Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri, page 186

Calendars on other worlds

On the Earth, the time and date is pretty easy to figure out. But what about on other worlds? There is next to no chance that the days on another planet will be 24 hours long and even less chance that their years would be 365.25 days long.

The solution: two calendars. One local and one "universal" calendar, keyed to Earth of course. Not that the Julian calendar is all that logical but you have to start somewhere.

Say that today is January 21st, 2013 at 1:05:24 PM GMT. We would define Universal Time (UT) as 20130121.01.05.24. One second later, it would be .25 then .26 and so on.

The local calendar can be tailored to the particular planet's rotational period and orbital period around its primary star.

Can this work? It already does, here on Earth. For example, there is the Jewish Calendar which is lunar-based (as is the Muslim calendar) yet all Jewish people know the Julian calendar date. We all know about the Mayan calendar. Time is time and already measured against GMT.

Even if everybody accepted this, when you get to where you are going, your UT clock will be off. If you travel faster than light, who knows what it will read? It could even go backwards. If you travel slower than light but still at relativistic velocities, you will experience time dilation and your clock will run slower.

The solution? Find an astral object with predictable properties. Say it is a quasar that flashes with a certain periodicity or a star whose brightness is diminishing by an infinitesimal amount. Whatever it is, certain markers will be tied to UT so that whenever you get to where you are going, you can set your UT clock by the stars.

Your local clock? Good luck with that. On a planet whose orbit takes only 180 days, people would live to be 140 years old easily, local time. But UT would still give us a way to tell their actual age. People-years, dog-years, it'd all be predictable and calculable.

Metric Time and the Universal Calendar

In the last post, entitled Counting in Vuduri, I hinted that the Vuduri week is ten days long and the Vuduri year is ten months long. That's because the Vuduri keep what is called Metric Time. A metric second lasts .865 seconds. This allows you to have 100 metric seconds in a metric minute, 100 metric minutes in a metric hour and 10 metric hours in a day.

Try the math yourself and you will see it really does work. A metric day equates exactly to 24 of our hours.

The only problem is the 365 day year. Nine of the Vuduri months are four weeks times 10 days = 360 days with only 5 left over. So the Vuduri month of Tamas is typically 5 days long but in leap years, it is 6 days.

The Vuduri or the mandasurte at least, call the tenth month "Poor Tamas" because it is the little month that got cheated of its full length.

Poor Tamas is actually also a world-wide holiday. It is a combination of the Jewish Yom Kippur which is a reflection back on one's transgressions from the prior year and a joyous New Year celebration. Most of the mandasurte take the entire "month" of Tamas off to celebrate.

So far, so good. All this helps us on Earth. But what about on other planets where a day may not be 24 hours and a year is unlikely to be 365 days? To avoid such complexities, I removed the whole concept of Metric Time from the current version of Rome's Revolution. But I will discuss it tomorrow nonetheless.

Counting in Vuduri

As mentioned in the previous post entitled How to speak Vuduri, the Vuduri language is based upon Portuguese then put through a computer algorithm to substitute some vowels and consonants.

Here is how the Vuduri count. I will tie this in to the Vuduri timekeeping system tomorrow:

1. Um
2. Tios
3. Dras
4. Quedri
5. Conci
6. Saos
7. Sada
8. Iodi
9. Nifa
10. Taz

The Vuduri word for day is Emi. Here are their days of the week: Umemi, Tiosemi, Drasemi, Quedremi, Concemi, Saosemi, Sademi, Iodemi, Nifemi and Tazemi.

The Vuduri word for month is Mas. Here are their months: Umas, Tiomas, Dramas, Quemas, Conmas, Saomas, Sadmas, Iomas, Nimas and Tamas.

Polyhydramnios

When Rome became pregnant, she was the first female in human history to gestate the spawn of a Vuduri mother and an Essessoni father. The child, Aason, was fully connected from the moment of conception. He knew he was supposed to connect to his mother but was not able to. The harder he "pushed" to become connected, the more frustrated and frightened he became.

The physical manifestation of this was an excess of amniotic fluid called Polyhydramnios. It put Rome in increasing stress as her uterus pressed against her diaphragm and made it harder and harder for her to breathe.

A normal woman carries 800-1000 mL of amniotic fluid. Rome was carrying close to 2000 mL with the levels increasing at an alarmingly fast rate.

The Vuduri doctors correctly identified this was her principal problem. To reduce Rome's stress, they decided to treat the symptom first which was to reduce the amount of amniotic fluid using amniocentesis.

After Rome had recovered, they decided to address the underlying cause and injected Rome to allow her to reconnect to her son. After this, all was well.

