Physical Characteristics
The tattoo gun is a relatively lightweight machine. It is about 1'3" in length and weighs close to six pounds. It comes in all different colors, can be customized for the purchaser's satisfaction. Can hold up to 32 ink wells- additional ink wells attach in the rear of the gun. The gun looks kind of like a modern day (2001) bazooka. The end of it forms into a point with a lense at the end of it. The lense is used to put the design in question on. The spigets around the lense release the chemical Xorman onto the skin in the shape of the design. The gun can also be used to remove a tattoo simply by switching the switch on the side of the nozzle to remove. In order to make the gun inoperable, simply switch the same switch in the middle position. In order to change the color of ink, all you do is punch in the slot number (all ink circles have a numbered position) on the key pad above the ink cartridge and press enter. The gun does the rest.
Chemical Explanations
Xorman is a chemical that was created in the year 3647 that is a completely harmless chemical that can be put onto the skin and can create permenent designs, without the pain. The chemical Xeleninan was created twenty years after Xorman to remove Xeleninan. In the year 4235 this tattoo gun was created in using colored Xorman to create and delete tattoos. In order to remove a tattoo with the same gun, you simply slip the lense off of the tip of the gun, flip the switch on the side of the nozzle to the remove position, and sweep the design with it. In a matter of five minutes, the Xeleninan will completely pull all of the Xorman out of the skin, enabling the user to wash the Xorman off. This process is completely harmless to the body.
Power Consumption
You can either plug the tattoo gun into a power source for unlimited power, or use the travel power pack. The travel power pack allows up to six hours of use.
Roles In Society
Since the gun's invention, the main user of it is prison's. They use it to mark an inmate when they are brought into the facility and remove the mark when they leave. It is also a very popular item for Halloween.
The colloquial name of the Telegressors, the hyperdimensional gateways that link a Lattice World with any of its eight immediate neighbors. See Tour: The Interior of a Lattice World: The Teegs.
The Superior Traffic Protocol
based on work by Serraphin
To coordinate and maximize the efficiency of traffic from World to World through the Teegs, the LWA's Teeg Administration Cabinet has implemented the Superior Traffic Protocol. Each Lattice World is assigned one of four schedules: The East/West Main and the East/West Alternate (for Worlds opening their Out Teegs eastward or westward), and the North/South Main and the North/South Alternate (for Worlds opening their Out Teegs northward or southward). Each World opens its Out Teeg in only those two directions, as specified by its schedule; its In Teeg is conversely coordinated with the two Worlds that will be opening their Out Teegs to it, in turn. The four schedules are offset in such a way as to maximize transit times between Lattice Worlds for all possible routes. Teegs remain open for precisely seven minutes, in all circumstances.
| SCHEDULE | MNEMONIC | COORDINATES | OPENS TO |
| E/W Main | "Both Even" | World-0 is designated as an East/West Main World, as is any other World both of whose Lattice coordinates are even numbers. | N/S Alt. |
| N/S Alt. | "Only North Even" | Any World whose north-south Lattice coordinate is an even number and whose east-west Lattice coordinate is an odd number is on the N/S Alt. schedule. | E/W Alt. |
| E/W Alt. | "Both Odd" | Any World both of whose Lattice coordinates are odd numbers is on the E/W Alt. schedule. | N/S Main |
| N/S Main | "Only North Odd" | Any World whose north-south Lattice coordinate is an odd number and whose east-west Lattice coordinate is an even number is on the N/S Alt. schedule. | E/W Main |
Because of a quirk in the relationship between the four traffic schedules, travel in northeast or southwest directions through the Lattice averages much faster (3.5 minutes per World) than does travel in northwest or southeast directions (10.5 minutes per World). Fearing economic and demographic biases in Lattice World development due to this imbalance, the Telegressor Administration Cabinet has established a twenty-year cycle of rotation for the N/S Main and N/S Alt. Worlds: every twenty years, N/S Main Worlds will switch to the N/S Alt. schedule, and vice versa, thereby reversing the travel-direction bias. E/W schedule Worlds (including World-0) remain on their own schedules, without alteration.
