Yinrih don’t discover FTL in the form of the mass router until after First Contact with humanity, dozens of millennia after every suitable body at Focus has already been terraformed. Prior to the mass router interstellar travel is limited to missionaries of the Bright Way searching for worlds that already have sophonts, a very risky endeavor that they only undertake out of zeal.

Post FTL, ethical questions come to the fore, and the Bright Way takes a dim view of being grabby. There’s internal disagreement on which planets qualify for this designation. Some say all exoplanets are off limits, others say only those with promising prebiotic environments should be left alone. The doctrine as written seems to preclude only planets in the habitable zone of their star. As far as secular law is concerned, if you maintain a presence in a planet’s gravity well it’s yours, and the Bright Way’s missionary efforts partially pivot to squatting on such promising planets to prevent others from bulldozing the environment.

At this point the Neoshamanists are much more homogenous, with both the Lifebringers and the Mindseekers (who sought to create strong AI and likewise failed) having long faded into history. They may or may not care one way or the other at this point. The setting doesn’t really explore far beyond present day.

Yeah I can see the resemblance. I designed the symbol some time last year. I noticed earlier this year that it resembles the logo of a certain chain of veterinary hospitals.

The yinrih themselves are largely inspired by me processing the aging and eventual passing of one of my dogs, hence why the average yinrih lifespan is an inversion of the typically quoted dog:human ratio of 7 dog years to 1 human year. My dog ended up passing at one of these hospitals.

I should hasten to add that unlike Firefly’s resemblance to Big E, The zap rats’ similarity to Pika-- *looks around furtively to see if Nintendo’s lawyers are around* --I mean certain other fictional electric rodents is very deliberate.

There’s one species of zap rat that has evolved a eusocial lifestyle similar to naked mole rats, but they’re carnivorous and hunt in giant swarms. They use their biocapacitors offensively, shocking their much larger pray into submission then devouring most of it on the spot and carrying the rest home to feed the queen and young. They inhabit the grasslands south of the yinrih’s original jungle home. When the yinrih migrated south out of the jungle after the founding of the Bright Way, many yinrih fell victim to these tiny voracious predators.

Well it’s a good thing monkey foxes don’t know about NFPA 704.

The symbol is called the healer’s paw. It’s a stylized depiction of the female forepaw print minus the digital pads.

Because yinrih are perennially unshod, and because they can see infrared radiation, they can see glowing paw prints left in a person’s wake if the ground is metal or otherwise absorbs heat quickly. Since the arrangement of palmar pads on the forepaws is sexually dimorphic (male prints are shown below), and since the medical field is dominated by women for historical reasons, people desperate for medical help would follow random trackways of female paw prints in the hopes of finding a healer.

Yinrih don’t use nukes. The atomic age was brought about by faith rather than warfare. Once the Bright Way figured out what exactly stars were, sustained fusion reactions, they set about trying to recreate these icons of the Light on a smaller scale for liturgical purposes. A hearthkeeper’s job is to bring light and warmth to those around her, and doing that with a miniature star seemed very fitting.

There is a (probably not historical) anecdote about two pre-space age countries at war. One of them starts their version of the Manhattan project, but just as the first working prototype is about to be tested, one of the scientists working on the project suffers pangs of conscience and betrays them to the enemy to stop nuclear proliferation before it starts.

The enemy nation had just undergone a regime change (whether through a coup or a peaceful election or royal succession or something) and the new leadership was keen to put an end to the war. So for perhaps the only time in the history of the galaxy, a politician chose integrity rather than short-term advantage. The enemy scientists and all their notes were gathered together, and the one and only working nuke was detonated on top of them.

In reality, the yinrih just discovered it was much cooler and more sustainable to yeet inert masses at significant fractions of the speed of light before they got around to weaponizing the atom.

Most of my stuff, including more stories, is available on this thread on the CBB forum.

I only started posting stories here because it was otherwise really quiet, but I want to space it out because this isn’t a writing community.

I ended up going with this one. I can’t confirm the accuracy of the gauge as it hasn’t rained much yet and I don’t have an analog gauge to compare, but I suppose it will work fine as a rough estimator if it isn’t accurate.

There’s no app or account required which is the biggest selling point for me.

Nothing like a good sweaty breathless lore dump to a friend or loved one as they look on with an expression that says “I have no clue what any of this means but I’m happy you’re happy.”

The lion’s share of my work is on the CBB. I was active on /r/worldbuilding before quitting Reddit in 2023. Prior to that I was a lone conlanger/conworlder since the late 90s and only recently thought to seek out others like myself.

Humans discover hyperspace that allows faster than light travel. Unmanned probes come back fine, though covered in a tacky fragrant patina as though it traveled through thick clouds of incense. Video recordings come back blown out, and audio recordings pick up no sounds but listeners report feeling that tingle you get when hearing beautiful music. Animal tests come back unharmed, but the moment a human crew is sent in the ship comes back empty, with no signs of internal struggle or hostile ingress. It’s just empty piles of clothing.

