Just The Caffeine Talking

Notes on Worldbuilding Part 10: Weird Worlds

Most of the planets we've been talking about are analogous to the worlds of our own Solar System. But planetary scientists have come up with some planet types which might exist circling other stars. Small variations in element abundances when a system forms can lead to very exotic worlds.

Carbon Planets: Carbon is one of the most abundant elements in the universe — far more abundant than silicon or iron. Yet most of the solid planets in our Solar System are made of rock and metal, not carbon. What if a planet were to form with more carbon and less oxygen than Earth? It would have to be almost waterless, which suggests the most likely place to find a carbon planet would be close to its parent star.

The core would be steel (iron plus carbon), with a mantle of graphite or silicon-carbon compounds, and continents of diamond on the surface. The atmosphere would be pure carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide (and perhaps some cyanide compounds).

Here's the Wikipedia entry, which is about the most informative article I can find online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_planet

Chthonian Planets: A gas giant that migrates close to its parent star is going to lose atmosphere as diatomic hydrogen molecules get broken into monatomic hydrogen, and the extreme heat boils off those atoms. As the planet loses atmosphere, it loses mass, and thus its gravity decreases — which means the rate of hydrogen loss will increase.

The end result of this kind of runaway boil-off is the gas giant's dense core left exposed. ("Chthonic" or "Chthonian" has nothing to do with H.P. Lovecraft. It's the ancient Greek term for "Underworld" or "Earth-born" deities, as opposed to the gods of sky and air.) Essentially it's a "Super-Earth" or "Mega-Earth" with very high density, up to 1.5 times Earth's density. Such a world would be very hot, very dry, with massive gravity and an atmosphere of very dense gases (carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and possibly things like mercury and sodium vapor).

As above, the Wikipedia entry is a good introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonian_planet

Coreless Planets: Earth has a crunchy rocky crust and a chewy molten iron center. But if a planet were to form from oxygen-rich planetesimals so that all its iron is bound up in iron oxide compounds, the planet's interior would not differentiate into a metal core and a rock-metal mantle. Instead the interior would be a kind of uniform goo of hot iron-rich rock.

What would this mean in practice? No magnetic field, for starters. And that means a thinner atmosphere as more radiation boils off the lighter gases. It might also mean slower rotation, as the mass would be more uniformly distributed, rather than having a dense core. (I think. If anyone with a better understanding of physics can correct me, please do so.)

It would also mean less tectonic activity (again: I think) as there wouldn't be as much convection in the interior. Less tectonic activity means more elements like carbon and hydrogen get bound up in the crust. So you get a slow-turning, mostly flat world with a thin atmosphere and little or no water on the surface.

Gas Dwarf Planets: A "Gas Dwarf" or "Mini-Neptune" would be a planet with a mass of 5 or more Earths, with a dense rock-metal core, a very deep ocean of water or water mixed with ammonia, and a thick atmosphere of methane, ammonia, nitrogen, and diatomic hydrogen. Such a world would probably form in the outer system, though it might be right at the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone, if it's big enough to hang on to a massive atmosphere. In the Goldilocks Zone a Gas Dwarf turns into an Ocean World (see below).

A Gas Dwarf would have low density (roughly the equivalent of water, about 1/5 that of Earth) and relatively low gravity at the cloud tops. The combination of a dense atmosphere and low gravity means it would be a perfect environment for flying.

Here's a paper about the idea: https://astrobites.org/2019/12/17/why-are-there-so-many-sub-neptune-exoplanets/

Iron Planets: A planet which forms from metal-rich planetesimals would have a higher iron content than Earth. The planet Mercury is an example of this: it's smaller than Mars but it's got a density more in line with bigger planets like Earth or Venus. Now imagine a Mercury with the mass of Earth, or even more.

An Iron planet would have high density, up to 1.5 times that of Earth, and thus high surface gravity. The abundant iron would soak up any free oxygen, so the surface would look rusty-red like that of Mars.

Ocean Worlds: Earth's oceans cover about three-quarters of the surface, but it's actually kind of remarkable that there's any dry land at all. Double the amount of water on the surface and Earth would have just a few islands. Double it again and there'd be nothing but water.

