Sketches, outlines, and studies

Welcome to Rûmple// a wrinkle in space-time

Excerpts and concept pieces from the Rûmple universe.

excerpt1// encyclopedia rumpleica

The sthromite¹-mining, excavation colony on Damer – a planet three-quarters of Earth’s size – has got this awful sense of character. The planet is mostly an uninteresting sphere, unremarkable. Yet this fact alone is bizarre, since the planet has only a few small impact craters. The surface is covered in a layer of fine yellow-red grains of sand.

The many lines which one can see from the windows of one’s spacecraft mark ravines which open unto subterranean canyons and wide gorges carved over hundreds of years by sediment-laden waters winding towards underground lakes. The surface of the planet is devoid of lakes; the rivers, on the other hand, leave fine blue-green curves like a spider’s web on the smooth face of yellow-red sand.

— from First sight: Recollections of Damer’s Early Colonists and First Settlers, 3rd ed., unbound volume
compiled for the City Museum of Origins

The collection of journals, letters and messages² that eventually became First sight was first housed in the old mess hall. The alcove opposite the main entrance was originally intended as a public bulletin board. When the first children were born on Damer, three years after the founding of the settlement, their names and birth certificates were posted there. When Elder Gorman became infirm and later died, the mess hall alcove³ was how the then village-sized colony stayed apprised of her status. The place quickly became a place to honour the dead, welcome the living, and keep tabs on the in-between. When the notices are removed they are taken to the Fulminus Gamma Administrative Archives where they are digitised, and then stored for posterity.

excerpt2// on top of the dragon

It is hot on top of the dragon⁴ despite the buffeting breeze that tosses dust into the air along the upper edge of the ravine. Sêno is sweating in the three-day-suit.

Big beads hang off her neck, arms and legs except where they are caught by the too-big suit, where they rivulet down into the catchement fabrics. Sêno curses, зут. The suit still is not sweating. She should have seen a faulty connection. Or did a fan get damaged when she hit her knee?

‘I’ll have to run a diagnostic.’ Sêno scrunches her nose at the idea. Dušan was right. I need to take better care of my stuff.

— from Rumple: chapter 2.1.3 - Sêno’s Weekly Walkabout

The dragon is the subject’s name for the wall to the west of the Hex, opposite the Tечностθра river.

excerpt3// harper’s junior cadet corps

‘I scrubbed these three times already’, Luc whined.

‘In the past—’

‘Uh, fortnight, fortnight and a half.’

‘So you’re certain they’re in perfect condition?’

‘They were when I finished.’

‘Which was when?’

Owen’s raised inflection suggested that he knew it had been over a week since Luc’s suit had been inspected.

Not that they really needed to be inspected that often, since they remained stowed most of the time.

‘Where is the internal pressure regulator valve?’

‘Phhh, come on. Really?’

Owen asked the question again in the same tone, one of polite but insistent need. This was akin to the quick recall training that Luc would get next year, but Owen gave the questions as though he were a paramedic examining a completely foreign suit.

‘Dead centre, in big dark shiny blue. Righty-tighty—’

‘Five. Technically correct, but always speak from the perspective of the observer if you aren’t going to use the correct terms. Where is the—’

‘The Offal terms suck.’ Luc countered quietly.

It was his own private victory that in the jump the Moonshot had finally left behind the, in his own terms, “inhumane oppression by the Bureaucratic Homogenisation Directive Establishment’s Official Standards of Communication”.

That corrupt group of bureaucrats was the source of most of Luc’s problems. It was their fault Luc’s father had to move them to Scotland. Their fault that Luc’s mother hadn’t been able to follow. It was their fault when Owen’s papers were rejected by the university for not meeting national standards.

“It’s their fault that we’re even in this mess”, he thought often recently, “we wouldn’t be stuck in this ’rramt ship on a one way journey to nowhere.”

‘Where is the temperature gauge’, repeated Owen.

‘There are two. The water temperature gauge is on my left arm, just under the elbow.’

‘Which is hard to see. Where’s the other one?’

— from Rumple: chapter 3.2.4 - Life after the long jump

croquis4// au bord de l’inconnu

Sêno has been looking forward to this climb for a while, preparing for it: physically, mentally. In her mind, she has already climbed each pitch a hundred times.

Those who work in the tunnels don’t see much of the sky, and those who are out in the atmo don’t get much dark. Even in the darkest night is akin to a full-moon night on Earth. Jade during the day, the atmosphere catches and refracts sunlight until the wee hours of the night. High atmospheric clouds keep their greenish tint through the night until finally, a blue-white pearl appears on the horizon, alighting the ruddy landscape.

