Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri, page 150

The first encounter with Estar

In both the original, long-form version of Rome's Revolution and the modern version, Rei passes Estar in the hallway and notices she has funny eyes. Also, in both cases, Rei encounters Estar in the hallway, right after Rome is Cesdiud. In the original scene, Estar did not have mismatched eyes, though:

     “Halli le,” someone said to Rei.
     He turned and saw a woman coming toward him. Like all the Vuduri, she was short. She had blonde hair, but it was cut so severely, it was almost a buzz cut. Rei recognized her as one of the ones from the Great Room and the exercise room, but he did not know her name.
     “Yes?” he said and walked back toward her.
     “I need to ask you some questions,” she said in English.
     “How do you speak English?” Rei asked.
     “From Rome. The Overmind,” she said, tapping her temple.
     Rei wrinkled his forehead trying to understand how one person learning English could result in another mastering it. This Overmind must accumulate information in a way he couldn’t comprehend. He decided not to try. And still, there was something else about the woman. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
     “What’s your name?” Rei asked.
     “Estar,” she replied.
     “Oh yes, Rome mentioned you,” Rei said. “You’re the other data archivist, right?”
     “Yes,” she said. “It is imperative that I speak to you. I require that you remain still for a few moments.”
     “Sure,” Rei said. “What do you need?”
     “I need to clarify your intent,” she said.
     “My intent about what?” Rei asked, looking her right in the eye. Then it came to him. Her eyes were not like Rome’s or the other Vuduri for that matter. Her irises were luminous silver. They were so bright, they seemed actually reflective. She had the same glow emitting from her pupils as did Rome. The net effect made it seem as if she had no pupils at all which Rei found slightly unnerving. To Rei, it almost looked like she might be blind, yet clearly she was not.
     Estar interrupted Rei’s reverie. She said, “Your goal is to continue your journey. Perhaps to find a way back to Deucado and also find a way to tow your Ark with the Essessoni aboard, correct?”
     “You already know that,” Rei said. “Aren’t you part of the Overmind?”
     “Yes, of course,” she said. “But I need to know your intentions. You are going to thaw out your people when you get wherever you are going, correct?”
     “Well, sure,” Rei said, puzzled. “That’s the whole point of our mission in the first place.”
     “Is it your intent to unload the Erklirte weapons as well?” the woman asked.
     “Weapons?” Rei replied, confused. “What kind of weapons? We’re not carrying any weapons.”
     “Let me rephrase then,” Estar said. “When you arrive at your new home world, you intend to land the cargo portion of your craft and unpack its contents, correct?”
     “Of course,” Rei said. “We’ll need that stuff to get organized, to start our lives there.”
     “Very well,” she said. “That is all I needed to know.” Without another word, she spun in place and started walking back toward the gym.
     “Wait!” Rei shouted after her. “Why are you asking me this? Who are you, anyway?”

Well, now we know who she was. She was an agent for MASAL, spying on the Vuduri mission to Tabit. Why MASAL sent her was never clear to me but I suppose he had an inkling, as did OMCOM, that stars disappearing is not a good thing and he wanted to be prepared just in case he needed to exploit what they found. It turned out to be quite fortuitous because otherwise, he would never have known a whole Ark-load of Essessoni were on their way to Deucado to foil his plans for genocide. Unfortunately for him, he never quite got the chance to pull it off, though, being vaporized and all.

The Vuduri gym

In the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution, after Rome had been cast out (Cesdiud), she told Rei to get lost and he truly did. He had no idea where he was and wandered around aimlessly.

At one point, he stumbled across a rather large room which he could tell was a gymnasium. This is not surprising. The Vuduri are very concerned with physical conditioning and the gravity on Dara is rather low. Here is that deleted scene:

     Rei noticed a large group of Vuduri entering a room so he followed them in and was amazed to find a huge gymnasium with curvilinear walls. The room was at least 30 meters in length and there were all sorts of people engaged in calisthenics, weight machines and other exercise equipment that he couldn’t identify. Some of them were locked into an apparatus that was spinning, perhaps to simulate higher gravity using centrifugal force. He couldn’t tell.
     He stood there for a moment in awe because of the furious pace that the participants were taking yet not a word was spoken. The calisthenics group jumped up and down in perfect synchrony, twisting and bending.
     The weight lifters would get up and switch equipment as if they were cogs in some invisible machine or human lemmings. He recognized one woman as the one who was staring at him when he and Rome took their first meal together. She was staring at him again. He stepped toward her, but one of the nearer crewmen grunted, “Locance,” at him and made the same sweeping motion, toward the door, that the older man had done. Rei finally figured out that it meant get out of here so he left.

