Proxima Centauri

by on November 5, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

We bypassed Proxima Centauri on our way to the Alpha Centauri Binary System. Proxima is a red dwarf star, and even the worst planets in the Binary System were far more easily habitable. Most of biological humanity does not even think about Proxima anymore. It is simply one of the countless number of stars where no one lives. It is a different story for cybernetic humanity. Proxima was the first star our earliest AI probe swarms explored, our first foothold in the stars. The AIs and their cybernetic descendents have never left. They built Proxima into their first Memory World, the location of their first independent storage facility for all the knowledge of their race. Proxima is a far more important system than most people realize, and that is why it is so heavily defended.

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Rhiannon

by on November 4, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

It turns out that Rhiannon isn’t much older than I am. Maybe a few years at most, though nailing down exact times can get a bit tricky when birthplaces are the best part of five thousand lightyears apart. We decided to celebrate our birthdays at the same because…why not? Her people don’t celebrate them like we do, and she’d never had a real birthday party in her life. Not what we’d call one at least. So when my birthday came around, we went out on the town and put our superior metabolisms to serious work. That’s another way of saying we ate and drank a lot. It was a very merry time, I must say. I think the thing that surprised me the most that day was finding out just how much she looked forward to hitting the Hyades. She wasn’t bloodthirsty or anything, but she’d been literally bred, born, and trained for war. And seeing all the people just living on Sunnydale made her realize something. She wanted to end The War as soon as possible so she could enjoy the same life they did. I can think of worse reasons to fight.

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Weylan

by on November 3, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Weylan are born infertile. They can’t have children the natural way. The Albion designed them that way on purpose, after losing too many promising Weylan to the rigors of childbirth. The problem was the wings. Birds grow up inside an egg and then break out. Their wings are fully formed and ready to work at that time. But humans give birth by pushing their child through a thin tunnel and out in to the air. The birth process almost always broke the wings, and sometimes tore them apart inside the mother. So the Albion made their best creation infertile to keep them from dying out, and then built a massive collection of cloning chambers to grow new ones. Most of those died when the Ennead destroyed Arkadia, but the Weylan saved a relative few. They were the only way the Weylan could procreate for the next two thousand years, and they were too few to generate anything that might be termed a population boom.

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Alpha Centauri

by on November 2, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

Hyperphysicists sometimes call Alpha Centauri a quadrinary star system. There is the primary Binary System composed of Cen A and Cen B that most people think of as Alpha Cenaturi. Then there is Cen C, often times called Proxima Centauri due to its proximity to Earth. And there is Sol. Earth’s own sun. Earth, Proxima Centauri, and the Alpha Centauri Binary System are linked through hyperspace in ways that few other stars are. That is why starships can travel from Earth to Alpha Centauri so much faster than from Earth to any other star. But the link to all of those other stars flows through Alpha Centauri. That is what makes it our gateway to the stars.

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Rhiannon

by on November 1, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Rhiannon is one of the younger Weylan out there. She was not alive during the last great war. She did not see the Ennead destroy her homeworld. She did not kill the Ennead in response. She didn’t even live through most of the two millennia that followed. She wasn’t born until after the Peloran made Contact with us, in fact. Hers is a small generation, as all Weylan generations are, but they were raised in an autumn of peace. She grew up knowing it would be her job to fight the next great war that came along. And they expected it to come along soon. I envied her that, once I understood. At least she wasn’t surprised by all the shock and violence that heralded The War. And she envied me, once she understood what growing up in a time of peace and innocence could be like. It’s amazing how life works. What we can miss when we meet someone who lived a different life.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

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