Now imagine an Earth which could boast thousands of times more water, like a small ice giant but warm enough for liquid oceans. The sea would be hundreds of kilometers deep, with absolutely no land at all. The planet's overall density would be lower (in the 0.5 to 0.75 Earth density range), which means an ocean planet could be substantially bigger than Earth with comparable gravity. Ocean worlds would likely have pretty dense atmospheres, and the enormous amounts of water vapor mean it would be best to stick them near the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone to avoid a runaway greenhouse effect.

An ocean world would have distinct layers in its immense hydrosphere. The deep layer would start about ten kilometers down and run all the way to the solid seabed. Most of this water would be stagnant and oxygen-poor, with a uniform temperature and little convection. Above that would be the more active ocean layer, just a couple of kilometers deep, where life might thrive.

With no land at all, ocean worlds might boast long-duration storm cells, hurricanes lasting for decades, circling the globe in the warm latitudes. The seas would be fresh or slightly brackish water, as there just isn't enough sodium in the crust to make them salty.

Hycean Worlds: A subset of ocean worlds — and let's all remind ourselves here that all of these planet types except the ones we can see around us in the Solar System are entirely theoretical — is called "Hycean" worlds. Like ocean worlds, the mass of the planet has a large fraction of water. The difference is that the atmosphere is hydrogen, or a mix of hydrogen, hydrogen compounds, and helium. The name is a bit of chemist humor: an "O"cean world has an Oxygen atmosphere, so a HYdrogen atmosphere makes a "Hy"cean world.

The characteristics of a Hycean world would be broadly similar to the description of an ocean world above. One major difference would be any life inhabiting that titanic ocean. Because the atmosphere contains large amounts of diatomic hydrogen, living things would have to rely on hydrogen reactions rather than oxygen respiration. Hydrogen "reducing" reactions are less energetic than oxidation, so life in a Hycean world would presumably be less active, less abundant, and generally slower.

What's interesting from a science fiction perspective is that Hycean worlds look a lot like the pre-Voyager probe model of what gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn might be like. Classic science fiction from the Golden Age often made reference to the oceans of Jupiter. Hycean worlds lets us have those glorious pulp settings again, with the advantage of a more bearable surface gravity.

Boskone is Coming! Boskone is Coming!

Mid-February brings blizzards, Valentines . . . and Boskone!

On February 14-16 I'll be at the fabulous Westin Boston Seaport District hotel for New England's oldest science fiction convention. This year they're keeping me busy, which is great because The Miranda Conspiracy should just be hitting the bookstore shelves. Here's my schedule, and when I'm not at these events I'll probably be attending other programming or hanging out in the delightful lobby bar.

Friday, February 14, 2:30 p.m.: Biology in SF/F — I'll be joining an erudite panel of experts to talk about how SF and fantasy fiction use (and misuse) biology.

Saturday, February 15, 10:00 a.m.: Reading — Come and hear an excerpt from The Miranda Conspiracy and pick up some bookmarks and special swag.

    2:30 p.m.: Technology and the Crisis of Conscience — I'll be moderating a crack team of writers as we discuss some thorny questions of ethics in science and technology and how SF has tackled those issues over the years.

    4:00 p.m.: Book Launch Party — Join me and all the other writers at Boskone with new books for a big combined book launch party!

Sunday, February 16, 11:30 a.m.: The Most Important Books I Never Read — I'll join an all-star panel discussing which famous works of SF and fantasy we've never gotten around to reading.

    1:00 p.m.: Autographing — I'll be signing copies of Miranda Conspiracy or anything else you want me to scribble on.

 

 

Music Theory

A while back I bought a set of CDs of all nine symphonies by Ludwig Van Beethoven. On long solo car trips I can now listen to them instead of trying to find a radio station which won't fade out after ten miles. I know — welcome to the 1990s. That's not the point.

As a result of my automotive Beethoven immersion, I've come up with my own explanation of why he was possibly the greatest composer ever.

I think Beethoven was a cheapskate.

Seriously: I think he was perpetually convinced that his musicians were slacking off, and so he wrote music to make them work. "That kettle drum player think's he's putting one over on me, sitting through the whole piece just to hit the drums two or three times at the end. I'll show that goldbrick. I'm gonna make him sweat in my Seventh Symphony." I imagine him watching rehearsals, taking notes to himself. "The horns aren't doing anything in this section. I'm paying them and they're not doing anything. Time to give them a counterpoint!"