We eventually figure out that hyperspace is actually Heaven. Any perception of the glory of the Empyrean outside the ship, even indirectly through sensors, by a human causes their face to be melted off Raiders of the Lost Ark style by inapproachable holiness. Navigation computers are developed that allow ships to traverse the realm of eternal light without the crew having to acknowledge the outside. However, you’re traveling through the light at the end of the tunnel, the one that beckons you as you lie dying. It beckons you even now. Can you resist?

Falling in love with AI never seemed out of the question to me. Think how people can get overly attached to literary characters, like how Arthur Conan Doyle got a bunch of hate mail for killing off Sherlock Holms. Or how humans tend to empathize with or anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Heck I’ve probably apologized to my toaster a time or two. Or how we can attach sentimental value to our possessions “I can’t get rid of this, it was my first _____” or whatever. Combine all that with the isolation and loneliness of modern life and it doesn’t seem farfetched. Not healthy in the slightest, but not at all out of left field.

I read this last year IIRC, and it has become my go-to warning when talking about this stuff. There was also a similar case involving a brain chip to mitigate seizures I believe. In that case it was a trial or something and the company demanded the one person that actually improved have it removed.

Sounds interesting, though “bending” makes me think of Avatar, though maybe that’s intentional?

IIRC Mankind Divided was all about regular humans persecuting augmented humans, which I found ridiculous per my first point. That brings me to a wider problem I have that probably deserves another post, about the trope of an inherently, measurably, objectively superior group of people, mages, supers, mutants, cyborgs, being persecuted by baseline humans.

The bugs are larger than ants, maybe like bees or roaches. As for the yinrih, see the image below. I can see why you picture a cat, the posture with the tail wrapped around the paws, the polydactyly, the long whiskers. Humans often call yinrih monkey foxes. That’s why she can hold things in her rear paws (and she should really be wearing gloves if she’s going to use her paws as a vice grip while soldering.)

There are cyberarcheologists who specialize in ancient operating systems, forgotten protocol standards, and dead programming languages. They exist because of archeonets, ancient corners of the network or long-abandoned but still operational data centers. When you live over 7 centuries and have a written history that stretches back to the dawn of your species you have to think long term when disaster-proofing a system, but stuff still falls through the cracks.

I have a few more stories, and may just put them on here since it’s pretty quiet.

no single farspeaker knows it from nose to tail”

What I was going for is this. In real life you have sysadmins, net admins, cybersecurity people, etc, that make up an IT team. They all have interdisciplinary knowledge but aren’t experts in every field, and indeed may work at cross-purposes on occasion. (How many times have I heard “It’s not the network!”) That’s not getting into the underlying hardware, and the stack that goes from hardware to firmware to OS to application. 99% of IT people nowadays probably can’t design a CPU from scratch, and if they can it’s likely not going to match an actual commercial CPU from AMD or ARM or Intel. Those are the products of thousands of man hours.

Then you have the differences in vendors (not really a problem for the Farspeakers at this point in time since they hold a monopoly on the network) but they DO have to contend with dozens of millennia of brown field infrastructure. The story takes place around 35 to 40 thousand years ago, when Earth was in the middle of the ice age, but the Farspeakers were founded around 95 thousand years ago when they invented the telegraph, soon (in relative terms) before achieving orbital flight. That’s a long time even if you scale it to account for the yinrih’s longer lifespan.

You might enjoy the book The Victorian Internet which is about the impact of the telegraph on society. The telegraph was the first time a message could be conveyed faster than a galloping horse or ship’s sail. A lot of the themes you mention are echoed therein.

In my own conworld there is a concept called the rLrsfBMr literally “realm of minds” which I translate as noosphere in English. It has different definitions depending on the religion of the person you ask, but in the Bright Way, sapience itself is regarded as a sacred gift, and the noosphere arises through the interactions between sapient minds (i.e. communication). Since sapient species are thought to be social, at least to some degree, in order for culture to develop, the noosphere eventually accretes a “body”, analogous to the brain and nervous system that upholds an individual sophont’s consciousness, which is the physical infrastructure involved in communication. A particular order within the Bright Way called the Farspeakers is in charge of building and maintaining this “body”, making them monks who are also network engineers.

More broadly, the Bright Way believes that there are other sophonts dwelling among the stars, and that they have been given a commandment to seek out these sophonts. Different corners of the Bright Way have their own ideas of what this means, but the Farspeakers believe they must bridge the respective internets of these far-flung sophonts, creating a galaxy-spanning meta internet.

A lawful neutral (as in the dispassionate laws of nature) god of wind and weather called the Storm Archon. It takes the form of an everlasting stationary tornado and speaks through thunder echoed off of the hills behind it. A party of adventurers, angry at their hometown being destroyed in a storm, does what all good little JRPG protags do and goes on a quest to kill the god. They succeed in committing deicide, but as they journey home they notice the rain stops and the air becomes stagnant. They’ve doomed their world to a slow death as the atmosphere gradually dies.

Cheap real estate?!