Worldboat at Life's End

They Fled a Dying Universe...or Did They?

Serendipity and synchronicity plus a good bit of weirdness seem to have come together recently. On March 30th, as I was trying to get caught-up on the blog reading after the surgery, I clicked into the post An Abandoned Lifeboat at World's End at the Quickly, Quietly, Carefully blog. It's a nice post. But what really caught my eye was a comment by C'Nor (Outermost Toe) where he swapped-around the words a bit and made the following suggestion: "Hmm. You or Netherwerks (or both) should do a post about an abandoned worldboat at life's end."

A strange notion. A Worldboat? Hmmm...it was one of those off-hand ideas that sounded interesting, but leaves you wondering what the heck you're going to do with it. Then a few hours ago, while trying to get some sleep, the crazy thing came to me. Like a smack in the forehead with a wet fish, only with no fish.

The Worldboat is an almost lozenge-shaped macrostructure large enough to encompass four entire worlds sequestered within their own orbital rings that act as extended habitat, stabilization mechanisms, and do other things. An artificial sun is at the very center of the Worldboat, locked within a nested set of three selectively transparent shells. This sun is the primary powersource for the vessel.

All along the inner circumference of the hull runs the Primary Transport Tube. Four massive hexurat-like structures serve as the docking facilities for four spheres, artificial Inner Moonlets, that act as ferries between the outermost sections of the Rings surrounding each planet and the Primary Transport Tube (PTT). On the otherside of the PTT there are another set of similar facilities for the Outer Moonlets that serve as ferries to the receiving stations on the interior face of the Hull.

In-between the Four Planets and extending inwards from the PTT are four slightly smaller Core Tubes that connect to the First Shell surrounding the artificial sun. Each of the Core Tubes have a matched and synchronized pair of Elepods--gargantuan elevators several hundred miles in length--that make a six-month transit from the PTT to the First Shell and then another six months back again.

Outside the Hull are Four Hypercrystalline Hexamids that act as defense nodes and the primary means of entering/exiting the Worldboat. The fields or energy produced by the vessels various systems are tuned in such a way as to block intrusive teleportation by hypercharging any object attempting to teleport into the Worldboat without clearance, effectively disintegrating or deflecting any such efforts.

Teleportation within the Worldboat works fine, as long as you're properly attuned to the vessel's interior systems.

At the Top and Bottom of the interior surface of the Hull are two very huge structures that appear to be some sort of paired sphinx-like statues that are also massively parallel and telepathically resonant nodes of concatenated conscious-matter.

The Builders of the Worldboats launched a small flotilla of the things just prior to the complete eradication of all life within their originating universe.

Whatever destroyed all life and drove the Builders to flee across myriad universes in their Worldboats may still be hunting them.

There are a lot of questions to be answered still, but this is a good start.

Thanks C'Nor. We're already drawing-up creatures to go prowl about the abandoned corridors and some of the not-so abandoned sections of one of these Worldboats...