In the year 5555 AD, Earth is long lost, but numberless billions live spread across ten thousand star systems of Known Space in the pancosmos - the multiverse. Across this diverse scattershot of worlds, abstract and impalpable entities flicker in the shadows of everyday spacefaring life, backdropped by the clash of great political blocs where fancifully advanced transhuman technology and bona fide magic of all stripes are as ubiquitous as air. This cosmopolitan mix of societies plays host to species and peoples from numerous known cosmoi - universes - that have been hooked into the Stargate Highway and the intricate intercosmic shipping routes plied by jumptenders and jumptrucks. Meanwhile, like a multiversal North Pacific Gyre, Known Space accumulates all manner of stray items and unwitting visitors who have melded in turn into transhuman civilization - some have eked it out on their own, while others have formed organizations to locate and shelter others like them - and in some cases, to protect them from the prying eyes of authorities whose interest, or ire, may be drawn by the unique abilities and qualities of visitors from parts unknown.
It's a place where lost things from across reality accumulate, and where any crossover is fair game, attempting to "realistically" figure out how different canons and their various laws of physics, magic systems, and even different ontologies could fit together.
STANDARD CANDLES - OVERVIEW
Standard Candles takes place in a region of the wider pancosmos (multiverse) that sits an unknown far distance away from Earth, through hyperspace (higher-dimensional space, where universes sit next to each other). Transhumans - the collective name for humans and various sentient lifeforms derived from or otherwise created by Homo sapiens - arrived here via the Great Abduction, where alien tech was inadvertantly activated which brought them on a one-way trip from the old Solar System to this multiverse.
In the pancosmos, the laws of physics are variable. Fundamental forces may be different from one world to another; the weak nuclear force may be present in one world and almost non-existant in another, while one cosmos (universe) may have planets and stars while in other cosmoi (universes), gravity works in completely different ways, giving rise to a world of floating islands.
(Strictly speaking, the laws of physics themselves do not vary - there is thought to be only one global "laws of physics", but it contains many locally variable parameters that can be different from place to place, causing huge changes in what kinds of the behavior are manifested by global physics - but the phrasing works well enough for our purposes. The technical jargon for "differences in the laws of physics" across the pancosmos is symmetry breaking.)
Magic - or "magic", depending on how you prefer to think about it - is also a reality in the multiverse, one that most people take for granted in their daily lives. Magic doesn't refer to just one system of rules, the way it does in many fantasy settings, but instead is used the same way we use the word "magic" today, as a catch-all category for powerful and subtle phenomena yet to be explained. All sorts of strange magics have been empirically studied and verified, but exactly how they operate remains a matter of guesswork and speculation.
Standard Candles is also heavily intended for crossovers. Travelers and lost souls from around the multiverse frequently find themselves in the Known Pancosmos via strange, possibly paranormal means - tripping into a cave that happens to really be a portal to the far beyond, getting too deeply involved in the business of some mysterious entities, etc. Wanderers' Societies exist across known space to help people get on their feet who've managed to find their way to this cosmopolitan corner of existence, one way or another.
PLOT - OVERVIEW
The overarching conflict of Standard Candles largely revolves around the struggle between the three biggest interstellar political blocs:
- The Free Traders Union (FTU), the largest bloc in all of known space. A loose and internally quarrelsome federation of states, they see themselves as the highest legitimate authority of known space. The chief difference between them and the other powers is that they're not capitalist, but not really socialist either - their member states practice certain different "modes of production" amongst themselves.
- The Liruma Mandate (Mandate). Technically a sub-faction within the FTU secretariat, this bloc represents the interests of the new capitalists, since capital re-emerged in the last millennium. Vaguely akin to the UN / NATO. Like the FTU, they are not a unified front themselves; different regional superpowers jostle for political and economic dominance among them.
- The Zone of Peoples' Self-Government (ZPSG). Communists, or "libertarian communists", roughly speaking. An embattled polity facing aggression from both of the other blocs.
