I had planned on doing a post on the Robopocalypse and how the economy will need to change to deal with that onrushing event. However, I'm swamped. That past will come on Feb 6th. Instead, I am going to post about something I wrote. Its part of a background for a larger writing project I have been using as my self medication for dealing with stress.
After looking at Kotk and her sister quattids, it’s time to take a turn to another species. Yes, its another case of DOOMDOOMDOOM. I’m using their experience as vignettes within the larger story. There are going to be a few more these past Kotk’s people and this one. However, I’m looking for that creative outlet and seeing if I can do something a bit niftier than most of the books I’ve been picking up at the bookstore as of late.
First though, let's talk about their world.
Let’s discuss another doomed world. This one is going through the opposite of what Kotk’s world is. This is fire to Kotk's ice: rather than freezing over, this one is getting ready to boil itself to death. Like Kotk’s world, there is an intelligent species to witness it. Unfortunately, its also not going to survive. They are the Shia, but this email is not about them. Its about their world. We need a name for the world. While I’ve settled on Agassiz for Kotk’s world, the Sia homeworld needs a moniker that’s appropriate. For the moment, I’ll call it Boiler, but that’s not what I will call it when it goes to page.
Boiler is a bigger world than the earth. Her diameter is 35% larger. She actually is somewhat lighter though, having a smaller iron core and lighter mix for her magma. Her gravity is .96 g. Her atmosphere is roughly analogous to earth’s but thicker. The biggest difference is that things have gotten to the point where the atmosphere is supersaturated with water. Everything is slick with moisture. Fungal analogues are rampant.
There are no supercontinents on Boiler. There are a number of smaller ones that are more or less the same proportionately as ours, if the layout is different. In the south, the continents are laid out such that there is an Antarctic Ocean that’s roughly what ours is if you exclude the Bering Sea and south of Greenland. It acts as this world’s Mediterranean. There are a few connecting straits into the other oceans, but north of 60 degrees S, it’s a dead sea, or at least increasingly hypoxic and nearing anoxic at the equator. The land area below 60 degrees that rings the Antarctic Ocean is roughly the same as North America.
There is also an Arctic continent that is roughly the size of Australia and completely habitable, but its surrounding ocean is completely connected to the other oceans and has an impoverished marine ecosystem because of it. An upwelling is a deadly thing along the coast. Life there is concentrated inland and there its focused around the fresh water bodies. If not for the polar hadley cells, both environs would have serious problems with contaminants from the dying world seas.
A little over 1.2 million years ago, Boiler hit the inverse of the Pleistocene, something even stronger than the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. The Milankovitch cycles for Boiler twittled into hot zone. Instead of producing glaciers advancing from the poles, these cycles made a hot zone, a dead zone around the equator where macroscopic autotrophes (plants) could not photosynthesize. Each cycle is approximately ten thousand years long.
The first time out, the cycle produced a dead zone of 5 degrees +/- from the equator. Within that zone, no plant life could live. When that turn of the cycle ended though, a permanent dead zone of 0.5 degees +/- equator remained. The next steamer cycle pushed the temporary dead zone to 5.5 degrees and ended with a permanent dead zone of 1 degree. The growth of the equatorial dead zone has been
additive and progressing to the point where 1.2 million years later, the permanent dead zone now reaches to 60 degrees +/- from the equator. This could go on for another half million years, if not for
the fact that the tipping point is about to be reached and the equatorial seas will start boiling at the start of the next cycle…which is 3k years in the future. Once that begins, things go down hill fast into a hot wet greenhouse, which most life and our witness species, the Sia, cannot survive.
Equatorward from 60 degrees, even though its called a deadzone, there is still life. First the lichen zone down to 50 degrees then think yellow stone on land (remember, the air is saturated with water and things are slick) and death valley’s pupfish (although there's nothing like a vertebrate, think more like sea slugs that have developed into fast swimmers or filter feeds or...) in the oceans.
That’s said, let’s meet Zah.
Zah is a Sia. This is another species that is going to be witnessing the end of its world. This one has a world that is warming beyond the levels that macroscopic autotrophic life (plants) can handle. Its species is rather different than Kotk’s quattids. For one, they are definitely not vertebrates. Sia are a species that comes from a family of animal-ish life that would be, if terrestrial analogues were any guide at all, a mollusk trying very, very hard to be an arthropod. The genes that would have gone into producing shells for a mollusk have been coopted into producing a exoskeleton. Let’s call them the armollusks.
