Gallery of the Possible
Cultural Shift Edition
I’ve followed Safiya from toddler to elementary school to starting a new city to now almost a grandmother. This is from about the fifteenth year of the settlement to almost the sixtieth. Industrious, hopeful world and people, building farms and towns and roads in an environment that, though tolerant of humans, is far from ideal. In two centuries, the Famine will come, and the Caballardo follows the Famine.
Three refugee ships, hoping to build a peaceful world, end up replicating every horror humanity has forged before and manage to create a couple of new ones.
No, I’m not cynical and hopeless; why do you ask?
The signs are already here. There have been murmurings of cloning before; now Biosphere is recording everyone’s DNA… just in case. There are other cultural shifts as well; resources can’t be spared to maintain the highly tailored clothing styles brought from Earth, and the younger generation is choosing a loosely wrapped and tied-on style. There is a vague prefiguring, as we’ve seen, of the new religion coming, but so far only its shadow is cast. Old traditions are nearly dead. And as always, the planet itself, for those who are observant, moves behind everything.
(The new calendar doesn’t exist yet—Safiya would say it was 2355. The ships left Sol around 2180.)
Yes, I play with AI art. There would be no art here at all without it, except on my notes. It’s a predictive toy. If it will replace me, then it will replace all of us and no force, save total catastrophe and genocidal struggle, will stop it. (Please see refugee ships, three, above. ☝️Note also that the Council, in Dardana and Hee-young’s time, forbids AI altogether. Note also that Seoribyeol appears to live alongside it.)
So this first image up top is not right, but the post-Modernist spirit of Safiya’s parents and grandparents is violated. The nurse looks somewhat like she might in “modern” Iphigenia. (Recall that significant change—cultural drift—is antithetical to the Council, so if that were the style in 820, it sure as shooting would be much the same in 420.)
Moving on in no particular order. The mind in the box loved making plants inside. Dunno why. Again, a bit more “modern” than Safiya’s time.
A little closer, but the internal vines are a no, and the clothing again, not quite. No way to get it there, really.
Meh, sort of RenFesty.
This actually gets there in some ways, the rattletrap impermanence of the social-democratic kibbutzim world they lived in.
What I settled on. Not because it is accurate but because of the peculiar social shifts that it implies, which Safiya, by the time she’s eighty, if she lives so long, will have an increasingly difficult time understanding.
Safiya and Biosphere
Safiya is forty-five. She is sitting in the waiting room at Biosphere on Kulhanek Strato. She is reading the weekly Kolektiva Journal. There is an interesting article on hybrid citrus fruit designed to flourish on the regolith with minimal soils. There’s a black-and-white picture of the orange-lemon hybrid.