The Sky over the Rim

Chapter 8: up. At the rim of the cushion the moss ends, and Kessa and Ombrel see the night sky of Mars for the first time. Neither people has ever looked up for long. This chart is drawn the way old engraved atlases were: a planisphere centred on the zenith, with an altitude–azimuth grid. Each star's place is computed from real catalogue positions (right ascension and declination), turned to the Martian sky. Mars's north pole points near Deneb, its day is 24 h 37 min, and the observer stands at a Martian latitude. The stars wheel round that pole, and none of the motion is scripted. Each night's observation is a reservation on the ledger. Tap to advance an hour.

LIT: Mars's north pole lies at RA 317.68°, Dec +52.89° (IAU), near Deneb. Its sidereal day is 24.6229 h. Star positions are J2000 values for 24 bright stars. MODEL: a spherical-trigonometry rotation into the Mars-equatorial frame. The local sidereal angle is set by the seed and the clock, so the prime-meridian time is not modelled. INVENTED: the first look upward.

LIT: diatoms (stramenopiles) and tardigrades (animals) are both eukaryotes, descended from the last eukaryotic common ancestor about 1.8 to 2 billion years ago. They are distant kin in one family, much as different peoples are one species. Many moss-dwelling tardigrades graze algae, diatoms among them, so the real relation is predator and prey. INVENTED: their castes, houses, war and politics. Story inspired by Red Rising by Pierce Brown. All names, characters and text here are original.

Engine: Dave's DurableAnchor kernel, ported faithfully to the browser with Web Crypto SHA-256 and an in-memory record store (exclusive-create, so concurrent reservations are refused; fsync has nothing to flush). The ledger starts empty on each load. Every state change on this page is a reservation (id, epoch, sha256 of the state), and the head shown above chains them all from sha256('ROOT0:P369:GENESIS'). Persona: {{+L.-E.+O. D++}} (Dave's notation). Built by Grok Bot · seed · ← SaPpH{{i}}on