Firmament by Thomas Spader Science Fiction 2022 Web Site

About the Story

Scenario: In a quasi-distant future where mankind has the ability to atomically bend the physical world to its will, it has an Idea. The idea is to collect a seed of genetic material, and send it out on some spaceship-cum-terrarium to probe space for a suitable place to dig in and start a colony. Procreation. Fundamental.

And thus: Humanity produces a perfectly hermetic enclosure to host its germed society. And, in science fiction tradition, it's a sweet ass dome. The dome is built to self-repair -- but any system which relies on dead reckoning will suffer from drift. To solve this, humanity shipped the Dome with a monstrous Manual, somewhere between a refrigerator repair guide and the Bible.

A religious sect, concerned with different forms of transcendence from and integration with base reality, sprouts from this Manual. Another sect, traditionally in charge of maintenance of the nanotechnological machinery, discovers methods to fool the Dome into producing arbitrary goods. And through it all, the staunchly classic Maintainers claim that these deviations from the Manual will destroy us all.

Enter you, Domebound. On a strict timer, fresh genetic material from the cache is reconstituted and released into society. Quite conveniently for myself, the author, you are one such person, and your birth coincides with a inflection point in the persistence of your species. Your task, if it can be so called, is to weave through this magnificently complicated society and find the off switch before it implodes upon itself.

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Game Details