AND I have the First Aid merit badge." He made this declaration as though that made him a reasonable stand-in for a paramedic. "She's breathing fine, her temperature feels good, and her pulse is normal."

Sunshine's agitation at Manny's lack of urgency began to mount. She started thumping her tail on the floor. Her anxiety caused a momentary lapse in her English proficiency. "What reason you human do nothing? On that floor this my friend die!"

"I'm not 'do nothing'."he said. "I think I know exactly what will fix her right up." He walked over to the kitchen, grabbed a cup from the counter, and began filling it with cold water from the fridge.

***

Sarah floated content in a featureless void, finally free of the extremes of hot and cold. She could stay like this forever. Snatches of English and Commonthroat bubbled up from the abyss. She didn't catch what the voices were saying, but a vague notion of concern tickled the back of her mind. She brushed it aside and continued drifting in this room-temperature sea of beautiful nothingness.

But her repose didn't last. A sudden shock of wet and cold tore her away from the lukewarm void. She came to, sputtering and swearing. The first things she saw were Sunshine's lapis lazuli bandpass membranes staring back at her. She bolted upright, her head barely missing the edge of the coffee table.

Sunshine pressed the top of her skull against Sarah's shoulder. «You're alright! Light shine upon all of us, you're alright! I thought you were dying!»

"Why did you do that? I was FINALLY asleep!" Sarah glanced down at the water dripping onto the collar of her tee shirt.

«That wasn't me.» said Sunshine. She trotted over to Manny and repeated her cranial gesture of gratitude with the knee of his blue jeans.

"Maintenance," Manny repeated. "Sorry I'm late. Your friend let me in. Are you OK?"

"Well, insofar as I'm not dying, yes." She looked at the wall clock. "I wasn't even out for ten minutes."

"Glad to hear it. Now let's see about that air conditioner."

Manny got to work, checking the thermostat, and then the compressor outside. Sunshine shadowed him all the while, peppering him with questions about everything he did and every tool he pulled out of his bag.

"I'm surprised you're so interested in what I'm doing." Manny said. "I figured you all think we're cavemen banging rocks together."

"You humans are so fascinating! The way you're built, the fact your forepaws are completely specialized for grasping and your rear paws are optimized for movement, how you've compensated for your lack of an innate ability to write, and how all that effects the tools you use, and how you construct your buildings and vehicles. Plus it's nice to be around people with almost as little fur as me!"

"But, like, there are others, right? Out there? We can't possibly be that interesting." said Manny as he put away his tools.

"Nope." said Sunshine.

"Nope? What do you mean."

"There's nobody else out there. We Wayfarers have been looking for other sophonts for nearly one hundred thousand of your years. Until we found you we hadn't encountered so much as a microbe."

Manny stood up and brushed the dirt off his pants. "So It's just you monkey foxes and us humans, all alone?"

"Seems that way." she responded.

"That... actually makes me feel kinda lonely."

"Believe me, we know the feeling. But now we can be lonely together!"

Thunder murmured in the distance. Manny looked toward the horizon, where storm clouds were gathering. "I need to let Sarah know I'm done and get out of here before that nasty weather hits.

He knocked on the window behind the compressor. "Is it working?" he asked. Sarah gave a thumbs up. "Awesome. Let the office know if something else happens. I gotta get going." He picked up his bag and started making his way to the truck, with Sunshine trotting behind.

"Listen, it was great to finally meet you, I've seen you walking around in that cloak of yours but I never knew how to say hi. I didn't even know you could speak our language with that computer in your hand."

"I'm happy you came by when you did. Come say hi when I'm out walking, and I can start teaching you Commonthroat." She set the keyer aside and shook a cramp out of her paw. "The more humans that understand Commonthroat, the less I need to use this blasted keyer."

Manny gave a thumbs up and pulled out of the parking space. Sunshine went back inside just as the gust front from the distant squall sighed through the trees.

[lurker]

He glanced nadirward through the observation window at the green and blue surface of the planet. A river, coruscating in Focus's rays, wound through the verdant jungle passing below. It was THE river, the measure to which all other rivers were compared. It was so old that it didn't even have a name. Every other river on Yih, and every watercourse wrought on other celestial bodies by pioneers in the intervening millennia, was, after peeling away one hundred thousand years of sound changes and semantic drift, named after this river.

