The name means nothing to today’s youth

Story time: When I was a kid in the late 90s, there was a fad for toy walkie-talkies at my school. I was obsessed with seeing how far I could get my signal, which wasn’t very far given the likely minuscule power.

The teachers decided to capitalize on this trend by inviting a representative of a local ham club to speak at our school. I was absolutely floored when I learned you could talk around the world. Two things kept me from pursuing my license at the time. There was still a code requirement, and nobody for the life of me could tell me what lunch meat had to do with wireless communication.

Initially not very powerful. The movement was most popular among the missionaries (naturally) as well as on the planet Hearthside. The tide turned when a dissolutionist preacher on Hearthside managed to convince half of the Bright Way’s private army (an order of warrior monks called the Knights of the Sun) to join the dissolutionists.

As for how the PD’s were treated by the wider clergy, a lot of them were sent to the Outer Belt to get them out of the way. The Outer Belt was the home of the missionaries (as it’s close to interstellar space) as well as former ecclesiastical slaves both manumitted and runaways, who formed the nucleus of the radical secularists that would become the Partisans.

I summarize things better here, here, and here.

I really like your technical style of worldbuilding. I’m fond of the little details that grand sweeping stories gloss over.

So they do address what the predators in Zootopia eat. I’m blind (literally, I have a guide dog) and I guess there was a visual reference to it somewhere that I missed. I was so irritated that the whole point of the film was about predators not eating prey anymore but it didn’t address what they ate instead.

The Pious Dissolutionists are what you’re looking for. The Bright Way started monetizing the tech they invented in order to fund the missionaries, but that little side hustle turned into all they cared about. The Pious Dissolutionists wanted to purge the organization of its corporate interests. (Incidentally, my avatar is their symbol. The red arch represents an element of Claravian sacred art whereby a golden arch would be drawn behind a saint’s head, analogous to a halo. The usual Bright Way symbol is the bare “star and gear” without the arch.)

While I’m contemplating moving away from hard numbers, my stories say the trip from Focus to Sol takes about 250 years, and 12 days pass for the missionaries in sim. I think that would be way too fast.

Every few sim hours someone ducks into the OS to check on things in realtime. There’s also a leasemind (weak nonsentient AI) that monitors the ships systems and can preemptively pull someone out of sim if it sees a problem developing. There’s also a live mission controller monitoring the ships systems via ansible who can yank one of them out of sim if needed.

In the Bright Way, scientific research is considered a form of contemplative prayer. To meditate on the mysteries of Creation is to grow closer to the Creator. More familiar forms of mysticism also exist, such as the steadtree hermits, who are similar to the Egyptian pillar hermits.

In Neoshamanism, consciousness is believed to be woven throughout the fabric of the universe in something called the noosphere (3 syllables, NO-uh-sphere, not NOO-sphere). Consciousness can become apparent in any physical system, with more complex physical systems being more conscious. The brains of sapient beings are the most complex physical systems and are thus the most conscious. Every idea that has ever or will ever exist is already present in the noosphere, and neoshamanist mystics seek to map out the noosphere through meditation.

The Bright Way also uses the term noosphere, but instead of the noosphere giving rise to consciousness, consciousness gives rise to the noosphere. In Claravian philosophy the noosphere is more a way of looking at things rather than a tangible force, though they do speak of it in the same way a human might speak of “mother nature”. The noosphere emerges from the biosphere when a species becomes sapient, just as the biosphere emerges out of the geosphere as life comes to be. It’s the sum total of the thoughts and social connections of all sophonts. The Bright Way believes they have a divine mandate to unite the hitherto isolated noospheres of all sapient species, which is why they undertake interstellar mission work.

The Farspeakers, a Claravian religious order, speak of the noosphere possessing a “body”, which is any physical means of communicating, which in modern times mostly means the Internet. They believe they have a sacred duty to tend to the body of the noosphere, and see the union of two noospheres as the physical connection between the two respective Internets.

Nose Balm

Keeping one’s nose wet is an important part of yinrih grooming. A wet nose helps aid the sense of smell, and a dry chapped nose is uncomfortable. A glistening wet nose is also considered aesthetically pleasing.

In addition to the nose’s natural mucus, wetness is maintained with an occasional lick. In dry climates, however, nose balm is used to prevent the nose from drying out. Unlike human lip balms, which are often mildly flavored, cynoid nose balm is invariably scentless. Indeed, many brands are advertised as having “negative odor”, possessing no smell of their own but enhancing surrounding odors.

This is a bottle of nose balm. It’s fairly representative of pill bottles and other similarly sized containers. The only real curve ball compared to its Terran equivalent is the ring on the cap. The ring serves two main purposes.

