DEAD AIR
> Overview
It is difficult to imagine the idea of nothing. The breaking down of reality defies the very thought of its process. But we can stand on its edge, within the storm before its non-horizon.
The Dead Air of the Broadcast System is that storm. It is an expanse of red clouds where the rain is inescapable. Bereft of solid ground, one could float weightless in them for ages—an almost enticing embrace—if the raindrops were not too bitter to be serene.
Gravity only takes effect while grounded, distorted in a way unique to Dead Air. The rain falls endlessly downward fueled by no clear source, but solid objects do not. Even liquids will suspend into droplets midair instead of falling.
This quirk leads to a surreal landscape where the only respite is adrift, just like any being looking for it: rusted scraps of floating metal, isolated crumbling buildings, lonely stretches of shattered highway. They are fickle footing, but any ground is better than none. Dead Air is true to its name, staying among its debris would ensure a pitiful, slow death. The places worth staying in must be journeyed to.
The Broadcast System is as much of an empty abyss as it is a crucible. Fragments shaped by its broken gravity cluster into fields, which coalesce into and around cores of life—limspaces: places that have known nothing but rain and rot. Whatever the destination may be, that influence is certain. How it manifests, however, is not.
Dead Air is the outskirts of those spaces, populated by, what some believe, to be remnants. At a glance most of it is waste, but that assumption is quickly proven false. Fundamentally, the salvage from these clusters is a lifeline for everything in them. Nomadic creatures make nests in the orbiting junk, just as nomadic explorers use it to build colossal ships.
> Exploration
Some believe the floating debris to be remnants of limspaces, or leftovers from their formation.
Those ships are the main way of traversing the vastness of the space. The zero-gravity environment and stagnant air leads to strange designs, not quite spacecraft nor aircraft. While no two crews' vessels are identical, they are all hand-built and share the same function at their core: travel.
Sails are useless, so these ships demand fuel to operate. All but the smallest craft use biofuels: gas, liquid fuel, or both. Obtaining such a resource depends on the ship. Some can simply salvage enough from the debris to keep moving, while others have to resort to more active strategies.
Usually, this means hunting the megafauna of Dead Air, not unlike the whaling of antiquity. What seems like a lonely expanse of empty sky harbors immense beasts of metal and flesh, with electrical activity so violent they turn the soft rain around them into a raging thunderstorm. Though a vessel may only have to hunt these creatures a handful of times in its lifetime, the danger of doing so is unmatched.
Cultivation has also proven useful for the crews of large ships, running their engines off of gasses produced onboard. While it is a quieter lifestyle, the fuel is harder to store, and difficult to maintain. Giant inflatable storage bags of patchwork leather are prone to damage, bulky, and hazardous to keep full.
The exception to these rules is the black metal vessels piloted by vagrants of the red rain: intelligent crews of Dead Air’s radiofauna—rotting, biomechanical natives of the Broadcast System. While that term is not exclusive to the intelligent variants, it describes them well. They are deeply inhuman, sapient beings with goals hard to decipher. The technology they wield is the same: powered by living circuitry and pulsating red cores said to drive people insane, folding the fabric of reality to transcend limspaces. Yet, their intentions seem benign, almost helpful. Perhaps they’ve taken an interest in humanity’s motivations, willing to ferry us across their worlds and beyond in pursuit of mutual discovery.
The travel itself is grueling. Exposure is a constant threat, and the space between meaningful stops is vast. The downpour endlessly drums on any improvised craft made to traverse it, dulling any senses to let cabin fever fester. And when one finally gets to disembark and wander the fractured landscape, they may not be alone among its debris.
▸⠀ While drifting between the sparse walkable portions of the debris fields is not dangerous on its own, it can quickly prove to be without a way to get oneself back to stable gravity—exposed to the elements and easy prey for passing creatures.
It is an existence of scrapping: of salvaging pieces upon pieces to make a meager whole; then constant patchwork to make sure that whole is kept. When travel by foot is impossible, the rusty vessel painstakingly built up to keep you alive, to keep you moving, becomes an extension of yourself. People cease to be individuals within those dark interiors. They are operators, the hearts of their ship. If it dies, they die with it.
That isolation is crushing, but the anticipation of the distant light ahead may be even more so. One either breaks amid the madness or carries the weight of the red rain forever, be it a gentle call, or a horrible scar. Countless derelicts are a quiet reminder of this very notion. Some never finish their first journey, while others dive too deep. Regardless, all are reduced to salvage for the next voyagers to pass, their logs warnings for whoever may read them.
▸⠀ There is a unique horror to be found when exploring these dead vessels: the history of the crews, and the history of their descent, is on full display. Deprivation often leads to frenzy.
