Vaskania Prime is one of many exoplanets that was targeted for colonization from Earth in the late 23rd century. To reach other habitable systems, humans designed large-scale, self-replicating robotic fleets. Modeled on Von Neumann probes, the ships of the fleet were built with minimal resources in the inner Sol system. They mined raw materials, hydrocarbons, water, and other resources from asteroids and Kuiper belt objects as they traveled through the outer system on the way to interstellar space. These fleets were operated by distributed AI systems, and were capable of self-repair and complex planning. They carried a seed vault and multiple copies of all information networks from Earth.

The most precious cargo was the store of human embryos. No adult humans were present for the thousand year voyage to Vaskania Prime. While the fleet terraformed the new world, the embryos were genetically modified to be viable in their new environment. The embryos were then “birthed” from incubated fluid sacs, with the genetic engineering and upbringing process improving iteratively over the generations.

BandCamp

Vaskania Prime

On Vaskania Prime sleep doesn’t work like in the simulations of Earth of old. Instead, people experience a shared hallucination, like plugging into a virtual reality through a hidden interface. In the dream world, people appear as distorted shadows of themselves. You can’t identify them unless truly intimate, and even then, you can go wrong. And things can happen to the real you. No one seems to have died in the dream world, but they’ve been trapped, drained, tortured. People harmed in the dream world may wake up with extreme personality changes, as if their mind has been shattered into fragments and hastily reassembled. And it seems as something else is there, observing and waiting. Enough of the old human gene line has been preserved that the inhabitants of Vaskania Prime can feel the biological machinery of prey behavior kicking in: the sense of being stared at.

Alien Gaze

When the fleet entered the Vaskania system, they had known for some time their target world no longer had water on its surface. Crossing from interstellar space into the system’s heliosphere, automated harvesters mined comets and small icy worlds in the outer belt for propellent and affixed small thrusters to many of these bodies. Over the next few hundred years, short burns from those thrusters adjusted the orbits of these small bodies so that they would collide with the surface of Vaskania Prime. The earliest machines to colonize the world had already landed and restructured much of the ground surface to force the flow of the incoming water into two large rivers that would form a new boundary around the habitable strip.

Comet Bombardment

With water flowing, terraforming could begin in earnest. Patches of green popped up as the fleet sorted out various genetic engineering problems, adapting the plant life in the seed vaults to the fixed day/night boundary on Vaskania Prime. This growth spread gradually over the next decades, filling the space between the two vast rivers the diggers had engineered: a new Tigris and Euphrates for a new human world.

Two Rivers Flow

Tidal Resonance

Vaskania Prime is an eyeball world, tidally locked to a class M star slightly smaller than Earth’s sun. Settled by a robotic fleet, all humans who dwell on the surface or in its orbit were brought to the Vaskania system as embryos and raised there. A narrow, terraformed strip marks the surface, divided by two rivers. The rivers form a boundary between light and burning heat on one side and a vast darkness on the other. The majority of the planet’s surface is in the light or dark and completely sterile. The terraforming process on the strip started hundreds of years earlier, when the fleet first entered the system, but there are signs the planet may have been habitable before.

Tidal Lock

I make music that teleports you to other worlds. PatternShift is the project of composer/producer Benjamin Kamphaus. Other projects include:

Hadamard Gate · Mnemonurgos · Generation Ship · Fading Skies · Abandoned Kingdom · Datacaster