Journal Entry 3: The Rhynia

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Journal Entry 3: The Rhynia

Year: 2547

Date: Feb 12, Sunday

Location: Nicholson Transit Base, Upper Decks

Nothing prepares you for seeing the Rhynia with your own eyes. The station is bone white, bleached by Proxima Centauri’s cosmic rays, and truly immense, far greater than the outer solar system worlds and rivaling that of Earth’s moon. Our vessel was repelled as we approached the station, completely antithetical of what I had expected to happen. The group leader explained to us that this sometimes happens when a shuttle is too fast for yet unclear reasons. After we squeezed into the station through a crevice on one of its rings, we were in the decks. The gravity inside the whole station was similar to that on Earth, directing towards the cylinder at the center of the station, which is remarkable, as it completely contradicts what one would expect from centrifugal forces. Some engineers theorize that a rod made of ridiculously dense material is at the station’s core, with one going as far as to claim it to be a chain of stabilized mini black holes. This then raises the question of why the station has not collapsed onto itself to form a sphere, as celestial bodies far smaller than it would already have. One deck researcher I have become acquainted with presented his pet theory that just as humans had managed to harness the electron 7 centuries ago, the alien precursors that made this station found a way to control the graviton using something hidden deep within the lower decks. He is currently trying to find this hypothetical device. I know little of all that, but I agree that the station’s inner workings are not as dead as it seems. For one, solar panels on the station’s outer surface seem to move and react to their relative position to Proxima Centauri, and electrical lights in some parts of the decks seem to still work. This heavily implies that some autonomous system still works at the base level of the Rhynia, though there are no signs of any central AI controlling it. As our group leader explained to us, the Rhynia could be divided into three main portions from edge to center, the domes, the upper decks, and the lower decks. The innermost parts of the Rhynia are known as the lower decks. This comprises the main cylindrical structure of the station as well as the shafts extending from them, connecting to the first ring around the station. Despite there being six shafts, and thus six connections, navigating to the lower decks have remained incredibly obscure so far. Most of the entrances have been depressurized and subjected to freezing cold, somehow nearing absolute zero. The only known path into the lower decks was found on accident a few months ago while some workers were clearing debris. Since then, researchers have flooded the section in droves before swiftly returning and requesting reassignment. ‘A pilgrimage of the meek’, as the leader put it. Deserters reported that the proximal portions of the shafts were relatively mundane and resembled parts of the upper decks, but the air grew damp and hot as they descended. Sounds followed them in the dark, and the same rooms seemed to keep repeating. This is when most researchers decided it was time to leave. Some, however, braved the whole journey to the central cylinder. There, as one source claimed, thrived some sort of parallel ecosystem in the pitch black, despite the complete lack of oxygen and light. Another purported to find a sterile alien city fashioned out of indestructible materials. Vertical arcologies flowed into each other, hanging from an unseen ceiling. Despite the materials having been sculpted deliberately for their texture, they were a mismatch of colors, almost as if they built homes using a geological cross section. No teams stayed long out of the ‘heavy air’. Above the lower decks, where I am currently, were the upper decks. The upper decks consisted of the first ring around the station, as well as the six vertical shafts which lead edgewards from the ring. The upper decks was where the crevice leading into the Rhynia was found - or made - the consensus is vague on that detail. The ring is an expansive series of tubes, tunnels, and rooms, which I would almost compare to a metro station. Most of the ring is completely sterile, owing to the lack of breathable air and any source of food. Though unfit for living, this makes the environment relatively safe for travel once it has been mapped out, which is why the leader stressed again for us to follow the convoy and not stray from the path. The sub-dome shafts were much more hospitable environments, apparently taking on some qualities of the domes above them. There were windows on part of them, fostering monochromatic forests that use black pigments to harness the entirety of Proxima Centauri’s pitiful light. Mold festered in some unlit parts, though I have been told these support no ecosystems. As there were no other entrances in or out of the Rhynia, we would be journeying through the upper decks into Dome 4, where I would soon get to work. Connected above the decks were six massive biodomes, serving as the main habitat for all life that remains on the Rhynia. Each roughly circular dome has an internal surface area of about [data corrupted], somewhat larger than two greenlands. Like on Earth, the land to water ratio in typical domes is approximately 40% to 60%, though this varies tremendously in some domes. The Rhynia rotates around its axis on a 23-hour rhythm as it travels around Proxima Centauri, accurately simulating the length of a Devonian day (before the gravity of Earth’s moon slowed a day down to 24 hours). Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, so its energy output is far less potent than our own sun. To counteract this, the domed ceiling - known as the firmament - is constructed out of material to create a hyper efficient greenhouse effect, maintaining all domes at tropical ambience. The exception to this is Dome 5, with the temperature being similar to central Europe. As the domes are flat across the Rhynia’s length, the station seemingly tries to simulate seasons using an extremely elongated, elliptical orbit. Though this more or less works, the orbital speed of the station causes the seasons to be about 2.3 times as long as they are on Earth, and gives the tropical domes seasonal variation as well. It is unclear whether the latter is an oversight, or is meant to represent subtropical environments in the warmer upper Devonian. As Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, its light spectrum does not accommodate green terrestrial plants. The dome material helps out again, by generating artificial light waves in addition to letting in the star’s natural emission. The reasons why the aliens went to such lengths to circumvent a problem they could have avoided by simply building the Rhynia around a G-type star are not