VIGNETTE - DAILY LIFE IN THE FAR FUTURE
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THE MULTIVERSE
Multiversal travel in most settings is restricted to a fringe phenomenon experienced by very few: sometimes it is relatively routine for this small group of people (something like say, Kingdom Hearts, Sliders, or I don't know, Rick and Morty) and other times it is a strange and little-known subject of fascination, horror, or serves as a fleeting plot device such as in paranormal fiction, superhero stories or the odd Star Trek episode where they enter the mirror universe. In Standard Candles, where multiversal travel is mundane, an attendant constellation of different institutions and practices have grown up to manage it. Multiversal "strays", or "wanderers" - those who have become lost from their home cosmos - are often trained, legally represented, and even provided for by the myriad Wanderers' Societies across known space, although it is not always necessarily a great deal for them. Vast research institutions and great investments are poured into ensuring that technology functions everywhere across space, especially on frequent-traveling vessels, despite the stresses of jumping between different physical laws. The structure of the pancosmos is studied and mapped out through gravity-wave astronomy and by various entirely new kinds of physics unknown on Earth today. New kinds of industry make use of the differences in physical law and magic between worlds to produce goods and operate systems in some cosmoi that cannot be done elsewhere.
The diversity of entities that eke out life in starfaring society, to say nothing of those who prowl in its shadows, is vast (and unfortunately largely yet to be illustrated) - furry robots walking alongside denizens of other worlds sometimes spirited away from their homeworlds by (mis)fortune, others from worlds already well-connected with the greater multiverse, from childrens' plushes given life to fallen deities to alien wizards to hiveminds to beings manifesting in our world across a mathematical transform to yet other things, and stranger ones. And the pancosmos is littered with ruins of various civilizations, paranormal phenomena, and hazard zones where it is dangerous to tread.
PARA-NORMALITY, MAGIC, & THE EVERYDAY OCCULT
The occult is a burgeoning field (or fields) of study in the 56th century, and not only that but the occult and magical phenomena find everyday use in a variety of applications from the household, to industry, to large-scale societal engineering; and from the use of occult means to achieve everyday ends (enchanted dishwashing soap that gets at that extra bit of dirt, say) to ends which can only be achieved through the occult (asking divine favors or manipulating one's luck, for instance). Almost all people have at least some knowledge of small-scale magics that they can practice in their daily lives, and there are scores of practitioners of various occult abilities, who often are not explicitly identified as mages or witches and such, as the use of magic tends to fold in to myriad other fields. (Much like, say, many different kinds of professional make use of the principles of mechanical engineering and all make use of the study of physics, but that doesn't mean they are physicists or mechanical engineers explicitly.) Charms, sigils, magic-infused gadgets and such can be found everywhere.
At the same time, different cosmoi often host different magic systems, which can require magical professionals to retrain themselves to use abilities in other parts of Known Space. To mitigate this, much as with hardening technology against transitions between different laws of physics, a whole infrastructure of practices and study has grown up to try and develop invocation techniques that draw on magical phenomena that work across Known Space where possible, or can bridge or switch easily between different magical rulesets where needed. In other cases, magical skill packages can help, though these are subject to varying degrees of control and enclosure by authorities and markets.
In addition to the usual ways magic is frequently understood in fantasy, magic in Standard Candles is often highly industrialized, and also heavily emphasizes the social and the ontological: magic both affects and is affected by the organization of society around it, and at times even seems capable of altering the nature of logic and existence itself, depending on the circumstance. Certain forms of magic may be powered by the practice of a particular set of social relationships - this also makes magical practices and available powers different between societies and social groups, not just between universes. And industrialization refers not just to the use of occult practices in "factories" per se - one might find warehouses and offices where mass ritual facilities are located, full of workers and AIs carrying out rituals ranging from more obvious incantations to strange patterns of social life that happen to invoke large-scale occult phenomena. One might imagine, for instance, a roster of employees deliberately trained to act out an existence like something out of Twin Peaks, or like a forum populated entirely by spambots chattering to one another in strange gibberish, which provides an arena for communicating with beings in the unseen realms that could confer some boon to a company's business. Or hackers war-dialing thousands of phones into a conference call to create a temporary social link between vast numbers of people, which invokes some magical effect.
The study of the occult might be broadly likened to the study of medicine today: the workings of the human body remain in many ways poorly understood, and designing drugs, therapies, and psychological practice often does not rest on a robust and complete understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms responsible for, say, why a drug treats depression or even something seemingly simple like fever, but rather drugs are selected from batches of random chemicals and tested to see if they have desirable effects and seem to avoid harmful side effects, all while the drug-maker may remain largely ignorant of the specifics of whatever processes are actually responsible for the observed behavior.
