July - An Intro to EXPULSION ZONE

[maniraptorans]

I think almost everyone who enjoys worldbuilding or storytelling has one project, world or character they just keep returning to, never quite continuously, but every so often, it has a resurgence in their mind and gets slowly torn down and rebuilt until it’s almost totally changed shape. ROT, now known as EXPULSION ZONE, is my one of these.

I’ve had it in my brain in some form for, probably approaching 5 or more years? It’s remained a sci-fi setting with a junky spaceship and some core characters trying to transport a person across the galaxy to hunt down their past. The rough outlines of some characters and some worldbuilding has remained the same, but almost all of the specifics have been played with in some way. After making Cast Off, My Darling a more concrete pitch for a story as opposed to a vague floating blob of concepts, I realised that it and the previous incarnation of ROT were incredibly similar thematically, and Cast Off, My Darling taking up that thematic space leaves me to, once again, play around with ROT and solidify it more into its own beast.

Cast Off, My Darling is a more whimsical adventure story, and while it’s not childish, it deals heavily with themes of growing up and I consider it, despite having violent content sometimes, to be all ages in whatever its final execution turns out to be. The new EXPULSION ZONE is adult-oriented and more graphic (violent and sexual) and is a bit more psychedelic and psychological in its storytelling and intended visuals. (as such, trigger warnings for cults, sexual assault mentions and drug mentions for the Pitch section.)

In this post, I’ll detail the setup for the story & some rough plot threads, the themes I want to address, the setting & worldbuilding, and the questions I still need to answer!

The Pitch:

Before she became assimilated into the ranks of the Company, ROT13 lives on a backwater exoplanet at one end of the Orion Arm, isolated and subjugated by the Company, a cult-like weapons manufacturer bankrolling a war it never sees. Struggling with her hopeless life, she has no choice but to sign up with the company and take on a new, powerful robot body. After spending an unknown amount of years doing god knows what, an EMP attack causes her programming to glitch and ROT13 gains consciousness. On waking, she resolves to escape, and through epic transgender robo-sex and pulling her own heart out, she makes a run for it—before the Company blows her to pieces.

On the other side of this arm of the galaxy, reborn as a skeleton and a memory drive named Marceline (it isn’t her real name, but she feels an odd attachment to it), she gets to see a world she’s only ever heard of, the world of Free Space, an expansive and lawless network of space stations away from planet-bound society. Two easily bribeable cargo couriers, Oeya and Ganymede, are instructed with taking her to the right roboticists, but after a sexual assault attempt ends in the three of them carrying out a grisly murder, they’re on the run. 

Journeying across Free Space and hiding out on bustling planets and desolate moons, ROT13, or Marceline, or Chayok, or any other number of aliases, has to find a way to rebuild herself into who she truly is, but first she has to figure that out. And these two assholes on this nasty junk spaceship aren’t really helping—but they have companionship, weed, and a gun stash, so it could be worse. Much worse.

The Themes:

This is going to be a story about identity and belonging, explored through transhumanism, robots, and aliens. It’s about ingrained ideas and programming, and how to imagine a life without them. It’s about dead ends and people with nowhere else to go, and about confronting the choices you’ve made or been made to make.

I want to use robots as a method to explore how social constructs and propaganda affect us. I’ve always been fascinated by the way robots are used in fiction—as malleable minds, as people who aren’t quite real, as the ignorable masses, and I want to play around with what robots mean to humans in EXPULSION ZONE. There’s still a lot that I’m working on around this, as I’ve only been reworking this for a while and I need to do way more research and reading to build up the themes I want to explore.

The Setting:

EXPULSION ZONE is set in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, in a future where humanity and alien species have settled somewhat comfortably in space, living on planets or the sprawl of Free Space.

Free Space is composed of space stations that don’t directly orbit/communicate with a planet, and the bustling culture of spaceships that fly between them. Certain stations or groups of stations might be consolidated under one authority, but there is no wide-reaching authority in Free Space, although not for lack of trying. Stations in Free Space try to look after their own amidst constant disputes between stations or the groups who run them. Due to not wanting to waste resources, there is an uneasy peace across Free Space, for now.

Individual stations in Free Space might be oriented around a specific common interest or job, such as laboratories, artist colonies or churches, or settlements. There’s a huge breadth of people you can find in Free Space, but it tends to harbour spaceborn people who have never touched ground, people working on niche or dangerous projects, and those who don’t want to be found easily.

