Cyclolucidites

== Acquisitions Entry ==
Cyclolucidites, more commonly known as “Lucies”, are a nomadic class of space pilots and engineers.Though Spacer culture is defined by their belief in the superiority of living in space, Spacers themselves cannot navigate faster than light travel, and more often than not won't even crew their own spaceships. These tasks are all given over to Cyclolucidites. The related technology has its origin in the devastating losses suffered by ships navigating the first faster than light drives. The computational demands of FTL drive tech outstrips computer processing even today—those first crews never stood a chance. Collisions with stars and space debris killed most, but there's all manner of lethal stellar phenomena that we couldn't even detect at the time, and some drives just went nova the moment they turned on. So we learned to see more of what was out there and have since solved that spontaneous meltdown issue (mostly), but the continuous volume of calculations required for extrasolar jumps remained a problem.A conscious man, with some enhancement and computer assistance proved capable of guiding a vessel through FTL, but here again a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: with the rest of the crew in cryosleep the pilot was left to battle an exhausting mental task, entirely alone and without rest. Various drugs were developed to keep a pilot awake for weeks at a time, necessary to complete a successful jump. However this solution was prone to its own host of problems, usually manifesting as small lapses in judgment or increasingly delayed response times, but always devolving into bouts of cataplexy that precipitate complete mental breakdown given a sufficiently long jump. Some pilots survived these more acute cases, but many (and their crews) did not. The conscious mind was not meant to endure weeks of time awake, and stringing together shorter jumps with recuperation for the pilot was both too fuel and time intensive to be cost effective for most carriers. The only workable solution, also employed by the ultra rich, was to keep a stable of crack pilots life-supported in a chain harness, allowing them to spell each other in succession instantly. This proved neither a popular prospect for pilots, nor economically sustainable.But what if the pilot didn’t need to stay awake?Sourcing from an unlikely program (under investigation for "...copious, negligent barbiturate and methaqualone dosing.") probing the mind’s capabilities under REM sleep and other altered states came the first Cyclolucidite: a man living in a permanent dream state with sensory link to the outside world. As the dream state grows deeper over days, months, years, a Cyclolucidite becomes withdrawn from every day concerns but increasingly capable of savant-like feats of calculation, of hyper concentration. Over time not only did the “Lucies” become the only way to pilot FTL-capable starships more than a cursory distance, they evolved into their own culture. -Efi
== Trivia ==
* Potential Brigador Oscar Allard is a Spacer pilot who resculpted himself to become a Cyclolucidite.
Category:Lore