This scene didn't really drive the plot along very much so bye-bye. After Rei left the gym, he encountered Estar for the first time and that was important enough to leave in.

Emotional distance

When I originally wrote the modern, long-form version of Rome's Revolution, it was my first time trying to create completely new people from scratch. My previous novel, Future Past, while it is a book of fiction, it was based upon actual people I knew.

When I created the character of Rei, I jotted down some basic elements of his personality and physical characteristics and dove in. Two days ago, I discussed the trauma that Rome underwent when she was first cast out (Cesdiud) from the Overmind. While Rei was capable of telling that she was upset, after Rome kicked him out of her room, he just started wandering around the star-base.

An early reader pointed out to me that if Rei really loved Rome, he would be heart-sick over the situation and wouldn't just blithely walk away. So I had to go back and retrofit many, many scenes with indicators that he was, in fact, emotionally connected to Rome and her pain was his pain.

The first thing I did after Rei left Rome's room, was have him sink against the wall right outside of her room and hug his knees. This was meant to show that he was now helpless to assist her but still couldn't bear the thought of what she must be going through. After that, I had him rub his chest, his heart in particular and gave him many more emotional expressions when the subject of Rome (or the sight of her) came up.

The particular reader who spotted the initial emotional disconnect said that I had done enough and it no longer made Rei seem like he didn't care.

This was a very useful exercise. When I started Book 2, which became Part 2, Rei and Rome are separated for a good portion of the book. Rei thought he had lost Rome forever. I was able to throw in a lot of scenes, expressions and actions to indicate that he was under emotional duress.

Live and learn. From here on in, my characters must care about each other and show it!

The Vuduri keyboard

The data input devices demonstrated in Rome's Revolution are not exactly like the keyboards we use today. Because the Vuduri are connected to the computer (OMCOM), via their bloco and stilo, they don't need to type in individual words. Their keyboards are more like the type seen at McDonalds.

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However, the Vuduri input devices are mounted flush with the horizontal surface of the workstation and are projected. Their actual functions can be context-sensitive and they can even convert to a Vuduri-alphabet-based keyboard if required but that is normally not necessary. Upon occasion, there is a drawing section that uses swipe motions to produce actions or render images.

You will recall in Part 2 of Rome's Revolution, Rome's new genetic structure is kicking in and her bloco and stilo have stopped working. She is still able to manage the flight controls because they are just a variant of the input keyboard and flexible. Also, occasionally, a mandasurte has been known to enter data so they have to be able to access more primitive data entry as well.

So while I may refer to it as a keyboard from time to time, understand it is a powerful and flexible data entry device. iPad anybody?

Rome reborn

In the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution, Rome and Rei did not use the bands nor sleep together until Chapter 9. In the current version, they do so at the end of Chapter 2. Regardless of what chapter it happened, the next morning/day, Rome is awakened by something falling off of her desk because of a moon-quake.

There are several nuances to this scene designed to give it the proper flavor but they are not emphasized. For example, when Rome woke up, she spoke English to Rei which had already become natural for her. Second, as soon as she realized she had been cut off (Cesdiud) from the Overmind, she had a panic attack and showed strong emotion. The Vuduri are not supposed to express emotion so already we knew that there was a deeper, more caring Rome inside of her even though this particular incident was caused by trauma.

As the gravity of the situation begins to present itself to her, she leaps up, stark naked. The Vuduri just don't have a sense of modesty like we do. Also, I mentioned she was wearing a thin ankle bracelet, called a Yatori which is incongruous with the concept that the Vuduri do not wear jewelry. Or as my wife likes to point out, makeup, either.

Next, as I have mentioned before, when Rome is stressed out, she reverts to formal English or even Vuduri. In this case, it is straight Vuduri. She accosts OMCOM and demands to know what has happened in Vuduri. Her worst fears are realized and she collapses to the floor. At this point, although she mostly cries and carries on, English is gone. Only Vuduri.

The other thing I tried to hammer home was the Rome curled up in the fetal position. This is meant to be figuratively and literally Rome's rebirth. In fact, if I ever go back and rewrite Rome's Revolution and split it back into three books, this first book, currently known as Part 1, will be called Rebirth.

