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Language:
English
Series:
Part 1 of Like grains of sand
Collections:
Icewall, Ice Opera, Family
Stats:
Published:
2020-05-25
Words:
775
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
25
Kudos:
45
Hits:
221

The long way home

Summary:

A young girl's father explores other worlds, but she must remain in their home world where it's safe.  She misses him dearly, but is undaunted, instead writing a report of just what's out there and what he faces.

N.B.: 11 months after writing this, I set another, more serious-toned story (A jug of wine) in the same civilization (that story's more standard sci-fi in its nature, dealing with the adult characters' respective worlds' different social norms and the logic of empire and the understated deceptive allure of cool shiny sci-fi gadgets).  That started as a series with this one, but became inextricably linked such that this story serves as a prologue to that one, rather than a stand-alone.

I read and appreciate (and try to reply to) all of your comments (they are always welcome)!

𝑫𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝑳𝒊𝒌𝒆, 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑺𝒖𝒃𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒃𝒆! ❤️

Notes:

For this series, and really all of my stories, keep in mind something like Asimov's laws of Robotics, or perhaps psychohistory boiled down to two rules of thumb:

RULE:  Any world (no matter how improbable) in a spatiotemporally infinite rule-based random universe is virtually certain to exist (merely occupying a smaller portion of phase space).
 
Corollary:  Any world that someone thinks is “cool,” given sufficiently advanced means of production, is virtually certain to be produced.

With the overall Zelda / Peach series set 2242-2260 AD and Capt Williams's log (Earth 1 / Orion Earth) in Icewall being set c2308, Ms. Agbim's school report on the politics of the Federation, Coalition, and Alliance presumably occurs >c2138 (giving them 100 years to adjust and explore) and <c2338 (300 years post-WVD) — this is narrowed down to 24c in ch. 4 of the sequel, while we explore quite a bit more of this setting's tech.

This borrows a little from an episode of Rick and Morty in its specific mention of Purge worlds, and some of the variations introduced in Sliders (Swappers being a better parallel to that), though mostly introducing a physical spatiotemporal variation on Wheeler's MWI (much like the multiple Earth clones of Star Trek [the original series], but fanning more specifically on a “What if...” regarding Flat Earth conspiracy theories of an infinite plane of ice).

There's a comparative map of the two worlds in particular in chapter 2 of the next story (A jug of wine), and a generalized conceptual map of the many worlds in that same story's chapter 4.

NB:  If you're wondering, please see my tutorial “How to make and fix a series on AO3 ” (in a series with another tutorial on CSS work skins for fonts, which made that link become underscored blue ink highlighted in yellow [assuming that your browser settings, site skin, and third party apps didn't prohibit it]; it also covers how to highlight things, circle, view fics' work skin rules, and similar such).
 

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Geo-history report by Swansea Agbim (age 10)

 

We live in the middle of a whole bunch of other world-ponds.  They're called “world-ponds” because each one has a sun that keeps them warm and bright, so they're not covered in ice, and they're just like ponds of water with islands in them all in the middle of the ice.  All of the other world-ponds are just like Earth.  There are thousands and millions of Earths all around us.  They're not all the same, but they once were.  All through history, everything that ever happened was completely the same on all of them until WV-Day.  Then everything changed.

A long time ago, when the Wikivirus broke in 2038 and news of all of the conspiracies actually being real spread everywhere at once, some Earths started killing themselves, with wars between their nations and corporations and citizens and everything.

Some Earths ignored it all and just did the same things as they had before WV-Day.

Some went out and explored for science, or hippy love, or military power, or resources.

 

We decided to make contact with the other worlds and see if we could all be friends.  It doesn't always work though.

Some of the other Earths are nuked to ashes, some are full of robots and dinosaurs, or completely empty — even though there's no sign of war or anything, all of the people simply vanished.  There are even Purge worlds and places full of radioactive cannibalistic mutants!

They aren't all bad though.  There are even some places that turned into Paradise, living in beautifully groomed trees with manicured lawns and all of the animals everywhere.

Not all of the other Earths are nearby.  Some are stuck together in tight clusters, some are spread out in sparse scattered arrangements, some along strings or geometric figures.  Nobody knows for sure how many Earths there are, or how far out they go, and we don't know what any of this means, if anything.  Some people think it's just random, or we're all part of a lost civilization that once spanned all of the world-ponds, or God did it, or aliens are running a really big experiment, or it's some weird quantum cosmological polygonal mirror effect.  Some even say it's a corruption of the holographic array.

 

Our nearest neighbors are the Coalition of Free Worlds (they're basically just interested in profit, so they stay neutral in everything and try to keep everyone nice, and they have One King to rule them all, so they're more like an imperial conglomerate than a mega-corporate zaibatsu), the Federation of World Ponds (they like to think that they're The Ice's self-appointed and unasked for police force), and the Alliance (they're kind of paranoid and think that all of the other Earths just want to get what they have; they don't really get along with each other, but they're even more afraid of everyone else).  There are a lot of others nearby, and a whole lot more of them that are farther away, but those are our biggest neighbors.

Not all of our neighbors are part of big groups of world-ponds.  Some of them are all alone, or only know a few of their neighbors.

All of the aliens are human.  That's because God said so.  It's a shame that we'll never meet any Martians or Dragons or anything, but it also means that we're completely safe against any real live aliens ever invading!

 

In between all of the Earths is a big empty land of nothing but ice and darkness.

There might not be any aliens, but there are some things that live there, just not many.  And they're all weird.

There are giant mushrooms that are almost lighter than air, and sometimes they float around.  There are these really big microorganisms the size of whales, and that's why we call them whalemoebae1.  Then there are ice-squid that skate along on special tentacles using jets of compressed air to push them at high speeds when they need to go fast.  The whalemoebae eat ice and organic stuff that's in it and use radioactive stuff to keep warm.  There's also some really funny creatures that look like glowing rods and balls of plasma.

 

Right now, my daddy is on a first contact mission really really far away, and it's going to take him a long time to come back because he's going to stop at a bunch of different Earths along the way.  I miss him, but what he's doing is important.

And that's why when I grow up I want to be a United Worlds representative just like my daddy!

 

The End

 

O ~~~ O

 

Notes:

1  Whalemoebae:  Written in Swansea's report as “whalemoebae”, they would more properly be capitalized under my own naming conventions to indicate some reasonable degree of sophonce.  For a short but pointed example of this, please see the story EVA.

Also, aside from the species that Swansea names, further Ice life includes things that look like ion globes, lava lamps, fiber optic fronds, Tesla coils, predatory luciferase-trees, jellyblimps & brinkeroos (Our Universe, Roy Gallant, Nat. Geo., 1980 [though I could've sworn that these two had been in Sagan's Cosmos]), shambling lichen & giant tardigrade (n-times-removed cousins to those in the 2e D&D story The Dimmendark), slime molds, koosh blobs, tube worms, and lobstorpions.

Then there are the world-trees, trees that are literally the size of worlds, with millennia-long lifespans, first digging deep into the Ice as drilling seeds to reach nutrients, then growing ever larger, sending up shoots to the surface of the Ice, blooming as whole worlds with gene-library semi-random ecologies, maturing, and eventually volcanically spewing the next generation of asteroid-like seeds far into the cold outer darkness.

And rarest of all, the ice-worms, whose spice (Dune-like) changes people into Trek/Charmed-like Titans.

Whether world-trees and/or ice-worms exist within the Terra-centric megacluster is another matter, but the rest are all certainly there somewhere (and we do get to see a little of them in the next story's chapter 4).

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