Tales of the Vuduri: Year Two

by Michael Brachman



  Tales of the Vuduri: Year Two

  Michael Brachman

  Copyright 2015 by Michael Brachman

  TALES OF THE VUDURI: YEAR TWO

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Brachman

  Cover art copyright © 2015 by Bruce Brachman

  V2.01.0002

  Also by Michael Brachman

  The Rome’s Revolution Series

  Rome’s Revolution

  The Ark Lords

  Rome’s Evolution

  The Vuduri Knights Series

  The Milk Run

  The Vuduri Universe Series

  Tales of the Vuduri: Year One

  Tales of the Vuduri: Year Two

  *The Vuduri Companion

  (*not yet in publication)

  Dedication

  It’s hard to come up with a new dedication when the same people behind Tales of the Vuduri: Year One are the very same people that helped me produce Year Two. So, like before, I want to thank my brother Bruce. He is my go-to guy when it comes to the world of the Vuduri. Not only is he my editor and artist and the inspiration behind MINIMCOM, but he is also fiercely protective of the Vuduri culture and characters. Bruce creates the amazing covers, the astounding book trailers and makes my writing so much better. Bruce, none of this would exist without you.

  I want to thank my wife, Denise, for putting up with the endless hours of hiding in the basement, cranking out these stories, articles and so on. She wants the Wife Award and she richly deserves it. I could not have done it without her patience.

  Finally, as always, I would like to thank my heroes, Rome and Rei. They have supplied me with an endless amount of material of a future not yet born.

  Introduction

 

  When I started writing my Tales of the Vuduri blog in December of 2012, I really wasn’t sure where I was going with it all. I knew that there was a lot of material logged that served as background for the Rome’s Revolution series and the blog seemed like a convenient place to present some of that material. As I really got into it, I was shocked to find out how much material there really was and the pile was growing, not shrinking. First with The Ark Lords and then even more as I got ready to release the final book of the trilogy called Rome’s Evolution.

  So, I dove into Year Two and this book is the result. I’ve learned a lot more about the 35th century by writing the posts. It has helped me work out some plot issues, character development and world-building concepts in general. I also completed a new novel called The Milk Run this past year and the blog has allowed me to present some of the novel ideas incorporated in that book which should be out in early in 2015. Later next year, I will be releasing The Vuduri Companion which will be a series of short stories and novelettes which didn’t really fit anywhere else. It will even include the original versions of VIRUS 5 and Rome’s Revolution written in 1973. That should be good for a laugh or two. I am also planning on recording Rome’s Revolution as an audio book. I hope to have that done by the end of the year. It’s a daunting task but somebody’s got to do it!

  In case you missed it with the book Tales of the Vuduri: Year One, what I do is write seven blog articles on Saturdays or Sundays and then post them one at a time over the course of the next week. Sometimes, if I know I am going to be away the following weekend, I’ll write 14 articles. That’s a lot to pump out at one time! Now that we’ve come to the end of Year Two, I’ve taken all those articles and bound them together in this volume for your reading pleasure.

  My strategy over the last year has changed a bit from that first year. Once I had gotten past posting all the secrets and research and untold tales I wanted to put forward, I decided to pick up the original version of Rome’s Revolution entitled VIRUS 5 and follow it somewhat faithfully. Each page is chock full of reminders of things I had forgotten to post. I wanted to explain why I did this, why I made the characters say that. It was a lot of fun revisiting those memories.

  When writing articles for the blog, many times these ideas launched me on a tangent, sometimes a week or two at a time but I always returned to the story. I don’t know if this is good news or bad news but using this as a guide, I can tell you that I am now only halfway through the second part of VIRUS 5. Simple extrapolation tells us there will be a Tales of the Vuduri, Years Three and Four. Then there’s The Ark Lords and Rome’s Evolution to consider. I may never be done!

  As with the previous volume, this collection of articles covers little-known facts, previously unrevealed secrets, backstories, environmental design, improvements in my 35th century technology and so on. And like the previous volume, I’ve included musings and even more occasional ramblings.

  It is not necessary that you have read the Rome’s Revolution series or even Tales of the Vuduri: Year One but it couldn’t hurt. There are many, many references within the articles to events and characters that inhabit those books. But there are also some amazing new scientific facts and amusing articles that transcend the original trilogy. There’s been a lot happening in the world of science over the last year that has a bearing on the series and the projected world of the 35th century and I try to incorporate those discoveries as I go.