Aside from the occult in general, "the paranormal" is alive and well in Standard Candles - strange Beings, cryptids, UFOs, and so forth. Magic may be a daily, well-studied reality, but there remain enormous unknowns in the vastness of everything, and the study of magic so far has allowed questions to be asked about the supernatural that could not even be asked before. At the same time, "fringe" science, blind faith, and conspiracy theories continue to run rampant.
TRANSHUMANITY
In the current year of 5555 AD, Homo sapiens do not exist. Great advancements in biotech, nanorobotics, and machine intelligence, as well as massive political upheavals over healthcare and labor in the mid-21st through 24th centuries, brought access to "cybernetic" prosthesis technologies and, eventually, advanced neurotech and mind uploading to the masses. Today, digitized, immortal consciousness is simply a fact of life, and all "humans" have some form of cyberbrain with a (usually) flesh-like robotic body.
The development of mind uploading required a detailed understanding of the mechanics of consciousness and cognition, so modern minds are highly modifiable, and direct interfacing between consciousness and other software allows people to read, learn, etc faster than ever before, even allowing thoughts and memories and cognitive structures to be shared between people over the net. This also enables cognitive modding: the creation, distribution, installation and uninstallation of various cognitive processing frameworks, modules, tweaks. However, limitations on transhuman mind modification and enhancement are enforced by the powers that be in various ways - to maintain the direct power of the ruling classes, in the FTU, or of commodities and money, in the Mandate. DRM, for instance, is frequently used to lock away higher-level skill and knowledge packages, forcing people to physically study through community / online resources or attend classes. In the FTU, sumptuary laws are frequently used to formalize practices of use, sale, and provision of knowledge downloads, while in the Mandate, private property law and state security are used to justify paywalling knowledge downloads or otherwise putting them beyond public reach. Cognitive structure mods are also regulated in similar ways. Conversely, cognitive mods can be laced with propaganda and adware, as well as outright malware - all factors in modern cybersecurity culture.
Robotic humans typically eat food, or are at least capable of doing so. However, they do not have to use the toilet, at least not in any conventional sense. Expulsion of waste occurs in a controlled and clean manner, and in a separate area from the bathroom. They do bathe, and large baths are actually quite common in space due to an abundance of water. Since humans do not need to breathe, they can work comfortably in hard vacuum and in liquid, and have even pioneered "submerged hotels" and similar leisure establishments where most of the facility is completely filled with comfortably hot water.
ECOCYBERNETICS
The advent of transhuman technology did not merely bring about the potential of revolutionizing the human self, but also dovetailed with fast-growing fields of ecological management that were necessary to maintain life on Earth and eventually develop robust habitats in space. Even when people could be created entirely through artificial processes, this did not eliminate the need for a litany of complex chemicals, nanostructures and microstructures, as well as the capacity for full recycling of all materials through the "ecosystem" to ensure no buildup of unusable wastes that could grind the system to a catastrophic halt in the long run, which at first were often still easiest to do with mostly biological systems. Bioengineering, nanotechnology, macroscale robotics, and industrial systems engineering converged over the centuries to produce entirely new kinds of ecosystem - "forests" of ecocybernetics that might look as much like industrial parks as verdant groves, often segueing into more traditional industrial parks themselves, and wired to the utility grid. In addition, ecocybernetic vacuum flora are widely employed to help prepare asteroids and other airless rocks for mining and habitation, slowly remediating harmful chemicals and processing razor-like regolith dust into a soil form that won't wear on machinery and people. Ecological management takes a diverse array of forms across Known Space, often due to (but also, not only because of) differences between the relationships of production in different societies.
Moreover, many socialists see in ecological cybernetics the potential for freeing all forms of life from relationships of predator, prey, and natural disaster: no longer is it necessary for resources to be produced by life-forms who are forced to kill each other to obtain them, but rather the processes responsible for resource production and recycling can be isolated into non-living forms and collectively managed so that all life-forms' needs are forever met without suffering and destruction. While this vision remains to be fully realized across much of Known Space, pragmatic concerns have often brought it at least closer to reality in some respects, such as the drawdown of meat production in the era of climate change and its replacement by vegetable, fungal, microbial and cloned protein sources.