Dramatis Personae for Rome's Revolution and The Ark Lords

Just a little refresher for those of you who forgot where we were at the end of The Ark Lords so you can get ready for Rome's Evolution coming this spring.

Rei Bierak: An engineer and one of the frozen passengers aboard the Ark II, launched from Earth in 2067AD (original target: Tau Ceti). The Ark II went off course and was not discovered for nearly 1400 years. Rei was the first human awakened and responsible for eventually getting the Ark II to its original destination, Tau Ceti, now called Deucado by the Vuduri.

Rome: A half-blood (mosdurece) Vuduri woman from the 35th century who fell in love with Rei and eventually married him. Originally connected to the Overmind, she was cast out (Cesdiud) when she consorted with Rei.

Aason Bierak: Rei and Rome’s two-year-old son.

MINIMCOM: Originally an autopilot computer that was fused into the airframe of a Vuduri space tug. Circumstances and experience caused him to become self-aware. Now a starship, MINIMCOM can fly as fast as 1000c.

OMCOM: Originally a standard computer installed on Skyler Base within the Tabit System. Eventually he transferred his consciousness into a mass much larger than a planet.

Fridone: Rome’s father, a 23-chromosome mandasurte (mind-deaf) oceanographic scientist. Rome calls him Beo which is the Vuduri word for father.

Binoda: Rome’s mother, a full-blooded 24-chromosome Vuduri. Binoda is an animal husbandry expert. Rome calls her Mea which is the Vuduri word for mother.

Pegus: Leader of the Vuduri contingent on the planet of Deucado.

The Overmind: Group consciousness created by the mind-connected Vuduri.

Maury Keller: Captain of the Ark II and de facto leader of the colonists from old Earth.

Lee Ionelli: One of Captain Keller’s lieutenants.

Trabunel: Leader of the Ibbrassati (the Oppressed) on the planet of Deucado.

Bukky: Leader of the Deucadons, descendants of the Ark III which crash landed on Deucado 500 years before the story begins and lived underground for most of those years.

Melloy: Bukky’s main lieutenant.

Ursay: A Vuduri commander, currently living in retirement on Earth. Ursay was Rome’s original commander when she was deployed in the Tabit system.

Hanry Ta Jihn: A legendary hero and martyr from the past, responsible for organizing the resistance that eventually defeated the Ark Lords, called Erklirte in Vuduri.

Grus: A Vuduri soldier, present when Rei and Rome were banished from the Earth.

MASAL: A supercomputer that designed the 24th chromosome which was responsible for the rise of the Vuduri. His plan was to engineer the humanity out of mankind. He was destroyed by Rei and Rome.

Sussen: An Onsira spy sent to Deucado by MASAL when it was still a prison planet. Her mission was to ensure that the mandasurte remained imprisoned there until the planet was destroyed by an asteroid. When she saw things unraveling, she escaped in attempt to return to Earth to warn MASAL. Rei, Rome and MINIMCOM beat her there and had already destroyed MASAL before she ever arrived.

Virga: Leader of the Vuduri contingent on the planet of Helome. She had captured Rei hoping to mate with him. She released him on his word that he would send mandasurte to help her rebuild the gene pool. Rei came through with his promise.

Bonnie Mullen: A female member of the Darwin group. She was also the colony’s historian. She was banished along with the rest of the Darwin group to Helome. She was pregnant at the time with Edgar Mullen’s child.

Gray Goo

From the very beginning, in 1973, the Stareater has always been the nemesis of Rei and Rome, starting in the original novel entitled VIRUS 5 and now known as Rome's Revolution, Part 1.

Even back in 1973, I knew how Rei was going to defeat the Stareater. He was going to use the power of the exponent, calling them the Virtually Identical Replicating Unit System aka VIRUS units. It wasn't until many years later that the technology became more trendy and is now known as nanobots.

Self-replicating nanobots are called Gray Goo because everything they touch is digested and consumed. Another name for this is Ecophagy or an environment which consumes itself.

Obviously we do not have the technology today and we may never have it. But I gave the Vuduri the Casimir Pump and free, unlimited positive energy. With infinite energy, anything is possible.

In the current version of the novel, the Gray Goo serves two purposes. The first is a virtually infinite substrate for OMCOM to transfer his consciousness and thus survive the onslaught of the Stareater. The second is the introduction of the mutations and the consequent evolution of self-aware autonomous entities.

Originally, I had them split into some good, some evil but for the time being, they do not figure into the equation. You will find out what happened to them in The Milk Run, to be completed in 2014.

Plasma and star drives

No, I'm not talking about the clear liquid that carries blood cells around your arteries. I'm talking about the widely-considered fourth state of matter.

