Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.5    An Idiosyncratic Interlude

1.2.5.18 Feliformation

10pm, Thursday June 8th, 2045

In the middle of the courtyard was a padded reclining chair made of dark leather. It had a drink holder in the left arm, and an elasticated net bag on the back, suitable for stuffing loose magazines into, but otherwise it wouldn’t look out of place in a stately manor house.

Nadine: “Is this what you crafted?”

Heather: “One of the things. Have a seat, put your feet up.”

She sat down and found it to be comfortable, if surprisingly springy and less solid than she’d anticipated. She leant back and spotted a group of lights approaching from above. Heather clipped a 4-point harness over her, pulling it snug, and quickly attached wires being lowered to the chair and to her own steam-punk harness.

Heather: “60 kg, no problem. Comfortable?”

Nadine: “Heather!”

Heather: “Good. Away we gooooo!”

And off they flew, into the night sky. If she tilted her head, she could see lights in the distance from the valley below, but mainly she could see the stars above and Heather, whose wings were now glowing with the pale orange of an old-fashioned carbon filament bulb. A voice came from her ear-ring, clear over the buzzing of the drones.

Heather: {Nadine, how’re you doing?}

Nadine: {You’re a rotter for not warning me, and the view is fantastic! Where are we going?}

Heather: {Up to the summit, where I’ve sent the rest of the things I want to test. We could have spent an hour walking there, but this is faster, more fun, and I needed to check that you’re ok with flying for our journey tomorrow to the MythOS bot launch.}

Nadine: {Is it safe? What if an eagle snatches one of the drones carrying me?}

Heather: {I’ve got a sensor net up - I’d spot it coming and intercept. If it did grab a drone, I can remotely release the wire. There’s redundancy among the drones - it would need to kill three of them before you’d start sinking. If it killed them all, the chair can release a chute. If the chair itself malfunctioned, I’ve got another set of drones below with a net that could catch you. Trust me; as an engineer it’s my job to plan for unlikely contingencies.}

Ahead she could see a row of large glowing arrows, blinking in waves of colour that washed along in the direction they were pointing.

Nadine: {Then I guess we’ll fly. What are those arrows ahead?}

Heather’s voice sounded mysterious: {Those aren’t arrows. They’re bees.}

A minute later they’d landed and Heather brought a bee over to show her. It was a tiny drone, very nippy, whose payload was a glowing discus. She taught Nadine some hand movements to control its position just by pointing, then demonstrated how eight of them could act like a swarm, keeping station relative to each other in order to make a cube. From there she demonstrated the tuneable colours, bringing down more bees to form two dice, a red and a blue one, then activating a pre-set flight pattern to give the illusion of the dice being rolled across a table. Nadine got a “4” on her blue die, while Heather got a “6” on the red, much to her delight.

Heather: “Yay, I win!”

Nadine: “They’re very cute. But what are they good for? Why did we have to come all the way up here to test them?”

Heather struck a dramatic pose, arms upraised, fingers splayed: “Fly, my cuties, fly!”

From all around them, where they’d been resting on the ground with their fans and lights off, rose thousands of bees. Starting with a single hovering bee as their foundation, they assembled into a 10 m tall hollow statue of Heather: wings, hat and all. Each bee was 20 cm away from the others near it, and appropriately coloured, so even the expression on her face was hinted at.

Nadine: “Cool. Though your black hat doesn’t show up too well.”

Heather nodded, and the statue nodded with her. She moved her arms to fiddle with brightness and contrast settings, and the statue’s arms moved too, with the fastest moving parts (the hands) lagging a little as the little bees reached their maximum speed. They played with the effects for a few minutes, Nadine giving feedback, until they were both happy with the result.

Nadine: “Ok, yeah, that might have attracted a bit too much attention, back down in the village. So, anyway, there’s a question I’ve got…”

Heather: “Ask away!”

Nadine explained what she’d asked Bungo and Tomsk, and what their replies had been.

Heather: “So you want the big picture? What I think matters, what I want for the future?”

Heather: “Sure, no problem. I’ll give you a short answer, then I’ll show off the final thing I wanted to test, then I’ll give you my long answer. Suits?”

Nadine: “Awesome. Finally someone with a short answer! Let’s hear it.”

Heather: “Feliformation.”

Nadine: “What?”

Heather: “Feliformation. Like terraforming, except it is transforming a planet into a suitable habitat for felines. I want to travel to another solar system, set up an atmosphere and ecosystem, introduce all sorts of felines as the apex predators, and maybe uplift some of them to sentience.”

