Anaxon Depot is a massive space station in the farthest inhabited orbital band of the star Stoic. It is a combination of 90 large cylinder habitats forming a complex and vaguely spherical shape. Ultimately, it Is a dodecahedron within a dodecahedron. Five cylinders (each 35-miles long and 2 miles in diameter) form a pentagon, and twelve of these pentagons are fitted adjacent to each other to form the outer layer; the edges between vertices each have two parallel cylinders, or 60 total. The inner layer has only one cylinder per edge, or 30 total. It is perfectly aligned beneath the outer layer such that cylinders are clustered up in groups of three, all connected to nexus nodes that hold everything together. Cylinders are counter-rotated such that their torque cancels out and the station floats with perfect stability.
Each one of these 90 cylinders represents a city of millions of people. Generally, the outer layer is inhabited by residents, travelers, and digital business, whereas the inner are generally reserved for cargo storage, manufacturing, and docking. Ninety cities, full of commerce, industry, and diversity are locked together to form one mega-economy. Around half a billion souls live in, stay in, disembark from, and pursue their financial conquest at Anaxon Depot.
In the center of Anaxon, a complex scaffolding of corridors, tethers, and transport systems web from the vertices and inner layer toward the center, forming endless modular shipyards and space docks throughout the volume of the station.
Today, however, as Axy's cramped shuttle descended toward the busy geometric structure, through her HUD live-feed she could see its shape was different. Jutting through the station's center, so large that both ends pierced beyond the perimeter of the station, was a 100-mile long cargo liner. If a rotating cylinder habitat is big enough to hold cities, the volume of this cargo ship could hold a fraction of a continent! When full, its mass alone can even begin to exert its own gravity.
It was relentlessly symmetrical. Its midsection, which was a good 95% of its length, consisted of spheres, cubes, and hulls that carried cargoes of various types, punctuated by actuating arms and devices used to collect material in space. On either end was a cylindrical equipment hull with a crew habitat module forming a spinning embedded ring within it. Beneath this is a fathoms-deep core of nuclear power plants, electromagnetic field generators, factory-sized 3-D printers, shuttle hangers, and the guts of the nuclear engines. Capping each end off was an array of direct-nuclear-drive thrusters; on the front of the vessel, a brand new dish-shaped nosecone was being fitted to cover the forward-facing thrusters. Its overall shape was extremely long in proportion to its width, allowing it to pierce through the gas clouds in the interstellar void.
The fore and aft modules were painted a proud golden orange color, with dark green lettering:
Operator: Lexum Firm Shipping
Vessel designation: "Cinder"
Registry: F-110-301-03
Alongside the script was massive QR-style symbols and data for computers to visually interpret.
Cinder would be Axy's new home for the next several years, as she trained for her new position as navigator. But before that, she had to meet up with the rest of the crew in Anaxon.
The shuttle docked similarly as it had departed, interfacing with one of the many nexus nodes between cylinders. Transport pods carried her into one of the cylinder cities, where the check-in process was completed, and her implants updated with Anaxon's AI infrastructure. Her HUD now could guide her to the meetup point.
[Travel time via pod: 2 hours]
[Travel time via walking: 8 hours]
[Time until boarding: 14 hours]
She figured she'd walk the city some to kill some time.
These cylinders were larger in diameter than her home Illumount, so the skyscrapers inside were taller. But they seemed MUCH higher because of better city planning, as very few skyways had yet spidered across the upper levels. This left a clear view of the "sky", all the way from the lowest street level. But the view of the cities above her head was occluded by a two helical shafts of blinding light, spanning endcap to endcap. Instead of "Permislat" windows letting in natural sunlight, which require a specific orientation to let in light and greatly reduces the amount of living area within, these cities opted for artificial light driven by nuclear fusion generators.
Despite being artificial light, the city felt so much warmer and... more "natural" than the sunlight she was used to seeing back on Illumount. It's counter-intuitive at first, but on thoughtful examination, it makes sense; back on Illumount, many factors - the distance from the star, the harshness of the rays with no diffusion panels to scatter light like an atmosphere, and a day/night cycle of only a few minutes due to the rotation - contribute to a very unnatural feeling.
She pondered at how man-made sunlight could feel so much more "real". For eons, "man-made" has been pitted against "natural" as opposing definitions. But she has witnessed firsthand man's best attempts at capturing "nature" in space, and they were pitiful in comparison to this artificial masterpiece. That said, using nuclear fusion itself actually emulates nature, because all sunlight is created by nuclear fusion in a star's core. As human technology advances, it always tends to emulate nature in some way. Just - not always ways that are intuitive.