For yinrih who live planetside, the ring helps them fish the bottle out of a backpack with their tail. For spacers, the ring is slipped on one of the digits while the bottle is open and in use in order to keep the lid from floating away without having to sacrifice an entire paw just to hold the lid. The outer thumb is used most often for this purpose.

A more subtle feature of these sorts of containers is the texture on the lid. It’s not just there for grip. It also helps the yinrih identify the bottle by touch alone. The texture, together with the overall size, shape, and mass of the bottle, differentiates it from other similar containers nearby.

There are other similar items that a yinrih typically keeps on their person, whether in a wallet around the right foreleg or a larger bag on the chest, back, or belly. Paw wax protects the paw pads against surfaces that are hot or have irritating chemicals. perfumes as well as perfume remover (for when one’s natural musk is deemed more appropriate) are packaged similarly. There are salves for treating minor cuts, which act to both treat the wound and cover it like a bandage.

How many species are sapient? All members of the kingdom animalia including microscopic animals like water bears and face mites?

Oh this is great!

I’d love to learn more about this religion! Does it specifically mandate slavery or is it more of a “the slavers happen to believe in this religion” thing?

The Bright Way is dedicated to finding extraterrestrial intelligence, or as they say bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh. They start out benign, but once they start sending out interstellar missions they realize they can’t fund their work on donations alone. They start monetizing the vast array of tech they’ve invented in order to get to that point, at first to fund mission work, but they gradually lose sight of why they’re making money and concentrate on just making more money.

Slavery in this context is a form of debt servitude one is consigned to if they can’t pay their tithes. Treatment of slaves varied greatly. On the yinrih’s homeworld of Yih, slaves were de facto treated as property. On the planet Hearthside, which was a hotbed of traditionalist movements opposed to the Bright Way’s pecuniary interests, serfdom was treated more like an assistance program to help the disadvantaged gain technical skills. Institutions on Hearthside would even “buy” slaves from Yih (really taking on their debt) in order to save them from harsh treatment on the homeworld, as can be seen in this story.

Regarding the Partisans, they got your typical cult of personality surrounding Firefly the Apostate (their leader), but there’s also a literal cult, which emerged more or less organically without the government’s input, that worships the Great Leader a la the Emperor of Mankind from 40K. The Partisan government goes back and forth between persecuting them as they do religion in general, and cynically promoting the cult as a means of control.

How quickly can a passenger return themselves to a nominal “real-time” experience if the ship, say, detects something notable that is worth slowing down to investigate?

Time perception can be altered more-or-less instantly, though it causes phantom nausea in the process. In the case of womb ships, there is the simulacrum (or just sim), which is the realistic Matrix-like environment designed to keep you sane where time is sped up, and the operating system environment, which is less Matrix and more Tron (I describe it as like being in a synthwave music video). Time passes normally in the OS, and while you do not have to leave the sim to interact with the outside world, events happen so quickly that it’s impossible to process them, so checking the ansible for messages from back home, confirming the ship’s course, controlling micro mechs to do maintenance EVAs, etc, are done in the OS.

Eloi vs Morlocks?

The Mass Router

Kid: “Mom, can we get a star gate?”

Mom: “We have a star gate at home.”

The star gate at home:

Long ago, when we humans were still squatting in a ditch poking berries up our noses, the yinrih discovered subspace, which they called the underlay. They quickly learned how to send information through the underlay faster than light, instantly in fact, but transporting matter proved illusive.

It wasn’t so much putting matter in or taking it out. The problem was momentum. An object egressing the underlay retains all the momentum from its point of ingress. If you ingress the underlay in a space station in low orbit over a planet and egress at the surface, you’ll be traveling at mach 20 relative to your point of egress.

The first thing they figured out was how to flush Newton’s laws of motion down the toilet. This resulted in many technological wonders such as force projectors, which generate a reactionless force normal to their surface when a voltage is applied, and retribution fields, which are force fields that absorb the kinetic energy of incoming projectiles and release that energy in a concentrated blast of concussive force back at the attacker^[1]. But while they had mastered force manipulation of objects in realspace, the same was not so for objects in the underlay.

Approximately one year after First Contact, a group of Claravian research monks perfected the impulse buffer, which absorbs the momentum of objects egressing the underlay. Because there were yinrih on Earth with access to a fabricator, they were able to establish a mass router trunk between Sol and Focus right away, allowing the missionaries to return home, and most importantly, bring their human friends with them.

But there’s one catch: The mass router is a claustrophobic nightmare. There are both mass and volume limits to what can be sent through the underlay, meaning that only one person can be transported at a time. There’s enough room for a person and maybe a few bags depending on how high up the chonk chart the person is. Mass routers look like the unholy offspring of an MRI machine and an iron lung. You have to be sealed in a very small cylindrical space. If in a gravity well, you get a bed to lie on. If in microgravity, you strap into a harness. The sensation of ingressing and egressing the underlay feels like your whole body falling asleep for a split second.

