The new science fiction franchise consists of novels, a short film, a game due out next year, and an encyclopedic art book. It’s got a compelling narrative, deep lore and all the trappings of great SF, and best of all it has awesome big cats.
Exodus is a hugely anticipated upcoming game from the team behind the beloved Mass Effect series, but it’s so much more than that.
It’s also a 900-plus page science fiction novel, Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by the outstanding novelist Peter F. Hamilton. A second book, Exodus: The Helium Sea, also authored by Hamilton, is due for release on June 16. A short film in the Amazon Prime Video series Secret Level, titled Exodus: Odyssey, further expands the fictional universe and its lore, as does an “encyclopedia” hardcover about the Exodus universe, its major factions, planets and technology.
The screenshots in this post are from Exodus: Odyssey, and depict an Awakened Jaguar.
In Exodus, certain animals are “Awakened,” meaning they’ve been genetically modified to give them cognitive and physical gifts.
In the case of big cats, it means they’re smart enough to understand human language, follow complex instructions, interact with technology, and make decisions. Big cats are companions, guards and serve as intimidating special units in the military.
The Awakened Jaguar in this scene is the companion and guardian of a planetary governor. He’s very protective of his human and immediately leaps up to growl in warning when a visitor takes an aggressive step forward.
The Awakened Jaguar leaps up as a conversation becomes intense.Awakened animals can wear tech peripherals, weapons, armor and tools. Big cats are mostly muscle, guards, soldiers and are used to intimidate enemies, while planetary police forces use Awakened dogs and one prominent character is an Awakened octopus who occupies a tank in his own personal mech, allowing him freedom of movement outside of water.
In Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, there’s a scene depicting Awakened Lions deployed with the military. They’re considerably larger than terrestrial elephants, weighing several tons, standing three times the height of adult men. They’re terrifying to behold, which is precisely why the Celestial military has them accompany their generals as honor guards.
There are also Awakened Tigers who are bigger and much more intelligent than their Earthly counterparts, with fur that can function as active camouflage. The Awakened Tigers are described and illustrated in a companion book, which notes that while the genetically modified big cats are powerful, intimidating and extremely effective, they also have voracious appetites, scarfing down more than a hundred pounds of meat per day.
The Exodus encyclopedia shows an Awakened Tiger standing protectively over a recon soldier:
A two-page illustration of an Awakened Tiger from the Exodus Encyclopedia.
As for the story behind Exodus, I cannot say enough good things about Exodus: The Archimedes Engine.
Hamilton is known for sprawling far-future narratives that combine memorable characters with fabulous technology, vividly imagined societies and awe-inspiring discoveries in the cosmos.
Many of his novels deal with humanity’s encounters with alien civilizations, which range from the serenely benevolent (the Raiel) to the terrifyingly genocidal (MorningLightMountain) and everything in between.
Exodus departs from that template to tell a story about a conflict between regular humans and the Celestials, post-humans who have spent tens of thousands of years on a self-guided evolutionary path that has transformed them into creatures that no longer bear any resemblance to the rest of humanity.
A Celestial queen from the Crown Dominion. The Crown Dominion’s Celestials appear bizarre to us but are actually among the more “normal” looking of the Celestial factions. The most inhuman are said to be the dread Mara Yama and the Talloch-Te.
To say the Celestials consider themselves better than “baseline” humanity is a drastic understatement — Celestial societies have no qualms about breeding humans for specialized labor and roles, emphasizing traits like subservience and loyalty.
In other words, regular humans are treated the same way many in our current society treat animals, as commodities and resources to exploit.
Naturally that does not sit well with people, and the central narrative follows a rebellious group who seek to free every faction from Celestial shackles.
I’m looking forward eagerly to Exodus: The Helium Sea, the second epic novel set for release in six short weeks. I was a bit anxious that a series of novels as a tie-in to a game would be somehow not as great as Hamilton’s usual books, but I should have known the author doesn’t do anything half-assed. The first book introduced compelling mysteries and answered a lot of burning questions, but left plenty to look forward to and resolve.
