#spec tech

[carniekisses]

I don't know how it took me more time to put this together than the previously posted illustrated piece, but it did

Spectech for my light scifi world, pretty simple stuff!

[behavioral-multicellularity]

WORLDBUILDING NOTES: URBAN MODULES

The single, biggest question I wanted to answer about life in a human body is how gravity is dealt with. Previously it was like, this flat plane? Bc that’s what’s implied in the canon? But that was FAR too restrictive in what could actually be done. How does it move? How does it exist in a way that at least makes SOME sense?

What I decided on was basically a very humanlike 3d structure. It stands up and moves and does all the things that a human body does, whether or not I want to talk about them. Any organ you can think of, structurally at least, is just “real life but mechanical.” Each one has its own quirks and lore and everything, but that’s the framework. Just so SOMETHING exists before manual adjustment.

But cells don’t function on the organ level, so we have to go smaller. And that’s what this fucker is

This is what the inside of an “urban module” looks like. There are millions of these scattered throughout the Body, each specialized to its specific tissue. If you were a cell, they’d be roughly the size of a large college campus or town square (but can be as big as a metropolis or as small as a supermarket) and houses about 30-40 thousand cells.

The reason they fix the gravity problem is that they can rotate freely. The module is made of two spherical shells—the outer shell is anchored to the Body’s flexible matrix, and the inner shell is unattached to anything. The space between the shells is filled with a slippery, fat-like substance that allows free motion of the entire module. This happens readily because the lower half of the module (underneath the city) is weighted with storage units, though emergency correction technology helps prevent damage due to sudden motion.

Those Twinkie-looking things between the shells are shuttles. To get in and out, red blood cells must pilot them to climb through the tangle of ventilation and energy cords to get from the blood vessel to the nearest docking station, which is what you see against the wall there. It’s clunky, but it works. It also makes the passive spread of pathogens incredibly difficult.

The most populated regions of the city are the two ring-shaped buildings. The outer ring is all apartments, and the thick inner ring is all workplaces. This particular module is in the vascular endothelium, but different tissues will have different specializations in both workplaces and living arrangements. But no matter what, every module will have two (sometimes more) huge radiators to dissipate heat from respiration, which also maintain homeostasis of the module in general. The little “gardens” also serve a purpose. Those are synthetic cilia, they a) look pretty and 2) trap pathogens, especially bacteria. In this AU, bacteria are no longer sapient, so they’d naturally be looking for places to hide. The idea is that they’ll hide in the cilia where they can be ambushed by immune cells and processed in the hidden bunkers underneath.

Lastly, every module has a synthetic nerve communicating with it, which provides a good chunk of their energy as well as their primary communication system. If two common cells want to talk to each other across the Body, sending pen-and-paper notes via blood cells will have to do. But urgent messages and orders are given instantaneously through rhythmic surges that resemble Morse code.

[somerunner]

You know, I’m glad we don’t have flying cars. The increased number of cars in use, and the massively increased number of accidents, would be for lack of a better word bad.

[kungfugrift]

Though sadly bereft of psychic interfaces and welding torch-like capabilities, Gunther Cox's rendition of the subject material is nothing to be scoffed at. As spotted by MAKEzine, the Arduino-powered replica of the device has, among other odds and ends, an EMF (electromagnetic field) meter, voltage detector, dog whistle, sound level meter, serves as a universal remote and offers, well, shiny lights. On demand, it can be turned into a laser pointer or flash dramatically.