Rome's people were escaping persecution from zealots back on their home world (Mintaka?) and were fleeing outward. When Rome came across Rei, she decided to show him that you could deal with life without using the 'Mints. That theme was the basis of the original Rome's Revolution.
This story, in its entirety, will appear in The Vuduri Companion to be released early next year.
Entry 1-281: October 2, 2013
The Central Power Plant on Dara
In the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution, Rei spent much of his time wandering around Skyler Base on Dara, using his observations to clue us in on what is going on.
One of the things that got cut when the novel was compressed into an omnibus was Rei's description of the power plant. Here it is in its original form:
The room was very warm and the air had a pungent smell, perhaps, ozone, that tickled Rei’s nose. Before him, he saw thick tubes, conduits and dense wires that split into branches which split into branches and so on back to the far wall. The whole scene reminded Rei of the capillary system in the lung and if the analogy held true, way in the back were the alveoli.
He picked out one set of branches with his eyes and very slowly and very carefully followed it until he came to its final destination which was a shimmering stack of tubules or crystals. He couldn’t tell what it was.
He walked over to the mysterious stack and reached up with his finger, but before he touched it, OMCOM shouted at him.
“Rei!” OMCOM yelled from a grille mounted on the wall.
“What?” Rei asked, pulling his finger back from the equipment.
“I cannot see you but you should not be in this room.”
“What do you mean you can’t see me?”
“The video feed from this room has become non-operational. I only just now realized you had entered the room from the hallway,” replied OMCOM.
“Why are all your video feeds failing?” Rei asked.
“I do not know,” OMCOM replied, “but I do know that you should not touch anything in this room.”
“What would happen if I did?” Rei asked as he backed away.
“All around you are millions upon millions of Casimir pumps. If you touched the wrong place, whatever part of you came in contact with the fields would be transported to somewhere else on the moon.”
Unconsciously, Rei started backing up, away from the stack. “I thought you couldn’t make PPT tunnels within a gravity well,” he pointed out.
“You cannot make stable PPT tunnels in a gravity well. They pop out of existence too quickly to form a useful tunnel. But they still exist long enough to create a temporary distribution of positive and negative energy.”
“So what do you do with it while it is split?” Rei asked.
“The negative energy is dispersed in the atmosphere. It simply moves molecules from one place to another. It is fairly benign. If you do not touch it.”
“And the positive energy?”
“That is what powers this station. The collection tubes conduct the power to electrical generators and the power grid of this base.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t perpetual motion?” Rei asked.