Given the tearing of what is real in this place, an eerie truth is that some of these derelicts may have never had a heart at all: ghost ships, in the most literal sense. The pasts that are genuine and the pasts forged by the rain walk a blurry line. Even if there is no perceived intention behind such anomalies, it does not make them any less distressing to ponder.
Life among the debris fields demands transience. To stagnate means to end up like these lost souls. There is no time to be disgusted at the taste of metallic rainwater, or the rubbery texture of boiled hide stripped of rotten meat and wires. There is only time for preparation—to experience that disgust again and again until it no longer registers as such. It is a slow poison, but it is slower than starvation.
accessing file: [INVALID ID] temp: “d/log_007”
contributor to CRUCIBLE database: HUMAN crew
contributor ID: “Bismarck_II//ORIONS_BELT”
LOG UNABLE TO BE VERIFIED
probability of TEMPORAL ABERRATION: 35%
PRINTING LOG…
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A great structure lies before me and my crew.
It is strange, I am the sole human aboard, yet, we share a solemn drive forward. I can see it in their massive white eyes.
Communication is difficult, they speak gibberish, aside from an occasional nod and a singular code: 10-4. Conformation. I say it too sometimes, being here so long.
Sometimes, I wonder if they dream, because I’ve lost the ability to. So, I take to wondering more, mostly about the creatures I’ve grown so attached to.
One, I call it Omega, because that's one of the few coherent chatters it makes, was the first hint of intelligence I saw in this place: a towering humanoid in a heavy suit, almost like the antique designs once used to explore the seafloor. Can’t see much of its face; it's obscured by dirty glass and a red haze, except its eyes. It saved my life, caught me from drifting away into the cold storm, and brought me back to solid ground. It reminded me of the ISS members who go on spacewalks in that moment, gliding through the air gripping a tether, trails of machine smoke propelling it forward.
I wonder about its past, and what it thinks of the world, what it thinks of limspaces. Does it get the same fuzzy, warm feeling of home here that earth might bring us? Is this even where it came from? Does it have an origin at all?
Maybe it simply is. It doesn’t sit right, how could that be the case? But, I suppose if this is where it came from, it carries some of that logic-defying nature. It doesn’t give a neat conclusion, but nothing here does. Thinking too hard about it only leads to more questions.
So I wonder… It's all I can do to stave off the oppressive monotony between our stops.
The anticipation of our arrival aches.
The rain, oh, the rain_
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> Access
The powerful gravity of some limspaces forms faint, haunting rings.
Those that enter Dead Air always do so willingly. Most embark on the alien vessels of the radiofauna who roam other limspaces, but a rare few are simply confronted by the red rain in a way they cannot quite recall afterwards. Some even swear it poured in their dreams long before their arrival.
The only exit, besides the cores of the debris fields, is to disembark a radiofauna vessel outside of Dead Air, be it by choice or catastrophe. The latter is unfortunately very common, as there is no telling where their ship will appear, potentially leaving the ship destroyed and its crew stranded. It is a burden they carry, however. We know they occupy dataspace like us through the terminals, and have for a very long time. Perhaps they have an archive of their own that is worth the risk to fill.
▸⠀ Freedom like that comes at a terrible price. “Crucible sickness” is the unfortunate affliction that plagues those that roam with the raidofauna. It deprives them of their dreams, of their imagination, replacing it with red, nonsensical radio chatter. The worst of them even begin to look like their inhuman crewmates. To remain sane in this state is a miracle, but it is a risk many take.
> The Crucible
Anything could be hidden in the distant clouds: rifts to other realities; old, living machines of incomprehensible size; silent mirages of skyscrapers on the horizon; dark edges of the storm, fluttering with snow. We have no defined courses, no maps to guide us, so we must make them. There is peril in being the spearhead of those voyages, but it is a noble pursuit.
For most it is easier to list the unknowns of Dead Air rather than the known. What is known is sparse and leaves more questions than answers. But this is why many choose to wander it. It is in the same vein as the astronauts of Baseline, braving an unfathomable void in pursuit of uncovering what it holds—here, too, we reach for the stars. The cosmic megastructures and shimmering rifts at the cores of Dead Air’s nebulae outweigh any danger present in the journey to see them.
Despite the hardships, that strange beauty persists. Reality is bent in ways both wondrous and terrifying—Dead Air is a crucible after all, and that nature is on full display. It is a gentle, enigmatic chaos devoid of reason, or perhaps its reasoning is beyond our understanding. In that way, it is like our own cosmos and its many words. A reality so alien may not be under that perspective, as the same existential yearning to explore it is no different here: a red universe in the place of our own.