Core Traffic
Within the Core of a Lattice Worlds complying with the Teeg Traffic Guidelines of the LWA's Teeg Administration Cabinet, traffic in and out of Teegs is organized into various virtual corridors, i.e., lengths of space around a Teeg where vehicles may make certain maneuvers under various velocities and accelerations, as shown below:
NB: For commercial purposes, Transit Loop space belongs not to the individual Lattice World within which it lies, but to the Lattice as a whole, per LWA mandate.
Transit Loops are intended primarily for vehicles entering from the In Teeg and proceeding circularly around the Teegs to exit the Out Teeg. Transit Loops are 30km in diameter, with a travel-distance (circumference) of nearly 71km. Ships direct their thrusters outward, creating virtual orbits around the center of the loop. During this time, occupants of the vehicles experience and outward "gravity" (centripetal acceleration) of varying degress (see High Deck and Poke Deck, below), unless interior grav-plates counter the effect.)
Acceleration Corridors allow vehicles at rest within the Core to align themselves into standard Teeg traffic and build suitable velocity. The Central Acceleration Corridors accomodate vehicles from the Out Teeg side of the Core; direct entry into the Out Teeg is permitted. For vehicles approaching from the In Teeg side of the Core, the Lateral Acceleration Corridors allow room to merge with Transit Loop traffic while making the turn to approach the Out Teeg.
Deceleration Corridors allow space for vehicles exiting from traffic to shed velocity before dispersing into outer Core areas. The Central Deceleration Corridors accomodate vehicles arriving through the In Teeg and destined for the In Teeg side of the Core; direct approach to outer Core areas is permitted. For vehicles arriving through the In Teeg but destined for outer Core areas on the Out Teeg side of the core, the turn towards that side of the Core may be made at velocity in a Transit Loop, whereafter the Lateral Deceleration Corridors will allow room to shed velocity and merge with the slower traffic of outer Core areas.
[Example: A ship moves westward from World-0 (an E/W Main World) to World N-0/W-1 (a N/S Alt. World). If the ship wishes to move north, he must wait 3.5 minutes until the Out Teeg opens northward, so it is to his benefit to spend 3.5 minutes moving through the Transit Loop, arriving just as the Out Teeg opens northward. If, however, he wishes to travel south, a 10.5-minute journey through the Transit Loop will bring him to the Out Teeg just in time to move south.]
When travelling transiently through a Core, via a transit Loop, it is most efficient to synchronize one's vehicle's time within the Transit Loop with the duration until the Out Teeg opens to the next World in the vehicle's itinerary. Using the Superior Traffic Protocol, only two possibilities of duration exist: 3.5 minutes, or 10.5 minutes, which the TAC has termed "Fastrack Transit" and (wishing to avoid connotations of delay or slowness) "Standard Transit."
Therefore, two layers or "decks" of traffic corridors exist, equally spaced from the midpoint of the Teegs:
- The upper layer, often called the "High Deck, " is specified for traffic travelling at 336.6 m/sec (1212 km/hr), which allows a vehicle to circle through an upper Transit Loop in 3.5 minutes, perfectly timed for a Superior Traffic Protocol Fastrack Transit. Occupants of vehicle using the High Deck will enjoy a centripetal acceleration of 0.77 gravities during this transit.
- The lower layer of traffic, sometimes called the "Poke Deck, " is specified for vehicles travelling at 117.8 m/sec (424 km/hr), resulting in a Superior Traffic Protocol Standard Transit of 10.5 minutes through a lower Transit Loop. Occupants of vehicles using the Poke Deck will experience a mild centripetal acceleration of just under a tenth of a gravity.
