Seasons of Tomorrow: a furry cyberpunk hard sci-fi worldbuilding project

[pepper]

Seasons of Tomorrow 

My Big AU Thread 

Introduction

So this started off as a couple drawings I did of my fursona Pepper. I was sort of toying around with color and landscape as a creative challenge and really enjoyed the color palette I landed on for this piece. People seemed to really like that one so I continued to use the future setting for my drawings and did this piece as a challenge in extreme perspective. While I was working on these two drawings I spent time thinking about the world they are depicting, with the mildly vivid colors and few actual people around (mostly drones and ads). I also did a huge stupid crack on the moon on the first drawing and really ran with that.

To give you a better idea of the feel of this world I made the first drawing while obsessively listening to Tokyo Police Club’s Citizens of Tomorrow (but really that whole EP is great).

I later made a second fursona, named Sodie (short for Sodium because I am hilarious). Sodie was made as a sona for the more carefree, less anxious part of me that has been having more of a voice lately and so I wanted to express that part of me in the fiction that I was crafting with Pepper. I decided that Pepper is a musician and an artist, and Sodie can be a technician and mechanic. These are the two big parts of my own productive life – I’m an artist but also work in a highly technical dayjob. I made this piece featuring the two sisters at home in the same setting I had been working on, and in the background as a throw-away detail I decided Sodie could have a drawing table with blueprints. This turned into her spaceship.

[pepper]

Sodies Spaceship – the initial thought process and brainstorming

This is where this project really took off. I wanted Sodie to be a spaceship pilot, but she’s a raccoon and super scrappy and would absolutely have built her own ship, so I made some sketches to see what that could look like. I wanted it to be built from scraps, so I needed to create at least three different types of ships that she got the major parts from. This meant I had to think about where the scraps came from, why are they derelict, who did she know to get her hands on them, and how was it built.

I also had to consider: Pepper is a musician and artist, that’s easy, that’s what a lot of my friends do in Portland irl. Sodie though? She drives a spaceship. That’s fiction, and there needs to be a reason for that. What does she do with her ship? Well, she’s a courier and smuggler, obviously. This is cyberpunk, she probably smuggles goods for some sort of resistance. Hm, I had the moon all busted up, maybe I can tie in Lunar bases? I like the idea of the big stupid death star. Let’s roll with that.

Designing the ship became a learning experience in astrophysics.

So, Sodie drives a spaceship between Earth and the Moon. OK, what does her ship need to support that? Well, piloting, comms, life support, mess hall, cargo of course, air lock, engines, power supply. Wait, what exactly is rocket fuel? OH, heavy as hell. I want her ship to look like Serenity from Firefly, so I need something other than traditional rockets. OK, ion thrusters… woah they need a lot of power to do what I want. Hm, ok how about nuclear power?

Nuclear fission can exist in space, and the method for cooling can actually be really cool (lol). You can have a huge radiator outside the ship that uses the vacuum of space to spill off the heat as the coolant travels across the radiator surface. I brought this all up with a friend who works in aerospace doing rocket launches (yes I have a rocket scientist friend not to brag  ). She recommended fusion, considering this is in the future, and Helium-3 is a fuel source for nuclear fusion that can be harvested from none other than the Moon, a central location for my setting! Using fusion has the added benefit of: we don’t actually have working economical fusion power generation irl yet, so I can make my fusion core a black box that “just does” the amount of power I need. This is one of the few things in this world that is hand-waved and not based in hard science (the other being gravity generation using tiny black holes. Don’t think too hard about how scary that is).

So from here I knew everything I needed to build the spaceship. I know how much power is needed. I researched cargo transport and found the dimensions and weight of TEUs (twelve-foot equivalent units) and knew how heavy the ship is with a full load. I calculated the power necessary to get two sets of four Hall-ion thrusters to get enough thrust to take off from the planet’s surface into space (1.5 GW energy input into Hall ion thruster can provide about 600kN. 4X thrusters per engine, 2x engines mounted on the ship: ~4800kN of thrust in vacuum , I_sp = 1200sec, using Xenon propellant. All this I think is actually possible, given an arbitrary power generation which I allowed myself with my fusion black-box). I learned about the way the ISS uses electrolysis to re-use Oxygen in air, and how they recycle water in almost a closed loop. Again, with arbitrary amounts of power this loop can be completely closed and Sodie’s ship can have a completely self-contained cycle of oxygen and water. So cool!