From atop the ridge the lower, redder clouds are visible. These clouds are not all water. The lighter red ones catch the reflected colour off Damer’s salmon crust, weathered and eroded in twisting corridors of salts and atmospheric moisture. The darker clouds are dust storms on the horizon reaching dozens of metres into the air, sometimes hundreds.

Every once in a while, a particularly strong gust catches up along the ridges, and billows up until it is caught as in a whirlpool going up, and then a channel of darker, richer red streaks across the horizon, to later drop in the great undulating stripes that characterise the calmer crater valleys.

— from Rumple:thenotes - on chapter 2.1.3 - Sêno’s Weekly Walkabout

The upper atmosphere is awash with what would be trade winds, if the wind were a viable means of transportation on Damer. Inflamed by Coriolis forces and a relatively high axial tilt, these silt-saturated winds have been slowly eating at the rock. They can wreak havoc on mechanical systems as well, necessitating regular maintenance of the seals, joints, and bearings of quite nearly every moving part on Damer. The few mechanisms that operate using magnets (such as the doors to Sêno and Dušan’s hovel?) usually have battery backups as generators are unreliable. The charged atmosphere has a way of destabilising non-hardened electrical components as well, though this is really only a problem during the seasonal storms.

croquis5// flore et faune

She has never come this far before.

She has never come this way before.

She has never seen this before — anything like this.

It is unlike any tree Sêno could remember. She tried to compare it to the trees on Blaire, but she was much smaller than. Maybe they grew hundreds of metres on Blaire, too. She can not remember. They seemed a lot wider.

This tree, for it has to be a tree, has a thin trunk anchoring its roots to a small slit in the lightly eroded plateau. Its roots spread over the face of one of the many divots in the terrain — each small enough to step into or over, but big enough to get tiring. She tries jumping over one, and just makes it. It’s only two metres. She jumps again, this time towards the tree. Not quite hard enough this time. She slips, catching herself just in time by grabbing onto the trunk. Almost as quickly, she jerks her hand back and looks at the tree.

‘Aïe. Ça fait mal!.’

A piece of the outermost layer of her glove tears off as she jumps back. It is not a deep gash, but it is big.

The piece of fabric sticks to the tree’s trunk, as if frozen. She looks up along the trunk that at first seems to get thicker as it goes up⁵ before splitting into dozens of even thinner stalks, each curving out slightly before reaching an elbow of sorts and shooting almost straight up. Like a reverse lightning strike, hundreds of thin, straight tendrils arc almost jaggedly into the sky. The fabric patch flutters slightly in the breeze, as though trying to tug itself off the branch, but the bark holds onto the fabric just as tightly as to the rock.

— Rumple: chapter 2.1.3 - Sêno’s Weekly Walkabout

This is a focal point for the moment. I’d like to better understand the geography and flora of Damer, and since Sêno’s primary interaction with these aspects of the planet she calls home are almost nonexistent, this is a good opportunity to do so. Overgrown, bulbous versions of the plant we call trees grow in the centre of the Hex, but they do not grow to the heights of the native species. I am certain that, while this lifeform has a cellular structure not dissimilar to some trees and a lymphatic system similar to the sap system of most Terran plants, it will be quite a surprise to discover that this $not-tree has quite a lot in common with insects. Especially with honeypot ants. It resembles a willow tree, but rather than weeping its arms are lifted up and are sustained there, growing to several dozen metres in length. We’ll get into the how at some point as well. (Think spiders.)

excerpt6// Damer compared

The mining colony on Damer is only one among several similar claims managed remotely by corporate entities with investors thinking long term. Some are managed more directly, others (especially the less “regulated” ones) take a more hands-off approach.

Damer is a relatively hospitable planet, if you avoid the poles, most of the year. The eccentricity of it’s orbit is relatively high, such that seasonal differences in weather patterns are significant. Most of the year, temperatures are quite comfortable along the equator (just south of which the Hex was built).

Damer is generally covered in soft sandstone deserts; most of Damer’s water is trapped in the upper atmosphere or far enough from the equator to be quite inacessible. What water is caught up in Coriolis winds is caught up in the unceasing jetstreams and forms the ever-present clouds that line the horizon. Only the equatorial region, what might be termed the tropics, is spared from an almost interminable shadow.

Even in the tropics, when high clouds and low dust storms are quite out of sight, the effect remains. Sthromite-1 dust is highly charged, and upon reaching the upper atmosphere it is caught by the planets considerable magnetic field. The nearly even spread of sthromite-1 dust and high altitude water-ice lends a jade tint to the sky most of the year.

During the so-called winters frost forms high in the atmosphere and is caught by the sediment particles borne aloft across the surface of the planet. This traps and returns some water back to the ground. Then, for a few days at a time, the upper atmospheric cirrus are driven off and — between the billowing dust storms — the almost violet hue of deep space can be seen amoung the stars of Damer’s night sky.

