Cover Ideas

Copy

This is a first pass at the back copy. It’s a bit long, which could probably be trimmed down by choosing a shorter quote. The goal is to show that after all this time, a lot of the Odists are starting to crack. Dear has basically frozen and isn’t changing much, May has come to hate (rather than just love) someone and is intensely uncomfortable with this, and True Name really isn’t getting by very well being all manipulation all the time, constantly having to hide her emotions.

“Do you know how old I am, Dr. Brahe? I am 222 years old, a fork of an individual who is…who would be 259 years old. I am no longer the True Name of 2124. Even remembering her feels like remembering an old friend. I remember her perfectly, and yet I do not remember how to be earnest. I do not know how to simply be.”

The cracks are showing.

Someone picked up on the broadcast from the Dreamer Module and as the powers that be rush to organize a meeting between races, Dr. Tycho Brahe is caught up in a whirlwind of activity. And as always, when the drama goes down, there is Codrin Bălan to witness it.

When faced with eternity in a new kind of digital world, however, old traumas come to roost, and those who were once powerful are brought to their knees

Growth is colliding with memory, and the cracks are showing.

Front

Once again aiming for isometric text revealed beneath voxels, maybe in cyan (since we have magentaish and yellowish so far).

• Emissaries’ dinner in Tycho’s sim

  Shortly after the list of emissaries are picked, they all gather along with Dear in Tycho’s sim for dinner. His sim is a mossy meadow in the midst of a ring of forest in the pacific northwest. It acts as a dark-sky sight for naked-eye astronomy, so it’s basically a forest at night. They have dinner in the field at a table with a single candle lighting them. It’d be pretty dark, but who knows, maybe it could work.

• Tycho and True Name talking in his sim — first time, second time

  Twice during the book, Tycho and True Name have a conversation in his sim, that same dark field. They use red-tinted flashlights to watch what they’re doing. During the first meeting, they keep them nearby and pointed towards them so that they can see each others’ expressions. During the second, they share champagne after the successful talks, though they do so mostly in the dark without the flashlights.

• True Name grabbing Answers Will Not Help while others jolt away

  During the conference, True Name grabs Answers Will Not Help, who is slowly losing her mind and has said the Name, by the blouse. Obviously, everyone is kind of freaked out by this, so they all jolt away from the action, meaning Codrin, Tycho, and Sarah jolting to the side and the Artemisians, if shown, jolting back.

• Ioan, May, End Waking, Debarre, A Finger Pointing, and Douglas camping out

  Ioan and May visit End Waking’s forest along with Debarre, A Finger Pointing, and Douglas Hadje, where they eat a very good stew cooked over a campfire and share stories, guessing what the Artemisians are like and talking about why time skew sucks for Odists.

• Ioan, May, and Douglas walking and talking

  Once May recovers from an overwhelming rush of emotions and requests some alone time, she meets back up with Ioan and Douglas in the dandelion field. After lunch, they go for a walk and discuss some heavy stuff, whereupon Ioan gets preeetty upset at the thought, however unlikely, that ey might lose her.

• Tycho and Stolon chatting in the sunny window

  Tycho and Stolon, as astronomers and fucking nerds, have a lot to talk about, so they take every chance they can get to steal some time away from the meetings and chat about stars. As a lizardy type, Stolon is fond of sunning themself, so they’ve found an alcove where they can do so on a windowsill.

• Tycho watches news disseminate

  The Odists control when and how the news of the Artemisians arrival disseminates through they system. They do so by posting five articles to the equivalent of the ‘net, which are represented by five sheets of paper on a whiteboard. As the responses come in and more articles by others are posted, they are added below the first five and the relationships between articles tracked with marker on the whiteboard. A ton of articles come in, so the whiteboard grows upwards, and the Odists and Jonases watching the dissemination stand on air in front of the stuff they’re working on if it’s too high for them to reach.

• Tycho showing up at Dear/Codrin’s the first night

  After giving the go-ahead for the Artemisians to board, Tycho goes the first place he can think of to try and figure out what to do, which happens to be Dear’s house on the prairie.

Back

Would like to keep the door imagery, preferring instances where someone is leaving rather than arriving

• Tycho leaving for Artemis through the Customs Office (This would involve Tycho leaving through a door, obviously, which I enjoy)

  At the end of the book, Tycho decides to join the Artemisians without leaving a fork of himself behind. Due to standard Odist bullshittery, the way to upload to Artemis is in a small building labeled ‘Customs’ that has clearly seen better days. Sticking out from the roof is an old radio antenna, one of those trapezoidal ones made with angle irons and painted red and white stripes with a blinking helicopter light on top. It is on a stone plaza in the Italian style, but just beyond it is a desert in the style of the Sahara.

• Codrin watching Sorina leave during sunrise

  Despite the fact that it would mean leaving behind eir partners, Codrin decides to send a fork to Artemis before it leaves, too. In order to try and leave the past behind without being too sad, the new instance decides to change as much as they can, winding up a shorter woman named Sorina wearing traditional Romanian garb (a white blouse with wide sleeves, embroidered at the cuffs and neckline, a plain white skirt, and a heavily embroidered fotă, a half-apron that covers the front and back of the skirt ref1 ref2). Codrin does this at sunrise in the prairie away from the house to keep from waking eir partners, and does it before they wake so that Sorina can leave before they learn of her, knowing that if she sticks around to say goodbye, she won’t be able to leave.