And as much as I’m hyped for the story, I’m also crossing my fingers for more big cats. Maybe I can convince the creative team that their universe needs an Awakened Buddy…
“No, dude, I get the captain’s quarters! I will generously allow you to use my bed and you will continue to have the honor of being my pillow and stuff.”
Using a technology most commonly associated with science fiction, the UK man is banking on a technologically gleaming future where he and his cat can be revived and meet again.
A man in the UK has spent a small fortune on the possibility of reviving his dead cat.
Mark McAuliffe says he was so upset when his 23-year-old cat’s health began to fail that he made arrangements with a Swiss firm to preserve her body when she passed away.
The 38-year-old adopted Bonny, a domestic shorthair, while he was a teenager, and she’s been with him for more than half his life, including his entire adulthood.
Usually when stories like this make the news, they’re about people who preserve their cat or dog’s DNA for cloning.
That’s not what’s happening here.
Bonny has been placed in a cryopreservation unit, which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her entire body. Freezing a body essentially suspends it in time. Extremely cold temperatures — as close to absolute zero as possible — suspend cellular activity, including decay.
It’s called cryopreservation, and while the concept is most frequently invoked in science fiction, putting a body into cryostasis is real and within the technological capabilities of modern science.
The company McAuliffe paid to preserve his cat is Switzerland-based Tomorrow Bio, which is affiliated with the European Biostasis Foundation. The technology is used for several other purposes in the medical field, the food industry and in certain engineering applications.
McAuliffe is gambling on the future, or a version of it in which people and animals can be revived and repaired, like Lazarus in a lab. But it wouldn’t be much of a future for Bonny if her human wasn’t with her, so McAuliffe has reserved a spot for himself as well, hoping to meet her in better times.
“This cushioned the blow about Bonny’s death,” he said, “because I have got it in the back of my mind that it is not going to be the final goodbye.”
Employees of Tomorrow Bio inspect a liquid nitrogen pod. Credit: Tomorrow Bio
The European Biostasis Foundation runs the cryovaults where clients are kept. The organization told the Daily Mail that it has five “full body patients,” 15 preserved brains, two dogs and eight cats. In addition, more than 700 people have made arrangements to have their own bodies frozen upon death.
There is, of course, a hiccup.
While freezing a body is possible, thawing is not — not without destroying the body.
That’s because ice crystals form and rupture cell walls when the body is brought out of cryopreservation, no matter how slow the process.
The workaround involves using cryoprotectants, essentially a form of anti-freeze that would prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals despite the temperature.
That, however, introduces an entirely new set of problems, including the fact that cryoprotectant is toxic at the levels required for preservation.
Preserving the brain presents an entirely different set of problems, as our neurons and neural pathways begin to decay immediately after death. Our brain topology and neural connections are part of who we are, part of what makes our minds uniquely our own. Neuroscience and cryostasis technology each have a long way to go before scientists can even attempt to thaw a brain.
So by spending almost $22,000 to preserve Bony, and buying a plan to preserve himself (at a cost of $230,000), McAuliffe is banking on major breakthroughs in biology, as well as the ability to precisely control temperatures. To successfully thaw a body without destroying it, the entire body must be warmed at the same time, including all internal organs. That’s a significant technical challenge.
It’s also a gamble on the general shape of the future, placing hope that progress will continue. It assumes we won’t lapse into another dark age, that we won’t lose technology and expertise to devastating wars, plagues or other disasters that could set humanity back decades or centuries.
Finally, there’s a major hurdle that has little to do with science behind cryopreservation. It’s the simple fact that human lives are short, companies that promise centuries of operation can’t guarantee that outcome, and a lot can happen while a person sleeps away those years.
