vignettes: the future - planetfall, the past

 

we're looking at one of three train-engine-sized bullet-shaped object attached to a flying-buttress-like pier structure, this pier is extending out below a cathedral-sized space station in low orbit above a planet, slowly spinning in silence, hanging in the blackness of space. white clouds and sparkling blue water, just like our cradle world only the shapes of coastlines aren't familiar

we input something, tap or press a button or whatever

as we look on we notice the bullet has decoupled, tiny jets fire, and the bullet slowly begins to fall away… and we follow it down, down, down…. we watch it rotate to an angle that will help it in its goal to survive the stresses of entering the planet's atmosphere…

we can shift the camera around, zoom in, zoom out

when we input something else there's a jump cut

as we descend we're buffeted, shaken, we see flames lick out from the bullet's heat-shield.

the planet and its atmosphere, previously perceived as a rounded spherical object, now surrounds us

the image starts breaking up, static, noise, inexplicable imagery, flashback, memory

input= jump cut

 

soon we are able to discern details of coastlines, rivers, mountains, forests… we're plummetting and the surface is alarmingly close when three white-and-red striped parachutes whip out of the bullet's transom, and all of a sudden our fall begins to slow… and for a moment it feels as if we're hanging there, and we can look all around and below, at mountains with lumpy clouds, and a fog bank obscuring the coastal waters

input= jump cut 

and then our bullet-shaped pod suddenly snaps apart and is wrenched upwards by its chutes, jettisoning a smaller brillaint aircraft with rockets a-glow

input=jettison

now input controls small aircraft

the scout ship's wings are creating lift but not enough to fly, not quite enough to glide, and so it descens at an elegant angle, tumbling through the coastal fog bank, levelling out at a comfortable altitude low above the darkened, twinkling ocean of this unfamiliar, limitless new world

when we eventually climb out of the coastal fog bank we see a vast planet looming in the sky above, and we see a faint pink-ish aurora borealis above wispy clouds

 

exploring the world we make our way up the lowlands and glimpse an impossible creature

as we proceed we sometimes hit the ground or sustain various impacts, the camera shakes and flickers letting us know how mild or severe these are, and for some hard impacts our view may be distorted, as if our display or camera is malfunctioning under stress. similarly, at high speeds our view narrows, suggesting g-foces.

sometimes when these distortions occur we see ghost images. do they represent the pilot's memory, like micro-second flashbacks? on our first hard impact we saw a face, a woman, a man, an airfield, a building.

there are various entities and phenomena in this world. we sometimes see waterspouts and little twisters, forming and then dissipating. if we approach our view becomes slightly distorted, we get the sense the entity is electric in some way, and if we approach closely enough we'll see more ghost images. a roomful of uniformed people. a chandelier. a cat. a bunk. these little twisters dissipate before we can see any one image clearly, before the images resolve into a story.

we encounter other obstacles in our way, even aggressive entities that would damage the scout ship. if we were skilled and knowledgeable about how to operate our scout ship, and if had a better understanding of our goals and motivations, we might better understand these obstacles and avoid them. if this is our first time then it's possible, likely even, that we would have several opportunities to learn about impacts, dangerous phenomena, shields, damage... and it's quite possible we would learn about what happens when our ship crashes, and our pilot ejects, his or her chute popping open as he or she blacks out and our view goes dark...

we awake, we're near a crash site, our chute is all around us... but this isn't the same place, this isn't the same time... we're on a blindingly white salt flat under a bright blue sky, on our cradle world. we can see the smoking remains of our craft a few hundred yards away, and we can hear far-off sirens. we look around, trying to place the source of the sirens, and we see three dark spots, one of them an ambulance, driving in our direction... the words '1000 years ago' appear