The night sky is rarely dark enough to appreciate this however, even on the few clear opportunities between winter’s eroding bluster. Damer’s sun is perhaps not quite as large as Sol, but the planet makes up for this paltry discrepency by orbiting closer within the Goldilocks zone for much of its orbit.

The planets mass is nearly three quarters that of Earth and along with a diameter nearly half Earth’s days are only about sixteen hours long. Dusk and dawn last almost half the day, and midnight is not much darker than they.

Most mining operations are almost exclusively by miners and support staff.

While it started out the same way, the Hex became home to the children and families of several hundred miners, administrators, farmers, drivers, metalworkers, computer scientists, engineers, and medical staff.

By the settlement’s fifteenth year the population had reached one thousand, nearly five percent native-born.

The 7/6⁶ charter, which incorporated the Hex as a city, was drafted the next year. Seven hundred signatures can be found on the back of the document. Pride in the organisation and relative independence of the colony over the next fifteen years turned into a cultural movement whose motifs include these symbols of the coöperative functioning of the industrial and civil sectors on Damer in Shestograd.: « *Ф/Ш* », « *F/Š* », « *7/6* ».

This coöperation has its roots in the initial structuring of the settlement. The result was a several hundred hectare hexagonal enclosure due west of the mines, dedicated to non-industrial labours. At first, the land was mostly turned to farming experimentation. The entire northern-western half of the Hex was turned to this purpose.

The land on its own was hardly suitable for most crops, but even then some took. As the years passed, more arable soil was created form the waste of the previous crops. In year α-six⁷ the decision was made to start farming outside the Hex.

Most of the remaining soil in the Hex was moved to a central plot of some fifty hectares and trees were planted. This experiment became the Шума/Šuma⁸.

Not long after, the Варош was built to the south; community structures were built at ground level, with living space above. One of the few buildings to not follow suit was Музеј поријекла града⁹, whose exhibits primarily remember the provenance of the Hex’s many denizens not born on the planet Damer.

The Eastern district, which had formerly housed much of the population became increasingly used for smaller scale industrial uses, and eventually earned the moniker Производни прстен (7abring)¹⁰.

Regardless of the political/management structure of the settlement or the remoteness of the system from the rest of civilisation, there is one thing that ties all of humanity together. Getting there.

excerpt7// Transport - a compulsory historification

Voyager 2 and her elder sibling Voyager 1 were the first manmade objects to leave the vestiges of our sun’s gravitational influence. They were not the last.

Timid at first, each failure a small step back, each success a giant leap forward: Humankind looked out of the cave it called home and felt longing.

Longing drew great minds; points of light dotting the celestial canvas inspired generations.

From outside, it looked like a false start. Two lone probes shot out into the black, almost haphazardly. One on a course to nowhere, the other taking a longer way to the same. Then a few long, pregnant moments later they were accompanied.

The two probes whose missions so exceeded purpose or intention float on, long since gone cold. Alone.

Virgins to the black expanse’s endless seas, it took mankind nearly one hundred years to get up the courage to try again.

each failure an immense blow, each success a small step forward: Humankind looked out of the cave that it called home and balked.

So the humans turned to each other, looking for comfort from the fear that haunted them. The borderless continuance which once inspired sailors, and soldiers, and pirates, and pioneers, they wrapped around themselves as a blanket. No better than a […]

— Several False Starts: A History of Man’s First Forays Beyond Sol

The first exploratory probes were sent the long way.

α- and γ-Centauri, Sirius, the hundreds of thousands of star systems within 60 parsecs that have planets that might be candidates for the support of human populations: These were the first candidates, and so a handful of promising ones were selected and probes were sent. The probes pursued their ambassasorial task among the celestial objects sending back data on the interstellar medium as they travelled.

Few of the probes lasted more than a hundred years. And none of them were fast enough to get were they were going in that time. Back home, the scientist gathered the data, collated, simulated. Hypothesis were made, experiments performed. And it was on Earth, (or more properly on Luna, Earth’s moon) that a series of experiments took a quite unexpected turn.

It was known for some time that sustained fusion reäctions could provide a renewable source of energy. Research was focused primarily on the токамак which heats isomers of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) with relatively low Lawson criteria in order to cause fusion and a release of energy greater than the energy input through heating.

This was until the discovery of Kralick’s star. The so-called star was discovered entering Sol’s orbit quite by accident. Analyses from exoplanet hunters indicated the presence of an object of small mass radiating a great deal of energy. It was thought at first to be a rogue planet or a brown dwarf but this hypothesis was discounted a year later as more observations were made. The asteroid’s size, over 500 miles in diameter, gave rise to wild speculations about a comet-planet which, like Pluto, spent most of its orbit far beyond the outer planets. The