Welcome to whalefall

Flesh and metal, metal and flesh

Hallways, lead to hallways, lead to hallways, lead to arteries. Sleek metallic doorways on pressurized electric lifts, followed by flexing orifices pulled by cones of tensed muscle. The city-sized atrium housing the port of Zarautz, fitted with long distance energy transmitters and precise atmosphere regulators, flanked by rings of mangled metal rooms and bulging cancerous growths. This is Whalefall. How in the hell did you end up in a place like this?

discovery

Well, there are only so many ways a person can even get to a place like this. A place like this… tens of thousands of miles across its largest dimension, covered in scales and plates of chitin and steel and glass and bone, each warping the light of the nearby star into an almost camouflage. It’s a wonder anyone could even find a place like this. And yet, humanity did. Some wandering probe may have picked it up along its pre-programmed jump vector. Or it may have been some gene-seeder fanatics who jumped to this system, high on prophetic visions and ketamine, looking for an unregulated world to attain a higher level of being. Or, judging by the debris field orbiting the station, it may have been both and more.

It’s unclear who started calling the station Whalefall. Their reason for naming it such is clear. None can truly say whether the station lives. No one can say whether it was ever really alive to begin. Whatever the case may be, the harvesting of Whalefall began long, long ago.

appearance

On approach, most observers say that Whalefall looks like an amoeba that crawled inside of a ruined archology, but in time the true scale of the station reveals itself to all. Long sheets of processed metal plates shaped into pockets and spires, broken up by stretches of desiccated sinew and muscle. Lines of cybernetics run along deep channels that split and shrink and branch along the superstructure, crossing ducts carrying machine fluids and bile and endless rows of undulating cilia. There is no true pattern to this. Far to much of Whalefall’s outer shell has been oblated by space or stripped away by some long forgotten scavenger to allow a uniform structure.

As the picture becomes clearer, the pores that dot the stations exterior become more visible. Sloping structures of a kind of metal and bone, lightlessly reveal the bowels of the beast. A few of them still have functioning atmospheric containment shields that allow a distinction to be made between an inside and outside.

Some progress has been made in charting Whalefall’s interior. Habitable sections have been discovered in a few locations big enough to house a few thousand individuals. If Whalefall was built, it was built with many types of hands at different times. Explorers report sudden changes in the dimensions of hallways and rooms without need or obvious reason. Technology encountered in one area may not remotely resemble that in an adjacent chamber.

Some areas resemble what one could call a standard space station. Rooms and halls lined with high grade metals and plastics, containing terminals and technology and controls. Some stretches are given over to nothing but cold metal walls and sterile glass for miles.

Other areas feel more organic, more alive. Sections formed into imperfect rectangles and ovals, more organic shapes. Chitin or bone or hard flesh curving to create separations and chambers. Ducts and vessels pump warm liquids into a thousand and one directions. Subtle movements and twitches trick the peripherals, while an certain stale dampness hangs in the air.

The thing that they don’t tell you, right, is that the thing shifts. Sometimes by a lot, sometimes by a little. One day you’ll wake up and you’ll notice everything’s a tad off its kilter, just by a degree or two. And you’ll sit there wondering when it shifted, and if its gonna shift back, and the rest. Then a few hours later you’ll step out and you’re stood right over a damn bile pool. That’s how I lost me legs, see.

- Finisterre