[pepper]

Piloting, Comms, Cargo, and Ship Overview

   

Piloting is very cluttered. I wanted it to feel lived-in. I looked up what standard instruments would be present in modern aircraft, and added a few others for space travel. I made sure to indicate how you control roll, pitch, and yaw. A big theme in my setting is a counter-culture rejection of automation and AI, and so everything is as manual as possible in here. HAM radio for radio comms, CDs for music, CRT monitors instead of LCDs. This also includes the comms systems: I have radio, radar for peeking inside wrecks, and a laser comms system that can be used for private uplink to a satellite Sodie built for communicating with the resistance members of her cell.

The overview drawing includes information about ship dimensions and cargo capacity. This is a key schematic for me as it has all the dimensions I needed to design all the other parts of the ship. Here is also the registration info for the ship:

• Name: le deluge - named for a phrase by King Louis XV of France, “après moi, le déluge,” after me the flood. He knew his decadence was hated by the people, and knew that once he died the monarchy was over. He was an asshole, but he was right. Sodie’s ship is a part of a new flood.
• Registration: [7%L2X^M – TRA-LNA] Δ/Σ – registration ID, indicating her ship travels between Earth and the Moon. She also has a delta/sigma pass which gives her entry to the  Δ-STAR artificial moon inhabited by the ultra wealthy. She delivers grey-market goods for the Corpos but also smuggles gear to the small resistance cell aboard the station.

[pepper]

  engines, power generator, life support, commons, and crew quarters

this is a rough design but I'm pretty sure its actually feasible given enough power lol    

Details are in the images for how the engines work. Ion thrusters and fusion power generation using Helium-3 harvested from the Moon. The ion thrusters glow bright blue as they fire. They can be used for take-off from the planet’s surface, but it’s cheaper to use space port launchers to takeoff. Space ports on Earth use giant magnetic railguns to launch ships into the air until they are high enough for ion thrusters to take over. This is how big logistics companies transport their goods, but independent couriers and shuttles can also use the ports. This is incredibly unsafe.

Life support is largely taken from what they are currently using on board the ISS, with very little modification. I did take some liberties and make the water system look more industrial, because I just like how it looks. In reality it’s just a boring box hidden in the walls of the ISS. Commons is a kitchenette and two small crew quarters underneath the maintenance interstitial. This part of the ship used to be a part of a military soldier transport vessel, and the angled wall used to be a large hatch that opened to let soldiers and armored vehicles out in active warzones. Sodie sealed this shut and now it’s a living room and kitchen. Food is stored in two cargo containers in the cargo hold, and there is a dumbwaiter to bring things up/down the ladder. Ladder access is the only way to get down here normally, although there is a freight elevator on the catwalk that can take you between the cargo hold, this area, and the upper deck.

[pepper]

undercarriage, harpoon, airlock, spacesuits

This is the outside-the-ship stuff. The harpoon is the only thing resembling a weapon aboard the ship. About 350 meters of tightly wound cable connects to a harpoon with dumb-ai (image recognition) tracking and a physical barb as well as an electro-magnet for grip on the target. Uses solid-state fuel that needs replacing after every use.

The airlock is one of the only things Sodie has on the ship that was aquired new. She got it from a friend for a steal, her friend found it after it fell off the back of a space truck. The advertising is awful and it cannot perform up to the specs that IAC advertises, but the Safe-T-Loc is still one of the most reliable civilian airlocks on the market. Just don’t try taking it to the surface of Venus.

The spacesuits are fun. This is a furry world, so the suits come in many different body types to accomodate different ears, tails, heights, etc. This is the feline version :3


That's it for now! Next up: all the details about the world, the major players in politics, what the hell Freezone is, and how you can have a few billion people in space that don't starve! (if ya wanna see that before I post it here I have a drawing already up on my site wink wink  )

[pepper]

Project update!