jump cut

medical exam

jump cut

walking into a large building, a hundred young uniformed people stand facing away from you, looking to the front of the room, where someone is speaking, addressing the audience, who we gather are pilots-in-training, and today is a big decision day, there are three large doors at the front of the room, one on either side of the speaker, one directly behind her, and we are told the central door is for new recruits, basic training at the salt flats, the door on the right leads to a train which leads to a facility on the coast where various maritime and heavy weather exercises and courses take place, the door on the left leads to a forested mountain and alpine region where survival and high altitude exercises and courses take place. the speaker continues to speak, the uniformed pilots continue to stand, but we make our way to the doorway of our choice, walk down a corridor adorned with relevant imagery of the kinds of places and activities we might expect, and as we approach the end of the corridor

jump cut

a beautiful day, our sweeps down from on high and we see a dot leaving a trail, carving its way across a landscape... our view starts to approach and follow this craft, and it dawns on us that we can press an input and take control. we'll be presented with various exercises, we'll learn how to operate our scout craft and the various equipment it comes with, we'll learn how to manage its cargo, how to deal with heavy weather, to manage our fuel consumption and our energy absorption, we'll learn to gather, to transport cargo, to land and to take off... while in-between and during each exercise we'll get glimpses into this world that is familiar but interestingly different, and we'll get clues about what it's all about, and we'll notice whenever we're in a menu that we can press R to fast forward to the future, to that planetfall scenario, we can try again whenever we like, whenever we're ready... and if we do launch another planetfall mission, or pick up where we left off, we know we can flashback to this flight school to become more skilled, more knowledgeable, more self sufficient

this is going to be a videogame where you mostly zoom around low over ground and water in a little science fiction scout ship, having a fun time, going slow and enjoying the natural world as it goes by, listening to the wind and the birds and the sound of creeks accompanied by an unseen orchestra of hushed thrumming strings, and then you put your foot on the gas and hear the rockets fire and now you're going fast and skidding around corners and taking risks, taking jumps and landing them with skill and flair. as you get into the flow and get familiar with the controls you'll discover you can 'film' your adventures as if you're directing an IMAX film

think of the best bits of driving a car, with a lot of the off-road thrill of snowboarding/skiing, plus occasionally some of the thrill of flying a hang glider, riding a rocket or flying around in a jet. 

there's a world to explore, river valleys to whizz up and down, surf-battered coastlines and beaches to follow, large mountainsides to traverse. you feel the dirt kicking up behind you, you see a satisfying plume rise out of water. each corner of this world has its own charms, there are swamps, lakes, meadows, forests, grasslands, desolate moraines, glaciers and snow… and in a matter of minutes you can skate on down from a windswept ice field following a growing river to the sea, our inexplicably quiet careening startles birds in the morning light

the sun rises on dew-soaked grasses, the morning fog lifts, it's a glorious morning although there are dark clouds on the horizon suggesting heavy weather, perhaps a storm this afternoon. we take a moment to plan out our tasks for the day, where we'd like to go, what we might be able to gather or harvest, and we think about how much we can realistically get done before the storm rolls in towards dusk, because when the sun is gone our scout ships solar won't be able to supply us with the energy we're presently enjoying the heck out of

on our way up an unfamiliar coast we sight a contrail, evidence of another scout ship in the vicinity. the trail uggests the ship has followed a creek. should we investigate? we haven't been up there. would be interesting to know who it is and what they're doing, and maybe there are some materials worth gathering, or some food or fuel we could harvest.

as we're driving slow, looking towards land, enjoying the mood, we glimpse something else that catches our eye further down the coast… an impossibly large shape, floating in the air, attached at one end to a hillside.. we move to investigate this titanic creature, slowing down as we get near so as not to alarm it… you've heard of these creatures, that they are plagued by parasites made of a material that would be precious to your fellow pilgrims, perhaps… if you're careful enough… maybe you can approach and use a kind of tether harpoon on one of these parasites, remove it from the floating creature's side like a horn from a lion's paw… but of course, the floating creature might see us as a threat, and we might have to deal with that… but that parasite would definitely come in handy…. let's watch the creature for a bit, he appears to be feeding, and birds are circling his maw… maybe we can learn something that'll make our task easier