Nadine: “That’s certainly big and long term. But seriously, is that what you’d really pick as your vision of the wombles being successful? Is it that important?”

Heather: “It’s vital, Nadine. No kidding. Let’s lie back and look at the stars, then I’ll explain.”

Heather sent her bees back into their travel hives and turned off her wings. The summit of the mountain was fairly flat, and blocked out all light from the towns and valleys below, leaving the stars in the moon-less sky their only illumination. It had been a long while since she’d done this. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, more and more stars became visible. She lay back on the comfortable chair, warm clothes wrapped around her, and just took in the view.

Heather: “I love doing this. When working at Steading Lastovo I could spend hours floating on my back in the warm water, just looking up in the sky with the Mark 1 Eyeball. Tell me, can you see Mama Bear?”

Nadine: “I don’t really know much about the stars.”

Heather: “Mama Bear is the constellation Ursa Major, who looks after her little cub, Ursa Minor. Constellations are whole areas of the sky, containing millions of stars and other things too faint to see with naked eyes, so what the ancients did was pick out just a few of the brightest stars, arrange them into patterns called asterisms, and make up stories about them. Look high in the sky for a group of seven stars that look a bit like a long-handled dipping spoon. Can you see it?”

Nadine: “Yes, I think so.”

Heather: “It’s a really useful asterism to know, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. You can follow the line formed by the last two stars in the bowl of the spoon to find Polaris, the one star that doesn’t appear to move during all the hours of the night because it is due North, sitting on the axis going through both poles, about which the Earth spins.”

Nadine: “Got it. What else can you show me?”

Heather: “Move your eyes back to the Big Dipper, and look at the last three in the handle: Alioth, Mizar and Alkaid. Imagine a curve going through the three of them and follow that curve on until you reach a bright orange star. That’s Arcturus, in the constellation of Boötes the Ploughman.”

Nadine: “A lot of Arabic names.”

Heather: “Half the stars you can see without a telescope have Arabic names. We’re from Europe, so we tend to use the Greek names for constellations, but the Chinese and others all had their own stories. For example, the Arabic astronomers didn’t see a plough or dipping spoon in Ursa Major, they saw the handle as a funeral procession and the bowl as a coffin. Want to see?”

Nadine: “Sure.”

Heather: “There’s a pair of goggles in the bag behind you. I’ll set the overlay to display the mythological symbols in faint red lines in order to not spoil your night-vision.”

She put them on, and found they’d been personalised to fit her face exactly. The glass was so clear, she barely noticed she was wearing them. Then Heather remotely turned them on, and suddenly the sky became a story, bestrode by legendary heroes and monsters.

Heather: “Carry on the curve beyond Arcturus, about the same distance again, and you get to another bright star, sitting next to the lopsided crow. That’s Spica, in the constellation of Virgo the Maiden.”

She looked at the infodot by Virgo, and a hushed voice from her ear-ring started telling her the tale of Persephone and her abduction to the underworld. She’d heard that one before, from Bulgaria, and blinked off it.

Nadine: “So, you said you had a last thing you’d crafted, that you wanted to try out?”

Heather: “Oh, yeah! I had to set up the ability to make lenses and mirrors in order to craft machines that would do stereo and photolithography, but after that they were idle, so I did what I normally do.”

Nadine: “Dismantle them?”

Heather: “No. Telescopes! I crafted a trio of meter-diameter telescopes and stuck them on high vantage points. They’d cost about 80,000 CFF each if I bought them, but if you’ve the right machines they cost less than 800 CFF to craft. I’ve left dozens on high peaks around the world, and if anyone steals or breaks them, I just craft another and hide it better.”

Nadine: “That’s… that’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve grasped what your setup can do. Is there anything it can’t do?”

Heather: “Not much. It can’t match a dedicated factory for throughput or efficiency, and I pre-order most chemicals rather than brew them - though Bungo tells me that’s mostly automatable too. Capability has really been improving fast, over the last five years, since expert systems improved enough to take over all the boring bits. I’ll show you tomorrow, if you like.”

Nadine: “Sure! But for now, how about you show me what your local trio can do, and then explain why feliformation matters.”

Over the next hour Heather spoke non-stop, with a passion that was infectious, like an avid gardener showing off the grounds of a home that they’d worked on for forty years. She learned about dwarves and giants, binaries and holes, the main sequence of stars and the difference between a nova and a supernova; not as in a lecture, but as someone introducing their friends, each with a personal story attached.