  Here is a partial list of what you’ll find in these entries:

  More on the flora and fauna of Deucado and Helome

  A discourse on the nature and cure of Type 1 Diabetes

  A complete study on methods of exploiting solar energy available today

  More backstories

  The nature of Heaven and the hyper-verse

  The original short story “Last of the Cavaliers” which became the historical section folded into The Ark Lords

  Hot fusion versus cold fusion

  How I was foiled by The Simpsons Movie and Stephen King’s Under the Dome

  The untold story of the arrival of the Deucadons at Tau Ceti

  An actual picture of MINIMCOM before he became a starship

  The design of the split narrative for Part 2 of Rome’s Revolution

  First looks at the inhabitants, geography, geology and astro-geophysics behind The Milk Run including:

  The design of the forest on Hades

  The Ice-Saberoo

  Junior’s medium haul configuration and redesigned cockpit

  Sh’ev, a member of the race of plant people called the K’val

  Starship OMCOM

  Life Force Theory: the grand unification of all things scary

  The secret history of Hades leading up to Aason’s visit

  More alternate and deleted scenes

  More apparent contradictions resolved

  In-depth analysis for why the plot had to go the way it did

  More on legal time travel

  Some new scientific discoveries that have a bearing on the whole Rome’s Revolution series

  Even more amusing images

  And not last and not least, why sandwiches taste so good!

  Hopefully, I have improved as a blogger since last year’s volume. I’ve worked harder at finding more images to illustrate the point of many of the articles. As before, you will find occasional hypertext links which work great on the Internet but not so much in books. Where the sole purpose of a link was to take you somewhere else, I added an underline to the link. As with Tales of the Vuduri: Year One, the rest of the entries are exactly as they appeared on Goodreads although I did fix typos when I found them.

  So dive in and enjoy. You don’t need to read the articles in order although the general flow would follow that of Rome’s Revolution. At the rate I am going, there will definitely be a Tales of the Vuduri: Year Three so you’d better get started! And as always, I hope you enjoy reading them as much as
I enjoyed writing them.

  Entry 2-001: December 27, 2013

  Happy New Year

  Wait, what? It's only December 27th. What's going on here? Well, yesterday's post was my 366th article about Rome's Revolution which means I have posted a full year's worth (including a gratuitous leap day) of blog entries. Every day for the past year!

  In the beginning, I sat down at my desk and wrote a fresh post every day from scratch. That was a lot of work. Then I got into the habit of writing seven entries at a time (usually on a Sunday) and then posting one each day until the following weekend. That was much easier. If I knew I was going to be out of town, I could set up the publication engine to post on a certain date and time automatically. This was great but I wasn't getting much traffic so I started posting the link to the blog articles on Facebook and Twitter. That seems to have gotten my daily visits up to around 30 - 40 a day. That's over 12,000 page views! Some of my more popular articles get 60 or 70 page views the first day.

  I've been compiling the articles for the book. I'm about 1/3 done and I am up 35,000 words. If my projections are correction, that means I've written more than 100,000 words, bigger than two of my three Rome's Revolution novels!

  My biggest hit ever was my first post entitled "How to speak Vuduri" which is sitting at 109 page views. My two most clever titles were "Tails of the Vuduri" and "Ah, Capella." I found that posting little pictures, sometimes relevant, sometimes amusing (like the one above) boosts page views as well.

  Here's the amazing thing. While many of the articles are random, mostly I have been following the original long-form of Rome's Revolution for inspiration and I am only up to Chapter 8! So if I can keep it up, this thing might go on for years! Thanks for all your support and I hope you have enjoyed it so far.

  Mike

  Entry 2-002: December 28, 2013

  Deucado

  In the world of Rome's Revolution, Deucado, "the little world that could" serves as the home and centerpiece of much of the action in the Vuduri universe. Now, for the first time, you can see a full map of Deucado with all its features flattened:

  The most important thing to notice are the huge holes punched into the surface of the planet by countless asteroid and meteor strikes over the millennia.

  Lake Eprehem is annotated and this is where Ibbra City and New Ark City were founded. To the east, on the little isthmus between the Great Northern Bay and the Great Southern Bay lies Vuduri City. The western continent is called Asquarti. The eastern hemisphere is considered two separate continents connected by a larger isthmus. The northern continent is called Toraode and the southern continent is called Sul.

  As mentioned in a previous post, there were a group of Vuduri who did not agree with the plan to allow the Overmind to take over. This group was called the Suduri and they eventually left Earth. They were the first humans to land on Deucado (ignoring the fact that the Deucadons had been there for over 400 years) and they settled in the lower continent of Sul. Aason Bierak led an expedition there and discovered evidence of their colony. However, the Suduri had long since fled to places unknown. I think you may find out where they went in the final novel of the series entitled The Final Journey but I have no idea when that will be.

  Entry 2-003: December 29, 2013

  Why Rei was picked

  In the original, long-form version of Rome's Revolution, the book opened with the prologue about Silas Hiram and the first chapter was about how the Vuduri captured the Ark II and towed it back to Dara. However, since the whole book had to be sped up, that opening scene had to be excised. Briefly, I tried to patch it into the chapter on how OMCOM reprogrammed himself, but eventually I had to throw in the towel and now it is gone altogether.

