Oolite Bulletins

Zaonce
Economic status: Average Industrial
Technology level: 12
Population: 5.3 billion Human colonials
Political status: Corporate State
Radius: 3873 km
G: 0.35 standard

“This planet is a tedious place.”

Man oh man, who would have believed that just six words could shift a whole planetary economy? One word, really. It’s been over a century since the Co-operative published the definitive Register of Worlds, but that little “tedious” has been haunting Zaonce ever since it came out.

It took ninety years standard to compile the Register. Ninety years of official visits, editorial committees, reviews, complaints, boards of enquiry, threats, diplomatic incidents and at least one full-blown military exchange; megalitres of sweat, ichor, blood, tears, and pretty much any other biological fluid you care to mention were poured out in its compilation, and billions of credits spent. So why is it such a paltry collection of bald statistics, fuzzy orbital clips and some of the least informative one-line descriptions you could possibly imagine?

The Register was originally intended to be a comprehensive catalogue of every planet in the Eight Sectors, filled with metadata, hyperlinked to here and back again, constantly updated and built on a semiotic platform so fundamental that it would be immediately comprehensible to any sentient being. And then the compromises began. It was unfair to include olfactory information-cells, because only a subset of the insecta used them; illustrative material got boiled down to conform to the most basic visual spectra; and entire concepts were banned because they lay outside the ideological ranges of certain species. Professional, ethical and political disputes ensued, followed by swingeing budget cuts and drastic downward revisions to the programme. The whole procedure almost fractured the Co-operative. Eventually, after the grand Fourth Editorial had pared everything down to the utter minimum, the Register as we know it today was published and everyone has been bitching about it ever since – but no-one is willing to suggest revising or even updating it.

From the start the Corporation of Zaonce had viewed the whole project as a vast marketing exercise, but every attempt to insert information about their industrial products, or their trade facilities, or their service sector was stymied by the editors. Nothing they did met the editors’ exacting standards of universality. All they achieved, for all their arguing, threatening, lobbying and outright bribery, was to get their entry upgraded from “dull” to “tedious”.

The political fallout on Zaonce was huge. Four bitter Reorganisations and one cataclysmic Restructuring saw thousands of executives purged, their shares sequestered and their entire clans reduced to proledom. Out of the chaos a new Board emerged, led by the charismatic Maria “Challenge” Ventry, and rallied around her new Mission Statement: FUN.

So: is it fun? Well.... The first thing you see as you vector in towards the planet is the monstrous Hurricane Kev, dominating a huge swathe of the northern hemisphere – one vast, perpetual artificial weather system set aside for “the thrill of a lifetime”, where battalions of screamingly exhilarated tourists get to ride storms of firework lightning in total safety inside specially reinforced Morays. It’s a blast for the rubes, right enough, but weirdly flat and pointless for anyone who’s ever run through Raale with a hold full of hot wares and a tank full of fumes.

Get your feet on the floor, though, and things start to look up. The Zonkers are passionately serious about fun. If you like, you can surrender all free will to one of the many professional funsultants who swarm around the drop, and have them craft a total experience built around your psychological profile, your metabolism and your credit rating. It’s an expensive service but if money’s no object I say go for it: there really is so much to see and do on Zaonce that it can be a real boon to let someone else show you what you’d like. But if you have ethical or privacy issues, or you’re on a tight budget – or you’re just a cheapskate – then here are a few of the highlights:

The Zaonce Aurodrome: a massive, million-seater globe arena where all the titans of popular music perform a neverending schedule of gobsmacking sets. No matter what your taste, you will find something there you like: the subsonic drooper-woofers built into every chair will see to that.

Zanadoo Zoo: live a lifetime in one day as an Usleian Tree Ant, or join in with the songs of the Mariar forest chorus, or bound with the Tiinlebiian mountain slugs, all from the comfort of a neural entanglement chair. If there’s a subsentient animal that’s cute, or exciting, or otherwise notable, Zanadoo Zoo can drop you inside a perfect simulacrum of its sensorium. Fun and educational, too.