Savvy readers will note the use of the term router and correctly guess its mechanism of operation. It shunts a bubble of realspace containing the person into the underlay, fragmenting that bubble into billions of discreet packets. From the perspective of a hypothetical observer embedded in the underlay, these packets appear discontiguous, and can take separate paths to reach their destination. However, and this is important, from the perspective of a person within one of these packets, the space is still contiguous. If a box containing an ant were to be sent via mass router, the ant could travel from one end of the box to the other without noticing a difference. Or it could if the traversal weren’t instantaneous. There is no ontological question that what exits is the same entity that entered.

“But what happens if a packet is dropped?” I hear you cry. Well, the entire bubble containing your mass, called a flow is harmlessly shunted back into realspace at the router that dropped the packet, provided the router absorbs your momentum correctly.

Where there are routers, there are routing protocols. Mass Routing Protocol (MRP) is used to dynamically build paths from point to point in a mass router network, as well as coordinate mass flows within that network. Firewalls can prevent unwanted intruders from egressing at a particular router, and route poisoning can be used to hijack a person’s mass flow and make it egress somewhere it wasn’t supposed to.

Some people, on four legs or two, harbor misconceptions about how mass routers work. Some people think your body is digitized and sent over the internet. Others, drawing on ancient superstitions regarding demons lurking in the underlay, believe that mass routers may allow demons to invade realspace^[2].

Erickson, TX

Erickson is a small town in central Texas and the site of humanity’s first contact with the yinrih. The town was historically an enclave for Lebanese immigrants arriving in the US via Galveston in the late 1800s. There was an influx of ethnically european Yankies after the proliferation of air conditioning in the mid 20th century, and the town is demographically mixed by the time of First Contact.

The town is large enough to justify the presence of a small institution of higher education, Erickson College, which is most known for its veterinary school. It also hosts a small linguistics program as well as various STEM subjects. The town is served by two churches, Our Lady of the Cedars and Calvary Bible Church.

The town’s citizens welcome the newcomers with open arms, and it’s largely thanks to them and their many, many, many guns, that these alien visitors remain unmolested by state actors.

The six Claravian missionaries aboard the Dewfall elect to remain in Erickson, integrating into the community and preparing them (and by extension humanity) for a more formal delegation from Focus that, as far as they know^[1], will arrive in 250 Earth years. The missionaries are fairly young by yinrih standards (about 150 Earth years), and the average yinrih lifespan is a bit over 7 centuries, they expect to be alive for the arrival of their fellow yinrih. It comes as a sad surprise when they learn their new human friends will be dead and forgotten long before that day comes.

The Star Hearth

A star hearth is a type of fusion reactor used in the Claravian liturgy. The hearth is kept in good repair by the hearthkeeper, a priestess of the Bright Way. The building that houses the star hearth is called a lighthouse, which serves as a house of worship.

In former times, the star hearth powered the homes of the faithful as well as the lighthouse itself. After the War of Dissolution, however, the custom of merely powering the lighthouse while selling the excess electricity back to the municipal power company in order to cover operational costs was imposed across Focus.

Postures and Gaits

One of the two resting positions yinrih can assume while in a gravity well. This is referred to in English as perching, and the piece of furniture is referred to as a perch. Yinrih straddle the perch on the belly as they would the branch of a tree, leaving their paws and tail to hang freely. A desk may be located under the perch, and the user manipulates objects on the desk with the freely hanging paws and tail.

This is the typical seat of a vehicle cockpit, but such an arrangement can also be found as computer workstations. The yinrih lies on his or her back, gripping a keyer in each of the four paws. Paw keyers use chords of simultaneous key presses to input text and other commands. If analog controls are present, they will be located at the base of the chair to be manipulated by the tail.

Yinrih prefer HUD specs (AR goggles or glasses) rather than screens in most cases. A pair of Google Glass-like HUD specs and a single paw keyer, possibly along with a tail gesture ring, are the typical tools that serve as a portable computer or smartphone.

In addition to perching and lying on the back, yinrih can rear up on their hind feet, preferably with the tail wrapped around something for balance. This posture allows the use of the forepaws to manipulate objects, but it is more energy-intensive than perching or lying belly up. They can also “sit” in canine fashion with the palms of all four paws touching the ground.

In microgravity, they an anchor themselves in place by wrapping the tail around a tail bar, leaving all four paws free for grasping and manipulating controls and such.

