Democracy of Bees

Fluted shells of enflamed scarlet, the windflower tendrils dancing like wheat in a wind-field. He inspected the oily coenosarc film on their skeletons, and the giant mesoglea penetrating through in bulbs along their side. They were desiccated, shriveled, and decorated with pale color schemes. Gelatinous, chemotrophic titans with grobladders filled with a strange, fluid substance. They pumped electrical pulses through hydrogalvinized membranes. Organisms that seemed to communicate on contact, through an electroceptory organ. They had developed a sort of invertebrate dialect in that strange, unconventional way.

The Oceans of Europa had become a setting for a vast thriving ecosystem that had integrated itself like a brain, a web of organic processors and terminals to arrive at this uncanny appearance. Lupovius took his hand and contacted their flesh. He could feel them beat softly as he dragged his hand across, wiping away and rubbing the greasy residue they left behind on his fingertips.

The coral was stonewashed in only a select few areas, the rest, a bluish cornflower, perhaps bluer, blue on blue. It was supplemented by translucent features, torsional and pruned. As he swam along his eyes scanned the area rigorously. The seabed was a canvas for light caustics, above which, limbless vertebrates caudaled in schools between the coral stacks. Planulae and bottom-dwelling creatures with barbs and pedipalps were in a great diaspora to the outer banks of the shelf.

A fanned-out, curtain of light cast itself down onto the fringe reef. Nimble creatures, beautiful and bizarre. Lycoform genera with bodies like wet glass and biophotonic organs, from orange to blue in smaller schools, navigating from disbanded gases absorbed into their swim bladders. They were marine and piscine, but exotic, unconditional, and hardy. There was a great variety of color among the halophiles, repeating in elegant patterns of symmetry.

Lupovius Bartha-Rey was an overly tall ethnic man with an ill-freckled, olive complexion, finely set and untonsured black hair, small and organized teeth almost ostentatiously bleached—an epistergon, recreational officer of Epistemicon, one of the quadrivium under the polyorbital corporation Sidon, among Mechanicon, Polemicon, and Giatricon. Lupovius had been sent on a probing expedition to Europa, a tropical moon in the radiation belt, to study gravitropism on coral colonies with radial tentacular symmetry.

Lupovius began to glide toward the surface, through almost tensionless conditions. He traveled along the light beam of Jupiter, reemerging, and reeling himself back to the coast. The water slid off his biosuit as he clumsily peddled to shore, any remaining water was reabsorbed osmotically into cache-vessels. He wiped the water from his face and stepped on the coastline, easing his head toward the dark sky and to the one side facing the sea.

Jupiter was hanging in the air—covers of light and movement were stamped across it. The fusion candles were only faint beams jetting into space, the rest was snuggled under the cloud decks. The stars were mostly washed out to a few, faint objects. Io, if he were to stretch his arm out and place his hand against it was a mere pebble, emitting a pale, sickly glow. It was sited beside Jupiter in the north. Calisto was only a speck of light in the west beside a fainter Saturn. Across to the east was among the brightest of the stars, Capella. In the northeast there was Algieba. Above Jupiter, Arcturus. Vega was stuck near the zenith, roughly in the southern region of the sky. The rest were largely faint specks, spangled across the night cap.

The sky was made out by one of its ultrarare seasonal anomalies, where only tiny patches of cloud were present instead of the usual—drowsy, dense cloudscapes brushed off into the higher atmosphere. He extended his arm against Jupiter, and made an ell shape and aligned his eyes with his hand. The gas giant’s bend sat snug into the region where the thumb and forefinger met at the first interdigital space. A smile came across his face.

Europa was flat, only some tiny rippling patterns were marked in the sand. The coast was alabaster, so fine that it felt like silk—every inch of his biosuit relayed synaptic information, the environment was restimulated with unparalleled precision on his body. He looked on ashore, every continent fabricated, continental shelves jutting out under the water on a declivitous plane. The oceans were recalcitrant too most offworld marine organisms. Conditions of exceedingly high alkalinity, salinity, and pressure dictated the hardiness of the life placed there. Almost all life was categorized as a bioengineered extremophile.

Giant forecasting towers lined the shore, beacons at their summit, releasing vibrant pulses of light against the darkness. The air was sultry, salty even, and a heavy odorous gas projected from the ocean. Cool water was circulating around his biosuit and the olfactator apparatus delivered a message to sets of receptors to block the scent, and left others free, such that the aroma had been made faint and more pleasurable.