   An Aside: A manifesto from a Freezone resistance leader 

The other day I discovered nightfall.city and claimed a spot on the shore there, wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it at first. I decided I want to try telling a non-linear story with my characters and make it a part of my worldbuilding thing. There's a link hidden on my site's homepage that takes you to this little sub-project, so go look if you want! (it isn't hidden that carefully lol), or if you don't wannt search for it here it is :P

Anyways it's meant to be a copy of the data on the satellite that Sodie runs, saved as a a git check-out on her laptop. She lost her laptop somehow, and that's the mystery: how did she lose it and what can you learn about what's happening by looking around the files on her laptop?

I was sort of inspired by computers you find in immersive sims like Deus Ex.

I haven't introduced Freezone in this thread yet, but the tldwrite (yet) is: Freezone is a section of space around Earth that is radiation-free due to the Van Allen Radiation Belts and human intervention in further de-ionizing the space between the belts. The result is a sliver-shaped donut ring of space that is safe to spend a lifetime in: home to about 3.5 billion people, without any centralized government. Just a bunch of stations, ships, convoys, families, communes, cults, and co-ops, all floating around in space with a strong DIY attitude and fierce independence as a deeply held cultural value. There's a lot of good and a lot of bad there but it's all very messy and very human.

Basically, gay space communism.

Freezone is a core part of my world, and the central conflict is corporate empires from Earth trying to push their way into Freezone after conquering the moon. My characters belong to a resistance group fighting against these Corpos, the satellite this laptop is connected to is a part of that resistance movement.

This is the manifesto written by one of the founders of the resistance, I'm pretty proud of it and I won't be putting anything else on the nightfall.city site until its all done, so I wanted to share this here now:



                                  __       
                                /´ ·´         
                               (  (   .         
                      _____    `·  `‾,     
                   .´:  .   `.    ‾‾       
                  /::     .   \                   
                 ¡::: .        ¡     _  ()   
                 !:::.  .     .!   /   \           
                  \::::'·'.'.'/    \   /           
                   `.:::::.'.´       ‾             
                      ‾‾‾‾‾     

                resistance for a unified freezone.
               
                resistance
                                 unified
                                         free

What do these mean in the context of this group?

To me, it means that what Freezone has become is something very special, something that cannot and should never be controlled. To be controlled is to be imprisoned, forced to be uniform. To be uniform means there can never be true unification. Unification does not mean we all follow the same laws and have the same leaders. In the context of what we believe in, of what Freezone has by chance become, unification means the freedom to be different, wild, chaotic: a mess of humanity spread accross space orbiting our ancestral home, together. It is a collective unified in the idea that we are different, and that is ok. To be different from your neighbor is encouraged. We are a diverse people, unified in our differences.

Freezone started because people were pushed off the Earth. Corpos were strangling our ancestors, dangling the promise of property as a carrot, hiding the stick they used to drive ever increasing productivity from us. When fusion came, energy became cheap, and the promised wealth of the world never trickled-down to those at the bottom. When AI allowed labor to be automated, the work done by the common man did not become easier. It only became possible for the Corpos to demand more of it from us.

So, our ancestors left. Exiled from their home, their Gaia, their Terra, their Earth, their soil, their home. Fled to the stars, just so they could breathe.

Those that left, those that came to space, were the ones that had things to do, things to say. They had a DIY spirit, built their own ships, their own stations and satellites. They were the people who could build something from nothing, and what they built was wild, chaotic, purely human in its splendor. Those left behind on the old world fell in line, they took the path of least resistance live just to get by, living for the weekend, which is all too short a time to live. But the ones that the Corpos couldn't control, we made our own world, and we are truly alive.

Freezone grew naturally into a wild collective of communities with as many philosophies as there are people, and without the central government to corral us into boxes, without the power to smooth out our differences. By its very nature, Freezone resists centralized authority, and encourages community independence. It is not a perfect place, far from it, but it is a purely human place.