Take a proton and a single electron in orbit around the nucleus. We call that an atom of hydrogen. Now separate the electron and you have two elementary particles no longer atoms. Throw a whole lot of protons, electrons and neutrons in there and you have a very hot, very energetic fluid-like substance called plasma.

Plasma has different physical characteristics than liquids or gasses and the Vuduri find it most useful as the propellant for their plasma jets. Occasionally, they use it for small hand-held weapons called plasma projectors.

Where do they get all this plasma from? They use Casimir Pumps to create pockets of negative energy for traveling via PPT Tunnels. The waste product is unlimited, free positive energy. Check the article entitled Creating elementary particles with energy to see how they do it.

They shoot the plasma out the rear of their ships and get to go very fast. Since the Casimir Pumps do not work very well within a deep gravity well (like near the surface of a planet), for atmospheric flight, they typically use electrogravity to get around within a gravity well.

However, upon occasion, MINIMCOM finds the need to fire the plasma jets even in the atmosphere causing an eye-popping pyrotechnical display. He always did have a sense of showmanship.

Dark Energy and the expansion of the Universe

In the original incarnation of VIRUS 5, all I had was the "villain" being the Stareaters. It never occurred to me to ask why they wanted to eat stars. I really just wanted them as raw material for the VIRUS units to get out of hand and cause a cliff-hanger because of their mutations.

But after I wrote the story, I was compelled to write Part 2 which was when Rei and Rome got to Deucado. Simply writing that story dictated that I had to write Part 3 which was supposed to tie up loose ends.

But what of the Stareaters? It was a really neat idea to have a double climax: Rei and Rome confronting then destroying MASAL and then the Stareaters come to the Solar System. But it was depressing to think that everyone had to die.

So I "asked" the Stareaters, what was your motivation? Why do you eat stars? Their answer was shocking and made complete sense. There is a force called Dark Energy which seems to be implicated in the accelerating expansion of the universe. Once the universe gets too big, it will collapse upon itself and cause the Big Crunch. And it has been proposed that supernovae and hypernovae shed so much Dark Energy that they accelerate the acceleration.

So at last, I had a motivation of why the Stareaters eat stars. They are trying to prevent supernovae and hypernovae and retard the acceleration of the universe. If they stop this, the universe would remain in its current state until all energy in the universe goes to absolute zero. In other words, they were simply trying to prolong the life of the universe.

Thinking about such questions hurts my head. What came before the beginning? What comes after the end? Ultimately, the Stareaters' mission would fail. In the Epilogue to the final section of the final book, entitled The Milk Run, Rei and Rome and OMCOM must address such questions. The answer will surprise you but it won't be ready until 2014.

Is the core of the Sun ice cold?

When I was building the concept of the Stareaters, I was worried that they'd burn up trying to swallow a star. I stumbled across an article about a man named Renzo Boscoli who proposed that the inside of the Sun was ice cold. The article described the well-documented Ranque effect which shows that within a vortex (like a tornado), the outer part gets hotter and the inner part gets colder. Boscoli speculated that the Ranque effect would dictate that the inner core of the Sun was actually super-cold slushy hydrogen and the main fusion reaction took place closer to the surface of the Sun. I figured maybe the Stareaters could siphon off the photosphere and then digest the rest of the star more leisurely.

In fact, the original design of the Stareater was a long tube with bulges representing multiple "stomachs" like a cow for digesting the various layers of the star.

Ultimately, I said screw it and made the Stareaters Dyson Spheres. That way, they were so large, it didn't matter. They were really cool "villains" but why would they eat stars in the first place? Next blog entry.

The Yatori and Vuduri nudity

The Vuduri have very little sense of self. As such, while they do not flaunt it, nudity neither shocks nor arouses them.

To strengthen their divestiture of self, most Vuduri adorn their body with a trinket or piece of jewelry call a Yatori. Rome had a small ankle bracelet. Pegus has a red thread tied around his wrist.

These items were not worn in an attempt to make themselves prettier. It was not vanity. Instead, they were a self-test. A true Vuduri would know they had broken through and completely divested themselves of sense of self when they could not longer see their Yatori. It proved that the Overmind controlled their perception of the world.

To most Vuduri, this was a desirable outcome. They called it Second Sight. It was using the Overmind to see the world instead of their own eyes.

As we know from Rome's Revolution, Rome struggled with this her whole life. She always wanted to be a "good little Vuduri" but there was a part of herself that always yearned to be free.

When she was first cast out, Cesdiud, she was horrified and scared but eventually came to embrace her new-found autonomy. Through the course of Rome's Revolution and later, The Ark Lords we literally see Rome growing up emotionally. From her metaphorical birth when she was in the fetal position through becoming a loving mother and wife, her journey toward self-reliance is ongoing. She eventually embraces the fact that she can see the Yatori as a symbol of her independence.