Notes on "Biomega" setting

(some spoilers for 'Biomega' manga)

'Biomega' is relatively short manga made by Tsutomu Nihei, the same guy who made 'Blame!' It uses many of the same elements 'Blame!' used (synthetic humans, long journeys, messed up world, general rapid incomprehension of the story), and many characters look so similar to 'Blame!' that 'Biomega' could be a part of something like Nihei's own Eternal Champion-like multiverse.

I won't talk about manga itself, but there are some notes about the setting in the second part of it.

1) The world is distorted and impossible.

The view from very high above; the messy parts are landmasses

According to manga the world is 100 km in diameter but 4.8 billion km long – impossibly long thread of the world, curling through the universe, although in terms of the universe it isn't that big (about the distance from Sun to Neptune). Manga assumes that it was created from Earth after mystical reformation, but if my math is even half-correct, its surface alone (not counting the mass and volume) about 5500 more than Earth surface, so it is another of impossible cosmic structures like in "Blame!" where in the endless city there is at least one empty space the size of Jupiter.

This place cannot scientifically exist the way it is described. How does it get sunlight, atmosphere, magnetic field, gravity, energy? How can it exist without breaking apart? How the underlying entirely artificial structure (mentioned to be polymer with big 'P') can even support life?

But considering that this world was made by magical wish of/and/or/by entirely impossible technology, this isn't any more strange than cubes of Acheron or infinite Abyss.

The billion kilometers of length are interesting in the way it immediately changes the relations with the distance, especially in the context of familiarity – people could be anything from either really close and familiar or impossibly far, and this 'far' quality increases in much rapid pace than on Earth or any other equidirectional plane while 'familiar' is in much shorter supply. Given that a motorcycle doing 200 km/h non-stop needs about 2700 earth years to travel from one side of the world to another and in (almost full) absence of teleportation the regular people of the world cannot know their own world fully – to them it is, effectively, endless in one direction, and people from very far away, while technically people of the same world, could be as alien as demons.

2) The world has long and irregular strips of what is called Insanity Lenses.

The wild fields where Insanity Lenses grow

They grow from the world as a biome but their function is to protect the world from meteorites, laser-incinerating everything that comes from above into their field of view. Lenses are big enough and spaced far away enough that human-sized creature can carefully navigate between them, but it makes some places even more disconnected from each other. In the manga there is an example of a kingdom which is pretty much isolated by lenses from everywhere else much to the kingdom determent.

I just really like the idea of laser-blasting biome which is not simply impenetrable obstacle.

3) This world is inhabited by humans.

Biomega humans

To the eyes of the protagonist who saw actual Earth and actual humans they are heavily modified bio-androids. One of scans shows that they have at least some subdermal plating, reinforced joints and modified eyes; they can regenerate and are capable of mind-link with fully synthetic android. Nevertheless, in all other respects they are humans: they are born (with all their modifications) from mothers just as humans would, eat food, cry tears, go shopping, grow up and grow old, bleed when wounded, their thoughts, emotions and culture are human, they can mutate and zombify into drones, and in this world reinforced subdermal plating and regeneration don't make them any less fragile than actual humans would be in ours. 

It is interesting thing to me, because their inhumanity is only obvious from the outside. They call themselves humans and because Earth at the very best is a myth, they presume that humans always were like that. It is similar in a way to Zelda and Hylian people who look a lot like elves to us but they don't consider themselves anything unusual. I really want to make my own or repurpose somebody's character generator for these humans, to highlight strange and wondrous shapes they can take.

As a result of their diversity through the manga they exhibit less xenophobia when encounter an unusual person. The aforementioned isolated kingdom has a case of frequent mutations, but it is regarded as a disease, not as an innate difference or damnation.

4) Somehow this world grows its own nature.