Today, the poisonous philosophy of Control the Corpos thrive on has flowed into space. It has reached its tendrils past Freezone, unable to find a grip on the brilliant chaotic sea of our collective souls, but it has reached the moon. It has attacked our moon, scarring her. The Imbrium Fissure will forever blight her face, and Tycho City is an impressive feat of human engineering, turned against itself by the desires of the corrupt, turned into a monument to Corpo control. In recognition of their own toxic inhumanity the Corpos have themselves fled Earth, creating their own world, Delta Star, further separating themselves from us, further symbolizing their disdain for humanity. And it is from this world of theirs that they threaten ours.

The Corpos have begun aggressively disrupting Freezone communities. They are infiltrating our world, attempting to poison it with their Control, while overtly attacking our people with their PMC soldiers and their nukes.

Freezone has enjoyed generations of community building, of surviving, then thriving in our space, together building something beautiful and truly unique, to stand as a beacon of hope against all of human history.

Now is the time to defend that world.

Now is the time to push back against the Corpo attacks, to keep the spirit of our diverse collective strong against their propoganda. And we cannot stop at the VA Belts. We need to push back, into their system, to destabilize their fragile world from within and without, the same as they try to do to ours. Delta Star, Tycho, the Corpo Empires on Earth, they are all filled with far more of our people than Corpos.

And those people seek the freedom we found.
And that is a freedom we want to share.

Now is the time to resist, and we will win this fight, because we are free, and we stand unified in our freedom.

- Kaia Lee, 2087

[pepper]

^{Also! Please respond here in the thread if you wanna talk about any of this! I want to talk about this project LOL I don't intend this thread to just be updates from me, I would love to have some discussion about this project or questions, recommendations, tell me if my science is egregiously wrong, talk about your own projects if they're similar, whatever!}

[zomboid]

this looks amazing!! i would put myself in the group of people that Really Like the original piece you drew :>

also only now is my brain processing sodium and pepper / salt and pepper. read through this like 3 times and only Now getting the joke 

i wish i had a bunch of interesting questions to incentivize you but you've covered pretty much all of the bases i could think of asking about when it comes to technicality... im really impressed with the amount of effort especially behind the science of sodie's ship

the only thing i can really think of - some of them are a bit Obvious and Implicit - but what other inspirations have you pulled on aside from Deus Ex? :> whether it's media inspirations or political inspirations or even just People inspirations im really curious about what sparked your interest to start making this!!

[pepper]

Thank you Kepler I'm flatttered lol 

the only thing i can really think of - some of them are a bit Obvious and Implicit - but what other inspirations have you pulled on aside from Deus Ex? :> whether it's media inspirations or political inspirations or even just People inspirations im really curious about what sparked your interest to start making this!!

So cyberpunk has always been a favorite genre of mine, I think I was just thinking about it when I was drawing my characters and the whole idea sort of got out of hand. Definitely influenced by the Current State of Things and all that, but I've also been influenced by a lot of cyberpunk things since forever.

A (non-exhaustive) list of inspirations and cool cyberpunk things to check out!

• ghost in the shell
• cowboy bebop
• firefly (this is the main influence LOL)
• blade runner (original and 2049 but especially 2049)
• hackers (1995)
• alien (the whole franchise)
• Elysium, District 9
• Terry Gilliam (especially Brazil)
• Deus Ex (the original but also HR)
• Elite: Dangerous
• FTL: Faster than Light
• The Matrix (especially Animatrix)
• William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Philip K Dick
• Tokyo Police Club - A Lesson in Crime
• Arctic Monkeys - Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
• A Perfect Circle - Eat the Elephant
• analog photography, local Portland punk music scene, DIY culture (zines, cassettes, patches, crust clothes, etc)

[pepper]

So I finished my little interactive short story "satellite server" ... thingy!   I decided to host the whole thing on my site because I wanted to style is and use a little javascript.

There's a link hidden on my site, but if you don't wanna hunt for it (again it is not well hidden) you can find the "first page" here:

https://mildlypepper.net/resistsat03_c/found/index.html

I'm open to constructive feedback/ criticism on any of this! Think peer review, anything that you can offer to improve my writing or art is welcome ^.^

[pepper]

Project update!

conlangs and anthrolopogy

Making a bird-folk species for the setting, pondering on their culture relative to mammalian evolution/ culture & society, and developing a conlang

I'm still messing around in a DAW to produce exactly what I want this thing to sound like, but I want to share my progress on this idea!

