Clarke chamber

Clarke chambers are strange pyramidal structures found scattered throughout the known universe of Icathiria, and believed to have been placed by the Stagehands. One of the many enigmas of Icathiria, Clarke chambers have diverse effects on those who venture within.

The distribution of Clarke Chambers seems fairly random. They are found scattered over inhabited and uninhabited (and uninhabitable) planets and moons alike, on land and underwater. Some Clarke chambers have even been found floating in space, either in orbit around planets or stars or other larger bodies or moving freely in interstellar space via some unidentifiable means of propulsion.

Clarke chambers are called by many different names by different races and cultures. The term "Clarke chamber" itself is a relatively new one, used almost exclusively by humanity and coined by newcomers to Icathiria—the reference in the name is to science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, well known for his maxim that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"—a statement clearly applicable to the Clarke chambers, and perhaps to the Stagehands in general. Despite its recency, the term has caught on and largely displaced the structures' former names among humanity (or at least the English-speaking part of it), though not among other Icathirian races. Still, some older names are occasionally heard from time to time, such as "hexahedra", "kaliae" (pronounced /ˈkæli.i/; singular kalia, /ˈkæliə/), or "pentabooths".

Description

The size of the Clarke chambers varies, from less than a meter tall to gigantic chambers nearly a hundred meters in height. Regardless of the size, however, the shape and proportions are constant. All Clarke chambers have the form of five-sided pyramids, with slightly rounded edges. The base of the pyramid is not a regular pentagon; two non-adjacent edges are significantly shorter than the other three, by a factor of roughly 3.4. (The pentagonal shape of the base can also be thought of as a square with one corner truncated... in this case, assuming it's a perfect square and the three long sides are all of equal length, this would make the ratio of the lengths of the long sides to the short [math]\displaystyle{ 2 + \sqrt{2} }[/math]; the sides of Clarke chambers do in fact seem to match this ratio within the limits of measurement error.) The height of the Clarke chamber is about 2.94 times the length of the smaller side; thus far, no one has been able to find any special reason for this ratio.

Strange glyphs and symbols cover all Clarke chambers inside and out, though they differ between chambers. In some cases the symbols are in raised relief; more often they are apparently incised in the chamber's surface. Some of the glyphs look like representational drawings of various objects and life forms; others are wholly abstract. Often they are arranged in lines that look like writing, and occasionally they even resemble characters of known alphabets or other writing systems, though even when they do they're never arranged in an order that is meaningful in any known language—it has been proposed that they may be in some sort of code, but if so it's one that has yet to be broken. Investigators have looked for patterns connecting the symbols borne by a particular Clarke chamber and its effect, in the hopes of learning how to predict the effects of a Clarke chamber based on its markings, but so far this aspiration has not been realized.

The entrance to the chamber is in the middle of the face between the two narrow faces, and is shaped like a rectangle topped with a semicircle. The entrance has about half the height of the face it lies on. Just over half of all Clarke chambers have open doorways; in the rest, the doorway is sealed with a door. In many cases, the doors simply open at a touch, or even respond to the mere desire of nearby noetic beings that they open. Others, however, have more esoteric requirements. Some open only to the touch or thoughts of members of certain races, or of those who meet various other criteria. Others require specific objects to be touched to them, or other triggering actions. Some Clarke chambers have strange devices in front of them that must be manipulated to open the doors, posing peculiar puzzles for those who would enter. Not a few Clarke chambers have never been entered, simply because no one has discovered how to open them.

Composition

Although the Clarke chambers look metallic, their exact composition remains yet another mystery. They are resistant to any damage or chemical analysis that has yet been attempted upon them. Whatever the material is, it is a good conductor of heat and electricity, and is hard enough to withstand any known attempts to scratch or break it. Visually, the metal of the Clarke chambers has a very slight bluish cast. The emission spectrum of the material matches no known element or compound, though some chemists have concluded from the spectra that one of its major components may be rhenium.

Effects

All known Clarke chambers have transformative effects upon living beings—and no effect at all upon most nonliving matter. There is, however, a wide variety in the precise effects. Some Clarke chambers give those within them strange mental powers; others effect physical transformations, such as altering their species, granting extra limbs, or dissolving the subjects into amorphous (but somehow still living and viable) piles of goo. Some rare Clarke chambers split their subjects into multiple beings—or combine multiple beings into one, in various ways. Sometimes the transformations are relatively subtle—such as changing slightly the subject's coloration, or making them slightly more intelligent—other times they are drastic and outré. However bizarre the transformations, no Clarke chambers are known to kill their subjects outright, with the possible exception of a few that seem to agalmatate their subjects into various substances. (Even in those cases, it's not impossible that the agalmatated subjects remain living and perhaps even conscious, though there's no obvious way to know for sure.) Some Clarke chambers produce their effects instantly upon anyone entering; others do so only after a subject has lingered within for a particular amount of time—which may be a few seconds, or may be a matter of hours. In some cases, the chamber's effects are gradual and continuous, accumulating over time—of course, this would not apply to discrete transformations such as changes in gender, but could apply to others such as the growth of new appendages, or transmagnifications.

While different Clarke chambers may have widely varying effects, the effects of a given Clarke chamber are consistent. This doesn't mean that they're always the same, but it does mean they follow fixed patterns; a chamber may have one effect on males and another on females, or may have different effects on members of different species, or may have an effect that changes over time according to a set schedule. Unless one already knows the patterns, however, the effects are not predictable a priori; the only way to learn the effects of an unfamiliar Clarke chamber is to enter it (or induce some other life form to enter it) and see what happens. Naturally, knowledge of the effects of a Clarke chamber can be a valuable thing, particularly if the effects of the chamber in question are especially beneficial or useful. Some guides to Clarke chambers exist, but they tend to be incomplete and unreliable. In any case, known Clarke chambers of markedly serviceable effects tend to be claimed by powerful individuals and governments and maintained under heavy guard, and if possible their very existence, or at least their location, kept a carefully preserved secret.

Purpose

While no one knows how the Clarke chambers work, or what they're made of, perhaps the biggest mystery of all regarding these cryptic objects is what they're for. While it's almost universally accepted that they are creations of the Stagehands (though there are some who have other theories as to their origins), few claim to know why the Stagehands created them, and those that do so claim don't agree.

One popular belief is that the Clarke chambers (along perhaps with other elements of Icathiria) pose some sort of test, that perhaps the inhabitants of Icathiria are expected to ferret out the meanings of their obscure inscriptions, and that perhaps when they break the code the Stagehands have some reward in store. Though the fact that a few of the chambers are associated with overt puzzles that must be solved to open them has been cited as supporting this idea, most scholars opine that the thought that the Stagehands are lurking somewhere waiting to reward their captives' cleverness is nothing more than wishful thinking. Others believe that in some arcane way the Clarke chambers are drawing off some sort of unknown energy from the beings they transform, but this seems even more unlikely; it seems very clear that the chambers' transformations must require the expenditure of energy, rather than gaining it. Still others believe that the Stagehands have placed the chambers only for their own twisted amusement, that they are entertained by all the ways that Icathiria's inhabitants are altered by them. In the end, though, too little is known about the Stagehands—if they even exist—to draw firm conclusions about their motives for anything, their creation of the Clarke chambers included.