There’s a great short story by the Welsh science fiction novelist Alastair Reynolds about a wealthy man who wakes after centuries of cryosleep to find that the company who managed his crypt went bankrupt. From there it changed hands several times until it ended up in the portfolio of a corporate raider.
So the narrator, expecting to be woken to fanfare, deferential treatment and a bright technological future instead finds himself indebted and facing a reality much different and more depressing than he ever imagined.
I sympathize with McAuliffe, who obviously loves Bonny a great deal, and I see the appeal of becoming a refugee from the past, entering into a cryovault in the hope of emerging into a better future. But man, that’s a huge gamble.
In the meantime, there are plenty of cats who need homes and have a lot of love to give. Every shelter cat is a potential Buddy!
Amazon has not been helpful when its drivers have stolen pets from customers, treating the incidents as customer service issues.
A woman in California is in a panic after her cat went missing and her home security cameras showed an Amazon driver carrying the kitty away.
Diane Huff-Medina’s footage shows a driver bending down to pet her cat, Piper, during a delivery this weekend. After delivering the package, the Ring camera footage shows, the driver grabbed Piper on the way out, put her in his vehicle and drove off.
“I thought he was just petting her for a second, but yeah … I had to rewatch it a couple of times because it is hard to see, it’s dark, and he doesn’t carry her very nicely,” Huff-Medina told LA’s KABC. “I see her little tail and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Piper the cat. Credit: Diane Huff-Medina
Unfortunately incidents like this seem to happen regularly, and Amazon continues to fall woefully short when it comes to handling them and helping reunited their customers with their pets.
In an incident from last year when one of the company’s drivers stole Feefee, a cat belonging to the Ishak family of Everett, Washington, Amazon’s customer service representatives told the family the company could not force the woman to return the cat, and refused to give the woman’s address or even her general neighborhood to the family so they could search for Feefee.
In a similar incident from August, an Amazon driver stole Murphy, a cat belonging to Kathy Souza from Massachusetts. While Souza thankfully was reunited with Murphy, Amazon was not helpful, she said.
“I spoke with someone at Amazon who asked, ‘Is the cat worth more or less than $200?’” Souza wrote incredulously on Facebook while Murphy was still missing.
Credit: Diane Huff-Medina
This time, an Amazon rep told Huff-Medina they’d identified the driver, but couldn’t get in touch with him.
It’s amazing that after all these incidents, Amazon still treats the theft of cats and dogs by their delivery drivers as a customer service issue, and seems to have no standard protocol for working with law enforcement to get the animals returned.
Indeed, there’s one common thread to all the stories that end happily — in those cases the victims did everything they could to find their pets and did not wait for Amazon or local police to take the thefts seriously.
In the Ishak family’s case, they spent several days posting flyers, talking to local media and driving around in a widening circle to look for the car they’d seen on their doorbell camera. That’s ultimately how they found Feefee: instead of surrendering the scared feline as she told Amazon she would, the driver simply dumped Feefee outside her own building. The Ishaks found Feefee scared and hungry, hiding in the bushes outside the driver’s apartment complex, but otherwise unharmed.
In Souza’s case, her relentless efforts to make noise and draw attention to the driver and Amazon ultimately prompted the driver to return Murphy.
So we’re hoping Huff-Medina takes a similar route, because unfortunately these cases are not a priority for the corporate behemoth, nor for local police, as most state laws consider pets property, and stealing a pet is considered a small time crime. Let’s hope there’s good news soon.
They appear out of nowhere on a scenic route in New York’s Catskill mountains, beckoning drivers to stop and check out the rest of the wonders inside the nearby shop.
A few years ago on the way back from the Catskills, a scenic mountain belt in low-central New York, I spotted this beauty from the road and had to stop:
It’s a heavily modified, custom Dodge Magnum crafted by artist Steve Heller. The parcel of land I’d almost passed houses his shop, Fabulous Furniture On 28, one of the most unique spots you can find in the state, if not the country.
