obvious noob questions from a writer

[TheodoreBonn]

Gawds...you guys suck. (Can't STAND it when people think of my great ideas first, though I should be used to it by now...I've been here, like, three days, after all.) Actually in my story it is a covert attack.

Technically, you did think of the idea first since you developed the story idea some time ago We just came to a similar conclusion after you provided enough information.

On a related note, and sort of connected to the ideas below - how far in the future do you think you could have your sleepers hail from without compromising their 'real life relatability'? Would people who were frozen a hundred years from now be too far future?

I ask, because if people are willing to engage in cryonic storage now, when no method of reviving them is known, then consider what might happen if science developed a way of ALMOST reviving them.

As you probably know some species of frogs can survive being frozen:

http://www.livescience.com/32175-can-fro...rozen.html

Given your earlier comments on RL use of cooling in surgeries and such (and subject to our resident bioscience members not having a stroke at what I'm about to suggest), it might be reasonable to postulate that sometime in the next hundred years a method is developed to replicate what these frogs do in other (simple) organisms (at least to some degree). Perhaps only a wide range of cold blooded creatures, or maybe even some simple warm-blooded creatures. Maybe in combo with some sort of hibernation tech such as bears and other animals do.

The tech hasn't been developed to the point where it will work on humans, or been demonstrated to work safely on humans for any great length of time, or whatever but it would seem much more promising than cryonics to many. So perhaps there is a boom in 'cold sleep' enterprises.

As part of this large numbers of people, most with incurable diseases go into 'cold sleep' with the thought that future tech will be able to wake them and cure them (much like modern cryonics patients). Except that it turns out to be harder than first thought to get the tech to work on a human and get a functioning nervous system out the other side (animal subjects tend to develop cancer, nerve damage or deterioration and other not great things, but surely that will be cured or curable eventually right?). So the sleepers languish for centuries, first watched over by people and later by AI support systems. Which brings us to...

In my story, a rogue AI that was run off Earth for being too...destructive has used nano (actually reprogrammed cancer cells, monocolonals) to infect both the hull and the crew of the colony ship, using these 60,000 hapless refugees as distributed nodes and servile waldos. This rogue AI got in on the ground floor, implanted some distributed nodes in the hull...and is using this flying beacon of hope...to attempt to infect its next target, that being the colony in question.

Been doing some thinking about this. Not sure if the following will still be relevant to your story depending on how it's developing, but will throw it out and see if it helps.

As part of the OA timeline we have mention of a conflict between different camps of transapient AIs:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49a7d33abf557

The losers (many of them anyway) ended being driven from the solar system, using shanghaied starprobes to leave. I'm honestly not entirely sure about the starprobes bit (we don't talk a lot about this phase of early interstellar exploration and should probably expand on it), but it does lend itself to a couple of possible plots, one of which might fit into your story as so far described. To wit:

Option A) The conflict takes place much as already described. One of the losers, an ahuman AI, oversees one or more cryonics facilities. In secret it has been developing the sort of waldo tech you describe. Or maybe it just has some attachment to the sleepers as pets or a remnant of its programming. Or maybe it wants to torture them for some reason or do experiments or whatever. Regardless, it decides to leave Sol and take them with it. Via various tricky methods, it manipulates events so that the sleepers are loaded aboard a star probe aimed in the direction of the Hyades and uploads itself aboard. And then...

Relating to this, do you actually need 60,000 sleepers (which mass rather a lot), or would 6000 work?

Option B) The conflict between the AI factions takes place much closer to the nanodisaster (or maybe it's a WWI and WWII type of thing - more than one AI conflict). The conflict in question takes place near or in the ND (maybe the ND is a side-effect of the battle - a theory that some might hold in later centuries, along with the notion that GAIA was created to be a weapon that ended up getting out of control and turning on Her transapient creators - forcing them to flee Earth and causing some to flee Sol entirely). One of these is an ahuman AI that oversees a cold sleep facility as mentioned above. It first gets off Earth and then decides to leave out of fear of GAIA or the Dark Age or something. To get out of town, it manipulates events to get its sleepers and itself loaded aboard one of GAIA's arks and then takes off with it, heading for the Hyades. It might either leave before more people can be loaded aboard (I don't think we indicate how many a given ark could carry), only bring enough sleepers to fully fill the ship, or kill off the rest of the passengers en route. And then...

With this options, 60,000 sleepers is quite doable. It's an ark ship after all

Regardless of the option picked, while in flight the AI detects the passage of faster ships and the colonization of the Hyades. First by ahuman AIs (which it likes), creating the Taurus Nexus and later by biologicals (which makes it very unhappy). Knowing that it is stuck heading to the Hyades, wanting to be there, and resenting the idea of dirty bios taking its chosen plot of space, it begins re-engineering the sleepers into bioweapons of some kind such as you describe or something more OA-esque. Eventually it arrives at a system in the Hyades and the story begins...

Or something like that - just some stuff that occurred in the shower this AM. YMMV. And some of this would need approval by the larger group since we might need to add or tweak some things to the setting.

The interdiction ship - told from the viewpoint of a Dexter-type psychopath from Earth who has been blessed by a particularly malevolent archailect who has taken a liking to him with some unusually potent imbedded firepower - picks up on the ruse, and...duly blows the ship out of the sky.