For safety reasons, travel through the Transit Loops at speeds faster than 336.6 m/sec is prohibited to all but certain military and emergency vehicles. Such speeding, called "Running the Teegs, " is commonly performed, however, by impatient or thrill-seeking travelers who wish to move faster than 3.5 minutes per World.
Also for safety reasons, ships unable to achieve the appropriate velocities are usually disallowed from the use of TAC traffic space (which effectively denies them any use of the Teegs whatsoever).
Inter-World Travel
The time required per Superior Traffic Protocol for travel between Lattice Worlds can be determined using the Teeg Travel Time Calculator.
There can be no temperature below Absolute Zero: -459.71°F = -273.17°C = 0°K
Since the 79th Century, the monopolistic guild of the TSC has held proprietary authority over the Mass Generators of all Lattice Worlds under the LWA. Based on Shangrila (World N-3/0), the TSC accepts applicants from hyperhuman and alien races alike, but maintains a strict code of silence, hunting down and harshly punshing those defectors who spread TSC secrets (although stringent departmentalization keeps most TSC agents from knowing anything but the most trivial details of mass generation).
The two services named in the TSC's name refer to altering a planet to be like Earth (terra-forming) or to approach some ideal vision (shangrilizing). Indeed, the TSC's own world is their crown jewel, visited by billions of tourists who marvel at the oceans and waterfalls and towering cities -- the TSC has even given Shangrila a spectacular planetary ring system.
Because of the indispensible nature of mass generation in colonizing and maintaining a Lattice World, the TSC is able to charge confiscatorily for their services. Second only to the Neva Vateca, the TSC ranks as one of the most affluent organizations in the Milky Way. Their capabilities with a Lattice World's Mass Generators are legendary, and speculation runs high that they have discovered the hypothetical Scanners (devices that can duplicate existing patterns of mass, such as trees or animals, without the necessity of operators manually coding the structures of such mass); the TSC denies that such Scanners exist, and claim to rely upon a hard-built repertoire of mass models developed over their long history.
The LWA's authority over the TSC is tenuous at best; but, in their 7, 800-year history together, there has neer been a firm break between the two entities ... although incessant petty skirmishes continue to mar the record, despite the efforts of their publicity departments.
Thrones have existed since ancient times, but technology has refined them into things of wonder. Now the word "throne" means more than a symbolic chair. People of wealth and power ride in special chairs that are more like portable luxury homes. A throne usually rides on its own gravity plates, cruising easily over ground or into the air. To facilitate business and communications, computers are installed with easily-accessed interfaces (sometimes in the throne's armrests, sometimes mounted or floating before the user's face). Entertainment systems such as music, video, and interactive games are easily added to the throne's computers.
Sometimes the controls for a throne are keyed to a user's voice, and simple spoken commands suffice to operate the throne. Gesture-commands are also possible, as are eye-movement and facial-expression commands, though these are less common.
A throne is sometimes custom-formed to the user's body, padded and grav-plated for maximum comfort; and often it will have heaters, coolers or even enclosures for environmental control. Thrones can also carry food and drink and recreational chemicals; usually a garbage disintegrator is included and sometimes a body-waste disposal is also present. Privacy screens are easily erected or retracted. A user can literally eat, sleep, breath, and live in a throne for an unlimited time ... and because some thrones are designed more like couch-beds than chairs, many other enjoyable activities are possible. "T.OD.S." (Throne Over-Dependency Syndrome) is common, but has not stopped the market.
It is only a small step, and one that has been taken by millions of throne users, to surround a throne with a hull and add a gravity engine, and take to the stars in luxury.
by Mr. Halloe
Though noone has yet devised a method of moving backwards in the time-stream, there has long been a functional method of moving forward, into the future. It is not a direct, instantaneous journey -- indeed, it is more of a sneaky trick than any kind of breakthrough in the nature of time itself -- but it works.
