Punched In: Good Morning (New) World

Wayfinders rank among some of the toughest folks in the Freelands, and for good reason, as they take Boldly Going to an extremely hands-on and personal level. Clad in sealed exoskeletons that are as much a mobile home and ATV as they are a life support system, they're the first people to set foot on unexplored planets. Just to see if people can, not even to see if they should, they go hiking in some of the galaxy's most dangerous terrestrial places, like it were a weekend getaway. Brave as they may be, they're also privileged to lay eyes on sights beyond what we can imagine, pristine and untouched. Their lives may be hard, but their souls are rugged; they're built for this. So now you get to see how one of them starts her day, and the glory that's waiting for her when she gets up and running.

PS: I now find myself with a really cool planet in the setting that I'm definitely going to be heading back to. Myrisa will return.

Good Morning (New) World

She knew herself to dream easily and peacefully, of meanderings in worlds made entirely out of liminal spaces, of hotel hallways that led opened up into the garden concourses of starports, which splintered off in deltas that became the corridors of underground malls. They were never dreams prone to fits of fancy, but also never unsettling or nightmarish, just restful, and ever at her own pace, always in control. She didn’t need an analyst to figure out what it meant, because it was a symptom of her own character: that she had a mind forever in motion, at travel, even when fully at rest.

In brief moments of lucidity within her dream, she knew she was on her back in a cave. What were they calling this planet again, Myrsia? She thought, examining the kalledoscopic pattern of the low-pile carpet beneath her feet. That’s a nice name for a planet. Given the decor that surrounded her, she should have been in an ink-and-paper library, but if that was the case, where were all the books? Never mind that, what was that humming sound?

Oh right, the electromagnetic anomalies she was investigating planetside. Because she was lying on her back in a cave, and only dreaming she was in a more hospitable place.

Shit. Too much coherent thought, too much outside stimulus- she could feel the dream fading, the vague sensation of an open space being replaced with the close warmth of a soft bedroll. She blinked, and when her eyes opened again, she was looking up through the canopy of her snailsuit’s helmet at a ceiling of burgundy stone, her head pillowed on expanded polar-foam cowling. Beneath the gentle, airtight pressure of her neck support, her body felt as though it was swaddled in an overstuffed comforter, one of her suit’s many technological tricks: simsense strips embedded in the vertebrae interface pads, a built-in electronic pain and discomfort control system, that she could also use to nervehack herself into a more restful night’s sleep. It’s not that the suit’s rest mode wasn’t comfortable enough on its own, working off the same expanding polar-foam tech to turn internal padding into a full-surround sleeping mat. It was more just that she was on day eight of an expected twelve day excursion, during which union safety standards said she couldn’t take the suit off, and being able to convincingly pretend she was wrapped up in bed for eight hours at a time was a huge morale boost.

Lisa Greenaway looked at approximated date in her helmet’s HUD as it woke with her- a month away from being 34, give or take a few weeks to the Devil’s Share of faster-than-light travel. She was in the prime of her life, exactly where she wanted to be: drawing away the curtain of the unknown, on the fringes of the Freeland frontier, exploring an alien world by her lonesome. She was a Wayfinder, one of the toughest people in the known galaxy, ranked among those of Section 99 for their ability to get their jobs done despite impossible conditions. But the 99s were were warriors, one against one hundred types, people capable of sowing fear in the enemies of common freedom and rights like they were monsters that crawled out from a dictator’s bed. She was an explorer, Section 4 under the C-FIC, and one of the elite of their union: someone made to leave the first footprints on undiscovered worlds, just to see if survival was even possible at any scale whatsoever. It was necessary work: even if the people of the Freelands had no interest in a planet, if it was too hazardous to set down on, or too full of sensitive life, people needed to know what was down there, just in case someone had no choice but to make a landing. For one, people needed to know if the water was safe to drink, and she was one of the folks that administered the final test by drinking it herself. That alone took uncommon courage, enough that people looked at her like she was built different, someone to be awed by. It wasn’t something she wanted, necessarily, but something she acknowledged. Fact was, if she tried to normalize what she did as No Big Deal, she’d be expecting every Freelander to be as comfortable sleeping in a cave as she was.

