Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri, page 141

More on The Milk Run

Yesterday, I gave you a teaser for the beginning of my next novel entitled The Milk Run. Well, today I want to give you a little more of the setting and the main characters.

Of course there is Aason Bierak, son of Rome and Rei, now 21 years old. Also along is Aason's sister Lupe who is 16 going on 30. However, as you can see from yesterday's post, she disappears in the opening paragraphs and is gone for three-quarters of the story.

The starship "star" of this book is Junior (MINIMCOM, Jr. actually) and also in attendance is a clone of OMCOM's library clone as well. The story starts out near Tabit, home of Planet OMCOM but quickly shifts to the Nu2 Lupi star system which was supposed to be the home to two habitable worlds. When Aason arrives, he only finds one which is puzzling.

That one world is called Hades by the residents and is very cold most of the year. The vegetation has adapted and the forest in which the denizens reside is embedded in something they would call a forest but it looks more like a pile of Jenga blocks to me. Here is an image of what sort of resembles this forest:



From there we move on to the "invisible planet" called Ay'den by the residents who happen to be intelligent, ambulatory plants.

The plant people, who refer to themselves as the K'val, have three stages of life. The first stage is the seedling stage. When they get large enough, they pull their "feet" out of the ground and become mobile. Later in life, they replant their "feet" and grow tall and willowy and resemble trees that can talk.

Also on Ay'den is a second class of creatures, based upon a silicon version of DNA. I wrote about these "living crystals" in a previous post.

I think that's enough spoilers for now. The only thing I'll mention is you get to meet Lupe's "cousin" who is also a starship named Fury. This particular ship is pink! So is her livetar. It's going to be wild.

The Milk Run has begun!

I know I have been promising you The Milk Run starring Aason and Lupe Bierak for a long time. Well, I'm pleased to announce that finally it has begun. I have completed a draft of the first chapter which sets up the protagonists, the conflict, in fact, the entire plot. Just to prove I am not making this up, here are the first three paragraphs.

     “AASON!” Lupe shrieked, her voice warbling in terror. The teenage girl’s bloodcurdling scream shattered the peaceful calm of the starship cabin which moments before had been filled by the gentle shushing sound of the Null Fold star-drive.
     21-year-old Aason Bierak was caught by surprise. He had been staring straight ahead, lost in the mesmerizing blackness of null-fold space just beyond the cockpit’s windshield. It was a trap and Aason knew it but it was one in which he allowed himself a few minutes of entanglement. With a titanic effort, Aason tore his eyes away from the lush void to face his sister. He was horrified to see a waving set of translucent tentacles had emerged from nowhere, enveloping Lupe, constricting her in their grasp.
     “What!?” Aason gurgled. He clawed at the clasp of his X-harness, snapping it open. He flipped off the straps, extending his frame. Even as he jumped out of the pilot’s chair, the crystal-like extensions of light were dragging his younger sister into a not-hole. There was no other way to describe it. Her whole body was distorted and it looked like she was being sucked into a vacuum hose. Aason leaped toward her, arms outstretched, but he was only able to brush his hand across one of her fingertips just as she disappeared into nothingness.

Exciting, huh? I am relieved to finally get going on this thing! I currently have it scheduled at 35 chapters and about 110,000 words. There will be one flashback in the story to help with a critical plot point and my first ever "flash-sideways" to show what is going on in another part of the universe that will dovetail with the main plot.

Stay tuned!

Suspension of disbelief

All of science fiction, not just the Rome's Revolution series, requires a certain suspension of disbelief. I mean my whole trilogy takes place in the 35th century, for gosh sake. I find it funny when people select one part of a work which is inherently implausible and say I couldn't buy this one part.

Take a look at this photograph by Laura Williams:



Pretty cool, huh? Remind you of anything? How about Rei's invisible chest because he was using the PPT vest during the first half of Rome's Evolution.

On its surface, you can buy that MINIMCOM invented a miniature, portable self-sustaining PPT tunnel that protected Rei's back (and later his chest). But he couldn't walk around like the woman in the picture. So I had MINIMCOM invent a tailored shirt with an electrostatic charge that kept it inflated in a shape that made Rei look normal. Of course if you pushed on the shirt, it would collapse in and your hand would come out the other side.

And the electrostatic charge part is the one section that doesn't seem to be possible? Huh?

When is a tunnel not a tunnel?