Einstein's Theories of Relativity state that any observer subject to an intense gravitational field (highly curved space) will experience a slower passage of time than someone subject to less acceleration (flat space). Proximity to a high-mass object easily produces measurable effects: the stopwatch of a man standing in Death Valley will move more slowly than the stopwatch of a man standing on the summit of Mount Everest, simply because the Death Valley stopwatch is closer to the Earth's center and experiences more of the earth's acceleration due to gravity (the difference is extremely slight, but measurable); if the two men had superhuman eyesight, and could see each other's watches and discern the speed of the watch-hands with infinite accuracy, the Death Valley man would see the Everest man's watch running fast, and the Everest man would see the Death Valley man's watch running slow, for the two men are moving forward through time at different rates.
There are plentiful sources in the Milky Way of much stronger gravitational fields than the Earth provides: neutron stars and black holes are the most convenient, for they allow a traveller to get very near the center of gravity and thereby experience a maximized slowing of the passage of time. Indeed, a single orbit past a sufficiently massive black hole, while seeming to take only days or weeks for the traveller, can take centuries of time in flat-space areas of the universe. Given the same superhuman eyesight as in the Death-Valley/Everest example, the traveller orbiting the black hole would see the rest of the universe speed up amazingly, and observers watching from flat space would see the traveller move slower and slower on his way around the black hole.
Of course, gravitic and radioactive effects from near exposure to such a dense mass are extremely hazardous. The ship's occupants must be extremely careful about how much tidal force they undergo as they orbit the black hole, and must shield themselves appropriately from electromagnetics and high-energy particles of all sorts. Unfortunately, the protective warped-space bubble of a grav-engine ship, which does not allow relativistic effects past its simulated event horizon, cancels out the very quirks of Einsteinian space that the traveller would rely upon to accomplish this forward time-travel.
Question: How to convert Douglas Adam's Babelfish to the Lattice without going against the rules?
Answer: Find some suitable way of getting around the possible telepathy bit.
How to do that?
A definition of telepathy is at best interpretable. I will define it the following way: A direct transfer of thought, especially of the non-articulate kind, from one organism to another, using some means of fast transfer.
Again, this is interpretable. What is thought? Technically, any kind of contemplation qualifies as thought. Is a thought directed at a certain person, maybe an unspoken sentence, still contemplative thought? That is the question.
The TSCS was designed at the time the first deep space vessels began using the gravdrive to find distant planets. At the time visionary humans examined the evolution of languages, and sought a way to prevent alienation of emigrants to their ancestors. How to achieve this? It was clear that humans were by and large not capable of adopting a single language as a form of global communication. National, tribal, or whatever identity prevented this. And if groups of people were further isolated from the rest, they might even develop other, individual languages. The probable encounter of alien species further complicated the matter.
It was also clear that even intense research into translation computing wouldn't create the kind of intuitive use of language that a human was capable of. It seemed organic brains were necessary for this. It was not until later that computing reached the ranges of total neural network capability. Therefore the necessity for an organic brain to translate different languages or forms of communication remained.
While computing hadn't reached a total AI, biotechnology was in the ranges, where creating new organisms was possible. And organisms seemed like the obvious choice.
Naturally it took a good deal of lobbying to forward the idea of a translation symbiont. But on the overall the idea took on, especially among the emigrants.
The design the bioengineers finally came up with was as simple as possible, while remaining as effective as possible. It was important to keep the interaction between symbiont and host to a minimum, while maximising effectiveness of the symbion-host communication, and the communication between symbionts on different hosts. The main difficulty was somehow making the symbiont learn whatever language the host was using, and then transmitting it to other symbionts by a universal form of communication, a form that would also hopefully not evolve with the host, even if the symbionts were separated for several generations.
The universal form of communication was ideally binary. The adoption of digital data structures for a biological organism wasn't as difficult as some people thought. After all, they kept it to the most simple way, by transmitting an ASCII type of alphabet over ultrasonic ranges. This sometimes resulted in a sensitivity of both symbiont and host to ultrasonic noise sources, but was deemed necessary.
