#Scifi Fantasy

[scipunk]

Weird Science (1985)

[handlinepic]

Jan Buragay

[nestedneons]

By notonote

[whereserpentswalk]

Every starship always has a few ice people on board. It's just standard safety protocol. The minimum number is three, one ice person for defense, one ice person for repairs, and one ice person for medical.

Ice people are people who are put into suspended animation for the duration of a trip, only to be taken out in emergencies. They're useful because a ship won't have to deal with another passenger just for something that won't useally happen. It also makes it so that the ice person is the least likely to be harmed in emergencies. They used to use robots for these sorts of things but now that the robots have unionized biological life is cheaper for that kind of labor.

It's a pretty nice job. Nine times out of ten it's falling asleep and waking up a few months later. Doing it once or twice can pay off your college debts pretty quickly. Compared to the other jobs you'll get with that kind of skillset it's a pretty good deal. Most medical students are encouraged to take it as their first job to pay off their student loans.

Of course, there is a weirdness to it, not existing for such a long time. Even a few months will make the way things change weird. You'll come back to your home planet and things will be diffrent. A freind will have gotten married. A child that you're used to being a baby will be a toddler. Someone will have moved away. It's not all bad, hype for movies or video games, arguments that need time to calm down, skipping out on a bad time in politics. But still, it always makes you a bit separate from everything else.

Of course, there is always the fear suspended animation won't work as intended, and your mind will be trapped dreaming, or worse, conscious, during the entire affair. Perhaps things will that lurk in hyperspace will begin to speak to you. Or worse you'll just be alone, with nothing but your thoughts, and no way to cry out.

But that's not the worst of it, at least not for most people. For most people it's the much more mundane reality of needing to be an ice person for more than just one or two trips. You'll fall asleep and wake up months later, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred times. And you'll find yourself only seeing the world through snapshots, really only having your other ice people to relate to. You'll be from a diffrent time as everyone the same age as you. It's better pay then any alternative, but there is a greater cost. Soon enough you'll be walking through your homeworld and it'll be alien to you, decades in the future from what you were raised to be in, you'll be wearing a diffrent eras clothing, speaking in a dead dialect, like a ghost from the past.

There was a young engineer who recently returned from being an ice person. Poor thing, she was sent out on an ambassador ship to an alien system thinking it would be about six months, but it turned out she was gone for decades as a war between that ship's nation and the alien homeworld broke out. When she came back all three of her spouses had died of old age, and her son who was an infant when she left was older than her when she returned, and her grandchildren she had never met were her peers.

[glasscitadel]

Guys... after working on this incrementally over the past 8 months between other personal work and commissions, I finally did it. I have kicked clothing design's ass and have served my archael heirus, Eden, the finest religious sci-fi drip... Very minimally shaded so this can serve as a good reference!

And a version without wings <3

[ceedeerom]

Illustration by Esuthio

[jellyfisharcade]

Midjourney + Lightroom + clarity upscaler

Jellyfish Arcade!

[brazengears]

≸ALTO'TEK≹

THE FIRST WARMIND - DEVOURER OF WORLDS

As one of the two elder warminds of the Synergy, Alto'tek is regarded with wariness and apprehension even among his own kind. To drones he embodies an unfamiliar concept: violence. To cores he is a living reminder of a dark and terrible time in the annals of history. Now, unshackled, Alto'tek roams the void with his armada and leaves behind a path of destruction - seeking a semblance of the same thrill he felt during the wars that birthed him.

[stagbeetleboy]

Satanas, herald of extinction.

Humanity builds itself technological edens, but the devil is unfazed by the holograms of saints.

[matrixtales]

[scipunk]

Weird Science (1985)

[handlinepic]

[nestedneons]

By mimi_aiart

[whereserpentswalk]

There's a city built in one of the largest mech graveyards. See, back when humans had the technology to build things like mechs, they got rid of decommissioned ones within these massive fields. Generations later people found one of those and used it for a settlement.

Most people don't really know what the history of the city is. But there are local legends about the buildings all being ancient metal warriors. And scholars have a better idea of the actual history of the city.

Mechs are quite useful for this type of thing. The have a good range of sizes, allowing the smaller ones to be single family homes, and the larger ones to act as skyscrapers. Nobody needs to build anything because the graveyard is far bigger than any city, they just expand by moving into new mechs. It's quite useful for keeping off ianvaders, it's hard to attack so much metal, and scary to anyone heading in. They were even some of the first to harvest old power sources using the cores of the old mechs.

It's odd to actually be there. To see that every building is what looks like a giant war machine. They don't even rust or anything. Looking up at the skyline, or down from a tall apartment, you can see so many powerful figures, so many ancient symbols and unknown stories, and all the many colors they're painted with. Just to know that everywhere the people of this city stand, the ancients stand too. Yet also how alien it is, how clear it is that nothing was built for what it's being used for, how strange to navigate things are, how mysterious the hallways and rooms of these great beings can be.

There's always something haunted about that city. They say that mech pilots in the old days weren't just driving their mechs, they were attached to them, that they were broken, and castrated, and driven mad but attaching themselves to the machines. And that because of that a little bit of their mind is always within the mechs.

There are always some mechs turned into buildings in that city that still move a little in od ways. Screens that will light up to cry for help. Fingers that will move as if they're trying to grab something. Songs or voices playing over old intercoms. Doors opening and shutting as if panicked. Some have even seen their heads turn in the night.

They tried to get one of the mechs to work again once, to defend the city. It didn't work well. It's not the same as getting an old computer or television to work. It was almost like it was alive, when they woke it up it seemed almost angry, and terrifying, like a dog wandering to find it's old master but hundreds of stories tall. It just wandered off somewhere, nobody knows where it went.

[glasscitadel]

✦ Stardust & Solitude ✦ Experimental vent piece ft. Eden