Terraform Triptych

By Caldon Mull

It is 2425AD and media personality Winston Starlight needs another big hit to revive his centuries long career. Sol Senators have been notoriously difficult to interview, so when Mars Senator Spenser agrees to a three-part broadcast retrospective on his Luna, Mars and Titania projects, Winston can barely contain his pixels. Sol Senators are big news. Winston has big plans for this broadcast. Science has very little to do with all the things Winston wants to grill Senator Spenser on, the news-hungry public demand a spectacle... specifically with one of the most eligible and certainly wealthiest men in the Solar System. Let the Production begin!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caldon Mull
• Release date: Mar 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463375044

Caldon Mull

Caldon Mull is the pen name of a veteran storyteller with continent-spanning work experience consulting for the financial and military sectors. His work includes his primary series the 'Sol Senate Cycle' and his time-tripping fantastika series 'Agency Tales'. He is best known for supporting Games Master Content for the GENCON, UPCON, Oubliette and ICON game and comic conventions but is lesser known for his more edgy literary Fiction.His genre-skipping Fiction work has received 'honorable mention' over the years beginning with the 1986 Q2 Writers of the Future contest and from the SFSA Nova Award over later decades. His shorter works have been published in Omenana, RPGA Network and the SFSA Probe magazines. His longer works have been published under his eponymous Caldon Mull brand and by Sera Blue Publishers. He is currently resident in Finland with his wife and many cats.

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Terraform Triptych

Copyright © 2019 Caldon Mull

Published by Caldon Mull

at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

Terraform Triptych… is a work of fiction, any resemblance of any character to any person, alive or dead is entirely coincidental.This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Terraform Triptych

Episode 1 Mars, Summer 2425AD

Episode 2 Titania, Summer 2425AD

Episode 3 Luna, Fall 2425AD

Epilogue, Fall 2425AD

About Caldon Mull

Other books by Caldon Mull

Connect with Caldon Mull

Acknowledgements

What to say about the Future History? That narratively; it is one of the most difficult thematic avenues to explore as one would assume that a certain sequence of events need to happen in order for the theme to unfold logically? Or perhaps; that the author’s vision of what the future might hold based on what they know today, at the time of writing, is inherently flawed? If you assume all of these things, why would one even attempt such a task?

I did because I believe it is important to be curious about the consequences of any decision we might make today, over the longer term. I am curious about what political mistakes we allow today might well alter our long-term viability as a species. What looks to be good enough today might be the dead-end of our species in the near future.

Even if something looks fantastical right now, in a few decades a simple invention may change the course of tool-working and application in unknown ways like Fire did for our ancestral lineage.

‘Terraform Triptych’ represents the last set-piece in the Sol Senate’s ‘Future History’, the one that started in 1986 and has evolved through the decades between there and now. While the ‘Future History’ narrative was being formed, much has become more evident in the world; some elements have entered our common history; others have been still-born.

The next Cycle of the Sol Senate’s ‘Diaspora’ might be years in coming; but that doesn’t detract from the relief of getting to this place, through thick and thin… no matter what. A History is always determined in content and in meaning by the survivors of events.

In the time the ‘Future History’ took to be transcribed, I have witnesses wonderful things; Hayley’s Comet, Asteroid landings, Mars Rovers, a fly-by of a cold little planet on the edge of the Solar System with a big heart; and have been moved beyond reason by the simple phrase: ‘My battery is low and it's getting dark’.

In the same instance I have seen many a People’s Hero become a despised tyrant; swaths of endangered environment destroyed for a few tons of ore and, human beings treating other human beings worse than things. All an author has in the end; is a Voice. It simply has to be enough.

Prologue

Winston Starlight is a true media phenomenon; initially coded in the early 23rd Century to provide entertainment and commentary inside the Arcology clone-culture (now referred to as the ‘Out Systems’), he was the first example of a software Type-3 personality to achieve widespread relevance and acclaim. Dominating the Arcology Virtual Reality through a variety of entertainment hubs and maintaining relevance through many persona using a variety of genders, species, VR holographic and mechanical forms; Winston Starlight has endured and thrived.

‘He’ (and he will VR-war with anyone who maintains otherwise) has maintained a repertoire of farce, soap-opera, news commentary, gossip and speculation channels as well, into the second century of his career. The decision of the Arcology society to lift off Earth in 2230 and re-establish themselves as a free-floating nomadic culture was seen as the defining moment for the ‘OutSystems’ fleet.

Their decimation beyond the asteroid belt in 2232 by the then-Jovian Senator Jevron threw the Genetically-Engineered-Numan culture into crisis, and Winston Starlight and the GEN Houghton Arcology he was associated with, was considered lost forever; the soft-personality Read-Only-Memory of both AI and GEN persona’s considered to have been destroyed by the solar wind as they drifted, powerless through the Jovian radiation belts; abandoned, lifeless with Winston Starlight considered gone from the Universe.

The two decades of his stellar career has since been examined in detail, analyzed, dissected and imitated by countless other performers enough times to pass into the historical records of the Human Race as one of Earths’ most substantial social commentary of any era.

But… like so many stories from The Ebb, Winston Starlight’s story did not end there and then. Under mysterious circumstance, Winston Starlight re-awoke; inserted on the Crux network in 2397 and began his career anew; not simply for the near-defunct Arcology GEN-culture, but for the entire ‘proto-Sol’ Network.

The Crux network; a Dyson Swarm initiated and constructed by Uranus-Senator Piotr Krashkov of light-entanglement devices and their associated control systems spreading through the Inner and Intermediate solar reaches provided an ideal environment to host self-aware AI.

The immediacy of communication and virtual travel the Crux infrastructure provided to electronic beings like Winston Starlight was not initially apparent, as has become over this last century of human evolution.

At the time immediately prior to the ‘Terraform Triptych’ broadcast episodes, Winston Starlight really needed a big news item to rejuvenate his returning ‘fifteen minutes of Fame’ as a surviving curiosity. The use of the Crux as a device to provide heat and light to the cold places in the solar system was primarily fixed in the human consciousness as an engineering and biological tool. The ability to consume media and communication content within eight minutes anywhere in the solar system in broadcast reach of any Crux device was not yet exploited until the Triptych episodes.

This turning point was provided by