A different creative process
Here’s a creative process I haven’t yet tapped into: dreams.
These are the musings of Thomas Duffy of deviantart fame, as well as Ben’s computer game team.
Tom: Hybrid hypnagogic/hypnotic idea/image flash the other night, with a heavy dose of hypnopompic rationalization and logical shoehorning!
Was musing as I was falling asleep on those little tiny spaceships you often see in sci-fi, “blasting for all (they’re) worth” (to paraphrase Shirow) despite having no apparent fuel source. The solution provided by my semi-conscious brain was that they are drawing on a (practically) unlimited source of hydrogen in a parallel universe via a kind of miniaturized Casimir gate or Krasnikov tube, generated at minimal energy cost by an integral component of the drive system. An inexhaustible reaction mass for (otherwise) air-breathing transatmospheric nuclear engines, not to mention interplanetary rockets, and of course an alternate to a Bussard-style ramscoop for interstellar vessels relying on nuclear fusion.
From there it became obvious that there were multiple such “mono-elemental” parallel universes–one, in fact, for every chemical element in our universe. Each universe had a sort of unique “resonant access frequency” that corresponded predictably to an intrinsic physical property of its native element–the element’s atomic number, for example. So once we had stumbled across the existence of these universes, they were easy to locate and tap into. The “problem” (such as it is) was that it required increasingly greater amounts of energy to draw material from them, not just proportionate to the weight of the element but logarithmically or expontentially as you moved “up” the periodic table. So hydrogen was basically “free” to us, but helium was significantly more expensive in terms of the necessary energy investment, and any heavier elements required such a prohibitively high energy expenditure that humanity hadn’t been able to extract them yet. For all practical purposes we were limited to exploiting the “Hydrogen Universe.”
It was unclear to me in exactly what form these elements existed in their “native” universes…I had a vague image of a uniformly distributed gaseous cloud of particles that were prevented by native physical laws from clumping, clustering, fusing, or degrading (decaying into lighter elements, I mean). These universes were clearly artificial, as indicated by the “coding” system built into their “resonant access frequencies,” and they had presumably been “built” by somebody native to our universe, or to a universe parallel to ours with identical physical laws, based on the chemical elements represented. This and other factors (most notably the proportionate increase in energy expenditure required to tap elements) led to the hypothesis that these different universes were originally created as part of a commerce or exchange system, perhaps one that hadn’t been used for millions or billions of years. “You get the hydrogen for free, but anything heavier than that is gonna cost ya!”
–Of course, you wouldn’t even necessarily have to invoke a parallel universe for this premise to work–you’d “just” need to establish the terminal point of the Casimir gate in a nebula, or the atmosphere of a fluid giant. But the fuel source would be much more unreliable, and not truly inexhaustible, and the energy expenditure for even a tiny real-world gate of that type would be trans-astronomical (not to mention that you’d have to transport it to the desired “endpoint” in the first place). The idea in my dream was that access to this parallel “Hydrogen Universe” could be had for a relatively small energy investment–that it was designed to be cheaply accessible from the outside.
Dan: I get the idea of a hydrogen universe (perhaps from a big-bang with no imperfections, resulting in the smooth distribution of ur-matter and therefore no clumps from which stars can form. Of course, once humans start extracting hydrogen, there will be clumps). But wait, nothing so perfect could exist naturally! And an all-uranium universe? Where the hell did that come from? And what if someone figured out how to game the system and steal from these vaults? And what if their creators found out about our scam?
Gentlemen, we have unintentionally stumbled into the Fort Knox of a godlike civilization. And back out of it again…with our pockets accidentally full of gold. And then we accidentally did that a couple more times. Anyway the silent alarm tripped, the cops are onto us, and the next wormhole from them to the solar system is due to open sometime in the next thousand years in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter!
By the way, I love the idea of trans-cosmic trading floors of mono-atomic feedstock. I’ve been trying to invent economic systems for godlike civilizations and that’s one I hadn’t considered.
Tom: I woke up all in the middle of the night kava-groggy from a dream involving a wormhole-like portal maintained by this spaceship or station…That in itself wasn’t too imaginative, but the intriguing aspect was that the gate or portal could only be accessed within a certain timeframe, and I don’t mean on a regular “Old Faithful”-type clockwork schedule as per Deep Space Nine, but like there was this specific narrow duration in which it could be accessed, once, and then never again. The idea was that–space and time being aspects of the same phenomenon or universal fabric–this gate was situated at a specific point in time rather than in space. It was delimited by temporal rather than spatial boundaries, in other words. It might be available at another time, but in a different location, and the ship or station with its requisite maintenance technology would have to be moved to “meet” it.
I wouldn’t have remembered this dream at all, probably, except that I had to get up to take a piss and while I was doing so I was thinking about the “Megacanthid” mech suits idea (sketches I just sent). I’ve been working on these (mentally) for quite a while, but because I was thinking about them in my groggy hypnompompic state, they somehow became conflated with that idea of the wormhole-like portal or gate and I started “dreaming” of this scenario where similar suits are dispatched from an orbiting station into the fast-moving eddies and currents of a Jovian or Neptunian fluid giant. (As with all nearly all my (more exotic and indefensible) mech designs, the functional rationale is that they be able to effectively grapple with potentially aggressive indigenous fauna if necessary.) They are more “planktonic” in every sense, drifting with the atmospheric currents and maneuvering within them rather than actively altering trajectory, and their design (like those of the native fauna) would reflect this.
The twist here, tying back to the dream, was that the mecha weren’t dispatched with their pilots in them, but rather that each suit hosted the terminal end of a Casimir gate with its “anchor” point back on the ship or station. Once the suits were safely inserted into the planetary atmosphere, the pilot would teleport into the suit’s control module via the gate, and would just as instantly teleport out if things went catastrophically wrong, either due to run-ins with native wildlife or the dangers of negotiating the hostile atmosphere. I was thinking (dreaming?!) that the whole scenario is so dangerous, though, that pilots still have a high casualty rate just because they often aren’t able to ‘port out in time (sudden attacks and unpredictable atmospheric phenomena (i.e. getting sucked into a downdraft and crushed by pressure), equipment failures due to environmental hardship, etc. etc.).
The Big Problem with this scenario is the gates themselves, which would require unbelievable amounts of energy to maintain–and if humanity has access to such vast energy resources, what are they doing stuck at the tech level of mech suits and spaceships?? One solution would be that the gates are a found, unreproducible alien technology; another is that energy is being drawn from some alternate dimension (remember the limitless hydrogen universe?!) but can only be used in this specific way for this specific purpose–allowing for the gates but no other form of energy independence. Which would also fit nicely with the idea of them being alien technology, I suppose…
Dan: Actually that kind of wormhole was the central conceit of the Anubis Gate www.amazon.com/The-Anubis-Gate…
What if those suits were drifting in the Jovian atmosphere in preparation to meet a gate we knew would one day open…and protect human space from whatever comes out the other end? Let’s say we’re not good at predicting when the hole will open. The margin of error is on the scale of centuries. So we seed these van-neuman plankton-mechs into the Jovian atmosphere and connect them via Cas-gate to people back on earth (or wherever). These Reservists go through their lives never knowing when they might be teleported into a mech in the middle of a freefall battle with alien antagonists. At death, they designate a successor. If enough time goes by, succession probably stays in the family, making a privileged soldier caste.