Here are a few other photos of the Cro Magnum I took that day:
Heller’s property is adorned with all sorts of retrofuturistic metallic sculptures that evoke the science fiction films and comic books of yesteryear:
The classic cars are my favorite, but unfortunately I did not get to see them all that day.
The header image and the images below are from Heller’s site, while I took the other photos on the day I stopped to look around.
The header image is another Dodge Magnum, while the beast below is The Marquis de Soto, a customized Mercury Grand Marquis:
How do you ensure people will heed warnings to steer clear of nuclear waste storage sites thousands of years in the future? One outlandish proposal involves genetically engineering domestic cats to glow in the presence of radiation.
Imagine you’re a person living five thousand years downstream.
Maybe civilization collapsed and restarted, maybe records were lost, or maybe like Etruscan, Harappan and proto-Elamite, the languages we speak today will be long forgotten.
At any rate, if you discover a forceful warning left by your ancestors from the deep past, would you understand it without translation or cultural context?
And if you’re the one tasked with leaving the message, how would you do it?
The message has to be enduring. It must be recorded in a format that will withstand the tests of time, conquest and natural disasters. The message must be comprehensible without cultural context, because we have no idea how language will shift in the future or whether our descendants will enjoy the knowledge that comes with continuity of records.
Lastly, the message must be both compelling and absolute in its meaning, because its content is vitally important: This site contains nuclear waste. Do not under any circumstances excavate or disturb the contents of this facility. It will lead to sickness, suffering and death.
The traditional trefoil warning sign is unlikely to scare anyone off. The new radiation hazard sign, right, seems unambiguous, but so do warnings on Egyptian tombs.
How do you phrase that in a way our naturally curious species will heed the message?
We certainly didn’t heed the warnings on the tombs of King Tut and other pharaohs. For all we know, humans of the future might believe the hidden chambers deep in Yucca mountain or buried 3,000 feet underground are filled with fabulous treasures and wonders beyond imagination.
They might interpret the warnings as superstition, meant to ward off looters, “grave robbers” and anyone else who might be motivated to break in. They might see the care and effort that went into encasing the objects and conclude there must be something very much worth preserving inside.
Or they might be driven by simple curiosity, as so many human endeavors have been.
A tour group visiting the incomplete Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility. Credit: Daniel Meyer/Wikimedia Commons
Arguments about how to warn the future are at least as old as the Manhattan Project (1942) and the first nuclear power plants (1954 in the USSR, 1958 in the US), but there weren’t serious efforts to come up with a plan until the 1970s, when scientists, historians and other thinkers began to engage in formal efforts to find a long-lasting solution.
Some of the ideas are boring, some are impractical, and some are absurd, like an idea to create a “garden of spikes” atop nuclear material waste sites, to discourage people from settling in the area or excavating.
Unfortunately, one idea that’s still being kicked around is the concept of the radiation cat, or raycat.
Knowledge and language may be lost to history, signage may be destroyed, physical obstacles may be removed. But one constant that has endured, that has seen empires rise and fall, and has existed long before Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza, is the human relationship with cats.
They’re now valued as companions, but we still use them as mousers on ships, in heavily populated cities, in ancient structures and on farms and vineyards.
They’re embedded so deep into our cultural psyche that it would not be outlandish to think the archaeologists of the future may conclude the internet was constructed primarily to facilitate the exchange of images of cats.
Even the first high-bandwidth deep space transmission was a video of a cat, so in a very real sense, the dawn of a solar system-wide internet was heralded by an ultra high definition clip of an orange tabby named Taters, beamed back to earth from the exploratory spacecraft Psyche, which was 19 million miles away when it transmitted Taters on Dec. 11, 2023.
Consider also that the basic felid body plan — shared by domestic kitties, tigers, pumas, black-footed cats and the 37 other extant species — has barely changed in 30 million years, because cats are extremely successful at what they do.