Biomega environments

Considering that the world has no sun, no reasons to have any atmosphere, no reason to exist in one piece, and that underlying megastructure of the world is a uber-polymer lined with grid-chasms of unknown depth above which landmasses seem to grow organically and haphazardly, it is pure post-singularity magic at this point. What I am finding interesting is that, given that everything on this world is very probably bio-cybernetical in nature, its wilderness could be seen as 100% urban wilderness, natural biomes with interactivity of abandoned urban/factory environment of regular Earth. I wrote a while ago on why I think urban wilderness gives players more nudges to interact with the environment in creative ways than with just pure nature, and here such environments are  world-wide and default. Imagine not simply a forest but a forest that grows vertically like a hive city, a forest than walks or a forest that can give electric sap. In manga the humans don't seem to interface with the world on level of directly commanding it, but it is plausable that with some training and sensitivity they could.

The miners mine organic machinery instead of ore. Nomadic villages follow giant wandering supply pipes as if such pipes were meandering rivers or herds. An equivalent of railroad is, basically, a giant vein.

It has animals and plants too, things that remind both a machine and an actual animal/plant. The local mount is called horse but looks a lot like a tachikoma tank or a giant spider with bone carapace; cultivated vegetables look like mutated octopi mixed with fractals. Given that technology often imitates the nature and there are actual plants – such as fiddleheads, Romaneque cauliflower, bitter melon or lotus roots – that look quite strange as they are, it isn't that much of the stretch to imagine plants and animals of this world to be barely recognizable but called familiar names, as a legacy of their long-forgotten roots.

However much I like 'Blame!', in terms of playable setting bio-cyber beats just cyber to me, both in aesthetics and usability; at least aesthetically I like this kind of bio-cyber more than pure fleshscapes.

5) The world is psycho-active and some people have special powers.

Biomega powers

The source of these powers is never explained but some people can do interesting things above what the regular world has, having an equivalent to magic. The main villain of the story was esper and/or mind-controlling psyker even in the times of the original Earth, and after the world was reformed she and her disciples are in sort of connection with the whole world (all 4.8 billion km of it), can create constituent manifestation (proxy bodies) regardless of the distance, which additionally serves as an equivalent of world-wide teleport, as well as communicate telepathically, change their actual bodies, create zombie drones and with said drone 'blooming' terraform the lands, heal very fast, live practically forever and utilize the world in defense. In the manga itself there isn't much of such powers, but extending the idea of bio-cybernetic world with bio-cybernetic people from above, it isn't difficult to say that some humans just have entra-interfacing capabilities with the world and themselves. In a way of Clarke's Third Law, the universal bio-cybernetic origin of everything becomes life force of the world, similar to Force or (in approximation) to chi.

(On a side note, one of the weapons there is a brain wave rifle where projectiles are propelled with terrible force by combined brain power of regular people, like a psychic Gauss rifle. It was dangerous rarity in times of Earth, but in this world it seems somewhat more common)

One of the more interesting legacies of Earth is that in times just before apocalypse-singularity some companies created things which are virtually eternal, as some of their remaining synthetic people and AIs as well as their equipment are able to exist for centuries if not thousand years without degradation, using all changed materials of the new world for self-repair regardless of how odd they are and be incapable of and somewhat immune to psycho-powers.

6) This is not really cyberpunk.

After writing all of that I realized it is quite close to UVG but with less caravans

There are kingdoms, princesses, knights, immortal sorcerer-tyrants, oracles in towers, overreaching empires, tarrasque-sized beasts, zombies, swords (and guns), an equivalent of magic, isolated villages with problems caused and/or solved by various drifters. Maybe which is why it is so appealing – to have all interesting bio-cyber things and yet, not in a cyberpunk. There is a dearth of fantasy cyberpunk settings (as these two genres are almost incomparable with each other) and I think 'Biomega' could be an interesting alternative to ever-present 'Shadowrun' in this respect.

There is no need for hacking mechanic either, which is always a plus.
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On a different note more-frequent-more frivolous-and-shorter-posts experiment for December is coming to the end. While posting twice a week as per initial intention didn't work, the goal did make me post in one month more than in four previous ones and made me think more about finishing thoughts and breaking down the bigger ones to more manageable chunks ('Whisperer' was one of such big posts). I would like to continue this experiment for January to see how sustainable it is on a longer run and I'd be very grateful if people can share any feedback about December part of it (for example, if the posts became less/more interesting to read, remained the same, etc.)