later on we a returning down the coastline we had been exploring as dark clouds move in, when we hear radio static, and a garbled voice. the voice comes in more clearly when we look at an island on the horizon, where we can identify a faint glowing dot that seems to blink in time with the voice. we could continue on up the valley to where our fellow pilgrims have settled, or we can head out over the increasing choppy water to investigate the source of this transmission. over open water we can really gun it, and it's fun to skid and watch the plume of spray jet skywards

at length we reach the island, a sandy rocky place, and sure enough we see a strangely-shaped structure close to the highest point. there's a sandy spot nearby that would make a good landing spot, so we gun it, skid, and then put our scout ship into a semi-automatic landing manoeuvre, the landing gear unfolds in a flash - four robot dog legs - and we're safe on the ground. we unbuckle, tur a latch, and now we're beneath the scout ship, our flight suit and helmet still on, standing on the sandy ground on our own two feet. the sky is darkening, the trip back to the mainland will be slow-going with less solar energy

but it's time to take a look at this structure, whatever it is. we slowly walk forward in our bulky flight suit, clambering up the rocky slope, we can hear our breathing apparatus. the strange structure has an entrance, we fire up our headlamp and step inside…

it's past dark, our trip up the valley was a slow one, our batteries mostly depleted, a trip made slower still by swarms of flying creatures that we took pains to avoid alarming. at length we see a comforting sight, the cheery campfires of the settlement, where twenty or thirty pilgrims are sleeping, cooking, eating, talking, drinking and laughing around campfires and in tents beneath a broad overhang. we put our ship into a skid and land, a pilgrim comes out to meet us, remarking on the materials and food we've been able to gather and how they'll be put to use to build new equipment or structures or for research purposes on this unfamiliar world or to better feed the pilgrims, and then we're invited to relax by a fire and listen to a story or a song before going to bed, exhausted after a busy day. 

should we tell that one pilgrim about the transmission, and the strange structure we found, and what we found inside? will the other pilgrims think we're losing it? there isn't supposed to be anyone out there.

we're dreaming. we are remembering our three years in flight school, preparing for this adventure. it's a blur. we remember the temple where the hundred or so young pilots would gather to for public addresses, where the young pilots would be sorted by year, by which assignments they would take, some taking the train to the rugged coast for ocean rescue training, others heading to the glaciers and lakes of the mountains, the rest staying here in the valley to learn about equipment and about the mission

we didn't know who among us would be chosen, or if anyone would be chosen. the odds were steeply stacked against our selection. only a dozen pilots would be chosen, and nobody knew when. more than once crews had been assembled and then, following endless delays and myriad setbacks, disbanded. after all, the titanic colony mothership had been in construction for almost a hundred years, the job of building it had started and re-started more than a handful of times as old designs were proven unfeasible or rendered obsolete. the feeling amongst our class was that now was the time, that the colony mothership presently in orbit was ready for the thousand year trip across the abyssal expanse of deep space, but hadn't flight classes' in previous years thought exactly the same?

there were advantages to the delays, it could be said. in the intervening time newer, more powerful telescopes told us more and more about our destination, a world we came to learn was in the 'goldilocks' zone of its star system, and impossibly according to many of our thinkers, it was home to oceans of water, with a cloud cover just like our precious, doomed cradle world and even forests, or something like them. with each new discovery, interpreted from spectrograms and decades-old reflected light, the design of the colony mothership and its various components and cargo was adapted and its appropriateness improved

perhaps the biggest improvement was the major advancements in propulsion in the last few decades, fuel yield, energy harvest and energy storage orders of magnitude better than what came before. what once took gallons of liquid fuel now required only microns. the original colony mothership was a mass of vulnerable fuel containers, the latest design could be contained within a hard-shield. for us recon pilots these advancements have re-shaped our scout crafts, we can go further and faster than what many thinkers would have thought possible in years past

ok so that touches on some of the main things we're looking to accomplish