I made a new character, Artemis, a corvid witch who lives alone in their ship, who is one of Pepper’s friends in Freezone. Artemis provides tarot readings, palm/ plume readings, and blessings/ curses in exchange for goods (Freezone is a barter economy, and corvids are really big into anarchism, so Artemis only barters for goods, she doesn’t use c.reds).

This means I need to contend with this fun problem of divergent evolution: “dinosaurs also evolved alongside several diverse mammal species”, whereas in our world only great apes got to evolve. So, how did a species of birds evolve? How was that process different and how was it similar to mammal evolution that yielded the anthro mammal species's?

Crows are: very social, engage in mutual aid, assist other species, live in large multi-generational flocks, and will go out of their way to assist strangers (other crows) when someone else calls for help (another crow calling for assistance mobbing a raptor, for instance). So it makes sense that the corvids were the group that led the initial migration from Earth to found Freezone: they were the anarchists and socialists, this sort of mindset is inherent to the corvid culture.

It also works out that the species whose anthropological ancestors could fly (modern corvids are too large to fly, their wings are used primarily for balance, body language, and to assist in spoken singing language. More on that in a second) were the ones that made the first big push off-planet. They are also the reason my world developed fusion power before the internet or AI: they wanted to fly, and they weren’t satisfied with just getting to the moon a couple times and calling it quits.

Crows also use their wings to sort of hover-jump really high (kinda how actual crows will do the same to get to high places without actually flying), and they still have hollow bones so they can easily jump to high-up places, perch, ruffle their feathers in annoyance, all the cool bird mannerisms. Since they do not have hands they evolved to be very good at balancing on one foot while they use their other foot and their beak to manipulate tools and interface with technology. For this reason corvids are very particular about keeping floors clean. I also really like the visual of a humanoid bird buying groceries, holding a grocery basket in their beak, while speaking completely clearly because they don’t need to move their beak to speak mammal languages.

This brings me to the big thing I’ve been working on the last couple weeks:

   Birdsong Conlang 

I wanted a specific language for my bird-folk to speak. They lived for thousands of years without much contact with mammals. So while mammals were doing their Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform thing, the birds had something else going on. Birds irl can sing really well, and are able to recognize that specific songs and patterns have specific meaning, and crows have been shown to be able to choose which songs and which calls they use with forethought: birdsong isn’t just some instinctive utterance, it is used to communicate specific ideas with other birds. Crows even communicate purposefully to other species: they have been found to call out to wolves when they find weakened or wounded prey animals so the wolves can kill the prey animal, and the crow can then feed off the carcass when the wolf is done eating! Birds are so cool!

I wondered if it were possible then, to estimate what a language that had its roots in birdsong might look like.

I have two languages of this type: Ancient Ionian, and Modern Corvus.

Ancient Ionian is not well defined, in-universe not much is known about it and it is a dead language. It used tetrachords as a big part of its grammar, and sentences were very open to interpretation, the tetrachords used in particular patterns to convey specific meanings. It is theorized that tones were relative to the other tones being spoken by a speaker at a given moment, sort of a just-intonation tuning system that you had to be there to really get. And there are no recorded examples of what it sounded like.

Modern Corvus is descended from Ionian, and while it still leaves a lot open for interpretation, requiring body language to fully convey specific ideas (mammals find Corvus very difficult to learn), it is much well defined than Ionian and still widely spoken by modern corvids.

Each “letter” of the language is derived from a specific tone, a frequency that can be approximately described using the 12-tone equal temperament system of musical theory. A triad chord is then built from the tone for each letter in a word or phrase, the chord’s quality depending on the speaker’s intended intonation (formal, informal, somber, excited). The triad quality usually remains the same for an entire spoken phrase.

Meter indicates the tense of the phrase: past, present, or future. Percussion is used to keep time (corvids will quickly tap their beaks at the end of each measure while speaking), as well as to indicate clause changes or when someone is done with their turn at speaking (low "drumbeats" are created by flapping wings).

