Monday, April 22, 2019

Farm Gamma and the Heap


Farm Gamma is a world where biology meets industry.  Mothercorp's vast farms are a far cry away from pastoral life. They use engineered flora first designed by the Floozies to replicate the fruits of machine civilization.  Clothing, weapons, computers, even spaceships are grown here. The landscape here is an exercise in managed chaos. Fields of widget plants checker the vista out to the horizon. Indentured workers swarm like the domesticated insects they work with. Thick tangles of vine cabling climb towering stalks, feeding titanic construction pods.
Farm Gamma is hungry for resources, as huge amounts of chon are taken off planet in the form of finished products.

Around Gamma orbits the Heap, a planet sized compost pile. The surface is covered by dead bio mass dumped here from Farm Gamma and from many other worlds. It has mountains of rotten fruit and vast fields of soggy woodchips. Amid the rotting bones and moldering paper there is a riotous tangle of plant life. Millions of species grow wild and strange, and odd things crawl though the garbage.  Mother Corp has armed camps where enslaved criminals mine rich soil. Escapees and rebels live out in the wilderness in hidden camps beneath the surface. They speak of a hidden way out, an unknowable salvation deep within the Heap. It is not a simple journey however. The crust of the world throngs with hives of clever giant insects and vermin. Uncountable kingdoms of beasts live and war beneath the surface. Beneath the swarming baronies there are the moist and crumbling worm tunnels, home to strange fungi and strange cults. Below that there is the anaerobic ocean, a lightless and airless expanse of tainted water. And below that, salvation.

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