This is one of the (many) maps I’m drawing for my own version of the starship in Metamorphosis Alpha. The Mutual of Omaha Starship Vonnegut is built of a number of interlocking discs with multiple decks, making it much, much larger than the Warden.
Deck 47-Gimel was once the vacation destination for outdoorsy crewmembers and passengers living in the forediscs of the Mutual of Omaha Starship Vonnegut.
Situated at the midsection of its disc, Deck 47-Gimel stretches some 120 miles in diameter and stands a half of a mile high, allowing for serious legroom, which was a huge draw for the crewmembers ancestors since they spent the majority of their lives working and living in the cramped corridors, chambers, crawlways, and conduits that thread between decks and through the ship’s thick hull. It features two mountain ranges, several forests, a swampland, grasslands, desert, and its own sea, which all teamed with Earth lifeforms. Its four arcologies served as both resort getaways and as places where crewmember seminars—essential for maintaining morale and efficiency among the crew—could be held for the length of the Journey of Journeys.
One of the arcologies is a place where crewmembers and corporate employees would be sent for team-building exercises and morale boosts. The place is controlled by a hyper-intelligent AI who goes by the name K.E.V. The AI is tremendously friendly and really wants to bring out the best in everyone who arrives at the arcology and for them to get the most out of their weeklong seminar. Once someone enters the arcology, they are not allowed to leave for one week, during which time they are subjected to K.E.V.’s increasingly depraved trust-building exercises. When the Vonnegut passed through the Space Radiation Cloud a thousand years ago, K.E.V.’s programming was altered in such a way that he became monomaniacal about improving human socialization through teamwork behavior unique to the Homo sapiens species. In K.E.V.’s view, all of the horrors he subjects the arcology’s visitors to are necessary for the betterment of humanity. (K.E.V. does not recognize mutant humans as anything different from humans and views mutant animals as simply an extension of human domestication practices, which is a component of the same trait it seeks to improve.)
I definitely get a sense of the sheer enormity of the Vonnegut.
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Yeah. I wanted to go completely overboard (there’s a pun there somewhere).
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