In Rome's Revolution, during the 35th century, most of the travel between the stars takes place using PPT tunnels. However the word tunnel is misleading. We all think of a tunnel as dark hole that extends over some distance with a distinct entry and exit point. However, a PPT tunnel is infinitely thin. So thin that its edge is sharper than the sharpest blade ever constructed. It has been used to slice off hands, construct a campus (like in The Ark Lords) and yield other miracles.

Rei Bierak had the same notion as we do when it comes to the word tunnel. Here is a little passage to illustrate the first time he entered and exited one made by PPTs:

     Rei watched in wonder as they passed through the tunnel but he felt no sensation other than the acceleration due to the engines. As soon as they were through, Rome told him to release the throttle. The plasma thrusters cut out and they coasted forward.
     Rei look up and around. “Did we do it? Where’s Tabit?” he asked.
     “Behind us,” Rome replied. “Here,” she said and took over the controls, twisting the navigation stick, rotating the tug so that it was facing the harsh glow of Tabit which now stood in front of them once again. The glint of the star reflected off the silver nose of the shuttle.
     “How is that possible? We never entered a tunnel,” Rei noted.
     “The word tunnel is meant figuratively, not literally like a tunnel on Earth,” Rome replied. “The word tunnel is from a perspective outside the ship. From inside, the tunnel would appear infinitely thin.”
     “I still would have expected something,” Rei said. “Does your bloco and stilo work out here?”
     “Insofar as it receives data from the on-board computer. Not from OMCOM,” Rome said, “not from this distance.”
     “So do you know how far we jumped?” he asked Rome.
     She closed her eyes for a second then said, “approximately one hundred light minutes.”

Pretty cool, huh? An infinitely thin tunnel that lets you travel between stars. Way better than a wormhole built from a black hole.

The story I always wanted to tell

Many times I have told you that I think these stories are real, they just haven't happened yet. I get glimpses of the stories all the time, mostly in the shower, but they aren't always in sequence and many times they don't make any sense.

The whole concept of Rome's Revolution just came to me out of the blue in 1973 and ever since then pieces of the story have filtered down to me until I could weave them together into a coherent novel.

However, there were always a few stories that just didn't fit anywhere. When I combined the original three novels into one, the entire story of the Flying Horse had to be excised. But it was a story I always wanted to tell.

My fallback plan for all of these stories is The Vuduri Companion. This is the book I plan to put out after I complete The Milk Run. It will be short stories, deleted scenes, the original 1973 version of VIRUS 5 and Rome's Revolution plus much, much more.

Rei's last day on Earth was always slated to go into this compendium but I never actually wrote it. When I started Rome's Evolution, I realized I had to have connector pieces to tie up all the loose ends that had been left hanging. One of the stories was Rei's space walk where he retrieved his solid state music slab. Another item was why Rei didn't have a pair of sunglasses and how is it that Rome was familiar to Rei before he ever met her?

It was at this point that I knew I had to write the full version of Rei's last day on Earth. It was so satisfying to knock out the complete story and it came out so effortlessly since I had been thinking about it for some 40 years. I posted an article back a few weeks called What Sally Saw and even that was fun to finally connect with that fateful day in January of 2067AD.

In media res

In media res is a Latin phrase meaning "in the midst of things". It is a literary device that you are supposed to use in a novel to increase the reader's level of excitement as you go from one chapter to the next. If a chapter picks up exactly where the prior scene left off, the lack of jump would cause the reader to ask why you put a chapter break there in the first place.

When I wrote the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution, I did not know about this. I was going for a more you are there kind of vibe so to me, chapters were just a convenient place to let the reader breathe.

However after the thunderous silence that greeted that original version, I set about collapsing my original three novels into one and that meant a severe edit job.

At that point I had been taught about in media res so I took the opportunity to cause a break in time between chapters. For example, the original Chapter 1 ended with Rei and Rome leaving the airlock/iso chamber and walking down the corridor. Chapter 2 started with them continuing down the hallway and encountering Estar. Now I have Chapter 2 starting with Rei staring up at the ceiling in the Great Room in the middle of the star base proving that at least a little bit of time had passed.

In the current version, I have Chapter 3 starting the morning after Rome and Rei have slept together. Chapter 3 and 4 are pretty seamless. I would say I failed there. Chapter 5 starts up after another afternoon of passion. The rest of the chapters break as best as I could.

