Liner Notes for Sky War Conscripts

 

Liner Notes for Sky War Conscripts

What has Ella Wright been doing, a question no one has asked since reading the last story she appeared in Partial City Defenders. Well now you know. She’s officially joined the Deep Patrol been through basic training, and is now a junior data recorder with an expedition to the Homeside/Skyside world.

What, you are probably asking, is going on here? Let’s re-examine where Wright explains.

“Within the world is as it appears. A globe, homeside, surrounded by skyside. And on skyside this seems reversed. Skyside is a globe itself, wrapped in homeside. The two are wrapped around each other in a higher-dimensional knot.”

Two worlds, appearing to be parallel, facing each other, a hundred miles apart. But here the space-time geometry is twisted. Each world appears to be flat, but is actually a globe. So far so understandable, you probably live on Earth and are familiar with the concept. If you stand on Homeside, then the ground falls away as you stand on the curved surface. And overhead, Skyside also turns, so that it dominates the sky, bending down to reach the horizon.

Yet on Skyside you observe the same. Skyside is a globe, wrapped around with Homeside. (They have different names for the two sides there). The two are wrapped around each other thanks to higher dimensional geometry. It’s supposed to be weird.

There’s day and night, the story doesn’t get into that so I’m leaving the explanation for that blank for the moment.

Of course if there’s another world a hundred miles over your head you’re going to want to go and see it. And a culture with the social organisation and technology to do so is likely to be in an expansive phase. Hence imperialism and resistance, colonialism and war.

Sky War Conscripts was a phrase that came up in the chat of an online reading. Too good to be forgotten. And I wanted the war to be close but far away, endless and grinding but comprehensible. Hence this.

How does this fit with the larger story? Ella’s still Deep Patrol, buried inside the dimensional twist. Gunn isn’t, and on the run in normal space. Well I put a clue in there, and if not…

There’ll be an explanation eventually.