But he had seen this sight countless times, and it failed to put his mind at ease. He spun the metal prayer ring on his writing claw, feeling each of the twelve teeth pass under the pad of his outer thumb. The ring had belonged to one of his sires, who had often handed the shiny trinket to him to amuse himself with when he was barely a pup. It had been years since he had prayed it, not until this morning just before being shriven. It had been years since he was last shriven, too. He'd be the first to say he wasn't the most pious Wayfarer, but there was a real possibility, however infinitesimal, that today his life would come to a messy end, and he wanted to have a clean conscience if it came to that.

He turned to face the cause of his anxiety. Attached to a bulkhead opposite the window was a cylindrical machine barely larger than a suspension capsule, with a bore just large enough to fit a single yinrih, and maybe a satchel if the yinrih in question was particularly svelte. He floated over and looked through the bore. He felt like he was staring down the business end of a railgun.

«You're going to be fine, Hearthfire.» He tried to reassure himself. «Nothing's going to happen. We did gross upon gross of tests. Equator to pole, Low orbit to surface, surface to moon, even interplanetary hops, all the way from Hearthside to Moonlitter. Inert object tests, live tests, and all the tree-dwellers we sent came out perfect.»

«Except Moonbeam.» nagged a tiny voice in the back of his brain.

«Poor Moonbeam. I know you're not supposed to name them. Makes it harder when... That happens.» The little tree-dweller went in fine, but the impulse buffer on the egress router failed as she dropped back into realspace on the surface, retaining all the momentum from the ingress router in orbit. In the span of a temporal quantum she ceased to be biology and turned into physics, ending up impacting the opposite wall at 20 times the speed of sound. The barrier was built to take it, but her poor body wasn't. She ended up a maroon smear on the wall.

«Time to get strapped in.» said a sandy-furred engineer floating next to the mass router.

He took a deep breath and floated into the bore, slipping his forelegs into the harness, then his hind legs, then his tail, and finally his head.

A voice came through the earpiece around his left ear. «Hearthfire, this is Morningstar. Everything's up and up down here.» It was the same cleric that had given him absolution this morning. «Just for review, you're being routed through an intermediate router on the surface before egressing at the antipodes. The impulse buffer is good on both the intermediate and the egress, in case a packet gets dropped along the way.»

«Ingress and egress buffers are synced.» Said the sandy-furred engineer.

«Acolyte, begin the countdown. May The Light illuminate your way, Hearthfire.» Said Morningstar.

«Twelve...» The sandy-furred engineer began solemnly sounding off the numbers.

«Eleven...» In a matter of seconds, a thin sheath of realspace containing Hearthfire's body would be shunted into the Underlay.

«Ten...» This realspace bubble would be encapsulated into billions of discrete packets.

«Nine...» From the perspective of a hypothetical observer embedded in the Underlay, these packets would appear discontiguous, and could take separate paths to reach the same destination.

«Eight...» But from the perspective of an observer contained within one of these packets, the entire space would still be contiguous.

«Seven...» Blood would still flow, and nerve impulses would still travel uninterrupted.

«Six...» Or they would if the traversal through the Underlay weren't instantaneous.

«Five...» Hearthfire's stream of consciousness would not be broken.

«Four...» There would be no ontological question that what emerged from the egress router was the same Hearthfire that entered the ingress router.

«Three...» These packets would hop instantaneously through an intermediate router directly below at the surface.

«Two...» This router would, in mere nanoseconds, direct the flow of packets to an egress router at the antipodes.

«One...» The egress router would absorb all the momentum that Hearthfire had while in orbit before shunting him back into realspace. Should the intermediate router drop a single packet, the whole flow containing Hearthfire's mass would be shunted harmlessly back into realspace at that router, provided it, too, absorbed his momentum correctly.

«Zero.» Hearthfire felt a tingling sensation, as though his whole body had fallen asleep. The feeling lasted but a fraction of a second, then he felt the weight of his body pulling him down. He had made it. In less than the blink of an eye, he had gone from a space station in low orbit over Yih to a lab on the surface on the opposite side of the planet. Hearthfire was the first yinrih to traverse a mass router network, and he had done it without a hitch.

This was going to change everything.

[Glenn]

Very interesting! I liked this one. A few questions and/or comments:

- What is the timeframe for the story? Is this happening in the same “present” as the other stories (e.g., those about the missionaries on Earth), or at a different time?