On his left, some way out in the distance were the lights of Belcastus, capital of Belus Linea. It was an intermediary colony for salt exports and ore imports from Io and Amalthea. Most of the eateries were heavily directed to the market of aquatic cuisine. Landcrops more often than not were imported due to lack of sunlight and overcast weather. A day on Europa was moderately dim, sol was softer, and clouds formed a crepuscular, eerie twilight over the capital.

Heavy transit machines from Minos corporation, the dominate monoliturgy of the moon, were flying into the city from far above. He could see heavy traffic in overlaying patterns against the sky, silent vessels navigating beneath the stars. Belcastus was the largest outing hub on Europa for mainly one reason. Waterdash. A popular solar amenity where people sprint across the surface of the water as long as they can without sinking. Most of the shelf was covered in reef, except for bare spots where they would hold the races. The regions beyond, where the waters’ depth reached great magnitude was almost completely devoid of eukaryotic life. However, some of the most grueling and strange predators in this region of the galaxy lurk in the nadirs of Europa’s oceans.

The most hardy and brutal, the most apt to survive standard conditions, and the most disadvantaged of all life on the planet.Some islands were confined to shallower regions of the ocean where mammalian brutes scurried about, the avifauna, scouting on high with a peculiar avian anatomy, and shriveled arboreal vegetation below. It is unfortunate in some respects, good in others to have no seasons and a persistent monoclimate across the moon. The climate may be naturally sultry, but the wind shears cooled the air, and they always bombarded the surface. There was something placed along the coasts called tempest-breakers. The airbursts were sifted through the towering parametric louver—like glide and mast.

Out among the oceans, there were little red specks in the distance. The photosynthetic glow of the vertical reefs, powered by fusion reactors—each projecting a drapery of light into the water. In the open flats where the wind shredded the sea and charged along the banks in the open, their stood, like immovable brutes, atypical and irregular shapes of Clepsideral form. They resembled that of an hourglass, rough and natural about each bulb, and what appeared to be a throat. There were three roughly shaped pillars connected from the top to bottom. Each sweeping from a pleated base into a long neck before expanding and bending back in to join the top of the edifice. At the central neck, paddles of airfoils propagated outward lying down like a wind turbine rotating and gently oscillating, not fixed to any surface, but kept aloft by superconducting forces.

The wind ran along the camber of the structure, increasing its velocity, its kinetic energy soaring, creating more torque. The paddles were of light substance creating ultimate fluid distribution, cooling the chambers, and creating energy for the abode. The curved surfaces guided the wind to the limits of its potential. From inside, the paddles were no longer in view, the ceiling was rotating. It was an apollonian gasket with extruded surfaces pivoting up and down and creating perfect orientations of fluid in the chamber as it generated energy. The edifice was constructed of some organic composite, in part rigid, and spongy. They were called Crytomal turbines, it was infrastructure capable of creating its own energy, and satisfying those requirements with brilliant strategies in form factor engineering.

Beside those structures and warrens, Lupovius met a dark, squat structure built of ceramic phyllosilicate and it bent and curved with low arcing, fluid sweeps. There was a discrete illumination pouring from the threshold, opened up like the entrance of a cave. The wind in its soft and flowing exchange between in and out crept along the structure. A skewed smell of the ocean roiled inward. He moved beyond the entrance into a room that seemed insulated from the sound of the breeze, and only the soft murmur of the waves reverberated inward and off the walls of the darkness.

The chamber was bulbous and upon the walls was a projection of the galaxy in near infrared. With the illusion of depth stooped over the face of the image, as real as one’s own hand.The image was sharp and apparent, with shooting tendrils of dust cast from exploding stars, a silhouette against the backcloth of the void. At least the cosmos could be seen as if unaided, as if our eyes had evolved into light buckets, that were as large as wheels.

There was one apparent deviation between being inside these places and being underneath the stars in the raw air, and beneath the palms and along the coast. It was the cliquey, cozy intuition that you could not be vulnerable to the elements, where quiet sounds were resonant, and the gentle muffle bred tranquility. One could dwell in the warm air of the night and breath in a vapor that embraced the lungs like cold fluid. Sometimes a person would extricate themselves from their pulmonary apparatus just for a moment, to breath in the air as is and know what it was like in the primitive world without machines.

Lupovius sprawled back near the entrance at a seat and found his comfort there. He plopped his arm on a rest, from which a little clay cup emanated, on a small area ligatured to the rest. He took the cup in one hand and pitched in for a drink. It was filled with a turbid, blue fluid and nectar extract, from one of the offshore islands in the east. It had a cold sting and tasted sour, but the strangest part was when the tart was flushed from the mouth immediately. He tipped his head back to the stars and shuffled the cup with his hand. He continued to put the cup down while looking up, then groping for it again and again until it was gone. He refilled it subsequently where it had emanated from the table, and once again the fluid rushed up through the bottom of the cup.

