New Czardas
13-07-2006, 02:58
Space.
It's really pretty big, when you start to think about it. Untold millions of light-years across. It can hold googols of people, (yes googol is a number, because I said so) with room for more.
In your particular sector of occupied space, there may be patrol ships trundling around invisible borders, ensuring the security of your general area. There may be commerce and rapid traffic. There may be great battles of epic proportions unfolding above your planets as your Super Star COCKstroyers combat enemy Super Star COCKstroyers. There may be newbies getting owned at World of Warcraft.
Then you pause and look up. And rightfully.
The largest obviously artificial object anyone has ever seen has decided to appear.
It may be outside the borders of your space, having reached there at wank-- er, warp speed; it may be in the middle of the system you claim; it may be on the distant borders. But you can hardly fail to notice an object so monstrously large.
Specifically, it is three thousand kilometres or so in length, over five hundred in width, eighty in height, and constructed out of some shiny material, because shiny stuff is cool. Spaceports for civilian ships extend like thin arms from its sides, connected to the larger object by spacewalks, which are reinforced synthetic glass-covered walkways providing one with a full view of the cosmos. There are also hidden panels from which military ships can be launched, if there are any.
This object is, of course, the Neo-Czardaian Mothership. It carries nearly eight hundred million people, not to mention a miniature terraformation of their own within. They left Terra I in the Sol System in search of a new place to live two thousand years ago... but what, in Terran years at least, numbers in the scores of thousands.....
[57,000 years ago on Terra I]
The ship had set off now, very large for its time, almost a kilometre in length, and carrying a thousand, four hundred and forty individuals, 782 women and 658 men. They were one of the well-known communes, a peaceful anarcho-capitalist one made up of varying numbers of punk rockers, incensed debators, sex offenders, drug users, and even a lawyer.
As the vast vehicle rose upwards from Terra, the occupants held a party. This meant large quantities of drugs were passed around. The drugs had the odd effect of preservation in space, which proved quite helpful (and led to the unusually long lifespan of Czardaians today). Eventually all one thousand four hundred and forty individuals, and approximately two hundred and sixteen who would become individuals in nine months or so, were locked in a semi-cryogenic trance and would wake up with a very bad hangover in several thousand years.
The AI pilot of the ship dutifully set the velocity to somewhere in the high multiples of c, with the effect that life on the ship progressed approximately a thousand times slower than life on Earth. After approximately a week in the Mothership, which was about nineteen years back on Terra, the hangover wore off but the freezing remained, as the AI running the ship deemed it best. Coming out of warp speed after quite some time, emerging in a totally foreign cluster (let alone galaxy), the ship's population awoke to find themselves hundreds of years in the future. Upon being informed of this situation, an unreasonable homesickness overcame the ship's population and it began warping through hyperspace repeatedly in search of its home planet. After more of these journeys, which translated into approximately twenty-nine thousand years, the exact co-ordinates of Terra were discovered.
No planet had existed on that site for several thousand years. It had been completely vaporised in a nuclear explosion, along with all 100 trillion plus of its inhabitants.
Feeling somewhat cheated, the Czardaians set off on a journey to find a new planet, only to discover that during the experiment with their very unusual technology every planet within a thousand light-years of Terra had been colonised and terraformed ad nauseam. Jumping aimlessly from here to there, taking resources from abandoned planets to accomodate a growing population and letting the AIs process them into building more for the ship, we wind up in the present day: where said ship has arrived somewhere near your space.
It is still in search of a planet on which its occupants can settle.
And it bears mentioning that it is equipped with an adequate array of defensive armament (for those warmongers out there).
It's really pretty big, when you start to think about it. Untold millions of light-years across. It can hold googols of people, (yes googol is a number, because I said so) with room for more.
In your particular sector of occupied space, there may be patrol ships trundling around invisible borders, ensuring the security of your general area. There may be commerce and rapid traffic. There may be great battles of epic proportions unfolding above your planets as your Super Star COCKstroyers combat enemy Super Star COCKstroyers. There may be newbies getting owned at World of Warcraft.
Then you pause and look up. And rightfully.
The largest obviously artificial object anyone has ever seen has decided to appear.
It may be outside the borders of your space, having reached there at wank-- er, warp speed; it may be in the middle of the system you claim; it may be on the distant borders. But you can hardly fail to notice an object so monstrously large.
Specifically, it is three thousand kilometres or so in length, over five hundred in width, eighty in height, and constructed out of some shiny material, because shiny stuff is cool. Spaceports for civilian ships extend like thin arms from its sides, connected to the larger object by spacewalks, which are reinforced synthetic glass-covered walkways providing one with a full view of the cosmos. There are also hidden panels from which military ships can be launched, if there are any.
This object is, of course, the Neo-Czardaian Mothership. It carries nearly eight hundred million people, not to mention a miniature terraformation of their own within. They left Terra I in the Sol System in search of a new place to live two thousand years ago... but what, in Terran years at least, numbers in the scores of thousands.....
[57,000 years ago on Terra I]
The ship had set off now, very large for its time, almost a kilometre in length, and carrying a thousand, four hundred and forty individuals, 782 women and 658 men. They were one of the well-known communes, a peaceful anarcho-capitalist one made up of varying numbers of punk rockers, incensed debators, sex offenders, drug users, and even a lawyer.
As the vast vehicle rose upwards from Terra, the occupants held a party. This meant large quantities of drugs were passed around. The drugs had the odd effect of preservation in space, which proved quite helpful (and led to the unusually long lifespan of Czardaians today). Eventually all one thousand four hundred and forty individuals, and approximately two hundred and sixteen who would become individuals in nine months or so, were locked in a semi-cryogenic trance and would wake up with a very bad hangover in several thousand years.
The AI pilot of the ship dutifully set the velocity to somewhere in the high multiples of c, with the effect that life on the ship progressed approximately a thousand times slower than life on Earth. After approximately a week in the Mothership, which was about nineteen years back on Terra, the hangover wore off but the freezing remained, as the AI running the ship deemed it best. Coming out of warp speed after quite some time, emerging in a totally foreign cluster (let alone galaxy), the ship's population awoke to find themselves hundreds of years in the future. Upon being informed of this situation, an unreasonable homesickness overcame the ship's population and it began warping through hyperspace repeatedly in search of its home planet. After more of these journeys, which translated into approximately twenty-nine thousand years, the exact co-ordinates of Terra were discovered.
No planet had existed on that site for several thousand years. It had been completely vaporised in a nuclear explosion, along with all 100 trillion plus of its inhabitants.
Feeling somewhat cheated, the Czardaians set off on a journey to find a new planet, only to discover that during the experiment with their very unusual technology every planet within a thousand light-years of Terra had been colonised and terraformed ad nauseam. Jumping aimlessly from here to there, taking resources from abandoned planets to accomodate a growing population and letting the AIs process them into building more for the ship, we wind up in the present day: where said ship has arrived somewhere near your space.
It is still in search of a planet on which its occupants can settle.
And it bears mentioning that it is equipped with an adequate array of defensive armament (for those warmongers out there).