The actual speech intelligence was then left primarily to a learning processes. The symbiont established three connections with the host, one to the speech center, linking directly to the nerve-strands that transmitted vocal communication to the actual speech organs, basically the vocal cords, and mouth. A direct communication with the brain itself was deemed too complicated.
The second was with the visual cortex, taking visual information directly from the seeing nerves, and processing it within the symbiont brain. This was regarded as important, since the actual language learning process was deemed to be more effective using visual inputs as well.
The third was with the hearing center, used to directly extract and input audio data to the host.
The symbiont brain was designed by copying speech and and visual cortices from present organic lifeforms, including some animals. The brain comprised most of the actual size of the symbiont, it was regarded that it didn't need any other organs, the host would provide the metabolism. The symbionts were also non-reproductive. They had to be cloned, and imprinted to the individual hosts DNA, and implanted before the host itself had completed his own language learning process. That meant implantation as a baby. The symbion was implanted in the abdomnen, since they eventually became over tennis-ball size, and only there there was the necessary space. Some people preferred to carry their symbiont in a lump of skin on their backs. The symbiont could easily be adapted accordingly. This ensured the highest possible flexibility in the application of the symbiont. The lifespan of the symbiont was intended to match that of the host. Cases of symbiont deaths before the host were rare, less than one in a million cases. In case of symbiont death the symbiont was extracted surgically, although it could also be easily resorbed into the host organism. Implanting a new symbiont was impossible, also the transfer of symbionts was impossible. Some cases of nervous breakdown or withdrawal syndromes were reported upon early symbiont death, but the majority of patients were able to resume their normal life fairly quickly.
An important aspect of the learning process was the communication with other symbionts. The learning baby symbiont had to be able to communicate with other symbionts as well as the learning host to complete its learning process. An isolated symbiont and host would result in incomplete learning.
The function of the symbiont was simple: It would register the communications of the host, translate it into its own binary code, and transmit it to any other symbionts in hearing range. Some people were reported to be able to train their symbionts to transmit only to some people, but this was not a design element, it only related to the form of motivation for the symbiont, which gained a low-level endorphin induction after a successful communication. The transmitted signal was registerd by other symbionts, and then translated into an understandable form for the relative hosts, thereby completing the communication. The effect that the host would actually hear other people's words in his own ears, while getting fake audio input from the symbiont was disturbing at first, but most people were able to deal with it. The symbiont was able to adapt the simulated voice to that of the speaker, so the host's brain could easily reference the perceived words to the speaker.
When the emigrant vessels began taking thousands of people to distant worlds, the TSCS was already widely in use, although at that time it was only called Trans-culture-Communication-Symbiont. The interspecies design came later, but it didn't change much of the principles, it only adapted the symbiont to other life-forms, by replicating the structure for a foreign DNA, or even totally different chemical based life. The systems of the symbiont changed, the principles remained the same.
The response from the alien cultures was varied, but at least after several encounters it was clear to most that there was a form of communication available for the next generation. Some cultures accepted it. Some didn't.
The TSCS was probably most universally accepted on the Lattice worlds. Since the Lattice offered fast and comfortable travel between myriads of worlds and cultures, it was necessary to provide means of communication other than learning languages. While lots of people still did that, for pure education purposes, the TSCS became the prime method of communication between species, and cultures.
It is therefore safe to assume that a majority of all people (who could afford it) on human and some other Lattice worlds have a TSCS implanted after birth. Some governments even introduced laws that enforced widespread implanting.
The TSCS above all ensures widespread communication, and thereby made an unparalleled era of understanding possible. I doesn't alleviate human, belligerent nature, but it does make it possible to understand almost anyone you meet out on a given spaceport, or bar, or street, in thousands or worlds on the Lattice, and off the Lattice.
by Hal Torbred
Any autonomous or semi-autonomous robot designed primarily for carrying bulky or massive loads and equipped with appropriate locomotive systems for its operational environment.