Capricorn at the human scale

I’ve shown you the wheel of Capricorn at a high level, and a map of Ossi, the sector in which Pod lives with his friends. Now I want to show you more of the human-scale geography.

The best way to illustrate this uses some original sketches I made when I was world-building for the book, starting from 2022. I’ve edited these sketches only lightly to remove a few details that have changed.

Bunk room

First, the smallest scale of all. Pod sleeps in a bunk room with his best friend Skylight. It’s narrow and tall with a sky-blue, half-cylinder roof. It’s pretty cramped.

Note the circles labelled Capricorn access iris – Capricorn-the-AI, which runs Capricorn-the-wheel, has mobile balls that hover above you and and dart around, telling you your daily chores and otherwise being annoying.

*Early sketch of the bunk room of Pod and Skylight.*

A group of three bunk rooms makes a cabin with shared galley and hygiene facilities, and an entry airlock. Along with Skylight, Pod shares his cabin with Ring, Marzipan, Terracotta and Aerial.

From outside, a cabin is a tall bump like a hillock covered in soil and grass, not too different from an Iron Age barrow, a burial mound embedded in the landscape. Cabins have no windows, only a single entry lock. For this and other reasons, cabin residents often spend their evenings sitting on top of their cabin on the grass, talking about their days.

A group of four cabins arranged in a diamond is called a four, and has an identifying number: Pod lives in cabin 84672 N. The other three cabins are suffixed S, E, and W (narv, sove, east, west). Each four shares laundry facilities, and the cabins surround a central recreational area containing a standard surveillance pole monitored by Capricorn-the-AI.

Four fours make a sixteen, sharing stores and security — a kind of police force, with officers known as wolf cubs or typically just cubs.

Early sketch of cabin arrangements into fours and sixteens. The shapes corresponding to each cabin N/E/S/W are buried under soil and grass, so you’d see four big bumps with external doors around each rec.

Many thousands of cabins cluster into fours and sixteens across the sector and across the wheel. Almost every space around a sixteen is used for small-scale farming, adding to the yield from the larger farms beyond the cabin areas. The map of Ossi I posted shows you how much space the cabins take up.

What would a typical view look like for a resident of Ossi? For a social post, I knocked up a quick video that admittedly isn’t great, with the joins embarrassingly visible. It gives you a rough idea at least. (That’s a surveillance pole, with a ball on top that watches and listens and talks. They’re all over the sector.)

Imagine if this was your view, 24×7. Imagine if this was your normal.