Chateau d’If: some people find this a bit unnerving, and currently it’s only available to those with mammalian brains due to compatibility issues, but essentially you get to be a god for an hour. Actually, all – all! – that happens is a cross-wiring of your mind, where your experiential centres and your perceptual matrices are bridged over, with the result that everything that happens around you appears to be nothing more or less than the total expression of your will: all existence conforms to your desire, all the time, as you sit there doing nothing in perfect, perfect dribbly satisfaction. The comedown can be a bitch, let me tell you: I wept like a baby. But there are trained counsellors on hand, and the haunting afterglow of my ersatz divinity is something I’ll never forget. Don’t try it more than once, though, is my advice.

The Perpetual Party: pretty much what it says on the tin. Once the entrance fee is paid it’s an all you can eat, drink, snort, inhale, shoot up or otherwise metabolise binge, where everything is keyed just right so there’s a constant gloss of glee and nobody ever gets bored or antsy. A franchise operation, there are Perpetual Parties running in every hotel on the planet; you can fritter away your whole stay in one of these and never make it past the lobby.

So, again: is it fun? Oh, absolutely. It’s fun. Fun fun fun. I had a great time. I really enjoyed myself. Blew through a stack of scratch as tall as a treeoid and didn’t regret a single credit. But truth to tell I wasn’t sorry to see Ventry Entry dwindle behind me on the shuttle back to the starside. Zaonce tries so hard, it really does – and you can see them try all around you, all the time. There’s a constant background buzz of eager solicitous care and concern wherever you go, and after a while it gets a bit creepy. Still and all, I don’t think the Zonkers are too concerned about that. Had fun? Yup. Great! Next! Ka-ching!

pagroove wrote:

It's a 1024 - 768 resolution

Isinor
Economic status: Poor Agricultural
Technology level: 7
Population: 3.7 billion Harmless Slimy Frogs
Political status: Confederacy
Radius: 6191 km
G: 0.95 standard

“This world is very fabled for its unusual oceans.”

If you’re planning a trip to Isinor, take an umbrella. And a cagoule. And sufficient waders for all your motile limbs. And another cagoule. Isinor is wet.

Despite the overwhelming dampness, Isinor’s so-called “oceans” would probably only rate as large lakes and small seas on many worlds. It’s just that there are so many of them. Tens of thousands of them, in fact, separated by marshy swathes of low-lying land studded with ponds and criss-crossed by a plashy webwork of streams, brooks, burns, becks, rivulets, rills and ditches. There’s very little on Isinor that’s not under water, on water, or right next to water. St Standing, Isinor’s principal continental landmass, is so small that one could gallop a gyrospider across it in just a few hours. Even so, it serves as the diplomatic and trading centre for the entire planet as well as the main shuttle drop. It’s either that or come down in a Moray.

St Standing is a pleasant little island, ringed with numerous black-sand wormuckeries, whose warm spicy smells linger in the mizzly air and provide an added welcome to the visitor. If the boats are in you can buy a box of wormucks straight from the scoop for just a few Sels, and eat them wriggling fresh, sitting on a gently rotting bollard in the evening mist as the greasy water slops and slaps beneath the jetty. It’s a good way to ease yourself into the planet’s atmosphere. Even with all the hectic activity in the system, where scores of Navy ships hustle through the lanes and buzz around the orbiting Sector Command station, Isinor itself remains a relaxed old world.

If you’ve got a specific destination in mind, then you’ll likely need to charter a skiff or flitter. Consult the Locator’s Office to find out where your destination happens to be at the time and plan your trip accordingly. If you’re footloose though just take a stroll along to Bandy Bay and see what towns are currently tied up there.

There are few geographically permanent settlements on Isinor: most of the inhabitants live in small floating townships, built on great soggy undulating mats of reeds and oxwood. These drift around the placid seas beneath a higgelty thatch of masts and sails, propelled by gentle winds and the stately gyres and currents, towing their puggy traps and nests of bidi rice. If all else fails, the townspeople can always get out and push.