discernible and extremely confusing. One of my travel companions conjected that perhaps the station occasionally jumps between different stellar systems, though she made no attempt at answering why it would. Geography inside the domes mainly consists of microcontinents, sometimes called continentettes, and many island clusters. Most of the water towards the center of the domes does not get much deeper than photic zones, but it reaches at least mesopelagic ones towards the rim, with 1213 meters below sea level being the deepest measurement thus taken in Dome 4. Whether geological or other Earth systems are simulated in the domes are of great contention. Tides certainly are not, resulting in coastlines littered with mangroves. Erosion, meanwhile, does exist, as the artificial skies are high enough to accommodate natural rain clouds and even a weather system. Dome 4’s chief geologist is convinced the sharp mountaintops and other relatively young orogenic formations on the islands could not have survived the last 380 million years of battery, and must have been recently formed. Most scientists I spoke to on the Roanoke are of the opinion that no matter how advanced the precursors’ technology, they could not have simulated genuine plate-tectonics or orogenies. The question still remains though, especially since the geology of the Rhynia is apparently authentic enough to produce fossil strata with which we can glean parts of what happened between 380 million years ago and now. Each dome is a self-sufficient and isolated system, not connected to any of its neighboring domes directly. This has predictably led to unpredictable results. While Dome 4 is the most thoroughly studied dome, preliminary or defunct expeditions into the others have revealed wildly divergent environments, despite all initially being populated with the same Devonian biosphere. Dome 4 is mainly populated by the descendants of placoderm fish, with chondrichthyans and bony fish remaining inconspicuous apart from some highly derived forms, but is not too dissimilar from Earth plant and microfauna wise, with the notable outlier of jet-propelled leeches. In contrast, Dome 1 seems to have been struck by a recent geological disaster, with the only reported life being microbial scum, and, if I am reading them correctly, dog-sized rotifers (?!). Any attempt to survey Dome 3 directly has been prevented by the sub-3 shaft being depressurized and damaged. Satellite surveys from space saw moving continents in the surviving footage. Dome 2 was the first dome where macroscopic life was found. Any vertebrates, or even arthropods, are entirely absent, replaced by echinoderms, molluscs, and even flatworms. Apparently this is where the stylophorans eked out a living against all odds, and have since diverged into a plurality of forms. The first ground crew dispatched found the waterways swarming with ‘fish-shaped mitrates and angelic pterobranchs’ and were attacked by ‘drone-sending echinoderms with too many legs’, resulting in one casualty. Dome 6 did not seem to get the memo about land composition, as the entire dome is flooded. Ocean stretched out in every direction, only broken up by the occasional mangrove jutting directly from the water’s surface. The furthest edges of the dome were encased by shadow, resulting in deep-sea looking fish dwelling at the water’s surface. These shadows were cast by vertical forests which coated the dome’s firmament. Genetic tests revealed the life there to be mainly of hagfish, even down to the ‘corals’ in the shallow zones. This is not to say each dome is isolated either; life in the domes can spread through the decks just as human explorers have, by entering the decks through a ziggurat-like structure at the center. Rumors of hagfish and stylophorans sightings in Dome 4 have circulated to the Roanoke, and Dome 5 itself is a living testament to interchange, its fauna a bizarre cold-tolerant blend from Dome 4, Dome 6, and oddballs one can only assume were Dome 5 natives. However, interchange is not easy, as it means navigating many kilometers of inhospitable deck space and abiotic barriers, making inter-deck travelers relatively rare. When we first arrived at the station, I asked the group leader why we could not simply travel counter-clockwise instead of clockwise to reach Dome 4 by way of the sub-6 and sub-5 decks. He told me with a deadpan that there was a sea, then a wall of ice, separating where we were and Dome 4 in that direction. I thought he was being awfully sarcastic before I got a map copy at the first deck transit base and found ‘deck ocean’, and ‘ice plug’, to be real areas on the station diagram. Our trip through the decks so far has been alarming but fascinating. When we were under Dome 2, we took a shortcut through a recently discovered series of rooms which grew jagged metallic spikes, almost resembling how a ferrofluid reacts to a neodymium magnet. I dared not touch anything, but saw glowing worm-like animals making crystalline casts of what appeared to be glass. They brought the casts to a 'turnip', somehow embedded in the substrate, and crowned it as if the casts were hats. I heard something just as whimsical in the long dark stretch between Dome 3 and Dome 4. I struggle with sleeping in the decks, so while I was laying down one night, I managed to make out a faint chirping echo in the distance. I am not sure if something was there or if it was just tinnitus, but it was surprisingly pleasant and rhythmic. I told the travel squad of this when they awoke, and they were absolutely mortified. The next few days of travel were irregular and went through many detours. I remember noticing that the security team had all strapped massive slabs which almost looked like speakers to their waists. They never elaborated on why. We arrived at the Nicholson transit base in the sub-4 shaft a day ago, where we are resupplying and taking a brief rest. While everyone else was sleeping, I decided to sneak out and wander around the base, as this region was designated a safezone. To my surprise, there was a lit complex of tunnels not far away, one which coincided with breathable air. I saw a few two legged placoderms (likely thelocauds, if my Dome 4 field guide is applicable to the decks) frolicking in a little garden of moss. There were even some of those fish-insects, thriae, which I had been so excited to see. Seeing as the lit complex was unmarked on my map, I reported the find to USSC officials at the transit base, who commended the discovery but warned me again against straying from the path. I suppose it will take something bigger to impress them. We depart on the deck journey’s final stretch into Dome 4 tomorrow, where I will leave my travel group and join my new research associates on Ziggurat Island. They will be traveling north from Dome 4’s southern continentette, Yanhuo, to meet me. Hopefully the research will be just as interesting but less nerve-wracking than my present trip.