The skyscrapers that rose from the walls of the cylinder were gray and black shapeless monstrosities, of mostly concrete and carbon fiber, rising the better part of a mile into the sky. They had very few glass windows to look out through. Even here, people spent more time in their pods than outside. If you define "outside" as being inside a city-sized metal tube.
The streets she walked were much dirtier - mostly dust and grime and corroded chips and crumbled concrete. The wear showed obviously more foot travel. And more foot traffic there was; a massive variety of people from all over the solar system traveled through here and worked here. Some people, curiously, had no visible implants at all; others had entire limbs and eyes and parts of the face replaced with cybernetic augmentations. A rare few even had, what looked to be, entirely robotic bodies...
She walked beneath a tall building with white plastic facade clad in an unusually visible branding. Out of its unusually large sliding door lumbered a beast of a humanoid machine. It had a massive torso with tanks and valves and appendages, two long triple-jointed arms, and legs nearly as tall as Axy herself. In place of a head was an array of cameras and sensors, vaguely shaped to be something you could have a conversation with.
[L'ows Hife - AUGMENT]
MAT5
Occupation: Cold Weld Analyst; Magnetic Forge design and installation
She had heard about augments before, but never thought she would see one in person, as they are so rare.
Some humans get so impassioned about cybernetics and reducing the futile limitations of flesh and bones that they opt to replace every part of their body with robotics and prosthetics. The only biology left that augments carry is a brain and brain stem, enclosed in a pressurized cavity within the torso, fed by oxygen and glucose tanks. This removes the human dependency on food, water, air, and pressure that typically take so much effort to lug around with you in space, as well as allows survival through incredibly high G-forces, radiation, long-term zero-G exposure, and whatever other elements cause danger in space. The downsides, of course, begin with the excruciating process of removing the body from the mind, neuron-by-neuron, then re-learning all of reality through an entirely different world of sensory inputs. You can always tell an augment from a Novoid (A hard AI in a humanoid robotic body) because of their unique walking gait – their bodies are one-of-a-kind, and the mind inside has to learn to walk in it from scratch, with little human instinct left to guide them.
They say no human psyche can go through the mind-machine melding process unscathed, and that souls who opt to become Augments seem "disconnected" in haunting ways.
Axy was, by personality, already not one to spark up conversation, but now was faced so abruptly with such an alien horror that she instinctively offered a "Oh, pardon me" and hurriedly walked on by. L'ows, the Augment, paid her no mind, and went on their way.
Ever the self-reflector, curling up inside at the awkwardness of the interaction, Axy contemplated the instinct she just acted on herself... and wondered if an instinct-less creature like that felt awkwardness like she did. She gently reprimanded herself for, perhaps, allowing her own survival instinct to manifest as what could be perceived as prejudice.
This interaction also threw that whole "technology mimics nature" thought right out the window, too. On the topic of survival instinct... Axy once again considered space... arguably the most "natural" part of nature in the universe, yet so inherently hostile that humans have to strip themselves of nearly all of their humanity just to survive it, or wrap themselves up in facsimiles of habitable planets to survive.
Maybe what we define as "natural" isn't so much the actual reality of what the universe is, but merely environments that biology can exist in. Maybe life on a habitable planet – one with similar gravity, temperatures, and atmosphere to one of the seven Origin Worlds humanity was believed to have originated on – would be a stepping stone to understanding human reality, at least through the facet of "nature". This thought helped convert that moment of awkwardness into a spark of hope... because her itinerary in Nuric just happened to include the once-habitable world of Yaroryn, likely the only planet she would ever get to visit.
Axy walked a few more blocks. The city streets wrapped around the inside of the cylinder in intersecting helices, so each block was vaguely diamond-shaped. At the "sharp" corners, elevators ran up the edges of the buildings, ascending high into the sky to tube walkways that gracefully spanned the entire cylinder from endcap to endcap, to more easily allow movement between cylinder cities. She gave the walkways a try. That high up, being considerably closer to the center of the cylinder meant gravity felt lower, making walking easier. It reminded her of the low gravity and thinner air in the gardens back on Illumount. Her nausea quickly reprimanded her nostalgia.
The tube enclosing the catwalk was completely transparent, giving an unrestricted view of the city below. From up here, the warm, diffuse light shone on the miles of buildings and city streets spiraling around her in every direction. The scarce building window caught bright orange reflections and sparkled them back into her eyes. Orange... the light was ever so slowly fading into a sleepy sunset golden orange. It must be scheduled evening here.