The synthesizer at the end of the rest was a porous surface and quite invisible to the unaided eye, instantaneously firing out prearranged molecules in configuration, layer by layer, top-down into a static field, generated by a thermoambient superconductor.

The bottom of the cup was broken back up and receded into the surface, and the liquid resumed, before the bottom was replaced with its molecules again. They were assembled with a thermocatalytic and an oxynocatalytic, which were contrived element of the system under which molecules would promptly bond upon contact.

Most of these apparatuses were revised with a series that could create exotic atoms and molecules, such as Hypernuclear atoms, Onium, and Hadronic atoms from which rather strange properties emerge that conventional materials would otherwise have, albeit largely similar. Some even made Hilldenbrot matter which was widely used in warfare since its one of the only substances in the universe that can kill a human.

Lupovius imagined he was back on Gaia, lying in the curling flower fields, glaring up at the Corsican stars on the limestone ledges or peering through the aperture of some transparent substance, out of a dirigible airship upon Caurula middle-year. On the great diaspora that night when the planet met its fate with its moon. One could look into the deep blue tint of the night and see a pale grey moon split like dry clay; ash pitched across the stars.

His mind began to linger to memories during the war, operating under Minos company in the war against Vega System and remembering that beautiful planet Varuna, and the horrible atrocities of war that lay waste to it, and the little olive complexioned girl in the city Olum, her clothing decrepit, and her hair mangled and matted, her face damp and smeared with pulverized debris, but most of all, standing out against everything, were the eyes. The froth of the waves along the furrows and the deep blue crypts between them. Staring into her eyes was like starring into the ocean.

He could remember the Genica, the highest-ranking member of Minos Company Polemic Sector; Genica Gyrē, who ordered his soldiers to carbonize Olum. He heard them call back across the land for the others left behind as if he were there, in that moment, and heard them call back as their short, broken pleas subsided, and when it did, the fire was no longer vengeful. From that place of bedlam, where it once was, where flames danced below the stars, came a picturesque frame; from within, hope and unanimity pervaded.

The little girl against all cries of the soldiers to stop, senselessly charted her way back into the thoroughfares of Olum. Genica Hardim Gyrē led his platoons to the planetary carrier and departed from Olum as the Colossal city lay there, engulfed in flames and as far as they went, the soldier could still see the faint glow becomes dimmer and dimmer until the third night, when the glow had been reduced to nothing. They spent the following months warring around an area of jumbled, broken terrain in the east at point Larcosa Chaos.

The vivid string of memories unfolding as he dosed off was interrupted by a dull, stimulating jolt in his left hand. His auglens, a sophisticated ocular device came online. The name Astrovela popped into focus. Under it: Departure Set, Solar Organ Set: Solar Time. Three discrete numbers were given. In order; three, two, twelve. The first indicating three of a quarter. The second, two of a quarter squared, and the third, twelve of a quarter cubed. Solar time was dependent on one body, the suns revolution. The third number, called the cubic quartile was an arbitrary eight-minute period. More precise measurements added quarter quartiles and so on. The Solar organ had notified him of a departure when the sun had reached the third quarter of its rotation and within that third quarter it was on the second of sixteen increments, and on the twelfth increment of sixty-four in that second of sixteen increments.

It continued: Departure: Belcastus Airstrip (BECA-1023), Europa of Sol. Arrival: Prasilios Airstrip (PRSI-9333), Celadon of Stellamar Colony. By the faculty of thought alone, he opened the starmap in his auglens. Everything he could see exploded into a vast network of lights plotted in every direction. The course heading was denoted by a faint, but distinguishable magenta line from Europa to the planet Celadon in Canis Major Overdensity, a neighboring dwarf galaxy to the Milky Way.

He homed in on the planet, its surface shared likeness and texture with a potato skin, though a bit of a rusty overlap. Clouds were almost flushed from the atmosphere, only a river or two and a number of lochs could be spotted. Lupovius had made it a personal objective to begin learning about the worldly affairs of Celadon well before his arrival, lest he appear unseemly. He could have inculcated such knowledge in the blink of an eye, but the worst way to cheat knowledge is to deprive it of experience. He thought.

Lupovius activated his hapticon, a neural device that places people into a residic state where they are kinesthetically isolated from the external world but can still have conscious experience. He opened his eyes to an empty, white area.