- Is the entire capsule transported along with Hearthfire, or is his body alone being transported from one router to another? My impression is that only his body was transported, but I wasn’t sure, especially with the description of the harness; does he disappear from one harness and reappear in another, or is the harness part of what gets transported?

- Kudos for explicitly addressing the issue of relative motion and momentum; this is rarely addressed in other versions of matter transmission (which is why I presume you chose to do so).

- It was also interesting to see that the mass router’s mechanism of operation followed the same principle as the Internet.

[lurker]

- What is the timeframe for the story? Is this happening in the same “present” as the other stories (e.g., those about the missionaries on Earth), or at a different time?

All the stories set on Earth so far have taken place within a 1-year time frame between First Contact and the establishment of the mass router trunk between Sol and Focus. The events of this post also occur during this period. The House of Friendship takes place years later after humans start regularly visiting Focus. The Artificer's Litter is an in-universe legend.

- Is the entire capsule transported along with Hearthfire, or is his body alone being transported from one router to another? My impression is that only his body was transported, but I wasn’t sure, especially with the description of the harness; does he disappear from one harness and reappear in another, or is the harness part of what gets transported?

A good question, and one to which I don't have a good answer. The mass router is supposed to look like an MRI machine, where you lie on a bed inside the bore, but you can't "lie down" in zero-G so I just came up with the harness on the spot. For the sake of convenience, I'll say it's just his body. One quirk of the Underlay is that it's very low bandwidth, so to speak. Physical limits prevent you from routing more mass/volume than about the size of a human plus a duffle bag. This will make for some interesting logistics.

- Kudos for explicitly addressing the issue of relative motion and momentum; this is rarely addressed in other versions of matter transmission (which is why I presume you chose to do so).

The momentum conservation is actually inspired by Portal, rather than a nod to real-world issues revolving around reference frames. The issue I wanted to address explicitly is the philosophical nightmare that most teleporters would be in reality, especially the Theseus' Ship Paradox and whether the person leaving is the same person that entered.

- It was also interesting to see that the mass router’s mechanism of operation followed the same principle as the Internet.

I started this project while studying for the CCNP certification, so routing is on my mind. That's why the first human colony at Focus is called The Split Horizon, and why this universe's version of hyperspace is called The Underlay. A now-abandoned concept I had was that the yinrih would have a version of cyberspace called the Data Plane.

[Glenn]

- Is the entire capsule transported along with Hearthfire, or is his body alone being transported from one router to another? My impression is that only his body was transported, but I wasn’t sure, especially with the description of the harness; does he disappear from one harness and reappear in another, or is the harness part of what gets transported?

A good question, and one to which I don't have a good answer. The mass router is supposed to look like an MRI machine, where you lie on a bed inside the bore, but you can't "lie down" in zero-G so I just came up with the harness on the spot. For the sake of convenience, I'll say it's just his body. One quirk of the Underlay is that it's very low bandwidth, so to speak. Physical limits prevent you from routing more mass/volume than about the size of a human plus a duffle bag. This will make for some interesting logistics.

This is interesting; it means that large objects - such as vehicles, say - cannot be transported, at least not in one piece, although components and spare parts might be. The most important cargo is probably individual people and the information they carry (which, given the level of technology, could be substantial; I'm thinking of a human or yinrih carrying the equivalent of a flash drive).

The second implication is that if the mass router can only transport one person at a time, sending larger groups (teams, organizations, armies) is not really feasible, and/or takes a long time. One way of speeding it up would be to have multiple mass routers operating in parallel. I don't know if this is physically possible; even if it is, it would probably take time and resources to start scaling it up.

The podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists, which I listen to, features three fantasy authors and a guest author discussing worldbuilding topics, and also slowly building a fantasy world "on the air," with suggestions from their guests. The one suggested idea that really took off was that of the "Magical Nude Gate" (or "MNG"), a network of magic gates that allow instantaneous transportation from one point on the network to the next; however, as the name implies, only the people themselves can pass through; anything that they are wearing or carrying (clothes, weapons, etc.) vanishes when they are transported and does not return. The main reason that the creators decided to do this is that they did not want the gate system to be usable for military purposes - no invading armies, etc. - but still allow for the exchange of people and ideas. Currently, they are preparing to publish an anthology of short stories (funded by Kickstarter) set in the world and featuring the MNG; the title of the anthology is Traveling Light.