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I’m back! And we’re going to space!!
The Varangians spend most of their lives in low to no gravity. They have factories that can make food, but I have to believe that growing plants is still far more energy efficient than printing food. So they do (or they make their slaves do), but of course in space hydroponics can be done in three dimensions.
“Varangian” is what the Norse invaders were called who went east to Russia instead of West to the North Sea. These guys are fans, I guess.
↓ Transcript
Panel 1: Ibrahim now has impossibly stretched-out limbs that are twice as long as they should be, with a long neck and a shaved head. He's wearing a bright pink jumpsuit and floating in zero gravity as he looks listlessly out of a big round porthole in the ship. There is an empty starscape out the window.
Panel 2: Narrator: "The Varangians we were sold to value children from the inner planets. Our bodies are tough, supposedly, compared to theirs." He looks down at his changed hands.
Panel 3: A Varangian woman brandishing a cattle-prod flies in through a doorway and threatens Ibrahim. Narrator: "We know languages they don't. We can read. But any body needs to be adapted to life without gravity in order to live among the asteroids and comets."
Panel 4: Several young prisoners in similar jumpsuits work in a hydroponics room, tending to plants in a three dimensional space. They are overseen by another armoured and armed Varangian with a bushy moustache. Narrator: "The Varangians at least weren't psychopaths like the Kakure who had first captured me. They didn't want us as soldiers or as hostages. They'd spent too much on us to let us die easily. But we were their prisoners."
Panel 2: Narrator: "The Varangians we were sold to value children from the inner planets. Our bodies are tough, supposedly, compared to theirs." He looks down at his changed hands.
Panel 3: A Varangian woman brandishing a cattle-prod flies in through a doorway and threatens Ibrahim. Narrator: "We know languages they don't. We can read. But any body needs to be adapted to life without gravity in order to live among the asteroids and comets."
Panel 4: Several young prisoners in similar jumpsuits work in a hydroponics room, tending to plants in a three dimensional space. They are overseen by another armoured and armed Varangian with a bushy moustache. Narrator: "The Varangians at least weren't psychopaths like the Kakure who had first captured me. They didn't want us as soldiers or as hostages. They'd spent too much on us to let us die easily. But we were their prisoners."
1. HOORAY for the comic being back! Thank you!!! and
2. I am not sure how you’d do hydroponics without gravity (with water and plants getting confused without gravity signals) but it is a very very cool idea!
I’m not sure how hydroponics work without gravity either! Fortunately, this isn’t the kind of story where I feel like it’s necessary to make all the science fiction elements explicable, just plausible. I know some plants do better in low gravity than others. But if they can genetically engineer people to survive without gravity, they should be able to do that with tomatoes, too. Getting the water to go where it’s supposed to is also a challenge, but this is a world that’s able to made solid-seeming holograms by telling water vapour where to go so it can be projected on, so, maybe that can be used for watering crops.
Oh, yeah, I am a plant-growing nerd and was more excited about plants being included than at all perturbed by the zero-gravity hydroponics question. Now that my brain has percolated on it more, you’d probably only need to make sure there was a seal at each plant’s stem and that the hydroponics system on the whole was sealed rather than relying on gravity and could call it a day there? A lot of plants could probably survive without gravity, with assistance (i.e. “which way is “up” out of the planting medium?” to guide which way the sprout and the roots should go when the seed is sprouting) and most plants head towards the light from there; I just looked up the ISS plant program and it’s neat, anyway: https://www.nasa.gov/exploration-research-and-technology/growing-plants-in-space/
But also yes, if you’ve got a system which can direct water vapor for holograms, then that presumably also results in a system that can direct water for plants!
That particular “ooh interesting” matters not a whit, though! I just got curious, and was already commenting with glee because you’d started posting again, so the “huh, I wonder what problems would have to be solved with hydroponics+plants in zero gravity” bit ended up also existing in the comment… Looking forward to the story continuing whenever you’re able! 🙂
This is very cool and now I wish I’d made the light in the hydroponics room pink. They grew wheat in space! I wonder if sprouting the seeds in a centrifuge would be enough to get them pointed the right way up, and then you can move them to a bigger, non-centrifugal room for the rest of their growth cycle? I’m going to say that’s probably what they did.