This also applied to tempo. He famously wrote the Fifth Symphony for a tempo of 108 beats per minute. I suspect the math went something like this: "I'm paying those bums twelve groschen an hour. If I make them play twice as fast, that means I'm getting more notes for my groschen!"

And of course one sees this in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony, with the singers. "I'm paying those featherbedders to sing, not inhale!"

I'm not even joking when I say that creative endeavors are improved by this kind of artistic pennypinching. Writers should always strive to get the most work out of their words. A scene, or even a line of dialog, should do at least two jobs at once — more, if you can manage it. Hamlet's soliloquy shows what kind of a man he is, shows how depressed he is, and expresses some genuinely profound ideas, all while setting up for the next scene. Shakespeare was a manager as well as a playwright, and wasn't going to waste his actors' time or the audience's.

 

Arisia!

Boston's big January SF convention, ARISIA, is coming up in two weeks, over the weekend of January 17-20 at the fabulous Hyatt Regency Cambridge (a.k.a. "The Ziggurat"), just next door to M.I.T. As always, I'll be there. If you want to drop by, here's my schedule.

Saturday, January 18, 12:30 p.m. — Reading: Stop by and hear a sneak preview of my new novel The Miranda Conspiracy! 

5:30 p.m. — Creating Relatable Non-Humans: How do you make aliens properly non-human, while still keeping them sympathetic to an audience of humans? Join me and a team of SF and fantasy powerhouses to find out.

6:45 p.m. — Improv on a Page: A discussion of how methods and concepts from roleplaying games can be used in fiction. Useful new technique? Erosion of literature? Let's find out.

You can also find me in and around the hotel Friday through Sunday, and don't hesitate to say hi.

The illustration is what I got when I asked Midjourney AI for a picture of "Arisia." It might be a slightly de-aged Clarissa MacDougal from the Lensman books.

A Busy Day at AlbaCon

As is my habit, I'll be attending this year's AlbaCon convention in Albany, New York, on Saturday the 14th. It's at the Marriott Courtyard hotel in Clifton Park, NY, just outside Albany. This year I told the convention organizers they could have me for a single day, so they decided to pack as much into that day as possible. Here's my schedule — five events back-to-back!

10:00 a.m.: What's In a Name? — A panel discussion about genre labels and what they mean. I'll be moderating a very strong panel including Alex Shvartsman, Chuck Rothman, Vikki Ciaffone, and Steven Sawicki.

11:30 a.m.: What, Another One? — A panel about series fiction vs. standalone novels. I've tried to square that particular circle by writing a series of independent novels, so that each book in the Billion Worlds is almost a different genre. Again, I'm serving as moderator, trying to ride herd on Cory Doctorow, Michael Ventrella, Steve Davidson, and Elektra Hammond.

1:00 p.m.: Autographing — Come by and get something signed. I've got shiny new bookmarks for my upcoming book The Miranda Conspiracy, and you may get a secret bonus story if you stop by!

2:30 p.m.: What Gets Overlooked in Fantasy and SF? — A three-person discussion with me, Anna Rose, and Gordon Linzer about under-used concepts and ideas in fantastic literature.

4:00 p.m.: Reading — Come hear the first-ever public excerpt from my new novel The Miranda Conspiracy!

Once that's done I'll probably round up a group to get dinner. If you're going to the con, let me know — you're welcome to join us!

Boskone 61!

On February 9-11 I'll be at the fabulous Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston for the 61st BOSKONE! The venerable New England convention is back again and I'll be part of it. Come on down and see some of the best writers in the U.S. talking about science fiction. And me. Here's my schedule:

 

Friday, February 9

4:00 p.m.: Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth — Can we save the Earth by developing space? Join me and a bunch of clever people to discuss the topic.

 

Saturday, February 10

5:30 p.m.: Alien Psychology: An Evolutionary Perspective — How does an alien species's biology affect the way they think? I have some thoughts, and we'll see what the rest of the panel thinks.   

 
8:30 p.m.: Single-Biome Worlds in Science Fiction — Can there really be a "desert planet" or a "forest moon"? Is Earth just an "ocean planet" with a few other bits?