Isinorians spend a lot of time in the water – as you might expect, being amphibians – and this has a direct link to those famous “unusual oceans”. It’s because of the body slime. These skin secretions contain a stable blend of tailored ribosomes, neuropeptides and mnemonic emulsifiers which continually seep off into the surrounding environment. Isinorians, quite literally, sweat memory. It’s a unique evolutionary adaptation to their extremely short sentient lifespans. The average Isinorian takes around two years to develop from an egg to a full adult; after reaching maturity, they can expect to live for perhaps another fifteen or sixteen standard years at most. But because they are constantly bathed in a wash of biochemical remembrances and impressions, their awareness is not of a short, swift, singular existence but rather one of a punctuated series of recollections which can stretch back for centuries, as memories are absorbed, processed and oozed back out again into the world. Even the presentient tadpoles, immersed in the experiences of their ancestors, can look at you with ancient eyes, ripe with the knowledge of the ages.

They swim in a huge collective past, the people of Isinor. Perhaps this is why the future obsesses them: “the great un-done”, they call it, “the veil of unknowing”. No village is complete without a seer or soothsayer, and usually more than one. The fact that these prophets seldom agree with each other, and even more rarely with actual events, does not bother the Isinorians. They expect the actual future to be indeterminate; it’s the sheer quantity of potential futures which they find so fascinating.

A passion for the future has made gambling an everyday pastime on Isinor. They gamble with everything. This is reflected even in their cuisine; no meal is complete without a serving of up-and-down cakes, often called “Isinorian Fortune Cookies” by offworlders. These delicate little shells of fried bidi flour can contain practically anything: spiced drubmeat, freeberry chutney, three-day-old wormucks, mud, grass, gravel, offcuts of phoxpher hide – anything. It’s considered impolite to refuse your share from the communal bowl. It’s also considered impolite to shake your cake, or to hold it up to the light, before biting into it. In my experience though it’s very unusual for an up-and-down cake to contain anything dangerously noxious, and spittoons are always provided.

Some years ago Isinorians were enthusiastic players in the sector’s Futures market. At the height of the bubble almost three-quarters of their planetary GDP was tied up in offworld speculations. But the escalation of the Thargoid war brought about a slump in large-scale trade; the resulting bank crashes hit Isinor hard, and the Sel, once a rival to the Legeesh Lotch, dropped through the floor. You can’t eat up-and-down cakes every day without learning to shrug at misfortune, though. At least the economic collapse, and the consequent rock-bottom orbital fees – combined of course with Isinor’s strategic location – made the system the obvious choice to host a Navy Sector Command station.

The memory of that financial disaster has not lessened the Isinorians’ mania for games of chance one whit. They’ll bet on anything: the weight of a puggy, the duration of a breeze, the amount of rainfall in the next five minutes. They play conventional games, too – Fox in a Box, Triple Whip, Texeonis Fold ’Em, and just about anything else – but the great game, wholly native to Isinor, is of course Four-Way Pellery. Four-Way Pellery is regarded by many gambling aficionados as the ultimate test of luck and skill, and the annual planetary championships can draw gamblers from across the sector and beyond. To date only one offworlder – Chexsin Cherzin, doyenne of the notorious hells of Isence – has ever come close to winning the title, reaching the final eight in 3139. She comes back, though, every year, cheerfully losing time after time, just for the pleasure of matching wits with the Isinorian masters.

It’s said that if you swim in the seas of Isinor, you’ll never forget your stay – and that Isinor will never forget you. It’s just an old frog’s tale, really; the mnemonic slime is peculiar to Isinorian physiology, and no other species has the necessary dermal uptake mechanisms to tap into that rich soup of memories. But the waters are warm, and pleasant, and largely devoid of dangerous predators. And you never know: sometimes, waking, I have had the oddest feeling that I remember something, something from long ago, that happened to someone else, far away... and then the yelping alarm drags me into consciousness, the cabin lights some up, and – gone. But I’ve never forgotten Isinor, and I doubt I ever will.