Remind me again...why aren't you guys running scifi yet?

Are you thinking that all the colonists die? Many or most? I'm not overly wedded to happy endings, but something where some of the characters survive would be nice Note that at the time the Taurus Nexus was a major modosophont civ, there wouldn't have been anything higher than the Third Singularity around AFAIK. Of course their brains are the size of Earth's moon, and they can make (crude and inefficient) wormholes, convert matter completely to energy, and create magmatter, among other things. So some quite potent firepower can be had if you want it.

Btw what sort of tech and wonders were you thinking of populating the Hyades/Taurus Nexus with? Some things appear later in the timeline and wouldn't be available. Others would very much be. We might also want to discuss wormholes. OA wormholes have various interesting features and limits and can take a bit of getting used to. Have you read the Layman's Guide by chance?

As to why we aren't running scifi yet...we talked about it but it seemed like it would be too much work

Anyway, hope all of the above helps. A lot depends on when you see your characters hailing from and some other factors, but hopefully this gives a starting point for discussion.

Hope this helps,

Todd

Pretty much we've been thinking along a lot of the same lines...and I think it definitely can be made to square up with the OA canon with minimal disruption. Keep in mind this story I wrote was just the first of a series of partly-completed (and in some cases, outdated) stories that I wrote, but the more I read the history and culture of the Hyades and the Taurus Nexus the more I think that our world-universes square up...honestly, we seem to have been working off a lot of the same postulates.

As for sleepers, pretty much the way I had it is, people who died, and had money, started commonly freezing themselves. Others wound up shanghied into freezers by a variety of methods (especially criminals, which provides a huge number of potential future villains for my stories.) The concept of "perpetual care" ensured that legally, even those the freezing operations could be bought and sold, the "perpetual care" aspect could not be set aside. In the early days the freezers would have been especially crude, but like every other big industry there would have been a lot of consolidation over time (keep in mind, these freezer outfits would have had huge financial resources, due to the trust funds associated with those who had died), so buying and selling these earlier, more dispersed freezer cemeteries would get to be HUGE business. Probably, over time, these consolidated mass freezers would have gotten moved up into orbital stations for more convenient storage. But especially due to the fact that earlier cryo was so disruptive to cells - especially brain cells - the tech to revive these earlier sleepers wouldn't have existed until much later per the OA canon. By the time this point arrives we're into the nano wars, the rise of GAIA, the dark ages. And maintaining these freezers would have gotten to be the purview of an AI quite early. (I'll call this AI "Charon", the ferryman of the underworld, for the sake of simplicity.)

When all the unpleasantness happens on Earth - the nano wars and subsequent Expulsion and dark ages - Charon's got a problem: he's got a duty to fulfill (perpetual care, and eventually resurrection) and needs to do something with these deaders. Which means that even though Charon now has the tech to resurrect the dead, Sol is a mess, and obviously the sleepers have got to go elsewhere. The abandoned relic megastructures (left when the Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ that had populated the Hyades transcended), are his solution. My thinking is that the Xi Geminorum themselves, before they transcended, built a megastructure called "Purgatory" as a new home for these revived deaders as fulfillment of some sort of trust. (The Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ might even be descended from Charon in some fashion.)

Purgatory is around an area of the Hyades I call the Godhead, a collection of megastructures built around the eight white dwarfs in the center of the Cluster's core. Through matter mining (I need to go over the canon on how exactly it works in the OA universe), the Xi Geminorum (again, these were aliens in my 'Verse, but I really like the idea that they're an ai-based Terran superciv a lot better) extracted a truly awe-inspiring amount of matter, which they then used to construct the megastructures that formed the base of their hyper-advanced civ.

By this point Charon has enormous financial resources (remember, he's got the trust funds of all those who died, which would have grown to an awe-inspiring amount of wealth over the centuries), and so he begins constructing arks and launching the resurrected towards Purgatory. Also by this point...the Xi Geminorum AI-1 civ has transcended and vanished, and the land rush from New Castillo and other civs to colonize the Hyades is on. (In the OA canon, this is a period of three centuries where everybody was colonizing the Hyades.) What eventually emerged from this, as you pointed out, was the Taurus Nexus.

But it's this wild and woolly colonial period in the Hyades that's interesting to me. What I especially like, in the OA Canon, is that the Hyades stayed low-topospheric for quite awhile, and there were, per the canon, "very few entities above SI:2".

Usually these arks just went straight to Purgatory, in my story. But this particular ark is off course...and heading for a colony world instead of the Cluster Core at Godhead. (Turns out it was not an accident, the malevolent AI that took control of this vessel knew Charon would sniff it out and snuff it if it ever reached Purgatory.)

Can I make it somewhat happier ending? Dunno. This story is dark. The viewpoint character is a former serial killer from Earth who is in control of some seriously potent godtech weaponry. (He's also got a dissembler bomb strapped to his chest, and lives 99% of his life sequestered in VR, because the rest of the crew does not exactly trust him...after all, he's a psychopath with enough firepower to obliterate a continent.)

Still...might be an interesting reversal if this guy were to somehow save some people, as opposed to just summarily nuking them all...