Another fact: this was one of the more aesthetically pleasing and comfortable caves she’d sheltered in, enough that she wanted five more minutes to sleep. A downright Ritz of a cave, really. Nah, she wasn’t staving off school on a lazy morning, she was a professional. Time to wake up.

Her helmet picked up her directed eye motions, its primary method of input for its integrated operating system. She opened the morale media system, and pulled up the next episode in her watch list: Stationbuilders, season 2, episode 4, Organic Roads in Artificial Wilds. It wasn’t that she had any particular interest in a career change to a Homesteading Engineer, just that she liked watching what other people did at their work, hearing their voices in her ears and letting it remind her that there was a civilization she could go back to if she wanted to. Her watching engineers and construction workers build realistically winding roads through the artificial forests of a cylinder station reminded her that she was terran.

She leaned back and let the show play, as she menued over to her suit’s hygiene systems. The atmosphere in her helmet became thick with a cleansing humidity that peeled away the built-up sweat and filth from the day before, before it was cycled away into her pack’s life support processing systems. Her drinking straw extended slightly, and she leaned to bite it- it flooded her mouth with a minty wash, before it too sucked it back away into the recycling processor.

“That’s the big problem with making nice, fun-to-drive roads for people on space stations,” a particularly harried-looking engineer said during the show’s opening reel. Cut to a crash, as a drone test car spun out and flipped on a too-tight curve. “Most people that live on space stations aren’t great drivers…” As her brain fully woke up, Lisa was glad that wasn’t her problem.

The documentary footage fritzed, along with the rest of her suit’s HUD. The notification [ELECTROMAGNETIC ANOMALY DETECTED, SHIELDED] blared in warning amber in the lower corner of her view, a rising, tingling whine tickling her ears. Beneath it, rose the notification [Similar Events Logged During Downtime: 638, Check Message Queue When Ready]. She didn’t need that much proof to confirm firsthand that Myrsia had some sort of subsurface magnetic witchcraft occurring; she could just look outside to do that. The sudden blurts of fuzz and static were just bumps on her road.

Powered motor assists emitted quiet whirs as she righted herself from a horizontal base. She could only recline backwards, as the back module of her suit was bulky, gave it the nickname Snailsuit. In it, she carried both her own life support and provisions, half as internalized systems, half as a robotic backpack of supplies that fed into the internal compartment of the suit. Handy for carrying solid food, so she didn’t have to subsist off of nutrient-enriched liquid meals through her drinking straw alone- other things that kept her feeling terran, feeling alive. Seated, she locked herself upright, checked her suit’s secondary seals, and then unfastened the interior of her left sleeve, enough that she could slip her arm into the suit’s torso compartment and put it to the pack’s inventory port. She menued to her pack’s internal stocks, and picked one of the squares she’d baked herself ahead of her expedition- after a few mechanical squeals, it dropped the wax-paper packet in her hand, near the same to any vending machine she’d used, only far more portable. Real basecamp-baked goodness, with the kind of high density nutrient enrichment she needed bionic augmentation to be able to digest without ill effect. Releasing the seal on her neck protector, she ate her breakfast one-handed- raspberry jam in a crumb-resistant pastry, so charged with calories it was practically a low explosive.

“Artificial wilds and arboretums are one of the most straightforward ways to keep things breathable in a station,” the show’s narrator intoned, his voice deep, wise and rugged. “But with the unbelievable views and vivifying greenspace this provides, it also offers a unique set of infrastructure opportunities… and challenges.” Cut to an ukhar engineer, beckoning to a in-progress model of a roadside vista with a crushingly muscled and pachydermally-skinned arm. “True, you’d want to drive this every day if you could. Problem is you can’t discount some yahoos seeing this as just a cool ramp to launch off of,” he said, his voice an articulate rumble. “Never want to give an opportunity for a determined idiot to pop a rivet in the spaceframe, tuuma?”

Lisa sat in a cave on an unexplored planet with native and static electromagnetic disturbances severe enough to turn an unshielded device into a small bomb, wearing a powered exoskeletal environment suit made to be lived in for periods of a week or more. In that moment, she thought about how anxious living on a space station made her, once upon a time. Popped rivet, she thought to herself, and she shuddered at the thought.