“Begin simulated learning. Object of interest, the planet Celadon.” Lupovius said.

A soft, nasally voice began, “What is your category of preference.”

“Proto and Contemporary Cultural Zeitgeist.”

The voice started again, the simulation came online, it was as if Lupovius were standing in the unfolding events to which the voice ushered in on; “Sulmidia, colony of Celadon was established under the rule of Stellamar Colony in the year 9997 PCE, Post-Capital Era. The Planet Celadon was first discovered 458 PCE by the navigator Sulmo Ovidius and established as a Polystate, a common form of rule under Stellamar Colony. The hyliconomics of Celadon are heavily focalized on rare mineral and element exports such a Cuprorivaite, Hailstone Amerite, Lutetium, and Livermorium. Celadons’s largest imports are hydrogenerators, ceramics, basalt fiber, and aquaponics from one of seven moons; Volga, a Marine Subsilica, its surface is comprised of seastrands enfolding dead, grey continents of a compact regolith and metal combine.”

“Tell me about the moon.” Lupovius interrupted.

The simulation transitioned to another scene, “Volga, moon of Celadon was thought to have been settled by humans shortly after the pangering of Celadon in 8744 PCE. However, more recent discoveries have uncovered a terrestrial species with excessive cerebral development. Once thought as aboriginals, genetic sequencing has revealed a rather peculiar fingerprint, one that is effectively identical to that of a human. It is now thought, using bioform factor Enthetometry, that these peoples were once human, that they had reached Volga in the distant past. Their genetic degeneration would place their arrival at Volga in 243 MCE, Meso-Common Era.”

He began stroking at his chin, “Tell me more about this terrestrial species.”

“Volgans are humans, having evolved over epochs while making refuge on an unforgiving terrain of extreme conditions and ambivalent climatic shifts. Volga is a darker world, the atmosphere has trapped heat causing the surface both high dosages of stellar radiation and bizarre, intolerable heat distribution across the surface. Thus, they have seemingly developed a pale sclerodermal coat or integument that is intolerant to the high-pressure environment of the moon. They have also developed a secondary, cuticle layer to protect them from the stellar rays, which is also efficient for dissipating heat. Volga is a world on the sterile end of the spectrum, which has bred a species of a much slower metabolism. Prominent features are held in the place of eyes, which are called photagoma. They have large light buckets with overlying stratums of iridial and pupillary topography and varying pigmentation. In all, they appear relatively human in form, although more streamlined. They speak a very broken, primitive vernacular, with poor lingual separation and punctuation.”

He wiped his mouth, “Tell me about the area surrounding Prasilios Airstrip.”

“The colony-city Sulmidia is positioned in Rubens Virgae of an ancient lakebed—.” His impatience began again.

He was anticipating something instructive, some shed of light on where he was going—something, moreover, interesting. He continued to shuffle through questions, then he was caught off guard with the remark to his next question—it evidently piqued his interest, “What can you say about Stellamar Colony?” He guarded his mouth.

“Stellamar is a cosmic reserve and stellar artisanal structure located in a Parnassus cloud.” The photohaptic event unfolded before him, as real as something he could touch in a waking experience. It revealed a mosaic of color from turquoise to orange blending and bleeding into the space around it, and its texture harsh and beautiful in the dust and cloud creases. The stars gleaming in recessions and projecting variations of color across the cosmos. There in the center was a distortion of space, about which a stream of plasma buckled—a blackbody and accretion disk. Nine stars poured forth their light into the void and a sea of pockmarks on the fabric of space, planets swimming in the dense field on the order of hundreds.

It continued, “This stellar grouping method is referred to as a Langrenn Disk—which is a gravitationally stable system. Each artificial system begins with a supermassive blackbody, generally orbited by a ring of main sequence stars referred to as a Langrenn Belt. The secondary ring is formed around the first stratum of stars. This ring contains hundreds of habitable planets located just the right distance from the first ring of stars to support the prime ingredients for life. Stellamar colony consists of a blackbody—dubbed Mnemosyne. The nine stars orbiting it, equally separated and of identical main-sequence appearance, are named: Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Thalia.

“And the planets?” Lupovius asked.

“Every planet in the belt has a presence, but as a reserve, very few have industrial activity.”

For the greater part of the night, he lost touch with the world he was on and began scanning the worlds in the Asservic belt, wandering on their surfaces, observing the spectacle. It was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t, in fact, it was almost impossible to tell. He had tuned his mental processing to subjective time, his brain slackened its activity, permitting him the illusion that times passes slower. Getting carried away was of little concern.