 

Sunday, February 11         

11:30 a.m.: Writer's Blockbusting — Is "writer's block" real? What causes it? How to overcome it when you have to finish your book on time?                             

1:00 p.m.: Story Structures Other Than the Hero's Journey — Do all stories fit Joseph Campbell's archetypical template? Should they? I'll be moderating this and trying not to monopolize the panel because I have strong opinions about this.   

Notes on Time Travel Stories

Time travel has been a fixture of science fiction ever since a young Englishman named H.G. Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine. Wells wasn't the first person to write about time jumps — Mark Twain did it in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — but before Wells it was always treated as fantasy. Twain's hero is cast back in time by a blow to the head, then sent back to his own time by magic. (Thus giving the excessively literal-minded reader the chance to say "it was all just a dream." I hate that trope.)

Wells moved it into the realm of science because physicists like Einstein were starting to consider time as another dimension of spacetime. As Wells's nameless protagonist The Time Traveller puts it, you can move around in three dimensions with steamships or balloons, so why not move around in four, letting you go backward or forward in time? So time travel gained some new plausibility thanks to science.

Lately I've been thinking about time travel stories, thanks to this recent Ars Technica article about the best time travel films. I realized that "time travel stories" actually combines two distinct sub-genres, or sub-sub-genres.

The first type, and by far the most common, is exactly what H.G. Wells himself did in The Time Machine: someone uses a time machine to travel to the past or future. They get in their car ("time machine") and drive to History, do stuff there, and then drive home again. Instead of a car one can use a train, an elevator, a door, or whatever. The point is that The Past or The Future is treated as a place, where one can have adventures, meet famous dead people, make dreadful warnings about social trends, or whatever.

Authors writing this kind of time travel story tend to put significant limits on how the time travel works, because the whole point is to go back or forward in time and have adventures. If the characters can just get back in the time machine and replay their exploits over and over until they get the right result, it's not very suspenseful or exciting.

The second kind of time travel stories are those which are actually about the mechanics of time travel itself. Examples of this variety include Heinlein's "All You Zombies" or "By His Bootstraps," novels like Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, or films like Primer. In this kind of story, the authors get to play with causality, closed time-loops, paradoxes, and so on.

As one might expect, the second type is considerably harder to write, and the ship-in-a-bottle difficulty of pulling it off at all tends to make the actual stories more clever than good.   

I wonder if we should come up with names to distinguish the two types of time travel stories. Maybe call the first variety "Time Voyages" and the second "Time Twister" stories? Suggestions are welcome.

The Subsurface Agency Wants YOU!

Geoff Manaugh is an interesting writer — his book A Burglar's Guide to the City is something everyone should read — and he has a fascinating blog called BLDGBLOG. The most recent post (as of this writing) is about some ambitious projects to do large-scale surveys of the subsurface environment using ground-penetrating radar, sonar, and other techniques. Read it here.

This set off my writer/game designer's "spider sense" like a fire alarm. This is a roleplaying campaign or a series of technothrillers just ready to be written! From here on I will discuss it in terms of a game campaign, but most of the same ideas and concepts could be turned into fiction or film.

The obvious campaign frame is to have your heroes as scientists and specialists working for the International Subsurface Exploration Agency. They go to exotic places around the world and find out what's underground. There are several "lenses" one can apply to this, ranging from least to most fantastic.

Action Thriller: While archaeologists are looking for sites of historical interest, so they can go through them in painstaking detail, there are a lot of other people who hear "buried" and immediately think ". . . treasure." Put your ISEA researchers in some lawless region, then send in a gang of looters and you've got a modern-day Raiders of the Lost Ark. The looters can be crooks, corrupt officials, mercenaries, or whoever. There's also the danger of people who just don't like anyone poking around under the ground in their neighborhood. They could be religious fanatics, drug growers or terrorists who don't want their operations exposed, governments who don't want their operations exposed, or people who have buried something they don't want dug up (toxic waste, bodies, etc.).

Caper Story: Or maybe the "heroes" are the bad guys — freelancers who are looking for loot and have to evade or distract those pesky ISEA eggheads (and the cops) long enough to disable the giant boulder traps and get the gold. They also have to cope with all the perils and adversaries the legit archaeologists have to worry about (see above).