However, there was one pair of chapters where I broke this rule on purpose. Chapter 11 ends mid-sentence on an ellipsis and Chapter 12 picks up with a leading ellipsis. Chapter 11 ended with "as soon as the inner hatch opened, he jumped through the doorway and…" and Chapter 12 started with "…ran right into Rome, almost knocking her over." This violation was the chapter break (no in media res) that got the manuscript thrown at me one time. That was awesome!

More on Dara

In Rome's Revolution, Rei Bierak questioned Rome several times as to why they elected to build their starbase on a moon instead of free-floating in space. To him, building a base at the bottom of a gravity well was counter-intuitive. It required energy to go into space, energy that could have been preserved if you were up there in the first place.

In an earlier post, I explained that the thin atmosphere of Dara was sufficient to allow for aerobraking. Rome also explained that building the star base within an atmosphere made it easier to secure and maintain. However, there was one more reason which Rei only learned about when he and Rome were taking their first training flight together. It went something like this:

     Rei felt a vibration as the massive hangar doors pulled open allowing him to look at the surface of Dara for the first time. The pressure differential caused air from the hangar to rush out, creating swirling eddies of dust and dirt during the process. Beyond that, the ground was brown and reddish, illuminated by the lights of the hangar bay.
     “For some reason, I was expecting it to be all gray and cratered, like Earth’s moon,” Rei said.
     “No, Dara has a substantial atmosphere and weather,” Rome said. “That is why we picked it. It reduces the engineering requirements that we’d need for a vacuum. Plus aero-braking is easiest when you have an atmosphere to rub against.”
     “Still, you have to take off and land every time you need to do something. Wouldn’t a space station be better?” Rei asked.
     “No,” Rome answered. “Most gas giants like Skyler’s World usually put out gigawatts of lethal radiation. We need the atmosphere of Dara to provide some shielding. Plus it undergoes rhythmic gravitational contractions which causes it to radiate IR which is trapped by the moon. It makes it easier to maintain a comfortable temperature.”
     “But the gravity well?” was all Rei could counter with.
     “The gravity well would only be an issue on take off. It is not an issue for landing,” Rome answered.

From my perspective, putting the first part of Rome's Revolution on Dara allowed for the dramatic final scene when Rei thought he had lost Rome forever. That was good enough for me.

No instruments

The Vuduri space tug, first introduced in Rome's Revolution has no actual instrumentation. Instead, all instrumentation is virtual and displayed on a large flat-screen panel built into the console in the cockpit.

This concept has become increasingly popular even in today's airships culminating in the cockpit instrumentation for Boeing's 777 commercial jet.



As you can see, most of the readouts are just screens. There still a few mechanical dials left. These dials would be autonomous, analog instrumentation such as an altimeter, fuel gauge, horizon/attitude wheel and perhaps a compass. You would want these as a backup in case the electronics failed.

The Vuduri spacecraft have no such backups. I guess they figured if the electronics went out, you were doomed anyway so why bother building in mechanical instrumentation? We already know the Overmind was too cheap to build probes to search for the cause of the stars disappearing. If it wouldn't spring for something to save the entire Solar System, why would it spend money on a measly person or two?

Infinite fuel

While the whole Rome's Revolution universe is based upon carefully researched science, there are times when I have to wave my hands so that I can get on with the story.

For example, when Rome is training Rei on the starship controls on his first trip in a space tug, she mentions that the trim-jets can be used in space or within the atmosphere. But what is the fuel that powers the trim-jets?

I posted an article some time back which explained that the by-product of the Casimir Pump was positive energy which could then be converted into matter, specifically plasma. However, this same method could be used to create hydrogen or helium or even higher elements.

So I think I'll just say that the PPT star-drive produces matter as a by-product and some of that matter is helium gas. It is placed in reservoirs and kept under intense pressure so that the trim-jets can shoot it out into space (or the atmosphere) with tremendous momentum thus generating thrust.

This is similar to the Reaction Control System (RCS) used by the Space Shuttle and other air and spacecraft as well as geosynchronous satellites to maintain proper attitude. Cold gas thrusters use carbon dioxide or nitrogen as their base propellant but these molecules would require more construction in a Vuduri spacecraft so I think I'll stick with helium.

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Indiegogo campaign starts today

I am going to try and get Rome's Revolution made into an audio book. I am going to use the Indiegogo crowd-sourcing platform to fund this venture. Here is the link: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/rome-s-revolution-the-audio-book.

Here is a short link in case you need it: http://igg.me/at/RRAudio/x/4972686

If you could spread the word, I'd really appreciate it. Here is what their widget looks like:
          

Every little bit helps.