• Ioan and May stepping to abandoned hike sim to talk about the Name (Doesn’t involve leaving through a door, but they are stepping into a sim)

  To avoid possible prying eyes, Ioan and May step away from home to an abandoned sim containing a mountain lake.

Descriptions

Dear

No change

Ioan Bălan

No change

Codrin Bălan

Similar to Ioan, more feminine features, longer hair kept in a braid, often wears a tunic and a sarong as a skirt, warm colors.

Sorina Bălan

Shorter than Codrin, cis-feminine, wears 19th century Romanian garb linked above.

Douglas Hadje

Tall, slim, curly black hair, tan skin (though, as he’s a Canadian, still a white guy).

May Then My Name/True Name/skunk-type Odists

No change - ref

Tycho Brahe

Tall (6‘4” to Codrin’s 5‘11”), white, graying hair kept short, salt-and-pepper beard, well groomed, ~50s, wears flannel shirts and jeans

Sarah Genet

Tall (6’), straight gray hair kept no more than shoulder length, ~50s, dignified features, professional bearing, blouse and slacks

Iska

Basically a short (4’) anthro weasel, described as being the splitting image of Debarre

Stolon

very colorful lizard with scales that shine like an oil slick and a frill of feathers or elongated scales around the crown of their head

Turun Ko/Turun Ka

appear to be synthetic constructions that are equally comfortable on two or four legs with six-fingered hands and feet both with opposable thumbs and a thick tail for balance, almost canine faces with a dark glass visor where the eyes would be, no visible mouth, analogous to a kangaroo

Artante Diria

appears almost human, though with their features much smoothed, epicanthic folds, pale skin, straight black hair

Artemisians are described thus:

Arrival.

Arrival and light and noise and a slick, slippery feeling to the air about em.

Codrin stole a few long seconds with eir eyes squinted shut. The light itself was loud, the noise bright. Everything was just slightly off, just slightly wrong.

And then, those seconds passed, and the noise was less blinding, and when ey opened eir eyes, ey no longer felt deafened, and ey was able to take in the world around em. The floor, the colonnaded walls, the greenery beyond. Tight-fitting stone, slick and polished.

Before em stood what ey supposed must be the Artemisian delegation.

Turun Ka and Turun Ko, judging by their artificial appearance, stood half again as tall as em. Their flesh, what might have otherwise been skin, was made of what looked to be a supple, rubbery material in gunmetal grey. Powerful thighs supported a stocky torso, and the fact that they were leaned slightly forward was counterbalanced with a thick, lizard-like tail behind them. Their shoulders were sloped and narrow, and ey could see now why they had described themselves as equally comfortable on both two and four legs: their hands were clawed and padded with five fingers and an opposable thumb, but so were their feet.

Atop a long neck rising from their shoulders sat heads with a distinctly canine bent. They were shaped, in fact, not too dissimilar from Dear’s, though the ears were less outrageously large.

It was the faces, though, that captivated eir attention. They did not have visible mouths or noses, their ‘muzzles’ instead being covered with a somewhat lighter grey version of that same supple coating. Porous, perhaps? ey thought. To let them smell? I don’t suppose they need to eat. Maybe for speech?

Rather than eyes, there was a mirrored panel of black, looking more mercury than plastic or glass. No visible eyes, no visible expressions.

Well, this will be interesting.

To their right a being of similar shape stood on two legs, though one far smaller, coming up only to Codrin’s chin. The longer ey looked, however, the more those similarities began to fall away. Yes, it stood on two powerful legs; yes, its body was canted forward and kept on balance with a thick tail; yes, it had an elongated snout.

However, rather than that supple plastic, it was coated in a scaly hide, washed in oil-sheen colors. Where the firstrace representatives had little in the way of facial features, though, Stolon, ey assumed, almost seemed to have a surfeit. Their eyes were bright and curious, their mouth seemingly ready to a smile — or some other expression, ey reminded emself, as what appeared to be a smile to humans may not be so to secondrace. They did not have hair, as made sense for a lizard of some sort, but they did have a crest of what appeared to be feathers of a sort, or perhaps massively elongated scales.

Beside Stolon and standing a head shorter than even them was a creature that reminded em so much of Debarre that ey did a double-take. The resemblance was uncanny: a svelte coat of brown fur with a creamier white starting beneath the chin and heading down over their front — or at least, ey assumed it continued beneath the thin, blue tunic they were wearing — and a black-tipped tail behind. Plenty of whiskers, curious eyes.

The last of the Artemisians, Artante Diria, looked almost-but-not-quite human. Her features seemed far smoother, with a nose that melted into her face and earlobes that ramped smoothly down into her neck below. Beyond that, however, the differences were negligible. She could easily get lost in a crowd of humans with no problem whatsoever, another face of Asian descent. She even wore a blue tunic and sarong of nearly identical cut to what ey had worn for so long.