Sia ancestors prior to leaving the water would have been a passable ammonite. The spiral shell remains. The beak remains. There are also four warty, horny tentacles that have ‘moved’ to the sides of the beak: they are long enough to be useful as manipulators, but are not super dexterous (they were coopted . However, there the similarities end. They are now quadpeds with very arthopodish legs. The legs have a calcified shell as the exoskeleton. They have two articulated arms that are like their legs – basal armollusks had 10 tentacles – giving them a bit of a centaur appearance. Well, if that centaur was based on an ammonite, had the face of a beaked cthulhu, and the legs of a calcified insectoid or perhaps coconut crab. It almost sounds like a joke, a Cthulhu, coconut crab and an ammonite go into a bar and… The legs and the articulated arms have a nifty feature: extensible digits. Looking like calcified, exoskeletal claws when retracted, these digits (three per foot or hand, with two ‘fingers’ and a ‘thumb’) can unhook and extend outwards for a good distance, about three inches. They are really tentacles that can be stowed underneath the armored surface, helping to reduce water loss.
The Sia’s nose, olfactory organ I suppose, is located in the shell where the ‘lung’ is. Likewise, vocal communication is done by a larynx in the shell as well. There are no lips moving for these guys. I should not, but probably will include chromatophoric communication. Its just cool! And also gives a way to silently hunt, too!
The Sia are not large, really. They stand at around 4 ft high. There are limits, even on their less dense world, to how big something with a calcified exoskeleton can get.
They are also really bright. More so than humans even. However, unfortunately, so is a lot of the armollusk fauna. Imagine a world where the average animal is a primate, even the herbivores. A lot of energy has been and is expended on securing life from...pests, Imagine if rats had the brains of monkeys...and then it gets worse from there. There is also a second megafaunal lineage that causes no
end of headaches for the armollusks, petroskelines.
Armollusks, too, have an odd life reproductive cycle. The eggs armollusks lay develop into a 'larva' that looks like a bivalve. It filter feeds from the air or water depending on the branch of the clade of armollusk. These larvae close their shells and undergo a metamorphosis that produces a small Sia. The protection of the breeding grounds was one of the main drivers of intelligence in armollusks and their...predators. The first permanent settlements were built around ideal hatching grounds. All Sia are herms...
There are domesticated animals, even chariots, but no mounts that are ridden like horses on earth. Some of slithomollusks (very active metambolism and quick land slugs) have been domesticated for equivalents of canines. One breed is even used in war. Other armollusks have been domesticated as arachinid-like 'cats' and whatnot. There are no active fliers on Boiler.
The great rivals to the armollusks and slithomollusks are the petroskelines. These are really fast and hungry equivalents of arthropods. They are rarely large, but often swarm. They actually look more like horseshoe crabs, but have rather harder armor and typically are rather small. Their great menace is that they swarm. When they do, they strip the plants and the often even animals bare. Individually, they are not bright, but they have the wisdom of the swarm. A hellbug is about the size of your fist, scuttles around on eight legs, has a shell harder to crack than a walnut and has the voracious appetite of a piranha on meth. They swarm up from the south, their breeding grounds at the start of summer chewing, consuming and gnashing their way across the polar lands like a arthropod Mongol Horde, until they recede again to breed when fall comes down at the edge of the habitable zone.
The Sia employ a great deal of outcasts and adventurers to go south to destroy hellbug nests. These bug hunters tell the tales of cities lost to the encroaching heat. Ruins with treasure down in the lost lands. The greatest of these tales though is the belief the Arctic of Boiler holds another civilization of Sia, an Atlantis or Eden where there are no hellbugs and life is grand. Occasionally, some damned fool adventurer embarks to try to cross to the other side of the world. They never succeed.
The Sia have reached the iron age. There are multiple empires competing to dominate the known world around the Antarctic.
When the Sia clash, it looks like a square of halberbers. If they used hammers instead of axes in the halberds and the halberds were wielded by Cthulhu rendered into an insectile legged ammonite. Thrusts are made for the facial region by the front ranks of the Sia Phalanx and the third and later ranks are raising their hammer-berds up and swinging them down in an attempt to crack the shell of opposing Sia phalanx. To protect the face, the facial tentacles often have either shields or a closable facial mask. Metal armor is pretty close to too heavy for a Sia to wear. Some attempts at padding and hardened 'leather' is used to soften the hammer blows. Normally, at least one tentacle holds a dagger...its for dealing with the warslugs.
Charioteers race round the edges of the formations, throwing darts aimed at faces or caltrops to break up the enemy formation. Defending charioteers attempt to prevent the disruption and do unto the other side...
Finally, the warslugs shuffle through the formations, both to fight each other, but most importantly, to attempt to bite the faces of the Sia phalanx soldiers.
5 major states ring the Antarctic Sea plus a host of smaller ones. There are two ascendant empires which are marching on the others. An unstable coalition faces off against them when they are not preoccupied with each other. The three lesser empires jostle for position and try to pull down the two rising and when faced with being conquered unite to hold off the two. They also often hire the small city states to make raids on the large empires ... and each other.
This arrangement might have eventually produced the necessary cultural innovations to save the Sia. But...it will not. The last Sia passed away in a hovel in the ruins of the northernmost city about the time the Maya form a 'civilization' in MesoAmerica. Humanity won't find the scorched, boiled and fried remains of the Sia for another 2,000 years and then only archaeologically and when in environmental suits or teleremotely.
No comments:
Post a Comment