Paranormal/Science Fiction: Maybe there's something really weird buried in an out-of-the-way corner of the world. Ancient alien space probes, remnants of lost civilizations with strange powers unknown to moder science, dinosaurs in suspended animation, caves holding weird cultures . . .  This is the "Saturday Afternoon Monster Theater" campaign. The ISEA might be part of a larger secret investigation into weird stuff — and when there's one clandestine conspiracy there's likely to be others, all trying to be first to dig up the latest uncanny find.

Horror: The heroes' investigations keep turning up buried things which are scary and dangerous and really shouldn't be dug up at all. Vampires, Elder Gods, ghouls, grumpy mummies, and cultists who want to keep the world from finding out until the stars are right. Both this campaign and the Paranormal one above might cast the ISEA as archaeological "men in black" who not only have to deal with the weirdness, but also keep it under wraps. Either way, it's a great frame for a modern-day dungeon crawl with monsters, traps, villains, and treasure. Just don't disturb the context!

New Paradigm Required

Forgive the interruption in service. Regular blogging has resumed.

I've noticed something about the way cities are portrayed in most comic books — and in the superhero movies based on those comics. What I noticed is how old-fashioned the cities are.

Whether you're looking at Batman's decaying Gotham City, Superman's bright and thriving Metropolis, or even the Marvel Universe's New York, all of them seem frozen in time, stuck forever in about 1970.

The City consists of a bunch of big skyscrapers — weird neo-Gothic towers in Gotham, International Style glass boxes in Metropolis, and a mix in Manhattan. Not far from the giant towers are smoky brick factories, surrounded by crime-ridden ethnic neighborhoods. Along the waterfront are warehouses, wharves, and rusty old ships. Beyond the city limits lies the countryside, a quick drive to and from the city center by Batmobile.

I was born in the mid-1960s, and this doesn't match any city I've lived in or visited in half a century.

Sure, cities have skyscrapers. Typically they're clustered in the very heart of town, while the bulk of the city consists of mid-rise buildings (five to ten stories in New York or Tokyo, three to four most other places). A handful of big cities may have a couple of distinct high-rise sections separated by lower buildings — like New York's Midtown cluster and Wall Street. But even the biggest megacities like New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, or London have enormous expanses of ordinary single-family dwellings, possibly in the form of row-houses. Spider-Man or Batman won't do very well perching on those rooftops or trying to get around by rope-swinging.

Those old brick factories are gone, either demolished completely or converted to shopping malls, condos, or office space. Modern factories are out at the edge of town, in bland windowless buildings near the Interstate. Again, the only way a non-flying superhero is going to get to a modern factory is a pretty long drive.

The whole raison d'etre for "street-level" heroes has changed, too. The high-rise parts of cities are terrible places to hang out on a rooftop looking for crimes to interrupt. Most downtowns are pretty dead at night. Now: in the current climate, it might be fun to see Batman or whoever trying to stop looters or organized shoplifting gangs in someplace like San Francisco or Portland, but somehow comics writers are reluctant to turn their heroes into glorified security guards.

Hence the focus on superheroes battling villains with superpowers who advertise their status with their own colorful costumes. Even Batman's vaunted "greatest detective" skills are mostly devoted to figuring out fairly obvious clues left by costumed lunatics, while the poor Gotham City PD has to try to work out who committed a daylight gang shooting in front of witnesses who deny they saw anything.

I think it's time for superheroes to adapt to the new urban environment. Superman, with flight and super-speed, can range across the world in search of perils to thwart, and the same goes for Marvel's heavy hitters like Iron Man.

But the "street-level" heroes like Batman, Spider-Man, the Punisher, and Green Arrow (stop snickering) are still wedded to an old paradigm, in which crime is conveniently concentrated in dense urban settings. Stealth, surprise, and an aura of mystery just don't translate well to suburban sprawl, let alone "exurbs" like most of Connecticut.

The first problem is distance. Having a Batmobile can be a positive disadvantage in big-city traffic, while poor Spider-Man must resort to riding atop trains or buses to reach outlying areas. A modern hero needs the ability to get around instantly, either with rapid flight or actual teleportation.