Formality, intended “tone of voice”, indications for when a speaker is done speaking so their conversation partner can begin responding without accidentally interrupting, are all built-in to the language, because they are all very important in corvid communication/ culture. Corvids value explicitly communicating matters of formality and politeness, while being more interpretive when it comes to the actual content, whereas mammals tend to do the opposite: they tend to imply things like formality or sarcasm with sometimes vague tone of voice, and express many specific ideas with large vocabularies. This is another reason Corvus is difficult for mammals to pick up. On the other hand, corvids are naturally skilled at mimicry, and can speak mammalian languages relatively easily.

For this reason most corvids are multilingual: they speak Corvus with their families and with other corvids, and they will speak at least one mammalian language (usually English). It is much more rare to find a mammal that speaks Corvus fluently.

Grammar Rules for Corvus

I built Corvus as a sort of ungodly combination of toki pona and 12-TET music theory. The language itself shares the same vocabulary and much of the same grammar as toki pona, but includes a couple other rules that make use of musical chords (triads), meter, and percussion, in order to make it sound like a language natively used by birds. Also, because there are 14 letters in toki pona and not 12, I merged toki pona’s letter “j” to be a “i”, and “w” to be “u”. I chose these letters to drop because they are among the least frequently used toki pona letters and are easy enough to merge into more frequently used ones. The distribution of letters, especially vowels, are meant to be spread across the circle of fifths, with the hope of making this sound at least a little harmonious (it doesn’t lol)

Meter defines tense. Words are spoken in the necessary meter, with clicks or taps at the end of each measure. If a word has fewer letters than quarter notes in the measure, or if it is longer than one measure but ends with beats remaining in the measure, the remainder of the measure is consisted of rests. Words always start at the beginning of a measure.

For each letter in a spoken word, a triad chord is built using the letter’s assigned note (from the first table above) as its root note. Do this for each letter in each word, using only one kind of triad for the entire sentence.

The triad’s quality explicitly defines how a sentence is meant to be interpreted. If someone is speaking in minor triads, you can be sure they are not being serious and if they say something that sounds rude you know that they are not being rude. Sarcasm is not left up to interpretation.

This is not a very useful language, nor do I intend for it to be actually usable by human beings.

Because I make liberal use of diminished and augmented chords in the language, it doesn’t really sound what we would normally call “harmonious.” Words do not fall within a specific scale to sound good together, and augmented chords especially will typically sound very off to our ears. This is on purpose: this a language spoken by the descendants of dinosaurs, it isn’t going to sound “pretty” to mammals.

The “letters” of each word are also spoken very quickly, and so it would also be almost impossible for a listener to pick up what is being said unless they are themselves a corvid, are fluent in toki pona, and have perfect pitch.

toki pona is an esoteric language which leaves a lot open for interpretation. Transcribing a toki pona phrase into Corvus renders it almost impossible to understand when listened to, and only possible to understand when reading it if you are a musician who knows western 12-tone equal temperament music theory. Furthermore, when corvids in my setting speak the language they make use of flapping their wings, tilting their heads, and other forms of body language, making the language even more difficult for non-corvids to understand.

In-universe, Corvus was never historically written down. It can be written onto a musical staff or written down using chord notation, but such written forms are meant for mammal musicians to understand harmonic musical compositions, and are not effective ways of actually communicating the language of Corvus. Audio recording was developed by corvids much earlier than by mammals in our world (phonographs and wax cylinders were invented in the 1500s and were in use by scholars to record their work until the 1800s when proper turntables and flat records were invented), and historical records of Corvus (or rather, Ionian) that survived antiquity are rare.

So what I’ve done is make a language that is (nearly) impossible for humans to use. 
Let’s say something in Corvus! 

The toki pona phrase “ale li pona” means something like “everything’s good”:

Following the above example, the phrase "it's all good :3" when translated into Corvus might sound something like this: https://mildlypepper.net/media/art/cyberpunk/ale_li_pona.flac

I plan to use this system to make a whole conversation and see what it sounds like. This sample kinda sounds like nonsense language you hear in like Banjo Kazooie or something, which I dig! It still doesn't sound like what I'm imagining, so I want to mess around more with my DAW and apply effects until I can figure that out, which may take some time as I'm also learning how to use a DAW lol

Thanks for reading, hope you found this interesting, or at least fun!
till next time :3