A yinrih’s rear paws are just as dexterous as their forepaws. Buttons and other controls are designed to be tactilely distinct so they can be used with the rear paws without looking, and a braille-like tactile alphabet is used even by sighted yinrih for labels on controls and small objects so they can be identified by touch alone.

Anatomical Overview

If you’ll forgive the AI-generated horror show, this is the closest I’ve managed to depicting how the yinrih look in my head, with a few discrepancies explained below.

Here are a few of my own artistic attempts at depicting them.

Humans often refer to yinrih as monkey foxes because they appear to have the head of a fox and the body of a new world monkey. They are quadrupeds with prehensile, six-toed paws and a prehensile tail. The body is covered in fur, but the palms, soles, and last joint of the digits are hairless, revealing grayish black skin underneath.

Yinrih are plantigrade, with the palms of the paws bearing their weight. Each paw consists of an inner thumb, four fingers, and an outer thumb. The tips of the digits have sharp, iron-enriched claws used for climbing and defense. There are doglike paw pads on the palms and on the underside of each digit.

They have sharp, carnivorous teeth, a whiskery muzzle with a wet nose, and erect fox-like ears.

The eyes work very differently than those of Terran animals. If human eyes are cameras, yinrih eyes are radio receivers. Each “eye” is an array of millions of nanoscopic antennas sitting on a shared ground plane that couple with ambient electromagnetic radiation like a radio. The surface of the eye is very good at absorbing visible light, making it look like the eyes are coated in Vantablack. Between these nantenna patches and their primary eyelids, there are four pairs of bandpass membranes that filter incoming light. Between these bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, yinrih ‘tune’ to different light spectra. They have a much, much wider visual spectrum than humans, able to see microwaves at the low end and non-ionizing UV radiation at the high end, but they can’t perceive the entire spectrum all at once.

Their senses of smell, hearing, and touch are much more acute than a human’s. They rely more on pheromones then on body language to communicate emotion. You don’t say “I feel happy” you say “I smell happy”. A yinrih’s natural musk identifies things like gender, age, and whether or not they have had children. Yinrih have expanded this olfactory communication to include complex perfumes that serve the communicative and social functions that clothes do for humans.

Having fur means they don’t require clothes for sun or cold protection, and they rely heavily on the tactile information gained through their paws, so yinrih are perennially naked and unshod.

They are arboreal, and move through the trees by brachiating (swinging hand over hand). This arboreal lifestyle dovetails nicely with living in microgravity, and there are orbital colonies of spacers who live permenantly in zero G so they can overcome the limitations of their quadrupedal stance, now having four hands instead of four feet.

One of the secrets to the yinrih’s meteoric rise up the tech tree, achieving spaceflight a mere five thousand Earth years after gaining sapience, is the writing claw. In each forepaw there is an ink sac located near the knuckle of their index finger. A duct leads from the sac to the tip of the claw, which has evolved to look and act like the nib of a fountain pen. Their ink is blue-black and smells strongly of petrichor, and carries the same pheromones as their ambient musk.

AS nonsapient animals the yinrih used this writing claw to mark territory. A written language emerged out of this scent marking behavior in parallel with a spoken language. They have historical records reaching back to the dawn of sapience, with the earliest written records being from “kindled” (sapient) yinrih who were born into otherwise nonsapient litters to nonsapient parents, only discovering their differences after leaving their litters and finding other sapient yinrih.

Paw Morphology

The arrangement of palmar pads on the forepaws is sexually dimorphic.^[1] Males have three large pads, with one pad at the base of each thumb, and another directly under the knuckles. Females have the same two lower pads, but the single upper pad is replaced by several smaller pads in order to make room for a lactation patch. The lactation patch appears as an undifferentiated patch of grayish-black skin, the same as the rest of the furless portion of the paw. When exposed to saliva, the patch begins oozing bluish-white milk.

Vulpithecine ink and milk evolved out of similar excretory structures, which is why they are both located on the forepaws, and why the milk is bluish. The milk has potent antimicrobial properties to account for the fact it’s being excreted from a surface in constant contact with the ground. Lactation is not linked to the reproductive cycle, and may occur at any time after reaching maturity. The on demand nature of lactation evolved in order to make climbing easier. If lactation happened automatically it would make for slippery paws at inopportune times.

While I can appreciate the desire to maintain order in the midst of chaos, and I can certainly see why radio is essential for that, I’ll never understand the people who say they’re into ham radio because they don’t want to be censored or intercepted in a time of crisis. Ham radio is insecure by design. Your dox yourself every time you give your call sign.

Oh this screenshot was taken years ago. I got my extra ticket in 2021 (first licensed in 2019). I just keep coming back to it because of how on the nose it is.

I’ve actually been away from the hobby for the most part for about 2 years, and am trying to find ways to get back into it.

Yes, I am talking about Lemmy posts.