Design concept - Fenrir's intruder defense system, "Labyrinth."

[xaq_the_aereon]

In the canon of my online avatar, Will Rennar, he builds a starship, Fenrir (as depicted during my "Creativity in Downtime" period, as a near-total blur), using a rather non-Euclidean crystalline substance for the infrastructure; it maintains a rigid shape but is gelatinous in nature, allowing materials to be placed within it. The non-Euclidean nature of it causes the space within to not match the outer size; while the exterior is roughly 1/2 the overall size of a Space Noah-class space cruiser, the interior space is literally immeasurably larger. Think "TARDIS" and you've got the general gist.

There is one very notable difference between the spacial distortions of the crystal and the interior of a blue police box, however. Direct exposure to the space-warping properties of this crystal is immediately fatal to a biological being, akin to being torn into a trillion pieces and then being put back together (in horror story fashion rather than Star Trek teleporter fashion. However, being within an area of Euclidean space (anything from a room to a cardboard tube whose ends are sticking out of the crystal) is perfectly safe (in the latter example's case, if the ends of a 1-meter tube were sticking out of the ends of a 50-meter diameter crystal, you could transverse 50 meters in the space of 1 meter). As such, the interior of the ship actually consists of a variable network of rooms and corridors immeasurably larger in total size than the outer size of the ship (which in wholly encased in Orihalcon plating, effectively sandwiching the crystal between an outer and inner area of normal space).

In order to permit faster travel through the areas of the ship, each passageway's entrance has a panel nearby that allows a person to connect it, via spacial distortion, to another door anywhere on the ship, provided that door is not above their security clearance or linked elsewhere. Think "Portal" and you should be able to wrap your head around the idea.

This property of the ship's interior allows for a very intricate and impenetrable defense against intrusion: The Labyrinth. When on lockdown, all passageways along the ship are linked to a vast network of 216 cube-shaped rooms, each measuring 6 acre x 6 acre x 6 acre in size. Within those rooms, the control panels for the doors are removed, with each passageway generating a random link to another door within the Labyrinth. Each room is built as a 3D maze, like a game of Pac-Man built onto a Rubik's Cube and then turned inside-out.

The reason for the cubicle nature of the rooms, and the 3D maze construction, is due to a spell-program, known as the Escher Effect, placed on them that alters gravitational pull; effectively, while in one of those rooms, "down" is whichever way you perceive it to be. This enables all 6 sides of the rooms to be used as a "floor," creating a 46,656-acre randomized maze. Add in the near-total darkness that makes seeing the other sides of the room almost impossible, and a would-be intruder could be left to wander the maze indefinitely without even realizing they're going in a giant, polydimensional circle that would give MC Escher nightmares (hence the spell-program's name). The only clue they might get is if they reach an area where they could see a fellow intruder walking along another surface; this could prove disastrous, however, if they suddenly get it in their heads that the other person is the one on the ground, at which point the Escher Effect's definition of "down" for them would change, leaving them to a potentially lethal fall to the "floor."

The only way out of the Labyrinth is to be permitted out by a member of the crew; at that point, the next exit the intruder takes will lead them back into the main hanger, the primary entrance to the ship and one of only two rooms on the ship physically linked to the outside world on its own.


On a side note, it just occurred to me that the total acreage of the Labyrinth, 46656, is 6 to the 6th power.

Comments

[davidn]

Out of interest, have you seen Cube? The maze of Rubik-style rooms reminded me of it...

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Name's not even ringing a bell.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Actually, I thought that as well. :P Although presumably the chief dangers in this version are boredom, sudden gravity switching and running out of food and water, rather than any inherent obstacles in the rooms themselves.

Also, just as a minor nitpick, "non-Euclidean" doesn't actually mean sanity-breaking alien physics, although that's what everyone understands it to mean thanks to H. P. Lovecraft. Euclidean geometries only function in a specific set of circumstances, which are fairly easy to break. For example, one principle of Euclidean geometry is that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. However, space-time can be warped into a curve under the effects of gravity. Therefore the shortest distance between any two points is actually an arc that follows the curvature of local space-time, rather than a truly 'straight' line - for an analogous example, think of walking from the North Pole to the equator, and you're travelling in an arc shape that follows the curvature of the Earth. Finding a wormhole or what have you that lets you cut through space-time more directly (or, in our analogy, digging directly through the Earth from the pole to the equator) would actually be more Euclidean than taking the normal route, not less.

However, I like the idea that walking into non-space tears you apart. We're only designed to work under a very limited set of conditions - at least, compared to a universal scale where you can muck around with space-time to your heart's content - and it just... feels right that contact with something that's by definition outside normal experiences should be fatal. Something in the person's body and/or mind goes "you expect me to endure what? You must be joking" and disintegrates.

Nice design, anyhow.

D.F.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Those dangers you mentioned are kind of the idea; the purpose of the Labyrinth is to make an invader want to leave, cry uncle, and then let them out. If the idea were to kill them, simply dropping them straight into the psychotic physiology of the crystal would do the trick.

The term "non-Euclidean" was basically the best way to describe it that I could find.

And yeah, the idea of direct exposure to spacial abnormalities that simultaneous crush you into dwarf star matter and explode you to the size of Jupiter would be unpleasant. Canonically, Wilren finds this out the hard way when testing a gauntlet he crafted using the crystal; he puts it on a little too quick, and about the time it's almost up to his elbow, the lower half of his arm is gone.

I mostly did this to have a valid reason for him to wear it as a prosthetic, so that I could justify it having Rocket Punch capabilities. XP