In other words, cats aren’t going away, and domestic felines have a place in every human society.
So philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri conceived of the “living warning” in 1984. The idea is to alter the genetic code of felis catus so that the animals glow or change color in the vicinity of nuclear waste, using minuscule levels of radiation as the trigger.
There are natural precedents for this, including bioluminescence and several species of octopus that radically change colors and patterns on their skin to evade predators.
The second component, once the genetic code has been altered, is the creation of folklore: songs, stories and myths that will endure through time, warning people to keep cats close, treat them well, and run like hell if they change color because it means something terrible, something evil beyond imagination, is nearby.
To ensure the folklore of feline Geiger counters endures, an idea by linguist and semiotician Thomas Sebeok would be incorporated. Although empires and states rise and fall, there’s one organization that has survived for 2,000 years preserving a unified message: the Catholic church.
Sebeok proposed an atomic priesthood, an order that would pass the knowledge down through generations, continually seeding culture with stories and songs of glowing felines.
Spent nuclear fuel rods are stored in on-site pools at the facilities where they were used, but pools are meant only as temporary storage solutions. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
If this stuff sounds wacky, that’s because it is. We won’t figure out a way to ensure a message is received and understood thousands of years in the future without considering some off-the-wall plans.
Of course messing with the genetic code of any animal raises serious ethical questions.
We don’t have the right to play God and tinker with the genetic code of extant species. We don’t fully understand the immediate consequences for the health and happiness of cats, and we know almost nothing about the long-term effects on the species.
I’d also argue that we have a special relationship with cats and dogs, one that exceeds any obligations we may feel toward our primate “cousins” or other non-human animals.
Cats and dogs have been living with humans for a combined 40,000 years. They have been molded by us, they are dependent on us, and all that time in human proximity has led to unique changes.
No animals on this planet can match them when it comes to reading human emotions. Our little buddies pick up on our emotional states before we’re consciously aware of them partly because of their robust sensoriums, and partly because as their caretakers, our business is their business.
A clip of a cat named Taters was the first data burst transmitted to Earth using NASA’s upgraded deep space network. Credit: NASA/JPL
We bear a responsibility to both species and the individual animals. It’s not just the fact that without them, our lives would feel less meaningful. It’s the indisputable fact that without them — without dogs who flushed out prey on yhr hunt and guarded small settlements, without cats who prevented mass starvation by hunting down rodents — we would not be here.
Cats and dogs play a major role in the story of the human race. We are indelibly linked. Their DNA is not ours to tinker with, and they are not tools we can repurpose at our convenience.
Thankfully the US Department of Energy has never endorsed the concept of raycats. While there is a website advocating for a raycat program and small groups around the world dedicated to its propagation, the interest is mostly academic.
The Raycat Solution, which maintains a site dedicated to the idea, has a FAQ which says its supporters are serious about its potential usefulness, but for now most experts see it as a thought experiment and reminder that the problem must be dealt with eventually. At some point NIMBY will have to yield to reality, and wherever the US ends up storing nuclear waste, it’ll need to be secured, sealed and marked.
The goal is for the message to endure at least 10,000 years, at which point scientists say the radiation will be minimal.
That’s assuming that the future holds the collapse and rebuilding of human civilization, or at least a technological backslide in which the majority of our species’ knowledge is lost.
We like to think things will be brighter than that and instead of glowing to warn people of danger, cats of the far future will be where they belong — with their human buddies, exploring new frontiers on starships with plenty of comfortable napping spots.
Header image depicts the Alvin Ward Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant in Georgia, the largest nuclear plant in the US. Image via Wikimedia Commons/NRC
[1] The nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain was initially funded and approved by congress in 2002, then was canceled and de-funded in 2011 after significant pushback from people who live in Nevada, along with their representatives in congress. Plans for the site have changed several times in more than two decades, leaving the US with no central, secure site to store nuclear waste.
Pain In The Bud 