So, if you get a chance to review, go back and read that chapter and you will see that even though it is subtle and uses very few words, there are a lot of sociological and plot-driving points here.

Burial at sea

In the middle of Part 3 of Rome's Revolution, Rome and Rei are interrogated regarding the supposed disposition of Aason's body. Their cover story was that he was stillborn. However, this was one part of "The Lie" that they didn't review. When Oronus questioned Rome as to what they did with the body, she quickly stated that Rei build a Ceoxei (a type of coffin) and they gave Aason a "burial at sea" meaning they ejected the coffin into space. When Rei was questioned, he quickly stated that they recycled the body because that's what the Vuduri do.

Oronus did catch the lie but did not really spend any time thinking about it. Rome's fate had already been sealed and this inconsistency had no bearing on the outcome. Secretly, Estar and the Onsiras were tapped into the proceedings. After she captured Rome and Rei, she was determined to find the truth. She injected Rei with a serum which would force him to enter MASAL's version of the Overmind. The spirits within confronted Rei about this inconsistency, trying to prove that either he or Rome was lying.

However, the answer Rei gave reconciled the two versions and confounded Estar because she could not challenge the story. Rei told Estar that he had drugged Rome and suffocated the living baby at birth and tossed its body in the recycling vat before Rome awakened. Thus the story he told Oronus was true.

He then went on to say that as far as Rome knew, the baby was stillborn. He did, indeed, make a Ceoxei but he did not let Rome look into the little coffin he had prepared. Thus Rome's remembrance of the events were true, as well, from her perspective.

Rei's reasons behind all of this are unspeakably horrible but since Aason wasn't really dead, everything he said was all a lie, anyway. I supposed you could say that Rome and Rei had the last laugh because in the end, that lie led to Estar's death and vaporizing MASAL beneath Kilauea.

Sleek and Wow

In Rome's Revolution, the colonists from the 21st century don't leave until 2067 AD. You would assume that some new colloquial expressions would seep into English between now and then. Adding new colloquial expressions is nothing new in science fiction. Anybody who is a fan of Joss Whedan's Firefly knows they speak a mix of English and Mandarin and they often describe cool things as shiny.

When I was growing up, things were neat, cool, slick, hot and so forth. Regardless of the word, the sentiment was to use an ordinary word to express something being special or great.

So it was that I introduced the word sleek into Rei Bierak's vocabulary. It had to be a word which meant something to us today but could also be easily understood that it had evolved into a colloquialism in the future.

The Vuduri, on the other hand, don't even speak under normal circumstances. The fact that Rome grew up in a mixed home allowed her to develop her language skills but learning English was completely foreign to her. OMCOM fed her the transliteration of our language as she was acquiring it until she conquered the new language. However, she only mastered formal English at first. Later, having spent so much time with Rei, she picked up on how to speak more informally, sprinkling her speech with contractions. At first she thought this was sufficient but after listening to Rei, she realized there was more to speech than just vocabulary.

Her big breakthrough was with the word wow. Her first attempt at using the word came when OMCOM computed the distance a star-probe could cover in a single jump. It turned out to be 120 light years. Rome couldn't help it. She said wow to express her wonderment but the word sounded funny coming out of her lips.

Of course we know as she became more comfortable with English, the word wow became a natural part of her speech. In fact, by the time she and Rei left Tabit to begin their year-long journey to Deucado, it was already rolling off her tongue. The very fact that she learned to experience wonderment and used a word to express it is a big wow unto itself.

Go Rome!

Burial habits of the Vuduri

When we first meet the Vuduri in Rome's Revolution, we are introduced to how they handle death almost immediately. After all, the only reason they have quarters for Rei is because a crewman died. When asked how they treat their dead, Rome replied simply that their bodies were recycled. Not buried. Not cremated. Just recycled. Shades of Soylent Green!

This makes sense when you look at it from the Vuduri perspective. People are interchangeable, barely distinguishable and therefore their deaths have nearly no significance. Rome was different. Even before she showed her inner personality to Rei, we noted that she was holding on to the Espansor Bands as a remembrance to keep her father's memory alive. Very un-Vuduri-like.

Rei's people, known as the Essessoni, brought with them their belief in God, Heaven, Hell, the soul and so forth. When it came to people dying, their first choice was to bury the dead and they forced that choice among the denizens of Deucado.