INFRASTRUCTURES OF KNOWN SPACE
The far-flung star systems and cosmoi of Known Space are linked together primarily by three transport systems: the Stargate Highway, Jumptenders (pictured at right), and Jumptrucks. The Stargate Highway is a network of wormholes: expensive to set up, but more efficient in the long run at facilitating high traffic throughput. Jumptenders are the oldest system: gigantic spacecraft that carry freighters and passengers along with them, employing warp drives (or metric drives, as they are generally known) to traverse space at near-lightspeed, towing a wormhole-like structure called a Krasnikov tube with them which enables an FTL return journey. Jumptrucks are a newer development, as miniaturized metric drives and certain economic considerations have made it feasible to have a class of smaller and more flexible transport spacecraft, spending weeks at a time in flight with one or two coworkers between disparate "truck stops" and making deliveries to the numerous constellations of smaller habitats that have grown out across the pancosmos as social and market forces and cheaper transport have made increasingly disparate yet interconnected space settlements a reality. They are also in some ways analogous to starfighters in soft sci-fi settings like Star Wars or space combat and trading games like Freelancer, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, etc. and sometimes are legally permitted to bear a limited suite of weapons.
Warp drives and wormholes belong to a class of technology known more broadly as metric technology, so called because they involve bending spacetime to create a certain shape or "metric" as it is known in general relativity. Because gravity is also a kind of space warping, metric technology is also responsible for reactionless propulsion, hovering, and other such forms of gravity manipulation. While metric propulsion is ubiquitous and gravity manipulation also finds uses in industry, much of in-system propulsion after dropping out of warp or exiting a stargate is done using nuclear fusion torch drives.
The population of the 56th century lives in spacebound and planetary habitats of many diverse kinds. Some space stations are capable of housing billions of people within a modest hour's train ride of one another; much of the populace of Known Space lives in space rather than on planets. Gigantic mega-habitats such as these, known as the Polises, are a common fixture of core systems along the Stargate Highway. Tens to hundreds of kilometers wide and in large parts filled with air, they house colossal 3D cityscapes stretching off in every direction, networks of free-fall districts and rotating centrifuge districts strung together by transport and utility cables, with the air held taut inside by a gigantic balloon structure often placed inside an asteroid, or built into its caves, or constructed of tougher materials to hold pressure on its own against the vacuum itself. Other mega-habitat structures are built in vaccuum orbiting asteroids, sprawling complexes of districts and individual buildings linked together by inflated transport tubes. The exteriors of asteroids are often richly "forested" with vacuum cyberflora, creating elegant and lush landscapes for travelers to bound about in zero gee. Different sectors of habitats are also commonly separated for infusion with different atmosphere mixtures for the range of chemistries in use by different clades ("species") of Known Space.
Intensive asteroid mining, use of torch drives, and reactionless metric propulsion are not necessarily without impact on the space environment. Some systems that have undergone heavy industrialization have seen the formation of hazard bands of mining debris. Torch drives create a radiation hazard for large distances around them. And the aggregate use of reactionless drives has the potential to shift planetary and (perhaps more importantly) asteroidal orbits slightly over time.
GEOGRAPHY, LOCALES, POLITIES / STATES
Trillions of souls live spread across thousands of inhabited star systems (and other, stranger kinds of celestial formation) across many cosmoi of known space. Intercosmic hyperspace is divided into hyperspace belts that make passage with a metric drive easier, or in other cases, possible at all. Belts are divided into their resident cosmoi (universes) and sectors of space within those universes.
Bear in mind that most names are placeholders that I intend to revisit when I have better research and a better command of linguistics and language construction. That said, I hope these don't sound too dumb to native speakers who recognize any words.
HYPERSPACE BELTS
- Foxtail Belt
- Golden Junction
- Rubija sector (Foxtail Belt)
- Rala Darag sector (Foxtail Belt)
- Abazu Free Peoples' Republic
- Nyeri Republic
- Tienhou Federation
- United Cantons of Caloocan
- Seven Blossoms Federal Republic
- Kivalliq Democratic Confederation
- Garissa Union
- Piwra Mutual Association
- Roussilon Coalition
LESSER STATES: FTU
- Rubija Common Economic Zone, RCEZ [nominally FTU-controlled, heavily Mandate-influenced]
- Sifaks Democratic Republic (Rubija sector)
- Folsom-Fremont
- (TBD)
LESSER STATES: MANDATE
- Amleang Federal Republic (Rala Darag sector)
- Democratic Unitary Republic Kandal (Rala Darag sector)