  It will come back in the upcoming compendium entitled The Vuduri Companion but that's not the point of this post. I have been asked the question several times as to why the Vuduri even bothered to save the Ark and why they picked Rei to thaw out. The ostensible reason was that the Overmind of Tabit was built for research and the content and purpose of the Ark II stimulated its curiosity. That's bunk, of course. The Vuduri are just not curious, ever.

  Within the story, I had the Vuduri try to grab to sarcophagus next to Rei's and they could not get it to budge. So they moved to Rei's sarcophagus and when it, too, was stuck, they investigated further and found the latching mechanism.

  If you allow that they captured the Ark then you would have to allow that they would grab a sarcophagus. But in the story, once they thawed Rei out, it almost seems like the Vuduri lost interest or worse resented Rei's presence.

  This is all so contradictory. So what is the real story? The real story is the story. If they had not rescued the Ark and had not thawed out Rei, there would be no Rome and no Rome's Revolution and no Aason and no Deucado and no peace with the Stareaters and no defeat of The Ark Lords and no Rome's Evolution.

  Sometimes you have to take dramatic license if you want drama. Or humor. Or action. Or adventure. Or romance and so on.

  Entry 2-004: December 30, 2013

  The Shell War

  Although it is mentioned several times throughout the Rome's Revolution series, the shell of protection using the livetar clones and the shell of detection using the star-probes is continually expanding. The star-probes and livetars are both built as variants of the VIRUS units so they are capable of self-replication. As time wears on, these shells expand radially.

  What is the purpose of these shells? Originally, it was to protect against the Stareaters but they turned out to be friendly and intelligent and all you had to do is put out a gravitic beacon and they would not eat you.

  Another thing these shells were for was to protect the inner planets from meteors and asteroids from striking the inhabited world. At the end of Rome's Revolution, MINIMCOM states that he is going out to check on how the livetars were doing digesting the planet-killer asteroid originally planned for wiping out the mandasurte.

  The third and unstated purpose for the shell was to protect against invasion by the Cecetiras. However, Lawlidon and his secret war with the Cecetiras was excised from the modern version of the book.

  Regardless, over time, the shells keep expanding. Eventually, they intersect with similar shells produced by other sentient races. How do those alien cultures react? For some, it is welcome and the Galactic Union comes out of it. Others are less receptive. In fact, in one case, a war, called The Shell War, breaks out and that will be chronicled in the novel Vuduri Knight which will be out next year.

  Entry 2-005: December 31, 2013

  Thorium-235

  In Rome's Revolution, you will find many references to an isotope of thorium. In this particular case, it is thorium-235 which has a half-life of 7340 years, the same as thorium-229. The reality is: my version of this isotope does not exist. The real isotope has a half-life of only 7.6 minutes but my version lasts a lot longer.

  Why thorium, anyway? Well, I needed an isotope that could continue to produce power for at least a thousand years. The Arks were powered by thorium-235 and the electronics that modulated The Grey Drive as well as the on-board computers were powered by a nuclear reactor.

  When the colonists arrived at their new home world, the power rods that reanimated the frozen people contained thorium as well.

  The power rods were also used for activating vehicles and so forth. The Deucadons used the power rods to create their artificial sun, deep within the caves of Deucado, before they tapped in the magma pool and switch to geothermal.

  The theoretical isotope of thorium was also used to provide the explosive power behind the mini-nukes. Now that the book trailer is out for The Ark Lords, you can get a better idea of how powerful they were.

  Entry 2-006: January 1, 2014

  The Game Plan for 2014

  Happy New Year to all from the 35th century and the world of Rome's Revolution.

  Here is my game plan for 2014:

  2. Bear down and start cranking out The Milk Run. It's about half done and
the remainder has all been outlined. No reason why I shouldn't be able to get it done in a few months.

  3. Continue to post these articles. Tales of the Vuduri has been a lot of fun for me and keeps the creative juices flowing and has actually helped me in the development of the The Milk Run, believe it or not.

  4. Release the book trailer for Rome's Evolution. Bruce has an animatic version of it done and it is mind-blowing. The book trailer for The Ark Lords is pretty awesome but this new one is going to blow it away.

  5. After the release of The Milk Run, finish up The Vuduri Companion. I have all the material compiled. This is really just an edit job.

  6. Start laying out the ground work for The Vuduri Knight starring Aason's son, Rory and his "pet" starship, Trei. This book concerns The Shell War which I mentioned two days ago.

  7. Get Rome's Revolution made into an audio book. I have a studio who is interested. I am waiting on the voice audition tape. If it sounds good, I'm going to try and get financing via a crowd-sourcing site.

  8. I have Rome's Revolution in the hands of a genuine Hollywood producer. The trick is getting him to find the time to read it and render his judgment or pass it along.

  9. Beyond that, there is the "redo" of the first Rome's Revolution book trailer. Plotting out The Last Journey, attending another PhilCon. Plus other stuff I haven't even thought of.