Plant: Nepenthes x ventrata (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) Abstract: Description of a uniquely preserved fossil bed dating approximately 65 million years before the present Details: While the fact that our planet once had an extensive civilization across all major landmasses has been established for at least 60 years, that civilization is still poorly understood. Due to extensive chemical weathering of the surface, the traces…
Tag: Backstories and Fragments
Backstories: "Senseweb" (2021)
Nepenthes rafflesiana x sibuyanensis BE 3819 “Suki” (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) At first, they were found on old, dead worlds. Massive chrysalises by the hundreds, seemingly impervious to cutting tools, waiting in alcoves and caves, surrounded by metallic fibers that slowly waved as if in a light breeze, even if in total vacuum. When disturbed, the chrysalis cracked open, with the monstrosity inside attacking…
Backstories: "Professor Lindsay's Amphibian Wedding Present" (2021)
Plant: Nepenthes spectrabilis x tenuis (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, the first serious experiments in DNA manipulation and editing came not in the early part of the 21st Century, but in the latter half of the 19th. Professor Huxley Lindsay of Rice University in Texas never knew the word “deoxyribonucleic acid,” and would have taken a bullwhip to anyone trying…
Backstories: "Blink Clunk" (2020)
Plant: Drosera adelae (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) Blink clunk. Every daybreak started the same way. Blink clunk. As soon as the first direct rays of the sun hit its upper receptors, the little proximity sensor took in its surroundings in visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, sonar, and gamma rays. Blink clunk. In a femtosecond, it compared the current pile of data from the same point…
Backstories: "Virgil" (2020)
Plant: Nepenthes sibuyanensis (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) In the annals of human-developed artificial intelligence, Virgil shouldn’t have succeeded. Originally developed in the mid-Twenty-First Century, Virgil was the Euclidean ideal of software development of the time: proposed by senior managers who could barely spell “computer,” given parameters by marketing managers who definitely couldn’t, overseen by project managers who would flounce out of the company the…
Backstories: "Lifehutch" (2020)
Plant: Nepenthes ramis x spectrabilis (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) Out of all of the known examples of elder civilization technology currently catalogued, none is more helpful, more lifesaving, or more exasperating than the Lifehutches. Lifehutches have been found under nearly every environment known: asteroids where escape velocity is a fastball pitch, deep within super-Venuses with hundreds of atmospheres of pressure, locked in orbit around…
Backstories: "Conjunction of the Million Spheres" (2020)
Plant: Nepenthes sathulata x hamata (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) In which an artist, in an attempt to create backstory for a recent artwork, dives headfirst into obscure fanfic. On that particular morning, Lietyran awoke with a sense of responsibility. She awoke every morning with a sense of responsibility, considering her position and her heritage, but this was different. From the moment the tower servants…
Backstories: "One Giant Leap" (2020)
Plant: Nepenthees bicalcarata (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) This is an excerpt from the transcription of the Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transmission (GOSS NET 1) from the Apollo 11 mission. Communicators in the text may be identified according to the following list. A series of three dots (…) is used to designate those portions of the communications that could not be transcribed because of garbling. One…
Backstories: “Stasis Bunker” (2020)
Plant: Nepenthes ampullaria (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) A regular comment about military history involves the trope “every peacetime is spent preparing for the last war.” Across four galaxies, with approximately 10,000 sentient species per galaxy, the trope holds true: whether an intraspecies conflict, a formal war between one or more civilizations, or a galaxy-wide beatdown, most plans, equipment, and strategy are battle-tested and ready…for…
Backstories: “Raven Well” (2020)
Plant: Nepenthes ampullaria (Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?) The locals refer to the days before the Well as “The Belonging,” when the veil between worlds was weak and people were better than they were afterwards. Not that they knew much other than that: those who asked too many questions were either asked to leave or disappeared suddenly in the night. The foothills and valleys around…