Her suit’s screen fritzed again, longer and bigger this time. It threw the same notification, of an electromagnetic anomaly that the suit had sunk. But then it gave her something she hadn’t seen yet, fonted in the light blue colour code of a meteorological sensor update: [Electrical Storm Detected; Grounding Protection Projected Within Safe Tolerances; Heavy Precipitation Detected].

Myrsia’s atmosphere was volatile and turbulent, a reflection of the strange magnetic streams and currents that ran beneath its surface like leylines. She’d seen meteorological disturbances that her instincts told her were a reflection of the planet’s chaotic magnetics, sudden strange streaks of colour like furtive, high clouds contrasted against a sky that glowed and seethed like a gift shop plasma ball. But she’d yet to observe the planet’s water cycle. She knew it had to have one, there was natural fertility in the soil enough to grow plant life, lichens and fungi, not to mention nurture pollinator insects and a myriad of winged and agile xenofauna. But given what else she’d seen of the planet’s features, she knew she had to get this logged and photographed, because it was bound to be something special.

Manuevering the suit to its feet was nothing to her at this point; once upon a time, it took training and exercise just to be manage it in a few minutes, even with the motor assists.  So she focused on her show as she made her way to the mouth of the cave: “That’s the honest thing about building roads for a living,” the ukhar engineer said, looking over his plans rendered in holosprite models. Zurum, the show chyron said his name was. “You get to make the claim that you do it so that other people can follow safely behind you, and they can’t really call you out as pretentious, because, well…” He shrugged, an earnest smile on a face like craggy stone. Lisa liked him instantly- a practical philosopher.

A flash from outside. Seconds later, thunder. Lisa sped to a running pace, the weight of her suit thudding beneath her, echoing against the walls.

A deluge greeted her, and she stepped out, letting the water pound down on her canopy helmet. Her suit’s disruptive environments screening tried to kick in and silence the noise of the droplets beating against the polymer and alloy of the Snailsuit, to preserve her hearing in the surrounding environment; she belayed it, it was an absolutely gorgeous sound to her at that moment. Life, raging, squalling, unbound life, falling out of the sky on a world barely mapped. It put a thrill in her heart, but nothing compared to what she saw when she turned her eyes to the horizon.

She’d dubbed them Myrsian Miracles in her notes, and they were something neither she nor any that worked under Section 4 had any precedented for: gargantuan floating stone masses, holding stable station above what Lisa reckoned were coherent convergence points of the planet’s magnetic anomalies. Given that they looked as though they’d been forcibly uprooted, each of them suspended high above a crater in Myrsia’s crust, Lisa conjectured that they might just be particularly iron-rich, but they might also hold some form of naturally occurring superconductor, considering how solidly they held in position, and how the largest of them she’d observed were literal islands in the sky. Islands big enough that she’d gotten clear photographs of of the vibrant, tall grasses that covered their surface, with the occasional speckling of hardy, gnarled, flowering trees that grew in groves. She looked to to her immediate north, to the Miracle she’d noted before settling down for the night, the one she’d called Shark because of the mountain that poked out of its back.

A waterfall. Over the edge of the flying island, a waterfall high enough in the sky that the still-setting sun was casting its light directly through it, splitting it into a perfect rainbow. Wonder held her still, not in disbelief, just out of sheer need to behold, be stunned and drunk by galactic majesty. When it waned just slightly, her more professional instincts kicked in, and she drew up her suit’s camera functions, engaging digital zoom to snap photos and capture video. As she directed her suit’s camera suite, ignoring the intermittent fuzzing from the electromagnetics raging around her, her mind worked: was that just simple runoff, or were there actual identifiable streams and rivers on the surface of the Shark? Wait no, scratch that: she focused to where the waterfall was flowing from, cranked the digital zoom up to its 40x maximum. The flat surface toward the edge of Shark, it wasn’t stable like it was yesterday, it was shifting, with ripples, waves.

What she was seeing was a lake, a full basin contained on a floating island, made to overflow by torrential downpour and cast down a waterfall from stratospheric height. She froze again, paralyzed with a mix of reverence and madness, and when she regained her composure, she snapped her cameras like an ironclad blazing away its cannons in a broadside attack.