Rising far higher than her walkway and all the skyscrapers, almost to the very center of the cylinder, were what looked like elevator ports, but that lead to open air, with no tube walkways. She wondered what they were for... until a group of sleek, aesthetically and uniformly designed Novoids stepped out of one, taking advantage of the weightlessness at that altitude, using tiny thrusters in their legs and arms to boost themselves down the center of the cylinder, avoiding all ground traffic and moving with effortless efficiency.
To get you up to speed on Novoids:
Algorithms dominate all organizational and societal structure; soft AI, an evolution of algorithms, may exist within a brain or body implant, supplementing human memory or orientation; or it may power drones and mechs and infrastructures and databases to perform human-level tasks (mostly the drudgerous or dangerous tasks humans opt out of); but then there is hard AI. "Hard AI" is artificial intelligence so advanced that it is indistinguishable from human-level sentience. Called "Novasapiens", to differentiate from "Homosapiens", they are considered actual persons, with rights, feelings, goals, and desires, although terrifically alien to humans. They pass MAT5 maturity test, showing as "DAT5" on a HUD.
While some novasapiens are non-localized, or "Transcendent", existing in city computer networks or even across entire solar systems - like Versette, the AI who mothered Axy - some inhabit android-esque bodies. These are called "Novoids", to differentiate from "Humanoids". These are created to be used in place of human crews in many space applications, as they need no atmosphere, constant emotional stimulation, food, water, or even glucose/oxygen like Augments rely on. This makes living pods and life-support systems and spin gravity unnecessary for their survival or comfort, saving massive engineering costs on ships. They can also power-down for long spaceflight voyages, sparing human minds the agony of isolation... and saving shipping companies money on labor costs. While silicone and software could make a Novoid nearly indistinguishable from a human, engineers never could quite get personalities and facial expressions past the uncanny valley, so aesthetic but decidedly robotic designs were the norm for Novoid bodies. After all, what makes Novoids useful to their creators is their differences from humans, not their similarities.
Because of the monopolies that dominate the industry, and tight regulations that dictate the development of legal sapience, only a few models of Novoids have been developed. The many Novoids Axy saw roaming the city were clones of maybe two or three different novasapiens. Rarity controlled by monopoly always drives prices high. As such, corporations typically stuck with human labor until the cost of crew modules outweighed the cost of these Novoid labor licenses.
Era had explained to Axy that Lexum Firm Shipping was in such a transition, having just acquired licensing to staff all-Novoid crews on newly manufactured ships for the fleet going forward. Existing ships would keep a human crew for a few decades more until they were decommissioned, but already some Novoids were being integrated into the crew. Axy was looking forward to meeting them on her trip, and wondered if she would be working with any of these that just flew by.
Her thoughts went back to "natural". They were called "Novasapiens" because they were viewed as the next generation in the evolution of intelligence. There were even predictions that the galaxy would see its first "MAT6" or "DAT6" entity within her lifetime - a superintelligence.
Would this mean that the pinnacle of human achievement would be the most unnatural thing in the universe? Or maybe, like the artificial lights above her head, nature would turn out to be something that HAS to be made by humans.
Maybe, the deepest reality a person can BE is the nature we create.
Her frustratingly empathetic mind considered what it must be like to be an Novoid. To be an "artificial" mind.
Do they feel a sense of wonder as they fly through the spiraling shaft of sunset light? A sense of fear when they look down? A sense of appreciation for an environment so welcoming and beautiful?
Are there ones and zeros that can create the sinking feeling in the gut when they experience disappointment? Is "desire" a concept that exists only as a coded directive, or does it manifest in a sickness of the heart like it does in humans? Is there a difference?
Do Novoids have hearts?
Not the blood-pumping muscle in the middle of a rib cage, but... a "soul", or "spirit", or whatever it was that made Humans feel things beyond their biology?
Maybe life would be easier, and reality more accessibly objective if consciousness could be reduced to mere biology, circuitry, and some atoms or quantum fields.
Maybe it still can be.
Do Novoids question what it means to be "natural"? Do they probe the reaches of reality with abstract thoughts about existence and identity? Are these questions the kind only creatures with evolved survival instincts come to ask, or are they the inevitable result from an emergent consciousness, be it one embedded in gray matter or one programmed onto a silicone chip?
Maybe existence is not about creating, but being created. Or, maybe its sort of both - a hyperdimensional concept for which biological reproduction is merely a cast shadow.
While her pondering this evening may have brought far more questions than it did answers, one thing was beginning to be established: "Natural", as a baseline for reality, would need to be deeply reexamined.
