BY LETTER
Dream Rejection Tendency, The
 Image from Steve Bowers | |
| The Dreamspheres have strips of habitable land separated by radiative cooling elements, which supply energy to the outward facing lands. | |
In 3332 AT The Stellar Umma Survey ship Scheherazade made contact with a hitherto unknown binary culture based around three L-type brown dwarf stars at the spinward edge of Umma space. Each dwarf had a dynamically supported superstellar world above its surface typically at a distance of three hundred thousand miles, with energy collection facilities on the internal face. These suprastellar shells had been built over the last two thousand years by an earlier wave of colonists, a clade of relativistic cyborgs most of whom who had eventually thrown off their biological components and now live inside the shell material in a vast series of virtual cybercosmoi. They call their virtual world the Dream-life; it continues to grow in complexity and today has datalinks with virtual worlds throughout the Terragen Sphere.
On the outside of the superstructure, protected by the shells from the brown dwarfs' harder radiation, but warmed by the waste heat from the simulation machinery, live the descendants of the few cyborgs who have rejected the dream state. This faction has taken the name the Dream Rejection Tendency, or simply the Tendency.
The shells are suspended far above the surface of the brown dwarfs, but the surface gravity on the outside is still strong, more than twice earth standard. Even before the Tendency started to build their biosphere on the outside this shell had acquired a thin atmosphere of primordial hydrogen ad helium. The Tendency have imported ice and rock from the dust rings surrounding the brown dwarfs; with this material they have created a lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. The new atmosphere is a mix of nitrogen, helium and oxygen, and the soil supports tailored fungi.
Large overhead lights powered by the waste heat energy emitted by the cybercosm within the shell. However the light is generally quite dim compared to most human worlds, and the Tendency clade has used genetic modification techniques to give themselves large eyes sensitive to infrared wavelengths. They have abandoned most cybernetic enhancements, relying instead on biotechnology to adapt themselves to their unusual world.
Following contact with the Umma the Tendency clade have largely adopted the Islamic faith, and some have emigrated to other worlds in the Umma region and elsewhere. They are often recognisable by their large, dark sunglasses, short stature and high-gravity strength. Some, but by no means all, members of this clade often actively promote real-life existence as preferable to virtual reality.
To this date a large population of the Dream Rejection Tendency clade still live on the vast starlit plains parasitizing the waste energy of the buzzing cyber worlds.
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Development Notes
Text by Steve Bowers
Initially published on 07 June 2002.
Initially published on 07 June 2002.