Before her eyes, her masterpieces rendered in high-res, images of a beauty that pushed the boundaries of understanding: light, water, stone and air, cast in shades of celestial glory; a soaring nature-temple of untouched rock high above the terrestrial plane, cascading waters through open sky in every colour the eye could capture and the mind comprehend. What she was seeing was the awesome kernel of truth at the core of legend, the sort of wonder enough to make an agnostic give a prayer of thanks, because their opinion just got solidly swung towards divinity.

She was seeing the reason why she was an explorer. She was seeing why anyone would choose to be an explorer.

Then her HUD raged at her in danger red, as in her ears, a peal of thunder distorted, and became a fuzzing whine: [ELECTROMAGNETIC BUILDUP DETECTED IN VICINITY; RECOMMEND HAZARD SHIELD]. Even through her suit, she could feel her skin tingling, her hair standing on end, all accompanied by the whine, louder than she’d ever heard it. That was the close warning that she was passing near one of Myrsia’s magnetic prominences, she’d learned on her journey. Except now, she was feeling it all around her, hearing it all around her, especially from above.

She dropped to a knee and keyed her suit’s hazard defenses, a shield array fit to turn away multiple direct hits from a plasma rifle. Reactive Potential coalesced around her like a bubble of half-visible oil, her suit’s crouching form small enough to shelter itself totally and evenly within. As fast as she could, she set as many systems into safe mode as possible, trimming power output to just life support, shields and her camera array as it still snapped away on auto shutters, given the last directive to focus on the sky and any atmospheric anomalies.

Then her world turned white, and mute, and dizzy.

When she could discern she was hearing ringing in her ears, that’s when she knew she was alive. It faded, replaced with the beating of rain that sounded like it was dying off. She would have liked to have her vision back, but she realized that her helmet had responsively polarized to a totally opaque state to ward the sudden flash, and she’d doused the internal lighting to prevent an EMP blowout. Her eyes weren’t fried, she was just in the pitch dark. She was fine, she assured herself, it was safe enough to take a deep breath, she could still hear suit’s air supply cycling and the strange frequencies of the shield emitters working. Neither were straining; her suit had shrugged it off, just like it always did.

The planet just tried to kill her, and she shrugged it off. Toughest in the galaxy, she thought. She was trying to pump herself up but even her mental voice sounded punch drunk and anxious. Right, better not to think about it. She relit her HUD instead, and checked the meteorological sensors: localized disturbances were fading, back to the levels she’d logged previously. But with it, came an odd and slightly alarming warning: [CAUTION: PRECIPITATION TEMPERATURE - APROX 82-84C. CHECK SECONDARY SEALS.]

“The Hell?” Lisa said to herself in the darkness.

She turned her helmet back to transparent, and saw the sky was on fire. No, not quite on fire, but burning off into embers- distant motes of plasma in the upper atmosphere, purple, peach and blue streaks of ball lightning spiralling off in mad directions before dying away into trails of hot vapour. As she looked, she brought up the video feed from her cameras, looking for anything discernable, anything that survived the blast uncorrupted. What she saw was hard to read: one second, it was the stormy, roiling sky of a planet that had been in the process of a sunset for the past three Union Standard Days, a dark matte of clouds lit from pink and peach light finding breaks in the cover; the next, it was flat white, completely unreadable, blindingly bright even as a video. She backed it up and reviewed it, scrubbed back and forth. Then she put it on the slowest motion playback she had, and watched.

It wasn’t a lightning bolt, or a sheet that lit the cloud cover, but in one instant, the sky above her had exploded with such a buildup of electromagnetics against contrasting thermal currents, it became a momentary vastness of ionized matter. She watched it happen frame by frame, clouds flashing into what she could only describe as an ocean of lightning, a great sea of plasma that swallowed the storm near-whole like some galactic Fire God. What it left, it boiled, casting it down as a rain that fell as hot as tea. She couldn’t feel the heat, the suit was made to walk through a forest fire like it was a drizzle. But she could see it happening before her eyes in real time, as the cold rain that fell began to rise as a fog off the ground as its temperature rose, turning to a steaming vapour that clung as condensation to her helmet. Microvibrations from the suit’s external cleaning systems made it sheet away, clearing her vision again, just in time for her to watch the final act of the drama before her eyes.