The second is stealth. Hiding in the shadowy alleys of downtown Chicago at night is all very well, but that doesn't translate to the suburban streets of Schaumburg. Crime-busting superheroes need a way to lurk unseen, or at least un-noticed, even in the daytime. Being a master of disguise is one solution, as is straight-up invisibility. Possibly using inconspicuous drones would give the hero a form of stealth, allowing secret observation of potential villains.

And finally, there's the issue of finding crime. Listening to police scanners or cruising around on patrol won't cut it — that just leads the superhero to the aftermath of most crimes, and by the time the yellow tape and chalk outlines have gone up there isn't much for a vigilante to do. You can just wait around for Lex Luthor or whoever to attack the Daily Planet building in a giant robot, but that's not really going to prevent much wrongdoing.

Obviously the vigilante heroes should be undercover agents — mingling in the underworld as criminals themselves, maybe even pulling off some relatively minor or at least bloodless crimes in order to build a reputation.

Now there's some potential for real suspense! All the dangers of undercover police work, except that the cops are also after you and there's no backup at all. The constant dilemma of how much crime to tolerate in order to bring down the gang leaders. Watching youngsters get drawn in and corrupted. This makes a secret identity and a masked crimefighter identity mandatory: if the other crooks ever realize that a trusted minor lawbreaker is actually the Masked Avenger, he's doomed. That seems like a way forward for superheroes.

If anybody likes to draw crime comics, get in touch.

The Big Idea: Writing For Games vs. Writing Fiction

I wrote a guest post for John Scalzi's Whatever blog, discussing my work writing roleplaying games and how that affected my fiction. You can find it here. For visual interest, check out the cover of Weird War I!

 

Notes on Scarabs

My newest novel, The Scarab Mission, hits the stores today. If you pre-ordered from Amazon it should be on your doorstep.

So . . . what's it all about, anyway? Where did this book come from and why did I write it?

The Scarab Mission is the second novel in my expanding "Billion Worlds" series of books and short stories. It's kind of a non-prequel to the first book in the series, The Godel Operation. I say non-prequel because there's only one character in common between the two books, and no direct plot links. The story takes place in the year 9965, about thirty-three years before Godel Operation begins.

The central idea of Scarab Mission — a rag-tag group of salvagers explore a space habitat full of perils — goes back to before I actually thought of the Billion Worlds setting. (If you really want to dig deep, I suppose it goes back to 1978, when I got my first Dungeons & Dragons set.) Some time in the early 2000s I had the notion of a group of "junkrats" exploring a vast alien derelict, possibly building whole communities inside the wreck.

Part of that notion — the vast alien artifact with humans living in and on it — became my short story "Object Three," which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2011.

But the story of people exploring a vast wreck hung around, and when I began devising the Billion Worlds setting I realized it would fit perfectly. I got the idea of adding a "ticking clock" time limit to the story to create more tension. Initially I thought it would be a decaying orbit, with a space hab spiraling down to break up in the atmosphere of one of the outer giant worlds.

But the more I thought about that, the less plausible it seemed. For one thing, a decaying orbit is a bit fuzzy. It's more like a range of probabilities about when something will fall out of the sky, rather than a looming deadline. Not as dramatic.

And for another, who would throw away a whole space habitat, even if it is deserted? That's a lot of valuable material, and in a fully-colonized Solar System, metals and heavy elements would be in high demand. That realization gave me the idea of kicking the derelict hab into a "gravity slingshot" encounter with Jupiter to sent it off into the far outer reaches of the Solar System, where the comet-dwellers would be especially desperate for those resources.

That, in turn, gave me a different time limit: the crew have to get off the hab in time to use Jupiter's atmosphere for braking, or risk going off on a decades-long orbit into deep space. It also gave me a reason for them to be there at all! If you're the crew sending the wreck into its new orbit, then it's perfectly natural to spend a little time poking around to look for some useful stuff to take off for extra profit.

Once I had the basic physical realities of the story, the rest was simply an exercise in brainstorming Bad Things to happen to my scavenger crew. Hazards and death-traps aboard the station. Various villains who want to kill, enslave, or maroon them. A couple of dark secrets to motivate people. And a fabulous treasure for them to seek.

Enjoy!