Ganymede and Oeya work as cargo carriers on their scrappy little spaceship in Free Space, a vital part of the ecosystem for making sure stations can operate and trade. They’ve had many run-ins with the groups that vye for power in Free Space and keep their networks of stations running with elaborate weapon smuggling (including the creations of the Company), but nobody wants to down a cargo carrier, except one that’s as willing to take bribes as they are. Ganymede's ex-partner, Aryele, operates as a weapons smuggler in Free Space.

Three major alien species reside in the Orion Arm. Most of the population of each lives in planets on their own solar system, but there are still large populations on other species-habitant solar systems, other habitable planets, or various other settlements including Free Space.

Ganymede is Thele, a species of sapient beings composed of hundreds of smaller organisms working in hive intelligence, similar to coral polyps. They communicate with chemical signatures emitted by their polyps and transferred through touch, and have somewhat of an immunity and affinity to radiation. They reproduce through continually emitting spores, and if there are enough thele in one place, the spores will clump together and grow into polyps, creating a new organism with enough Thele around to step in and raise it. Ganymede isn’t strictly her name, as her thele name is a complex chemical signature, it’s the place where her first polyps were from: a thele-human scientific base on the Jovian moon Ganymede. They have a complex relationship with death and don’t quite die in the way other animals do. I don’t have a polished idea for the thele design yet, but it’s very frilly and frond-y, like a sea dragon or jellyfish, due to the complex webs and trailing polyps, and stands upright but has limbs that can reform into any configuration.

Oeya is Yao’oocha, a species of methane/ethane based sapient beings, adapted to live on gas giants. They have an appearance similar to sea slugs, but with 3-5 pairs of limbs (6-10 in total) that they can use to interact with their environment. Yao’aecha (plural version) use incredibly low frequencies and long sounds to communicate, so human-speakable versions of their language, such as the name Oeya, are cut down from about 5 minutes to an easier length. Yao’oocha families are typically big units and community is celebrated, as a child can be created with any number of parents and infants are often born in litters, but when they reach maturity, yao’oocha children are expected to leave their family and go to find their own community.

Humans in EXPULSION ZONE have adapted somewhat to new environments—many of the humans living in Free Space have never touched a planet and are able to adapt more easily to different gravity levels, and technology has helped all species interface together. Almost all humans will never see Earth—like many other habitable planets, it’s damaged but still liveable, however, mass exoduses and the planet being largely closed except to those who can be trusted to care for it means it’s a fairy-tale like land in most humans’ eyes. ROT13 used to be human, but this has changed. One of the most famous human stations in Free Space, the Tau Ceti Human Orchestra, which houses a colony of musicians and giant archives tracing human movements and communities across the Orion Arm, has been missing for over 10 years, and the search continues.

There are many other forms of sapience in Free Space and other settlements, such as mouldminds, large fungal organisms from many different planets that have huge intelligence and the ability to process many systems at once comparable to the largest AIs. They mostly work to keep whole facilities or communities going and have their own clear personalities.

Robots and artificial intelligences are present almost everywhere, with varying levels of population density and varying jobs and purposes. I’m still working on worldbuilding for exactly how robots exist in this world and how they’re treated by society—that’ll probably come with research too.

The Stuff I Still Need To Get To:

This project is very much a work in progress, and I don’t know when or how it would ever become a finished thing, but I’m enjoying working on it and intend to keep working on it as long as I do. I think the main thing I’d like to work on is doing some research and thinking about how I want robots to exist in this society and the various ideas surrounding that, and then build a more concrete idea of ROT13’s journey up from there. I’d also like to figure out the background of previous wars that the Company helped facilitate, and their actions, and what ROT13’s life was like when she wasn’t ‘awake.’ I tend to start something from an interesting hook and then build outwards, which is useful in some ways and annoying in others, oh, she has a mysterious past, I just don’t know what it is yet.

I’d still like to follow through on the plan of building a wiki for my worldbuilding and characters at some point, but I’m currently doing kind of a lot, as well as the start of University approaching (just under 2 months! woo!), so I don’t want to start on it and leave it unfinished for long amounts of time, especially when I’m still working on the actual worldbuilding & plot stuff.

I’m going to be on holiday for the end of June, but I’ll try and get an update blog out after I come back in early August with an Artfight recap (still going strong & enjoying it!) and some of the projects I’d like to work on going forward, because I have a lot of plans.

Thanks so much for reading! If you’re interested in EXPULSION ZONE as a project, please feel free to comment on this post on Dreamwidth or on my main comment section and perhaps that’ll push me to make more stuff and work on the wiki. Ellis :)