The Deucadons, survivors of the Ark III crash, lived underground so they could not bury their dead but rather created extensive catacombs in their underworld and placed the departed there. The mandasurte too, buried their dead so this became the universal method of remembrance on Deucado.

However, the Rome's Revolution universe takes place in the 35th century. It's hard to imagine that in this future world, there isn't some progress in determining if there truly is an immortal soul and a life after death. This is the central theme of The Milk Run and will show one possible place where the soul might go. Think of it as a unified theory of God.

And once it is established that when you die, you aren't really dead, could a two-way street be opened there? You'll have to wait until the final chapter in the Rome and Rei saga tentatively called The Final Journey which I hope to have completed by the end of the year.

The mind-deaf and the hearing-deaf

I have a Ph.D. in Sensory Science (specifically auditory physiology) with a minor in Computer Science from Syracuse University. During my time there, as I was studying for my doctorate, I had many opportunities to interact with deaf people and study the deaf community at large. When I designed the Vuduri society for Rome's Revolution, once I came up with the idea of mind-connected people and the balance of the mandasurte, the mind-deaf, I had to draw upon that experience to build an alternate society to contrast against the Vuduri.

The hearing deaf, especially in the United States, are a complex community and have many unique characteristics. I make no judgment. I'm just a scifi writer so I used my experience to mimic things that I learned about a group of people who have a different way of perceiving the world than the main-stream.

First and foremost, while deaf people are aware of the fact that they are deaf, they have found numerous ways of overcoming that sensory deficit to the point where it isn't a deficit at all. As a whole, they are just as happy as the hearing people so I made the mandasurte a happy group as well. The hearing deaf have their own language (sign language) and so I made sure the mandasurte had their own language as well.

Also, while this is certainly no rule, hearing deaf people sometimes gather in communities or groups, just like any other group. Thus I had the mandasurte gather in enclaves where they could luxuriate in the comfort of others like them.

As in our world, our scientists have worked tirelessly to research and come up with inventions to allow the hearing deaf to hear. So too, with the Vuduri, I had them invent the Espansor Bands so that mandasurte could experience communication the same as the Vuduri with an artificial device.

All in all, I tried to make the mandasurte parallel the hearing deaf to give a feel of authenticity to a society apart. At the same time, I wanted to show that such a people are not to be pitied but rather respected because they have taken what nature has given them and built a complete and satisfactory society around themselves.

The cryo-hibernation fluid

In a previous post, we discussed the action items the sarcophagus had to perform to reanimate a frozen person. However, I never really went into detail regarding the cryo-hybernation fluid itself. The fluid was introduced very early in the long-form version of Rome's Revolution but excised during the compaction of the first three books into an omnibus.

At first glance, the fluid reminds one of the green slime made popular on Nickelodeon:



However, the liquid is a little less viscous and has about the same density as anti-freeze. The liquid has a dual purpose. When it is first pumped in, its sole purpose it to put the sedated would-be colonist into a state of extreme hypothermia. The fluid starts at 25 degrees Celsius and this is low enough to cause the body to enter stasis with the heart, lungs and circulatory system shutting down. At that point, the cryogenic coolers kick in and the occupant is taken all the way down to zero degrees Celsius. They are completely frozen.

This is not fatal, as demonstrated by the common wood frog because the subjects are completely dehydrated prior to being frozen. The state of dehydration prevents the intracellular fluid from expanding too much and rupturing the cell walls.

However, it is upon reanimation that the special properties of this fluid come to the fore. It contains a heavy dose of co-trimoxazole which is designed to penetrate the skin and rehydrate the body as well as act as an antibiotic to counteract any infections which have been festering over the centuries. Believe it or not, another component of the fluid was derived from Urushiol which is the oil exuded by poison ivy. As we have all experienced, it is particularly effective in penetrating the skin and getting to the underlying layers. The final element was that the fluid was hyper-oxygenated so that life-giving oxygen could be delivered to all the tissues before the heart started beating again.

Early research into the cryo-hibernation process revealed that re-hydrating the body was of paramount importance during the resuscitation cycle. Here is the original resurrection scene where Rei had to deal with the melting of the fluid:

     Barely conscious, Rei Bierak lay motionless within his cryo-hibernation chamber. Pumps vibrated quietly as they drained the thick rehydration fluid from his hermetically sealed sarcophagus. Rei did not feel the gloppy green liquid as it oozed from his ears and nose. He felt nothing but abysmal cold. Eyes shut, he could do nothing but wait until his body warmed sufficiently to move.