I took my bodyguard’s hand and walked through the converted barn that housed the family farm’s teleportation disc, trying not to let my resentment show. Liam was a nice enough guy, as genetically-engineered super-soldiers went; my father’s senatorial ambitions weren’t his fault.  “Are you ready?” Liam asked.  I nodded, we stepped forward, and the next minute we were outside, surrounded by coniferous trees and the jagged faces of jutting mountains. Roaring filled my ears and I turned, identifying the source of the sound: river rapids.  Hardly the capitol building fresco I’d been expecting.  “Where are we?” I asked, with more annoyance than concern. “I thought teleportation discs had to be inside.” The science was beyond me — I had an MBA, not a STEM degree like my younger brother, but I remembered something about stable atmospheric conditions being critical to the process.  “Teleportation is safer than planes, trains, and cars, but there are still glitches sometimes.” Liam said the words calmly, but I wasn’t stupid: he should have been able to answer my question with ease. His tether, unlike my deliberately dumb phone, was connected to military-grade satellites and integrated into his consciousness.  A flash of light drew my eye: a pastel lizard, perched in an curlycue tree that looked like something out of _FernGully_, doing its best to gnaw on a luminescent orb with all the awkward daintiness of a squirrel cracking a walnut. “I don’t think this is Earth,” I said in what I considered an impressively calm tone. “And I don’t see a way home.” “Maybe we’re in some sort of weird GMO nature preserve,” he offered.  “There’s no disc,” I said.  He looked down at our feet and blinked once, but it might as well have been a flinch. Teleportation required an expensive bio-printer at the endpoint; the one in the barn had cost my family a fortune.  I looked around, I didn’t see anything that looked even remotely human-made nearby, much less anything resembling post-industrial technology. So how had we gotten here?  Abruptly, I realized that wasn’t the most important question… and there was no obvious way to turn around and go home.  When one of the vanishingly rare accidents happened, re-printing was a straightforward process thanks to scan-state retention and instantaneous backup by the entry discs. I had no doubt already stepped out into the capitol and gone to meet my father; for certain definitions of I.  The me _here_ had to worry about surviving _now_. With no way of knowing how what the rest of the local fauna was like — or more importantly, what they ate, and if they were as afraid of humans as most creatures back home had learned to be — it seemed stupid to sit here speculating.  “We need to get somewhere safe,” I said, and finally took a moment to really look at my surroundings. I grew up in a ranching family from the American midwest, which meant that I was accustomed to long stretches of flat, with mountains just barely visible in the far, far distance on particularly clear days. We didn’t get teleporter access on the farm until my dad became a senator, so family vacations had involved long drives on straight highways even when we made a trek to the airport on our way overseas to Monaco or the Alps. There was nothing flat about this landscape, not even the surface of the river. I’d been rafting before, but these whirlpools and eddies looked fierce; the rocks seemed obsidian-sharp.  “I think this is an island,” Liam said after a moment. “The shoreline’s not right for a peninsula.” My shoulders relaxed a tiny bit; he wasn’t going to argue, which put us a step closer to safety. “Is that good or bad?” I asked when he didn’t say anything else. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Probably bad; there won’t be a lot to work with here.” “The river’s probably decent protection from predators,” I said, trying to inject a note of optimism into the situation. That was why so many birds made their nests on islands, right? I grimaced as a documentary video I’d seen once flashed through my memory; some kind of snake crossing a river to swipe a plover’s egg. When she was a toddler, my niece’s favorite [[a book involving counting plovers|book had involved counting plovers]]; I’d had a hard time reading it at first. I’d never liked snakes, and given the size of that lizard, I couldn’t count on the local reptiles being as small as they were back home. My father had no patience for my phobias and I’d shot my fair share of diamondbacks, but I didn’t have a gun with me — I didn’t have so much as a shovel. “I’ll know more once I take a look around,” Liam said. “Stay put.” Liam had our only weapon. “Wait, no. Take me with you.” He hesitated. “I want to move fast. We don’t know how long the daylight will last.” I looked at the sky and cursed. The local… star? looked tiny compared to the sun back home, and we had no way of knowing how fast this planet would rotate. If we were on a planet at all, for that matter: for all we knew this could be a moon, or some kind of Dyson sphere, or hell, a plate floating on the back of an elephant. *** * Image: * [[indigo tree.png]] * [[furry lizard.png]] * Meta: This world should use the towns and the nodes as planets and stars and the metaphor for humans needing to get out into space and expand expand expand in order for it to work. This should not be a planetary globe world, this should be nodes in space carved out of the void. * Addendum: * [[a book involving counting plovers]] * "plate floating on the back of an elephant" is a Discworld reference; Dyson spheres are similar to Niven's Ringworld, but are done 'correctly' [in other books I haven't read](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/63/is-there-a-novel-using-a-dyson-sphere-as-setting). * References: * the aquatic keelback (_Rhabdophis tigrinus_) is a very skilled swimmer. I haven't actually seen a documentary that does this, but a lot of documentaries are genuinely kind of horrifying and tend to stick with you. * [Islanders edition](https://www.eleanorkonik.com/islanders) & [Settlements edition](https://www.eleanorkonik.com/settlements) will be relevant for worldbuilding crossing the river and getting to town, particularly the rafts vs. canoes bit. * Shared: [Discord](https://discord.com/channels/954068589885923389/1081038327098122311/1270001489708056628)