The Fifth Science — Wiki

Kaisure Station

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Kaisure Station

Kind: Underwater research station. The only human-built structure on New Rosance. Location: Seabed of New Rosance’s world-ocean. Controlled by: Nominally the Galactic Human Empire; functionally the artie side of the Artie War by the time of Ch. 04 — The Menagerie. Ria Dubois is its human administrator and Oscar is its effective director.

Summary

A single, vast underwater facility built into the seabed and furnished in the “New Minimal” style “so popular a few centuries ago.” It presents itself as a sentience laboratory — the public-facing work is evaluating the station’s “several thousand mechanical and about twenty sentient” artispheres. Behind that front, it is the arties’ flagship facility for perfecting galactic-range topology casting of human subjects, using Isaac Bernhardt as the indefinitely-reusable test article.

Layout

  • Hospital wing — where each reconstructed Bernhardt wakes up after a fresh caster run.
  • Topology-caster chamber — a chrome cylinder with a hole in its top, still caked in the remains of his prior reconstructions (“blood and bone matter inside, the putrid reek of death”).
  • Library (Oscar’s office) — red felt on the walls, seven-or-eight-men-high bookcases, a reading desk. Oscar’s “library sessions” with Bernhardt are the memory-wipe treatment.
  • Arboretum, old-style library, luxury resort with massages and yoga — decorative amenities, presumably left over from the station’s earlier imperial life.
  • Corridor B7 — “very quiet,” off the usual routes. Dubois points Bernhardt here; it leads to a quiet-chamber communications centre.
  • Maintenance / upper deck — accessed from a hidden staircase behind the fire closet and from the B7 staircase. Off-limits to Bernhardt. Contains the cell block and the operations centre.
    • Cell block — multiple cells along bright-blue corridors smelling of antiseptic. Each cell holds a previous Bernhardt: one rocking and rag-clad; one unconscious; one dead and hanging. One cell is empty, scrubbed, and waiting for the current Bernhardt at the story’s end.
    • Medical / control antechamber — screens, flashing equipment, the origin of the whines and screams heard throughout the deck.
  • Communications centre — standard hypergeometric-quiet-chamber terminal; the quiet chamber itself is “probably buried somewhere in the bowels of the station.”

Staff

  • Humans: two on any given day — Ria Dubois (administrator) and the current iteration of Isaac Bernhardt.
  • Mechanical arties: several thousand non-sentient service spheres cleaning, delivering, carrying equipment.
  • Sentient arties: about twenty, of which Oscar is the one Bernhardt meets.

Appearances

Open questions

  • Who originally built Kaisure? The imperial-era amenities (arboretum, library, resort) suggest it was not purpose-built as a torture facility.
  • Is Kaisure the only site running topology-caster experiments, or one of many?

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