From out of the fronds of broad grasses, shades of a verdant green-blue interspersed with autumnal hues, there sprung great, thick shoots that rose skyward, the size of saplings. At their highest point, lantern-bulbs of red, gold, pink and violet popped and peeled open, becoming great, wax-petaled flowers that were also water basins. As they drank deep of the near-boiling rain, the great, bulbous stigma at their center began to glow with amber bioluminescence, which travelled down their stems like knots and cords and into the soil. In turn, bit by bit, and slowly at first, vivification began to spread from the bases of the huge flowers, taking the form of the grass seeming to strain and twitch, before it simply grew in a visible spurt. From the larger tufts sprung flowers like heliotrope, which immediately burst with a hazy pollen that mixed into the haze of the hot rain, gave it faint hues and an ephemeral sparkle. Environmental sensors came back relatively clean: pollen allergies would forever be pollen allergies, but there wasn’t anything particularly nightmarish in the mist that her suit could detect.

Lisa found herself short on breath. It took her a second to work out that she was holding stock still as she took this in, overwhelmed by what she was trying to grasp, the details happening all at once. She didn’t know what she was looking at, but instinctively she could understand what was happening, a form of symbiosis unlike anything she’d seen, nor read in the factbooks assembled by her peers, seen in their photos and footage. As if through some unknown process, the flowers were absorbing not just the water but the heat, then synthesizing it into some sort of active growth catalyst. It was like the speed growth tech used in greenhouses, only fast enough to work before the naked eye, and she had no idea how it was happening.

Life had evolved for this. This happened enough that the plants could exploit it.

Then she heard a sound over the rain, amplified by the suit’s external mics, a clamouring of claws against slick stone, coming from over a nearby ridge. Carefully, she tread as silently as she could manage in her suit, and found that at the bottom of the shallow ravine below, a congregation of six-legged, stony-backed tortoisoid creatures had emerged from their sleeping craters, literally uprooting themselves to shower in the scalding heat, more than a dozen somehow being nurtured by a rain that should have been withering. They were so invigorated that they were practically dancing in place, their back-stones of built-up calcium and silt from their habitat clacking against each other, a few of the fiestier ones finding it in them to take little pounces and swipes at their peers, who held them at bay with feigned bites. It wasn’t pain, they weren’t being harrowed by this- they were loving every minute.

Everything. Take pictures of everything. Video, audio, stills, 3D depthscans, everything her suit could render. And breathe, as always, remember to breathe.

Lisa made the last point her momentary priority, letting the automatic functions of her camera suites take over. Enough was happening that even a Procedural Intellect-based algorithm was able to catch frame after frame of pure gold with minimal input. She centered herself and focused on bringing her heart rate down, watching contentedly as her suit’s drives were filling with unprecedented documentary evidence. No, more than contentedly, elatedly, because this was her life’s work. She’d been to many places, seen many things, and with her outlook, she was capable of seeing seeing the beauty and fascination in a totally dead rock of a planet. But this was something entirely different from what she’d seen in her life, something that just struck her different. This was something that she knew would take the imagination of her people, her culture, something that was equal parts dangerous and wonderful, an expression of what Mother Nature could work in her terrestrial craft when she was at her most inspired.

She understood: she was building a road, that others would follow behind her to this spot. A Wayfinder- she’d always thought of the name as romanticized, but now she knew she’d found something people would make their way to. It made her giddy. And a little bit frightened.

So she focused on the job at hand: document the bared secrets of an alien world, as they rose to strange life in front of her. Just to make sure she was only thinking in the moment, she let her show’s audio play in the background beneath her camera suite, give her a voice to focus on that wasn’t the one trying to talk a mile a minute in her head. Because she had a job to do, one that had only just begun for her shift, and one that was shaping up to be a different kind of day at the office. What she was seeing was life writ large and diverse, as worthy as any other of protection against the damages of irresponsible colonization. If people were going to try to make this place a home, and they would, because Freelanders were nuts like that, the ecosystem needed to be documented so that it could be guarded, respected and sustained. Plus, people deserved to know if any of this stuff was going to eat them, that was also a big part of her job, Lisa reminded herself.

Right, good. Head on straight, one foot in front of the other. Good morning (new) world, it was another big day.