The Walking Lakes of Freggaire
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I only had a couple of hours to spend on Freggaire and of course like everyone else I had to see the walking lakes. Freggaire is ANI so you can’t really tread the planet except for one lab that has a small lake in the containment area.
The walking lakes are naturally occuring lakes of non-Newtonian fluid that you can walk on with properties like that old recipe for Ooblick of water and corn starch. But that is where the similarities end and the magic of Freggaire begins. The very first thing everyone does when they get to visit the lake is take a hammer to the pond and give it whack and then quickly reach into right where you hit and retrieve a mirrored sonic duplicate of the hammer. The duplicate is very substantial in density although somewhat slippery due to the nature of the fluid material. I had brought a wood handled hammer because of what I had heard about how it replicated wood and I wasn’t disappointed.
When I pulled out the sonic duplicate of the hammer, the steel head was an almost perfect match but it had only duplicated the hardest part of the wood grain so it was like a skeleton of the wood handle. Of course I had to do it several times just see how the duplicate changed depending on the amount of force and I ended up with several duplicates on the shore. Amazingly the duplicates keep their shape for about an hour before they “melt” back into a semi-solid.
What scientists have learned so far is that the lakes are a mixture of several minerals, clays, and surprisingly a microscopic organism not unlike the zooplankton in earth’s oceans. The unique properties of sonic duplication is not lost on the native inhabitants.
There are two distinct life forms that make the lakes their home. The first is a predator that lives on the surface and looks something like an elephant with fangs. They are quite large but can move surprisingly fast when running on the lake surface. At rest they spread their supple bodies out to take advantage of surface tension and float on the surface and sun themselves as they kick with their rear legs to slowly move across the lake.
The other life form is not unlike a large earthworm that spends all its time beneath the surface. They are filter feeders of the microscopic organisms suspended in the lake and feed similar to earth’s Basking Shark.
When the surface predator senses a worm beneath the surface it starts the chase in a sort of galloping gait that creates a pressure wave to try and corral the worm. When it has the worm in its sights it leaps up and brings its two front legs down hard on top of the worm. In what you would call the feet there are dagger like bone structures that it uses to create sonic duplicates beneath the surface and impale the worm.
The worm is not without some defense as it can create a counter pressure wave to block the surface predators dagger attack.
I only saw one such chase while I was there and it was something to see the predator galloping across the lake and then leaping up to plant its front feet on the surface, it reminded me of how a dog plays when they will jump on something with their front feet together.
Amazing and well worth the visit.
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